From Music to Film: DeLaVanta Tabor’s Transformative Career in Audio Post
US-based sound editor and re-recording mixer, DeLaVanta Tabor, is renowned for his contributions to film and television with his expertise showcased in recent projects such as Tempted by Love: A Terry McMillan Presentation (2024), Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge (2024), and The Match (2024), to name a few.
Inspired by his multi-instrumentalist musician father, DeLaVanta was just two years old when he began playing drums. As he progressed through school, he explored a variety of instruments, including the saxophone, piano, and flute with his journey taking a pivotal turn in high school when his father, working on an album, introduced him to the world of music production. Witnessing the intricacies of studio work sparked a newfound fascination, and, at around the age of 16, led him to purchase his own recording equipment including a Gateway Pentium 4 computer, a Digidesign Mbox 2, and Pro Tools, teaching himself with the guidance of manuals.
Eventually attending Full Sail University in Florida, DeLaVanta experienced sound design classes and post production but continued to focus more heavily on music production despite his ongoing uncertainly about where he wanted his journey to lead. Returning to Atlanta, he eventually got the call that would set him off on his career path…
Can you tell us how you first got your start in audio post-production?
It was during my time working at Guitar Centre when I got a call asking me to help out with a session as a Pro Tools expert – I was Pro Tools certified from when I was at Full Sail and everybody knew me as the Pro Tools guy. I showed up thinking it was a music project, the guy walked me through the facility, showed me all the stuff, and then we went into one room and there was a 48 channel ICON mixing console, and a big screen, so basically like a mini stage. A guy in there was working on a film, and the owner of the facility explained that this was the project they needed help with and that the guy was just helping them to try to get it up and running but they needed me to mix the film. I was thinking, I’m a music guy, I don’t know anything about film besides the few things we did in school, I have no clue what to do here, I just know Pro Tools. He asked me if I thought I could do the job and how much I would charge and in my mind, I was thinking really quickly; I get paid, I do a good job, maybe some more work comes. I get paid, I do a bad job, no more work comes, but, at the end of the day, I still get paid, and as I’m still young getting paid for work is good.
I sat down with the guy that was there and he walked me through some of the general stuff that he had already done – the dialogue, the sound effects, the score – he just gave me the crash course and it was all focused on the post production aspect. He left me with it and I just started going through to figure it out; ‘okay, here’s dialogue and sound effects, I got to balance this out, I need to make this sound good, the vocal levels need to be X, Y, and Z’, and this and that. So, I just got going and I spent about 8 to 10 hours working on it that day, then again on Saturday and after church on Sunday and then Monday came around and the director came in and sat down.
I didn’t know who the guy was at the time, it was Roger Bobb – people call him Tyler Perry’s protégé. He came and sat down on the couch and I hit play, we went through it together until he said ‘alright, sounds good, let’s get this out to the network and go through QC.’ I couldn’t get my head round what was going on – what was this process of the director coming in and sitting with me? In music, I didn’t ever have that experience, this was new and refreshing. I didn’t even know how to do a real invoice at the time, I just went into Microsoft Word and figured it out and a couple of days later I went and picked up the cheque. Now, looking back, even though it was a pretty good amount for engineering at the time for me, working on a film for that rate shouldn’t have happened, but it did. It got me into the industry and that guy offered me a full-time job at the facility which got me out of Guitar Center.
I started working on TV shows, documentaries, other films, and really got into it. I had a co-worker who had been a teacher at Full Sail and I learned a lot from him – how to do certain processes, the deliverables and all that stuff. I cut my teeth in that facility working on all kinds of things. When it shut down, I started teaching at SAE to keep the money flowing. I was still doing smaller projects here and there and I made a few relationships with people at that facility who were editors and they would send me projects but it wasn’t enough to be able to stop the teaching.
I was thinking, I'm a music guy, I don't know anything about film besides the few things we did in school, I have no clue what to do here, I just know Pro Tools.
