And nowhere to go tonight, because:
1. My hardware is broken.
This screw that holds the thingie that holds my shock mount that holds my mic is busticated. Unclear how that happened.
I *JUST* adjusted it, for the first time in…over a year…on Sunday. Hmmmm.
When I got into the studio today the mic was flopped down. I’m super bummed because I just finished spending my work hours over the last day updating my narrator notes.
I needed to incorporate all the AWESOME 1:1 coaching I got from Kathy Garver this past weekend.
Kathy was an instructor of mine at Voice One in SF, specifically for audiobooks. By inviting her for a mini SB overnight, I was able to tempt her to visit. She took some extra time on a trip to L.A. to spend a couple of hours providing me with coaching.
I work alone and I’m a relative newbie, so it can be hard to evaluate my work and identify how to continuously improve. I asked Kathy to listen to my audiobooks as she drove, and provide professional feedback. When she arrived, I plied her with traditional SB fare (Harry’s Plaza Cafe), the company of friends, and an evening of SB Improv.
2. I am also having a fight with my Kindle app. It keeps telling me that my narration document can’t be uploaded, or converted, or some such nonsense. It will resolve eventually, but the mysterious process by which my Word Doc becomes a Kindle-readable file is clearly snafu-d and there’s nothing I can do but try again and wait.
Based on Kathy’s feedback, I’m trying out 6 new things to improve my audiobooks. Over the next few posts, I will share them, starting with GESTURES. The feedback from her was that sometimes, character’s voices become inconsistent, or fade out. During scenes, different characters will start out nicely different, but by the end of a scene, or when they come back in a later scene, the characters are not as easily distinguishable.
To combat this, I’m designating a gesture of some kind to go along with each character. I “know” that to inhabit the characters I have to change my posture, stance, head position. Usually, a lot of movements make up a character and character voice. Which means that if I’ve made it too complex, it is easy to forget something during the rapid pace of recording, and when the body slides…the voice slides…and if I am not careful, every character sounds just like me.
Bad Form. So to try simplifying and making the voice transitions sharper, I have gone through and picked unique gestures – all hand related – to do as I voice characters. Woo-Hoo! Learning and improving! I’ve practiced the gestures and voices and added hints to myself in my Narration Notes…
…the Narration Notes that I can’t open in my Kindle App and that even if I could, I can’t read and record because I have no way to keep my microphone pointing toward my mouth, not my toes.
So ends a disappointing work night for me. Tomorrow is another day.
What do you think?