Scroll down to learn how to get started, or click one of these links:

• Home Studio Setup: 🔨 Choose Your Studio .. 🔩 Stand+Arm .. 🎤 Mic+Mixer ..  Vertical Supports
• How To Record: 🎤 Learn to Record .. 🎧 Audacity .. 🔊 Better Sound ..⚡ Mixer

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Ready to start your home studio space?

Start by sending us FOUR pictures. Take a picture from behind the mic looking out (#1), and one from a distance away looking in (#2). We need to see the whole room. Take a picture of your mixer and microphone as well (#3 and #4) showing how your microphone is mounted, and how the microphone cable is routed.

For Audacity or your Computer:

Request to schedule tech support help from your coach during a session, or by email or text, and they will send you a code to enter below. They will remote connect to your computer and assist you.

Enter your 9-digit code:

For Mac Users:

Live video support: Download one of our augmented reality apps below, and we can draw right on your live video as we chat live with you to help you make changes to your studio setup:

  

If you haven’t yet, download and install Audacity, a free program to let you record audio on your computer:

Download Audacity

Start by setting up Audacity so that you can record (connect to your microphone) and set basic preferences  (video coming soon!)

For several videos of Audacity tips, be sure to visit this link. 

Do I have to use Audacity?

No. But it’s the easiest-to-use program for recording voice over, it’s free, and it also includes very powerful features for advanced users. If you use it, we can help you with it. If you prefer to use something else, we won’t be able to help you as much as if you use Audacity.

► Follow these steps to make your first test recording.

If you prefer a getting started video tutorial, try this one:

Once you’ve gotten a few basics down, learn these tips:

1. Save the Project, Not Just the Export

When saving an Audacity project it is normally easiest to use the File > Save Project command, which has a default shortcut of Ctrl + S (or ⌘ + S on Mac). The first time you save it will prompt you for a file name. If you save a project again having made further changes to it, there will be no further prompts—it will just save.

To share audio files, you will need to export them. Don’t try to share an Audacity project! The project and its related files stay on your computer. We suggest watching the following video below to learn how to export using Export Multiple, which can also be used to export single files. It’s the best way to create an audio file to share it, in our opinion. Alternatively, you can click ‘File’ then click on ‘Export‘ to bring up the File Export window. It gives you options on where to save, type in a name, and choose a file format to export to.

Making a commercial from voice over in Audacity by adding music and sound effects is known as sound design. (To learn how, go here.) Once you’ve added all the voice and sounds into Audacity, click the File Menu and save it all as a project.

Eventually, you will export your work (the option underneath Save Project), but always keep all your tracks and modifications saved as a project separately.

If you are going to modify a track, such as your voice over, first duplicate that track, drag it down to the bottom of the project, and mute it. This is just so you have easy access to a backup of the original track before you started modifying it. To duplicate, select the track (double-clicking anywhere in the track will work) and then use Ctrl-D (Windows) or Command-D (Mac)—or click the Edit Menu and choose Duplicate.

Your main goal in saving your project workspace (vs only saving the exported file) is to be able to go back and make changes later, even after you export your final draft of the commercial.

Exporting and Sharing

If you don’t know what format the client wants, export as a .wav file (large) or high-quality .mp3. You can NOT share a file from your software—you have to export before sharing. For example, a .aup file created by Audacity is actually just a shortcut to the audio database on your computer. There are few cases where you would share an entire project from your software—you would only share the exported files.

To share your work on social media, you will often have to convert it to a video (mp4 is a common video format that will work everywhere) if you want it to play inside the social media post. That means, at a minimum, choosing a static image that will be visible in the video while your audio plays. To find an image that gives you the rights to do this, try Pexels. To convert your audio to video with the image you choose, use ez-converter.

2. Control Clipping at ALL Stages

Oversimplified, clipping is audio distorted by being too loud. The rounded top or bottom of a waveform is “clipped” off. When you are viewing audio in Audacity, clipped areas appear red (IF you have set Audacity to make clipping visible, see next paragraph). Here is an example of viewing the same clipped audio at two different zoom levels:

  

Audacity can fix mild clipping, and it’s particularly good at fixing clipping in voice-only recordings. The first step is to set your bit depth to 32-bit float and see where clipping occurs by turning on “Show Clipping” at the bottom of the view menu. Simplest is show clipping all the time. (Alternatively, you can have Audacity search for clipped areas by using the “Find Clipping” Analyze function.)

🎧 Technical note: Think of the bit depth setting as the place where your computer stores the volume or loudness of your audio (more accurately called amplitude). Your sampling rate is the place your computer stores the pitch (more accurately called frequency) of your audio.

Control during recording

When recording, you will adjust amplitude levels (louder or softer) using knobs on your mixer (these knobs are sometimes called “pots”, short for “potentiometers”).

