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GOLDEN BOY After graduating from the Film & Television Institute of India in Pune with a Gold Medal for Sound Recording and Sound Engineering, Daman Sood was determined to stay at the top of his game. Throughout his career, he made regular trips to the UK, to ensure he always had his hands on the latest technology available, which arguably made him the go-to recording engineer in India. One thousand albums later, Sood tells his fascinating story...
WORDS PAUL WATSON
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aman Sood’s first break was a four-year stint at Bombay Sound Services which began in 1969, where he worked under the late B.N.Sharma, who recorded film tracks for Madhumati, Mugle-a-Azam, Talash, and Bandini. During that time, most of the recording setups in India were optical, and Sood was well trained in working with the format. “In India, everything was recorded live on one-track, 35mm mono, but at Bombay, we had an RCA three-track machine,” Sood explains. “We had a very basic mixer, with two auxes, but we managed to record some incredible pieces on that three-track, including an 80-piece orchestra. We’d have the orchestra on the floor, and artists in a separate iso booth, playing soft instruments like guitar, sitar, and banjo; one track was for the rhythm;
one was for harmony and solos; and one was for the voice.” That period of Sood’s life was a real learning experience, and from there, he developed a passion for recording. In June 1973, Sood established a recording studio for Western Outdoor Advtg. Pvt. Ltd. in Mumbai, where he worked as recording director. He started off recording radio and TV commercials, which he describes as “a completely different art”. “I was responsible for fixing the booms, placing the mics and the musicians, and switching recorders on and off, basically.” he explains. “I had a good salary, and I was independent; the company started making these huge billboards like you’d see in Hollywood, with space for multiple adverts on them, so I was making a lot of commercials. I’ve done more than 1,000
radio and TV commercials in my life, which is pretty crazy, when you think about it!” MULTITRACKING Because there are so many dialects in India, it was always key, even in those early days, to keep one track totally free for the voice. “We have 20 different languages in India – I think there are around 700 films that come out of the country each year now, and only 200 of those are in Hindi, our main language,” Sood reveals. “We’d do the full commercial in Hindi in the morning, then throughout the rest of the day, we’d have to do the voiceover in all the other Indian languages!” In that same studio, Sood eventually got into album work and recording songs for Bollywood films. He received a Platinum Award for his recording and mixing duties on the 1980 Bollywood action movie, Qurbani;