The Organic Sound of Bluey w/ Sound Designer Dan Brumm

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You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

As the father of three young daughters, I end up watching a lot of kids' shows.

Now, some of these shows are clearly just meant to appeal to kids, but there's one kid show that I like just as much as my girls do, if not more.

This show has made me laugh out loud and sob uncontrollably more times than I can count.

It's an animated series from Down Under called Bluey!

Can you tell me what Bluey is about?

It's about a family of dogs living together in Australia.

That's my 11-year-old.

Kind of like an ordinary slash not ordinary family who like go on big adventures, except not too big.

My oldest daughter is now a few years older than the kids in Bluey, but she still loves the show, as does my eight-year-old.

My favorite character is

Muffin, because she's crazy like me.

Crazy like you.

And there's the youngest, my four-year-old.

I like it because

I

watched Bluey when I was born.

My family and I discovered Bluey about four years ago, and we've been obsessed with it ever since.

If you're a parent of a younger child, you probably know this show too.

Since its debut in 2018, Bluey has been broadcast in 160 countries and dubbed into 20 different languages.

In 2023, it was the second most streamed show in the US.

And over on IMDb, it's the 14th highest-rated TV show of all time.

The show is about two dog parents named Bandit and Chili and their kids Bluey and Bingo.

The episodes are usually only seven minutes long and the stories typically center around the imaginary games the kids invent.

There's often a small moral or message but it's never really heavy-handed.

Great works are performed not by great strength but by perseverance.

Hang on, are you trying to teach us something?

One must persevere.

Aw, he is.

For me, I love how Bluey shows a version of parenthood that's sweet, but also very realistic.

Bandit and Chili often have bags under their eyes as they try to keep up with their kids' endless games.

Can we play delivery chair?

No.

Oh, please.

I don't use your please face.

Alright.

Yeah, Bingo's delivery chair.

The please face gets me every time.

Parenting is a very unique adventure.

That's Bluey's sound designer and mixer, Dan Brum.

It's tough and it's really emotional and you love these kids but you also sometimes you're a bit tired and the games are crazy and the adventures are wild and that's just represented so sincerely on screen.

Dan also happens to be the brother of Bluey's creator and main writer Joe Brum.

A lot of the games were straight out of games my brother created to play with his kids.

He came back to Brisbane and started a family and he had young kids and he realised just the absurd games that you play with these young kids to keep them entertained and to have fun with them.

And so he thought that that would make a great kid show and you know he was obviously right.

But of course it takes more than just a great idea to get a show off the ground.

This all started off as a fairly guerrilla operation.

A small production company ragtagged new animators, a lot of them were straight out of university, And it was very low budget because it was such an untested, unproven show.

So low budget that I was the only sound person involved.

That means one person to gather all the sound, carefully craft it for each episode, and then mix it in with dialogue and music.

On top of all that, Dan's also a parent of young kids himself.

Let's just say it was a lot to juggle.

Looking back now, it's crazy.

There should have been a team of me because it was such a hectic schedule as 52 episodes in that first season.

One per week for sound design, music mix and final mix and corrections.

With that kind of time crunch, you might think that Dan relied on a lot of pre-recorded sounds, but he actually took the opposite approach.

I tried to record my own sounds because I wanted this show to feel original and I wanted it to feel natural and warm and organic so that on one hand you've got a stylized picture and the second hand you've got realistic audio.

Dan still remembers when he first saw the show's animation.

It's so beautiful, the art is so amazing and they've represented my city so well.

Bluey is set in Brisbane where Dan and Joe grew up.

So I feel this duty to embellish that with as beautiful an audio background as I can.

So I, in the early days, I would go around my city and my suburb recording all the different atmospheres, like the nice bird sounds.

Then I would work those into the backgrounds of the show.

You sure you don't want some help?

No.

The sounds of Brisbane are so important that even when the characters are inside, you can often hear birds chirping and bugs buzzing in the background.

Daddy

didn't come and see the walking leaf.

Ah, I'm sorry.

I didn't hear you.

That's okay.

What is your favorite sound from Bluey?

Um,

just like the nature sounds.

The nature sounds.

In regards to the nature sounds, that's a really big thing for me because Brisbane is such a beautiful sounding city and it doesn't sound like any other city because we've got this wild array of unique Australian birds, including the kookaburras.

So now crows and magpies.

There's this one bird called a cockatoo, which is this beautiful white kind of parrot with these yellow, it's like a yellow mohawk.

But the sound they make is the most prehistoric dinosaur-like screech.

If you can't see one on screen, it's a really terrifying sound to be in a kid's show.

The kids in Bluey also like to play in the creek by their house.

