A New Narration Recording Technique

Last night I started recording a new chapter in the audio book I'm narrating, and I went about it in a different way. This new way is going to save me a ton of time in post. I'm still not even halfway through editing the enormous first chapter of the book. I recorded the first chapter by hitting record and just going until I was done reading the chapter. I took a couple breaks to refill my water cup, but when I was done I had over two hours of audio to go through. This chapter is way longer than most clocking in at over nine thousand words. In some cases I wasn't sure about the way I read a line so I would do a few more takes. Now I'm having to go back and edit all of those out and it is taking me forever. Like, two hours gets me twenty minutes of edited audio type of forever. Yeah, that long - really!

From what I've read on the web many of the pros record audio books using a "punch and roll" technique where they stop recording on mistakes, and then punch right back in recording over the mess up. I'm using Audacity to record and it doesn't have a way to listen to a few seconds of the track and then record over the bad line, but I've found a method that works surprisingly well for me. It maybe takes me a second longer than it does for them with their expensive recording software.

Last night I spent around two hours recording. There were some interuptions, but I got almost forty minutes of recorded audio. This audio, however, is only of the good takes. No bad lines can be found, not even a couple good versions of a line. If I mess up I stop and delete the bad line, then hit record and keep going. In some cases I'll still just keep recording until I nail the line, then stop recording, review, and edit out the bad ones right then and there. I really thought this would mess with my flow of narrating, but it hasn't whatsoever. I was already stopping to take sips of water, so stopping to do a quick delete and hit the record button is no big deal - especially since I'm using hotkeys. This is going to cut down on a ton of my production time for this audio book. I'm so excited to be doing this and I can't wait to see it out in the world on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes! Thanks for stopping by.

Writings of Dan - Episode 00 "A Short Preview"

You may have noticed that I removed the "soon to be" red text from above "podcaster" in my blog's header. That's right, I have recently obtained a set up that I can record nice, clean, high quality audio on! I will now start to podcast my fiction. I can't say how excited about this I am. My eventual goal is to get my novels onto podiobooks.com, but first I must finish one, and edit the other :) In the mean time, I'll be podcasting one Fantasy short story next month titled "Good Things Come in Small Packages." In the month of May, I will podcast a Sci-Fi short story titled "My Last Day." I'd like to put out one short story a month until I release my first novel, and maybe at that point I will start a feed in iTunes. Until then, this is your one stop shop for podfic from Dan Dan The Art Man.

Episode Zero, a very short preview of what's to come, enjoy!

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Reading On the Go

If you're like me, you can't find enough time to read. I have a question for you, do you have anytime where you could listen to some fiction? I have a 45 minute commute to work each day, but it's enjoyable because I've got a whole bunch of audiobooks, and podiobooks to listen to. What is a podiobook you ask? If you know what a podcast is, then you can see, a podiobook is simply someone podcasting thier book, or a podcast audiobook. One great thing about podiobooks is, they're free! I'll recommend some good ones in this post, but back to my little story here. I consume at least one book every two weeks. That's right, and no, I don't have time to sit and read, ever. Any scrap of free time I can scavenge up, I use to write. So I challenge you, give it a try. Go and get a podiobook, and see if you don't get hooked. Or if you want to go and buy a traditional audio book, the two audiobook narrator's I highly recommend: Frank Muller, and Scott Brick. The narrator makes or breaks if an audiobook is any good, trust me. If you're looking for traditional audiobooks for free download, I suggest Project Gutenberg, although be careful, because a lot of the books there are read by volunteers, which is great, but you get different readers throughout the book instead of one narrator, and some of them are bad readers, or they don't have the best sound recording set up so the quality isn't always great. However, there are some great audiobooks there. They're free because they're all books that have gone into the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired. I highly recommend The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I've given you a direct link to the page with the amazing narrator. For some reason, they also have a version of this book with volunteers reading it, but I don't know why when they already have such a great version up. Oh well, to each his own.

Here are a few recommendations for excellent Podiobooks:

SCIENCE FICTION
- Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell
- Space Casey by Christiana Ellis

FANTASY
- Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword by Tee Morris
- Murder at Avedon Hill  by P.G. Holyfield

ADVENTURE/YOUNG ADULT
- Pirate Jack by Alessandro Cima

Tell me if you don't get hooked on consuming fiction through audio!