How to add sound to amateur films (1954)

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effected automatically when the commentary is added. The advantage of the split-track method, however, is that you can alter the commentary without affecting the music. If you make a slip in one passage of commentary, you have only to repeat the superimposition process. Then the unsuccessful recording of speech is erased and replaced by a new recording and the background music is not affected. This is why you should arrange for the erase head to operate over a slightly greater tape width than the recording head. This ensures that unsuccessful recordings will be completely erased when you use the same tape displacement at each attempt. Once you have mastered the principles of split-track mixing, you can extend the method to the combination of more than two recordings. You can, for example, record the sound of waves in the normal way and then, by displacing the tape by three-quarters of a trackwidth, replace this proportion of the width by a recording of seagulls. Next you can reduce the tape displacement to a halfwidth of the track, erase the seagulls from this part and replace them with the chug of a motorboat. Finally, you reduce the displacement to a quarter-width of a track and replace half of the motorboat recording by the skipper's voice. This process builds up a sound picture of waves, seagulls, motorboat and skipper. Each sound is carried by a track only a quarter the width of a normal recording. Consequently, although they are actually separate on the tape, you hear all four sounds at once during playback. 87