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Tag Archives: Earwolf

Inside the Workflow of Stitcher’s ‘All American: Tiger Woods’ Podcast

All American: Tiger Woods
Writer, co-host and producer Jordan Bell (foreground) and co-host Albert Chen recorded episodes of Stitcher’s All American: Tiger Woods Podcast at Earwolf Studios before moving to a remote workflow due to the pandemic.

Los Angeles, CA (November 5, 2020)—Don’t underestimate the value of a solid workflow and staff rapport in the formula for what makes a compelling podcast. “At Stitcher, we have a pretty great system in terms of giving our shows the proper treatment they need from an engineering perspective,” says Jordan Bell, who created All American: Tiger Woods and serves as the podcast’s writer, co-host and producer.

Audio engineer Casey Holford
Audio engineer Casey Holford.

Working with co-host Albert Chen, audio engineer Casey Holford and the engineering team, Bell says the podcast’s switch from a typical production arrangement of writing, face-to-face meetings and table reads to a virtual process was seamless. “[It] has been quite a different experience to just plan and predict and try to do the best we can,” she says. “But I think one of the biggest things [is] major kudos to our whole engineering team for what they did at the start of this, because we have a really great system.”

That system includes a pivot from tape syncs in which a producer would travel to a guest’s location to record audio, to shipping audio kits so guests can record themselves locally. The typical kit includes a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface paired with a Samson Q2U USB microphone or a Shure SM58—always with a foam windscreen, which Holford calls “the savior of home recording during the pandemic”—as well as detailed instructions for setting up a successful recording.

First-person interviews aren’t the only audio sources on All American: Tiger Woods. In fact, Bell goes to great lengths to include familiar audio from the golf superstar’s public life to connect listeners to his whirlwind career of 82 PGA Tour wins, including a comeback victory at the 2019 Masters Tournament.

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“When we’re revisiting this history, we want to put things in a fresh perspective,” she says. “So, using a piece of tape that you hadn’t heard for a while, when you listen to it 10 years later and wrap it in all this new context, it’s going to take on a different meaning. And we hope that gives that effect to listeners.”

All American: Tiger WoodsThose audio clips form one of the podcast’s most unusual sonic features—the footage from golf tournaments where the key moments are silent, when the spectators are watching what’s about to happen. “That feature pops out in every episode when I’m mixing,” says Holford. “The apex moments are quite silent and then followed by a huge reaction. It’s almost more engaging than actually watching footage of this stuff, or it engages a part of the mind that goes, ‘What’s about to happen?’”

Another key storytelling component is the podcast’s theme music, which Holford composed using a variety of acoustic instruments that signal an Americana vibe. “I wanted to make the music conceptually in a way that seemed to me like it was blending different elements of American music,” he explains. “I used jazz elements, hip-hop elements and folk elements. I made a washtub bass and a one-string slide guitar called the diddley bow, and we played them both. I wanted it to sound like a mishmash of an American musical experience.”

Holford applies stems of the theme music to fill in the audio and create transitions, stings and bumpers. He has the theme broken down into eight stems highlighting various instruments and uses them to sketch remixes of the theme as needed. “I can mix and match those for different flavors depending on my own internal compass,” he says. “The use of stems this way lets us have a unifying musical flavor across the whole series.”

Creative Editing is Key to ‘Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend’ Podcast

Conan O'Brien usually records his podcast on the Warner lot, but has been using Earwolf Studios since the pandemic began.
TV talk show mainstay Conan O’Brien (foreground) and audio producer Matt Gourley (background) typically record the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast on the Warner lot, but have been using Earwolf Studios, seen here, since the pandemic began.

Los Angeles, CA (September 24, 2020)—Improvisational comedy moves fast, and the audio pros entrusted to capture the magic don’t always have many opportunities to fix flubbed words or phrases. But over the course of recording the mostly improvised podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, producer Matt Gourley has found creative ways to get it done.

Matt Gouerly
Matt Gourley

Case in point: When a recent guest hiccupped over the word “about” while recording a key segment, Gourley used a trick he learned while working on another improvised podcast, Superego. He analyzed all the audio tracks from the interview to find every other instance of the guest saying the word in search of a substitute.

“As I was editing, I was keeping mental notes,” says Gourley. “I think there were six or seven times he said ‘about,’ and only one of them fit. It has to feel like a natural human, not artificial intelligence taking speech from the internet and pasting it all together. Luckily, one of them really worked.”

Creativity also comes into play in other ways, he says, such as the introduction and theme music. Longtime O’Brien associate Jimmy Vivino composes and performs most of the original music used on the podcast, with one notable exception: a clip from The White Stripes’ song “We’re Going to Be Friends” featured in the intro. Gourley transitions from a Vivino-composed segment with a simple kick drum pattern that links the two clips.

“[He] did the music for it to be a complement, even down to the same beats per minute,” he says. “I was able to take the separate stems of the music and take out the music after the introduction, hoping to make it seem like one seamless piece. It’s a little hard to tell, but that’s kind of the point.”

