By Patrick Birk

Star Trek: The Next Generation is back! Well, sort of. CBS All Access’ series, Star Trek: Picard, features Patrick Stewart reprising his role of the beloved Starfleet captain, Jean-Luc Picard. The 10-episode first season revisits Picard 20 years after Star Trek: Nemesis and features familiar Next Generation characters, such as the android Data, Commander Will Riker and the half-human/half-Betazoid Deanna Troi — all of whom served on the USS Enterprise under Captain Picard.

Harry Cohen

In this new story, Picard is a retired Starfleet admiral who is unable to shake traumatic memories of Data’s death, for which he feels responsible. When a young woman named Dahj appears at his picturesque French vineyard, Jean-Luc is pulled into a plot that forces him to confront the loose ends of his past.

The show features an incredibly fluid sonic world, with ever-evolving effects weaving in and out of crisp dialogue and a lush score. In fact, both the sound editing and sound mixing teams, working out of Warner Bros., were nominated for Emmys for their work. Re-recording mixer Todd Grace, CAS, and sound editors Harry Cohen and Tim Farrell were kind enough to share some of the secrets to achieving a sci-fi soundtrack of this caliber.

Todd Grace

The dynamic range really struck me. How wide was it? How did you end up having enough headroom to be able to make those effects so loud in comparison to the dialogue?
Todd Grace: That’s sort of the challenge that we have in attempting to make something that is just for television seem theatrical. We very much approach this in the same way as we might approach a feature dub. We do a predub pass, and I’ll go through and predub dialogue, then go back and do a music pass and sort of weave the music in and out of the dialogue, much like I would if I were doing a feature. My partner Ed Carr does the same thing with the sound effects, scene by scene. When we put it together, we’re really balancing against each other, much the way you would on a feature dub.

I find that to be a useful tactic because it forces you to leave room for the big moments to be big while still keeping the dialogue in a nice, tight package. What we don’t want to do is make this all sound, for lack of a better term, like a rock n’ roll mix, where everything is crammed up into the top third of the dB range. We want it to have some feeling because I think that’s where the storytelling is. If we’re not able to build emotion or feel the impact of something, I think we’re failing the story.

Harry Cohen: At the same time, it is not a theatrical dynamic range. When you watch most movies on TV, you turn it down for the chase scene and turn it up for the dialogue on your volume. This show’s not like that.

Grace: We’re trying to find the middle ground so that dialogue is perhaps sitting a little bit more present than it might be in a theatrical mix. The same is true with the score, which is really important. We had a theatrical premiere for the first three episodes at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, and it got pretty damned loud. But we’re mixing for an at-home streaming environment, so I’m trying to bridge the two and then find a range where it can be big.

Where are the mix and dialogue sitting in terms of loudness?
Grace: That’s really dependent on the episode. In terms of dynamic range or the LRA value, we’re usually sitting at LRAs of 14 to 15, which is a lot of range — whole mixes tend to be in the eight range. We’re trying to shoot for our normal overall levels. If you’re using an LKFS value, it’s minus 24 plus or minus two. We are always on the plus side, so typically around minus 22. Dialogue usually falls a dB or two below the total loudness measurement.

Has the transition to streaming over the last few years changed your process at all?
Grace: I’ve tried not to change too much. In fact, I’ve been accused in the past of mixing too dynamically for television, and I wear that like a badge of honor. What I have found is the transition to streaming has been beneficial because it has evened out the playing field. In analog broadcast days, ABC had a spec, CBS had a spec, NBC had a different spec and Fox was completely on another planet. Everybody was doing their own thing. With digital broadcast, it’s sort of evened a lot of that out right off the bat. There are still outliers, but generally speaking, the streaming services have, for all intents and purposes, adhered to this minus 24 LKFS plus or minus two. Typically, they all have a true peak of minus two, which is easy enough to achieve. We have good tools for those things these days.

Tim Farrell

A sci-fi show presents a lot of opportunities to invent sound effects. How did you go about creating all of the sounds the show demanded?
Tim Farrell: A lot of that comes from the classic creative process of “come up with idea, try idea, reject idea, repeat,” until you run out of time. Realistically, a lot of it comes from the visual effects. As things start coming to life in front of us, it’s because the VFX team is giving us these wonderful, lush images. There are so many hooks and barbs and nooks and crannies to hang sounds on. There’s a certain aspect of just sitting back and seeing what you have and letting that speak to you, and then focusing on what’s going on story-wise. You have to keep your eye on that prize as well as focus on understanding the emotional content and storytelling of the scene. We let that lead.

Cohen: Tim won’t say this, but he’s actually a big fan of the series as well.

Farrell: I think Harry’s a bigger Star Trek fan than me!

Cohen: He’s taken the time to understand what the traditional Enterprise doors and phasers and all those things sounded like, or what the story is behind the way this transporter beam sounds. He’s really been the arbiter of all of those things.

Farrell: Everything starts with the original.  Anything that has previously existed, I look up and try to use as a starting point. A great example of course is the transporter, which is just a classic sound, and each iteration of Star Trek kind of has its own version. What’s great about that is it allows me the freedom to put my own creative spin on it as well. This show has so much new material. We have to be constantly creative. Every week there are new weapons, new environments, new ships, new force fields. Visually, the look and environments of the show have been updated as well, so that informs our take on those classic sounds.

It is also vital that I have such a great team working with me. Harry and Mike Schapiro are such creative and incredible talents. I’m able to give them direction and point them at things, and I know they’ll be able to knock anything I give them out of the park. I’m incredibly grateful to know that I’ve got them in my corner on this show. Also on our team are Matt Taylor, our incredible supervising sound editor; Sean Heissinger, our dialogue editor extraordinaire; and Clay Weber, our Foley supervising and editing maven.

