How To 'Break' Into Voice Over (Part IV of Many)
Welcome back, my friends!
Previously on Audio Advice...
PART I was about setting and reframing your mindset, which is the foundation for any successful career.
PART II tackled honing your skills as a voice actor, understanding how important specificity and script analysis are, and breaking your habitual patterns so that you develop more range as a performer.
PART III opened the door on what it takes to stay competitive; auditions, the truth about authenticity, staying ahead of AI by adding value, the numbers game, and keeping your tank full.
Today, we venture into the most loved, hated, feared, and addictive part of a successful Voice-Over career: Broadcast Quality Audio
The Evolution & Revolution of Studio Recordings
When I graduated from Stephens College in 2002, the world of voice over was quite different from today. It was relatively unheard of for most actors to have their own Broadcast Quality studios—save the folks who were also producing and voicing National Commercials. Considering that just about every effect or process made within audio production required an analog piece of hardware to do it, it was cost and space prohibitive. Back in those days, we all generally auditioned at our agent's office, and recorded in-studio.
When I first started in narration and commercial work in 2005, my agent told me to "just record my auditions from home and send them in," and I said... "what?!?!?"
I'd never done that before. I didn't own a mic. Not only did I not have a treated space, I wouldn't even know how to do it. How do you edit? Would my Logitech headset microphone be enough for the job? WHAT DO I DO???? I'm a voice actor dammit, isn't that enough? And then I fell through the first of many rabbit holes that opened up how vast the whackadoodle world of VO really is!
I want to mention this story upfront, because I want you to know that I know what it is like to feel overwhelmed and clueless about audio tech, and to remind you that:
A) We don't know what we don't know
B) We all start knowing nothing
C) If there is an openness and willingness (plus motivation) to learn, you can and will master this subject in time.
I am thoroughly grateful to Kevin Carney, Bob Michaels, Alex DeWees, and Tim Tippets for guiding me down the rocky path to having broadcast quality audio, and for helping me master my own workflows and processes. What once (in the beginning) took an hour to figure out and do, can now be accomplished in mere minutes, and thanks to hot keys, sometimes even seconds. You just need the knowledge, and the practice.
Are you ready to dive in?
Whether it's your first foray into the Audio Jargon Jungle, or you are looking for a refresher, we'll go slow and easy!
There's always space for improvement, no matter how long you've been in the business. ~Oscar De La Hoya
Broadcast Quality Audio: The ultimate goal
We will start with the big overarching theme, and then break it down into its components. When you audition, market to potential clients, and studios, you want to be able to tell them (with confidence) that your studio offers broadcast quality audio. What does that mean exactly?
NOISE FLOOR
Also called 'room tone,' it is both the measure and quality of the sound of your space when no one is speaking. When we talk about the dB (decibel) levels of your "silence" (the loudness or quantity) we are referring to your 'Noise Floor,' and when we are talking about the EQ of how it sounds (the quality), we are referring to your 'Room Tone.'
There is a lot of confusion when it comes to noise floor and room tone, because they actually are the same thing, but applied quite differently.
People seem to know about these concepts but not really understand them. I see folks asking how to fix their 'floor noise', 'noise tone', 'room floor', and all kinds of other things. It really hurts my heart to see that, because this is a concept that anyone can understand so let me explain this with practical applications:
When setting up certain processes to clean up the audio (like the DeNoise process) you need the profile of the room tone, so it knows what to clean up and the dB level of the noise floor, so it knows how much to clean.
Most home studios, with effective room treatment and lack of noise-causing elements (like computer fans, refrigerators, HVAC, landscaping, traffic, etc.) will fall somewhere in the -48dB to -52dB range when the audio is raw.
Each studio will sound slightly different (due to the size, shape, microphone, and other components of the space) so there will be different frequencies (the exact tone, or musical note of the sound) that will be adjusted, but generally the DeNoise process will be looking to make a -8dB to a -12dB adjustment to the noise floor to get it to -60dB, the broadcast quality level. It will accomplish that feat by using your unique room tone.
The other thing to understand is GAIN.
Gain is the input level (usually set on your interface) for how loud the signal will be. When you increase or decrease your gain, everything comes up and down, your voice, and your noise floor.
Some folks, in order to get their noise floor down below the -60dB threshold, will simply turn the gain down, which just delays the problem. The noise floor is successfully at -65dB.... but your voice is now -20dB!! Which needs to be coming in closer to -3dB.
So they normalize the file (more on 'normalizing' later) to -3dB in the edit session... and uh oh... now the noise floor is -48dB, which isn't going to be competitive in today's audition marketplace. It also won't pass certain quality checks (like for audiobooks on ACX.)
