Muse

howdy odyssey i'm bob and i'm jesse welcome to the official adventures in odyssey podcast album 80 rewritten has finished airing so it's time for one of our favorite podcast traditions jesse and i step out of the host chairs and hand the podcast over to the team traditions are meant to be repeated and changed. This time, it's not the usual team. Right. It's not the writers this round. It's the people who make Odyssey sound like Odyssey. Today's Q&A is with the production team, the sound designers behind the episodes. Listeners called in with questions about how the sounds are created, how scenes are layered together, and how these guys pulled off some of the biggest and smallest moments in recent episodes. Alright. Odyssey sound designers, take it away.

Thanks, Bob. And before we go through introductions, let's hear that first question from Carissa, who lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

How many people does it take to do sound design, and what are their jobs?

That's a good question, Carissa. Let's just go through and kind of explain what our jobs are first. So, my name is Christopher Diehl, the production manager for the sound design team of Adventures in Odyssey. The boss of all of us.

What does the production manager do, Chris?

I sit around and I drink coffee and put my feet up on the desk.

Oh, sounds fun. And listens to the shows and says, do it better.

And I actually produce shows here and there. Oh, okay.

I'm a little bit the odd man out here. So my actual title is the mastering engineer. This is Rudy Hare, a.k.a. Fireman Rudy. But I'm sort of the last step in the process. Once the sound designers finish their shows, they come to me and I master them for whatever format they're going out in. And so different formats require different things. And so I master them to those different formats. And I also make sure that there aren't any mistakes that made it into the show in the last pass of producing the shows.

So the last set of ears before this show goes out to our listeners.

That's right. Yeah. And kind of I wear a number of different hats. I'm the archivist for all of the audio related stuff. I try to do kind of anything that would help the sound designer stay with doing sound design on the shows without having to pick up too many extra responsibilities.

Has that included cleaning up rat droppings from the Foley Room?

Rat droppings. Well, we are exaggerating a little. It was mouse droppings, but it was a lot of mice, though. And don't ask me how I know this. Mice really enjoy eating candles. I did not know that. But don't ask me how I know that. Moving right along to Luke. Yeah, I won't.

Hi, I'm Luke Cano, one of the sound designers. I am responsible for putting together the show after we record it, recording the show too. And yeah.

I am Zach Schneider. I am also a sound designer, much like Luke, just slower. We do all the same things. We edit all the voices, do the Foley, add sound effects and mix the final shows, which we then give to Rudy.

Yeah. So that's kind of what our jobs are. But the question is, how many people does it take?

Oh, well, one, two, maybe three, three. Have we ever had four people on a show? It could be four. Yeah. I think it takes all of us.

It does take all of us to ultimately produce a show. All right. Our next question is from Elliot from Oregon.

How hard of a job is sound designing, really? And what kind of qualifications do you need to be able to do that?

Well, I'm going to toss this over to who's going to catch it? Zach, he caught it.

How hard of a job is sound designing? It's very, very difficult. Yes, super. On all levels. Yeah, it's both a very technical and creative kind of job. So in terms of qualifications, anything that you can learn to do creatively, things like music or if you ever actually do any editing, also being able to think some creative thoughts, plan out things like pacing, ways to make the audience feel more engaged, whatever sound effects you're adding. um so then yeah like i said there's also a lot of technology that goes into recording and editing and all sorts of stuff that are tool bags so to speak so it's a yeah like i said it's both creative and technical but how hard is it really i don't i don't know but what kind of qualifications

for it um luke do you have an idea i mean i'd say that qualifications or maybe official credentials or something aren't quite as important as maybe just getting some good work experience. So if you're interested in doing some... sound design maybe try experimenting with um creating some of your own projects or maybe find a project to volunteer on i started making my own little productions with a tape recorder when i was like four so i and i just kept experimenting and child prodigy learning along the way um so yeah just getting in there and um just trying trying stuff and getting your hands dirty yeah or your

ears in this case. All right. And on to our next question is Rachel from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

I really want to get into audio storytelling and I love editing, but sound design really intimidates me. So do you have any recommendations on resources for learning how to begin?

