The series is a set of episodes meant to fill a standard half-hour slot, which likely means an actual running time of about 25 minutes. We're shooting for twenty such episodes, to fill a month of weekday air time or six months of weekly play.
The programs are meant to inspire listeners to visit specific National Parks and visit specific historic sites. The show's working title, "In the Footsteps of...", was chosen to create a sense that visitors can put themselves in the exact spot where history took place.
Given that none of us are musicians, this needs more information before we determine what kind of work it will take. I have access to a great deal of royalty-free material via the Creative Commons initiative. However, many contemporary "podcasters" use these same tunes in their own works, so it might sound derivative to rely solely on this body of work.
See Resources for further thoughts on this.
We will need to make up some of this as we go along, but I imagine that we will take index cards and write down elements of the tale on each. The goal is to create a picture in the mind of the viewer, and the narrative can do that.
Between and beneath the narration will be all the field recordings, musical tracks, and foley effects. If we arrange it like a symphonic score, the end result will look like the layout inside my sound software. This should make the post-prodution a little easier to keep track of.
We are going to need a few different types of music. The first type is what you normally think of as an interesting song or establishing theme. This might be used to bridge a pause in the narration or to signify a change in time period. It's something that gets your attention and breaks up the pace of the storytelling.
The second type is more of an ambient bed of notes. If you've seen The Fog of War, you'll know that it's just MacNamara's side of a long interview. This dry presentation was made interesting through the clever use of visuals, but also through Phillip Glass's minimalist soundtrack. You'll often hear similar things being done in This American Life, where they'll use a repetitive Penguin Cafe Orchestra track as the backdrop for a monologue.
I currently use a mid-to-high-end digital music player to do my recording. It has a hard drive to store the recorded sound, and can plug into any USB port to copy the files off. It also records raw sound instead of using potentially destructive "lossy" compression such as MP3.
For studio recording situations, I use a Shure SM58 microphone (the same model we use for dock announcements). I patch it through a Tascam 4-track machine and do basic level management and some noise filtering, and then feed it out into my digital recorder. It's dirt-cheap old stuff, and I could probably find cheaper and smaller equipment nowadays. Still, it does the job and gets a clean track.
The trick to recording is to find a "clean" room. The echo of your own voice off the walls will give the recording a particular ring, and any devices with even the tiniest fans built in will make a hiss that the microphone will not forgive. This is why I don't use my own laptop for recording.
The only other trouble is that if you're on a noisy electrical circuit, you can get some hum in the patch panel. I suspect that the generator on Alcatraz is what makes the dock PA system buzz the way it does, but there may also be a simple wiring reason for it.
For the field, I have a pair of microphones for the right/left side. They're very small, and I've been working on ways to fit them in my own ears to get a realistic spatial recording. Since I'm putting them where the headphones will eventually go, the result is a remarkably lifelike 3-d soundscape.
There are instructions on making remarkably cheap headphones on http://art.simon.tripod.com/stealth.html and the demos at the bottom give an example of how binaural recording can sound. Appropriately enough, he includes samples of the Fort Point foghorns.
The only real drawback to this technique is that I can't turn my head when I'm recording or it will sound like something has suddenly swung around the listener. I also can't use headphone monitors or I'd get nasty feedback. So what I am going to do shortly is pick up a cheap styrofoam wig dummy and use it as a Kunstkopf device.
Early binaural recording equipment was larger than the tiny microphones we have access too today, so the first rigs had the bulky pickups built into replica ear canals of a handmade wooden head. I am told by Eureka that "Kunstkopf" is German for either "art head" or "artificial head".
At any rate, all this rigamarole isn't strictly necessary, so if anyone has a good microphone, windscreen, and recording device, we can spread the load of recording around.
I use a Free/Open-Source sound editor called Audacity. It's entirely cross-platform, so it is possible to install it on Windows, Macintosh, or GNU/Linux systems as needed. It's not the most powerful or elaborate tool in the world, but it does more than was possible in the days of editing on raw tape. I think it should be more than enough for what we're doing.
You can get copies of it at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ if you're curious.
It was observed that a shorter between-shows segment (perhaps five minutes) could have the widest opportunities for distribution, because a program manager can use it to fill gaps in the schedule without having to allocate a full half-hour slot. The work involved in producing a shorter program would also be much smaller, and give us a chance to practice before moving on to a half-hour show.
Wouldn't it be easier to "podcast" our show, putting it up for download? That would mean instant distribution, listing in iTunes, and a whole host of other media aimed at tech-savvy listeners.
John Muir: