Promotional video

As a little project using my new microphone. I made a recording of the blurb off the back of “A Secret Gardener?” and then made it into the “background music” of a slide show made up of images of the covers of all the different editions. Not very ambitious, but it was a good test for the new mike and my first attempt at making a slide show using the Windows Photos app.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=10qmp8eTrKKM1V32cZx5ajHbAMVKP7ODr

My new microphone

After the failure of my old computer and the subsequent problems over getting my microphone to work satisfactorily with the replacement one, I became increasingly conscious of background noise, interference and low volume. I came to the conclusion that the microphone had reached the end of its useful life (or had never been that good in the first place!) I’d done my homework before buying it, but I think I’d not been careful enough about checking the spec. I was also probably not prepared to pay as much as is necessary in order to get a decent piece of kit.

This time, as well as selecting a condenser microphone, I was fussy about rejecting any that didn’t explicitly state that they were unidirectional (i.e. they only pick up sounds from directly in front of them and not from all around, thus reducing the noise from my computer etc.) and had a USB connector (condenser microphones need a power source and I had a hunch that the low power of my previous one might have been because the jack socket didn’t provide sufficient). None of the cheapest models gave all the necessary information (or else they explicitly claimed to be omnidirectional or to connect via a jack plug).

£32.99 isn’t actually that much, in the grander scheme of things and I was pleased that I could immediately hear the difference. My voice sounded much clearer and there was almost no background noise audible in between sentences. The only processing needed in order to satisfy the ACX recording specifications was adjustment of the maximum volume to below their required threshold. It’s going to save me a lot of time compared with the post-recording cleaning that I’d been having to do latterly with the old mike.

You can listen to an audio sample from the next book, “Weed Killers”, recorded using the new mike, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BzUsB8_cwJ4eczc8gHWVTCVYF3RkYm8N/view