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The Hamilcast: A Hamilton Podcast

#477: Nevin Steinberg // Hamilton Broadway's Sound Designer // Part One

The Hamilcast: A Hamilton Podcast

Gillian Pensavalle

Arts, Performing Arts

4.32K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Award winning sound designer Nevin Steinberg has made it to the pod! Nevin is such a captivating storyteller and everything he talks about is infused with gorgeous detail and a palpable feeling of both awe and gratitude. You know how they say "how can you not be romantic about baseball?" How can you not be romantic about sound design?! That's what I say, anyway.

In his first episode, Nevin walks us through his early career from working all night editing reel to reel tape with nothing but the ghost light and a healthy fear of the shadows (This is so fascinating and cinematic!! He can still taste the metal of the razor! That will make sense when you listen, I promise! I love it so much!) to dinner theatre and Sunset Boulevard and eventually a chance meeting on 42nd Street when he heard about a project called In the Heights. 

Nevin has the most beautiful things to say about his experience working on Hamilton, including how it saved his career and reinstalled his faith in art and the people he gets to make it with. 

Plus, Nevin explains audio details in songs like "Wait For It", "My Shot", "Yorktown", and "Satisfied" including how they changed from the workshops to what you hear on stage today (no matter where you see the show).

The Wrong Man

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, I'm Stage in Stages, Lynn Manuel Miranda, and you're listening to The Hamelcast.

0:05.1

Boots and cuts and boots and cats.

0:07.0

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Hamelcast. I am Gillian, and today, this is so huge. I am here with Nevin Steinberg. Hi Nevin. Hi, Jillian. How you doing? I'm doing so great. It's an honor to sit and chat with you. So thank you so much for taking the time. You're welcome. I always find it slightly awkward when people say it's an honor, but I'm happy to be here. I know I've heard a lot about

0:38.3

you. So I'm excited to finally meet you. Back at you. People say, well, everyone if you don't know, Nevin is the award-winning Broadway sound designer of Hamilton and a ton of other things in the Heights. Freestyle Love Supreme, Sweeney Todd, Hades Town, Avenue Q, dear Evan Hanson, the wrong man, which I have so much to say about.

0:35.4

Productions literally all over the world.

0:37.5

You also serve as the audio consultant for the Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, which is very cool. It is cool. Yeah. It's a great job. It's a great job. The coolest gigs ever. You are absolutely incredible. You're the president of the Town Hall Foundation, which I would love to get into the nonprofit organization. I was lucky enough to play town hall with my other podcast. We did a live

1:15.8

show there. So, which one? True crime obsessed. We recap true crime documentaries. And we were actually

1:20.5

the first podcast to ever play Broadway, too. We had one night on Broadway. Oh my goodness.

1:24.8

So yeah. That's so cool. Anyway, thank you so much for being here.

1:30.4

Everyone who's been on the show, everyone has like the best, nicest, most wonderful things to say about you and your

1:36.6

work and what it's like to work with you. That's very nice. I know you can tell them all I have nice

1:40.8

things to say about them as well. I'm sure. No, that's really sweet to hear. It just sometimes embarrasses me to hear nice things about me. So that may, that may happen. But yes, it's very nice. We're very similar in that way. Yeah. Before we do anything else, though, can I please ask your pronouns? Yeah, it's he, him, his. Great. Thank you. So I always ask people, like,

2:01.6

tell me your life story, tell me your Hamilton story. I'm sure they'll all intersect. But I would

2:06.4

love to hear the beginnings of how you become a Nevin Steinberg. Well, yeah, it's an interesting

2:14.3

story. I was, I came into theater. I'll start with how you become a theater sound designer maybe before. I won't go so far back. But yeah, I became a, I got into theater by way of music. I was a bass player growing up. I was a pretty decent bass player playing in orchestras in my, you know, middle school and high school days.

2:36.9

And by playing with orchestras, I became a good reader of music.

2:42.2

And when I wanted to play in rock bands, I got about myself an electric bass and started doing that

2:48.4

because that sounded like fun.

2:56.7

And it turns out that being an electric bass player who also reads music when I was growing up,

3:00.7

which was in the late 70s and early 80s, was not that common.

3:03.7

There were a lot of rock bass players, but a lot of them, it's a second instrument. It's an instrument that they kind of pick, you know, they're filling in because somebody already plays drums and guitar, so they, you know, they pick up bass.

3:12.3

For me, it was my first instrument, and because I was trained and classically trained,

...

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