The Trapping Effects of Effects

Voice actors are continually tempted – or even encouraged – to use processing Effects to “enhance” their recordings or make them “competitive.” But, does this help? Or do Effects just mask underlying issues in your recording and actually make things worse?

In the last article I wrote about the “Myth of the Microphone” – how the question “what mic should I get?” might miss the larger issue of what you actually put into it. I raised the idea that the brand and model of microphone wasn’t all that important in the scheme of things – and wouldn’t compensate for a lack of VO craft.  

All this technical recording stuff – as much as I enjoy it – has to sit on a strong foundation of training. And practice. And showing up when it is hard. 

Those are also things which I’m often evaluating and reassessing. 

Recently, on my evening dog walks, I’ve been listening to “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown. It’s a challenging book, as it continually asks you to consider whether what you are doing is important. Not only “important” but vital.

McKeown shares examples of various entrepreneurs who cut against the grain. Instead of asking their teams or themselves to do ever more, these individuals focus on stripping away the non-essential to those things which truly mattered. To ask stronger questions. 

If I think of voiceover, then…

What “matters” for VO? 
Which specific changes actually move the needle? 
Is there a particular aspect of your work that your client (or potential client) truly cares about?

I’m not sure I can answer those larger questions within this one article. However, that idea – getting beneath the distractions, noise and the flashy-trendy – to continually focus on the core… That idea remains vital to consider. For me, t’s an ongoing practice and challenge. 

A Reminder: No one cares about your mic

As I mentioned before, no client has actually asked what microphone I use. (I’ll let you know if that ever happens.)

Yet if you skim through any number of VO discussion groups, you’ll see that exact question being raised, answered, dismissed, rebutted, offered, countered, re-rebutted and stated commandingly and emphatically. 

I get it. It’s fun to obsess and opine about equipment. But just focusing upon that misses the larger point.

What should we fix?

Just as with The Microphone Question, there seems to be an increasing trend of people asking about the “right” Effects or Processing Chain for voiceover. Don’t know if it’s the season, or a slug of new folks joining the discussion. That topic seems to have lately increased within the VO discussion groups. 

“Helpful” answers come fast and furious. Those often describe all kinds of complicated steps of de-noising, de-clicking, de-crackling, compression, limiting and other stuff that I actually had to look up.

Answers before you hear the “question”?

The funny thing to me is how specific these answers are…
Even though no one has actually heard any audio.

How can anyone know this without first listening to and assessing the audio? This is one of the reasons I offer a no charge audio review. I feel that it’s dangerous to make a recommendation without actually knowing where things start.

Early on when I was taking some of my first VO classes, there was another student who shared their rule for recording with the the class. “You have to use compression” Emphatic. No room for discussion. This, folks, was law.

Which struck me as kind of strange. Since I’d used Compressors – real ones with dials and knobs and stuff – and had a pretty good idea of how they worked. And what they normally got used for. I had a hard time connecting the dots to what we were doing in VO.

The scripts we’d been asked to record for the class had clear direction – “Conversational”. (A trend which has continued a decade or so later…)

The audio that the Compressor-enthusiast-student supplied sounded like the love child between a high wattage FM major market pop DJ and a high intensity this network tonight! promo.  But the content of the script? It was supposed to be a cool, next-door neighbor talking about their local credit union. Over the fence. At approximately beer-thirty.

Bit of a disconnect between what the audio sounded like and what the specs asked for? 

Audio Compression (which is not that same as “file compression” – making big files smaller) is what I like to call a tool of high leverage. Meaning it can break stuff pretty easily with just a wee bit too much pressure.  The results are very easy for someone to recognize if it’s used poorly. And those tools very easy to use poorly.

A non-audio example

Back in grade school days, I took wood shop.  Before we could work on any self-directed projects, we had to complete “The Block”. Starting with a single 8 x 10”  piece of board, we had to cut, shape, drill, and more until we ended up with a reasonably useless result that had bevels, miters, dovetails, inlets and cut-outs and all kinds of processes – probably 20 or so discrete steps checked off in sequence by the teacher.

