Have you ever found a podcast or teleseminar which promised really important information to you? So you go in and download it. And then you go and try to listen. But you can barely hear what they are trying to say. It may have had great information but the recording is so bad that you can’t listen to it. A podcast that you can’t understand is worse than no podcast at all!
So how do you make you voice sound clear while podcasting? As a creator of podcasted content, you need to worry about content and organization sure, but you also need to worry about delivery. In this article, Glen Ford gives us some hints to help make your voice sound clear while podcasting. In fact, these hints apply to any audio product.
A clear voice starts with a clear voice. No, I’m not trying to be smart. Podcasting is just a form of public speaking. Your voice is your instrument. You need to learn how to get the most out of it. There are a number of tricks that any public speaker learns to help them speak clearly. I’m not going to go into them in detail here since I want to cover the recording tricks. But they include things like standing when you speak and having warm water or tea (not cold or hot or coffee) available.
As you may have guessed, the key to having a clear voice in your podcast is having the best recording possible. The quality of your recording is dependent on the microphone which you use. Never use a desktop microphone. No matter how good the recording itself will never be of sufficient quality. The best microphone for the job is a standard headset. Even a cheap set will be capable of recording your voice well.
The one thing that your microphone must have however, is a wind guard. These small puffballs of foam fit over the microphone itself. They prevent wind from your mouth showing up in the recording. You’ll find the pops from Ps and whistles from the Ss are virtually eliminated with a wind guard.
The placement of your microphone is also a key to clear recordings. The microphone should be placed roughly at the bottom of your jaw when it is fully open. In this way, the microphone will pick up the sound reverberated through your chest. The pops and whistles are also further reduced since your breath does not roll over the microphone.
The next step in your recording is the recording itself. Clarity in this case is dependent on the fidelity of the recording. With a digital recording you have the ability to record at a number of different levels from telephone quality (11 kHz, 21 kb/sec) up to CD quality ( 44 kHz, 172 kb/sec) and higher. Generally speaking, you want to record at as high a quality level as possible since reducing quality is easy while improving quality is not. In practice however, you’ll find there is a limit to the level based on the speed of your equipment and the size of your hard disk and memory.
By this point, you should have a very clear and high quality recording. Of course, should and do are not necessarily the same thing. The final step in the quality process is editing your recording. Using an editor such as Audacity is one way to correct any problems that have occurred to this point. Audacity (and many of its free competitors) has a number of filters and modifiers which will help you remove extraneous noises, any clipping that has occurred or any buzz which causes your voice to be less than clear.
By Glen Ford Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6057835