AV News 180 - May 2010
Sound Advice
M a u ric e D y b e c k ARPS
In Issue 178 (Page 4) I challenged you about all those lovely slides that clog
up your shelves and which you now never use. But what about your ancient
sound archive? Or maybe you don't have one of those. If your resource for
AV productions is simply music and the spoken word then this is not your
problem. Pick and mix and away you go. Read no further.
But others of us and particularly disciples of Howard Gregory, may have
drawers full of tapes containing all manner of interesting sounds gleaned
from anything from football crowds to mating butterflies.
For my part, I came into AV via film-making and, as older types will recall,
most of our filmed pictures were, perforce, shot in silent mode. So, if we were
to bring a pretence of "reality" into our shows, location sound gathering was
part of the process. As a result I have drawers full of quarter inch tape,
recorded at 7½ inches per second, of anything from animals in Uganda to
late night Ceilidhs in Shetland. Moving into the cassette age I have lads on
probation whooping with joy
on Snowdon, little girls tipping
up canoes in Hampshire and
knitting
ladies
recalling
ancient crafts. And of course
no end of location interviews.
Should I just dump it all? It
has all served its original
purpose and, let's face it, like
those Kodachrome slides, is
unlikely to be used again.
Then there is the problem of
how to play it all. How many
people still have the old
recorders? And do they still work? Things like rubber band drives have a
habit of dying on even the best machines and replacements are not easy to
get. I stagger on with a bank of cassette machines that I use for Blind Society
duplication but their days are numbered. As for the reel-to-reel stuff when did
you last see a Ferrograph in good health?
But, hang on. If I take the trouble to go through all this stuff there are, as in
old slides, items that might one day be just what we want for some special
effect in a new show. When a team of young explorers came back from
Iceland with some wonderful waterfall shots, but no sound, I was able to dig
out the whoosh of that very waterfall taken on my Fi-Cord 25 years earlier!
If properly stored many of these sounds can be as good as the day they
were recorded. The real problem is knowing where to find that elusive sound.
Unlike pictures, you cannot do a quick flip through a collection but you must
sit there in "real time" as they say and log it all. (OK, like a good boy, I did
once log it. But the number codes relate to a now-dead recorder.)
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