Yes, this is rather old … the original talk was all over the web earlier this year. But, it resonates for me again now as I work on Frankenstein and can hear that it’s not quite what I want it to be. There’s no obvious Thing To Fix, I couldn’t really say why I don’t feel like it hits the mark. But, I have to do it as it is, as I am, in order to improve at all and move a tiny bit closer to wherever it is I’m heading. And there’s no way to wait for that to happen, to put off recording the very best texts, because if I did that, I’d never ever be good enough to do them. A frustrating situation, but true for me.

Also, I don’t know what happens when I do Arrive. There could be a lot of rerecording to get through, while there are a LOT of other unread books out there waiting for me. Guess I’ll just figure that out when I get there. *smiles*

• I listen to someone miles better than me. For me, this works because my most loved voices are very calming, soothing ones, and really, nothing can be all that wrong in a world with Alan Rickman’s voice in it. (If you’re reading this page, Alan, and finding this hint most unhelpful, may I recommend Juliet Stevenson’s audio recordings?) Plus many many years have been spent honing such voices and technique, and while I’ve done some work, it’s nowhere near that league. Puts things in perspective.
• I listen to someone worse than me. Okay, this is a rather negative method, but let’s be honest, I suspect many listeners have thought, on occasion, “well, at least I don’t sound like THAT”. Listening to that voice also helps me put things in perspective. The world is a big place, and every voice is going to find some fans and some people who hate it (and that latter applies even for famous and respected voices.) There’s honestly room for all sorts of recordings.
• I think about something great I’ve recorded! Note, I don’t actually listen to it – in a mean mood, I’d tear it to bits entirely undeservedly. I just remember that this one *worked*. That I can do good reading. That sometimes the author, microphone manufacturer and audio software developer have conspired to make me sound amazing. I just showed up and showed willing.
• I get a second opinion! For this, I try to pick someone who’s going to be nice but constructively critical. There is definitely a time and a place for being told that something is “just fine, stop fretting about it”. Or for hearing that a pop-shield or volume adjustment would make the world of difference. Or for agreeing that a character voice is too annoying for words and it needs revisiting. I also try to avoid nay-sayers and pessimists like the plague. I’m already my own worst critic, I don’t need to audition anyone else for the role.

What else could I try..?

I have a dedicated room, formally known as the hall cupboard (closet, for American readers) which is lined with noise-reducing foam tiles and material (mostly heavy velvet curtains.) It has a couple of shelves, one of which has an old-but-quiet laptop with its screen at a comfortable-to-read height. The lower one, at hand-height is for water, lipsalve and my keypad (more on that in a bit.)

My microphone is a Blue Yeti, it has its own floor stand which it is always attached to. It has sound card/encoding settings on board, so it just sends data to the laptop by USB and I don’t have to worry about pre-amps, computer sound cards and so on. Easy!

Before I record, I clean my teeth, get a glass of water and put on lipsalve (these all help reduce mouth noise for me.)

I record in Sony’s SoundForge to WAV. This takes about 75 mins for 60 mins of polished audio; however, I rarely record for more than half an hour at a time, followed by a 5-10 min break. SoundForge allows me to ‘punch in’ edits, that is, re-record immediately over the top of a mistake, and I have a gamer’s keypad set up with keyboard shortcuts to make this process easy. The keypad is old, cheap and effective! However, this way of recording extends the time spent in the booth significantly, so I don’t often work this way. I probably should … even though I’d still have to do a full listen/edit for overall smoothness, it’d still be quicker to process.

I then save a copy of the WAV file and noiseclean gently in Audacity. This step and all subsequent work is done on a file tagged -nc, (e.g. candy08-nc.wav.) That’s not what the final name of the file will be, just a shorthand that helps me know whereabouts in the process I am — very useful when I have several files at differing stages of the production process. My Audacity is version 1.3.12-beta (Unicode) and the Noise Removal settings I use are: 13 // 200 // 0.00. I always leave at least 10 secs quiet at the end of the recording, and use at least 2 secs as the sample of ‘room noise’ for the Noise Removal process. Happily, there’s very little background noise, just a gentle, constant hiss. Though, if the laptop’s fan has come on, these settings will also remove it without fuss as long as I include that steady fan-sound in the room noise sample.

