Day 537 | At Mary's: don't think I like the sound of my voice

rest day

One reason I’ve been in Adelaide for a couple of weeks is that I’ve set myself a few digital tasks, the major one is starting to get a few podcasts up on my website.

There’s a bit to do for the novice: work out how to record them in the first place, I join my computer forum and someone who has done a few hundred recommends a USB microphone, others suggest one that’s much cheaper and can do the job, the Samson Meteor Mic is even available in store here in Adelaide.

Next some software for recording, Garageband that comes with my Mac will do I’m told, and later I find that it is absolutely perfect, there is a day or two of experimentation and then it’s a piece of cake.

The next stage is selecting the material, I’ve got the almost 4 years of blogs, a bucketload of material, and the idea is to pick out the best passages and read them out. That can’t be hard, I even work out how to have both the script and Garageband operational on my 13 inch laptop screen simultaneously.

I had a few goes at recording: arrrrh, is that how I sound, the new mic captures my voice in all its horrors. I try expressive, trying to sound interesting, even enthusiastic, but listening back it sounds fake and rushed. Instead I slow it down and have a more usual deadpan delivery, laconic to go with the ironic, sounds much more like the real me. Plus going slower I can read it straight through, mostly, not as many mistakes to cut out and join together.

Then there’s the addition of some suitable theme music, I’ve spent the last months consciously thinking about that one, some 10 second grab. It’s gotta be Australian and have some relevance to me, in the end it’s come down to Ed Kuepper’s 1995 song, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, a song with a bit of oomph.

So far so good, but I still had to get it up on my website, bit of coding required there to get both streaming and downloading, finding a podcast player that doesn’t look too 2005, but eventually it all just fell into place and more surprisingly happened to work. Still more effort required on the arrangement of the podcasts on the website but at least the first one is up, an entertaining few tales about the strange characters I fraternised with in Esperance during a summer at the beach style break in my initial crossing of the Australian continent at the end of my first year’s travels. Eventually there will be about 25 of them, basically I’ll just keep going until I get sick of making the podcasts in my spare time. All you need is a quiet room with plenty of padding, my laptop and a power point.

I’m happy with the result and you can check it out here.