Jad Abumrad podcast tools: how he builds immersive audio stories

Three pieces of software stand out in his answers. The first is Fantastical, a calendar app. Abumrad admits it is unusual to love a calendar, but he says it turns the most irritating chore he knows, finding a meeting time that works for a crowd of busy people, into something close to fun. For anyone booking interview guests, that is the job that eats the most time.

The second is Granite, a granular synthesis app. Granular synthesis chops a recording into tiny slivers of sound and rebuilds them into new textures, which is how you get shimmering pads and strange, stretched tones from an ordinary clip. Abumrad says he owns far more audio plug-ins than he needs, but Granite is the one he keeps going back to. It is around 15 years old, he calls it very musical, and he used it to score dozens of the original Radiolab pieces.

The third is Alfred, the first app he installs on any new computer. It is a light launcher that replaces Apple’s built-in Spotlight search on the Mac. He compares it to Raycast, a similar tool, minus what he calls the annoying AI features.

Those tools make more sense once you know what Abumrad built. Radiolab began as an experimental public radio show, and Abumrad produced and co-hosted it with Robert Krulwich from 2002 until early 2022. In the first years of podcasting, many shows were simply people chatting around a microphone or radio shows reposted online.

Radiolab went the other way. It built themed episodes around heavily reported stories and wrapped them in original music and cinematic sound effects, and Abumrad often made those sounds and scores himself. That came from his background: he studied creative writing and music composition in college, with a focus on electronic music, and wrote film scores before he moved into radio.

The approach earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, with the foundation praising how he used his composing skills to weave dialogue, music and effects into documentaries about hard subjects. It is also why a 15-year-old sound plug-in still sits at the center of his workflow.

For someone who works in sound, Abumrad is surprisingly fed up with the noises his phone makes. He says he would get rid of every buzz and ding if he could, and he wishes there were a single button to turn his smartphone into a very basic phone, since he only needs the smart parts for a few minutes a day.

His focus routine is simple: two minutes of meditation, then he makes his phone useless for a while. When he is stuck, he sets up gamelan strips (metal bars from the Indonesian percussion tradition) on a table and plays them to reset. He goes out without his phone often, though he admits his Apple Watch probably means that doesn’t fully count.

His browser is equally plain. His pinned tabs are a few news sites, a sports site and his university library’s research page, and he had 14 tabs open on what he called a heavy research day. He used to be active on Twitter, but a change to the login process locked him out and he never bothered to return. Today he uses Instagram now and then, and his favorite corners of the internet are Bandcamp and musician Andrew Huang’s YouTube channel.

Abumrad stepped away from Radiolab in 2022 and handed the show to Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. He has not slowed down. He now teaches at Vanderbilt University as a distinguished professor, and he composes for film, theater and dance.

His biggest recent project is Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a 12-part podcast about the Nigerian musician who helped create Afrobeat. Abumrad drew on more than 200 interviews with Kuti’s friends, family and fans. The series won a Peabody Award and a Webby Award, matching the Peabody he won for Dolly Parton’s America, his nine-episode 2019 series about the country star.

Asked for his favorite gadget ever, he picked a Motorola flip phone from 1997, for the satisfying snap of opening and closing it. His biggest letdown was a Muse brainwave headset. And the last physical media he bought was an original pressing of John Coltrane’s Blue Train, picked up with his son.

The lesson for anyone starting a podcast is less about which apps to buy and more about how he uses them. Abumrad sticks with tools for years. Granite is old software, and he still reaches for it ahead of a long list of newer plug-ins because he knows exactly what it can do.

His choices also cover the boring parts of making audio. A good calendar handles guest booking, a quick launcher stands in for the built-in search, and a phone kept quiet protects the hours needed for editing and writing. None of those habits needs a professional studio.

The best advice he says he ever received came from his longtime work coach, Richard Nodell: that the job is to lead the search rather than to know the destination in advance. For a storyteller, that means starting with a question and letting the reporting, and the sound, show where it goes.