Blog: Just Like Radio 4

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On Tuesday I headed up to DERBY after work to get stuck into some more of Dinosaur Planet: THE CONCEPT ALBUM. Regular readers may recall a few weeks ago when we spent the day in Dean Street Studios recording vocals and dialogue with some of the Guest Cast. The next day I went in and downloaded THE LOT onto a hard drive and ever since then I have been PANICKING about LOSING it all. I wanted to get to Derby AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to get it glued into the rest of the stuff, and Tuesday was the first opportunity I'd had to do so.

You can imagine my relief then when Rich EXTRACTED it all and put it into the system at SNUG. PHEW! With that done we spent a happy evening lining up the vocals onto songs and then stitching together the dialogue parts - VERY happy for me, as it all sounded so AMAZING! I sat there like a TWIT, giggling and bouncing up and down with GLEE as I listened to it. I know it's WRONG to LARF quite as much as I did at GAGS that I myself had written, but GOSH DARN IT i was PROUD of what we'd achieved! Also really lovely was the fact that I got to hear some of what Emma'd recorded when she was in the other week, and it sounds BRILLIANT.

A warning though: anyone hoping for a return to the more stripped down, less over the top sound which we used to have before our last album - you may be slightly disappointed. Especially when you hear the Dialogue Scenes, one of which we had a go at next...

The bit we did is "Grandad's House", the scene where Terry arrives at his Grandad's and tells him that the army needs his house. It's about 40 seconds of dialogue between myself as Terry and Mr Chris T-T who plays Grandad, so we thought it'd be quite simple. It took NINETY MINUTES!

The reason for this, as we soon realised, is that Painting Pictures With Sound takes a LOT of AURAL PAINT! It starts with the sounds of distant battle, over which we hear a car drive up, stop, and someone gets out. We needed ALL those individual sounds and then someone SHUTTING the door, running up the drive, knocking on the door, the door SHUTTING (and then the sounds of battle becoming much quieter) as they go into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

It was a LOT of work, but crikey it sounded INCREDIBLE. We did a quick mix of it (along with some other mixes I was taking away to allow other people to do their overdubs) as I was getting my coat on to go and get the train home, and realised we'd STILL not finished it properly. We suddenly noticed that once Grandad's closed his front door he appears to FLY into the kitchen, where the kettle gets switched on BY MAGIC. MORE sound effects are needed!

So yes, it's going to be QUITE a THING when it's finished, this album, but I think it's going to be rather SPLENDID!

posted 6/5/2010 by MJ Hibbett

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