The Time of the Daleks
More than you wanted to know about my involvement.
How did I get the gig, given my astonishing lack of talent or experience? Staying power I guess.
I've been messing around with audio since I was a kid, chief inspirations in the late 70s and early 80s being my father's copy of the Beatles 1966-1970, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Lord of the Rings, The Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour and Round the Horne on Radio 4 and my first cassette; Doctor Who - Genesis of the Daleks.
One Christmas my sister and I both got portable cassette players as presents, with tiny microphones built in just next to the motor for maximum noisiness but for me it was a revelation. I recorded off the TV, made comedy shows with my friend Andrew Biggs, which seemed to largely encompass dropping odd music or huge crashing noises between us playing presenters of some show or another. Lots of half pence pieces made a very satisfying building collapse noise, and only slightly knackered up the mike grill completely.
On occasion I also borrowed my sister's tape machine and father's tape deck when they were out and
'multi-tracked' layered effects tracks live, generally awful attempts to mix records together to produce bizarre harmonies or alien zoos in which I played a number of bizarre beasties until I had a vast menagerie, that was almost entirely inaudible behind
layers of cassette motor noise.
Eventually I got given a better tape deck and two mikes, and began to experiment with stereo, surreptitious actualite recording of family life from equipment hidden behind the sofa and how exciting the whooshing noise you got from spinning a mike by its cable was. Time passed.
Mikes broke.
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I became a maker of compilation tapes at university as an aid to work avoidance and got rather good at it, while still dabbling a bit in sound while pursuing my Drama degree and my writing.
Tapes were generally how I learned my lines and a couple of the plays I wrote around that time were definitely influenced by my feeling that sound was neglected in theatre.
Time passed again, it does that, and I got poor, though I occasionally got little bits of comedy on
Radio 4 which was nice.
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Working at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television I first got to play with a DAT machine. I knew I wanted my own. I reckoned that with a DAT recorder and one of the PC sound editing packages that were emerging I could make demos of my comedy and drama, pushing myself as a writer and performer and perhaps even as an independent producer of it in time.
A dear relative died and left me money to spend on something I really wanted and so I entered the digital era. A hunger for digital sound cards, new software, a CD Writer, more memory and speed followed and has done ever since. I learned how to edit sound slowly, making a very amateur demo that got a bit of interest from radio producers, producing a couple of pieces of art for exhibitions, doing the sound effects for a stage play, then re-recording the play itself in a bedroom lined with cushions, creating a long ambient piece based on recordings from a holiday abroad and so on and so on.
Then one day Big Finish, a company who worked in two of my areas of obsession Doctor Who and sound, requested CDs or DATs from people who wanted to work as sound designers for them.
A mailing out, a long wait and a request from Nick Briggs to produce a 5 minute segment of one of his Dalek Empire plays as a demo followed and suddenly I was offered a chance to do an audio piece twice the length and ten times the complexity of anything I'd tried before.
I couldn't believe I was being allowed to try out on something as high profile as the Paul McGann's first Dalek story.
Four months part time work on it later, during which time I went from despair to jubilation and back several times, learned a ridiculous amount and worked harder than I ever have before in my life, it was finished.
During one particularly frenetic period of wall to wall deadlines, I was doing my day job and making the sound of a nuclear reactor blowing up for a James Bond exhibition and working on the Dalek story all at once. I'm not blind to its faults, there are things I could have done better, moments I mishandle, segments which I feel I rushed, and a catalogue of things I'd go back and do again if I had time, but, warts and all, I'm very proud of what I've done and of becoming a little footnote to the Doctor Who story doing it.
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Besides squelching, banging and otherwise noisily handling some of the things you hear moved about in The Time of the Daleks, I actually also make a few vocal cameos too, as a computer voice, a guard on a walkie talkie, a number of dying resistance fighters, a Second World War army officer (and his men!), Mark Antony in Shakespeare's original production of Julius Caesar, and as a couple of background Daleks (with and without casings) largely for my own amusement. Some of the effects I concocted for the piece came from misuse of wet balloons, refried beans, vegetable oil, burning hair (remove from head first). bundled matchsticks and condom covered mikes recording underwater.
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It appears traditional that anyone involved in anyway with sound production has to have a web page listing in mind numbing detail all the gear they use.
Warning- you are now entering the realms of too much information.
On The Time of the Daleks I used:
A PC running Windows 95, some mikes, a
DAT machine, a mini disc recorder, some
leads to make them all work
Acid 2.0, Climax 3DAudio, CoolEdit 96, Cubasis VST, Cylonix Vocoder, Ed!son for the EWS64 XL soundcard, HumanMachine 3D Audio, SoundForge, Waves compression plug ins (and a 14 day trial of some of their more weird effects too!) and a mass of free Direct X and VST plug ins off Future Music magazine discs!
Through an accident of timing, SoundForge, in which about a third of the editing occured, was a nightmare.
I'd bought the Waves plug in at Alistair Lock's recommendation only to find, my version of SoundForge (3) needed to upgrade to chain this and the various other plug ins I had. I tried to upgrade but Sonic Foundry had just released a new version of the software and were no longer offering an upgrade that worked on Windows 95.
Not prepared to change my operating system with all the attendant problems that would bring in the middle of a job, (particularly as it appeared my soundcard was likely to pack up under a new operating system) I was helped out by a friend who lent me his SoundForge 4 until the work was done, and I could upgrade both my computer and SoundForge at the same time. Madness!
I'm now on Sound Forge 6
and Windows XP Home and very happy, except of course for the fact my lovely old
Terratec soundcard (quirks and all) has become a little used museum piece stuck
in an elderly PC that now rarely
gets dusted off.
I did warn you we were entering the realms of too much information didn't I?
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Just about everything here is copyright of the 
, 
and a half dozen other people one way or another.