"Sweetie"
"Yes, love?"
"Can you turn it up a bit, cos I can't hear you talking clearly"
"Sure", as I crank up the volume 4 more notches, rewind to the beginning and listen again.
The opening link ends, followed by a deafening loudness of the first song.
"Jesus, where's the remote!", "Ow, too loud, sweetie", "Daddy, that gave me a fright!"
I then spend the next 90 minutes juggling the remote volume up and down as the podcast unfolds, wielding it like a samurai blade, hitting the down button as soon as the first hint of a song chord starts to emanate from the speakers, trying to remember when the song will end and flicking the volume back up again for the talking bits, right up to the final 'Bye bye'
A quiet descends on the room, you put the remote down, sit back, relax a little and ask "So, what did you think?"
"It was very funny, typical you two, and a lot of music I hadn't heard before, but..."
Ah, the dreaded 'but'. One word that, in the one second it takes to utter it, takes me from a euphoric high to a heart-clutching cold terror, like the proverbial glass of water in a drunk's face that will sober them up enough to get a clear message through to them.
"Oh god, you hated it, it was too silly, not enough factual content, too many random tangents, it took SteveB hours to edit too, I knew we went on to long..."
"No! All I was going to say was that the talking is too quiet compared to the music, that's all!"
"Ah. Oh. Good. Er, well, it sounded all right when we recorded it, it must be an editing thing, I'll text SteveB and see what we can do"
And thus began the struggle to get the balance and volume right between the talking and the music parts of our weekly podcast 'Off The Chart', and quell the initial main criticism we received over it.
So what was the problem? Well, a number of things, actually.
The microphone we were using, the type of microphone we were using, the location we were using it in, our position to the microphone, the levels, the software, how we were using the software, how SteveB was editing the podcast, and so on, and so forth...
With me only having about 90 minutes a week to be able to actually spend time with SteveB recording, there was no real time to play and get things right, so each session was 15 minutes of trying to get microphone b to work with software a, or a with b, or even b with b! Or microphone c with either software a or b, which resulted in microphone d being used with software a and b, but still not being 'loud' enough, even though during recording we were on the borderline of clipping our audio, based on the input volume, and we weren't wanting to head down that route, ha ha!
(actually, I'm not a 100% sure what I mean by that, but I know it's bad and causes problems ;o))
So about 3 weekends ago, the weekend before Eurovision, SteveB and family came round with the aim to get a couple of shows recorded, followed by food, drinkies and natterings. We used our spare room, which doubles as our study, lots of space, lovely dead sounding room. We set up a table in the middle, which we sat either side of, and promptly failed to get any of the proper mics working, which resorted in us going back to what had been our only main success so far. A USB dual mic webcam, set in between us, at an equal distance from both of us.
Guess what? This gave us our crispest sound to date. Why?
Well, firstly, the room setting was a good one, with no real echo as sound bounces off the walls, etc., normally, but this room actually deadened all other sounds. Secondly, the way we had set up the mic and were facing each other was also better. Up until now, we were normally sat side by side, with the mic sort of between us, but every lean back or turn away meant sound was not being directed to the mic, but between us, facing each other, meant the mic caught a lot more of our voices directly.
Thirdly, and rather key as it turned out, based on a discussion earlier that week on Twitter, with a mutual friend, we discovered that there was a sample bit rate setting on the actual driver of the microphone. I mean, a setting on the driver!
Fourthly, during editing, SteveB had come up with a clever way to bring the audio to the fore and not have it drowned out by the music, if he decided we should be talking over the beginning or, heaven forbid, the end of a song.
Look, I know there are a lot of blogs and info out there, which probably would have made our lives easier, but we quite like the journey as much as reaching the end, so #FumblingTowardsProfessionalism is our hashtag, look out for it on Twitter.
And if you would like to listen to what we get up to, along with all of SteveB's other stuff, you can find us via:
SteveB's 80s site SoundOfTheCrowd
The associated Mixcloud page
The associated Facebook page
the associated Twitter account.
Please drop us a message via any of the Sound Of The Crowd pages, or to @babel17 or @evibenstein. We'd love to hear from you.
Oh and I forget to mention in my last post, that my original idea for a podcast, before everyone started up and dying, was to only play music by artists already deceased. Would it be bad of me to think that there would be even more music to play now given the events of the year so far?
Yes, yes, I'm going to hell, but then, I think we always knew that ;o)
Friday, 27 May 2016
Monday, 23 May 2016
*blink, blink* Hello? is this still on?
So it's been 8 years since I started this and nary a post in over 7. So what happened?
Well, my son will be 8 next month, yesterday (Thu 19th May 2016) was my 8th anniversary at work, we aren't in Australia, I don't blog about wine, (I just drink it), I still do the same job and I'm slightly less grumpy.
