Brad Colbroock

Brad Colbroock is a SoCal podcaster who does sound editing, voice acting and writing. They began working on Sector Ø before stumbling into far too many other projects. They are currently helping to produce upcoming shows for Parazonium Podcasts and The Shadow Network in addition to writing a sci-fi romance with just a hint of horror.

When not working with microphones, Brad can be found helping in horticulture labs.

Voice Credits

Lead Roles

The Haunted Hell House of Horror
Alan Armstrong

APN's Scary Stories
Victim-Maurice
Hunter

Christmas Buffet Roulette
Nicholas

In Transit
Ziggy

Hubris Round One
Just Wait For Dawn
Rain

• Shellshocked

Remy Dubois

Supporting Roles

• Sector Ø

Carl - Spafaman - Hammakaplu

• Novitero

Medic

• Sticks Shift Incorporated

Coby

The Way We Haunt Now
Cas Bromley

The Paracelsus Effect
Ensemble

Charlie Cradle's Wonderful Existence
Tom

If Leeches Ate Peaches
Leech Choir

DNA 404
Kyros

Guest Roles

Sidequesting
Fig

The Shadow
Tommy Borden

Deep Blue Stars
The Speaker

Wizard Seeking Wizard
Idrubov The Meek

Occulting (3)15
Terrence

Life With LEO(h)
Cesar

Where The Stars Fell
McKenzie

Cameo Appearences

Sound Credits

Sector Ø

Science Fiction
2 Seasons, 28 episodes - Sound Designer
After being kidnapped by a mysterious agency outside of space and time, Leland Huxley is shuffled around realities with a dinosaur partner and a creeping sense of dread. With no hope of getting home and increasingly dangerous assignments, he must figure out the truth about his new employer before it kills him.

In The Beginning
A feature length prequel to Sector Ø - Sound Designer

The Donut Monologues
Ongoing bonus episodes - Sound Editor

Someone Dies In This Elevator

Anthology

Season 1 Trailer

Sound Designer

A spoiler driven anthology series, where there is always an elevator and someone always dies in it - but everything else is different.

Teaser Episode

Sound Editor

A Historian enters the Elevator of the HMR Spaceship Marigold, but be warned. Someone Dies In This Elevator of the Series Trailer.

The Board Meeting

Sound Editor

Drastic measures are taken to avoid a stressful presentation.

Pinnacle of Passion

Sound Designer

Have you ever had a bad date and just thought: “Ugh, kill me now?” Pinnacle of Passion Dating Service is here for you!

The Cop, The Clerk, & The Body

Sound Editor

They call it a speakeasy, but some things are too hard to say.

Dining In The Void

Science Fiction
The Jupiter Monologues and Season 2 - Sound Editor
With Tal Minear and Nikko Goldstein

When six alien celebrities are trapped onboard a space station, they will have to work together to survive--or die at the hands of an unknown monster. Welcome to DINING IN THE VOID.

The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen

Fantasy

20 Episodes - Lead Sound Editor

The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen follows a young woman named Aurelie who, after the death of her parents embarks on a quest to learn the truth her family and her identity in the magical world of LaFresia.

Crime Scene Arcanum

Fantasy
3 Episodes - Sound Editor

A procedural crime audio drama with action, mystery, and magic. Follow the investigators as they work to solve the city of Aldren’s most spellbinding crimes.

Hubris

Anthology

Just Wait For Dawn

Sound Designer

Sometimes you think you're alone in the building, working all night, facing a deadline come morning. And then sometimes, the deadline is... surprisingly literal. Four unlikely companions face uncertainty together while the world falls apart around them in the last few minutes before dawn. Not for the faint of heart.

Springs Eternal

Dialogue Editor

Two robots alone in the rubble of humanity; two AIs watching from above, and a healthy dose of 18th century poetry. In the future, hope ... well, you know.

The Real Treasure

Dialogue Editor

While searching for a legendary treasure, a pirate crew has some unexpected guests.

Crown Jewels

Sitcom
Episodes 1-3 - Sound Editor

Rags to riches, riches to rags. Crown Jewels follows Heer, Nazzy, and Bilal Kazan (formerly of the Mirza family, the third richest family in the world) as they navigate life on a literal dime. Everything gets turned upside-down when Altaf, the third richest man in the world and Heer's father, knocks on their door asking for a new life of his own.

