Miking & Voice Recording Successes for Rapid Idea Development

Due to its high visual appeal combined with low efficacy, Amanita is forever cursed to be the face of ingesting Psilocybin.

Cybermonk

it’s been surprising how I seem to get better and better results – for voice recordings , very much including leading edge idea development, that is effective for me to listen back to ) more and more easily and quickly, by avoiding certain approaches & certain mistakes, and continuing to work on various aspects

things come together eventually

a constraint in 1995 and now in 2022 is that i cannot, or should avoid, talk loudly for hours every day

It was taking forever to get the medium of voice recording to be as useful for idea development and rapid idea capturing as hand writing and typing.

I tried in 1995 to use voice recording for idea development, and I haven’t really listened to those recordings, because the playback was low quality and inconvenient, and the content didn’t really seem that good – it can’t hold a candle…

I doubt that It can hold a candle to my latest results, but who knows?

I’ll have to produce Episode number -80 (April 12, 1995) and we’ll see if it’s anything there worth listening to.

Technique: have a large assortment of microphone equipment

mix it up and have fun with all the different gear

have various good mike stands/mounts and Mike equipment & various options all available

even if a single setup would work fine, that doesn’t really click with me

my goal is not to get a single setup, but rather to master the equipment in general.

Technique: no pop filter and no monitoring

accomplish that through having extreme amount of r&d experimenting experience and knowing what to avoid, being highly conscious of what will produce bad results and good results at the Mic

The latest thing since maybe 2011 to factor in also is voice dictation; voice to text.

but this page is not about voice dictation for rapid idea capturing –

although there is one exception: my most recent experiment, of doing voice dictation while recording the voice at the same time, which actually proved to be kind of a lifesaver, because the voice dictation malfunctioned and lost data

but I had the full session recorded, and so it went out as a episode of the Egodeath Mystery Show just fine.

And the data (word spoken content) still exists in that form, so I could patch the broken incomplete voice dictation if I wanted.

Technique: stay further from the mics and feel free to use multiple mics and move around a lot

however this is advanced technique

you have to know what you’re doing (performance experience/ mindedness)

have to know all the tradeoffs involved

and know what to try to avoid

be ready to defend the trade-offs the result you have to relax the ultra polished production to enjoy the huge benefits of this mix this mixture of low effort and great content resulting

and great content results and very good and effectively great seeming audio

Technique: always master pronunciation/ elocution/ enunciation, even though constraints will not permit getting some ideal vocal sound in all ways

clean delivery and being in control, to eg:

avoid under enunciation, and avoid over enunciation

avoiding erring in this direction and avoiding erring in the other direction

the more in control, the more experience, it eventually pays off, even though by a harsh judgment, there will always be theoretically improvements that “ought” to be done.

but all things considered, the rewards eventually come together.

Technique: use multiple separate recordings – avoid mixing multiple types of content that would need to be disentangled/ sifted during production

tips and tricks-

changes that I have made that have made voice recording 10 times easier with 10 times better of result and 10 times more effective at developing ideas

after all these years of working on trying to make fast idea development through voice recordings trying to make that work

I finally been able to improve my policies for creating the initial recordings and then improving my techniques of production to be faster and better more automated

by strategic coordination of producing or creating a set of recordings that doesn’t need intensive production repair but that is combines good quality content with good quality voicing and not containing lots of problems that have to be fixed

Technique: avoid junk utterances, and be very silent, very often, while recording

I have learned how to be silent while talking in between words or phrases

don’t say any junk words or make any noise at all

then during production, you’re good to go for automated production, and the results are great.

avoid producing any junk utterances, and go ahead and be quiet as much as you want , as long as you want,

be quiet while recording, don’t insert any junk, and then you are totally good to go for automated production, it’s awesome!

Amanita does not imply ingesting Amanita but rather Psilocybin. that’s true today, and that’s true in the year 1200 by the very same token.

I worked out the solution in a couple of different media in the email reply to Dr. Brown and then talking it through on voice recordings .

it sounds counterintuitive and hard to believe but when you talk it through and work at through the answer is:

due to its efficacy profile, Amanita is forever cursed to be the face of psilocybin use!

Technique: understand that speech at different times of day is bound to sound different

Technique: automatic removal of silence

Technique: stack multiple separate recordings of different type end-to-end, then export MP3

Technique: a reading-based, prompting approach

Trick one: read read my materials or read something else. the funny thing is , I read two sentences and then I stop reading and I do a monologue for an hour, then I read two sentences, and do another monologue for an hour.

it takes only the tiniest bit of reading material and I’ll go off and it is really amazing some of the idea development that I’ve done and discovered worked out ideas that I could never have planned ahead, Like I never would’ve predicted that I would figure out a solid argument of why Amanita is always given pride of place visually yet in all errors it is never used people don’t use it people have never used it and

I actually figured out why this is

By talking it through I actually figured out how we use Amanita without using it , without ever ingesting it , and why this is-and we’re not even aware of it.

it explains the parallel argument by the same token of why we know that in art, Amanita does not mean ingesting Amanita, any more then then we do when we talk about “magic mushrooms” and we draw red and white, but we never ever ingest amanita.

that exactly explains why amanita in religious art does not imply ingesting Amanita!

a head shop decoration of amanita absolutely does not imply in the slightest ingesting Amanita

go to a head shop and count the number of amanita

now go to people taking mushrooms and how many of these customers of the head shop are taking Amanita? answer: 0%

why is that? now package that explanation of why that is , then send it in a time machine back to the year 1200, and you’ve answered your question, Dr. Brown: why amanita in Christian art does not imply ingesting Amanita but rather, ingesting Psilocybin.

