What the crap is a pre-slate?
Us sound designer folks do some strange things. We put ‘dead cats’ on poles then stick them an inch above a stream. We will drive far out of our way to stick a dead cat on a pole, just so we can hold it under a bridge, to see what the water flowing under it sounds like. We’ll put a .7 second sound on loop, listen to it intently about 100 times, before deciding ‘Hm, nope. I don’t like it’, whereupon some of us will bust out the scrubber, and play it back reallllllllllllllllllllllllllll slow like to find what we don’t like about it. We pretty much look like crazy folk. One thing that I didn’t think made us look insane, but apparently does, is pre and post-slating. Pre-slating is when you speak into the microphone, and say ‘Uhhh, I’m at the uhh, the school, that I walk by every day. It’s uhhhh, on that road, and this is the really noisy heating unit that uhh, is like, next to it’. They all sound like that. At least, all of mine do. Post-slating is the same thing, only instead of saying ‘This is uhhhh’, you go ‘that was uhhhhh’. I did this one day, and someone pointed out to me ‘What? You just told the microphone what you recorded, why?’, my reaction was ‘Well, puh! So I don’t forget!’, they countered with ‘But you just recorded it! How will you forget!’. It makes sense to me, but apparently telling a microphone what it just heard is weird.
Anyway! Mr. Zachary Quarles, recently made a tweet about how silly his pre-slates sound. Which inspired me to make a blag!
So, since I gave you a run down on what a pre and post-slate is, I present you with what is EASILY, the best pre-slate I’ve ever recorded, have a listen!