Doing professional voiceover work from one's home makes certain demands on the voice over talent above and beyond the mere demo. One needs to be able to produce true broadcast quality audio.on demand, and in order to do that properly, one needs the proper equipment and environment to do the recording. Unfortunately, with home computers as powerful as they are today, everyone who owns a PC or laptop up to 5 or 6 years old has enough number-crunching muscle to produce professional sounding recordings, and might even already have audio.recording software installed, but the room in which they work, and the equipment being employed could be ruining an otherwise great vocal performance.

It would be outside the scope of this article to attempt to discuss all the details of audio.fidelity, the various excellant PC recording applications available, and the myriad other tiny tricks and details of the art and science of the recording studio. What we will discuss is the physical connection between you, the voice over talent, and the recording process.

The most important part of good recording is now and has always been the microphone. As simple as this piece of equipment seems to be, it is the most often overlooked and underestimated link between your voice and the recording medium. The simple fact is, regardless of the speed of your PC, the quality of your recording software or the overall quietness of your studio environment, your product is only as good as the microphone you use. Buying the best quality microphone you can get is guaranteed to improve the quality of your performance. The difference between a standard PC mic and a quality "dynamic" mic is breath-taking. As to getting the new mic to talk to your soundcard: All professional quality mics are equipped with either a quarter-inch phono plug or the more exotic-looking XLR (3-pin) mic plug. If you choose a mic with the XLR connection, you'll need to discuss the details of how to interface these mics and your PC with your dealer. The 1/4 inch plug c! an easily be reduced with an adapter to fit the mic port of your PC's sound card- and here we assume you have at least a 16-bit soundcard. Choosing a "vocalist" mic at a local electronics or musician's store will likely get you a dynamic microphone which is rather like a loudspeaker in construction. A fine diaphragm attached to a small coil of very fine copper wire is suspended in a strong magnetic field. Vibrations in the air (a sound such as your voice) strikes the diaphragm and causes it to vibrate which generates a varying electrical signal which travels through the mic cord to the recording software. Depending on the lightness of the membrane and coil, the stiffness of the diaphragm material, the strength of the magnetic field and a host of other variables we won't go into here, the "crispness" of your voice is more or less precisely represented by the signal generated. "More or less" because no microphone is absolutely perfect, but there are tremendous differences! between department store mics and real professional quality hardware. A cheap PC mic might have a frequency response of 300 Hz to 11kHz with a 2 or 3 percent distortion level. The aforementioned 100 dollar mic can deliver up to perhaps 100 times higher fidelity in terms of sensitivity, frequency response and distortion. The truth of the matter is that any really big dollar top-of-the-line "studio standard" mic from one of the truly good mic people (Shure, Newmann, AKG, Blue, Sennheiser, Marshall Electronics, etc) might only offer an additional 10 to 15% increase in fidelity over a 100 or 200 dollar mic, whereas this mic will show an increase of 100 times the overall audio.quality of the PC mic. You see why just a small investment in a better microphone can improve your sound vastly.

OK. You've gotten your new mic and learned to use your software. Hopefully you also got a mic stand- surely you didn't expect to hold the mic in your hand? Now where are you going to do your recording? Here?

Stop.

Right now.

Listen.

What do you hear? Is that the refrigerator I just heard come on? Is your window AC running? Do the chains on your ceiling fan jingle? Outside traffic sounds? Neighbors? Dogs? Kids? How about your PC head itself? Where is that? Not sitting next to your nice shiny new mic?

See how easy it is to tune out sounds that come at you all day long? You might not hear them, but the mic most surely will. Now that you have the room quiet, you need to look around and see what kind of surfaces you have in the room. Lots of hard surfaces like tile or hardwood floors are no good at all. Recordings made in such a room will contain odd sounding harmonics which come from echos of your voice which have bounced off the tile and other acoustically reflective surfaces then entered the mic and are dutifully recorded by the software along with your voice. These harmonics are called "coloration" and are not acceptable The better your mic, the more sensitive it will be to picking up these colorations. Fortunately there are simple cures for this problem. Set up your gear in a carpeted room with drapes. Close the drapes to cover the windows. Choose a room with lots of soft furniture. Set up facing a corner of the room and tack a cotton or wool comforter or quilt to! the walls at that corner. Mount it high enough to when you are sitting at your mic, the top edge of the quilt or fabric is several feet above your head. The idea is to keep as much bare walls away from the mic as possible. Don't use the shiny "zippy" sounding nylon comforters for this; they reflect too much sound. And don't use a regular sheet as the sounds will travel through the sheet and end up echoing off the walls anyway. Set up your table or PC combo facing the corner. Find a way to enclose your PC head or place it at a good distance from your mic. Cover the surface your mic will be on with another cloth. Ideally, if you have a room in your home where you could cover all four walls with such material then do so and make this your studio. Placing your PC head in a nearby closet is a perfect way to reduce almost to zero the fan noise the average desktop beast emits.

