Wilmington, North Carolina (September 17, 2025)—Dozens of movies and TV shows have tried to capture the trials and tribulations of rock bands, from the big breaks and hard luck moments to the adrenaline rush of bringing down the house. The key to making them work is to capture a sense of authenticity—yes, they need good actors and musicians, the right songs, a solid script and all the rest, but above all, they need to feel “real” to the audience. And sometimes real can be elusive.
The new Amazon Prime scripted drama The Runarounds follows an up-and-coming young band’s journey, and the show strives to achieve that sense of authenticity. The story is fictional, but the band is real—and so is each musical performance in the series, recorded live every time. That level of commitment gives the show an added truthfulness, but it also means that during production, engineer Scott Steiner had his hands full, riding herd over an audio system that had to straddle the line between live sound and post-ready recording.
“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; 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.”
Take, for instance, a gig scene shot inside a brick-walled warehouse turned makeshift club, where The Runarounds played take after take for a room full of extras. Capturing the music, the crowd, dialogue and more, Steiner looked after a Yamaha DM7 console that served as the audio 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.”
Live performances—even ones shot for TV—often hinge on the crowd’s enthusiasm, and to ensure the extras were kept in the vibe, Steiner rolled out a pair of Yamaha DHR15s to cover the crowd. 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 DHR15s filled the space beautifully,” Steiner reports. “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. “We didn’t have room for big wedges,” 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.”
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The post-production pipeline mirrored the hybrid spirit of the set. Steiner tracked performances with classic micpres 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, he could just open ’em up, we agreed on plug-in lists and such, Jason could add his thing and then send the entire session back to me,” Steiner explains. Final mixes were delivered in stereo to re-recording mixer Andy D’Addario to mix with dialogue, effects and more, 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.