That's a great question, Rachel. Honestly, the interesting thing is, is we all kind of came to what we're doing on different paths is that can you explain a little bit of how you got here

yeah so i mean my general advice for most people is to just if if you want to do something do it which it sounds like you're already doing doing some editing yeah just find the tools that you need and they're pretty readily available now but find some way to record and edit and then just keep doing that. For me, I kind of got into it because I loved watching behind the scenes for movies and like TV shows and stuff that I liked. So that kind of led me down the audio path of movies and filmmaking. And so what I started doing was I would watch something and then see if I could recreate it on my own. So that's a great tip if you want to try sound design is Find something that already exists and then see how you can mimic it or recreate it yourself. And in doing that, you'll learn parts of the process that you need to then create your own sounds later on.

When you're recreating something that exists, isn't that called plagiarism?

Yeah, not if you don't distribute it. If you do it for your own learning's sake, then yeah, it's fine. It's practice. It's practice. It's like, am I plagiarizing Mozart when I play it on the piano? No. I can't play Mozart on the piano. So it wouldn't be anyway.

Now, Luke, you kind of came in a lot earlier in your life as far as getting involved with audio dramas. What was your story?

Well, growing up, my family was part of a ministry that had a radio station. So we listened to a lot of audio drama, a lot of radio. I got to get into the studio every once in a while, go on air and things like that. So that was a lot of fun. And I wanted to do more of that. So, like I said earlier, I started experimenting with creating my own little productions, and then The Apprentice Position opened here at Focus. And then we stole him.

Yeah, we did. Nab that kid. So, with that, because you jumped in so early, what kind of stuff did you use? What kind of resources did you use in order to actually create what you made?

Well, cassette tapes, but I wouldn't recommend that necessarily anymore. It's a little harder to find that. What's a cassette tape? I don't know what that is. There's a lot of just really basic free software that you can get started with. GarageBand is a nice one. If you're an Apple user, Audacity is, it's relatively simple and it's free. Even the software we use, Pro Tools, has basic inexpensive versions that you can download and experiment with.

They can all be intimidating when you first step in. Right. But, you know, you get in and you start using it and you'll start learning some of the basics. Yes. It'll come along. Yes. Yeah.

And being able to search online for like, I'm using this program and how do I do this? Like, there's all kinds of great tutorials online for being able to do that.

There's a lot of great info out there. Now, Rudy, the electrical engineer at one time, how did you come into all of this?

Yeah, I came into it much later than Luke did. I was more like 40, not four. But no, I, as Chris said, I had a career before this, but I wanted to get into dramatic audio. And that's a long story on how that happened. But once I realized what I was interested in, my training, I'll jump back to like what was important. I was being trained without even realizing I was being trained. I was into playing piano, was taught as classical pianist, but I always had a lot more fun getting away from the sheet music and just making up my own stuff. and so playing by ear basically and i didn't know i was being trained for sound design at that time but looking back on it i definitely was and that was just training my ear to be a critical listener to does this sound good does this does this chord progression sound good does this what does this make me feel when i hear it that that kind of thing what creating a feeling through the music definitely goes into the job that i do now with with mastering i'm listening for is is the cadence And so those footsteps appropriate for the emotion that the character is saying, and there's so much music-based stuff.

