In a quick recap, there are five items that J.D. Sawyer outlines as basic qualities of good audio:

1) The voices are clear, rather than muddy
2) The background noise levels in a given scene are consistent, rather than fluctuating up and down
3) The editing is clean – where there are breaths, they are full breaths rather than chopped in the middle.
4) The plosives don’t pop and the sibilants don’t hiss
5) The sound characteristics are consistent – you can’t tell where one take ends and the other begins, even with ADR.

We resume at number 3.

Getting Good Audio
by J. Daniel Sawyer

The editing is clean – where there are breaths, they are full breaths rather than chopped in the middle

Unfortunately, very few people in the world can give a perfect read with perfect pacing every time — that’s why we edit audio. The most common newbie mistake with editing audio it failing to pay attention to the breaths between words. Most people inhale shortly and sharply between phrases, and even a trained voice actor with superb breath control will have trouble recording without at least some of these breaths.

The sound of a breath cut off in the middle, or beginning in the middle, is very effective at creating anxiety — that’s why you’ll often hear panting sounds in the soundtrack on horror and suspense films. Cutting your audio without paying attention to those little, insignificant-seeming breaths can leave your audio with little panting noises all through it, which are subliminally unnerving and distracting.

To prevent this, when editing your audio, make your tracks as tall as possible, and watch for the little bumps in the waveforms that the breath sounds make. When you edit audio, always either cut the breath noises out completely, or leave them in completely – never make a cut in the middle of a breath. All other things being equal, this will give you a clean, listenable, professional-sounding edit.

Popping and hissing is not welcome

Plosives are the hard, popping sounds – B and P in English. They’re made when a big wall of air hits the diaphragm of your microphone (or ear). To attenuate them, use a pop screen when you’re recording. Alternately, perform at a 45 degree angle to your mic diaphragm, so the mic will pick up your voice very strongly, but the breath bursts will slide by it. Finally, in either case, running a low-cut filter (an equalization pass that squashes all frequencies below about 125hz) may be desirable if you’re still getting significant bass spikes on your plosives.The corollary to this is that many people, myself included, have a harsh sibilant “s” when they speak. The sibilant sounds (”s,” “sh,” and “ch”) occur at different frequencies from the other consonants (like the “t”, for example), and it’s possible to soften your sibilant “s” without crushing your other consonants. This is called “De-essing,” and you can do it with any good parametric EQ, including the one that comes free with Audacity. Pay attention to this part of the spectrum when building your EQ curves, and you’ll be golden.

We shouldn’t know that you recorded over three days

Ever watch Return of the Jedi? Remember the scenes in Jabba’s Palace? It sounded like a real place, didn’t it? And like everyone there was in the same room?

Here’s the shocker: almost none of the audio recorded on set was used in that sequence, because all the actors in costumes had to have air conditioners and fans running constantly in order to keep from collapsing (and, even then, between takes they had to put fans inside the suits). The noise floor was so high that pretty much nothing was usable. Everything you saw in that sequence, audio-wise, was recorded after the fact (a technique that’s called ADR for “Additional Dialog Recording”).

Over the course of a performance that lasts more than twenty minutes, your voice changes. The muscles in your throat get tired, you get dry, and your voice drops in pitch and the crispness softens. Listening straight through from one end to another, most people can’t hear it, but when you start editing, all bets are off. What if, at the end of a chapter, you decide you’ve really found the groove and need to redo the beginning section, so just loop around? You could be causing yourself troubles.

The audience shouldn’t be able to tell you’ve been editing. Your voice should sound like it’s the same person, speaking into the same microphone, on the same day, all throughout your episode. To achieve this, you want to make sure that you are using the same mic every time, that you’re sitting or standing the same distance from it and speaking at the same angle to it, and that you’re recording at roughly the same time of day.

Beyond that, learn to pay attention to the muscles in your throat. Keep tea or water (never milk or coffee) nearby, and take a small sip whenever you start to feel a little dry. Take breaks every 20-30 minutes, and don’t talk during those breaks. Do warm up exercises (singing scales, reciting tongue twisters, etc.) for your voice before you start recording. Then, when you’re in the edit bay, listen to the sound of your voice, and make sure that you never stick two takes next to each other that sound qualitatively different.

