Nice read!

You will want to edit out the excessive silence/room tone at the beginning of your audio file. For actual gigs and auditions, you’ll also 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. Try to keep the beginning of your recording to about 0.5 seconds or so before you begin talking. Casting directors may have hundreds of auditions to sift through, and they will generally know within the first few seconds whether they want to continue listening or move on to the next one. Having extra dead air at the beginning (7+ seconds in this instance) may increase the likelihood that the casting director might skip your audition and move on to the next one. 

Your audio sounds a little muffled. If you are using a microphone, make sure the input diaphragm is pointed toward your mouth. Microphones that use the cardioid pick-up pattern 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’re not using a microphone for this class, that’s perfectly okay too! Recording on a phone or a laptop works too as we’re just focusing on the basics of voice acting for this class. 

Generally a good distance from your microphone as a rule of thumb is the space between your pinky and thumb when they are extended apart from each other. For louder talking/yelling you may need to increase the distance a little and/or lower the gain. Having the microphone input pointed at your mouth but offset to one side maybe 20-30 degrees can help reduce plosives. 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. 

Don’t forget to tell us who your audience and demographics are in your homework. Really consider specifics of who, what, where, when, why and how. Think about how your audience is dynamically responding to you as you speak to them. This will help bring the script to life and lift the words off the page. Our goal as voice actors is to take a script and not sound like we are reading at all, but just talking naturally.

0:15 Read “miss” instead of “missus”. There is a difference between “Ms., Miss, and Mrs.”. A small point, but important for differentiation. :) (Typical comment)

0:27 Nice humanism including a bit of a laugh in the words.

0:29 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. (Typical Comment) 

0:36 Mispronounced “nasturtium”. Don’t be afraid to look up how to pronounce words online if you aren’t familiar with them. Some great reference sources include Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/), youglish.com, forvo.com and You Tube Videos among other places (there’s a lot of options out there). You can simply type in “How to pronounce [word]” in Google search and it should give you several references. Try to avoid the robot / AI-sounding ones though.

0:42 Mispronounced “carotenoid lutein”

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. 

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.

Nice job overall. Keep up the good work!