Since its debut in 2018, Bluey has become one of the most popular and beloved TV shows of all time. In this episode, Bluey’s sound designer and mixer Dan Brumm walks us through how the show began, the unique challenges of season one, and the lengths he goes to give the show its organic sound. Plus, Dallas reveals the secret timing of the Bluey theme song.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Speedy the Spider - The Limbo Twist
Stationary Sign - Paint by Numbers
Trabant 33 - Bird Songs
Ruiqi Zhao - Getaway
John Utah - Obvious Trent
Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen - Ventus
Moss Harman - Buffoon
Josef Falkensköld - Crayons
Alexandra Woodward - Family Life
Josef Bel Habib - Next To Our House
Alexandra Woodward - First Wives Club
Anna Dager - Visions
Ruiqi Zhao - No More Sadness

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.

[music in: Speedy the Spider - The Limbo Twist]

As the father of three young daughters, I end up watching a lot of kids shows. Now, some of these shows are clearly just meant to appeal to kids. But there's one kids show that I like just as much as my girls do... if not more. This show has made me laugh out loud and sob uncontrollably more times than I can count. It's an animated series from down under called...

[music in: Stationary Sign - Paint by Numbers]

Can you tell me what Bluey is about?

The Girls: It's about a family of dogs living together in Australia.

That's my eleven year old.

The Girls: Kind of like an ordinary slash not ordinary family? Who like go on big adventures… except not too big.

My oldest daughter is now a few years older than the kids in Bluey, but she still loves the show. As does my eight year old...

The Girls: My favorite character is Muffin, because she's crazy like me.

[laughs]

Crazy like you?

And there's the youngest, my four year old.

The Girls: I like it because I watched Bluey when I was born.

[music in: Trabant 33 - Bird Songs]

My family and I discovered Bluey about four years ago, and we've been obsessed with it ever since. If you're a parent of a younger child, you probably know this show too. Since its debut in 2018, Bluey has been broadcast in a hundred and sixty countries, and dubbed into twenty different languages. In 2023, it was the second most streamed show in the US. And over on IMDB, it’s the 14th highest rated TV show of all time.

The show is about two dog parents, named Bandit and Chili, and their kids, Bluey and Bingo. The episodes are usually only seven minutes long, and the stories typically center around the imaginary games the kids invent. There’s often a small moral or message, but it's never really heavy-handed.

[music out into clip: Bluey - Ragdoll]

Bandit: Great works are performed not by great strength, but by perseverance.

Bluey: Hang on, are you trying to teach us something?

Bandit: One must persevere…

Bingo: Aww, he is!

For me, I love how Bluey shows a version of parenthood that's sweet, but also very realistic. Bandit and Chili often have bags under their eyes as they try to keep up with their kids’ endless games.

[clip: Bluey - Yoga Ball]

Bluey: Can we play delivery chair?

Bandit: No.

Bingo: Awww please…

Bandit: Aww, don’t use your Please Face! … Oh, alright.

Bluey: Yeah, Bingo, delivery chair!

Bandit: The “Please Face” gets me every time…

[music in: Ruiqi Zhao - Getaway]

Dan Brumm: Parenting is a very unique adventure.

That’s Bluey’s sound designer and mixer, Dan Brumm.

Dan Brumm: It's tough, and it's really emotional, and you love these kids, but you also… sometimes you're a bit tired, and the games are crazy and the adventures are wild, and that's just represented so sincerely on screen.

Dan also happens to be the brother of Bluey’s creator and main writer, Joe Brumm.

Dan Brumm: A lot of the games were straight out of games my brother created to play with his kids. He came back to Brisbane and started a family, and he had young kids, and he realized just the absurd games that you play with these young kids to keep them entertained and to have fun with them.

Dan Brumm: And so he thought that that would make a great kids show. And, you know, he was obviously right.

But of course, it takes more just than a great idea to get a show off the ground.

[music in: John Utah - Obvious Trent]

Dan Brumm: This all started off as a fairly guerrilla operation. Small production company, ragtag new animators, a lot of them were straight out of university. And it was very low budget, because it was such an untested, unproven show. So low budget that I was the only sound person involved.

