Signal to Noise
- nathankuykendall
- Sep 19
- 4 min read
Opinions on Recording, Editing & producing an Actual Play Podcast | Software | Hardware Techniques
Why not start with a little about me and why I'm so passionate about sound?
I grew up in a household where music was ever-present. My dad, was a professional musician, playing cello professionally in the Air Force Band, Baltimore symphony, National Symphony and various DC-area philharmonics, where he would also play violin & viola.
He taught strings in our basement where he would also repair instruments and make bows.
I personally never had the patience to learn & practice any instruments, though I attempted cello & piano when I was a little kid.
He took me to see the original Star Wars when it came out in 1977 and that became a core memory. I also remember a few years later, when I was maybe 10(?) where I watched a documentary on how the Sound was designed for Star Wars.
It featured the legendary Ben Burtt as he talked about how he designed the iconic sounds for the Tie Fighter, Darth Vader's mask, laser blasts and the lightsaber. The way he described running around recording non-literal sounds & manipulating them and layering them to create the sounds he wanted really stuck with me,
Fast-Forward another decade plus and I'm attending Full Sail, a recording school based in Florida. I made some friends for life there and learned a lot about the science of audio from recording analog and digital recording to editing. Yes, that included editing analog tape with a razor blade. I even had a chance to meet and shake hands with legendary Recording Engineer, Tom Dowd before he passed away.
There were classes on studio maintenance & repairs, building studios with the guy who built Electric Lady Studios and live sound reinforcement. My favorite was the Digital Audio Workstation class. I was exposed to MOTU's Digital Performer, New England Digital's Post Pro/Synclavier, Digidesign's (now Avid's) Pro Tools and a few more whose names' I've forgotten.
My overall feeling is that they did really well teaching me the technology and the physics of audio and recording, but not enough of the creative or artistic side of things. The classes were hard and the hours were rough, but I did really well overall
Well enough that they offered me a job as a lab instructor for several of the classes, including the DAW labs.
I was applying for jobs and internships in the Orlando area, but since I was only focused on doing Audio Post-production for feature films, there were only 2 studios in the area that were doing that kind of work at the time. Most of that work is on the West Coast with some in the NYC area.
Then I got the call! Soundelux was looking for an Intern to help the Dialogue Editor on an upcoming TV Show, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures. It was an unpaid position, but it was my foot in the door at an Oscar Award Winning Studio. The joy was short-lived, as I got a call right before I was to start to let me know they had lost the contract to a studio overseas where the show was being filmed. They gave me the option, to start the internship anyway, but with it unlikely that it would turn into a full-time position. I accepted. Still not sure if it was the best decision, but I was able to learn some concepts & techniques that have come in handy with podcast editing.
While I was there, I was able to assist with some projects for the local theme parks, as well as the production system for a Barney the Dinosaur "Live" show. But the coolest thing by far was assisting the Dialogue Editor for City of industry. Interns don't get movie credits, so I'm not on there, so don't bother looking, haha. The production audio had a lot of problems, including being completely out-of-sync with the film. Every morning, I would get in early and manually sync the production audio to the Dailies that we were sent. Mind you, since we were using NED Post Pro for the Dialogue, there are no visual waveforms representing the audio, just rectangles. So I had to scrub the audio manually to sync it with the lip movements for that scene.
Unfortunately, this skill has become far too handy when dealing with "audio drift" between our locally recorded audio and the video we record with OBS.
I was pretty broken up when the Internship ended, but Full Sail, kept a spot open for me. I stayed there for a while and lucked into a job with a computer manufacturer which really helped me find the stability I needed with my new and expanding family.
That was really the end of my creative audio journey until late 2020 when me and the gang of miscreants you see on our show had started a weekly D&D game online to help us deal with COVID lockdown.
Matt proposed the idea of us recording our sessions and tossing them out into the ether and nearly 5 years later, I am more creatively fulfilled than at any other time in my life.
My biggest thanks to Matt for this terrible terrible idea.
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