Early Tuesday afternoon, as I was doing a little design work, Shelley called my name.
"Could you come here for a minute? We need your Spanish expertise."
Because this year's An Evening Under the Stars fundraiser is Latin-fiesta themed, they've needed my limited Spanish much more often than one might expect from a public radio station in
"Errrre, errrre..." went Patrick, attempting to roll his "r's." "How would you say 'the beautiful grounds of Arbor Crest Wine Cellars' in Spanish?" Shelley asked me with a critical look at the screen. And so, I became one of the voice coaches to a
On Wednesday, after we had hammered out the perfect mixture of Spanish and English words so that an everyday listener might understand the promo, the three of us headed to the recording studio. Patrick's voice is naturally pleasantly mid-range but to transform into the sultry latino, he kept deepening it as he practiced the script.
"Buenos días," he said normally. "Buenos días," a little deeper. "Buenos días." With that, he went too deep, reaching instead the voice of a latino you would hope not to run into in a dark alley. Patrick readjusted and ran through the entire script several different times, pausing to ask the correct pronunciation of "señores," to perfect a Spanish-accented version of the word "radio," and several times just to laugh with Shelley and me at the silliness of the whole situation. When Patrick decided that he had enough usable takes, he took the sound recording back to his office to piece together the best versions of each section of the script.
Behind the promo recording he layered (what else?) music from the soundtrack to The Mask of Zorro.
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