FOR ALL YOU SOUND EFFECTS FANS OUT THERE! IF ANY!

The following is an email recently sent to a fellow sound effects aficionado who frequents the ToonZone Animated Cartoon Forums. I decided to also publish this email on the Random Access Thought Blog with audio links via TWAUDIO.
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Hi Bill! Merry Christmas!
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I had mentioned in a previous transmission that I would relate some additional background information on the remarkable but truly esoteric subject of motion picture sound effects. SO! Here is more of that detail:
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MY VISIT TO UPA PICTURES!
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Back in 1979, I took a trip out to Los Angeles to visit a friend of mine, a Mister Ronald Gordon, who was trying really hard to convince me not only to visit southern California but also to live in southern California. I spent about five weeks hanging out in lovely Glendora, a typical suburban tract some sixty miles out from LA. While I ultimately did not relocate, I did spend much of that time visiting various animation houses, broadcast music syndicators and radio stations, littering each one of them with my most likely not-too-impressive resume, since at that time I had only been employed by two local radio facilities, one in here in Albany and the other in New Haven.
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I dropped by a number of AM and FM stations including KBIG and KNOB in Los Angeles, along with numerous others whose callsigns I can no longer recall. I also made a point to visit Drake Chenault which, at the time, was one of the largest purveyors of pre-programmed taped music for low-budget automated broadcast outlets. But the most fun was getting inside such studios as Hanna Barbera, Jay Ward and Walt Disney Studios.
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What I learned in these places was that you needed to be in a union to get a job but you couldn't get a job if you weren't in a union. But getting into a union was extremely difficult since there was, and presumably still is, intense internal competition for employment. Disney is in Burbank but so was UPA Pictures, which was only a few blocks away. So of course I stopped by with many questions about their editorial department and their unique effects. What I learned at UPA was that unlike HB, JW and WD, UPA Pictures "farmed out" their soundtrack work and actually did not have much in the way of audio facilities onsite. Custom music, such as the songs performed by Robert Goulet and Judy Garland for "Gay Purree!" were taped at Capitol Records, with voicetracks and sound effects recorded at other third party vendor locations.
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In fact, if you check film credits, if any, you may see names like Marne Fallis and Sam Horta (flag this name, I have more!). These names have been billed on numerous late 50's and early 60's low-budget animation efforts like "Popeye". Another fella, Phil Kaye, did effects for Rankin-Bass features like "Frosty The Snow Man" (Jacky Vernon:'Happy Birthday!'), plus all the "Roger Ramjet" stuff and some Jay Ward work, including "Super Chicken" and "Tom Slick".
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These gypsy-esque editors collected their sound effects from studio to studio along the way and deployed them from film to film along the way and this is why you, as viewer and listener, may hear sounds from Hanna Barbera or Walt Disney, in a 60's "Popeye" cartoon produced by Paramount Pictures which, by the way, had a remarkable library of their own, and which has never been released. Furthermore, many of these effects ultimately came to rest in post houses like Ryder, Edit-Rite and Producers Sound Service. I visited Producers Sound Service on the Sunset Strip just a few blocks downrange from Jay Ward, and had I been truly evil, I could have stolen reels of magnetic film containing these same effects right off the shelf in the lobby. But I was a Good Boy!
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So, when you view a "Pink Panther" cartoon and Pink is riding a bicycle making the famous Hanna Barbera squeak noise and then the bad guy flies overhead in a jetplane that sounds like the "Rocky The Flying Squirrel" sound, know that some freelance sound editor came through those doors, did some editing and left copies of those marvelous effects behind in their library as he or she moved on to the next assignment. The ending to this story is sad though because companies like PSS and Edit-Rite did finally close their doors, What became of their libraries? Who is to know?
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THE STORY BEHIND STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES SLIDING DOOR EFFECT!
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Back in the early 1960's, if you were watching TV on a typical Saturday night, you were most likely watching "My Three Sons" (because what else was there to do back then), which starred Fred MacMurray and William Frawley. The program was sponsored by Hunt's Tomato Ketchup (or Catsup). One fairly persistent theme and catch phrase for Hunt's was that "It takes one whole fresh tomato to make one bottle of Hunt's Tomato Ketchup". While this slogan was smoothly intoned by an unseen, offscreen and uncredited voice-over announcer, the camera lens (and our electronic, though analog, third eye) focused on an empty ketchup bottle. A human hand missiles in and places one whole fresh tomato on top of the one completely empty bottle. There is a "hiss-squeak-thump" noise as the tomato miraculously slips right into the bottle! 60's special effects! How cool was that? It was a neat sound and while the effect never did appear in any cartoons (to the best of my knowledge), it did show in an episode of "Hogan's Heroes" as a flag popping out of a cannon and a couple of times in "Bewitched", when Samantha had a power failure.
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But the Hunt's Tomato effect does live on in truncated form. The "hiss-squeak" part was somehow appropriated, and, with a little audio compression added to give some heft, this same sound is now heard as the sliding doors on the USS Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Original Series" (STOS). This clip, along with all the other STOS effects, was made available some years back on a consumer CD produced by Crescendo Records. I don't know if the compact disc is still in print, but many copies are available on eBAY. According to the liner notes, The sound was created by recording a pneumatic airgun and then playing it backwards. I have rendered the effect in reverse myself and it sounds like a plan to me.
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THE HORTA, THE BATHTUBS, THE GENERATORS AND THE TRANSPORTERS!
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One of the sound guys who worked on the original "Star Trek" series was Sam Horta. This name is frequently seen in sound editor credits, especially in 70's vintage Filmation cartoons, like the "Archies", "Fantastic voyage" and "Star Trek: The Animated Series" and also more recently with "Ren and Stimpy". When access to the Internet became commerically available by the mid 1990's, I hoped to seek out and contact Sam but sadly he passed away at just around the same time. But Sam lives on in name as well because one of the many cockamamie alien species encountered by Kirk and Spock were the silicon-based cold-stone lifeforms known as the Horta!
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I had mentioned in a previous email that, at Hanna Barbera, many new effects were created out of existing sounds. Included in this transmission is an mp3 containing the so-called UNNNG bathtub sound plus additional familiar derivatives of the same effect, which goes to show you can get more bang for the buck through audio recycling! Also included is a short clip of the GENERATOR effect restored fairly close to its original frequency and pitch. This is what you may want to listen for should you decide to scope out the "UFOs-through-the-tollbooth" scene in "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind".
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One other noise I'll toss in for this session is a vibrato-like effect usually heard during the transport sequence in STOS. Like the sliding door, this sound has become synonymous with "Star Trek" but predates the series by upwards of eight years. You can hear this twang in "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol" when the titled character is seen careening around his bed in the morning after his experience with the three ghosts of Christmas. Also too, in "Gay Purree", as Jean Tom spies a mouse, his feline talons come popping out of his paws just prior to launch.
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That's it for this time. More stories later! I hope you had a Merry Christmas and all the best to you and your family for a Very Happy New Year!
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Bill

