Narrating Stories

Narrating Music Audio Stories is a lot of fun! If you listen carefully to my stories, you will notice that the music is phrased with the narration and character voices, making it almost seem like songwriting rather than your standard audiobook. This quality of writing words and sentences rhythmically was evident from my first audiobook March of The Ants and has continued in every audio story I have written since. As with everything I do, I don't overthink! This just happens naturally.

Once the story and score are written, I record the scratch track. This is the guide track that the actors will later follow when they do their voice-overs. From the guide track, the narrator's lines are cut out and I re-record the lines in my "narrators" voice! I record the narration, in the same way, I record singing, with one side of the headphones off my ears so I can hear my natural voice as I go.

I colour all of the character's lines on the script in different colours to make parts easier to read. I keep all the narration in black ink and even though I already know most of the lines, as I wrote them, I still need the script to guide me.

I don't think of it as "reading" though! When you already know most of the lines it becomes more fluid and more of a performance. At first, as most people will say when they first hear their voice recorded, it was a little strange to hear my voice! For years I have heard my singing voice but never my speaking voice, so it took some time to get used to.

The more audiobooks I made, the easier the narration became and now I absolutely love being the narrator of Music Audio Stories!