That means one person to gather all the sound, carefully craft it for each episode, and then mix it in with dialogue and music. On top of all that, Dan’s also a parent of young kids himself. Let’s just say it was a lot to juggle.

Dan Brumm: Looking back now, it’s crazy. There should have been a team of me, because it was such a hectic schedule, there was 52 episodes in that first season. One per week for sound design, music mix and final mix and corrections.

With that kind of time crunch, you might think that Dan relied on a lot of pre-recorded sounds. But he actually took the opposite approach..

Dan Brumm: I tried to record my own sounds, because I wanted this show to feel original, and I wanted it to feel natural and warm and organic, so that on one hand you've got a stylized picture, and the second hand you've got realistic audio.

Dan still remembers when he first saw the show's animation.

Dan Brumm: It's so beautiful. The art is so amazing, and they've represented my city so well.

[Brisbane city ambiance in]

Bluey is set in Brisbane, where Dan and Joe grew up.

Dan Brumm: So I feel this duty to embellish that with as beautiful an audio background as I can. So I, in the early days, I would go around my city and my suburb recording all the different atmospheres, like the nice bird sounds…

[sfx: bird ambiance]

Dan Brumm: …And I would work those into the backgrounds of the show.

[clip: Bluey - Bike]

Bandit: You sure you don’t want some help?

Bluey: No!

The sounds of Brisbane are so important that even when the characters are inside, you can often hear birds chirping and bugs buzzing in the background.

[clip: Bluey - The Weekend]

Bingo: Daddy you didn’t come and see the walking leaf.

Bandit: Aw, I’m sorry. I didn't hear you.

Bingo: That’s okay.

What is your favorite sound from Bluey?

The Girls: Ummm, just like the nature sounds.

The nature sounds?

Dan Brumm: In regards to the nature sounds, that's a really big thing for me. Because Brisbane is such a beautiful sounding city, and it doesn't sound like any other city, ‘cause we've got this wild array of unique Australian birds. Including the kookaburras…

[kookaburra recording]

Dan Brumm: And our crows and magpies. [sfx: Magpies]

Dan Brumm: There's this one bird called a cockatoo, which is this beautiful white kind of parrot, with these yellow, it's like a yellow mohawk. But the sound they make is the most prehistoric dinosaur-like screech, like, "Mraaaw!"

[cockatoo recording]

Dan Brumm: If you can't see one on screen, it's a really terrifying sound to be in a kid's show.

[clip: Bluey - Featherwand]

[Creek Ambiance in]

The kids in Bluey also like to play in the creek by their house.

Dan Brumm: And I've recorded a lot of the creeks around my place.

[Creek Ambiance Under]

Dan Brumm: Like in the episode Creek, that's me down splashing in my local creek.

[clip: Bluey - Creek]

Bandit: Ah, it still looks the same.

Bluey: So, what are we supposed to play?

Bandit: Uhh, dunno it’s just a creek. You just sort of muck around. Ah yeah!

Dan Brumm: And in Grandad, that was all the local creek here.

[clip: Bluey - Grandad]

Bingo: Do you want me to do it grandad?

Bluey: Okay. My thumbs flare up a bit these days.

Bingo: Is that why mum wants you to rest? So your thumbs get better?

Grandad: Yeah, probably.

[Creek Ambiance resumes]

Dan Brumm: It's the most calming sound and it's so beautiful. I love the idea that people from around the world just fall in love with how Brisbane sounds.

[Creek Ambiance Up, then Out]

But achieving that level of detail wasn't easy.

[music in: Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen - Ventus]

Dan Brumm: The first few episodes, that was, uh, hard time in my life. Everyone was trying to figure out what the sound of the show would be. I was given a lot of free reign to take it in a certain direction. But then it wasn't quite how my brother was hearing it in his head. And he has a really phenomenal grasp on sound for animation. And sometimes it's a hard thing to describe how you want something to sound, ‘cause it's such an emotional, feeling-based thing. So that led to, yeah, a few, um, terse arguments and fairly stressful situations of these deadlines.

