For our recording environment, we're using a very small, alcove-like dressing room space - really just enough room for one person to stand in. We've treated the walls and ceiling with our acoustic panels, bass traps, and throw pillows, we've placed carpet panels on the floor, and we have hung up an old bed comforter behind us to close in the space. For VO, you really want your space to be as acoustically "dead" as possible, which means you want to minimize reflections, reverberation, echo, etc...the maximum amount that you can.

Pictured is the view looking into the space to give you an idea of the finished setup. Behind the camera (not pictured) would be the bed comforter hanging up.

The Setup

So we've got all of our gear, and we've got a nice place to record in. Now it's time to look at how we will actually setup and use our gear in our recording space, to provide the best results.

Mic Position

The first important consideration is Mic Position. We'll need to properly setup our mic to give us the best sound, and minimize things like mouth noise and any environmental ambiance. There is no one correct way to do this, but there are a lot of popular and regularly used mic positions. A popular one that we will use in this case study, is to place the mic 6-8 inches away from your mouth, then move it a few inches off axis either to the right or left and angle it back towards your mouth. This way, the air coming from your mouth isn't hitting the microphone directly, but the microphone is still facing the source of the sound.

Your pop filter should be placed straight in front of your mouth, in the line of the air that comes out so it can catch any plosives.

Another idea you can try is to setup your mic so that it is in a corner and facing out, so that you are speaking into a corner, rather than into a flat surface. This can also help minimize reflections.

Surface Behind You

While it's important to treat all of the surfaces in your recording space with absorptive material, arguably the most important is the surface behind you as you speak. This is because while your microphone is facing you, it is also facing the surface behind you and is prone to catching any reflections that come off of it. This is why we hang a big heavy bed comforter behind us.

Input Gain

We'll also need to take into consideration the input gain on our recording interface. If it is too low, it will not pick up a strong enough signal from our voice, and we would need to rely heavily on post-production to get our audio up to an acceptable volume, and doing so would likely bring about other complications.

If it is too high, it will likely capture more room noise and ambiance than we would like, and could possibly clip or distort if we recite a portion of our VO particularly loudly.

So for our example, we will start with our input gain rolled all the way down, and slowly bring it up until the recorded audio is at a good audible level. This is a sort of quick and dirty way to do this, but will serve our purpose for this case study.

The IRig PRE we are using simply has a rolling wheel without any numbers to signify how high our gain is turned up, so I have no concrete numbers to give you, other than that the wheel was turned up maybe 25% or so. Setting input levels will be different depending on your interface and is something you should put time and care into doing.

Our Raw Audio:

So now we have acquired our gear, designed our recording space, and set up all of our equipment properly. Here is the raw audio that results from this setup, which we will enhance further through processing in our next section.