This week I finished the recording of ‘A Good Liar’ and here are a few things I learned, in case you fancy doing it yourself.

  1. Find a good studio with a decent mike and a proficient engineer. Mine was the Music Farm in Egremont, only 20 minutes from home,mf-studio7 and exactly what was needed.
  2. Abridge if you need to – definitely consider the number of CDs, cost of duplication and packaging, and the consequent price.
  3. If you’re not using CDs, consider whether all your potential customers/listeners will have the necessary new technology at their disposal or within their confidence boundaries.
  4. Once you have the text you want, print it out, double spaced and in good dark quality. Number all the pages.
  5. Read and rehearse, marking up your script with prompts about where to take a breath or a longer pause, and alerting yourself to difficult words or phrases. The fewer times you have to stop and re-record, the quicker the process, with less studio time and lower costs. Rehearsal before you go to the studio is key, at least twice and more for difficult passages.
  6. Do all the sound checks, wear the headphones and get used to them.
  7. In front of the mike, use a stand and arrange your pages in such a way that you can work through them without having to stop each time you need to go the next page. A very good mike will pick up every sound, so practice doing this until you can do it confidently without making a noise or stopping. It helps if each page ends at the end of a paragraph when you would be pausing anyway.
  8. Have water at hand, you’ll need it.
  9. If you make a mistake as you read, or if you’re not entirely happy with the way it sounds, stop and re-record straight away – much easier than going back to it. If you need to stop frequently, don’t worry about it, just keep going. Afterwards, however, think what made you hesitate or stumble and try to correct it before the next session.
  10. Concentration is key to both the technical quality of the recording and the feeling you can put into the text. This is where recording your own story is so effective, if you can do it well. You know everything there is to know about the story and that will come through.