How to improve your voiceover audio workflow - A webinar for Voices.com

I recently gave a webinar for the folks at Voices.com around how talents can optimise their voiceover audio workflow, including compression, editing and other areas.

This has been released onto YouTube so I’m happy to share it with you here!

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Greetings from New Zealand. Luckily, it's early in the morning here, but it's nice and warm in the studio. So yeah, awesome. Awesome. Well, welcome everybody. I really hope you can all join us there. Thank you for your patience and getting started, just want to make sure we had enough time for everyone to get joined. As always, my name is Kyle, I work with all of the Platinum talent on our site, as well as all of our coaches, much like Toby. Today we'll be talking about audio production and processing, which is obviously Toby's expertise there. So without any further ado, I'll hand it off to you, Toby. And, and you can get us running. Fantastic. Thanks very much, Kyle, for that intro. So my name is Toby Ricketts, I was actually just remembering this before, I've actually been on the voices.com platform for over 10 years now, a quarter of my life. So I've definitely thrown thrown a few hours at this. And before that I've been sort of in audio engineering since I was about eight years old. So I now make my full time living from from being a voiceover artist and have won several awards and stuff, but I won't bore you with all that stuff. Let's get straight into it and get into the presentation, which is about today editing and processing your voice recordings. So let's take a little roadmap about exactly where we're going to hit today, here is the journey we are going to take together this morning, hopefully we're gonna, this is going to take about 30 to 40 minutes. And I do encourage you to if you have any questions at all, so put them in the q&a panel here in zoom, and then Kyle's gonna sort of sort those. And then we're gonna have a good old q&a session at the end. So if anything comes up that you want sort of more detail on or just want to bend my ear about then then put it in there and, and Kyle, and I will discuss it at the end. So first of all, we're going to discuss the importance of audio engineering, briefly, we're going to talk about who the end user is, because it's one of the big questions and the most important questions when delivering audio, and how to approach editing and processing your auditions. We're going to go over some recording basics. And then we're going to start sort of, you know, ratcheting up the expertise a little bit and talk about my three hot tips for getting absolutely seamless edits. And we're going to talk about how to speed up your editing process. And also about processing your voice recordings. We're gonna talk about, you know, really getting a sharp edge on your efficiency. Because, you know, time is money. And it is a numbers game here in the voiceover world. So there's some advanced tips in there for you. And then we're gonna talk about delivering the goods and then we'll have the questions which I talked about just before. So let's get started. Many people shy away from the audio production aspect of voiceover, because it is quite a technical field, or can be quite a technical field. You know, lots of people say I've, you know, I've people say I've got a great voice, I want to get into voiceovers, that classic thing, isn't it, and you get really good at your craft. But if you've got a terrible recording of you doing, you know, a great voice survey, it's still a terrible recording. So it's important to match these skills so that you have good voice performance. But you match that with the good audio recording quality, and that you achieve from your studio. So I encourage you to not shy away from this. Because it is just another program to learn just like learning Microsoft Word, or you know, any kind of, you know, program that you use on your computer, even email, you know, we will have to learn how to use that at the start. So it's just another program we have to learn. And it's just, you know, you'll build on this kind of this, this this pyramid of knowledge, which is important to establish the foundation of your voiceover career on is this good quality audio. I think it's as important as performance, how you record yourself, because auditions on the voices.com.com platform or anywhere in the voice world are also a technical audition these days, because often we will be remote recording in our studios. So they're assessing not only your vocal performance and your suitability for the project predict, but they're also listening to how you record yourself, and whether they can trust the audio that's going to come from your studio. Imagine movies with bad audio, you know, if you imagine, you know, there's all these stars in this movie, the special effects look great, but you can't understand anything anyone says chances are you're listening to a Christopher Nolan film. But you know, it's terrible. If you can't understand what's being said, or if it's just bad quality, then it kind of ruins the experience. So become a sound expert. First, it's really important to discover who your end user is. Because this is the person who's ultimately going to be using your audio of course, and you want to make sure it's fit for purpose. But not just that, you want to make sure that that it's it's suitable it also it lets you demonstrate your knowledge about audio if you give it to them in the form that they're used to receiving it in. Okay, so your end user could be a production company. So that's someone who produces TV commercials or elearning commercials, for example, not using commercials, but elearning content. It could be someone who's like an owner of a business, who's quite scared about this whole process because it's the first time they've had a voice over an audio post production house. You know what those are? This is guys that deal specifically in just The audio behind really big productions like, like film and television productions. And they will often have ways that they like to receive the audio. Maybe it's a freelancer, maybe it's, you know, one of those guns for hire where they go out and do video stuff and cut together the Edit sort of in 24 hours. So ask questions of your clients, you know, when you're, when they're getting you to quote, or when you're on the platform, if they if they contact you and say, you know, we want more info about your services, ask them about how they want to receive it, because this will help you build the relationship with the customer. And it also helps you develop a sense of, of who you're working for. And then in future, you can you can know exactly, you know, what's expected at the other end from other producers as well. If they say, you know, I'm we're an audio post production house, we, we need to receive the audio and the 48k 24 bit files raw, then that helps you establish a sense of, you know, that's that's how audio production houses generally like to receive things. And always over deliver, I tend to sort of, you know, take every kind of way of delivering audio and just throw it at the client and say, Look, I've given you this option, this option, this option, choose which best suits you. And that, you know, that is good client servicing, because they're getting more than they expected, and they've got everything they need to achieve the job. So try and solve the problems before you encounter them with your end user. So with auditions, this is before you've got the job you are, you know you're doing your work in the studio. It's a numbers game. Now those of you who've worked on