King Street Recording Company
Professional Audio Services for Any Purpose You Can Think Of – Video Too!

Volume 60, Summer, 2015
610-647-4341
www.kingstreetrecording.com
kingstreetrecord@aol.com

The Other Room

Many first-time visitors to my studio generally enter through the office area and turn left into the control room. This is where the computers are and where much of the actual production is done. Not everyone knows about the “other” room – the actual studio – and what it’s used for. Here are some examples of the sounds recorded in the other room:

• A fifteen-voice chorale
• A CD of poetry
• A twelve-year-old rock guitarist
• An established rocker who created his own virtual band by over-dubbing all of the instruments himself
• A five-member folk group who created an album of their music and made it available for sale
• Actors from People’s Light and Theatre Company, who recorded audio tracks for use with a live performance
• A three-member acoustic group from New Jersey – the finished CDs were used as demos to help them get bookings in the resort areas.
• Narration for hundreds of instructional programs on customer service, finance, health, meditation, psychology, safety, sales and technology
• A variety of radio commercials
• Audio tracks for online commercials
• Audio for video
• Audio tracks for professional puppet shows – complete with character voices, original music and sound effects
• A classical guitarist’s demo to accompany his college application – he was accepted, by the way!
• Another demo by a violinist – for the same purpose
• A sophisticated demo for a classical quartet
• A demo for an impressionist – his Edith Bunker was hilarious!
• Several audio books, including an audio version of a newly published autobiography, a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and a selection of children’s stories
• A series of instructional recordings for business owners, managers and professional salespeople
• A narrative track for a visual presentation by the Audubon Society
• Audio tracks for music-and-information-on-hold telephone systems

Now you know what the “other room” is used for. If there’s something you want to sing, say or play, why wait? Call 610-647-4341 now.

IN THE STUDIO

Words
Self-Improvement

I’m enjoying giving professional coaching to folks wanting to improve their presentation skills. It allows me to pass along what I’ve learned in more than fifty years in the performing arts.

• A singer is learning breath control in order to sustain notes longer. He’s also developing richer tone and greater resonance by forming vowel sounds correctly.
• A young songwriter is learning basic stagecraft. By itself, the music isn’t enough. These days, new songwriters are everywhere, and competition for attention (and recording contracts) is fierce. For maximum impact, their actionson area stages are every bit as important as the music they play – it’s Show Biz!
• And an attorney is fine-tuning his presentation skills in order to be more effective – both in the courtroom and on the platform. Some of the sessions are recorded on video so that he can review his own work at home.

If these areas are of interest to you, current rates for private coaching begin at $45 per half-hour; $85 per full hour. For more information call 610-647-4341.

 Words and Pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture with words must be even more effective.

• I’ve recently created narrative for a video to be used in a courtroom presentation. The video will provide a judge and jury an accurate view of a plaintiff’s situation in order to gain a fair and equitable settlement. When last-minute revisions were needed, the original served as a reference so that timing, pacing, recording level and tonality would match.
• A California producer of infomercials needed to revise some off-camera narration. Since the voiceover artist lived in this area, we recorded it here while the client in L.A. monitored the session by phone. In order to more closely match the tonal quality of the original, we used three different microphones simultaneously to give the client multiple choices.
• A second West Coast client needed replacement dialogue for an infomercial about a revolutionary new personal care product. To allow the voiceover artist to match the pacing and tonal quality of the original narration, we were sent a copy of the original to use as a reference.

While the client monitored by phone, we recorded several versions of each paragraph of text to provide multiple options for the video editors. The final edited files were sent by email and approved same day. With the phone and the Internet, it’s possible to serve clients just about anywhere!

Music
At the Keyboard

What a pleasure it was to record a session by a pianist who truly loves the tunes he plays. His affection for the music shows in his enthusiasm at the keyboard. As an expert musician, he was able to record an entire CD with just one re-take. Titled, The Good Ol’ Stuff, it’s a wonderfully varied and entertaining selection of popular tunes from the basic American Songbook.

For a colorful cover, I took some high-resolution digital photos of him at the piano. When he’d selected the image he liked, it was added to one of the many original templates used here. The combination produced an excellent cover design.

In work of this kind, all processing is done at 1200 dpi for maximum clarity. This provides enough detail to allow retouching a single hair!