Wrapping it up

I didn’t deal with equipment (mics, mixers, etc) in this post, because even the best equipment won’t give you a good sound until you’ve got these basics down. Once you’ve got these down, some carefully chosen and inexpensive gear can take you to the next level – but even with a cheap USB Snowball, you’ll get a serviceable sound if you’re careful.

So, pay attention to your signal, read clearly, and start podcasting!

SPECIAL NOTE

J.D. Sawyer will be the host of a special Podioracket.com Blog Talk Radio Extension where he leads a discussion with guests Rhonda R. Carpenter and Heather E. Roulo. If you have questions for the ladies about Podioracket.com, BTR, or either of their books then be there LIVE at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern on Thursday, September 17th. Set a reminder!

ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTOR

J. D. Sawyer is author of The Antithesis Progression, Sculpting God,, Down From Ten, the host of The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour, and a regular contributor to LinuxJournal Magazine. Through his company ArtisticWhispers Productions, he manages various types of a/v productions and photography projects. Find out more, and get his podcasts, by clicking here.

Getting Good Audio
by J. Daniel Sawyer

Good audio can’t save bad writing. You’ve heard it before, and it reflexively sounds true – after all, great special effects can’t save a lame movie, and the same might well be true for audiobooks. The inverse, however, is a little less obvious to most people: Bad audio CAN destroy good writing.

This one doesn’t have a good film corrolary — after all, there are gobs of great movies made on shoestring budget, shot on video or 16mm, that are interesting enough that the low production values don’t make one bit of difference, aren’t there?

Actually, there aren’t. Unless you’re a bad movie fetishist (not that I’d know what that is), any movie that holds your attention is meeting a certain quality threshold with its production values. If you’re not seeing it on the screen, close your eyes and listen: chances are the movie has good, solid audio. Even if it’s not fancy, it’s got a few basic qualities:

1) The voices are clear, rather than muddy
2) The background noise levels in a given scene are consistent, rather than fluctuating up and down
3) The editing is clean – where there are breaths, they are full breaths rather than chopped in the middle.
4) The plosives don’t pop and the sibilants don’t hiss
5) The sound characteristics are consistent – you can’t tell where one take ends and the other begins, even with ADR.

How do you get these? Here are a few quick tips:

Clear voices

Voice is what you’re all about as a podcaster, so make sure that you’ve got a mic that plays fair with your voice. If you’ve got a bass heavy voice, don’t get a mic that attenuates the high end — you need those consonants in there to have a bright, clear sound.

To pull this off, the spectrum analyzer is your friend. Almost every audio editing program has one. Vocal range for most people is between 200 and 2000hz for the tone, and between 4000 and 20,000hz for your consonants. Record your voice doing different things and then look at it in the spectrum analyzer to see where your voice is the strongest and where it’s the weakest. Make sure that your consonant peaks don’t get lost when you process your audio — so don’t ever boost your bass without also making sure you can hear your consonants brightly and clearly.

Give me a clean sound

You must record in a dead room. In audiogeek speak, “dead” means “does not have much of an echo” where “live” means “has echoes like a gymnasium.” When you chose which room to record in, you want something that is, as Miracle Max would say, “mostly dead” (but not all dead – you need a teeny bit of resonance to help bring your vocal characteristics out.)

Most houses are pretty live – the flat, parallel, bare walls and the flat ceilings make for very unpleasant reverb – so you’re going to need to break things up. Throw pillows all over the place. Record with a bookshelf (filled with actual books) behind you. Cover any metal or glass or hardwood tables with reasonably thick blankets. Hang moving blankets or quilts in front of the walls and put throw-rugs down on hardwood floors. Put chairs at odd angles. The object of the game is to reduce the number of straight lines in the room and to introduce surfaces that absorb sound. If the flat surfaces can’t reflect sound back and forth to each other like a ping-pong ball then you’re on the right track.

Once that’s done, and you’ve recorded, you’re going to find out about another kind of floor: the noise floor.

Your noise floor is the noise that you can hear on the track when you’re not speaking – it’s the noise produced by the air moving in the room, fans in your computer, the electricity in the lines, the transistors in your equipment, and any radio frequency interference your mic cable might be picking up.

