Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-26280153-20150413194008/@comment-6548012-20150518191641

Sir Ayme wrote: FrenchTouch wrote: English isn't my native language either, but over time and practice, I found how I could improve myself, and now, what I do is voice acting, and audio editing for personas such as the Comic Crossroads community. Also, I have no problem with little mistakes, au contraire, I marvel at people's narrow escapes when they do, because personally, if I mispell a little thing, I'm restarting the whole thing and that's pretty bad :D

The sock trick doesn't work. Actually, if you're holding your microphone in your hand, the fibers will create noise. Sure, they will attenuate the vibrating noises, but also the sound of your voice, so yeah, irrelevant. If you use Audacity, you may want to go heavy on the Noise Reduction, though not too much, if you don't want to phase your whole track. Pop filters will save your life, though :)

Oh also, don't use the same soundtrack twice. Like, never. Also, speaking of which, you may want to give some dynamism to your music, so first off, you should tone down the overall sound of it, it's pretty distracting (even though your voice is much louder), and also, try focusing on the more higher notes, for example, you may need to level your track, so that the highest notes really resonate through the hears of your community. For example, that would work quite well on "Bon Bon". For sadder and heavier, more lore-focused pastas, you should add to the bass. That's a little trick that might help you out a lot. I've compared a couple of times, and I feel that the sock actually does help a little. The microphone I use is a standing microphone and it manages to tone down the fans of my computer a little.

As for soundtracks... Yeah, you're right. I never use them twice in the same video, but my music library is too small to not use them more than once.

I use noise reduction, and then I compress and add bass/treble to all my recordings, but I bet there's better ways to brush up my audio :)

And another fun little fact, I actually played with the pitch a little bit for bon bon, up a little for the main protagonist, who was a kid, and down a little for his father. If you use a standing microphone, then yeah, it does help, I thought you had the microphone in your hand, but I guess it's a Blue Yeti, then? If so, you should turn the setting to "monodirectional", it should only pick up the sound of what's directly in front of it: You.

If you need help with audio library, I can provide you some tracks, and even mix up the audio and sync it up a bit, though I'd need your voice first to do this; it takes more time, but it should be efficent.

Well, you use a pretty good technique to brush up your audio, but if you want my advice, that's a thing that needs a little bit of spontaneity, for you might want to change a bit from the exact same method, that would push the spectator out of his comfort zone a little, though, maybe you could use a little more leveling and normalizing :)

Very good initiative, though, if I might give you some advice, you may want to read the text differently with each persona. With Bon Bon, for example, you could have put yourself in the mind of the Narrator, the protagonist, and the father, to do so, you can try speaking with your hands at the same time and making facial expressions in front of your computer. At first, you'll find it stupid and unsettling, but soon enough, you'll accomodate. I have been doing this a while, and even with my lack of talent and poor microphone (a microphone in the Band Hero Wii Bundle (a.k.a a really bad mic)), it gave a different personnality to the characters I've voiced (here's a human under the emprise of his own demons, a planet-eating planet-sized robot, and  a old Brazillian capoeira master, they're all different :D), and even with a lot of pop (not me fault, I ain't got no filter either :}), and that helped me out a lot, even in the most dire situations (I've recorded the second character's voice while prone to an acute laryngitis which I kept from 6 weeks). If you want to play around with audio, may it be a voice or a soundtrack, you might need to play around with all the levels, the tempo and use the Hard Limiter, a lot. ( a song I've cut, edited, and applied most of the effects I know to, in order to use it for a specific occasion, it's my take on the instrumental version of Roc Marciano's 76)

I really like your style, and I hope you can get a good future with your usage of voice acting and audio editing. ;)

Sidenote: The voice clips I've linked you to were made with much fewer knowledge of audio than now, plus I didn't really use noise reduction on them, at the time, so sorry about that.