You may not know it but hidden in the heart of Sydney is one of the world’s best sound recording studios. Trackdown has been operating for almost 40 years now and in that time it’s seen some of the world’s best walk through its doors and has recorded music for some of Hollywood’s top titles. But that’s only possible thanks to the talented folks behind it.
Elaine and Craig Beckett, a husband and wife team, have run Trackdown for nearly 20 years. They’ve worked with top talent, adapted to the evolving needs of the audio industry, and kept the studio not just alive but thriving during a global pandemic.
Invited on a media tour of the studio space (which is situated in Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter), Gizmodo Australia was able to see first-hand the top-notch facilities and the quality expertise that Trackdown offers.
The centrepiece of the studio is a vast scoring stage, large enough to hold a full orchestra of over 100 musicians.
Many of the recording devices around the stage are Neumann or Sennheiser, which Elaine explains during our tour is a “client request” due to the industry respect for both brands.
“It means there’s a consistency when you’re doing projects all around the world,” she explains. “It means they can put talent in any studio, anywhere in the world and they will get a consistent recording product that delivers a seamless audio soundtrack. The brands allow us to collaborate with studios all around.”
A global outlook is something Trackdown Studios has become known for. You only have to scroll through the studio’s Instagram page to see the huge variety of top projects they’ve worked on.
During the tour, Elaine and Craig rattle off a list of names Trackdown has been involved with, citing everything from local films to major Hollywood productions, including the likes of The Lego Movie, Mad Max: Fury Road and Mortal Kombat.
Global music artists like Pavarotti, Aerosmith and Coldplay have all worked at Trackdown. It’s even become the studio of choice for some.
“We’re well respected in the global industry, even to the point that Michael Giacchino recorded his own personal music recording project over COVID with us, and I think that speaks volumes,” Elaine said.
“We’re attracting the work due to the talent of the musicians, the conductors and the engineering team.”
Attached to the sound stage is a studio control room that is outfitted with Avid Pro Tools, ready to record and mix everything from foley to ADR. It’s also outfitted with surround sound, allowing the engineers in the room to get a true sense of the soundscape they are recording.
As the lead sound supervisor and CTO at Trackdown, this room is Craig’s home and he’s used it to record basically any instrument imaginable. A personal stand-out for Craig was recording eight double basses for the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands soundtrack.
Gaming projects are actually something Trackdown is receiving more of these days, having recently worked on World of Warcraft, Tactics Ogre and Overwatch 2.
“We started doing video games about 15 years ago and back then it was about 10% of our scoring work. Now it’s about 50% of the orchestral work that we’re doing,” Elaine said.
“Games go big when it comes to orchestral recording because it’s so much of the user experience. They really respect that addition of music to gameplay.”
Elaine added that future-proofing the audio of their projects is another big focus for the Trackdown team.
“There’s always something to be said about future-proofing problems. Sometimes things go really well in the marketplace and then 20 years down the track they’ll do a re-release and we’ll obviously prepare projects to have a life beyond their delivery if there’s scope to do that,” she said.
The post-production industries have seen a lot of attention this year after reports came out that VFX artists are consistently being exploited by major studios with huge workloads and short turnarounds.
Many of the major movie studios outsource their post-production work to independent studios like Trackdown. But while Trackdown may fit into the post-production schedule, Craig and Elaine said they were yet to experience any of these same issues on the audio side.
“Music has always had a fast turnaround because of where we are in the pipeline, being right at the end, but it hasn’t changed in the 17 years I’ve been here. [There’s] no difference in expectations,” Elaine said.
“Generally at this point, our boss is the composer. What they want we deliver for them. They’re the studio,” Craig added. “The longest days we do might be 9 or 10 pm.”
This has even continued throughout the challenges of the pandemic, during which Trackdown’s studios were busier than ever.
“At one point there were three orchestral studios open in the world and we were one of them,” Elaine said.
This is largely due to the nature of recording which Trackdown has been able to do remotely for some time.
“We have been doing remote recording for 15 years now so we did have a lot of processes in place already,” Elaine explained. “…We were able to keep a lot of players performing and doing what drives them during those two years.”
Here’s to another 40-plus years for Trackdown.