In professional environments, -70db or lower is an ideal noise floor and -60 or lower is acceptable (as most playback equipment produces -60db levels when it runs.) Anything over these levels is likely to be audible to your audience.

To measure the noise floor, use your spectrum analyzer — select a “silent” portion of audio and have the spectral analyzer graph it. On the x axis of the analyzer you’ll see the frequencies marked off, and the y axis will have the amplitude (volume). As long as your highest peak doesn’t break above -60, you should be fine.

Sometimes, it’s not possible to get a noise floor this low. If you’re recording multiple mics simultaneously, or you’re in a room that just can’t be made quiet. When this is the case, your audio requires special care when you edit. A number of programs out there contain noise removal tools called “gates” and “levelers.” Unless you know what you’re doing, do not use these – most of them will silence the quiet parts of your signal and/or boost your words (including the noise underneath them). This leads to sharply fluctuating levels in the noise floor, which triggers the fight-or-flight response in the human brain and will subtly unnerve your audience. On the other hand, the brain is perfectly capable of adjusting to even a fairly loud constant noise floor — put simply, it’s better to have a slightly dirty signal with a consistent sound than it is a signal that’s only clean in some places.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

SPECIAL NOTE

J.D. Sawyer will be the host of a special Podioracket.com Blog Talk Radio Extension where he leads a discussion with guests Rhonda R. Carpenter and Heather E. Roulo. If you have questions for the ladies about Podioracket.com, BTR, or either of their books then be there LIVE at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern on Thursday, September 17th. Set a reminder!

ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTOR

J. D. Sawyer is author of The Antithesis Progression, Sculpting God,, Down From Ten, the host of The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour, and a regular contributor to LinuxJournal Magazine. Through his company ArtisticWhispers Productions, he manages various types of a/v productions and photography projects. Find out more, and get his podcasts, by clicking here.

or download Podioracket Ep-13.

INTERVIEWS

Brian Rathbone

Website: http://www.brianrathbone.com

Email: Brian@BrianRathbone.com

Twitter: @brianrathbone

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1388294048

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/brianrathbone

Bio: Horse trainer turned technology geek turned fantasy author and podiobooker.

J.D. Sawyer

Coming soon to Podiobooks
Website: http://antithesis.jdsawyer.net/

Email: dan@jdsawyer.net

Twitter: @dsawyer

When he’s not indulging his psychosis or happily encouraging his burgeoning case of carpal tunnel syndrome by feeding his writing habit, he spends his time doing fine art photography, video production and editing, and podcast production through his media company ArtisticWhispers Productions. He is currently in post production on his first feature film, Hunting Kestral, which takes place in the same universe as the forthcoming podcast novel Predestination and Other Games of Chance.

CONTESTS

Seth Harwood is offering a signed copy of Jack Wakes Up on our BTR-PR show July 21, 6:00 pm PST/9:00 pm EST. Be at the show as a call in guest 347-996-3319 or in the live chat and get to ask him a question in order to qualify for the drawing. You could win! Set a reminder.

Brain Rathbone’s has 4 ways to win four autographed copies of his book, including on our LIVE BTR-PR show on July 23rd at 6 pm PST/9 pm EST. Details on the other ways are available at his website. Set a Reminder for the Podioracket live show and join in the fun.

Philippa Ballantine has extended her Weather Child contest until August 1. Write a review or blog about the book and let Philippa know with an email to pip@pjballantine.com. Your name will go into the hat for a huge collection of New Zealand goodies.

Contest number 9 has been announced in The Mark of a Druid 2009 Contest series. Kidnap the Trailer. Go to http://www.themarkofadruid.com snag the trailer and put it on your blog, twitter the link and talk it up, then click participate on the book site and give Rhonda the link. Every time you talk it up add to your participate list and your name will go in the drawing each time you let her know you kidnapped the trailer. Contest details located here.

Arlene Radasky needs book club questions for The Fox. Visit her site and shoot her an email with a question and your name will go into the hat. Contest ends July 31, 2009

J.C. Hutchens and Matt Wallace bring you the Sword of Blood show and tell competition. Watch for Friday’s post or visit http://SwordOfBlood.com

NEWS

Parsec nominees are being reviewed. Watch for badges coming soon to nominees.

