[LAU] Looking for voice recording suggestions

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2018 23:10:27 +0000, Will Godfrey wrote:
>When you say 'voice actors' is this just spoken word? If so it would
>be a good idea to put a pop screen in front of the mic to suppress
>plosives. If desperate you can make one with a wire coat hanger and a
>bit of a nylon stocking.
         ^
         ^opaque

Don't care too much about all those angles you should avoid to the
walls. For testing purpose listen in another room using headphones, if
you should notice an unwanted comb filter effect, just change the
up/down angle to the floor. The opaque nylon stocking is only needed for
single speakers/singers very close to the microphone, even a few thin
layers of a tissue wrapped around the microphone and fixed with an
elastic band could do the job.

There is only one rule, you need to care about when doing your very
first recording of that kind. Test listen in another room using
headphones, due to the short blanket syndrome you can't fix what is
going wrong in the first place, by using de-essing, filtering hum
and other noise.

How to place a group of speakers/singers depends on the kind of
microphone, since you only own one microphone, you only could do tests
by listening via headphones in another room and try to get the best out
of this microphone.

The only thing you really need is a parametric EQ. Perhaps you need low
and high shelving filters and maybe compression, too.

It is very unlikely that your microphone is kind of a special
microphone, such as one with omnidirectional characteristic, so giving
advices how to use such microphones doesn't make sense. Most beginner's
microphones are cardioid.

Tell the people that they are not allowed to touch the microphone, e.g.
not to turn it off and on by a switch that some microphones do have.
Often amateur singers/speakers think they help the engineer by e.g.
turning the microphone off and on, helping to fix the position etc.,
but you should be the only one testing different positions of the
microphone, to become aware how the quality of the recording does
change, when changing the position.