Everyone loves to get out ahead of the competition, which has led to a cascade of "special early-bird savings" emails. It's easy to get overwhelmed and excited in equal measure. Although it may be cool to get an amazing deal on a new microphone, will that really help your VO business in the long run?
A bit of mid-session adaptation underscored a point I repeat often: things will always go wrong. As counterintuitive as it seems, starting with that mindset takes the pressure off of us.
Is distortion ever a good thing in the home voiceover studio? Getting things correct at the source is a key step in good sound. In our home voiceover studios we attempt to capture a very dynamic instrument - the human voice.
The term "distortion" crops up frequently when discussing audio from home voiceover studios. Distortion may be applied to a wide variety of recording steps, making it tricky to determine precisely what someone might be talking about. The effects of distortion can range from recordings sounding "not quite right" to a vocal track that sounds like a space alien has taken up residency in our booth.
The need for additional recording options can occur when we are in charge of the actual recording. In most home voiceover studio setups, the focus is on capturing high quality sound from your microphone. Understanding how to get the sound from your booth microphone into your recording software remains the first step in VO home studio setup. Needing to record someone else who is not even in the same space is an added layer of complexity once you've solved that.
Before we start trying to record different streams of audio, it's helpful to understand a bit about I/O routing. As I mentioned in last week's email, "I/O" stands for "Input/Output." The actual I/O routing determines how each piece of software connects with different audio signals. Some signals - like that from the microphone - flow "into" the app, while anything that is broadcast from the app is flowing "out." While this may seem like a simple concept, it can get a bit confusing when we start sending the output from one app to another.
While playing with some Audacity setups recently, I realized there was a feature that can be helpful in remotely directed sessions. Even better, it's not limited to that app alone, and can be replicated in Twisted Wave if you want to venture out past the documented features.
When other voice actors would share their audio and warn in advance how bad it sounded, I would expect to hear horrifically bad mouth clicks, or sibilance that might make my skin crawl. Lo and behold, their audio sounded good. This was confusing until I turned things up - way up.
Unlike many creative disciplines where there are specific mandated guidelines, "Industry Standard" doesn't seem to be that well defined within the confines of voiceover training, recording setups, or deliverables. Navigating that truth is a challenge for every voice actor and narrator.
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