the platform for for a number of years, we'll know that the more auditions you do, the more work you get. So the idea is, with your with editing and processing your audio recordings is to really get that process down to a fine art, okay. So in order to do as many auditions as possible, and as high quality as you can, you've got to really find like the rough spots of your process and get out the sandpaper, as I say. So, really, like as you're going through your audition process, maybe tomorrow morning, or whenever you do your auditions. Just keep a notepad beside your desk for a couple of weeks and just realize whenever you hit a snag where you're like, Oh, I have to do this, or, gosh, this is a pain or this has taken me longer than it should just write down what the problem is. And then look for solutions to that problem. My big one was like, you know, having to print out scripts and go into a booth, for example, you know, that takes a lot of time and resources to achieve that. So you know, if you can, why not treat the space where you're sitting in front of your computer, because then you can literally be on voices.com you can be reading the audition straight off the screen into your, into your software, and you don't have to leave your desk so you can get out a lot more auditions than you otherwise would be able to if you're going to have to go into a booth for example, or get an extension screen to go in there so that you can operate your computer from that other room. Other examples Let me see are you know having presets on hotkeys on your computer so if you're doing a lot of mouse work, see if your audio software can can streamline some of those things into hotkeys. So with auditions, it's an audio arms race as well I want to mention So, you know, this is where clients are listening and comparing apples with apples on on the voices.com platform. So they're listening to you know, me from New Zealand and someone from England and someone from America, you know, could be all over the world. And these audio audios are right next to each other. So processing is quite important. Because you know, in terms of volume, if there's a lot of commercials on TV, and then one is lot louder than the others, you notice the one that's louder, and I'm not saying make your auditions as loud as possible. But I think there is some kind of arms race in terms of like how you present your audio and making sure that it is is loud enough to get noticed. Okay, and we'll go into that a little bit further in terms of compression and volume. Okay, so before we do these auditions and deliver any audio, remember the basics of your studio, okay? These are the fundamental things that will that will define how good your audio is not how good your mic is, or your interfaces, although you know, it's important to have one that is professional gear, but it doesn't have to be top end much more important is your noise floor. So that's like when you're not talking. Like how quiet the studio is. So do a lot of listening in your studio when you're not talking and listen to the noises that are around. Some of these are easier to solve than others, outside noise getting in like planes, traffic, noise trains, etc, very hard to get rid of, but not impossible. So you can build your studio around this. Also the time of day can be really important. So figure out when the quietest time of day in your studio environment is to record because that that will give you a nice clean recording and you won't have to do as much cleanup on it. Also, the the gear you're using, like whether there's hiss in the recording, you know that that's when you pay for really good quality gear. It's got a very low noise floor. So you're not you haven't got that hiss behind you. And there's also rumbles and things that you can't hear. So we'll we'll go into that a bit later in terms of the processing as well. So your noise floor is really important. The room reverb is I think the thing that kills so many auditions to people that Due to voicing, because they go out and buy a microphone and an interface, and they don't treat the room that they're in. So when they end up sending it through, compared to all the other additions, it sounds like you're recording in a shower or in the middle of your kitchen, it doesn't sound like professional audio, you know, professionally, audio should sound like the voice in your head, in that it should have absolutely no reverb, and it should just be completely cold. Because then we can also affect it, when we add compression, etc. And you're not enhancing all this this room sound. So having a noise floor really low, and having absolutely no reverb going on is really important. And you can just test that by clapping your hands. And it should be like that just go out and then just stop instantly. And the just your voice, that's all we want is just your voice, not the outside world, not your gear, and not your reverb, but just your voice. And then it's important to establish for yourself what your usual recording level is, because that's going to affect all of your compression settings and your your presets going forward. So if you record very quietly in there, then you add compression, it's only going to increase it a little bit. Whereas if you go in and you record really loud, then the compression is going to really hammer down that audio. So develop a sense and develop your presets around what your normal audio looks like. And if your interface has got a gain knob, which it almost certainly will have, then just get like a sharpie and just mark a little.on it because often they don't have dots on them, it's hard to establish where you're at in terms your recording level. So just put a.on both sides and then just always have a sense of where your normal recording level is, and watch it on the screen, so that you can see where you're peaking, because that's really important to develop a sense of. So that's the basics, let's get into some editing tips. My first one here is to use your spectral view and amplitude view. Now this is going to save you a whole lot of time. And I'll demonstrate these different views. So the spectral view for those of you who use Adobe Audition, and which I'm a massive fan of. And you can do this in Audacity as well or they're not quite as effectively. So you can see up here, the green one up above is showing volume versus time. And that's you know, that's the one you're used to seeing. It's it's just like your waveform, right. But the spectral view will give you this lovely sense of what the frequencies are happening. So you can see my fundamental voice note down here. And you can see up at the top where the esses and things occur right up here in that space. This really can save you time when editing recordings. Because you can see when pops occurred, this is almost a pop down here in the subsonic frequency area. It also helps you clean up audio because you can see, for example, when planes fly over, you can see when you've accidentally kicked the desk and there's a big thud sort of down here in the frequency somehow. So get used to using the spectral view, even if you're not editing it, just have it open so that you can see, you can start to relate certain noises to certain things on the screen. Because as I say you I can open this up now and just be like, right I pop there, there and there. And this stuff at the beginning is just me clearing my throat, which it almost certainly is because you can see there's quite loud noises right in the mid frequency band there. So develop a sense of that, when you're doing your editing. Using a click or marker to indicate mistakes is really useful. You can get a little dog clicker or something that