And I've recorded a lot of the creeks around my place.

Like in the episode Creek, that's me down splashing in my local creek.

It still looks the same.

So what are we supposed to play?

Uh, dunno, it's the creek.

You just sort of muck around.

Oh, yeah.

And in Grandad, that was all the local creek here.

Do you want me to do it, Grandad?

Okay, my thumbs fly up a bit these days.

Is that why mum wants you to rest so your thumbs get better?

Yeah, probably.

It's the most calming sound and it's so beautiful.

I love the idea that people from around the world just fall in love with how Brisbane sounds.

But achieving that level of detail wasn't easy.

The first few episodes, that was

a hard time in my life.

Everyone was trying to figure out what the sound of the show would be.

I was given a lot of free rein to take it in a certain direction, but then it wasn't quite how my brother was hearing it in his head.

He has a really phenomenal grasp on sound for animation.

And sometimes it's a hard thing to describe how you want something to sound because that's such an emotional, feeling-based thing.

So that led to, yeah, a few terse arguments and fairly stressful situations of these deadlines.

And it was, you know, 10 hours in the studio of just trying ideas that were, some were getting across and some weren't.

And then it was going home and trawling my neighborhood and local schools for different sounds that I could record to use the next day and then coming home and sort of editing them.

All the while I've got a four-year-old and a two-year-old and then you go to sleep, but you're just thinking about this show.

I was probably sleeping about two hours a day in those first few weeks just out of sheer stress and it actually weirdly led to alopecia and this weird spot on my neck and my head where I noticed these ball spots from stress so I kind of grew my hair long for season one and grew a beard to kind of hopefully mask all of those and yeah that's season one was hard

imagine this sleep-deprived haggard looking man wandering around parks and playgrounds with a strange electronic device in his hand suffice to say he landed himself in some pretty hairy situations.

There's an episode, Kids, which is set in a supermarket, and

Bluey and Bingo are like ramming a shopping trolley into an aisle.

There really is only one way you can capture that sound is to go to a supermarket and ram a trolley into an aisle.

So I did.

I went down with my microphone and I found like an empty-ish aisle, and I just was ramming this trolley into the aisle while recording it.

Trying to just get the sounds as quickly as possible before management came and asked me what I was doing.

Now that Bluey is an international phenomenon, Dan could probably tell the employees that he's recording sounds for the show, and the manager would ram carts into the shelves for him.

But back then, you just kind of looked like a bit of a crazy person.

All the scenes at playgrounds where the kids are going down slides or playing on the monkey bars, I go to playgrounds and I record the slides.

And, you know, often I actually have to go down a slide myself with the microphone which is pretty awkward and weird as a 40 year old at a playground.

But you have to get those sounds right because kids play in playgrounds and they're so intimately familiar with how the slides sound.

There's another time for Shadowlands.

There's a scene where a council bus goes past.

So I wanted that sound of a Brisbane Council bus driving past.

And I was driving home from the studio one day and I noticed that there was a bus driving alongside me.

I went, oh, great.

So I went down the window and put my mic out and started recording and the bus just slammed on the brakes really suddenly.

And I went, oh, what was, why did that happen?

Then I realized that my mic is on a pistol grip and it's a long shotgun microphone.

So it literally looked like I was pointing a gun out the window at this bus driver who's just freaked out and slammed on the brakes.

So yeah, I was sort of a little bit more careful with where I waved that thing around

in the future episodes.

Dan would take these recordings back to the studio and then start cutting them into the scenes.

It was an exhausting process, but the whole crew was in the same boat.

This whole show was in its infancy, so everyone was working as hard as they could to figure out what the show would look like and for me sound like.

But they just loved the show so much that you wanted to.

You wanted to pour your heart into this show.

For Dan, a big motivator came from the work that the animators did.

It's just so precisely animated the beat of a joke or the beat of a certain sequence.

And then if I could sync up the sounds and punctuate those different beats, it suddenly just brought it all to life.

Eventually, Dan started to find that rhythm.

A good example is an episode called Magic Xylophone.

There are lots of great little sound design moments in it, like when Bingo finds the Magic Xylophone in the toy chest.

Or later in the episode, when Bingo cinches up the hose so that their dad can't spray Bluey with it.

Magic Xylophone was the first real episode, I think, where I was really happy with how the sound communicated with the episode.

If you watch Bluey in Order, Magic Xylophone is listed as the first episode, but it was actually the fifth one they made.

The previous four, I think, ended up in really good places as well.

But from sort of five on, we basically landed on what the sound of the show was and I started sleeping a little more after that.

Good sound design is like a conversation between audio and picture.

And for Bluey, that conversation starts before the animation is even complete.