it goes into the critical ear that it takes to be the mastering engineer. But once I knew that that's what I wanted to go into, I ended up going through a college program that taught me a lot of audio production. Shout out to Cedarville University, if that's okay to do here. But they had a great audio production program. There are a number of colleges that have audio production programs. But, you know, as we've already said, you don't have to go that route. There are multiple

routes to doing good sound design? Yeah, there's several ways. I kind of came in similar to a little bit between both Zach and Rudy, except mine was on the music side and working in the music industry. But honestly, some of the resources I used to help learn was doing live sound at my church, sitting down behind a console and just learning how this signal flow worked, how sound moved through, what made a good mix in an environment. And so there's multiple ways, multiple resources you can use to get in, but honestly getting just involved in it. And there's a lot of communities out there that there's groups that just really enjoy audio dramas and sound design that just get excited about this stuff and listening to each other's stuff and critiquing each other's stuff, trying to kind of hone each other's talents really helps. That's one advantage that we have of having this team here is listening to each other's stuff and helping each one of us refine what we do. I want to say too, for Rachel's

question, she said she loves editing, but sound design intimidates her. By editing, I'm assuming you mean voice track editing. And the more experience you get with that, the better. Like that's the absolute bedrock of our show. We have to be good at voice track editing in everything that we do. Everything else is built around the voice tracks. And so if you're getting good practice with voice track editing, you're actually working on the most foundational part of all of this.

True. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our next question. It's from Joseph from Alberta, Canada.

I'd like to know how many sound effects you have for your board.

Is a lot an acceptable answer.

I was going to I looked it up guys I tried to look it up hold on let's all just I want to take a guess because I know the last time I looked at the number 173,000 Rudy, Luke you guys going to throw your numbers in

I would have actually gone quite a bit higher than that just guessing off the top of my head but I could not find the number and I looked and I could not find it

I think we have close to 2 terabytes of sound effects I was going for size

I was going to say, you guys are both correct. It's 172,847. Are you serious? I actually got the number right. Yeah. Oh. I totally guessed. And Luke's also right because we have 1.8 terabytes of sound files stored. So currently, after this comes out, who knows what it will be.

And does that include our music as well, like all our music cues? That doesn't include music. Oh, okay. Yeah.

All right. Going on to our next question. It is from Rachel who lives in Fremont, Nebraska.

I was just wondering how many people work on sound design per episode.

That's a good question. Well, when you're listening to the show and you get to the end and Chris comes on and she gives her theme, kind of explains a little bit about the show and might give us a lesson, after that are this thing called the credits. And within that, it usually lists who wrote and directed and then it'll list who sound designed the show. And a lot of times you'll hear maybe one name, you could hear two names, and that's usually about how many people work on an episode. Each one of us is assigned a show, and we take that show and we produce it from the beginning to the end. There might be times that we get a little bit of help in the middle of it, but for the most part, that person works on the whole show. Now, sometimes you'll hear a multi-parter, and you might hear, you know, Zack Schneider and Luke Gonneau, and they do work together on that. But for the most part, each person, each one of us, works on a show by ourselves.

I may add that Rudy here works on almost every episode with us in the Foley room. He does work on almost every episode. He records our Foley sessions for us, engineers the Foley, and helps oversee that.

He's really good at critiquing us. He's like, you might need to redo that. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fun to make him do things over. yeah that's that's actually my favorite part of the process is because it's very collaborative and you know a lot of our time is spent just alone in our studios doing working on the shows but when we do Foley it's at least two of us in the room yeah it's very collaborative great

question all right let's move on to some of our favorites the first question is from Sam who lives

in Florida. What is each of you guys' favorite episode ever?

Ooh, that's a good question.

Thanks, Sam. Favorite episode ever. So one that you didn't necessarily work on. What would your favorite show be?

I mean, for me, it changes, but I think my first favorite episode, like my very first favorite, would probably have to be License to Drive. It's a good episode. It's a classic. Yeah, that is a classic.

And it's cliche, but The Time Has Come is my favorite episode. The writing, the acting, the sound design especially. That's powerful. The music is just a beautiful episode.

