This episode was written & produced by Casey Emmerling and Andrew Anderson.

In movie musicals, the vocals are almost never recorded live on-set. Instead, the actors pre-record their songs, then lip sync to those recordings while filming. But on Wicked, they threw out the rulebook, and recorded all of the lead vocals live. In this episode, Production Sound Mixer Simon Hayes reveals how they pulled off this audio feat. From cleverly disguised lav mics and in-ear monitors, to “silent wind” machines, to a jaw-dropping live performance of “Defying Gravity,” this is the story behind a truly magical production.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Rachel Sandy - Waltz on Lake Silver
Raymond Grouse - To Begin
Million Eyes - Curious
Howard Harper-Barnes - La Danse Timide
Million Eyes - Our Favourite Hideaway
Million Eyes - Caught By a Dream
Raymond Grouse - Quiche for Two
Raymond Grouse - Morning Traffic
Howard Harper Barnes - Eyecatcher
Million Eyes - Yogogi Stroll
Raymond Grouse - Toss Me The Tomatoes
Rachel Sandy - Waltz on Silver Lake
Howard Harper Barnes - A New Day Is Here
Raymond Grouse - Just a Drive Away
Million Eyes - Come Nighttime
Raymond Grouse - Art on a Plate

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View Transcript ▶︎

[20K sonic logo]

[sting: Rachel Sandy - Waltz on Lake Silver]

[music in: Raymond Grouse - To Begin]

When I saw the movie Wicked, I was pretty blown away. For anyone who's not familiar, the film was adapted from a Broadway musical about the witches from the Wizard of Oz. It was directed by John Chu, and stars Ariana Grande as the good witch Galinda, and Cynthia Erivo as the so-called wicked witch, Elphaba.

Between the performances, the score, the choreography, and the production design, Wicked is an absolute spectacle. But the thing that impressed me the most was how great the singing sounded. Especially because I had heard that all of the lead vocals were recorded live on set.

This is virtually unheard of, for many reasons. In movie musicals, you've got dozens of people dancing, cameras and equipment moving around, all of which make a lot of noise. The singers themselves are dancing and interacting with the set and props, which isn't a recipe for a flawless vocal performance. The boom microphones that hang down from above have to stay out of the shot, so they can't be too close to the action. And lavalier mics on the actors' costumes can easily get jostled with all of that movement. Basically, it's an audio nightmare.

[music crashes and burns out]

For these reasons, the stars of movie musicals usually record their songs in advance, and then lip sync to those recordings while filming.

[music in: Million Eyes - Curious]

Simon: On old-school musicals, they weren't singing live. They were miming to a playback track.

That's Simon Hayes, the Production Sound Mixer of Wicked.

Simon: And the playback track would generally have been recorded with a studio microphone, really, really close.

As in, close to the actors' mouths, to get the cleanest possible recording.

Simon: And the film microphone on the set potentially would have been much further away.

This means that viewers can often hear the change in vocal tone when the actors go from talking to singing.

[music fades under]

Simon: You hear this shift in the vocal and you go, "Whoa! Here's the lip sync."

[clip: The Wizard of Oz - Somewhere Over the Rainbow]

Simon: And although we love those movies, and we respect them, we all knew that people were lip syncing.

As the Production Sound Mixer, Simon is in charge of capturing any on-set vocals, whether it’s talking or singing.

Simon: Now, what I wanted to do in Wicked was we don't want to hear this transition between singing and dialogue, because there isn't a transition, because it's all live on the set.

[clip: Wicked - Popular]

[music in: Howard Harper-Barnes - La Danse Timide]

On set, Simon has a lightweight, all-terrain cart loaded with equipment.

Simon: It's small enough that one person can roll it across the floor. And it's light enough that two people can carry it up some stairs.

On the bottom of the cart, there are radio receivers which get the signals from all of the microphones in use. On top, there's a thirty two track mixing board, plus three small screens that show what the cameras are shooting. As they film, Simon records the on-set audio, known as the production sound.

Simon: And I'm going to be recording those isolated mic tracks so that I can present them to sound post, but also doing my own mix for the picture editor in the way that I would like to hear it based on what I'm seeing on my screens, as if I'm sitting in a cinema and I'm one of the audience members.

Throughout the shoot, Simon works with the director, the actors, and the audio assistants or A2s to make sure the dialogue sounds great.

Simon: It's my job to record the cleanest vocals possible, so that those original performances that the actors give us on the movie set make their way all the way through the editing process, all the way through the sound editing process, and into the movie theater.

