The Book Author’s Home Recording Studio.
Everything writers wish they didn’t have to know about creating audiobooks and podcasts on their own schedule.
I talk to a lot of authors in my role as a board member for Sisters in Crime Los Angeles. I’ve just finished editing video of a live event called Inventing the Page with Michael Connelly, Laurie R. King and Walter Mosley, which you can check out right here. To make a thing like that sound good, I do a lot of audio work, and one of the most frequent questions I get from the authors is, “how do I create a home studio to record podcasts and audiobooks, and will it be expensive, and does the software have a steep learning curve, and will my audio get rejected by Amazon, and do you think my voice is good enough to pull it off?”
If that’s you, read on. Let’s just assume you have the pipes and chops of Holly Hunter, because assessing whether or not you have a compelling reading voice is a completely different article.
I’ve engineered a couple of audiobooks and a lot of podcasts, and I have a couple decades experience doing audio post for video and television ads. I also produce and score the Writing Criminals podcast for SinCLA. All this stuff used to be done in professional recording studios, which you’d have to schedule and buy time in. But now, most audio productions — even some that end up in movies – are done in home studios. Need one of your very own? Proceed.
What can I use as a recording booth? You’ve probably thought about it. “I can use my coat closet. My casita covered in Mexican blankets. The back seat of my car!” (People do this. I’ve done it in a pinch with talent when shooting on location.) The biggest issue you’ll have to overcome in creating a home studio is carving out an environment with what Amazon’s ACX calls a “Zero Noise Floor”, meaning, literally, zero noise that’s not your voice.
To comply with ACX specs, in the silences of your recordings, your audio waveform (the picture of sound your software makes and shows on your screen) must be a completely flat line and be measurably under -60db, far more quiet than any room in your house or mine.
Amazon and Audible have not only been notoriously picky about file types and bitrates, they have been known to reject a recording if it detects any hum or rumble in the spaces between your spoken words above -60db. And in a city like ours, full of freeways, police helicopters, jetliners and the constant gush of air conditioning ducts, that can be harder than it may seem, even in that coat closet you’re planning to use.
A lot of the professional talent we work with across the country no longer schedule a schlep to a recording studio — many do so much Voiceover work, daily some of them, that they have a Whisperroom in the garage. It’s a a free-standing booth, a little bigger than a phone booth to create that Zero Noise Floor environment. It seals out just about anything except the barrage of a 4th of July in LA.
That’s great if you can afford it, but for a lot of writers, it’s a little much.
One thing that’s been a pretty great accessory to help create the voice isolation reqired for audiobook production is the Kaotica Eyeball. It’s a mic isolator, a small foam globe (well, not all that small, it’s just about volleyball sized) — made in dozens of configurations to fit a wide range of popular microphones. You’ll still have to be vigilant, and deaden sound reflection behind you, but it will get you, like, 90% to Whisperroom quiet. I have two.
Now. No matter how you do it, set it up, get it right, and don’t touch it. I mean it, paws off. Especially with lengthy audiobook production, you’ll want to be able to edit one days’ work to another and have it sound exactly the same. If you move a mic, it won’t. If you record with the door in a different positon, it won’t. if you sit in a different chair, it won’t. So don’t move or change mics around or change anything, really, about your room once your book, series or production starts.
Even after all this, you may still not achieve a ACX’s Zero Noise Floor, but you can get it close enough that a little bit of light post production, like a noise gate and compression (Garageband comes with both, free) or a digital denoiser will get you legal.
Your Microphone: For most podcasters and audiobook readers, it’s easiest to use a USB mic — a mic that’s built to plug right into the USB-C port on your computer — unlike in my studio, where $2000 mics are plugged into a separate gaggle of preamps, compressors and twinkly lighty thingies.
USB mics have been, for decades, notoriously terrible. Just cheap junk, and if you were reading this 10 years ago, I’d warn you off all of them. But now there are a couple of exceptions. Among them, Shure offers the MV7, a sort of grandchild of the famous (well, famous in my circles) SM7B which, according to legend, Michael Jackson preferred on big hunks of the Thriller album. The MV7 has its preamp and gizmo gaggle installed internally, and gets plugged directly in to your Mac or PC. (It also has a traditional XLR connector if you’d ever need to bring it to my house and plug it into my gizmo gaggle – it’s a professional level mic). Kaotica makes an Eyeball that fits it, but get your settings locked in because that big foam globe may partly cover the fancy LED controls on this version of the mic.
If your closet and room are indeed sufficiently quiet, an unusually excellent choice is the highly portable Tula USB mic. There is always one in my bag. About the size of a pack of cards, it can be affixed to a standard mic stand, or it can rest on its own foldaway foot. I have nearly two dozen professional mics, but we record my wife’s podcast intros and outros with the Tula sitting on the couch. As an extra bonus, the mic has built in memory to record up to 12 hours even when it’s not attached to any computer. Nifty. (Note: Before the Ukraine war, components of these mics were sourced from excellent Russian sources (hence the name), but the company is based in Sweden, and now sources parts elsewhere — which is why you can still buy this mic.)
Your Recording Device and Software: If you’ll have your computer in the closet with you, and you probably will, you’ll want one where the fan is rarely kicks on, except in heavy processing, which usually doesn’t happen when you are simply recording. In my humble opinion, the best choice for a laptop that will share a room with a live mic is a recent MacBook Air with Apple silicon. These chips are so efficient, MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan at all. Making it perfect to preserve the quietude required for publishing by Audible. I’ve owned a lot of Macs and PCs over the years, but I’d really have to point you to an Air. They are light and quiet and wicked-fast for audio production even by professional standards. And it comes with GarageBand on board, which you can use right out of the box, or load any number of 3rd party audio apps from the App Store which some folks find easier to learn. Just be sure they can output files in the format Amazon and Audible require.
If you get very, very serious about this: I grew up using Avid’s ProTools – software that made tape recorders all but obsolete in the 1990s– and it’s still the choice of a lot of my friends in the industry. But I personally now use Apple’s Logic Pro, GarageBand’s big, semi-expensive brother, for everything — podcast production, music production and mixing audio for video. Software of this class, from the free ones to the pro level suites are called DAWs (digital audio workstations). And they all use similar concepts of tracks and regions.
And of you’ve come this far, consider plugins from Izotope, one called Nectar for EQ, compression and to shape voices, and one called Ozone to master — which mostly means to make the audio sound loud and professional within the limits of the tech that will play it. These are professional grade, kinda pricey, and used by every audio pro in Hollywood. Overkill for an audiobook? Maybe. For the work I do, it’s been essential. When you hear what Nectar’s tools do to make voices clear and professional across a range of devices and media, you might get hooked.
But do I really need to spend all that? In the podcasting space, there have been plenty of very popular podcasts done at a kitchen table through the computer’s built in mic or from the audio notes app on iPhone. Even a Zoom call’s audio recording can make a pretty reasonable podcast, especially with a little post-production care. But I gotta say, some really challenge the ear, and a few can be exhausting to listen to over time, no matter how compelling the content. So I’d recommend getting some decent USB mics at the bare minimum.
An audiobook is different. There are pretty strict requirements, and it would be sad to record and edit 30 hours of your unabridged novel only to have it rejected for technical reasons. So, at minimum, get a quiet computer, a quality mic and a strategy for keeping your booth — or closet, or parked car, or casita lined with Mexican blankets — as noise free as possible. And maybe don’t record parked under the approach to LAX.
