Daily Archives: March 1, 2006

How to produce voice-overs that DON’T SUCK: Part II, The ToolsGreetings! If you have not read the first in this series, please review that section now before proceeding.Now, the tools! In this article I will lay out for you the minimum tools that I would recommend to record a quality voice over (VO).Computer
Mac, PC or Linux… choose your poison. Although I profess to be a Mac guy myself, I have no beef with any OS. The bottom line is that you need two high-quality pieces: a good sound interface and a good audio editor. These abound by the dozen. If you are going to be doing this sort of thing for the long haul it would of course behove you to investigate the pros and cons of all of them before making your purchase.

In general, I would recommend looking at a multitracker as opposed to a 2-track editor. The reason being that two-track editors offer a more simplistic environment and often offer advanced sound design and editing features (such as those found in Peak Pro, a favorite sound effect/VO editor of mine. For example, I found the ability to loop a sound with a cross-fade built in extremely easy and very convincing for taking seemingly random sound scape materials (such as crickets in the forest) and slicing it down to a meer 20-30 seconds without it ever appearing to “loop”. This is easy enough when you are dealing with sounds that have a very finite beginning and end (foot steps, for example), but becomes extremely complicated when you start working with sounds that are continuous (a train flying down the tracks, or crickets, or a waterfall, to name a few).

(more…)