Technical Difficulties

This week once again presented itself with difficulties as I was putting my stories together. Two weeks ago, I went to several events involving Pat Martino, who is a world-famous jazz guitarist with an incredible story. He had a brain aneurysm and lost 60% of his left frontal lobe; when he woke up he didn't remember he was ever a guitar player or how to play guitar and he re-taught himself using his old records. He really was a fascinating character and one of the events I attended that week was a one-on-one interview he did in the Bond Life Sciences Center with Dr. Joel Schenker, a specialist in brain damage and memory loss. The interview was fascinating and Martino gave literally dozens of great sound bites throughout.

I plugged my Marantz into the Multbox they have there and listened to the first several minutes on my headphones; it all sounded fine and the levels looked perfect on the meter, so after about five minutes I took the headphones off and just sat, listened and took notes for the remaining hour or so of the interview. Unfortunately, when I got back to KBIA to put together my feature the next day, the sound was horribly distorted. Turns out that they had their settings far too hot on their board for the mic's that they were using and even though it sounded fine in the room and on the Marantz's headphones, because it was plugged into their multbox (for supposedly clearer sound) it sounded as if I'd been holding the mic up right next to one a speaker that had been turned up too loud.

I met with one of the producers at KBIA and we worked on filtering out some of the background hiss and overall junk noise that was flooding the audio and it sounds a lot better than it did, but it still sounds bad. I was very disappointed with that, because I think the feature could have turned out to be a great piece if the people at the Life Sciences Center hadn't had their settings so screwed up on their soundboard. Now I feel as if it's a decent story that had great potential that couldn't be realized because of a technical error that wasn't even mine. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy with this result, but there's nothing to do now except make the most of it and try to get it to sound decent.