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Post by benedict on Jul 12, 2017 22:03:23 GMT -8
See if there's a way to isolate yourself from your laptop. It may not be convenient to record that way, but it's worth testing to see if it's your cooling fan that's doing this. If you're recording under a blanket, try putting your laptop some distance from you and run the mic and cord up under the blanket where you are. If the hum decreases, chances are it's your cooling fan.
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Post by benedict on Jul 1, 2017 23:52:13 GMT -8
Sorry for being so late getting back with you. I probably spent too much time dinking with this. As far as capturing the whistle, my best results were about 45 degrees off and normal operating distance from the microphone. (Basically what duffyweber said in the shoutbox earlier today.)
I got a little better reduction of mouth noise if I displaced the mic up and rotated down rather than having it off to one side. I tried varying the distance to the mic, but it just picked up more room reverb. (Makes sense.)
As for making the whistling sound not flat, I found having some reverb helped a lot. But small room reverb just made it sound harsh. (I tried recording in a round concrete room about 13m across. Pretty cool, but not all that practical.)
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Post by benedict on Jun 28, 2017 15:04:58 GMT -8
Break a voice?
(Go through puberty AGAIN?!)
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Post by benedict on Jun 27, 2017 13:19:15 GMT -8
Yeah, they sound really really similar, minus the mouth noises from the first. There's a little more life to the second, bounced one, but it still feels... close? Close and more sparse than the first.
I can play with this a little when I get home. All I've got on me at the moment is lavs.
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Post by benedict on Jun 19, 2017 12:48:15 GMT -8
Thanks, LadyStardust!
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Post by benedict on Jun 17, 2017 13:10:11 GMT -8
I'm sure there are better exercises for this, but the one I do regularly is to read aloud. I've been reading to my kids every night for something like seventeen years. Of all the skills I've been trying to develop for voice acting, sight-reading is the only one I had any kind of leg up on, solely because of that.
If you don't have kids, check your local library and see if you can volunteer to do a regular reading session. The kids love it, the librarians can use it to draw patrons into the library, and it's a great opportunity to work on sight-reading and developing voices.
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Post by benedict on Jun 15, 2017 15:16:51 GMT -8
Excellent! I need to check out WavePad. I hadn't run into that before. I'll toss out one other recording app. It's designed for field recording, but it works for voice as well. It's called "Field Recorder": play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.pfitzinger.recLots of options for samples rates, bit depth, file type, etc. One feature I like about it is that it has tools for moving sound files from your phone to a computer, the cloud, etc. Not sure how it would play with WavePad. Kind of esoteric, and probably not really in line with aiming at this at people getting into voice acting, but I've been playing around with plugging an interface into an Android using a USB-OTG cable so I can use XLR mics with Field Recorder. It works better than I thought it would! But like I said, that's kind of an esoteric pursuit, and probably not all that useful for someone starting out.
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Post by benedict on Jun 15, 2017 12:10:48 GMT -8
Cool! I'd like to hear what you're getting. I played around with this a little last night, but it's tough to say if I'm getting anything useful without hearing what you've got.
Neat bit of history: I searched for some iconic whistling pieces to see if I could find the engineer's notes to see how they did it. I figured the theme song for the Andy Griffith Show would be a likely candidate. Nope, couldn't find the notes, but I did find out that the folks who wrote "The Fishin' Hole" (the actual name of the song), Earle Hagen and Herbert Spencer, wrote it in about fifteen minutes. Herbert Spencer did the whistling.
Needless to say all the tests I did last night were "The Fishin' Hole."
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Post by benedict on Jun 14, 2017 10:23:07 GMT -8
I haven't recorded myself whistling, but I've recorded a lot of birds, both inside my house and outside. (One of the things that makes my house such a dodgy recording environment: sharing it with seven birds.)
Just thinking out loud here, but it may come down to the difference between the spoken word and a musical instrument. The one is easier to record in a (relatively) dead space, and the other sounds better in a live space. Have you played around with room treatment, mic placement, and distance from the mic? Moving a couple of feet away from your microphone might take out some of the airy sound, if it's picking up the rush of air through your lips.
