Voiceover Training: Recording Voice Overs

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Today, there’s a lot of great voiceover training available that teaches people how to actually do voice overs, even specific types of voice over. Well, sure!  But given the nature of the industry, it’s also essential to learn about recording voice overs. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve gotten a lot of piecemeal training in audio engineering and sound design, starting with analog audio and later in digital audio. It’s not like there’s an all-in-one voice over school out there covering the three components of a successful voice over career: performance, technology and business.

Many of the audio engineering courses I encountered were boring or unnecessarily complicated or more focused on music production. And much of it was text-based. Imagine teaching audio without using audio! Although experiencing different approaches can be helpful, it’s always better to start with a clear and comprehensive course that’s well presented, easy to follow and actually shows you how to record voiceover.

I found it! Check out this terrific course by Dave Schroeder called Digital Audio Principles at Lynda.com. Dave has an easy manner and a good teaching voice.  His video tutorials explain key concepts of audio recording in a completely comprehensible way. He also provides video tours of microphones, audio interfaces and other recording equipment, instruction on microphone placement, even hands-on plugin applications in Pro Tools (EQ, compression, and noise reduction).

Even though he teaches using Pro Tools, his course isn’t Apple-centric. Dave covers common DAW components and key design elements in different audio programs, so that you can find your way around popular audio editing, multitrack and loop-based software. Seriously, I was immediately able to find and use the same features Dave talked about on my PC-landlocked Adobe Audition.  (Will Adobe ever make a Mac version? And no, Soundbooth doesn’t count!)

Seriously, Digital Audio Principles isn’t just a great introduction to digital audio but an essential overview of audio recording in general.  A lot of people who want to learn how to get started in voice over will flounder around for years trying to pick up the basics for recording voice overs. It’s so important not to lose precious time re-inventing the wheel when someone has actually taken the time to put it all together in such a nice neat package. I definitely recommend this course to anyone who wants to start a voiceover career and even veteran voice overs who, like me, got most of their initial training in analog audio recording.

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Lynda.com provides hundreds of tutorials on all kinds of audio software and business applications. At my company, we’ve referred many of our clients to the Microsoft and Mac courses, and finally became affiliates of Lynda.com. The link to the Digital Audio Prinicples course  in this blog can earn us a couple bucks, but you can bypass it if that turns you off and just go directly to Lynda.com. The learning materials they provide are incredibly helpful and the first few chapters are free, so you have a chance to see whether the presentation is something that appeals to you.  You can buy hard copies of specific courses on DVD or CD or get access to all their courses a month at a time for $25.

We have our own monthly subscriptions at my company so that we can learn more about all kinds of subjects (like web accessibility or Adobe’s CS5 apps) and also review training options for our clients.  It’s a great investment.

WPaudio WordPress MP3 Player Plugin for Voice Over Samples

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I found a nice, clean, attractive, fast-loading audio player plugin for WordPress today, the WPAudio WordPress Plugin designed by Todd Iceton. It’s very easy to install and customize (alter colors to fit your theme). Because it’s so streamlined, it doesn’t leave a big, empty gap in browsers that don’t support flash.

If you have flash, here’s what the player looks like:
El Sanctuario Promo – English.

Although I had created a page with Html5 tags, I didn’t like how long the page took to load on my iPad. Using this page, gives everyone a faster loading front page for my voiceover demos. Then, iPhone OS users have the option to click on the Html5 version.

There are many audio player plugins for WordPress, but like the standard Html5 audio player, many flash-based audio player plugins load pretty big players. WPAudio is the first one I’ve seen that keep’s things nice and thin. Love it. And you don’t need to use special tags in your post. Just drop in your mp3 hyperlink and the plugin does the rest. Very nice. Thanks Todd.

New Html5-Friendly VO Website

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Buying an iPad has been an unanticipated benefit for my voiceover business. I no longer print my scripts. I just email them to my iPad account and it reads any attachment: doc, docx, xml, pdf. Nice!

But my flash-based audio players disappeared from my website! Not nice. Since I had never joined the iPhone bandwagon, I didn’t know until recently that my voiceover demos weren’t available to web visitors coming to my site from their iPhones, or from iPads which use the iPhone OS. People could download my demos, but I didn’t even add download links until earlier this year! And none of my profiles on the voice marketplaces I’m still affiliated with currently use supported audio players. That’s particularly unfortunate for paying subscribers.1

I know what you’re thinking: what’s the big deal, Nikki? Your flashy audio players work just fine in Internet Explorer and hardly anyone uses their iPhone for surfing the web. And Steve Jobs will eventually cave in and support flash on the iPhone OS. Yes, and crude oil will become water soluble.

Like most of my hungry voiceover colleagues, I would like my website to work as well as it can on whatever devices or browser a site visitor uses.  In fact, many of my new contact emails are coming from iPhone users. And this was before my upgrade.

So here is the upgrade, a cleaner design with a bit more contrast and these few content coding changes:

  • A background image behind the flash player on my home page so that iPhone visitors don’t see a big empty space.
  • Html audio tags with embedded audio. This required minimal coding and the addition of .ogg versions of my demos for browsers that don’t support .mp3 in html5.  The most universal syntax for the audio player seems to be to separate out the source tag like this:

    • <audio preload=”auto” controls=”controls”>
    <source src=”voiceoverdemo.ogg” />
    <source src=”voiceoverdemo.mp3″ />
    </audio>

    The “controls” option loads a rather ugly player in every browser except Opera. Most browsers will also support an autoplay option which I find obnoxious and don’t recommend. The preload option (formerly “autobuffer”) is still being adopted by browsers and will be great when it works more universally but I would only use it on the first couple demos.

If you’re on a web-compliant Internet browser (unfortunately that means any popular browser except Internet Explorer), you should be able to see what an Html 5 audio player looks like here:

That’s it as far as coding. Until browsers are updated to incorporate more of the html5 web standards (which are still being vetted), my preference is to keep it simple. And since Internet Explorer isn’t expected to adopt enough of these web standards any time soon, it’s probably a good idea to use both a simply flash audio player and html5, which is what I did here.  Of course, I’m still into making things look pretty so I opted not to use the html5 tags on the home page and instead prominently featured my Voiceover Demos link so that it’s part of the first screen content mobile browsers will see.  Yep, not the best way to go for a voiceover web site, but probably the way I’ll keep things until I can make html5 audio controls more universally appealing.

Personally, I’m looking forward to more browsers adopting html5 open web standards, especially the audio tags. Embedded audio is just a better, cleaner concept for web development. I also like that visitors can right-click the player and download the files when they need to so you don’t really need a separate link. As for making it look pretty, a little javascripting and use of the new <canvas> tag will ultimately improve the look and functionality of media players on the web.

Hope you like the new site and that you find it much easier to navigate. Let me know!

1.  Unfortunately, as of the date of this blog, none of the major marketplaces — Voices.com, Voice123.com, VOPlanet.com or Bodalgo.com — have html5 audio tags so that site visitors can readily play audio on iPhone OS devices, and only Bodalgo and Voice123 currently have download links, which will allow visitors to either play the audio in a separate window or save it locally.