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This is a podfic workshop that I originally posted on the [livejournal.com profile] generation_kill comm, intended as a follow-up workshop to [personal profile] chemm80's excellent beginner's workshop. That comm is mostly locked down, though, so I'm posting it here as well. I am going to assume you know the basics of how to get sound recorded, how to edit, how to export your podfics, how to upload and how/where to post. Some of what I say is also going to assume that you're using Audacity.

All of this is of course from my POV, and while I am doing my best to acknowledge the different opinions and experiences out there, YMMV on any of these topics. Thanks to [personal profile] andeincascade and [personal profile] podcath for reading through the post beforehand!

1) Reading

When I listen to my own early podfics, I can hear a huge difference in the reading style compared to what I sound like now. Reading is really something where you can develop your talent over the years! Also, the main difference between podfic and professional audiobooks (besides issues of sound quality) is IMO that podfic always comes from a place of love for the characters, and that's what I love about it. So don't be afraid to let that love shine through when you read and when you act out the story!

You can experiment with different ways of reading to find a style that works for you and for the story you're recording: vary your pacing, both the speed with which you read a sentence, and the length of the pauses you use. If there's an action scene, for example, reading it faster might give a sense of urgency. You can vary your volume: if a character is whispering, go ahead and whisper, too. Lowering your voice can actually also be a way of making a scene more intense: for example, imagine a villain making a threat. That could actually be more scary said in a low, intense fashion rather than loud and blustering.

You can also vary your pitch, though be careful with this and don't fall into the trap of thinking that all female characters have to be voiced with a high pitch and all male ones with a low one. I think that's very hard to pull off in a natural-sounding way, and I usually differentiate between characters based on personality rather than gender. Enunciation and melody of speech is also a great way to vary your reading and differentiate between characters. One character might be a little formal, and then you could enunciate more, while another might slur their words together a little and be more casual. Some people find it helpful to study the way the characters speak in canon (if it's a canon where you get actual speech, like GK) and others like to find character voices on their own, since it's usually very hard to imitate the actors.

Try using your body when you're acting: clenching your fists when your character is angry or aggressive, smiling when your character is happy, shrugging when your character thinks something doesn't matter. It's amazing how much this can influence the way your voice sounds!

In short, experiment and have fun with your reading and your characters! Using a beta is a great way to get feedback, both on your reading in general, and for finding errors that you missed, and mispronunciations of words. Since podfics generally get less feedback than fics, a beta is also a good way of ensuring that you get feedback and interaction at all.

Collaboration with another podficcer is also a great way of getting feedback and interaction, as well as often producing awesome results. Most collaborations between podficcers are of stories that are easy to divide up into sections, such as a story that alternates between two POV:s, or stories that alternate between present time and flashbacks. But some people have also done full-on radio plays with a narrator and separate readers for different characters' dialogue. You can also collaborate with authors to create new podfics or adapt existing stories into a form more suited to podfic. Podfic collaboration in general is something that a lot of people are experimenting with and finding new creative forms for!

If your voice gets tired easily, you may be using the wrong vocal technique (this is something I myself have had a lot of trouble with and have gone to speech therapy and taken singing lessons for). When you speak, your throat should be as relaxed as possible, and your stomach muscles should be doing all the work of moving air past your vocal cords at the right speed. To test this, say "ssssssssss" while keeping one hand on your throat. If you feel your throat muscles tensing up, you're doing it wrong. "Ssss" is not a voiced sound--your vocal cords should not be involved at all, and neither should the rest of your throat muscles. The air should just pass through your throat to your mouth, which shapes the sound.

Another way to test this is to stand up and put your hands on your waist between your hipbones and your ribs. Say "but", lingering on the "b". You should feel your sides going out as your stomach controls the air. Now put one hand just below your belly-button and one on your solar plexus (just below your breastbone). Say "but" again. Your solar plexus should go out and your stomach should go in. There's an interesting book called Complete Vocal Technique by Cathrine Sadolin that you can check out if you want to learn more about this (it's about singing, but a lot of it applies to speaking as well).

Other general advice on taking care of your voice: keep a glass of water on hand. Clearing your throat is counter-productive--it amounts to slamming and scraping your vocal cords together, and will tire them. It's better to drink some water and/or cough gently. Also, yawning is actually a great way to stretch and relax your throat muscles.

Finally, do not worry about your accent--podfic fandom celebrates diversity among accents! And we all have accents of one sort or another, wherever we come from.

