Or a power fist assuming a tennis racket pop and blast filter.
There are other techniques, too. You can push the microphone left or right so it’s roughly half-way between your nose and ear, but still pointed at your lips. That has minimal effect on your voice quality, but most of the plosives and other damage goes away. Most trash goes straight in front of your face.
Microphone placement can be a theatrical tool, not just a technique to minimize damage. I once played two different people, man and woman, by very serious change in mike placement, and acting. This works best with directional microphones such as the cardioid (#1) setting on the back of your Snowball.
…not be using the Limiter effect until much later in the process, after the hand claps had been removed.
Which pre-supposes editing first, then mastering.
Could you post a sample that is recorded directly from the Snowball mic (without Voicemeeter or any other digital effects)…
I was recording too close to the mic. I’ve corrected that. Just recorded two more samples. One is straight snowball, no voicemeeter. The second is another with the voicemeeter, at the proper distance.
I experimented a bit with the effects, using it to amplify the straight snowball track, then remove noise. (None of that was saved, what you’re hearing is unedited.) It sounds a lot like the voicemeeter sample, though I can see that I would have a lot more opportunity to tweak. Should I be thinking of Voicemeeter as something useful for people who are recording live, say for a podcast, allowing them to enhance the sound the way they could if they had Audacity in post-production?
Straight snowball:
With Voicemeeter at proper distance from mic:
I just saw someone bragging about a $350 mic. What would be the price point to get myself to another level of sound quality?
What would be the price point to get myself to another level of sound quality?
I think you should resolve all the current problems first and then maybe think about other microphones.
For example, you have motor hum in your last post (the plain one). You need to resolve that before you do anything else. A much better microphone is likely to make that problem much more obvious and louder. Higher end microphones assume they’re being installed in a studio and that you know what you’re doing.
Do you have the computer in the room with you? Can you tell if it’s running without looking—just by listening? There’s a low volume hum sound and its pitch is not normal for household wiring or appliances. That almost always means the computer is a performer in there with you.
The voice is still overly crisp, but I’m investigating the tools to correct that. I can fully correct the hum, too, but that messes with the tones in your voice. So does Noise Reduction.
ACX puts great stress on making the voice as natural as possible. That means not applying any more corrections and patches than you can help. Getting rid of that background hum—physically, remove the motors—will do a world of good.
So far we have people using Zoom H4, Zoom H1n and Zoom H5 stand-alone sound recorders to successfully produce terrific voice work without all the hassle of trying to record directly on the computer.
Lot to be said for that.
I know this isn’t the goal of these clips, but did you notice you gasped twice and made a fluff in the uncorrected clip? All in 12 seconds. And you wrote the book.
I got introduced to the difference between writing for presenting and writing for reading. I write two-hundred mile long sentences that nobody can ever present without turning blue and falling over. That doesn’t make very good audiobooks. Do you write like that or was that just a poor example?
There’s another non-electronic thing that happens to New Readers. They get to the of the book and realize what trash the beginning was and read the first few chapters over again. Some read the whole thing again to make sure all the chapters matched. Make sure that closet is comfortable.
How far south are you? One reader was in a closet in his apartment in Hollywood. He may still be there. It wasn’t air conditioned. He would come out every few minutes and gasp for air. We did get him published, though.
Yes, I can write long sentences. But I just wasn’t worrying about reading cleanly at that moment. I am aware I will probably find edits as I read this.
Yes, I have a laptop in there performing with me. It’s very quiet. For a computer. So, these recorders you’ve mentioned have mics on them. Are those mics adequate, or would I have to use an external mic? If so, which? The Snowball is USB.
It seems the units that do multiple tracks would be overkill for this purpose. Are there other features the more expensive ones have I should be interested in?
I’m in North Carolina. My plan is to have this done long before summer. Presently, the closet is comfortable enough.
Nobody is beating down my door to read anything, but it does pass ACX testing with just Mastering Suite corrections and a teensy bit of noise reduction.
