How To Produce A Comedy CD

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 Cher etc. and always wanted 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, 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.

By Lorraine Messina