I can hear the popping on headphones and even on tinny laptop speakers which do not reproduce low frequencies,
the P of “sPeaking” is really conspicuous, the B of “Before” is not so bad.
I gotta go back and listen again. I’m at work. The only thing that bothered me was the slightly “essy” sound of his voice – which I assume is natural. He’s a reptile in addition to being unable to pronounce “button.”
Koz
This discussion has a more serious extension. Whatever we do to get the voice perfect is going to need to be applied to each and every performance forever. So fine tuning every phoneme may not be warranted faced with that. The Audacity “Chains” batch process is, I believe, not up to doing everything we’ve done so far at a button (sorry, Buh-On) push.
Koz
@Trebor I did notice the tiny pop with that initial P after listening to your comparison. I’ll make one out of wire and panty hose today. Likely, I can just hang the pop filter from the top of the isolation box. Was hoping I wouldn’t need one, but whatever works. I can live with the s’s or perhaps experiment with pronouncing them. Ironically, the CEO of the company I’m doing this project with used to work in the recording industry and he’s not nearly as picky about sound. He just wants good content.
He just wants good content.
That’s his new goal. He’s now a producer. His old goal was professionally good sound.
I shot one half of a radio show a couple of months back and they emailed me a short list of technical requirements. I already do most of them, so it was a piece of cake past the upset of doing it at all.
“Wait, they want us to do what, now…?”
Time was everything would have to be done in a studio somewhere to get the required quality.
I remember one of the clear requirements in the email was Do Not Post Produce or Filter. Send me the raw show. This is against the horror of trying to unscrew somebody’s bad filters and effects before the broadcast.
By the way, one of the Movie tricks is never record anything below 100Hz. All the live recording sound mixers have the “100Hz” button pushed. You might try the Hi Pass Filter set to 100Hz and that may suppress some of the plosives in the performance. Again, I think it’s just fine as it is. This is your product; this is what you sound like. If you mess with it too much, one, you’re being obsessive/compulsive, and two, you lead the client into thinking the patched together job is the real you – and remember you have to do all these tricks to every show from now on.
A respected sound guy friend of mine in Florida once told me I was going to hear a lot of things in my shoot headphones that were never going to appear in the show.
Koz
My goal is good sound and content. His is good content. Regardless, it doesn’t hurt to know how to make recordings passable as professional, especially with the animation stuff or future recordings for pickier people. I made a ghetto pop filter out of a wire, pantyhose and duct tape. It works well for pops. As for the sibilant s’s, it seems like there are some pronunciation tricks to make them less overwhelming. I Googled a couple of them. That 100 HZ thing is a good tip to keep in mind for the future.
Even though human hearing goes down to 20 or so, there’s not much of value down at the last few octaves. I have three mixers (over time) that have 80Hz, 100Hz and one that switches between 40/80/160. 160 is very noticeable, but if the options is getting a voice track in a high wind or not, you use the filter.
If you lose the sibilance, the only thing we have left is pronouncing “button.”
I want to hear you doing a real piece. Test clips are OK, but I want to hear you doing the full-on cupped hand over the ear announcer thing. You know that trick, right? It feeds some of your voice back to your ear so you have a better idea what you sound like without the mixing board foldback.
Koz
OK. I officially recorded the intro track, which is an announcement about why I partnered with that company. There was one obnoxious “s” that I truncated because it was quite obnoxious. Once I complete the third or fourth track, I’ll post it to this thread in a day or two when it’s recorded. Not sure how secretive the company wants to be before the launch, so this first track won’t be the one I post. As for listening to my voice while I’m recording it, not sure if that’s going to happen. Seems very annoying, especially with a very slight latency. I typically do a soundcheck first and assume it will sound approximately like that. By the way, those compressor settings someone suggested really came in handy. The first track is very even amplitude wise. Didn’t need to even amplify it afterward. It just seemed to level things out and amplify it all as much as possible. Also, the panty hose is doing wonders for the p’s and t’s. It was definitely worth the funny work some old man gave me as I was selecting it in the grocery store.
NB: Dynamic range compression can make sibilance worse.