2) Sound quality while recording

There are two aspects of sound quality: one is what you capture on your raw recording, and the other is how you manipulate that recording afterwards.

Many podficcers start out recording just on their built-in computer mike, but you may find after you've done a couple of podfics that you'd like better sound quality than that. There are a couple of things to consider here: what price you can afford, if you want a head-set mike or a free-standing mike, if you want a mike stand to put it on, if you want an external recorder that stores the recording on a memory card rather than on your computer hard drive, etc. There are tons of posts about this on [livejournal.com profile] podfic_tips.

Once you do have a decent microphone, you want to get the best out of it. Many of us don't have much control over where we can record, but keep in mind that the room you're in is going to influence the sound you get. If you're in a big, empty room, for example, you're going to get an echoing effect, which is usually not desirable, so consider recording in a small space or where you're surrounded by soft surfaces. To minimize background noise, the best thing is of course not to have any in the first place (I wish!). But if you do, there are a couple of things to think about: if you have a directional mike, you can position it away from the source of the noise. It's also better to record with lower gain with the mike close to your face, rather than with high gain with your face far away. This is so that your voice will be relatively louder than the background noise.

Of course, you can't be too close to the mike. One problem is that if your voice is too high relative to the gain, you'll get clipping (also known as distortion). Another problem is that the mike will pick up on your plosives and sibilants--that is, your "p":s will produce a little puff of air that the mike picks up on, and your "s":s will sound all hissy. Some people use a pop screen in front of the microphone to slow down the puffs of air (here's a tutorial on how to make one). I use a boom mike stand that stands on the floor beside me and that positions my mike at the side of my face to avoid it instead.

Another point is that you should record in a format that retains as much information as possible from the start. I record in standard-quality wav files (which gives CD-quality sound). You can of course record in mp3, which is a lossy format, but if you then edit the file and again export it in mp3, you'll lose information twice. Of course, wav files are huge and will fill up all your hard drive space after a while if you podfic a lot, so I usually delete the original files a while after I post a podfic.

Stereo or mono doesn't much matter, I think--you need stereo in sound files if you want it to appear as if sound is coming from different directions, such as if there's a band playing and your ears pick up slightly different sounds depending on if your right ear or left ear is closer to the drums than the guitar. But in podficcing there's just one voice, and I don't think stereo actually gives any benefit. I usually record in mono.

3) Sound quality post-recording

Okay, so what can you do to improve the sound quality after you've got your raw recording? Some people like to use the "noise removal" tool in Audacity to get rid of background noise. I personally don't like it--while it does reduce noise, it can also add a sort of metallic quality to your voice, or in less extreme cases I find it still leaves the voice slightly deadened or muffled. I'd rather have a bit of background noise than that (although there's always a point where the noise is just too much). But YMMV, of course. Experiment with the sliding scale to remove more or less of the noise to see what happens.

It's often a good idea to increase the volume, if you start out with something fairly low and don't want your listeners to have to turn the volume up high. This is done with the "amplify" effect in Audacity. Just experiment to find a good level. If you have loud spikes of sound in your recording, you'll find that there's a limit to how much you can amplify it without getting clipping/distortion around the loudest parts (Audacity will warn you before this happens--you'll have to click a tickybox to allow clipping if you do want it). So if you use hand-clapping or the like as an aid to editing (see below) you'll want to edit before you amplify your file.

Some microphones will tend to give you "spikier" sound waves, so that you can't amplify as much as you'd like. In that case, you can run the "compressor" effect before you amplify (the settings on it will usually work well the way they are). This will reduce your loudest spikes of sound without doing anything to the lower ones, and then you can amplify after that.

How much data compression should you use when you export to mp3? This is up to personal taste. Some people find that 64 kbps (kilobits per second) is enough, but I usually prefer 128 kbps. The lower the bitrate, the worse the quality gets, so it's a trade-off between sound quality and how much bandwidth/storage it'll use. I don't think I can actually hear much difference between 128 and, say, 192 kbps, though some people can.

If you record in stereo, you should be careful to export your mp3 in joint stereo (you'll find that under "options" in the export window of Audacity). Otherwise you'll get significantly worse sound quality. As I said, mono really is the best option for speech, but even if you only include bits of stereo music in your mostly-mono podfic, it's still best to export in joint stereo.