This is something every freelancing voice actor needs to know how to tame.
You will hear different coaches, teachers, audio consultants, and YouTube videos all give different recommendations about what levels to set your recording gain to. Some will have you set your gain very low, and have your voice peaking under -18dB, some will suggest setting it much higher.
I've tried them all, as each of my mentors have different recommended strategies. Here's what I learned through experience and experimentation:
It's a spectrum. If you set the gain too high, the chances of you clipping or distorting your audio (where the sound is louder than the equipment can handle, so it gives it that 'hot,' cutoff, distorted sound) go way up. Either in session when an outlying peak comes out with too much juice, or in post, because the amount of headroom you have to edit with is too small.
The other issue is that for certain interfaces (and I'm looking at you, Focusrite Scarlett Solo!) the amount of self-noise they generate goes drastically up past a certain point that creates more issues than are ever worth solving.
BUT... Set the gain too low, and you're just creating more work for yourself in the edit. You'll basically be normalizing your audio multiple times, and adding unnecessary steps to your processes. There was a time when gain needed to be that low based on the equipment that was being used. In today's world of digital plug-ins, editing, and effects, that simply isn't as much of a problem as it used to be.
So, what do I use, after trying all these approaches?
I set my gain to "just past 12 o'clock" on my interface, to have most of the voice coming in around -6 to -12dB, as it's the middle ground.
It leaves plenty of headroom for randomly overly projected syllables, for the polishing effects to be made in post, and the noise floor is low enough that I can tame it with a highpass filter (which is an effect that we'll discuss when we get to EQ) and Izotopes RX DeNoise.
SAMPLE RATE & BIT DEPTH
This is basically how your digital computer takes "snapshots" of your signal. But it is also how YOU will determine the quality of your audio.
The 'sample rate' is the rate of capture and playback and is expressed in hertz (hz for short). The 'bit depth' is number of bits per sample per second.
Here's a visual:
When you record, whatever you set your sample rate and bit depth to, will be as high of a quality as the file can ever be.
Think about it just like graphic images or photography, while you can compress a large HQ image down into a thumbnail for an email or website, you cannot take that thumbnail and produce a large HQ image for a poster or billboard.
The other caveat is, the higher the quality, the larger the file size and bandwidth it takes up. If your internet can't handle supporting the signal of 48khz on a Source Connect session, you and the studio will have to take it down to 44.1khz (which is fairly standard.)
Those high rates also can crash or create delays on Zoom, if you are attempting to stream your original audio to the client on a directed session.
I still set my initial recording sessions to 48khz/ 24bit sessions, but most exports and live sessions will be in 44.1khz/ 16bit (which is CD quality, and used by quite a few projects.)
It's a matter of both personal preference and client need, but it's important to understand the basics, and all of this is helpful to know when you are selecting an interface, and setting up your DAW. (Digital Audio Workstation; like Adobe Audition, Audacity, Reaper, etc.)
YOUR TREATED ROOM
We could easily call this section, "garbage in, garbage out," but I know you don't have or want garbage anywhere near your auditions!
We could also call this section "buy right, or buy twice," but I know that budgeting for all the investments needed in this career can seem daunting and unfair.
The biggest, and most expensive misunderstanding that most folks have when setting up or making improvements to recording space is SOUNDPROOFING vs. ACOUSTIC TREATMENT.
Soundproofing prevents sound from traveling into or out of the space, and is also called 'isolation.' It is expensive, it requires mass, many layers, and to truly be a soundproof space, must be air/ water tight.
Acoustic treatment changes the sound inside the room for clarity and dynamics. While, with enough layers and mass, it can dampen noise, it isn't soundproofing. It stops echo, reflections, and other unwanted room sounds from making it into the signal along with your voice.
There are many products out there that market themselves as being designed to help you soundproof your space, but in reality, they simply deal with acoustic treatment.
GETTING WHAT YOU PAY FOR
Here's a test that I want you to remember: >>>how much does it weigh? <<<
Soundproofing requires MASS, so how much does that product WEIGH? This will give some indication of how much it will interrupt unwanted sounds from outside the room, so that you can isolate your voice, inside the space.
Professionally manufactured isolation booths like Studio Bricks, Whisper Rooms, Vocal Booths, etc. weigh about 5 pounds/ square foot. So they weigh anywhere from 50-200 pounds (and cost thousands of dollars).
Producer's choice blankets weigh 10-14 pounds each (and cost $50-$100)
Sound panels and diffusers weigh anywhere from 1-12 pounds each (and cost $25 - hundreds of dollars, depending on the size and thickness you select).
How much do you think these weigh?
