VO Weekly Workflow – Raw Should Sound Good

One of the ideas I offer in my VO recording classes is that our frame of reference for audio quality can be a bit skewed. When we start recording ourselves, our reference point for that quality is often the fully produced spots which we hear everywhere.

The high concept advertisements we encounter now have considerable sound design behind them. Long form documentary narrations are another area where we can be in awe of the aural richness.

Listening to our own recordings, you might wonder why they don’t sound like those examples. A quick googling or chatgpt’ing might turn up all sorts of “secrets of the pros” – recommendations for a myriad of tools to beef up our sound and get that “finished” polish.

There are certainly a load of those “secrets” available to us. The speed at which noise reduction and polishing tools have improved in the last few years has been very impressive. The combination of those two trends create the sense that everything can be fixed after the fact.

That takes the pressure off getting things right at the beginning. A good room and decent quality equipment may seem less important if we use those cool tools. That’s not the case. Building upon an unstable foundation will always create problems down the road. The better your raw audio sounds, the better the finished result will sound.

I have been reviewing audio samples for many years. Over a thousand voice actors have sent in samples. In the last year or so, more VO’s have noted that they are embarrassed to send in raw audio. It’s not quite enough to be called a trend, but frequent enough to be noticeable. When asked why, they will often reference a particular streamer or podcaster. In most of the examples they share, the amount of observable processing in the audio is pretty extreme. We just don’t sound like that naturally. And that’s OK. It’s important to realize that isn’t how they sound without gobs of aggressive processing.

In a similar vein, there’s a lot of well-meaning but incorrect advice for audiobook narrators. I’ve untangled a lot of workflows that people used to try to hit the delivery spec for ACX in their raw recordings. This is another example of someone trying to match the end result with their initial audio. It just doesn’t work that way.

Where does that leave us? It helps to realize we won’t sound like the end product. But we do need to know how we should sound.

Create a reference recording. I always encourage anyone recording themselves in their own space to archive a recording of a known script. Ideally, this is text that you can easily and consistently perform. Create a folder and save the raw audio with a date stamp. As you change and update your space, take a moment to record a new reference audio. This gives you a solid baseline you can listen back to if things start to sound “different” to you. It also can give more comfort with the sound of your space, allowing you to trust your work.

Posted 1/27/26

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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