Quality Sound

I've been spending a fair amount of time getting things going for Triangulation: End of the Rainbow. This has involved things such as getting a budget approved, getting the guidelines put together and online, scheduling the first sessions, etc.

One thing that's new for this year: we'll be doing podcasts after each reading session to talk about what we're doing and what we're seeing. Obviously, we can't talk about our take on individual stories like that, but it will give us a chance to relay overall information about how the anthology is shaping up, what we'd like to see, and how far behind we are in the slushpile.

For those purposes, I've been trying to turn my living room into a recording studio. If you've never tried this before, let me tell you, it's not easy. In a real recording studio, each participant has their own microphone and the sound tech can mix them in and out as needed. Additionally, recording studios are soundproofed to keep out all sorts of background noise (I never knew how much background noise there is in my living room at all times until I tried recording voice audio there). In our case, I'm not buying 5 microphones and a mixer, and I've got to be both the sound guy and a participant at the same time. It creates a few challenges, and I'm sure there will be even more than I expected when it comes time to actually record, edit, and rip the casts.

One lesson I can share now: those $10 PC microphones aren't worth the $10 you pay for them. After struggling with every imaginable setting to try to get the microphone to pick up decent voices from all 5 positions on the couch, I finally decided to see if the microphone might be the cause of the problem. I had to search quite a few places, until I finally ended up at Swissvale Music Store, where I picked up a CAD U3 USB studio microphone. Yes, this is a $70 mic, but it's worth every penny. It basically took a situation that I wasn't sure how I was going to handle, and made the problem go away. It's capable of picking up a normal voice from all corners of my couch and ignoring 99% of the background noise.

It's one of those cases where you get what you pay for.

So watch out for the Triangulation slush reading podcasts. Starting next week in crystal clear hi-fidelity surround stereo definition. Or something.