Practical Advice for Making Your Products Sound Better

Have you ever seen a cut of a particularly powerful film that doesn’t have the musical soundtrack edited into it yet? Sometimes you can get hints of this watching special features to a film, but it’s much more  powerful to see a whole movie without a note of music laid in.

It changes the experience of the film. Music adds a palpable emotional element that lessens the entire story by not having it present. Scenes that create the need for an entire box of Kleenex seem flat and boring without the soft swell of violins in the background.

Music matters.

And it might matter to whatever sort of audio product you’re creating. At the very least, finding and using a “bumper” (a very short bit of music that is typically used at the beginning and ending of a segment or product) can create an identifiable musical signature for your brand.

A good one can subliminally put your audience into a positive state of mind as they begin listening to your product.

A bad one … well, we’ll assume you don’t choose a bad one.

Finding Your Music

I’m going to assume that you’re not a composer or professional musician. And if you’re not one of these – or married/living with/have indentured to you one of these folks, you ought not make your own from scratch.

So where do you go?

Well, if you know a musician, you can ask her or him if they have something you could license for use on your audio products. Most musicians will jump at this, because most musicians don’t have fat record contracts paying their bills.

If you go this route, be able to play for your musician acquaintance no fewer than four or five examples of the kind of music that you think fits your personal groove. This gives your musician/composer someplace to start. Heck, you might get lucky and she’ll have something already done that will work perfectly for you.

Another path is to license something from one of the plethora sites that are out there on the internet.

One source I’ve come to really like is called Magnatune. These folks work with indy musicians, offering up some really incredible music at reasonable prices. Even better, you can listen before you buy, and they have appropriately-priced licensing agreements for commercial use (which is what your audio product is).

With this sort of source, you’re going to be pulling no more than 45 seconds out of a larger piece of music to use as your bumper. If this is something you’re uncomfortable doing, you can license the music and ask a sound editor to help you find the right bits.

There are also sites that specialize in bumper music … small musical bits composed specifically for this use. One site I know of in this vein is Royalty Free Music. One nice thing about this site is that you purchase the license, but don’t have to continue paying royalties for sales you make against the music.

Whatever you do, Just Don’t Steal

Whatever path you take to adding a bit of musical pizzaz to your audio products, just don’t “borrow” music without paying for it. Just as you want and expect your audience to honor your creative rights to the content you produce, so too do the musicians who create really amazing music.

I know it’s hard to remember this sometimes, given the fact that you can find anything just hanging out there on the interwebs, waiting to be downloaded. But it’s not cool. Ever.

Plus, if you’re stupid and steal from the wrong person, you’re looking down the wrong end of a lawsuit.

The Point

Music can and will add an intangible something that helps your audio products hang together more than they do with just the dulcet tones of your own voice. Add some music and make it your own. The identifier will strengthen your brand, and help your audience instantly engage with every new product they purchase from you.

Do you have sources for purchasing bumpers? Share in the comments. It helps everyone.

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I’m in the process of getting over a two-week bout of some vile and disgusting respiratory Thing. (“Thing” being a technical medical term in this case.) It went from a dry hacking cough that prevented me from breathing, to my voice transforming into a Harvey Fierstein-esque gravel, to that productive part of a respiratory Thing that involves icky things I won’t describe here.

In the midst of this, it occurred to me that sometimes folks who want to create and produce audio products get respiratory Things too, and sometimes this (inconveniently) happens when you’re scheduled to record. This also applies to in person seminar-like presentations or speeches.

What to do?

How to cope?

I have some thoughts.

Thought 1

Reschedule.

No one does her or his best work when not feeling well. If it’s at all possible, put off recording until you’re feeling (and sounding better).

If we’re talking about a seminar or other in person dealio, I know that rescheduling may be impossible. But if you’re recording an audio product, you probably can. Yes, even if others are involved. Trust me, pretty much everyone is understanding of sickness. And if they’re not, do you really want to work with them anyway?