Excess sibilance can be caused by compression,
Set the threshold (aka “floor”) for compression as high* as will produce the “even amplitude” level you require,
This will leave the low amplitude shh sounds at low amplitude, if you set the threshold low the shh sounds will be made louder.
[ * Confusingly highest threshold means the lowest -dB value, e.g. use a -20dB level if you can, rather than say -30dB ]
heavy-duty old-lady type “surgical stockings” aka “support hose” produce a good result, but are the most embarrassing to ask for.
As for listening to my voice while I’m recording it, not sure if that’s going to happen. Seems very annoying, especially with a very slight latency.
Right. That’s why you monitor either at the microphone…
Or at the mixer or with your cupped hand, not at the computer.
but are the most embarrassing to ask for.
You’re doing it wrong. When they present it to you, you need to ask, “Do you think this will go with my coloring?” and then ask about proper care and laundering instructions.
Regarding this picture…
That’s dress material and the lady at the cloth store asked me what I was going to use it for. I finally broke the charade of creating a fabulous wedding dress and admitted I was going to use it as a lighting scrim for photography.
Koz
If I had taken that pantyhose to a cashier instead of the Star Trek lane, I probably would have told them it’s for the dog. I’m definitely bookmarking this page. Lots of good info. I’ll post a whole track tonight or tomorrow.
OK. Here’s track 2 of the course per Koz’s request. The only thing missing is course title and track title just to protect the privacy of the company I’m partnering with just in case. They’ll be giving the course away with purchases of their product. This one is with the -.2 threshold and the 5:1 ratio. Instead of Mediafire, I uploaded it to my site. Sounds pro to my ears, but the pros may beg to differ. Here it is: http://www.deepermeditation.net/forum-sample.mp3
EQ - Sound Frequencies
The Very Bottom End
20-40hz is generally out of instrument range*. Nothing desirable can come from a boost in this range, unless you want the rumble of an earthquake, thunder or anything else earth shaking. Most sound systems don’t even go this low and all you will do is soak up valuable headroom. It is best to filter out this area completely and avoid wasted power due to low frequency rubbish.
- (OK before some wiseguy points it out, the fundamental of a grand piano (A0) is 27.5Hz but believe, in real world situations, me nobody really hears the actual fundamental).
The Bass
40-200Hz
Fundamentals of rhythm section. EQ can change musical balance making it fat or thin. Too much makes music boomy.
40hz to 80hz
The 1st octave is the sub-bass of the “feel” of the bass, gives a sense of power, felt more than heard… An important range for hip-hop, dance or electronic music.
Deep bass requres a lot of energy to produce, these frequencies are for sub woofers or large speakers. Small sound systems and stage monitor frequency response rolls off in this region and there can be a danger of boosting the bass to overcompensate for poor bass response.
Using a bell shaped response rather than shelving is often preferable if a boost is required, centred around 60-80Hz this will add the weight without introducing too much low frequency mush.
It usually is enough to boost just the bassline or bass drum or both to get some nice tight powerful bass, boost on many tracks in this area can easily over power the everything else. Other instruments are often completely filtered out in this range.
100hz - A boost around can often add fullness and punch to a thin sound, but it is also known as the the boom frequency. Often guitars or other instruments will sound boomy and a cut at around 100hz will remove that quality. It is here that bass and guitar tend to blur together, cutting the guitar here helps separate the two.
The Low Midrange.
200Hz-600Hz
The borderlands between bass and mid: The muddiness region or ‘mudrange’.
200Hz-250Hz - can add fullness to vocals but also muddy things up so it’s a good place to cut on muddy vocals. Keep to small reductions or boosts in this range to much can easily become too drastic.
Mud and fullness of other acoustic instruments hang out around here also. Slight boosts in this range to fill out a thin sounding acoustic guitar is common.
250Hz-600Hz - Gives fullness to some vocals and percussion, snares in particular. The gong sound of cymbals can be found here.
250Hz to 400Hz - A cut around here can cure a cardboard box sound in the kick drum or other low register percussion. This is also a good area to get space between the bassline and kik drum.
The Midrange.
600Hz-4kHz
Subtlety is required here, sound can really get mushy in this range so it can take some work to get everything to fit, and it is also easy to induce ear fatigue in this range.
