Idea and Inspiration
As we all know, the COVID-19 situation has rendered many of us stuck at home to practice our social distancing. That said, I had a little rough time finding someone to do an interview with for this assignment while maintaining the level of audio quality I wanted, so I instead opted for a doing a review format.
Since I’m a gaming blog, I really wanted to cover something I’ve been obsessed about the past few months: My new controllers for the Nintendo Switch from the 3rd party company HORI called the Switch Split Pad Pros. Definitely a mouthful for sure.
Design Process
Inspired by quick review format videos you see on gaming site outlets and certain Youtube channels, I thought I could take the format and make it work for me in a purely audio-based form. My thoughts were that this could be something that could be squeezed into a podcast maybe. Either way it definitely proved to be a fun and unique challenge to sell a controller (something which is largely judged by feeling and sight) with pure audio.
Originally I wanted to do a combo of music, narration, and sound effects, but the latter proved to make the entire thing sound much to busy in the end. In addition, most of the sound effects I recorded were mere clicks and clacks from the controller and not adding much to the project. That said, the project as a whole was pretty direct in approach: I typed up a script of what I wanted to say, and recorded the words in my office.
Technical Detail
To dig a little deeper however, my recording process was using my studio mic and Audacity in order to get audio as clean and crisp as possible, usually requiring many takes and rerecording to accomplish. Each rerecord was experimentation with how I projected my voice, how much gain I had going into the input device, and how much distance I was gauging from my mouth to the microphone. For the backing track, I decided to use a song I made as a demo about a year and a half ago that unfortunately went unused. I felt like it really matched the theme and energy I wanted to have in this video and would save me a bit from having to wrangle with creative commons material.
The editing process went pretty smooth for the most part. Audio editing and composition is like my soul craft when it comes to hobbies and really enjoy the entire process of it. I first started jacking up my voice a bit since I’m pretty soft spoken person, using compressors and vocal enhancers to really beef up the range in volume between my words. I cleaned it all up with an equalizer to remove any weird frequencies in my voice, as well as a DeEsser and DeNoise to nuke some of those hard consonants and background noise respectfully.
After that came the tedious process of zooming into the recordings and hand cutting with the razor tool all of the blank space and bad takes. I then bunched up all the floating recordings into a seamless narration in an “ad-like” fashion.
Again the process went pretty smooth over all and the only difficulties were some rerecordings due to some personal level of quality I wanted in my sound, and the omission of using sound effects. After posting to our discussion board for feedback, Cheyenne did give some insight in the backing music being a tad too loud in comparison to my voice, so I adjusted it appropriately.
Sources and Material
All sources used were of my own, including the backing track that I had made a year and a half ago as a demo that went unused.
Tucker, Cody. (2018). “Star-Sliced Summit Demo4.mp3”
Gaming with Cody Tucker 