Thought 2

Plan ahead to increase the time needed to edit.

If you’ve got a one-off shot to interview someone amazing and otherwise inaccessible, you may have to go ahead with the recording. Or you may have to do the in person gig (the one you planned on editing on the back side to make into a product for those who couldn’t be there in person).

Plan now to double or even triple the time it will take to edit. If you’re doing it yourself, it’s just a matter of reordering your personal schedule. If you’re paying someone to do the editing, expect a bigger bill.

If you can’t do this, please refer to Thought 1.

Thought 3

Prep your voice.

You need to take care of your voice at all times, but if you’ve got a respiratory Thing, it’s even more important than normal. And “better living through chemistry” will often have side effects that, while you may sound okay, will cause you to make no sense. (Think narcotics here, folks.)

I’m not a doctor, so this isn’t medical advice. These are tricks I’ve used forever for public speaking and necessary recording times.

Tea.

Hot tea with honey and lemon. NO MILK.

Why? The heat is good for you. It helps to loosen up your chest. The lemon is an astringent which helps with the goopy stuff that you don’t want ejecting from any membranes while you’re working. The honey (and yes, I mean honey; not sugar or sugar substitutes) coats your throat, reducing the pain.

Ibuprofen or your personal pain reliever of choice.

A pain reliever will help you push past fever and soreness and actually pay attention to what you’re trying to say. The kind of pain killers that require a prescription because they are nonsensical-vision-inducing are not a good idea. Just saying.

Drambuie (this is my father’s favorite solution to a respiratory Thing)

Any viscous liquor will have a similar effect as honey. And the alcohol, because it’s a system depressant, can calm your cough reaction as well. But again, remember, you don’t want to not be coherent, so use with caution!

Thought 4

Take many breaks.

This one applies more to recording than it does to live stuff.

Plan on stopping every 10 minutes or so for about 10 minutes. When your throat is sore, using your vocal cords only exacerbates the situation. Take many breaks to ensure that you can make it through to the end.

The live version of this is to have access to enough water so that you can consume the equivalent of a glass of water every 15 minutes or so. Yes, you will need to pee more quickly, but that will help keep you on schedule.

To Sum Up

Getting sick stinks, more so when you have plans to record a product or present to actual 3D people. But by taking some simple steps you can get through it, without creating something that is entirely unusable for future product sale.

And just for the sake of saying it … no, no one will want to buy an audio product that sounds like absolute rubbish unless you happen to be someone like the Dali Lama, providing the secret to life, the universe, and everything. And frankly, he’s important enough that he can reschedule.

Do you have tips or tricks you use to get through a sore throat or respiratory Thing? Please share in the comments.

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I get asked a lot where to buy the gear I recommend. The answer isn’t as easy as you might think.

There are several things to keep in mind whenever you are making a purchase of professional (or near-professional) level equipment.

Firstly, you need to understand that this equipment isn’t something you’re going to find at WalMart or Target. They just don’t carry it, because their core demographic doesn’t buy it.

So you can look at your local chain music store … think Guitar Center or Musician’s Friend or Sam Ash Music or similar. That’s an okay option, but as a chain, they tend to have only certain things in stock and while they’ll special order something, you often can’t return it. Also, and this is my personal opinion based on my own experiences in those stores, their employees are often musicians who need a day job, and they won’t necessarily “get” what you need, given the fact that you’re developing a product; not an album.

Yes, there’s always Amazon. I certainly use Amazon for things. I freely admit that. They’ve got tons of stuff, but I’d be willing to guarantee you that, if you could get customer service on the phone, they wouldn’t be able to help you pick the gear you need if you paid them. And while they sometimes have the best price, I would like to suggest that it’s often worth a few dollars more, when you get more than you’re paying for anyway.

Christy’s Theory of Economic Sustainability

Buy local. When you don’t have a local resource, buy from a company that is local somewhere.

