Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-39874510-20190628000721/@comment-35711173-20190629015419

Nightwell,

I will do my best to help. This is a good community here that really wants to help. There is even a "Narration Station" section in the forum for narrators.

Critically analyze one of the big name narrators. Break down how much time in the narration is spent with what. I think you will notice distinct lead-in and lead-out music, but it is separate from the drama and fades. See how they pace their stories and how they use sound. Track of the number of seconds of music they use.

You can download YouTube videos using a YouTube downloader. (Atube Catcher is one) I would download ones you really like as MP3 files and then use a spectrum analyzer to take them apart and see what makes them good. See how loud the background sounds are relative to the narrator.

You can download the automatically generated closed caption transcript with timestamps. You can use that to see what they use when and how they pace the story.

The narrators I like will have a beginning that says who the story and author is. Give it a try.

I've noticed that narrators often mispronounce "foreign" words, even ones so common that it really surprises me. It's somewhat surprising when the finest narrators so obviously stumble on this.