Phil Rossi’s Crescent hit #5 in horror in his Amazon book rush. Killer job!

Podiobooks 2.0 is so close! Stay tuned for the details as authors prepare!

New Releases

There are many options to enjoy!
   

• Checkwolf – Book 1 by Remy Gibson Fiction
• Quilt, Book and Bard by Bryna Chalmer Fantasy-Family Freindly
• T’Aragam: the Max Ransome Chronicles, Book One by Jack W. Regan-Young Adult-Family Freindly
• Acts of Desperation by Tim Dodge Thriller

• Unconventional by J. J. Hebert Inspirational Fiction-Family Freindly
• Untrue Tales… Book Two by Teel McClanahan III
  Science Fiction
• See Tom Run by Scott Wittenburg Mystery
• Star Struck by Emmy Z. Madrigal Romance

• The Mariner’s Secret, a Matt and Heather Thriller by Mary TomasiDubois Thriller-Family Freindly
• Inherited Danger by Brian Rathbone Fantasy
• Checkwolf – Book 4: Failure Not Tolerated by Remy Gibson
  Fiction
  

Now Completed

These have completed since our last Season One show.
   

• See Tom Run by Scott Wittenburg Mystery
• Inherited Danger by Brian Rathbone Fantasy
• The Mariner’s Secret, a Matt and Heather Thriller by Mary TomasiDubois Thriller-Family Freindly
• Jujun by Graydancer Magical Realism-Adults Only

• Hard Boiled Headline by Greg Crites Humor
• Untrue Tales… Book One by Teel McClanahan III Science Fiction
• Traitor, Book 1 of The Turner Chronicles by Mark Eller Science Fiction
• T’Aragam: the Max Ransome Chronicles, Book One by Jack W. Regan-Young Adult-Family Freindly               

Or download the Champion Quest.

 Welcome from Podioracket.com. Those who are brave enough to stand against Nina Kimberly the Merciless and her Uhk horde need your help.  The invasion has begun and the battle lines have been drawn. As you know Nina Kimberly the Merciless has demanded the surrender of Podioracket.com as she continues her quest to take over the Internet. We will not give in . . . Never Surrender!

Seeking Our Champion

As you can see, the number of resisters is few and our numbers shrinking. Who will champion Podioracket.com? In our quest to remain free from the oppression of the barbarian horde? We are seeking among the Podiobooks.com characters for the best and bravest to stand against Nina Kimberly and, perhaps, risk their lives to save us all. 

Already Among the Suggested Contenders Are:

• Live report from the street provided by Emerian Rich’s, Jespa~Night’s Knights
• Arlene Radasky’s, The Fox~King Calgacus
• H.E. Roulo’s, Fractured Horizon~The Adams
• Michele Roger’s, Dark Matters~Louella
• Nathan Lowell’s, Quarter Share~Ishmael Horacio Wang
• Rhonda Carpenter’s, The Mark of a Druid’s~Brian Boru
• Philippa Balentine’s, Chasing the Bard~Puck 

Honorable mention- Perry Dawsey from Scott Sigler’s Contagious and Infected.  Sadly, Sigler has declared his allegiance with Nina.  Could Perry be turned against us?

Is your favorite hero listed? We will be having a special Podioracket.com episode for the exciting confrontation. Share your thoughts NOW!

Those Who have Joined Nina:

Tis disheartening, to announce the following have sided with Nina Kimberley. Who would have dared to thought The Dark Overlord, himself, would ally himself with the adolescent Kimberley?  Then again, should we really be surprised at the side he picked?

• Scott Sigler
• Get Published
• Nobilis Erotica
• Antithesis
• The Celtic Myth Podshow

Declared Resisters:

We do not stand alone. Among our allies in the resistance are:

• Wander Radio
• Chris Lester of Metamor City
• Secret Society for Delayed World Conquest (as represented by Kim AKA Comic Book Goddess of Geek Pantheon and Moment of Kim).

Declare your allegiance NOW!

Who will be our champion?

Music for this podcast was provided by Kevin MacLoed of http://www.incompetech.com/  Stoneworld Battle 1.