Seriously, you’ll help your town or city stay afloat by helping the local merchants stay in business. This means doing business with them. The bonus for you in this is that – assuming that the proprietor is running a professional operation – you will have a resource you can easily access when you run into trouble.

But not all of us have a good locally-owned and operated gear store in our neighborhood or town. So what do you do then?

Well, there are two main companies with which I have done business that I would recommend.

Full Compass

The folks at Full Compass know what they’re talking about, and love to talk to others about it. They have a wide range of gear options, and their sales folks are exceedingly useful in helping you pick one item over another.

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, they are a woman-owned business that (if you look at their news releases page) gives back to the local community in both time and money.

Sweetwater

The Sweetwater sales and service folks also know what they’re talking about. Many of them are engineers and musicians who actually use the gear they sell. Just like the Full Compass folks, they can help you pick if you need some help deciding.

Based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Sweetwater has been growing steadily over its 30+-year history, and provides employment opportunities for many, many local folks.

Which to Choose?

If you don’t have a local shop (as I don’t), I actually go back-and-forth between Full Compass and Sweetwater. They each have excellent service. Their techs can answer pretty much any question you have.

Sweetwater offers a significant bonus in giving a 2-year warranty on nearly everything they sell. So unless you’re a total knucklehead and drop your live ribbon mic in a tub full of bubbles, they’ll help you out with any problems you have.

I buy from both based on who has what when I need it, who has the best price, and who’s giving free shipping. I feel comfortable with both of these retailers.

An Interesting Approach

Both of these retailers do something that, if you’re not accustomed to highly technical industries, will sound strange. When you establish an account with either of these retailers, you are assigned to a specific person as your sales person. That individual gets to know your needs/goals and keeps in touch to make sure all is going well.

If you get weirded out by that sort of contact, they may not be for you, but personally I find it useful to know that I can contact “Bob” whenever I’m stuck on finding just the right thing. It makes the process personalized, and builds my confidence in the company as my go-to.

Let Me Sum Up …

You can find many items that I recommend on Amazon. And you have me to call upon for help setting things up and trouble-shooting. If, however, you buy from Full Compass or Sweetwater, you have a much larger team available to back you up in the event that I’ve gone off deep sea diving (which I’ve never done, but it sounded really cool to write it here).

No matter what you choose, make sure you choose gear that will improve your sound quality, make your recording process simpler, and give you less to do in editing. If whatever gear you buy doesn’t do those three things, you’ve got the wrong gear.

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A long time ago, when I first started working in radio, I was absolutely terrified of dead air. The silence. The lack of either music or speech going out through the transmitter to the radios of my faithful listeners.

It took only 2 or 3 seconds of dead air for me to begin to panic. Yes, yes, I know that doesn’t sound like much to you if you’ve never worked in the medium, but it was a huge deal to me, and it is to most people just starting out.

When you’re doing spoken-word products, however, there are moments in which a few seconds of silence isn’t the end of the world. Sometimes over-editing can be far worse, because if you take out all of the natural pauses of your speaker, allofthewordsruntogetheranditbecomesveryhardtoprocesswhatisactuallybeingsaid.

You will find that this is particularly true of recordings of live seminars or presentations.

Unconscious Habits Quickly Become Annoyances

When you’re editing a recording of a live event – yours or someone else’s – you will typically find that the speaker falls pretty quickly into a pattern that has nothing to do with the words. Most speakers have little verbal habits – a way of taking in a breath, a word or phrase that is repeated often, or a longish pause in speaking – about which they are entirely unconscious, but that when you’re editing become annoying quickly. This annoyance factor is true of audio-only as well as video recordings, but it’s much more noticeable in audio-only situations.

If you are editing your own presentations for packaging as products to augment your business, then take a step back from the editing program and give yourself a good listen. What is your thing?

