For anyone who has made the sane decision to not have a podcast, Pro Tools is Avid’s audio editing suite and is the most common DAW (digital audio workstation) in use once you reach a certain level of production. It has all sorts of plugins to enhance or alter audio files and can mix in Dolby Atmos, if that’s your bag. It also has a limit of 1,024 discrete tracks to hold audio files in a single project. For one recent episode of the”Worlds Beyond Number” podcast, producer Taylor Moore hit the Pro Tools track limit. Twice.
“Worlds Beyond Number” is an audio actual play series currently concluding its first arc of fantasy tale “The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One,” before it transitions to a new setting for an as-yet-unnamed science-fiction story. But every two weeks for the past two years, players Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii, and Lou Wilson have adventured as Suvi, Ame, and Eursulon, growing into the titular wizard, witch, and wild one; gamemaster Brennan Lee Mulligan, meanwhile, has spoken for every other character in the animistic, magic-filled world of Umora.
The fourth season (or, to use the show’s nomenclature, the fourth chapter) of “The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One” has seen Umora suffer great harm as a war erupts between two powerful empires. The characters’ quest to save a group of children stolen from their parents by one of those empires for exploitative purposes has stretched these True Friends’ grasp on both the truth and their friendship — and that was before they ended up between the front lines of a major battle.
Mulligan sets the stakes early in “The Battle of Twelve Brooks Part 1” by telling the players they cannot experience what’s about to happen via the normal rules of D&D combat (the show uses the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons for its game mechanics). But it was Moore’s job to craft a soundscape that pays off Mulligan’s descriptions of a horrifying perspective shift — one in which the characters go from being at the center of their own story to being as small as “bugs that have crawled out of some rubble at the edge of one of the continent’s largest events in its history.”
IndieWire reached out to Moore about stretching Pro Tools to its limit to sound design “The Battle of Twelve Brooks,” all the ways podcasts can sound as epic as the biggest film blockbusters, and the value of silence in audio.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: What are audio’s strengths as a medium when it comes to doing this kind of storytelling, with the Battle of Twelve Brooks?
Moore: It’s cheap.
Yeah, fair enough.
Because we have chosen audio, we are able to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful entertainment production houses in the world, regarding the emotions of our audience. I can get tears, I can get laughter, I can get disgust in the same way that Marvel or Disney can, and for a millionth of a percent of the cost.
How are you constructing the show? What’s the normal workflow?
The normal workflow is very simple, God bless podcasting. Brennan and I will have a few story meetings, writers meetings, then he’ll talk with the cast, usually one-on-one. Then I got to LA and we build a recording studio in the bedroom of an Airbnb; we record a bunch of episodes in there; then we take the episodes back and Jared Olson, my assistant editor, and I will cut it.
Jared will do a first pass on the dialogue edit and the design edit. Then, when it comes to me, I’ll scooch things around and take a couple of swings before last looks. Nothing’s locked until I hit publish. I have truly gone back at the 11th hour to add some extra sauce to some early cue or fix a mix problem I didn’t discover until the very end. We will usually make these episodes in less than two weeks.
It’s one of the benefits of working in a small team: We can be flexible without all these levels of production hierarchy. There’s no one else to answer to, aside from us and the cast. We can follow our bliss until the very end. It’s a beautifully simple process — until you decide to have a “Return of the King” sized episode, a 1 hour and 40 minute episode with 1000 cues in it. And to have each effect stand out and be identifiable — and to combine it with everything else going on at the time to maintain immersion when so many things are going on all at once and each faction has a different style and sound of magic and music — that’s when it becomes really complicated.
That’s when you max out Pro Tools. How do you go about fitting a ‘Return of the King’ into a DAW?
Combine and compress. Lock ‘em in. Listen, when I first started Fortunate Horse, my production company, we made really big, beautiful, sophisticated audio shows on Audacity. This is back before Audacity’s recent updates, which gave it non-destructive audio editing and plugins. So we were dealing with audio with no plugins, no real-time audio processing, everything was destructive editing. Thinking about that now, it seems like the most irresponsible thing, and I can’t tell you how many times I lost a whole show or a whole episode or something because of some software problem that, with software like Pro Tools, is not an issue.
The issue is — when you have this many cues, this much music, this many sound effects, eventually you discover that it turns out there’s a track limit and then you have to commit and then you have to decide, ‘I’m not gonna fiddle with the mix on that one magic spell anymore. I’ve got to combine tracks and get it way down.’
Wow, like 2015 Audacity? That’s wild.
