I had a lot of fun with this! The biggest issue was trying not to get sucked in to playing with audio settings too much (I have a lot on the go right now, and must manage my time very conservatively). I recorded using my Steinberg C11, and ran that through an amp simulator in Garageband. I finished it in Audacity, where I removed a couple of pops and tightened up the dead space at the beginning of the track. I realized after the fact that though I recorded in 96000 kHz through Garageband, you can still hear the 60-cycle hum overlay from the amp simulator. I thought that was pretty cool…very authentic to the time and style. I had to restrain myself from doing multiple takes when it didn’t sound just right, or doing ‘punch-ins’, where a portion of audio track is replaced by an overlay.
Please note there is a 20 second delay before audio inputs are audible.
I had already edited the file before posting, so I thought I would put the original up. I left the click track (or metronome, if you prefer on in the background, which is very distracting with its little digital blip every quarter beat. Here’s what the unedited version sounded like.
For the final version, I tweaked a graphic equalizer to scoop the mids, then isolated and split a lead vocal track (very copyright, but this is not for commercial distribution) into two different tracks, and placed vocal ad-libs at interval. I also shortened the dead space at the beginning to 10 seconds, removed a small click at head of the guitar track,and added a fade-out to the final notes of the guitar, leaving the vocals at volume. Lastly, I put the noise reduction filter over with very low sensitivity to preserve the original amp simulation.
Addendum: The Importance of Inclusion in Teacher Pedagogy
This combined audio file took a lot more work because I had an audible hum from a short in my microphone that I could not remove to my satisfaction. After I re-recorded the segment and punched it in to the main audio track, I had to play with the EQ to match the levels and different microphone inputs. I also played with swelling in and fading out audio tracks, and had to paste the same track over and blend it a couple of times so that it filled my audio track timeline. When I created this, I definitely saw this as a podcast for teachers; I really enjoyed it, and that may be something I pursue in the future when I have more time to generate content.
Keith Webster
Hi Ryan,
It’s always a basic starting configuration, in graphics what is our finished resolution, in audio what is our project rate and in video what are both of these. I usually just tell people today: create big and then export at the appropriate size.
Machine hum is something the noise reduction filter on Audacity works well on. Last year I got a new microphone for Christmas 2019 and the first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t record a track for this course that needed noise reduction (so I offered the file from the Internet Archive). I think you have lots of options for combining and working with audio using Garage Band and Audacity. When I had a Macbook I tried Garage Band but found it just little more complex than I wanted to dive into, and it was only Mac OS so not great for this course. A long time ago I used a 4-track portable recording/mixing platform for all our analogue + digital multisource recording. It worked but with a budget we could have saved so much time and had much better quality product.
For your combined audio file I think a little more narrative volume might be in order (though you’re within the range where this might just be what headphones the listener is using).
Ryan MacGregor
Thanks for the feedback, Keith; I found when I listened to my audio on my fancy-shmancy headphones, that the bass in my voice really carried through, so I dropped the decibel levels a fair bit. Listening through the laptop speakers, I can understand where you are coming fro,m… I think a good lesson here for me is anticipating the audience’s listening avenues. I actually used the amplify function to turn myself down a fair bit, so if you’d like, I can easily boost it back up.
I really liked doing the guitar recording. One of my favourite things with music is when there is ‘bleed through’ from the studio (for example, Zepplin’s The Ocean (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9iKCszVMls), or ‘Poundcake’ by Van Halen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu0yAW_Hf1s). Of course, I am aware of the control studios have, that everything that is included is done so intentionally… I love the audio ‘voyeurism’!