Take one, Take two, Take Five?_009
Recording the introduction to my podcast
Right, so, I’m now 9 posts deep and I haven’t actually shared with you anything about my publication; I suppose I’ll get to that when the time is right, but I have scripted the introduction and since the first 10+ stories or so have been written, it’s about me getting more used to being infront of the mic and putting together full takes.
I have the know-how to cut, splice and multi-track/mix properly to get all the half takes, full takes and retakes, but if I’m honest, a one-take is usually best, particularly with individuals such as myself who never stick to script.
So, I started there…
29 January 2024, 23:30
I sat down this evening to take another crack at the recording. Since I’ve had some time to experiment with recording setups (now that podcasting is officially part of my day job), I figured that all my pieces should sound, rather, should be mixed the same way. That means, similar input gain (though exact gain doesn’t matter too much), similar noise environment profile (i.e. at night when neighbours are quiet), preset equalisation for my voice, and then preset noise gating and compression.
What’s quite interesting is that listening back to my voice in different settings also affects how I choose to equalise it. They always told us at University that the best environment to mix for is the one that the listener will listen in. But I don’t have studio control room monitors… or a studio… or a control room haha.
Here’s what I’ve landed on for now—the frequency spectrum at the bottom is present when I play back the audio recording. My voice is quite bassy and unfortunately, despite my best attempts to deaden my home-office, around the 150Hz—300Hz, the room still adds a lot of boominess. A small cut there helps. And then to add a bit more clarity to my voice, a slight boost around 2kHz. I will of course tighten up the EQ ahead of bouncing the track when I’ve mixed it correctly with headphones (the playback medium I plan to suggest to my listeners).
I’ve also reshot the intro, Episode 0 a couple times, editing the text along the way as anyone who writes and reads regularly will know, written text doesn’t mean great spoken text. Work and social is keeping me quite busy, but I hope to have all these posts and the intro (Ep0) live in early February.
That way, #010 can introduce Remaining Mark.
~M.