Next I move to Adobe Soundbooth and compress gently. This is a relatively new step for me, but I was spending HOURS manually editing volume spikes and boosting quiet bits, so that’s much reduced by this step. Compression in very non-technical terms smooths out the volume, so the quieter sections are made louder and the loud spikes are quietened down. It took a LOT of faffing about (and reading lengthy explanations of exactly what compression IS, which I immediately forgot) to find good settings that work with my voice without changing the sound quality significantly. My Soundbooth is version 1.0 — a demo version that I’ve never upgraded. I would pay full price for the newest version if I could trust it to record, but it’s been unpredictable in that area in the past, and I don’t want to risk recording a lengthy passage and then have to rerecord because Soundbooth paused or glitched, both of which have happened in past trials. One day I’ll try out Audition … The (Advanced) compression settings that seem to work for me are: -3.0 dB, ratio 5.0, attack 1.0ms, release 100ms, output gain 1.0dB. Just to emphasise, I’m pretty good at listening to my own voice now, and these settings work well there, but aren’t at all guaranteed for anyone else! It’s definitely worth experimenting, if you have software with compression — just go GENTLY or you’ll squash the life out of your voice.

In non-LibriVox recordings, I leave the sound processing stage here; however, for LibriVox, I then reduce the whole file’s gain (volume) by 1 dB (on the Soundbooth scale, though I don’t know how that matches to Audacity etc.) Most LibriVox recordings are relatively quiet and especially if I’m working on a collaborative book, I don’t want to blast a listener’s eardrums too much compared to the previous reader! My settings are still on the louder end of many files I’ve seen, but not as far away from everyone else. The volume is increased during the compression stage, so really this is just putting it back to how it was before I did that smoothing out.

Here I’ll note that I do all my noise-cleaning before editing, so if it’s wrought havoc on the recording, I’ll pick that up as I listen through. Noise-cleaning at the end, just before MP3ing, caused me a few problems in the past which were only caught by PLs / end-listeners. However, there’s an equally good case for doing the processing after editing, in that if there IS a problem with the noise-cleaning, fixing it is just taking one step back in the process, not potentially having to do all the editing again too! My noise and noise removal settings are generally constant, so I seldom have problems with it and the first order works for me. Also, I have a decent pair of Sony MDR-XD200 headphones, which I do all my sound processing and editing with. It’s well worth listening through a few different pairs to find ones that let you hear as much as possible. There’s no way to know what end listeners will use, and it would be crazy to process the recording with a particular pair of headphones in mind … but you have to use SOMETHING so it might as well be something that sounds nice. It’s also very educational to try with a bad pair of earbuds, since many of your listeners will use those! Much of the detailed fussing I do over sound is made completely irrelevant there. :) Helps me not to be obsessive about it! Also, the Sony ones are extremely comfortable — very important when I spend so long in them.

Once the file is processed and tidied up — which only takes about 5 mins, even for long files — I begin the editing. I use Soundbooth — it’s not the most obvious software, but I’m very used to it, and have lots of keyboard shortcuts set up to make it faster, e.g. C instead of Ctrl-C. I don’t make a noise/click when I make a mistake during recording (as some people do) because I’ll be listening all the way through anyway, editing as I go. I edit pauses (usually making them a bit longer), mistakes and annoying mouth-noises. This takes 4-6 hours for 1 hour of finished audio.

Finally I save a copy of the finished WAV file, then and then MP3 it. I use Soundbooth for this step too now: I used to use RazorLame, but then found I could HEAR a little sound degradation in the MP3 files produced that way. After checking every MP3 maker I could find, using exactly the same settings, I settled for using Soundbooth. Note: I couldn’t hear any difference IN Soundbooth (or Audacity) but in other players (RealPlayer & WinAmp) there was a definite difference. So that’s another way to check sound quality, using different software, or even a standalone MP3 player if you have one. Obviously I don’t do this for every recording, but it’s worth doing when I make a change in the process, just to be sure I’m still happy with the end result across a variety of output systems.

* * *

As I said in my forum post, the more one knows about recording, the lengthier the process seems to get. The more I learn, the more I want to apply to my recordings, and though I’m very happy with the output at the moment, there is a definite trade-off to be found between time and quality. This process has evolved significantly from the days when I recorded straight to MP3 using a headset mic, doing a quick edit before finishing, and I think my recordings over the past five years reflect that. Not all my improvements have been for the better (argh!!) and circumstances like house moves have changed the set-up too.

http://piratelibrary.com/twistr

The aim was to have a manageable, fun exercise to put my mouth through before starting to record. I’ve not noticed much benefit in the past from general warm-ups (though I should probably still do them, just as good practice) — but limbering up the tongue, jaw and lips, definitely makes the recording process feel easier to me. The same tongue twisters will appear from time to time since there are only 10-15 in each of the seven categories and they appear in random order, not sequentially, but I hope that’s enough to keep the exercise fairly fresh. We’ll see; I can always write more if needed.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be back to recording — and before I start, I’ll play twistr with my tongue.

