In the Home Voiceover Studio: The Limiting Factor – Tuesday Voiceover Tech Tip

When working with other voice actors, my sessions often start by answering gear-focused questions. Gear issues are what I help folks wrangle – getting their new or improved studios rigged up and tuned to sound competitive for voiceover projects. We focus on a smart gear set up to support the creative workflow. 

But because VO work balances the creative and the technical, it’s easy to start focusing on particular equipment and wondering if it’s doing all it could be doing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. it’s always worth questioning whether a specific piece of equipment is handling the necessary task. 

The problem occurs when we start asking if there’s something “better.” 
Because, the answer is “yes.” There’s always something “better.”

A more appropriate query might be, “is this piece of gear limiting me in any way?” That question helps frame things in a more helpful manner. If your interface or microphone is adding excessive noise to your recordings, that’s a pretty serious limitation. That is why spending just a little more for decent gear is a good investment. It’s always a strong plan to get the best quality equipment that works within your specific budget.

The actual gear may not be what is holding us back. Even we spend twice as much to replace it, there might only be a negligible improvement. 

Playing around with the new Rode NT1 Generation 5 microphone got me thinking about this idea. I’d left it set up in the booth instead of my Mojave, and ended up auditioning with it for a week or so. It was entirely possible to book work on that microphone, even though it was less than half the price. In a well treated space, it would not be the bottleneck to good quality recordings and won’t be the reason for not booking a project. I’ve said before that we do live in a time of riches for good quality gear at an affordable price. 

We see this in any artistic endeavor. A painting will not capture our attention because of the type of brush which was used, or the particular canvas it was painted upon. It still comes down to the choices and execution made in the moment of creation. 

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