(Yes, everyone has one. I’ve been a public speaker for most of my life and I one too! Well, more than one, but my brain seems to pick one per presentation. Go figure.)

Listen to yourself unedited. Why do you do that thing you do? Are you making sure the audience is still with you? Have you forgotten where you are in the presentation and are using some word or audible habit to cover? Or are you just one of those folks who has a vocal/verbal filler habit all of the time? (You know what I mean … the person who says, “You know?” or “Right?” or loud exhalation through your nose or something else that you – likely unconsciously – use to fill space, because most people are very, very uncomfortable with silence.)

If you hear something that you always say to make sure people are listening, you can choose to teach yourself to instead look for their nonverbal cues to tell if they’re listening, rather than demand a response from them in your speech.

If you are covering for a lost train of thought, consider having better notes for yourself next time.

If you make weird breath noises, you can choose to work to become conscious of them yourself and stop it.

Back to Editing

But still, you’re working with something you’ve already recorded, and now you need to decide what to do with it. Spend hours and hours engaging your OCD sense of perfectionism and edit out every single “You know?” or breath sound or silent gap. Or ignore all of the annoyances and just put it out, unedited, as it is. Or something in between?

I’d advocate for the middle way. Why? Because …

• Editing out all of the annoyances will inevitably make the final product sound stilted and unnatural. The glitches are part of the human experience. Besides, the hours and hours it will take for you to make it perfect are not really worth it. There is no such thing as a perfect recording. Really.
• Leaving everything in is just as extreme as taking everything out.  But in this case, you end up not with a stilted, unnatural-sounding product; you end up with a product that annoys your customers. Annoying your customers is not good for the bottom line.

Taking out some of the instances of an unconscious catch phrase or noisy breath and leaving others in will produce a recording that feels genuine and is listenable. That’s what you’re after, since in this atmosphere creating online audio products for an online audience tends to be as much (or maybe more) about the person presenting as it does about what they have to say. You want the person in the recording to sound human and real as well as someone who intelligently and articulately delivers content worth listening to.

How do you achieve this balance?

Practice. And forgiveness.

You will make some really poorly-edited recordings at first. That’s just the way it is. Deal with it. But make sure you get a little better with each new recording. No one expects perfection, so forgive yourself for not being perfect, get over yourself for wanting to be perfect, and get better at what you’re doing.

Over time, you’ll instinctively realize that this “Right?” should stay, and that one should go. And you’ll remove the ugly one and leave the one that serves as an identifier of your unique voice.

The same goes for silence. Sometimes a 2 or 3 second pause is good for the brain. It allows just a bit more processing of the thought just spoken, before jumping to the next concept to be presented. Give your audience that breathing room. They will have no idea why they like it, but they will like it.

What are your editing challenges? How do you face them? What do you wish you knew how to do better? What don’t you know that you really want to learn?

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In case you didn’t notice, I had a bit of a hiccup for the past several months here on the Online Sound Advice blog. I’ve still been around. Helping people with their audio trauma … hanging out on Twitter.

But I didn’t blog.

It’s a long story but suffice it to say that I’m back. And I’m roaring into 2010 with a plan and a will to succeed.

If you poke around the site, you’ll find newly-refreshed service plans. I’m here and happy to lend a hand with your vexing audio difficulties. And, if your difficulty is that you just need someone to do it all for you, well, I can help you there as well.

Even better, I have 3 shiny new products planned (so far) for release this year. The first one is nearly recorded, and the other two are ready to roll. They’ll come out in due time and I’m really excited about each and every one of them and the ways in which they can help you create stronger, better-sounding audio products right out of the gate.

Here on the blog, I’m going to be posting new entries a couple of times a week, and if you have something specific you would like me to cover, please feel free to ask in the comments or email me. I want this to be useful to you, and I haven’t quite yet mastered the whole mind reading gig.

At any rate, the blog is on again, Twitter is still a-blazing, and all is well with the world.

