Documentally: Recent Episodes
Christian Payne
A few minutes later a band started playing some wonderful dream pop folk.
It felt like summer had arrived. They were called Lost Chimes and their set was one long and lovely sigh. I was blissfully lost in it all.
Music expresses what can’t be said and is one of the most beautiful vehicles for story. And these two do it so well.
The audio above is a chat I grabbed with Gemma and Nicky Kirk as they packed up.
I will assume you have already found their music on Band Camp. Their previous band Hunt Us is also there.
Lost Chimes have new album on the way and while you wait for that, i’ll leave you with their beautiful cover of Joy Division’s, “Love will tear us apart”.
Thanks for listening.
Christian
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit documentally.substack.com/subscribe
A short walk from my hotel is a shop I have passed a couple of times during this brief stay in Austin Texas. It’s at 1105 East 6th Street. A unassuming white shopfront tucked between a barber shop and a beauty salon. Underneath an unlit neon five pointed star are the words ‘Witch Shop’.
It has been closed both times I’ve passed, but I’ve still knocked the door. My curiosity would have it no other way. The second time I knocked, it opened.
Inside was Yamil Henriquez, Cartomancer, Shaman, practitioner of latin folk magic and sorcery. Even though he was ‘spiritually cleansing’ the store in preparation for opening, he welcomed me in. If you have clicked on the attached audio you will hear him telling me a little about the shop.
Walls and cabinets were filled with books, charms and amulets, curios, candles and human remains.
A bowl fashioned from a human skull will set you back $400 and the skull of a human child $1600. Witchy pins and patches are quite a lot cheaper.
In the corner, a table where patrons could have their tarot read, and at the other end are shrines.
Latin America is well known for its witchcraft and occult religious practises. A spiritual mashup of European spiritualism, Taino practices and African magic.
Devil worship and the summoning of ancient demons is common place. It’s usual to call upon the devil to do the work you are not keen on doing yourself.
It certainly was a fascinating corner of the city. Austin has a few places that might surprise including a vampire parlour called the Glass Coffin.
Thanks for listening and here are a few Latin American folktales and legends should you want to know more.
I recorded this audio for day 15 of Audio Blogger’s Month. Check out the hashtag #AudioMo on Twitter and have a listen.
Here are my posts so far. Day 01 / Day 02 / Day 03 / Day 04 / Day 05 / Day 06 / Day 07 / Day 08 / Day 09 / Day 10 / Day 11 / Day 12 / Day 13 and Day 14.
To hear all the podcasts I share in this dispatch please subscribe.
Cheers,
Christian.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Drinks were had, a microphone was produced and I began to chat with Dave Thackeray. A few minutes later Jon Carmichael was pulled into the mix and I got him to reshare one of my highlights of the #TDC22. The story of how he got to create ‘one of histories most amazing photos’.
There was a party on the banks of the River Tyne in Gateshead. The afterparty for Thinking Digital. The finale for all that had come before and a celebration of it’s success.
Herb Kim, Emma Turnbull and the team had done it again. Another wonderful curation and delivery of a fantastic tech based event. An international meeting of the most curious souls, all descending on the North East of England with open hearts and minds.
For many, this is a yearly pilgrimage, but having been deprived the last two years we were back with an appetite for connection. An aching to re-immerse ourselves back into the finest curiosity cult in physical space. A collective of geeks, nerds and devs. Futurists, academics and researchers. Techies, hackers, designers and consultants. Even some normal folk. A wonderfully eclectic gathering I feel very much at home with.
We got together. We learned about design thinking, fintech, blockchain, VR, the social web, astronomy, robotics, psychology, education, whisky and so much more.
Ten years ago in a blog post about Thinking Digital, I shared how my body and mind had been ‘invigorated to exhaustion’. This year, this antidote to ‘remote’ was the same.
I feel we are still on the cusp of so much. Technology is best when it brings people together and these physical spaces, where we can share and learn, enable us to collaborate and converse in a much higher resolution than any screen can offer.
Also back in 2012 I mentioned that the subtle combination of body language and expression was still undigitizeable. This year, even though a computational social scientist will have us think the algorithms know us intimately, the context is missing and a guess is as good as it gets.