If your mixed has BOTH a level AND a gain knob (check the labels on the mixer itself) set the “Level” knob midway between max and minimum (usually straight up) and turn up the “Gain” knob until your voice at normal volume is clipping often—but not all—of the time. Then turn down the “Level” knob until your voice is sometimes but rarely clipping. Occasional clipping is better than setting levels too low; very low levels will can over-amplify background noise. (If your mixer has more than one channel, make sure you are adjusting the channel your microphone is plugged into.)

Control during mixing

When you add music and sound effects, you may have to quiet everything 1dB or so, or the power of voice and music combined may clip a bit too much. Fortunately, it’s easy to see what is going on and adjust accordingly.

Here’s a simple way to tell: Select all (keyboard shortcut: ctrl-a/Windows; command-a/Mac) and then mix everything down to a single new track (picture at right: Tracks Menu > Mix > Mix and Render to New Track).

If there isn’t much that is red/clipped, select either the entire new track, or only the main areas with red/clipping, and choose Effect Menu > Clip Fix. If there’s a lot of red/clipping, delete the combined track (or just undo (Ctrl/Command-z) the new track you created) and quiet (reduce the gain) one or more of your tracks a bit. The easiest way to quiet the level/gain of a track overall is to drag the +/- slider at the left edge of the track.

If you want to understand advanced settings better—NOT required!—read these next:

 

Looking for Troubleshooting Tips? Here they are!

Simple Studio Tips

First of all, there should be a quiet corner behind you. You face into the room, the microphone faces into the quiet corner.

It doesn’t matter how you deaden the sound in corner, anything from hanging acoustic panels to putting shredded fabric in chicken wire will work! For the least expensive acoustic panels anywhere, be sure to talk to your School of Voiceover or Academy of Voiceover coach for a deal we give to students.

Second, there should be something behind your copy that “catches” some of your voice, such as hanging a blanket in front of you, and pinning your script to it. Or something behind and slightly around your microphone, such as a fabric bowl. Don’t let it come around the sides of the mic much, though—you don’t want to put your mic in any kind of tunnel—that will change the quality of your sound.

Tip for better audio:

If you’re new to recording, try to just barely avoid clipping. Eventually, you’ll want to record at a high amplitude—record loud, as loud as you can get away with. If you don’t, you many have to increase the amplification of your recording, and that means you will ALSO be increasing the amplification of any noise on the recording.

How loud works best? To the point where your audio is actually or nearly clipping slightly from time to time. To visually see if your audio is clipping when you record, in Audacity click the View menu, and put a check mark by View > “Show Clipping (on/off)”.

What does “some, but not too much” clipping look like? If you were looking at 10-15 seconds of audio on screen (it looks different at different zoom levels), it might look about like this:

But isn’t this a mistake? Isn’t this “bad” audio? How would you fix this, anyway?

Audacity and its competitors all have a “Fix Clipping” feature. In Audacity it’s Effects > Clip Fix. Since the top of a peak (or bottom of a valley) of your audio waveform has been cut off, what Clip Fix does is calculate what the missing peak (or valley) would look like, and “draw” it back in. Let’s zoom way, WAY in to the clipped area in the picture above (the red line) that is farthest left—under the “G”. Here’s what that looks like:

See those four vertical red lines? That marks the part that’s missing—the part of a peak that was “clipped” off. The blue lines mark the part of the waveform that was recorded accurately—we’re zoomed in so far we see the audio as digital “points” instead of a smooth analog waveform.

But: See how easy it is to see visually what part of the peak is missing? Audacity won’t have any problem adding the missing peak back in. Heck, you could probably draw them in with a marker and get pretty close to perfect. And it will sound as perfect as if it had never clipped. If we zoomed in a bit less than this, you would see there are about six peaks and valleys that look like this in the dark red line under the “G”. Each easily fixed automatically by Effects > Clip Fix.

Again, ideally, you want your audio to undergo ZERO amplification increase after recording; otherwise, you will ALSO be amplifying your background noise (“Room tone”). So DO allow slight clipping so that you will actually be DECREASING your your audio amplification slightly, which also decreases your background noise!

For voiceover, occasional light clipping is fine. Yes, it means you are “risking” too much clipping, but  think of it this way:

Instead of spending another $5,000 on your studio to be able to record at lower dB settings, gain experience with when and how much you clip, and let occasional clipping happen.

A very small amount of skill in allowing clipping can save you hundreds or thousands in studio upgrade costs!

What is Good Audio?

 

First, let me point out that you should always record more than a second of silence/”room tone” (leave setting alone—don’t change them after you begin speaking) at the beginning and end of each track. Some clients and marketplaces even require it. It help you and them hear your “room tone” and it can be used in a variety of ways.

