Voice over settings

Hey Everyone, I am new to doing voiceovers, and for now I want the simplest way to make my audacity recordings to sound as professional as possible. would it be advisable to do the following to my voice recording, in this order?:

-Reduce noise

  • noise gate
    -Normalize
    -EQ
    -Compress


    Thanks.

Bump…

Do you have a client or customer in mind? Some clients have specific requirements for voice work. It’s not open ended.

Are you really announcing over an existing audio or video track (voiceover), or are you just recording your voice?

Your list of correction tools is to be used when you have to change or adjust a voice track from something to something else. It’s not a Use This List For A Pro Track.

Are you in any position to post a voice sample on the forum?

https://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html

It’s short. You can’t post a book chapter. Read down the blue links.

Koz

AI is here now, (beta), claims to produce professional results … Enhance Speech from Adobe | Free AI filter for cleaning up spoken audio
But still need a recording space with low levels of reverb …

Oh, right. That was my garage experiment.

StudioBMicrophonePlacement.jpg
I have a furniture moving blanket over the metal garage door and I’m recording in the evening with low traffic noises.

The garage has a peaked roof (no clean opposing walls) and it’s full of boxes and junk. It doesn’t sound like a kitchen or bathroom because it’s not.

That’s just a piece of plywood, two cardboard boxes, and an iPhone SE. That’s it. That’s Pressure Zone configuration if anybody asks. It provides good volume and no proximity effects (talking into a milk jug). It’s only shortcoming is picking up floor noises if you’re not careful. This garage has a cement floor.

So that and a cup of coffee will get you passable voice tracks without writing big checks.

I cut some successful voice tracks in one of the company’s records, lists, and documents storage room/closets. Same thing. Lots of boxes and paper to kill the reverb.

Koz

Bump…

AI is here now

So why are we announcing into a microphone? I made it a minute or so into a pleasant and entertaining YouTube video before I caught it making an odd pronunciation mistake. Of course, once I found the first one, I found others. It wasn’t human. It fell over on compound English Craziness such as: “thoroughly thoughtful.” Other than those, it had very nearly pitch-perfect rhythm and pronunciation.

I should have kept that sound segment. Granted, most Machine Generation is pretty dreadful and I can’t listen to it. This one was different.

We won’t be needing the garage, the furniture moving pads, or the iPhone SE.


Koz

I meant AI for processing audio, rather than to generate synthesised voices.
The Adobe Enhance AI does quite a good job at reducing reverb & noise,
but it can remove the start & end of words in the process, (no threshold controls to dial it back a bit )

Your studio-B example shows Adobe Enhance can be useful on audio which is already good,
not just for noisy reverberant recordings.

I’m just now putting it together. There’s a YouTuber that I can’t listen to because he records in the kitchen. The video, background images, and production pictures are terrific, but the voice quality is kids foolin’ around.

Just recently he lost that obvious “kitchen/bathroom” sound, but the voice quality didn’t completely clear up. I wonder if instead of actually improving his environment, he just applied fancy Post Production Processing.

it can remove the start & end of words in the process

Traditional gating can be made to work OK, but you may find you can’t move your head. The correction is effective only for that volume and head position. AI is supposed to clear that up.

Echoes are hard. They are your voice lower volume and late. You’re asking the software to remove the voice from itself.

Koz

Thanks for all of the responses.

My original question was mostly geared towards submitting auditions regarding a clients script.

In general, I’m just trying to find out if my previously listed chain of events is advisable or not…in general.

We still can’t do an evaluation without hearing the work.

We have a pretty good record of getting people’s audiobook published. ACX is pretty sticky about voice quality.

Koz

Thank you, that AI actually sounds really clear!