Award Winning Storytelling through Sound & Score | Interview with Lars Deutsch

Warren Huart:

Hello everybody. Hope you’re doing marvelously well. I’m sitting here with Lars Deutsch. How are ya?

Lars Deutsch:

Nice. How are you?

Warren Huart:

I’m marvelous, and we’re just talking about a second ago, this is Magic Corridor Studios.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, because I record in my corridor. That’s where that came from.

Warren Huart:

We met at Sunset Sound a couple of weeks ago at Craig’s memorial. We talked for a while. We talked probably for about an hour or so, and when I found out that you had done a lot of really great music and then I said, “Well, let’s come and film you in your studio.” And then you said, “Ah, but my studio where I make all this great music is really just a bedroom with some speakers in it, and it’s very modest.” And I was like, “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.” My good friend Graham Coxon, who does a lot of very successful stuff, has a set up just like this, and I just started thinking to myself, “We need to expose the reality of what it’s like to be a professional and make a living.”

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. I know somebody who did sound design for Inception, Interstellar, The Lion King, and all of this. 90% of the work at is done in a room that is much smaller than this with worse speakers than this. And when I found that out, I was like, “Okay, whatever.”

Warren Huart:

You’re right. If we go to Capitol, not the studio, but you go to Capitol Records, I cut a vocal for Tori Kelly on a song which ended up being a big hit in Europe with Professor Green, for those people in Europe will know who he is. We did it in one of their little studios, which was exactly that. It was a gray, carpeted office building with… It had some nice gear in it, but there was nothing special about the room. It was just the gear that was put in there.

Lars Deutsch:

Next time I’m going to Germany, I’m going to bring some stuff to treat the room a little more, but the way I work is, I work quietly on these speakers. When I’m done, I crank up the volume a little bit, and then I have two very different pairs of headphones there and I run the mix or whatever I’m working on through there. And then my secret weapon is the JH Audio. These are molded to my ears. There’s six amps in each side of them, and they’re killer. They’re killer, killer, killer, and they are… When I put them in, it’s the perfect sound stage. And that sounds better than any mastering studio something or something I’ve been. It’s super intense.

Warren Huart:

So you were listening on IEMs, In Ear Monitors?

Lars Deutsch:

It’s the last pass, because one thing that I notice with these, they’re so precise. If I listen to a hit record, I can hear… I heard phasing in a Sia record on these that I didn’t hear anywhere else. It’s something…

Between that, I’m okay working my setup, I’m happy working here. And the most important thing is there’s a window there, which is… I’m a composer first, so I can have noise until I go into a final mix or until I mix for somebody. So I can open the window, and I have sunlight, and I cannot be in a room where there’s no window. I cannot work in a room, that’s not going to-

Warren Huart: 

I understand. So yeah, this is where the magic has been happening for nine years now. In nine years, how many commercials have-

Lars Deutsch:

I’ve done 300 films and commercials, about. Most of them as a composer. A lot of them as a composer, and a lot of things are now where I… I learned mixing while composing, and now there’s stuff… In November I did a big international Intel commercial here, and that was just the mix. So yeah, everything here, I don’t have a subwoofer. So for if I do a bigger project or something, I usually go somewhere and just run it once or twice to see how it works. We also have a car now that is very… The subwoofer is a little bit on the strong side. That’s also a good place to check it.

Warren Huart: 

Yeah, absolutely. So occasional car tests as well. So tell me a little bit more about your process. So you’ve got two pairs of headphones I see over here. You’ve got the AKGs-

Lars Deutsch:

The Quincy Jones… It’s the 701 or 702. And this is the Quincy Jones signature.

Warren Huart: 

Oh, Q701.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. I don’t know how they’re different.

Warren Huart: 

Austrian, obviously.

Lars Deutsch:

That’s just the regular, Beyerdynamic DT770-

Warren Huart: 

Beyerdynamic DT770s.

Lars Deutsch:

Which I really, really like. And especially with the Dragonfly or something… These are a little mellow and boxed in. If you have something that is a little nervous or too much high end, it’s a good balance. So if you make it sound good on those…

Warren Huart: 

Well, in the UK, in England, I grew up on the DT100s. Remember those? The white ones?

