It has been a fantastic year for The Tonebenders Sound Design Podcast in 2019! We put out 34 episodes which is by far our most prolific year, and we over doubled our play count from 2018. By any measure this has been our most successful year to date.
We want to send out a special thanks to all the fantastic guests we had this year. We are humbled by their generosity of time, spirit and knowledge. As usual we are always bowled over by our listeners, we have a such a great community of people working in sound following us. Through emails and meet ups we have gotten to know some of the people listening and a more interesting group of people you could not find. We hope to meet even more at our upcoming MeetUp in Austin, Texas on January 9th, 2020.
In case you missed them over the last 12 months, here are the top five most listened to episodes in 2019:
104 – Working with Dialog on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
For the second year in a row our most popular episode is one that covers the topic of dialog (2018’s top episode was our Dialog Editing Round Table). The idea of getting the location recordist, dialog editor and re-recording mixer of a project, all on our show together, had been a priority for years but we could never find the right project and people. Then this show came along and it was the perfect vehicle for this kind of talk. We were really happy with how it turned out, make sure you don’t miss this one:
Watson talks us through the field recording sessions he did for a recent game, Ring of Elysium, including automobile drops from a crane, lots of unusual vehicle engines, and a ton of guns. Watson was a great guest with funny stories and a ton of knowledge to pass along. Hopefully he will come back on the podcast again in the future.
This is a great episode! Long time LA based re-recording mixer Gary Bourgeois, shares screen shots of the Protools template he uses as a starting point when he takes on a new project. We talk through each track about the routing and plugins he chooses. Not only is Gary super generous with his workflow and experience, but he is delightfully opinionated and very funny. We could have listened to his stories for days. This is manditory listening:
111 – Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
This episode is another great one! Legendary soundman Harry Cohen joins us along with Zach Goheen & Leo Marcil to talk about the work they did on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. From an epic vehicle record session, to the tiniest ting of a wedding ring on glass, this team knows importance of every sound that goes into a film. Very engaging talk with super interesting people.
099 – Sound Design for VFX Round Table
This is one of our all time favourite episodes! Nia Hansen (Avengers: Endgame) & Paula Fairfield (Game of Thrones) were fantastics guests. They are so smart, creative and talented that it was a bummer to have to wrap up the interview. Hopefully we can convince them to do a “part two” someday in the future, they are both welcome back anytime. DO NOT MISS THIS ONE!
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Obviously using the metric of “most listened to”, favours episodes that came out earlier in the year and benefited from a longer time to gather plays. This put episodes featuring the sound teams behind John Wick, Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Ford vs Ferrari, or our Roundtable on Recording Rain, and the amazing interview with Wylie Stateman , at a clear disadvantage as they all came out in November or December.
We were lucky enough to have so many fantastic people take part in the podcast this past year. Amazingly I have not even mentioned our 100th episode with Mark Mangini!!! He is one of our all time sound heroes. One of our stated goals for 2019, was to branch out to include more then sound people as guests. We were able to have on picture editors (Rocketman, Seal Team) and Directors (Making Waves, I am Mother) on a few times. We had an interview with the sound team of The Cave, where we had our host and 4 guests, all calling in from 5 different countries around the world to talk about the sound of this amazing film. Plus 2019 had talks about True Detective, Avengers: Endgame, Big Little Lies and so many more great episodes this past year!
Thanks for listening to our podcast this year. We have so many great talks on the verge of coming out, so please stay with us in 2020, we have a feeling that it will once again be our best year yet…