The H5 is in use for a podcast by one of the forum posters. He was successful and wanted to know how to connect a microphone to the computer because it would be “more convenient” than going through the H5.
Probably not.
The H1n is used for field recording by a commercial broadcaster whose name I forgot to write down. That one fits in your pocket.
They are all stand-alone recorders with built-in microphones. My clip was recorded with the H4 on a role of Piggly Wiggly paper towels, a furniture moving blanket on the desk and a quiet room. It’s missing all the problems that USB microphones plugged into a computer can have.
Oh. I missed an important one. This is an older Zoom H2.
Josh did all of his early work on that thing. That design did hit the sweet spot. The older H2 recorders are still going for new recorder prices on eBay, but the newer H2n is not too shabby.
I have other recorders, but they don’t count because you can’t buy them any more. The obvious solution is record on your phone, but I never got that to work particularly well, so that project is in the to-do pile.
I have a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air and I have recorded temporary voice tracks using just the built-in microphones. That does work, particularly with the Air which is all but dead silent in normal operation. I need to do some more with that.
I’ve used the H1n and the H2. They are both good. In my opinion, the H2 sounds a bit better, but the H1n is smaller, easier to carry around, and a bit cheaper. There are also some very good alternatives from other manufacturers, such as the Tascam dr-05 / dr-40, and a number of voice recorders from Sony and Olympus. (There’s also the Roland, but their prices for portable recorders start at around $200).
One thing to be careful of with the Sony / Olympus / “Dictaphone style” recorders, is that many of them don’t record as WAV, but use their own proprietary audio format that is incompatible with anything other than their equipment / software. If you go for a stand alone recorder, it should definitely be one that can record in WAV format.
When looking for reviews, look for one’s that are critical. Too many reviews these days are just “Wow, this is fantastic”, and that’s why so many people end up with Snowballs and Yetis.
Another problem, particularly with YouTube reviews, is that so many are done by “gamers” who have no idea how to use a microphone - I’ve just listened to a comparison between a Blue Yeti and an AT 2020. The reviewer failed to use a pop shield, and his microphone technique was so bad that the AT 2020 (a much better mic in my opinion) sounded dreadful.
Disclosure: I’m not a fan of Blue microphones - while they are certainly far, far better than a typical “computer mic”, they all sound pretty bad to me compared with a “proper” recording mic.
I have and use successfully an Olympus WS-823 recorder. I can literally hide it in my hand. It uses AAA batteries or rechargables. It records in perfect stereo WAV format and has comprehensive controls so I can make it do exactly what I want.
Olympus thought it was too complicated and discontinued it in favor of a “consumerized” version with far fewer controls and no WAV file format. They made it into a poor quality MP3 recorder.
I took the plunge and ordered a used h2 off of Amazon. Amazon will cover me for 30 days if it’s defective. Since I know I’ll be using the heck out of it the next 30 days I took the chance. I saved $80. It comes Thursday. I have a 16GB SDHC card. I believe that will work. I’ll check on the firmware version right off. It doesn’t look like I’ll need any of the accessories. I’ve already got similar laying around. Do you ever use the remote?
Come Thursday I will be back in business.
Is it a legitimate technique to amplify the heck out of room noise to ‘hear’ it? Is there some db I could be at and if I don’t hear much I know I’m okay?
We should remember that by “Back In Business” we mean getting good at recording your voice without all the computer problems.
Did you print out your work? Are you going to read it from a tablet or other electronic device? All work, but whatever you do should be pretty much silent.
You probably should not read chapters and chapters without checking everything is going OK. ACX has a process by which you can submit a Quality Control test for evaluation.
And the act of submitting the actual work has its own lists of requirements.
More than one performer has cranked through all the actions for publication and got bounced because they put the wrong number of seconds of Room Tone in the chapters. You do have to pay attention.
