Good news, everyone! As of today I have officially wrapped recording for the audiobook version of Gift of the Shaper!

It took me just over a month to do everything — installing sound dampening material in my “studio” (below), putting up the microphone, doing all the voices, and doing multiple takes for those times where I jut forgot how to read in the middle of a sentence.

Fortunately I had some practice when I tried doing a YouTube series, so I mostly had what I needed already — I just had to put it to use.

THE PROCESS

Once I had everything set up, I would have to go through the painstaking process of recording. It basically consisted of me locking myself in my closet (to minimize outside noise) and recording for 4-6 hours a day, depending on how adventurous I was feeling.

I think the toughest part was the voices, though. Since I have so many characters, and any well-narrated story has a different voice for each character, I had to figure out exactly how to match the voice that I was born with the voice that fit each character. I’m of the school of thought that each character should sound a certain way: a character like D’kane, who is devious and uncaring, is not going to have a light, high-pitched voice. People would laugh, and not in a good way. But sometimes, just doing a different voice for a character wasn’t enough.

DO I DETECT A HINT OF AN ACCENT?

I had a little trouble with the female voices, mostly because my voice is decidedly not female. That was going to be a problem because there were a few chapters where I had more than one female speaking together — and I wanted the listener to be able to tell them apart. My solution?

Throw an accent in there!

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with accents as I mentioned in a recent interview with the Author Stories podcast, so this part was actually a lot of fun. And, while not being perfect at the accents, I felt pretty confident about my ability to pull off doing Scottish, Irish, English (Cockney and Received Pronunciation), and good old Midwest American. Thank goodness for YouTube because I definitely needed a refresher on the Cockney and Scottish accents a few times.

But for a project that took as long as this one, what happens if you forget which voices you did for which characters?

KEEP IT CONSISTENT

Before recording, I found this video by Bill DeWees to be incredibly useful. The two biggest things I took out of it were (1) maintain a consistent distance from the mic, and (2) title each chapter with the names of the characters involved (see below).

I found myself, more than a few times, going back and playing the audio file for a certain character to remind myself what they sounded like, so this was absolutely crucial in getting the recording done — and done well.

But, after a few weeks of work, I had recorded the final line of the final chapter of the book. Now all that’s left is the editing, and I’ll be submitting it to Audible for processing!

Oh, and in case you’re curious about it yourself, there are standards you have to meet for recording, so don’t just dive into it thinking you’ll be fine.

THAT’S ALL (S)HE WROTE

Stay tuned for further updates if you’re interested in the audible version; otherwise you can pick it up in paperback if you haven’t already.

If you had any questions about the process that I didn’t address here, feel free to get in touch with me or message me on Facebook. I’m usually pretty good about checking it.

-D.L.