Recording A Live Presentation To Create An Audio Product

Do You Realise Just How Many Products You Can Make Out Of Just One Audio Recording?

If you speak or present live in any way on any subject to any number of people, then you have great potential to instantly & easily create audio products simply by recording your voice as you deliver your presentation.

There are a number of ways to do this. The easiest and least expensive way it a basic lapel or tie microphone and a pocket digital voice recorder.

I have used this simple set up for many reasonable to great quality recordings – totally usable as saleable products:

Olympus WS series recorder

• Select any model in your price range
• Make sure it records .mp3 files (it may also record as .wma and .wav).
• Set you recording quality to the highest possible (
• USB connector makes it supereasy to transfer audio to your comuter. Just drag and drop.
• For best results, always record at the highest quality setting possible. This will use up memory fastest, so you may want to consider memory size (Gb) and the option to expand with a memory card. If you copy your recordings to computer every few days and clear the recorder memory then you will not need to expand with a memory card..

Audio Technica 3350 tie-clip microphone or any decent minijack/3.5mm jack microphone from Maplin/Tandy/RadioShack/JB HiFi/Dick Smith – depending on your country. Remember to make sure the microphone battery has plenty of juice to last your recording time.

Click here for recommended low cost, super easy audio tools then follow this step by step guide to recording your presentation

Positioning the Microphone

1)     You will need to clip the microphone to your clothes, so wear something that can hold the microphone in place without moving. You don’t want the microphone to fall inside your shirt or blouse and record the sound of clothes brushing across the microphone, or a muffles sound from inside your jacket.

2)     Pass the microphone up under your shirt or inside your clothing and then clip the lapel microphone to your lapel just below your collarbone and as near to the centre of your body as possible.

Tuck the cable neatly out of the way so that you don’t pull on it by accident.

3)     Make sure you can move your arms and body without covering the microphone or pulling on the cable.

NOTE: Your microphone may be battery powered. Remember to switch it on and use a fresh battery!

Connecting to the Voice Recorder

1)     Check that the voice recorder has lots of battery power.

2)     Connect the microphone jack (or plug) into the ‘microphone’ socket on the voice recorder.

3)     Do a short test recording to make sure everything is connected, working and that you have good sound quality. Do this by playing the audio recording back, ideally through good quality headphones to really check on the audio quality before going ahead and recording your presentation.

Recording Your Presentation

1)     I know this is obvious….but remember to PRESS RECORD before you start! Even after years of recording people professionally, I have to confess that very occasionally I have forgotten this myself…but luckily never missed anything too vital.

2)     Start your recording with a spoken ‘audio’ label. Just say a few words straight after pressing record to clearly show what the recording is about. For example, your audio label maybe something like this:

‘21st of July 2011-  Business presentation at the UK Professional Speakers Association on how to use video in social media, session 1 – why video and social media is important to your business…’

This is so that when you transfer your audio to your computer, you will easily be able to identify the recording and its contents just by listening to the first few seconds, and you can then label the file with the right details for easy reference.

3)     Ideally your voice recorder will have a safety switch of some kind to ‘lock’ the record button in position so you are unable to accidentally switch the recording mode off while the recorder is in your pocket. Make sure this is on.

After Your Presentation

1)     Create a folder on your computer to save all your recordings in, together with any other files you may have used during a presentation e.g. slide show, graphics, handouts etc. This is so that you have the option to create further products with your audio recording by adding slides and other visual material to the audio and creating a video from your MP3.

2)     Transfer your recording(s) to your computer and label them with the right file name.

3)     Your audio can now be edited by using a super easy editing program like Audacity to remove any gaps or mistakes from the recording. This can be done by simply selecting or highlighting the parts of the audio you want to remove and deleting them in exactly the same way as you would when working on a word processing document.

Once that’s done simply ‘export’ your edited audio as an mp3 and your audio product is ready to go.

Audio & Video ‘Done For You‘ – Click image below…

For more on recording audio take a look at my “Easy Audio” ebook series.