goes, just makes one of those dog clicky noises when you're training your dog for like 50 cents on eBay. And you just hold it in your hand. And whenever you make a mistake, put a click in because then you're going to see on your on your recording here. You can see I've put in clicks here. So I know I've made a mistake there. I've put one there. So I've made a mistake there and there. So you can start to edit this before you've even listened to the audio is the point. And this will come in handy later when when we talk about sort of editing and proofing in real time. So using the clicker every time you make a mistake, and forming a rhythm of those retakes. So try and develop a habit to whenever you mock up, I just go out of the corner of my mouth because I don't want to hold the clicker on my hand. And even now when I'm doing a reading live or in person, if I make a mistake, I'll go just without even thinking about it. So if you train yourself to always put a click after you make a mistake, then you don't necessarily have to proof the whole file because you you know yourself well enough that if I made a mistake, I would have put a click and I wouldn't be able to see that. And this is really useful for long form audio, where you've got you know, 10,000 20,000 words to do and listening to the entire thing is going to take a long time. You know, audiobooks are a great example. So but it does mean that you really have to trust yourself as you're voicing that you remember to put these clicks in because you don't want any of those mistakes getting through. And also a form of rhythm of retakes in terms of whenever you go back to like say you always go back to the beginning of a sentence, or you go back to the nearest consonant, which is like a glottal stop or something which is an easy edit point, which is one of my tips of it later. So yeah, just form a rhythm of how you like to do retakes, and it will speed up your editing process. relisting editing and proofing all at the same time is a really good skill to master. What I mean by this and I'll do some All you hear now this is something that I recorded a couple of weeks ago. And I kept it because it was just a good example of, of just basically a normal voice session for me. So before I've even listened to it, I know that all that stuff at the beginning is just junk. So I can just lop that off, because it's just me, clearing my throat, pop test and pop. So there, that's me doing a pop test. So you can see that anything that looks like that is probably a pop in the spectral view, okay, so I can go back and just use my pop filters to get rid of that. So I can just lock that off before even even listening to it. And by the same, so what I mean by proofing, at the same time as you're editing is, I'm going to start playing this audio. And then I'm going to go and get rid of the breaths. And I'm going to go over get rid of the mistakes at the same time as it's playing back. So I'm listening to the proofed audio, while my brain is ahead doing the rest of the edits again, every language has a saying for easy does it. Ask those multilingual people you know, and build a collection of your own translations. Use the to remind yourself that you are taking step every day with every habit. Wait till one is truly built. And then you can skip ahead when you get ahead of hair. If you're a fan of bollywood songs, Google, Google it, you can see that there's a repeating pattern here. So when when I've gone like right, there's a mistake there. And then I look at this next audio and I say Where do I retake that from. And it's usually it's the same shape as something that's come just before. And then you can see I've done another take. And I've said the same word Google, right. So without listening to it, I generally these days, just go straight in and do that. And then I know that the Edit like matches the one before. And then my playhead comes along. And I proof that to make sure that is the right thing. So this is just a quick example of the system I've developed to really speed up editing, especially for medium to long form audio, where you don't want to listen to necessarily the whole thing. And Another good tip is to always edit immediately, because I don't know about you. But when I'm doing a reading, and I'm making mistakes, I'm kind of making an edit list in the back of my mind like I can, if I redo something like four times, I'm like, Ah, that's right, this one took me four times. So I can just go in and get rid of the first three retakes, and just use the fourth one. So it's a case of like building up this, this mental picture of the audio that we're working on. And if you record something, go to bed, and then wake up the next day, all of that's gone. So edit while you're fresh, don't put it off. Okay, let's move on to the next slide. Here's my seamless edit tip number one, put edits, where you'd least expect them. And this is a tip I learned a long time back in my radio days when, when trying to you know, someone's come in, and they've done a retake of something. But if you edit it hard up against it, it just it sounds like the voice changes. And it's clear that someone's come in and just taken that whole sentence, and it sounds different from the rest. So if you've got this problem, and you've met you, maybe you're doing a retake on a different day. And you know, maybe you've got a cold that second day, okay, and there's only one word that needs to change. But if you change the whole sentence, it sounds like you're all stuffed up. So what, what I suggest you do is to edit the audio, so that it's in the middle of a word like it's right in the middle of a consonant or something in the middle of the word. So here is a an edit. So let's have a look for a an opportunity to put an edit where you'd least expect it right here. That is the moment to be kind and compassionate, kind and compassionate, right. So the word compassionate here, and compassion, compassionate. So the good thing about the letter P is that at some point to make the letter P, you have to hold the pressure in your mouth, and then let it go, which means you're producing no audio in that instant, like it's absolutely zero. And there's a bit of a plosive after it so it's easy to spot in the Edit. Okay, so passionate, passionate, right there. We'll cut from the P to the P and compassionate vote that retake Okay, so let's find the second p kind and compassionate, right, so we're going to cut from that P to that P. So right in the middle of a word, leaving exactly the same sort of time around it to be kind and compassionate to yourself and say, so there you can hear that there's, there's, there's, there's a completely clean in there. And we're not, we're not losing any audio. And it really does help if you're doing a retake on another day to try and sell that edit if it's in the middle of a word because no one is listening for the edges of an edit in the middle of a word. You don't audiobooks when you're listening and you're doing something else. And then sort of suddenly on a chapter or in the middle of a chapter, it'll be like, Oh, this is a different day, I can hear the voices changed. And this happens to all of us, like every day, Your voice sounds slightly different. So in order to hide that fact, when you're doing retakes, try and hide these edits in the middle of words. Soon as edit tip number two is similar to this in that if you need to edit in perhaps it's a new line of dialogue. So perhaps this is that you're not editing exactly the same words, but you need to put something in the middle of a sentence. Use your breaths to sell the Edit. If You're doing if you're supplying it with with the Brits in there. So what I mean by