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: The Hobby of a Lifetime!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for a feature entitled THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO for airing on October 25, 2003. For more information on this audio news service, please click on http://www.twiar.org/

I remember this little kid. Cute kid. About nine years old. I remember this little kid sitting in the front room at his house at 644 Morris Street which was actually a huge rambling apartmentthird floor up in the Pine Hills section of Albany. Crouched by the big bay window, tightly gripping a heavy chrome microphone with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into a Roberts upright reel-to reel tape recorder, he sat there belting out a play-by-play commentary over the fly-in, the fly by and the fly away of the glorious Goodyear Blimp , a silver helium-filled, lighter than air baggy cigar gliding gracefully high in the starlit skies over the city on a crisp and chilly Friday October evening with its glittering red, yellow, green and blue pinpoints of light that spelled out the word GOODYEAR in giant sparkling letters across its massive broadside.

Then I remember remember this other little kid. He's about a year older. About ten. He's feverishly tape-recording the warbling, the chortling and the singing noises of the Three Amigos coming out of a big beige-colored RCA Color TV three-inch speaker from a NBC show called "The Wonderful World of Disney". He's doing this with the same grey wrinkly-metal clad tape machine with it's light-glinting plastic seven-inch diameter Scotch Brand magnetic tape reels coasting around and around at an amazing seven-and-one-half inches per second. All the funny music, the silly voices and the bang-clang sound effects preserved on a thin quarter-inch slice of acetate plastic and magnetic stuff that the 3M Company called type 111, all of which is basically just coherent rust.

Of course, all this this happened some forty years ago and all this courtesy of Dad, who faithfully made the commute upstate every Friday night after work because he lived in the Bronx and who sometimes lugged the twenty-five pound Roberts with him just so some little kid could practice blimp announcing or generate an endless succession of mouth-fart noises or sometimes even secretly spied on Mom and Dad's kitchen conversation using the heavy chrome mike with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into the Roberts all weekend-long.

And then there was this other little kid who finally got his own portable Airline tape recorder from Montgomery Ward with the tiny three-inch reels. The big fist-sized microphone was concealed on the front face of the machine which unhinged along with a long thick coily cord, which then could be parked in front of the TV in order to snag the cool Hanna-Barbera sounds from Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Top Cat plus neato noises from Hollywood flicks like "Forbidden Planet", "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars". All these little kids soon grew up to be me who's talking to you right now.