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah.

Warren Huart: 

Those were in every studio. We have four pairs in our studio.

Lars Deutsch:

They are great. These are open, so you can’t use them for recording or for a serious recording. I use those for recording as well. I like the, I don’t know, open-close, as much contrast as you can possibly get. And then between the speakers, this, and the in-ears, I got a pretty good idea how it translates.

Warren Huart: 

When you’re working just generally, do you stay on speakers?

Lars Deutsch:

It depends. For composition, I like to be on the speakers. For mixing, I do a lot of stuff on headphones. I also start really early in the morning, so the first two hours of the day are on headphones.

Warren Huart: 

How early is early?

Lars Deutsch:

5:00, 6:00.

Warren Huart: 

Great.

Lars Deutsch:

Depends on-

Warren Huart: 

That’s early.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. Yeah, it depends. I love the home setup because usually I wake up with an idea or working on something. I got this far and still I stopped working the day before and when I wake up the next morning I’m excited and motivated and I just go in here and I cannot blast anything at 5:30 in the morning.

Warren Huart: 

So let’s get into some specifics here. So that over here, this keyboard over here.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. Next NEKTAR P6. I wanted just something with some controllers and a fader. Honestly I never use it. I use it to play but I don’t use the pads, I don’t use the fader or anything.

Warren Huart: 

But you’re triggering sounds on the keyboard, you’re playing-

Lars Deutsch:

I play on the keyboard. Well, you cannot see, there is a piano over there, which I am very happy that I have this because one of my things is I want to do stuff away from the computer as much as possible. And so if it’s just about figuring out choruses or certain things I do that over there and then I go here and play it in there. I don’t use the pads, I don’t use the fader. I got this, didn’t use it for a long time, And then I saw a video with Michael Brower mixing X’s and O’s and how he really performs the guitar on the fader as well and does all this active stuff. And since I saw that video, I’m using it. Antelope Audio over there.

Warren Huart: 

And that is your I/O?

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. So that’s the Zen Tour, and I have this Zen Studio Plus. I had an Apogee do it for a while and I like things that are light and easy and the Apogee, one thing that I love about it, it just always works and it’s always there. And even if you overdrive it, it somehow makes it sound okay and-

Warren Huart: 

So soft limiting the-

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, soft limit, and I think for most people this thing is perfectly fine. I met one of the Antelope guys, Marcel, who has a mastering studio and he played something to me and he said, “This is off iTunes and this is what the Antelope clocking and this is without Antelope clocking.

And it was a mixed finished song. I was like, “okay, that’s interesting.” And then he said, “Oh, you want to play one of your mixes?” And then I played around with this. I got this, played around with it for a bit-

Warren Huart: 

The Zen Tour, yeah.

Lars Deutsch:

The Zen Tour, and then my Zen Tour broke and I got the Apogee back out and I felt how the beat and everything just gets fuzzier with a Dewart than it is with this. This is crisper and nicer. And one thing that I noticed, that I produced an audiobook while this broke. The difference between these pre-amps and this input and the Apogee, it’s pretty strong. With the Antelope, it sounds like you’re there. The vocal chain does a-

Warren Huart: 

The DMP.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah.

Warren Huart: 

I love those.

Lars Deutsch:

Brand new addition here is for this project, is we have a U-67 Re-Issue.

Warren Huart: 

Beautiful.

Lars Deutsch:

And the Preamp makes quite a difference. I have to say though, because a lot of people will watch this that don’t want to spend $8,000 on a vocal chain.

Warren Huart: 

Sure.

Lars Deutsch:

I use the Rode K2 before.

Warren Huart: 

For how long?

Lars Deutsch:

Basically almost everything I’ve done.

Warren Huart: 

So most of the 300 was done on a Rode K2?

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. And one thing that I noticed was that for me always, when I say something that’s stupid, that’s very obvious for you, keep in mind I’m a composer first or started as a composer, when I figured out how to really work with masking or not masking voices, that made a much bigger difference than the microphone. So while this is a great microphone, if you know a little bit what you do in mixing with a K2 you can do anything still with a less expensive microphone.

