Jingle Bells
THERE'S ONLY ONE Kenny
Everett when it comes to jingles! His zany tunes can be heard
morning, noon and night on Capital - and they're all his own
work.
He has his own studio at his farm, tucked away in the Cotswolds,
and it's there that this jingle maker extraordinaire comes
up with his seemingly endless ideas.
Remember that silly little song he made that consisted of
a lot of hellos? Well, here's Kenny's explanation of how he
made it.
"First, you sidle up to the microphone, then you cue yourself
by saying 'one, two three' and sing the first line of hellos
into a tape machine.
"Then you take a second tape machine and whilst singing a
second set of hellos, you play back the first tape, so you
end up with two voices singing in harmony. Then you add a
third voice in a different harmony until you end up with a
whole bunch of harmonies that fit together quite nicely!"
Kenny reckons that the minimum you can get away with if you
want to make his kind of jingles are two tape machines joined
together by wire, a microphone and a turntable.
He explained: "The sort of equipment I've got here is just
a sophisticated version of the home equipment. The turntables
are special big ones with motors like washing machines so
that you can park the needle where you want and stop the record
with the tip of your finger without anything terrible happening.
When you want the music to start, you just let the record
go." Kenny's got quite a few gadgets to help him with some
of the weirder effects he achieves.
"I've got an instant phasing machine which phases my voice
and makes it go all psychedelic. And then there's this twiddly
knob called a varispeed control, that speeds my voice up or
slows it down depending on which way I twiddle it."
Then, of course, there's the echo chamber. "A very dangerous
piece of equipment, that," said Kenny. "Many a good dj has
got lost in an echo chamber by turning it up too much. There's
a chance that you might never come out...
Kenny uses a special set of effects for his Captain Kremmen
adventures.
"They're just silly sound effects that come up at the press
of a button," he explained. "There's one monster sound that
I didn't do, I think it was probably recorded at the zoo.
Then there's a modern monster sound that reminds people of
a belch. Which isn't surprising because that's exactly what
it is! It happened when Tommy Vance and I were looning about
in the studio. I felt a burp coming on, so I recorded it.
I twiddled with the dials and put the tape machine into playback,
so the sound reverberated."
Then there's that blood-curdling scream that is featured so
often.
"That was easy," said Kenny, "I just stuffed my wife in the
oven!"
The music Kenny uses to introduce Captain Kremmen sounds like
an original 78 record. And again, that's not surprising, 'cos
it is!
"It's called 'Women In Uniform'," said Kenny, "and it's all
authentic stuff with real scratches and crackles. I think
it was made in 1920."
And lastly, there's an even more blood-curdling scream that
Kenny uses quite often.
"Another easy one," said Kenny, "I just took the wife out
of the oven and stuffed her up the mains!" So now you know!
Another aspect of sound effects is covered by the production
team who make the Capital commercials. Jan Bradshaw heads
the team whose job is to co-ordinate and make the commercial
tapes.
"About 5000 of the commercials come in ready taped from advertising
agencies," said Jan, "and we make the rest on behalf of the
advertiser. Clients either send in a script or come in to
chat with us and discuss their ideas. Some will specifically
ask for a particular person to do the voice-over, but we've
got a bank of voices we can call on for making commercials.
You'd be surprised the number of times that we use a girl's
voice to sound like a young boy - or vice versa!
"Some clients just want a straight script, but others often
want a special sound effect. Some sound effects are quite
straight forward, like the client who wanted the sound of
a bottle of wine being uncorked. We simply sat in front of
the microphone and uncorked a real bottle of wine. The sound
effect was perfect... and so was the wine!
"Another time, a client asked for the sound of 10,000 cartoon-style
feet running, so we got on our hands and knees and scrabbled
our finger nails on a metal waste-paper basket!"
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