All the audio plugins you will ever need for voice over…

Your software, or DAW already has a ton. Do you need third party plugins?

I can safely say that I have every plugin I will ever need – and about 500+ more I never will…
The true number is somewhere closer to 1000 plugins of all variety. Some of them very advanced, that I purchased with intent – and others I may have never even looked at, which came bundled with some of the software or hardware I acquired over the years.

Don’t get me wrong – there is some wonderful stuff out there – and in my role as a producer and editor on a variety of projects, some plugins are absolute must haves… if your job is production.
There are plugins that I love, that simplify everyday tasks, and occasionally make the impossible seem possible… But, I only use 15 to 20 of them on heavy rotation, they are mostly useless in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand them, and when applied without discretion or a functional understanding of how they operate, usually do more harm than good.

None of the plugins I own were purchased exclusively for voice over, and of the entire collection, hardly any are ever applied to a single mono voice signal. So – the short answer is – no – you don’t need third-party plugins for voice over. To learn more about why, continue reading.

Most DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) or software suites, come bundled with many, many plugins. Pro Tools and Logic Pro come to mind as the heavy hitters in this category. The plugins are “value added” additions – filling gaps or providing enhancements in areas the DAW software was not designed to provide. The thing to remember is, Pro Tools and Logic Pro are professional production platforms designed for producers, most of whom are not voice over talent. And, sorry to break it to you, most voice talent do not qualify as professional producers.

The reality is – as a voice over talent, recording, editing and sending clean audio tracks to your clients from your home studio setup, you could go the rest of your career, if not your life, without a single plugin and you would be just fine. Nine times out of ten, they will serve very little purpose and sit around in the the digital file cabinet taking up space.

In my experience over the years, they often do more harm than good in the hands of a novice. Just owning an audio production plugin and running your signal through it will not “improve” your sound – or make you an audio producer. Even worse, having a collection of plugins or presets lined up as a mastering chain, blindly applying static processing to your signal without any regard for how it affects the source audio, will take you even further away from being a professional producer.

Applying processing to your audio signal without an understanding of the following – will not make you a better, more successful voice talent. You’re more likely to end up as a talent whose auditions are routinely passed over.
Audio processing – DAW-based or via plugins, requires an understanding of:

• what it is being done
• why it is being done
• what is being adding to the signal
• what is being taken away
• how to undo whatever the processing has done
• how the processed signal will later be used

Your primary focus when recording and delivering voice over audio, should be on learning how to capture the best, highest quality sound possible with nothing more than a digital audio interface, some quality isolation and a good microphone. Leave the processing bells and whistles to the producers.

Stop making production decisions that aren’t yours to make.

Accurate listening and monitoring must be used in order to make meaningful, subjective modifications or adjustments to an audio signal. Those subjective decisions are difficult to make sometimes, even under the best circumstances, and even by people who make them all of the time. However, those decisions are still best made by someone other than the talent.

Even those of us who produce professionally are prone to make mistakes and errant processing decisions – but we are also the ones who are more likely to recognize a problem before it becomes an issue. Running your audio through any type of signal processing before we receive it, forces our hand and pushes our productions in a particular direction that we may not want them to go. I can assure you it doesn’t go unnoticed, and isn’t appreciated.

Also realize what we go through every time we send out a general casting:
20 voices – 10 male, 10 female – and every one of those auditions arrives at different levels, from different recording environments, 5 to 15 different microphones, preamps, encoding algorithms, and sample rates. They all have different frequency ranges, microphone proximity, acoustic environments, sound floors – and the list goes on.

If, in that maelstrom of information to sort out, a heavily processed audio recording comes in, and we can’t quickly sort out the why, what and how of it – we’ll just delete it and move on to the next talent.
We simply don’t have time to fiddle around with that which has already been fiddled… or try to sort out the issue with the one who did the fiddling…

Understand the importance of sending clean, raw audio to team members further down the production chain. Everything you add to, or subtract from the raw signal via processing, has an effect on the overall sound – which once again – unless it is YOUR production – is outside the scope of your role as the voice over talent, and quite likely a part of the signal that someone is going to have to try to add back to – or try to subtract from whatever you send them.

