I’m Jad Abumrad, Founder and Co-Host of Radiolab, and This Is How I Work
As the creator of Radiolab , Jad Abumrad is responsible not only for one of the most respected radio shows and podcasts, but also for the sound design style that has influenced many of the most popular audio shows today. He is also the host of the additional radio lab More Perfect , a show about Supreme Court rulings and constitutional amendments. We spoke to him about his career, the Radiolab team and the hate letters he writes in Pro Tools.
Name: Jad Abumrad Location: Brooklyn, Manhattan Current Workplace : Host / Creator of Radiolab , More Perfect Current Mobile Device: iPhone 8 Plus Current Computer: Mac Pro (Waste Bin), 13-inch MacBook Pro One word that best describes how you work: Constantly
Tell us a little about your past and how you became who you are today.
I was a skinny Lebanese kid growing up in Nashville, Tennessee during the First Gulf War, so I spent a lot of time in my room playing the 4-track cassette recorder and recording imaginary scores for films that didn’t exist.
I don’t know how to do it, but it occurred to me early that I would be the film scorer. For this I entered Oberlin College. But after graduating (barely) and entering the real world, I realized that writing music for films is difficult and that I am not very good at it.
So after five years in the wild, I decided to quit music. It was then that Karla (my then girlfriend and now my wife) suggested that I try radio. And so I did.
I founded Radiolab in early 2002. Since then, it has been a long, slow development. I’ve learned almost everything I know about journalism and job reporting. Many mistakes later, here I am.
Tell us about a recent work day.
My weeks are divided into days of chaos and days of work. Days of chaos – Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Production days are Tuesday, Thursday.
Today is Wednesday, so my calendar looks like one of those restricted maps of South Carolina. I have three 20-minute meetings with producers about stories, a “target group” meeting with an ad sales department, a call with a lawyer, a one-hour fact-finding interview on the constitutionality of the US / Mexico border zone, a two-way interview. braindump watch studio (where the reporter talks about what they’ve been up to) to talk about the opioid epidemic in rural Kentucky, then I have another call with a lawyer, and then a ten minute tracking session with Robert [Krulwich, Radiolab co-host] to update radio broadcast. At 4:30 am I run home to be a dad for a few hours. After the kids go to bed, I’ll be working in Pro Tools from 8 am to midnight on the next episode of More Perfect , which I’ll finish on Thursday. [Season 3 ended in December after Jud answered these questions.]
No appointments tomorrow, Thursday. My calendar just says “Manufacturing”. Large pink block. My favorite thing. So I will spend the day in my studio.
What apps, gadgets or tools can’t you live without?
Pro Tools: I wish I could live without it, but I can’t. I spend so much time in Pro Tools, I sometimes have Pro Tools dreams of people talking to me and the words fall out of their mouths as small blocks of color, which I then desperately try to cut into smaller blocks.
Here’s an average Pro Tools session:
Pro Tools crashes frequently. When this happens, a small box will appear.
I often write messages to someone who doesn’t read them on the other side.
I don’t like Pro Tools. This is a loveless marriage.
Ableton Live: I really like this program. Live is where I write music that goes into Pro Tools. I love how flexible it is. It has one workspace (view session) …
… where you can create a collection of music cells that can then be combined into an endless number of patterns such as Lego.
On each track, you can set up fancy effect chains that take one piano note and turn it into a cloud of noise. This is simply the best program. If only it had more keyboard shortcuts, I would ditch Pro Tools for good.
Granite: A small granular synthesis program that I have used for ten years and still love. Granular synthesis is a form of sound processing in which sound is broken down into a series of particles (or “grains”). You can then recombine these grains in any number of ways to create large, transparent masses of sounds. Great for drones.
Other non-audio apps I can’t live without …
Google Docs: Damn it Google for owning all of this, but wow, it’s amazing (and increasingly critical) for us to have two different producers in two different cities working on the same script at the same time.
Evernote : I’ve dedicated my whole life to Evernote. Clippings of articles, receipts, notes from telephone conversations.
How is your workplace arranged?
Here is my home studio in Brooklyn. It is configured for both music and podcast.
Left view:
- Moog Sub 37: The funniest synth ever.
- Korg MS-20: Newest addition.
- Pedals: I’ve amassed tons of guitar pedals over the years. I find this to be a very fun (and tactile) way to control sound. My pedal board currently has two JVS pedals for amplification, a TC Electronic Ditto pedal for looping, two ElectroHarmonix POG pedals for pitch bend and harmony, an Eventide H9 for all sorts of weird effects, and a few Earthquaker Devices pedals below this picture. (self-portrait of my son Amil, taken in art class).
- Lyra-8 Synth: A very, very strange “organismic” synth that honestly has its own opinion. Every time I turn it on, it makes a different noise depending on my mood.
Foreground:
5. Vulture thermionic culture: This is basically a distortion box. When I record Radiolab stories, I often take very clean sounds coming out of the synthesizer and run them through this box to get them dirty.
6. Dreadbox Abyss: A simple synth with strange built-in effects. Great for pads.
7. Ableton Push 2: I’m not a Push fanatic like some people, but it’s great as a MIDI controller for Ableton.
8. Matching Empirical Labs Distressor Pair: Great compressors for chopping drums or whatever.
9. Native Instruments Kontrol Keyboard 49.
10. AKG 414: I have been using this microphone since 2002.
11. UAD Apollo 16: The heart of my setup. All audio goes in and out of it.
What’s more important than people think about creating radio and podcasting? What is less important?
