Rock podcasts and audio fiction long-form stories with engrossing characters and lavish sound design.
"My advice would be follow what inspires you, what fills your heart with raw passion."
Today Adrian Byrne & Michael Taylor, the creators of A&M Audio Adventures share their story of Fiction podcast.
► Tell us about you and your podcast
We started this podcast because we love what we do with our creative passion for the past 37 years now, since we were kids shouting into a microphone together down in a basement, and continuing to this day, 1000s of kilometres apart, over the internet, recording on a Saturday in and around our other lives. What better way to stay on your toes than to write, record, edit, and produce content that makes us laugh and gives us energy for the week ahead.
We're about having a few laughs and a little bit of weird wisdom with our well-produced shows. It's hard to get into something completely new, original, and experimental. It takes time and taste, and as taste is subjective, it's pleasing if someone else shares our sentiment for audio fiction comedy, for twisted tales, for disturbing characters, for a little Irish bizarre bazaar. We particularly enjoy our most recent creation; the 'Moshtalgia' series of vintage rock album reviews, as it's great fun to record, three hours of back and forth. However, editing it down to an hour is a beast. How many 'ums' and 'ahs' and mistakes can there be? Millions! My most rewarding production is the 'United Mutations' trilogy, a near 4-hour sci-fi epic that took a year to make, with great action setpieces. Adrian would say his favourite is 'Timefiddler', because he wrote it and voiced the main character Tucker Peacock. I'm quite proud of 'Frumpy Dumpster'; a nice story about a middle-aged woman taking murderous revenge on the men who wronged her in her life. It's a comedy, it's a bit puerile too, but it has its pathos and tragedy in there too. Gleaned from a real-life story, it was a challenging recording session, and a marathon editing one. 32 tracks of audio, and a lot of effects and foley to make it all feel real to your ears. Our Moshtalgia is an 'interview'-type podcast, but all else are fiction adventures. As for our listeners? A little like us I hope. With a sense of sneer, sarcasm, and sentience in this muddled era we live in. A respite from the madness.
► Why & how did you start this podcast?
Actually, I never listen to podcasts. Adrian does, mostly football and supernatural subjects. Why do this? For the sheer insane love of it, and at never a penny made, we still invest time, over 80+ hours for one hour of audio fiction, still invest our money to keep going, and still invest unwavering energy over decades into our passion of inventing scenarios, character voices, and sublimely surreal tales. Why do it? It IS rather bizarre, a bit odd, but does wonders for our mental health to be doing this for 37 years since we were teens. The initial goal was an escape in those economic straitened times of the late 80s in Ireland. We didn't come from much so A&M started in the time of cheap tape recorders and dwelt in an asbestos-riddled room penning scripts on puce-toned bookkeeping journals.
We flicked off the curious spiders, propping our legs up against noxious oil-wick heaters, we wrote frozen-fingered in the damp confines of a 200-year old cellar. We then roared our scribblings into a 'Unisef' SZ 70 Portable Stereo cassette player microphone, (making sure to press record). We played our two voices from that in the background on a JVC RCW40 deck that had a surprisingly good built-in mic. We overdubbed and overdubbed, ending up with a hiss-filled cacophonous chorus of puerile teenage filth. We taped and taped, often onto 'Hi-Tech' ferric oxide 90-minute tapes, bought up at the local post office for £1 each. Outside it rained. Inside it smelled of must and total immersion. Maybe break now for an oven-heated 5-inch pizza from Mace, mushed into white bread, lathered in Heinz Salad Cream, with talk of more ideas to write down, to record, and why? To make each other laugh. To try to outdo each other with our creative input.
We started this in 1987, when hair metal was riding high in the British Gallup-compiled charts and we hung on late on a Friday night to catch Tommy Vance on the BBC Radio 1 Friday Rock Show, followed by The James Whale Radio Show on ITV. We just saved the tapes and digitised them.
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► How'd you find the time and funding to do this podcast?
As mentioned above, it's about 80+ hours of input, it can be scribbles, discussions, scripting, then revising, recording, editing, mixing, mastering, the whole lot. We have a back catalogue of 100s of hours of completed well-produced titles since 2001. That's about 50 full-length episodes either standalone or in a series. Before that we keep those analogue days and its output for ourselves only. Maybe one day we'll dive into the archive. In 1987 we'd record every weekend and sometimes after school. In the 1990s it was about three times a year. In the early noughties it was once a year, then in the last couple of years post-COVID, we manage three or four a year on average. This means around 4 hours of completed content. Yeah, this is all around the day jobs we both have. And we both live in different countries so all our recording is via Source-Connect (now Source-Nexus), typically on a Saturday afternoon, if neither of us is hungover. Oh, yes, we fund all of this ourselves as so many do, the Neumann TLM 103, the Eris E8 Active Monitors, the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20s, the Roland Quad Capture I/O 24bit 192khz, the Rycote InVision Popshield, the two SPL Track One Pre-Amps and a lot of Auralex Sound Proofing plus the many Absorber Wall Modular panels, two music pcs, copious amounts of software, sound effects, along with the Source-Nexus, the hosting, all of it and all the time, money, and energy is just from ourselves too. We do live in some sort of weird glorious isolation. At a guess, about €25,000 over the years. But then, what A&M creates is unique to our perception of the world, to our location in it, to our reaction to what is around us. It's certainly not mass-marketable content, it's specific, from a specific place, with a specific voice. We don't make populist podcasts, we produce HQ audio fiction audio adventures and from Ireland too. And with mature themes, twisted tales. 'A rare breed i'd say.
