You might remember how Ned came to me with this asinine request for an all-purpose alarm system for the office. It took all of my leet skillz to make it happen. And I thought I had it all working until the servers crashed and I lost all my work. By the way, if you ever tell anyone I didn’t have it backed up, I’ll mess your email up in ways even I can’t fix. Just so we’re clear.
Anyway even though Ned had insisted on giving me all the alarm sounds himself I had nothing anymore, and if I went back to him to ask to re-record them, he’d figure out that I’d lost them. So even though I’d built a sweet iPhone app for Ned to trigger over 40 different types of alarms over our office PA system, I was two days away from go-live with no viable alarm sounds. My entire house of punchcards was about to come crashing down on me.
Then I heard it.
I wasn’t originally sure I knew who it was, but after listening for several minutes I figured out it was Mallory, one of the new folks over in Operations. She must have been practicing scales or something, but she was singing in the supply closet. Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration. I grabbed a digital audio recorder and captured it all. And back at my desk, I worked my magic. A little reverb here and we had our Toxic Gases alarm. A little backmasking there and voila, we had our Escaped Animal alert. After just three hours of taking the same few sounds, working and blending them, I was done. Then I could finally work on installing those security patches Microsoft’s been telling me about the last few weeks.
Later, as I was demoing the system for the office, I was cycling through the alarms and explaining each one. Everyone seemed pretty impressed until the very end when Tom spoke up. ”That’s great work, Brad, but what’dja do to get those alarms? Record Mallory singing and just mess with the sound board settings? How hard could that have been?”
I am fail. Hear me squeak.
Last 5 posts by Brad- For Every Occasion - April 12th, 2010
- Snooping - January 11th, 2010
- Drip ... drip ... drip - October 19th, 2009
- Moving Violation - July 23rd, 2009
- What a cluster! - May 14th, 2009
About Brad
Brad is SO hot!