Direct mp3 download or play:   Hong Kong At Walnut Creek Inn With Scolding

Direct mp3 download or play: Hong Kong At Walnut Creek Inn Without Scolding

Walnut Creek Inn, Walnut Creek California

You probably will not know what to think after listening to this recording.  This was made in the early 1970s, probably 1971, while I was in the 11th grade at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California. I was friendly with a fellow student who had a distinctive voice and an interest in recording. My parents had just purchased a Sony  TC – 560D open reel tape recorder, the same machine that I used to record “Harry To The Ferry.”  So one day  I had my friend over to the house, and it didn’t take long to decide what to record. As soon as he spotted a copy of The Contra Costa Times newspaper on the coffee table, he knew just what to do or maybe not. But nevertheless he started turning pages and reading parts of sentences and then recombining them in all sorts of nonsensical ways. Some of you might recognize some of the names including Gary Bogue, the pet and animal columnist , Royal Pools, and  of course Walnut Creek Inn. The idea of Hong Kong being at Walnut Creek Inn  seemed very funny to me. Now I think that idea would be quite reasonable, such as an Asian restaurant being inside or somehow associated with a large hotel.

I recorded my friends voice using my Calrad DM-59HL dynamic microphone, plugged directly into one channel of the microphone input on the Sony tape deck at 3 3/4 inches per second. Years later I thought it might be fun if  I had the sound of an angry parakeet to go along with the voice. I already had recordings of my pet parakeet “Greenboy” and so I think (I can’t quite remember) I played a cassette tape connected to the other unused channel on the Sony. On the TC – 560D there is a record button for each channel so you can record one mono track on the left or right, and then rewind the tape and record the other side while listening to the first recording, and since there are only two heads on this recorder, syncing the recordings was never a problem. I think while I was still living in California, I digitized the voice recording to a 256 KBPS MP3. I know now that digital recording should have been made into a lossless file like .aif or .wav, but it still sounded okay, anyway. In preparing the recording for this post, I used Adobe Audition to process the stereo version (with parakeet squawking or scolding as I like to call it) with room ambience.  In the monaural version I used several types of compression to try to make the voice consistently as loud and clear as possible without clipping distortion. Also on this version, you might notice the fade up and the fade out have filters that open the high frequencies at the beginning and close back down at the ending.

I know all of that was a mouthful or whatever, but I hope you can enjoy and have a laugh!