Love all the inflections and emphasis on certain parts, your tone sounds just like those commercials telling me to call the number on the screen now to double my offer

Great hard sell commercial read! Great job working on projection too!

For actual gigs and auditions, you’ll want to cut out the breath at the very beginning of your read. A good way to do this is to take your breath, pause a moment and hit record and proceed with the read. Or, if you’re already recording, take your breath and pause that moment before reading. This gives you room to edit it out later. 

0:34 When you misread or have a little stumble (happens to everyone and it’s okay!), it’s highly encouraged to start again at the beginning of the sentence or paragraph or a good pause point that would make it easy to remove and replace the mistake during editing. If you just keep going and don’t return to a solid point that makes it easy to edit out the mistake, you may need to come back later and re-record as a pick-up, and it becomes challenging to make it sound the same as the original recording. So, a good rule of thumb is to record so that it’s easy to edit later. When the mistakes are then edited out, it will sound like you read everything perfectly. 

1:27 Read “pencil pocket” instead of “pocket pencil”.

1:38 Read “added extra” instead of “extra added”.

There was quite a bit of distortion in your audio where you may have clipped/peaked during recording due to the loudness.

Generally a good distance between the microphone and your mouth as you are recording, as a rule of thumb, is the space between your pinky and thumb when they are extended apart from each other. Try to have waveform peaks for yelling/loud projection land between -9 dB and -3 dB. For normal talking, try to have the waveform peaks between -12 and -6 dB. Shoot for -3dB of headroom. You may need to adjust your gain for louder and quieter parts; if so, it helps to know where to turn the gain to in order to achieve optimal levels during recording. Having the microphone input pointed at your mouth but offset to one side maybe 20-30 degrees can help reduce plosives.

When you’re ready to take the next step to improve your voiceover recording, you will want to look into treating your recording space with acoustic foam (we recommend 4” thick) and/or blankets to help reduce the reflections and reverb in the space. Basically covering any hard, reflective surfaces that sound bounces off of with soft materials like blankets or towels, etc. It’s not necessary for this class however as we are just focusing on the basics of voice acting, but something to think about as you progress in your journey.

For the next homework, we’ll be working on articulation and enunciation. There were some words here and there that could benefit from being spoken more clearly or more fully pronounced with these skills we’ll work on next.

Overall, excellent read! Keep up the good work!