How to Produce a Comedy
CD
Author:
For many years I have written comedy monologues as a hobby. Most of the
material has been in my head but in the last few years I have been writing my
thoughts down on paper. I have grown up watching a lot of comedy on TV
such as Bob Hope,
the Marx Brothers, Sonny and
to produce a script of my own. More recently I have been studying material
from Jerry Seinfeld and Jeff Foxworthy. I have funny lines that I have learned
to put together into a story. It took a lot of trial and error to get it right. My
best writing occurs in the morning. I guess I am a morning person. To learn
how to put your funny lines into a script you have to study material from other
artists and authors.
It was time to look around on the Internet for a sound engineer that would help
me produce my CD. To my surprise there were several engineers in my area.
There was one sound engineer in particular in a near by town that operated a
sound studio. What are the odds of that happening in Upstate NY? Anyway
I emailed him concerning my idea of producing a demo CD to see what my
material sounds like. He was agreeable so we set a date to record. I asked
him the obvious questions such as what the rates were and whether I need to
provide him with any blank CDs. I was given an hourly rate which I thought
was fair since I didn’t want to spend much money on the project. It was really
just to settle a curiosity I had about the whole experience. In addition, I
needed to provide a blank CD and DVD for the recording.
The recording session was scheduled. I was a little nervous even
though I have practiced the script for over two weeks. It was only going to
be three paragraphs that I was going to record on to a CD. I did the recording
in two takes but it sounded a little stiff. I learned later that if you memorize
the script it sounds more natural and less like it is being read. My sound
engineer did some editing to the recording and added a laugh track. I received
the finished product the following week.
After leaving the sound studio I was on cloud nine. I never knew I could actually
make a professional sounding recording. It was something I always dreamed
about doing and it was finally done.
When the CD demo arrived in the mail I must tell you it was such a treat to
play a CD that I produced rather than one from another artist. I laughed so
much when I heard my comedy material. It was such a great treat! I was
hooked!
Over the past several weeks I have written additional pages to my script and
practiced reading it with a tape recorder every day. I practiced changing the
speed and pitch of my delivery so the recording would sound natural. I
also scheduled another recording session with my sound engineer.
A co-worker of mine who is an amateur photographer took some photos of me
today. I will be using the photos to create a cover for my CD album. If you
can find people that want to help you out, it is a great way to reduce the
production costs of making your CD. It took about two hours of posing for
pictures in order to obtain the correct photo for my CD cover. It was a learning
experience. I have only posed for family pictures. It was like learning how to be
a model in two short hours.
It was time for my sound engineer and I to get to work. We spend two hours
working on my comedy CD one night. It was so exciting. Everything about this
project has been a big learning experience as well as a very exciting one. It has
given me new skills that I use daily when I interact with people.
Another thing I needed to learn was how to market my CD. I have read about
putting ads on the Internet, posting articles or classified ads to sell a CD. I
also read about an organization called SCORE. SCORE is made up of business
people that volunteer their time to help others. It is very charitable for these
people to offer their time to help others.
After watching a stand up comic on Comedy Central the other night I noticed how
he was getting laughs. There was laughter inserted after every pause he made in his
monologue. My sound engineer and I have been trying to figure out how to make
my CD sound real. I emailed my sound engineer my idea and he was agreeable to
making these changes to my sound track. That meant that I had to define all the
places in the script in which to add laughter so the sound track sounds like a live
recording that was made in front of an audience. So far this is the most challenging
technical item to get right in the production of this CD. I altered the script and
emailed it back to my engineer. My sound engineer, as I like to call him, explained
to me that when adding sounds to a recording the sounds all have to sound like they
came from the same spot. For example, the cheering sounds in a football stadium
would be different than the sounds in a comedy club. I will have to wait and see
how this works out.
Created my web site. My web site is located at: lorrainemessina.com. I
spent hours working on this web site. I used Netscape web page editor and
Microsoft Front Page software to create my web site. The Netscape web page
editor is the easiest to use. It is just like using word processing software.
The time consuming part was editing the HTML code. The Netscape editor allows
you to do this. There is something interesting I learned. When you add a link to
your web page the default color is blue. You can actually change that by altering
the color number used in the HTML code and moving the color command next to
the link you want to be a different color. Even thou the project was time consuming
it was fun
and creative work.