I have to go for two and the second one might actually be a cheat but just for a super fun episode to listen to do or die it always makes me laugh but for story and sound design and the whole thing the green ring conspiracy just the story arcs that were started there and the creativity of the storyline and the sound design that went into all the big scenes in it I just love it overall yeah that's a good

one mine change a lot so a lot of times it's maybe one I just listened to so i just got done listening to the three-part malachi's message and that was such a great three-parter it was a really good episode all right moving on to another question this is

from grant who lives in winchester virginia what is your favorite episode to work on

i'm gonna i'm gonna let me let me start off here okay uh sometimes um the ones that are your favorite to work on are sometimes the ones that are the most difficult to work on and you're like you're dreading it as you go through it. It's so much work, but then you have so much gratification when you're done with it. Uh, and I, I've got a few today. I'm going to say Walter flying bus. That's the one I'm going to say today. If you ask me again tomorrow, I'm going to have a different one, but, uh, that one had a lot of animals in it and, uh, and a lot of sound effects and, um, and a flying bus and a flying bus and Walter, it had Walter, but we had some cool stuff in it with some chanting and i actually got to to have my son come in and be part of that which is really cool to have to be able to come in and and record uh with him on some of that stuff so

yeah that's my answer for today uh for me was failing to the finish line mainly because and this is from a sound design perspective our sound effect server failed us and so we ended up getting to do a very fun adventure but we needed if you know the show you need the sound of a go-kart in the show. And our sound effects server had sounds of go-karts, but it did not have sounds of go-karts by themselves. It was more like you're at a racetrack or something like that with multiple go-karts. And so the sound effects server we couldn't use. So we had to get our own go-kart sounds. And fortunately, there's a great go-kart racetrack out east of Colorado Springs here a ways. And our team went out and talked to the owner and he let us come in early when we would just be the only ones there and we put microphones all over a go-kart and we all got to go out and race the go-kart on the track recording all the different uh parts of the show that you hear in the show and anytime we're involving engines or go-karts or anything like that that we actually get to go speed go race or whatever it was just it was just super fun so it was yeah more selfish that we got to go play on go-karts than anything else but that was a very

fun episode to work on uh the best is yet to come uh eugene's send-off episode that was a special

one to work on for me uh for me i think probably the show dose of virtual reality just had so many fun sound effects to create and things i could do with it being like part video game part virtual reality so it was that one was just a whole lot of fun volcanoes in the background it had a giant gorilla in it, didn't it? It had a giant gorilla and an elephant.

Oh, an elephant. Yeah, it was a good time. Alright, moving on to our next question. Clara from Spring Harbor, Michigan.

What was your favorite episode and album 80 to make

and why? I'm going to throw this over to Zach and Luke because they're the ones that pretty much sound design those episodes.

I mean, for me, I think it was either Face the Unknown or Face the Truth because Because for both of those shows, there were some really weird moments in the script where you suspend reality for a little bit. And any time you get to do that with sound effects and sound design, I think it's really cool. Plus, I like the way the story kind of wraps up for Rene.

And I really enjoyed working on This Is My Story just because of how it all came together. I was just really happy with the effects and Foley. and I especially love the music score that Conor Savoca put together for the show.

All right. Our next question is from McKenna, who lives in New Hampshire.

What is your favorite sound to record?

Ooh, favorite sound to record. Okay, as the usual. Hold on. This is it, everybody. Just all together now. That was it, silence. Silence is really difficult.

record that quiet yeah that was really awkward what are we waiting for um what were you gonna

say well i was i was gonna say and as we've said i'm usually the recording engineer in the foley room and so my favorite sounds to record are usually like the fights and the the scuffles because it usually involves a sound designer hitting themselves on mic and then i can just say no that wasn't hard enough you got to do that again harder harder and you know we could have gotten the right sound several takes ago but yeah i see how it is there's something special about

recording someone walking into wits end uh we have a nice wood surface in the foley room that we use for the wits end floor and so when you act out walking in the front door and walking up to the counter you get to imagine you're at wits end and that's really fun that is good yeah i like the

quiet of sitting and recording a location sound like even if the location itself is like a work site and not very peaceful there's something really cool about just sitting and listening to the world around you so i like those ambient sounds the environmental sounds and we don't get to record them very often but when we do i think it's it's fun so i'm assuming

this is not talking about voices from voice actors we're going to talk about actual sound effects but i'm gonna i'm gonna lump in crowd recordings as a sound effect because it's a lot of fun to get a group of people in, especially when they're engaged with it, because you just sit and listen to them and it's fun to hear what they have to say in the background. And you're like, no one's ever going to hear this really, because you're going to bury it into your mix somewhere. But it's an entertaining time to watch and listen to this group perform against maybe lines that they're hearing from the show that they're recording with. I feel like my answer

was much more violent than any of your answers.

