Looking for feedback and advice for new voiceover recording

[Dman883]

Hi, all. Great forum. I'm an author that has decided to jump into the deep end of the pool of narrating my audiobooks in a sink or swim methodology. I've been laboriously doing some recordings, deciding they're horrible, and recording some more until I think I"m getting near where I want to be. I'm using a Scarlett Solo gen 2 kit with an AT2020 mic in a walkin closet I've set up as my recording studio. I'm running the latest version of Audacity on an older windows 10 machine. I have two wav files here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z7dtmbs0q968 ... XgeZa?dl=0 What I would like to know is what should I do with the post file to make it the best sounding I can and what would be the post production steps you would do to the raw file if it was you? Kind of a step by step as I'm really just playing it by ear at this time. The Audible check plugin says they're OK. I just read on another post here about sending a sample to Audible as well. This is pretty much what I'm doing now:
3. Compress dynamics plugin
a. Threshold: -12db
b. Compress Hardness: .500 (default)
c. Floor: -40.00 (default)
d. Ratio: 2:1, 3:1
e. Attack time: .20 sec
f. Release time: 1.0
4. Limiter:
a. Input gain: 4.00
b. Limit: -3.0
c. Hold: 2.00 ms
d. Apply makeup gain: no
7. Set a High Pass Filter to 80 Hz and a Low Pass Filter to 16000 Hz.

[kozikowski]

Screen Shot 2018-07-31 at 19.55.51.png (12.94 KiB) Viewed 751 times

I've been laboriously doing some recordings, deciding they're horrible, and recording some more until I think I"m getting near where I want to be.

Everybody hates their own voice. It's the first time you've heard it without it going through the bones in your head.

Which recommendations are you using and which Audacity do you have by three-digit number?

We do have a mastering process, but I want to try it out on your raw recordings. This is a rough guide for forum test submissions. It saves a lot of back and forth posting errors. The silent piece is important.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/Test ... _Clip.html

Koz

[Dman883]

I'm using 2.2.0 Did you want me to cut those down to 20 seconds then post directly to the forum then instead of the longer pieces in my dropbox?

[Dman883]

Here's a short clip of the raw recording. I would love to know exactly what you would do in post to get the best sound so i can compare notes to what I have been doing. Thanks.

[kozikowski]

instead of the longer pieces in my dropbox?

There is no longer pieces. The dropbox folder is empty.

The goal of Mastering 4 is to preserve your natural quality. If I do it right, you should not be able to tell I did anything.

As we go.

Koz

[kozikowski]

The clip failed noise, but it didn't really fail noise. With reference to this process...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/Test ... _Clip.html

The "Silent, Room Tone" at the beginning is full of you shuffling, rolling, smacking, ticking and harrumphing. That's enough to throw off the ACX-Test analysis tool.

Try it again. Hold your breath and freeze this time, and no fair generating fake silence for that gap. That has a different failure.

I really like your swing delivery but I can't pick out the state or even region. Pennsylvania, Kentucky? It's not deep south. I can usually get those down to the city.

Also fair warning, people may complain about you breathing during the reading. To My knowledge, ACX has never complained about natural human noises in a reading.

And yes, once I get one to work, I'll tell you how I did it.

As we go.

Koz

[Dman883]

Shoot, I thought I did hold my breath and such for the room tone. I'll try again. This is a first person book, so it's a character voice, not necessarily my own. Thanks.

[kozikowski]

I did hold my breath and such

I think you left out the "and such." Freeze. We can hear your shirt moving and your pants crinkling.

Noise is hard to get your head around. ACX wants your background noise to be 1000 times quieter than your voice. That's the English version of -60dB, if you're reading the submission standards. Everybody fails this because everybody lives in a noisy world and see it as perfectly normal. Noisy backgrounds make for bad recordings.

Due to an accident of family, my house has a soundproofed third bedroom. I can walk in there with any microphone and walk out with a presentable voice recording. I did it with the built-in microphone on my laptop once just to see if I could do it. Nobody's throwing roses at me for theatrical sound quality, but it worked. It passed ACX.

Noise is a big deal.

I got the clip to pass the other two standards, so if you feel like presenting that 20 second chunk again.. Or any chunk.

it's a character voice

From where? Where should I be when I'm listening to that?

Koz

[Dman883]

My bad. I didn't clip the right section of room noise. This should have good room noise. The character is from Brooklyn, but he's lost his accent over the years. I'm not really concerned with character accents and such as my natural linguistic anomalies are likely to slip in. I'm from Oregon, but I have natural tendency to adopt certain aspects of speech depending on the company and environment. It's been corrupted over the years by nearly two decades of various world-wide social immersion through military service. Thanks again for the help

[Dman883]

I use noise removal and a gate to remove all unintentional noise. I've recently started using Izotope's click removal (amazing results) and an RMS normalize plugin. I've checked my post production using the ACX check plugin and the basic technical standards are met. Now it's mostly about making sure I'm doing the right steps to get the best sound with as little intrusion/post work as possible.