Voiceover Studio Housekeeping Tasks – Tuesday Tech Tip

I usually spend the first week of the new calendar year doing a bunch of tiny studio tasks.

For starters, I update the date in all of my recording templates. I’ve mentioned templates before. They are a way to set up files which are ready to go for the demands of auditions and sessions. The Information Metadata in Twisted Wave allows me to enter the year, so every January I need to bring that number current. Going through the tem[plates, I realized there were a bunch which no longer got utilized. I haven’t created a 16 bit WAV in years, and don’t need more than two templates set up for a 44.1 kHz sample rate (one for ACX and another for any other platform that still uses that legacy format). It’s a little thing, but flipping through the 20 or so which had been cluttering up my Auditions folder was just wasted effort. Now, the 5 templates that get used nearly every day are the only ones to choose from.

Meanwhile, in my Auditions folder, it was time to bulk delete those reads which didn’t book. Anything older than July 2023 didn’t really need to be taking up local drive space. I may have heard my computer hard drive heave a sigh of relief and stretch like a dog getting up from a nap.

Just before the end of the year, I had ordered new ear pads for my Beyerdynamic DT770’s. They had actually split on the inside, which explained why they felt a little funny, in addition to, well, being a little generally funky. Given the amount of hours they get used, I’m actually surprised that the super soft velour fabric stays as comfy as it does for as long as they do.

Once again, I dug through the corners of my gear storage areas to see if there was stuff that I didn’t need. A few years ago, while staring at a box of connector cords that I didn’t think were useful but didn’t want to discard, I put the date on the outside of the box. Curiously enough, the Firewire 800 connector cords (just to pick one of the many cabling oddities contained within) have not come back into general usage, so they are on the pile to go to the electronics recycling operation in town. Now that the old aught-nine Macbook Pro has been pastured, there are a bunch of connectors which will probably join them. I’ve learned that I rarely end up needing those things “I might need.”

That archeological dig also retrieved some things that need simple repairs – hopefully my soldering work will be able to restore functionality to those audio cables and extensions. That dig got me wondering if anything else had been acting a bit weird. My studio hub may have been getting a little flakey toward the end of longer days. It might be time to research what’s available now. It’s better to replace something before it fails against deadline.

Although it’s not on my personal list, this is also a good time to check tube gear. Tubes (or “valves” if you are in the UK) will age over time, subtly changing tone and increasing noise as they get to the end of their life. That subtle shift of tone is one of the reasons I tend not to recommend them for home setups. Best practice is to record a specific script at a particular performance energy, then archive it for comparison purposes. Every few months, repeating that performance using that mic (or a tube-based preamp) should give a sense of whether the tonal character is changing. It’s good to deal with that before clients start noticing.

One last thing that’s easy to overlook – vacuuming the booth. I actually do this every week or so throughout the year, and run an air filter regularly. We spend a lot of time in our recording spaces, so it’s a good investment to keep them “healthy.”

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