First Vocal Recordings, Foley and Environmental Sound
I get a lot of unwanted sounds from the road outside my window, and a lot of unwanted reverb from the reflective surfaces in my room, so as a solution I put a duvet and some blankets on a clothes horse. This actually turned out to be really effective and I got a very clean result. I did get a little bit of low frequency bleed through the floor, but I fixed it with an EQ and a noise gate. If I were to redo this process I would place the microphone stand on the bed or something elevated. I spent a lot of the time editing out bad takes and finding a good pacing for the speech. I mixed the voice fairly loud at -4Db, I wanted it to be very clear and set to the volume so I could know how the other elements fit around it.
Quotes
The first elements I added were the quotes, I had a lot of trouble finding a way to rip the audio straight from the internet. I ended up sending the audio from the internet to my monitors and recording it. This did result in some room sound but I didn’t really have much of a choice, I might continue trying to find a way to download the mp3 files.
Crowd and Playground
The second element I added was the sound of a crowd, this is in the section where I mention the busy street. Ideally i would have liked to used a field recording of my own for this, however with time restrictions and the difficulty finding somewhere that matches what I need, I opted for using audio from a sound library. I had similar reasoning for using sound libraries for the sound of a playground but I also didn’t want to go around playgrounds with a recorder.
In Utero
Lastly for this session, I tried to emulate the sound of being inside a womb. This was the most interesting and entertaining element to record. Firstly I made two base layers of low frequency drones. For the first one I used a sample of a bass drum I had recorded and applied an enormous amount of reverb to it, only using the wet signal, I also removed the initial sound from the bass drum, faded it in, removed a lot of the high frequencies with an EQ and automated a gradual increase in volume to try and keep the volume constant (because the reverb fades out). For the second layer I used a field recording of my own, I had recorded the sound of wind and birds in my garden. I then removed the higher frequencies, added a lot of reverb only using the wet signal and pitched it down a little bit. This layer gave a bit of texture to the sound scape, and a sense of realty as it’s environmental sound. Next I used a bucket and a rubber textured cloth to create sounds of bodily fluids. These recordings were then processed using compression, reverb, EQ and pitch correction. I recorded two takes and panned them left and right making use of the stereo field to aid the sense of immersion. I also recorded some audio of me singing ‘Thats Life’ by Frank Sinatra and some general talking, I treated this audio the same as previous with less reverb. I am waiting on a recording of my female friend talking, I want to show that there are multiple voices for the section where I say the foetus can distinguish between voices.