Several years back when the Rays made it to the World Series….they handed out cowbells.
That's when that's when you kind of second guess your career.
There's only so much you can do when 30,000 people are all hitting cowbells.
The sounds inside a stadium can be unpredictable.
But parked outside every major sports event, in a semi truck full of broadcast tv workers,
There’s an audio engineer tasked with bringing those sounds into your living room.
They’re called “A1” mixers.
And they’re hired by the network that’s broadcasting the game.
Basically the easiest way to describe what it is I do is
everything you hear at home in the broadcast I'm responsible for, other than commercials.
That means they mix the music, the announcers, sound effects, interviews...
But it also means this,
and this,
and this.
If you just went and looked at a World Series game from you know, 1980
and then you looked at like last year's World Series it would be painfully obvious.
That takes a lot of work.
To capture the ambience of the space, they point stereo microphones into the crowd.
But we don’t want to just be placed among the crowd, we want to hear the sounds of the
game itself.
And that requires microphones near the action to capture what they call “field effects.”
So I currently run 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.
I run 10 on-court effects mics.
If you’re sitting in the stands, you might not hear the sound of the net.
But for viewers at home, there’s a little microphone taped right under the basket.
In baseball, the key sounds are clustered around home plate.
You see all the advertising boards.
But there's also two little Blue Jays logos and in those logos are parabolic dishes and
that's what I use to capture all the sounds around home plate.
Parabolic microphones use a dish to focus sound waves from far away.
For big budget games, like the World Series, you can see those mics around home plate
too, but the setup becomes much more elaborate.
They put wireless mics in the bases; they have handheld parabolics out in the foul ball
territory, and they wire up the outfield wall.
We actually started a couple of years ago, burying mics in the grass and in the infield
so you can hear like some guys like
Max Scherzer, they really kind of like grunt when they release the pitch.
And we also put mikes on the foul poles.
Some of them are like a real thunderous kind of cannon sound like at Fenway Park.
It’s harder to capture field effects when the players roam around a big field.
you just hope that they're close to your mics.
You've got a huge field with 15 guys running ... on grass.
A handheld parabolic mic can do a better job following the action.
And that’s long been the standard for NFL games.
When Fox came along they they put a mike on the umpire .
and we were using that to pick up the cadence of the quarterback and the line coming together.
And that was huge.
The umpire was getting run over a lot, and to keep him from getting hurt, they moved
his physical position from being in a defensive line to being on
the offensive line.
Well that doesn't help me at all.
Because now he's behind the quarterback.
The next year, the NFL players union agreed to let the league put microphones on certain
offensive linemen.
Depending on who's mixing it could be way up in the mix.
I've been called on that because it's like candy and I love it.
Those quarterback audibles are the only times they’ll take a mic’d up player live during
a game.
I'm sure you've seen the games, basketball games where we mic up players, we mic up the
head coach.
Those mics will never be tracked live.
It goes to tape, somebody reviews it and then
it gets played back later.
But the effects mics can pick up angry players too.
If something's getting heated on screen I will you know, I'll kill those mics.
I want people to be able to hear but, you know I gotta be careful.
The A1 is constantly adjusting the levels throughout the game, and not just to keep
the show family friendly.
A lot of people would have the thought process that you just
set up these mics and you leave
them be.
You don’t.
I mean, you can’t.
I mean you're talking 18-20,000 people screaming, you got the PA sounds.
So if you just leave all these microphones up
you're not going to get anything.
So you're chasing the action with them with the faders on the mixing board.
The game effects in hockey come from 10 microphones taped inside the glass and the
mixer will fade them up and down to follow the play.
They can get those effects to pop even more by tweaking the EQ, or “equalization.”
Most people would know it as like a car stereo.
You turn up your highs, your treble, and your
bass.
Well in our world it's a little bit more specific than that,
we can dial into actual specific
frequencies.
So they'll tend to increase the high frequency EQs and turn down the low frequency.
You don't want that rumble so you want to hear the skate blades, you want
to hear the sticks, you want to hear the pucks off glass, you want to hear them off the post.
But all those efforts can be drowned out by the A1’s arch-nemesis: the PA system in
the arena.
If I could find PA people and beat them with a wooden stick sometimes I would.
NBA is just it's horrific because you know they run the PA during play.you
The PA will bleed into all the mics in the building.
But the audio team is always there, battling the noise on our behalf.
You should be able to hear the announcers, follow what they're saying.
The game should be below that and you should be able to hear everything that's going on
in the game without struggling.
It takes a lot of work to do that.
If we do it right.
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