Voiceover Gear We Rely Upon

When it comes to new gear, I tend to preach caution. That can surprise some students or clients, who may have assumed that the first thing they need is more expensive equipment. It’s easy to lose sight of what we need to achieve, and get distracted by cool features and the allure of “new”.

Working in our home setups, we need to reliably capture great performances and deliver usable audio. Once you have bought a certain level of quality (and that seems to get less costly every year – see Moore’s Law), the focus should be getting what you’ve got to sound as good as it possibly can. It takes conscious effort to choose equipment which will work well over time.

The Allure of New Studio Gear

The newest latest/greatest stuff – whether a microphone, interface, or other audio gee-gaw – simply won’t fix a bad read or poorly treated space. That truth is unlikely to change… though just for a second I was daydreaming for a plug-in which featured a “BETTER” button to just improve a “meh” acting choice…

I actually do appreciate shiny new gear. This abundance of caution does not simply stem from a Luddite approach. This perspective of new-product-cynicism came from years as a retail buyer and will likely never completely go away,

In that capacity, I have wandered trade show halls and encountered wonderful..nay… BRILLIANT offerings in company booths. Then I invested inventory dollars and trained sales teams to be knowledgeable about those products. But, those beautiful, shiny products simply sat on the shelf, gathering dust until they finally moved to the closeout section and were deeply discounted (which in some cases made no difference). A sad failure for no clear reason.

That wariness forms a risk-aversion strategy: not making costly mistakes.

We Rely Upon Our Recording Equipment

As a voice actor, your studio has to function. Always. In fact, pulling everything apart remains a great way to cause a client or agent to call with an URGENT project. That gets back to the basic tenet of our voiceover recording setups: we are the production facility. Redundant systems keep us operating. We all seem to end up with a couple of mics, additional cables, an extra interface (or backup USB mic), and some plan as to what we would do if something ceased to function.

When I see a new system which relies on proprietary software or hardware, I get a little careful. There is some really interesting work being done with microphone “modeling” software. With the more advanced products, you can record through a neutral microphone, then quickly make it sound like a wide variety of other classic mics. But all of that relies upon specific hardware. The hardware needs to have software. The software needs to work on your computer and the computer needs to connect to the hardware. Some of that is trivial, other parts not so much.

If your client relies upon that cool sound you crafted, then you need to be able to deliver it. But, all equipment breaks down from time to time. Which might mean that you buy two of those modeling rigs (we’ll just assume that the budget exists) to prevent against catastrophic hardware failure.

Potential Pitfalls

But what happens if your computer update prevents your modeling software from working? Maybe you have a “sandboxed” software system or another computer which remains an update behind your main one. Ok. What happens if the creative group who made the original mic/software runs out of funding and the system doesn’t get updated? Perhaps there will be a clever entrepreneur who can create code to convert things.

I’m not trying to sound dour. Maybe the answer is “Oh well! I delivered a lot of work with that gear, but it’s time to move on.” Nothing at all wrong with that approach. In fact, that seems pretty healthy. I just want to be mindful that I’m making that kind of decision when I choose my equipment.

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