that is look for the time as you're breathing in between your sentences here, just gain this up a bit, so it's easier to hear and see, we find a little retake here somewhere. Otherwise, I can jump out, there we go, there's a take. And again, it's like, Oh, so you can, I can just instantly see, because I'm so used to seeing my voice, I can see when I break form, and do one of these little clicks, it's very easy to find mistakes to edit, and give yourself lots of credit for how credit for just credit for help. So I do a little breath after credit in the in the take their credit for just how far you for help. And so if I, if I cut from the far there, sorry, after the credit, and what I'm going to do is I'm instead of cutting from the the, the the word here how of how I did it for just how, for just how so I missed the word for there, I'm going to cut right on the back of this one, so that I capture this next breath that comes up. And that forms part of my edit. Okay. So let's listen to that, again, for how credit for just so that second breath that comes after that is going to sell this edit in terms of I haven't cut it because the breath is still in there. So listen to this. And give yourself lots of credit for just how far even just that little slip of breath in between those two words, makes it much smoother, and you can't hear where they're editors. So that's my two tips for seamless editing. There's another tip down here, which is always making sure that your edits are at zero crossings. And by that I mean there's this centerline in the middle, which is basically no audio, right? It's minus infinity dB. And you can see that all waveforms pass this at some point when they're wiggling away and doing their their audio thing. If you make an edit, and one of these points, let me just find out loud a bit of audio somewhere here, scaling this up. So if you make an A an edit, say, and this bit here where it's not, it's not on the on the center line in the middle, it's going to form this pop or click because when the speaker tries to Well, there are the headphones try and reproduce the sound, they're just gonna have to go from you know, whatever is minus nine DB to two to nothing in an instant. And that always forms this kind of click or pop that comes through the speakers. So there's, there are modes that you can turn on on your audio software, I know you can audition up here in the Edit menu, where you can snap to the whereas it there's a thing here for snapping to the zero crossings. One of these and target in here, very much the snapping and you can snap to zero crossings down here. And if you make that then whenever you go into audio, it's not going to let your cursor sit on something, it's going to always be where that audio crosses that centerline. So it's not going to leave any audible click or pop when you do an edit. So that's my tip number three is to always edit at zero crossings. Hopefully that's clear. Otherwise, jump in the questions here. So before we get into audio processing, that's that's my kind of editing tips otherwise, so audio processing is like breadmaking we all have a recipe that we think is best. And the best way to learn it is to experiment and learn by doing because then you'll come up with your own your recipe which really reflects your voice and you'll understand it and can tweak it etc. Be aware that you know, you might hear conflicting advice about processing. And there's some there's certainly people out there with with some sort of wild ideas about processing, etc. And it works for them. So maybe take it on board, try it out and if it suits your sound and then keep it. The other thing to mention that kind of counterpoints there is the fact that try and keep your audio processing consistent once you're a working professional voiceover because if you come back four months later, and they say, we, you know, we need to pick up on that particular job, the words changed or whatever, and you've changed your audio processing Meantime, then the Edit is going to stand out like crazy. So at least archive your old presets that you have. So you can be like, Oh, yeah, okay, I did that in 2018. This is the processing I used in 2018. So you can match that because otherwise, it's very hard for them to try and match audio processing afterwards. So before we start getting into processing, compression, etc, sort out your issues, this goes back to the studio basics as before, so get rid of any noise that's in your recording, get rid of any subsonic. So that stuff that's that that is below the human hearing range or right on the threshold. So it's anything below about sort of 50 hertz, because anything below 50 hertz is not useful in the voice sense, like the warmth of the deepest male voice ends at about 50 hertz. And for females, it sort of ends at about 110 hertz. So really, you know, if you're a female voiceover, you can afford to do like a low pass filter, sorry, a high pass filter, you know, below sort of 100 hertz and get rid of any kind of rubbish, that's that's lurking around the bottom there. clicks and pops are really good to get rid of. We all just have them. It's not necessarily something you can get rid of with practice or technique. It's just how your physiology is that day. So learn things that get rid of it. Live if you can So whether that's green apples, I know lots of voice servers have died from eating too many green apples during sessions, having a glass of water handy coffee, whatever your poison is, then also perhaps invest in something like the like RX seven mouth D click, I know I use that and it's a brilliant plugin for for just getting rid of all those little little mouth noises that just does lurk and it just gets rid of them. So I tend to put that on my on my voice recordings. And, and learn the best time of day for you to voice as well. So that you can get try and get rid of these before using plugins to do it, of course, like edit mistakes, silence and excessive breaths, right at the start, because then you're just gonna be processing your voice itself. Okay, so we've sorted out, which is because the thing to mention about this is compression makes any kind of flaws in the audio bigger, like it'll take any small noise. And it'll just make it bigger. And so it's going to exacerbate any of these problems. Now, once you've sorted out those issues, you've got rid of any kind of like lingering noise, you've got rid of your clicks and stuff. And you've got a nice clean version that hasn't been compressed, save a raw version, always save a little version, because once you've saved a file with compression and EQ added, and then you've exited out of the program, it's impossible to get back to that raw state and very hard to undo compression, if not completely impossible. If you can't go back to that raw state. So always make sure you have a raw version, and probably supply that to the client as well, I always give them the option, you know, instead of me doing the audio processing for them, especially if it's an audio post production house, you want to say look, if you want to do your audio processing, here's the raw version. And here's my processed version as well. You know, that saves everyone time because they can just use whichever one they want. So always save a raw version. Now gain staging, I'm going to quickly go over this, I'm not going to get too bogged down in compression, because like I say, it's like breadmaking it's like trying to teach breadmaking in five minutes, you know, it's not, you're not going to get a good result. So just a few points on it. compression is an art, okay, so use it wisely. If you're a complete novice, then maybe just do a bit of like compression, a raw