Warren Huart: 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the biggest difference I suppose you’ve noticed probably between the cheaper mic and the more expensive is you’re probably not DSing as much.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, and one reason why this, we did a microphone shootout with a specific artist. And one thing, I love 3D separation and the idea was that this album is all this turmoil, sharp edges, and sometimes the voice still stands by itself. So we have a song that’s really dark where she’s almost whispering, but we have big guitars and big drums going on at the same time.

Warren Huart: 

Fantastic.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. And the idea is that you… The ideas, she needs to be right here with you. And that microphone is, I don’t know, it’s amazing. We did the test with at Vintage Audio King with all the mics they had and yeah, we didn’t know which one would win. I was hoping it would be a cheaper one. But this one won, yeah.

Warren Huart: 

So one of these speakers, they’re the sE Munro.

Lars Deutsch:

So yeah, they used to be sE, and then Munro split ways. And then they were called Munro Sonic Eggs. To my knowledge, they stopped making them two years ago. I love the 3D separation. These give me a lot of detail without being fatiguing. So I really, really like them, and if they would ever break, I would hunt down another pair. Absolutely. The one thing that I had to learn with these is because they do 3D so well I did a mix for something and it was perfect here. And then I went in the car and the lead vocal and some of the backgrounds, they were on top of each other because these speakers can… They separate and so I cannot trust them all the way because it’s so nice that every now and then I need to check with something that doesn’t do that. But yeah, I love the sound. And I had them for, I don’t know, seven, eight years or something now.

Warren Huart: 

So I see guitars laying around. I see a rather lovely Strat. I’m going to reach over and grab it. But you told me how much you paid for it and I’m very envious.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. It’s something like $450 because the shop that was closing said half price on everything outside and they forgot to say excluding certain items. So this one was on sale before and then I paid half of the sale price and I’ve-

Warren Huart: 

It’s gorgeous.

Lars Deutsch:

So there’s a Collings acoustic guitar. I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience. You have a less expensive acoustic guitar and you spent half a day queuing and it never sounds right and you have the right acoustic DTR, it just works. So to my knowledge, an acoustic guitar is one thing where there’s no deal. Having said that, this is considered to be the bargain of the custom shop thing.

Warren Huart: 

How much was it?

Lars Deutsch:

This was $4,000.

Warren Huart: 

Whew, bargain.

Lars Deutsch:

Well-

Warren Huart: 

I know what you mean.

Lars Deutsch:

I wouldn’t be surprised if you need to spend twice the money on a Martin to get a similar quality guitar, because the $4,000 Martin doesn’t sound like this.

Warren Huart: 

That’s gorgeous.

Lars Deutsch:

What was interesting for me with the Strat was, I would play with this artist and we had a ballad with a lot of open chords higher up on the fret and they sounded beautiful and the colleagues and then we moved to full bend and I picked up the Strat and it was tuned and I played the first chord and it felt so incredibly out of tune on stage, and I was a lecturer for the Bachelor of Film Music at MI for a while, which has some benefit, which is yeah, you just go to the head of the guitar department, tell him this story and this guy said, “Oh no, that’s a Strat, they’re never in tune.” I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting comment. So what if I buy a custom shop?” “No, there’s nobody in the world that can buy you a Strat that is in tune.

I was like, “okay, that’s a…” I love the Collings and I’ve done so much research before I bought them, it was between Santa Cruz and the Callings and I’m so happy with this and…

Warren Huart: 

Were you primarily a guitar player or were you a keyboard player? How did you get here?

Lars Deutsch:

I’m really a pen and paper composer first. That’s the thing, but guitar has always been my instrument.

Warren Huart: 

It was your instrument, great.

Lars Deutsch:

And all the rock and metal stuff you can imagine when you’re 15, I’ve done it all.

Warren Huart: 

Like who?

Lars Deutsch:

There’s really fantastic pictures of me with hair all the way to my ass, and so I really liked Sabotage at the time, and crazy guitar player who died far too young. But I was very lucky to meet him after a show and talk.