Some of the most well-known standards in the world for quality voice over audio are part of the ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) Audio Submission Requirements. I wouldn’t suggest reading it (yet) until explain some of the basics behind the technical language, but I’ll relate this discussion back to those requirements.

Most important: When you make changes, work on a COPY of your recordings. Simple way to do that: After you’re done recording and saving, do a Save As of the session to create a copy of it, and work on the copy.

There is a plugin for Audacity (get it here, install (how?), then choose Analyze > Add/Remove Plugins to enable) that will do most of the necessary measurements for you. You don’t have to learn a bunch of technical language about audio engineering concepts. It measures the three most important things:

1. How loud is background noise? We don’t want to hear your air conditioner or the traffic in your neighborhood. Measured as “Noise Floor“—ACX standard: “No higher than -60dB RMS”. This is where recording as “loud” (high gain) as you can helps the most.
2. Is the volume fairly consistent? Don’t make listeners keep having to turn the volume up or down when listening. Measured as “RMS Level“. If volume isn’t consistent enough, simply run the compression effect at default settings—ACX standard: “Between -23dB and -18dB RMS”.
3. How loud are the loudest moments? This is just a one-click (Normalize) setting you choose before measuring. Measured as “Peak level“—ACX standard: “peak values no higher than -3dB”. Imagine you are clipping at about +.1 dB. That means you can lessen the amplitude by 3.1 dB to bring it into ACX compliance—and the process, lessen your background noise by 3.1 dB too!

Here is a partial screenshot of what you get when you select some audio to test, and choose Analyze > ACX Check from the Audacity menus:

There are ways to “cheat” to pass a home test of ACX requirements, and still fail the actual test. Two things NOT to do: Do NOT replace breath sounds with complete silence, and DO include some “room tone” at the beginning and ending of your recording for testing purposes. More about these two tips below.

How Quiet is Your Voice Over Studio?

Think of the noise floor as “How loud is the silence in your studio?” A quick way to get an approximate idea is to record a few words in your studio, then continue recording but hold your breath/hold still/make no sounds for a few seconds and watch the Recording Meter Toolbar. Here is what it looks like in Audacity before and after you start recording,

When you are “recording silence” (room tone), you want the color to stay at the far left, typically not to go past -42 on the scale. Note that what you see is only an APPROXIMATION of what a test will show. You’ll still need to run ACX Check (or something similar) to be sure.

Tip: Do a retake when intermittent noise happens, e.g. you bumped the mic, a dog barked, a plane flew over, a truck drove by, etc.

Whenever you record, always include a few seconds at the beginning and ending where you make no sound. This isn’t silence, this is what is called “room tone”, or “background noise”.

If your “room tone” volume is too loud, you can take a sample of it and remove it from the recording using Effects > Noise removal.

Realize you can only do this if you have recorded some room tone! However, what also can work is to make a copy of a track (Ctrl-D) and deleting all the sounds made by you. Once you have a few seconds of room tone left you could try using it as the sample for noise removal. So any time consistent sounds change in the background, go silent, keep recording, and get a new silence/room tone recording. Then use that sound as the sample for noise removal.

For ACX specifically, they require you submit your audio with room tone at the beginning and ending of your recording (“Each file must have 0.5 to 1 second of room tone at its beginning and 1 to 5 seconds of room tone at its end.”)

You’ll have to use your judgment! If a steady/consistent background sound is too loud, you may have to wait for it to end before recording. (Of course, for intermittent sounds—such as a dog barking—you’ll almost always have to wait and retake).

Tip: If your studio is quiet enough that it passes a noise floor test without doing any noise removal, you can probably use noise removal when remote distant sounds occur. But if you are already having to remove background noise from your studio “as is”, when other sounds happen, you will probably have to wait to record more. Too much noise removal reduces the quality of the overall recording—your voice will start to sound weird.

ACX, also requires that you NEVER replace anything with silence, such as breaths. You can only replace them with whatever recording you have of “room tone”. Our new macro for Audacity will help you with this.

Is Your Audio Volume Consistent?

Even if you aren’t producing an audiobook, if your recording seems to vary between too loud and too quiet, you’ll need to adjust it.

This is very easy to adjust via Effects > Compression. To experiment, try making a recording, run Effects > Normalize set to -3.0 dB and then select the audio and run Analyze > ACX Check on it. Write down the number in parentheses that appears on the screen after “RMS Level”. In this example screenshot, you would write down -18.8

Now select your audio and run Effect > Compression, and then Effects  > Normalize (again set to -3.0 dB), then run Analyze > ACX Check again. See how the RMS level has gone down? That’s because the compression effect makes your audio volume more consistent—the quiet part are made louder without changing the loud parts.