Dan Brumm: And it was, you know, 10 hours in the studio of just trying ideas that were, some were getting across and some weren't. And then it was going home and trolling my neighborhood and local schools for different sounds that I could record to use the next day, then coming home and sort of editing them. All the while I've got a four year old and a two year old.

Dan Brumm: And then you'd go to sleep, but you're just thinking about this show. I was probably sleeping about two hours a day in those first few weeks just out of sheer stress, and it actually weirdly led to alopecia in this weird spot on my neck and my head where I noticed these bald spots from stress. So I kind of grew my hair long for season one and grew a beard to kind of hopefully mask all of those. And yeah, that's… season one was hard.

Imagine this sleep-deprived, haggard-looking man wandering around parks and playgrounds with a strange electronic device in his hand. Suffice to say, he landed himself in some pretty hairy situations.

Dan Brumm: There's an episode Kids, which is in a supermarket and Bluey and Bingo are like ramming a shopping trolley into an aisle.

[clip: Bluey - Kids]

Dan Brumm: There really is only one way you can capture that sound, is to go to a supermarket and a ram trolley into an aisle. So I did, I went down with my microphone, and I found like an empty-ish aisle, and I just was ramming this trolley into the aisle while recording it.

[clip: Bluey - Kids]

Dan Brumm: …trying to just get the sounds as quickly as possible before management came and asked me what I was doing.

[music in: Moss Harman - Buffoon]

Now that Bluey's an international phenomenon, Dan could probably tell the employees that he's recording sounds for the show, and the manager would ram carts into the shelves for him.

Dan Brumm: But back then, you just kind of looked like a bit of a crazy person. All the scenes at playgrounds where the kids are going down slides or playing on the monkey bars, I go to playgrounds and I record the slides, and you know, often I actually have to go down a slide myself with the microphone, which is pretty awkward and weird as a 40 year old at a playground. But you have to get those sounds right because kids play in playgrounds, and they're so intimately familiar with how the slides sound.

[music out into clip: Blue - Bob Bilby]

Dan Brumm: There's, there's another time, for “Shadowlands,” there's a scene where a council bus goes past.

[clip: Bluey - Shadowlands]

Dan Brumm: So I wanted that sound of a Brisbane council bus driving past. And I was driving home from the studio one day, and I noticed that there was a bus driving alongside me. [sfx] I went, "Oh, great!" So I wound down the window [window rolls down] and put my mic out and started recording, and the bus just slammed on the brakes really suddenly. [bus screeches to a stop]

Dan Brumm: And I went, "Wow, what was, why did that happen?" Then I realized that my mic is on a pistol grip, and it's a long shotgun microphone. So it literally looked like I was pointing a gun out the window at this bus driver who's just freaked out, and slammed on the brakes.

Dan Brumm: So yeah, I was sort of a little bit more careful with where I waved that thing around in the future episodes.

[music in: Josef Falkensköld - Crayons]

Dan would take these recordings back to the studio, and then start cutting them into the scenes. It was an exhausting process, but the whole crew was in the same boat.

Dan Brumm: This whole show was in its infancy, so everyone was working as hard as they could to figure out what the show would look like and, for me, sound like. But they just loved the show so much that you wanted to. You wanted to pour your heart into this show.

For Dan, a big motivator came from the work that the animators did.

Dan Brumm: It's just so precisely animated the beat of a joke or the beat of a certain sequence. And then if I could sync up the sounds and punctuate those different beats, it suddenly just brought it all to life.

Eventually, Dan started to find that rhythm. A good example is an episode called Magic Xylophone. There are lots of great little sound design moments in it, like when Bingo finds the magic xylophone in the toy chest.

[clip: Bluey - Magic Xylophone]

Bingo: (Gasp) Bluey! Look!

Or later in the episode, when Bingo cinches up the hose so that their dad can't spray Bluey with it.

[clip: Bluey - Magic Xylophone]

Bandit: Oh! Yeah! … Huh?

Dan Brumm: Magic Xylophone was the first real episode, I think, where I was really happy with how the sound communicated with the episode.