That was really cool. And yeah, and then all kinds of stuff like Overkill and a lot of the German metal bands. And then I had, you know, the Dynamo Festival in Holland.

Warren Huart: 

Yes.

Lars Deutsch:

So I think I went for the third time in a row and something didn’t gel with me. I wasn’t so excited. And on the way back to my tent from the stage I heard “I Have a Nova,” Heather Nova’s one hit, and I was listening to that and I was like, “I think maybe it’s time for a change.” And just like that I… I still love distorted guitars, I like loud drums, but I just needed a different color. So this is a project I really like. 15 years ago I was in a CD store in Cologne and they had these signs everywhere, biggest CD store on the planet.

And so just current atonal, classical music was as big as usually a CD department is. Hundreds of thousands of CDs. So walking around there, I was thinking there’s really no more point to make any music unless it’s new, different, special or something like this. And one thing for me is I get bored really easily and I want to do something that works for an audience, but that where there’s a challenge with something interesting. So this one is called “Reinvent Yourself” and it has all of this growing pains. So basically, I only use synthesizers on these. Most of what you hear is Hive, u-he synth, which I really, really like. So basically this is almost punky stuff with synthesizers over edgy images.

Warren Huart: 

Great.

Voiceover:

Invent yourself, and then reinvent yourself. Don’t swim in the same slough, and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. Change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. Reinvigorate yourself and accept what is, but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. Be self taught, and reinvent your life because you must. It is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.

Lars Deutsch:

Couple of things with us. First of all, there’s a moment when she kicks a shopping cart, which is me doing a filter sweep. It’s not the actual sound of that, and I’m very proud of that. They go, and it sounds like it’s the actual sound of the-

Warren Huart: 

Oh, it’s great.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. And the other stuff with this is that there’s an actual composition behind that with polytonality and all of this weird… So there’s friction and a lot of stuff when you see trailers or things now, the harmonic language has gotten lamer and lamer.

Warren Huart: 

It’s all sound effects.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, it’s all sound effects. I have the growing pains in the chords and then all the sounds and everything is stretching and distorted and all this, and so this kind of fun. And one of the big challenges working on something like this, this is my mix where the music is too loud but is when somebody is whispering, which they do a lot in commercials and there’s no real pitch information.

You can do a mix where you can hear the voice really well or you can do a mix where the music is cool, both at the same time is a little tricky. Whispering is tricky, but yeah, so this is one of the projects I’ve done. This is very, very recent. This is a Stephen King project. Let me talk about it first because then it’s more fun to watch.

Warren Huart: 

Okay.

Lars Deutsch:

So it’s a Stephen King short story, it’s called The Passenger. And there’s a bend in the logic, there’s something that is not right, and so I didn’t want to write a normal score. So half of the music I composed, reversed, and then sent through the mausoleum settings but with no direct signal. So you basically just had this big hall reverberating with the score backwards. And so stuff like this, just mind bendy stuff.

So this section is where the guy that gets picked on a lot for the first time comes out of his shell and he’s beating somebody to death.

Warren Huart: 

Oh, yes.

Lars Deutsch:

So first thing that is fun about this, I did the sound design for a commercial and there was a cart in front of a supermarket and a watermelon fell off. And so I needed to sound design the watermelon. The exact watermelon sound is now when he does the final blow to the head in this. So this watermelon sound made it on two projects. Pretty impressive. But what I did here is if you play the violin and you turn the ball around and you hit the string with the wood, it’s called collegno and what you get is a very percussive sound with a little bit of pitch but it’s never 100% in tune so it’s annoying and weird. So I had a lot of people not in sync play collegno, so you have this clattering kind of thing, then I reversed that so it goes like this, and then I use that and I wrote the fader with every hit like this and then ran it through guitar amp, and that’s what you hear.

Warren Huart: 

Very, very interesting.