The Roberts machine would eventually return to me and stay with me and finally die with me many years later but not before a succession of other tape recorders came along, like the monster WEBCOR that I borrowed from Kurt Hackel down the block. It never got returned because he and his family moved away and he said he didn't want it anymore. Then there was the Mercury five- inch reel-to-reel portable and another Wards Airline seven-inch reel job, both of which I played and plowed into the ground until no reels would turn anymore.

But during the associated tenures of all these machines, many more hours would be spent recording silly sounds off the TV or the sometimes seemingly bizarre noises right outside my bedroom window. The Goodyear Blimp would make many more migrations to our city over the course of a half-score of years and on many occasions, the mike would be thrust out the window to document the low "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" of the blimp engines. Scary space noises also came in over the crunchy static on a shortwave radio, a big one down at Terry O'brien's house. Terry and his brother Mike had this huge ominous pinewood-finish shortwave radio console with the eerie green tuning eye circa 1940 in their attic bedroom and the WEBCOR was dragged over to archive the weird burbling teletypes, the oodly-doodly howling facsimiles, the impending BEEP..BEEP..BEEP of CHU , the monotonous drone of the WWV and other boinking, beeping and blipping baudot blasts that boodled and oodled their way beyond the heavy cloth speaker and into the microphone.

The many hours spent tape recording soon gave way to many more hours spent hunched over a splicing jig, mounted on my little desk which was hand painted a horrible stark blue color by my well-meaning Mom who felt that wood-aging and antiquing was her personal calling. These hours would be spent carefully slicing and carefully splicing and carefully matching the forty-five degree sliced ends of the tape together with some very sticky milky-white splicing tape, all of which you could get at the Lafayette Electronics store or the Radio Shack. Splicing the tape meant you could connect a bunch of sounds together or maybe shorten or maybe lengthen a song, which seemed a really cool thing to do.

And so this became my hobby. At least it was my indoor hobby. I wasn't a total nerd though. I did actually go outside and do the skateboard and sprain my ankle, many times. And I did go and bat the ball and break the window, many times. And other kid stuff like that too. I did also get into the fine art of throwing stainless-steel razor-edged boomerangs with intent to kill. But here, I digress.

The concept of sound effects as a hobby was further cast in stone when I chanced to see a 50's vintage George Reeves Superman re-run on the tube where some kid running around with a tape machine collecting sounds actually helps Superman catch some big bad thugs by using the recorded sounds of the Man of Steel flying and landing to drive them crazy. I figured if it was good enough for Superman, then it was surely good enough for me. Now of course to our well meaning but terminally-misdirected though-most times kindly Certified Social Workers of our latter day, such an activity would be tagged to as "therapy". Because I was a kid doing all this, the CSWs would pencil it in as "play therapy".

Basket weaving is therapy. Potholders is therapy. Making a lamp out of some chunks of wood is eighth-grade shop class. Drawing pictures of Boogie men is not only play therapy but is also disturbing. Manipulating sounds at your very whim is magic. More than a hobby. Beyond an adventure. Magic! Those hours and hours of taping sounds and splicing sounds did become a minor obsession and this is actually how I got into broadcast radio. At the time, my primary goal was to gain access to sound recording equipment and that I did for about twenty years at various radio stations here in New York and Connecticut.

Access initially came in the form of big glowing rosy red tube-amplified AMPEX 350s and then the solid-state 440s, Scully 280s and Studer REVOX A77s. To be sure, I loved doing radio. But I loved playing with the sounds even more. A universe of monster ten-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, lead-weight sixteen-inch diameter turntables and audio consoles with audio gain knobs, known to the insiders as "pots". These pots were as big as a stevedore's meaty hands, all of which would maintain into the early 1990s when without much fanfare, an IBM 386 with Windows 3.1 and an on-screen virtual production studio-in-a-box called CARD-D materialized. This unseen epiphany unfolded at WROW here in Albany and now things could be done in way not seen before. Play a sound backwards? Click on a tab which said REVERSE. No more physically flipping the tape reels on a full-track tape recorder just to get the same effect. Play a sound at half speed? Click on a tab which said SAMPLING RATE. Change the rate from 44.1 KHz sampling to 22.025 KHz sampling which amazingly equals an analog recording run at half-speed. No more seven-and-a-half or fifteen inches per second mechanical speed switch.

