Recording Voiceover.

Think about how the finished peace should sound. Your voice has just as much to do with this, as the copy, and the fx and music bed. How should you speak your lines. What format of music is the imaging for. If you are unsure how you should speak listen back to some of the imaging examples provided above, or listen to local radio. It’s not that you should try to sound like someone else, as much as understand the tonal voice qualities that other voice artists have. When you are starting out it’s tough, because you don’t have all of the other elements in the production. You at this point just have your copy and your thoughts. So voice your lines and be ready to come back to the drawing board, and re-voice them again once you have a better understanding. As you are producing you can sit at your DAW with phone or whatever easy recorder you have and record some takes that may sound better when you are in the mode of producing. Then you will have these to focus on as you re-voice lines. There are times where you must develop your voice, and it may take time to do so. A lot of times when we speak into a microphone we may speak at a softer volume to try and get a specific sound. Maybe it’s easy to speak deeper at a low volume at first. This isn’t necessary and this will shine through with all the compression in the world. Speak loudly, speak clearly don’t try and speak quickly, you’ll set this up when you are producing the Voiceover.

Remember you are going to be editing your takes/recording, so you don’t have to get your lines right the first time.

Take/record each line or couple of lines several times. You think you’ve said it the way you want it? Maybe you did! congratulations that is awesome!! Say it a few more times. I’m amazed how often I settle on another take than I originally thought I’d settle on.

IF you say a line, and then think about how you said it for the next 20-30 seconds, you may use silence reduction in GoldWave to cut out the dead air, and it’s easier to cut out dead air than extra words. The more comments you make to yourself on the recording the more you’ll have to edit out and that can become frustrating quickly.

Sometimes you may want to use multiple recordings as it gives a sense of not wasting time/space. If you can pause your recording and have one file to work with vs 10-20 recordings, this may be preferable.