The Home Voiceover Studio of the Future – Tuesday Tech Tip

Some voice actors work while wedged into tiny closets, surrounded by pillows and clothing, timing their takes between BART trains or street traffic. Others have dedicated setups, spacious and unaffected by environmental sounds or even passing planes. A lot of us fall somewhere in the middle – a generally well controlled, but hopefully very consistent recording environment. We’re able to deliver audio today that matches the quality of what we recorded a week or more ago.

That’s an important tenet of our workflow. A simple goal, but not one which is necessarily easy. One of the challenges in teaching voice actors how to record in their home setup is that everyone’s environment is so different. At some point the final adjustments become pointedly unique to our situations.

Changes continue to evolve around us, meaning it’s never a “finished” equation. Gear fails, neighbors begin remodeling projects, that kid down the street decides to start a band in the garage, all of which remain outside of our ability to directly control.

The industry keeps changing as well. These days we are often asked to step into more complex roles that have little to do with the actual craft of voice acting. While that’s unlikely to cease, it brings with it opportunities. By continuing to recognize the next challenge to solve, coming up with solutions will likely help us to continue to be competitive.

Before the pandemic, I had been encouraging voice actors to embrace Source-Connect and other remote connection methods where appropriate. These days, having no way to connect with a remote director is a strong disadvantage for most types of voiceover work. Identifying and embracing new technologies remains key.

More importantly, solving the technical challenges must support our creativity. We still need to bring our unique perspective and spark up to the microphone. What can we add that has the minimal amount of impact on our creative flow? Take for example the auto-input-gain setting feature on the new Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interfaces. Push the button, be as loud as you are going to be for 10 seconds, and move on to being brilliant behind the microphone. No back and forth to check levels on a test recording. Or with a Rode NT1 Gen5 running through the USB-C connector, using 32 bit floating point input means not even worrying about setting gain.

These solutions catch my interest because if they work, they allow us to concentrate less on the mechanics and more on the performance. These are the improvements which pay outsized dividends.

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