I got very fed up with spending all day in front of a PC and slowly stopped using them at home. My wife has the laptop out nearly ever night, doing one thing or another. I stopped using Twitter, I kept an eye on Facebook but never posted. Worst of all, I did completely forget about this place.
But something has changed recently.
I was speaking to my good friend SteveB at the beginning of the year, over alcohol, as we do now and again, and we got talking about 80s music, as per usual, and how I had noticed, inadvertently, that he seemed to spend a lot of time tweeting about old episodes of Top of the Pops. *sigh* Yes, I had gone back on Twitter for a look see one day and sort of hung about lurking for a week or two on and off, just like when trying to get back in to being part of h2g2, back in the day.
So anyway, he said, "Yes, I do enjoy tweeting about TotP, as do many others, just like during Eurovision, and we rip the carp* out of the old DJs and the styling and sometimes we tweet about how good the music is, or isn't in certain cases. But mostly I moan about the schedule BBC4 are running to show these old shows."
"Whaddayamean?", slurs I. It was quite late by this time.
"Well, what with Yewtree, the BBC have refused to play any episodes hosted, or even co-hosted by anyone being investigated, which is quite frustrating, and also they just don't show, or change the schedule for anything else, like the Proms, or anything more high-brow then old episodes of Top of the Pops"
So, we ruminated on that for a bit longer before calling it a night and heading home, or rather we didn't and drank more which resulted in us devolving into our usual silly inane chatter that amuses us, but not our wives, which did end up with us heading home. And my wife calling me an @rse. And my son saying "Yeah daddy, you and Uncle Steve are just too silly and shouldn't drink so much, that's why you are fat"
So how has this brought about a change? Did I realize my family were right, I am an @rse and drink too much? No, but it did get me thinking. And what a thought I came up with. It was genius! And so simple and the world would thank me for my 'Eureka' moment one day!
The thought was this: What SteveB needed was to fill the void of the missing episodes by doing a podcast about them. Simple. Genius. Everybody wins!...Until I mentioned it to him.
We bumped into them outside Asda one evening and I told him about this great idea he could have, about doing a podcast based on the old TotP show of that week in history, and how we could resurrect some of the more obscure songs none of the commercial 80 stations played!
Don't get me wrong, he didn't out and out dismiss it, but there was a definite hint of "Stop talking carp*, man", so I said no more and left feeling a little deflated as the light dimmed a little in the brightness of the future.
A week later, over dinner, and SteveB said "You know, I've been thinking about this podcast thing, but I don't want to do a direct replication of the TotP chart of any given week. There are loads of things like that out there already, and I agree that there are a lot more interesting tracks out there than those we hear daily on other 80s shows, so I was thinking of this...we could do a rundown of the chart, the full chart, pick a few songs, play the top 5 and maybe have a record of the week? What do you think and do you want in?"
"Er...yeah!", says I, and that's how we started.
It took us a couple of weeks to get the time right to get together and attempt to record something, but on Thursday 31st March 2016, we had 90 minutes of free time to attempt to record something.
In one hour we managed to record.... 100 up to number 85, go off on about 15 different tangents, dissolve into fits of laughter about 5 times and generally muck about. We were running out of time, as I had to leave and pick my wife up, and SteveB had wanted to get this done and out for Saturday, so I said "Look don't worry, call this our pilot and throw it in the archive and we can try again next week. We'll be better organised. It'll go smoother, I'm sure. I've never done this sort of thing before, it'll work out".
SteveB's shoulder sort of slumped a little and he mumbled, "I suppose so", and I gathered up my stuff and headed off, thinking no more about it, apart from wondering what we could do to be better organised and make the next attempt a better one. "Maybe we don't need to go through the whole chart, maybe we just do a quick recap in batches of 15, play a track, next batch, play a track, track from the album and repeat until we get to the top 5", and I think SteveB was having the same, if not very similar thoughts to this as well, but I didn't think too much more about it until Saturday morning, when I got a text from SteveB saying "Podcast is up" and a link.
"What?", I thought, "How?" Turns out with a bit of clever editing and a quick re-record of virtually everything, he made it sound like we had both contributed to the whole podcast. It actually sounded quite good, although there was a definite issue with mic quality versus track quality. My wife was mildly impressed at both the obscurity of the tracks chosen and the knowledge going with it, plus it was funny. "So what's next week's, then?", she asked "and are you going to actually manage to get it all done in 90 minutes this time?"
"Darn tooting, we are!" and with that said, that was it, there was no going back now, we just had to get good at this thing, or give up trying.
Our first podcast is 2nd April 1988, is hosted on SteveB's website and can be found on Mixcloud here
*edited from the original in case young people read this
Well, my son will be 8 next month, yesterday (Thu 19th May 2016) was my 8th anniversary at work, we aren't in Australia, I don't blog about wine, (I just drink it), I still do the same job and I'm slightly less grumpy.
