I was asked to mix a weekly show for PBS. For the next ten weeks, I would receive the files to mix on Friday, and I would have them delivered by Tuesday morning. Is this something that I would be interested in? Well sure. It's almost like having a real job; something to work on early in the weekend morning over a bowl of coffee. I've never had a project like this and is seems fun, routine, and rewarding at the same time.

But the business-minded person inside me wants to insure that the client is happy and will continue to be happy. That first show that I hand off has to be perfect, if there is such a thing. I want them to be so comfortable with me that they do not feel the need to check every mix under the microphone, and trust me to do my job. But trust must be earned so I must establish myself in the first episodes. The largest part of my job is to make certain that the mix is compliant with the specs for a national broadcast. This means that the mix is compliant with the A85 loudness standard set by Congress in 2012 . Since I teach such things at a University, I learned as much as I could about being compliant and I never really considered that investigating and understanding the loudness levels would be a pivoting factor in getting work.

So here I am. setting up the mix for the first of many shows. I want it to be an efficient, almost an assembly line kind of process so that every week I can plug the new show into a template which would insure that each episode has a consistent sound. I guess I'm creating a style-guide. Each week the narrator should sound exactly the same, and I create a plug-in chain that I will use every week for his voice. I'm sure it would be better to make these decision after I have a number of shows completed, but I have to start somewhere and then modify the template.

Let's see how this goes....