Arthur Machen's "The White People" (Live Reading) (March 22, 2020)

In the spring of 2020, while stuck in isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I began experimenting with streaming live audio to Twitch. I wanted to mix, chop, and screw with Creative Commons-licensed music live while reading weird fiction no longer restricted by copyright. My elderly Mac Pro from 2008, connected to even older audio interfaces and a Reloop Mixage Controller Edition USB DJ controller, running El Capitan and old versions of Traktor and Logic, gave me endless troubles. I originally wanted to use MainStage, but it would not behave reliably for me at all and I had to give up. Audio was glitching occasionally, but I kept the setup limping along long enough to finish this live reading. This is a challenging story to read aloud, as much of it is in the form a single monologue of extremely long sentences that flow together into extremely long paragraphs in a hypnotic, stream-of-consciousness style. Because there is continuous background music, no editing was possible. Enjoy! Music: Apophasis: Caul; Cordell Klier: Kingdom; other Dark Winter artists. MP3 file

Captain Dan Danblasten

This is a bit of an oddball story for Hodgson, and not one of his more famous works. It's a romance. Sort of. It involves a pirate, a buried treasure, and a long-lost love -- and some gutter French (apologies in advance for my atrocious pronunciation) and a few dirty jokes. It's a long story, and not his best, but I really love the character he created in this one.

The text I'm using comes from the long-awaited fifth volume of The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. This story has also appeared in a slightly different version elsewhere in the series.

I wanted to record a short story now, although I'm planning some longer works, because I'm trying out a new microphone. It's an Electro-Harmonix EH-R1 ribbon mic, which is really a rebranded Oktava ML-52, a Russian-made ribbon mic. I am new to ribbon mics, but I was just not satisfied with the sound I was getting out of my Neumann BCM-705. It was too "spitty," too unforgiving of little bits of sibilance and mouth and lip noise. So, I sold it on eBay, and bought this one.

So far, I'm liking the way this ribbon mic works on my voice and in my recording space, which is untreated, in the same room as my computer. It's a darker microphone, with a lot of bass response, which helps my somewhat nasal voice, and seems less sensitive to proximity and direction than the dynamic mics. The raw recording seems to need a lot less compression and EQ.

This may not be my ultimate vocal mic, but I think I'm on the right track. I am hoping to buy myself an Oktava ML-53, modified by Michael Joly of OktavaMod, maybe for Christmas. I 'd like to save up for an AEA ribbon microphone preamp, and while there isn't a whole lot of acoustic treatment I can do in this cluttered corner of my upstairs office, I could at least get some foam up on the wall behind the mic, and maybe a foam barrier to cut down some sound from my computer's fan.

There is one more new piece of technology I'm using -- after the new mic hits my Apogee Ensemble, and gets 60 dB of gain, it is getting fed into the RX Denoiser plug-in, and then to the brand-new Alloy plug-in from Izotope. I just bought it today. It is set up with the "Upfront and Crisp" vocal preset, with a few tweaks. Consider this mention to be a plug for the Izotope plug-ins in general, and Alloy in particular -- I'm just getting started with it, but I'm pleased so far.

Then on the ouput, I'm adding a little bit of room reverb from the Ozone plug-in, and that's about it.

I'd be happy go hear any feedback. Just please don't criticize my French -- I KNOW, I KNOW! It's even worse than gutter French spoken by a drunken Irish pirate.

MP3 File

The House on the Borderland Underway

I've begun recording the Hodgson novel The House on the Borderland. That will be the next project, and I'll serialize it by chapter. It will take me a while to complete this one -- sorry, I don't have an ETA, especially since things are going to be unpredictable with the new baby. My goal is to get enough quiet time to finish recording the text of the book before the baby arrives. Quiet time will then likely be very scarce, but I'll do my best.

New Podcast

I have a second podcast and a blog tracking it here. This is more of a personal project. I have a few ideas for episodes, but the general format is going to be whatever pops into my head, so I'm calling it the Potts House General Purpose Podcast.

I'm expecting that "whatever pops into my head" might include field recordings, original ambient music, movie or book reviews, interviews, and rants about this and/or that. Enjoy in moderation!

The End of Summer

We just got back from a family vacation in Grand Marais, Michigan, on Lake Superior.

