Live music on British TV is something of a rarity these days, with Jools Holland, Britain’s Got Talent and The Graham Norton Show amongst the few opportunities for artists to reach an audience. Netflix’s Building the Band aims to change that.
The series follows a group of talented singers as they compete to form the perfect band, without meeting one another. Once the bands are formed, the singers finally meet and must agree on their looks, choreography, and style.
Backstreet Boys‘ AJ McLean is the show’s host, with Nicole Scherzinger as the series’ star mentor and judge. She is joined by Kelly Rowland and Liam Payne as special guest judges. The show was filmed prior to Payne’s untimely death last year.
For any band, the key to success is its sound, and that’s even more crucial when they’re on TV. Sound supervisor Oliver Waton’s journey began as a touring musician before he moved into TV, starting out on Big Brother in 2011 and forging a niche role that concentrated his talents specifically to music-on-screen, with other credits including ITV’s Mamma Mia! I have a Dream, the Mobo Awards, and countless concert films and music specials. The call for Building the Band was a perfect fit, offering him the opportunity to bring his music background to a global Netflix show.
As the sound supervisor for Building the Band, Waton’s role was extensive, spanning almost two years from conception to delivery. In the early stages, he was responsible for discerning the project’s technical scope, meticulously allocating budget elements to ensure audio quality without bankrupting the production or causing editorial compromise. “The work started with the planning stages and – crucially – crewing the right people into the right roles, and moved all the way through to mixing the music during production. Then in post, I looked after the delivery of all the music elements into the show,” he tells TVBEurope.
“As a supervisor, it isn’t unusual to be involved from the start to the very end, especially when it’s a music project, because there are a lot of stages where things could go wrong, so being across it really helps.”
Building the Band was filmed across three sites in Manchester: the old Granada Studios, now Versa Manchester, the arena stages at Aviva Studios, and an apartment building where the contestants lived. To ensure seamless operation across all the locations, Waton collaborated with Spiritland Productions and Plus 4 Audio for equipment provision. Extensive recces were conducted in advance to guarantee the planned setups would work, with the entire show “coming to life” in pages of a spreadsheet long before a cable got plugged-in or a microphone was rigged.
Microphone mastery
The scale of Building the Band required a sophisticated setup. Waton began with 64 lavalier microphones for the contestants, utilising a diverse RF network across 3 buildings, 5 studios, and countless ancillary spaces. “We had another 48 lines of house band, 20 performance microphones, and then mics for vocal rehearsal rooms, choreo rooms, and interview/confessional rooms” explains Waton. “The reality mics were all Wisycom wireless, and for everything that was musical performance, we used Shure.”
Waton describes the show as a unique project due to its many iterations and guises within the same format. “Normally, you’ll do a TV show, you’ll set it up once and it’ll be the same show repeated. I worked with Simon Cowell’s Walk the Line and apart from the competition element changing slightly each week, we built one show in one studio and repeated the formula.
“Building the Band was very different, which is why, as sound supervisor, I had to be across every element of it. I couldn’t just sit down and mix a show. I’d be going through the schedule every day and saying, here’s my 30 crew, how am I going to allocate them tomorrow? It was highly logistics-based and involved moving crew and kit and making sure the systems were going to work for every permutation of the way we were filming each day, which—as with every first season—changed and adapted to the storylines and requirements of the narrative.
“We started the show with 50 singers but we didn’t hire 50 vocal mics. That would have been silly as there’s only a maximum of five singing at the same time, and using Shure’s Axient Digital Wireless system, we could instead have remote control of the gain in the very front end of the mic, meaning we could adjust as they changed hands. This was a huge benefit on this show, because ultimately, the way that a mix comes together quickest and sounds best is when the gain structure is right.”
For the arena stage, Waton opted to use Shure’s Nexadyne 8/C Dynamic capsules for a few selected vocalists.
Initially, he planned to continue using the company’s KSM8 capsules for all vocal mics throughout the recording due to its consistent sound. However, halfway through production, Waton began to notice some “niggles” with some of the singer’s vocals. “A couple of people just had some resonances that I was fighting against sometimes: no mic can work for all voices all the time, but the KSM8 had been an amazing starting point for voices I wouldn’t get to hear before they sang.”