Lars Deutsch:

One thing that I also do here, which I like to do in film a lot, is have two different timelines at the same time. One thing that has always… Like when you’re in the box, you can be so perfectly on the grid. And I had to score a really difficult project about a very difficult topic and I didn’t want to be the person that writes a tear jerker score under such a already dramatic topic, but I couldn’t write anything safe. So one thing that I did for that was I wrote music that is relatively mellow and then I hand played woodblock but I played the woodblock after I hadn’t listened to the piece for awhile in its own timing. And then I play this at the same time. So the woodblock is not in sync in any shape or form with the rest of the music, but it feels like a metronome.

So it totally messes with your mind. And so one of the things that I do for stuff like this is that, it kind of starts together and then this sound happens when it wants to happen and it only comes back together at the very last hit. So when you watch this and when you’re in the cinema and when this is loud, you get torn, like something is tearing at you, and only in the last moment with the last hit, all of these things come back together. So it’s out of sync on purpose.

I love quiet music and I’m not the most religious guy, but I was happy when a church asked me to write something that feels like the whole humanity is singing at the same time. I got the budget to do a choir with 250 voices.

Warren Huart: 

Amazing.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah. A total waste. At some point you don’t hear the difference anymore, but it’s cool. And when Logic updated to a thousand tracks, that came just a month too late for me. So this is a project with 250 actual voices, and it’s a German hymn and it’s really dark and the video doesn’t matter, but it’s the sound of I got to do classical music.

Yep. Two soloists and 250 voice choir. They wanted that it sounds like it was performed in a church which made it really difficult to produce because there’s so much stuff moving around this.

Warren Huart: 

Sure.

Lars Deutsch:

And so you can’t push it all the way to sound like the trailer but that was a fun project and a lot of editing, as you can imagine.

Warren Huart: 

Where did you record it? Where did you get 200 and people in a room?

Lars Deutsch:

In Berlin. It’s in shifts.

Warren Huart: 

Oh, I see.

Lars Deutsch:

It needed to be in shifts because they still wanted somewhat sharp edges. And if you do orchestral recordings or choir recordings like this, if you do a full on classical piece where everything flows, it’s not hip hop tight. It’s never hip hop tight. And we needed to be able to go in there and be hip hop tight in case the need would arise. And so it’s a lot of microphones. I just love choir and voices, and when I arrange pop songs… Maybe this is a good transition. So this is a pop song, but the idea was that we wanted to place the artist as something different and unique. I also write… It’s not very loud in the mix, but I write a choir arrangement off a voice 50 times in the background.

So that was a little goofy variety kind of-

Warren Huart: 

Is that an American artist?

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, the video was out. At some point they pulled this and I did another video with her where I got to play guitar with a Muppet, which is awesome. That was on my checklist. I like doing things like this. I also produced the music video, which is something… I’ve done a couple of music videos.

Warren Huart: 

Did you create that music video?

Lars Deutsch:

I did create that music video.

Warren Huart:

It’s fantastic.

Lars Deutsch:

So because of my work in film, I’m connected with a lot of filmmakers and one thing that I… If I don’t score film, I think that my talent is a storytelling through sound. So when I work with an artist, I can build a wall around them that that fits them, that fits who they really are. And then it’s a little quirky, interesting or something. And that extends to the music videos as well. I’m not holding a camera on myself. I usually get a director, but I’m very involved to keep it on point for the artist. So usually we decide on the concept and stuff and then I have very good people to do this, and with this especially, color grading is vital and took forever with this one as you can imagine.

Warren Huart:

I can imagine. Yeah.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, I’ve done one in downtown LA with underwater shoot, drone up and down the building, and I think the most gangster or LA thing that I’ve done here was we were filming the artists walking out of this high rise and the drone was flying towards her, and this being an Indie video, we just quickly did that and then the police pulled up and our drone operator just hovered the drone above the police car until the light changed and the police drove on. So this is under water.

And so on.

Warren Huart:

That’s great. Really good. So you produce, wrote, co-wrote, produced the song?

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

And presumably play everything on it?

Lars Deutsch:

Yes. There’s a guitar somewhere. The rest is in the box but yeah, I just like the storytelling part of it. And I like the video, the song, everything, her story. Everything together creates something. And yeah, that’s my thing, storytelling with sound.

