Reducing Harshness of Booming Vocals

[monkeywisdom]

Howdy,

I'm having a problem recording an audio course. I'm in Windows 7 on a Lenovo Z570 laptop. The mic is an AT2020 USB condenser. The following file is recorded at 10% input volume with the mic 14 inches from my mouth and slightly below it. Then it was normalized and amplified to give it a normal volume. No matter what I do and how close to the mic I am, the voice comes in very harshly. It's rather startling even at normal volume. I'm trying to record a meditation course and one person's feedback is that the voice is "too sharp". Is there a way to smooth out the voice so that I don't jolt people off of their meditation chairs? Maybe there's something I can do while recording or during later processing. By the way, the mic is in a milk crate isolation box, though this does not seem to make a difference in the harshness.

The file is at http://www.mediafire.com/?ryd63pxlrlo13aw

Thanks.

[PGA]

Your recording is suffering from over-recording. Look at all those peaks on the blue waveform that are touching the top and bottom edges. You need to do one of two things: move the microphone further away from your mouth or turn down the level of the input signal. The latter is easiest to do. You should be aiming to get the initial recording level so that the peaks of the blue waveform are running at about three-quarter height.

Also, if your microphone is directly in front of you, you should move it. Imagine you are looking at a clock face with your mouth opposite the dead centre. For best results, your mic needs to be at one of 10-11, 1-2, 4-5 or 7-8 o'clock. If you are reading from a script, your tendency will be to look down at that script, so set the mic in one of the upper positions. Good mic technique is to talk past the mic and not into it. The mic of course, should be pointing directly back at your mouth.

[monkeywisdom]

Thanks. Actually, the initial input volume was very low. I amplified it in Audacity to get the waves to span the entire space vertically. I just tried another test and amplified it less, and there are still some harsh qualities to the voice. Any ideas on how to process it to take the edge off of it?

[kozikowski]

Record something typical like your first published test but don't do anything to it. Doesn't matter what the level is. Post that somewhere.

If you throw enough technology at it we can't tell where the problem stops and your patching starts. You can get into serious trouble with Normalize and Amplify. Koz

[monkeywisdom]

Gotcha. Here's another file with no processing whatsoever. Not even noise removal. http://www.mediafire.com/?074o595tow7p6nt
Thanks.

[PGA]

OK, now we can hear what you really sound like. The level of the recording is a little too low (those waveforms are not quite big enough). It would be a good idea to increase the mic level a little more. You should aim to get the peaks of the waveform to about the 0.5 level at the time of capture (a little over 0.5 would be OK). Second, your voice is naturally sibilant (somewhat hissy). That you will either have to live with, or wait for someone else, with different knowledge to me, to offer advice on how to improve that in post-production.

[PGA]

Not even noise removal.

Forget about Noise Removal, there's hardly any noise to remove. Your silent sections are running at about -50dB: that's near enough to inaudible for most purposes. You have created a recording environment that gives you a good, clean sound. All it needs is a little tweak on the mic level as I indicated in the previous post.

[monkeywisdom]

OK. A little better at .5 or .6 input volume. Those settings bring the average wave to 0.5 or a bit above. The only thing I'm worried about is that there's a very busy street a block away and a bunch of screaming kids at recess 50 yards away plus cicada season and crickets at night. That's why I had it at 10% input volume before. It seems to keep those extraneous sounds from getting out of hand. Right now, at 2am, everything''s dead silent. My house is made out of cinderblocks, but those sounds are picked up easily on condenser microphones, especially this one. Not sure what tomorrow will bring, but at 2am, it's quite easy to record something that doesn't pick up crazy traffic and large obnoxious bugs.

[PGA]

... plus cicada season and crickets at night...

Ah! When I Amplified (to peak 0dB) a piece of silence between your phrases I thought I detected a rhythmic sound. I thought of tree frogs but cicadas will do very nicely! I stress: these became audible only after amplifying the silence. They were not obvious in the raw recording.

[kozikowski]

This is your clip after simple, gentle processing (wait until 17 seconds).

http://www.kozco.com/tech/clips/harshne ... ify-NR.wav

The file is much bigger now because you can't repeatedly compress MP3.

Amplify to -1 target (Never Amplify to 0. That can cause problems later). I used the first silent patch (thank you for that) as the Profile for noise reduction, and then applied the reduction at -12dB (very gentle) starting at 17 seconds.
So everything remaining is just you at normal volumes, levels and background noise.

Since your original posting had very serious distortion and damage, this should be enormously better, even though I didn't directly address the booming or harshness. I would not get closer to the mic. That gives you directional microphone proximity effects and that will give you a boomy voice.

The microphone seems to give a very slightly bright voice and that can be desirable in a spoken show. I'd leave it just like that.


Now for presentation, you still have "room" in the show. I can tell you're recording in your mom's kitchen and not an acoustically dead room like an overstuffed living room or carpeted bedroom -- or a studio. There's no filter for that. We can't get rid of echoes.

Styrofoam is a terrible sound absorber. Go with blankets, pillows or quilts and put something up on the wall behind you. That's where a majority of the echoes are coming from. We have people at work that record in a closet with quilts on the walls.

A visit to the packing and shipping store might be good.

http://www.kozco.com/pictures/boothFini ... op-mic.jpg

Work on pronouncing "Button."

Koz