Hiya! It's a new person!

[KristyCutie]

Hi everyone! It's a me, Kristyn!

I'm excited to try my hand at some reading! I won't lie though, I'm a little nervous too. I'm sure I can handle the technical side of it, but I definitely can be self-conscious about my voice. That's part of the reason I want to do this too. It will expose me to my voice so much more, and help me become more comfortable with it.

As a note, I'm a trans woman - I've recently transitioned from male to female. As such, I'm a little uncertain how I feel about how my voice sounds, and have some trouble critiquing it on my own. And while I know all sorts of voices are appropriate here, I really want to strive to create the best production I can when reading. I figure just doing it, and practicing, would be a good way to improve - but if anyone has any resources that they feel might help in this regard, feel free to share them!

[msfry]

Hello Kristyn. Welcome to Librivox. To put you at ease I'll share that most readers start out hating our own voice because it isn't what we hear in our own head. But nobody else has that expectation. Listeners just accept that that's how you sound. As to producing "good" recordings, you'll never please everybody, but my take on it is I try to please the authors, as if they were alive and hiring me to represent them! Am I doing them justice? Capturing what they really mean -- the humor, sadness, charm, pacing, or anger of their words. To me, the trick is to pick things to read that I resonate with, get it recorded, then carefully edited. Assuming a male orator or character, for example, I haven't found it matters to the listener whether the reader is male or female, (except perhaps in a dramatic production with male and female roles). What is important is to be authentic, so I say just be yourself and you'll do fine.

So now, just follow the instructions in your Welcome Letter, submit your 1-minute tech specs test, then pick a few short pieces from our Readers Wanted forums to practice on. Poems and children's books are good places to find short pieces. I look forward to seeing you around the LV playground!

[KristyCutie]

Thank you! I really appreciate your post. I definitely don't expect to please everybody, because I know each listener would have their own preferences - but I've certainly listened to audio books who wouldn't be my "preferred" voice, but I absolutely enjoyed their work nonetheless. It's a very subjective thing, so there isn't a lot of worth in worrying about it.

I'm very excited to be starting here! I will be posting my 1-minute test soon. Waiting for new stuff to come in (tomorrow or Wednesday), because the headset I already had wasn't cutting it for where I wanted it. From most of the research I've done, it's probably because it wasn't a USB mic (used 3.5mm connection), and my computer just wasn't cutting it when it came to processing. It was literally one of the cheapest headsets I could find, that my husband was using for gaming a while back. I've seen a lot of feedback around that even just a cheap USB headset can typically help.

[msfry]

LV doesn't require you to use a good mike, but my own experience is that everything I recorded my first year with my noise-cancelling Logitech headset sounds like my nose is pinched. I wince now when I listen to it - and I'm talking whole books here. After I got my USB Yeti Blue desk set, there was a dramatic improvement in audio quality. It makes sense that a USB connection would give a richer fuller sound.

[annise]

One of the reasond USB microphones usually sound better is because of the sound card in the computer - sound cards are often poor quality in cheaper computers and the usb bypasses the sound card.

Anne

[KristyCutie]

Anne,

That was my understanding. I definitely was not concerned about the quality of the sound card when I purchased this laptop, so that seems very reasonable. Thanks for the note!