I got very fed up with spending all day in front of a PC and slowly stopped using them at home. My wife has the laptop out nearly ever night, doing one thing or another. I stopped using Twitter, I kept an eye on Facebook but never posted. Worst of all, I did completely forget about this place.
But something has changed recently.
I was speaking to my good friend SteveB at the beginning of the year, over alcohol, as we do now and again, and we got talking about 80s music, as per usual, and how I had noticed, inadvertently, that he seemed to spend a lot of time tweeting about old episodes of Top of the Pops. *sigh* Yes, I had gone back on Twitter for a look see one day and sort of hung about lurking for a week or two on and off, just like when trying to get back in to being part of h2g2, back in the day.
So anyway, he said, "Yes, I do enjoy tweeting about TotP, as do many others, just like during Eurovision, and we rip the carp* out of the old DJs and the styling and sometimes we tweet about how good the music is, or isn't in certain cases. But mostly I moan about the schedule BBC4 are running to show these old shows."
"Whaddayamean?", slurs I. It was quite late by this time.
"Well, what with Yewtree, the BBC have refused to play any episodes hosted, or even co-hosted by anyone being investigated, which is quite frustrating, and also they just don't show, or change the schedule for anything else, like the Proms, or anything more high-brow then old episodes of Top of the Pops"
So, we ruminated on that for a bit longer before calling it a night and heading home, or rather we didn't and drank more which resulted in us devolving into our usual silly inane chatter that amuses us, but not our wives, which did end up with us heading home. And my wife calling me an @rse. And my son saying "Yeah daddy, you and Uncle Steve are just too silly and shouldn't drink so much, that's why you are fat"
So how has this brought about a change? Did I realize my family were right, I am an @rse and drink too much? No, but it did get me thinking. And what a thought I came up with. It was genius! And so simple and the world would thank me for my 'Eureka' moment one day!
The thought was this: What SteveB needed was to fill the void of the missing episodes by doing a podcast about them. Simple. Genius. Everybody wins!...Until I mentioned it to him.
We bumped into them outside Asda one evening and I told him about this great idea he could have, about doing a podcast based on the old TotP show of that week in history, and how we could resurrect some of the more obscure songs none of the commercial 80 stations played!
Don't get me wrong, he didn't out and out dismiss it, but there was a definite hint of "Stop talking carp*, man", so I said no more and left feeling a little deflated as the light dimmed a little in the brightness of the future.
A week later, over dinner, and SteveB said "You know, I've been thinking about this podcast thing, but I don't want to do a direct replication of the TotP chart of any given week. There are loads of things like that out there already, and I agree that there are a lot more interesting tracks out there than those we hear daily on other 80s shows, so I was thinking of this...we could do a rundown of the chart, the full chart, pick a few songs, play the top 5 and maybe have a record of the week? What do you think and do you want in?"
"Er...yeah!", says I, and that's how we started.
It took us a couple of weeks to get the time right to get together and attempt to record something, but on Thursday 31st March 2016, we had 90 minutes of free time to attempt to record something.
In one hour we managed to record.... 100 up to number 85, go off on about 15 different tangents, dissolve into fits of laughter about 5 times and generally muck about. We were running out of time, as I had to leave and pick my wife up, and SteveB had wanted to get this done and out for Saturday, so I said "Look don't worry, call this our pilot and throw it in the archive and we can try again next week. We'll be better organised. It'll go smoother, I'm sure. I've never done this sort of thing before, it'll work out".
SteveB's shoulder sort of slumped a little and he mumbled, "I suppose so", and I gathered up my stuff and headed off, thinking no more about it, apart from wondering what we could do to be better organised and make the next attempt a better one. "Maybe we don't need to go through the whole chart, maybe we just do a quick recap in batches of 15, play a track, next batch, play a track, track from the album and repeat until we get to the top 5", and I think SteveB was having the same, if not very similar thoughts to this as well, but I didn't think too much more about it until Saturday morning, when I got a text from SteveB saying "Podcast is up" and a link.
"What?", I thought, "How?" Turns out with a bit of clever editing and a quick re-record of virtually everything, he made it sound like we had both contributed to the whole podcast. It actually sounded quite good, although there was a definite issue with mic quality versus track quality. My wife was mildly impressed at both the obscurity of the tracks chosen and the knowledge going with it, plus it was funny. "So what's next week's, then?", she asked "and are you going to actually manage to get it all done in 90 minutes this time?"
"Darn tooting, we are!" and with that said, that was it, there was no going back now, we just had to get good at this thing, or give up trying.
Our first podcast is 2nd April 1988, is hosted on SteveB's website and can be found on Mixcloud here
*edited from the original in case young people read this
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