Was there any back and forth between you and the VFX department, where your sound design would inform their work, as well?
Farrell: We have deadlines we have to meet, and our producers are constantly creating and changing. Often, due to delivery requirements, we have to be finished with the soundtrack before the VFX are done. There were a few instances when we were sitting on the final day of the mix and we would hear, “We need to change this, so create some sounds, and we’ll animate to it,” and we do our best! To steal a phrase from Todd, it’s “do no wrong editing”.

Grace: I know it seems cliché, but it’s just the combination of people that makes us work. I’ve had the good fortune of doing this for quite some time. I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a team like this, where everybody’s bringing it every single week. It’s really been fun. It’s very … I’m going to steal from Tim: It’s very fulfilling. You put your heart into it.

And more often than not, our producers — Alex Kurtzman and Michael Chabon — will say, “Huh, that was cool.” As opposed to, “Oh, that’s a new sound to me. It bothers me. Don’t bore me with anything new.” They’re actually quite open to it, and they’ve been very interactive. That doesn’t always happen.

Do synthesizers play a role in your sound design?
Cohen: I personally have a huge collection of software synths.

Farrell: And hardware, Harry.

Cohen: Well, we’re only talking about things that have been turned on in the last 10 years. I lean on those for source material quite often. Everything’s got to be quick. If it’s not connected through a hard drive of mine, it might as well be on the moon these days.

Which creative tools were the most critical for you?
Cohen: It depends on what kind of sound you’re going for. I just finished working on some drone sounds for an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, and I thought they should have a classic Star Trek sound to the drone. So I used a software recreation of the Minimoog and the Prophet to accomplish those. I’ve probably got 50 soft synths, so it’s whichever synth I associate with the kind of sound I’m going for, whichever synth I’m most familiar with to manipulate. In a previous life, I was a keyboard player.

Farrell: Mike Schapiro, who’s our interface guru on the show, uses Phase Plant by Kilohearts along with their other plugins to create the majority of the beeps and interface interactions. Also, while it’s more of a sampler than a synth, Radium by Soundminer is something we use constantly on the show to help create and manipulate sounds. 

Cohen: For the transporter, I started with some stuff off of the Korg Wavestation, which had that kind of pan-tonal, swirly kind of sound. I built it off of that and, these days, probably something in one of my other synths.

To what extent did existing sounds that are processed play a role?
Farrell: Well, for me, that’s more my process. I enjoy opening up synths and trying out presets to find cool, weird sounds, but for the most part, I like to take real sounds and manipulate them and kind of push them until they break using any kind of tool at my disposal. That’s always been my creative process — to just kind of push things beyond their limits and then create a bunch of nonsense and hopefully organize that in a creative way, and then use those pieces to reassemble and rebuild until we have a little collage that becomes our final sound.

What are some of your favorite plugins for design?
Farrell: It changes from project to project … as time goes by, you get new toys. I remember on Picard, I was using a lot of frequency shifters. There was a frequency shifter from Tonsturm that was really fun and another from Kilohearts that I use as well. GRM Warp can get you some fun results also. Shifting frequencies can create this different kind of tonality and an almost alien sound. A lot of the material in Picard came from frequency modulation and manipulation.

Another big one was Portal by Output. I had just gotten Portal and I would spend a lot of time creating new signature sounds for the show using various granular synthesis techniques in that plugin.

Cohen: Every time I delve into synthesis or heavy manipulation with plugins, there’s only a certain amount of the time we can do that per show. It just creates a bunch of new material, some of which I’ll use, some of which I’ll archive for later. So I have this huge archive of stuff I’ve created over the years. If I’m in a big hurry, and if I’ve spent some time with my plugins and created some cool stuff but not quite what I’m looking for, I will browse through my older stuff that has not been used yet. I produce maybe 10 sounds for every one that I use.

Do you audition new sounds, while developing that backlog, to picture?
Cohen: I always pause the picture while I’m looking so I can run the picture in a moment’s notice and see if the sound is going to be part of the layering of whatever I’m trying to achieve there.

Farrell: I front-load a lot. So as the season is ramping up, and we’re getting scripts, that’s when I’ll take the time to create a lot of my material. Once the shows start turning over, it’s just go, go, go, go. There’s not nearly as much time anymore to create.

How do you keep track of the effects so that there’s a logical consistency to what sounds go where?
Farrell: I work in a supersession. I literally have every episode I’ve ever cut in my session. This way I can quickly call up anything I need at any point. Having a large session with all your episodes in one place can slow you down a little while Pro Tools has to think about what it’s doing, but having the ability to quickly recall anything I might need, instantly at my fingertips, actually considerably speeds up my process and keeps me organized.

Sounds also evolve over time. As you get into the season, you’re working on a spaceship and suddenly, five episodes later, it does all these new maneuvers that you’ve not created any sounds for. But you’ve already come up with a custom sound for what that ship is or what it’s supposed to be and have a concept, so it’s great to have what you’ve already done as source material right there as a starting point.

I noticed what I’d call a “signature sound” in the form of Soji’s necklace. What are some other signature sounds within the series?

Farrell: Soji’s necklace was done by our Foley team! They did a great job on it. For me, I think the best example would be the Borg Cube, which is more of a character than a location. It is very much alive and kicking and needed to feel that way sonically. The approach was to create an environment people could recognize without any visuals to inform them — though we try to give all the environments some kind of signature sound. We try to find something for every location that has a lot of character or its own unique personality. I like to use a lot of animal sounds as source material and pitch them way up or down. There was a signature weird ticking rumble in the Cube that was a result of pitching down a parrot.

Did you use animal samples for the ch’khalagu sound in the finale?
Farrell: That was a sea otter shriek.

Cohen: And a whole lot of machinery.

Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City.