Read The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over Online
Authors: James Alburger
The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over (53 page)
This section is not intended to give you solutions to your room acoustic issues, but rather will give you a general understanding of typical acoustic problems facing voiceover actors and some ways to solve them. There are literally dozens of books on how to deal with adverse room acoustics, and an Internet search will bring up thousands of other resources.
If you’re going to work in voiceover, you will need to have a home recording studio, which means you will need to find a place to record. Your objective should be to record your voice at a quality comparable with that of the best recording studios in the country. OK… that might be a bit lofty a goal, but you
do
need to be able to record with excellent sound quality.
“So,” I hear you ask, “how do I find a place in my home or apartment where I can record my voice and have it sound that good?” You’ve actually got several options ranging in cost from relatively inexpensive to very costly.
If you’ve never been inside a major recording studio, you’re probably thinking that you don’t have a reference point for what a professional studio might sound like. Actually, you do! But it’s far more important to know what a professional studio
doesn’t
sound like: It doesn’t sound like your living room, your kitchen, your garage, your bedroom, your office, or your bathroom. Although it certainly is possible to locate your home studio in any of these areas, in most cases they simply won’t do if you expect to produce high-quality recordings. So where will you put your home studio?
All of these rooms have inherent acoustic “problems” in most homes, the most common of which is simply referred to as room reverberation—the common echo that is the result of sound waves bouncing off parallel surfaces like walls, windows and hard surfaces. A typical bath room is probably the best example of room echo. Solid hard walls, mirrors, and tile surfaces cause sound waves to bounce all over the place. A less offensive, but still unacceptable, form of reverberation is known as
slap echo
. This form of reverberation is what you’ll usually hear when you clap your hands in an empty bedroom. The resulting reflections of sound waves bouncing off the walls creates a relatively short echo that may not be obvious until you actually listen for it.
The one place in your home that most closely resembles the “sound” of a professional recording studio is your bedroom closet stuffed full of clothes. The soft fabrics absorb sound waves, preventing them from bouncing off the walls. A room with overstuffed furniture, thick carpet, heavy drapes, and lots of wall hangings will have the same effect of killing reflected sound waves, resulting in a relatively “dead” sound.
Acoustically treating the walls of a room will achieve a similar result. Acoustic treatments can be anything from hanging a few heavy, absorbent blankets on the walls to applying specially designed acoustic foam to the walls. The general idea is that you want to create an acoustically non-reflective environment, one in which your voice will be recorded without any reflections from objects or walls.
More expensive options include purchasing a preconstructed booth to serve as your recording space or building an acoustically isolated room within a room. An Internet search for “voiceover booth” will reveal numerous manufacturers of prefabricated booths and even a few sites with instructions on how to build your own.
If you are going to try to “fix” the acoustics of an existing room, be careful not to overlook the corners. Corners where walls meet the ceiling or floor are notorious for reflecting low frequency sound waves often resulting in a “boominess” that can seriously affect your recordings. The right-angle corners where walls meet can also create a similar bass reflector. These areas can be dealt with in many ways through the use of acoustic foam, corner bass traps, mounting absorbent material, or even using an overstuffed pillow to effectively eliminate the right angles of the corners.
Although fabric wall hangings, blankets, pillows, overstuffed furniture, and other inexpensive acoustic treatments may appear to “fix” many acoustic issues in a room, they still may not create an environment that is ideal for your voiceover recordings.
Creating an acoustically dead area surrounding your microphone may work better than trying to treat an entire room. A few inexpensive three-fold screens or custom-built wooden or PVC frames draped with heavy blankets can serve as a portable recording area. There are even “portable” voiceover booths and stand-mounted acoustic baffles available that create a sound absorbent area around the microphone.
If you are using one of these portable acoustic environments, be sure to aim your mic toward the acoustic material if at all possible. Any room reflections will first hit the back of the mic, which is a dead zone for cardioid microphones, and then be absorbed by the acoustic material, thus minimizing being picked up by the mic.
Chances are you will need to do some additional research and spend some money to make your recording environment as quiet and “dead” as possible. If you’re just getting started in voiceover, you should strive for the best room acoustics you can achieve that is within your budget. I would not recommend purchasing a prefabricated voiceover booth or building your
own isolation room without first doing a lot of study on the subject of acoustics. Explore other options first. The time to upgrade your home studio environment is when you are generating a substantial income from your voiceover work—not when you are just getting started.
If you are just getting started in voiceover, you don’t need anything more than the basic equipment discussed earlier in this chapter. However, as you begin to get booked, you’ll soon discover that some clients might request
ISDN
or
phone patch
services. You may never need either of these, but it is still worth knowing what they are and how to use them.
ISDN stands for
Integrated Services Digital Network
. This is basically a hard-wire digital phone line provided by your local phone company that will connect your home studio to any other ISDN studio in the world. It’s the next best thing to the client actually being at your home studio. To connect your studio to another studio requires a codec (coder-decoder) that will convert your audio to an appropriate digital signal that can be transmitted over phone lines. The receiving studio must have a compatible codec in order to receive your audio.
Most ISDN set-ups use two sets of phone lines—one for transmitting audio and the other for receiving. Depending on location, installation of the phone lines can cost up to several hundred dollars per line and the codec alone can cost up to about $3,000. Add to that the monthly fees for maintaining the phone service and the price of ISDN can add up quickly.
For many years, ISDN was the preferred method for digital audio transmission because it allowed for real-time, high-quality remote audio recording. With the rapid improvements in Internet technologies, ISDN has steadily been losing favor and, in fact, many telephone companies are reducing or discontinuing ISDN service in their service areas.