People are always amazed at how much time we spend looking for stories. We often spend months calling, reading and doing interviews, only to kill the story later. The longer I do this, the longer it takes to find something that will surprise the audience.
What’s your best shortcut or life hack?
Wake up at 5 am. Does it count? I have to listen to cassettes for hours a week, and I like to listen in the early hours when the kids are asleep and the house is quiet. It’s a lovely little window of time where I can hear things differently.
My best rage trick is when I’m angry I pretend I’m the director by watching me get angry on stage acting out a scene and actually killing it. Director I claps my hands and says, “Great performance!” Somehow, this little dissociation helps turn rage into entertainment.
Here’s a meeting trick that is by no means original: I have meetings while walking. I believe that meetings usually end up as the place where the meeting takes place, so if that place is a conference room … okay. Better to make the meeting look like New York.
Tell us about an interesting, unusual, or challenging process you have at work.
Our whole process is unusual and fastidious. We once tried to draw this on a big board, thinking it would help us better track the storytelling process. The effect was just the opposite. Nobody wanted to look at the board because it was crazy. So now we will hide the thing in our studio.
But I still like this process. And we have simplified it a little over the years.
We have borrowed a lot of process ideas from other areas. We will draw storyboards like movie or comic book writers do. We’re going to make mood boards, like the way architects, I understand, do at the beginning of the design process.
In general, we spend a lot of time trying to turn stories into gestures, a series of emotional blows. Kind of like the way gesture painters drew with expressive strokes where you could see movement through those big waves of the hand. As a listener, I need narrative structures that you can feel , where you can hear the questions driving the action, the emotional energy going up and down. I personally have problems with stories that become too analytical and confusing.
Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?
Oh my god, there are so many people to mention.
There is Soren Wheeler, editor-in-chief of Radiolab . He is my right hand in Radiolab and a kind of Atlas show. I want him to get a tattoo on his ass one day:
Susie Lechtenberg, my second right (left?) Hand in Radiolab . She started working with me at More Perfect a few years ago and is now the executive producer of Radiolab . You rarely find a creative person who is so good at managing other creative people.
The person I rely on most in my daily life is Shima Olyayi. Shima is a unicorn. She does everything from scheduling my chaos days, to helping me come up with ideas for TV shows, to celebrity tears during interviews (this has happened several times).
Oh yes, Robert! The smartest and most talented person I have ever met.
He’s the guy I call when I really run into a problem. Robert always manages to say what distracts me. I have been writing about its brilliance for 15 years.
Also…
Dylan Keefe, Director of Sound Design. In 1997, Dylan became a # 1 hit. Now he writes beautiful music for Radiolab . Bethel Habte (new Radiolab producer, Werk It star), Becca Bressler (Werk It co-star, Radiolab point guard), Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, and Sarah Kari (a more accomplished trio who, in between producing SCOTUS documents and civilian albums, travel around the world talking about how democracy went wrong … sometimes right).
Latif Nasser (Canadian storytelling genius and host of a new series coming soon!) Annie McEwen (story-building expert, second Canadian among us).
Molly Webster (fearless science researcher, gonad power!), Tracy Hunt (reporter, caver of forgotten archives), David Goebel (who keeps our shit in order), Matt Keelty (the person everyone wants to work with.), Producer Simon Adler ( the man we’ll all be working on in one day), Pat Walters (soulful editor, sailor and host of a new series coming soon!), Arianna Wack (head of our radio show and 594 stations where he goes), Rachel Cusick ( one of the newest producers of sound and a black belt in baking) and Alex Overington (the genius composer of More Perfect, the author of the theme song “Oyez”).
This is the best team I have ever worked with, possibly have ever worked with.
How do you keep track of what you need to do?
Shima and I use Todoist to record and organize tasks. But to-do lists quickly turn into guilt lists. So if something really needs to be done, we just put it on the calendar and trust.
How to recharge or relax?
I watch the best moments in the Premier League, or the NBA, or really the best moments in any sport other than golf.
What’s your favorite side project?
In terms of podcasts, I just completed a side project called Unerased about the history of gay conversion therapy in America. We worked with Focus Films to create the series so that four episodes would be linked to The Boy Erased , based on Garrard Conley’s memoir. Conversion therapy is such a strange and little-known phenomenon in America. It was interesting to know about these stories. Also: I always write music in between. I spent too much time last night trying to create an audio mix from Om Kaltum and Appalachian folk music.
What are you reading now or what do you recommend?
I am currently reading a book called Gratitude, Heart of Prayer . A friend advised me to read this even though I am not God.
What do you listen to while working (when you are not working with sound)?
Lately a lot of Johns Hopkins . Alex Overington drew me to him and now I’m obsessed. His 2013 album is a masterpiece. I was also very passionate about this metal band Azusa .
Who else would you like to see to answer these questions?
Mitch McConnell.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
To be the boss, I don’t need to know where we are going. I just have to be the guy looking.
What problem are you still trying to solve?
At this stage in my career, I feel like there should be less staying up late. But there are still so many late nights.
However, I love late nights.