Joseph Vella: Passionate Podcasting
Flying High
One of Vella’s recent projects was, in part, composed at 30,000 feet. In 2006 he and a colleague Michael deMartin were commissioned by EMI Records to do a series of podcasts to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Beach Boys’ breakthrough album “Pet Sounds.” Vella and deMartin interviewed Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston about each one of the album’s tracks. In many cases, Vella had only a few hours to pull an episode together. “We would speak with Brian, record it, then get on the plane,” he says. “I knew I had three hours and I took full advantage of it. I would edit small segments of the episodes and then pass my Mac three rows behind me to Michael and he would listen, comment, and then pass it back up to me. We had this mobile systematic collaboration going on.”
Using GarageBand, Vella cut the musical backing tracks for the series en route to interviewing Wilson and the Boys. On the way home, he composed and edited several drafts of each episode. “I have found GarageBand to be the most valuable application that I use,” he says. “It’s just so easy and yet it allows you to do so much. During the Pet Sounds project, I used every available track in GarageBand to layer audio and used the application to adjust levels and get everything just right.”
GarageBand is Vella’s favorite on-the-road tool. “I do a lot of commuting between my home in Connecticut and a few offices in New York,” he says. “I use my commute to review and edit my pod productions, sometimes immediately after recording.
In addition, I use my iPod a lot with pod episode drafts to test the mix, levels, and overall content flow. I am constantly trying to perfect my content to work with a mobile lifestyle.”
New Perspectives
But Vella isn’t always mobile. His latest and largest project, in fact, has pulled him into a semi-permanent recording space. “Right now I’m working on a series about John Coltrane, called the ‘Traneumentary,’” he says. “It’s really a big project. I’m speaking with people who knew Coltrane, people who worked with him, and people who played with him, as well as a cast of contemporary artists. It’s a celebration of Coltrane’s artistry as told through personal interviews and Trane’s music.”
The journalist conducted nearly all of the Traneumentary interviews within the relatively controlled setting of a New York office building. Armed with his MacBook Pro, GarageBand, Soundtrack Pro, and a good mic, he was able to capture the odd threads that ultimately make up Coltrane’s musical legacy. “I was able to sit down with Jimmy Cobb, one of the few surviving musicians who played with Coltrane,” says Vella. “I had an idea. I wanted to have Jimmy talk us through a performance. So I whipped up an old bootleg track of a 1960 recording of Coltrane with Miles, Jimmy on drums. I started up the track and Jimmy started talking over it, telling us the story of that night. It was amazing.”
Technically, the commentary presented some challenges. “I needed to clean the voice track up without affecting the timing,” says Vella. “So I dragged the track into Soundtrack and edited it so it was cleaner, taking out the ‘ums’ and ‘uhs.’ I was actually able to clean it up without changing the timing.”
Vella is technically adept, but to him, podcasting is more than just getting the levels right. “The experience with Jimmy is really what I’m after for pod work,” he says. “I pursue that kind of feeling in my work. Whether it’s Steve Reich or Bebel Gilberto or the cast of ‘A Chorus Line,’ I think the goal of great podcasts is to produce quality content that moves people.”
