Mastering VO Recording: Essential Volume Tips and Professional Coaching (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello everybody, Larry Hudson here. Hope you're doing well. This is your tip of the day. It's about recording and editing. As you know, I've been teaching recording and editing VO for about the last nine years, and the number one mistake that most people make is their volume is too low when they're recording their voice. The actual range of volume that you want your mic to be at is when you record is between negative 12 dB and negative 6 dB. Now, there are times when you'll go a little bit over negative 6 dB. That's fine. Even if you went up to negative 3, even if you went beyond that, it's okay. Now and then it's going to happen. Same thing with going below negative 12. Now and then you're going to dip below negative 12, but what you want is that your average volume come in at negative 9 dB. Now, there's two reasons for this. The first main reason is that these microphones are very sensitive, and we need to push them. We need to turn the gain up to a particular place, being what I just told you, so that it's picking up all the nuances of our voice. The other side of that is, you want to be sure that the volume of your recording is even beyond where I'm telling you now, when you normalize it at the end of the editing process, so that you're competitive with your competition. Nothing worse than hearing people who have great recordings, a good volume, and then all of a sudden yours is 10 dB lower than theirs. That's not going to fare very well. So just take a quick look here. You're going to see this would be a recording that is at proper volume, and what I want you to keep your eye on is this little yellow needle here, as well as where it's flashing. You're going to see that it's going to start bouncing right around here, around negative 9 dB. So here we go. See how it's bouncing right at 9? It jumped up a little bit above 6, but again, we're averaging right around 9, and that's exactly the way that we wanted to have it. Okay, volume tip of the day. You guys take care, and I hope to see you all soon. Bye-bye.

Speaker 2: Not sure if you know this, but if you ever want to train with a professional, you can always go to atlantavoiceoverstudio.com and click on Private Coaches in the menu. Yeah, we have a full list of

Speaker 3: coaches who will meet up with you live on Zoom and help you work on whatever you need, whether you're trying to master the conversational natural read, you want to practice bringing a script to life as opposed to just reading it. Or if you'd like to make sure that your home studio

Speaker 2: is set up properly, we have a private coach for that. We're here to help you on your VO journey.