In Your VO Booth: Position, Position, Position – Tuesday Tech Tip

Remember the old joke in real estate that the three most important things are Location, Location and Location?

There’s a corollary for getting good results in your home VO recordings: The most important three things are Position, Position and Position.

In the past few weeks, I worked with a number of clients with acoustic challenges. A few had minor but noticeable echoes which proved to be tricky to track down, while the others had sibilance issues.

The winter lull is always a good time to pull things apart and put them back together. Tighten up the cable routing which always gets tangled or finds its way underfoot. Shovel out the corners of your studio (literally or metaphorically). Make everything clean, fresh and tidy.

Stepping into your studio should make you smile.

Sometimes when taking a step back from the frenzy of auditioning and producing projects, you hear aspects of your sound which you don’t like. It takes a little bit of space to realize you need to tune things. Entropy maybe involved, but we can also be part of the problem.

We’re all creepers in the booth.

Here’s what I mean: Though we may have started in a perfectly good spot last year, it’s a very natural tendency to lean in on a mic. We may sound a little more full and intense, or we may shift into a different posture for specific characters. These things tend to increase over time. If we moved a quarter inch closer last week, we may sneak another this week and the next.

Suddenly, we are a couple inches closer to the mic and wondering why everything sounds so bass-heavy.

It might be time to take a bird’s-eye view of where you are in your recording space. Be mindful of how you are positioning yourself and also what you do when you start speaking. If your space is decently treated acoustically, backing off slightly is probably a good plan.

Changing position may not be as much fun as buying a new piece of gear to “fix” things. But it is effective. It reduces mouth noise, diminishes sibilance, provides less prominent plosives and explosive dynamics. That means that you need to do less with your software repair tools or effects.

When you start moving, record some raw audio and listen back. Be methodical. Use the same script and performance energy. Work simply. Change one thing at a time.

Start by taking a look at your mic – has it slipped slightly or been nudged into a different angle? Are you lining up the same way each time. As I’ve shared with many of you, I have a taped “X” on the floor where my right foot goes. That way if I’m in the right place each time, I can tell if things have moved a bit.

One change is probably not going to correct everything, but I’d start with gaining a little distance from the mic. It all gets back to the idea – if you can make the so-so stuff sound good, then you can make the good stuff sound great.

Another Booth Variable to Test: Microphone pickup pattern

One of the nice things about the Vanguard V4 microphone is that it has a stereo pickup pattern (technically figure-8 or bi-directional) – which can actually work to reduce some negative aspects in vocal recording. Obviously, it’s going to pick up a lot more of what’s “behind” the mic, but if your space is well treated, that could be a benefit. If you have that option on your mic, give it a try

Each week, I send a “Tuesday Tech Tip” to my email community. It includes technical tricks I’ve come across, refinements for voiceover workflow, and insights gained as a working voice actor and VO technical audio consultant. If you would like to receive these as soon as they come out, please take a moment to sign up here. Thank you.