However, if the reason it varies is because you are moving your head too much during a session—or changing position between sessions—you may want to re-record. Generally, this is NOT an issue if you have had some on-mic training. Moving around a bit is okay! One thing you SHOULD avoid is turning your head much. Again, a little is okay, but if you aim your mouth away from the mic too much AND get too far away, you’ll become very quiet on the recording.

Why Care About ACX Voice Over Requirements?

You don’t have to. Many ACX requirements are common sense, such as that your audio must be:
► “Narrated by a human”;
► “Be free of extraneous sounds such as plosives, mic pops, mouse clicks, excessive mouth noise, and outtakes” (notice they do NOT say to exclude breathing sounds);
► “All in the same … format” (all mono or all stereo);
► “Be consistent in overall sound and formatting”.

Fixing Mouth Noises

One of the first steps is to install some great Audacity tools that can help you! See this article for tips about click and pop removal techniques

Click to enlarge:

A Good VO Mixer Does What?

We like the MIC500USB. Here’s what it does:

1. Direct-connects headphones. Connecting headphones anywhere else may introduce a delay, or phase reversal. Having an on/off button is also useful, so you can stop listening to the mic when you are listening to recorded audio, or when the talent is warming up, clearing their throat, etc.
2. Provides vocal adjustment. Some folks own thousands of dollars of mics for different sounds, when they could just be using preamp modes! Save your money: get mixer with more than one preamp mode. Some mixers include one mode and that’s it! Always seemed silly to me vs. having multiple modes.
3. Shows Clipping. You MUST see this BEFORE it reaches your recording software.

   How to Use: Watch the lights while you set the gain (4) You want to see ONE yellow led occasionally, TWO yellow led’s rarely, a red led NEVER. AFTER you have set the gain, only then adjust microphone volume/level in your software.

4. Provides Mic Gain Adjustment. Some mixers also provide a “fader” or “mic volume” control…that you don’t need or want if you have gain control. Read above for how to use.
5. Headphone Volume Control. Seems silly to leave this out, but some mixers don’t provide it.
6. “Quiet Mode”/20dB Pad: This decreases the gain (lowers the volume) of the mic by -20dB. Love using this when a script calls for shouting. Beginners back up, but pros hit the -20dB pad and get high-quality audio at all volume levels.

   ► You should practice using this! See how loud you have to be to generate audio at the same volume with the pad pushed on. You can back up when you need to get loud, but that brings in a LOT more room echo, and makes your voice sound “tinny”—useful if you WANT to sound “off mic”, but better to hit the pad when you need to get loud.

7. Mic Power. Extend the life of your mixer and mic by turning off power when they’re not in use.
8. Cut Subsonics for Cleaner Sound. You actually MUST do this somehow, somewhere. Subsonics are everywhere (floor rumble, HVAC noise, plosives, etc.) and they muddle up other frequencies and make mouth sounds worse. If your mixer doesn’t cut them, those sounds have to be cut later, after they have already affected your audio.
9. Provides FULL 48v Power. Sadly, many if not most budget mixer/preamps do NOT provide full power, and do NOT say so on their spec sheet. You’re left guessing. This helps mics that need more power work properly and often, mean less mic “self noise”, helps many mics work their best, and never leaves you with a mic that won’t work well with your mixer.
10. Provides USB Audio Out. The internal sound hardware on your computer should be avoided when you can. It can lower the quality of your audio, cause necessary device setting issues, and introduce latency (delay). So bypass the analog audio input port on your computer when you can.
11. Acts as a Tube Preamp. The circuitry that amplifies your voice before it reaches your software is the preamp. Tube circuitry (instead of solid state) has long been preferred for voice, hence the label on the mixer “Audiophile Vacuum Tube Preamp”.
12. Doesn’t Break the Bank! The real benefit of the MIC500USB is that it does all this at a much lower price than other mixers with these features. You don’t have to cut corners to save money.

You almost lose #9 or #10 or #1 or all three with cheap mixers. Expensive mixers sometimes skimp on #2 or #8.

Bonus: Phase/Polarity reversal:

This has several potential uses in a studio with multiple mics and preamp/mixers, but for single mic voiceover you’ll probably never need it. However:

If your headphone cables or Mic XLR cable is reverse wired, press this button to fix it. Experiment by talking into the mic with your headphones on and see which setting sounds most natural to you—on or off. If you’re not sure, leave it off.

The potential issue is that your voice through the headphones may be polarity reversed compared to your voice through the air. Think of how a speaker pushes air: when it’s pushing forwards into the room, it’s pulling on the air inside the speaker. The air on one side of the speaker membrane, like a drum, is polarity reversed on the other side. To an observer on one side the drum is pushing out, but on the other side it’s pushing in.