From ‘Halo’ to Miles Davis: One woman’s life behind the scenes

A long, winding drive through Lucas Valley leads to the wooden gates of Skywalker Ranch. Inside George Lucas’ exclusive estate, well-manicured gardens blend in with the sweeping wilderness of California’s Marin County. Past an empty baseball field and multiple rows of grapevines is a red-bricked “technical building” that houses Skywalker Sound, a state-of-the-art studio where Hollywood’s most iconic soundtracks have been created.

Inside the building, the hallway that leads to the scoring stage is dotted with a couple of dozen framed Grammy nominations. A large analog console covers the front of the control room. Three Bowers & Wilkins speakers tower over hundreds of tiny knobs and buttons that line the breadth of the dashboard. A glass window separates the room from a recording stage that’s big enough to house a 125-piece orchestra. At the head of the console is Leslie Ann Jones, Grammy-award winning director of music recording and scoring.

As a mixing and recording engineer, Jones has mastered the tricks and turns on the console over the last four decades. Her abilities don’t just keep the scoring stage busy; they also bring in accolades. This year, Jones is up for her fourth Grammy. She’s nominated in the Best Engineered Album category for Laura Karpman’s Ask Your Mama, a multi-genre project that’s been in the making for the last seven years.

Jones’s exhaustive catalogue defies genres. As an engineer, she’s recorded with jazz legends like Miles Davis and has worked on unforgettable scores like Apocalypse Now and Requiem for a Dream. And for the last 19 years, she’s been at the helm of the recording studio at Skywalker Sound, where she’s recorded massive symphony orchestras and worked on game scores like Gears of War and Halo.

She credits her ability to understand the minutia of any kind of music to her lineage. Her father Spike Jones, the legendary bandleader of Spike Jones and The City Slickers, put a satirical spin on popular songs in the ’40s and the ’50s with mundane objects like tin cans, cowbells and whistles to create his own genre. And her mother, Helen Grayco was a singer who often performed with the band on The Spike Jones Show, a famous variety series at the time.

Growing up, Jones often went on the road with her parents. “I always felt bad we couldn’t go to summer camps or family vacations but I think we got the better end of the deal,” she says. “When we’d be in [Las] Vegas, the only thing to do at night was to watch my parents’ shows. I sat and watched my mother singing every night. I really got a great education in what it is to be a great singer and that’s helped me a lot in my career.”

The exposure to the inner workings of the music world shaped her early choices. At the age of fourteen, she started out playing the electric guitar in a band. But she quickly realized she’d never be as good as the players she admired. She switched to recording other bands on an assembled PA system. “There was something about getting a small console and putting my hands on the fader and being able to turn somebody up or down that gave me a feeling of much more control over the outcome,” she says as she moves the fader on the massive Neve 88R console that she now controls at Skywalker Sound. “Turn an EQ knob and change the sound of someone and affect it in a positive way. That, to me, was a much better use of my musical skills than trying to be a great guitar player.”

Over the years, she went on to become the first female engineer at ABC Studios in New York before moving to San Francisco in 1978 for a stint at The Automatt, where she worked with legends like Herbie Hancock and Carlos Santana. A few years later, with the shuttering of The Automatt, Jones moved on to find work at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. A decade later, in 1997, she brought her expertise to Skywalker Sound.

The scoring stage that she oversees is a shape-shifting room. The sidewalls of the 60-feet wide room are scalloped with concrete pillars. Behind each hard surface is a soft, adjustable panel that’s made of absorptive material to keep the sound from bouncing back. “By pulling them out we can change the sound of the room,” says Jones as she slides a 30-foot high purple panel out using both her hands. The panels in the high ceiling are motorized.

Most engineers at other studios need to rely on software to artificially create a reverberated sound. But Jones can adjust the size of the scoring stage to change the acoustics. The movable panels change the reverb time – essentially the echo and the time it takes for a sound to fade to silence – from 0.6 to 3 seconds, a range that maintains the integrity of the natural sound so it doesn’t seem like an effect. The flexibility of the architecture has allowed Jones to record large orchestras as comfortably as a string quartet or even a solo musician in the same room. It has also made it easier for her to accommodate the nuances of different genres like jazz, rock or classical orchestra music.

