[LAU] Looking for voice recording suggestions

[David Kastrup]

<hollundertee at gmx.net> writes:

> Thanks everyone for your suggestions!
>
> Equipment wise I do have a Rode NT-1A and come to think of it a really
> cheap (<10 €) dynamic mic too. I do have a stand and a pop screen.  I
> probably can't hang up a duvet or curtain.

The NT-1A does not add noise of its own.  Which is good.  It's cardioid,
large diaphragm.  This is a microphone that picks up just anything.  So
you need to find a placement where it captures direct sound from all of
your speakers reasonably well while not being affected too much by
reverbation.  It's a pressure gradient receiver so you want to place it
perpendicular to the traveling direction of long-lived reverbation, so
you don't want it pointing in the long direction of the room.  You also
don't want it to be too close to the wall or it will attenuate low
frequencies.

> It will be spoken word and I'll record them separately.

Recording separately of course makes a large difference.  In that case,
you can just point the mic at the speaker and choose your distance such
that the amount of reverb is reasonable.  If your result is supposed to
be stereo, you want to capture close and add stereophonic reverb rather
than the room reverb: then your balancing criterion is not a nice amount
of reverb (you want as little as possible so you want to get as close as
possible) but rather tolerable speech (such as well-balanced plosives).
You'll want a screen and then try picking a distance where the speech
sounds well and dry.  You can always add reverb in post (stereophonic
reverb from a particular direction) but you cannot remove it.

> It will be around 150 lines, so I'd like to keep editing and
> post-processing to a minimum. I was thinking of doing just some
> cutting and then batch processing only.  My thought was r128gain to
> get a consistent volume and maybe apply a compressor or somesuch, sox
> compand maybe?

No compression etc when recording.  Any decision you make then cannot be
reversed without damage.

> The quality of the recordings don't need to be top notch, but they
> need to be intelligible and at least at consistent levels as they'll
> appear more or less randomly one after another.

You can likely adjust levels once for every speaker before cutting (and
if speakers are to come from different directions, give each one his own
directional placement/reverb) so the main thing is to keep each speaker
consistent.

-- 
David Kastrup