"Will you turn that music down?" vs "Speak up, boy!" #FumblingTowardsProfessionalism

"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)