7 Essentials Of A Professional Voice Over Studio

what equipment do you need to record and produce professional voice over recordings in this video we're going to talk about the seven critical pieces that you'll need i'm lenny b voice over audio engineer let's make your voice sound better there are many ways you can capture your voice and produce professional quality voiceover recordings in this video we're going to talk about uh the typical stuff these are the things that are happening now these are the things that i suggest you put together if you want to produce quality voice over recordings and make money or promote your own products or whatever you want to do create marketing material uh do auditions for voice over whatever it is this is what i suggest the seven things are room treatment you need a microphone obviously an audio interface a computer you're gonna need a software or a daw a digital audio workstation processing is involved and you also need to monitor correctly let's look at each one of these seven things in more detail room treatment is first and there's a good reason it's because it's the most important thing that you have to consider your sound starts here and it's important to understand that it's a compounding process if your recording space isn't properly treated and it's not prepared the right way it's going to affect the next stage of the recording process and the next stage you know your your second step is only as good as the room treatment first step the third step is only good as the second step so you have to get the room treatment part right otherwise you're sabotaging yourself further down the process now what are we talking about when we refer to room treatment well there's really three types of noise that you have to concern yourself with there are three types of noise that you have to uh really try to get rid of the first one is external noise and that's noise in your recording space that's coming from outside the room and that could be trucks uh driving down the street that could be a jet going over uh that could be several things but that's the first type of noise that you have to consider you you know removing or making sure that it doesn't leak into your recording that may be recording at a specific time of day that may be trying to find a central location to record in your uh the structure in the room or in the house that you're working in uh the second type is internal room noise and that's the stuff like computer fans air conditioning vents or heater vents the air flow can make a low rumble sound that could be noise from a tv in the next room or you know there's a number of things but that internal noise is something that you have to be aware of and try to uh eliminate and prevent from leaking into your recording and the most important one is reflection noises this one is the one that uh i think is the most difficult to get rid of but it's also the most important reflection noises are the echoes and the reverberation that happens naturally in your room it's the noise that is coming from your voice bouncing off the walls and it's actually being delayed a little bit and then it reaches uh your microphone in addition to your direct mic voice sound so these that reflection noise is really important they're all important to get rid of but when we talk about room treatment it's minimizing those and you can do it in several different ways like with um diffusing material that you could put on the hard reflective surfaces in your room now i do want to mention one thing here is there are low frequency reflections that come from your voice and depending upon the size of your room they can cause peaks in the mid low and really extremely low frequency bands and this is a deep subject and can get very complicated and the smaller your room if you have a small vocal booth the worse they can be so that's a whole separate category it's a little deeper than i want to go in this particular video but i just want you to be aware of it the second thing on the list is the microphone now i want to tell you a little bit about the results and budget because this is this is the thing right away you think i've got to get a professional mic an expensive mic it's not the case in my opinion i believe you can get a professional voice over sound with a budget microphone and i've got a list of those equipment suggestions on my website uh but the budget microphones range anywhere from 100 to 200 when i say budget you know that may not be in the budget for some people and they may not consider that a cheap microphone but this is what i suggest if you're looking to get a professional voice over sound that's kind of the low end of the spectrum so you know like we talked about um before with the room treatment if your room treatment is right if you're if the rest of the process is set up correctly you can absolutely get a professional sound from an inexpensive mic meaning you know 100 to 200 in that price range it's important to understand that the professional microphone is not designed to make your voice sound good it's designed to capture uh the most information it's not unlike um a camera right you wanna you know a higher quality camera has a better resolution or if you shoot video in a higher resolution you're capturing more information well as you progress up the quality level for microphones it's the same thing a microphone will capture a wider spectrum of the frequency and it captures it evenly so you can manipulate it uh further down your production path just understand that the microphone's job is to capture as much information as possible not to make your voice sound good um and so you know consider that when you listen to a mic uh a good mic or you say i really like the way this mic sounds uh that might kind of be that might be misleading because you want the microphone to be a true representation of your voice so you can sculpt it and manipulate it in your recording later on so the way that i look at it is a better microphone is something that is going to give you a more accurate representation of the sound that it captures the next thing you want to consider on your list is the audio interface and the audio interface what does it do that's really kind of a big question the audio interface translates and it takes the analog information the audio sound waves they go through your microphone they go through the cable and they go all into the audio interface and its job is to basically translate that audio analog information into the digital domain into the digital format ones and zeros that your computer