The Totally Unwanted Sleepover (That Ended Up Being Awesome) [Glee]

[marsmaywander.livejournal.com]

Title: The Totally Unwanted Sleepover (That Ended Up Being Awesome)
Author: missgoalie75

Reader: marsmaywander
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Klaine
Rating: PG13

Author’s Summary: Long story short, Finn is forced to stay at home with Kurt and Blaine while Burt and Carole go out. Shenanigans ensue. (Prompt Used: Kurt, Blaine, and Finn have the girliest sleepover.)
Warnings: "language"
Stats: MP3, ~42 min, ~6200 words, ~9.6 mb

Temporary Link: Sendspace, Mediafire

Permanent Link: Pending... (feel free to archive, mods!)
X-Posted to: personal lj, tumblr (with streaming audio), gleepodfic, kurt-blaine
(please comment and let me know if this link goes down or you need a different host; i’ll be more than happy to fix it, no matter how long after posting)

reader ramblings notes: feel free to con/crit! also make sure to leave a review on the original story if you liked it! i just read these stories aloud - missgoalie75 did all the hard work!

also! i’m looking for the next fic to do, so i’d also love comments with suggestions. looking for kurt-centric glee fics that are rated low (non-explicit), and short-to-moderate length (less than 10,000 words, plz).

Comments

[sordid-humors.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised no one has commented to offer con-crit yet....

Okay, so here are my thoughts as I wrote them down while listening.
- You have excellent pauses, both between words and between dialogue and descriptions. I wouldn't over-edit those because they're just right the way they are.
- Randomly: whatever recording equipment you're using is very nice. I'm not getting much static. Brava.
- When you cut your breaths, or possibly when you're splicing between takes, the air just goes completely dead. It sounds like a scene break and really throws me off the story when it happens several times very quickly, such as between dialogue. How are you cutting/crossfading?
- You really only did a character voice for Burt and Carol. Everyone else was on the same keel. Ultimately (for me), this made Burt come off as kind of monotone, probably because you were reaching for that lower register. You might want to practice speaking in that deeper timbre to get it warmed up before you record, and work on getting more inflection while you're speaking down there. Whenever we do characters, there's a tendency to either go nuts or to go monotone. You want to keep it more towards the middle so you don't sound schitzo, of course, but I found myself wanting a bit more energy from Burt, since he was really the only one with a stylized character voice.
- There were also a few moments where Finn's dialogue slipped into monotone, similar to Burt. I know he's kind of the dumb jock character, but Cory Monteith manages to get a lot of good tone and inflection in there, anyway. When I'm doing an iconic role (or anything where a specific actor's voice is already associated with the role, really), I practice by speaking along to tapes of the original actor. Helps to get the cadence right. Especially because Finn is tricky, it might be worth trying if you intend to do more lovely Glee fics.
- The distortion at the end was cool but ultimately hard to understand. I had to listen to it twice before I understood what was going on.
- My last note was about camp--specifically the sort of over-the-top Vaudeville-style which Kurt is a delightful revival of. I wanted to see more of that. I could feel moments in the recording where your voice wanted to be more casual, to break into a half-laugh and really "camp it up," as the saying goes. I think, especially because you are reading seventeen year old boys and not Macbeth, you can afford to be more playful with the sound, more informal. I think adding that element would really take this podfic over the top.

Hope that's helpful! I enjoyed your reading. <3

[marsmaywander.livejournal.com]

thank you for listening and offering so much help! i especially appreciate the comment about the jarring silences. i have two methods of cutting extraneous noise (splicing in bits of the file where i'm not speaking, or hitting the 'silence' button in audacity), and i can't tell the difference between them when i listen, but i wondered if that was just because i'm using laptop speakers and it's hard to hear sometimes. also, thank you for the tips about doing character voices. i'm going to try the "speaking along to character quotes" thing for next time. :)

[sordid-humors.livejournal.com]

I've never used Audacity, personally. I took one look at it and ran for the hills. It just... looks like the open source freeware of eight years ago (yeah, I'm a software guy). I've been using TrakAx (http://www.trakax.com/software/pc/), which has treated me pretty well so far. It has very good handling for cross-fading and working with multiple audio tracks--which is perfect for me, since I tend to do multiple takes and splice together the best samples.

I think it's the "Silence" button that's killing you. It's better to play the silences in your recording sessions, that way you have something to chop out later without the "hanging up the phone" effect of a total silence. Definitely use headphones when you edit over laptop speakers--you're going to get a superior sound quality. I've been delving into the land of creating my own sound effects (scary stuff, that), as well as accents--British accents, Irish accents, Russian accents, oh my! The deeper you go, the more you're going to be relying on that sound source, either your speakers or headphones, to show you how on-track you are.

Another thing to check is what bit rate Audacity is recording in, and whether you're recording in MP3, WMA, or FLAC. I'm old-school and record in FLAC; then again, I have the hard drive space. The better quality you're recording in, and the higher the quality of your remastered output, the more small details like the silences or background fuzz are going to stick out. It's something I'm currently fighting, so I feel ya. You want enough quality that the nuances of inflection and tone aren't lost... while at the same time, you don't want the fuzzies, the breaths, and the cuts/cross-fades to be apparent. It's a scale we have to balance, I guess.