I started working in the music department for Greenleaf, (the Oprah Winfrey Network) and the assistant engineer for one of the sessions worked for Tyler Perry. Me and him were just talking amongst ourselves about work and dealing with clients etc, he took my number and a day later messaged saying ‘send me your resume, I want to put you in for Tyler Perry’. The post supervisor from Tyler Perry called me and we had an hour-long conversation in which he explained that Tyler was getting ready to move all his post production back to Atlanta and they needed to get some audio people in there and I came recommended.
I started at Tyler Perry studios at the same time that Sistas and The Oval began – I started both of those shows as the only re-recording mixer, which was crazy. I left at the end of 2019 and decided, because I had my studio, I finally should give the full-time engineer thing a real shot. I had enough money saved to get me through 4-5 months if needed but as soon as people knew I wasn’t working for Tyler any more things started picking up and I realized that I had probably missed out on so much work because I hadn’t been available to do the work. In people’s minds, if they’re going to hire you to work on something, they need the assurance to know that it’s going to get done within the timeline. I’ve now been on my own for the past four years doing mainly audio post – from feature length films to TV shows, commercials, advertising spots, and I still do a few music projects. Most recently I’ve accepted the re-recording mixer job for CBS’s newest daytime series, Beyond The Gates. As the sole post audio person, my job is much more than just mixing episodes. Everything from advertising VO recording to final mix is in my hands.
A lot of people I speak to in your position are finding that more and more of the recordings are being passed down to the end of the food chain to get fixed in post. Are you seeing more of that and how important are the tools because of that?
Absolutely. That seems to be the story of everything that we do for audio post – less time, less money, but still expecting pristine quality and all the things that you normally have. I worked on one series where we (entire post process) did eight episodes in two weeks. It’s maddening.
If I’m lucky, the editor has done some sound effect stuff, whether it’s temp or not it doesn’t matter, or if it’s just basic ambience, they’ve maybe at least addressed some of those things. With those types of schedules, you don’t have all the time you need to do a full-on dialogue edit – full background lay and foley – so we lean heavily on production audio. Like, whatever footsteps are there, doors closing and opening, if it’s in production and it’s workable we run with it because you’ve really got to get the dialogue right, it’s king. From the client’s perspective, if I get that dialogue sweet they’re going to be happy so I spend the majority of my time on the dialogue.
So, with dxRevive, I love the fact that it’s ‘reviving’. We get so much audio where the boom is five feet away or it’s way off axis because they didn’t turn the mic to the person, or there’s scratchy lavs or weird things, dxRevive allows me to go in and dig into that stuff and get it pristine. My favorite version is the pro version because most of the stuff you want to deal with is in specific frequency ranges and so being able to go in there and single out the range that you want to deal with and then mute out the other stuff means you can go through and clean up really nicely and stop wasting time with other tools. I found myself really using dxRevive sometimes for weird clicks or rustle, because if you hone in on the right frequency range and you turn that knob up just a little bit, it’s gone, it knocks it out.
You’ve really got to get the dialogue right, it’s king. From the client's perspective, if I get that dialogue sweet, they're going to be happy.
What did you think the first time you pushed that knob up on dxRevive and heard what it did?
When you first open it, it’s not at zero, it’s at 50%, so you start playing with it and start dialing it back because you’re thinking that’s pretty hefty. But the thing about it, even at 50%, it’s not digging into the dialogue. It’s not killing the highs, it’s not making it sound jarbly, it gets rid of the noise but keeps the dialogue untouched. And here’s another reason why I like the Pro version; you start flipping through the different algorithms, and you start hearing all these different tonal things that happen, and ways you can manipulate, so now, I’ll use dxRevive as a creative aspect. So, like, this shot is an off-shot, so if I go with the natural it’s going to keep it where I want it to do it, whereas if we move into a closeup, I maybe go to one of the studio presets, so you start thinking about it in those perspectives. It opens up the palette and you can start using it for so many things that you maybe didn’t even think you could use it for. The most recent version with the EQ thing, I don’t know what it’s doing, but you just throw it on and it’s just ‘ah, that’s it, that’s good, I can live with that’.
