The podcasting partners and I recorded a practice show over the weekend; it came out a lot better than I expected, actually, although there was definitely room for improvement.

Now, the three of us are pretty comfortable public speakers, and at least two of us have what could charitably be referred to as “disk jockey” experience, but even with that it’s sometimes amazing just how much extraneous noise creeps into speech. “Uuuhhhss…” and “ummmss…” and the pernicious “sort of” pops up a lot, especially in the case of yours truly. I am blessed to be free of inserting “like” every third word or using the Cheerleader’s Question Mark (“You know that’s like when you end every sentence on a rising note? Like you’re trying to get everybody to agree with you? And it makes you sound like really vague and annoying or whatever?”), but I did occasionally find myself actually making “tic-tic” noises to fill audio space when trying to come up with the second half of a sentence.

Fortunately, a lot of the more egregious stuff can be fixed in post-production, but with that you have to have a light touch so it still sounds natural. For our ten-minute test show, I probably cut out at least 45 seconds of “…” and I probably could have been more aggressive, but when it comes to the actual showtime, I’m also going to try to keep us working from an outline (which will then form the basis of show notes) and try to schedule our recording times for some point when we’re all a little more awake for it. I don’t mind if we sound like NPR, but I don’t want us to sound like “NPR on sedatives.” ;)

There are a few technical things I need to keep in mind for the actual show as well … up the gain on the voices, reduce the gain on the music, etc. But on the whole, I was quite pleased! Hopefully we’ll have a website and other good stuff in the next week or two. I’m jazzed about it!

-The Gneech

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