I am new to this forum and new to Audacity. I am currently a student of an acting school, with specialization in dubbing, reading and diction in a large way.
English is not my mother tongue, so please forgive my mistakes
I started to record audiobooks by myself, to improve myself, and I downloaded Audacity, never ever used a post production software before.
I’m doing my first steps, watched some youtube tutorials, try to understand how things goes. I lernt how to reduce noise, cut breath, inserting “silence” during words.
That’s it, I’m afraid.
Do you have like a step by step guidelines on how to improve a reading speech?
Like “first do this, then do that, then do compressor effect, etc” (I really don’t know, I’m just wondering)
Help will be really appreciated, cause I feel I’m getting exciting on be able to record, manage and shape my voice to the best.
Do you have a microphone and a very quiet, echo-free room? The word “Studio” scares everybody, but that’s what you need to record your voice the best quality. We can’t take echoes and many room noises out of a recording. It doesn’t have to be one of those glass-paneled rooms with the heavy door, but many closets can be used.
You can make a small studio with plastic pipes and moving company pads.
It’s nice to think that you can fix all the mistakes with production editing, filters and effects, but you can’t. After you get better at this, having to stop at each performance to work on the sound is a problem. The goal is to sit down, announce something, correct the mistakes, set the volume and send it to the client. And then announce for the next client.
Record a 10 second test and post it on the forum. Don’t change it. Just record, cut it if you need to, export a WAV and send it to the forum
I got a headphones with a nice mic, it records very clean and of course I can hear all the little imperfections like mouth clicks etc. Not so much background noise.
I don’t have money right now to afford some nice mics and stuff, my goal is to understand how to manage the sound (the speech) properly. I don’t want to make great changes, I understand that more changes I will make worser it gets.
I understand how to eliminate background noises working on the track, I’m not so sure how to use compression, normalise and some other stuff.
I have already tried the closet thing eheheheheh!
I was wonder if there is any “path” to follow when interact with a voice track, that’s it.
I’m studying in a dubbing academy and I would like to excercise, read something, improve the hearing and listen to the final work. Maybe send it to someone…
And learn something, because I discover Audacity and I think it’s a very nice software.
ACX Check (part of the above process) will tell you if your noise level is within spec. Note that typically when you run RMS Normalize, you’ll end-up boosting the levels and that will also bring-up the noise floor (making it worse*). So, it’s important to measure noise after getting you RMS (and peak) level into spec.
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The signal-to-noise ratio isn’t worse and this is no different from turning-up the volume control, but it does make the noise more noticeable and it does increase the noise measurement.
The test doesn’t have to be in English. That one ten-second sound track can give us an idea of what problems you might have when you try to read for good quality voice recordings.
Most people publish in Audible/ACX. ACX has strict standards for reading quality and we can give you ideas how to change your reading so it will pass inspection.
We don’t have “start from zero” classes on how to record sound. Some common mistakes might be avoided if we did.
