Money well spent!

September 3, 2009 at 6:12 am (Audio equipment, Baha'i, Home studio, Recording, audiobooks)

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!

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Saffire Blues: The saga continues!

August 22, 2009 at 6:59 am (Baha'i, Home studio, Pro 24, Recording, Saffire)

I got my replacement unit yesterday: it’s a Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP, first released a few months ago in June.  I really like the new horizontal form factor, the heavier gage case, and the more detailed dial labels. 
It took all day,  installing, uninstalling and reinstalling, but I think I’ve finally  got the Saffire’s new software interface all figured out.  On top of that, the Saffire and Cubase appear to be playing nicely together.  Woo hoo!   
Then I listened back to some of the files that I thought were already complete, and was very disappointed (read: disgusted) by what I heard.  It’s too early to tell, but it’s possible I may be starting over from scratch. 
 
I was already thinking about it before, but now I’m decided.  I’ll be calling an audio engineer on Monday to come over and help me configure everything.  I hoping that if he can optimize my setup (mic placement, hardware, and software), I can re-record the whole thing in a tiny fraction of the time it took me to get this point.  And in less time (I hope!) than it would take me to try to clean up everything I’ve already done.
 
This feels like one of those stories where bad news becomes good news and good news becomes bad news.
 
My Saffire started blasting static – How terrible!
But it’s under warranty, and they (eventually) replaced it with a better unit – Oh, well that’s good.
Unfortunately, the new unit is so good, it revealed how crappy my recordings were – Certainly, that’s bad!
Yes, but thankfully I now have a chance to fix it!  – Well, that’s good!
See what I mean?
 
I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to start futzing with recording.  I’m tired!

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Changing it up: lessons in good recording

May 14, 2009 at 4:27 am (Baha'i, Home studio, Recording, Verdanta, audiobooks)

I’ve made several changes to the way I record.  Other than the headphones, everything is the same, I’ve just changed some of the settings.

1.  Before: I had dropped the mic down below mouth level to try to eliminate plosives (hard B’s, P’s and T sounds).  It had reduced the plosives, but hadn’t completely eliminated them.  After: I raised the mic back up to mouth level but shifted it to the side, at a 45 degree angle.  The plosives are still there (so Hans tells me) but to my ear, are much better.

2.  Before: I didn’t know what those little switches on my microphone were for, so I simply didn’t use them.  After: I looked up the specs on my Sterling Audio  ST66 microphone and discovered that I had a 10dB attenuation pad and a Switchable 75Hz, 12dB/octave high-pass filter.  Did that make any more sense to you than it did to me?  I did a little digging, and figured out what those two terms meant.  It turns out, an attenuation pad means I can put the mic in front of a REALLY loud sound source, like a drum, and it will be able to record the sound without distorting it.  As a lowly little voiceover, this was NOT something I needed use, so I left it turned off.  The other switch is called a high-pass filter, because it’s a filter that lets everything higher than it’s threshold pass, while everything below it gets rejected.  In this case, anything below 75 Hz (somewhat lower than my voice can go) gets rejected.  That sounded good to me!  I switched that baby on, and on it’s going to stay!

3.  Before: I tried to use the compression and eq on my audio interface.  After: I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing and decided it might be better not to mess with the recording up front, but rather to wait and do all my audio processing after the fact where it’s reversible, using software plugins.  (Obviously, I also had to learn how to use software plugins, but that’s a discussion for another night.)

These three changes have made a big difference on the noise floor of my recording, as well as on it’s overall quality. 

Now my big dilemma: although better is good when it comes to short projects, better means different, and different is terrible for long audio narration.  This probably mens I’ll be re-recording the beginning of Advent. 

Ah well, that’s how it goes, doesn’t it?  Three steps forward, two steps back.  But in the end, all forward movement is a good thing, and  I’ll just have to be satisfied with that.

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