All right, Anna Grace from Louisville, Kentucky has a question for us.

What is like the weirdest sound you had to do when you were recording an episode?

The weirdest answer. Yeah, this is a tough one because I feel like there's so many different ones.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different types of weird, but to me, anything that doesn't exist in the real world is kind of weird. And there was one scene in 28 hours where I had to do an electric car peeling out, which on paper doesn't sound that weird, but electric cars don't do that. Like, if you've driven in an electric car, they accelerate, like, it's very smooth. They don't, like, the tires don't skid on pavement. So creating that was... A little bit of a cheat. It was cheating. Yeah, it was cheating reality a little bit, but that was a weird sound that you will never hear in the natural world.

The ketchup and whipped cream fight and makes no mistake was kind of weird. It was kind of messy. It was just lots of ketchup everywhere. The Foley Room smelled like ketchup

for multiple days after we recorded that. It did.

Well, I'll go along that line is the banana fight. It was with Camilla and Matthew, and it was just a mess.

I'm assuming you threw away the T-shirt you were wearing.

Yeah, I think I did. I think I didn't use that again.

I think weirdest was, and this was during Darian's Rice series, that Chris did all of the sound design on that. But there's a scene in there where a button gets shot across the room, just flicked out of somebody's hand across the room. And I went back and listened to it a couple days ago, just that sound effect, and I thought that I don't think what we recorded made it into the show because there wasn't time for what we recorded. So it only happened in the Foley room. But we set up a line of mics across the Foley room and shot multiple pennies and buttons and things trying to capture the flight of something across the room. And it was just, it was just fun to think through, how are we going to do this? And, uh, and the sounds we got out of it were pretty weird, but not everything that gets recorded in the Foley Room makes it into the show. And that was one of them.

All right. Um, let's look at some of the latest episodes that we've worked on. Uh, Lucas has a question from Martin, Georgia.

When Buck falls to the ground after being hit in the head with a baseball, what was the process of making the montage of voices and singing that eventually leads to the decision of him knowing who he is and who he is not?

Oh, that's a good question.

You know who worked on that was Luke. Yes. Well, in the original draft of the script, Kathy Buchanan, the writer of this show, had jawed down some ideas of what she wanted that montage to sound like. And then Nathan Hubler took her draft of the script and poured through pretty much every single show featuring Buck and wrote down which lines we should use and in what order, according to different themes and the best pacing. So then I took what Nathan had written out and went back to the original mix and recording sessions for all those book shows, including the song Amazing Grace from Best is Yet to Come, and pulled those clips and edited them all together. Nathan and I went back and forth on a few versions for how fast the clip should go and the order of them. Then I added a... A ton of special effects like echoes and reverbs and delays and sound effects like whooshes, reversed smashing glass and droning wind. Then John Campbell composed an amazing music score to put with it all. And that's kind of how we built the montage. It was pretty impressive.

Yeah, it does not surprise me that there's a question about this because in the playback of the show when the team was all together, there were lots of kudos given for that montage. It was good. Great job.

Okay, moving on to the next question. It is Caleb from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. How often do you change the background noises for Wits End or other crowd noises? Because I noticed, especially in a lot of the older episodes, those noises were the same. Oh, good ear. Yeah, that's good.

Wonderful. Here's the laughing goat. Yeah.

Yeah. Over the years, we have slightly altered the sound of Wits End. We've recorded new crowds that could be used in Wits End. We still use the original, but now it's layered with some other sounds at the same time, just to give it some variation. And honestly, there are times that we've even changed the empty sound of Wits End.

