This sort of dual theme came to mind after coming across a particular soundfile.
One part details my skills with the Yamaha K-40 Dual Cassette Deck, a component of the revered stereo Mom & Dad got me for high school graduation. The other part is about the happiest A I can remember ever getting in school. Both are part of the story.
Fall of 1994 I took Intro To Mass Comm at Flo Valley. It was my first night class, and I loved it. The students at night were more mature. It expanded on a lot of stuff I knew about, covered a lot of bases, the teacher knew her bidness, and I liked it enough that I inadvertently became the class ham.
One of the projects toward the end of the class was for us to group off and create a product we could market to the class. There were 2 other guys there that I hung with and between the 3 of us we had our poo together. Clint was about my age (22 then) and our other compadre was Young Guy With Funny, But Apparently Fashionable Hair. I don’t remember his name for sure so we’ll call him John. The 3 of us got on well and had the same energy for the class. Naturally we joined forces.
The ad was to be for radio or print (though I seem to remember extra credit for a TV ad) and we had to set a price, target market, etc. The whole shebang. A good ol’ fashioned Q&A from the rest of the students was part of the deal as well..
Not having any good brain storms hanging out after class we decided to group at my University City apartment before the next class. John came over the next Tuesday so we could come up with a product to lay on Clint a couple days later. He had to work or something. We figured that once we thought of something really cool everything else would fall in place. Not necessarily true for our first attempt though.
The idea John and I came up with, Dr. Kevorkian’s Home Suicide Kit, was sketchy at best but that didn’t stop us from spending a whole night trying to make it work before we scrapped the concept. I seem to remember some complications in the marketing we couldn’t work around. We did have a script though, I’ve got it somewhere.
I don’t remember how we came up with the idea for our real product but it was a good one.
We called it the Voiceperfect Notetaker. It was a handheld device that would record lectures and then turn the sound into text on a computer. Seemed to us to be a lofty idea for 1994. I wrote a good chunk of the script at work one day and then we all tweaked it.
The next week the 3 of us met at The Pad to finalize the script and record our 60 second (to the nose) radio spot. We chose to do a radio spot because drawing sounded like a lot more work. Namely because we couldn’t draw.
We tweaked the script to run in about 55 seconds and set about to figure out what sort of background sound to intro and outro the body of the ad.
The motif we decided on was of 2 kids leaving one class and walking to another. We put ourselves in a mindset of sitting at the end of class and thinking about what sounds would be around us. After a moment of meditating we figured things like a school bell or buzzer, movement in a hallway, muffled talking, and maybe doors opening and closing were going to be the right path.
This is where my mojo mastery of the Yamaha K-40 dual cassette deck comes into play.
If I were to do a project like this now it would take about 10 minutes to get such things from Google (I’m surprised they don’t have a sound effects library yet) or extract the samples from a DVD or CD and loop them. Since this was 1994 I had to pull out a Jimmy Neutron style brain blast.
You’ve all seen Ghostbusters right? Of course you have. The lead in to them getting their first call is Jeanine, the receptionist, saying into the phone she just stumbled to, “Of course they’re serious…ok…they’ll be right there.” She hangs up the phone and screams, “We got one!” while hitting the firehouse bell. The music cues cuts moments later to the Ghostbusters entering the Biltmore Hotel.
I recorded that whole section, but only wanted the sound of that bell. I had to chop it from cassette deck to cassette deck until just the bell shrieked by itself. Editing that took a while but I could have done that in my sleep. One of the satisfying joys of a cassette deck was knowing your gear well enough to know how much lag there was starting and stopping a tape. Who’s with me on the satisfaction of hearing tape end on a new mix a mere second after a song fades out?
Then for the crowd noise. For these sounds we go to another time honored flick, Dead Poet Society. In the early part of the movie there are scenes of the boys in a couple of different class room settings. Short transitional scenes show them moving through the halls on their way to the next class. One sequence in the stairwell had the most convincing crowd noise.
I repeated the process with the hallway sounds. This was easy because I didn’t have to chop dialog or music at the beginning and end. I just took a middle section of the sound we wanted, probably 7-10 seconds worth, and looped it by rewinding that tape and recording more onto the other tape. I looped more than a minute’s worth because I would just fade it down manually. I would achieve this effect with an ancient device called a volume “knob”. A device now only found in your car.
Right after I hit play and the bell had blown us out of our seat, I used a Panasonic dictation tape recorder (an appendage during that time of my life) to record John and I reading the script. When you listen to this, I warn you that the bell is really abusively loud. Loud. If it were a real ad it would get your attention but not in a good way. Anyway, after the bell rang I faded up the hallway sounds. John and I read our parts and faded the sound before Clint read the closing argument in his cheesiest radio voice.
We did this many many many times to get it to the mandated 1:00 minute mark. We assumed that our little ad would be timed by W.O.P.R from War Games. Comparing John’s digital watch to the timer on my editing software we came out at 1:00:109. Score. Not to keep spanking a dead armadillo but if this were today I could have read the piece a couple of times, taken the best bits, expanded/compressed it so that it was 1:00:00 on the nose, and then burned it to a cd.
The day the assignment was due the three of us wore slacks and ties and briskly walked to our seats with unchoreographed precision. We proceeded to rule class with iron fists toting double barrelled kegs of woop ass. Our classmate’s grueling questions were deflected with velvet bazookas. “Will this still be viable in 5 years?” “Of course!” “Is it easy to use?” “Of course!” “When do you think this will be obsolete?” “Never. Clint, kick his ass.”
At the end of class we asked our teacher how we did and she laughed at us while saying we all got an A. Probably the happiest A I’ve ever received. To be completely forthcoming, probably the only I had honestly earned up to that point. Everything else was b.s.’ing skills or something I already knew about.
I used that cassette deck to tape volumes of live performances from any show showing anything cool. Late night talks shows were a favourite as were MTV & VH-1. Insert “when was the last time MTV played music” comment here. My friends and I all traded tapes when they were at college, copying bootlegs to cassette, a catalog of soundbites. You get the picture – tons of stuff. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably got at least a few tapes lovingly crafted with it. Alex and I also used it to edit and compile the demo for our radio show (another story though).
Sadly, the years have worn that cassette deck down. I don’t blame it. Ten years of constant use will do that. Tapes slow down and drag when I play them. It’s probably fixable. Maybe I’ll do that one day. I’ve tanked most of the mix tapes I created with it, given most of my bootleg cassettes away, and have been converting the ones I wanted to keep. All those tapes my friends made for me are all in a milk crate waiting to be converted but that will be a long way off. I kept a few regular mixes because there’s something about the faded, boomy, warm sound of a cassette that I love. You might even feel a bit of the same way.
I could go on about the majesty of cassettes and give my personal High Fidelity style rules for the perfect mix tape but I’ve pulled your ear enough.
Here is the Voice Perfect Note Taker. Just a reminder, the bell is please-mommy-make-it-stop loud, but only for a second.
Midnight Rider
