VO Weekly Workflow: Reasonable, but “Wrong”

I get things wrong all the time. That’s a good thing in my book. As long as I’m not continually making the same mistakes, that should mean I’m learning new skills, or further refining existing ones.

Every time I use a tool, it feels as though an adjustment occurs in my hands and brain. Whether wrenching on a bicycle, gaining fluidity on a bass guitar, or nudging settings in a plug-in to correct some audio, on my best days there’s a feedback loop that adds a little bit of additional knowledge.

Bicycle bolts I rounded out or snapped because of poor fit or too much torque gave me a better feel the next time. Experimenting how to make things sound better made me trust my ears. I safely – though sometimes very frustratingly – learned what “wrong” sounded or felt like.

These days we can easily find reasonable sounding people sharing their views online. It’s very easy to simply repeat those opinions without having tested them. Given that opinions are so easily shared, those presented “facts” may even combine into larger theories that may sound “reasonable,” but are in fact pretty untested.

“Not the bass treatment you seek…”

A voice actor I know was trying to dial in their sound. Another person they knew recommended “bass traps” to fix their sound. It’s a common recommendation that many well-meaning folks make. There’s often good reason to install bass traps.

However, bass trapping wasn’t the most appropriate answer in this case. Bass traps are best used for removing low frequency resonances in an enclosed space. In any enclosed space there will be certain frequencies that resonate – for example, in commonly found 48″ square prefab voice booths, there’s often an axial room mode resonating around 80 Hz.

In this case, the actor had a soft-sided booth which didn’t set up that low frequency resonance, and their higher pitched voice that didn’t energize that frequency to begin with.

The underlying acoustic issue turned out to be hard surface reflections rather than resonances. The several hundred dollars invested in bass traps probably would not have fixed the underlying cause. Simply adding another layer of acoustic blanket on the “echoey” side of their booth actually fixed the issue. As with all things acoustic, it’s the details that matter.

Trust, but verify

Not-quite-right answers show up a lot in various places. It isn’t that they are necessarily wrong or malicious, there’s typically a solid grain of truth at the center of the advice. Recognizing the unique aspects of our recording spaces means that even the best advice must be refined for our specific situation. There’s really no one-size-fits-all approach.

Posted 7/21/26

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