Loud And Clear: Make Better Voice Recordings Now

Before we start, we have to get a basic understanding of acoustics. That in mind, we start to think about what we are about to record and which are the options.

You cannot record a voice without recording the room too. This lecture helps to choose the room matching your goals and gives some ideas on how to improve the rooms with some little, inexpensive tricks.

This lecture teaches you about different microphone types (especially dynamic and condenser) and helps you to choose your right tool with the properties you need.

Recording levels are vital for high quality recordings. Make sure to record as loud as possible, but not too loud. Normalize the data afterwards to use the headroom to get a nice, loud vocal signal.

Please note: If you're looking for more infomation on the material, be sure to watch the A/B-tests in the Bonus Section!

Headphone volume is often underestimated. The right level helps you to use your voice correctly, but beware of "bleeding". Use good, closed headphones that sit tight on your ears without getting uncomfortable.

Just a few questions about headphones usage.

This lecture will teach you how to place the microphone, find your distance and use helpful tools like pop filters.

After everything got set up, choosing recording quality and performing the recording are the next steps to take.

If your environment keeps you from recording clean material, noise removal might be an option to reduce background noises like fans or air conditioning. In this lesson we're going to capture a noise profile and remove noise from an example recording.

Another method to remove noise, especially non-repeating noises, are gates. This lecture teaches you how they are set up.

An EQ helps to cancel unwanted frequencies or to boost your voice level over noise. But: Sometimes, results are not what should be expected, so be extra careful when you apply EQ!

Compression helps to balance the levels in longer recordings and can be used to increase the overall gain level. This lecture should give you a basic understanding of compression.

Depending on the kind of content, a little room might give your material a nice warm polishing.

Thanks for taking the course! If you have question or suggestions, please don't hesitate to get in touch or post your opinions to the discussion board for this course! Have fun improving you vocal recordings!

As suggested by students, this lecture teaches you how to apply fx to your audio material in audacity.

This bonus lecture tries to clarify some topics that came up in the discussion area. I use the technique of AB-testing to demonstrate how different recording levels and normalization will affect the final noise level.

PLEASE NOTE: The recordings were made intentionally noisy so you could hear the differences clearly. In general, if your recording has such a high noise level, you should take a step back, think about the reasons for the noise and re-record the material to get the highest quality.

This bonus lecture is a bit longer. I used only free plugins (gate, eq, two compressors, reverb and a limiter) on a recording sent to me by a student.

This bonus lecture was a suggestion by some students that want to make "talking head" videos and recordings. I bought a quite cheap microphone, record a sentence with the mic and my studio condenser mic simultaneously and point out difference as well as tricks for the treatment.

Please not: The whole audio is NOT processed, so the beginning sounds a bit worse due to the microphone.