Richard Kogan finishes new piece with producer Thomas Mowrey

Dr. Richard Kogan with a bracing image of the great Leonard Bernstein.

Acclaimed performer, psychiatrist, and lecturer Richard Kogan returned to Dubway this past month for work on the new video presentation of one of his celebrated lecture-recitals, which is now out and viewable below!

Dr. Kogan and his longtime producer-collaborator Thomas Mowrey–an extraordinary classical producer with a long career at Deutsche Grammaphon and Decca–have created a series of these visual documents with the Dubway team, which transport the viewer into Kogan’s engrossing lecture-recitals on the psychology of famous composers in the Western art-music canon. This edition focused on Leonard Bernstein’s life and works, with a particular interest in West Side Story. Dubway editor and engineer Pascal McGilvray-Guard helmed the video editing; staff engineer Keenan DuBois led the audio post-production and mix.

Dr. Kogan has presented his programs on the psychological origins of musical creativity at some of the world’s most prestigious venues, including the World Economic Forum in Davos and Rockefeller University, in New York. 

Dr. Kogan presenting to a packed house at Rockefeller University.

Dubway records ADR for upcoming AAA game release

There’s almost nothing we can say about this project yet, but we’re excited to pre-announce that one of the most anticipated upcoming games has had actors and producers at Dubway in recent months to record ADR! This AAA game – the ‘blockbusters’ of the gaming industry – has been hyped since it was announced, and is slated for an upcoming release. Several of our staff engineers, notably Pascal McGilvray-Guard, have sat behind the board on these sessions.

We’re so excited to release more (as soon as we can) – stay tuned!

Dipsea continues recording sessions with Dubway

Dipsea founders Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan; picture courtesy Vox Media.

Dipsea, the company that is reinventing erotic audio content for the new decade (“think of it like a much sexier Headspace“), has continued its East Coast work at Dubway, working tirelessly through the pandemic to bring listeners new content. Sessions have been lead remotely by Dipsea’s all-star (and nearly all-women) production team, and engineered locally by Dubway recorders Keenan DuBois and Pascal McGilvray-Guard. Both Dubway and Dipsea staff have taken great pains during these sessions to remain safe, clean, and distant from one another, with talent and engineer working in separate rooms and producers calling the shots remotely.

The voice talent and production values for these short erotic works are extremely high, and if you’re interested, check them out! You can find a free trial link here.

McKinsey & Company record podcast remotely with Dubway

Global management firm McKinsey & Company has chosen to partner with Dubway during the COVID-19 pandemic to record an internal podcast with a regular release schedule, 100% remotely. These recordings, which are ongoing, are overseen by a Dubway team including engineers Louis Fisher and Zach Grappone, with studio head Al Houghton acting as production manager for the operation.

The entire recording system was set up off-site from Dubway’s Manhattan studio, in a convenient and COVID-19 safe location for the voice talent, and assembled such that Dubway engineers can monitor and control the recordings remotely. This allows McKinsey’s staff and our staff to continuously put out new, high-fidelity episodes without sharing the same space or physically coming into contact with one another.

To learn more about our pandemic productions methods, including our mobile rigs, click here.

#TBT: Margaret Ying Drake announces greenlighting of "Butterbean's Café" season 2

To keep spirits up while the studios have been quieter than normal, we’ve brought back some of our favorite projects, stories, and collaborations. Dubway is re-opening under the Phase Two regulations in place for NYC, and we felt like doing a final celebratory look backward before returning to the present day. With that in mind, #TBT this week comes courtesy of actress Margaret Ying Drake and our colleagues at Nickelodeon.

Dubway has worked with Nick Jr. on a number of projects, providing services from voice-over recording and dialogue editing, to sound design and soundtrack recording. One of the more recent and exciting series is Butterbean’s Cafe, an animated series for preschool-aged children about a fairy café. Today, we’re throwing it back to this Instagram pic from Butterbean voice actress Margaret Ying Drake, which actually helped break the news that a second season of the show had been renewed! Margaret snapped the pic in one of Dubway’s Main Floor sound rooms during a session engineered by Louis Fisher, who does much of the automated dialogue recording (ADR) work for the series.

The first season of Butterbean’s Café received excellent reviews, including an Emmy nomination in the “Outstanding Performer in a Preschool Animated Program” category. We were overjoyed to hear the show got a well-deserved renewal, and are excited for more success as the second season comes out!

Butterbean season two is currently still airing and is partway through the season. If you have young kids in the house, you can check it out every Sunday morning at 10:30am on Nick Jr, or at the Butterbean website linked above.