So for now, intimacy and our thoughts still belong to us. Apart from when we come to Thinking Digital, a hive of learning, sharing and collaboration. Where intimacy and thoughts are shared freely with like minds.
Here is a link to a Twitter thread from TDC22
Here is a link to the #TDC22 tagged tweets.
Thanks for listening and/or reading.
I have more audio for supporting subscribers of this email in the pipes. The sporadic email I post to Documentally.net is free. The archive, all content and access to the other channels is available to all supporting subscribers of this dispatch for the small cost of £4/month or £55/year (That’s $5/m $69/y).
Thanks in advance for supporting my endeavours. If you take out a supporting subscription and would like three free months to NordVPN let me know and I will send you a voucher.
For those that like to think ahead, registration for Thinking Digital is open for 2023.
Thank you to Jon Carmichael for chatting with me. Please go check out his work.
For the audio geeks, I recorded the above audio on the Sennheiser Hand Mic Digital (Amazon Affiliate link just incase you are flush). It plugs straight into the iPhone and so I can’t monitor the audio but as you can hear the limiter handles drunken raised voices pretty well. It also does a decent job of isolating background noise. The audio was recorded into VRP7 and I left it unedited apart from a few seconds of when (an even drunker than us) guy shouted a rude word into the mic. It didn’t really add anything and he did ask for it to be removed.
Please share this with to anyone you think might appreciate it.
I’m @Documentally on Twitter. I consult and run workshops on content creation and narrative strategy. Feel free to reply to this email if you would like to know more.
See you on the web, in the back channels, next year at #TDC23 or in Egypt on the August 2nd 2027 for the total solar eclipse.
Cheers!
Christian.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit documentally.substack.com/subscribe
This unedited stream of consciousness was recorded and uploaded using my iPhone.
It used to be really easy to capture and upload audio with AudioBoom. There might still be workarounds but I’m pleased to see this appears to work.
The bird I watched catching fish while recording was in fact a cormorant. Such skills.
I recorded the audio in VRP7 and in the same app converted the audio to MP3 before uploading to iCloud. I then took a photograph with the standard camera app and uploaded that and the audio into Substack in the browser. I wrote most of this text using voice dictate.
Having a laptop certainly makes writing my dispatch easier on the road, but should I want to travel light, I’m glad there is a podcasting solution like this I can use with just the phone.
If you want to dip into the previous 39 recordings you know what to do ;-)
Documentally is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts (especially audio) and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I’m looking forward to doing more of these in the not too distant future. Possibly from the Thinking Digital conference on the 18th & 19th May. If you want to hang out there there may still be a couple of tickets left.
Don’t forget you can comment or reply to this email. It’s always nice to hear from you.
Thanks for reading/listening.
christian
@Documentally
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to another rough and ready conversation captured over the phone.
In this episode I call Mark Cotton aka @MCFontaine at his home in Northampton.
As is the theme with this podcast, while introducing you to another supporting subscriber of the Documentally Dispatch you will also get introduced to some kind of interfering distortion or digital anomaly.
Thankfully apart from a cameo from that and some wildlife, Mark features most. We talk about his work as a freelance podcast producer, particularly the Bletchley Park Podcast. We also chat about his foray back in to music, his passion for AudioMo and Alan Moore another Northampton lad gets a mention.
Previous episodes in this mini series:
Episode 1 with Harriet Dodd.
Episode 2 with Jim Robbins.
Episode 3 with Tim LeRoy.
Episode 4 with Carolyn Jones.
This is the podcast feed url.
If you are a supporting subscriber and would like to be on the podcast please email your phone number and best times to call. I’m working my way through a bit of a list but if I do happen to suddenly call unannounced you should know the drill by now ;-)
Thank you to Mark for joining in the fun.
Please make the time to listen to him at work as he gathers stories from a generation past and preserves them for many generations to come.
And thank you for listening.
Christian
@Documentally
P.S. The wasp is still somewhere in the shed.
The intro and outro in my podcasts are made using music composed by Andre Louis AKA @FreakyFwoof and Gary Terzza also known as @VoMasterClass is the announcer.
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Let us begin the experiment.
An open-ended podcast mini series with supporting subscribers of my weekly email.