A number of alternatives to ISDN have made their appearance, most of which use advances in Internet technology to provide real-time remote recording similar to ISDN. Two of the more popular systems are Source Connect,
www.source-elements.com
, and AudioTX,
www.audiotx.com
.
Do you need ISDN—or even one of the alternatives? Probably not. Because any digital remote recording scheme will require matching equipment at both ends and the potential for monthly service fees, I do not recommend investing in any technology of this sort until you have a client base that will support the initial costs and produce a return on your investment. And when you do get that first ISDN booking, there’s no need to rush out and install expensive equipment. Most cities have at least one ISDN studio where you can book the session.
Many voiceover talent buyers and producers prefer to direct or supervise their VO sessions from the comfort of their office. In order for them to do this, they need to be able to clearly hear you as you record their script. At the same time, you need to be able to clearly hear them as they direct you through the session. Using a phone patch to your studio is the next best thing to ISDN or its alternatives, and it’s a lot less expensive.
Although holding a telephone to your ear will do the job, this is not practical for a voiceover session as the mere action of holding the phone will restrict your ability to move as you perform. A Bluetooth headset or some other telephone headset will do the job nicely and may be the simplest, most cost-effective way to go. Many VO professional use a Bluetooth headset with great success. However, ideally, you should be able to connect your home studio directly to your phone system.
A properly configured phone patch system will require an analog or digital mixer with the ability to send your audio both to your computer and to an external telephone hybrid that will interface your audio output with your telephone system. Once installed, your client will call your phone number (or you call them) and you push a button on your hybrid to connect your studio to the phone line. Connecting a phone patch digital hybrid to your equipment can be a bit tricky and is fully explained in
The Voice Actor’s Guide to Professional Home Recording ebook
, available through
www.voiceacting.com
.
At some point in your voiceover career you may want to upgrade your home studio. By the time you are ready for this you will have plenty of experience and you’ll have a better knowledge of what you might want to upgrade, what equipment you might want to add and, more importantly, why. Equipment that is installed outside of your mixer or computer is generally referred to as
outboard equipment
. There are literally dozens of audio equipment manufacturers and equipment to fit any budget.
A few of the possible equipment upgrades or additions are listed below:
- Outboard signal processor—
A signal processor can be any device that modifies or adjusts an audio signal. The most common outboard processors include a compressor/limiter, equalizer, deesser, noise reduction, signal enhancer, or mic preamp. Some devices include multiple functions while others are dedicated to a single purpose. - Outboard microphone preamp—
Your mixer or USB interface already includes a mic preamp. A microphone produces an extremely low electrical output. A mic preamp boosts this audio signal to a level that can be used by a mixer or other device. An
external mic preamp will generally be of a higher quality than the built-in preamp in your mixer or USB interface. - Powered speakers—
Advances in speaker design have produced new speaker systems with the power amplifier built in. This results in extremely high quality audio from relatively small speakers. - Additional microphones—
Different microphones can produce different results from your voice recordings. You or your client might want a certain sound for a specific project or type of voiceover work. Careful selection of your mic can help you achieve the desired results and allow you to offer greater versatility with your recording services.
Upgrading your home studio should only be a consideration when you have either a specific need for the upgrade or you have generated enough income to justify the expense.
Regardless of your computer or its operating system, you will need to devise a method for managing your files. There is no one correct or ideal file management system, so this is something you’ll need to work out for yourself. However, I do have some suggestions that you might like to keep in mind as you work out your personal computer management system.
- Devise a folder system that is easy to work with—
Think of your computer as a file cabinet. You might have a primary folder for each client and subfolders for each project you work on for that client. Within each project’s subfolder there might be additional subfolders that hold files for various aspects of that project. The key to a successful and efficient file management system is to thoroughly think it through, even mapping it out on paper, before you start creating folders on your hard drive. This advance planning may reveal potential structural issues or result in some better organizational ideas that you might otherwise miss. - Include an “Upload” or “Deliver” folder—
Rendering your MP3 or other deliverable files to a separate folder will make it easier to locate them when burning to a CD-ROM, attaching to an email, or uploading to an FTP site. - Use a separate external hard drive for your voiceover projects—
If you keep all of your VO recordings on your C Drive, you stand a chance of losing everything when your hard drive crashes… and eventually, it will! By using a separate hard drive for your voiceover work, you remove a considerable amount of stress from your C Drive, allowing it to work more efficiently for running your system’s
programs. Using an external USB drive can give you the additional flexibility of being able to move to a different computer to work on your projects. Large capacity portable and network USB hard drives are inexpensive, and the investment will be well worth it. - Master your computer software—
If you are going to operate as a professional business person, you must be able to handle any computerized business functions quickly and efficiently. Learning how to use your software now will pay big dividends later on. - Know in advance how to deliver files to your clients—
There are many ways to deliver audio files: CD-ROM, FTP, email, and third-party delivery uploads. Any of these may be used to deliver MP3, .wav, .aiff, or other files. Learn which delivery methods work best for which file formats. CD-ROM may require software to properly burn the files to a disk. Email cannot handle a file larger than about 8–10 MB, and realistically, anything much larger than 4 MB will tend to slow things down. FTP (
File Transfer Protocol)
can be challenging to work with, but is often the preferred delivery method for very large files. There are many third-party delivery methods that allow you to upload your files to a server and then notify your client via email with a link for them to download the files. An Internet search for “file delivery service” will reveal dozens of options, many of which are free and some of which can handle files up to several GB in size.