Penguin Random House remotely records audiobooks with Dubway's mobile recording rig

Publishing giant Penguin Random House has been in close collaboration with Dubway Studios’ Manhattan facility to record several authors reading their own works for audiobook releases. One of these books, the excellent Honey & Venom from author Andrew Coté, has just been released, and was recorded entirely remotely during the current pandemic.

Engineer Louis Fisher conducted the recordings using one of our newly configured mobile recording rigs, dubbed Orbiters, allowing us to set up a recording environment in a client’s location and then engineer the recording from a distance, guaranteeing a safe workflow. Studio head Al Houghton assisted with designing and deploying the system, and worked closely with Penguin producers Dan Zitt and Oh Kee Kolwitz to ensure quality throughout.

You can find the book available at the links above (as well as an excellent piece on Andrew Coté from NPR). Happy listening!

Dubway expands VO/ADR bookings capabilities

We’re proud to announce that, in the time of COVID-19, Dubway has expanded its offerings for directors looking to book, record, and produce VO and ADR recordings remotely! For years, Dubway has been equipped for SAG/AFTRA signatory hiring, and our network of talented VO artists has grown significantly, making us a one-stop-shop for a producer on a deadline–and a budget.

In addition to our talent networks, we also have the technical capabilities to make sure the job gets done right from top to bottom. Our talent networks include many voice actors with home studios and the ability to connect directly to our studios in Manhattan or LA, giving producers the ability to remotely direct pristine recordings in real-time.

Hand in hand with our expanded booking capabilities are our newly expanded Orbiter rigs (mobile recording units), which we can deploy on behalf of clients, should their selected talent not have home recording capabilities. You can read more about our newly implemented strategies for remote recording here. Clients like Netflix, Penguin Random House, and Vox Media have already enjoyed the flexibility, speed, and safety offered by our remote recording workflows and talent networks.

More information on our signatory status and VO talent can be found here, and you can contact us with any questions about your specific production’s needs here.

"Piper And The Dots" receives Recommended Winner at Parent's Choice Awards 2020

Piper And The Dots, an interactive podcast brimming with excellent music and sounds, has just received the Recommended Winner nod from the Parent’s Choice Awards for their 2020 season! We’re thrilled to see this excellent project getting recognition.

This podcast, for children ages 3-12, is the result of a collaboration between children’s content platform Pinna, Dubway Studios, and Dubway’s sister organization Rhumba Recorders. The show was directed by Dubway alum and head Rhumba wiz Michael Rubin, with Dubway handling recording and additional production, including the recording of the musical elements, written by the prolific composer and jazz musician Doug Weiselman. Each of the show’s characters is sonified by an instrument, and their interplay is delightful, educational, and fun.

If you’d like to listen to a clip, you can check out the first episode (and all other episodes) on the Pinna site. Congratulations to all involved!

Virtual Dubway West tour from head engineer Chris Montgomery

Dubway-engineered audiobook "How To Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings" nominated for Independent Audiobook Award

Dubway and Andrews McMeel Publishing are proud to announce that a recent collaboration–the audiobook for author Sarah Cooper’s How To Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings–has been nominated for an Independent Audiobook Award!

Our engineering efforts were led by Louis Fisher, in conjunction with the author and Andrews McMeel production staff. Congratulations to all involved!

If you’d like to learn a bit more about the book, we previously wrote about this project here, or you can pick up a copy here (or wherever you get your audiobooks).

#TBT: "No Reservations" with Nora Jones

To keep spirits up while the studios are quieter than normal, we’re bringing back some of our favorite projects, stories, and collaborations. #TBT this week comes courtesy of the The Travel Channel and “No Reservations”.

On our previous #TBT, we linked to an old favorite feature in the NYTimes that has some choice quotes from our founder, Al Houghton. The spotlight this week is on just about the furthest thing from bands recording in practice rooms: an intimate recording with multiple-Grammy-award-winning artist Nora Jones for the 2011 Christmas Special episode of the great Anthony Bourdain’s hit show, No Reservations.

In the scene, Jones sings “Silent Night” at the Ace Hotel’s piano for an empty bar, save for Bourdain (and the audio and camera crews). The recording took place on location and was mixed by the Dubway team before being incorporated into the show’s final mix.

You can check out this section of the episode here, and hear about the most recent recording we did with Nora Jones here.

