Recording Sounds

As my text extract is from a fairytale, I wanted the sounds I used to reflect that in my work. Following this theme I decided to use a lot of natural sounds in my work. To record my sounds I used a mix of sound studio and field recording. 

In the studio I brought with me a large variety of items to use, such as rice, wooden items, water and glass. I asked my friend to help me so that I could record the sounds from the operating room and she could use the items I brought with me in the recording booth to makes different noises with. 

We experimented with using the same item in different ways to create more than one sound I could use, which meant I would have a lot of stuff to pick from in the edit, and it's always better to have options later on, when I won't be able to book out the sound studio again in time.

I just tried to think of any sound you would associate with a fairytale and tried to recreate that, such as tinkley sounds, or hooves, rain, chains clinking, fires crackling or walking/running and any number of things that I could imagine in a fairytale setting.

I made sure I saved all of my sounds to my hard drive to use later on when it came to editing.

Then I used a Roland to go out and record a lot more natural sounds. I went to a local park, and using the Roland I recorded leaves rustling, walking through dead leaves, knocking on old wooden doors and creaking gates. I was worried that there would be a lot of wind noise and tried to stop it as much as I could, although I knew it was inevitable that some would get through. It was unfortunately, a very windy autumn day.

A week or so after I had recorded the sounds for the soundscape, I booked the sound studio out again and I asked someone I know on the creative writing and journalism course to come and help me out by reading out my text extract. 

She was more than willing to oblige and really enjoyed trying out different voices with the extract, some of which were hilarious as she is rather good at accents.

In the end I tried to keep it simple, and knew I'd end up using the first take. This one she had recorded without faltering, was very clear and spoke in such a way as that I knew I probably wouldn't need to record anything else all morning. 

Nonetheless I had booked out the studio so I decided to carry on anyway, and at one point she whispered her way through the text which I made me hesitate in my decision to use the first recording we did. I then thought about another way in which I could incorporate both.

It was a very successful morning until I realised later on I had exported my files in the wrong format and had to go back to the recording suite with my sound tutor and re-export my sounds correctly - nearly had a heart attack when I first realised, but luckily they were still saved on the computer.