Back to the Future Part 2.5
After the efficiency of our studio sessions recording sounds it was decided that each week I would run a correlation session to put together all the sounds recorded. Adam Higginson, Shay Jagger and myself sat down to put all our recorded files in place. Clean them up with fades and EQ and have them in place ready to move on with our next studio recording session.
Today was a frustrating but very successful day in the studio. As I am not as proficient as I would like in Pro Tools I am using these sessions as great practise to really develop my skills.
Having to run a session off the desktop I started out by copying the project file to the desktop. Then running this session I made sure the project was set to the frame rate of the video 23.96 fps which allowed me to set the nudge value of Pro Tools to one frame. Coupling this with the tab to transient feature I was easily able to tab to the transient, break the audio file and then nudge each of the click sounds into their exact frame in the project. This technique is incredibly effective to the point where we discovered just how out of time the original foley work was in the video file.
We layered levels of clicks on top of each other making sure each click had its own unique sound and chopped all the rotary dials so that clicks happened on intervals of 10 on each dial. This process took a long time but the result was well worth the effort (video latter).
The guitar pick schwing was a very interesting sound to create. Shay had an awesome idea of an extended schwing. At first I was very clueless on how to achieve this sound. First I tried reverb and chorus but nothing gave us the desired result. Finally after a lot of head scratching I tried warping the audio. Stretching the audio allowed the schwing to ring out and finally we had the sound we were chasing. Check out the video below to see how it sounds.
After a solid 4 hour session and a bounce I went to move the project file back onto my HDD and clicked the replace button as I wanted the new version of this project on my HDD. It was at this point as I went to post my bounce file to youtube that I realised we have been running off the HDD the entire time and all my work was lost. After a little research I worked out there is no way to recover our work and we would have to start again.
Learning from this mistake I have now implemented a policy of ejecting my HDD after copying to the desktop and before opening the project. This workflow will avoid the possibility of this ever happening in the future. This was a blessing in disguise however, as the second time around I was much more proficient in moving audio into place and really got a great result as you can see in the progress video below.
(Doctor Duck, 2017)
This failure was a great insight into how as a team we can rise above a challenge, we were able to remember all the samples we used for each click and put everything into a tight position locked to the frames in a very timely manner without too much fuss all be it after a little swearing. We are back in the studio tomorrow recording vocals and some more sounds.
References
Doctor Duck. (2017, October 6). Back To The Future Sound Replacement Correllation Session 1[Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/8PTGzxtL6qA