can understand so you could bring it into computer software record it manipulate it so you can look at it as a converter from analog to digital now one of the other things that you'll find in many of the very popular voice over audio interfaces are the preamps and they're included and the preamp is really important as well because the microphone is actually picking up and using a very low level signal from your voice and the microphone preamp amplifies that signal so it's more easily understood and manipulated further down the process as well and one of the reasons why you'll see me and others suggest for voiceover focusrite or audient or ssl those are fantastic preamps because of their lineage and consider that it's really being taken from equipment that has been legendary and more expensive equipment it's just put in a smaller box so i think focusrite in my opinion owns the voice over small one to two channel interface market i think they're fantastic and you can't go wrong and i do also have some audio interface suggestions uh equipment suggestions on my website if you want to take a look you're gonna find phantom power which i'm sure you've heard about phantom power is necessary it's a uh it's a voltage that helps run the microphone for condenser mics it's not necessary for some uh dynamic microphones but most interfaces include phantom power another thing that's really important is the headphone amplifier that you'll find in many of the audio interfaces you know you need to be able to monitor yourself and i uh not everybody likes to wear headphones or earphones when they record i do i like to be able to hear the mistakes and hear if i need to re-voice a particular phrase or a line or whatever and i i think it's important to do it and get in the habit of doing it that way but the headphone amplifier needs to be strong and of good quality because you want to be able to hear yourself and also being accurate as well because you want to be able to hear exactly what's being recorded so you could um you know do quality control while you're recording an audio interface is also where you're going to be able to connect your studio monitors your speakers and control that volume as well now it's not to say that there are other ways that you could capture your voice and get them into your computer to go to the next step of the voiceover recording and producing process this is just my suggestion on uh the parts and pieces of a standard voiceover setup that i think yields the best quality this brings us to the computer you've got to have a computer to capture and manipulate and record and compress and data compress and get the file in the right format to send off to the client your computer is really important but here are my thoughts when you're looking for okay what do i get if i'm looking from the market for a good computer for my voiceover recording it's an investment we all know how expensive they can be so you know one of the things you want to consider compatibility uh and storage and i will say that storage isn't as important for a voiceover setup you know if you're recording multiple tracks at a time like a band or you're recording music and eight or 16 or 24 tracks you know you're going to need a lot more storage or if you're doing video you're going to need a lot more storage if it's a single voice over audio track the speed of your disk drives and the amount of space you know you're going to need some storage and i i suggest an external drive to organize and save your your files you know it never fails a client that you're working with will contact you uh two to three or four months later or even a year later and say hey do you have a copy of what you did for me and i say yes i do and i know exactly where it is because i try to keep that stuff really organized and it's important to do that but what i'm you know you can record directly to the internal drive of your computer if you're doing just one track you shouldn't have a problem with that but uh you should consider storage you know one of the things you'll want to look for is look at your digital audio workstations minimum requirements so maybe before you purchase a computer to work on your voiceover production figure out which digital audio workstation or software you're going to use or hope to use or may upgrade to and find out what their software minimum requirements are to run the audio program because you know that'll give you a good baseline of what you need and and the speed and and the processing power that you'll need for the computer if that's going to be your main thing that you're going to be working on it's important to consider usb or thunderbolt or the usbc connections you know it has to be your computer has to be compatible with the audio interface you either have or you're going to get so that's something that's really important software compatibility is also something to consider i use apple's logic pro to record and to produce voice over and all of the videos that i produce i use apple and final cut that's not available on pc but then there's other programs like adobe audition that's available for both mac and pc but it's something to consider another thing is which i think is really important is a learning curve you know if you're kind of on the fence you don't know which way to go is it mac or pc or i don't know what type of uh computer that i want to get i think learning curve personally i feel that should play a big part into your decision because you know if you're already comfortable with a pc and it's what you know you're comfortable with it you know the programs and there's not much of a learning curve there and you're already using maybe a software package that's only available on a pc i say stick with that you know go with what's the easiest way because when it comes down to it at the end of the day all audio software packages are basically the same at a certain quality level um but they basically work the same i always say that they do the same thing the buttons are just in a different place so there's just a learning curve there and if you're familiar with one as opposed to the other uh that's what i say stick with then you also want to consider the the price and there is a pretty big difference there's some free options for software and then there's uh you know there's um subscription based software packages adobe audition i think is 20 bucks at the time of this video 20 bucks a month or you can outright and you know buy something like logic pro or other packages uh for a more expensive price but then you own it and there you go the