John Hodgman (podium) and Jonathan Coulton (guitar) with two colonial impersonators, the soon-to-be-deposed King of America and members of the Hungry March Band. Photo: Whitney Pastorek

Jeff Towne on Live Recording for LGB

John Hodgman was pretty determined to record the Little Gray Book Lecture in a bar. And I understood the appeal, that’s the native habitat of the series in Brooklyn, and there’s a certain sticky-floor vibe that can somehow make it down the wires and onto a recording, impossible to replicate with piped-in sounds of ice cubes clinking. So when I was asked for advice on which divey bar to record in as the lectures roadtripped down to Philadelphia, I proposed a compromise. The feel of the space for an event such as this is important, but for listeners at home, noisy patrons at the back bar, blenders, phones, busses going by, independent streams of jokes and pick-up lines are merely distracting, devoid of any contextual charm. As luck would have it, I happened to know of the perfect spot: Indre. It’s a full-on professional recording studio, but with the requisite bohemian mojo, supplied largely by the ancient chandelier and the array of cast-off couches, but also by a thin film of grease and cheese whiz from Pat’s Cheesesteaks around the corner.

I felt it was crucial to get the sound of the crowd, but in less-controlled environments, it’s hard to record only the amused gasps and chuckles without being overwhelmed by the baseline buzz of the city. So starting in a quiet, soundproofed room like Indre's Studio A, was a helpful step. To capture the applause and laughter, we used a pair of mics that permanently hang from indre’s high ceiling, but we could have just as easily put a pair of mics on stands, somewhere backed-off from the audience. The last thing you want is the sound of one guy clapping directly into the mic, so you need to get the mics away from the crowd a bit. The good news is that applause is loud, and so is laughter, so the gain on the mics can be kept low, barely present during most of the recording. But a little bit of that room sound helps transmit the realness of the event, too much and it’s hard to concentrate on the main event.

On stage, it was a simple affair, with one podium mic, another for the singer, a direct line from his guitar, and one line for audio clips being played from an iPod. We talked the readers into keeping the stage volume low, and kept the level of the audience PA at a moderate setting as well. This went a long way toward avoiding the cavernous ringing that can result from a raging PA in an echoey hall, so common in live recordings.

Indre studio engineers Mike Richelle and Pete Girgenti had already wired-up the old stand-by Shure SM-58 microphones as the voice mics before I arrived, and my first reaction was to replace them with something a bit more exotic. The studio has a mic locker with some big, expensive, German condenser mics, much loved for their rich translation of the human voice. But I have learned to listen first, before making assumptions about what is or isn’t going to work. And when we got up into the booth while the readers were running through a timed rehearsal, the SM-58s sounded great. Especially in this circumstance, when there was a PA blaring out into the room, and stage monitors shooting some sound back at the readers, the SM-58 demonstrated why its tight pattern has made it one of the most popular stage microphones for decades. Simple foam windscreens helped reduce P-Pops.

Mike Richelle patched classic dbx 160 compressors into the voice-mic inserts, to even out the inputs on those channels, compensating a bit for varying speaking volumes, and keeping the occasional laugh or demonstrative underscore from overdriving the inputs.

In the booth, we tracked through a big SSL board, sending each channel individually into ProTools, creating the opportunity to rebalance each element later if desired. But at the same time, we mixed to stereo, as if we were on live the radio, hoping that we could deliver a simple stereo mix to the editors that would only require edits for time and the occasional dialog clean-up, not a full mixing job.

Everything went smoothly, and it seems that the comfortable feel of the room made it to tape, aided, no doubt, by the squishy old couches, and abundant Irish Whiskey.

(Thanks to Michael Comstock, Mike Richelle and Pete Girgenti from Indre studios for their work on the recording and live sound.)

John Hodgman (podium) and a very red Jonathan Coulton (guitar). Photo: Whitney Pastorek

Brendan Greeley on Editing/Mixing LGB

Jeff Towne’s several microphones and one iPod input produced a seven-track ProTools session just over two hours long. It was entrusted to my care, and Jonathan Coulton’s, to make radio.

The first part was easy. We had asked all readers to repeat themselves in full sentences if they misspoke; these we snipped out. I’m sure there’s a more appropriate term for this, but Jonathan called these mini-edits “fixies.” This I will call them forever more. After fixies, we had about an hour and fifty minutes. Do we pad it up to two hours or cut it down to one? We had planned a two-hour special, with the first hour as a stand-alone option, but two hours is a lot of shelf space for a station to free up, particularly for a pilot of a completely new show. Better, we thought, to make one tight hour.

Ira Glass told us “Lose the Ben Franklin jokes.” I had thought that Ben Franklin went over well, but a response that sounds generous and warm to you in the middle of an audience of fifty can sound on tape as if you are among ten people having a moderately good time. Ira was right (and what does he know about radio, anyway?); we lost Ben.

This, we learned, is the challenge of turning a live event into good radio. When you hear a recording of a live event, you’re listening right along with the people in the studio audience. If you can’t hear them enjoying themselves, you’re going to feel a little conspicuous enjoying yourself out there alone in your car.

The cutting gets easier. Much easier. I liked all the little good parts of this piece of audio I’d been living with; I felt each loss keenly and then, suddenly, I didn’t. At around two in the morning of my last day in Jay Allison’s borrowed studio I began to slash and enjoy; it was no longer personal between me and all those mostly-good-bits.

It hurt a bit when, on Chris Bannon’s advice, I cut myself out of the hour. I’m not going to lie here, I’m waiting for the popular Transom uprising that demands I edit myself back in, but I think Chris was right. Of the possible combinations of individual segments, Paul Tough’s and Starlee Kine’s work best together, particularly separated by John Hodgman’s story about vampire call-in radio in western Massachusetts.

To listen for in this final produced pilot: We aren’t playing to our home crowd of Brooklyn, and we’re in a studio with couches, not a vast echo-y former-mayonnaise factory-now-bar. Does it sound like we’re having a good time?

Additional help producing/mixing this radio piece came from Jay Allison
w/ advice from Ira Glass and Chris Bannon.

The Little Gray Book Lectures
Main Story Page | Radio Production + Bonus Audio

Related Links

The Little Gray Book Lectures Web site:
www.littlegraybooks.com

The Little Gray Book Lectures on Public Radio Exchange:
www.prx.org/series/2347

Transom Guests: John Hodgman's Review:
www.transom.org/guests/review/200208.review.hodgman.html

Transom Shows: Brendan Greeley's "The Most German Day Ever":
www.transom.org/shows/2003/200308.lawnmower.html