Engineer Rick Sanchez worked at the legendary Record Plant in Los Angeles, as well as their branch in Sausalito. For a number of years, he also toured as the live mixer for Hot Tuna. After returning to Los Angeles, Rick branched out into post production work and is now sound supervisor at a production house specializing in movie trailers for upcoming attractions.

“As a sound engineer, I’ve found that the more diversified you can become, the better off you are,” says Sanchez. “Of all the great engineers who were at Record Plant when I was there, only a handful are still doing music. Just about everyone else is doing postproduction sound in some way or another. It’s a good idea to get as much experience in as many different areas of audio as you can.”

Sanchez’s studio and live music credits from the mid 1970s to the early ‘90s include bands Santana, Huey Lewis, Jefferson Starship and Hot Tuna and R&B and funk artists Sly Stone and Rick James. Sanchez migrated to audio post in 1991 and almost a decade later he heads the sound department at the production house providing the major studios with turnkey creative services for movie trailers for television and home video.

When he joined the company in 1998, it was doing strictly picture editorial at the time ,and outsourcing mixing and sound editing. Sanchez was hired to put together the sound department.

“It was a good chance for me to use a lot of what I’d learned watching studios built at Record Plant and to take advantage of my Foley stage experience,” Sanchez explains. “There was a bit of a gap in my knowledge, especially digital editing systems which had rapidly developed by that point. During construction I had time to learn, talk to people, visit other facilities, then spec the equipment.”

Sanchez carved out the sound department from empty rooms on the second floor of the building. The entire first floor is dedicated to seven Avid video editing rooms, a cost-effective Final Cut Pro editing system, three graphics workstations and Sonic Creator DVD authoring.

He outfitted two sound rooms with Digidesign ProTools and Avid AudioVision systems, Panasonic DA7 digital mixing boards, Aphex 1100 hybrid tube-digital mic pre amps, t.c. electronic effects processors and Finalizers for stereo dubs, DA88’s, DAT machines and CD players. Monitoring for 5.1 surround or theatrical formats is done outside on large dubbing stages. A small voiceover room is also used to record some sound effects and ADR. ISDN recording is performed with a Telos Zephyr link. The machine room houses Sony Digital Betacam and 3/4-inch decks.

Approximately 80 percent of Sanchez’s work is mixing and editing movie trailers for TV and home videos. Confidentiality contracts prevent naming specific projects, but most of the companies work the same way. “The elements we cut from usually come on digital Betacam or DA88; sometimes we get all the stems and sometimes we don’t,” he explains. “For re-releases of older films, we usually don’t get all those separate elements. Some were destroyed, and many times they never existed. Cleaning them up can be pretty challenging especially when you’re adding a new music bed over existing tracks which contain score from the film.”

With a broadcast or home video trailer Sanchez has to think about “what goes on after it leaves here -- what it’s going to be played on can greatly affect your mix. You have to think ahead about dynamic range limits; you don’t have a lot of dynamics with broadcast and have to be careful how loud you make things.”

Sanchez works frequently with top voiceover artists, whose abilities in the booth never cease to amaze him. “These guys are able to read a 15-second spot with so much copy and still sound relaxed,” he marvels. “They can change the voiceover to fit between dialogue bites, sound effects and music hits.” Sanchez uses the Telos Zephyr ISDN link, or arranges for a EdNET connection, for voiceover artists who work almost exclusively from home.

He laments, as do many audio post professionals, that often clients “wait ‘til the last minute to think about sound considerations. Audio is still the bastard child of the movie industry. You have to adapt and not be offended by the limitations of time, and now bandwidth, allowed to do your job.”