Our friends at Radio Eugene shared a happy little ditty from Soundcloud the other day:
Previewing some tracks for a someday upcoming radio sorta thing and the associative trails led here. And it’s only just Tuesday morning. https://t.co/ZtJwBXjVz0
— Radio Eugene (@RadioEUG) August 3, 2021
I had a folder full of Bob Ross quotes that I had been looking to use. My thought was to make some Garageband beats to go with them, but this track made it easier.
To get the quotes, I imported audio from a few Joy of Painting episodes into Audacity and listened for things I might use. Each video has a transcript, so I copied those as well to make it easier. For each episode I applied the Amplify effect and then the Compression effect, using the default settings. Then I copied selected quotes, pasted each into a new file and exported as MP3. For the file names I used whatever he was saying in each one. This ended up being helpful foresight.
Soundcloud user Fused Forces made his track freely downloadable, so I’m assuming they don’t mind if people use it. I imported the track in Audacity, then imported a Bob quote as a second stereo track. I moved it a bit to line up with a beat. I imported another quote, which made a third track. I thought it might get confusing and unwieldy to have separate tracks for each quote, so I copied and pasted the quote audio into the second track and deleted the third. I repeated that process for each quote. I didn’t have a plan for the order of the quotes, but I did put some thought into the selection as I brought each one in, so they’re not in a completely random order.
I kinda like the way it came out. There’s some background noise in the Bob parts, some from his brushes and some tape hiss. I wonder if it might have been better to have a line of that noise running throughout, at a low level, to blend the Bob tracks better. Alternatively I could have tried some noise reduction to take the hiss out.
I set Kim Beom’s Yellow Scream to music a couple years ago:
If I come up with a few similar remix/mashups, maybe I can make a whole album of art rock. Or is it art rot?