Hauntingly Humdrum

Halloween Anthology

Pumpkin, Carving

Sound Editor

A pumpkin gets carved!

The Straw Guardian

Sound Editor

A scarecrow gets up to shenanigans

MARÉMOTO

Drama
Sound Editor

A recreation of the 1924 radio play MARÉMOTO, by Pierre Cusy and Gabriel Germinet, featuring the last transmissions of a doomed ship.

KQMP

ShareVestiga
Research
Sound Editor

An audio summary series that makes complicated medical research easy to understand and available on the go.

At The Tone
Sketch Comedy
Sound Editor

Skruntville's latest News, Sports, Lifestyle, and Traffic updates from KQMP, AM.

What Will Be Here?

Science Fiction
Sound Editor
With Tal Minear, Cole Burkhardt, and Nikko Goldstein

In What Will Be Here?, five friends send a rocket to space with a collection of recordings on it that document the world’s decline, the stories they want to tell, and their efforts in building this rocket to get their message to the stars. They wonder what their world will have become by the time their message is listened to. What will be left of a planet that has destroyed itself? What will be left of the people who lived there? What will become of their stories? What will be here?

The Way We Haunt Now

Drama

Season 2 - Sound Designer

The Way We Haunt Now is a lighthearted horror audio drama about female friendships, found family, and fighting the narratives that try to define us – even in the afterlife. Oh, and ghosts. Did we mention ghosts? It follows dual protagonists, Eulalie Reed and Frankie Summerson, on their crash course toward self-fulfillment and friendship as they struggle to make the most of life and what comes after.

Coming Soon

Crossing Stars

Queer Pride and Prejudice

SPECTRE

Writing

• The Moonlight Inn

Into The Cavern

• The Night of the Clown

Teaser Trailer

• What Will Be Here?

The Board Meeting

Hire Brad for Your Podcast!

Wherever you are in the process of making your podcast, I can help!
Whether you just need scripts looked over to make sure the writing works for audiodrama or you're looking for a full sound editor, my services can make your podcast better.

Sound Design & Foley

Looking for a sound editor for your podcast, or just need a foley artist for a spare sound effect?
Fill out this form!
Or send an email to holographicva@gmail.com with the following details:

*Sound Editing rates will vary depending on the scope of the project.
Foley rates will vary based on the complexity and length of the sound effects.
Payment will be made through Paypal

Script Services

Podcast Consulting

This video has been thrown together for the Fiction Podcast Creator Corner Discord. I’m an audio engineer, not a video editor, so forgive my lack of arrows, graphics, and consistent zoom. Since we’re just looking at quality, I haven’t done any editing and stumble over myself quite a few times.

All files have been normalized to -0db.

When we talk about bad audio there are generally two culprits: Reverb and Frequency Response. I’ve done my best to illustrate both on a couple of mics here. I recommend opening the video in a second window so you can see the spectrograms along with the notes outlined below.

0:00 Zoom H6 In Studio
This is an example of good (or at the very least passable) audio. I don’t usually use the H6 for voice over but it’s a lot more portable than any of my other mics so it works well for this exercise. I’m using the M-S capsule with no side input in a roughly 5’x5’ carpeted closet with three walls covered in blankets, and one wall and the ceiling covered with a mixture of 1 and 2 inch acoustic foam.

There’s very little reverb, meaning an engineer can add as much or as little as they like to fit the space my character is supposed to be in. The frequency response actually goes all the way up to about 35kHz in my recording, but as the human range of hearing is only 20Hz-20kHz I’ve cropped the spectrogram to 22kHz. The important thing is that the frequency response covers the range of human hearing.

0:25 Zoom H6 In Studio (From Behind)
Please talk into the front of your mic. Your mic is most likely a cardiod microphone (more on that here) and has a front. If you talk from the back your mic will pick up the reverb reflecting off the wall in front of it more than your voice. If you look at the spectrogram, you can see a significant reduction in the frequency response over 4kHz. This is considered bad audio.

