We've been watching empty-ballpark baseball for a couple of weeks, and getting used to the sights and sounds of the game being played without fans. The sights are something we may never get used to: Empty or advertising-covered sections of seats, jumbo cutouts of fans and former players and pets, announcers doing their best to keep up with the game despite working from home when their teams are on the road.
Among the challenges has been making baseball sound as normal as possible. That's where Chris Tveitbakk is a big-time player.
Tveitbakk is the audio engineer who brings the noise from Target Field when the Twins are playing, working amid the ballpark sounds real and artificial to make something that sounds as interesting as it would be – and more so, sometimes – if the ballpark was filled with fans.
A few days ago, the Thief River Falls native answered questions about what it's like to bring baseball to fans under circumstances he couldn't have imagined.
Give us the short biography about Chris Tveitbakk:
I've been working in sports television since 1997, with my first mixing job at Gopher Women's Basketball in 2002, and I started mixing the Twins in 2004. When I work Twins games, I work directly for Fox Sports North, and also mix the Timberwolves, Wild, and Gopher hockey. I'm the Union President of IATSE Local 745, which is the same union that covers Hollywood films and Broadway stage shows, and we have a contract with FSN, which pays into our union health and retirement accounts. A majority of us have been out of work since early March and there are still a lot of us who are unemployed. Fortunately, our union has covered the last two quarters of health insurance, and I'm hopeful that more of us get back to work soon. It's been a tough time for us.
Where do you work from during games? Are you choosing sounds or is that being done by someone else? How big is the sound crew? Is that larger or smaller than for a pre-COVID game?
When I'm mixing a game, I'm following the action, creating the field effects, opening up microphones behind home plate when the batter is up, and if there's a hit, I open up the microphone closest to where the ball goes. We have parabolic mics pointed at home plate), mics pointed at first and third base, along the outfield wall, and even in the bullpen so you can hear the pitchers warming up. (The parabolic mics are hidden inside the "TC" logo boxes against the backstop). During usual times, we also have a few crowd microphones so you can sense at home how the crowd is reacting to the action.