It’s entitled ‘On The Line’ as unprepared and unscripted, we enter a state of uncertainty. I am also (while not able to meet face to face) recording these impromptu chats over the phone.
Episode one features Harriet Dodd, a coach and mentor specialising in non-profit organisations and social enterprise businesses across the world. In fact, it was over 2000 miles across the world where we first met.
In the audio we mention a mutual friend, a guy called Phil. That author, Journalist and surfer Phil Sands.
We also chat about Care International, the IRC and a project we were working on for the UNHCR. That can be found here Life In The Shadows.
Harriet can be contacted via her website and feel free to connect with her via LinkedIn.
If you are a supporting subscriber and would like to be on the podcast let me know. Be warned though, time is doing weird things at the moment so there may be a long wait. Either way I’d love to know you’re there and up for a recorded chat.
Many thanks to Harriet for taking part.
And thanks for listening.
Christian
@Documentally
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Fresh back from a Cornish holiday.
Here are a few clips I captured down there and stuck together with a little bit of ‘Dayvan Cowboy’ from Boards of Canada.
I’d packed a load of radio and recording tech but used hardly any of it. The audio above was recorded mainly on my phone. Sometimes with my shirt pulled over it to block the wind.
You can tell the bits when I forgot to do that.
The only audio not recorded on my phone was recorded with my radio. It has a handy feature where you can record both transmitted and received signals.
I mentioned Clive in my last email and you can hear him in the audio above. Just a snippet as I only recorded the first couple of contacts. He had so many amazing stories. I hope I get to collect and share a few.
I’m out of radio range with him till we establish a long range HF way of communicating. Till then we of course have the less fun ways of chatting. Email, phone and Zello.
Weird being back home. Great to see the dog and she was excited to see us. But she seems a little sulky at the moment. Probably wondering if we are going to hang around.
I also just found out that Story Maker has sold. I no longer own a Narrow boat. As things are, keeping hold of such a luxury would have been a little too extravagant for my means.
I’m feeling sad to see her go but happy to have had the adventures.
She sold for a respectable price and it might be that I take a year out. I mean why not. I’ve pretty much taken four months out already.
Unless you know of:
A foolproof investment opportunity where I can’t fail to double my money.
A really great value thirty foot or smaller leisure craft.
A small woodland for sale with planning for a yurt.
An electric Land Rover Defender.
A paramotor and lessons.
If I do take a year out I might put the Documentally Dispatch on hold. There is a pause button that can suspend all payments. What I will probably do is create a thread in Substack to flesh these options out.
Till then, It’s way too warm for the early hours of the morning in the shed and I really should get some sleep.
Thanks for reading and/or listening.
Take care,
Christian
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Audio Archiving and an Introduction to Editing.
This is episode six in a six part mini series on how to podcast.
In Ep1 we asked what is a podcast and why make one?
In Ep2 we looked at format tone and finding your style.
In Ep3 we covered audio capture and tone.
In Ep4 we looked at how to write for you podcast.
In Ep5 we covered interview techniques.
The full podcast archive and all content to come is open to supporting subscribers for less than the price of a beer each month.
Some of the things we cover are in this episode are:
How to organise and archive your recordings
Finding the best editing app for you.
How to tighten your audio but keep it real
Where to cut and how to mix
Editing software I mention:
Audacity / GarageBand / Hindenburg / Reaper / ProTools First / Adobe Audition and what I use for editing… Ferrite Recording Studio
Podcasting hosting I mention:
Audioboom / Blubrry / Buzzsprout / Libsyn / Podbean / Simplecast / Soundcloud, Spreaker / Transistor and check out Anchor if you want to get up and running quickly with just your phone.
[None of the links in this email are affiliate links.]
I am very grateful to those that contributed to this podcast. I invited four male and three female audio professionals from my Twitter lists but guessed it would be hard for many to participate. One friend I have known for 20 years was sick with Corvid-19. Thankfully he has since recovered.
So many thanks to Mark Cotton, Manoli Moriaty and Patrick Perdue who responded and submitted audio clips. Please click their names to find out more about them.
Podcast music resources mentioned by Manoli were Filmstro / Ben Sounds and Free Music Archive.
I also used music from both Andre Louis and Ketsa.
