Warming up your voice before reading a script can improve your diction, and help eliminate mistakes - making for an easier recording session for everyone.
Say each of these out loud, three times each:
Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran.
Big black bug bit a big black bear and the big black bear bled black blood.
Can I cook a proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot?
Don’t doubt the doorbell, but differ with the doorknob.
Eight gray geese in a green field grazing.
Fine white vinegar with veal.
Grab the groundhog from the glazed grass.
High roller, low roller, lower roller.
Inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping.
Jingle jungle jangle joker.
Karmanaut kills for karma, but can’t conceive of killing cats.
Lucy likes light literature.
Monkeys make monopoly monotonous.
The Next nest will not necessarily be next to nothing.
Octopi occupy a porcupine’s mind.
Peter Prangle, the prickly pear picker, picked three perfectly prickly pears.
Queen Catherine wakes the cat, and the cat quietly cries.
Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers!
Some shun sunshine. Do you shun sunshine?
Three thick thistle sticks.
Unique New York, Unique New York, Unique New York.
Venti, Grande, Tall - Very Grand Words for Large, Medium, Small.
Will’s wetsuit is round and wet and rough and wide and ready to go on a watery ride.
Xylophones exist or so existentialists insist.
Yoda met a Yeti on the Plains of Serengeti.
Zoologists illogically love to read astrology.
The "1,2,3" rule is simply reading the first sentence of text out loud 3 times before going into the rest of it. Supposedly, by the third pass of the first sentence, your brain has tuned into where it needs to be and the rest of the performance will go a lot smoother. After learning that from a coach and implementing it into my auditioning, I noticed that they were sounding much more polished, even after just a single take.
One thing I’ve learned so far is every voice has merit! Just start talking into a mic… any mic! Listen to yourself and critique what you hear. Don’t try to “be” anyone else, just talk the way you would talk to anyone. Don’t worry about your “pipes”, or if your voice is deep enough. Just talk, and then listen… really listen to yourself. It’ll come.
Sometimes longer reads can be challenging, particularly if they span multiple pages. Promptr.tv is a dead simple prompter that allows you to keep your eyes on one line and let the text come to you.
Prompters are also very helpful to help you control your narration speed. By just reading the line in front of you, you avoid the risk of rushing or slowing your pace. Great for practicing long-form narration.
Conveniently, the code for this prompter is open source and downloadable from github, so you can run it on your own computer ( you don’t need a webserver to do run this, just download and expand into a directory.)
Finding the right music beds for your voice overs can be a challenge, especially if you are posting them to YouTube. YouTube’s ContentID will identify copyrighted music and can prevent you from monetizing your videos.
This is where the YouTube audio library comes in. YouTube has provided a library of royalty free music and sound effects that you can use in your projects.
This is especially helpful for the new booth junkie who is looking for music beds to use in your demo reel.
Helpfully, the library allows you to search for music by Mood, so if you need dramatic music, or happy music to match the tone of your copy, you have lots of good options. You can also filter by Genre and Instrument.
NASA has posted a large number of space and space travel related sounds on their website. The library includes lots of iconic astronaut communication clips. According to this article
you’re free to use all of these sounds as you wish, because NASA’s own audio isn’t copyrighted. It’s meant to be a public service to the American people of their taxpayer-funded government program, but that extends to everyone. There are some restrictions – not everything NASA publishes is covered by the same license [...]
So have fun with these sounds!
Redditor sbplat, and fellow booth junkie Will Irace reminds us that if you are on a Mac, or Linux Machine (Windows users would need to use cygwin) there is a command you can issue from terminal to download all of the sounds to your computer:
<code>wget -r -A "*.mp3" -w 30 http://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds/</code>
Transcribe stuff from youtube
write your own
go to /r/recordthis and check out /u/mechanate‘s Airchecks that get posted each month, He provides some well-written (fictional) ads there. Many folks do the full production with background sound and fx. Post them on soundcloud or similar to get feedback.
Reaper is $60 US, and so very affordable. I haven’t used Audition, but I have used Studio One, Garage Band, Ableton Live, Audacity and Reaper, and Reaper is the one I stick with.