I’ve been working on my solo recording of Anna Sewell’s “Autobiography of a Horse”, Black Beauty, all summer, as its short chapters and positive attitude were a pleasant change from the intense modern non-fiction book I was recording for Audible (not yet released.) Black Beauty was catalogued at the start of the month, and is averaging 30 downloads a day, which isn’t bad going for a book which has previously been recorded for LibriVox.

Listen to Chapter 1 here:
Download audio file (blackbeauty_01_sewell.mp3)
5:03min (128kbps)

Then there was a poem which I found for the LibriVox Weekly Poetry reading. This is more of a challenge than you’d think; finding a shortish poem, by an author who died more than 70 years ago (to maximise the countries in which their work is in the public domain) and which is in some way interesting for multiple readers to try recording, and hopefully, that then has differences in the interpretations that’ll appeal to listeners. Down the Bayou by Mary Ashley Townsend fits many of these criteria, to my mind. I did find I had to check I knew how to say “bayou” correctly, but once I’d done that, I was away! (Along with 11 others. :)
Download audio file (downthebayou_townsend_cs.mp3)
1:15min (128kbps)

There are three other poems, pending cataloguing … that should happen shortly, since both collections are nearly full. I’ve not read poetry for a while, so it’s been really nice to come back to it.

And finally, lady pirates! Yes, my long-ago-read chapter on the “Adventures And Heroism Of Mary Read” has now been entered into the catalogue, and you can hear it as part of The Pirates Own Book by Charles Ellms (Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers)! Or here:

Download audio file (piratesownbook_26_ellms.mp3)
10:04min (128kbps)

I have a few other things very close to finishing … this will have been a super-productive month, all in all!

It’s interesting to record with other people around … I feel like I made fewer mistakes with people listening to me (the editors of these chapters may disagree!) And it’s quite sociable, too, gives an instant and limitless source of conversation in wondering at the lengths of TF’s literary poaching.

Probably the least expected of all the chapters is the one collecting stories of Dead Hands – linked below for your listening pleasure:
Download audio file (strangepages_08_dyer_64kb.mp3)
(10:54, 5.2MB)
http://librivox.org/strange-pages-from-family-papers-by-t-f-thiselton-dyer/

This takes my total catalogued recording time up over 61 hours, which is nice, because, what with struggling to finish an old solo project, putting in long-ago claimed chapters, and editing the Midsummer Night’s Dream behemoth, it feels like I’ve not been doing much “real” recording.

Another gem catalogued recently was the splendid essay by Agnes Repplier, (1855-1950), titled “A Short Defence of Villains”, in which she argues that Modern Literature is impoverished somewhat by a lack of really good moustache-twirling villains for its heroes and heroines to quest against. You’ll need quite a good background in the literature of her time to make sense of all the references, but it’s a lovely piece regardless.
Download audio file (shortdefenceofvillains_repplier_cs_64kb.mp3)
(21:03, 10.1MB)

http://librivox.org/mathilda-by-mary-shelley/

Two things to note — although this story is about an incestuous relationship, it’s not salacious.  If it were a musical, it’d be seriously Emo.  Or, my grandmother could have listened to it without her hair curling.  Second, anytime Mary writes “I will be brief”, you can be sure she’s about to be anything BUT brief.  The runtime is somehow only 4hrs, though.

Audio for Chapter 1: Download audio file (mathilda_01_shelley_64kb.mp3)

Usually, I just read and record the chapter text.  This is the first piece I’ve spent a lot of time with beforehand, thinking about it.  Which, I think, might mean this is on the unfamiliar side of reading vs. performing, one of the common differences between LV audiobooks and other publishers’.  (As mentioned here on the LV samples page, which  I look at from time to time, simply because it stars my first ever LV recording. Ego much?)

What I hope is that Elizabeth Willard comes through clearly, and there’s not obvious Cori hanging around catching the listener’s attention. I couldn’t have done it any other way (without even more performance angst), and the only thing I regret is the hideous sound cleaning process I used. Oh well, die and learn.