Capturing the Sound of The Runarounds: Behind the Scenes with Audio and Recording Engineer Scott Steiner

Find out what it takes to make a television show sonically feel like a live club performance. As a seasoned audio production engineer for film, Scott Steiner talks about the good kind of chaos on the set and balancing sound between scripted dialogue and capturing real performances on a sound stage.

It’s just past 7 a.m. in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the set of The Runarounds is already humming with energy. Inside a brick-walled warehouse turned makeshift club, extras sip coffee, cameras glide on tracks, and a band of guitar-strapped young actors tunes up under stage lights. Cables snake across the floor, lighting rigs buzz overhead —and just off-stage, tucked behind a curtain of black duvetyn, audio and recording engineer Scott Steiner is deep in concentration at his rolling cart, earbuds in, fingers flying across a console.

This isn’t your typical television shoot—it sounds more like a soundcheck at a buzzing live club.

Unlike most music-driven narratives, where actors lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks, The Runarounds made a bold choice: record every musical performance live, on set, as the cameras roll. No miming, no overdubs—every guitar strum, drum hit, and vocal captured in real time, just like a real gig. The Amazon Prime series, about high school graduates chasing their musical dreams, blurs the line between scripted drama and actual performance.

From day one, Steiner knew this was going to be different. “Jonas's (Jonas Pate, Director) whole goal was to record everything live, and that's what we did. We literally recorded every take in multi-track format,” he says. “We weren’t just shooting a show,” he adds. “We were staging a live concert—again and again, under tight time windows and shifting camera angles. It was controlled chaos, but the kind I live for.”

To manage that chaos, Steiner built a rig that was powerful, mobile, and simple to operate under pressure. At its heart were Yamaha’s DHR Series speakers, especially the DHR12M monitors. Compact but punchy, they became the cornerstone of on-set monitoring, delivering clarity and consistency in a constantly shifting production environment. “It was chaos in the best way,” Steiner grins. “You’ve got a Steadicam flying around, actors giving dialogue, a live band playing—and I’m capturing all of it as we go.”

To bring the music to life, Scott recorded the performances with engineer Brandon Hackler, whose technical precision and creative instincts shaped the show’s raw, unfiltered sound. Their collaboration ensured every take had the energy of a real gig, adding authenticity and elevating the emotional impact of each scene.

“We didn’t have room for big wedges (the industry term for angled floor speakers),” he explains, gesturing toward a DHR12M now scuffed from fast resets and location changes. “These gave us tight, focused sound without cluttering the stage or interfering with shots. They just worked—every single time.”

In episode eight’s club scene, where the band plays to a crowd of extras under strobing lights, Steiner rolled out a pair of DHR15M’s to handle front-of-house duties. With no subs or outboard amps, they were stacked in stereo on either side of the stage and fed directly from the Yamaha DM7 console.

“The DHR15Ms filled the space beautifully,” Steiner says. “We were trying to recreate the energy of a real club with very little setup time—and they made that possible.”

On tighter scenes, he would deploy DHR12Ms for foldback or rehearsal playback. Their onboard DSP let him tweak EQ and volume in seconds—a godsend when switching between setups on a tight shooting schedule. “Any of us could quickly make the changes we needed. These speakers were flexible, rugged, and sounded fantastic.”

The DM7 console served as the nerve center, routing multitrack live mixes, playback stems, and monitoring sends across several Dante-enabled zones. “I needed a console that could do it all—track live, feed playback, handle IEMs, and prep audio for post,” Steiner says.

“The DM7 gave me that flexibility without overcomplicating the workflow.” Backstage, the vibe was part tour van, part recording studio. Cots were tucked in corners; road cases doubled as tables. But the second someone called “rolling,” the crew snapped into gear—and the gear never missed a beat.

“We were all holding it together with coffee and adrenaline, but the Yamaha system never blinked. That kind of reliability? You can’t put a price on it.”

The post-production pipeline mirrored the hybrid spirit of the set. Steiner tracked performances with classic mic pres to Pro Tools and then collaborated with mixer Jason LaRocca using Audio Movers for remote collaboration. “We developed a workflow where I could send him multi-track edited and pre-mixed sessions in Pro Tools and he could just open 'em up and we agreed on plugin lists and such. And then Jason could add his thing and then send the entire session back to me,” Steiner explains. Final mixes were delivered in stereo to Andy D'Addario to mix with dialog, FX, etc. and then upmixed to 5.1 for cinematic effect." The result: a show that doesn’t just look like live music—it feels like it.

Throughout production, Yamaha’s support was a constant. “They didn’t just drop off gear—they were partners,” Steiner says. “Every question, every curveball, they were there to help us figure it out.”

As the final chords of a scene echo through the makeshift venue and the director calls “cut,” there’s a beat of silence—then a collective exhale. The actors are sweaty, the band is grinning, and Steiner already knows they nailed it.

For a moment, The Runarounds wasn’t a scripted series—it was a real show, with real energy, captured in real time. And thanks to Yamaha, it sounded like one too.