Don't call us...

[b3fiend]

Thought I'd share a funny story.

 

We have a telephone in the vocal/acoustic booth of our studio, and we forgot to turn off the ringer during a recording session.

 

During the vocal take, the phone rang. We quickly grabbed it off the hook, hoping it wouldn't come out on the recording.

 

Upon playing back the recording, the phone could not only be heard, but it rang twice PERFECTLY on the beat, at a volume that was perfect in the mix. We ended up keeping that take because the phone ring fit into that phrase of the lyrics and sounded perfect.

 

I wonder if this is how Pink Floyd ended up having telephony sounds in their material? http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/cool.gif

 

 

 

This message has been edited by b3fiend on 07-20-2001 at 09:23 AM

[Magpel]

That's great. You just can't argue with synchronicity. I was once recording in a studio that was close to a small town mainstreet, and in the middle of a vocal take, an ambulance in full blare passed the studio. The siren, *doppler effect and all*, dropped perfectly into a gap in the verse, creating a cool call and response effect. Needless to say, it made the cut. The odd thing is that it was a British style two-tone siren, right here in NY. I don't understand that.

 

For historical perspective: the novelist James Joyce dictated parts of his enourmously complicated novel Finnegan's Wake to his personal secretary, another literary great, Samuel Beckett. One time, druing dictation, someone knocked on the door and had a brief conversation with Joyce. Beckett, concentrating hard on getting down everything the great linguistic genius was saying, accidentally transcribed the conversation. On "replay," Joyce said keep it in there. (If you've ever looked at Finnegan's Wake, the most difficult novel ever written, you'd understand how something like this could pass without being noticed by the reader.)

 

John

[joegerardi]

Keith Emerson's studio used to be out in his barn at his home in Sussex. He continually had problems with local birds on his mixes. He used to keep a shotgun in the barn which he would fire off repeatedly to scare away the birds, but on some of his recording, you can hear the birds chiping away in the mix.

[marino]

I'm pretty sure to hear a few telephone rings in Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick". They're NOT in sync with the music, but their placement kind of makes sense.