Waton contacted Shure and said he’d be interested in trying the Nexadyne mics. “Jack Drury from Shure’s Market Development team kindly sent some across, and I deployed them on the three trickiest, or rather, most ‘uniquely challenging’ vocalists (who I won’t name!). With the Nexadyne, I could just let the mic do the work, rather than dialling correction in myself. That isn’t to say that the KSM8s weren’t amazing. They’re beautifully rich. They’ve got loads of bottom-end presence when you’re close up on them, which makes for such a thick and full sound to work with. But for some vocalists who are especially bilabially plosive, (which means they’re very ‘effy and pee-y’), the KSM8 was a little too present on those tones in the voice.
“The Nexadyne 8/C, the cardioid dynamic version, just really dialled that back a bit for me, it made everything a little bit more manageable in an otherwise very busy mix with no trade-off with the spill. The last thing I want to have to do in post is go through and carve out every syllable that they sing and remove all the crowd, because it just totally blows the coherence of the mix away.
Dolby Atmos delivery
The show has been delivered to Netflix in Dolby Atmos, but Waton made the strategic decision to mix all the music in stereo on-site for ease of the QC and remix workflow. “I [then] worked closely with Andy Hodges, the dubbing mixer at Envy Post Production throughout the post process. I delivered stems to him, and then we sat together and built the Atmos mix up around those stereo stems. With the addition of elements such as height reverb stems and rear audience stems, just to really elevate that immersive experience.
“As with all of these things, that effort is tempered with the reality that comparably few people are going to have the opportunity to watch this in true Atmos when viewing on Netflix, which means the stereo fold-down is just as, if not more important. In reality, as a Netflix show, most people are going to listen to this either on a flat-screen TV, sound bar, or in Apple Spatial Audio on a mobile device, so that fold-down and cross-compatibility becomes a really important thing.”
Overcoming scale and logistics
The biggest challenge of Building the Band, according to Waton, was the sheer scale of the project and staying on top of every element, particularly the kit logistics. “We had days where a full house band moved overnight from a rehearsal studio to a stage for a single performance, and then back to a rehearsal studio. That goes for the singers and the performers and all their IEMs and Wireless systems as well,” he explains.
“If we had approached this with a conventional system of analogue splits or even point-to-point MADI (multichannel audio digital interface) going around the buildings, it would have been a far more complex process to replug and get the band back online every time they moved. Instead, we installed a primary and a redundant Danté infrastructure site-wide, and along with a core of Wisycom, Shure, SSL and Yamaha (all native Danté kit), it meant that we could wheel everything to another building, plug-in some power and a couple of fibres, and everything would come back exactly as we left it with no stress or testing.
“That was a game changer for being able to do a show that is as dynamic as Building the Band. Although it was a challenge in the planning stages and in the technical building stages, when it came to making the show, because we’d gone down that route, it all became very straightforward. And I need to give a huge thank you to Spiritland Productions for making that possible and being open to approaching such a huge project in such an unconventional way.”
Waton is excited for audiences to see the end product and is keen to pay tribute to the “exceptional talent” who contributed to making Building the Band.
“I worked really closely with David Tench, who is also The Voice’s musical director, and his incredible team and band, both during filming and after. Once the performances were locked, I was able to send him the mixes and to my absolute delight he said Building the Band is the best-sounding music show he’s worked on. Now, in a huge part that is down to the immense musical talent on display and in the house band, but is also due to the way we planned it and the kit we used; putting the right mics in front of these immense instruments, and treating the signal with care at every stage through the infrastructure.”
Like viewers around the world, Waton will be tuning in each week to watch the band’s journey. “Watching it in a dubbing suite is one thing, but it’s divorced from the reality of how people are going to enjoy it. I’m really looking forward to sitting down with my dog and my partner, getting stuck into the narrative (not just the mixes), and hopefully hearing her say, ‘this sounds great!’. If non-technical people think that the music sounds good, that will be the icing on the cake of a project that has been an immense privilege and honour to be a part of.”
Building the Band is streaming now on Netflix.