In a recording studio designed for a multitude of music styles, it takes a highly trained ear to differentiate between each sound. “I think the biggest challenge is trying to figure out the idiosyncrasies of different genres of music and not taking a cookie cutter approach to it,” says Jones. “I like to think people ask for me to do their projects because they know I’m going to deliver what they want. When it comes out of the speakers and they walk in and go, ‘Oh that’s exactly what I thought it would sound like’ – that to me is the best compliment.”

Her ability to do that has made her the go-to engineer for some of the most multi-layered projects from many of the leading names in the industry. “When it comes to orchestral music, the way Leslie spatializes the orchestra within the stereo spectrum is second to none,” says Tommy Tellarico, composer of Video Games Live, an ongoing concert series that has been turned into multiple albums at Skywalker Sound. “In my recordings, there are hundreds of instruments all going at the same time. If you don’t know what you’re doing it can sound like a bunch of flat noise. Her artistry lies in taking each of those instruments and creating something that sounds big but distinguishable.”

When Laura Karpman, an Emmy-award winning composer, started work on Ask Your Mama, one of her most complex works to date, she turned to Jones. Karpman had taken on the task of translating Langston Hughes’ poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz into a multimedia live show. She interpreted the music instructions that accompanied Hughes’ masterpiece through a multitude of contrasting genres including orchestral music, opera, hip-hop and jazz.

“To move in between pre-recorded sounds and [live] music in a fleeting moment, I had to have somebody who understood all of those genres but also knew how to move among them,” says Karpman. “[Leslie] is a very exacting person. She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. Everybody else needs to respect that and fall into that kind of disciplined environment. That’s where I thrive and it’s one of the reasons I love to work with her.”

Together, along with legendary soprano Jessye Norman, The Roots and other iconic musicians, Jones and Karpman performed sold out shows at Carnegie Hall, The Hollywood Bowl and The Apollo Theater before turning the project into the Grammy-nominated album that was recorded at Skywalker Sound last year.

Given the multiplicity of sounds on this project, Jones’s work on this project wasn’t contained to recording the orchestra, a task she performs on a regular basis. It demanded a deeper understanding of techniques, too. “The stuff Laura asked me to do was stupidly difficult,” says Jones. “But she’s such a great composer and if she thinks it can be done, fine I’ll do it. You’ve just got to say yes when the opportunity presents itself or you’ll never grow.”

Jones exudes a sense of self-assurance that comes from having seen all sides of the music business. She’s one of the few women who has pushed through what continues to be a largely male-dominated industry. She understood the challenges from the beginning. “Phil Kaye, the guy who hired me at my first studio job said ‘I’ll hire you but we’ll have to see how the clients react to having a woman in the control room’,” she says. “That was fine, I was expecting that.”

Even so, she remembers an instance from the ’70s when she was assisting a Barry White recording and she answered his wife’s call in the studio. “I got fired from the gig because I was a woman,” she says. “You realize there will be people who will think about that and be uncomfortable. I kept going.”

She also recalls artists who asked her when the engineer would show up. But she’s quick to add that an hour or so into the recording session, she’d see people coming around. “It’s almost like they had less expectations of the job I could do, but once I could do it, there was no stopping,” she says. “Then it was ‘can you do my next record?’”

Despite the challenges, she says she came into the industry at the right time. She was neither expected to know the technology — “I didn’t have to know, I could just read about it” — nor was there a need to be social media-savvy. But she realizes she did things a little differently that helped set her apart. “A lot of women I knew were trying to prove that they could do it all or trying not to be any different than men,” she says. “But I asked for help when I needed it.” She believes that helped her find mentors who developed a vested interest in her success.