0:46 Zoom H6 In Studio (4 Foot distance)
Similar problem as above, because I’m so far away the mic picks up more reverb and the higher frequencies aren’t quite making it to the mic as well. It sounds tinny. It’s bad audio.

1:08 Zoom H6 in Bathroom
Don’t record in your bathroom. Please. Your bathtub acts like a giant resonator chamber and tile and big mirrors don’t help. You can really hear the reverb in this recording. It’s bad.

1:31 Zoom H6 in Bathroom With Fan
I turned the fan on. Honestly, only about as bad as the previous recording. Still bad.

1:49 Zoom H6 in Bedroom
Carpeted bedroom with a bed and pretty bare walls. You can still hear some reverb here, but it’s not as bad as the bathroom. This audio could conceivable be used if you were putting a bunch of effects on it (like a robot voice or more reverb) but won’t be ideal for human characters in the same location

2:11 Zoom H6 in Dining Room
This is right in the middle of my apartment with mostly bare walls. Note that because of the larger size, the reverb time is a little longer than the bedroom. This is below par for my standards and would be considered bad audio.

2:31 Zoom H6 in Dryer
Not as bad as you might expect, but it still gives the audio an unworkable reverb like the bathroom and is very tinny. Bad audio.

2:58: Zoom H6 In Dryer From Behind.
Same as above, I turned the mic around so it faces into the dryer and away from my face. The resonant frequencies of the drum are accentuated and the reverb is worse. Bad audio.

3:18 Zoom H6 on Balcony Facing Out
This is outside, and the mic is facing my building. The great thing about recording outdoors is that there’s very little reverb, but there is also background noise. Frankly I’m shocked I didn’t pick up more of the cityscape in this recording. Outdoors isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just incredibly unreliable. My balcony is also covered, so you can hear some reverb. I wouldn’t call this bad audio but it’s definitely at the bottom of the usable barrel.

3:38: Zoom H6 on Balcony Facing In
This time my mic is facing away from my building. While there’s less reverb (there’s nothing behind me to reflect my voice) you can hear the cityscape more clearly. However there’s still enough reverb and background noise that I would consider this bad audio.

3:59 Laptop Mic in Dining Room
“Why do I need a good mic? I have on in my laptop and another one in my webcam!”
The answer is usually a diminished frequency response. Professional and prosumer mics generally have a frequency range of 20hz to 20kHz, same as human hearing (some high end ones may only go as high as 18kHz and many live performance mics top out around 16kHz). My laptop tops out at about 9kHz. There’s also significant reverb, but the telephonic frequency response is what really qualifies this as bad audio.

4:20 Shure 401b in Studio
The frequency response tops out around 6kHz here with a surprise band around 9kHz. This is literally a radio mic and is supposed to have that extreme telephonic sound, but it will stand out like a sore thumb next to a condenser mic in a treated space.

5:01 Smartphone in Studio
This was recorded on a voice recorder app. I was honestly expecting something a little better but apparently not. While this does give a full 20Hz-20Khz frequency response, phones typically have no way to set their gain (or tell you exactly where your mic is) so clipping and plosives abound. The frequency is also very uneven on this device and you can hear some sort of boost in the lower-mid frequencies. Bad audio.

5:20 Smartphone in Bathroom
If you don’t know what reverb sound like by now look (listen?) no further! The phone is really picking up the reverb in this space and would automatically disqualify you from most productions.

5:41 Smartphone in Bedroom
It’s still picking up significant reverb, and I suspect that’s more because of the uneven frequency response moreso than the room. Still very bad audio.

6:04 Smartphone in Dining Room
The reverb is really bad in this one, on top of the clipping issues that you get with not being able to control your gain.

Now let’s talk about export quality!

This is the exact same audio exported at different qualities ranging from a 24 bit wav (its raw recording state) to a 24 kbps MP3. As you can see the lower the quality the more high frequencies are cut out to compress the recording. On most of the mp3’s this isn’t a huge deal until you get below Medium, at which point you can start to hear the frequency cutoff. You should always submit wavs to your engineer, especially if effects are being applied, as they have less of a frequency cutoff and retain a higher number of samples than MP3s.

A quick note on bitrate: 16 bit wavs tend to introduce some high frequency noise (at least in Audacity) that can add up if you are laying 10+ files together.