How to get that Golden Radio Voice?

I’ve been watching some youtube tutorials by Mike Russell, and he’s able to record a really deep/rich voice, even though he often sounds like this.

I tried to apply similar filters to my own work, and went from a reasonable dry track to a swampy, overproduced wet one. This is after compression, bass boost, treble boost and a hard limiter, with normalizing at each step.

Any ideas what I can do to improve?

We have a frequent request of “Help me make my voice into [something else].”

Apart from some gaming voices which just involve adding distortion, it almost always fails.

— A lot of broadcast announcing is acting. “NBC Radio News on the Hour…” is not the presentation of somebody ordering a pizza on the phone, even if that same person is ordering pizza on the phone. I loved Gary Owens on “Laugh-In.” He was a broadcast announcer spoofing a broadcast announcer.

— If your voice doesn’t normally produce low tones, most simple filters just produce boomy mud. We can’t boost tones that aren’t there.

— Pitch Change is only good for a couple of semi-tones before the presentation starts to sound funny. Plosives and Sibilents don’t change between voices. Everything else does.

Don LaFontaine and my little sister sound the same when shushing somebody “Shshshshssh!” But only Don LaFontaine sounds like him when he’s announcing a movie (“In a world with Monsters and Aliens”).

I love that he was in on the joke when he “announced” the Geico Insurance commercial as “that guy from the movies.”

That’s not to say you can’t design a software package to do that. You probably can. And Audacity stands ready to consider your submission should you decide to do it.

Koz

There’s no shortage of people posting “I saw it on YouTube, but I can’t get it to work.”

Pay attention when the YouTube expert makes his trick work with multiple examples, not just once or just him.

Similarly, almost all Audacity YouTube postings are either wrong or for the wrong version of Audacity.

Koz

I am aware that some things are a quintessential aspect of the speaker’s voice and acting skill. My point is that the guy in the video is able to produce this voice effortlessly for a number of videos, and ones that don’t focus around the technique of that voice (it’s about other skills, such as using Adobe products).

I was wondering if anyone used Audacity to achieve something similar, such as through a blend of EQ and microphone proximity effect. But based on the youtube tutorials I’ve seen (which are, as you say, heavily flawed for the most part) it seems the answer is “no”.

is able to produce this voice effortlessly for a number of videos

But always his voice?

It’s possible you are the celebrity, not him. Maybe your voice will not convert no matter how hard you try. Have you tried it with anybody else’s voice? If he has a sample of his voice before converting, try to do the effect with his voice.

Like I said, I think it’s possible to program something like that, but I’ve never heard it succeeding with straight, simple filters, compression and amplification. I have a bass doubler in my music system. It “knows” when certain bass tones go by and automatically produces an octave lower version. Instant rumbly cathedral organ. I never tried putting my voice through it.

This is, oddly, a cousin to a different problem: “Make my voice into an AudioBook presentation.”

There’s no way to know where you started from, so outside of extensive programming skills, there’s no way to know what the conversion needs to be—or even if there is one.

Sorry.

Koz

Proximity effect usually only works well with directional microphones. Directional tonal cancellation gets all squirrely if you’re too close giving you the bass bump. But that doesn’t work for everybody, either.

Koz

It is possible to match the equalization of your recording to Mike Russell’s , ( using this experimental tool ) …

but the bass-boost in that equalization is the making the reverb from your room even more obvious :frowning:
There’s no post-processing cure for reverb : if you want to avoid it you need to add sound-absorbing material to the room.

The short answer is that you need to be educated in England. :slight_smile:

A more serious answer is that you need to learn to speak from your lower diaphragm. So many people these days speak through their nose, and it really jars. Try to imagine you are pulling the words from your stomach.