Tod Maffin tours CBC Vancouver's radio drama studio, showing the mixing consoles, tape machines, and a 22-door rack used to create sound effects. The studio includes a mock bathroom and kitchen, different walking surfaces, and a cardboard-box trick to simulate voices from behind doors.
We are on the T-level? C-level? I'm not sure, of CBC Vancouver. This is the room I'm going to take you into momentarily, but just to give you an idea of where we are, this is Studio 4, which is where Freestyle comes out of. "The United States, and then he actually went on to say the thing which even surprised me." Currently the Regional Afternoon Show. So, this is the Radio Drama Studio sound effects. Chris is the guy in charge. He can let me in. Hopefully he's here. I haven't actually checked ahead of time. I probably should have done that first, eh? Is it usually locked? Oh, look at that. Well, well. Why don't I just take you on a tour and I will explain to Chris later why things are broken. So this is the CBC Drama Studio in Vancouver where— where are the light switches here? Here we go. Where we produce radio drama. I call it the Sound Effects Studio for a reason that'll become apparent quite shortly, but sort of your standard radio studio. You know, obviously it's got the mixing board here, another mixing board there. All of these are various CD players. What else? It looks like there's a DAT box, line connectors. Some of these tend to be a little bit more high-end. High-end equalizers and gates and limiters and compressors and stuff that bores most people. And down here, even an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. But this is not the most fun room in CBC Vancouver. This one is. And again, I don't know where the light switches are. That's not it. Here we go. This is the Radio Drama Studio. So just a quick tour here. You can see it's one sort of a large room with a bunch of microphones, which is not surprising. Two different kinds of stairs to simulate different sound effects, and I'll take you into the— what we call the walking room a bit later on, but So, your sort of average microphones. Beautiful microphones, actually. This is a pop screen to prevent people from blowing or making pop noises into the microphone itself. And this is where the sound effects come in. So there are all sorts of contraptions here. This is the door. I'll just show you this one first. If you need the sound effects of curtains opening, they've got that. This is the coolest thing. Strange. It looks like it should be in some sort of a— I don't know, on that show Kink, maybe? But it is the block of 22 doors. So sound effects of different kinds of doors. Closet. Screen door. A large door. And just so you know, these— there's nothing in here, right? It's like— it's just wood. But it's just for the various sound effects. Here's a large— One of those kind of pull-open jail doors. It's kind of nice. More over here. Various door handles. Even a bell opening. One of these locks. So one device, which stands about 7 feet tall maybe, and contains all sorts of door sounds. Let's move further back here. Sorry about the shaky camera work. There's chairs littering this whole place. I think they kind of use it for storage. And now there's a chair actually blocking my path. Alright. Again with the light switches. And then this is the bathroom and kitchen sound effect room. So here we've got— and these of course are non-functioning, but in case you need the sound effect of an oven door opening. Two different kinds of sinks. In case you need the sound of a bathroom sink or the sound of a kitchen sink. I think they actually use this too. Bathtub, shower, and another kind of stairs. You can see also they've got windows in here, so if you're looking for the traditional sliding glass panel window that you see in a lot of houses, they've got that sound effect. So once again, nothing behind, just brick. What's behind doesn't matter. These kinds of windows. Different types of doors. So on. And yet we are not actually in the coolest room, I believe. So we will try and make it past the gauntlet of chairs again. Is gauntlet the right word for that? I don't know. I am so taking one of these microphones at some point before we leave today. So here is, uh, here are the different kinds of stairs. So we've got cement-sounding stairs, wood. Not a huge difference, but enough in radio drama that it makes quite a difference. And this sort of side room here is where they record people who are supposed to be on phones. So if you need to get someone on the sound of a telephone, you isolate them from the other microphones, put them in this little room, and then process the sound digitally so it'll sound as if they're coming from another— from a phone. The way you make it sound as if someone is coming from behind a door is you put them in this room and put a cardboard box over their head. Some walking surfaces. Here's gravel. And underneath all of this, all the way down— now they've covered it up with, again, I think just storage at this point— but all the way down here are panels full of different kinds of walking materials. So if you're looking for— oh, so there's more gravel into there. Number 5 has got a softer gravel, like sand, for beach sound effects walking. Now there's more under here. This is the sound of either fire or rain, and what it is, it's actually old discarded magnetic tape, but close your eyes for a second and have a listen. So that's rain. Fire is just slower. And then once the wizards who run this room get through with it, it doesn't actually sound as lame as it sounds like I just did there. So that's it! It's a pretty tall room. More places up there for— this is for, I guess, people who have to yell off mic, for instance. A large microphone up here to capture sort of a large crowd if they end up doing that. And that's all. Now I have to make sure I back out of here without anyone knowing that I was here. Construction everywhere. And that is CBC Vancouver Studio 3.
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