After 11 seasons, the ABC comedy Modern Family has come to an end. Over the years, we’ve watched as the Dunphy/Pritchett family changed, expanded and grew up, all the while making us laugh.

The show’s beauty was in its relatability. Phil and Claire Dunphy and their kids seemed real, or at least real enough to remind us of our own dysfunctional families. And it was that feeling of reality that set the tone for Modern Family’s sonic identity over the years.

The Modern Family sound team: (L-R) Peter Bawiec, Brian Harman, Dean Okrand, Stephen Tibbo and Srdjan Popovic.

We recently reached out to the show’s Emmy-nominated re-recording mixers Brian Harman, Dean Okrand and Peter Bawiec from Burbank’s Smart Post Sound. They got the nod for the episode, “Finale, Part 1.”

Modern Family is a mockumentary. How does this genre affect how you approach the show’s sound?
Dean Okrand: Even though the show is a comedy, the sound needed to be natural. And although there are hundreds of sounds added in each episode, we want the viewer to think they were with the characters, in the same room not being manipulated by sound.

How would you describe the sonic style of Modern Family?
Okrand: It’s all about making it feel natural with real environments. If we were in a noisy place, such as a mall, we wanted to hear the mall, escalators and all. If Phil was showing an empty two-story house with no rugs or furniture, we wanted to feel the emptiness of the house: roomy and boomy. If we were outdoors and saw leaves moving in the wind, those would, of course, be heard. All that is the world around the characters, but it could never be added at the expense of hearing and understanding every word of dialogue. The dialogue was paramount.

How much of the show uses ADR and Foley?
Brian Harman: Like on any show, ADR is used to help some technical or story points, so of course we’ll have some lines from time to time. But the great thing is that it’s almost always recorded on the actual sets. (The production is typically filming another episode at that time, so it’s easy to grab lines.) This makes the ADR sound really authentic. Foley, in turn, is fully covered and recorded for each episode every week.

How does the sound for the show enhance the funny? Can you provide a specific example?
Bawiec: The most important thing that traces its routes from the picture-editing style is the timing of the jokes. There is a natural rhythm of the jokes that the audience follows — kind of like “1-2-3.” This could be Phil getting hit by a softball and how the sounds are cut or someone tripping, falling and crashing.

Similarly, it could be about the use of contrast of loudness of the sounds thata can be heard when Phil and (his son) Luke go on Magic Mountain Roller Coaster in Disneyland (Season 3, Episode 22). Here loud rattling of the rollercoaster and screaming of people really emphasize the comedy — Phil feeling worse and worse. This predictable rhythm (loud, quiet, loud quiet, loud quiet) really plays up the humor of the scene.

There are many different types of roles in the sound department. Can you explain the difference between sound designer and sound mixer and how that works on Modern Family?
Harman: Sitcom shows, due to their nature, must be careful not to expose the sound creation process, so sound design is really more about the wholistic understanding of what the sound does to scenes, characters and entire stories. In the case of Modern Family, most of the sound crew carry that responsibility because these decisions can be made in sound editorial, during the mix, or even with prop recreation in Foley.

The re-recording mixers are responsible for finding a balance between all the dialogue, music, effects, ambiances, etc. to create a harmonious soundtrack that the audience believes is just the world of the show. It’s a process that results in creating an immersion in the world of characters for the audience.

Peter, Brian and Dean have mixed the show from Season 1. What advice did they have for you when you were starting out on the show?
Peter Bawiec: The most important thing was for me to just sit in the back of the mix stage on one of the days and just listen to how they approach an episode. It’s like watching the kitchen of a restaurant: If you understand the tools being used, then you understand how the recipe is being made.

Was there an episode that was particularly hard to mix in the final season?
Bawiec: “The Finale Part 2” was the big one since it carried the weight and gravitas of being the last episode of the show. It wasn’t necessarily about the difficulty, but more about on the complexity of the elements in it. We needed to make sure it tied the whole series to end up sonically, and we wanted to go back to some of the stylistic choices that were made in the past.

About how long did each episode take to mix?
Bawiec: We typically had one day. We’d start off with dubbing the dialogue to get it “in the pocket.” As that was happening, Brian would attack the backgrounds, Foley and FX. Typically, we’d do a playback of the whole episode for ourselves before the creative team came to give notes. This way we were showing something that was ready. And at that point, since the show had an established language, the notes were really focused more on the small details than broad brush strokes.

Can you talk about the equipment you used on the show?
Okrand: We tried to keep things simple. The show is mixed entirely in the box in Avid Pro Tools with two rigs and two D-Command surfaces — one for dialogue and music and the other for sound effects.

iZotope, Abstentia and Cedar were important plugins. On the SFX side Brian has some Altiverb for recreating some of the sets the show is filmed in. Modern Family often was a quiet show. Not hearing angle changes and bumps, which are unavoidable at times, was the biggest challenge for a quiet show.

What would people be surprised to find out about the show’s sound?
Okrand: How consistent it was when it came off the set and arrived on the dub stage. Thank you to Steve Tibbo and his crew. In fact, the dubbing crew and Steve were together for the entire 11 years the show aired. Lisa O’Donoghue started with Modern Family with me on the pilot as the supervising sound editor, and when she moved to Northern California, she became the dialogue editor for the remainder of the run. Her dialogue editor, Penny Coghlan took over as supervisor through season 10. This consistency meant so much to the overall sound of Modern Family.