Levels. Recording levels are quite important. They should be as high as you can get them without peaking. If you studied your recording software's help files, you should know what your levels are doing and can adjust the mic level, as well as your delivery volume to prevent the clipping from occurring in the first place. After the file has been recorded, you might try applying a bit of compression to level out the low's and hi's of your volume. Again, see your own help files for info on this.

And don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be intimidated by your software. Read the help files. Play with it. Get comfortable with it. Remember, being a voice over talent means learning to edit and manipulate your files as well as making a good sounding recording. This is part of the job and actually tends to take longer than the actual read. You should factor this into your pricing scheme. The faster and more fluent you are with your recording software, the less time will be spent on the production of the demo or finished product. Oh, you cannot possibly damage the software or your PC by playing with it and seeing for yourself what each of these functions are all about. Naturally, there are software packages with minimum effects and some with all the loot but they have one thing in common: they can record as high fidelity a sound as you feed them. As a general rule, the special effects are not necessary for basic voiceover work.

So, now that you have your track recorded and edited and everything is ready, it's time to actually audition the track. The first thing to always make sure you do is see that your PC's audio.playback tone controls are set flat. No bass or treble cut or boost. Same thing for the PCs media player. Almost all the media players have a graphic equalizer or at least a bass boost button. Make sure your media player's tone controls are off and all other processing plug-ins are off as well. The author recalls a recent demo which had been recorded dry and flat (no reverb or other effects and no tonal manipulation with an EQ or other filter) using Cool Edit Pro and was being played back in Windows Media Player 10. The playback through WMP was decidedly deeper and more resounding than it should have been which puzzled the voice over talent until the SOS WOW effects were discovered to be on. All the settings are remembered by most media players, so unless you know you changed them to! listen to a music file you shouldn't have to go into all the control panels and reset them each time you record a new demo.

For the most accurate monotoring of your performance, a good pair of real headphones are another necessity. Earbuds are not sufficient. Your PC's speakers aren't either. You need as wide a frequency response and dynamic depth as your mic has. You can hardly judge the quality of your delivery listening to the playback on a tinny pair of earbuds with a bottom frequency response of 250 Hz , or a top-end response of a mere 12 or 14kHz. This means another investment of something in the 50 to 100 dollar price range for headphones that cover your ears, not fit in the ear canal. Look for real fidelity with a range of 22 to 30 Hz for a low-end to about 16 to 18 kHz or higher for the hi-end. Stay away from headphone models with features that alter the sounds coming from the player. Don't use models sporting inline bass boost, or super bass response which actually vibrates the headphones in a lame simulation of a subwoofer effect. Even tone and volume controls on the headph! ones or inline cord should be avoided. Now, the headphones won't make the recording sound better to the customer, but you will be more likely to pick up unwanted accidental sounds you didn't notice on recording (foot shuffle, chair squeak, that darn cat outside the door). And play your track to yourself loud. Not earshattering loud but louder than you would normally play the TV to yourself. Not only listen to your voice but listen between the words. Is there any hiss? Hum? Even if the AC is quiet in the room, it might be rustling papers or blowing a soft draft across the mic which can be heard as a faint (or not so faint depending on the strength of the draft) irregular booming sound so make sure the AC vent is pointed away from your work area. Hold a lit lighter near the mic. If the flame barely quivers, you are draft-free. If the flame consistantly leans in a given direction, look for the AC vent and close or redirect the louvers.

A brief closing word on mics and software. Each microphone has a certain inherant sound of its own, and each mic builder has fans and detractors because of this inherant sound. Once you have decided to make the investment of a couple hundred dollars in a good mic, no matter what brand you choose you can hardly go wrong. If you possibly can, try out different mics. Take them home and use them in your rig. After a while, you'll start to hear the difference in the acoustic "personality" of the various mics. In the end, it all comes down to your own ears being the judge. As to the various PC recording programs available, you can use a free program like AUDACITY or a very pricy package like COOL EDIT PRO and get the exact same sounding recording with the only difference between the fancy package and the free one being the extra features and effects which the average voice over talent would quite likely never need or use.

So get out there and start shopping for a mic. Go through your closets and find some soft quilts. Find a quiet room to set up in, and start talking!

See, that wasn't so hard after all, was it?

By: Thomas Dycus
Bent Ears Audio Laboratories
thomasdycusiii.voice123.com

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