Jonas Johansson

Helping a friend - it always backfires.

A friend was in great need of a sound effect - a potato cannon being fired.

I wanted to surprise my friend by making the sound effect myself, so I ran off to the kitchen immediately to find something that could make such a sound. Oh, a wine bottle! Excellent!

Holding the wine bottle in my hand and enjoying my soon-to-be-success, I walked back to my recording area. “So, I’ll be standing here…”  I carefully rigged the microphone.

Record. Get in position. Focus. Hold wine bottle close to mic. Open, action, G…

Wait! Before we continue - the sound I wanted to achieve was the thick “flumpf” sound that you could imagine you would hear if an elephant in a cartoon were to suck in a peanut with his trunk. Or that of an egg being sucked in by a vacuum cleaner. Use your freakin’ fantasy!

Open, action, GOOOO! I pulled and pulled and pulled… and there - with the sound of an invisible cats fart in slippers - the cork came out of the bottle. For two seconds (and I know this exactly because I listened to the recording), yeah for two seconds I was only thinking about how lame the sound was. Then I started shaping the F sound with my lips. FFFFFFFF. For one second this F was sustained… I realized that my wine bottle had, in the heat of the action, sprayed wine all over my synthesizer. UUUUUUCK!

With tears in my eyes, I ran to the kitchen to grab a couple of tissues. I hurried back and started cleaning up my baby. “There, there. It’ll all be over soon.”

While I was cleaning her up, my sixth sense (or the one that is my vision, dunno) signaled to me that something bad was about to happen - again.

I looked up… and there was my microphone… and the microphone stand. They both seemed to be increasing in size at an accelerating speed. Nope, they were FALLING. TOWARDS me. Shifting my baby’s weight over to one hand, I managed to grab a hold of the microphone before it flattened my scalp. The stand has a Y-shaped foot, and I’d managed to get the top of it towards me.

My synth will never be able to drive a car again - legally.