Hi all,
I have been trying to get into doing voice over work for some time now. I’m making do with what I have, which isn’t a lot and the space that I have as well. I do not have the space or the option to setup an area where I can truly soundproof a room for an ideal voice over setup. The setup I have is, I use my laptop to record (using Audacity) and a nice MXL Studio Condenser microphone with a Focusrite USB interface that plugs into my laptop & a xenyx 802 soundboard. There are problems I am still dealing with though that I wanted to reach out to this forum and see if there might be any suggestions such as possible filters and filter’s settings, respectively that I can use.
Issues I am encountering are:
-Extraneous noise such as the hum from our attic fan as we have no central air. It is becoming way too hot not to have it on with my room being upstairs. When I have been in an actual room that is built for recording voiceover, and I start recording, I notice the sound waves are completely flat. It’s not picking up any background noise whatsoever. However, in my current situation and setup, I do hear the air coming from the air vent, and any other ambient noise in general causing the recording to pickup those noises resulting in a not so silent recording even when I am not tracking anything. I’ve attempted to use a mudguard, but with how my desk is positioned and I place the mudguard behind my mic, that really doesn’t do much because the air vent is behind me & defeats the purpose of the mudguard.
-When I edit my voice track and splice it up taking out breaths and other unnecessary stuff, I can literally hear the edits and cuts after splicing–sounding a bit jarring. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff obviously, and I know it doesn’t sound good at all. This as opposed to recording in a true sound booth & not hearing any ambient noise, etc… obviously any edits, cuts, etc… are smooth and I don’t hear any jarring edits.
So my question to this group is, are there any filters I could use, and if so, what settings would you suggest I use to help eliminate this extra noise but at the same time, not let drastically affect the way I sound. I hope I didn’t make this too confusing. If you’d like, I can post a sample track to show what I mean. Which in turn, might be better to help understand what I’m dealing with.