I dig your tone, Owen! Smooth, deep voice. Nicely done.

Excellent read! I could definitely picture you in commercial, corporate, and e-learning type voiceover work. Great energy and smile in your read! It came across as very friendly and warm.

0:28 I hear “musk” instead of “muss”.

0:46 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. 

1:00 Added word “and”.

1:18 Added word “on”.

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.

Your audio sounds just a tad bit muffled or boxy perhaps. Make sure that the input for the microphone is pointed toward your mouth. Cardioid pattern microphones are designed to not pick up as much sound from the back side, and it’s easy to accidentally have the input turned the wrong way. Usually the logo is at the front side of the input, but check with your specific microphone to verify where the input is. If you have your microphone enclosed in something, try to give it more room to ‘breathe’. Depending on your setup you may need to add some bass traps to help with a build-up of frequencies in your audio recording space. I’d start by changing one thing at a time until you find your audio is nice and clear. 

Staying well hydrated will help to reduce mouth clicks during recording. A good rule of thumb is to hydrate well a couple of hours before recording and drink water in between as you’re recording to stay hydrated. 

As you progress with voice acting, investing in the RX series mouth declick plug-in is a very useful and worthwhile tool to have at your disposal to help keep the recording as clean as possible. 

For the purpose of this homework to work on projection, I felt like you did well with it, but there is still some room to go even further. Practice projecting even more such as with the scenario of being in a gym or large auditorium with no microphone and you need your voice to be heard in every single corner of the room. Engage with your diaphragm and take in a big, deep breath to fill up your lungs so that you have the power to push your voice out even further. 

Overall, very nicely done! Keep up the great work!