I made a video -- my first -- using Apple iMove, and uploaded it to a brand-spanking-new YouTube account. The video is our family vacation, in the form of a music video for Jonathan Coulton's song "Summer's Over" (Thing a Week #51).

Here is the video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSVuCYOYYKM

I also recorded several hours worth of water, wind, and people sounds. I took my Sony digital recorder to various spots along the Lake Superior shore at Grand Marais, and also recorded at Munising Falls and upper and lower Tahquamenon Falls. I've got a lot of water sounds, wind sounds, footfalls, boats, boardwalks, and stairs. Some of this material will eventually make it into podcasts. In particular, the Hodgson novel The House on the Borderland features a waterfall, and I'm planning to make it sound as cool as possible!

There are also lots of other Hodgson stories set on ships, and Lake Superior will just have to serve as a stand-in for the Sargasso Sea.

I don't have a timeline yet for starting (or finishing) The House on the Borderland, but I am hoping to record more stories very soon.

The Voice in the Night

It has been almost two years since I last released a podcast. It has been a difficult couple of years; last summer at this time I was in Pittsburgh, and then Erie, to visit my dying mother. We are having another baby in October, so it may be difficult to do any recording for a while, depending on what kind of a sleeper he or she is. I am hoping to get at least a few more stories and perhaps one of the novels completed by then.

Anyway, into the night once again I cast a pod. This may be Hodgson's single best-known short story; it has been adapted for film twice, and the idea has been borrowed numerous times. I find the text to be quite interesting. The narrator appeals to God and gives thanks to God on numerous occasions, but he is undergoing a horrible transformation and dying -- not entirely unlike dying of cancer. it speaks to me of the Book of Job, and also hints that Hodgson's relationship to Christianity was probably not a simple, cut-and-dried one.

I made a few very small edits to the text. Since I represent the "voice" as a modulated voice, with audio special effects, and switch back and forth between the narrative voice and the voice of the mysterious visitor at sea, I have cut out two or three instances of phrases like "the voice continued" and "the voice went on." When listening, there is no need to be reminded who is speaking.

If you are subscribed to the podcast, via iTunes or some other tool, you should be able to receive it now. The listing has not yet appeared in the podcast's page in the iTunes store. I have sent a ping to the server and I'm told it should be there within 24 hours.

I am personally very pleased with the improvements I was able to make in audio quality. I'd welcome any feedback.

MP3 file

Sleep is for those who are not Podcasters

It was getting light by the time I finished my first round of work on "The Voice in the Night." Most of that was setup and experimentation work, though, trying to find a vocal effect that I like for "the voice." The vocal take is 50% edited, the project is configured the way I like it, and the rest will go faster. Then I'm on to experimenting with the environmental sounds, mix-down, and mastering settings.

The rough plan is to do a few short stories, just to get the hang of everything again, and then pick a sound setup that I like and use it to tackle a novel. The stories are generally short enough to record in one session, before my voice starts to give out. The problem with a novel is that it will require numerous installments and numerous nights of recording, and I want them all to sound the same. No one likes to go back and re-do completed work, so it's important to try to get it right up front!

The Updated Studio

The following is really only for recording geeks; read on if you'd like to know what I'm using to put together my latest podcasts. This is really a bit premature since I'm writing this before releasing any of the new audio, but it will be a good incentive for me to hurry up and get something done.

My current apartment studio setup now starts with a Neumann BCM 705. Choice of microphone is highly individual -- a mic that makes one person's voice sound good may emphasize the flaws in someone else's voice. I'm pretty satisified with the way this mic makes my voice sound. My voice is a little nasal and thin -- I've got an extremely deviated septum, which tends to make me tend towards mouth breathing, and if I avoid mouth breathing, my nose is a little "whistley." (Is that too much information?) Not all the time, but you can hear it, and some microphones emphasize breath noise worse than others. This one seems to be fairly resistant to breath noise, and also to pops, to the point where I didn't feel the need to set up a separate pop filter.

This is Neumann's only dynamic microphone and one of only a couple broadcast-style microphones designed to hang from a boom. As such it might seem like a slightly controversial choice -- why not use a BCM 104, a condenser mic? The 705 was also quite a bit less expensive, which is certainly a consideration. Price was not the only consideration -- I did not want to buy a mic made in China. The 705 is made in Germany.