4) Editing

Editing can be done in different ways. Some podficcers regard editing as an essential part of the creative work of making a podfic, and usually spend a lot of time on it. They often do multiple takes of lines and choose between them, or splice together sentences from different takes, and adjust the length of pauses. Some also edit out breathing noises and puffing sounds from plosives, etc, but it really is best if you can avoid these at the recording stage instead--it's such a soulless task to edit them out by hand.

Others regard the reading more as the product of a performance in the moment, and mostly edit out mistakes. I am definitely in the second camp here, but there's no right or wrong--it's down to your own tastes, so experiment and see what works best for you. I use a method of clapping my hands to indicate what needs to be cut, which is described in this post. It really speeds up the editing process, so try it out if you like.

Sometimes you find in the editing stage that you did something wrong and need to re-record (sometimes called doing "pick-ups"). Maybe you misread a sentence from the fic, for example, or maybe you realize that "condolences" is not in fact pronounced "CON-dolences" but "con-DO-lences" (an example from my own experience). Or maybe you just don't like the way it came out. Then you need to rerecord that bit and splice it in. Even if it's just a few words you need to replace, I recommend reading the whole sentence, or even a sentence or two before that--it will make you sound more natural. Another thing to consider is the way your voice sounds. If you originally recorded in the morning, maybe record the replacement in the morning, too? Often your voice will change over the day. And of course, do the recording in the same room to get the same sound quality.

There are some tricks you can use if you need to splice together recordings from several different sources (such as when you're doing a collaboration with another podficcer). I usually start by making sure the volumes are the same by amplifying, and possibly doing noise removal if the background noise levels are very different. Then I put the two recordings on different tracks. When handling multiple tracks, the "sync-lock tracks" feature is your friend. It will make sure that if you cut a little bit from one track, the same amount is also cut from all sync-locked tracks, so that you don't get mis-aligned.

To handle transitions between two people's recordings (that is, when a clip on the first track ends and a clip on the second track begins), I leave a bit of background noise at the end of the first recording, and do a "fade out" on it. Overlapping with that, I leave a bit of the second person's background noise before they start to speak, and do a "fade in" on it. That way, you get a smooth transition between the two different types of sound quality and background noise. The same technique is useful if you're splicing in music or other external clips in your podfic.

If you're doing a back-and-forth conversation rather than alternating between longer sections from different readers, you can do that over Skype. There are various programs such as mp3 Skype recorder and Piezo for recording Skype conversations, but I wouldn't actually use those recordings for the podfic, since the sound quality will be bad. So what you can do is 1) record the whole Skype conversation using one of those programs and 2) have each person record a solo recording of just their side of the recording. You can then use the group recording to align the tracks of the solo recordings, and then sync-lock them for further editing. This has the huge advantage that you won't have to paste together the dialogue line by line, and it will preserve the pacing of your original recording.

There are special effects you can use if you want to sound like you're talking on the phone, or if you want to alter your voice to indicate, say, that someone is speaking telepathically. I've never used that kind of thing, though, so I don't know what effects to recommend.

Check out this site for short videos demonstrating basic editing as well as techniques such as compression, amplification, and others.

5) Podfic fandom

Podfic fandom is a friendly and welcoming place! I'm going to list some great multi-fandom comms that you can check out.

[community profile] amplificathon/[livejournal.com profile] amplificathon is the main comm for posting podfics. It's also where the amplificathon challenge is held each spring, and also hosts the reccing event amplirecathon and the podfic gift exchange podbang.

[livejournal.com profile] podfic_tips is a great place for podficcers to ask and look for advice on podficcing issues both technical and otherwise.

[community profile] podficmeta is a discussion comm for podfic meta, for both podficcers and listeners.

[community profile] podficbigbang - what it says on the tin, basically.

[community profile] multipodicity is a comm meant to encourage repodding, that is, recording stories that have already been recorded once. It sometimes holds exchanges.

[community profile] pod_together is a challenge where authors and podficcers collaborate to make podfics.

[community profile] theatripod is a challenge to produce play-style podfics led by a director.

There are also a lot of podficcers on Twitter--here's a recent Twitter friending meme.

And finally, you should really check out the recent [community profile] pod_aware event, a week-long celebration of podfic and podfic fandom. There are so many interesting podcasts and meta posts!

(no subject)

Date: 2012-11-28 03:34 pm (UTC)
podcath: podcath's default icon (Default)
From: [personal profile] podcath
i love this guide! You cover everything I could ever have thought of and then some. I especially like when you talk about how to protect your voice. I've never had an issue with it, but I know where to go for help to prevent it now :)

Very very cool work. Thank you!!!
(Reply to this)
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