Recording Software: The Unlikeliness of “Learning” – Voiceover Studio Tech Tip

No matter which recording software we use in our home voiceover studio, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever “learn” it completely. Even the simplest audio recording application has many more tools than we’ll ever use. In our VO studios, the tools we learn will be the ones we need.

It’s easy to get a bit overwhelmed by all the options which any software presents to us. It’s also OK if you simply use just a few of them. What you use often, you learn well. Try as I might, I’ve never found a use for the “Cut” tool in Twisted Wave. I’m not talking about the EDIT menu choice “Command-X,” where you highlight a bit of audio and remove it. There’s actually an option to “Cut” any amount of audio from the head or tail of your recording, hidden  deep in the Batch Processor tool. It only lives there, and in all the years using and teaching Twisted Wave, I’ve never had a reason to reach for it. 

Each New Recording Project Guides Our Learning Process

The most efficient way to learn specific tools is to use them on a project. It’s likely you’ve been working this way already. Thinking back, there was a point where the challenge of the moment was getting a viable audition out the door. While that may seem a simple task today, in the beginning you had to think through each step of that process:

First, create a new file, make decisions about bit depth, sample rate, and number of channels (hint – “mono!”). You then had to save that file (likely into a specific type of audio format) so that your pending performance did not fizzle into nothing if you had a computer crash. Of course, there was the matter of actually getting audio into the file, which meant wrangling phantom power, gain settings, and possibly audio drivers in your computer. Once the waveform magically appeared inside the recording software, you had to trim bits and perhaps engage in a bit of judicious cutting or pasting to spruce things up. 

Things didn’t end there – to be competitive, the audio needed to be in the expected format, adjusted to an appropriate loudness, with perhaps a few choice Effects applied to burnish things to an appropriate luster. 

None of those steps were particularly obvious or easy the first time you took on that task. Yet after delivering auditions day after day, they now seem trivial – if you even think about them at all. 

Build Your Voiceover Studio Skills: Learn by Doing

One of the ongoing challenges of working as a voice actor stems from the variety of things we are asked to do. An IVR project requires different deliverables than eLearning, which of course is not the same as an audiobook, and that certainly differs from wrangling local recordings from a live-directed session. 

Doing any of those things means balancing the creative demands of performance against a framework to keep things organized. Anything we don’t do on a daily basis becomes a little less immediate, and we’ll tend to forget tiny details that matter. If there’s a process you only do every few months, it’s unfair to expect you’ll memorize it to that deep level.

Welcome New Challenges in Your Voiceover Studio

When you encounter a new project that differs from your regular workflow, take a moment to break things down. Identify which parts seem familiar and then think through any new steps it requires. Take notes and keep them available. That is your opportunity to begin building the “Pre-Flight Checklist” for this new aspect. Over time, that becomes a strong asset of your home voiceover studio.

It also helps to take a moment when you are done to read back through those notes when the process is fresh. My most effective “Pre-Flight” lists grew from stepping back through a process immediately after completion. It’s a great opportunity to capture those little “things you’ll remember” which didn’t get written down. Each time you run through it again, that provides an opportunity to refine any inefficiencies.

This information recently went out directly to my email community. Each week I send out a new article about using technology in the home voiceover studio, and how to balance those challenges with the need to be creative behind the microphone.
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