Hello this is Mike Russell from MusicRadioCreative.com.
In this video I'm going to give you a five step process to recover poor quality voice
overs.
Now you can get poor quality voice overs for many reasons.
If you're working in a radio station perhaps it's been sent over, old school, ISDN line
or maybe it's just been sent as an mp3 and the bitrate was too low it will sound something
like this "this is a voice over but it could do with much improvement".
Let's compare that to a full quality good quality voice over "this is a voice over".
You can probably hear the difference in dynamic range and frequencies there but let me show
you how you can first of all detect what's missing.
Head into the window menu and find your new best friend the frequency analysis window.
That pops up this window down here.
Now if I play this back and hit one of these buttons it will save a print of the voice
over "this is a voice over" notice that big long line all the way from the low frequencies
right the way up to the high frequencies an indication of a good quality voice over with
all the frequency ranges included.
Now let's play the bad quality voice over and save that one as number 7 a blue line
"this is a voice over" and as you can see there this voice over has clearly been sent
over ISDN or with reduced quality on mp3 because it's missing pretty much all of the high frequencies.
Okay so how can we process this voice over to make it sound better despite it's loss.
Well first of all to analyze it a bit further and let's go into the silence here.
What I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to Effects Amplitude and Compression, normalize to 98.8%
and oh that's a noisy voice over studio.
Yeah, not good at all.
Let's undo that so we're gonna do something about the noise as well in that voice over
and just to show you that there's noise there in the silent spaces.
Look at that noise here indicated by purple and red colouring in the mid to low frequencies.
Now often voice artists will send you a session and they will place silences when they're
not speaking like this so you can tell if that's been done because it will be completely
black here.
Let's undo that and head into the multitrack and see how we can recover this voice over.
So I'm going to drag that bad voice over into track 1 and I'm going to go through a five
part recovery process.
First of all, let's go in and put some 20 band EQ on it.
I've got a preset that you can get if you click the link below this video and get my
free presets called Mike Sparkle.
This is where I add a little bit of high frequency.
Let's listen with and without "this is a voiceover" ok and I'm gonna add in maybe a few more around
the mid range "this is a voice over" sounding better to me already with just a little bit
of EQ.
Once you've added EQ to slot 1 of the effects rack then go into slot 2 go into Amplitude
and Compression, Dynamics processing and again and another preset that I give if you click
the link below this video is Mike compressor this should just crush the voice down and
make it sound ready for any radio imaging or promo you're making "this is a voice over".
Next head into slot 3 on your effects rack go into to Filter and EQ and head for the
parametric equalizer.
One of my favourite presets is the Loudness maximizer because it adds a little bit of
low end and a little bit of high end as well but not only that you can click number 3 to
bring up another slot here and you can literally slide it up and down to remove or add certain
frequencies.
So let's do that now.
Let's first of all play it back and try to remove some frequencies "this is a voice over
but it could do with much improvement" and you can hear the changes there.
Also I can go along and add in frequencies "this is a voice over but it could do with
much improvement" "this is a voice over but it" now I think that taking frequencies out
at 552 Hz are gonna help in this instance of course for you it may well be different
every time but this is just another way and have a play to have a poor quality voice over
sounding better.
After I've done that.
I'll go into slot 4 and effects rack, Amplitude and compression, Dynamics processing again
I've got Mike's compressor there but instead of adding just compression I'm actually gonna
add a gate and to do that, I just drop in a dot there and pull it right the way over
now a gate will literally stop any noise below a certain decibel level getting through that
gate.
In other words, it'll be completely silent.
This is rather an aggressive gate I've just drawn on and when I play this back you'll
notice it cuts off some of my voice "this is a voice over but it could do with much
improvement" you can hear there but it can do with much improvement just struggling to
get through the gate.
So I'm gonna move it over a bit "this is a voice over but it could do with much improvement"
and that seems to be a little bit better and then the final effect I'm going to go into
track 5 of my effects rack and I'm going to go to Amplitude and Compression, Hard Limiter
and just to make sure that the voice over's got extra power to cut through any sound effects
or music bed limited to minus .1 db.
I wouldn't usually do this when producing voice overs but if you have got a voice that
is lacking certain frequencies or just doesn't sound right Hard limiting as a final process
can really help.
Now once I've done that, let's mix it down and you'll notice immediately some differences.
First of all where there are any silence is they have completely gone.
They've been removed by the gate that I added in and also if I get this frequency analysis
here.
You can see that the voice over has been completely compressed and hard limited to sound great
in radio imaging or a promo.
Let me play it to you.
"This is a voice over but it could do with much improvement" and now let me compare that
to the bad voice over.
"This is a voice over but it could do with much improvement" and finally let's playback
my improved version of the voice over again and take a print of the frequency analysis
graph to see if there's any changes are present "this is a voice over" and as you will see
there it does appear that the high range frequencies have been improved and the overall sound of
that voice over is much better.
I hope this tutorial has helped you and if you'd like to get some of my favourite presets
for radio imaging and voice over production click the link below this video.
I'm Mike Russell from MusicRadioCreative.com.