recording is better than a badly compressed recording always. So, you know, do I do experiment with it, because I think it's one of the most important things. In fact, it's worth saying that I think it's the thing that affects your voice, your auditions and your voice sound the most out of anything, I think compression can really sell the voice make it sound like a really professional voice or make it sound like a really unprofessional voice, you know, aside from any performance factors. So it is an art, get used to it, experiment with it in your spare time. And maybe on your auditions as well. But use it wisely use appropriately. By then I mean, it's not really something you've set and forget, like I think I believe it's a kind of a dynamic thing. It's really good to use compressors that are inboard. And why I mean that I mean, it's not something a lot of you know, voiceovers traditionally would have their mic, it would go into a mic preamp, it would go into a compressor, and then it would go into their computer. So they have this kind of audio, you know, like an audio chain compressor, like something that sat on your desk. But now we switch to the digital realm where all this stuff is inside the box, and you can tweak it. And I think keeping it inside the box is a very good idea. Because then you can have different presets, and you're not twiddling with knobs and stuff. And it's less chance of noise getting in as well to you with your signal chain. So sometimes you're not gonna use any compression, sometimes you're gonna use heaps, and we'll go into that in just a second. But remember, slide one who is your customer never, never lose sight of who your customer is, if you're supplying to someone who's a really high end audio above, they're going to they're going to do their own stuff on your audio. So you probably don't need to compress it just say, here's the raw recording, is that okay? You know, but if it's someone who's completely green, and as a business owner, maybe it's the first time I've heard a voice, they're not going to be doing any compression, so you're probably better than they are. And they're probably just gonna put it straight on the video. So know who your end user is, and, and also figure out what what the genre is, okay, so the, you know, if it's a an audio book, those tend to not be heavily compressed, because if you're listening to sort of this really compressed, like, it's like a movie trailer, then it's really fatiguing to listen to like for an hour, you know, that's going to be really hard. Whereas the 32nd, you know, commercial spot for, you know, $1.99 gloves is going to like, you do want to sell that and want to sound exciting, but that too much is going to be it's going to sort of blow people's heads off. So remember who your customer is and what the genre is, and use it appropriately. Just a quick note here on gain staging. gain staging is just using multiple compressors in a row to do different jobs. So there's one to take the peaks off. There is like a slower harder compressor to do the sort of legwork of it and consider using a multiband compressor if you're already comfortable with single band compression, start experimenting if you use audition or whether use Pro Tools with the effects rack here because it allows you to like have your raw audio here and then listen to your audio in real time. Through a lot of different compressors, so you can, you know, go on here and start setting your your compression graphs here and playing around with this stuff. But then you can set up multiple that work on top of each other. And then the best thing is, once you've got something you really like, instead of saving all these presets in the compressors individually, you can save the preset for the entire rack in one. So you can do all this compression in one step, and then assign that to one key on your keyboard. So I can, you know, go in and do all kinds of cleanup, compression factors, multiband compression, just with the single keystroke, because I know it works for a particular genre. So that's view advanced pros out there who are, you know, using, you're doing this every day, and I kind of bored with what I've been saying, today, I'm also using a limiter as well as a multiband compressor to add extra volume of punch. But only really do that, if you are aware of the appropriateness of hard compression, because hard compression, as I said, is very fatiguing. And it sounds completely inappropriate sometimes. So here's an idea of where to use light to no compression meeting compression and hard compression, I'm not going to read them out, but I'll just have it on screen there. So that you can have a look. So things like text to speech, they don't want any compression on it because the algorithms are examining your voice and they don't want any kind of pollution of the of the of the dynamics in their audio books. As I say it's very fatiguing compression, computer games often are supplied with no compression because they're gonna do their audio on it. And it needs to sound like a real performance, not like a voiceover, doing the compression, medium compression, I've put here explainer videos podcast intros stuff, which is kind of relatively short form. It's kind of something like two to five minutes long. It doesn't need to sound professional though. So you need to hear all the consonants which compression brings out and clarity. And then over here on the right hand side hard compression, we've got, you know, TV commercials, radio imaging is very highly compressed. Often. Social media ads, if people are watching on their phone, you get a lot more clarity if you're compressing and listen, and you can hear all the constants a lot clearer. movie trailers are often very compressed as well as cartoons and animation when they actually make it to the final stage ASMR recordings, I don't know if you've heard those on YouTube where people eat an apple or have a slip of tea or something. And that's using the maximum compression you can so it's basically bringing every every noise in the room up to speaking level. And the audio and it's it's incredibly disconcerting. If you haven't listened isn't my recordings, then go and have a listen on YouTube because it's equally disgusting and fascinating at the same time. And also IVR recordings are usually compressed quite a bit as well. That is an idea of appropriateness of compression. Some other processing tools are breath removal. But beware because they can steal your consonants, I use waves ns one, which is a great breath removal tool, but it sometimes you listen back and when you're proofing it, and you're like, Where's my s gone and stolen an S because it thought that was a breath. So you do have to watch those and not use them too much because they can steal your words. I'm waiting for the big audio companies like isotope and wave to come up with like a machine learning tool, which basically learns what your breath sound like and then remove those rather than remove generic breaths. But anyway, that's another subject entirely. equalization. Only really use EQ if absolutely needed if you're solving a resonance problem in your booth if you're trying to get rid of a hammer or something, because I feel like you know, it's one of those if it ain't broke, don't fix it, don't just put on EQ because it sounds better. Because, you know, often it does, it only sounds better to you or depends what gear you're listening on. So try and like maintain your voice in its pure form. In terms of frequency, and terms of amplitude, it goes all over the place, but frequency wise, you know, try and leave it pristine, if you can, and the SS as well as something that sometimes people do