Cloudberry's "Cloudcast" records remotely with Dubway

For some clients, and in the current context, a trip to the studio just isn’t feasible. But what if you can’t come into the studio, but need to stick to a production schedule? At Dubway–or in this case, not at Dubway–one of our remote recording packages will have you covered.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with NYC design firm Cloudberry Creative to create a remote recording workflow for their Berrycast, a show about female leaders in the design industry. The podcast will continue running as scheduled through quarantine and social distancing measures put in place due to COVID-19, and to address this, we’ve created a solution that’s a bit unusual for a recording studio–we’ve set up (and now remotely run) a temporary podcasting studio locally in the Cloudberry offices.

Dubway engineer Zach Grappone is overseeing the project, which is ongoing, as well as handling the remote mixing of the finished episodes. Recordings are done on-site to our engineering specifications, then remotely transferred to Dubway for collaborative editing. Grappone finds the workflow so smooth that “[we] are able to treat this like a normal podcast routine,” when the logistics are anything but!

If you need a creative solution to your remote audio needs–whether that’s remote ADR/VO talent booking and production, remote mixing or mastering sessions, Audio over IP (AoIP) sessions, or something custom–don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Richard Kogan continues post work at Dubway with Thomas Mowrey

Lecturer, pianist, and physician Richard Kogan returned to Dubway with his regular collaborator, former Deutche-Grammaphon and Decca producer and Grammy-Award winner Thomas Mowrey, to produce a short film of one of his trademark lecture-recitals on psychology and music. We wrote about Kogan and Mowrey’s previous visit here, in which they produced a similar piece on the music of Chopin.

Dubway’s creative professionals Pascal McGilvray-Guard and Keenan DuBois worked with Kogan and Mowrey to edit and mix the video and audio for the piece, respectively. Kogan’s lecture, which can be viewed below, covers the music and psychology of Tchaikovsky, and features Kogan’s magnificent piano playing and thoughtful analysis as he guides the viewer through the life of the great composer.

Dr. Kogan’s programs on the psychological origins of musical creativity in the great composers are presented at prestigious venues throughout the world, including the World Economic Forum in Davos and Rockefeller University, in New York.

#TBT: "Babel-on-Hudson" at the Music Building

To keep spirits up while the studios are quieter than normal, we’re bringing back some of our favorite projects, stories, and collaborations. #TBT this week comes courtesy of the New York Times archives and author N. R. Kleinfield.

There’s not much to say about this one that wasn’t said in the original piece, readable here via the New York TImes’ web archives, about our studio’s original home in the Music Building. Check out the article and the quotes from owner & operator Al Houghton!

Remote audio takes center-stage during COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic forces all non-essential businesses to move to remote work, recording studios, artists, and producers are getting increasingly creative and flexible in making remote recording a feasible replacement for the in-studio experience. At Dubway, we’ve been doing remote recordings for years, but there’s no time like the present to iterate and consider the various alternative options that are popping up during the crisis. If you’re an artist or producer looking to make a deadline or hit the studio, read on to hear a bit about how we can make that happen, and if you’re an engineer, we’ll have some tips for you as well.

Dubway has offered a variety of remote sessions for artists and actors for nearly two decades. Many of our post-production and VO clients have worked remote or semi-remote for years and are already (more or less) adjusted to a socially-distant workplace. When we have no clients in-studio, we have a number of ways of recording audio that’s every bit as high-quality as the in-studio recording chain. If the client has a DAW on their side, the best solution is generally a stable remote connection via an ISDN replacement like SourceConnect, which we use extensively. For some clients without a DAW, we can offer in-home services, such as setting them up with a recording platform and mic, monitoring remotely, and then receiving the recordings to edit and mix in our studio environment. Dubway engineer Zach Grappone has had great results using in-home recording platforms with some of our podcasting clients, including CloudBerry. Whether you’re looking to dub vocals, record your podcast, or get edits on mixes, we can ensure the sound will be every bit as professional. When coupled with the now-ubiquitous Zoom app, it’s the next-best thing to being in the room—the same results, but with no commute!

For producers, we also have an extensive network of VO talent with in-home recording environments of their own, and we are more than happy to offer booking services, alongside the entire end-to-end audio process of recording, editing, mixing, and mastering your projects.

Our engineers have been getting creative as well, testing and comparing various technological strategies for different remote workflows. For those curious, we’ve found our favorite apps during this have included the aforementioned SourceConnect and Zoom, and we’ve been having success using the Open Broadcaster Software Project’s eponymous OBS to stream ProTools with relatively low latency to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Twitch; we’ve also heard great things (and seen some cool results) using Listento from Audiomovers, which is like a more affordable SourceConnect, without the ISDN part. Operations Manager Nathaniel Reichman lead the team in a test of some of these technologies’ latency results, and has been using them to successfully conduct mixes with remote production teams (he swears by SourceConnect and OBS).

