By Patrick Birk

If you haven’t seen the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, then I suggest you run — don’t walk — to a screen and start binging. This charming fish-out-of-water story stars Jason Sudeikis as Ted, a college football coach whose hokey, saccharine brand of Midwestern positivity is transported to England when he is hired to coach the AFC Richmond football (soccer) club. The jaded team and its front office serve as the perfect foil for Lasso, who wins them over one by one with what we discover is tried-and-true optimism.

Brent Findley

Sound designer Brent Findley (The Defiant Ones, The Good Place) was called on to help craft the show’s sound, and he immediately became a fan as well as a collaborator. “We’d be working on an episode, and Jason (who is also the show’s co-creator) would point to part of a storyline and say, ‘This is foreshadowing X down the road.’ I’d be like, ‘Spoiler alert! I want to watch it!” With that in mind, a warning to the reader: There will be a few spoilers as we dig into the conversation with Findley.

While the show is a comedy, it also features some high-production-value sports sequences. What was your approach to building that soundtrack?
The practice scenes were definitely more straightforward than the games which featured crowds and where the sequence of the action on the field was more vital. Practicing was more of a supporting part of the story… just a background activity.

The players on screen know how to kick the ball around, and the production dialogue mixer captured that. We took the recordings from different practice days and built beds of different types of activity. We used these to adjust how busy we wanted the team to sound off camera. We would also back off on the beds when we needed the forefront conversation to take over. When we needed to minimize offstage voices but also keep the sound of the team practicing, we would lean on the tracks of ball kicking and running on grass. The Foley for those sections was performed by Sanaa Kelley and her team.

What about the crowd noise?
Obviously, we wanted it to sound like it’s a football match, but that sound differed depending on location. Being down on the field had to sound a bit different than being up in the stands, in the executive box or in the announcer’s stand. So there are shifts depending on where we are around the stadium. Those are kind of literal perspectives. Are we in the bar, watching on the TV? That’s kind of the practical, without-any-creative-instruction stuff that we would just do naturally.

The next part is Jason’s desire to tell an on-field story that supports our off-field character arc. For example, the players Roy and Jamie have this tension. A sequence that illustrates that tension could be happening in real time, almost like a singular moment. We really had to use the sound to help build this development, so it’s not just a big crowd swell over the whole thing. The audience also has to feel the crowd’s separate moments. Instead of a big general build, we made sure it felt like individual moments in order to help land tension between those two characters. We help to support what we know about these characters through the way the sound is mixed and cut together.

You were cutting in effects from your production mixer. Did that include the crowd noise? Did they fill a stadium with people for the production?
No, we didn’t fill the stadium. We had around 100 people chanting “wanker,” not 30,000, but we can create the feeling of 30,000 people pulsing with the more articulate 100 people that we have. So the 100 are being supported by this big wash of the crowd, and with that more general crowd noise, we can fill the stadium with a massive crowd saying “wanker.”

Sometimes, for the gameplay, there was no crowd. The crowds were just there for the chants. At the production itself, with big crowds reacting, that’s all being directed, and we can’t use that sound because it’s got bullhorns for direction. So we took the core, orchestrated chants and had a loop group give me those chants clean. Then, by using library stadium crowd sounds, I have software that allows me to impose the characteristic of one sound onto another.

There’s another scene where the stadium crowd is chanting, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Then we see the bar crowd, and they are chanting the same thing. But at the bar, because there are fewer people in a smaller space, our human nature wants us to chant that faster than an entire stadium would. So when we cut back and forth, a lot of our work was slowing down the bar without it looking weird to the picture. We then sped up the stadium to try to meet somewhere in the middle. Then we cut into the stadium, “you don’t know what you’re doing.” And back to the bar. That pacing is a rhythm of the same chant over and over in all places. The result is an orchestrated effort from dialogue editor Bernard Weiser, effects editor Kip Smedley and me, along with the re-recording mixers filling the Dolby Atmos sound field. It really took everybody playing off the material the others brought to the party.

Loop group work-from-home setup

How do you balance the super-high-energy moments throughout the show with the more subtle moments in the plot?
I love the dynamics of this show. We have some really fast, heart-pounding-type things, and then there are these moments of subtlety. Our composer, Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons), is fantastic. And (co-creator) Bill Lawrence has a knack for putting together some of the best soundtracks for shows that I’ve ever heard — the combinations of songs he digs up with help from music supervisor Tony Von Pervieux are amazing. So a lot of that is driven by the music.

I can build up excitement with crowd and action and exaggerate a ball kick into the net. If it misses, then it’s heartbreak, and we can just suck the air out of the room, let the score simmer and take people on that emotional trip. The cinematography helps with that as well. Some of the footage goes into slo-mo a little bit, and you can kind of see the weight.

