Imitate this! (Revival of an old Savvy thread idea!)

[chucktaylor]

Here's my little contribution to this experiment.

I had fun playing with the filters in AA

[Lee Gordon]

Here's my entry. I had to stretch Colin's music bed to get the timing I was after.

[arthurburton]

Here's my take!
Arf'

[JoeActor]

Great takes all 'round!

Love the effects and music manipulation - gotta get more techy!
Joe

[Mike Sommer]

Ok here's mine in full production, static and all.

There are are some fun nuances in Hal's voice, and on subsequent takes I'm sure I could get them.
Hal's stress on "Only" has a nice lift to it, the same goes for "long cigarets" -you almost have to aske yourself, what kind of cigarets are they?, to get the line. All in that "just the facts ma'am" sort of delivery.

Enjoy:

[Mike Sommer]

Here is the music bed I built up.

[chucktaylor]

Great Job Mike, Lee, Colin, Joe, et al. This is a fun experiment, it's great to hear everyone's takes on it.

How about this for the next one?

[Colin Campbell]

Originally Posted by JoeActor

How about like the prize from NPR's quiz show... A custom recording by Colin for your answering machine?

Problem is Joe... none of these guys need ME to do their phone recording. They can do it themselves.

Mike... GREAT. So far you are the front runner...

...and THANK YOU for the more authentic music.

Hal had a funny intonation on certain words.

Dragnet... "Draegnet."
Files.... "fiels."

I'm going to try a re-do with Mike's bed and some more production. Post it later.

Now if anyone can imitate Jack Webb, be my guest. I can post an example if anyone cares.

More Hal (and a little bit of George...) Neat because it has the NBC chimes at the end and Hal Identifies himself.

[Mike Sommer]

Hmm Fred Foy, I'll have to give that a try when I get back.

Thanks Colin
I was able build a close sound chain that mimicked what NBC had at the time at the Sunset and Vine studios. The trick was to get the tubes to distort so there was a little fuzz on my voice, and I used an RCA 74B ribbon so that sound was built right in. Rolled off the bottom below 80hz and above 10Khz. With about a 10dB boost @ 1,25 Khz and 7dB @ 1KHz. Next came my Disney Stage B reverb (this mimics the sound of that wonderful old stage. If you've ever heard narration from Disney old films you know what I'm talking about) Then came over drive, kind of gives it a metallic brittleness to the sound.

On the output, there is a multi band compressor and another Over Drive. The original production probably sounded spectacular, and more than likely was recored on tape, then again it could have been direct to disk. Either way it's what happened to it over the past 60 years; How many dubbing generations did it go through, how many bad EQ tweaks were added. I could spend a day trying to find the sound but I think it's pretty authentic otherwise.

[Colin Campbell]

Here's the script for Fred...

(God, this is fun...)