The interview which appears below, was originally published on Celemony magazine in December 2005. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
A key moment in A.R. Rahman’s life: he met one of India’s most famous directors, Mani Ratnam, who asked him to compose the music for his next film, “Roja” (1992). The rest, as they say, is history. He went on to compose several great hits for Tamil-language films before composing the score and songs for his first Hindi-language film, “Rangeela” (1995).
The enormous success of his first Hindi venture was followed by the chart-topping soundtrack albums of films such as “Bombay” (1995), “Taal” (1999), and “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India” (2001), which was nominated for best foreign-language film at the 2002 Academy Awards. He also worked with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Shekhar Kapur (director of “Elizabeth”) on a musical called “Bombay Dreams”.
What have been some recent productions of you and how have they been recorded?
Well, “Warriors of Heaven and Earth”, “Provoked” and “The Rising” are amongst the movie projects, I completed in recent times.
We have just opened our new facility, called AM studios, a few months ago. We were initially recording at the older place on a Euphonix System 5 with Genelec monitors. The Euphonix has now been moved to the new film mixing room designed by Studio 440. In the new recording room, we have installed a Neve 88R. A major portion of my forthcoming projects, “Rang De Basanti” and “Provoked” were done at the new facility. Logic is our main workstation, which works in combination with Digidesign hardware.
On what projects are you working at the moment?
Currently, I’m just about wrapping up “Rang de Basanti” and “Provoked” in India, whilst I’m in the final stages for “The Lord of the Rings”, a theater adaptation in Toronto.
Did you use Melodyne on these projects? In which songs, in which particular moment?
Sure, using it mostly on vocal tracks of “Rang de Basanti”, with the aim of creating fresh harmonies, reducing quivers, pitch correction, etc.
How did Melodyne change the way you work with audio files?
Well, we have been using Melodyne for most of the vocal corrections, but I also like fooling around with it, making harmonies and things like that. I think Melodyne is an ideal and very transparent solution for this. We also tried to make percussion sound bigger with it, using transpose and stacking functions.
How is your workflow with Melodyne?
We are right now importing files into Melodyne, working on them, and exporting them back to Logic. I am looking forward to the next version, which will help me a lot. Then I’ll use the Melodyne Bridge on MacOS X Tiger.
What do you like especially about Melodyne?
I enjoy the flexibility, transparency, and many ways in which Melodyne surprises us!
