Kasama Labs module 1 transcript // addendum

So there's a couple other things I want to just take note of for our Kasama labs students. And that is, mistakes that were made that I knew immediately as soon as I made them, but I didn't have time to correct them. So one of those is that prior to this episode, I had been using a Blue Yeti mic. And those of you who have heard me talk about my voice ever said it before, know that I record under a blanket fort.

That little moment in the episode where I talk about a child's blanket fort, that's real. I mean still, to this day, I record my voiceover in what is basically a blanket fort and I use a lot of pillows and I have a little clam shell sound shield. And because I am reading off a computer screen, my computer fan noise is an issue that I always have to think about.

I have an external monitor, which helps a little bit, but it still doesn't completely shut it out. The space that I'm recording in is a hundred square foot shed, hard surfaces and windows all over the place. So the blanket fort really helps me to get that intimate studio sound, which by the way, I'm not using right now, I have sort of a halfway in between set up right now where I have my clam shell, I have one of those screen dividers with blankets draped over it. And I actually have something draped over the top of my mic and that clam shell as well.

And I have tested this out a lot and gotten to a pretty good place with being able to create really quiet, intimate voiceover. And then I got this wonderful new mic when I won the international women's podcast awards the prize was this wonderful Shure microphone and so this episode was the first time I had ever used that and what I didn't realize. That I had this hiss sound happening. I knew it was great equipment, but I didn't realize that there was going to be such a difference in that ambient sound, that hiss. And so one thing that I learned from recording, this was anytime you change equipment, It doesn't matter how long you've been doing this; it doesn't matter if you're under your blanket fort, make sure that you do your homework on your equipment before you start using it so that you do a really thorough sound check. So that if there is anything like that coming up, you have the time to go back and watch the YouTube videos and do the research and, read the instruction manual so that you can fix that.

I ended up actually putting the voiceover through isotope RX. Fixed the hiss, but then it kind of made my voice sound a little too dampened. So I ended up actually using a mix of the untampered with voiceover that had the hiss. And I tried to do some things within logic that didn't completely fix it, but it helped. And then I had a second track that I sometimes use when it wasn't too muffled sounding from the isotope RX version. In the moment, when I talk about there being like an echo-y cave and my voice in multiple different versions, it was actually kind of advantageous to have my voice on multiple tracks. And then I brought them both in, but I just wished in retrospect, I had been able to do my homework ahead of time to figure out what I needed to do to make my mic sound is clean and crisp and clear as I possibly could.

The other thing that is a mistake I've made before, and that I'm very grateful to my friend Adriana, who gave me the heads up that I had two voiceover tracks that were playing at the same time. It was clearly a mistake. And I know exactly what happened. It was late at night. I was doing the final listen through that. I always do with episodes. And in Logic Pro X, there is a function where you can do no overlap, prayer tracks. If you're moving them around or you can do shuffle left or shuffle, right.

Or crossfade, there's a couple of different options. And I had it on shuffle left and I did not realize that I had it on shuffle left. I had listened through actually the entire episode. I was right at the end and I was just tweaking some things and I deleted a track that I didn't need anymore. a little piece of a track, not realizing that I had it on shuffle that. And so what happened is the second half of the episode shuffled left at the beginning, when I cut that little piece out, which then resulted in overlapping voiceover, which was clearly a mistake. And I didn't notice it because I had already listened through.

This is a mistake I've made before. I know better at this point, I've done this over 180 times. I've probably made that exact mistake a dozen times of just forgetting to put it from shuffle left back to no overlap. And then really, even beyond that, doing the, not the full listen through again, but just the click through of, okay, let's put my play head at five seconds in, five minutes and, you know, just click it through quickly to make sure that everything is sounding good and normal, and the volume levels are consistent and all those things that you've already checked, hopefully at that point.

And I didn't do that cause I was tired cause it was 10 o'clock at night. I had to get the episode out and it is just a good reminder to me that no matter how many times you do this, it's always worth it before you bounce or export that project as MP3 to upload to your podcast.

Whatever your hosting site is, it's always worth it to go through and just check and make sure that nothing has moved around. Nothing is wonky. 90% of the time, everything is fine, but there's always that 10% where something weird happened. And you won't catch it unless you do that little final check through.

So that is something I learned. I I think I fixed the whole thing in about 15 minutes and you can do that if you know exactly what the problem is, but you know, the bottom line. it's always good to have one final check through. If you can have somebody else or even yourself, listen through the MP3, once you've bounced it or export it. That's even better because then somebody can say, Hey, I noticed at, you know, 10, 15 timestamp, the volume is a little off here.

Maybe you should bring the music down these are things that you try to guard for as you're building the episode, but especially as an indie podcasts, there are going to be things that you miss. And so I think setting up the safeguards to try to prevent against.

And then also if it happens, it's not the end of the world. Nobody died here. Go fix it, do the thing that you need to do to update it. Life goes on. And probably nobody else even noticed. I hope this helps you as you are building your own podcast episodes. I think the overall message of this episode isn't just have fun, but also just realize it's a process you're going to keep growing. You're going to keep changing. And most of all, I hope that listening to this episode did feel like an adventure to you and that you can embrace your life as this creative journey that it is.