Coming up next:

A quick view on editing out those annoying bits from your recording and why it’s good to leave some of them in.

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This is almost a part two of my last post about USB headsets. Almost.

One of my other core issues with USB headsets is that you can’t hear yourself. You can’t hear what your voice sounds like going through the microphone. There’s good reason for that, but it’s still a bad idea if you want to make good audio recordings.

Why They’re Designed This Way

You’re going to have to forgive some geek-speak to understand this. Because you will run into this term now and again, I think it’s okay to explain it here, so please bear with me.

There’s a principle in audio production called “latency.” A synonym for it is “delay.”

Have you ever been on a telephone call (particularly an overseas call) in which there is a delay between the words you speak and your voice echoing back to your earpiece?

That’s latency. Less latency is better when it comes to good sound production.

It’s the time it takes for the sound you create to travel out to the equipment that’s turning it into a signal that can be transmitted, and then travel back to your ears through the listening portion of your device.

Okay, enough with the geek-speak.

The reason understanding why latency matters is the explanation for the reason you can’t hear yourself in a USB headset.

The electronic circuits that send your voice to the computer through a USB headset just aren’t sophisticated enough to send it back to your ears fast enough for you to hear yourself without feeling like you’re trapped in an echo chamber (or on a really bad overseas telephone call).

Because this is an expensive problem to fix, they don’t. And thus, you cannot hear yourself in the earphones of a USB headset.

Why You Should Care

Despite my attempt at cleverness in the title of this post, this is not about enjoying hearing yourself talk. It’s about listening to the sounds you are creating and making them the best sounds possible.

You need to be able to hear what’s coming through your microphone for three basic reasons.

1 – Background noise.

The noises made by your ceiling fan, your A/C vent, your child three rooms away, or the cat contentedly purring on your desk. You need to know if the microphone can hear these sounds, and eliminate them before you start recording.

2 – Mic position.

If your breath is hitting the mic in the wrong way, you suddenly start sounding like Sylvester the Cat. It’s call sibilance, and it’s really annoying to have to listen to as an audience member. If you can hear yourself, you can reposition the mic before you start recording and eliminate it.

3 – Gain.

As I’ve said elsewhere, gain is sort of a synonym for volume. You need to make sure that the signal you’re sending to the computer for recording is neither too loud nor too soft. If it’s too loud, you get what’s called “clipping”. It’s a horrible distorted noise that makes listening impossible. If you’re too soft, you’ll have to artificially boost the gain in the editing process and you’ll end up adding all sorts of hiss and other noises by doing that.

What To Do About It

Start listening to yourself.

Step up from the USB headset to a proper microphone. If you’re not ready to go the full-blown professional route, go for a USB microphone (I have some recommendations if you’re interested).

Once you have the USB mic, you need a decent set of headphones. Yes, your iPod earbuds can be used, but they’re not going to serve you well in the long run.

Why?

Well, they’re lousy with closing your ears to outside noises (which you can confuse with sounds coming through the mic itself) – the geek term for this is “sound isolation” – and they don’t have a wide enough range of sounds they can reproduce for you to really hear everything that’s going on with your recording.

I’m a huge fan of the Sony MDR-7506 studio reference headphones.

Sony MDR7506 Headphones. Excellent bang for the buck.

No, they’re not cute and dainty, but they’re one of the best dang set of headphones for the money you will find.

DISCLAIMER: If you ask 10 sound geeks for a recommendation for a good set of reference headphones and you’ll get at least 12 answers.

Disclaimers aside, these are one of the most widely-used headphones in the professional recording industry. If you watch the special features on movies, look for the sound people; more times than not they’re wearing these headphones. I certainly have. And if you go into a professional music studio, you will find at least one set of these lying around.

Why?

Because they’re good, and given what they do, they’re reasonably-priced. You can find them for around $100 if you know where to look (hint: click link above), and while yes, $100 is real money, it’s cheap for professional-level audio equipment.