One of the complaints about stand-alone recorders is needing to connect them to the computer. Computer makers have determined we don’t need cables any more, and so have left out many of the connectors we do really still need. Make sure you can connect everything. Being obsessive, I also get the adapter that allows me to connect the memory chip to the computer without the H2.
Is it a legitimate technique to amplify the heck out of room noise to ‘hear’ it?
As a diagnostic tool, yes. that’s sometimes the only way to figure out what the noise is. But it’s not fair to Dive For Noise just to set Noise Reduction values. If you have gentle rain hiss—normal background noise—all you have to do is pass the ACX -60dB value (with a hand-full of dB for safety) and you can submit. If you have any other noise like the motor hum thing, then it’s a bit more exciting. You have to do that by listening. Enough Noise Reduction to suppress noises like that may also harm your voice. That’s why we urge strongly to get rid of the motor.
The last noise is the Yeti Curse. Some Yeti microphones and computers hate each other and the voice has a screeching whine to it.
That’s so bad and so common we designed a special tool for it. After weeks of batting it around, we determined there is no cure other than replace the computer or the microphone type. The same microphone type by anybody is going to have the same problem. “Affordable USB Microphone” where they left out important parts to get the price down.
When it comes and you get set up, do that 20 second voice test thing and submit it. We can usually tell in the first few seconds whether there’s going to be a problem or not. It’s probably going to record stereo (two blue waves). Audacity > Tracks > Mix > Mix Stereo Down To Mono. You should not get a large change in volume. You can do everything in stereo (two blue waves) and everybody will allow you to do it, but unless you have a religious commitment to stereo, mono is far better. It naturally appears in both ears, storage is twice as fast and takes up half the space. Transmission to ACX is twice as fast. Corrections, filtering and effects are twice as fast. ACX Strongly recommends working in mono.
ACX urges submitting in mono, yes, but requires MP3, not WAV. Your own personal archive should be in WAV, but you will need to install the LAME app to make MP3 in Audacity.
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Do you ever use the remote?
None of mine has a remote. That can be sticky because the obvious use for a remote would be surveillance, law enforcement and conflict management. We do not support any of those activities.
We publish ACX Check which will tell you, most times, how well you’re matching the three ACX sound specifications.
It is possible to fake it out because it needs at least 3/4 second of background sound—Room Tone—to measure noise. If you never stopped talking long enough for it to work, it will give a stupid-high noise measurement.
It’s usually so far off that There Must Be Something Wrong and nobody takes the numbers seriously.
You can get bad readings the other way, too. Nobody can record a work with a -89dB noise (for example). It’s too quiet. To get a measurement like that, you had to artificially mess with the sound. ACX hates that.
On a guess I would say the original H2 had good microphones and a careful design.The H2n was a result of Marketing and Promotion getting their fingers in. They got a good deal on “slightly lower quality” generic microphones and made up for it by putting a bunch in there.
“Now with 35 microphones and 52 different acoustic patterns!!!”
I’d settle for the old microphones, thanks.
There is a video where Josh turns on his H2 in the middle of the introduction dialog for a song and then he switched audio tracks in the edit as the new one became available. He was speaking into the video camera until then. It’s a shock.
I had a disheartening experience with a vlogger I like. He determined that casting off all his high quality sound and going with the microphone on the camera and room echoes only cost him a small number of viewers, but made his editing enormously easier. So that’s the end of his lavalier microphone.
The external mic pre-amps are said to be better in the H2n than the H2. Certainly the external mic pre-amps in the original H2 are nothing to write home about, but I don’t use my H2 with external mics.
From tests that I’ve heard, there doesn’t seem to be a great difference in microphone quality (internal mics) between the H2 and H2n, though I’ve not had the opportunity to do a hands-on side by side comparison myself.
One definite improvement that Zoom made with the H2n, is that it has a fully adjustable 39 dB analog gain range, whereas that original only has a 3 position switch for analog gain (H, M, L, with a range of about 26 dB between high and low).
