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[juliael]

If I want to pursue voice acting more, I need to address the microphone/recording environment issue soonish. The Logitech usb works, but it's not very adjustable from a height perspective. So Christmas present make involve a Snowball, if the gods are kind. This tutorial on building your own pop screen showed up on podfic_tips which encounters some of the same

Comments

[rfrancis]

Your environment sounded pretty good in your audition. Your sound quality's a bit tinny and not very warm, but getting a better mic and getting fairly close up on it will help a great deal there. You also had some mic pops so you'll want to either talk next to it (which is what I do; I picked it up from jeffrey) instead of into it, or make or get a pop filter

[juliael]

Thanks for the feedback. It's really appreciated.

I do try to speak off the microphone a little. My biggest problem is finding the right seating arrangement with me, computer and microphone. Like I said, the Logitech isn't that flexible, height wise. Too far below me and the microphone doesn't seem to pick up anything. Too close and well we've seen some of the results. If there's a microphone equivalent of a "sweet spot", I haven't found it yet.

Accents -- I think my biggest concern is replication. I'd feel uncomfortable auditioning with an accent if I didn't think I could do it again and again, especially for a recurring character.

By tinny and not very warm, what do you mean? Too much echo?

[rfrancis]

It's not just echo, it's, hmm, this is hard to describe except by comparison. If you've still got Audacity installed, and still have your audition, you could load it up, run the equalizer over it with the "acoustic" preset, then run compression (2:1) over it a time or two, and listen again. Not ideal, but it gets across the idea... warm recordings sound closer to the listener, in a way sort of intimiate, if you'll pardon the word. Like any good thing, too much is not necessarily desirable, but too much the otherway and it sounds like it was recorded out in the hall or something. Yours wasn't that bad, but put in the same scene with someone like, say, Pete Milan, and the director has to either pull tricks like above or (worse, in my opinion) do equalization tricks to make Pete (or whoever) sound less warm to match, either way so you sound like your characters are actually in the same room

[juliael]

No, no, this is all good, I assure you. I like knowing what I can improve on, especially ways to improve the audio quality. Most recording advice I've read focused more on eliminating breath pops, so I wasn't aware of this aspect at all. It's all a learning experience. Suggests I might try recording in a different location. This is why most people seem to record in a quiet closet? So it sounds more closed in?