In this segment J. Anthony Allen explains his process of composing and mixing music for narrative sci‑fi podcasts using Ableton Live. He walks through a typical session that contains separate vocal tracks recorded by actors, layered sound‑effects, and his own MIDI‑based music cues. Allen emphasizes the critical role of automation—subtle volume fades, targeted boosts for quiet words, and dynamic adjustments when multiple characters speak simultaneously—to achieve a balanced mix where dialogue remains clear while music and effects enhance the story. He demonstrates how small automation curves (the pink lines) are used to fine‑tune each element, and he shares practical tips for handling overlapping speech, correcting uneven recording levels, and integrating short musical fragments into a longer episode. The overall message showcases a detailed, hands‑on workflow that blends sound design and composition to support narrative storytelling in podcasts.
Chapters
So one of the things I've been doing for the last year or two is contributing music to podcasts. There's a couple of podcast companies I work with where I'm writing the music for their shows. Primarily narrative shows and primarily Sci Fi stuff, because that's the things I find really fun to work on. Doing sound design for Sci Fi is like, dream job. So here is an episode of a podcast. You can see if I go all the way to the end. It's pretty, like 40 minutes long. I don't even remember this one. Oh, this is a really short one. This is only like 15 minutes long. But it's a narrative. And you can see what I have here is I really have all the different vocal tracks that were recorded by the actors. And then down here we have some sound effects, and then at the bottom we have music that I wrote for it. So it's just little chunks of music here and there. But you can see in this whole thing how important the automation is. So here I'm just fading out the volume. But as you mix something, you really have to do a lot of delicate automation, especially when it's a narrative like this and there's, like, multiple people talking over each other. So anywhere you see this pink line, there's some automation in it somewhere. So looking at this section, you can see it's just very subtle things that happen when you're working on anything, music or narrative or anything. So I believe these are all just volume. But here, you know, the volume of this character needed to come down just a touch. This one came up just a touch. And then this word. It looks like we wanted this word to be, you know, comparable volume. So I just boosted that word because it was recorded quietly and the actor must have turned their head away from the mic or something. This is how we fixed that. It turned out, you know, really quite nice. Station's over. We don't need sarcasm at a time like this. Oh, wow, Hannah. So, you know, it's neat. So it's a big session. Here's some musical thing I wrote for them, and then a couple other music things. So the music, it looks like, is just MIDI stuff. That's actually it. Let's listen to what's at the end of this. Did it just. I'm afraid it did, yep. Just pissed on him and blew up. Look out the window Is it afraid it is. Mars is no longer our discovery Gone Ayden you. Pretty simple. But, you know, it's nice to see a whole big kind of session like this with all these actors going and then looking at how the music gets placed and put together. These are from projects. I like doing them.
