VO Weekly Workflow – Navigating Eddies

Voice actors often run into trouble navigating the eddies of their home recording setup. The image of confusing backwater currents suddenly sending us in weird directions at unexpected times seems an apt metaphor for how things often go when trying to do our work.

Many voice actors simply aren’t entranced by the technical bits. Certainly, much of what we do to record our voices makes little logical sense. For anyone new to recording, it seems odd that numbers get smaller as recordings get louder, or that we want very sensitive microphones that then pick up all kinds of unwanted sounds. We just want to get behind the mic and be brilliant.

Even those who don’t mind the nerdy stuff can get pulled far off task. After all, no one signed onto this VO gig to become their own IT department. Yet we often find ourselves deep into the weeds of computer esoterica in order to troubleshoot strange system behavior just so we can get work out the door.

Whichever camp you may identify with, minimizing the penalty of “wrong” answers pays significant benefits. This is why simplicity matters. I’ve talked about that in terms of our choice of recording software, the items we choose to have with us in the booth, and the amount of processing we might utilize on our audio.

There’s enough that can go wrong on its own without adding needless complexity or reducing flexibility. For example, I’ve worked with narrators who felt “less than” because some others flaunted the time savings of a super short pre-roll time when punching in on their audiobooks. (I prefer an easy 7 seconds or so myself…). There might be a case to be made for all those odd seconds adding up over the course of a longer project. Yet missing even one punch in negates most of that gain. A miss means a return to the beginning (and often another as the frustration from that first flub typically begets another….) or it causes a separate pickup edit later on.

It’s better to loosen the tension a bit so the mistake doesn’t happen in the first place, trusting that there’s more benefit to be gained by doing it well the first time. That may feel slightly less efficient at that moment in time, but it keeps us in the main current, steadily moving forward.

Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

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