Recording Voiceover

The Spoken Word in Media

Tom Blakemore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134745036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Radio

The only book on the market to specifically address its audience, Recording Voiceover is the comprehensive guide for engineers looking to understand the aspects of capturing the spoken word.

Discussing all phases of the recording session, Recording Voiceover addresses everything from microphone recommendations for voice recording to pre-production considerations, including setting up the studio, working with and directing the voice talent, and strategies for reducing or eliminating distracting noise elements found in human speech.

Recording Voiceover features in-depth, specific recommendations for recording radio and television commercials, corporate communications, documentaries, tracks for gaming and animation, radio drama, interviews and roundtable discussions. A discussion of the voice in film and television is also included.

Special attention is paid to the final release format and its impact on recording strategies. Exploration of using telephone interfaces – including both analogue and digital ISDN, as well as recording across the internet – is included.

CHAPTER

Introduction

1

One microphone, one actor, and one channel on the mixer. What could possibly be simpler or more straightforward? This is how the majority of spoken-word recording is done, and on the surface it appears there’s nothing to it. Certainly nothing compared with a high-powered music session, right? Well, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in more than thirty years in the studio, it’s that this can often be the most demanding recording situation that you’ll be thrown into. Think about this for a minute: If you are performing with a symphony orchestra, you are playing with perhaps eighty other musicians. But now step onto a stage with only your instrument and with the audience in front of you. There’s no place to hide, and every moment is magnified. It’s the same with recording the human voice. One microphone, one voice, and only one channel on the mixer. It’s now just you and your skill to make or break this moment. Much of the information that we share as human beings comes through spoken words, and the majority of media that we come into contact with every day has a spoken component. Radio, television, movies, video games, even the annoying “Your call is very important to us … a representative will be with you shortly”—they all rely heavily on listening to someone pass information to us through words. And the interesting thing to consider is this: Some audio professional somewhere is responsible for recording all of this material.

One microphone, one voice, and only one channel on the mixer. Simple, right? With this book I hope to give you some techniques to think about and put into practice to make recording the spoken word a strong part of your professional repertoire.

A LIFE IN SOUND

For as long as I can remember, from when I was very young, I’ve been fascinated with the sound of the world happening around me. While my friends were playing baseball or gazing at a line of ants, I would stand transfixed, listening to the sound of a running stream, or to a far-off train. When I was about seven or so, my parents gave me a small transistor radio as a Christmas present. A radio of my own, to listen to whatever I wanted! Late on Christmas afternoon, I lay on my bed and turned on the radio. I always thought that radios were for listening to music or the ballgame, but that afternoon I tuned in to a broadcast of a radio play—A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. I had never experienced anything like it—a complete movie playing only in my head and imagination, performed by actors in a studio, using their voices to bring this story to life. On that long-ago Christmas, I discovered the power of the spoken word, and I still marvel at it to this day. Later, in junior high, I acquired a small tape recorder and began recording the sounds of my neighborhood. I soon discovered that I could play these sounds backwards and that, by using a pair of scissors and some Scotch tape, I could put the sounds in a different order. From these childhood beginnings, a life in sound as a recording engineer was born.

Back when record stores were the only way of purchasing new music, every record store had a large section called “Spoken Word Recordings.” Comedy albums, audio documentaries, recorded speeches—all of these and more found their way into the spoken-word bins, and in those days sales were brisk. With the demise of vinyl, spoken-word recordings morphed into podcasts, walking tours, news and information on specialized topics, and the like. But the spoken word is still with us, now more than ever, and on a greater range of topics. All of this information must be recorded, edited, and produced, and this is the topic of this book. The greater the skill with which the voice is recorded, the wider the potential audience for this work.

A BIT ABOUT THIS BOOK

This project was conceived at the 2012 AES annual convention in San Francisco. While browsing through the selection of titles available at the Focal Press booth, I was struck by the absence of any information on the subject of voiceover recording. After a lengthy conversation with the person at the booth, and after thinking about it for the following two days, on the four-hour flight back home I started putting together some notes and a sample table of contents and sent them off to the woman I had met and talked to in San Francisco. It turns out that she was an Acquisitions Editor at Focal and she began to guide me through the process of getting a green light for my idea. Now, here we are in 2015, and the results are in your hands.

In the following pages, I am going to take a few things for granted. First, that you have a working knowledge of basic recording techniques, including microphone design and signal flow in the studio, and that you are familiar with audio editing concepts in general. In the examples, I will be using Pro Tools screens and terminology, but the concepts that I’ll be discussing apply equally to any digital audio workstation (DAW) platform, as well as good old analog recording and editing on that quaint medium, magnetic tape. After all, we’ll be discussing capturing the sound of the voice and not the theory of any one recording medium. Also, this is not a book that discusses voice acting, recording vocals for music, location recording for film and television, or audio editing and processing in general. Those subjects are deserving of books devoted exclusively to each subject, and indeed there are a number of fine texts available on those topics. But I’ve found that, for spoken-word recording, there’s just not a lot of information out there.

