I put myself in "the Driver's seat - what I found out

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waltergrund
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I put myself in "the Driver's seat - what I found out

Post by waltergrund » Thu Jan 05, 2023 9:37 am

Happy new year everyone!

Writing this little article was one of my to-do-topics on my 2022-list, so it's time to get it done; it takes a while to roll out the whole story, but stay with me... :D

My friend A. turned 50 this year; I knew her since I was 13 and we used to have the same guitar teacher and played together in guitar ensembles etc. until we got out of school in Germany.
She studied law and became I judge, I studied music and became a musician. We got ouf of touch for 20 years and when I got in contact again, I learned that she sits in a wheel chair and needs full-care due to MS. I was devasted when I met her again after 25 years
>Now, in 2022, she turned 50 and invited my wife and me to celebrate. The guests were asked to do simple recordings of wishes, infos or whatever since she can't move her hands anymore to read or hold a book herself, but she loves to listen to audiobooks.

I gave it some thought and as the deadline approached, I decided to use a funny brand-new book that I just read; it isn't available as Audiobook so far. It's from a fairly unknown comedian. The book consists of short chapters of dialogues of a baker and his customer. So I thought it would be cool to read some of the chapters with my wife and record them. Of course, I would add some of my music and thought of mandolin-tracks. I just started to reactivate my mandolin skills in summer.

When we recorded the dialogue I wanted it to be most comfortable for us, without much hardware, software and time to spend on technical stuff. It had to be fun for us, too!
So I put up my iPad and recorded straight into garage band with the built-in mic right at the table in our living room. Oh no. It sounded bad! The mic picked up all the boomy room-frequencies, it had to be better. So I got my small Universal Audio Volt 276-interface. It works fine with the iPad and I put up 2 (expensive) condenser mic's for close recording and a pop-filter each. I recorded 2-track and it sounded so much better. The leaked Audio from one mic into the other mic was fine, this way you would hear a little reverb and I would not have to cut-out/mute anything!

We had a lot of fun recording and even had some "that'll be great for outtakes"-moments.

NOW WERE GETTING CLOSER TO WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT....:

I imported the recorded VOCAL-audio files in my DAW and screened some of my music that I have already recorded/placed in TV/licenced. The project's for a friend as a private gift, not meant to be released anywhere, so there were no legal issues.
Obviously, I looked for happy music, relaxed, funny stuff and
>>>CHECKED how they sounded as background music underneath the spoken vocals. Soon, the mandolin-idea was abandoned. The high frequencies distracted from the Spoken Words.

I found myself in "the Driver's seat" as a producer and doing this, I listened to totally different aspects of my own music that I'd do when I'm on the musician's/composer's side. Of course, I knew about these issues from many TAXI-TVs etc., but actually doing it was different.

Simple VOICE-OVER every time a new chapter starts gets boring, too. So I had to be more creative. In some instances, I faded-out the music after a while, then came back in towards the end, so it could add my button-ending after the chapter was finished, to really finish it musically, too and move on to a new idea in the book. another time, I liked the ending of my track and worked my way backwards to the place where it would be nice to have the music started. Cutting here and there was neccesary, of course, but my music has strong sections i recognize even if it's a 10 year-old recording. There were more ideas I came up with, but it's been 4 months and I forgot. You can listen yourself below.

>>>This was really an "ear-opener" to me. I have learned so much about underscore/voice-over etc. for the past 14 years as a TAXI member. DOING it, was different. Being a cutter/producer/music superviser gave me another view and experience. <<<

So if you're doing instrumental stuff e.g. for music libraries, I'd encourage you to start to "Making the cut" with your own music. Check out how it workes with voice-over as an underscore. It's also a lot of fun!

Walter

Here's the personal "audio book" for my friend I wrote about above; spoken word is in German, so you will probably not get the funny dialogue, but check out the take-outs (long laughter etc.) at the end:
31min. audiomix of audio-book

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