The first twenty hours: Audio Production · 6:35am Dec 15th, 2014
The following is an old blog post written in February 2014 that I'm putting here because I don't know where else to put it. I also added some tips at the end I've gleaned since writing this.
I’m not sure if you've heard of “The first 20 hours” rule. This will be a recurring feature of the blog I've thought about making a blog at one point in which I try out the ideas in Josh Kaufman’s book The First 20 hours, how to learn anything, fast and apply it to various Brony hobbies.
These last few months I wanted to conquer the first 20 hours of making an audio production by recording my fanfic, The Library of Discord. I have attempted to record things in the past, I got through about an hour of reading Children of a Lesser Dragon God, Boy, Whelp, Thingy, guy in a British accent before giving up as I kept flubbing my lines or messing up trying to figure out how the character should sound. It’s so hard not to flub a line or two here and there, but the funny thing is that that is a completely normal aspect of recording audio. There are great radio producer's that have that same problem, for example in an episode of the How Sound podcast (which is a show that explains the process of producing radio storytelling), the host, Rob Rosenthal, said that most of the lines he does in the show are said about three times each before he gets a good line.
To be honest, the idea of reading every line I mess up on again sounds arduously slow. Is that what it really takes to create good audio? Of course. I’m sure over time some people do better, but the power in audio lies mostly editing out the stuff that didn’t sound very good and working with what you do have.
I had a lot of advantages in producing my story, particularly my location. Being a college student enables me to get a cheaper version of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software which includes the “Photoshop for audio,” Adobe Audition. I also found that my campus comes equipped with a single recording booth that any student can reserve. The sound booth had a fantastic microphone and the carpeted walls provided an incredibly clean environment for recording good sound. Something I wouldn’t get from the microphone in my laptop in my dorm.
In an episode of Mugglecast where they interviewed Jim Dale, the man that does the voice acting for the Harry Potter audiobooks, he said that his best advice for recording video was to chew on a Granny Smith apple every once in a while. Doing this got rid of any excess spit in a mouth after long periods of talking, leaving the voice much crisper.
So, I had my granny smith apples, three hours reserved, a microphone and got to work.
The voice acting itself was a lot of fun. The trouble I had in particular was talking at a normal speed. I listen to podcasts at double speed and I have to stop and realize that that is not the pace at which normal people converse. And certainly not the default speed for an audiobook.
I recorded the whole book in one session.
When I got back to my dorm with the audio it sounded so hard to listen to. I thought I had a good voice, but spending several hours listening to myself talk, hearing every mistake that I hadn’t corrected with retakes was a little unsettling. For the first half hour of the fic I was determined to remove every time I breathed. It just sounded bad.
Maybe Tay Zonday had the right idea? Actually no, it's okay to hear breathing, just muffle the sound using Audition's "Spot healing brush" if it's that bad.
I had a good time editing it until I realized at a certain point my speaking was getting unintelligible. I ended up going back to the booth and rerecording the entire second half.
And I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure what I did the second time, it was probably all that editing that helped. I saw what it sounds like in post and I knew how to slow down enough an make sure my words do not run into each other. Taking multiple takes and having each word enunciated enabled me to take words that fit in some sentences and transfer them elsewhere without it sounding terrible.
Another part that helped was discovering the ridiculously talented artist, Evening Star. He specializes in absolutely impressive background music with no lyrics. I applaud him for this because it means that I now have something to listen to while programming besides the whitenoise app. He also has a ton of music on both his pony channel and his more professional channel, Marcus Abbott Warner. His music is absolutely perfect for audio productions. It’s free to use if you credit him, and it’s such good music you just want everyone you know to listen to it.
However, music in audio needs to be done sparingly or it will be overwhelming to a listener. As well as downright aggravating to those who choose to listen at double speed. For that, I limited to three songs, at the beginning and end, and a spot in the middle I thought was appropriate.
I really liked the idea of using sound effects. So I tried to Google around and find a good resource for all those background sound effects. I found little success, only one zip file of some of the sounds in the show. I started going through the show itself trying to pick out sound effects I could use. I still cannot figure out how to "photoshop out" background music. I tried to, and I got really strange effects. I found my best success when there wasn’t any background music and a sound I wanted was there, which is surprisingly very rare. But I got the most important sounds, like the teleportation sound, through extreme luck that there wasn’t background music in those scenes.
I got a lot more sounds, like pages being turned and others from freesound.org. I only bothered listening to sounds that were labeled “creative commons” as I didn’t want to bother remembering where every single one of my sound effects came from.
I started adding the background sound, and I really feel like the sounds made the story feel much more alive. I love the sounds involved and once I had them they were easy to use.
