Chinese Voice Over Recording - How to Do It Professionally?
The voice over industry is like the Disneyland for those love working behind the scenes, however, to enjoy the fun of working as a VO artist, it is no easy job.
VO recording is a audio process that requires creativity, and the final quality of your work can be affected by a series of important factors, including the original quality of your own voice, which is a must to a VO pro, professional recording equipment, effective project management systems, and voice over performance skills.
So we can see, having a natural born great voice is not enough, and professional recording equipment is available to anyone that is willing to pay for it. What makes you stand out of the crowd?
Experience, and performance skills.
Below are some great tips for those with great voices that can help them become professional VO artists:
1. Put your lips close to the microphone.
You may be thinking:”Emmm, that’s it?”
Yes, that’s it.
Having a good voice doesn’t equal you can speak clearly, and if people can’t hear you, however wonderful your voice is, it doesn’t make sense.
The proper distance between your lips and the microphone varies based on your own voice quality. Usually, the distance is 4-12 inches, but you must try it yourself. Do a couple of recordings from different distances, mark their with the distances and check which of them delivers the best quality of your voice.
2. Get rid of your dialect.
China is a large country, and although Mandarin has been promoted as the standard official language for decades, almost all Chinese people still have more or less local dialects. This is inevitable.
But as a voice over talent, you need to get rid of that, especially when you are doing recordings.
3. Quietness is gold.
Doing recording needs a quiet place. That is common sense. However, even in the best recording studio, that is hard to achieve, let alone those freelancers that work at home.
Just do your best to avoid all the possible noise sources, for example, you kids, your cellphones, the unclosed windows and doors, and so on.
4. Post-recording processing
However great you are, you can’t make everything perfect just in front of a microphone. That’s why post-recording processing is important.
Post-recording processing can improve the recording quality from several aspects, for example, you can use noise reduction software to reduce the noise that is accidentally caught during the recording process, audio compression software to compress the size of the audio file, and normalization software to tune your recording.
These 4 tips can greatly help you with the career development. If you are a voic over professional and want to share with us your own tips, feel free to reach us at hello@mateinchina.org
