Don’t Pass Up Part One!
The orchestra was recorded in Prague, which, Reistad explains, took place in a smaller room, but reverb can help make it sound more cinematic. “Reverb can take things that sound really up-close and kind of set them back more into a sonicscape, because I don’t want a guitar that was recorded with an up-close mic sitting at the same level or at the same distances as dialog would be sitting,” Reistad says, adding that she uses Cinematic Rooms and Symphony 3D, which can expand up to surround. (“They can de-correlate the signal and put it in a surround space versus just stereo.”)
“Then I’ll use a reverb like Eventide SP2016, which is something I’ll put on a shaker or a guitar or a whistle, where I can actually steer whether the signal is up-close or a bit further away, so that allows me to put something back and not be so up in the front.”
Reistad mixes in her own room, fed by a Universal Audio Apollo x16 with a 7.1.4 Neumann monitoring setup consisting of KH 420s across the LCR, with KH 150s for the surround channels and KH 120s for the heights. She uses the Penteo Pro+ plug-in for upmixing.
“Upmixers take a signal and disperse it around the room without us having the same signal,” she explains, “so instead of having a synth that’s panned up front, instead of just duplicating the synth and then panning it to the rear, an upmixer is actually taking that signal and dispersing it in a way that isn’t getting a repeat signal coming out of different speakers. That prevents us from dealing with phase issues. I do that a lot with longer synths, and I also do that with delays; that delays the signal a little bit, and the delays will be panned all the way to the surround, so now we’re sending signal to the back of the theater.” This does not generally work as well with percussion because of the nature of the instrument, she notes.
Reistad also ended up using a distortion plug-in for the intense church organs in the score. “I did a massive amount of panning automation on these cues,” she explains. “For the distortion, I put a SoundToys DevilLoc on there, or DevilLoc into their Decapitator on the Punish settings, with occasionally an EQ roll-off. I would also automate that send to the distorted rears on different elements, so they’d be kind of fading, coming in and out of each other, for more movement.”
At the end of a lengthy project like Euphoria or Dakota Dry’s 2025 record The Edge of our Never Ending Universe, Reistad likes to take time to recalibrate.
Euphoria began in February and finished mid-May, and she also took on some other work during that period as, originally, she believed the episodes would take less time. Three days in bed did the trick, and then Reistad, who thrives on her work, was ready to get back to it.
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Projects included a Russian TV production, as well as releasing her own artist single called “A Way Back”—a track she describes as indie pop, which she started in her parents’ basement five years and “three laptops ago.” It reached fruition at East West Studios in a live tracking session where she was so inspired as a first-time producer of her own music with a full band in a room, that she broke her own rule and did it over and over again.
“Whenever I’m in a session,” she says, “I always say less is more and make people make decisions so it won’t take forever to go through it later, so I really shot myself in the foot. Surprise, surprise, it did take forever.”
