Getting Audio to Match

Special Interest Groups Audiobook Production
1

Alright, so I’ve ran into one problem I’m sure I’ll run into a billion times. I read an audition script, I made many mistakes. One of the mistakes was that I thought I had a decent reading of a line, but when I played it back I hated it. I hit the record button and tried again. I liked what I got this time, and I pasted it into the proper spots.

However, when I played through sentence one, and newly recorded sentence two, I did not like it at all. Sentence two was probably recorded in a slightly different position. It was louder by a very obvious margin. As a test, I applied audio book mastery to the two sections. Low rolloff for speech, RMS normalization, limiter. It still sounded out of place. The volumes were now similar, but the second clip had an extra…warmth to it? I don’t know how to call it.

I’ve figured out a way to get roughly similar recordings by tapping my forehead to the blanket on the top of my home made sound resistant cube thing. I ended up rerecording the whole audition and I’ve had better results with adding in newly recorded audio since. How would I fix this problem in the first scenario though?

2

This is a problem that you need to fix in the recording stage of the project (rather than in the editing / processing stage).

  • Use the same recording environment / studio / room each time you record.
  • Use the same microphone
  • Sit / stand in the same place
  • Position the mic in the same place

In a professional recording situation, the engineer will set up the same microphone in the same place and tell you exactly where to sit / stand, and may even comment on your posture if that is affecting the recording. When recording yourself in a home studio, you have to do all of that (and everything else) yourself :wink:

It is possible to make some adjustment to the “warmth” of the sound using the Equalization effect, but very difficult or impossible to match different recordings precisely. Microphone distance can also have a big effect on the amount of “room tone” and natural reverberation which should also be corrected. Much better to get it right at the recording stage.