I have already mentioned that I edit in Ferrite. It’s only when you get the shortcuts set to your liking that you feel the real power of this amazing app.
Watch this video through and see if this is the kind of workflow that might appeal to you.
(Thanks Al Power for bringing this video to my attention.)
Here is a video of the workflow for Audacity and here is one for Reaper.
If you enjoyed this podcast please like it’s webpage. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment (subscribers only) and if you’d like podcast consultation then Founding Subscribers get an hour for free!
My parts of this podcast were recorded in my shed during the Corvid-19 lockdown of 2020. I used Zoom H6 and a Rode NT4 and edited in Ferrite on a first edition iPad Pro.
Thanks for listening. Normal(ish) service shall resume soon.
Please share and take care.
Christian
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
Two things in the audio.
1st. A recipe for the future. A bunch of questions about the direction of this email. Like how and when it is delivered.
Yes I know there are are more important things in the world… like a global pandemic. But with workshops being cancelled left right and centre, I’d really like to make a go of being able to work from home and this email could be one solution.
2nd. A recipe from the past. Many thanks to Chris aka @CyberDoyle. for sharing the secret to the best rice pudding I’ve had.
So please have a listen to the audio and then let me know your thoughts in an email or the comments below.
Things to consider…
Shall I carry on as normal and miss the occasional email if things get crazy busy?
Shall I do away with the deadline and format and post stuff sporadically?
Or perhaps make all issues subscription only.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
In tomorrow’s subscriber only email i’ll share a few moments from my 1200 mile camper van trip (some of you already heard this audio) and then… who knows?
Once again, thanks for reading and listening.
See you out there.
Unless you’re in self imposed quarantine.
Christian
P.S. Hitting the red button below creates a parallel universe. Join me there.
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
I took this photo after a sporadic, meandering drive to my current destination. The Tan Hill Inn. The highest Pub in Britain.
Night has since descended and the weather has been dialled up to eleven.
I’m taking some solace from being in a metal carapace and not a tent. The wind is howling outside and the fact I just used the word carapace may give away that I’m supping wine for morale and central heating.
Do not be fooled by these still images. Everything is tidal. From the wine in my cup to the bile in my belly.
Tonight I will either sleep or stare into the dark with a fevered wind as my soundtrack.
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
What is a podcast and why make one?
In this episode we talk about the difference about podcasts and social audio.
Why sometimes you might just want to get your audio out there as quick as possible.
I also discuss some of the benefits audio has as a vehicle for your story or information.
Plus I mention the app VRP7 and foam microphone windshields.
For homework i’d like you to write down a podcast outline:
Write down the title of your show…
Then write down what your show is about…
Then write what someone might expect…
And then write down why someone should listen…
i.e. This podcast is called Documentally on Podcasting. It shows you how to start a podcast from scratch and on it you will hear tips and tricks about podcast planning, capture, creation and dissemination. You should listen if you are looking for an informal no fuss guide on how to start your own podcast.
Please post any questions or your podcast outline in the comments below.
Thank you for listening.
And if you think someone else might be interested in this series please let them know.
Over to you.
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe
I still haven’t got round to getting an amateur radio licence. So as a stop gap and yet another distraction, I have thrown myself back into CB Radio.
I dug out my old power pack and SWR meter but I was missing the essential ‘Rig’ (CB radio) and ‘Twig’ (antenna). So I headed to my closest shop selling CB equipment. Thunderpole In Northampton.
There are other shops out there and i’m not affiliated with the shop in any way. I paid full retail price for everything and I have recorded this audio for fun not profit.
(I’m more than happy to record a podcast for you though. For money. Or train you to make your own. ;-)
The guys were very helpful. Especially Joe (Jumping Master). A Coventry lad like me and someone I’m sure I would have crossed frequencies over there back in the day.
I mostly had a CB on my pushbike and it feels strange having one in the car. It’s weird driving along talking on a communication device. At the moment it’s not illegal to chat on the CB while driving. According to Ofcom, as long as you are transmitting CB in the 27MHz range you come within a legal exception. This exception was created because so many government and private organisations (e.g. taxis) use 2 way radios.
So far it’s been fun. I’ll drop more info into the next email.
Thanks for listening!
This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at documentally.substack.com/subscribe