That Practical Substack post Pt2

Audio

The view from my office desk

The sky is grey but the sun peeked out today. Do not worry about the pathetic fallacy, neither cloud nor sun affected my mood, and besides, I have a strange, steadfast feeling this week. Here is the second of the two practical posts I have been meaning to post for some time, after receiving some questions from friends new to writing on Substack. If you don’t publish here, then feel to forward it to someone who does, or just scroll down to ‘This Week’s Good Thing’. Next week, back to a regular post, whatever that actually means here…

The poll for a date and time for paid and founding members to get together with me on Zoom next month was clear: it will be Sunday 2nd February at 4pm GMT / UTC. I’ll put a link at the end of each post from next week behind a paywall break. The paywall is there to save me the hassle of trolls in comments or on the Zoom. So if you’d like to come along but can’t afford the paid subscription for a month, then reply to this email and I will comp you 6 months for free.

Audio

Following on from last week’s practical post about all things visual, you’ve customised your wordmark, logo, paragraph breaks and maybe even tweaked your colour and font settings. Now you’d like to record your voiceover, but how? For many years I was a recording artist, mainly vocals, bass and guitar. Things have changed so much since I was in the studio, that it was better for me to just start again fresh and find a good simple way to record audio from scratch.¹

Personally, I really enjoy recording my essays and have heard from many people that providing a voiceover makes my work more accessible to them for so many reasons: time, responsibilities, fatigue, eyesight, concentration. I am glad when I hear readers start their week with my recordings as they walk home from dropping kids to school, or leisurely over their morning coffee. Now I am back in my preferred 7am Monday morning slot, after a challenging winter meaning I was often unable to commit to that particular timing. So hello dear readers, greetings from my house-sit desk.

There are a few readers with chronic illnesses who tell me they find it much less taxing to listen to an article, rather than read it on screen. Yes, it is simple to now have an AI voice read anything to you, but the sound of my particular English voice seems to tickle quite a few of my American readers, so I am happy they will continue to enjoy my long ‘A’s back on shedyool (rather than skedyul)²

Hardware

There are a few simple things that make voiceovers quick and easy to do. I am going to list the bare minimum of hardware, as well as some work-arounds and cheats, as spending money unnecessarily is never fun. There are many ways to record spoken word so that it sounds good. I am vaguely aware that there are a selection of online platforms which do it, both free and paid but I am going to share the method I use as I am now up to almost 90 episodes and feel no need to change it. By all means make your own comparisons.

During lockdown I was teaching my regular T’ai Chi students online and needed a better microphone than the one on my laptop, so that they could hear me clearly when I was further from the screen, during the Form. I asked advice from my friend

Dougald Hine

as I had recently joined A School Called Home’s online Homeward Bound course and found the audio to be surprisingly clear. Dougald had been a radio journalist in a previous life, so I knew kit recommendations would be sound.

I didn’t need a clip-on or Bluetooth mic, just something with a long enough lead and a good dynamic range (ability to pick up the quietest and loudest sounds). About 5 years ago I bought a Blue Yeti Nano and it has been my mainstay ever since.³ If you’ve heard my voiceovers on here or listened to me on a podcast, then it is this mic you usually hear, except for when I am travelling, when I use my iPhone voice notes recorder.

I spent something over £100 but have not regretted it at all. I also bought a cheap pop shield online for about £10, which you can see in the picture of my set up here at the house-sit office desk. A pop shield makes a huge difference to the ‘Puh’ and ‘Ssss’ sounds so common in English, preventing the plosive and sibilant sounds from making peaks in the recording by simply slowing down the air in front of the mic and preventing a small proportion of it coming through. They also help mitigate breath and mouth sounds and can somewhat mellow the peaks and troughs in the recording without the need for more production.⁴

The pop-shield clamps onto an old tripod I have at home and I set my laptop up on a small stand which cost about £10, so that it cools more swiftly when running in warm weather and so that the text is at a good reading height while I record with the microphone. I don’t have a picture of my home set up, which sometimes includes cushions to the sides of the screen, as that noticeably softens the sound. It’s an everyday scene that I now wish I’d photographed for you! Instead here’s my (ad libbed) set up for today, using the angle poise lamp to hang the pop shield.

Yeti Nano mic, cardioid pattern selected for recording one voice, rather than omnidirectional, and my simple set up, pop shield, mic on a pile of notebooks, laptop, cushions to the sides are optional for sound softening.

Workarounds and cheats

You can just use your laptop microphone as these days they are often pretty good. You may already have a separate clip-on camera for Zoom meetings, to give a better picture and you might find this also has higher definition sound than your onboard mic. Compare the specs in your settings. You can also just use the voice notes in your phone, which can be found these days even on a ‘brick’ (non-smart) phone. You can also use a digital Dictaphone, channelling Agent Cooper.⁵

You can, and I have, also make a pop shield from a wire coat hanger, an old pair of tights / pantyhose, and some elastic bands or Velcro ties. I seem to remember recording an early single in a very low-budget studio where the engineer’s girlfriend’s choice of tights was almost certainly thick navy blue, as that what was on the pop shields. Still, waste not, want not.

