©2021 Michael Raven

Some of you made have had a bit of déjà vu if you had visited earlier and seen the original post for “familiar” posted this morning and then came back around again and saw the same post title with some minor differences: namely “[with audio]” appended to the title and a quick little intro added.

And, if that wasn’t enough, some joker posted it with a standard WP audio embed and, not 20 minutes later, changed it up with an Anchor (podcasting service) embed instead. Someone ought to shoot this guy, amiright?

So here’s the thing:

I had a friend earlier today challenge me to get over my “I hate the way my voice sounds” thing and do an audio post. After all, she pointed out, I used to do spoken word back in the day and apparently it wasn’t so awful as to have the hook brought out from stage left and pull me out of my performance, or an ACME anvil drop down from the sky and accordion me — what did I have to lose? Heavy sighs ensued, as I admitted she had a point. I wanted to do something on the shorter side to get the vocal cords back into practice, so I chose to add audio to “familiar” (forgetting I had one of them there foreign words in it that I had no idea at all how to pronounce correctly).

Well, I’m not one for doing things half-ways when it comes to recording and, while I didn’t pull out the big guns with Reason Studios, I did decide to not record it on my phone and repost that way. So I pulled out the old microphone I used back in my music days, did a butt-tonne of troubleshooting to get it to work on my desktop (and I really can’t tell you what finally made it work), pulled out Audacity (which usually only use for mixdowns to MP3 from less lossy formats) and started recording. I wanted some ‘verb and, in retrospect, I think it was a bit too much on the wet mix, but it’ll have to do. And then there is the normalization, which I wish I had known about with I did a few other pieces you can find here because it works much better than Reason’s tool.

Then came the sticky thing of learning how to say a foreign word without totally butchering it — we’ll see if people disagree with that assessment.

Then, I played with WPs audio player. It’s not very pretty or fancy and it eats into my storage to have files stored on the server here. And so I went with trying it out on Anchor, which I had originally considered because of the lack of limits and had signed up for when I first toyed with the idea of adding spoken word, but never got around to actually trying.

But, having already posted with the WP audio player and then seeing what Anchor looked like, I decided to repost yet again with the Anchor app — it just looks all-around neater, plus gets the audio off of my server and puts it elsewhere, freeing up space.

I’m not sure — my friend may have created a monster. I had too much fun (even if I still don’t care for the sound of my own voice) to just let it go at one post.

Yes. I like studio work that much.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the repost as much as I enjoyed farting around with it tonight. I expect there will be more unless someone get me banned from Anchor for tasteless poetry spoken by a man with a hideous voice…