This is cross-posted at Shoot the Fruit, the official blog of Falling Fruit.
As Executive Producer, I'm pretty geeky about the studio at Falling Fruit, to say the least, and I thought I'd give you all a little tour of the space where our shows are recorded and produced. I'll cover our studio in layperson's terms, but I'll also throw in some geeky lingo for those audio/producer nuts out there:)
Our studio is located just off of the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder, Colorado. Pearl Street is one of my most favorite places to hang out in Boulder, not for the shopping really, but for the awesome coffee shops! Around the corner from us are the Boulder Bookstore and Bookend's Cafe, and down the street are Trident and Saxy's Cafe. On any given day you're likely to find some of the Falling Fruit gang at one of these joints sipping on some tea. Before dropping into our studio, I highly recommend any of these cafes:)
Now, on to the studio! When designing and creating our studio we had two goals: 1. To make the experience inviting, warm, and exciting. 2. To be professional and have the capability of producing high-quality audio content. Basically this comes down to aesthetics and technology, both of which we emphasize equally. Our shows are similar to talk-radio shows in nature, and often radio stations have great technology and gear, but you feel like your in a sterile, boxed-in environment. We want you to feel like your in a warm, cozy living room as much as possible:) At the same time, we set our studio up with the same equipment you'd find in any professional studio.
The first thing you see when coming to our studio is the "green room". This is a space where hosts, guests, and producers hang out before recording an episode. It's a relaxed, informal space, and is a great space to get to know one another and to chat about the topic of the episode prior to recording. It also happens to be a prime hacky sack space for Falling Fruit when we're not recording:)
Next is the recording studio. Hosts and guests grab a seat at the broadcast table, where we have five broadcast mics (industry standard, Shure SM7B's). These mics make you sound smooth, with a nice radio voice, although it doesn't guarantee you'll sound Theolicious;) Now, you don't have to be in the studio to be on an episode. Non-local guests are brought into the conversation via Skype, and we set it up so everyone can hear everyone else. All in all, we can have five people in the studio and, theoretically, an infinite number of folks non-local (though we prefer no more than two or three).
Now, for the geeky tech stuff, for those of you interested:) To help everyone sound the best they can, we run everyone's voice through a voice-processors during the recording (we use DBX's). After the recording we edit the audio in Pro Tools, another industry standard and favorite. We use Garage Band 08 to piece together the main parts of an episode (intro, dialogue, outro). We also use Garage Band and Apple Loops to create the music in our shows. For the voice-overs, we have an special mic (Shure KM32) and a vocal booth. At the heart of everything is our Mac Pro (we're Apple addicts at Falling Fruit).
We have other gear that we use to make our shows sound great, including equipment to record outside of our studio, which I'm excited to try:) If you have any questions about our studio, geeky or not, feel free to ask in the comment section.
April 02, 2008