Songbird

A talented young lady who loves to sing has made a recording in secret as a surprise for her fiancé. For accompaniment, she provided pre-recorded Karaoke music from a variety of sources.

In the studio with the headphones on, she sang her heart out – and finished with just one re-take. It’s wonderful to hear someone sing with such a rare combination of skill and enthusiasm. The most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard have been human voices. This young lady’s voice was a joy to hear.

FROM THE ATTIC
Audio and Video

When digital recording burst upon the scene, most studios dumped their old-fashioned analog equipment and bought computers.

Never being one to automatically follow the crowd, I bought a computer, too – but kept all of the old machines as well. One reason was that they have limited re-sale value – nobody wants ‘em ‘cause they’re old! An even better reason to keep them was that they all still work! This allows handling the many vintage disks and reels of tape that find their way here every year. If you have an old tape or disk recording of special importance, please bring it here for proper handling.

Speaking Out

A long-time client was able to provide original voice recordings of his father, produced while his dad was in college in the early 1940s.

What a wonderfully effective speaker he was! In a warm baritone voice, he recited poetry, famous speeches – and quite a lot of original material. More than just saying the words clearly, he gave meaning to the words.  He eventually developed a career in the ministry. With his skills, I’ll bet his sermons were amazing!

Survivor

The interview had been professionally produced on high quality videotape about twenty years ago. Now it needed to be carefully transferred to disk. The subject of the interview was a man who’d lived through the horror of the Holocaust in the 1940s. His recollections were truly fascinating.

Make Room, Make Room!

An interesting challenge in recent months was an order for conversion of eighteen original VHS tapes to DVD. As there were already several other projects in progress, the first concern was available hard drive capacity.  Y’see, compared to audio, video files are huge. So, to keep files active and available to the client, it was necessary to increase storage capacity by installing four additional high-capacity external hard drives.

There were other concerns along the way. For example, one tape had been recorded in poor light conditions, so it was necessary to add brightness and contrast to just a few individual frames – one at a time. From importing the tapes to printing the labels, the entire project required two weeks of nearly constant attention.

Family Travels

With a project a little larger than most, I accessed a special website to download the client’s many vacation videos. More than a dozen original home movies had become 133 individual digital files! Due to the special format provided by the website, all had to be downloaded in real time.

After downloading, the ends were trimmed and the images recorded to DVD disks for use in the family video system. Then all files were converted to MP4 format and recorded to a second set of disks. This will allow the client to import the files to her laptop, then mix and match individual segments to suit her needs.

The family went everywhere – or so it seemed. And they had videos to prove it.  Using their camcorder, they captured colorful images from their tours of Africa, Australia, the Bahamas, China, The Cayman Islands, Japan, New Zealand and Patagonia! The underwater footage from the Bahamas was amazing! I want to find someplace these folks haven’t been – and go there!

Digital technology is misunderstood. Not everything is quick, easy and simple. Altogether, processing all those digital video files took 34 hours!

First Aid

A priceless original family videotape was gobbled up by the family VCR. Luckily, the client was able to extract it from the machine and bring it here for repair. Carefully taking the cassette case apart allowed removing the short tangled section and accurately splicing the remaining ends together. Once repaired, it could then be transferred to DVD videodisk.

Got a broken or damaged tape? Please – don’t try to fix it yourself. Special tools, materials and methods are required. Bring it here for professional repair. Rates begin at $14.95.

IN THE PHOTO SHOP

More Wedding Memories

The beautifully produced album of wedding photos was a delight to work with. Every shot was perfect. In a smartphone world, there’s still no substitute for professional photography!

Carefully removing the pages from the album allowed proper scanning, followed by a series of careful steps to convert the still photos to video.

• Once scanned, each image needed to be properly aligned. Then the resolution could be set – in this case to 600 dpi, or dots per inch.
• Careful cropping allowed isolating each image from background information.
• Next, brightness and contrast were adjusted.
• Converting each image to a Jpeg format allowed transferring them to a separate workstation where they were converted to a video format.
• Then adjustments were made to determine how long each image would display on the monitor.
• After that, cross-dissolves were inserted to allow each image to flow smoothly into the next.
• Finally, the entire group was rendered to a single file and transferred to disk. Total production time about four hours. Nothing to it!

Scribbles

It was fun helping a client fine-tune an application letter for a Master’s program at an area university. Got something to express that has to be said just right? Give me a call at 610-647-4341.