Step One was to square the edges. Easy.

We attacked our boards with the big hand planes across the edges, sending large curls of wood up into the air and onto the floor. Enthusiastic as only unleashed 7th graders could be.

Most of us failed badly. Out of square. Cut too deeply. The instructor would sit back in his office and run his angle over the corners, look at us silently and shake his head. Most of us ended up with him running it through the jointer to regain a clean edge, followed by gluing a new chunk in place and trying again. 

We suddenly realized that the aggressive cuts we were using pushed us past the specs.  Once you shaved off too much, you couldn’t go back.

I learned the simplest tool used with too much enthusiasm can cause all kinds of problems. 

What are the audio tools you can use for voiceover?

I like to break them down along three basic lines – 

Volume controls –

Making stuff louder or quieter. Changing the “Amplitude” or height of the wave. Amplify and Normalize live here. There’s a lot of power in volume alone.

Frequency controls –

Here, you are controlling intensity at different pitches of the audio spectrum – essentially the high, middle and low notes in your recording. In the olden days, stereos used to have “bass” or “treble” controls, which let you increase or decrease the lower or higher parts of your audio. With our voiceover recordings, we can apply much more fine-toothed controls. These are the filters and EQ/Equalization effects.

Dynamic controls –

This is a bit more complex idea to wrap your head around. “Dynamics” in audio deals with the relationship between the quietest and loudest parts of your recording.  If you are trying to meet loudness and peak specs for something ACX, you’ve probably run up against this. This is the part of the forest where Compression and Limiting live. Remember that idea of a “Tool of High Leverage”? Messing with Compression and Limiters can cause a lot of things to happen to your audio.

Audio Nerd Moment: Some of the newer tools are blurring the lines between these divisions – like Dynamic EQ’s and Multi-Band Compression. But if you understand how these relate to one another, they will make sense when you encounter them. 

What About Noise Reduction?

One thing I didn’t mention is Noise Reduction. I’d honestly rather you didn’t use that. To begin, my bias is to work to isolate your space, remove the computer from the booth, turn off the HVAC and make sure the refrigerator hum doesn’t come through the walls. Get things as well isolated from environmental noise as you possibly can.

There are two reasons for this. 

The first is that Noise Reduction algorithms are also tools of high leverage. Noise Reduction can have significant impacts upon the audio. It can cause artifacts in the audio.  (If you are not listening back through Studio Monitor Headphones, you’ll likely miss the impact it can have on your audio.) All of which calls attention to its use. And when the listener’s attention is not on our performance, it’s easy for them to choose someone else’s audition.

The second is that if you are relying upon significant noise reduction in your process of delivering auditions or finished audio, that will limit your ability to work in real-time directed sessions from your studio. There’s nowhere to hide in a Source-Connect, ipDTL or even a skype-directed session. 

Getting auditions and work out the door – what is important

It’s not that we can’t use these tools at our disposal. We don’t get points for manually deleting mouth clicks. 

But relying upon them instead of first addressing shortcomings in your recording space can get you into trouble. 

You can fall into the trap of thinking things sound great when in fact you are kind of “hyping up” the audio or masking core issues with these effects. That makes things much more difficult for anyone who has to work with it “downstream” from you. I know voice actors who have had project audio kicked back for too much processing and then lost the job because their audio lacked quality. They simply could not deliver quality raw audio.

Which – to answer the questions I posed above – does matter for VO, definitely matters to our clients, and will move the needle in terms of getting and keeping work.

The best practice is to capture clean audio. Think about any effects as the spice in your dish – just enough to bring out the flavor of what you serve.

JustAskJimVO.studio Podcast

This article originally published through the JustAskJimVO.studio Podcast “The Trapping Effects of Effects” – Episode 2.

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