Home Voiceover Studio on a Budget

hello there so can you set up your home voice over studio on a limited budget in this video we'll take a look and go around the home looking at the best areas for you to set up your recording equipment to record voiceovers at home for money is a fun creative and quite often easy way of bringing in income but we're well aware here that many people watching this will not have the resources to afford to build a broadcast quality recording studio in their own homes in our training courses we've put together over the years at voiceovermasterclass.com maybe we've assumed that people have more technical knowledge than we think or that everyone's got large savings to dip into but of course many people have been made redundant over the big pandemic year have money problems and don't want to commit to something that may not turn out to be a money spinner for them at first so in this video i'll assume that cash is tight and i won't just give recommendations on equipment but also tell you how you can save money by using free software programs also tips and tricks within that software to make your recorded sound sound like they're recorded in a far more professional environment you know the good news is because voiceover is audio only duh yes people can't see where you're recording so as long as it sounds good that's all the client cares about all right so first of all what do you do with your smartphone surely that can record audio well it can but yes they're amazing but you can't use them to record or edit voiceovers in fact i don't even use my phone to record quick demos i wait until i'm behind a proper microphone as quite often clients want to hear not just your take on the audition script in terms of voice style personality and so on but the quality of the final recording in your home studios so the best possible even for demos so what equipment will you need is a very basic list a microphone a plosive pop filter a microphone stand a computer interface box a computer laptop whatever cables audio editing software and that's all you need to start with as well as the internet of course and the location where you're going to record your voiceover that's the sticking point for many people it's where many people come unstuck where in the house can i put this stuff so what does a good recording location need to be for voice over work two things really one somewhere very quiet with a low noise law i'll explain what that is later and two somewhere that's acoustically very dead minimal sound reflections you know giving the echo or reverberations so first of all look around where you live but think sound not what things look like so get away from hard surfaces such as tables and floors without carpets and definitely away from kitchen areas where there are appliances that always make pesky noises all the time so investigate particularly bedroom areas those rooms that have got lots of drapes curtains soft furnishings around to absorb sound you may want to be comfortable in your living room but if you're near any windows not only will they let sound in from the outside but they'll also reflect sound too so you'll need to close the curtains now of course many vloggers and podcast producers are quite happy to sit in their kitchens on their breakfast tables and set up their microphones there and even interview people and when you have two microphones or more open it makes the environment even more acoustically live than when it's one mouth on one microphone close up but that's fine for the podcast type production but it won't be good enough quality to sell your voiceover recordings to a client who want really good quality to edit into their productions ideally you need a desk where you can sit and be comfortable to put your laptop or tablet in front of you where you read the scripts but ideally you'd cover the hard surface of the desk with a blanket or towel also i wouldn't have what the lady has here a microphone stand that will pick up vibrations from your hand and arms on the desk you should have a microphone boom pole where the stand is actually on the floor many people i know who have set up their first recording area have found the walk-in closet is extremely rich in audio recording possibilities surrounded by lots of lovely soft clothes that absorb sound make sure the clothes around you don't rustle but set up a little led light in there led because the light won't get hot and so won't be a fire risk with your clothes around with a small desk in there you could find that's the best area in your house to get a recording setup with a low noise floor and to check you've got rid of reverberations clap your hands if it sounds like you're outside and you can't hear any reverb that's good so what is a noise floor well i'm in my voice booth now and what you're looking at is the software program i use adobe audition which you do have to pay for but i'll show you a free one a little later on in the video so first of all once you've calibrated your input so that you are kicking okay on the meters and it looks like you're getting good signal to noise ratio in other words it's not too loud that it's distorting and it's not too soft that you've got lots of in the background and it's very faint so that means good signal to noise ratio and so what you're looking on there is a good healthy waveform so now i'm going to shut up and we're just going to look at the meter at the bottom and see what happens when i don't speak that is the noise law and it is measured in decibels it should be a minus number i hope it is or else it'll be a terrible noise floor here we go i'm going to stop speaking now so that's about minus 75 kicking around there and that's what it should be for a professional voice booth the lower the noise floor is the better it is the more clients you'll get the more money you'll get there'll always be some clients who've got low standards and don't really care that much about technical quality but the downside is they probably won't pay as much either to get the high-end paying clients you need to have good quality recordings not distorted the right signal-to-noise ratio and a low noise floor okay now if you're thinking of recording audio books for example and thinking all their technical standards will be there's only audio books in it well no think again acx who are arguably the world's largest audiobook distributors insist on a noise floor of minus 60 decibels or better so if you don't achieve those standards your audio book recordings will be rejected now for a laugh i went out to my garden i've got a summer house it's like a glorified shed basically there's no way i could record anything in there but i had a go i didn't use my fancy microphone i used an akg p120 which is less than 100 new although you can pick up many of these used for far less than that it doesn't come with a shock mount but you'll see i had a boom mic stand so it doesn't pick up the table vibrations and my solid state laptop was supported by an amazon box as expected the noise floor here wasn't very good and the acoustics were terrible surrounded by all those hard surfaces but i just wanted to see if i could fix anything in an edit program i'll show you how i get on in a minute but first