[music out]

Simon: Now, If I have a bad day at work, or if I'm presented with challenges which destroy my soundtracks, then the actors will have to come in, they'll have to re-record their vocals…

This is called ADR, or Automated Dialogue Replacement.

Simon: And potentially those performances aren't going to be quite as authentic as the ones recorded on the day.

[music in: Million Eyes - Our Favourite Hideaway]

Now, almost everything we watch has some ADR in it. And if it's done well, you won't ever notice. But from an acting perspective, it's really not ideal.

Simon: We never get the actors back in together to ADR their piece. You know, an actor could be on a different movie, in a different city, and we'll get them into a vocal booth. And they will re-record their dialogue on their own. So they won't be wearing their costume. They won't have the actor that they're communicating with sitting opposite them. They won't have the props in their hand that they were playing with.

Simon: And so, there will almost be a disconnect for the actor. And obviously, really great actors can do it. But I think the more lines of dialogue that are ADRed, the less likely the audience are to buy those performances.

Simon: Someone that doesn't understand filmmaking may not think to themselves, "This has been ADR'd. The vocals have been recorded later," but they may just be looking at the actors facial expressions, listening to the tonality of their voice, and thinking, "I don't trust this."

But making ADR believable isn't just about performance. It's also about the natural reverberation of the space.

Simon: If we've got someone walking across a desert speaking, and we can just detect something within their voice that tells us that they were in a room, is that gonna make us think, "Do we buy it?" And so these are the problems with ADR.

[music out]

In the real world, you can almost always hear the space around someone's voice. And to capture this on set, filmmakers use boom mics, which they can hold closer or farther from the actors, depending on the shot.

Simon: We want the sound to match the picture, and [reverb changes to match words] a wide shot should sound slightly wider than a closeup. A mid shot should sound mid, because that's the way as human beings, we expect sound to be.

But with a musical, it's different.

Simon: Basically, when someone's singing, there is only one type of sound that I want, and that is close sound, in the same way that when we hear someone singing on a pop record, their voice would be miked.

And to keep the vocal tone consistent, Simon recorded the dialogue with that same intimate closeness.

Simon: What I didn't want to do with Wicked was put any space around the dialogue. Because I knew that we were generally going to be going right into singing, I wanted that close-up dialogue so that there was no transition into the singing voice.

[clip: Wicked - Dancing Through Life]

[Dallas sounds distant/noisy, gradually cranks up along with music and gets muddy]

Plus, when a voice is miked from far away, you get less of the pure vocal sound, and more noise. Now, when there's not much music to compete with it, that can sound nice and realistic.

[music swells: Million Eyes - Caught By a Dream]

But if the music swells, you'll have to turn the dialogue up to match it. And all of that noise you recorded comes up with it.

[music + muddy vocals end]

So close miked dialogue gives you more flexibility to boost vocals cleanly, even when the score is loud.

Simon: Because it's a musical, I knew that even when the actors weren't singing, we would always be preparing for the next song and score would be building. So again, I wanted as much signal to noise as possible, which is closely mic'd dialogue, so that if John Chu said to Andy Nelson and John Marquis, our fantastic re-recording mixers, " I'd like to hear more score. Can we push the score?" They'd be able to say, "No problem."

[music in: Raymond Grouse - Quiche for Two]

To make that close-miked sound possible, they relied heavily on wireless lavalier mics. Typically, these are hidden in the actors’ costumes, which is a whole mysterious art in and of itself.

Simon: It is a black art. It's an absolutely creative skill, and we just have a whole host of tricks. We've got all sorts of mounts. We've got ways of keeping the microphone so that it doesn't get rubbed by the costume. You know, we put little bits of wire on a mount to push the costume out, but not enough so that you see a bulge. A good lav mic sounds great. A bad lav mic is ADR.

But with some costumes, you just can't get a good sound from underneath the clothing.

Simon: If it's a bit of velvet, a bit of chiffon, a bit of silk, [sfx: rustling] it's either going to be rustling, [muffle voice] or it's going to sound muffled.

And the elaborate costumes of Wicked included lots of those materials.

Simon: Ariana Grande, Galinda, all of her costumes were very, very ruffly. They were beautifully designed, but it wasn't going to be possible to mic her without putting the mics on the outside.

Simon: And so what we did on Wicked was, whenever we didn't have a great lav placement that we could hide, we just put the microphone straight on the outside, and it was removed in post.

Meaning, the visual effects team would digitally paint out the microphone. It was an extra step that Simon and the team felt was well worth it.

Simon: Removing a lav mic with VFX in post has a financial penalty, but so does ADR. But only one of the two supports the original performance. And that is removing it with VFX in post.