If you watch Bluey in order, Magic Xylophone is listed as the first episode, but it was actually the fifth one they made.

Dan Brumm: The previous four, I think ended up in really good places as well. But from sort of five on, we'd basically landed on what the sound of the show was, and I started sleeping a little more after that.

[music in: Alexandra Woodward - Family Life]

Good sound design is like a conversation between audio and picture. And for Bluey, that conversation starts before the animation is even complete.

When Dan first sees an episode, it's in the form of something called an animatic. It's got all of the dialog in place. Meanwhile, the pictures on screen are rough black and white sketches of what will happen in the scene. But while the animatic may look simple...

Dan Brumm: It's in that first stage where you get all the performances, you get the timings, and you communicate the story. So a lot of effort is put into getting that stage right, and then everything flows on from there.

Once he gets the animatic, Dan notes down every moment that needs a sound.

Dan Brumm: If something moves, you can tell that it's been very specifically done by the animators. So any kind of movement, I track a sound to.

Dan Brumm: Certain sounds are to tell a joke or they're to tell part of the story.

[clip: Bluey - Duck cake]

Bandit: Let’s do this! Woah!

Bingo: (Laughs)

Dan Brumm: But lots of incidental things like footsteps, which obviously are very important, but in Bluey they're really important because kids, when they're playing a game, and they're running, they are running.

[clip: Bluey - Magic Xylophone]

Bingo: Back Inside!

Bandit: Bingo! Bluey! Come back here!

Dan Brumm: And it's this thunderous sound, and it's this calamity of footsteps.

[clip: Bluey - Keepy Uppy]

Bluey: Dad! Mine! Mine!

Dan Brumm: But also, a standard footstep is kind of heel to toe. [sfx: normal footstep]

Dan Brumm: But dogs are dogs, right? They've got paws. And they needed to be really quick, so I just did a lot of one shot sounds. So it's just… [sfx: Bluey-like heel sound] a heel sound. And that really helps give that staccato speed of someone just running across a room as part of a game.

[clip: Bluey - Keepy Uppy]

Bluey: No! No! No! Quick! Quick! … Ah mom! You're making it harder!

But these staccato running sounds aren't all the same.

[Bandit walking isolated]

Dan Brumm: Bandit is a big, heavy, stomping male adult.

[clip: Bluey - Magic Xylophone]

Bandit: Ah, maybe they went downstairs.

Dan Brumm: Bingo is a tiny little four year old girl. So we tried lots of things and I think we landed with Bingo even tapping on the back of a guitar for that really light pitter patter of wood.

[Bingo running isolated]

Dan Brumm: And it's such a subtle thing that most people would never notice. But it really sells the movement in the show, and communicates so much that you don't quite notice, but I think you feel as the audience.

[clip: Bluey - Featherweight]

Bingo: (Laughs)

Bluey: She trying to stop us from getting to Chloe’s party.

Great sound design isn’t something you’re meant to notice. If it’s doing its job right, it just immerses you in the scene.

Dan Brumm: Joe's point of view is not just, “What would it sound like?” “What would it feel like to the kids?” So that was a really important thing that I had to switch gears a little. And I wanted to keep the realism of the sounds, but you also had to communicate those feelings in the sound without scaring kids, like if there's a “Dad falls over heavily on the stairs…”

[clips: Bluey - Ragdoll]

Dan Brumm: ... you want a thunderous sound that's sort of impactful of the dad kind of hurting himself, but at the same time, you don't want the kids freaking out.

[clip: Bluey - Ragdoll]

Dan Brumm: And it's those little moments, like in the episode “Dragon,” the big dragon that stomps on at the end, you want that to sound big and ferocious and huge and scary. But it's also a kid's picture, so it's got to sound comic. So, while you've got these thunderous footsteps...

[Dragon footsteps]

Dan Brumm: …you blend in a little toy squeak on each step, so that it's suddenly it's kind of oddly comic.

[Dragon footsteps w/ squeak]

Here it is in the episode.