of all two other ways that you can reduce the noise floor the first is to have hardware in between the microphone and the next box which is normally the computer interface something like this the dbx286 this box has got a noise gate in it so in other words it only lets through what's over a certain amount that certain amount being the pesky stuff in the background you're trying to get rid of the downside is if you haven't set it up exactly right it can clip your voice over and sound to be honest a bit strange and once it's recorded with that clipping you can't unclip it so if you are going to use any hardware noise gate like this then make sure you have a backup copy as well without any noise gate or processing of any kind which you should do anyway and you have a y connecting lead from your microphone into the dbx box and the other one into a solid state recorder as a backup the other thing you can do not just to reduce background noise but also to improve the acoustics is to use a pop-up tent like this this is from vocal booth to go and you need to look out for secondhand ones on your market if you don't want to pay the full price you're in a little mini pad itself with your microphone and your computer inside this box and you can buy a flap to go behind you of course you could make something like this yourself with a wooden frame and old duvas which is absolutely fine the disadvantage is quite often it sounds a bit boxy and a bit muffled in a small space like this in fact when i use my vocal booth to go while i'm in a hotel room or somewhere away from the studio then i have to put this equalization setting in basically base roll-off that i've worked out to compensate for the muffledness inside so what happens if you've got no option but to record in an area with a high noise floor if the actual recording itself is good quality and you only notice the high noise floor bleeding into the recording in between words and in between sentences i never did play the noise floor i recorded in the summer house did i it started raining as soon as i got in there this is it yes so it's like -40 so it needs to be below minus 60 to pass acx even let alone people who are more stricter than that so that's terrible but surely if we have a noise floor like that if we talk loud and over it and close to the mic it will be all right wouldn't it well this is a script i did in there even before the 111 point check is done to which of the three warranty types does this apply select no it's uh it still is in the background there so if you think that the words are okay but the client is only going to notice in between you could zoom in and highlight the stuff in between the words and click delete is done to which of the three warranty but you still hear it in the words so we've got a problem and we really should have done it properly in the first place and it needs a re-record although if for example you're a producer the voiceover's gone away and the client needs it now there are various rescue things in this software called adobe audition for example there's something called denoiser have a listen to this this is the same thing can you hear the background now to which of the three warranty types does this apply select a response and confirm your selection by clicking on ok let's hear what a dealer and it's disappeared however it does sound a bit muffled and it's got loads of artifacts but it is clever though isn't it well that's flipping clever in audition isn't it but look we can't afford audition ah right is there a software program that's free that can do this kind of stuff yes there is if you don't want to commit to subscribing to adobe audition software which is arguably the industry standard these two we recommend audacity in nch wavepad audacity is completely free but please donate to the developers if you can afford it and nch wavepad which is completely free for non-commercial use and not that expensive to completely buy out right to be honest but both of these are pretty impressive for the features that they include as part of the software we could do entire courses on each of these things but very quickly i'll show you how to record play and also get rid of any background noise so this is what audacity looks like when you open it up oh pretty scary and there's nothing there but don't worry most of these audio editing programs are pretty similar counter at the bottom you've got the menus at the top and this big space that's going to be filled with the waveform first thing to do is to make sure it can actually listen to what you're putting into it so in other words it needs to sense your sound card so first of all you go into edit then preferences and then you take a look at the devices it's already picked up automatically i've just installed this actually uh it's already automatically picked up the interface that i have which happens on this computer to be a steinberg ur 22 mark ii but it will say whatever your usb interface and you simply push the record button and look my voice is coming up there and it's recording it now unfortunately it's only doing it on the left hand side because one thing i didn't do was tell it to do mono but if i just stop that by pushing the stop button and then basically force it to do mono file new and then change it down here to mono now when i record it'll be what us voiceovers want after all we've only got one mouth so everything has to be done in mono that's basically how to record and if i wanted to play it back i push the stop button here or the space bar and click back to where we want to listen and push play so everything has to be done in mono and that's me and that's pretty good isn't it and if you want to edit anything you click at the bottom and you just highlight it if i didn't want that and then click the delete button and then you've got rid of it and i should have done that properly but i'm only basically showing you the very basics here now what happens if there's any background noise well i'm going to open the window of my booth and bring in some background noise and record some more so starting again i wonder if you can hear that in the background i've opened the window and also the door into the kitchen and i've put on the tumble dryer so i'm going to be very quiet now well i was quiet but obviously the ambiance is not and so we need to get rid of that noise ideally of course you would actually record in a quiet place to start with with decent acoustics as we've said before but if you really have to fix something here's how to do it in audacity so we've made it so that the waveform fills the whole screen and we'll go to effect and we go to normalize and we'll normalize to minus three which is like your industry standard uh minus three decibels and go okay now watch what happens to the waveform and it just basically goes bigger so let the dog see the rabbit now this is the pesky part and look at the noise floor up here when i play it minus 42 which is obviously horrible but there are ways of doing it and many of these audio programs have a way of sucking up or sampling the noisy bit and working out what it can be and taking it away from the rest of it so you highlight from left to right let go and then you go to effect again then noise