While the pandemic is certainly worrying for every industry, we’re committed at Dubway to do our best to make sure it has as little impact on our work together as possible. If you have questions about our remote options, session-specific inquiries, or want to let us in on another helpful tool, you can always drop us a line at our general contact email (info@dubway.com)—we love hearing from you!

National Speakers Association hosts marathon podcast session

Bruce Weinstein of the National Speakers Association, left, with Dubway engineer Louis Fisher.

Last month we welcomed the National Speakers Association for an all-day session, recording back-to-back podcasts in our Blue Room suite. The sessions were produced and hosted by the National Speakers Association’s Bruce Weinstein, and engineered by Dubway’s own Louis Fisher. Over the course of the day Fisher and Weinstein conducted eight hour-long interviews with Weinstein’s various guests.

Check out the National Speakers Association’s work here, and some photos from the sessions below. As soon as these episodes are ready to be released, we’ll post about it here – stay tuned!

#TBT: Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill

To keep spirits up while the studios are quieter than normal, we’re bringing back some of our favorite projects, stories, and collaborations. #TBT this week comes courtesy of our colleagues at The Intercept.

In 2018 (it feels like a century ago), we recorded a theatrical drama, produced by The Intercept’s Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill podcast, called Evening At The Talk House. Dubway’s Sam Palumbo engineered these sessions in our Mezzanine studio, which were attended by writer/star Wallace Shawn, director Scott Elliott, Matthew Broderick, Claudia Shear, and more. The actors performed the radioplay together in front of mics – almost like a fully-acted-and-microphone’d table read – with additional sound design and music added in post-production. It was an honor to work with such great talent, and we think the project sounds pretty amazing, too.

You can take a trip down memory lane with us by listening to the radio drama here, and check out the entire catalog of Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill here.

Dubway in the time of COVID-19

As we’ve all felt in New York and elsewhere, the novel COVID-19 disease caused by the coronavirus has rocketed through our communities, and despite containment efforts, the virus is still spreading.

Dubway is taking every precaution to make sure our staff and clients stay healthy and safe during this trying time. Part of the effort to address the spread of the virus includes assessing various remote (home) recording options. There are many varieties of remote connection, and we’re happy to collaborate in finding options that work for your production. Should you have any questions about precautionary measures we've taken and continue to take, send us an email or give us a call and we’d be happy to answer!

We know the creative community is hurting, so please reach out if you have questions or thoughts you need to share while social distancing. The office may be empty during the stay-at-home order, but we’re always reachable via email.

Stay safe, be well, be kind to each other, and we’ll see you all on the other side!

Vox Media brings two shows to Dubway

Media powerhouse Vox spent an afternoon this past week recording two of its popular podcast options with Dubway engineer Pascal McGilvray-Guard. The session covered recordings for both Recode Decode, which covers technology-related news and ideas, and Pivot, a similarly-focused show that also brings in additional business, economic, and political analysis. Both shows feature journalist, writer, and political commentator Kara Swisher in both production and talent roles.

We’ve worked with Vox Media on a number of projects, including their podcasts The Weeds, Switched On Pop, and Today, Explained, and always enjoy the professionalism and detail their production teams bring to each session.

You can check out the episodes on their respective pages, above, or find any of Vox Media’s shows wherever you get your podcasts.

Pascal McGilvray-Guard and Kara Swisher in our Blue Room as the session wrapped.

"The Lies We Tell" – Now live!

We’re so excited to announce former Radiolab executive producer Ellen Horne and Alex Gibney and Jigsaw Productions’ new collaborative podcast with Luminary, Lies We Tell, is now live! This has been in the works for some time – we mentioned the project in this write up last month – but is now finally available for you to listen to!

Lies We Tell “uncover(s) basic truths about human nature — by untangling twisted true stories set in motion by lies.” To do this, producer Alex Gibney and his team interview controversial public figures with well-known (and generally dubious) cultural narratives, and attempt to get to the heart of the deception that lies within these narratives. Dubway’s own Violette Furton has sat behind the boards for these sessions, recording interviews that can run the full emotional gamut as the investigative and production teams tackle difficult histories and subjects.

Congratulations to those involved – check it out on Luminary today!