Growing up in Maine, Lawrence Manchester dreamed of a career in music. Working behind the desk wasn’t part of the original plan, however. Playing guitar and drums, singing, and working steadily in his teens, Manchester headed off to the Peabody Conservatory to hone his classical percussion stops. While in college he became intrigued with the recording process. Manchester is kept busy these days with his steady job as Music Mixer for the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon show, and he sandwiches film score dates around his work at NBC.

In 1994 Manchester began a two year internship at the Power Station. “The music industry is always changing,” he says, “and that was a time of significant change. When I started out at the Power Station 24 track analog tape was still the master format, unless a client wanted to pay $1,000 a day to rent a Sony DASH machine. Now ProTools is the standard platform for recording mixing and mastering.”

Manchester does a lot of mixing and mastering at the room he operates out of Avatar. “I did the acoustic treatment myself, after doing a lot of research and experimentation. I use a Mackie Control surface with my ProTools rig, and JBL SLR Series 6328 surround monitors. I have a similar set up in the room I maintain at NBC.

“I rely heavily on the Waves Platinum bundle, and I also use their restoration tools at times. I like Revibe, the DigiDesign reverb quite a bit; it’s efficient and its 5.1 algorithms are very good. I’m also a fan of the Sound Toys series of plug-ins.”

Manchester particularly enjoys recording orchestras, and film dates have been an important part of his career. “After spending a few years as an intern at the Power Station I went over to Manhattan Center Studios. They’re one of the big orchestral studios in town and I wanted to get into that side of the busines. Joel Iwataki was my mentor. He engineers a lot of dates for Elliot Goldenthal, and I get to participate in a number of those sessions. These projects can take a good deal of time to complete, and Joel will often start working on one of them and then have scheduling issues that will force him to move onto another project, at which point I’ll continue working with Elliot. That was the the case with Across The Universe, which was a wonderful film.”

He jumps back and forth between three worlds, so what does Lawrence Manchester feel are the main differences between engineering records, film scores, and live television?

“A record is the product itself, whereas music for film or television serves to support another medium. More time and attention, therefore, can generally be put into making records.

“Technically, film music is recorded and mixed in 5.1, but records are still conceived and executed in stereo, for the most part. People love portability and stereo is the only practical way to deliver sound that can be moved around easily- we only have two ears, so multi-channel headphones aren’t practical! As long as people want to have music in their breast pocket we’re locked into stereo.

“Every day I mix bands and other musical groups for Jimmy Fallon in 5.1 and it’s great to weave the audience into the mix. I love it, and I have to admit it’s a bit depressing to have to take that material and listen to it in only two channels! That aside, I love what I do and consider myself very lucky to be working in this industry.”