next thing is the the software itself um like i said you know they all do kind of the same thing it's just a matter of uh the buttons in a different place so if you're already familiar with the adobe line of software you know adobe audition for audio may be something that you're really comfortable with already and there's a smaller learning curve now i will say that when you get into the more established software companies and software packages support comes into play you know some of the more expensive packages have better support there's a vast amount of video official videos from their website that'll walk you through any problem so that's something to consider because time is money and you want to get up and running so that should play a big part in and your consideration i also think that levels and metering is really important because the further you dive into production and the more you know about recording and processing and mastering your audio the meters and the software that's available to meter and show you a clear representation via the meters i think that's really important and you find it more important as you progress down your path to producing professional audio audio processing is the next step that i want to talk to you about um it's where i kind of feel like my it's my wheelhouse i love processing audio and uh i'm good at it for some reason i love tweaking eq and compression and this is one of the main things that i help professional voice over artists work with now to give you a brief explanation of what audio processing is it's basically similar to how you would process a word document you could change things around reword stuff change the font you know that same type of word manipulation you're able to do with audio manipulation and the sound of audio once you have it in the digital space that could be making the loud parts of the audio quiet or it could be making the quiet parts of the audio loud or it could be changing the tone and the frequency the whole goal is to write a better word document right and the whole goal is to make your essay better the entire goal with audio processing is to make the sound and the recording better and for me as a voice over audio engineer my bearing is to help make the message and the delivery and the audio and the voice over best connect on an emotional level with the listener audio processing tends to be used to try and fix a poor recording space poor equipment or poor connections and then audio processing tends to sweeten good recording spaces and good microphones and good recording levels so if you've got the stuff lined up and your system is put together the right way and you know you know some of the basic engineering skills audio processing is just going to make it sound better and those are the type of things i do for my clients i can suggest different equipment i can help with connections i can help with specific room treatment changes that may be necessary to optimize your audio and i also um one of the services i offer is to create custom processing settings for your voice and you know every voice is different every room is different and i could put something custom together when you want to just kind of reach that next level you can get all the information about it on my website lennyb.com and there's also free techniques and and training courses available too and that brings us to uh the last thing in my list which is monitoring which is incredibly important and uh i'll give it to you this way you know uh you don't want to set us this is like the microphone we talked about earlier you can get a set of speakers that makes your audio sound really good uh if you put on music or off a playlist on your computer you're doing you're listening to music there's speakers that make the audio sound better and sound incredible but there's what's called reference monitors which give you a true representation of the audio they don't they don't color or filter the audio it's like when you take a picture and you put an instagram filter on your picture it amplifies certain things uh it smooths out other things and it makes the picture look better well that's what some uh uh speakers can do to your audio too if you're not getting the right kind and you want reference monitors and that's specifically monitors that are gonna give you an accurate and true representation of what's of what's being recorded and here's why think about it this way you know if you make a change or if you record and you're manipulating your audio to sound better uh and you're helping maybe with the eq or the compression if you're not getting a true representation on your studio monitors then you're being misled right and so what's gonna happen is it sounds great in your room but then when you send it off to your client or you play it somewhere in the car or whatever you're gonna go did i record that well that sounds totally different well that's why you need a true monitor reference so you can really steer your changes in the right direction these types of monitors tend to be more expensive because they're engineered to give you that accurate representation of the sound and you'll also notice that many of them are powered monitors which means they have the amplification built in uh different from the old days of when you'd get speakers and you'd have a power amp uh the trend now is to have the monitors uh include a power amp and and they're engineered to give you that accurate representation so it's something to look at and there are reference headphones as well and uh it's again the same thing you know you want to be listening in earphones when you're recording to get an accurate representation so you can hear if you make a mistake you need to go back and change it or re-record it or whatever they do have reference earphones and again they tend to be really really expensive i hope that helps you as you spend hours and hours going through the big black hole of the internet and diving deeper into researching equipment like i always do that should give you a better direction i hope it helps your voice sound should inspire you when you hear your voice it should sound great and you should be confident that what you're you're putting out there and you're sending your clients you should be confident that it sounds great let's make your voice sound better thanks for watching

Channel: Lenny B

Views: 5,500

Keywords: Voice Over, Voiceover, Microphone, Audio Interface, Reference Monitors, DAW, Voice Over Equipment, Voice over gear

Id: 68OoMmKnaW4

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021