Episode: 2005
Title: HPR2005: How I prepare and record my HPR Kdenlive voiceover shows.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2005/hpr2005.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:12:27

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This is HPR episode 2005 entitled How I Prepare and Record My HPR K-Man Life Voice Over
Shows.
It is hosted by GEN and in about 16 minutes long, the summer is my preparation and recording
workflow.
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Hello HPR listeners this is Gedis with what is my first original content HPR show.
I'm going to run through how I prepare and record the K-DN live articles that I've
been doing as narrations, voice over narrations.
I have some of the information we'll be of interest to the HPR audience.
I've got a side off by saying I'm not a professional voice over artist and the workflow that I'm
going to present is based on what really works best for me and my current modest recording
facilities and equipment.
Let me start off by describing the room in the house that I do the recordings in.
For those of you who are not familiar with the typical UK terrorist house, they're
actually called three bedroom family houses.
In fact what you really get is two four size rooms and a very small room called a box
room.
Now these box rooms are roughly 9 feet long by 7 feet wide and that's more or less as
I mentioned of the room that I do the recordings in.
This room has a single bedding as well because on occasions it's used as a spare room,
spare bedroom, but the small size of it makes it act like a sound booth.
It doesn't actually have any proper acoustic insulation.
I do have thick wall paper on the walls however, so I don't get any sound bouncing around.
At the moment it is the best room in the house I feel for doing my voice overs.
The only up and coming issue I have, I have two adult children and ones at university
and will be returning from university for good within the next two or three months or
so the likelihood is I'm going to lose this room but I will cross that bridge when I come
to it.
Much of my workflow I think is common sense.
I take the approach I do because it allows me to draw on my previous experience as an
amateur musician, creative artist, I do also study sound recording and post-production and
also it's greatly influenced by my teaching background.
For me I see the whole voice over task as a performance and I suppose that satisfies
the geek aspect of my character I suppose and also because I'm narrating instruction
and tutorial material, I also see that as an extension of what I did when I was teaching
web design to six form grade students.
Now in the UK that would be 16 to 18 year olds.
At the time I was one of the very few teachers in the college I can remember not only to
use videos as a teaching aid but I also created my own instructional videos using Camtasia
Studio which was on windows at the time and I used it to walk students through the steps
of starting off a basic table based web page and we shackled with marks or front page
to do that with.
I remember students finding it amusing at first to hear the teacher's voice instructing
them along with what they were viewing on the screen but to tell you the truth they
settled down after two or three of them and it really did save me a lot of time and effort
in the classroom because if you can imagine trying to teach basic web design to 30 students
of that age if I didn't have that kind of method and trying to keep the whole lesson together
focus, class control and all the rest of it using videos just to start them off on a
task which they knew nothing about really did save me a lot of time and effort and it
made the lessons novel and everything flowed very well.
So as I've mentioned before I really do view the whole task as a performance really whereby
the piece and in this case it's the text article has to be practiced and recorded when
you're happy that it can be done with minimal mistakes.
So let's talk about the first thing I do in preparation for these shows and that is
to prepare the text.
Now all my text preparation is done in Google Docs because I'm practicing to be paperless
I don't print anything off and everything's done digitally.
Now if the article is in PDF form or it's in HTML form I will still copy the text over
to Google Docs preparation.
Now I find this useful as I can prepare the text anywhere if it's in Google Docs in
the cloud I can prepare it on a mobile device such as a tablet I can prepare it while
I'm out and about while I'm travelling on a train transport wherever and I can do
it online with a connection or I can do it offline without an internet connection.
So I'll read the whole article paragraph by paragraph and insert commas as breathing
points.
I'll also sometimes break up the sentences and place them on a new line to match those
breathing points.
Now I do this so that the text will fit nicely on whatever device I'm reading it from and
these days that's likely to be a tablet or I do have an 11 inch Chromebook.
I'm discovered that certain passages cannot really be broken up and really you've got
to read them as one whole block otherwise you run the risk of misinterpreting the description
of the action or of the point being made by the author or even break the flow of a particular
task being described.
So really in these cases I tried my best to read it all in one breath.
There's another issue you can run into which is that some passages can just turn out to
be tongue twisters.
Maybe it's the combination of words and syllables but you'll find it difficult to clearly
pronounce certain words together.
Now these can take quite a few goes to get right and you'll notice when I've hit one
of these text blocks as I will deliver it in a slightly slower pace than usual.
So you may be asking what's the main reason for this method of text preparation?
Why do it at all?
Well it's all centered around the difficulties of narrating texts that's been written
to be read and not spoken so breathing points wouldn't necessarily be a consideration.
I wasn't mentioning this to one of my children who studied piano and has done some composition
and they said to me that the same consideration applies to musical composers who don't play
wind or brass instruments and by that I mean say keyboard players or guitar players.
Now if they're composing for those instruments then they've also got to consider the
length of their musical passages and melodies.
They've got to be written with pauses to allow these wind and brass instrument players
to take breaths.
At the same time I'm reformatting the text for spoken delivery I'm also reading it to
myself in my head and also I'm practicing where to place the intonation in my voice as
I read each paragraph.
I mean what I've found is that this helps me save time when it comes to do the recording
because I already have an idea of how I want to say my lines.
Okay let's move on to the gear and software that I use and we'll start with the hardware.
I use Sure SM58 vocal mic which is the long standing industry standard vocal mic.
Obviously more designed for singing but perfectly good for speaking and podcasting.
I've also have a audio technique at 2020 condenser mic and that's one of the ones that's
used by the guys from Jupiter Broadcasting.