Also, given that the background noise level in my office/studio is not all it could be, I thought that a dynamic microphone might exhibit a little bit less sensitivity to background noise. So far that seems to be true. It might be interesting to do an A/B comparison with the BCM 104, and to try out some other microphones favored by podcasters, but for now I'd buy the mic again. The hanging broadcast-style design makes it much easier to use for reading.

OK, enough about the microphone. The stand is an unexciting cheap boom stand, not really a spring-loaded broadcast-style stand, but good enough for now. From there the mic goes into an Apogee Ensemble. The Ensemble is probably the item that has the most overall effect on the quality of the recorded vocal track. There are much cheaper audio interfaces and mic preamps, and of course much more expensive ones as well. I chose the Ensemble because I've become very sensitive to noisy mic preamps. It has a lot of headroom and a very neutral-sounding noise floor. I also have been gravitating towards doing all the vocal processing -- compression, etc. -- in software, so rather than set up a typical hardware channel strip I decided to spring for as clean and straightforward an input path as I could manage. The benefit there is that you can change your mind: you can just change some software settings if you decide you want more compression, or less, or sibilance removal, or not. As long as the original signal is clean with a reasonable gain level and some headroom available you have a lot of choices. Recording the effected signal tends to limit what you can choose to do with it afterwards.

I've had an occasional technical glitch with the Ensemble, but for the most part it seems quite easy to use. I'm currently monitoring the signal in headphones on the way back out of the computer, which means I'm hearing it out of phase with my voice, but you kind of get used to that; the latency is certainly far better than it was with my USB recording solutions. I'm only really listening for words that sound unclear, pops, excess breath noise, or anything else that would make me record a second take; I'll listen to it in much more detail later.

Anyway, the Apogee is connected to a Mac Pro. The computer is tricked out with 8 cores and 8 gigs of RAM. This is not strictly necessary for Logic; I could get by with a fraction of that. The memory is really there for doing photo work using Aperture and Photoshop, especially for slides and detailed restoration. But it doesn't hurt -- Apple Logic is very responsive on this machine and I can stack up plug-ins and tracks.

Next time, more about the plug-ins and the challenge of creating vocal effects for horror and science fiction -- they must sound strange, not too terribly cheesy, and also be completely intelligible and not fatiguing to listen to!

Back from the Dead

The next Hodgson podcast will be a one-part short story, "The Voice in the Night." This will be the first podcast recorded with my new home studio setup. I am still getting the hang of the new gear and software, but so far I'm extremely pleased with the results -- I'm no longer having to work around audio glitches, and the editing and mixing process is now much faster.

Look for it within the next week or so. I will announce it here, and it will be available through my podcast in the usual ways, including the iTunes store, for free, under an updated Creative Commons license.

Cross-Blog Information and Introductions

In order to try to avoid boring people with material they aren't interested in, I have divided my writing up into five separate blogs. The downside to this is that I have a tendency to wander from one area of interest to another over the course of a typical year, so it may look like I've dropped off the face of the earth. In case anyone is interested in following what is going on in one of my other blogs, I thought it might be useful to post this road map once in a while.

Geek Like Me Too is my general-purpose personal blog. The most recent postings are about a Jonathan Coulton concert in Pontiac that I attended and recorded. I have provided recordings of the show as a set of MP3 files, of interest to geeks who like music.

Geek Like Me is its predecessor, done in Blosxom, now still up only for archival purposes.

Geek Versus Guitar is about guitar playing. Recently I've recorded a few Jonathan Coulton songs myself. It will also be about learning to produce songs with my home studio.

Praise, Curse, and Recurse is about programming topics, mostly Haskell, Python, and Scheme. My free time has been devoted to other things but I will no doubt be back around to programming before too long.

The Marcella Armstrong Memorial Collection is about my family history, and the big task of scanning, restoring, preserving, and archiving family photos and documents. Of interest to any family members, but also of possible interest to people doing their own similar projects.

Tales from the Potts House: William Hope Hodgson contains information about the "Hodgecast" podcast available on iTunes, in which I record classic William Hope Hodgson novels and stories. I have more podcasts planned in both this series and possibly others in the near future.

Anyway, there it is... please join me on any of these blogs that might catch your interest. I always have far too many projects going at once!