About the Instruments:

Flatulina™'s Fabulous Holiday Spectacular - as seen on Comedy Central -
was produced using the following gear and software...

Logic Audio
Reason
Roland JV-1080
Kazoo
Several glasses of water
A Paper Plate
Mac Titanium G4 Laptop Computer
AKAI Sampler
Neumann TLM 103 microphone
EXS 24 Sampler [software]

VIDEO:
Canon ZR45 Digital video camcorder
iMovie

How did you make farts into melodies?
The first trick was to just record hundreds of fart sounds. Once I got about 500 sounds recorded, I listened to each one and determined the actual pitch of the sound. Also, as any orchestrator would understand, I needed to give my self several types of fart sounds. Some long, some short, some squeaky, some rumblers, some light and airy, some aggressive and loud. So, the task was to group them according to their sound quality, and assign them to the keys of my keyboard so I could play a melody with them. The detail work came in when I knew I would often need to repeat a note and wouldn't want the same sound twice in a row. So I had to assign different velocities [how hard you strike the key] to different fart samples. That way I could cycle through 3 or 4 different fart sounds on any one note on any one bank of sounds. I ended up with about 6 different banks of fart sounds.

This worked well for me until we upgraded the version of Logic Audio to 5.0 and it suddenly became incompatible with various parts of gear in the chain of connections between the computer and the AKAI sampler where all of the fart sounds were located. Another problem was the issue that I had done all of the work in creating my sound banks on an older mac with SCSI connections, and then began actually sequencing the music on a the laptop which had firewire connections. So between the new incompatibility on the older computer and the lack of SCSI on the newer one, there was now no computer that would "talk" to the piece of gear which contained the fart sounds. I had planned to eventually convert the samples on the AKAI rack mounted sampler into EXS samples that I could use as a plug in to Logic on the laptop. Unfortunately the Translator software which claimed to have this ability wouldn't convert the Mesa format on the AKAI sampler to the EXS samples. After several complaints to the company, they finally released a version which did this specific translation, but there was a glitch and it put a pop at the beginning of each sample, making it useless.

I finally got around this problem by finishing my sequences of all of my songs on the laptop. Then bouncing them down as an audio 2 mix and putting them on an even OLDER Mac which had the SCSI connections and WOULD talk to the AKAI but lacked the speed to run Logic with all of the tracks I was using, or the EXS. I opened my audio 2 mix on that computer, programmed the fart sounds to that and then bounced the FART sounds down as a 2 mix solo, and took them back to the laptop with the original sequence where I could put them into the mix just as an audio track. But this process only happened after several other failed attempts and gear upgrades in trying to get the other computer to talk to the AKAI. All in all, I spent 5 months without access to my fart sounds. That was when I worked on the video, the graphics for the CD, and the Flatulina™ artist website. I also recorded the fish during that time.

Are the fart sounds real?
Does it matter? I'm not telling.

What is the "fish choir" and how did you record that?
The "singing fish" are basically just me and a glass of water gargling and singing into the mic. This is actually not easy. It is very hard to gargle, sing, and get good mic placement. First of all, it's bad to sing with your chin sticking up and out, strains the voice. But you can't gargle without having your chin up or else the water comes out of your mouth. So, I finally found that the easiest thing was to sit in a chair, put the mic so that it was facing down, then I would hit record, rest my head on the back of the chair so that in terms of gravity my mouth was upright, but since I was laying back, my chin could be in a normal position to sing. Then I gargled the notes. I had multiple passes so that I could have different sounds and also a group sound. If I had it to do all over again, I might have also pitched them up a little to make them sound more cartoonish, but considering all of the other drama going on with the project, I'm fortunate to have even gotten as far as I did.

What is the best way to mic a kazoo?
After trying several different mic positions on the kazoo, I believe the best one was to mic the kazoo so that the end of it was aimed just below the mic to avoid wind noise. Then the mic could record both the sound coming out of the end of the kazoo and the buzziness of the tissue paper diaphragm which gives the kazoo its trademark sound. In addition to this I used a paper plate with a hole cut in the middle of it. I put the mouth end of the kazoo through the paper plate and used the plate as a reflective sound shield to send the sound toward the mic. Once I started doing this, it made a big difference.

How much video is on the enhanced part of the CD?
There are about a dozen different video clips totaling over 30 minutes. Some are mock documentary footage of Flatulina™ in the recording studio working on recording her "fish choir". Other clips are friends telling how fabulous Flatulina™ is in a testimonial style, and then there is also a Flatulina™ music video which we realized seemed like something we should obviously do if we were going to shoot video.

The problem with that was, I had originally planned for the dance mix to be a medley of Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer. That was the dance mix that I programmed, and that was what I edited the music video to. But after getting the video edited to those songs, it occurred to me, now that we have put these copyrighted songs to actual video footage, it is no longer just an issue of getting a mechanical license to record those songs. I also needed a sync license to have permission to put it to video. The problem is, a mechanical license [if you are only going to record it] is compulsory, all you do is just let them know you are going to record the song, and pay the amount. But a sync license is NOT compulsory, so the publishing company which owns the rights to a copyrighted song can always say that you can't use it. Once I realized this, I made efforts to get a sync license for those songs, but time was passing and they were dragging their feet, so I ended up having to replace those melodies with other non-sacred, public domain Christmas songs. [If it's public domain you can do whatever you want with it.] So then I had to try to put these new songs in to match the editing on the video, which had been edited to the phrasing of the other songs. Not the most efficient way to do a music video, but I got it done.

How did you edit the video?
This was another nightmare. Since the video was an afterthought, I just did it with a consumer grade video camera and iMovie which came free with my laptop. I had no idea how much video I would end up with, how long it would take to edit, and how many problems I would have using iMovie. The thing about iMovie is, you work from a clip board and make your video on a workspace below. So once I got all of my little video clips imported and named [my building blocks] I realized there was no "save as" function which meant that unless I wanted to go through the hassle of creating these little building blocks with each video segment, I needed to just assemble ALL of the video clips in the same file. I ended up with a 30 minute file, a ridiculously long file considering what iMovie was intended to do. One of the problems with iMovie is that once you put something where you want it, those little suckers will just slide all over when you are not looking. I had carefully place fart sounds to coincide with hand gestures or spaces in dialogue, hundreds of them, and they would just move around. Then I would spend a half hour just trying to put them all back where they belonged. This happened more times than is at all acceptable. I will never use iMovie again for this type of project, that is not what it was intended for.