Let me sum up

Being able to hear the sounds you are creating through the microphone are critical to recording success. If you can’t hear what you’re recording, dollars to donuts, you’ll waste a tremendous amount of your valuable time re-recording.

Why spend your time re-recording when a modest investment in your business can eliminate the need?

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Whether your online business is shiny and new or seasoned to near-perfection, the addition of occasional or regular quality audio content can shake things up as well as add new potential streams of revenue.

On the flip side, adding less-than-good-quality audio content can actually hurt you. In some cases, quite badly.

Let’s Start with the Flip Side

People who are truly part of your Tribe will forgive a lot of things. Because they are also likely True Fans, they actually care about what you think, write, and say. They want to learn from you, but that does not mean you can erect barriers to them and expect them to stick around.

Loading audio onto your site that demands that people must struggle to understand your words is like trying to type on a keyboard on which the keys have been rearranged. You can do it; but it’s such a distraction/hassle/pain-in-the-backside that you are so distracted trying to do it that you aren’t really paying attention to what you’re doing.

When people don’t pay attention to the content because they’re so incredibly distracted by the quality of your audio, everyone loses.

Your Tribe loses because they don’t get what they came for – your insight/wisdom/bad humor.

Your potential Tribe loses because they showed up to find out more about the buzz surrounding your innate coolness, only to be ridiculously disappointed.

You lose through loss of audience (existing and potential), revenue (through refunds and future potential sales), and self-respect (because none of us actually wants to suck).

Now for the Good News

As amazing and wonderful as the written word is (believe me, I’m a total word geek), there is quite a lot lost in the course of writing most blog posts. It’s not that they’re not communicative; in fact the really good blogs floating on the sea of the Web are very well-written. But they’re not meant to be the sort of prose that conveys emotion in the ways that a well-written novel does.

It’s a different form of communication, and as such, sometimes the power of the emotion you want to convey in your enthusiasm for your area of expertise can get lost in the midst of trying to bold or italicize appropriately.

By adding an audio component to your palate of communication tools – be it an occasional video blog, a podcast, the ubiquitous teleseminar, or an audio-based class – you are able to more fully express your unique vision, business, or teachings. You can add the specialness of “you” to the offering that may be missing when using only the written word.

Offering audio content also allows you to include things like interviews, example sessions that highlight how amazing your business offering really is, or teaching your Tribe new skills that utilize narrated screen navigation activity (you know, geeky stuff).

It also allows you to more easily convert your business model from one-to-one to one-to-many through audio classes, recorded teleseminars, and a general Mindful Biggification of your work.

Super Secret Hint That I Probably Shouldn’t Tell You For My Own Sake

Adding audio content isn’t for everyone. Really, it isn’t. It takes time and effort to do correctly, and if you’re not willing to put in that effort and time I’d strongly suggest you stick to text-only delivery of your wisdom and wit.

The honest-to-goodness thing is that adding good quality audio content really can help you.

It can give you the opportunity to expand your business’s footprint without being a complete time suck.

It can give more people the opportunity to tap into your business’s core competency, usually for a lesser cost than one-on-one coaching does.

It can allow you to expand the horizons beyond what is possible with just you and your keyboard.

But again, if you do it, you need to be mindful about it. Your recording space, your body, and your equipment must all work together to not cloud your incredible content, but instead become almost invisible to listeners because it’s so good.

You really can do it.

If you choose.

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As I was in the process of setting up Online Sound Advice, I reached out to a couple of people I either knew or knew of (and admired/respected) to see if I could help them sound better.

In all cases, these folks have brilliant content. At least I think they do. What they didn’t have is brilliant sound. And whether or not we’re conscious of it, we – as listeners – don’t “hear” even the most amazing content if it is packaged in an audio format that annoys, hurts, or otherwise creates a hurdle to us accessing the content.

