By Randi Altman

The series Cobra Kai revisits the 1980’s Karate Kid franchise to see what the two teenaged adversaries are up to as middle-aged men. Created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, the show reintroduces viewers to underdog Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), his childhood nemesis Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and the ruthless martial arts instructor John Kreese (Martin Kove).

Phil McGowan

The show is now streaming its third season on Netflix, with Season 4 set for a December 2021 release. One of the team members who has been on the series since its inception is music mixer Phil McGowan. This audio post veteran’s credits include Ozark, Fear the Walking Dead and the film Promising Young Woman.

We reached out to McGowan to find out more about his work on Cobra Kai as well as on the HBO documentary film Tina, directed by Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin.

What’s your typical mix process like?
For TV shows, I’m typically just doing one episode at a time, and they are spaced out a week or more between episodes. It’s nice to stay in the same mindset for a few days, as my weeks often see me bouncing around between multiple projects day to day unless I’m on a bigger film.

What was your workflow on Cobra Kai?
Composers Zach Robinson and Leo Birenberg start by sending me their materials in the week leading up to an episode mix. This would include everything from their sequencer sessions.

Phil McGowan’s studio

They then go and record drums and guitars with musicians here in LA before doing a late-night Source-Connect session with an orchestra in Eastern Europe. The LA musicians and the orchestra engineers then send me links to download all their recordings, and I begin to assemble all of the files by cue.

On any given Cobra Kai mix day, the first hour or two is just wrangling files and getting everything organized so I can dive in and start mixing. Once everything is assembled, I then proceed mixing cue by cue, always starting with the biggest, most complicated cue, as that will hold many of the sounds that the rest of the cues will use. That also helps me not stress about those big, intimidating cues all day.

Who else was part of that sound team on the show, and how did you work together?
Joe DeAngelis and Chris Carpenter are our excellent re-recording mixers on Cobra Kai, but I didn’t interface with them as much as I usually would. When we started Season 1 — when it was on YouTube — it was a bit of a whirlwind dub schedule, so I didn’t have my usual conversation with the dub team about stems, formats, etc.

Cobra Kai

Our fantastic music editor is Andrés Locsey, and he is who I end up sending all of my approved mix stems to. Andres makes sure everything is in the right place and handles any music conforms if they ended up changing picture after we scored, which I don’t think they did very often. Everything was very smooth with this team, and I’ve always been happy with the final result when I watch each season when it comes out!

What were some of the more challenging parts to this season?
As with any Cobra Kai season, the most challenging part is often balancing the various genres that the score features. On any given episode, I could be mixing ‘80s hair metal, four-on-the-floor electronic music or straight-up orchestral score. Then on some of the bigger episodes, I’ll have a bunch of cues that pretty much combine all those elements, and those can take a bit to get into a good place with all the elements speaking appropriately. Even though it can be challenging, Cobra Kai is almost always very fun to mix.

Cobra Kai

Do you have any favorite scenes?
I can’t speak to specifics of Season 4 just yet, but I would say my favorite sequence from Season 3 is the “Duel of the Snakes” part of Episode 10. There are about six or more cues strung together into a 10-minute-plus sequence that jumps back and forth between multiple fights and flashbacks to Vietnam, so that runs the gamut of many of the styles featured in the Cobra Kai score. Zach and Leo wrote their asses off for that sequence, and we’re very proud of how it all turned out.

Let’s shift gears for a bit. Can you talk about your workflow on the documentary film Tina?
For the Tina score, I received Avid Pro Tools sessions from composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. I imported all their tracks into my mixing template. Danny and Saunder are just about my only clients that work in Pro Tools, so the process with them is unique as I can see all their plugins, routing, edits, etc. and can tweak any of that as necessary.

Tina

Originally, I was only hired to mix the score, but partway through the mix, I was contacted by someone from the production team, who asked if I wanted to mix three live Tina Turner performances for the film. I immediately said yes! For those songs, I received tape transfers from Iron Mountain for the two concerts the songs were sourced from. The Rio show from 1988 was a transfer of two 24-track analog tape machines, while the Barcelona show from 1990 was a digital transfer from Sony DASH tape. That was fun to dig into those old recordings and bring them up to date in 5.1.

Any favorite scenes on that one?
For the score, the scene where Tina finally leaves Ike features the biggest score cue in the film and the way it plays against the picture and the voiceover from Tina is just brilliant. As far as the songs go, my favorite is “The Best,” which plays over the end credits, mostly because that’s the only song that plays all the way through without any edits.

Can you talk about working these two very different projects?
Cobra Kai and Tina are quite different projects, though I suppose they do share some similarities in that I was busting out some emulations of classic gear for the live Tina Turner mixes as well as any Cobra Kai score cues that were more in the ‘80s vein. I’m always excited when I can justify using the 480L, RMX16, or Korg Digital Delay on a mix. Those emulations from UAD are fantastic.

Cobra Kai

What are you working on now?
We just wrapped up Season 4 of Cobra Kai, and that features a whole new level of epic that we can’t wait for you all to hear.

Danny and Saunder have been keeping me very busy lately as well. We have four to five TV shows plus a couple films currently on our plate. In addition to all of that, I have the usual variety of other projects from other clients, so the end of this year is shaping up to be pretty jam-packed.

Any advice for those just starting out?
Fortunately, for anyone starting out now, there’s a massive amount of resources online to see how this kind of work is done. Mix With the Masters and pureMix are fantastic places to see directly how mixers and engineers do what they do. Before websites like those existed, the only way to learn from other engineers was to be fortunate enough to assist them on a session, so it’s quite incredible that those outlets exist. A good creative professional is always learning, so never lose that drive to always learn new things and grow.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.