How to PowerPoint

Resident elearning guru, David Anderson offers three really easy ways to make your audio sound good.  Instead of recording your audio in PowerPoint, record it using Audacity, which is a free audio editor.

Reduce Background Noise

In this first tutorial, you’ll learn to reduce background and ambient noise to make you narration sound much better.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Boost the Bass

The second tutorial walks through the steps of slightly boosting the bass.  It will make your voice sound warmer and give you a greater sense of presence.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Equalize the Audio Narration

In this tutorial you’ll learn to equalize the audio.  It adds a richness and warmth to your voice only equaled to a cup of hot tea and honey.

Click here to view the tutorial.

Adding Audio Back to PowerPoint

If you’re using a rapid elearning tool like Articulate Presenter, you can just import the audio into the slide using the audio import feature.

However, if you’re using PowerPoint, just select insert sounds>from file to bring the audio file onto the slide.

Hope that helps.  Do you have any audio narration tips and tricks?

Most of us aren’t audio engineers.  We just want to hit the record button and end up with good sounding narration.  We definitely don’t want to do a bunch of tweaking.  If only it was that easy.  Well, it could be.

First, you probably think that the microphone that you’re using sounds fine.  And it might.  However, if you compare it to other microphones, you might find that’s not the case.

Most people I know use headset microphones because they’re portable and typically inexpensive.  But are they the best to use for even simple narration?  You be the judge.

Here’s a demo tutorial I did comparing my headset to a desktop microphone.

• $30 headset
• $72 desktop (with no pop filter or any other type of adjustment)

As you can hear, the desktop microphone has a better sound.  I’d invest in a desktop microphone if you do a lot of recording or expect people to listen to your presentations. 

I use the Samson microphone and am happy with it.  And it’s relatively inexpensive.  You can get them for about $70, now.  It’s worth the investment.

Improve Audio Using the Levelator Tutorial

Click here to view the Levelator tutorial.

Once you have a decent microphone and record your audio, use “The Levelator” to make it sound better.  It’s super easy to do and will give your narration a richer tone.  Is it perfect? NO.  But it’s better than nothing.  And overall, I’ve been pleased with the results.

Here are two posts from the Rapid E-Learning Blog that provide excellent audio recording tips and tricks.

I get a lot of questions about microphones and getting good audio.  I think the single biggest thing you can do to get good audio quality is to switch from a headset microphone and buying a desktop microphone.

You can hear the quality differences in these two examples recorded on the same laptop in the same environment.

• $30 headset
• $72 desktop (with no pop filter or any other type of adjustment)

You’ll notice that the headset microphone doesn’t sound as good.  You also hear the pops of air and movement of the mouthpiece.  That’s why I use a desktop microphone. It just sounds better, which most likely means less editing and retakes.  Plus bad audio is worse than a bad screen.

4 Simple Tips for Recording High-Quality Audio

• Invest in a good mic.
• Maintain a consistent environment
• Get rid of ambient noise
• Dampen the sound

13 More Tips to Help You Record Narration Like the Pros

• Place your microphone in the right position
• Record a demo to make sure it all sounds right
• Listen to the audio playback with headphones
• Don’t get distracted with animations and annotations
• Make sure your script is conversational and easy to read
• Stand up while recording
• Don’t ad-lib
• Have plenty of liquids available
• Get rid of the plosives
• Record 10 seconds of silence
• Relax and don’t rush your words
• Mark your retakes
• Dampen the sound

Check out the post on Understanding Multimedia for Rapid E-Learning.  While it’s about elearning, the core information is the same.

The post discusses:

• differences between vector and bitmap images
• recording audio
• use of video

There are also some good links to some free multimedia software.  Here are a couple that I use quite a bit:

• Paint.net: it’s free and it’s turned into a really nice graphics editor that does most of what people want.
• MovieMaker: Microsoft’s free video editing application.  You’re not going to make Hollywood videos with this, but it’s a very capable and easy to use editor.  Plus, most likely you already have it on your PC.  I see they even have some MovieMaker books for those who want to learn more.
• Audacity: it’s a free audio editor.  Most of the time it’s easier to record in PowerPoint or your elearning application.  But sometimes it’s good to keep the audio and other production separated.  
• Screenr: I find this to be one of the best and easiest to use screencasting tools.  It’s free and you don’t need to download any applications.  I also like that there’s no Screenr branding on the downloaded MP4 videos.