While weight and density aren't the only factors that impact how much isolation you will get from your purchase, it's a pretty good place to start, so that you know what you are getting, and have a way to compare like to like.
领英推荐
Foam tiles and moving blankets are indeed the least expensive options around, which is why they make it into almost every new VO's first booth, but how many will you have to buy to get them as effective as a sound panel or producer's choice blanket?
How many would you have to buy to compete with audio coming from a vocal booth?
These are very important considerations to make when you set your budget and plan your upgrades. And while you may not have the budget for a whisper room for many years of your career, you do need to figure out how to keep your audio competitive, with what you do incorporate into your space.
You'd be surprised what a walk-in closet packed with clothes & textiles and/or a DIY frame with producer's choice blankets, or other higher quality panels can get you.
There is also the option to use a shotgun mic or other hypercardioid mic to help limit noise inside your sessions, though it tends to work better for commercial and narration work more than character work. It's not about the amount of money you spend, it's about spending your money strategically. (#Quality>QuantityAlways)
EQUALIZATION (EQ)
We've talked quite a bit about effects that control gain which are the "quantity" effects, like normalization, where you tell your DAW how loud you want the peak of your file to be, and it automatically adjusts all of your audio up or down to meet that threshold. It's really no different than grabbing all the audio and cranking the amplitude up or down until the loudest part is where you want it, but using Normalization makes the DAW do the math for you. It isn't selective or targeted; it's a generalized, all-over effect.
Now, let's talk a little bit about the "quality" effects, which involve EQ. These effects are quite specialized and targeted. EQ comprises the qualitative 'musical notes' of sound, which are expressed in hertz. With EQ effects, the gain of each frequency can be adjusted independently.
First, I'll give you a visual, so we can talk through the specifics.
When we talked earlier about your room tone (the quality of your 'silence') we can look at it in terms of its EQ footprint.
HIGH PASS FILTER
A lot of noise comes from low-end garbage frequencies that are lower than any of the notes of your voice, and so one strategy that many people use (including myself) is to do what's called a "HIGH PASS FILTER" or a 'low end roll-off'
It looks like this:
It takes the frequencies BELOW the threshold you set (i.e. 80hz, 100hz) and "rolls them off" at whatever slope of "gain" you set it to (in this example it's 24dB/ Octave, 48dB/ Octave would look like a steep cliff, and 6dB/ Octave would look like a gentle bunny slope).
There are many ways to test or use a high pass filter to see if it will lower your noise floor: The most common is to record sample audio (including silent spaces of your room tone, along with speech) and to apply the effect in your DAW. The next is to use a built in high pass filter on a microphone or on your interface to run the process live as you record.
In any and every case, looking at the EQ in your room tone to see where noise is coming from: low, mid, or high, can help you understand what effects to use to tame the noise floor.
I personally prefer to do it in the DAW in post. That way you can "un-do" it if you don't like the outcome, and it also gives you more flexibility in how you set it up than the switch on the back of a microphone, which generally only has up to 3 settings.
DE-ESSING
Another common issue that can be solved with EQ effects, is sibilance. The high-pitched whistling sound that comes from 'ess,' 'eff,' 'eth-like' sounds.
What a de-esser does is compress only the frequencies that you set around your sibilance. We don't have time in today's (already tome-like) entry to cover compression in depth, but it's basically a way to give the audio a haircut. For every x amount of decibel that passes the compressor's threshold, it only allows y amount to pass through. There's a heck of a lot more to it than that, but it's a good start.
Whatever effects we use with EQ (or with compression), we want to make our main goal to simply polish the audio with a light touch. Too heavy a hand, and you will quickly start stripping away the beautiful qualities of your voice, and the depth of the performance.
NOTCH FILTERS / SPOT TREATMENT
I cannot tell you the number of weird things some apartments I've rented have presented in terms of setting up a voice over space and keeping the audio clean. In one place, there was a fan, built into the wall, that had a 300hz bump that I couldn't fix in "the room." A voice isolation booth certainly would have fixed it, but I didn't, at the time, have $5K-$10K to invest in one, nor the room dimensions to install it. So I took my audio to an expert, and lo-and-behold a combination of notch and FFT filters took that fan out of my auditions, while leaving my voice mostly alone.
EQ can do amazing miracles to audio in post, once you know what the options are. Especially if you rent, rather than own your home, and can't build, change, or eliminate certain noise sources, it will literally become your audio best friend. It can fix plosives, fans, weird 'f" sounds, and so much more, but it has to be done intentionally and professionally.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
When it comes to staying competitive in today's audition marketplace, having clean, pro-audio is the third most important priority to get handled (after growth-centered mindset and authentic performance.)
