The Studio

Cell phones are great; you never know who is going to call you! It makes life interesting.

Today while I was at work I got a call from a fellow Olympic volunteer acquaintance. He had a friend (also a volunteer) who was in need of some help. She volunteers for the media department and needed some help doing some recording at the Qingdao Radio/TV Station studio. I'm all over that stuff, so I said yes immidiately! We decided to meet after lunch.

Around 12:30pm, I took a 15 minute taxi from the Qingdao Olympic Village to the radio station. Since facilities like this are all guarded in China, she met me at the gate and let me in. The guards just had me sign-in and I was good to go. We walked up to the audio recording studio on the second floor. On the whole, the studio was pretty empty, not that many people around.

Inside the recording studio, there were a couple of young people who aparantly worked there and ran the place. We sat down on a couch inside the control room and she showed me the couple of paragraphs that she needed recorded. When I read the paper, I realized that it was something that I had translated the previous week as part of my volunteering! It was short energetic-like slogans about the Olympics that were to be broadcast outside on loudspeakers at the Olympic Village.

After I figured out what I needed to read, I entered the recording booth. Actually, I was more like a fairly large room that could be used to record a whole band or small orchestra. Raising the mic, I faced the spit screen and the passion just began to flow. Pretty simple actually. A couple of takes and that was it.

Now, sometime in the future, I will hear my voice outside echoing around the Olympic facility. I'll be sure to post when that happens. I'm hoping to go back to that radio station. Recording studios are like home for me and anything with audio equipment and music is heaven.