[music out]

Now, even though they relied heavily on lavalier mics, boom mics were still an important part of the equation.

Simon: We always had two booms, and sometimes three.

[music in: Raymond Grouse - Morning Traffic]

Anytime Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were on screen together, they each had a dedicated boom mic above them.

Simon: Even if Ari and Cynthia are singing absolutely nose to nose, which they are many times in the movie, we always had two boom mics, even if these two boom mics were like jostling for position, and only missing each other by one inch.

These booms would normally be just out of frame. But in a pinch, they could paint them out digitally, like they did with the lav mics.

Simon: I think maybe five times throughout the whole movie, we painted booms out.

Recording all of these audio tracks is a ton of work, but it gives them more options when it comes time to mix the film.

Simon: Because I'm presenting these multitracks, I'm not making absolute final decisions for the director on the movie set, I'm presenting him with choices that he can make a decision on based on how his sound effects are going to sit around the vocal, how the score is going to sit around the vocal, and how he wants the final film to sound. So really what I'm trying to do is be an absolutely expert track layer and present choices.

[music out]

Now, whenever there's a duet, and the actors are singing right into each other’s faces, those mics are inevitably going to pick up both voices... which is not ideal for mixing.

Simon: My instinct as a Production Sound Mixer is to get the cleanest vocals. And so on Ari's close up, I would love to ask Cynthia not to sing. And then on Cynthia's close up, I'd love to ask Ari not to sing. But what I decided very, very early on was that if I asked one of them to mime, it wouldn't do the emotions justice, because the way that they were singing at each other had so much umbrage when they're hating on each other...

[clip: Wicked - Defying Gravity]

Simon: Or so much love developing as their friendship’s blossoming...

[clip: Wicked - One Short Day]

Simon: …that I felt that I would be taking something away. So here's the thing. I didn't even ask. I just went, "You know what, guys? You can sing over each other as much as you want to. We will work it out as best we can in post production."

[music in: Howard Harper Barnes - Eyecatcher]

Simon: And I think that we made the right decision. Because when Ari and Cynthia started singing together, every single time, it was like their vocals meshed. Something very, very magical happens when those two start dueting together.

Simon: And I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck starting to stand up. And many times, many, many times, I had tears rolling down my cheeks. And you just become… It's almost like my sound recording equipment is like a musical instrument. And I'm just feeling the faders. And I'm playing, and I'm feeling their dynamic range. And I just become part of this, we call it the dance, and it's the filmmaking dance.

Simon: And it's a dance that all of us do. The boom operators are dancing with the grips. The grips are dancing with the camera operators. They're all dancing with the actors. And we're just all creating this piece of cinema together. And that was kind of like every day on Wicked.

[music out into music in: Million Eyes - Yogogi Stroll]

Recording the stars of Wicked was a complex process, but capturing the chorus required a completely different approach. And the biggest challenge was yet to come.

Simon: Throughout the whole filmmaking process, all of these people would say to me, "Yeah, but what are you going to do about Defying Gravity? Cynthia's flying through the air. Surely she's going to lip sync to that. Surely you won't be able to record that live."

That's coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in: Million Eyes - Yogogi Stroll]

During the production of Wicked, the vocal performances of all the lead actors were recorded live on set. It was a risky move that came with all kinds of technical hurdles. But recording the chorus members posed a different set of problems.

Simon: In choruses, there could be a lot of choreography footfall, there could be some people who are better dancers than singers who are singing along in there. And so basically what we did was we said, "Look, we're going to record them live wherever we can, but we're not absolutely committing that these are going to be the vocals that we use in the movie. We're going to support those live on-set vocals with re-recordings of fantastic ensemble singers."

[music out]

For instance, there's a song called No One Mourns the Wicked, where the villagers of Oz celebrate the Wicked Witch's death. And when they filmed that scene…

Simon: There were people singing that were almost chanting, because they weren't professional singers, they were professional dancers. And so there was this very, very raw and real part of the way that they were performing that sounded like they were angry villagers.

Then in post production, these on-set vocals were blended with studio recordings of singers from the Broadway production of Wicked. Here's the official broadway recording from 2003.

[clip: Wicked – Broadway - No One Mourns the Wicked]

Simon: John Chu and the music team assembled some of the best singers from the Wicked stage show, and got them to come back in and basically become part of the ensemble vocals in the movie.

Here’s the same section from the movie.

[clip: Wicked Movie - No One Mourns the Wicked]

But there was one more sonic ingredient to these recordings, which involved something called a thumper track.

[Dancing Through Life - gradually filter out everything over 38 Hz]

Simon: Basically, we would take the sub bass from Greg Wells' backing track, we would remove anything above 40 hertz. I think our sweet spot was 38 Hertz.

