Lucky Dog Audio Post

Check. It. Out. I finally got a chance to try out the Auto-Tune Chamber here at Lucky Dog Audio. From a voice talent's point of view, it's kind of scary inside the chamber. With the unnatural gloam created by the blacklight glow lights, the acrid, cold taste to the air from the emissions of the multi-angle fog machine, and the ridiculous cover charge once you are in the door, the whole experience evokes the ante-room from Saturday Night Fever's 2001 Odyssey discotheque crossed with the isolation tank from Altered States. But this is where you have to go in order to get that Auto-Tune sound, so into the chamber I went.

Agency: Third Degree Creative • Writer: Daniel Solis • Campaign: Buck the Norm: Win Your Books 2010

Image by Will Amato

"By the time I found myself delivered to the lobby of Le Parker Meridien, I felt bullied, bruited about by staff and handlers, like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, an incomprehensible film Perkus had weeks before insisted I watch, a treatise on luxuriant self-pity that now felt terrifically relevant" (page 188).

Here's another book-mixtape, this one with songs culled from Jonathan Lethem's incredible new novel Chronic City. Lethem himself has posted a couple of playlists pertaining to the book but none feature Sandy Bull or Captain Beefheart or Crispy Ambulance or Souled America or any of the more obscure songs that made it into these pages. Oh well, that task is for obsessive music geeks. Music geek admission: I spent a couple of days trying to track down a song from Zeroville. Fred Mills ended up helping me out with that search. Thanks Fred!

With these book mixes, I always try to bring another audio theme into the track listing. This book is chock full of cultural references both real and imagined - the Criterion Collection, Gnuppets, Marlon Brando, Morrison Groom, Florian Ib, etc. I made a couple of inside jokes with SFX - I introduce the Richard Hell track with a cell phone ring (Richard Abneg's ringtone is "Blank Generation") and end-tagged the Sandy Bull track with this marvelous modem sample from freesound (Perkus Tooth is on dial up). But primarily I used audio snippets from The Man Who Fell To Earth for my song transitions. Yeah, it's quite a reach. The movie is mentioned just once in passing but it seems like blowing up a reference like that for its audio goodies is just the thing Lethem's artist/critic/stoner character Perkus Tooth would enjoy. So here ya go Perkus. Merry Christmas, wherever you are.

TRACKLIST:

1. ROLLING STONES - Miss You
2. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS - Blank Generation
3. PETER BLEGVAD - (Something Else Is) Working Harder
4. SANDY BULL - Carmina Burana Fantasy
5. CRISPY AMBULANCE - Chill
6. VAN MORRISON - Who Was That Masked Man
7. SOULED AMERICA - Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends
8. CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & THE MAGIC BAND - I Love You, Big Dummy
9. WARREN ZEVON - Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner
10. ROLLING STONES - Shattered

This past month we did the sound design for this bumpin' ASU promo that ran on ESPN2 during the ASU / ULM game on October 19. Scott did some really rad sfx work to create the ratcheting sounds that mark the Transformers-ish action early in this video. Without giving too much away I'll just mention that guns were involved and leave it at that.

Speaking of sports and sound design, have you seen the Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No video produced by No Mas???!!! Yowza! First off, it's an amazing story. But this video is the stuff! Great animation, killer song and some supa-clever sound design. The phone sounds are brilliant. Dig it! Wish I could say this was one of ours. Envy, thy name is Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No.

At long last we've launched Pedal Talk, our new podcast devoted to talking about magic and mischievous guitar effects pedals. In this installment we focus on a quartet of stomp boxes currently residing in the esteemed pedal-board of Chris Michaels. Check it, in this episode we demo:

• MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay

• Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb

• Fulltone Supa-Trem

• Seymour Duncan Twin Tone Classic

These are some wicked boxes. It was a blast talking to Chris about how he uses them and what he likes/dislikes about each one. Which reminds me, if you wanna hear more from Chris, his new album Morning and Night is now available on iTunes and at the Max Recordings Store. Or you can catch him and his band, The Cranks, at 9pm this Saturday 11/14/09 at the Oyster Bar.

So, enough with the shameless plugs. I could go on and on about what a great guitar player Chris is but it's best to let the audio speak for itself. Without further ado, heeeerrrre's...

PEDAL TALK

Check it, there's a Coen Brothers radio play for download!

Theater of the New Ear

Today, we had the honor of recording former NFL player and television broadcasting legend Pat Summerall via ISDN patch.

PS, I would have linked to a picture of Pat's "Legends of Broadcasting" trading card but those don't exist.

Though they should!!!

The stories and tributes are piling up around the web today about the passing of a true voice-over legend, Don LaFontaine. Undoubtedly LaFontaine is best know for his movie trailer work, especially for his deep and dramatic delivery of that oh-so-ubiquitous blockbuster phrase: "IN A WORLD. . ." That being the case, most of the obituaries I've read today play off the idea that though LaFontaine possessed one of the most recognizable voices in the industry, few in the public knew him by name. Such is the plight of the voice over artist. That said, Don could be seen (as well as heard) on national TV in a popular GEICO ad. Plus, if you haven't seen it, 5 Guys In A Limo is a fun, Hollywood romp that features a well-coiffed LaFontaine goofing off red-carpet style with four other masters of the craft.

