Someone on stream earlier asked for some VO recording/cleanup tips in dreams, so here's a few pointers:
This may sound obvious (but is often overlooked), make sure you record in as quiet of a room as possible. Turn off any computer fans and close your windows 😁
If your room sounds very 'roomy' and you can hear a slight echo in your recordings, try dampening surfaces which sound reflective in the room you're recording (laminate floors, nearby walls etc.). Rugs/blankets/mattresses are all fine.
Microphone placement is hugely important, start from about 6 inches away and experiment with a few recordings. Also make sure to be facing towards the mic so you are on axis. Trial and error is the best approach!
Bare in mind, if you're very close you will get some proximity effect in your recording, accentuating the bassier frequencies of your voice (which can be used creatively!)
and don't clip your voice! if its sounding distorted, you're likely too loud and too close to the mic. If you have a 3rd party mic you can compensate by adjusting the gain. If not, trial and error your performance/recording distance :)
So now you have your recordings in game! best next step is to slice everything down into phrases in the sample editor. You can be hyper granular and slice every word, but its not necessary and could potentially sound a bit unnatural.
Take special care with the start and end of each clip, making sure you remove unwanted room tone on either end. In the tweak menu it can help to add a tiny bit of attack and release in the envelope to smooth the triggering of each audio clip. The neater the better.
You can send all these edited voice clips to the voice channel in the sound channel settings, which will allow you to batch process all the audio simultaneously (helps with logic faff too!). Try dragging the compressor slightly up on the y axis for a clean compression.
What this does is reduce down the loudest parts of your recordings and boosts up the quietest. This will mean more consistent VO, but, can bring up some of your room noise. It's a balancing act at this stage, trust your ears!
Most of the time, we don't really want the low low end frequencies of our vocal recordings. So if you drag the low cut frequency slider up to about 20%, you reduce the frequencies below 100hz. Experiment to find a nice balance here.
On that note, a good pair of headphones plugged into your controller can really help when making these decisions! If you have the budget I recommend audio technicas, I use ath-m50's for most projects at home. They're designed to help your audio sound consistent on other systems.
Nice final touches on VO is adding reverb based on its usage. Sometimes no reverb is good for its purpose. Sometimes a bit of roomverb (reverb C/D) is applicable, if you want something to sound like it exists within a physical space. IMO less is more, start with a small % amount.
And finally the best thing you can do for your VO is design your audio world around it. If your VO is hard to hear and its recorded well, you should probably turn everything else down a bit, not slam it with more volume :)
final final point, we have some awesome voice actors in our community who I'm sure would love to collaborate with you! Making games is extremely fun when working in a team and might help liven up your characters with more variety. Reaching out is free!
If you have any questions LMK 😁happy to go into more detail
You can follow @OliGraaant.
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