[clip: Bluey - Dragon]

Bingo: (gasp) I see its eyes!

Bluey: Here it comes…

Dan Brumm: So there's realism, and then there's kid's realism. It’s this fine dance of sort of having these big sounds that also are quite soft in their way.

Dan Brumm: And particularly Joe didn't want any really harsh sounding sounds. So often, everything, from a audio geek point of view, everything is sort of rolled off from about sort of 8K onwards, so you don't get those really bright sort of hissy sharp elements to the sounds.

What Dan is talking about is called a "low pass filter." Essentially, it cuts out the higher frequencies, while leaving the lower ones intact. For example, here's the sound of a gift being unwrapped, without any filter.

[sfx: gift unwrapping]

And here it is with a low pass filter on it.

[sfx: gift unwrapping with 8kHz low pass filter]

Dan Brumm: If you take that out, it just kind of, particularly in Bluey, it just gave everything a more rounded sound.

[clip: Bluey - Bingo]

Bluey: See ya mum, see ya Bingo!

Bingo & Chili: See ya! Have Fun!

[music in: Josef Bel Habib - Next To Our House]

What do you think about the sound of Bluey?

The Girls: Well, some of the sounds are very cool. There's like super duper sweet music.

Dan Brumm: I've heard the music in these shows so many times, but I'll still listen to them and go, "My God, that is beautiful music."

After the break, the unforgettable music of Bluey, and the episode that I can barely bring myself to watch.

MIDROLL

[music in: Josef Bel Habib - Next To Our House]

Since Bluey began, Dan Brumm has been the show's main sound designer and mixer. But another crucial component of the show's sound is its incredible music, which is created by composer Joff Bush.

Dan Brumm: Anything musical in the show is Joff. He is just beyond talented. It was just week by week, he was just coming up with these pieces, whether they were kind of re-orchestrations of classical pieces or mostly his own compositions.

Of course, one of Joff's most well known pieces for Bluey is the show's theme song.

[clip: Bluey Theme]

During the intro, the characters dance along with the music.

[clip: Bluey Theme]

Whenever it stops, they freeze, and shout the name of one of the characters.

[clip: Bluey Theme]

These little pauses vary in length, so if you’re trying to sing along, it's really hard to get the timing right.

[clip: Bluey Theme]

Now, the internet has had a field day trying to figure out if there's an actual pattern to these pauses, or if it's just random. And on a radio show called Up Late with Zach & Dom, composer Joff Bush gave a hint…

Joff Bush: Three, two, one, Bluey. That’s the design. I won’t give away any more secrets. It’s like the DaVinci Code…

But in other interviews, Joff has explained what he means by "3-2-1-Bluey." Essentially, the first rest before they shout “Mom” is three beats long. Then, each rest gets one beat shorter than the one before it, so by the time you get to “Bluey,” there's no rest at all.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Here, I’ll show you.

[Full Bluey Theme with beat counts]

One, two, three, Mom!

One, two, Dad!

One, Bingo!

Bluey!

[music in: Alexandra Woodward - First Wives Club]

From the very beginning, Bluey's creator Joe Brumm told his brother Dan to be pretty heavy handed when mixing the music.

Dan Brumm: Music always had to be loud, and as loud as you could kind of get away with. In one episode particularly, “Shops,” it was already loud, and right at the very end when the big music comes on at the climax of that episode, I remember Joe just going, "Eh, push it up even louder."

In the episode, the kids and their friends are trying to play an imaginary pet store game. But Bluey keeps coming up with new ideas, and stopping them before they can start playing. The kids get more and more impatient, and to match that pent up energy, Joff Bush adapted the classical piece “Infernal Galop,” better known as the Can Can song.

[music out into clip: Bluey - Shops]

Mackenzie: Is anyone gonna stop me? … No? No?

Bluey: Just start!

Mackenzie: Da-Ding! Hi, I’m here to buy a lead for my other kitten.

Chloe: Certainly, customer! My assistant will get that for you.