[track up, then out]

Simon: And what the choreography would do, Chris Scott, he would say to his team, "Right, guys, we're going to do this one just for sound. Don't verbalize anything, okay? We're just going to do the dance."

Then, they'd cue up the thumper track for the chorus to dance to.

Simon: Which basically goes “woo, woo, woo, wooo.” And Chris Scott would say, "And one and two, and let's go three." And suddenly there, we would get them all doing their stamping [sfx] and their dancing [sfx] and the desk slamming [sfx] completely in tempo to the track.

The only music in that recording would be the thumper track. And since it’s such a low frequency, it could be removed completely with audio software, giving them a clean recording of all that on-set movement.

[clip: Wicked - Ozdust Ballroom]

Simon: And so if you like, we had the best case scenario. We had the live solo vocals which contain emotion, we had re-recorded and perfectly sung ensemble vocals, but then we had the real sound of the footstamps and the desks being smashed from the set in the right acoustic. They weren't rebuilt sound effects. And when you blend it all together, you've got something that sounds very, very real.

[clip: Wicked - Dancing Through Life]

Simon: And I think that that's what made it such a unique soundtrack.

[music in: Raymond Grouse - Toss Me The Tomatoes]

Of course, in order to sing on key and dance in time, the actors need to hear the music. But if they just blast the music through loudspeakers, that sound would get picked up by all the booms and lav mics.

So instead, the cast wore in-ear monitors, or IEMS, which are basically fancy ear buds designed for live performances like concerts. And this was another thing to hide from the cameras.

Simon: And so what we did, we got the cables and the IEMs themselves to be manufactured to match the skin tone of the actor. So for Cynthia, we liaised with the Makeup Designer who had designed the color of Elphaba's green skin. And we basically got that exact color match for her IEMs.

And for Ariana Grande, they matched her In Ear Monitor to her primary makeup tone. This color matching meant that on the wide shots, the IEMs were far away enough that you couldn't even see them. But on the mid shots and the closeups, they had to be painted out.

Simon: And so that was again, VFX supporting original performances, and giving Ari and Cynthia full acoustic support in the same way that they would have support if they were on stage doing a live concert.

[music out]

As for what was playing in those IEMS, it was the core rock instruments of the score, which were recorded by Music Producer Greg Wells. Basically, everything but the orchestral layers.

Simon: Greg's tracks that we played back were pretty much final mixed, and all they had to do is have orchestration added to them.

But singing to prerecorded music doesn't allow for any variation in the tempo... which is one way for a singer to add some personality to a song.

[music in: Rachel Sandy - Waltz on Silver Lake]

Simon: If possible, what we wanted to do was to play a keyboard into their IEMs and actually allow their performance and their emotions to drive the tempo of their singing. If they wanted to take a moment to reflect in the middle of a song, they could do if we had a keyboard player accompanying them, but not leading them.

Simon: So what we did, wherever possible, was we allowed the actors to go off-tempo with a keyboard, but still knowing that at a certain point, the drums and the bass was going to come in, and suddenly we have this rhythm and this tempo that's the lifeblood of Wicked, and at that point we would do a quick crossfade across in their IEMs from live keyboard into Greg Wells's, backing track.

[music under, clip sneaks in: Wicked - I'm Not That Girl]

Simon: For instance, Cynthia singing, I'm Not That Girl. Her first verse and a half was completely freeform. The orchestration is incredibly sparse and you can hear her breaths and you can just feel her emotions. And that was because we gave her that freedom which she asked for, which was the accompaniment from the keyboard.

Simon: But then as the rhythm comes in, and we do the fade across, and then we're into the big number.

[I’m Not That Girl up, then out]

Of course, the crew had to hear the music too, in order to time all of their camera movements, and boom movements, and lighting changes... So while they shot, nearly everyone wore headphones.

Simon: And what they would hear in their headphones was Ari, Cynthia's, or Johnny Bailey's, Jeff Goldblum's, or Michelle Yeoh’s voice blended with the final music track in the way that I felt they should be blended.

[clip: Wicked - What Is This Feeling?]

Simon: But if they take their headphones off, they've got those actors singing completely a cappella.

[What Is This Feeling - vocals only]

Simon: So it was a very, very unique experience.

[music in: Howard Harper Barnes - A New Day Is Here]

But the most unique experience that Simon had on Wicked was when they filmed the song “Defying Gravity.” It happens in the climax of the film, when Elphaba learns to fly on a broomstick, and gets chased through the sky by an army of flying monkeys. That meant that Cynthia Erivo would be strapped into wires, doing all kinds of flips, and zooming through the air... all while singing.