as part of the processing. If you've got a very sibilant s like this, and you can't get rid of it with your mic technique, then, then consider the ESR. But read up on how to use them because you don't want to go crazy and start you know, making it sound dull your audio. So that's some of the processing tools. And don't forget to smell the coffee. I've already snapped the coffee this morning here with my beautiful morning cup. But what I'm talking about with here with some other coffee is, you know, we're back when we used to fly everywhere. And we used to walk through duty free pass all the alcohol and perfume and you thought oh well I've got an hour to kill. I'll go off into duty free and smells and perfumes. And you start one and you smell that and you think that smells very nice, you move on to number two, and you're like, well, that smells nice, too. I'm not quite sure how that was this different from the and by the sort of 10th perfume. It's impossible to tell anything apart like you've gone so far that you don't know if it's not as nice or bad or whatever. So they encourage you to smell coffee between it because that resets your nose for the next set. And I encourage you to find a piece of audio or just silence or you know some some kind of really well recorded voiceover that you find at the start and always go back to that and then compare the audio you're doing with that audio because it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole and start compressing and compressing and compressing and you certainly sound amazing at the end of compressing this voice but it sounds cool. pletely bonkers to everyone else who's just come in at the end there. So always make sure that you don't go down a rabbit hole and that you are resetting between these moments of, of experimentation with your voice. So, quickly, we've got an under sort of a five or 10 minutes here. So increasing your speed and efficiency. going over some of the stuff we've learned in the session, use visual tools to identify your issues. So the spectral view I recognized as the biggest part of this because it just lets you do a first pass visually, you can see what you've popped, you can see what you've done retakes, you can see where you've coughed or planes flown over. And you don't have to listen to the whole thing in order to do your first pass, edit and get rid of all that junk edit immediately from your mental cue sheet. That's another huge thing. Like even if I've stayed up late at night, I'll edit the things like Vin in there and go to bed a bit later, because it will save me so much time the next day. And having all these edits already in my head, setting up rec presets on hotkeys, and having multiple levels of compression. So one thing I didn't say just before was, you know, when we talked about the appropriateness of different compression levels for different jobs, where you can set up you know, hotkeys in your keyboard, like 1234, which is the different levels of compression. And then if you're doing an audition for an audio book, you hit number one, if you're doing an a, an audition for like a movie trailer, hit number four, and that will compress them the maximum. So these, instead of compressing every voice recording and coming up with a different compression thing, not only can you not match that later, because you're just doing it in the moment, but it'll save you so much time in terms of you know, I write I want medium compression, that's number three, and just Chris number three on the keyboard. And you can learn how to set up hotkeys. On You know, on YouTube videos, probably and all the How to that comes with the comes with the program itself. set and forget, but be consistent. So that's, you know, setting up things on hotkeys so that you you can reliably do this compression, and you know how it's going to sound. And part of that is going right back to the start is defining your your normal recording level. So you know, record a little test passage, have a look at it, and say, Yep, that's my normal recording level, and then get into it. Because if you go in too hot or too cold, it's going to change how your compression algorithms sound on your voice. And then getting feedback from a mentor or Pro is really important so that you do smell the coffee, and you're not going on this crazy, like rabbit hole. It's good to you know, find out if you've got any issues with your booth, you know, if people can hear the trouble with like monitoring in the same space, as you're recording is that if there is a room resonance, you won't hear it, because it'll be on the recording, but you're so used to that sound being in that space. That, that you it's just invisible. So either get any like really good quality, any headphones like I'm wearing here today, because they will take away that room, bouncy ambience, and you can really hear any kind of floors that are coming through in your audio outside of the space that you're used to working in. But getting feedback from a pro is a really good idea because it'll really let you set and forget the audio, so that you can, you know, provide good quality auditions and work going forward into the future. So it's some final notes on delivering the goods. This is you know, you've done the audition. Yes, you nailed it brilliant, you worked and you work through the night probably. And you edited up your beautiful things. And right you're coming to deliver the files. This is to make your client the happiest client they've ever been delivered immediately, if you can, like time is money, and it's just nice to get jobs off the books, you know, you want a job, there it is, you read it, you record it, you edit it, and it's uploaded, and the client is gonna be super heavy, because they're getting it straight away. And often, you know, they want this audio yesterday, especially in advertising. So deliver immediately. And always upload raw and processed versions. So like I said, Right back at the start there, you right after you've recorded and edited it and got rid of all the floors, etc. And all the noise. That's the point to save a raw copy and then save as a processed copy and then deliver both because then you're you're exceeding their expectations. Remember to invoice if you're outside of voices calm, it's possibly the most important part of the process. If you're an audio professional, asked for feedback. Lots of people miss the opportunity to go back to a client A week later. And say, How How was it for you? Like Did you know Did that audio work for you? Is there anything I could have done better, because this is going to accelerate your your performance as a voiceover artists more than anything else is asking for feedback from genuine real world clients. And it's a great opportunity as well to ask for a copy of the final product to add to your show reel to win the next job. So you just snowball you know, work leads to work. And, and you know, it's happy faces all around them. And it's a great another touch point as well to talk to the clients and say, you know, how was it for you? Is there anything else coming up for example, you know, so it's a really good excuse to go back a week later. So put that in the diary once you've finished the job. Fantastic. That's the end of my presentation today. You can reach me if you want to reach out at Toby at Toby ricketts.com or my website there is Toby Ricketts voiceover calm. I've also got a look a video blog sort of podcasting thing I do, called vo life where I interview famous voiceover artists around the world and producers and Agents and that kind of thing. So you can find that@youtube.com slash Toby Ricketts. And I also got a fun side project which is called the pillow