“It’s really important to make people feel comfortable…You can learn the technology but it’s really a people business. We’re there to support the artist and allow them to do the best performance they can possibly do.”

Decades later, Jones’s success has turned her into a role model for many aspiring engineers. And the longevity of her career has become her biggest draw. “A lot of mixers work only in the digital world,” says Tellarico. “But Leslie does it both ways. She’s been around for so long that she understands the analog world as much as she does the digital one. The warmth and the effects that she’s able to pull out of the board can take the music from sounding like a community orchestra to Beethoven.”

Jones picks the precise location for every instrument, decides placements for all the microphones and controls the room full of gadgetry with the flick of a button. But she doesn’t always have all the answers. “Sometimes I do think how the hell am I gonna do this,” she says, raising her eyebrows beyond the brown metal rim of her glasses. “I just have to think about it really hard and figure out what the best way is to achieve what somebody wants. It’s really important to make people feel comfortable and let them know you care about them and what they’re doing. You can learn the technology but it’s really a people business. We’re there to support the artist and allow them to do the best performance they can possibly do, that’s why they’re coming here in the first place.”

Talk Android Apps of the Week: February 14, 2016

It’s Sunday, the time of the week when Talk Android brings you a report on some of the very best applications we’ve been using over the course of the past seven days. Today we’re focusing our attention on a fantastic reading service, a great photo-editing tool, an incredibly easy-to-use QR scanner and last, but not least, an addictive survival game.

Amazon Kindle

If you’re a bit of a book worm, you’re going to love the first application we’re looking at this week. The official Kindle application for Android is home to over 1.5-million books, which are all available to download and save to your device’s built-in storage at any given time. One of the best things the Kindle app incorporates is its support for Dictionary, Google and Wikipedia — so if you stumble on a word or phrase you’re unfamiliar with, you can take to the Internet to pull all the information required to gain a better understanding. If you already own a Kindle Tablet, you’ll be glad to hear that you can read whatever book you’re reading across multiple devices, and your progress will synchronise automatically.

Play Store Download Link

Pic Collage

I’m sure frequent Instagram users will agree with me when I say that collages are one of the most effective ways of getting your message across when it’s a friends or loved one’s birthday. Combining several years worth of memories into one large image creates a truly treasurable picture that is guaranteed to make their heart melt. The best way to create these iconic square-grid snapshots is by using Pic Collage. The application enables you to import photos from your gallery, Instagram and Facebook accounts. You can then rotate, resize and edit them any way you please. If you have a particular theme in mind like love, for example, you can open one of Pic Collage’s integrated templates to create a great looking themed portrait in a matter of seconds.

Play Store Download Link

QR & Barcode Scanner

It’s impossible to walk down the street nowadays without spotting a QR code. However, Android doesn’t integrate support for a QR Scanner — so if you want one, you’ll need to take to the Play Store to find an application to decode the barcodes. The best tool I found to do the job goes by the name of QR & Barcode Scanner. All you have to do is point your smartphone at a QR, and the app will automatically detect it, then refer you its link. There’s no fancy user interface, which is probably the reason why I’m so fond of this particular offering. As soon as you open the application, you’re presented with a camera to scan the code. That’s really all there is to it.

Play Store Download Link

Bouncing Ball

In keeping with tradition, the final application we’re looking at this week is an entertaining survival game. The aim of Bouncing Ball is simple: tap the screen to make the ball bounce over any obstacles in your path. As the clock ticks, both the size and frequency of the hurdles will increase — so you’ll have to tap your handset’s screen faster than ever to keep up. If you do happen to come into contact with an obstruction, your ball will disappear, and you’ll have to start all over again. Progress is recorded in accordance the score you obtain, so the longer you go without colliding with something, the more points you’ll be credited with.

Play Store Download Link

Previous Apps of the Week editions:

• February 7, 2016
• January 31, 2016
• January 24, 2016
• January 17, 2016

Come comment on this article: Talk Android Apps of the Week: February 14, 2016