I hired an audio engineer – Steve from The Audio Suite – to come to my house, examine my setup, and help me figure out what – if anything – I could do to improve things.
One of the pieces of advice he gave me (among many) was to import several audiobooks into my editing software (Cubase), and listen to them through my monitors and headphones. Although I listen to audiobooks all the time (much to my kids’ annoyance!) I had never thought to listen to them through my recording/editing equipment. It turns out, it’s very different. About half of the audiobooks left in all the mouth pops, breaths and “stickiness” that I had been working so hard to take out.
What Steve told me, and which I didn’t really believe until I listened to them through my equipment, is that the ideal to strive for is not perfection, but ”naturalness”. And all conversations naturally contain mouth pops, breaths and “stickiness.” We hear them all the time, and ignore them with no problem.
It was true, when I listened through my monitors, I heard all of the things which I had very slowly and painstakingly been editing out of my own files. I had achieved a level of perfection in the recording that couldn’t possibly exist in real life, even if I had the most well-lubricated mouth on earth, simply because I do have to breathe. And here were all these award winning audiobooks, getting great reviews, and yet including pops and clicks that sounded gigantic on my monitors, but which I had never once noticed while listening on my iPod.
While this may seem like a small, relatively insignificant thing, it is in fact, huge.
I’ve been spending something like an hour editing every single minute of my recording. With a 60:1 ratio, I’m not going to finish anytime this century!
Now that I have officially received permission from a professional set of ears, I’m going to force myself to relax my standards. I know it’s not going to be easy, but I simply have to do it.
Wish me luck!