In other words, if your quality of your audio gets in the way of your content, your “right people”either won’t find you, or worse, won’t listen to you and will be deprived of your message.

So every now and again (always with permission) I will highlight someone with whom I’ve worked to help them improve and succeed in getting their message out in a way that can truly be heard.

Emma Newman – The Queen of Post-Apocalyptic Publishing

If you don’t know Emma, you are really missing someone special. So English that I’m convinced that PG Tips runs through her veins, Emma has written a “young adult novel” set in London 20 years after a massive apocalyptic event.

And for anyone hung up on the “young adult” part, just set that aside. It’s a marketing thing. If you like adventure, characters that stick, and the future-casting that can only happen in sci fi, you’ll like Emma’s book.

As is the case with many, many, many, many writers, Emma has been struggling to get a publishing deal for her lovely novel. She is querying widely, while simultaneously considering self-publishing. In the midst of this, Emma got the idea to podcast her novel in a serialized one-chapter-at-a-time fashion.

Her challenge?

She had no idea about anything to do with podcasting, recording, incorporation into her blog … much of anything beyond her personal ability to read the text of her book.

A second level challenge is that Emma is newly out on her own, building an ittybiz that has left her a tad cash-strapped. In other words, she didn’t have the cash to acquire a decent microphone.

Emma’s situation is not at all unique, and interestingly the solution we sorted out had only one piece of suggested gear for her to work to borrow … a music stand.

The Solution

First of all Emma and I got together on Skype, using the voice connection to enable me to hear her in her soon-to-be-recording-studio.

She was using a run-of-the-mill USB headset, and really hoped to not buy anything new in terms of microphones.

So I listened to her. I listened to her talk, what her voice sounded like. I also listened to the sounds in the room behind her voice.

Her Space

We talked about the room itself, and were able to establish that she did not have an overly “live”* room.

*A “live” room means that the sound is bouncing all over the place, usually enhancing the high end of the sound spectrum, and is possibly creating echos. It’s not helpful as a recording envionment.

Microphone Position

Next, we talked about her headset, particularly where the microphone boom was placed in relation to her mouth. She is thankfully one of the rare folks who somehow instinctually realize that the mic does not belong directly in front of your mouth.

When the microphone is directly in front of your mouth, on the same axis as your breath, you are physically assulting the device within the microphone that translates your sound waves into a signal. It is from this physical assault that we get sibilant s-es and popping p-s.

Her Body

At one point as we were talking, I heard her whole voice change. It became compressed and slightly higher-pitched. I asked her what had changed. She said, “Nothing.” So I asked her, “Did you just lean over onto your elbows or something?”

It turns out that she had, and the physical compression of her diaphram changed the tonality of her voice enough that even with a cheapo microphone, I could hear it really clearly.

So we talked about the idea of her standing up to record her podcasts.

Why stand up instead of just remembering to not lean on her elbows?

It’s simple. When you’re recording you want to remove as many variables as possible, so that you get clean sound. For Emma, I suggested that not having to think about not slouching (which is solved by standing up) removes one such variable and allows her to concentrate further on delivering her manuscript clearly and cleanly.

So I suggested borrowing a music stand from the local parish to see how it works for her.

In the End

As it all wound up, Emma was able to record nice, clean audio of her reading her manuscript, no slouching sounds included, and learned how to post it all to her website using a handy WordPress plugin called PowerPress.

Now Emma is posting one chapter each week to her website. As of this writing, the Prologue and Chapter 1 are available for your listening pleasure.

Go. Listen. Enjoy.

One Final Note

Not all authors should read their own work. Seriously.

Sometimes it’s about the timbre of your voice. Sometimes it’s that you write far better than you can read.

Don’t let this caution stop you from trying, but get honest feedback (no, you mother is not capable of giving you honest feedback!) and if needs be, hire someone to voice it for you.

Not everyone can be Neil Gaiman.

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