Creating Production Elements For A Podcast

I've teamed up with Detroit comedian Mike Geeter to launch a new podcast about the Detroit arts and entertainment scene called The D Brief. In this column, I am sharing the lessons I learn from it for other radio broadcasters who want to do the same.

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Mike Geeter and I were gearing up to launch a new podcast about Detroit arts and entertainment. The show structure would involve sixteen segments, each focusing on a different aspect of the local scene. I had purchased the equipment, which would allow me to fire off production elements from an iPad in real time as we recorded the show. This would free me up from having to do a lot of post-recording production, allowing me to spend the majority of my time on show prep instead.

The concept behind the podcast's production elements was simple: A quick sweeper followed by a long music bed that would play under our segments. (For podcasters who are unfamiliar with radio station jargon, a "sweeper" is the produced element that is played between songs on a radio station; it usually contains sound effects or short pieces of with a voiceover.)

The only problem? I hadn't produced a sweeper in years.

I grew up on Bay Area radio. I was a teenager when 98.5 KOME in the South Bay flipped to the Alternative format in an attempt to dethrone San Francisco legend Live 105. I first fell in love with imaging production while listening to KOME.

When I headed off to Brown University and began working at WBRU, the university-affiliated Alternative Rock station, I set out to recreate the sonic gems I heard between Pearl Jam tracks on KOME. I would record KOME's sweepers on cassette tapes during my trips home, then bring them back to WBRU studios and try to reverse engineer them.

I discovered the genius behind KOME's imaging production was a man named John Frost. I eventually learned to recreate his formula: Take a snippet of industrial music from a deep track by Ministry, White Zombie, or KMFDM. Next, layer a deep, deadpan voiceover on top of it. You could, stutter, pitch-shift, or loop the voice to give it some extra oomph. Finally, sprinkle in a few hip hop vocal samples, such as Flavor Flav screaming "Yeeeeeeeeah Booooooy!" And if you wanted to get really ambitious, you could try beatmatching several alternative tracks into a mini-mix.

I am young enough that I never needed to splice reel-to-reel tape to create my sonic masterpieces. After cutting my teeth on an Orban digital workstation at my college radio station, I learned to edit using ProTools. After graduating from college, WBRU's voiceover artist, Jude Corbett, helped me land my first paying gig as the Imaging Director at 105.7 KPNT / The Point in St. Louis. I moved out to the STL, where my full-time job would be creating imaging elements to go between songs.

After ten months in St. Louis, my career led me out of the radio station's production studio and into the programming office. So sixteen years later, when I set out to launch The D Brief podcast, my sweeper making skills were a bit rusty.

I called up my good friend and voiceover artist Jake Kaplan, who was the Creative Director at CBS Radio in Los Angeles. I asked Jake if it was still trendy for radio stations to mix Lords of Acid and KRS-One in their imaging production. He assured me that it was not. For the most part, he said, stations were using straight reads over music clips. Apparently, all that stuttering gets annoying after a while, so production directors have soured on the practice.

Jake told me that radio stations are very big on using "audience drops." That is, going out on the street and recording everyday listeners saying things like "I love the music!" and "I listen at work!," and then using those voices in the imaging production. The technique is used to create a sense of community around the radio station.

I knew that I wanted to use two different voices for the production elements -- one white and one black. The majority of Detroit's residents inside the city boundaries are African-American, but the city's recent resurgence was drawing more and more white visitors in from the suburbs on evenings and weekends. It would be impossible to do a podcast about the arts and entertainment scene without touching upon race, especially with one black and one white co-host. So Mike and I decided to lean into it with our choice of voiceover artists. We settled on a black male and a white female for the sweepers.

Most radio production directors purchase work parts to use in their imaging production. Workparts are audio bleeps, bloops, and swishes that can be combined to create sweepers. Unfortunately, I didn't have a budget for work parts. Instead, I was going to FreeSound.org, which hosts an online collection of royalty-free sound effects for use in audio projects like podcasts. Unfortunately, most of FreeSound.org's audio components are lifelike sound effects, not the cool, space-agey blips and thumps that I needed. Crickets and croaking bullfrogs were not the sounds I had in mind.

Moreover, you explore the site's audio offerings through a search engine, which is not particularly useful in my case. Type in "zap" and the results are a series of over-the-top cartoonish effects. What was I to do?

Many of the planned segments in The D Brief podcast would focus on a particular type of entertainment, such as movies or stageplays. So I decided to build production elements that would reflect those subjects. For example, for the sports segment intro, I searched for as many recognizable sports sounds as I could find: bats hitting balls, soccer balls being kicked, hockey buzzers, pipe organs, and cheering crowds.

I took the sounds, along with the voiceover reads, and laid them over a short snippet of royalty-free music. (I like to think of each sweeper as a very short song.) Here's the result:

I repeated the process with all of the production elements that had recognizable sounds associated with them. For example, the sweeper that precedes our "out of town" segment, uses sounds from trains, planes, and automobiles:

And the sweeper preceding our movies segment:

I have often found that it's best to start a sweeper by combining several very short snippets of the "attack" portion of these sounds before introducing the music snippet and the voiceover read. Doing this allows you to push the music or previous segment out of the way and catch the listeners attention.

In some cases, I was creating generic sweepers that would not introduce a specific segment. For these, I would often pick a theme and collect several related sounds. For example, for this sweeper, I chose a series of video game sound effects:

This sweeper has a tropical theme, incorporating the sounds of steel drums, seagulls, and waves crashing on the beach:

The resulting sweepers are tight, and quickly transition the show from one segment to another. Not surprisingly, these production elements provide The D Brief with a commercial radio aesthetic. This is much different than, say, the musical interludes and b-roll audio that you hear in storytelling journalism from the public radio side of podcasting. My goal is to make this podcast sound like a commercial radio morning show, and the production elements are an important element of that.

LISTEN: Hear the latest episode of The D Brief podcast.

More Glimpses Behind the Scenes:

1. Building a Radio Station Studio on a Podcaster's Budget
2. How to Check 200 Websites in 2 Hours
3. Can Podcasts Be Live and Local?
4. A Show Structure for Podcasts and Radio?
5. Why Podcasts Need Structure
6. Hard Podcasting Lessons for Radio Broadcasters