Some, it not most of the poor audio, comes from voice talent who have been actively encouraged to process their audio tracks before sending them out. Some of it comes from people who are just experimenting, which is never wise with auditions or audio submitted for production. Some people are using processing to try to make up for acoustic shortfalls in their recording environment. These make up the majority of post-processed submissions I receive, and are usually the worst offenders. Others have been instructed to use a series of processing chains, or have self taught via YouTube, and apply processing to everything they send out, which to me, seems like poor advice and certainly a foolhardy practice.

I have real-world experience with this. I see (and hear) it on a daily basis.
Many of the auditions I receive are “unusable” for a variety of reasons, though the overarching reason for disqualification is usually audio quality. Take heed, that when you are auditioning – you are auditioning everything. We’re looking at your performance capabilities as a voice over talent along with your “sound”, or the sound of our studio, as well as your ability to capture clean audio. If we can’t make a determination as to the core sound of your studio, because the original signal is completely drowned out by the processing, we have to move on and steer our attention toward talent that we know we can work with. Those who have audio and sound we can trust.

My first assumption when I encounter over-processed audio is that someone is trying to hide something – usually a noise floor issue or crap acoustics. Conversely, if the audio sounds perfectly scrubbed and sanitized – how can I ever trust what I’m hearing? Because I know I’m never going to get that sound during a live session with the talent. Capisce?

In a perfect world – there would be something that you could run your audio though that would fix every issue and make it sound great on every system in the world. The thing is – this isn’t a perfect world – and that device, or piece of software doesn’t exist. Even with the surge of AI, or Artificial Intelligence in audio processing – there isn’t anything currently in existence that can “do it all” for you. There still needs to be a driver in the seat. Preferably one with somewhat trained ears, great monitoring equipment, and years of “seat time” editing and producing audio from a variety of sources. Many, if not most voice over talent do not fall into this category.

So – let’s take a look at some of the why and why not of using audio processing plugins, and why I feel that most will never need them, and probably shouldn’t be using them in the first place.

1. Audio plugins exist to streamline workflow for people who produce audio all day, every day. Yes – they can be helpful in the hands of someone who is trained to use them correctly. This is usually where the problems creep in. People who don’t use them regularly, or worse don’t understand why and how to use them, really have no purpose beyond simple curiosity to be using them.
2. Of the thousands of plugins available, only a select handful have any real applicability to processing mono human voice signals with any transparency, and are used sparingly in day-to-day production. Most of the time when we bust out the plugins, it’s to fix things that are wrong or slightly enhance what was already pretty decent.
3. Most software platforms come with a litany of built in processing capability. All of the biggies – Adobe Audition, Izotope RX, Pro Tools and Logic Pro – all come with a host of audio processing capabilities that far surpasses the needs of the average voice talent. Buying additional plugins for voice over it tantamount to not wanting to learn the strengths and capabilities of the software you already have. Any one of those applications has more than enough features for editing quality voice over.
4. No mater what you use on your audio – if you don’t have the proper monitoring equipment and environment – you’ll never really know what you are doing to your audio signal. Ear buds and cheap headphones – or monitors setup in the wrong environment, will never clearly and accurately depict what is going on under the surface with your recorded signal.

So – the safest route to take – is to get a quality audio interface, a quality microphone, and a quiet, acoustically treated environment in which to record. Then, learn how to consistently capture pure, high resolution voice over audio at the proper level and sample rate. Once that has been achieved, you can confidently send your product out to clients. Nothing more. Nothing less. Any additional “processing” should be limited to editing for clicks, breaths and mouth noises – and possibly pace and timing – which is a demanding enough practice that is often overlooked and not seen as a serious, necessary and very much required skill. But beyond that? Leave it alone.

Decisions about EQ, leveling, normalization, compression, limiting and mastering, are simply not yours to make – unless – and I repeat unless – YOU are the one solely responsible for the final outcome of the production. In that case, I suggest you learn as much as you can about production and how certain settings, or in some cases plugins, can help you achieve consistently professional results. But, as a general rule, do not send processing decisions that you don’t completely understand downstream to other people if you have no hand in the production beyond the voice over.

In the words of a very well known, expert voice over – from an article on this very website:
“It is the job of the producer on the other end to shape the sound as they produce the commercial, promo or trailer. My responsibility as a home studio operator, is to give them a clean signal. Not a tricked up signal. My audio chain is: mic – preamp – ISDN codec or computer digi card. Clean. Simple. If they want to make it sound like Darth Vader on the other end, that is their choice. As voice talent, I just keep my attention on the performance, period.”

You can read that article here.