When Dan first sees an episode, it's in the form of something called an animatic.

It's got all of the dialogue in place.

Meanwhile, the pictures on screen are rough black and white sketches of what will happen in the scene.

But while the animatic may look simple, it's in that first stage where you get all the performances, you get the timings, and you communicate the story.

So a lot of effort is put into getting that stage right, and then everything flows on from there.

Once he gets the animatic, Dan notes down every moment that needs a sound.

If something moves, you can tell that it's been very specifically done by the animators.

So any kind of movement I track a sound to.

Certain sounds are to tell a joke or they're to tell part of the story.

Let's do this.

But lots of incidental things like footsteps, which obviously are very important, but in Bluey they're really important because kids, when they're playing a game and they're running, they are running.

and it's this thunderous sound and it's this calamity of footsteps

but also a standard footstep is kind of heel to toe but dogs are dogs right they've got paws they need to be really quick so i just did a lot of one-shot sounds so it's just a heel sound and that really helps give that staccato speed of someone just running across a room as part of a game.

No,

But these staccato running sounds aren't all the same.

Bandit is a big heavy stomping male adult.

Maybe they went downstairs.

Bingo is a tiny little four-year-old girl.

So we tried lots of things and I think we landed with bingo even tapping on the back of a guitar for that really light pitter patter of wood.

And it's such a subtle thing that most people would never notice, but it really sells the movement in the show and communicates so much that you don't quite notice, but I think you feel as the audience.

She's trying to stop us from getting to Chloe's party.

Great sound design isn't something you're meant to notice.

If it's doing its job right, it just immerses you in the scene.

Joe's point of view is not just what would it sound like, what would it feel like to the kids.

So that was a really important thing that I had to switch gears a little.

And I wanted to keep the realism of the sounds, but you also had to communicate those feelings in the sound without scaring kids.

Like if there's a dad falls over heavily on the stairs,

you want to thunder a sound that's sort of impactful of the dad kind of hurting himself, but at the same time, you don't want the kids freaking out.

And it's those little moments, like in the episode dragon, the big dragon that stomps on at the end.

You want that to sound big and ferocious and huge and scary.

But it's also a kids' picture, so it's got to sound comic.

So while you've got these thunderous footsteps,

you blend in a little toy squeak on each step so that it's suddenly it's kind of oddly comic.

Here it is in the episode.

So there's realism and then there's kids' realism.

It's this fine dance of sort of having these big sounds that also are quite soft in their way.

And particularly, Joe didn't want any really harsh sounding sounds.

So often, everything from an audio gig point of view, everything is sort of rolled off from about sort of 8K onwards.

So you don't get those really bright, sort of hissy, sharp elements to the sounds.

What Dan is talking about is called a low-pass filter.

Essentially, it cuts out the higher frequencies while leaving the lower ones intact.

For example, here's the sound of a gift being unwrapped without any filter.

And here it is with a low-pass filter on it.

If you take that out, it just kind of, particularly in Bluey, it just gave everything a more rounded sound.

What do you think about the sound of Bluey?

Well, some of the sounds are very cool.

There's like

super duper sweet music.

I've heard the music in these shows so many times, but I'll still listen to them and go, my god, that is beautiful music.

After the break, the unforgettable music of Bluey and the episode that I can barely bring myself to watch.

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Since Bluey began, Dan Brum has been the show's main sound designer and mixer.

But another crucial component of the show's sound is its incredible music, which is created by composer Joff Bush.

Anything musical in the show is Joff.

He is just beyond talented.

It was just week by week he was just coming up with these pieces, whether they were kind of reorchestrations of classical pieces or mostly his own compositions.

Of course, one of Joff's most well-known pieces for Bluey is the show's theme song.

During the intro, the characters dance along with the music.

Whenever it stops, they freeze and shout out the name of one of the characters.

These little pauses vary in length, so if you're trying to sing along, it's really hard to get the timing right.

Bingo!

Now, the internet has had a field day trying to figure out if there's an actual pattern to these pauses or if it's just random.

And on a radio show called Uplate with Zack and Dom, composer Joff Bush gave a hint.

3-2-1 Bluey.

That's the design.

I won't give away any more secrets.

It's like the DaVinci code.

Oh, I feel so much pressure because I don't want to stop this up.

But in other interviews, Joff has explained what he means by 3-2-1 Bluey.

Essentially, the first rest before they shout mom is three beats long.

Then, each rest gets one beat shorter than the one before it.

So, by the time you get to bluey, there's no rest at all.

It's not as complicated as it sounds.

Here, I'll show you.

One, two, three, mom!

One, two, dad.

One, bingo.

Bluey!