I agree! But I didn’t know any better. I run my company very much on the Wile E. Coyote principle, you know? You can walk off the cliff, just don’t look down. Don’t acknowledge that you might be doing it the wrong way. Don’t look down and you won’t fall.
Podcast with confidence, yeah. It gets at something, too, that there’s no right way to do audio storytelling. You just have to teach your audience and commit to what you’re doing.
As a person, I am in love with spectacle. I like spectacle. I like the feeling that someone has suffered to curate an experience for me, which makes me sound like Louis XIV, you know? It’s real ‘treasure bath’ time. That’s not what I mean. I listen to politics shows, and chat shows, and round tables in front of a microphone. I love them. But I want to make opera.
In the very earliest stages of developing this particular show, “The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One,” our first large format campaign in “Worlds Beyond Number,” we were very much influenced by Studio Ghibli and Joe Hisaishi’s scores and absolutely in love with the middle and late 20th century adventure film, the Alan Silvestri and John Williams of it all.
The problem is I did not know how to write music. I only learned how to write music and produce music on a computer in the last couple of years, so I could score podcasts without stealing music or licensing music. I was like, ‘Oh, I want to make some John Williams-style music,’ and that’s one of the most complicated — a John Williams action score has more notes in it than stars in the sky, and it’s the most musically sophisticated popular entertainment you can have. It was like saying, ‘Oh, this afternoon I’m gonna go develop powered flight and build an airplane real quick.’
I was so stupid, I didn’t know that it was a dumb idea, and so I got myself stuck in it. Have we even come close to that standard? No, not for a nanosecond. But you know, it’s nice to have something to shoot for.
Listen, there are some bang-on cues in “The Battle of Twelve Brooks Part 1.” Those mournful horns when we see that Gaoth soldier who’s a giant and also 17? C’mon.
So, early on, we decided that these different orchestral families would be the standard bearers for different factions in the world. So for The Citadel, it’s always brass. It’s these snare drums, these martial effects. Spirits are very much about strings and breath and the choir, while witches are always these scratchy, screeching violins and, you know, the catgut instruments. As much as it was an aesthetic vision for the show, it was always a great way to get over the creative hurdle of the blank page. And now that we’re so far along with the show, all these factions and parts of the world are mixing, so now we’re dealing with the entire orchestra. It’s a blast.
I mean, the cue for when Ame is talking to Suvi at the bottom of the rope before they part ways — I thought that moment was handled so incredibly well by Aabria, Erika, and Brennan — the music there is a reorchestrated version of the cue where Suvi is freeing the ink demons. It’s the same, and it literally matched up. I didn’t have to change any of the timing. I was going to write a new cue that references that moment, and then I dropped [the original] in, and it was the perfect fit, like down to the half-second.
And this shit happens all the time. Our natural organic rhythms of these things just constantly repeat and line up the way spirals on the fancy broccoli does. It’s all these shapes just repeating themselves.
Wow. Sometimes it’s not just dice. The story tells the story. Is there anything on the editing side that you feel like you’ve kind of leveled up or learned over the course of making “The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One?”
I think I’ve gained an almost religious reverence for the natural rhythms and texture of organic human speech. There is so much magic in a pause, in a slight hesitation before a word. The urge with all the hyper-intelligent machine learning, polishing mix algorithms out there and the ease with which modern technology allows you to pull all the silences out and all the breaks — I mean, I could hit one button on Pro Tools and it’ll strip all the silences and shorten the dialogue so there’s no gaps.
But that destroys it. In the same way that when we meet someone in person, there’s all these subconscious things that are communicated between people with body language and smells and stuff. There’s so much of that in the way people speak. And I think maybe in my early days, I was too quick to remove some of that, whereas now I understand that even if its meaning isn’t clear, the nakedness and honesty of it has a value that can’t really be quantified.
It seems especially important when part of the show is us hearing the players’ experience of telling the story together at the table.
Absolutely. I mean, I cannot use a gate to clean up my dialogue because I will lose these tiny little gasps that reveal how the other people are feeling at the table.
Without getting into spoiler territory, of course, I’m curious if you anticipate anything else in this chapter of the show potentially hitting the Pro Tools track limit again?
It will be a tall order. This is definitely our “Battle of the Bastards.” This is our big technical accomplishment for this season. I mean, maybe the finale? The finale has so much different stuff in it, and listeners will very much understand when they hear it. I think the finale has more locations and more characters in it than anything we’ve ever done.
“Worlds Beyond Number” is available on all podcast platforms and the show’s Patreon.
