Sound Advice

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.

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.

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.