From the very beginning, Bluey's creator Joe Brum told his brother Dan to be pretty heavy-handed when mixing the music.

Music always had to be loud and as loud as you could kind of get away with.

In one episode, particularly, Shops, it was already loud.

And right at the very end, when the big music comes on at the climax of that episode, I remember Joe just going, push it up even louder.

In the episode, the kids and their friends are trying to play an imaginary pet store game, but Bluey keeps coming up with new ideas and stopping them before they can start playing.

The kids get more and more impatient, and to match that pent-up energy, Joff Bush adapted the classical piece Infernal Gallop, better known as the Can-Can song.

Is anyone gonna stop me?

No,

no, that's not!

Daddy!

Hi!

I'm here to buy a lead for my other kitten.

Certainly, customer, my assistant will get that for you.

And there's been a couple of times I've watched that where I thought, ooh, maybe that was too far.

But the music is so carefully considered and it's so important to telling the story and the emotion of these episodes that to have it just sort of low down in the mix would be a real waste of its power.

The music is just meant to hug you basically for the whole episode and hopefully that's what it does in the mixes.

There's one episode in particular that really shows the links the creators go to finally craft the musical palette.

It features several reimagined classical pieces woven in seamlessly with original music.

The episode is called Sleepy Time.

It barely has any dialogue in it but the story arc is a beautiful metaphor for growing up.

In it, Bluey's little sister Bingo is struggling to sleep through the night in her own bed.

She wants to be a big girl, but she always gets lonely and ends up going to cuddle with her parents.

As Chili puts Bingo to bed, the music is sweet and gentle, like a lullaby.

Hmm, I want to do a big girl sleep tonight.

I'll wake up in my own bed.

You do your best, honey, but remember, I'm always here if you need me.

Okay, three dreams.

Then, Bingo has a dream where she hatches from the Earth like it's an egg and floats through space with her stuffed rabbit.

The music becomes dreamy and ambient with modern electronic tones.

Next, Bingo visits different planets, and the music becomes playful and orchestral.

For this sequence, Jaff adapted three pieces from Gustav Holst's orchestral suite, The Planets.

The three pieces we hear are called Jupiter, the bringer of jollity, Venus, the bringer of peace, and Saturn, the bringer of old age.

So the music that plays as Bingo visits each planet is actually a classical piece named after that same planet.

This is Bingo playing on Jupiter.

You got the impression right from the start that Sleepy Time, it was a layer above again, like everyone was just really working on this episode.

And then eventually I get the music.

And you're already so attached to the story by this point.

At one point while she's sleeping, Bingo loses her blanket and her stuffed rabbit.

Chilly notices Bingo alone in her bed crying, so she goes and lays next to her.

In Bingo's dream, she zooms toward the sun and experiences her mom as the sun itself, bathing her in warmth and light.

The music in this section is a refrain of Holst's Jupiter piece.

Suddenly, I'm hearing that piece of music for the first time

over those visuals of bingo being enveloped by the warmth of a mum.

It was a really beautiful experience.

I have to go.

I'm a big girl now.

Remember, I'll always be here for you.

Even if you can't see me.

Because I love you.

As a father whose kids are growing up faster than I can believe, this episode really gets to me.

Just the credits are like the most emotional credits I can imagine.

It's just the music is huge.

It just grows and grows.

My kids are looking at me like, oh, that's a really good episode, huh?

I'm just like, every time.

I tell, they know.

Dad can't watch Sleepy Time.

It's too much for me.

I love it, though.

Yeah, and even us working on it.

Like, I've seen these episodes a million times, but Sleepy Time, yeah, and Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound and Cricket and Granddad.

I could go on and on, like the episodes that just emotionally affect you, despite how many times you've seen it.

For me, Sleepy Time is the perfect encapsulation of what makes Bluey so special.

The brilliant writing, the vibrant animation, the precise sound design, the gorgeous music.

It all comes together to take me on this nine-minute emotional journey that's just as powerful as some of the best films I've ever seen.

Crafting something like that takes a ton of passion and a ton of hard work.

There's nothing that's appeared in this show that was just a throwaway thing or just, oh, that'll do.

Every single element of this show, whether it's animatic, recordings, sound design music, every single element is just poured over.

One of the elements that gets poured over is the show's incredible voice acting.

Bluey features some truly stellar performances from both the adult actors and the kids.

And just like the crew of Bluey, the cast is a tight-knit family, often literally.

And then I saw a script which was Horsey Ride come across my desk and I thought, great.

I think that character might be written for me.

That's coming up.

Next time.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of De Facto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Nicholas Harter and Casey Emmerling with help from Grace East.

It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Jade Dickey.

A huge thanks to sound designer Dan Brom.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.