Whichever way you choose, you’ll need to create a recording, whether by speaking into voice notes, recording to a similar program on your phone or laptop, or recording directly into an online editor. Whether I am recording directly, or uploading the sound file I created on my phone, I usually use Descript, after being required to use it for a job a couple of years ago. Like all current similar editing apps it prides itself on using AI… Even Substack creates its transcripts that way. If you put audio or video on Substack, that’s just part of the landscape, now, but it doesn’t mean you have to use it to create your ideas or artistic work, your visual art, the words you write, the songs you compose…

The free online version of Descript is how I record and/or edit my audio. Whether I record directly into the program or import a file I made on my phone, I do not change my content or create anything new there. I also don’t use their special effects as they are on the paid tiers, (which I have tried, but found unnecessary). I just remove coughs, noises, repeat phrases, etc. Some people use it to remove ‘um’s and ‘er’s but as I read my work quite carefully, these don’t happen. It’s useful for interviews and off the cuff recordings, perhaps. Simply, I highlight the text of what I want to remove and then press ‘delete’. I do all my textual editing by longhand or here on the Substack editor, so Descript is used purely for removing unwanted audio from the recording, I don’t use their transcriber, and find it has become less accurate over the last two years, with even some uncanny text artifacts in it.⁶ I export a Wav file to my computer when I am finished by pressing ‘Publish’, (the black button at the top right, below), and following the prompts.

Here I am highlighting a word in the text so that it is edited out of the audio. The program does all the fades and splices so that transitions are smooth.

Then I open the wav file in a free open source audio program I really like to use, called Audacity. It is not cloud-based and if you feel so inclined, you could entirely edit and enhance your sound on here without any AI involvement. Occasionally, I remove a loud background sound I have missed using this program, such as a car door slamming outside my window. You can expand the wave form graphic so that the shape of the specific sound is clearly visible and you can either highlight and delete it, or reduce it in volume. Using this program I top and tail the piece, add fades in and out, do any noise reduction I need for hiss or traffic sounds, and sometimes normalise the loudness of the piece. All of it is simple and intuitive, but there are many online tutorials if that’s your thing.

Never forget CTRL Z exists! You can undo what you just did, and thereby learn from experimentation. In some contexts, ‘easy undo’ makes us simpletons, in others, it creates learning opportunities for the constitutionally tech-tentative amongst us, myself included.

Using Audacity, here I am adding a fade in to the voiceover, before adding a fade out and ‘normalising’ the piece, (under Effect, Volume and Compression menu).

Finally, when I have listened through and it all sounds fine, I export the piece as an Mp3 to my Uncivil Savant audio folder on this laptop. I always edit the metadata too, giving it a track listing, album title, author, date and so on. This helps find pieces again and make things more traceable, I recommend it. The Mp3 file is what I upload to the Substack piece by pressing the headphones symbol at the top of the editor. That’s it. You can easily also turn this into a podcast, both on Substack and by feed to Apple, Spotify and everywhere else. Just follow the prompts in the Podcast section of your publication’s settings as they have made it pretty easy. It took me two hours to get it set up and half a dozen uploaded. Then I added five a day until they were all done, last February.

It is another way to bring people to your writing, to include listeners who maybe don’t already know about Substack and who will come across you through keywords, recommendations, even, shock horror, an algorithm. They may come for the sound of your voice on one particular episode, but they might stay for the other great articles they find on your Substack.

Lastly, I’ll assume you’ve remembered to add buttons for ‘subscribe’, ‘share’, ‘comment’ and any other offers you’d like to create. I also use the ‘custom’ option and invite people to donate as a one-off, after I saw this possibility on

Hadden Turner

‘s essays. It’s a simple and useful way for someone who maybe doesn’t want or can’t afford a subscription to say thanks for a piece that really spoke to them. You can set it up easily via Buy Me A Coffee as it uses the same Stripe payment system as Substack, so you can link the accounts.

Next week sees me adding to what you can receive via Uncivil Savant at no cost, and working towards a new rhythm. I don’t want to withhold things from one set of people in the hope that they’ll pay for what they’re ‘missing out on’. I want to trust in generosity and reciprocity. More on that, on gifts, response-ability, creativity and precarity over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hugely appreciate those of you who do subscribe, or who sometimes even

Full disclosure: I do sometimes spend it on tea.

This week’s good thing: Dover Publications books, including this one, Celtic Art - the methods of construction. When I was at art college in London, then later when I worked In Helter Skelter Music Bookstore off Charing Cross Road, I would sometimes spend my lunchtime browsing the delight that was the nearby Dover Books bookstore. Inside, hundreds of books with royalty-free images taken from Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Victorian design, Islamic patterns, Art Nouveau, Japanese prints… It was a treasure trove. The shop no longer exists but it continues online and you can still own these incredibly useful books. I never had the spare cash to buy them in my twenties, just the occasional card or bookmark, but I found one in a charity shop yesterday and I am very happy. George Bain’s exquisite renditions of the minute details in the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels and hundreds of Pictish and Celtic stones across Scotland and Ireland are really a great resource and inspiration. At last, I am beginning, slowly, the work of booklegging!

1. My era stretched from 2 inch tape huge recording machines and mixing desks, via 1/2 and 1/4 inch tape, DAT, ADAT, Roland VS digital desks then finally PC-based recording on various software platforms. I feel happy to have had at least some time in purely analogue set-ups.

2. Schedule…

3. I am not sponsored by them, this is just a straightforward report of my good experience of this tool.

4. Think of it like ‘in camera’ effects in film photography, such as lens flare or orange tinted filters (to get a deeper contrast in the sky), as opposed to what you might do in the darkroom, or even in digital production, later.

5. And of course, David Lynch will be sorely missed by me.

6. An exclamation I did not record, and a few lines of suggested text that I did not write...