But this was only the beginning. Things began to accelerate and began to become far more accessible beyond the professional broadcast or recording studio. Soon, the expensive IBM clone, the obnoxious proprietary software and hardware, indeed the studio itself was no longer restricted to the pages of Broadcasting Magazine but now sat on the shelves at COMPUSA. Another interesting bit of Karma phased in around the same time. A Canadian company called SOUND IDEAS managed to get its corporate fists wrapped around some remarkable and very well-known sound effects libraries. Here was something I had wished for for many decades and now for a few dollars, well, a lot of dollars, all the sounds I used to tape from the TV, all the sounds from Hanna-Barbera, all the sounds from Warner Brothers, all the sounds from Jay Ward were mine for the purchase. Sadly, the original tapes I had recorded those many years ago are gone. Some were lost through moves from place to another but most of them did not survive the decades well. They simply became unplayable through advanced age despite attempts to carefully preserve them. In their stead though, several small brightly-colored boxes with pictures of cartoons on them and each box loaded with many silver digital disks encoded with the very same things I had lost so long ago. They were back. And what's more, while I still have a functioning Studer Revox A77 sitting on the floor in my bedroom, I have do also nine different computers sitting in the living room loaded with various flavours of COOLEDIT and GOLDWAVE available to me at my very mouse tip. And so that which became my hobby is still my hobby.

In the evening hours when it's just me and Suzie (my one foot wife), I sit before a beige-colored computer monitor with the COOLEDIT displayed upon the glowing screen. There is no tape now. No splicing jig. But there is the mouse which works much better and certainly much safer than the razor blade. And sitting on track 30 of the disk which I just this moment slid into the CD player is a two-minute audio clip of the Goodyear Blimp recorded in 1961 by Audio Fidelity Records as it was nosing it's way up the Hudson River, heading due North and on course for little old Albany, New York. And did you know this COOLEDIT has a multitrack feature?? So there's one track for the blimp, And one track for Bill. And I've also got this long, thin plastic Radio Shack microphone right here with the tiny one-eighth inch plug jacked into the computer. Hmmm, what should I say next? -30-

N2FNH SFX: 1

WHENIWASAKID! From about the age of eight and on through my late teens, my one favorite pre-computer age geek thing to do was record sounds off the television with my trusty reel-to-reel tape machine. And there were several of those, each of which I used and used until they could be used no more. Among the recorders: a Wards Airline three inch reel-to-reel portable with a coily cord microphone, a Mercury five inch portable job, a fifteen pound WebCor seven inch vacuum tube machine, my father's equally tube driven Roberts and another Wards Airline Model Number GEN3659A. This last one I know the model number because I won one of those on eBAY, although at the moment that tape recorder is on display in a bedroom closet. My best guess is that I got the idea of making sound recordings from watching a 1955 episode of The Adventures of Superman. It was the story of "The Talking Clue"!

"Ray Henderson (Richard Shakelton), son of police inspector Bill Henderson (Roberty Shayne), has been using his tape recorder to "collect" weird sounds. Unfortunately, Ray is hoodwinked into selling a tape containing the sound of tumblers on a safe to gangster Muscles McGurk (Billy Nelson). When McGurk uses the recorded information to steal evidence against him in an upcoming investigation, Ray is implicated in the crime--and Henderson may be forced to
arrest his own son. If there was ever a job for Superman (George Reeves), this is it!"
Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sitting here right next to me stuffed inside the drawers of a heavy 50's vintage office desk constructed of heavy pine are boxes of audio compact discs and rows of SanDisk and Sony digital memory flash cards. Down the hall in a side closet are additional volumes vertically stacked, all housing ten inch reels of magnetic tape. Each archive is host to a mini-library of sound effects which I have amassed for the past thirty years. This is what I may occasionally refer to as my N2FNH Sound Effects Library.

The aggregate inventory consists of recordings compiled from three principal sources:


1) Commercially available sound effects.


2) WAV and MP3 files downloaded from the Internet.


3) Sounds designed and home brewed in house or recorded in the field.

Sound effects published on both audio and data compact discs can be purchased by anyone and there are many purveyors of this product. The two major players are Sound Ideas and The Hollywood Edge. Both companies offer a bewildering array of effects, detailing just about any conceivable category. It should be noted that these libraries tend to be expensive but I have discovered that there is quite an Internet fraternity of sounds effects aficionados and fanboys along with their affiliated forums.


Here is what I bought with a ten second critique for each. From Sound Ideas,


1) The Hanna Barbera Sound FX Library
Five discs of almost all the best animation effects ever. I say "almost" because there were notable absences.

2) The Sound Effects of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends:
To truly appreciate this three disc set, you have to be closely in tune with what you have heard in the Jay Ward classics. Many of these effects were also present in UPA films. Again, some notable MIAs.