What I will be talking about in these pages is improving your techniques in recording voiceover performances for narrations and commercials, documentaries, corporate communications, and games and animation. We will also take a brief look at the world of recording in the field, doing interviews and roundtable discussions. Also, we can’t really discuss any of this without revisiting the types of microphone and processing that are incorporated into this work. So, in this book, we’ll take a look at the various types of microphone and when you would use one versus another, understanding how the human voice is produced, what makes a good-sounding recording environment, working with voice actors, capturing a high-quality recording of the voice, and specific techniques for various types of media.

And finally, we’ll be dealing with the space in which the voiceover reading takes place, the studio, or booth, and not the control room, where the engineer listens to the sound coming from the monitor speakers. My definition of the two might be stated, “studio = performance space” and “control room = recording space.” To clear up any misunderstanding, throughout the book I make reference to “the studio”—this is the performance space, whereas “the recording studio” is the business itself, which is comprised of many different rooms—offices, lounge area, tech shop, the control room (or more than one), the studio, storage vault, etc.

The book is structured into two parts. In the first part, Chapters 3 and 4 cover technical and theoretical information on acoustics and microphones that we should be aware of, and Chapters 4–7 discuss the role of the voice engineer and the session itself. Chapter 8 is devoted to designing the voice studio and is aimed primarily at those who would like to record themselves at home, as many voiceover professionals do. The second part, Chapters 9–14, is devoted to discussing specific voiceover situations and types of session (commercials, games and animations, interview situations, and a brief mention of other types of voiceover opportunity). At intervals throughout the book, there are short sections that I am calling “Insight” sections. These offer thoughts on various aspects of our profession, and my guest contributors offer their views gained from many years of experience in the industry. Of course, I am very indebted to these individuals for sharing their thoughts with you. Read them closely and learn from their wisdom.

As I mentioned above, over the course of thirty-five years in the studio, I’ve been fortunate to encounter a wide variety of recording situations, almost all of them involving working with the human voice in some manner. Drawing on this experience, I would like to share some of these situations with you and give you some small insight into the skills that each requires. It is my hope that, by sharing some of what I’ve learned with you, you can more easily make your way in the industry and avoid some mistakes that most of us have made, thus becoming a true professional more quickly.

THE MAKING OF A SUPERIOR VOICEOVER RECORDING

I’ve noticed that those engineers who consistently produce great-sounding voice recordings have a number of things in common. First and foremost, they are world-class multitaskers. When doing any type of recording, we must be aware of many stimuli coming at us at once. With voice recording, we oftentimes must keep our ears open for problems and mistakes in the recording process and, at the same time, keep our eyes and concentration on the script and be on the lookout for missed, slurred, or mispronounced words. Also, we must be aware of the narrative flow and make sure that the tempo, style, and dynamics remain consistent. At the same time, we are documenting the recording and keeping track of timings and good takes, and being aware of possible editing choices we will make later.

Of course, making sure that the actor and the director have fresh coffee, water, and so on is part of the job, as is acting as amateur psychologist to keep the session running smoothly and tempers on an even keel. And we have to keep an eye on the clock to ensure that the session is accomplished in the time allotted and we don’t run over and cost the client extra money. All of this adds up to an incredible level of attention to detail that separates the extraordinary engineer from the average, and keeping all of this in mind is how you keep working on a steady basis. So, in a sense, it’s as much (or more) about these multitasking skills as it is about your recording skills. Of course, technical knowledge is the bottom line in any job in professional audio, but these skills are what will set you apart from the competition.

If there is any one piece of advice that I can give to anyone doing any type of recording, it would be this: Always be prepared and ready to roll at all times. Digital audio is cheap—if someone is warming up or practicing, why not drop into record? You never know—sometimes that’s when that magic take happens, and you don’t want to miss it. At the least, you can delete those takes if you want to, and you’re not out anything, but miss that one special performance, and it’s gone forever. What this means is that, if the client says she wants the session to begin at 10:00 A.M., you have everything set up, the coffee made, the script copied, and a session built in your workstation, and you have verified that the signal path is working properly. At 10:00 A.M., you’re all set to press the record button, capture every moment of magic, and come out with a superior product. Do all of this, and the client will return time and again; furthermore, the voice actor will appreciate your efficiency and hard work, and, the next time someone asks him for a recommendation on where to record the clients’ new project—well, who do you think that actor is going to suggest?

This book is aimed at anyone who is interested in learning how to effectively record the human voice. I came to learn about this intuitively, during time spent on the job, as I started my career in the studio, but only as I began to study communication theory and pay attention to how the voice is captured did I truly start to understand all that is involved. I’ll leave the mathematical proofs of much of what I discuss to others, and, if you’re interested in the math of how things work, I advise you to discover a number of excellent texts on the subject, some of which I list in the bibliography for this work.

