Jeff Rona
Lookin' At The Reel World Through PeakBy Randy Alberts
"I have Peak on every computer I own," says veteran composer Jeff Rona, "and there's lots of those around here [laughs.] "What would I do without Peak!"
On any given Monday you'll find Rona and his team sculpting multiple film, television and game music and sound design projects. Today, for instance, they're carrying on with the score to a major new fall TV thriller series (Persons Unknown) and launching into day one of a new film's soundtrack project whilst Gods of War 3, "a massive new video game for Playstation 3" still weeks from completion, dominates all their front burners.
Jeff's Santa Monica, California, studio and production suites are Logic- and Pro Tools-based around a massive supporting cast of audio and music software, all captained by Peak and its features. He says everyone at the studio thinks of Peak as their Swiss Army knife for audio, a sentiment shared and commented upon by literally every subject of these Artist Stories the past ten years.
The Fastest Editor West of China
"Last year, I spent a great deal of time in China doing a music project for the 2008 Olympics," says Rona, but a glimpse into his byline revealing songs and soundtrack works from Traffic, Kafka, Black Hawk Down, Stephen King's Deadzone and even "some visceral ambience" for Thin Red Line; his popular Reel World column, too, ran in Keyboard magazine for many years and lives on, still.
"Most of the music was for orchestra, but I also wrote a song for a female Chinese soprano that I had demo'd in L.A. before leaving for the Games in Beijing. The orchestra was sent their parts in advance in the key we had finally decided upon, but once we started rehearsing over there it became clear that key was not good for her voice."
The soprano didn't like the song's tempo, either, so after doing a rough recording of the orchestra Jeff went back to his hotel fast and put several variations of the track together for her, in a variety of alternate keys and tempos.
"Peak gave me by far the best results of anything else I used in trying to create natural sounding files, especially with all those altered pitches and speeds of those files," says Jeff, who toured briefly there with the same orchestra around the Olympics.
"Peak is still the fastest audio editor I know."
Back home in his studio, Rona says he uses his Peak knife to whittle down just about anything shy of an actual chunk of wood. Recently he produced a 6-CD collection of music for movie trailers and needed to make 30-second versions of the 200-plus tracks therein.
"That's not as easy or automatic to do as it sounds," explains Rona, who also just so happens to have been one of the co-founders in the spark and implementation of the original MIDI 1.0 spec.
"I edited each track in Peak to sound as musical as possible, then got each down to exactly :30 using the time-stretching tool."
The Transformer of Digital Audio Editors
More recently team Rona did the music for Activision's Transformers 2 game for Nintendo DS. Twenty or more pieces of music had to each be flawlessly looped, from the end back to the beginning of the soundtrack, a task which brought him full circle again back BIAS' way for the help of his favorite awesome multi-faceted, shape-shifting audio tool with a heart.
"The only way I could loop the music perfectly enough for Transformers 2 was to use Peak's fantastic crossfading loop tools. Then, after careful editing of the front and back of the loops, getting each as close as I could within Peak itself, I would apply just enough crossfade to get each piece seamlessly looping back with inaudible loop points."
"I also use Peak's playlists all the time to put together demos for my new projects, complete with careful mastering with it, as well," he adds. "I'm also a big believer in weaving custom sound design and sampling into all of my composition work. With almost every new project we do, I'll pull together some new, one-of-a-kind sounds to make a unique sonic signature for that project alone—especially when the music leans toward electronics."
One brief look at the news page of his website will give anyone a pretty good idea of who Jeff Rona is, of how busy he is, and of how he approaches his life and line of work.
"Peak is a fantastic tool for sampling, editing, looping and tweaking music, soundtrack and sound design stuff in a lot of very cool ways," he concludes during a busy, busy day—one hand on the trackball, the other seven tentacles likely somewhere inside his favorite editing software "tweaking time and pitch parameters with Peak to the extreme."
"With Peak, I create sounds that no other system can create."
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Check out the numerous soundtrack clips on his site, going back as far as 1991, and watch for Jeff's new book, the revised second edition of The Reel World: Scoring For Pictures.