Tuesday VO Tech Tip: A Little Interference

I used to help teach bicycle safety through a local county school program. Kids would bring their bikes out to the playground area and we’d teach them to check for issues before jumping on and riding off. Most kids’ bikes live a hard life of neglect and deferred maintenance. The kids were too excited to go through a preride checklist. So, the message we used was “if it’s different, STOP!”

That actually worked pretty well. “Different = Stop!” created a simple, easy test and provided a clear next action. This helped to make them aware of flat tires, detached chains, loose bolts, and non-working brakes.

The same method can be applied to our home VO studios. Working under typical audition deadlines, we often move quickly and might just skip past a more serious issue.

There have been times when I’m helping someone untangle a studio issue and the voice actor will say “yeah… my computer did something last week but it seemed to fix itself.” While there’s nothing like a good, solid reboot to take care of many instances of software daffyness, any type of odd or unique failures are usually worth paying attention to. A program that suddenly quits or freezes may be trying to tell you about a deeper issue. Just flipping the power switch may reset things, but it’s worth pausing for a second to think through what happened just before the problem occurred.

If your recording application is quitting every time you try to save a longer audio file, it could be a hard drive nearing capacity. The short daily auditions you record might not cause problems, but trying to save a copy of a long audiobook chapter could be a few hundred megabytes more than your computer can handle. Glitching audio following application updates could be the result of a changed or incompatible Effect Plug-in. A pitch-shifted recording might indicate that a sample rate got changed inadvertently.

Just noticing that “something is different” may let us identify the cause.

Recently, I was using my Studiobricks recording setup while some serious construction noise took place nearby. The jackhammers and steamrollers had shown up when I needed to get some work out the door. I knew there was a significant amount of environmental noise occurring while recording. Listening back to a section, I heard some low frequency sounds occurring throughout the audio. It seemed like my isolation was not quite as complete as I thought. While starting to reach for the noise reduction tool, something made me stop and dig a little deeper.

Listening back a second time, I realized that it was not really the rumble of heavy equipment vibrating up through the earth, but something more like electrical interference. Scanning my surroundings, it occurred to me that I’d recently shifted some equipment and now had a headphone amplifier inside the booth. Sure enough, unplugging that gear made the interference disappear. If I hadn’t stopped, it would have taken another recording session at a quieter time to expose the issue.

While it may sometimes feel far simpler to slap a quick band-aid on a problem, that pause – paying attention to the “Different? Stop!” rule – can take care of a minor problem before it festers into a larger issue.

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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