A few words on terminology: The end product of our work can go by a number of names: “voiceover,” “VO,” “narration,” “read,” and so on. I use these terms fairly interchangeably in the book; they all refer to the recorded work. Throughout the book, I’ll be referring to both “the microphone” and “the mic.” I do this to avoid redundancy; in our world, either is perfectly acceptable. By the way, “mic” is the shortened version of “microphone”—it’s never “mike,” which is a person’s name. Also, when referring to certain people and roles, I use “he” and “she” interchangeably, not only to avoid redundancy and seeming (possibly) sexist, but also to avoid the dreaded “he/she” usage or the creation of some sort of strangely androgynous figure (“the person” or “them,” and so on). As well, the person that you are recording can be called “the actor,” “voiceover talent,” “talent,” “narrator,” or simply “the VO.” All of these refer to the same person and their role in the studio. And finally, whether you are a student, a beginning engineer or a seasoned pro, we’re all in this together; we’re all recording engineers. We simply have different levels of experience. And so, throughout this book, I refer to “we.”

I’m discussing voiceover recording in this book, but much of the material can be applied to any type of recording that you may do.

Whether you are engineering a voice session or recording yourself, there are some things that don’t change: The physics of how sound reacts in a room, how a microphone functions, reaching an agreed-upon quality, and, above all, pleasing the client. The better that you understand the technical aspects of the recording chain, the better your final product will be, and the more clients you will have. You’ll have to become familiar with software programs, accepted editing practices, and proper mixing techniques. This book will give you some practical advice to start you down this path, as well as introducing you to a variety of markets that need your work and that you may want to explore, to help you make a living in the world of voiceover.

I would like to address two ways of looking at things: Facts and opinions. If I tell you that a particular microphone is a condenser microphone, that is a fact. It can be proven, and there is no doubt about it. Much of the information in this book is opinion, based on my experience in recording the human voice since the late 1970s. Over that time, I’ve made plenty of mistakes and also made some discoveries that helped me along, and it is these experiences that I would like to pass along to you, so that you can, in a sense, shortcut this process and learn from my mistakes and discoveries in order to get your recordings and your career to a higher level in a shorter period of time. You may have a different viewpoint on the best way to approach voiceover recording, and ten engineers will give you ten different opinions on what makes the best recording situation. All people are different, and what works for me may only hold you and your creativity back. There are no absolutes (except for those pesky facts). Be open and be aware that your opinion is just as valuable as mine and demands equal consideration.

A SHORT CASE STUDY

To help you begin to appreciate the multiple skills needed for effective voiceover work, I offer up this short story about an experience that I had some years back. I was booked to engineer a session at 8:00 A.M. one morning. The afternoon before, I had received a phone call from the producer’s assistant, who was calling from England. It seems that a famous British actor was in town filming a movie, and he was going to be recording a 2-minute public service message that would air worldwide. The producer was in London and would be directing the session via phone from there. They obviously wanted top recording quality, and, owing to the demands of the movie schedule, the actor would have only 45 minutes to complete the recording process, because he had to be on set for makeup shortly thereafter. I was to deliver three digital audiotape (DAT) tapes (you can look that antiquated format up on the Internet) via three separate overnight delivery services to the United Kingdom and also archive a safety copy at the studio (this was before the advent of digital phone setups and the Internet, by the way). At the end of that day, the actor was leaving the country, as soon as his shooting ended. It was evident that I had only one shot at this, and the reputation of the studio and my skills were to be tested that morning.

The morning of the session, I got everything set up and tested the signal path, including the phone connection into and out of the console. Scripts were copied, the coffee was brewed, and the studio was set up and ready to go before the scheduled start time. When the actor arrived (hungover, no less), it quickly became clear that he was nervous doing a voice-only recording that demanded emotion and empathy on his part; he had spent his entire career as a film and stage actor and was much more comfortable being able to use his body and facial expressions to convey emotions, rather than just his voice alone. My initial choice of microphone seemed wrong to me after speaking with him for a short period; there was something in his voice quality that I wanted to capture and I recognized that my first choice of mic wasn’t the one to use. A quick change of mic and mic positioning and we were off and rolling, watching t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Biography
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Voice in Media
• Chapter 3 Room Acoustics
• Chapter 4 Microphones
• Chapter 5 The Engineer
• Chapter 6 The Studio
• Chapter 7 The Session
• Chapter 8 Your Personal Recording Space
• Chapter 9 Recording for Commercials
• Chapter 10 Recording Long-Form Narration
• Chapter 11 Recording for Games and Animation
• Chapter 12 Recording Interviews and Roundtable Discussions
• Chapter 13 More Voiceover Opportunities
• Chapter 14 That’s a Wrap
• Resources
• Index