Simon: And throughout the whole filmmaking process, all of these people would say to me, "Yeah, but what are you going to do about ‘Defying Gravity?’ Cynthia's flying through the air. Surely she's going to lip sync to that. Surely you won't be able to record that live."

Simon: And I kept on saying to everyone on the crew, "Listen, of course we've got the pre-record in our back pocket, just in case it's impossible for her to sing live. But you've seen the way that Cynthia is performing everything live. She's going to want to go live. We've got to be ready, guys."

[music out]

The first thing they had to figure out was how to make it look windy without the noise.

Simon: Of course, Cynthia needed to look like she was flying at high speed through the air. But wind is the enemy of production sound. Normally when we need wind, it's manufactured by big, big rotor blades with either, if we're on exteriors, big V8 engines... [sfx: V8 engine] or if we're on interiors, very, very loud electric engines. [sfx: electric engine] And you've just got this mechanical noise. And it will generally mean that you're going to have to ADR everything.

To avoid this, they used something that Simon and various special effects designers have been refining for years... called Silent Wind.

[music in: Raymond Grouse - Just a Drive Away]

Simon: What Silent Wind basically is, is our Special Effects Supervisor, had all of his wind making machines outside the sound studio. And then he ducted the actual wind itself in through flexible plastic pipes, and he had his special effects team holding one pipe each, and they would be pointing them at Cynthia, and these jets of wind would hit Cynthia wherever she was flying.

Simon: But because the machinery was outside the soundstage, I couldn't hear the machinery. All I could hear was a kind of broadband "Shhh," which of course can be removed from the vocal pretty easily these days.

But the wind motors weren't the only things on set that had to be quieted down. For instance, the stunt wires that Cynthia was rigged up with were powered by noisy hydraulic machines. So they moved those outside the soundstage as well.

At one point, they had laid a track for a crane to move a camera around…

Simon: And on the rehearsal, it's going [sfx] "crick crack, crick crack." And it was noisy, and I said, “Guys, I'm sorry, we've got to take that, crane off that track, and we've got to re-lay it and put carpet underneath it.”

Simon: And so basically, as a film crew, we just all pulled out every single stop to make what would normally be an action sequence in a superhero movie, that's what Defying Gravity is, it's like a superhero movie, but with someone singing live. And normally that set would just be unusable for sound. And we made it quiet.

[music out]

Simon: And when we got Cynthia in that rig and Jon Chu said to her, just matter of fact, "Hey, Cynthia, how are you feeling? Do you want to go live?" Cynthia was just like, "Of course I'm singing live!" And we just kind of all looked at each other. And there was this knowing kind of glance around the room, where all of us who had worked so hard to get this set quiet went, “Thank goodness we made the effort.”

[Defying Gravity music only sneaks in]

And so, Simon and the crew watched as Cynthia was slingshotted through the air, flipping and spinning while delivering a spot on vocal performance.

[Defying Gravity up, then under]

Simon: It was an Olympic level of gymnastics that she was doing, and singing completely perfectly as she was doing it. I think only Cynthia could pull that off. It was something just unprecedented.

[music in: Million Eyes - Come Nighttime]

For Simon, capturing a performance like that is what he lives for.

Simon: What I realized when I started in the film business is that sound is performance, and I love performance. And when an actor is absolutely nailing their character, and I can feel it, and I know that I'm recording it beautifully, that's what I feel I was born to do.

Simon: And so there is kind of this feeling when I'm sitting on that movie set, although I am absolutely immersed in this wonderful feeling of creativity, there's also a feeling that I'm on a knife edge.

Simon: I've got to make sure that I'm perfect. I may not get another take like that. I can't say, "Hey, you know what? Can we go again?" if that was the perfect take for performance, that was the take that the director loved.

Simon: And I love that feeling. I live for that feeling. I really, really thrive on that pressure, and I thrive on being able to say to my directors and my actors, "I got it. It sounds great." That's the best feeling in the world for me.

[music out into music in: Raymond Grouse - Art on a Plate]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. To hear more, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram, or visit defacto Sound dot com.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling. And Andrew Anderson, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter.

Thanks to our guest, Simon Hayes. To learn more about his work, visit Simon Hayes dot com.

Finally, subscribe to my Youtube channel, Dallas Taylor dot mp3 for video exclusives. Over there, you can see my behind the scenes trips to Cirque du Soleil, SNL, Disney Imagineering, and more. You can also find clips of these stories on Instagram and TikTok under that same name, Dallas Taylor dot mp3.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]