March 28, 2007
When the IMAO crew first brought up the idea of doing a podcast, I was totally against it. Figured that if I'd wanted to do voice work, I'd have gotten a job at a radio station. I mean, while it's true that I have a face for radio, I also have a voice for mime. Nevertheless, I took the plunge to be a team player.
The first step, of course (aside from reluctant acquiescence), was getting some recording equipment.
I started with a cheap microphone. Not the bottom of the line $10 model, the nearly-bottom $20 model.
I used this for most of the early podcasts, but around August of 2005, I splurged on a fancy $60 mike and a $150 amp on the advice of the podcast's then-producer, Scott McCollum, who wanted to standardize the quality of the recordings. You can probably tell the difference if you compare the earlier and later podcasts, but if podcasting is only a hobby for you, then a $20 mic is fine.
However, after I got my $20 mike, I realized that I also needed two pieces of equipment that I didn't have - a pop filter and a microphone stand.
Well, they didn't sell pop filters locally, I didn't want to wait to have one shipped, and I didn't want to spend the time to make one of the fancy home-made ones. Even the ultra-half-assed method of slipping old nylons over a bent coathanger was beyond my means, as my wife didn't have any old nylons kicking around.
So, working on the theory that what I *really* needed was just some porous material between my lips and the microphone, I took a sheet of mesh foam-grip drawer-liner and wrapped it around the head of the microphone.
As for the microphone stand, well, I figured all I needed to do was get the thing off my desk and near my face. So I put the mike in a glass cup (heavy enough so that it wouldn't tip over), and set the cup on a cigar box. Here's what it looked like:
Crude, yet effective. But mostly crude.
For recording software, I used WavePad - it's free and relatively intuitive.
Then there was my "recording studio".
You can't just talk in a room, you need something to deaden sound & minimize echoes and ambient noises. My chosen something was to put a sheet over my head and the computer monitor:
Sheet over computer monitor (left) and computer chair (right). Recording artist not included. Some assembly required.
Which does the job ok, although it does get a little warm under there, and the light's not very good. The main side effect of this method is that it makes you do several takes, aiming for one good read, because you don't want to spend MORE time under the sheet editing your recording and it's a pain to keep setting up & taking down the sheet.
Once the talky bits are recorded, it's time for some simple post-production work with WavePad:
1) Apply the noise reduction function - get rid of most of the pops, paper-shuffling, and chair-squeaks. Makes the rest of the clean up easier.
2) Amplify - With my computer system, I found it helpful to double the volume so that I could hear everything clearly without cranking up my speakers.
3) Frequency adjustments - using the Equalizer, lower the highs and boost the lows a bit, so that it doesn't sound so tinny.
3) Cut! Cut! Cut! - Carve it down to one good, clean take - mostly snipping out throat-clearings, dead air, and bad takes.
And then the nightmare begins:
Mixing in music.
First, trying to find royalty-free music on the web is like trying to find REAL information on discount mortgages - a LOT of fruitless searching through deceptive, search-engine-optimized web sites. Ditto for sound effects. It was even worse for me, since I'm not musically inclined enough to write my own tunes, and all the free music-generating software I found had miserably steep learning curves. Sure, those programs are versatile, but I'm stupid and impatient. Plus none of them seemed to come with electric guitar samples - which is what I was mainly looking for - although you can bass, drum, and piano to your heart's content.
In the end, I wound up finding some guitar chord samples and I put them together using some chording instructions for basic blues riffs. Not pretty, but it gave me 8 seconds of music that I could loop for background. You'll hear it in the last few podcasts behind my reading of the Fun Facts.
Blending music and speech is fairly simple with WavePad - just copy, set the volume to mix at, and paste - but getting the music to stop and start at precisely the right points is tedious and time-consuming. Putting together a three-minute Fun Facts segment (actually two 90-second ones) took about two hours from the time I started printing out my scripts to the time the last finishing touch was in place. Very nearly the same amount of time it took me to write the Fun Facts in the first place. Which somehow made it seem not worth the bother, because I didn't think the background music & occasional sound effects improved the piece all that much over the plain written version.
Once that was done, I was done. I just mailed it off to the podcast's producer/sound-engineer, and prayed for no last-minute re-writes.
So that's my experience with podcasting. It was a huge bother and I didn't much enjoy it.
However...
Going through the process, with all the script-writing, Skype-chatting, and e-mailing back & forth with other participants in the various IMAO podcast sketches DID help cement friendships with the rest of the IMAO crew.
And THAT made it all worthwhile.
Posted by: Harvey at
10:11 AM
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