The train seems to have left the tracks, at least in part, with the rise in popularity of digital audio-book production, home based narrators and voice over talent producing them, and guidance given on websites like ACX.com, YouTube and others. Somehow, some way, the guidelines for audio-book production standards have filtered their way down into the lexicon of average, everyday voice over. Even some voice over coaches have wandered into propagating the fallacy that audio-book standards should be applied to most recordings and audition submissions.

I say that it’s a shame – and shame on anyone who promotes those standards as something that should be applied as a common practice.

No – not all audio should be put through processing, normalized to any predetermined dB level, compressed, squashed, equalized or limited. That is NOT what makes good sounding audio. Those are processes which allow audio to conform to certain mastering standards set by companies like ACX. That is where their application should stop.
Just because those standards work for them – that doesn’t mean they work for me – or anyone else.

So – what can be considered “best practice”?

It’s quite simple, really – and far from a mystery.
Without getting super technical:
Your native, or natural recording levels, independent of read style, and without anything additional in the microphone chain, should measure approximately -10dB to -9db on a VU meter – with peaks contained to roughly -8dB to -7 dB.
Peaks going any higher, say something nearer to -4dB or -3db – usually mean that your mic is too hot (too much gain) – or you are too close to your microphone, or at an inappropriate angle for the given delivery style – or – a combination of all of the above.

These numbers aren’t set in stone, they are simply targets to shoot for.

On average – when you send out your audio, it should be consistently in the -10 to -12 dB range, appear relatively consistent in your visual editor as far as dB, be captured at 48k – 24 or 32 bit – and exported as .wav or .aiff – unless instructed otherwise. No one will ever complain about getting audio like this. In our world – this is how almost every file we encounter, ends up. MP3 is fine for audition demos – but not for delivered product. Loud auditions, if they aren’t discarded, are always turned down before being passed along to clients, so don’t bother sending them.

This is a screen-cap of a recent recording, showing the audio, as captured, after:

• a -4 dB gain reduction to match an existing recording
• some mild noise floor reduction
• a low-end frequency filter applied to frequencies below 65Hz.

None of these processes negatively affected the source signal. They were applied with complete transparency, and didn’t require any type of plugin. These capabilities are already baked into the software – and are of the most basic types of processing. The moral of the story is – from a processing perspective, hardly anything was done to this audio signal before being sent off to the client. Elements were filtered or removed from the surrounding audio spectrum, but very little, if anything was done to the actual source signal.

The reason so little was done to the signal, is that all of the other standard conventions were followed:

• great recording equipment
• proper isolation and microphone technique
• high-resolution audio capture (48k -24/32bit – non-lossy export)
• appropriate signal-to-noise ratio
• high-quality monitoring equipment and production environments
• capable editing software

Without the above, it becomes much more difficult to produce quality audio on a first pass, and no amount of software or plugins will make up for a lack of just one or two of those things in combination. Having years of “seat-time” (one of my favorite expressions, taken from one of my favorite welders) also makes a difference. I am able to make certain determinations between what is acceptable or not, what needs processing or doesn’t, and what the best course of action is, because I’ve been in this chair for so long.

After years of receiving audio submissions from a multitude of recording environments, from newbie to advanced producers, that are all over the audio quality spectrum – a few basic things still hold true…
The less you do, or are forced to do to the original audio signal – the better. And if you’re constantly having to apply processing to your audio signal to make up for shortcomings in your recordings, you haven’t done enough of the foundational legwork necessary to participate at a higher level in this craft. Period.

There are no silver bullets, no magic potions, and certainly no special “mastering chains” or other secret incantations or chants that can make up for simply capturing the audio correctly the first time around, doing as little as humanly possible to it to bring it to standard, and then sending it out. Having an over-reliance on a bunch of processing passes in order to feel like a better player in the voice over game – means that you’ve probably already lost – at least where it concerns me, my studio and the clients I work with.

Do us all a favor – leave the plugins and mastering chains to the pick-axe and shovel salesman you’re certainly going to meet along the road to the prospecting claim – and learn how to record superior quality raw audio from the start – particularly if you ever plan on sending anything in to us.

With all of that said – if you need help getting a bridle on your audio – and/or curing yourself from a bad case of processedittoomuchitus – we’re always here to help – not to sell you software or plugins – or whoopdeedoo formulas for voice over success. We’re here to help you learn how to produce quality audio – and the right way to go about things.