The right Latte, Callers and ProTools – Andre’s Production Diary…
Do you remember Andre, the first winner of our Xmas Contest? – No?
Well, here’s his story: Andre, a young guy living near Stuttgart, participated in our contest. He is young, motivated and really willing to learn, so we gave him a chance for a placement at Benztown. He is cooking coffee, taking calls and learns a lot about girls. It is a massive secret to do a great latte, ask him and maybe he wants to tell you. Beside that he is working out at the ProTools LE System for a few hours a day (gaining his bizeps) and cutting VO and producing some basic stuff.
As promised, here’s his first production diary. We follow Andre through his time in the Benztown team. To clarify it: This is more for beginners and great if you wanna learn production and imaging from scratch. So Andre, let´go!
Chapter 1: Organization
Organization is the first step to success. The better organized your archive is, the faster you’re able to find all the stuff you need. Every element, we offer on Benztown Branding has a shortcut, which explains what kind of element it is. MB means musicbed, B means branding, SW means sweeper and so on…
An important part of organization are routines. It’s really annoying for a boss to explain every little step to his employees. To avoid this, we developed constant routines for a better workflow. It’s a kind of overview of tasks to do an when they have to be done. No questions like: ‘What am I supposed to do?’ or ‘When do you need this?’. This saves time and unnecessary frustration for everyone
Chapter 2: Cutting Voices
From voice recording to the final on air promo with outstanding voices, a lot of work is to be done. I’m telling you about the first step, the cutting.
To save time, we prepare every VO, before we use it in the Branding, the Promo, the Sweeper, etc…
We receive the VO as a big .mp3 or .wav file. Now it’s my job to cut the VO, this means cutting the big file into single sections and remove noises like breathing and these annoying clicking sounds (as seen as cracks in the waveform in the screenshot below).
For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with ProTools or any other DAW, let me explain some of the tools you use for cutting voices. You have a cutter, which (how the name says) cuts the files and a pen wherewith you can draw lines to smooth the waveform and get rid of the cracks.
To be honest, I didn’t know that “just” cutting voices is such a different task. In the beginning, I needed several minutes for just a few seconds of voice. I took me several days to hear all the noise hidden in the voice. I’m glad, Fabi has so much patience with me and shows me all techniques, I need to know how to recognize all the noises.
Sooner or later, every section is cutted, clean of noises, normalized, archived and ready to use in the final element.
Although I’m not here since a long time, I’m so glad about receiving this great chance from the Benztown team and to share this experience with you.
Cheers
Andre