Here are several reasons why this Booth Junkie loves Reaper:
It is immensely customizable. If there is anything you don’t like about the interface you can probably change it. Want different hotkeys? Go for it. Want meters on the right instead of the bottom? No Problem Want to change which buttons appear as your common functions? Cool with them. Want to get rid of the “bars and measures” grid? Yuup. On it goes. Watch the “Reaper for Radio” playlist by Jeff Emtman - particularly the last video in the playlist for examples.
Templates. I don’t know about Audition, But Reaper has some amazing time saving templates. There is a project template so every project starts up with the exact settings you like. Each VST has presets you can save and default, so once you get your compressor and gate and EQ set to match your voice and studio you can save them as defaults. It also has Chains that you can set that set up all your preferred VSTs with the defaults, in the order that you want them.
Its affordable. at $60US it’s hard to beat that price!
It’s fast. with the UI, Hotkeys, defaults, templates, chains etc… I can work fast. I audition a LOT on voices.com, and there time is absolutely of the essence. The faster you can get recording, and mastering the earlier you get in the list and the better chances you have of getting selected. Here is my workflow:
Open reaper, new project– this prompts me to save, and opens a blank project template with my preferred UI. No snapping, no bars and measures, Minimal buttons on my common buttons list.
Ctrl-T – I have this set to create a track, insert my mic from my interface and Auto-arm it for recording. It inserts my preferred FX at this time, and arms them.
Record – Do your thing.
Auto-punch – Anything I need to re-record, I highlight, Right click the record button and select auto punch. Click the cursor a few seconds before to get my lead in, and it will re-record as a new take just in that section.
Ripple Edit - Click one of the few buttons I have on my UI - Ripple edit. Listen to my track, hit “S” (a hotkey I mapped) to split the track whenever I want to remove something. The track automatically rejoins after I remove the bad section.
FX Chain - It was inserted when I armed the track, I only have to make minor tweaks, not set up the whole thing.
Render – Once I’ve edited and listened back, I bounce the final to disk. If it’s voices.com I bounce to MP3, everyone else gets WAV.
I’m done, and I can submit. I can get an 30 sec audition completed within 3 or 4 minutes, which is critical when there are 100 other VA’s doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, competing against me.
I've seen some people use sort of a "backstop" baffle almost directly behind their mic. Do you think this would make a significant difference?
I do. Think of it this way: That mic has a cardiod pattern, so it is least sensitive behind the mic where your egg-crate is, and most sensitive in front where your DIY panels are. But there is also a lot of hard, reflective surface behind you between those panels . So it would follow that it is hearing all those reverberations off the walls behind you. I turned my whole setup around and now I have my best, thickest absorption panels right behind me ,
and I sit pretty close to the wall to try and minimize these reflections.
A quick aside, and this is relevant - I promise - my daughter is a huge One Direction fan, and watches Youtube videos about them pretty much constantly. I totally rearranged my setup, after making her rewind this video to see how they were recording vocals in a hotel room look how much absorption is behind them instead of behind the mic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ycHifZqIGM&t;=19
Note that there is lots of padding behind them, and a SE Electronics Reflexion Filter
My policy is this: Experiment! Give it a try. Rearrange stuff, then record, then listen critically, if it got better then there is your new baseline setup to try again. I’ve been through probably 4 or 5 configurations before I got to where I am now (and I’m still thinking of other ways to rearrange!)
Finally. Listen critically, see if you can hear what is reverberating. I found that when I was doing really loud parts the metal covers on my baseboard heat radiators would reverberate!
I think Reaper is by far the best DAW for the new booth junkie. What I love most about it is it’s customizability. Many DAWs are optimized for music production, but we don’t work that way. We don’t care about bars, measures, tempo, metronomes etc.
When I was starting out, I watched “Reaper for Radio” a playlist by radio producer Jeff Emtman. It provides an excellent overview of setting up your DAW for voice work.
This’ll take you an hour or so to go through, but it is so worth it. If you are already familiar with Reaper, skip to Part 5 – there is gold in that video.
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULkH7FHv3IA
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB4GKEBnV9w
Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ8e7TElr3Q