Talk to me about Chameleon…
Chameleon is such an amazing tool that I need more people to know about because for me, and I think for many people, even in music, a lot of things that we do with reverb is trying to either recreate a space or to match an existing space.
This happens in music too because I deal with live gospel recordings. If they record it in a church that’s got a nice acoustical thing and all the reverb sounds very nice, but then you come in and you start doing overdubs in the studio you spend so much time going through all these different reverb patches or stacking two or three reverbs together to try to make it happen. With Chameleon, you just feed it the audio, it gives you a reverb back. Even if you want to go in and tweak a couple of settings just to refine a little bit more, it’s already 90% there and it makes the work so much easier. I’ve been using it for dialogue, foley, sound effects, music that needs to get fused into a scene… what’s better than using the actual verb of the room that they were in?!
So, let's say somebody is in a club having a drink and you've got the dialogue and you want to put the background back, you use Chameleon?
Yeah. Exactly. If I want the backgrounds to be in that room, Chameleon gives me the sound of the room, and then I’ll process the background and then I’ve got a cohesive scene that feels like it was all done together, and these people are in the right spot. Accentize have other tools like deRoom – if you pull up a walla from a sound effects library that was recorded in a different space and has a little bit of reverberation in it, no problem. You run that through deRoom, get rid of that, and then you go over to Chameleon and process it with the new room that you actually want it to be in. This is making life easier.
Do you think some people don't get the idea that Chameleon doesn't need a clean feed? For example, let’s say there's an orchestra playing in a big hall or a choir in a church, some people don't realize you could play the entire audio including the choir and Chameleon will figure out the reverb.
I think most people don’t think about that because they spent so much time with IR. They’ve been dealing with IR libraries so they’re used to having the single source and Chameleon is not that. Chameleon is much easier because you don’t need to go find the IR. You just need audio that was recorded in that space that you want to recreate, feed it through, let it do its thing and it is going to blow your mind every single time because it just works.
The fact that we now have it in surround and all the way up to 9.1.6 is amazing and I love that they added all of the spill controls and stuff because, again, if you’ve ever dealt with upmixing and all that kind of stuff, you spend time trying to filter things out and making the rears not as present, it’s already inside of Chameleon. They’ve already given you all the tools you need – if you want something to come more to the front you just use the spill feature and make it be only in the front, if you want to spill out a little bit, you spill it out… To have a tool like Chameleon, it gives you a great visual aid of what you’re doing. For me, having those visual aids lets me know when I’ve gone too far. For instance, if I’m using Chameleon, and I see a piece of dialogue that’s lighting up a lot on the rears, I might have pushed it a little too far. If you’re working on a mix for 13 hours, your ears are shot, having the visual aid helps.
Chameleon is much easier because you don't need to go find the IR. You just need audio recorded in that space, feed it through, let it do its thing, and it is going to blow your mind every single time because it just works."
Were you pleased to see the new preset library that you can search through really quickly?
Yes, I do love the new preset library. That was a great addition and I love the fact that not only does it come like that for all the built-in presets, but that you can add your own pictures and start building up your own library of sounds.
I get a lot of projects and I can point out where it was filmed because I’ve seen that conference room five other times. I’ve got one director now that’s shooting a project and he’s been sending me stuff and asking if I’ve seen this location because he doesn’t want to have any locations that have already been used a bunch of times on projects. So, you start building up your own little library of common stuff that you deal with that you’ve just got to have all the time.
We all have done projects that had zero time, zero budget, the actors are wherever they are, they needed to record something really quickly so they just recorded it on the phone. Tools like this really help us to still do a really good job because now we don’t have to take bad audio and say, ‘Oh that’s all they’ve got, there’s nothing I can do about it’, there is something I can do about it. I can dxRevive it, I can bring it back to life. I can deRoom it, I can use Chameleon to put it in a space. We talk about ADR matching, for me, there’s no better tool. You try to match ADR, half the problem is the verb anyway, stick it in Chameleon, there’s your match for your verb.
