How to Record Voice-Over Audio at Home | iZotope Home Studio Tips

Hey everyone. I’m Alex Knickerbocker and I’m a rerecording mixer based in Los Angeles. It can be a real struggle to get high quality voice recordings in a bedroom or a home studio. So today I want to show you a good workflow to get professional quality voiceovers from home. I’m going to cover the gear that you need and all of the audio processing techniques that you can use to get clean, crisp, and professional sounding narration, voiceover audio book, recordings, podcasts, even vocal tracks. So you can take your audio from sounding like this. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio to this. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. Now, before we get started, it’s important to remember the source quality rule. If you start with terrible sounding recordings, then you’re only going to be able to improve marginally at best. But if you do everything you can to get great recordings from the source, it’s going to be way more flexible down the line. You’re going to get much better results. So let’s dive in. The first thing you’re going to need is a quiet space to record it. Now, most professional voiceovers are recorded in a really pristine studio the environment is acoustically treated, but if you’re just working at home, you can use a small bedroom or a closet and get pretty good results. And I’ve even heard some really solid recordings come out of parked cars because they’re so well sound isolated from the outside world. Now, if you don’t have a quiet enough space, you can always bring your recordings into isotope RX and run the repair assistant on your audio repair system will listen to your recordings and give you some intelligent processing suggestions to fix things like mouth clicks or pops, hum, and noise. So you can go from recordings that is maybe not the cleanest. They have a whole bunch of little anomalies in them that are distracting to clean professional and smooth sounding voiceover. My ACL blew last year. So I was out of the show for 12 weeks. My ACL blew last year. So I was out of the show for 12 weeks. My ACL blew last year. So I’m, I was out of the show for 12. Next, you’ll need an interface and a microphone. I’m just using an avid inbox, three pros for my interface, which is actually kind of an older one at this point, but it’s got cleanup preamps. It’s got enough inputs and outputs for my needs. It gets the job done. And there are actually plenty of microphones out there that don’t require an interface. They’ll plug directly into your computer via USB port, and we’ll leave some links in the description. So you can check those out if you’d like, but all of these techniques and tips that I’m going to give you apply to any the microphone set up you’re going to use. So don’t worry if you don’t have the exact same hardware as I do. I’m also gonna use a pop filter to reduce any plosives that might happen when I’m talking. You naturally generate a little bit of wind as you speak. So that’ll keep the microphone from being overloaded and it’ll make for nice clean recordings. Again, with that source quality rules in mind, if you don’t happen to have a pop filter, you can always load your audio into RX and run the deep plosive module, either using your own settings or dialing in a preset supplied by isotope. And it’ll just, again, mitigate those low-end bumps from hard PS or heartbeats and give you much cleaner audio. If you could have only four plugins outboard, if you could have only four plugins, if you could have only four plugins or outboard I’ll position myself between eight and 12 inches away from the Mike with that pop filter in the middle, remember a cardioid microphone can give you that nice low-end presence bump with the proximity effect. If you get closer or it can keep it more conversational as you move back and I can record my lines from here, I’m recording this into pro tools, but you can use any DAW that you’re comfortable with it. This is just my voice by itself. Totally dry, no processing at all. Let’s take a listen. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio, just for comparison’s sake. I’ve also got a sure, SM 58. That’s got a bit of a different character to start out with. Let’s listen to that. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. I prefer the noise, but the mic that you choose is all about personal preference and what fits your voice to your ears. It’s not about cost or anything like that. Again, I like the starting point that the Norman gives me and with a few quick changes, I can get it into even better shape. The first thing I’m going to do is load up isotope nectar three, which is purpose-built to get great sounding voice and vocal recordings. You can dial in your own settings or load up one of the presets that nectar comes with. But if you’re just starting out, you can use, Nectar’s built-in vocal assistant to point you in the right direction, simply engage vocal assistant and tell it what you want it to do. I’m going to have it assist me in creating a new custom preset that fits my voice. Exactly. We’re working with dialogue recording. So I’ll set this to dialogue and set the processing intensity to moderate. So it gives me a good average suggestion of where my processing should be and where it should go from here. I’ll click next and play the audio that I’ve got back into it. And as you see, it’s going to analyze and determine which parameters it needs to adjust and what fixes it needs to make from vocal levels to SS or sibilance EEQ compression. Anything that nectar thinks I might need to fix in my audio. Once it’s done learning, I can hit accept, and it’ll have generated a whole bunch of different parameters that I can then audition and manipulate to my liking. You can also bypass or change the order of any parameter or preset within nectar so that you’re processing structure in your gain. Staging remains exactly as you want them. Now let’s listen to where the vocal assistant got us to. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. That sounds pretty good. Let’s take a look at what this first IQ is doing. Now. This is just notching out a few of the more irritating frequencies that nectar found in my voice. And I like where it’s at. So I’ll move on to my DSR. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio, not a bad starting point at all. I know that my S’s tend to live a little bit lower than just four kilohertz. So I’ll extend the cutoff frequency to closer to three, but I really don’t need to change this very much beyond the suggestions that the vocal assistant gave me. Let’s take a look at the second eat cue. This equalizer is shaping my voice to be a little bit more interesting than just the raw recording. And you can see it’s filtering out the unnecessary, low end. It’s accentuating the top end, kind of like my microphone choice already does. And it filters out unnecessary and extraneous air. So I’m not over brightening, anything. You’ve also got a little bit of a bump in the nice low-end resonance. That’s kind of accentuating that proximity effect that I mentioned before and dynamically reducing the harsh mid range that happens in a lot of vocal recordings. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio, looking at the compressor parameter here. It looks like this is slightly over compressing my audio. So I might want to back that off because I’m getting over six DB of gain reduction. And I think I’d probably like a little bit less than that. So I’ll change my ratio to slightly lower and I’ll bring my threshold up a little bit, and this will sound a little bit less compressed and more natural. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. I’ll also engage my output limiter. So I’m not clipping any of my audio and I’ll bring up isotope insight to just to check my levels and make sure that I’m in a good place with this voiceover. This is a demonstration of how to get professional voiceover quality in a home studio. My integrated lab, this falls within most broadcast standards at minus 22.1 L UFS. And with minimal effort, nectar has given me a custom preset that shapes my voice into exactly the way that I like DSS. All the problematic siblings. I’ve got compresses for a really natural even sound and prevents any clipping from occurring. So my voiceover is just ready to mix, and that is the basic workflow to get a professional sounding voiceover from home. Always remember the source quality rule. I hope you enjoyed the video and thanks for watching.