I don’t need to tell you that podcasting has blown up again and with heavy hitting content like This American Life, Serial, and Mark Maron’s WTF it’s easy to see why. Content is better than ever. But with an influx of great content and more listeners comes a lot of crap and poorly produced podcasts in a saturated market.

Moving 3,000 miles from jolly ol’ England to Brooklyn was definitely a challenge. So, when the opportunity arose to move my post production audio studio from Gowanus to Crown Heights, just 3 miles away, I didn’t even bat an eyelid!

I personally hate the word ‘entrepreneur’. To me it conjures up images of wannabe rich people just trying to think up ways to create the next fad and make their millions. I’m sick in my mouth a little bit if somebody introduces themselves as an entrepreneur at a networking event but perhaps that’s just me.

For this month’s post on The Pub I thought I’d bring it back to basics and explain exactly what it is that I do. A lot of friends, family and first-time acquaintances assume I do ‘something in the music industry’. While there is music in the work I do, I rarely work anywhere near the music industry! This article will discuss what sound design is, the tools and processes involved and how sound designers contribute to the final stages of content creation.

Sound engineers don’t have the best reputation for being pleasant, bubbly folk that just love to go out their way to do you a favor. We’re grumpy bastards.

The term ‘Virtual Reality’ always reminds me of some cheesy 80’s or 90’s movie that involved chunky headsets and dreamed of a future with flying cars and household robots doing everyday chores.

Music has always been sexy. And I don’t mean sexy baby-making music like Barry White. I’m talking about the idea of music; the industry, the stigma and characters that surround it. It’s cool to play, listen to or be involved in music. I guarantee even Mozart saw some action from the groupies in his time. Sound design is different though.

WeWork, The Farm, The Productive; you may have heard of at least one of these if you have visited any urban dwelling in the last three years. If you haven’t, the term ‘co-working space’ or ‘shared workspace’ should have penetrated your eardrums at some point, perhaps whilst buying an overpriced organic latte from a trendy vegan coffee shop.

It all begins with an idea.

There is no simple answer to this loaded question. Designers and marketers will obviously tell you a hard YES with a bunch of good reasons why.

Welcome to the Square Mile. This is the name I call my studio weighing in at a humble 77 square foot. 7’x11’ to be precise. So…what is one to do with so little space?

I’ve had the idea to start my own studio since I first showed interest in the audio realm when I was about 13. In fact, at the age of 14 or 15 my brother and my dad built a recording studio in the garage to have jams and make a bit of cash from recording local bands.

It’s no secret that a lot of my time in the studio is spent cleaning up dialogue. In fact, for a longform documentary I will generally spend more time on the dialogue tracks than on the sound design and mixing.

There are a lot of how-to articles and videos on the net about building acoustic panels for your studio or control room. They're really handy additions to any environment that requires less acoustic reflections and they're cheap and easy to make. I need mine to tighten the acoustics of the listening position in the room I'm currently in. Generally I'm sound designing and mixing commercials for TV which can be less forgiving when it comes to quality control than mixing music. My goal is to make more of these with bass traps also but for now I just built two panels that will be placed at the left and right mirror points from my speakers. Quite honestly, the way in which I built these is not that different to everything else on the interwebs except I did mine in 100-degree weather with a PBR in hand in about 2 hours for $22 per panel. My point is that this is easy to do and shouldn’t be a grueling or tedious process.