"This variant of the available Ted Nichols underscore recordings contains 20 tracks of Ted Nichols compositions that have been edited to provide a faux-stereo sound using reverb, as well as including the lead-in takes given by the booth director and Nichols."







Please read this description to understand these files further!





(If you got here from an external link that was part of a series, please note that this version of these files is the faux-stereo, reverb, vocal take title version. If you don't know what any of that means, then please keep reading.)







Description:





These files are audio files that contain 20 tracks used in the 1969-1970 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" - these tracks (in their original state), as well as others, were found this past June and also were uploaded to the Internet Archive. You can find them here:

https://archive.org/details/tednicholsunderscores







This variant of the available Ted Nichols underscore recordings contains 20 tracks of Ted Nichols compositions that have been edited to provide a faux-stereo sound using reverb, as well as including the lead-in takes given by the booth director and Nichols.





This project serves to attempt to increase the quality of all currently-available Ted Nichols underscore recordings.









About these files:





Before this year (and decade) ended, I decided to do something I had been meaning to for a while now.





I had uploaded the raw files of the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! underscore to the Internet Archive in June. I was not the original person to find them, but I was the first to upload them here to make them more available to you all.





It was really nice to finally hear a lot of these cues that were lost for nearly 50 years, and Ted Nichols' composition skills really stood out to me, but something seemed wrong about the sound quality of the files. There was a very audible hiss from the tape these likely came from, as well as some panning errors that were more evident when listening through headphones.





So, I decided to edit them the best I could to attempt to improve the quality of the recordings, without losing too much audio information. It wasn't that tedious of a process, and I will list the steps I used to edit these into this specific variant (faux-stereo w/reverb, vocal takes included).





Audacity was used in the editing/production of these files.









Steps Used to Edit:





1.) After loading the raw .mp3 files into Audacity, I proceeded to select a small portion of the audio hiss and create a noise profile using the Noise Reduction tool.





2.) I then used the Noise Reduction tool again (after selecting the entire track) in order to actually remove the noise. (The settings used were a Noise Reduction of 12 dB, a sensitivity of 6.00, and a Frequency Smoothing setting of 3.)





3.) I then split the stereo track into the left and right channels. At this point, I copied the right channel and pasted it (thereby duplicating it) on the entire left channel (the entire left channel was selected before I pasted). This created a monaural, center-channeled track (despite depicting a two-channel track).





4.) After creating the mono track, I removed all audio prior to the booth director giving the name of the take (i.e., "M1, Take 5-"). I also silenced any audio in-between the time of 0.00 seconds and the beginning of the booth take vocal.





5.) I then proceeded to the end of the track, where I silenced the end audio, selecting the end first, and then proceeding towards the end of the track's audio. I stopped about one second before reaching the end of the visible audio. This area was completely silenced, and the section between the end of the audio and the silenced area was faded out using the Fade Out tool.





6.) At this point, I highlighted the entire "musical" portion of the track (leaving out the booth take vocals and Nichols counting off), and added 45% reverberance to it using the Reverb tool. (My specific settings were as follows: Room Size of 100, Pre-delay of 0, Reverberance of 45, Damping of 0, Tone Low of 15, Tone High of 25, Wet Gain of 3, Dry Gain of 0, and a Stereo Width of 100.)





7.) Now, to ensure that the fade out at the end of the track had a reverb effect that was pleasing (this part wasn't necessary, but personally I believe it sounds better), I added another Reverberance, this time a 65% one (same settings - change the 45 to a 65, though), to the faded-out region of visible audio. I would say the best way to describe the "faded-out region" is the last half-second of audio visible in a waveform. The area selected started at that section and continued until the end of the entire file.





8.) Lastly, I exported each file as an uncompressed, 16-bit .wav file and added appropriate metadata to each track.





This was all I did to edit and produce the files you find here. I took the raw .mp3 files and tried to make them sound more presentable. I think I did a fine job, but please remember that this is not an official studio production. This is, above all, a fan project.





And of course, I find it necessary to stress the act of Fair Use:





Under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. I am uploading these files for the general public to use for non-commercial purposes ONLY, as well as to educate and do research to gain more information about them, as my hope is that by uploading them, the public will be able to find out more about them.





Thank you.





-CartoonCade