Making "Post Traumatic Fairy Tail Disorder"

RadioStar has acquired a taste for fairy tales lately, and this was the fourth one we've tackled. There's something enjoyable about having a solid backstory already established, after all the time we've spent starting from absolute ground zero. What made this particular episode curious was that two of the major players are based on a variant of the tale that most of us were not aware of. Diana and I worked out the main outline of what happened in Hansel and Gretel, but Janna was the one who remembered a version of the story where the children were helped home by a goose and a turtle.

Since we recorded it, I've located versions of the story where a duck helps the kids across a river, but I still haven't located any turtle variants. Be that as it may, Goose and Turtle quickly became two of our favorite characters and provide the stability to a cast of very unstable humans.

This is the first episode we've posted with the addition of a third microphone and our new mixing board, which has given us an even cleaner sound than before. Each channel is brought into the computer as a separate AIF file, so I pull all three channels into SoundStudio3, which I've gotten really accustomed to. Unlike the CueBase software that we record with, Sound Studio gives me a large waveform which allows for a largely visual editing style.

The music is a little more random than past fairy tales, which had an intentionally "fairy tale" quality to them. Our Pied Piper show had a lot of flutes in it, and I would have liked to have brought in a lot of accordian music for this one, but I don't have any loops like that, and by the time Jam Pack: World Music showed up, it would have been too late to post the show. So, I decided to play with a more modern musical style.

For those who wondered, that's a fireplace in Turtle and Goose's home at the end. I wanted something nice and warm, but I made it as quiet as possible so that people didn't think that Hansel and Gretel had burned down Turtle's home....

Dan