It also really made me appreciate the sound team behind "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." We know Daniel Ingram is amazing, we know that the background music is also fantastic, but I’ve never noticed how encompassing all the sound is in a cartoon like MLP. There are sounds EVERYWHERE in the show. Distinct sounds like the magic being cast and every single spring and boing from Pinkie Pie, all of the animals, every single trot, gallop and wing flap. The fact that magic from a unicorn sounds distinctly different from the magic sounds that Discord makes is so impressive. And stuff like magic has to be made from scratch just for the show. There is so much that goes into making the show feel alive and the sound crew behind MLP is top notch.
The problem is trying to fit all those sounds in without a great sound library like the show staff has to work with.
I didn’t have that many sounds, but I feel like I struck a good balance to make the story feel more alive than had I simply read it.
All of this production and editing and sound effects took a lot of time. I'm pretty sure I took over 20 hours. For example, Chapter 4 was only 8 minutes long and yet took 3 hours to edit.
I finished the editing the book and opened the file in iTunes and added ID3 tags so the audiobook would have a book cover and if you look at the lyrics the entire text of the story is there.
I love how it turned out. Not many people have listened so far. But I feel like I did a very good job for my first 20 hours of audio production. It's a lot of fun. I think if I did this again I really want a friend to be outside the recording booth directing me and deleting bad lines as I record. The friend could stop recording as I try to get "into character" and remember what a character sounds like. That would decrease the amount of time spent editing considerably.
Was it worth it? Completely. I've learned a new piece of software in the Adobe creative suite and I feel comfortable making more projects in the future. I like voice acting. I even like editing.
But most of all, I like comments like these.
So if you haven't yet, please listen to the book on youtube, mlpaudiobooks.net, or download from mediafire. I hope you enjoy it.
Note: My workflow for recording audio has changed since I made this.
Tip #1: When recording I find it best to clap my hands when I’ve messed up a line, that way later on I can see faster that I’ve messed up a line and I can delete faster chunks while editing.
Tip #2: Audition isn’t that much of a superior product to the free program Audacity. Just use Audacity.
Tip #3: Backup your original files, and then edit on the copy. (In case you delete a whole line once and it actually ends up being crucial to the story so you have to rerecord that line later which is what happened when I recorded Void.
Tip #4: If you are using Audition, don’t use the multitrack editor to make edits. Use the waveform editor. Use the multitrack editor when you want to add in sound effects or music or something.
Tip #5: Audition only: When you select a portion of track in the waveform editor, the volume can be changed there using that volume selector that pops up. Do not edit your volume in the multitrack editor like I was doing.
Tip #6: Try to record in between -15b and -5b. Your goal is to get as close to 0db as possible without going over. Audition only: You can go to “Favorites->Normalize to -.1 db” at the end of your edits to make sure your audio is loud enough.
Tip #7: Audition only: Markers are your friend, press “m” to place a marker and use that to mark when you mess up recording audio.
Tip #8: When recording audio in general, get a really good microphone (not your laptop’s microphone), and record in a closet or possibly under a blanket.
I really ought to make a tutorial video one of these days about all this stuff. 
And Neighrator Pony asked for some sound effects, so here they are, organized by where I got them from.
Ooh, how relevant to my interests! I'm so glad you reposted, or I never would have seen it!
Firstly, let me say that The Library of Discord was one of the first audiobooks I listened to after joining the fandom, and I think it's still my favorite. Fantastic story, fantastic production. You're absolutely right, the time you put into it was absolutely worth the effort. Stonking great, says I.
Secondly, this post was massively useful. Evening Star's music might be just the thing for a fic I'm working on at this very moment. I'll definitely have to poke around How Sound. Most of your tips I discovered myself through trial and error, but I'm definitely going to give the clapping and Granny Smith apples a try. I also don't feel as bad about the fact that I've yet to read any fic through less than three times before I'm satisfied with the results. I was sure this was an affliction of rank amateurs like me, so it's good to know that the pro's do the same.
Thanks for this! Keep up the good work!
P.S., could I trouble you for a .zip file with those sound effects?
2654416
Wow, thanks so much for the kind words! That means a lot to me from a fellow audio producer. I'll have to give your content a listen.
I can't seem to find the original zip I downloaded from some forum post a while back, but here are some of the sound effects from that zip, along with some other stuff I've created and used.
2655097 Sweet, thanks!
If you're still looking for all the 8ackground sounds, someone took apart the audio tracks for the first three seasons and posted links to the downloads at mlpost.tumblr.com, also known as the "MLP UST".
~Vriska Serket
2656900
That looks like a great resource for background music! Not necessarily the sound effects though.
Thanks for linking me to it though!
2655633
You're welcome!
Huh. Now I want to try this again.
2995625
Yeah! You have the technology! Let me know if you need help recording.