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There are several ways to punch up the comedy, says Tade, whose tool of choice is Avid’s Pro Tools. “For ADR, they might want a different approach on a punch line,” he says.“So if they want more irony from the actor, for example, something they didn’t capture in the original shoot, they might want to add a line to punch up a joke. Otherwise, we have the obvious devices on comedies — crashes and falls. But a lot of the edit notes are music notes, because on a single- camera show where there is no live audience, when I go to a spotting with the producers, often times the discussion is about what can we use for a music transi- tion or what kind of a music cue can we put here to make it funnier. In single- camera comedy,music is sort of used as the laugh track, so we have to weave the dialogue and music together to form a seamless whole.” Fittingly, Iowa-born Tade majored in music at the University of Iowa, and it was the dim prospects of making a living as a drummer in his home state that sent him packing for the West Coast, where he found studio work but soon saw the writing on the wall.“I was a drummer in the 1980s, when drum machines were taking over the industry,” he says.“They were taking a lot of the work away, and I asked my friend who had been working in the studios to give me a call if he needed an assistant.” More than 20 years later,Tade is still in the game, and on the right side of technology.“We bring 40 channels of sound effects and backgrounds to our little comedy, and that’s typical, as op- posed to the old days, when you’d bring one stereo background and one mono background to each scene. Now we fill it up, we make sure there are choices for the client so they can realize their vision on the mixing stage. By the same token, just the detail with regard to Foley and dialogue choices, the infrastructure that digital processing has brought to the mixing stage makes all that much more accessible and, consequently, the client expects a lot more. Gladly, the technology has made it an option.” THE BIG BANG THEORY When Charlie McDaniel talks to other sound mixers,“How’s your production dialogue?” is a typical refrain bandied about. “When I get production dialogue that’s in bad shape, I’ll go to see if we have any logs, or booms, or if I can steal a line from somewhere else,” says McDaniel, a Warner Bros. re-recording mixer for CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. “In the half-hour world, we don’t get a lot of time to mix these shows.We get four hours to mix and playback and print master, and that’s quite a change from shows I’ve worked on in the past, like Seinfeld, when we did get a little extra time because there were so many exteriors.” McDaniel sees Seinfeld as a groundbreaking comedy — and not just because it was the first show about nothing.“Jerry and Larry David used to come in and to let me play the backgrounds, as if it were a feature or a live drama. I kind of be- lieve that Seinfeld changed the sound of comedy, from the standpoint of playing the show not as stage show but as a show itself. In the ’70s, you heard no back- grounds, you won’t hear anything on stocks shots, or exteriors or door opens — on Golden Girls, you were lucky to hear a bird when the door opened to the out- doors. But on Seinfeld, you hear everything.You’ll hear cars honking on the street outside when you’re in Jerry’s apartment, you’ll hear all kinds of things. Larry and Jerry, at that time, were very new to the post production end, they came from stand-up, so they relied on Tim Kaiser to guide them through from this stand- point, and Tom Cherones, who was really big in the early Seinfeld.” McDaniel sees some parallels between the Seinfeld approach and what’s hap- pening in current comedy — especially The Big Bang Theory. “If you hear a lot of these multicam shows nowadays, you can actually hear a lot of that stuff, and people are saying,‘We want more of that.’ Chuck Lorre used to be the person that didn’t want to hear any live stock in his shows. But that’s one thing that Chuck has opened up about in the last two or three years, ever since Bang started. In the driving scenes on the older Two and a Half Men [his other show], you don’t even hear the car; he was opposed to that. Now with Bang, they’re in the cafeteria, or in the Cheesecake Factory, and he’s letting us play the reality of that, rather than the producers who think, it’s a live [to tape] televi- sion show — they don’t want to hear crickets on the stage.They want the audi- ence to know this is a staged show, rather than well produced from a sound standpoint, so they just want to hear the jokes, the dialogue and the audience. But Universal’s Paul Tade says his tool of choice for ABC’s CougarTownis Pro Tools. Lorre is very hands-on, says McDaniel.“More than most. He’s in on every mix; he’s the whole process. In fact, I still use some outboard analogue gear because it’s faster, and I have to be fast, especially when Lorre is in the room.When he says, ‘I want more echo on that,’ he doesn’t want to see you going over click and click and click on a mouse, and I can change things faster on a Neve than on a Pro Tools session.” GLEE & CASTLE Joe Earle has witnessed similar sea changes in the mixing of sound on TV shows — and its process. Currently the re-recording mixer at Technicolor (www.techni- color.com) for Castle and the Emmy-winning Glee, Earle hails from the days of Movi- olas, single-stripe audio and 1/4-inch with a razor blade. “For shows at Lorimar like Dallas, they used to mix for a week to get a one-hour episode,” he says.“The time schedule has compressed; now we start at eight or nine, and we’re playing back that show to a producer at five or six that day.” The co-producer who runs the post end on Castle is Mark Kahn,“and he’s al- ways urging us on. Our playback for producers is one o’clock on the second day, and it’s a little tight because the executive producers give the composer notes late in the afternoon, sometimes the night of the first day of the dub, so he’s up rewriting and mixing music cues all night, which I don’t get sometimes until right before they walk in the door.” Glee, however, is a different animal.“The music on Glee is pretty much locked long before they finish cutting the show because they have to do so much of it to playback,” he says.“On Glee, the focus is mainly on the big music numbers.The writ- ing is very intelligent, and the cast members are great. My hat is off to what the ac- tors are committed to doing each and every week — they act, they sing and they dance... four or five numbers per week. In fact, we just finished the “Regionals” episode, which has 11 pieces of music in it, including two original compositions by Adam Anders, the music producer on the show. Because that show is so chock full www.postmagazine.com April 2011 • Post 27 Chuck realizes that the sound in the cafeteria brings you more into the show, more into the characters.” On Bang, Chuck Lorre works in a different form than other shows.“We get that show, we start at eight in the morning,” says McDaniel.“Bob [Bradford, the recordist] will get a round of edit notes. After they’ve gone through the picture editor, they’ll say,‘We need to take this and that out,’ which normally a dialogue editor would do. So we come in at eight, I start taking out hums and buzzes, and doing any clean-up and putting in the backgrounds, mixing the audience and music, then we go back and Bob locks his Pro Tools up to mine and I’ll crossfade into whatever fixes Bob did.Then we’ll go back again and do a playback for the executive producer, and she has notes, and then the executive producer will come in and finish her notes and then we’ll do a playback for Chuck. Multiple playbacks like that are unusual.”