So with show themes, you pitch, and in many cases you pitch for… In this particular case, there were 93 people on the pitch. So I won the pitch and they were talking about they need this, this, and this for bumpers and all of this. And then it was about two weeks until premiere and then somebody said, “Oh yeah, Nikki Minaj likes the song.” Then they threw away my show theme, stuck a Nikki Minaj song under it, which didn’t fit at all. But as you know, that’s the industry.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. That’s cool. That makes a lot of sense. Who did the voices?

Lars Deutsch:

Insanely talented singer-rapper who can do anything from Luther Vandross to rap, and he is Naomi Campbell’s fitness coach as well, he’s a fitness coach to the stars kind of thing. So he was perfect for this, and I think he was here for 10 minutes.

Warren Huart:

Wow.

Lars Deutsch:

He’s crazy. Yeah, he’s really good. His name is Kevin Daniels. I don’t know… He travels between somewhere on the East coast and here, but yeah. Cool guy. Cool thing. I’ve done a couple of his songs. We did a barbershop quartet with him where he sings all the voices and all kinds of things. So he’s a cool guy to work with.

Warren Huart:

There’s a 421 here. What do you use this for?

Lars Deutsch:

So this is for writing. Basically, when I’m here with a singer or when the universe is really in need for some pain when I sing myself. So the idea is that for songwriting or something that you can just pick it up and then the speakers can still be on and nobody needs to wear headphones and you can just jam. The ideas that I can… When inspiration hits, somebody can go to the piano and just play, just grab a guitar, and with this thing, you can just sing. I like when people sing in the proper mics straight away because sometimes you get the first take. I worked on a song where the singer riffed at the end and got really aggressive right for the song, and she never captured that again in the vocal booth, and so I like when it’s on there.

Warren Huart:

I’ve done countless records with the main vocal and every day you hear somebody go, “Oh yeah, that was my first take.” Or the opposite like, “we’d already comped in. I did one more go, quick one.” And all of these different stories, it’s never exactly how you plan it. It happens the way it’s supposed to happen.

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, and I’ve seen singers get worse during… I’ve seen a singer that sang a song live well 20 times, we played shows around or she played shows and then it was time to release that as a single, and she was struggling in the vocal booth. We have perfect recordings live with no cuts or anything. Vocals can be tricky. I had a case with a voice, didn’t want to be tuned. It just never worked. Anything you did didn’t work. And then I had a tenor who was, for a classical singer, surprisingly off pitch, far, far, far, far. And at time he actually took even liberty with the notes and I could tune it whichever way I wanted it. It always sounded right. It’s kind of…

Warren Huart:

Right, I know. There’s no rhyme or reason, is there? Well, thank you ever so much for showing us about, I appreciate it.

Lars Deutsch:

Thank you.

Warren Huart:

So, is this amazing? Lars makes a living and 300-

Lars Deutsch:

Yeah, it’s a little more now. 300 films and commercials and I’m currently… Last project was the Stephen King thing that I showed you earlier. The current project is with Kiki Palmer. It’s an animation film with her voice. And before that I mixed a Red Bull documentary, did an Intel commercial. This year 2019, I got a really cool call where somebody said, “Hey, can you make James Earl Jones sound 50 again?” That was cool. Yeah, so it’s-

Warren Huart:

I’m assuming that’s for Star Wars.

Lars Deutsch:

No, that was not for Star Wars.

Warren Huart:

Oh, I would have thought that maybe they wanted to make him sound like a younger Darth Vader or something.

Lars Deutsch:

No, that would have been cool if it would have been for Star Wars. No, it was not for Star Wars, but I used it a lot to tease my Star Wars friends, all the Star Wars fans.

Warren Huart:

Okay.

Lars Deutsch:

I know.

Warren Huart:

I’m sure.

Lars Deutsch:

I got a lot of mileage out of that, but yeah, so it’s a lot of different projects. It’s a interesting album now, which will take most of my time until 1st of March. Then there might be a feature next. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic. Well thanks ever so much for showing us about.

Lars Deutsch:

Thanks for coming.

Warren Huart:

Please leave a whole bunch of comments and questions below and remember, there’s nothing really stopping you when it comes to equipment for making great music.