3) The Warner Brothers Sound Effects Library:
The big disappointment! Most are Foley sounds! Not on the list: the Road Runner's rocket jet sound and the Tazmanian Devil's wind up.

4) The Universal Pictures Sound Effects Library: A boatload of classic movie western effects. Every pistol, every rifle and every screaming PTWAAANG! you can imagine!
Missing: the original Frankenstein Thunder, in some circles identified as Castle Thunder, although various versions show on both the Hanna Barbera and 20th Century Fox sets.

From the Hollywood Edge,

1) CartoonTrax:
These are mostly unpublicized vintage recordings from Walt Disney Productions. There are quite a few unexpected gems clearly linked to Disney, along with many other unfamiliar sounds.


I have two additional libraries of note.


1) The Hanna-Barbera Library of Sounds:
An out-of-print two compact disc set version of an equally out-of-print eight vinyl disc set offered thirty years ago exclusively to broadcast radio and television stations. Unfortunately, these recordings are low quality, less common and mostly animal noises. With a digital editor though, these can be nicely cleaned. Some of the effects at large from the newer package
appear in this archive.


2) The O'Connor Crazies:
Still available for purchase! A comparatively low quality compact disc of Hanna-Barbera sound effects lifted from the Hanna Barbera Library of Sound and from a much earlier almost impossible to find vinyl offering from the late 1960's: The Hanna Barbera's Drop-Ins. Much cheaper now than when I bought it. Again, some of the sounds not in the inventory of the Sound
Ideas offering can be found on this recording.


So if you're a fanboy and I can only guess that this might be what I am then, like the Pokemon, you gotta catch them all. What follows is a bit of text on commercially available animation music that I lifted from myself from a forum dedicated to film and television animation.
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There have been a number of compact discs produced in the last few years which have focused on the music of film and television animation. Here are just a few.


1) Hanna Barbera Classics - Volume 1
Rhino Records
Contains main titles, sub-titles and underscores from many first generation animation efforts such as Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear,Quick Draw McGraw, Magilla Gorilla and more. Many of the earlier recordings were sourced from the Capital Records Production Music Library. There is even one track which was also used as the underscore for My Three Sons. There was supposed to a volume 2 but I never acquired the disc.


2) The Flintstones - Modern Stone Age Melodies
Rhino Records
Here, all the vocals that were heard though out the lifetime of this program. While the vocals are great to hear, even better are the underscores and music cues that are sandwiched in between those selections. Included in the clear is the classic laughing music cue that was used anytime a big joke needed audio support. All the songs and music beds composed by Hoyt Curtain.


3) The Carl Stalling Project - Music from Warner Brothers Cartoons. 1936-1958
Warner Brothers Records
Carl Stalling was perhaps the best known and most creative music composer and director at Warner Brothers during their Golden Age. A combination of select music cues and full length music and sound effects features makes this disc a must have. There is even a clip of the Yada Yada sound in the clear at the end of one of the tracks - an easy lift to add to your own
library!


4) Carl Stalling - Volume 2. 1939-1957
Warner Brothers Records
More fantastic Carl Stalling Music, again a combination of of individual music cues and full length track minus voices.


5) That's All Folks! Cartoon Songs from Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes.
Rhino/Warner Brothers Records
This is a two disc set including full length features such as What's Opera Doc? and Three Little Bops and a massive 100 page booklet detailing behind the scenes activities at Warner Brothers way back when.


6) Warner Brothers Presents Bugs Bunny on Broadway
Warner Brothers Records
This album features newly recorded renditions of classic cartoon music by the Warner Brothers Symphony Orchestra but there are also some original audio segments on the disc as well.


7) The Best of WB Sound FX - CRASH! BANG! BOOM!
Kid Rhino/Warner Brothers Records
Some music, a lot of sounds from the commercial Warner Brothers Sound Effects Library for use at parties, on videos, computers and answering machines.


8) Toon Tunes
Kid Rhino
A compilation of television animation themes including the best Scholastic Rock song - Conjunction Junction

9) Music for TV Dinners - the 1950's
Scamp Records.
It is here on this disc where you will find a number of recordings directly associated with Ren and Stimpy, including Happy Go Lively - Laurie Johnson, Workaday World - Jack Beaver, Holiday Playtime - King Palmer and Stop Gap -Wilfred Burns (I believe this last one was used for a number of years on Bob Barker's Truth or Consequences). Many of these selections were sourced from KPM and Associated Production Music. Actually, when you think about it, it's amazing just how much old sound escaped the studio vaults and landed in our own record collections!