Making-of Ornitologia May 3rd

For today’s show production I used a little more technology. The resulting sound is louder, but harsh and over-processed . I’ll have to improve on all that, but in the meantime, here is the description of my first shot at signal-processing bonanza.

The voice-over was recorded in Radio Zero’s studio using the known set-up. Then I processed it using a copy of Live Lite 7 that came bundled with an old M-Audio simple USB sound card. This version allows to use up to four plug-ins in the signal path.

First, I used the pre-configured de-esser Live device. It is a tuned compressor. I already knew that my sibilants occur around 8.8 kHz. So I tuned the high-pass filter to 7.9 kHz. It works really well.

Then I proceeded with another compressor to tighten in the voice. I started with some common voice settings, then I tweaked them the a little bit. Finally a EQ is used to boost the bass, remove the ultra-low frequencies and add some presence. The result is no so good, as I had limited time and only some cheap headphones. I exported the results as AIFF to GarageBand.

In the GarageBand Master Track I used another AU plug-in, the demo version of iZotope Ozone 4. I had no time to properly investigate it, so I selected a cool-named pre-set: “3-Band Master – Subtle Dynamics” with the loudness meter set to 60.9.

For the background sounds I used hazure’s seagull, the RHumphries mocking bird and a jet from digifishmusic, all from the Freesound project.