Idea and Inspiration
So unfortunately do the COVID-19 scare, my options became a little limited for interviews as I wanted to keep up social distancing. While I could’ve maybe had a friend record and send their answers as an interview, I don’t think I would’ve been able to retain the quality of audio that I would’ve wished for. So instead, I opted to do a personal review.
To stay related to the gaming blog, I had the idea of doing a quick audio review of a piece of hardware I’ve been enjoying. I’ve been using these 3rd party controllers for my Switch the past few months and they’ve really added to the already awesome experience.
Design Process
I was inspired by those quick videos you could find on IGN and other gaming news outlets, that make quick-stop video reviews on current happenings in gaming. I figured making an audible version of this kind of format might be a fun challenge to see if I could convey the strengths of a product without any imagery.
I originally wanted to do a combination of background music, narration, and sound effects, but the latter proved to make the entire ensemble pretty busy, as well as not really translating well to just sound for a bunch of clicks and clacks from the controller. The process for the whole project was pretty straight forward: just typing up a script of words I wanted to say and recording them in my office.
Technical Detail
To be more in depth about the process, after I had my script ready, I used my studio mic in my office to record my voice and controller in Audacity for the raw footage. Later for this draft, I decided to rerecord my voice once again with a few tweaks to my gain input and distance I was from the mic for a better sound. For the backing track, I decided to use an old demo of a song I was working on a few years ago as I hadn’t really put it to good use before. I felt it fitted the type of emotion and energy I wanted for this project. Again, it was about this point I decided the sound effects weren’t really cutting it and left them on mute.
Once all was set how I wanted in Audition, I got to work on the editing. I’m a pretty soft spoken guy regardless of my gain cranking and basically eating the mic, so I made some adjustments. I added a compressor and vocal enhancer effect to help balance my audio out a bit while also raising its volume. To clean up, I equalized a lot of my wonky frequencies in my voice to make it a bit more clear, as well as using a DeEsser on my hard consonants and a DeNoise to help mitigate any left over background fodder.
From there I scrubbed through my near 5 minutes of audio, using the razor tool to cut before transients and trimming off the fat at the end of my sentence chunks. With the dead space gone, I scooted the floating recordings together in one seamless narration over the course of the two minutes.
Again, the only real difficulties encountered were fitting the sound effects I originally planned. While I recorded separate recordings for button presses, triggers, and attaching and detaching the controllers, they didn’t really translate all too well for just being audio. With them just sounding like a bunch of clicks in the audio, I decided to leave them on mute so the focus could stay on the narration.
Sources and Material
All the sources used were my own recordings. As mentioned, I used a recording of a song I made about a year and a half ago, so I should self credit.
Tucker, Cody. (2018). “Star-Sliced Summit Demo4.mp3”
Gaming with Cody Tucker 