► What do you gain from podcasting?
I read through these questions and none of them were applicable until the last one; how does this benefit us? Well, over the years we've treated it like an old family carpet, sitting there threadbare, but holding the room together nicely. Our recordings have followed us all our lives. They make us laugh. They unite our friendship, myself and Adrian's, through all sorts of ups and downs. Many times we almost gave up. As for learning, I became a voice actor, I can produce audio and video content, I can do multitrack sequencing. Would I like a job as a game sound producer? God no. A lot of that is automated, repetitive nonsense. Our podcast is done our way, in a unique fashion. What works for us may not work for anyone else. But we don't seek accolades, we don't seek sponsorship, we don't care really. We like how we sound and like to listen to our finished stories. That's the satisfaction for us.
► How does your podcasting process look like?
We might deviate from the accepted term for podcasting here. We produce audio fiction, like films for your ears. Full-foley theatre plays. It's much more than a chat and a few questions. A standard podcast is a few people talking together and asking questions. That in old school language is a radio interview. I worked in talk radio in Dublin back in the 1990s. I found it boring and limiting. Audio fiction is where the imagination can run amok, and you can be Orson Welles again. Push it to the extremes, create characters, voices, scenarios, amazing aural extravaganzas, sweeping sound effects, and real-life foley, with score backing. This first entails scripting full scripts. I've always used Adobe Audition and Magix Vegas for recording and sequencing, actually since 1999 when on a Windows 98 'Gateway' computer and when Adobe Audition was 'Cool Edit Pro' by Syntrillium Software and Magix Vegas was produced by Sonic Foundry. The hardware I mentioned in Question 3, but that's morphed over the years. I think I still have our first Senneheiser microphone we used into an old Sharp WQ-T234 cassette recorder.
► How do you market your show?
Heheh, no idea about all this. Maybe that's something we need to work on, or try to hoodwink someone into doing for us. As our description on many of our videos on YouTube says; 'we are available on all good audiophiliac emporia'. We're all over the internet. Has anyone seen us other than an urban fox wandering by to pilfer from a bin on the street? I doubt it. If listeners do find our show and like it, I think that'd be a miracle. We're an acquired taste. We're not sugary sweet and easy to digest and we're not a conventional type of podcast. Neither are we disruptors or shapers or any of that. We're like that weird looking cheese at the far end of the counter, nowhere near the premium self-flagellating Edam or Cheddar or Brie. Gnarly, boney, gristly. A bit chewy and lumpy.
► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?
We developed our own thing our own way. My advice would be to follow what inspires you, what fills your heart with raw passion. Don't listen to the naysayers. Listen to yourself. Fancy a bit of Hamlet and Polonius? This is my advice or rather 'here, my blessing with thee. And these few precepts in thy memory. Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment, Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bear ’t that th’ opposèd may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear but few thy voice. Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy, For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station, Are of a most select and generous chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.'
TLDR: Do what you like, ignore those who say 'you can't!' and don't get into debt while doing it. Bring a friend along for the ride. A laugh and a shared purpose shall serve you well. Don't buy the books. It's all guff. Do it your own way.
► Where can we learn more about you & your podcasts?
Our podcast hosting and website full of our shows:
Full Audio Fiction Adventures
aandm.bandcamp.com
Spare some change guv?
patreon.com/user?u=112516609&utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Buy us poor lads a beeeeer!
buymeacoffee.com/aandmstudios1987
Apple Podcasts
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-m-audio-adventures/id1723738273
Spotify
open.spotify.com/show/737W5df6K7ZLWshTMw4ubX?si=77f3ebb7431a43be
Goodpods
goodpods.com/podcasts/a-and-m-audio-adventures-300638
Amazon Music
music.amazon.com/podcasts/2ac54326-85fb-4c34-a1d4-b144cfe6a0c0
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/vox1
Facebook
facebook.com/paul.gombatuna
Instagram
instagram.com/aandmstudios1987
Google Podcasts
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2FhbmRtL2ZlZWQueG1s?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjYktPAicODAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQYQ
Pandora
pandora.com/podcast/am-audio-adventures/PC:1001082857
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@aandmstudios1987
Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/aandmstudios
Mixcloud
https://www.mixcloud.com/aandmstudios/
Deezer
https://www.deezer.com/us/show/1000547802
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