The Ties That Bind (AAC and Voice Editing)

[static_whisper]

24 April 2021: I’m close to finishing the editing on The Ties That Bind Part 5, and I’m making a note for whenever the series gets updated with another part. (In case it’s far enough into the future that I wind up wondering how I managed to do certain editing steps.)

For Part 5, I went back to just reading normally with the fans off and less editing for the Raspy Voice. (I did not do what I tried in another fic in the series where I changed my reading in order to get a bit more of a rasp in the final product. It involves not fully supporting my voice with breath, which adds a bit more to the re-recording process. So I just skipped it this time.)

Again, like with another TTS [text to speech] section in the series, I just recorded the Windows laptop’s screen reader [Narrator; default voice]. Note to future self: Sometimes, you have to do another pass at Noise Reduction. This track did better when I Normalized it first and then got all the Noise Reduction out of the way? I also needed a little extra Amplify.

For the italicized sentences indicating sign language, I didn’t want to have to mess around with effects. I was already set up for the Raspy Voice, so I just did the full, normal editing process starting with a raw file without fans. (It’s kind of weird to think that if I followed common podficcing 101 advice that this would be the actual podfic voice listeners associate with me... But I’m also going to side-eye the fuck out of the other laptop if I actually wind up sounding raspier at the end of editing this track.)

We’ll have to see what it’s like after I get everything into the main project and start piecing things together. Honestly, I’m probably not re-re-recording, and if I have to, I’ll just make a note that the editing for the signed sentences unintentionally wound up sounding raspier than the spoken dialogue. The dialogue tags already describe Malcolm’s voice as raspy.