Dan Brumm: And there's been a couple of times I've watched that where I thought, "Ooh, maybe that was too far." But the music is so carefully considered, and it's so important to telling the story, and the emotion of these episodes, that to have it just sort of low-down in the mix would be a real waste of its power. The music is just meant to hug you basically for the whole episode, and hopefully that's what it does in the mixes.

[music in: Anna Dager - Visions]

There’s one episode in particular that really shows the lengths the creators go to to finely craft the musical palette. It features several reimagined classical pieces, woven in seamlessly with original music.

The episode is called Sleepytime. It barely has any dialog in it, but the story arc is a beautiful metaphor for growing up. In it, Bluey's little sister Bingo is struggling to sleep through the night in her own bed. She wants to be a big girl, but she always gets lonely and ends up going to cuddle with her parents.

As Chili puts Bingo to bed, the music is sweet and gentle, like a lullaby.

[Sleepytime in]

Bingo: Mum? I want to do a big girl sleep tonight, and wake up in my own bed.

Chili: You do your best honey. But remember, I’m always here if you need me

Bingo: Ok.

Chili: Sweet dreams…

Then, Bingo has a dream where she hatches from the earth like it's an egg, and floats through space with her stuffed rabbit.

The music becomes dreamy and ambient, with modern, electronic tones.

Next, Bingo visits different planets, and the music becomes playful and orchestral.

For this sequence, Joff adapted three pieces from Gustov Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets. The three pieces we hear are called Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, Venus, the Bringer of Peace, and Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. So the music that plays as Bingo visits each planet is actually a classical piece named after that same planet. This is Bingo playing on Jupiter.

Dan Brumm: You got the impression right from the start that “Sleepytime,” it was a layer above, again, like everyone was just really working on this episode. And then eventually I get the music. And you're already so attached to the story by this point.

At one point while she's sleeping, Bingo loses her blanket and her stuffed rabbit. Chilli notices Bingo alone in her bed crying, so she goes and lays next to her. In Bingo's dream, she zooms toward the sun, and experiences her mom as the sun itself, bathing her in warmth and light. The music in this section is a refrain of Holst's Jupiter piece.

Dan Brumm: Suddenly, I'm hearing that piece of music for the first time over those visuals of Bingo being enveloped by the warmth of her mum. It was a really beautiful experience.

Bingo: I have to go… I’m a big girl now.

Chili: Remember I'll always be here for you, even if you can't see me … because I love you.

As a father whose kids are growing up faster than I can believe, this episode really gets to me.

Just the credits are like the most emotional credits I can imagine. It's just, the music is huge, it just grows and grows, my kids are looking at me like, “Oh, that's a really good episode, huh?” I'm just like, everytime. I tell—they, they know, “Dad can't watch Sleepytime.” It's too much for me. I love it, though.

Dan Brumm: Yeah, and even us working on it, like, I've seen these episodes a million times, but Sleepytime, yeah, and Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound, and Cricket, and Grandad, ugh, I could go on and on, like, the episodes that just emotionally affect you, despite how many times you've seen it.

[music in: Ruiqi Zhao - No More Sadness]

For me, Sleepytime is the perfect encapsulation of what makes Bluey so special. The brilliant writing, the vibrant animation, the precise sound design, the gorgeous music... It all comes together to take me on this nine minute emotional journey that's just as powerful as some of the best films I've ever seen. Crafting something like that takes a ton of passion, and a ton of hard work.

Dan Brumm: There's nothing that's appeared in this show that was just a throwaway thing or just, "Ah, that'll do." Every single element of this show, whether it's animatic, recordings, sound design, music, every single element is just poured over.

One of the elements that gets poured over is the show's incredible voice acting. Bluey features some truly stellar performances, from both the adult actors, and the kids. And just like the crew of Bluey, the cast is a tight-knit family... often literally.

Dan Brumm: And then I saw a script which was Horsey Ride come across my desk and I thought, "Great. I think that character might be written for me.”

That's coming up, next time.

[music in: Speedy the Spider - The Limbo Twist]

The Girls: Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear more at defacto sound dot com.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Nikolas Harter, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Jade Dickey.

The Girls: A huge thanks to sound designer Dan Brumm.

I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.