"My bat cracks sound different when the roof is closed versus open," Stoakley says. You can't eliminate it - you just try to minimize it."Įven the building itself can change the sound. "The PA is the bane of every audio person's existence. Mixers also have to deal with the blaring public announcement system, which TV listeners at home don't want to hear. But baseball has more silences, so mixers need to be vigilant to fade out that one person "who will sit and scream, and no matter what you do you're gonna hear them." Hockey is noisy both on and off the ice, which can mask one or two unruly fans. "Baseball is not like hockey," Stoakley says (he mixes those games as well). Mixers have to quickly fade him out so he doesn't overwhelm the sound. Sometimes that means noticing that a drunk guy is shouting into one of your mics. Translating the crowd's roar is harder than it might seem. From those, he composes the ambient sound that most of us take for granted. "I have a series of six microphones that I use to pick up crowd noise," Stoakley says. 4) A great mix captures the crowd - but not the drunk fan swearing You end up with sound like this, from an epic shot in the 2014 Grand Slam of Curling:īut some of the most important sounds aren't from the players at all. In a featured game, mixers will put a mic on every team member and mix that in with the game's announcers. Players' grunts, chants, and shouts are a huge part of the broadcast mix. In curling, a huge sport in Canada, the expectations for hearing players are a lot different. But if they're celebrating, he'll throw in some of their cheers. If somebody's made a bad play, Stoakley might not track the audio for a player who's upset (and likely to curse). The players are a wild card that mixers like Stoakley need to interpret on the fly. And when it comes to players, that requires discretion. That arsenal of microphones gives the team a veritable soundscape of gameplay to select from. I might put mics on cameras that can get into the dugouts." "I have two microphones in the bullpens, so you'll hear the pitcher and catcher's mitts. "I have a parabolic dish at first base and third base for pick-off mics," Stoakley says. 3) Each key sound needs its own special mic That sound - which defines a baseball game for the home viewer - can vary wildly by A1 and by the mic type used by the stadium. "My mix tends to be a little sharper, and when you hit a ball on a bat, you have a deeper sound, and that's characteristic of the dish with the lav." "You want to hear that ball," Stoakley says. Imagine a tiny mic in a handheld satellite dish, and you get the idea. Stoakley uses two parabolic dishes with lavalier mics that, together, mix for stereo sound (you can read more about them here). It takes more than luck to get a sound like that. These two logos hide the mics that capture home runs. Those birds hide the microphones Stoakley uses to record the sound for home games: Look at the two square Blue Jay images in the photo below. The sound of a baseball bat cracking a home run is instantly recognizable, but for home viewers, that's only because of a careful audio mix. 2) Hidden mics capture home plate excitement Though audio mixers might need to improvise more at other venues, big stadiums are made for mixing a broadcast as easily as possible. As Stoakley patches in, his assistants are busy placing the TV station's mics on the field, which will stay there during a home series.Ī large stadium like the Rogers Centre (where the Blue Jays play) has an audio and visual system built into it, plus a circulatory system for TV. Stoakley runs audio lines from the TV truck to the "patch room," which serves as a clearinghouse for connections to the stadium's audio lines. They'll show up at 1 for a 7 pm game, since they have a lot of work to do. When the TV truck arrives, he and his assistants get to work. He's worked a lot of them this year, and as an "A1," he leads their sound mixing. Stoakley walked me through a typical Blue Jays game. He was nice enough to guide me through how he helps sports sound amazing, answering some questions I'd never thought to ask before: How do they keep the crowd from cursing into the microphones? What makes a baseball bat sound so good? And what's it really like making all that noise into an incredible show? 1) Mixers show up six hours before game time Related 7 things you never knew about being a sports camera operator
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