for studio gallery, which is just a bit of a laugh really, it's a Facebook group where, where voiceover artists who are outside of their studio, and, you know, away somewhere, make like a pillow fort underneath their bed or whatever and record so send through photos of you in your best pillow fort situation and uploaded there to the pillow fort studio gallery. So yeah, looking forward to connecting with you guys. Oh, that was that was amazing. Thank you very much. If you've got any questions, feel free to pop them into the q&a spot there. I'm gonna start going through them now. The first one I see is from Robert Toby Roberts wondering, should he use EQ or other processing when sending in audition Bo recordings? Hmm. Um, I tend to err on the side of just doing the lightest EQ possible. So that might be if you're if you're a male voiceover it's like a movie trailer, adding a bit more bottom into your voice, like a little bit of extra sort of low frequencies and maybe a bit a little bit of highs, just just that classic kind of not V, you know, EQ curve, but just just a gentle tweak at the ends there. because that'll interest enhance it. But again, I think the sets on the on the higher processing end of things. So only do it when it is appropriate for things like movie trailers or TV sees, for example, but I generally try and you know, steer clear of any any kind of significant EQ. Because any I ideally anything you want to solve in the booth and with your mic rather than later in the box. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's great, great answer there. EQ is tread with caution. Yeah, no, I think question I saw a lot actually in the chat was, what was the I think you said it was? Was it an RX seven? Yeah. The isotope RX 7 suite that's got a whole load of plugins, but one's called mouth De click, which is the plugin that I really recommend for getting rid of clicks and and mouth noise. It's brilliant. Okay, perfect. So RX seven there. And what was the what processor Do you use is Adobe Audition. Yeah, I use my DAW is Adobe Audition, which I've been using for decades. And I just I think it's the best tool for for voiceover recording specifically, like it's really just designed for for voiceovers, I'd say, and it's called audition. Yeah, exactly. Right. Just lines up to. Awesome. So Alright, um, here's a question from, I have our access to our RX seven note, D click and four dB noise suppression in my input chain, can this be considered a raw file? I, I do comply that before I save my raw and for the reason that I like with my audio engineering hat on. Like, I can't tell the difference between the before and after, apart from the clicks are gone. Like it's one of the most transparent plugins that like I've ever heard, where people often fall wrong is they put in like a noise and either a noise gate or they put in like noise suppression tools, or his suppression or you know, one of those things. And you can really hear it degrades the sound of the audio, it gives it a really mp3 kind of with the SS get all shimmery and kind of weird. And that is not considered a recording at all, like an audio engineer would really, really rather have the pure thing that came off your mic, then you try and do any noise reduction, plugin activity. Because if you get that wrong, it's like you really can't go back, you've lost the quality. But now if the click when used sparingly. Like it's absolutely transparent. So I don't think it reduces the quality of the recording at all. So for that reason, I put it before my save my recording. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And a question here. And and this is actually one that I'm fairly interested in. What is your take on normalization? Yeah, what's your take there? This is the big classic thing between, you know, when normalization sits between compression and hard limiting, normalization is not compression at all, all it is, is automatic gain. So my problem with normalization, why I never do it, is because it gives you inconsistent final audio levels. So what normalization does is find the peak of the file like so. And you often get this when you say like words like cat, or, or whatever, like when you've got a plosive or a or a real fricative sound in the audio. That often makes like quite a spike in the audio and normalization, we'll look at that spike and think that's the loudest part of the audio, and then it'll increase the volume of everything in your audio to meet so that that fits perfectly up to zero dB. The problem with that is if you didn't have that click in there, then the audio is going to be a lot louder, because then the peak of the file will be somewhere else in the audio. So normalization it's really only good if you know that your audio is consistent and doesn't have any random peaks in it. a much better way to do it is using compression. Because what compression will do is take any peak and reduce it by, you know, a set amount, and then it'll gain everything up proportionately. So you'll always end up with a much more consistent volume than you will with normalization, you know. So yeah, I mean, a good way to test that is to, you know, record a piece of audio, until you get one of those mouth clicks that just, you know, it's sort of peaks, then normalize that, and then save a copy and then normalize it without that click in there, and you'll get to drastically different audio levels. So I steer away from normalization, even though it's recommended on quite a few places. Definitely. I know that's, that's something that we typically recommend, like negative one. And so, but that I'm not an audio expert. So we'll get into that. And quick question here from Aaron, how much effort should you be putting into editing for an audition? Like, do you go to the max? And I mean, personally, I would say, Yeah, you're delivering what the clients going to see So what is what is your take there on processing and editing for an audition Absolutely, like an audition should should sound like you doing a part of the real job? Like it should be? It should be, you know, what you see is what you get, you know, if you went into a restaurant and and you know the food looks different, or is different from described, when you actually go to buy it, then you're going to have a problem with it. And it's the same with client audio. So I would I supply the the processed version to an appropriate standard. Plus, supplying the raw and your audition is, is generally getting like there will be other voices who are in the runnings, which will compress it. And suddenly, this will sound a lot more exciting than yours. Because, you know, they've got they've got a louder volume going through. And depending on the genre, of course, like, you know, could sound a lot more interesting. So if you're not, if you're not compressing your auditions, then you could be losing out jobs, because other voices just sound more exciting than you do, you know, because it is kind of an arms race when, and I've done casting where you've got 100 voices to listen to, and the ones that don't make technical quality. Other for me are the ones that get lost first, you know, of that list. So, so definitely, yeah, I don't over compress. Again, it's one of these things you develop a feel for. But except if it's something like an audio book, or if they specify that it's, you know, that it needs to be in RAW format, for example, you can get away with that. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. And that kind of leads into a question I see here, which is, which is perfect. Where's a good place, one that you think is reputable upon it, to start learning about compression? And, you know, hopefully, at least be pointed in the right direction there? Absolutely. I mean, it's something you know, there is a kind of a, there's a little bit of a gap in the market in terms of, you know, there's lots of voice training out there. There's lots of people who are, you know, who paid by the hour to do voice training, but not much in terms of technical training. So there are some out there who will sort of offer technical training and you know, I can offer technical mentorship as well as part of my coaching. There's other things like, you know, there's platforms like gravy for the brain, for example, which teach more sort of broad audio skills. There's YouTube, you know, if you type in how to compress for voiceover, trouble with YouTube is that sometimes the most popular videos aren't the best videos, and they can actually see. So there's no kind of like a vetting of this kind of stuff. It's very true. Yeah, exactly. So you can you can go down so someone else's rabbit hole there and start compressing completely inappropriately. It's a bit like in GarageBand, like the voiceover setting, engagement is hopeless of voiceover. It's hopeless, it sounds. So it's like whoever came up with that was just guessing, basically. Yeah. So I'd say yeah, there are a few different displaced spaces that you can, you know, get training for, for compression, and technical skills, but not as many as the actual sort of, you know, the performance side of voiceover. So it sounds like a really good place to start is with your expert here, Toby. Awesome. And I've got a question here from fleece. Any thoughts on dealing with plosives? You know, he said, up filter, but I'm still finding them throughout my auditions. What do you do with that? Brilliant, so yeah, I am, I went through a phase with a really sensitive mic where a pluses were still just getting through. And what you can do is, you can either, like the best way to do it is to increase the distance between your pop filter and your mic, but then you can't really get in for proximity effect. So if you need proximity effects, you need to be close to the mic. As well as having no pops, I'd suggest using two or perhaps three pop filters. Sometimes like that does help. If they're still getting through occasionally and you just want to edit them out, then having a hot key on your keyboard that just does a high pass filter to about 120 hertz is really good, then you can just highlight the pop, hit the P on your keyboard, and I'll just whip out the pop straight from there. And if you just do it to the plosive it doesn't really affect the words around it. So you can't hear that that bass drops out for that instant. So that's two options in terms of you know how to control those places. Awesome. And I know you touched on this briefly with regards to knowing knowing the end client and what it's going to be used for. And I have a question here is editing for animation the same as commercials in terms of space between lines since normally, there's another character line in between our lines, and there are normal breath between what's your What's your idea there? I think definitely if if someone's going to use that as an edit point, so they're going to, you know, cut up your audio and then stitch it together with another voice, for example, you're leaving a good two second gap, you know, like, a pregnant pause, something that can't be misconstrued. It's also going to help your editor who's who's taking the audio and changing it, like they'll be able to visually see where those edits are, if it's a longer than normal gap. You can also put markers in I know, an audition, you can and probably Pro Tools too. And that can help audio editors, too, in terms of illustrating where where you're making your edits. Awesome. Yeah. So, um, Christine has a question here. She's noticing a hissing noise that she's hearing at the beginning of a recording, what do you what would be your guess at where it might be coming from? She also has Adobe Audition, by the way. Okay, cool. Um, usually, hiss comes from either a piece of malfunctioning gear, but it also happens in sort of in cheaper sort of, you know, interfaces, like, sort of, you know, entry level interfaces, if you have your gain knob, you know, more than 75% of the way up. So you're, you're gaining quite a lot, that's when hits will come in, and it's in that last 25% of gain that you've got on the dial there. The reason that you know, $2,000 interfaces, or $2,000 interfaces is not that they actually provide better quality normal levels, it's when you start to gain them up, there, inherent noise is much less. So you can get a lot more volume without that kind of inherent noise. So it's probably happening either with a malfunctioning mic, you can change your cables, that can be a big thing. Sometimes I'll just wiggle the cables. I had a weird thing the other day when suddenly noise was occurring on my recordings. And I was, you know, I checked everything, and it was fine. And then I wiggled the cables, and it went away. So it's just a little bit of dirt in between the contacts there. So that can be that can be a real thing. Awesome. And Mary's wondering. So this is kind of going back to normalization. So she said I'm having problem with volume after I normalize. When I normalize the volume blows up, she uses a Focusrite Scarlett to itu interface. And audacity, there are volume controls on the interface and in Audacity, should you be using those to control the valve volumes? What's your kind of take there? Hmm. Let me say so, noise will only be introduced at the recording stage, like in the analog stage between your voice and your interface, once it's inside your interface. And in the digital realm, noise won't typically be added, it's only something that happens in the analog space. So by normalizing you're increasing your voice volume, but you're also increasing the noise, the noise that underlies that, which is why it's important to try and get rid of it, you know, in your analog stage. So I would like try and get a relatively healthy level into audacity, but not not a peak level. So I'd sort of, you know, be peaking at sort of minus nine minus six, when you're recording in and then doing the rest of your gain inside audacity, because that's just gonna make things bigger without adding any noise, which interfaces sometimes can do. So kind of, yeah, try and do do different experiments, try and record and really quiet and then gain it up on audacity, or try and record and really hard with your gain up on your, your Scarlet. And if you've got the same amount of noise, then that noise is just there the whole time. So it's probably your mic or your leads, or the inherent noise in your interface. Awesome, awesome. And now, I'll introduce the last question here. Because I know it's one that's probably on a lot of mine. Um, best way to get ahold of you, Toby. questions that we didn't get to, by the way, feel free to reach out to Toby. And that's way to do so. Absolutely. So yeah, my email yet Toby at Toby Ricketts calm as is the best way to get hold of me. Awesome. Toby at Toby ricketts.com, for any questions that we didn't get to feel free to reach out to Toby, if you've got any interest in learning more about audio. I know. He's a amazing teacher upon that. So without any further ado, thank you all very much for joining today. Really appreciate you guys setting aside some time. Toby couldn't couldn't say thank you more credit and judging by the the comment and chat section. Everyone sharing that. Thanks. So thanks for setting aside the time and helping us out here. No problem. Thanks, everyone. Stay safe and go well. Awesome. Have a great day, everybody. Until next time. Have a great day.