Building A Home Recording Studio
I’d like to try and help voiceover professionals who
haven’t yet set up their own home studios so that they
don’t make some of the common errors that I made. I
want to point out that I’m not a technical whiz so this
will be very low tech. These ideas and opinions
along with my personal experience and observations are
mine alone. Many others will have different views. This is
just an attempt to help those who have not yet set up a
home studio. This is my progression through the business
of recording my voice work and getting it to my clients
since the mid-nineties.
First of all, it’s a good idea to think about whether you
need one, and then, if you do, what you want to accomplish
with one. As I see it, there are two basic types of
studio.
- One is for someone who wants to send voice work only
to clients…no production.
- The other is for people who produce, or want to.
In my case, I have never been a producer and I send my
clients voice only.
ISDN or MP3?
The people who have already spent time in production
will be way ahead of the rest of us in knowing how to put
together a production studio, whether at home or
elsewhere. This article is basically for the rest of
us, who only want to voice material for clients and send
it back to them.
With that in mind, you still have two choices. You can
either opt for installing ISDN lines and using them to do
sessions with clients in studios outside your home, or you
can record your clients material in your little studio and
send it to them using mp3 or an ftp site. I find today
that there are a great many clients for my work who want
me to send them mp3 files, either attached to email, using
an ftp site or burned on a CD.
I also have friends who have ISDN studios in their homes
and use them…some more, some less frequently. Most of them
do at least some audio production work as well as just
doing voice work. In my case, I do not use ISDN in my home
studio. I do have access to it though, if required,
through a benevolent producer friend.
Ok, assuming you don’t do audio production, such as
creating radio and television commercials complete with
music background, and don’t want to get into the ISDN
thing…I can give you the benefit of what I’ve discovered
over the past several years. |
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Recording studio equipment
I chose an ElectroVoice RE27ND microphone. Someone
advised me to buy the microphone I sounded best on. This
particular microphone was in use at the radio station for
which I did commercials and promos. The technical people
at the station told me I sounded good on it, so I bought
one. A lot of radio stations use it’s cousin, the RE20, as
their standard microphone.
I had no dedicated studio room so I used the dining room
table. I ran the microphone through a Symetrix sx202
pre-amp and recorded on a Sony MDS-302 Mini-Disc recorder.
I still have the system, including the computer that
powered it, all long since retired.
This was in 1995-96, so it was pretty early in the home
studio game. There was little access to CD burners. Only
the biggest studios downtown had them. But I could record
on mini-discs and then transfer them to tape cassettes and
keep the quality pretty high. At least to the cassette!
At this point, the only way to record and edit was by
using the software that came with the sound card installed
when you bought the computer (usually SoundBlaster by
Creative), or that came with Windows. Now, there are
further choices as to what software you use to record.
I’ll have more on that topic later.
I was doing a lot of work in the commercial sound studios
in Toronto and area and didn’t really advance much further
in the home studio field until coming to San Diego in
1999.
I had a reasonably fast computer for the time, and
eventually got a DSL hookup. It was dicey with the DSL
because I was living at the outer limits of service from
the phone company office (or CO) nearest me. By the way, I
suspect most of you might have tried DSL and then cable,
or the other way round, as a connection for your computer.
I started with DSL, which worked (there were some
stressful times when PacBell first started offering DSL,
as many may recall), but when I moved to a new house in a
new subdivision, I opted for cable. I’m quite happy with
my decision, but there are also lots of happy DSL users.
It’s your choice…either will work for you.
Shortly after arriving in San Diego, I began to upgrade my
home studio. Very early in that process, I went from a
dialup 56K modem on EarthLink to DSL. That made it much
faster to transfer audio to clients over the net.
I did find that longer .wav files were still a problem
and a lot of people were still asking for them. I tried
attaching them to email, but for longer audio files, I had
to cut them up into sections. In a lot of cases, I was
dealing with studios where they could patch the audio but
it was still a hassle.
In the next while, things happened fast in the audio
field. People started using mp3’s more extensively, so I
did as well.
Better sound cards were becoming available and eventually,
I bought a SoundBlaster Platinum Plus Live 5.1. It has a
front panel for connecting microphone and headphones,
including volume controls, as well as optical connections
for people who want digital outputs. I started hearing
about a new microphone…a producer friend called it a
Neumann knockoff. It’s a Rode NT1000. I tried it out and
it was an quite an improvement over the ElectroVoice.
There was one problem for me though. It was also a lot
more sensitive. The RE27ND has a very narrow pattern,
meaning there wasn’t as much room noise picked up. The
Rode has a much wider pattern, and it’s just so much more
sensitive, I had to rethink the studio space. I had been
getting along with a minimal amount of soundproofing. Not
so with this microphone.
Soundproofing a home voiceover studio.
I know voiceover people who are using their walk-in
closets as studios. I’m using one of the bedrooms in my
house. There are many ways to sound proof. A friend of
mine bought himself a prefab sound booth and it works well
for him. You need a bit of space for the prefab booths,
although they do come in different sizes. I found that
buying an inexpensive comforter and hanging it on one wall
has helped immensely. You can also get soundproofing
material from your local pro audio store. I will be doing
more in regards to my soundproofing in the future.
Audio Processing Gear
In the same conversation with my producer friend that
ended with my purchase of the Rode microphone, he
suggested I should be running it through the same system
he was, a dbx286A preamp/mic processor. I picked one up at
the same time I bought my Rode NT1000. I also acquired a
pro windscreen and microphone stand.
With my recent purchase of a new Dell computer system, I
ran into a small problem. The Creative Audigy 2 sound card
that came with it doesn’t have the front panel I had been
used to, and I was left with mini-plugs on the back of the
sound card for connections. I didn’t feel comfortable with
that so, after asking around at sound stores and
consulting other voice pros, I bought a sound card called
a Mia from a smaller company called Echo, based in
Carpinteria, California. It is a very good pro card, with
¼ in jacks in back as well as digital outputs. I have both
cards installed but all my voice work goes through the
Mia.
The most popular editing choices seem to be Cool Edit and
Sound Forge by Sonic Foundry. You can spend more and buy
Pro-Tools or SAW, but these programs are intended for
people who are actually doing audio production.
This is the system I currently use.
The Rode NT1000, into the dbx286A, into a new Dell
dimension 8300, into an Mia sound card - by Echo, edited
on Sound Forge by Sonic Foundry, and either burned on CD,
attached to email and sent out or loaded on a client’s ftp
site. I have my own ftp site, so my clients can simply
download from there. I do have Cool Edit and use it to
edit music mp3’s but not for voice work. There’s nothing
wrong with Cool Edit, I just prefer Sound Forge.
If you have a questions about anything here, please email
and I’ll try my best to answer you.
Also be sure to check out
A Beginners Guide to Voice Acting at
www.starsandsites.com
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