The team normally records at the same Warner Brothers studios where O’Brien tapes his television show, Conan, in a dressing room they converted to a fully functioning podcast studio with a glassed-in green room. There, the typical setup is four Shure SM7B mics on Heil PL-2T overhead broadcast booms and Shure SRH840 headphones for monitoring, all with room to expand, but these days O’Brien and sidekick-assistant Sona Movsesian record at Earwolf Studios, using SM7Bs and Sennheiser HD 280 PRO closed-back headphones, while Warner is still shut down. They both record locally to QuickTime on their computers while videoconferencing with Gourley and the day’s guest via Zoom.

Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy (right) of Schitt’s Creek, seen here with producer Matt Gourley (left), were guests on the podcast in January, 2020, back when it was still taping on the Warner lot.

“Conan himself is an admitted Luddite,” he says. “He doesn’t really know anything about computers, so to send him a mic and a USB interface [wouldn’t work].” Gourley, who prefers to use a Sennheiser super-cardioid mic on the podcast, downloads their files and assembles them in Pro Tools, lining up the tracks to a hand-clap sync.

“We record on Zoom as a backup in case we need it, especially for the guests,” he says. “It’s different every time. [I] get on Zoom with the guests a little before the recording and have them try to set up a [local] recording on their own so that we can get some decent quality. It’s hit and miss—sometimes guests just don’t have that functionality, so we end up going with their Zoom recording.”

Once Gourley completes a rough edit, he gets to work on the signal using plug-ins like the industry-standard iZotope RX to remove “room noise, plosives and mouth clicks.” O’Brien isn’t a heavy editor, though. If he has any concerns, he usually notes them right after taping. Gourley puts the episodes together mostly on his own.

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Producing a podcast that thrives on interaction and nonverbal communication can be a challenge, Gourley says, but one the team at Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend has adapted to well.

“Timing is everything and you’re always on a delay [with Zoom],” he says. “It’s like trying to be funny on a cell phone connection. But like anything, you start to learn the rhythms, and Conan’s a master of that. It isn’t long usually before the guests get in the rhythm, too.”

Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend • https://www.earwolf.com/show/conan-obrien/

‘Dead Eyes’ Podcast Team Focuses on the ‘X’ Factor

'Dead Eyes' follows actor/comedian Connor Rafliff as he tries to determine why he was fired by Tom Hanks from a minor role 20 years ago.
‘Dead Eyes’ follows actor/comedian Connor Rafliff as he tries to determine why he was fired by Tom Hanks from a minor role in HBO’s ‘Band of Brothers’ 20 years ago.
‘Dead Eyes’ co-producers Harry Nelson (left) and Mike Comite. Comite: Erin Ortiz.

New York, NY (September 17, 2020)—All the fancy audio equipment and sound treatments in the world won’t save a wayward comedy podcast, say Mike Comite and Harry Nelson, co-producers of the hit podcast Dead Eyes. But with the right mix of talent, timing and post-production, it can all come together.

“[All] these amazing engineers and super-talented people are all using the same plug-ins and whatnot, they all have their little workflows, but you can’t make something sound awesome without raw talent somewhere in the mix,” says Comite.

The team behind Dead Eyes, a narrative comedy podcast led by actor and comedian Connor Ratliff, would know. The podcast follows Ratliff down the rabbit hole as he works to unravel an admittedly “very stupid mystery” that has dogged him for decades: why Tom Hanks fired him from a minor role in the 2001 HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. Along the journey, they’ve gone from working out of A-list podcasting studios in New York and Los Angeles to a blanket fort on a bedroom floor in Missouri.

Producing Dead Eyes During a Pandemic


Connor Ratliff and his Samson Meteor USB mic in the blanket fort.
'Dead Eyes' co-producer Mike Comite and associate.
Mike Comite's WFH production setup.

“I love the reaction we get from the show, knowing that Connor is now recording voiceover with a $99 [Samson Meteor] USB mic, in a blanket, in his parents’ house,” says Comite. “Connor is literally lying on his stomach for episodes eight, nine and 10, which is so fun to me. And everything before that was in a Headgum Studio with a [Shure] SM7B.”

Naturally, that homespun setup generates “a ridiculous amount” of electronic noise, he says, but after running it through iZotope RX, he’s satisfied with the finished product for now. The performance and interaction among the guests are the most important ingredients of the podcast. In episode one, for example, a conversation between Ratliff and Zach Woods (The Office) takes place on a street corner, recorded on a phone—and it works.

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“There’s stuff sonically that I’m super proud of,” he says, “but the stuff that’s janky is almost more fun to me because initially I was like, ‘We can’t do it this way. It has to sound professional.’ [But] you wouldn’t have Zach remarking on people walking by him on the streets in a recording studio. [That’s] just the raw talent of Zach and Connor, being amazing improvisers with amazing comedic timing.”

