Thom Cadley: Mixing Rock Bands for Rock Band

March 31st, 2010 by Trenton

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KATONAH, NY: A few years ago, when Sony closed its studios on W. 54th Street, Thom Cadley was one of the hundreds of Sony staffers cut loose. He’d been Sony’s chief mixing engineer as long as the studio had been running. “I was one of the first people hired at the studio, and I stayed ‘til the bitter end,” Cadley says.

By the time Sony closed in ‘07, however, Cadley had seen the future. “I was mixing a Ramones concert DVD for David May at Warner Bros, and he called and said he needed one of their songs remixed for a video game, and asked if I could squeeze that in when I finished the concert,” Cadley recalls. “They sent me the tech spec sheet and I mixed it and sent it off. Everyone was really happy with it, and soon, I was getting call after call.”

Thom Cadley in his converted barn-studio in Katonah, NY

It was the beginning of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band gaming revolutions — licensing departments at all the majors were going to need remixes of their greatest hits and Cadley was one they’d trust to do it. He’d been the chief in-house mixer for Sony, handling live concerts and 5.1 studio releases, Storytellers DVDs, ‘All Star Tribute To…’ shows, Concert for NYC, Sessions at W. 54th and more. Now, his label clients would need songs remixed for games, films, commercials, etc. and Sony Studios would be gone. He quickly got setup to field the work on his own.

In the few years since that first Ramones remix, Cadley has become the preferred music mixer for the MTV Games’ Rock Band franchise, and similarly remixes music for Activision (Guitar Hero, DJ Hero), 4mm, Microsoft, Genius and First Act as well. In less than three years, he’s remixed over 400 songs, including almost all the music coming out of Sony and Warner’s back-catalogs.

We recently took a ride up to Cadley’s studio, located in a converted barn near his home in idyllic Katonah, NY, and quickly discovered why this guy is the game remixing master.

NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EXPERIENCE
On deck the day of our visit is INXS’ “Need You Tonight,” which Cadley is mixing for Rock Band. Warner Bros’ licensing department has digitized the multitrack and sent it to Cadley, who combs through the Pro Tools session, taking stock of what’s there and what is, potentially, missing.

His spacious and sunlit studio is organized around one main mixing sweet-spot at a Digidesign Pro Control which sits in front of a 60” LCD monitor in a Genelec 5.1 surround monitoring environment. Cadley still does live concert DVD mixing in surround (Phish, Beyonce, John Legend) and set up his room accordingly, but the game remixes are all stereo.

“What I ultimately send them is a full mix and all the individual stems — kick, snare, side-sticks, cowbell (there’s a ton of percussion on this song!), all the way down to each guitar, bass, vocals, etc. — that can be integrated into the game as playable elements,” Cadley describes. “All of the stereo mix stems get mixed-down by someone at the gaming company, as a flat mix to make the bed of the song and then, just the playable elements can turn on and off. In an ideal world, if everyone’s playing the game perfectly, it sounds just like the record.”

Cadley’s deep knowledge of the catalog and archival processes is key. “I know most of the librarians and licensing people at the labels, so the work flows very easily through me,” he says, specifying, “Especially on the back-catalog material. With newer music, artists will sometimes use their own producer/engineer to remix tracks for games.”

Rear Surrounds and Sunlight!

Beyond his experience and contacts developed while at Sony, Cadley’s background engineering sessions at The Hit Factory, Right Track and Bearsville in the 80s and 90s, also comes into play on the game remixes.

“I approach remixing these songs for Rock Band or Guitar Hero the same way I would approach a radio mix,” he likens. “It’s absolutely the song everyone knows and loves from the record but it might be just slightly different. For example, there might have been a signature reverb used, like from a live chamber at some studio, or some amazing rare compressor that the mixer used, that I don’t have, and wouldn’t know exactly how he had it setup. But I can make it sound pretty darn close.”

Even better, sometimes he does know or can make a highly educated guess on what the original engineers used. “I was Bob Clearmountain’s assistant for a couple years in the 80s,” he notes. “And Bob actually mixed ‘Need You Tonight’ (1987), so I pretty much know what he was using in those days. I know all his reverbs because I scribbled them down in recall notes a few hundred times!”

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: “TODAY I’M IN A LATE 80’s MINDSET”
Knowing how the tracks he’s remixing for games have been recorded and cataloged, Cadley is able to dig through these digital artifacts like an audio archaeologist, and do the requisite guesswork to locate or simulate all the pieces.

“The mixing is the easy and fun part,” says Cadley. “The hard part is getting the right multitrack. Very often you’re working with poor documentation and lost titles or parts of songs, especially with more recent recordings.”

“Need You Tonight” came in as 70+ tracks, many of which Cadley notes do not belong in the song, including identical tracks from a slave reel and an entire reel of vocals. “In this case, I found a vocal comp, which is great because that is, for the most part, what got used in the original,” Cadley shares.

“But sometimes, that vocal comp doesn’t exist and I have to go through and re-comp the vocal. Sometimes there will be a slave reel that doesn’t get transferred with the rest and you’ll get half the song. Other times you’ll find that vocals have been overdubbed over an instrumental track and that vocal as an individual track is gone forever.”

To get as complete a picture as possible, Cadley will have the label send him every bit of documentation they have. “It’s great if it’s on tape,” he shares. “I’ll have them scan the box, the spine of the box, both sides of track sheets, loose pieces of paper, phone numbers, etc…and you know pretty quickly if you have everything you need. But I’ve had trouble with records made between 2000-2005 — I’ll get multitracks where files are missing. And you’ll find out that those files are on a hard drive at some studio and then you just pray they can be found. It’s gotten better in the last five years, because now producers send hard drives to the label when the production’s complete, and someone goes through and make sure all the files are there.”

Since he’s remixing single hit-songs for the most part — with the odd longer-format project like last year’s AC/DC Live (at Donington) Rock Band game — Cadley is switching mindsets, sometimes daily, to deconstruct the original mixes.

“Like today, I’m in a late-80s mindset,” he says. “But last week, I did the song ‘Roundabout’ [1971] by Yes. It was 16 tracks and jam-packed — there were vocals and keyboards on several of the tracks and a bass part that seemed to be done right over the top of the finished mix. I could tell they mixed the chorus and then snipped the rest of it together. So you just do the best you can, and I also send the client a copy of the record; they always have the option of using the original record.”

At the time of our visit, Cadley had recently finished several Ozzy Osbourne songs for Rock Band, and the hits just keep coming.

“I work on several other games, when you figure in DJ Hero, Guitar Hero and a new game called Scratch that’s coming out — it’s like DJ Hero but for hip-hop,” he describes. “There’s also a new game for Microsoft I’ve been working on. It’s a lot of work, I’m often mixing a song a day for a gaming company, with the occasional concert DVD thrown into the mix. And, I’d love to do more album work, if and when I can ever find the time.”

Get in touch with Thom Cadley through Joe D’Ambrosio Management. And for more information and his discography, visit http://thomcadleymusic.com/.