True, true. We tweak things pretty regularly, like changing the size of the Wits End crowd or adding in more freezer hum if it's a quiet day at Wits End. For example, I start including a morgue freezer sound effect in the background. And as far as I know, that hadn't been done before.

We're going to have to talk about this.

It's been in a lot of shows, man. A freezer is a freezer.

It's the sound that you're looking for, yeah. All right, let's move on to our last question. It's from Austin, who lives in Lakeland, Florida.

What is something that most people don't know that would surprise them about sound time?

um about sound design that not every sound is what you think it is yeah i was genuinely shocked

when i started working here and started bullying with rudy that the stools at the wits end counter are supposed to be bolted to the ground they are they don't they don't scoot around there's they're in one place that's surprising yeah they start scooting the stools i said nope nope nope You can't do that.

That's not how we do it here. Yeah. I mean, that is true. We have to think about what the environment looks like and sounds like. And until you actually start doing it and you have to think, oh, wait, I've got to now live in this world that has been created. You don't think about the fact that the stools are bolted down. Right.

You don't think about how many steps there are from the front door to the counter all the time.

We do have to sometimes suspend reality, too. I mean, there's things that we do that if you tried to do them in real time, you wouldn't be able to perform half the stuff that happens. unwrapping a present

they get unwrapped very quickly in Odyssey

the one joke I keep teasing Kathy Buchanan about because she has a show where Ryan walks Jules up to her porch and then gives her chocolate chip cookies and orange juice and I'm like where did this bottle of orange juice come from did he carry it in his jacket the whole time they were at the dance I mean what happened here so I mean there's stuff in there that does it surprises us sometimes

something that surprised me about sound design when i first got into it i guess as i continue is that i'm so glad i waited till the end to talk about this but how much math is involved like there's a lot of physics in room noise and like how things echo and like how your ear hears sound certain sound effects whether they're low or high and like so tailoring all of the sounds to your listening audience actually kind of requires you to understand a little bit of math which was a little bit of a surprise not calculus but no mostly physics yeah you know i don't know if this fits into the surprise

category well maybe this part does so the sound designer that does the show they do all of the footsteps and all of the foley for every character in that show so if it's a little child or an you know an elderly old person or somebody walking in high heels or anything that it's that sound designer who's making those sounds with one exception so have i mentioned a fireman in the show by the name of fireman rudy have i have i brought that up yet i think so i think you've talked about no well anyway there's this fireman in the show he's named fireman rudy when fireman rudy aka me started getting a line here and there in the show luke decided that any foley that fireman rudy does in the show i have to be the foley artist for that it's the rule good it's the So I have to get up from my engineering chair and put on headphones and appropriate shoes and go do my own foley. So all of the foley for Fireman Rudy, at least in Luke's shows, is actually me doing the foley.

It's the only voice that actually matches the feet. Yeah, that's good.

All right. Well.

We thank you so much for those questions. It's been fun going through some of these. And, you know, we always look forward to people exploring and wanting to understand more about what sound design is and what we do. So thanks for those questions. They've been great. Yeah, they're awesome. Thank you.

Those guys are great. And now I want to go listen to Album 80 all over again to hear everything they were talking about.

It's not a bad idea, Jess, because we have another announcement. Voting for the Avery Awards for albums 79 and 80 is now officially open. This is our annual awards show to honor the show and to honor our fans for voting. As usual, you can vote for categories like Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Scene, Best Sound Design, Best Script, and there will be a few special categories this year.

Voting is open right now on our website. Head to adventuresinodyssey.com to make your voice heard.

And while you're there, you can revisit all the shows in Album 79, 11th Hour, and Album 80, Rewritten, in the club. We'll have links to get them on CD and download, too.

But that's all for this edition of the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast, a presentation to focus on the family. Visit AdventuresinOdyssey.com or call us at 1-800-A-FAMILY. I'm Bob. And I'm Jesse, reminding you that with God in your life, every day's an adventure.

Thank you.