There are so many opinions about how much processing you should perform on your audio vs. how raw you leave it, and I think it really depends on 2 factors:
1) How close your raw audio is to Broadcast Quality (see the notes about treating your space, above) and
2) Who the audio is going to.
No matter who you learn from, myself included, they will endorse what works for them. But you have to remember we are really only ever a population of 1. Your unique challenges + your unique niche will determine where you land in that conversation.
I run basic processing on all of my auditions, unless they ask for it raw, in the same way that I style my hair, face, and wardrobe when I go to a speaking event or performance. The same way real estate agents stage a home before they put it up for sale on the market.
Why?
"This is the quality you can expect" is basically what your choice on audio production equates to.
So much of the work we freelance today is directly for the end-user client, and not a production house, or studio, so they'll need it to be ready for the public when it is delivered, and the audition is your chance to show them what that would sound like, before they buy. Your demo does too... but your demos have so much more than you will probably be adding to the final of your own audio. So, your produced demos + your auditions & portfolio should instill confidence in clients, that you can provide them what they need to create a compelling story, campaign, or audience-engagement video.
If you are working with a studio and running source connect sessions, your audio will always be raw, so you'll need to really focus your time, energy, and resources on getting your room to be as high quality as it can be.
If you are working with a production company, you can ask them how much polishing they want you to do.
In my experience, most production companies have requested I run the same processes on their finished audio as I did in the audition, as they don't really have time to edit breath, mouth noise, noise floor issues and sibilance. They have the client's story, timing, video transitions, and graphics to worry about.
Again, these are all personal preferences and decisions that you get to make about your audio, as they are reflections of YOU and your BRAND. I do highly recommend getting a consult with a professional to help dial in your settings, and DO NOT recommend trying to build your own "rack," "stack," or EQ profile without the help of a professional engineer, unless you are already one!
Some of my favorite folks for this are:
*Alex DeWees is another, but I know, that at the time of this writing he does not currently have openings for new clients, so I'm not linking to him.
They can help you understand your DAW, give you objective feedback on the sound of your space, and make recommendations of ways to improve it, both in the room, and digitally in post. There are many other great engineers out there, and this list is not exhaustive, it is only meant to encourage you to invest your money wisely when it comes to being competitive with your audio.
Maximize every dollar and every day you have for this whackadoodle journey!
Review of Audio Jargon (#TrivaWinners)
DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. The software you use to record and edit your audio. (i.e. Adobe Audition, Audacity, Reaper, Twisted Wave, etc.)
Gain - The input setting for the amplitude of the signal expressed in decibels
Decibel (dB) - Unit used to measure the intensity of a sound or power level of an electric signal
Normalization - the application of a constant amount of gain to a recording to bring the amplitude to a targeted threshold.
Broadcast Quality - A vague term used to describe clean, clear, high quality, pro-audio
Sample Rate - Measured in kilohertz (khz) and determines the range of frequencies captured in digital audio
Bit Depth - The number of bits of info in each sample
Soundproofing - Stops sound from traveling into or out of the space
Accoustic Treatment - Sound absorption to dampen echo, reflections, and unwanted sounds from the signal
Equalization (EQ) - Adjusting different frequency bands within the audio independently
Compression - Reducing the overall dynamic range (the ratio between the loudest and softest levels) of audio by detecting when it exceeds a certain threshold, and then attenuating it by a specified amount, in a specified speed
Sibilance - A whistling, hissing, sound created by certain syllables
Effects Rack - (also called a 'stack,' or pre-set) an automated series of digital effects applied to audio to help clean and polish it, and needs to be set up professionally, in order to keep the audio competitive
Thanks for reading! Please let me know if you have questions, and/ or if you have a topic you'd like to hear about. I really do love helping actors and business professionals understand our whackadoodle industry as best as can be done! ?
~Lauren Goode
Lauren Goode is a freelance actor and voice talent, based in Chicago who provides voice-over work for broadcast and digital media. Lauren's voice has been featured on television, radio, online streaming commercials, video games, park tours, cartoons—including the Cartoon Network— and has narrated numerous online video tutorials, phone systems, and eLearning modules. She is a collaborative artist who enjoys working with clients to find the right angle to tell and sell the story.
While she can claim, Walmart, Re/Max, SalesForce, Cigna, United HealthCare, Genpact, Calvin Klein, Microsoft, Animal Planet, Full Metal Alchemist, and Assassin's Creed as a few of her "big name" social credentials, she just really loves meeting people where they are and helping them get to wherever they want to go.
She describes her very fun and weirdly-awesome life as part acting, part fitness adventuring, and part goofy-yet-empowering mentorship.