Alan Meyerson: Scoring The Jackpot

Undoubtedly one of the greatest movie scoring mixes of the modern era, Alan Meyerson recently joined Headliner on a call from the 5.1 ATC mix room that he’s built in his home — and where he’s spent the majority of the last year — to talk about some of his favourite projects, his philosophy when it comes to crafting film scores, and his love of Leapwing Audio plugins.

After a couple of slow months when the pandemic first hit, Meyerson’s work as one of the industry’s most reputable movie scoring mixers soon started picking up; he expanded his home studio as things got busier, and now he’s cooking with gas.

In fact the movie he’s currently mixing, Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James and Don Cheadle, is his 11th movie since the start of the pandemic. Not to mention his recent work on Reprise, the upcoming 19th studio album by Moby scheduled for a May release.

And when it comes to movies, Meyerson’s credits as a scoring mixer are second to none. Iron Man, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Inception, The Dark Knight, Kung Fu Panda, Despicable Me, Hannibal and Gladiator; just a handful of the incredible projects he’s worked on over the years, and while it may seem like an impossible question to answer, I’m curious to know whether he has any particular favourites...

“Hopefully my favourite project is the one I’m working on at any given moment,” he replies in earnest. “So right now my favourite project is Space Jam, because it’s a phenomenal score by an incredible young composer named Kris Bowers. The first movie I did as the lead mixer on the music for Speed was memorable for me, because it won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing, and that was quite an experience.”

In his 30 years of mixing, Meyerson has been involved in over 300 movies and has worked with all the leading film score composers; he has a particularly long-standing working relationship with the great Hans Zimmer that continues to this day.

“Everyone points to Gladiator as where maybe my reputation got cemented - that was a great score and I really loved working on it,” he adds. “For that we were at AIR Studios in London, and I was particular about how I wanted to record it and mix it. Although it’s the last movie we ever recorded on two inch tape, I was still trying to really fit it into this certain formula.”

While Meyerson has a wealth of experience in engineering and score mixing in particular, he’s also racked up gold and platinum albums along with a bunch of number one R&B records.

“Music in support of another medium tells a different type of story; it’s more about the storytelling and the emotional content than it is about how it’s going to sound on the radio. Space Jam is a hybrid hip-hop orchestral score, which also fits because of my dance record background, so it’s interesting how all of the skills that I’ve developed through the years have sort of paid off. The only skill I didn’t develop was negotiation! [smiles] If I had, this would be a bigger home mix room!”

As well as having his 5.1 ATC home mix room, Meyerson is also settled at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions studio complex in Santa Monica, where his 7.1.4 mix room there contains a Euphonix System 5 digital desk, a bunch of Pro Tools systems, ATC monitors, and a few analog boxes.

Part of Meyerson’s process is helping the composer develop a sonic signature early on in the writing process, helping them set up microphones the way they like it, and building some useful reverbs. In the mix, he also has an assistant whose job it is to tighten up and edit the orchestral and live percussion elements:

“Some of the cues I work on are 1,000 tracks, so when you’ve got 25 layers of percussion, and everything’s not quite together, it becomes a dog’s breakfast almost immediately. My mixing philosophy is to work very fast on the first pass, then go back into each mix and get into the music and understand what it is - oh, and lots of coffee!”

And to help him achieve his sound, Meyerson finds Leapwing Audio’s plugin collection extremely powerful; he uses them across all his mixes:

“With Space Jam, I wanted to give the orchestra a bit of smack, so having a dynamic multiband compressor like DynOne means I can do that in a much more elegant way. Equally, with StageOne, if I get a signal that’s either too narrow, or is actually mono, I use it to expand that out to a wider or more interesting depth width. And then there’s this centre gravity thing, which is very cool: I can gravitate one sound a little bit to the right or left; that’s the magic sauce for getting that spatial feel - if you spend less time on compression and EQ and spend more time on spatial choices, you’ll get your mixes approved so much faster. I use it on reverb returns too; like on this one particular project, because of COVID we had to have the harp player in a booth. So I recorded her two ways: with a pair of modern stereo mics and a mono ribbon mic from back in the day, the output of which I put through StageOne to create an image that I could tilt either to the left or right.

“RootOne meanwhile is phenomenal. Having all the sub octaves of the primary signal, and being able to decide how much depth and low is there is super useful. I use it on a bunch of things, usually to get a little bit more grunge out of the ride cymbal.”

Meyerson has got a packed 2021 lined up, with a number of big movie scores on the agenda to keep his chops up:

“I’m not good at not being busy,” he admits. “I also have found out that the easiest way to get dementia is to retire. So I have no intention of stopping, and I’m gonna keep doing this until they stop hiring me!”