I've got the ordinary Canon version but there's also a more expensive USB version available.
Now I would love to use this mic as my main vocal recording mic because in the podcast
involved you'll see that most presenters do use condenser mics and that's because they
pick up more of the natural frequencies and overtones of your voice.
I do really feel you need studio or near studio conditions to use them and by that I mean
some type of sound up material on your walls and no or minimal noise pollution from outside.
Now unless I do my recordings at 2 o'clock in the morning there's no way I can avoid
outside noise coming into my recording environment.
My house isn't situated on the busy main road but the room that I use is at the front
of the house so a condenser mic would pick up all the passing traffic noise and noise
from people. It even picks up my family talking from downstairs and that's with my door
shut. It's very sensitive. So that being said I'm going to stick with the short SM 58
dynamic mic as its pickup pattern is mainly directly what's in front of you.
The signal from my mic goes into a small sound craft compact 4 desktop mixer and I just
use this to boost the mid and low frequencies of my voice. Now the signal from that goes
into a lexicon alpha 2 channel USB audio interface. Now I first came across this in Steve
McGotlin's door to door geek his how to podcast in Linux video which is available on YouTube.
I got that from his recommendation. I've also got the biggest version of the same range and it's
a mains powered lexicon omega which I bought later that is an 8 channel mixer. I bought that
mainly for live recording music. Now both of these work on Linux out of the box there's also one
in the middle there's a 4 channel model in the middle I think it's called a lambada.
Now these interfaces came out in 2007 and are the original Windows XP designs but they're all
version 2 which means they're USB 2 compatible. Now I do know that all three have been upgraded
since then lexicon have got new models out what I'm not sure is whether they've been tested yet
on Linux so I can't really comment on those. I'd just like to add that the three original
XP versions are still all available and can be bought online. Monitoring is done using a pair of
sure SRH 440 studio headphones connected to the headphone monitoring jack of the lexicon alpha.
I do have a cheap round pop filter that connects to your mic stand which I don't really use now
because the SM58 has got one built in. Now most of my gear is entry-level semi-pro home
enthusiast type grade equipment so while it's not the cheapest you can buy it it's not expensive
the majority of it came from amazon and online UK music stores at around say between 1570 UK pounds.
Now at the end of the line I've got a custom built core i5 desktop with 16 gigabytes of RAM
and it comes all out into an old 22 inch view sonic monitor. Okay let's talk about software. The
operating system that I used to do with my recording is Ubuntu Studio 1404 and inside of that
there is our door 14.4. I have signed up to the monthly subscription to support the project
so that means I get updates as and when they come out and at the time of recording this show
the current version is 14.7 which I have downloaded not yet installed. The other piece of software
I use is audacity and I use it to prepare the final audio recording for upload to hpr.
The last thing I want to talk about is recording and to tell you the truth it's really simple and
basic. I record each passage of text a single clip or region as I would or calls them.
Each region is given the name of the passage or topic that it covers so I do this so it can be
matched against its text position in the article. I also do it really because it acts as a kind of
bookmark and helps me to see where I've left off during recording sessions. Obviously the whole
article is not recorded as one session. I use keyboard shortcuts to start stop and delete the
recording of the region and there's a number of reasons for that and I'll explain that now.
1. It's quicker and quieter than using a mouse. 2. My PC fans are on the left side so I'd like to
record a few feet away from it. 3. I'm obviously doing multiple takes on occasion so it's just more
convenient to use the keyboard and I can stand stationary in one position by my mic stand.
I also don't have to be close up to the monitor to see the mouse pointer. I obviously use a mouse
in combination with the keyboard because I need to use the mouse for editing functions in our door.
Both my mouse and keyboard are Logitech wireless devices. The mouse is an M185 and the keyboard is
a K270. They were both purchased at quite cheaply off Amazon. They work on learning
out of the box. They also work on my Chromebook laptop and my Android tablets and if that isn't an
indication that these systems are Linux under the hood, I don't know what is. I always leave
a couple of seconds silence at the start of the recording of each region and mainly just
to compose myself and take the breath before I start speaking. I also leave the same couple of
seconds gap at the end. Visually this helps me to see the start and end points when viewing the
whole recording as one wrong track. What I'll do later on is that these gaps will be trimmed in our
door so I'll get a kind of consistent pause between each region and when I'm happy with that the
track is then normalized. Now at the moment that's all the post-production editing that's done in our
door. The whole narrated article will be then saved as a way file in our door and exported out
and then imported back into Audacity where I might tweak the volume of some sections or the whole
track if necessary. Now from there is exported out as a flat file in line with HPL's instructions.
Now I know some of you will be asking why use such a professional grade application such as our
door to do basic audio editing. Now my answer to that would be if you go to the our door website
you'll see that they're trying to aim the program at a much wider audience than just music
composers. It's anybody that has to work and manipulate audio and that also includes people
like video editors, audio engineers, screenplay writers and so forth. Yeah it does have a steep
learning curve but we're geeks and we should be able to get over that. At the current time I would
say that Audacity's audio cleaning up features are better, particularly when it comes to voice
recording. I think it's got better facilities for doing that and they're easier to get on with
them and manipulate but with each release of our door they're catching up. It's just great that
we've got open source projects like these and we should really support them any way we can.
Just want to wrap up by saying the voice overs are getting easier as I do them doing far less
retakes of each passage and enjoying them very much. Your comments and feedback are welcome on what
you heard today and so this is Gedis for Hacker Public Radio signing out and speak to you later.
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