maybe I should make myself a voice recording about this but anyway

it seems surprising to me how how well I’ve been harnessing voice recordings lately and

I have to think about why the rewarding success and ease lately

not just good results but every bit as important, ease.

in the past few recordings or episodes I’ve been not only getting great valuable results , but I’ve been doing so more easily produced

these two things go hand-in-hand

and I need to continue heading in that direction

Technique: construct a collection of intro and Outro material so that you never have to spend time on that during routine episodes

avoid the bad anti-pattern I’ve learned that

when it comes production time you extremely do not want to have to listen or search through an entire recording

this is probably the biggest improvement I’ve made, the biggest misstep that I have corrected in my approach

it turns out for ease of production, you absolutely do not want a given recording to contain more than one type of information, That you have to disentangle during production totally avoid any having to disentangle things you absolutely want to avoid that like the plague

you do not want to have to listen to a long in-depth content recording before you ship it! For example to sneeze it is literally better to terminate the recording then to have to go locate the sneeze afterwards if you can do you want to have any junk wanna make sure there’s no junk in the middle of recording always do whatever it takes so that any junk is at the end or beginning in that way here is a reasonable compromise you do have to check the beginning and check the end of each recording but you do not need to listen to the middle that is the key :

avoid having to listen to the middle of a recording during production.

for example if I switch to voice dictation mode while recording speaking that’s OK but I need to start a separate recording to isolate that type of content because it will need special processing during production

but you really want to hand to the production phase you want to handover lengthy content recordings that contain 100% content and not random junk that Hass to be removed and searched during production

that is the worst

you want any junk like the fire alarm going off at the end or beginning but not ever in the middle of a rec’g

avoid mode-switching in the middle of a recording

and so I need to continue breaking ending one recording and starting a separate recording when I switch to a different type of material

you definitely want shorter especially uniform content type the the point is not the length although you get the impression the short length is better but that’s not the point

regardless of the length of the recordings the key is don’t mix Primo Content with other type of material though I suppose station identification is innocuous

I am still forming the dues and don’ts Regarding creating the initial tracking Recordings – this makes an enormous ramification for how hard how time consuming the production process and above all whatever you do do not handover recordings that require sorting out good quality content from material that will be cut I mean look at the difference between

my verbose long freeform episodes and then the massive massive work that I had to do to excise the so-called “core” material from that

you extremely want to do that distinction upfront while recording too hot the core content Recording holt stop halt and terminate halt halt

you think I don’t know how to pronounce words with this stupid voice dictation my pronunciation is impeccable and differentiating words yet this voice dictation still can’t handle it halt and hold our pronounced entirely different

another great thing that has worked very well and things have really come together I could probably rattle off for major changes that have worked together to produce much better content and much less having to sort through and deal with timestamps and micro editing and all that time consuming processing lately I’ve been

Technique: Skip preparation by having a pile of backlog of ideas and reading material to prompt an excess of topics to cover

i’ve only had to do 10% of the preparation as before and then I’ve only had to do 10% of the processing that I used to have to do are used to have to do 10 times as much preparation and then 10 times as much clean up

so what are the tricks I’ve done and pull together lately??

My very latest is backing away from the mic means are no longer chained to one tiny fixed spot were you become all rigid

this does mean accexcepting more hiss

The jury is still out it’s too early to say but:

I really I’m really feeling pretty psyched enthused about this wildly asymmetrical dual miking which should not work at all, yet it’s producing good results so far, depending on what type of speakers I play back on

I thought Max was crazy using stereo and allowing room reverb but-

well I just threw away my the voice dictation just threw away my transcription of course has bad luck playing audio in the background at the same times foolishness

never do what Max Freakout does: use a stereo mic in a reverb room. unless…

but I’m approaching stereo miking differently , and I’ve done a ton of research on it ,

and I really like that-

it’s amazing completely breaking the rules well breaking some of the rules, but I am an expert at the rules , and so even when I bend the rules, I’m doing it at an expert level

I guess I’m enjoying the privilege of being able to exercise all kinds of different options and knowing what the trade-offs are

and I can access different configurations that a beginner would consider bad technique and not feasible

but it all depends , if you know how to play the trade-offs

I know all too well what it’s like it’s awful when you’re locked in one tiny position in the microphone

it’s like being chained with shackles in place

and now by miracle I’m able to do the exact opposite and move all over the place and it doesn’t necessarily sound awful if you just play it right

You can kind of get away with it and get a pass

it really depends on defining what your goal is a friend thought that my result was a failure until I explained that my goals are different than his assumed familiar professional production goals

I am doing live radio broadcast – it defines “success” as a different formula and I have the privilege of accessing different miking configurations different philosophy combination a different combination of philosophies about panning in room reverb and being on axis knowing all of these trade-offs at an expert level enables accessing certain combinations and emancipating from the shackles of being locked into one little rigid position in front of the mic

that intern that freedom that emancipation frankly standing up and standing back from the mic and moving around opens up so much it opens up a different alternate state of consciousness different different breathing different voice different character different tone and mood

as one little example: the much hated pop filter 😡 – don’t need no stinking stupid 6 inch dumb plastic garbage blocking my head.

know your angles, know your distances

and also frankly strategically plan on one plosive error per five seconds, and then you’re good, as long as you’re not continually plosive popping the mic

and then stand back further back and yell above the hiss