FUGU for Mrs K @StarMount Studio

FUGU, an improvisational music duo of theremin and violin was here to record music excerpts for "Mrs K" a film by Director Ho Yuhang.

Starting with the strings, we mic up the quartet players in a line formation from frist violin to cello. sE 3as were used for first and second violin, about 2 ft above the player's head, Akg C451B on viola and JZ V11 on cello. With a pair of sE RT1 in Blumlein for the overall ambient microphone, lush strings sounds were captured.

Dalang Post Production and Sound Mixing @StarMount Studio

WeFilm has brought their new independent film "Dalang" to StarMount Studio for post production and stereo sound mixing.

Music was scored by one of the prominent avant garde composer -Yii Kah Hoe. The artistic value was elevated more when the music was paired to the picture. We couldn't stress more about how important audio instills "life" into the video, so we did what we can to guide the audience through the story telling process. 

Our biggest challenge is always in cleaning up the dialogs from the location recordings. Phase reversal and a few more noise reduction/ restructuring plugins were essential and sometimes "life saving". The whole movie was carried by the music and conversations, so we kept foley and sound design at minimum. 

We used sE 4400 and JZ V11 for the ADR. They both have similar character but the V11 has become our favorite go-to microphone for voice over applications. It has a darker tone while maintaining good amount of body on the mids and low mids. Sibilance were much controlled on the V11 compared to the sE4400 which has more top end, less low mids. 

Audient Zen mixing console. 

Steve Long-Director

Maestro Yii Kah Hoe

Film Scoring with Ken Hor @ StarMount Studio

We had a thrilling week with Ken Hor on his latest film score for a horror movie coming to the screens soon. We don't think we're allowed to put a name to it yet but we can show you some hardworking musicians responsible for the fantastic music you're going to hear soon.
Ken is a perfectionist and strongly believes in acoustic instruments and tried very very hard to stay away from digital samples as much as possible, so he came to StarMount Studio (we liked to have everything recorded live too) for the job.

As you know the budget for music is tight these days, we worked our best to fit in as many great players as possible for the music. We did the harp at The Harp Academy Malaysia, where we recorded Jee Fei (founder of the school) with our mobile rig consisting Chandler TGII thru Lavry Blue ADDA. It was a straight forward but not easy stereo setup.

We had fantastic strings section back in the studio with violin, viola cello and double bass all together. We love the Audient Zen's pres on strings. They're balanced, clean and with a hint of warmth from the analog board. On the same night, we made use of the Disklavier on the DC-1 Grandpiano, playing back a fugue written by Ken and recorded back as an acoustic piano. It wasn't as simple as we thought, but its convincing after some tweaking were done on the midi.

Lastly the highlight/ theme song was recorded by Mei Sim. Her soulful voice went through sE 4400a to our newly acquired Tree Audio Branch. We loved the harmonic richness and the opto compressor works wonders.

That sums up part of the major highlights for the film scoring. Picture time :)

We do outcalls too

Fantastic Strings section

Tweaking to perfection

The Artiste, Producer and Engineer