Day: October 4, 2021

Sound Advice

recording a handwritten poem

Rather than sit at the computer dubbing in the lines of each character in my Ode to a Duck, I set up a makeshift recording studio and Barbara and I each read through the whole poem, with just a few out-takes. As I’m taller than Barbara, I moved the drawing board up to the next shelf for my read-through.

makeshift recording studio

I thought that it would sound better if we stood up, rather than record it sitting in my office chair. To cut down on any slight reverb we might get from the bare studio wall behind us, I hung a blanket over a clothes horse on top of the plan chest. The wall of books absorbed any reverberation from behind the microphones, which, by the way are iRig Lavoisier (snapped up in the sale when Maplins was closing down a couple of years ago).

soundtrack
Final verse (you can see there are a pair of rhyming couplets) selected, which I read in its entirety, as there’s just one character, the ‘desolate duck’ in the final scene.

In Adobe Audition, I cut and pasted each rhyming couplet, then used that for each of the characters in the film, Barbara and I reading alternate couplets.

Pike an Perch

After all the trouble that I’d gone to to avoid reverb, I added an echo effect to the grim warning given by the Pike and Perch in the penultimate verse.

Link

Ode to a Duck on YouTube

Heron Fishing

heron sketches

10.15 am, sunny, slight breeze: A heron is patiently watching and stalking in the shallows by an old coot’s nest near the outlet of Newmillerdam Lake. This is an immature bird; it has moulted out of its brown juvenile plumage but still has a shade of grey on its neck. It has yet to grow its crest into the breeding adult’s pigtails.

heron sketches

But it’s successful with its watch, bend neck and lightning-fast stab technique of fishing, catching two small fish in the space of 5 or 10 minutes. The second fish seems to me to be rather squat, and I wondered if it might be a bullhead.

Canada geese and tufted duck sketches

By the time that I move over to the Canada geese, gathering around someone feeding them near the main car park, my pen has stopped running freely, perhaps because there’s a bit of grease on my sketchbook page or the ink is running low. I bend down from the fishing platform and dabble the nib in the water. I like the transparent effect it gives to my drawing.

The tufted duck is so buoyant that it needs a little burst of power to push itself below the surface. It looks to me as if almost the whole duck jumps out of the water before diving sharply in headfirst, with legs ready to act as paddles to propel it deeper.

Gulls chasing Bat

gulls chase bat

10.52 am, Newmillerdam near main car park, sunny slight breeze: There’s a commotion amongst the black-headed gulls and a boisterous flock of 20 or 30 of them swoop and tumble over towards me from the outlet corner of the lake. At first I think that someone must be feeding the ducks and they’re falling out, as they do, over a snatched crust.

Then I notice that the pale brown ‘crust’ is moving about on its own account. My first thought is that for some reason the gulls have ganged up on a sparrow, but the manoeuvrability is un-sparrowlike and I wonder for a moment if it could be a late swallow or martin.

One of the gulls briefly captures it and it’s not until it escapes that I can see that it’s a small bat. It dodges around then escapes into the lakeside willows where the gulls can’t follow it and the gulls head off back towards the outlet.