Sound Recording- 911 Phone Call

Paul Overstrom

Paul Overstrom

Member
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction in going about recording a 911 phone call. I have little to no experience in sound, but am willing to work hard to record great sound. I need a "911 phonecall" to serve as a voiceover in a horror short that i am currently writing. When listening to some of them on youtube and other sources, i started asking myself questions about what it would take to get it done.

Would it be as simple as record two different voices in a quiet room and just mixing them together in post?
How do i get that "phone conversation noise"?
More or less, would this be more of a post production heavy task or is recording the dialog correctly the bulk of the work?

This might all sound confusing, but i can clear up any confusion if you ask me. Thanks in advance, and again...any point in the right direction is a big help..

PS: i have access to a wide range of microphones and sound editing programs at my University which i plan to utilize. Maybe some suggestions there too..
 
Many presets have phone call effects. I know sound booth does. Eq is the main thing really. Drop the lows and highs and mess around with the mids. From there I can't help unless I do it myself or am there.
 
One way would be to record the voices as clean as possible and then modify them through equalization, or by using a "phone call effect" plugin.
The other way would be to record the conversation directly over the phone, using any kind of telephone recording devices (there are plenty of them, ranging from about 10$ to 300$ or so...).

In my opinion, it's always better to work with a cleaner sound. It gives you more latitude in post.
 
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Record it clean and make the phone effect later.

Add a parametric EQ and, as Mitch said, take it down to mostly the mids. Phones are all mid-rangy. They also have a little touch of distortion to them. Play with the EQ until you get it where you want it, then add some distortion to taste.

You can also cheat the effect with iZotope's free "Vinyl" plug-in.
 
You can make it sound like a 911 real call, but most of those recordings you can't understand hence the captions. Just do it to make it believable but still sound good to you
 
Phone calls only transmit 300 to 3000Hz; just enough to understand and recognize the person talking. Set the EQ accordingly.
 
1. high pass filter
2. Lo- fi recording or "dirty" it up in post
3. 2k (Gotta remember the freq) low level "beep" every 10-15 seconds
4. Dispatcher needs calm and as if reading off a script (they do)
5. There needs to be a frequency shift difference between caller and 911 op to differentiate between them, not just voice.
6. Background voices of other 911 ops (if in a busy metro area)
7. Low level radio chatter/call out tones helps sell the audio "image"

LOL, basically what everyone else has said. Note to Self: read entire thread before opening yap.
 
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FWIW, I use iZotope's (free) 'Vinyl' plug-in every now and then for generating noise and other lo-fi effects.
 
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