Early episodes were recorded in traditional podcast studios, with Ratliff at Stitcher Studios in New York and guests like Jon Hamm at Earwolf in L.A..
Early episodes were recorded in traditional podcast studios, with Ratliff at Stitcher Studios in New York and guests like Jon Hamm at Earwolf in L.A..

Elsewhere in the series, the team relies heavily on tape syncs for interviews. The conversations between Ratliff and D’Arcy Carden (The Good Place) and Jon Hamm (Mad Men) that account for most of episode one were recorded pre-pandemic on opposite coasts—Ratliff at Stitcher Studios in New York and Carden and Hamm at Earwolf in Los Angeles. That trend has increased post-pandemic.

Co-producer Nelson, in addition to sharing audio duties with Comite, also had a hand in creating the storytelling tone of Dead Eyes, which plays the middle ground between emotional and absurd, veering from Serial-style seriousness to satire. Nelson recalls, “I was working in New York [with] former WNYC and public radio audio producers, really talented folks, [when] Connor and I set out to make a more straight-ahead comedy show. I think the influence of the people I’d been working with sort of creeped in, and Connor’s comedic sensibilities combined with [the influence of] the shows I was listening to and wanted to make at the time, resulted in the hybrid that is Dead Eyes.”

Comite says Nelson’s template opened a world of sonic creativity for the podcast to explore. Instead of playing the audio straight, they feel free to subtly enhance scenes that otherwise might sound stilted, such as the recreation of Ratliff’s script reading with “Hanks” (also played by Ratliff) in episode three. He recalls, “We ended up taking all of the audio from that interview and sending it through a couple reverbs and adding room noises and some fluorescent light hums and weird, awkward chair squeaks, really giving it a feel of actually [being] in the room with these people.”

Dead Eyes • https://headgum.com/dead-eyes

How the ‘Office Ladies’ Podcast Brought ‘The Office’ Home

Office Ladies

Stitcher Studios in Los Angeles, where the smash Earwolf podcast Office Ladies began recording late in 2019, was a perfect fit for co-hosts Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. The duo was able to track live while sitting across from their in-studio guests, many of whom starred alongside them in the iconic mockumentary sitcom, The Office.

All that changed, though, when COVID-19 forced them to leave the ease and comfort of their professional podcasting “office” to shelter at home. Now, the audio production team spends its time coaching guests who aren’t used to dealing with audio and then fixing sound anomalies in editing.

Codi Fischer
Codi Fischer, managing producer, Earwolf

“If you’re not in a beautifully soundproofed studio with all this very expensive equipment, you’re going to have to do a lot of back-end editing and engineering work on the audio,” says Codi Fischer, managing producer at Earwolf (no relation to Jenna). “It’s not that easy just to plug in a mic and record a great-sounding podcast.”

With guests joining on video conferencing platforms like Zoom—a fitting environment these days for a show that turned the mundanities of office life into comedic gold—the producers are no longer dealing with an even playing field for audio gear or sound environments. The co-hosts both use Blue Yeti USB microphones, but that’s where the uniformity ends.

“I try to send them as simple instructions as possible,” she says. “Most people have Macs, so QuickTime is available [for recording] and it’s the easiest for people to understand. We ask first that everyone has headphones. If you’re not plugged in with your headphones to receive the audio from Zoom into your headphones, there’s going to be sound bleed in recording yourself.”

Fischer is willing to go to great lengths to make sure her guests are well prepared, though. Since many of them live in the L.A. area, Fischer has even purchased $8 headphones from a local CVS and dropped them off at guests’ homes before recording. She’s found it can save time in the long run and rescue the producers and engineers from the fire drill and “mini panic attacks” when a guest doesn’t have headphones.

“You want to stay on a production schedule,” she says. “Even though people are in their homes, a lot of them have kids and are still really busy, so you have very small windows in not the best circumstances. You can problem solve ahead of time by just saying, ‘Hey, do you have headphones? If you don’t, I’ll bring you some.’”

Office Ladies audio engineer Sam Kieffer
Office Ladies audio engineer Sam Kieffer

Most Earwolf podcasts fall into the improv-comedy genre, like hits Comedy Bang! Bang! and Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. As their first “recap” show, the Office Ladies team has had to make adjustments to the show’s structure along the way, such as accommodating fan questions and call outs. With such a straightforward audio production, many of the challenges in producing the show surface during the editing phase, which takes about a week. There’s little sound design other than the opening theme song—written and recorded by The Office cast member Creed Bratton—so banter and dialogue are the big targets. Fischer and audio engineer Sam Kieffer often delete sections that don’t go anywhere.

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“We’re bringing in cast members or crew members that haven’t seen each other for a long time,” she says. “A lot of times the interviews start with catching up and personal chitchat, which we cut out. We just want to get to the core of what people are interested in.

“If you listen to the ‘Casino Night’ episode with John Krasinski,” she adds, “I think we left the interview pretty much as is, except for maybe having to stop to answer a doorbell or something like that. Those are the things you have to work around when everyone’s recording at home.”

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