But, of what I've seen today, I think Don LaFontaine: The Voice offers the best tribute to the man. Especially interesting are his thoughts (around the 4:50 mark) on how each voice artist makes the best use of his or her talent when they bring their own experience to a project. Well said, Don. It is most definitely the human touch that brings any script to life. So, it was with a touch of horror that I also noticed that his /Film obituary can be heard online spoken by a TTS (text-to-speech) program. The aforementioned irony-of-ironies can be heard here.

Rest in peace Don. You will be missed.

So, Judson approached us several months ago about being our intern. Really, our friend Ben approached us several months ago about his friend Judson being our intern. Anyway, our initial response was thanks but no thanks. We've never had an intern. We don't really need an intern. Etc etc. Well, Judson and Ben just wouldn't let up about the whole thing. "Are you sure you don't want an intern?" asked Ben. "Judson REALLY wants to be your intern." After several emails and iChats we conceded to meet Judson. We did our darnedest to scare him off. "Judson, if you are going to intern with us there's gonna be a lot of data entry," said Scott. "These is nothing glamorous about this kind of work," I said with a steely expression, "Are you sure you want to do this?" Yes, yes. Judson was excited. He wanted in.

So we conferred with Judson's professor at UALR and set up a course for the month of July. Then we came up with a rough outline of work we could assign to Judson, our intern. Things like archiving finished spots, soldering cables, updating our talent demos so they included more of Brian Winkeler's spots. Suddenly we were excited. We had an intern!

Not so fast. Turns out that in between signing up with us as an intern and showing up for his first day (July 7) Judson accepted a gig playing guitar in a touring band. Our buddy Jason ran into Judson on Monday of this week, learned this, and called us. Judson had been meaning to call but. . .

No intern. But more seriously, no heads up from Judson, the intern-turned-touring-guitarist, about the change of plans. So we decided it might be fun to play a little phone prank on Judson.

Here's the cast:

Listen to Prank Calling The Intern

Judson was a great sport about the prank. Obviously he gave us permission to post the recording saying that he would have his lawyer contact us with a release form. Ha!

Also, we are pretty excited for Judson. July looks like it's going to be a busy month for him on the road. He will be looping through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. His touring schedule can be found here and here.

Congrats Judson and good luck on the road!

In yet another attempt to squeeze entertainment from our celebrated Sleeve Face gallery, here's some select tracks that we've faithfully transfered from the vinyl discs that we found hiding within the cardboard, record sleeves that we held in front of our faces.

Put more simply, here's the music from the Sleeve Faces:

Lucky Dog Muxtape*

* This mix covers page one of our gallery - Arto Lindsay to Neil Young.

Really it's not a bad mix. There' some folk music and some rock and some folk rock. As far as music genres go, there's something for everyone, unless you are looking for:

alt-country, ambient, blues, britpop, celtic, chill, classical, country, darkwave, doom metal, down tempo, drone, drum and bass, dub, dubstep, electronica, emo, folk metal, funk, garage, goth, gothic metal, grindcore, grunge, hard rock, hardcore, heavy metal, hip hop, house, idm, indie, indie pop, indie rock, industrial, j-pop, j-rock, japanoise, jazz, jazz-metal, metal, metalcore, minimal, new age, nu metal, pop punk, post-ambient, post-hardcore, post-punk, post-rock, power metal, progressive metal, punk, r&b, rap, reggae, sadcore, shoegaze, ska, soul, soundtrack, symphonic metal, synthpop, techno, trance, trash metal, or trip hop.

The day before yesterday, we thought we were being soooo clever. We were working on a spot that required GPS SFX so we hopped in the car with Scott's Magellan GPS unit, programmed directions to Lucky Dog Audio, took a spin around downtown Little Rock, and recorded the Magellan beeping and cooing at us as we made all the right turns to get us back home. Awesome idea! Good job, Lucky Dog! Home run on the foley work there boys!

Nope.

The spot went to the client for approval and out came the gong. Spot's no good. Turns out the client has a Garmin GPS in their car, so all those Magellan bells and whistles mean nada.

Now it is time for reflecting on the task of creating authentic simulations of specific audio events when using new gadgets that are, as of yet, unfettered to concrete audio signifiers. And yes, we've been through this before. Several months ago we were working on a spot that needed a cell phone ring. We dropped a fairly ubiquitous ringtone into the spot and the client said, "Hey, that cell phone ring doesn't sound like my cell phone ring!" Not to sound like old man Wilson down the street, but it used to be a phone sounded like a phone. Not anymore.

Silent reflective pause.

So yesterday, our buddy Gary graciously lent us a Garmin GPS. Here's a shot of Scott pointing our Rode shotgun microphone at his (Gary's) unit (please refrain from commenting on this sentence).

We thought we were being soooo clever. . .