reduction click on that and then get noise profile but here you can preview and muck about with these things to see what it does we can cut down the noise reduction here have changed the sensitivity as well so if we go okay to that and suddenly it's got rid of the noise listen so then what happens if we want to do that to everything well it's still in the memory so we highlight the whole of the file now and then go back into effect noise reduction it's already got the profile from before and then go okay to the whole lot and now it's reduced the noise in the whole of the recording kitchen and i've put on the tumbled dryer so i'm going to be very quiet now the disadvantage is you do get artifacts and you get artifacts with all of these systems so that's why it's always best to record properly in the first place and this is wavepad from nch you are an excellent software company they don't do enough marketing or anything because um many people haven't even heard of them but um this particular one for audio editing is completely free for non-commercial use but it's not that expensive just to buy the thing so as before you've got to check that it's sensing your sound card here it's tools then options and then you go to audio and this is the play device make sure it says your sound device there and on recording you can even see yourself on the little meter here and you can even say i want display levels when recording is on standby as well and loads of other options but the first thing to need to do is to get connected and then go okay now here instead of the audacity buttons up here they're down here this time so we simply go into record it's now recording me and you can change the way it displays the waveform you can move this box around and do whatever you like and then you stop uh you can use the shortcuts if you want to but just using the buttons now for simplicity click back where you want to start from and push the play button it's now recording me and you can change the way it displays the fantastic if only we had this 30 years ago in the days of magnetic tape oh we're so lucky now you youngsters don't know how look you are and if you want to highlight a section again if you want to edit anything push the delete button on your keyboard and it's gone now recording me but what about noise reduction this is where nch wave pad really scores it's very comprehensive let's say i left a gap of good 5-10 seconds and i wanted to sample the noise we could do as i showed you before in wave pad go into the top effects one here and then you grab noise sample from the selected area and you can continue that way or you could go to the second effects menu not that one there but this one there if i had to criticize this software that is a little bit confusing but it's worth it for what it shows you the the lower one here and you've got all these colored things here now you go to a fix and clean up now look at this you're like this not a lot you got click pop removal you've got all the high pass filters which for example high pass basically means if you've got sort of low rumble or main sum or something like that it lets high pass and say 50 60 hertz anything less than that you roll off and that can get rid of an awful lot of problems but look at this noise reduction noise removal wizard oh my goodness me select the noise type and you can select all this look background traffic noise brief clicks brief popping sounds constant low frequency noise caused by electrical interference and you can preview it we simply go into record and i haven't got any of these problems here but it just does it you know and it's very very powerful there are so many options i i do recommend you look at this so that's the second recommendation of software that is free or extremely cheap to purchase so let's go through the equipment you can look out for new or used that will give you good quality at a budget price first of all your microphone there are two types of microphones usb and xlr connectors what does the difference make about the connector well if it's usb it basically means you can plug it straight into your computer and you don't need an interface box well that's good in it well yes it sounds attractive but it won't give you the flexibility of having an xlr connection when you need to use it in a mixer or if you have to put it into a solid state recorder so for professional use really xlr and purists and various sound engineers may scoff at these uh usb microphones and laugh in your face and share all sorts of technical parameters but it's your choice i personally say if you can afford an xlr connector then do it so these are my recommendations of usb microphones that will get you started in your voiceover career for very little money either new or certainly second hand as long as they've been looked after the rode nt-1a which comes in a kit as well with your own shock mount and a little pop filter the marantz is good so is the shore and the at2020 which is also made in an xlr variant as well and then for xlr microphones the rode pro caster akg 420 which is the bigger brother of the little one that you saw me earlier in the summer house se 2200 and the neumann tlm-102 if you really want to push the boat out but you may find a real bargain secondhand with a neumann if you find one snap it up if you have an xlr microphone you'll need an interface box to connect it to your computer plenty of them out there my two main recommendations are any of the solo scarlet or the steinberg you are 22 and there'll be many of the mark twos around now in the used market because people will be upgrading to the usbc type as to computer you don't need that powerful a computer for audio but just go for quietness don't have anything with noisy fans because it's a right pain to hide it away from where your microphone is ideally a solid state laptop if you can afford it so once you're set up with your home studio how do you start a voiceover career how do you start getting clients and making money with your voice well you need to take one of our courses at voiceover masterclass i'm bound to say but we do have a comprehensive free course you're very welcome to take simply go to our website click on the video based course there and we'll be very pleased to see you kt brodie and myself will take you through all these stages first of looking at your type of voice how to improve it and then how to set up your voice career getting those clients in so thanks very much for watching please subscribe to our voiceover masterclass channel and we'll see you at our website where we've got many more tips for you have a great day and thank you for watching

Channel: Voiceover Masterclass

Views: 24,044

Keywords: voice over, home studio, voice acting, studio on a budget, recording studio on a budget, voiceoverstudio on a budget, voice over studio cheap, voiceover recording home for cheap, where to record voiceover at home, save money on voiceover studios, voice recording studio cheap, on a budget, voiceover equipemnt, cheap microphones for voiceover, peter baker voiceover, home studio setup for beginners, home studio setup 2020, home studio setup, voiceover home studio 2021

Id: 1aBivHz54-I

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020