8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: recording audio

  • Podcast Guy

    I need to inform you that by the time you read this I will be a podcast guy.

    Ugh. One of those, huh?

    My excuse is such: in early February I embraced a few big ideas that manifested as a spoken audio project, which very much looks and acts like a podcast at the moment.

    Big ideas, you ask?

    First, I have been playing with sound, music, recording, and an array of other tools and toys that are burning a hole in my soul looking for a purpose. 

    Second, I looked at the conformity of what I should be doing and making as a so-called commercially viable product and said to hell with that, I just want to make what I want to make.

    Third, I realized, and you may have seen me write about this a few times already, that stepping away from posting and participating doesn’t make the terrible stuff go away, it just leaves a gap that is destined to be filled with political, vapid, or algorithmic slop.

    In other words, I was motivated to step up and start making more, posting more, and participating, but in a way that suited me. The result so far has been me dabbling in a new podcast-like project, and likely one that will not sound like nor look like the hundred other podcasts in your feed. 

    …or, so I hope.

    Big ideas, small project, and a vast shift towards a new perspective… and if nothing else, you can listen to me now, too.

  • Incompletable

    No creative setup is ever really complete, is it? But it is possible to say that milestones have been reached in aiming for an unreachable completeness, no?

    Case-in-point: I received a new piece of music equipment in the mail on Wednesday and it (so-called) completed my composition setup.

    The piece in question is a mid-range multi-track looper pedal, and it fits into my plan of making ambient background music tracks for my audio production project. It joins a list of other equipment including a recorder, mics, a preamp, an effects pedal, a synth, and about a hundred feet of various cables to connect it all together.

    And so for now my setup… it is complete.

    I can do what I want to do. Make what I want to make. Create.

    Which really means…

    It is probably not complete, of course, and in a month or a year or at some other point in the future I’ll decide that there is a gap in what I am able to accomplish with this current-state setup that will suddenly and irreversibly become less complete than what it is today.

    But for a moment, completion for the incompletable seems just so. I relish it, but know that incompletion will drive me to something else equally interesting, too.

  • Slow Down Cowboy

    I spent nearly three hours this morning working on recording audio for my project and the end result of all that work is what probably amounts to only about three minutes of usable audio.

    Let me back up.

    I am working on a new novel, and a side-project part of that effort has me attempting to translate it from the written word stuck inside a word processor on my computer into an audiobook-style production with some bespoke tunes and sound effects.

    I have a solid microphone setup with a pre-amp, hardware digital recorder, digital synths, effects pedals and wires going in twelve different directions.

    But it turns out after all the work I did to write a story and set up a technology jungle to set my voice into sound waves in file on my hard drive, what I needed most was practice reading at a practiced pace suitable for storytelling.

    Who would have thought, huh?

    When I figured out how to read slowly, enunciating each word, the results were oh so much better.

  • Developing Vocal Technique

    I want to get better at recorded voice work. Maybe for the purposes of making a podcast. Maybe because recording an audiobook from my stories is on my dream list. Maybe just improving my microphone presence seems kinda important if ever I need to do another video job interview.

    I consulted the wisdom of the internets and not counting the long list of technical adjustments and microphone setups and rules for fine tuning the recording equipment, it gave me three points to focus on to hone some of my own voice skills:

    Warming Up, which is to say doing vocal exercises for three or so minutes prior to attempting to record anything, which includes exercises like humming, trilling or reciting tongue twisters.

    Speaking for the Microphone, or as it suggested, exaggerating consonants, enunciating, and speaking more slowly than one would speak to a crowd or when having a conversation.

    Listening Back, by stopping after thirty seconds or a minute of trial recording and examining the effort like a critic, not critically, but with an aim to notice vocal tics, breathing, pacing, and other flubs.

    Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

    And if not perfect … well, then at least my microphone will get some extra use this month.