MMS 172: Project Output

FINAL PROJECT PRODUCTION STORY

This entire project, how did it come to fruition? What sort of preparations were made? Is it hard to do this as someone with no experience in this topic? Well, to answer all these questions I’ll just be discussing how I made my own project as someone who have absolutely no experience beforehand on creating audio recordings where I needed to tinker it as well.

So first, the best option to do this kind of thing is to create a layout of a plan. That is what I accomplished on my Pre-Production Blog which you can view also here in my blog on a different page. What’s very necessary for me, in my type of project is that, I needed to accomplish a script to use as my reference for the entire casting. I researched some news which I can use immediately and crafted a draft of my starting points.

I did my recording inside the confinement of my room. It’s not that special perse but the sound here is silent and smooth enough for me to record peacefully. This was somehow the “easy” part for me but the next thing is the real arduous one.

Now, the next thing I did for my project is that, I started to test out the Digital Audio Workstation that I’ll be using to edit out the audio. For this, I actually had to make some adjustments compared to my Pre-Production stated details. Waveform 13 didn’t go well with my audio recordings despite my attempts to realign the sample rate countless of times. There’s been a driver issue of sorts on my laptop and thus, the audio recording playback was going in a fast-forward pacing. I then resorted to looking up a different application to use and then, I found Cakewalk Sonar. Cakewalk Sonar did the job for me and I can personally recommend it given its newbie friendly user interface that anyone can easily figure out how to make use of. The application itself also gives a pop-up text whenever you hover on tools as to what it can do and what can you do with it. Here’s a screenshot of the UI and my actual recording being edited.

The audio files I used for the project were also edited first in Audacity. Things I modified for equally to each recording is this setup:

Noise Reduction Effect:
Noise reduction (dB): 12

Sensitivity: 6.0

Frequency Smoothing: 3

Compressor Effect: This is for making sure the audio doesn’t have imbalance and too loud parts get reduced

Threshold (dB): -18.0

Make-up gain (dB): 0

Knee width (dB): 5.0

Ratio: 3.0

Smoothing

Lookahead (ms): 1.0

Attack (ms): 0.2

Release (ms): 1.0

High-Pass Filter: Used this to cut out mic handling noise, the sound of the fan, and other low frequency sounds.

Frequency (Hz): 80.0

Roll-off (dB/octave): 6dB

Limiter: Used this to reduce distortions

Compression Curve

Threshold (dB): -5.0

Make-up target (dB): -1.0

Knee width (dB): 2.0

Smoothing

Lookahead (ms): 1.0

Release (ms): 20.0

Now with all the necessary materials set, I then assembled each recording using Sonar. I did adjust a little of the loudness of some recordings to avoid the voice being overpowered by the background music I decided to use. The background music I used were all royalty free audio as well to ensure that I avoid any sort of issues upon using them.

Once I finished connecting each recording to one another and applying some background music to timings I see fit, I then finalize the file and exported it from Sonar into a .wav file.

To put it simple, in order to recreate this kind of project. You need not really overthink much like I did. If you fear that you can’t be as good as the other, it’s okay to actually start somewhere simple like this. Start a concept, think about how you plan to execute your concept, practice voice recording, and learn to make use of a DAW even if it’s just the basics. That’s how I managed to pull this off. I also tried watching some tutorials on YouTube to further add knowledge for this project as well.

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