Now I want to go whistle at microphones to hear what happens!
After some Google searching, one other thing to try: A couple of threads on recording whistling mentioned using echo in addition to the direct signal. Try placing your mic a foot or two in front of a wall, pointed at the wall. Stand next to the microphone and whistle at the wall. The mic will pick up both you and the reflection, so experiment with placement, distance from you <-> wall, mic <-> wall, you <-> mic. The idea is to use the mix of the direct sound and the reflection to make it sound more full. I haven't had the chance to try this, but it's something to play with.
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Post by benedict on Jun 13, 2017 10:35:36 GMT -8
I've been watching that employer for over two years now, waiting for the right opening, so it's a pretty distant goal at this point. Still...
But what you said about Cincinnati gave me an idea. There's a company here that owns most of the radio stations in the state (Pacific Media Group). I know they have a studio about an hour from where I live, but I don't know if they do advertising spots from there or if they do them at one of their other locations. Hmmmm!
Thanks!
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Post by benedict on Jun 12, 2017 15:30:00 GMT -8
I've been eyeing an employer out in West Texas as a place to work for my day (ok, day/night) job, so my antennas have been perking up every time Texas comes up as a good location for VO work. There's the possibility I'd be able to travel to Houston or Fort Worth if I moved there, but time might be an issue.
For a larger project like Anime, about how much consecutive studio time would be involved? I realize that's like asking "what's the average job like", to which I'm assuming the answer is "what does average even mean in that context?", but a ballpark figure or a range of figures would be interesting to know.
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Post by benedict on Jun 9, 2017 13:57:42 GMT -8
Newbie questions: Since you can pack a lot of metadata into the header of an audio file, regardless of format, is it common practice to put your slating information (name, character you're slating for) in the header? Or are headers left blank in favor of putting that info in the filename (if the naming scheme for the project allows for it)?
I've been reading (and re-reading) the various opinions on slating over the past couple of weeks, and while I understand both sides of the question, I keep wondering what combination of circumstances it would take for someone's audition to come unglued from their name and the character they're auditioning for.
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Post by benedict on Jun 8, 2017 18:48:55 GMT -8
Do your uncle's mics have XLR jacks on them? In this thread: voiceacting.boards.net/thread/185/mic-geeks-favorite-mics-whyAbout half way down the first page Duffy wrote a bit about USB interfaces and mentioned the PreSonus Scarlett 2i2 and 2i4, both of which share the same preamps as their rack-mount models. A friend of mine has the 2i2 and I'm impressed with it. Very quiet preamps, nice user interface, and it'll do two inputs and two outputs. A while back I got a Senal XLR-to-USB adapter as part of a project at work. It's about half the price of the Scarlett 2i2. I chose it more because of space constraints than anything else. We didn't wind up using it for the project, so it's been sitting on a shelf in my office ever since. I wish I could like this thing, but I think something's wrong with the phantom power circuit. Even in a quiet room, there's this 1kHz hum along with a bunch of harmonics. For VO work it's not usable. I don't know if this is a defective unit or what, but I'm not happy with it. For my own use I'd go for the Scarlett.
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Post by benedict on Jun 5, 2017 12:29:54 GMT -8
This is probably a little over-share, but I've been listening to your Bohemian Rhapsody character demo reel over and over. I started smiling the second you started talking, and didn't stop. Brilliant approach!
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Post by benedict on Jun 2, 2017 17:32:36 GMT -8
Right now I'm recording myself reading aloud to my family, so it's less of a booth thing and more of a live performance in the living room thing. It's out in the middle of where everybody lives (and I'm not the world's best housekeeper) so there's a really good possibility of dust, mites, pet dander, and everything else. The more I mull over what you wrote, the more I'm betting it's allergies more than anything.
I'll start with the preventative measures and see where that goes.
Thanks, Razzle!
Tom
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