This the range in which edgey and aggressive sounds come from, but even if you are making aggressive music it is an extremely fine line .
500-1KHz - is the region where tube and horn-like effects lie.
800Hz is the area most often reduced to remove that cheap sound in some instruments. An excess here is notable in terms like cheap, plastic, tinny, toy sounding, unmusical, It can be the area to boost or reduce the punchiness of a bass guitar though.
1-2kHz - Tinny sounds, too much here creates listening fatigue.
2kHz-4kHz - The attack of some instruments can be accentuated or diminished here and in particular, the attack of the beater hitting a percussion instrument. This is also a very important area for speech recognition.
3KHz - Too much here creates listening fatigue, to little little can lead to lisping quality, "m:, “v”, “b” become indistinguishable.
The Presence Region
4kHz-6kHz
The range usually refered to as presence.
This area affects how close the sound seems and can help separate a sound from the rest of the mix. Defines much of the clarity and definition of voices and instruments. Where you boost to make vocals or instrument solos seem “up front. The region of the presence knob on a guitar amp.
Adding 6dB at 5KHz can make the entire mix seem 3dB louder, but too much level here on anything can easily become grating and induces listening fatigue very quickly.
The High End
6KHz-16kHz
Brilliance and clarity of sounds. Sibilance, harshness on vocals.
7k-8kHz is where the brightness of cymbals and other high register percussion is, often referred to as the shimmer or sizzle. It can add some bite to some other instruments, but too much boost in this area can produce a metallic sound.
7kHz is the nasty realm of sibilance, the “s” sound area of the frequency spectrum. This is where the unpleasant and sometimes overpowering “s” sounds in vocals are to be found.
8kHz and above : The range of “air” or “brilliance”, and it is here a sound brightened up and sparkle added. This is where you boost or cut the breath sound. and also where the brittle,‘ice pick’ sound can be tamed.
10k is a good starting point to look at adding some brilliance.
15k and above is more the area referred as “air.”
Your forum-sample.mp3 track looks like stereo but isn’t : it’s two tracks but they are identical, aka “dual-mono”.
Unless you want to add stereo effects to your voice you might as well delete one of the tracks, (“Split Stereo to Mono”) , the sound of a mono mp3 will be just as good but the file size will be smaller and consequently quicker to download/stream.
I have one negative performance comment. You have fluffs and word mistakes in that clip. There are instances where you pause at the wrong place while you search for a word or phrase or duplicate a phrase. The whole object of editing is so the mistakes never ever make it to the client.
I hate the word “So” at the beginning of a sentence in a performance of this type, but I don’t know who wrote the script, so that one may be out of our hands.
Koz
Good advice. I’ll edit that out. Normally I cut out those things. For some reason, I thought I’d keep most of it in that one track.
You’re note being compulsive enough. This is a segment around :38, before and after a fluff correction. Koz
I noticed as I was ripping down through the piece that if I tightened up the pauses and gaps, you have at least one sentence that goes on with a single thought for about 45 minutes without taking a breath. It’s not that bad, you get what I mean. Since I’m following along in my head, I started wanting to gasp for air.
This could be interesting to fix because you like to speak in long thoughts with choppy presentation.
There’s no Audacity filter for that. You have to get the script right. I can’t find the example cut, I’ll see if I can recreate it between jobs at work.
Koz
That’s true. My other audios are not like this. In those, I put myself in the listeners’ shoes just so that they would process the info optimally. Maybe I’ll redo it. I got the sudden case of the snots and was going blank the whole time which is not normal. The blanks created a lot of stuttering and such. The lack of space between ideas seemed a bit tonight to me, too. Part of that was editing out the mouth sounds. The other part was just cutting it too tight. The background seems dead silent, so perhaps “add silence” could do the trick. Otherwise, it won’t hurt to re-record and re-edit. All these suggestions are helpful because they confirm my inner dialog topics that occur during playback, some of which run in the background.
You’re not working from a script are you?
There’s a Hollywood thing about repeatability. Anybody can blow up a car. The good pyro people can make it land where you want after it blows up. The Hollywood people can blow it up again seven more times, exactly the same way.
We need you to change one word about two minutes in…
Koz