Cleaning up recording

[ccolreavy]

Hi, I recently recorded a voice over for a demo Audio Visual. Although the recording is very clean and audible, there is a slight echo in the tone of the male voice which I want to eliminate. Can you advise how to correct this.

Thanks, Cliff, Dublin, Ireland

[steve]

Unfortunately there is not much you can do to correct echo or reverberation effects. The key is to avoid them in the original recording.
Do you need advice on how to avoid echoes on future recordings, or was this just a one-off that you were hoping to "fix"?

[ccolreavy]

Thanks your help............
What advice can you give me to avoid echo on future recoprdings

Thanks, Cliff

[steve]

Much of it is environmental - one of the regulars on the forum does his recording in the bedroom with lots of blankets and duvets hanging around to soak up the reverberation of the room. Many "serious" home recordists build a wooden frame with rugs and blankets hanging from it to create an echo free "recording booth". Less extreme measures include such things as a coat stand or door draped with lots of coats and blankets immediately behind the microphone, or sitting on a carpeted floor with the back of an upholstered chair behind the mic. The simplest of all is to just use a room with the least amount of echo - bathrooms bad - bedrooms good. Soft furnishings and carpets soak up echoes - hard surfaces tend to reflect sound creating echoes and reverberation.

The other main ingredient is microphone placement. Using a microphone close up will record a greater proportion of direct sound and a smaller proportion of reflected sound. The thing you have to watch out for with "close mic'ing" is to avoid blowing on the microphone. "P", "B" and similar sounds can send a blast of air directly onto the microphone and cause a loud wind-blast type sound that will ruin the recording - The usual technique to avoid this is to use a "pop shield", which is a thin piece of "acoustically transparent" fabric placed between the speakers mouth and the microphone. You can easily make one of these from an old stocking and a wire coat-hanger - here is a commercial one in use: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec04/a ... 1204-6.htm

Echoes can also occur due to incorrect set up of the equipment, for example if you have the computer speakers switched on you could have the recorded sound coming out from the speakers and the microphone will record that sound in addition to the direct sound - for monitoring while you record it is necessary to use headphones rather than speakers.

[kozikowski]

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/wynonna2.jpg
Koz

[kozikowski]

This microphone has switchable patterns. The idea is to put a peak in the direction of the performer and a dip in the direction of the echoes. The more extreme the pattern, the worse the sound.

It keeps snapping you back to having a good room to begin with. Cleaning up a bad recording is always messy.

Picture 2.png (42.34 KiB) Viewed 897 times

Koz