Jason was all for the more mundane elements being literal and accurate, but when we’re starting to tell the meat of the story, he didn’t constrain us. We could cut out and just go and follow that cinematography, when the picture starts getting stylized, and they start going into slo-mo. It’s like, “Okay, it’s not just an absence of sound here. What else can we do?” Maybe it’s Rebecca (the team owner played by Hannah Waddingham) with deep inhales and exhales during the slo-mo, or a footfall is a “boom” instead of an actual shoe. Knowing we didn’t have to play everything all the time is really a freedom that Jason would embrace.

Loop group work-from-home setup

What were some of your favorite creative moments when you got to let loose? For me, Ted’s panic attack was a standout.
It worked well. I worked closely with Jason on that to make sure it was doing what he wanted it to do. I didn’t tell Jason, “I want to do all these tricks with the sound,” but it was a moment that was slightly special — we got to do some very specific design work that we didn’t do in every episode.

The mix on it was great. The elements in the sound design are great. The score is great. The high-pitch ringing, which can be a real thing for folks that experience panic attacks, was there to drive that home. Then we come out of it with a reverse breath pull-out into Rebecca’s clear, concrete voice saying, “Ted.” It was very powerful. I get chills thinking about it.

Another favorite Rebecca scene is before she confesses to Ted that she tried to sabotage him. We go into slo-mo and score, and she’s walking down the stairs slowly, but we gave her an exhale, inhale and an exhale. We had the locker room kind of peppering in from behind, and then it just goes quiet. She walks by, and they come back up to their world offstage, and then Rebecca comes into the room and confesses to Ted.

You mentioned Marcus Mumford earlier. Was he the head composer for the entire series?
He was involved in every episode, but our co-composer, Tom Howe, was fantastic also. I worked with Tom on Whiskey Cavalier, and he’s a great guy who understands the composition-for-picture workflow.

Was there an active collaboration between your departments during that working process?
For the initial creative process, I think it was important that Marcus and Tom were left alone to develop the sound of the show.”

Because the score is such an intensive process, they really needed to be left alone with it. I can’t keep sticking bugs in the composers’ ears to tweak it because of something I want. Our music editors, Richard David Brown and Sharyn Gersh, have access to all of the individual stems, and they let dialogue and music re-recording mixer Ryan Kennedy know he can cut out a hit of percussion or say, “Hey, maybe back off on this one particular instrument, but leave the rest of the score where it is just to make room for a line of dialogue or a cell phone ring. And maybe I can tune my effects to be sympathetic with the score. Or, if there needs to be tension, I can tune my effects to go against the score and create and work with that tension.” So, Ryan and effects re-recording mixer Sean Byrne can ride those elements separately.

There are a few elements of live music in the show. What was the approach for Cam, the street musician who’s standing in for Robbie Williams at the dinner?
Cameron Cole — they actually used his real name. Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard) and Jason love him. We didn’t bring him in to record in a studio; it’s his live production stuff from that day. Part of the beauty of being a street performer is that it can be natural and feel improvised because that’s what it is. That’s what it’s made of. That’s how it exists in real life.

And Rebecca in the karaoke bar, as well. Hannah, the actress who plays her, has got a fantastic voice. After the fact, she did re-record it in her bedroom through a remote ADR process, and I just cherry-picked a couple notes here and there because I didn’t want to lose that natural, real-life, recorded-in-location feel with the crowd. I mean, that was a live performance, so to try to recreate the sound of her voice, we’d have to recreate the crowd because the crowd married to her microphone on the day. It was a much better end result to just surgically stitch in what she wanted fixed, as opposed to trying to recreate the whole scene and have it feel contrived. She knows what she’s doing with a microphone.

One of the keys is to make sure there’s no hole in the crowd so the ambient noise is seamless. When replacing a note from her handheld mic, that note would also be present as bleed on the microphone that was in the crowd. I just had to find a spot of the crowd that didn’t have a note in it at all, and I made a comp of the crowd to get across that moment. Then Ryan, through his skill as a re-recording mixer with the dialogue and the music, used processing to match her recording to the sound of the karaoke stage.

To jump back to loop groups, being that this is 2020, did quarantine touch the post process?
All of the post sound was on a remote, lockdown basis. So, everyone was somewhere else. For the loop group, we had a core of four people working from their own homes using the online collaboration tools that we have. This was kind of a surprise to everybody. Some tools existed already for remote purposes, meeting certain niches, but it felt like there wasn’t something that already existed to cover the entire workflow. Even now, after however many months, we’re still trying new things and coming up with different combinations of tools that exist. When somebody comes out with something new, everyone’s on board for trying it to try to get some efficiency back or some quality back in this remote environment.

In five years. I don’t want an asterisk at the end of the Ted Lasso credits saying, “Sorry about the sound, but COVID.” It’s got to stand up, no matter when somebody’s watching it.

Finally, where did you typically based when working?
In “normal times,” when not on the mix stage nor in ADR, I execute my work from my dedicated studio at home.  Having this capability has been integral to staying productive during the COVID shutdown over the summer.  Universal is my primary major studio attachment.  If I have an established client that is posting a particular show elsewhere, such as at Warner Bros., I am able to take care of them there, too.

Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City.