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lydamorehouse) wrote2007-08-17 09:22 am
About Last Night
It finally happened. I dreamt I was Captain America. My GOD I was disappointed when I woke up this morning. Don't you hate when that happens in dreams? I was SO agile, so strong, so... ripped. This morning what do I get? A dumpy lesbian mom. It's just not fair. I finally figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and he's a ficitious superhero. I mean, come on, I could take the super-soldier formula, couldn't I? I'd even wear tights.
*sigh*
Speaking of disappointments, I had my reading at Nina's last night. I knew it was going to be a disaster the instant I walked in and heard the organizers of the event freaking out over the fact that there was no microphone and that no one at the venue seemed to know anything about the event. In a weird way, however, the chaos relaxed me. I'd been getting a bit nervous about the reading because, well, Nina's isn't my usual scene and the National Writers Union types are notoriously leary of genre writers (we're suspect of selling out to The Man for big bucks -- if only they knew.) I didn't end up reading any of Emily because my printer died -- actually it died the day before Tate's 400 + page manuscript was due in New York. Shawn has since purchased another one -- it's huge and will copy AND fax -- but since we averted the manuscript crisis by using Kinkos to print a .pdf of Romancing, we've been lazy and haven't hooked it up yet. So, I brought a copy of Dead Sexy with the thought that I'd either read the zombie bit or all of the first chapter depending on how comfortable I was (or how much I thought the others squandered their time.)
There room wasn't particularly set up for a reading, either. Mostly very disgrunteled looking patrons, who looked to me like they'd rather be working on their OWN novels without interuption, stared balefully at us. We went in alphabetical order, which put me in the middle-end. I went second to last. After listening to the poet read about spousal abuse, I thought, "I think I'll just read the zombie bit. It's funny and fast." I went up and stumbled through my bits, and sat down. I didn't get any laughs (which is kind of unusual,) but I think those who might have been interested were suffering whiplash after going from such seriousness to zombies buying copies of Voodoo for Dummies.
At least I was able to defeat evil with grace and panache in my dreams.
*sigh*
Oh, but if YOU want to hear me read "Emily," I made a recording of it here: Emily Podcast. The quality is pretty poor, but I'm still learning all this stuff. Feel free to give me advice for improvement.
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Advice for improvement:
All I can offer is advice on audio file improvement, since I'm not a writer or a reader. However, there's some hum and buzz in the recording, and it's quite quiet (which exacerbates the first problem because once you turn your volume up louder to hear it well, the buss and hum become louder). There are some ways to get rid of buzz and hum during the recording process, but given an audio file, you can also reduce it quite well afterward by using a noise reduction tool. I use one called SoundSoap by BIAS Inc. which is actually very good and easy to use (but costs a chunk of coin). All you do is find a two-second segment of silence in your recording and press the big button to sample the noise. It then has a profile of what the noise is lik e and can do a pretty good job of removing it from your audio. It has two knobs that let you adjust how intensely it does this to strike the best balance of getting rid of the noise while not making you sound like a robot in a tin chamber.
The other thing is about the volume. Volume is trickier than it sounds. The first step most people take to address volume is called normalizing. Normalizing will raise the volume such that the highest audio peak in your file is at the maximum volume. This seems like a sensible thing in that you're going to get the highest possible volume without clipping or distortion. However, when you just normalize, your recordings never sound as "hot" as commercial recordings. This is because commercial recordings take a few extra steps.
One step is compression. If you think of an audiofile as a plot with time on the X axis and sound pressure on the vertical axis (the usual way audio files are viewed), then this is basically taking the whole thing and compressing it toward the middle -- reducing the total dynamic range between the loudest parts and the quietest parts. Very picky listeners of classical music probably hate compression. However, most recordings do not actually have or want as much dynamic range as they started with, because if one part of your song is very very quiet and one part is very very loud, people are going to blow out their eardrums or sit there adjusting their volume constantly. The same applies to readings, where your voice goes through a lot of changes in volume. If you remember that you're going to move the volume up toward the maximum without clipping anyway, then you can see that compression, reducing the dynamic range, allows you to move it up even further and brings the quietest parts up toward the louder parts. If you use it too heavily, your piece will be brash and obnoxious and lack texture, but used sparingly, it'll give it more overall energy.
[...continued, this got long...]
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The last thing is limiting. Limiting is like cheating at normalizing. Essentially the idea is that you push the volume up *above* the level where it would clip or distort but then someone sits there on the volume dial and very quickly turns the volume down when a loud part is happening. This is important because when you normalize, it's going to be capping the volume based on some momentary peak volumes that don't actually represent much in terms of the overall recording. Of course, if you use it too heavily, it'll make mincement of the recording, and things will distort anyway. But used in the right amount, it allows you to make your recording a lot more apparently loud without distorting or causing other audio problems.
Most good mastering tools will have limiting and compression bundled in them. You can often get EQ in there as well, which can allow you to add some richness in, and sometimes noise reduction. I used to use a standalone tool called T-RackS 24 to get all this stuff. It's spendy, though. I might still have a license of it that I'd be happy to donate to you, since I no longer use it, if it's available for Windows, but you still might need to pay an upgrade fee to get up to current. However, freeware tools like Audacity probably have things that do a decent enough job of all of this for your purposes. I dunno what kind of computer you use, but if you want, I could try to find some apps to recommend. Alternately, if you like, when I'm home (I'm at work now), I can take a stab at working over that recording a little so you can see if the result is worth it for you.
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"At least I was able to defeat evil with grace and panache in my dreams." I feel more and more like that every day. The distance between dreams and real life seems like a good measure of age...
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Maybe you should come and pick me up. ;)