Minimalist equipment revisited

I continued fumbling with my new audio gear at random, trying to get used to working as an audio journalist. I needed to find one a story project to get the feel of working with the equipment in a variety of changing situations and having to solve audio problems on the fly.

The opportunity for my first audio story came with a community workshop for youngsters wanting to learn how to play rock and roll music. I knew both the organizers, who gave me come-and-go access to the entire program, because they knew me, my role at the newspaper and my work habits. Even though I had explained my intentions, I drew questioning looks from both upon my arrival.

Instead of a Nikon and camera bag slung over one shoulder, I had only one small point-and-shoot camera either dangling from a strap on my left wrist or snugly bagged on my belt, along with an MP3-sized recorder wired from its own case on the other side of my belt. And then there were those over-the-ear headphones hanging around my neck. By the end of the first day, even I had second thoughts about those.

The whole point of minimizing gear – other than a tight budget – was to keep things simple enough to concentrate on learning the technical process of multimedia production. I wanted to think visually with only one camera and one lens – I mean, look what Henri Cartier-Bresson did with one camera and a 50mm lens! – and I didn't want to be encumbered with a conspicuous set of headphones that felt so awkward clasped around my neck when not in use.

I downsized.

What I wound up using was a high-quality set of ear buds [Philips SHE9500] with soft rubber caps (three sizes provided for a proper in-ear seal) and a fairly short cord, one of the strands being longer to stretch around the neck to the other ear. The shorter around-the-neck cording helped considerably to alleviate the cord tango I'd been dancing the day before. Not only that, but I could unplug one or both ear buds and just let them hang without looking like an out-of-work audio tech.

Two more days at covering the workshop left me convinced that I had at least one more piece of audio gear to acquire: a shotgun mic.

Moving from band room to small classroom to auditorium stage to hallway meant shifting tactics in order to gather decent audio. More than once I found myself holding my tiny Olympus microphone by its tie clasp at arm's length, straining to get better definition of different speakers involved in a group discussion.

The last straw came with my attempt to get a clean recording of both organizers in a sit-down interview with our reporter. This took place on the auditorium stage while a handful of staffers stood around somewhere upstage discussing the day's events. Without the ear buds I could hear both of the directors clearly. With the ear buds in place, I could also hear the upstage discussion, loud and clear. I wound up losing about half the interview for usable audio before clipping two separate lapel mics on the two interviewees, wiring them both into the recorder, and switching the recorder to "Dictation" mode.

That worked, but a shotgun mic might have been so much easier.

For the week's work I wound up with enough good images on the workshop to lay out a nice photo page for my newspaper, but I did not think I had the makings of an audio story, much less the images for a slide show production.

Audio editing

I’ve discovered that audio editing takes an enormous amount of time. Not just in terms of the learning curve involved in getting acquainted with new software, but in the sheer time and concentration required for listening and relistening.

In terms of choosing which audio editing software to use, I settled very quickly on Audacity 1.2.6. It was recommended at the NPPA Summit, and it was free. I also had a 2004 version of the iLife’s Garage Band – and that may come into play in the future – but the obvious place to begin learning about audio editing was Audacity.

Along with the software and a plug-in necessary for dealing with MP3 files, I downloaded the online manual and every tutorial I could find, then printed them off for a “text” book nearly an inch thick.

Since I already had digital recordings of various presentations from the multimedia seminar, this seemed like good material to help me learn the basics of audio editing. I wanted to convert the lectures into brief sets of audio notes that could be “reviewed” quickly to keep myself enthused and focused.

Almost immediately my aging G4 Mac announced that its “startup disk” was nearly full and I should do something about that. Audio editing, it seemed, required a lot of memory, not to mention adequate processor speed. How would my Mac react when I finally got ready to put audio together with visuals? How would my wife react if I announced that I’d have to invest in more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and perhaps even a new Mac?

Well into the night and my shortest lecture file, it became clear that I also needed to develop a systematic approach to an audio editing project.

First and foremost, I needed to SAVE my work frequently to avoid having a lot of work wiped out by a disastrous software crash. (Audacity is reported to be very stable, so I presumed the occasional crash was due to the inadequacies of my computer.)

As for an overall editing strategy, I divided the task into three parts: 1) a rapid rough cut to select the parts I liked, then 2) a trim down session to tighten the selections as much as possible, and finally, 3) the fine tuning edit to even out the audio quality and smooth transitions between cuts.

Without this basic strategy, I spent a couple of hours boiling down a 30-minute presentation by Seth Gitner on “How to get started in multimedia.” The audio track revealed two immediate problems with the tiny Olympus WS-300 recorder: generally uneven levels of recording throughout the talk, and little patches of dead silence between the audible parts. If the speaker paused, the level of recording seemed to drop out entirely, then over-adjust its volume level when the speaker resumed, occasionally also dipping the volume with the leveling adjustment. The little silent gaps were easy enough to remove with the Select and Cut procedure, but I had to "Normalize" each swing and dip in the volume level of the recorded audio in order to obtain a consistent level for playback.

At the end of the evening, though, I had less than three minutes of audio notes – a nice, tightly-edited summary of what I wanted to remember from Gitner's presentation – in his own voice.

The trade-off was an uneasy feeling that what I wound up with probably could not be termed “documentary audio journalism.” It sounded “of one piece,” but was not. Most of the natural pauses for breathing were removed, as were inevitable pauses for thought, and initial sentences broken mid-sentence to be rephrased.

I even shifted some parts of his talk out of sequence, perhaps even out of context, in order to make more sense to my own ear.

Clearly, software for audio editing offered as many opportunities for manipulative abuse as software for photo editing.

The basic rule for the use of photo-editing software has been based upon prior experience: Do nothing to an image that you would not normally have done in the darkroom.

I had no prior experience editing audio. Where were the lines that should not be crossed?