what kind of voice over gear should i buy i have mac pro soundtrak pro sure fp 33 mixer what i am not looking for some homevideo voice over i want to use what the pro use any help thanks Tamim .

Heres a short article on Don LaFontaine's studio setup: Voice-Over Talent Sets Up High-End Home Studio (http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_voice_god_high/)

For the mic, preamp, mixer, and protools setup mentioned in the article, you're looking at more than $20,000. Add to that your cables, racks, and miscellaneous outboard gear.

All the gear in the world, however, will not do anything for you if you're not recording in a good space, be prepared to spend a good chunk of time and money on your booth.

Heres a short article on Don LaFontaine's studio setup: Voice-Over Talent Sets Up High-End Home Studio (http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_voice_god_high/)

For the mic, preamp, mixer, and protools setup mentioned in the article, you're looking at more than $20,000. Add to that your cables, racks, and miscellaneous outboard gear.

All the gear in the world, however, will not do anything for you if you're not recording in a good space, be prepared to spend a good chunk of time and money on your booth.


It's an old topic. Handled many times here.

The bottom line is that the best recording studio and gear in the world can only do one thing. Get you a REALLY good recording of whatever VOICE the talent has.

Don LaFontaine didnt' sound like Don LaFontaine because of the equipment. The equipment captured Don LaFontaine SOUNDING like Don LaFontaine.

Excellent, even superb, or go one step farther and call it AMAZING recording of a crappy talent - always sounds like a fine recording of a crappy talent. And nobody will buy that.

Announcers sound like announcers because they're announcers.

Want a track that sounds like a pro announcer? Hire one.

Period.

what kind of voice over gear should i buy i have mac pro soundtrak pro sure fp 33 mixer what i am not looking for some homevideo voice over i want to use what the pro use any help thanks Tamim .

I hate to use your post as an example, but I sure hate this broken record question.
What's the Best "insert equipment here" I can get for doing "insert type of work here"

Why don't you first tell us what your budget is for... software / Gear / Room /
and then we might be able to better guide you to voiceover bliss.
Do you honestly have $10K, $5K, $500?

But as Bill has suggested, A pro talent can sound great using an EV 635 hanging from a coat hanger.

I'd say on the cheap end, if you get a DMP3 into an Echo Audiofire with an sm7 you will sound pretty good. You can upgrade from there, but that's a pretty basic setup.

Best? That's personal.

Most pros just use a U87 with a pre of their liking (many times a Neve 1073 or John Hardy, or even Millenia or API) through a converter of their liking (Lynx Aurora, Apogee, Prism). Is it the best? Probably not if they are using the same thing for every voice... but it's good.

I'd say on the cheap end, if you get a DMP3 into an Echo Audiofire with an sm7 you will sound pretty good. You can upgrade from there, but that's a pretty basic setup.

Best? That's personal.

Most pros just use a U87 with a pre of their liking (many times a Neve 1073 or John Hardy, or even Millenia or API) through a converter of their liking (Lynx Aurora, Apogee, Prism). Is it the best? Probably not if they are using the same thing for every voice... but it's good.

Sorry, but the above is simply and categorically not true.

"Most pros" don't use one particular brand of anything.

Having done more than 2000 paid voiceovers personally, I can tell you that the vast majority of them involved me walking into someone else's studio and using whatever gear they had in place.

I've had my voice recorded on probably 50 different microphones - and those mics fed probably 30 different recording chains. I've worked with various models of Shure, Sony, ElectroVoice, Sennheiser, AKG, Neumann, and half a dozen other mics - and had then run everywhere from exotic pre-amp chains to directly into the mic inputs of cheap analog tape recorders.

And NONE of those voiceovers were ever judged unworthy of completing the journey onto a public program or being broadcast.

It's the script and performance FIRST, the voice quality SECOND - and the equipment DEAD LAST in the chain of importance in achieving a good VO.

Trust me. Yeah, I own a dedicated VO booth and a $2500 Neumann. Why? Because I've made enough earnings off my VO work to make top quality professional gear a simple, justifiable business expense. But I don't for a second think those tools are NECESSARY for my VO work. In fact, and my last five or six PAID VOs were done on an old decommissioned Sony short shotgun I pulled from a prosumer camcorder - fed through a $100 in-line preamp and directly via firewire into a mid-range laptop.

RECORDING THE HUMAN VOICE IS NOT PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT.

Even making a voice sound "bigger" is pretty trivial with laptops loaded with more dynamics processing power than an SSL console and a state of the art processing rack from 10 years back.

Performing voiceovers, however, IS reasonably difficult. It requires about the same dedication and practice as maintaining the status of being a good amateur musician or athlete.

Voiceover is NOT talking. It's PERFORMING. No different from performing on the guitar. NOBODY expects to buy a guitar, sit down and NAIL a song. Similarly, you just can't expect to print out your script, open a mic and start nailing VOs.

If your VO's sound bad it's most likely because you're using bad talent.

Period.

It's the script and performance FIRST, the voice quality SECOND - and the equipment DEAD LAST in the chain of importance in achieving a good VO.

After 46yrs in pro audio, 30 with our own audio visual and music studios, Bill is exactly right.

And to survive, you have to learn to be able to recognise good sound as fast as you can.

Cheers.

Wow. I have been holding my tongue on this thread, figuring it would probably just wind up as a rant nobody would want to read anyway.

But now Bill Davis has gone and done it for me, so I would like to add a little support for his view. Just in case some reader might think him biased, since he arguably has a vested interest in putting vocal talent before the gear.

Here is the word from the other side of the console - an engineer in one of those studios he could have gone into. If you count lead vocals, I have done well over 4000, if just pure voice overs and/or character work, somewhere in the hundreds at least.

Nobody in the audio business agrees on everything, so I went over his post several times before finally concluding this was that rare circumstance where in fact, I agree with him 100%. I fully expect bolts from Thor to strike me dead at any minute after saying that. :-)

Believe what he says - notably:

RECORDING THE HUMAN VOICE IS NOT PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT

and

It's the script and performance FIRST, the voice quality SECOND - and the equipment DEAD LAST in the chain of importance in achieving a good VO.

which is exactly the right order.

Here is how I handled voice over, narration, or character sessions for 30 years (not music vocals):

1. I asked the talent if they had a mic preference. If they did, I went with that. (most commonly if they did, it would be one of U87, SM-7, RE-20, even SM-57)

2. If they had no preference (which was most of the time), my go to mic was not a U-87 or any one of my other expensive condenser mics, but my relatvely inexpensive Shure SM-7.

Why? Ths mic has a nice sound on most voices. It has an optional low cut and presence boost switch right on the mic, which is sometimes handy. It doesn't tend to make female voices too sibilent. It is directional and can be used close, which means I get little bounce from the copy stand. In fact, a few times due to particular circumstances, I was able to use it right in the control room at the producers desk, because it is used close enough that the room has little effect on the sound. (Home users take note.)

But most important of all, the construction of the mic is such that it has a very large windscreen, backed by metal at exactly the right distance from the element to allow the talent to 'eat' the mic witout danger of pops (with a very few individual exceptions).

So I could tell the talent to just go ahead and get right on the mic, and I would get a very even and consistent sound. Not only on that day, but a month later, when the producer decided they needed a few more lines. If I used that mike, I knew everything would easily and -quickly- match.

3. I generally used a little mild compression, just enough to smooth things out a bit for voice overs, sometimes a bit more toward limiting if character voices were being recorded - they can get pretty wild.

My go to compressor for that was generally a dbx 166, or sometimes, with a few voices, an LA-2. Why? Dbx limiters sound good in general on most voices, and that model also has a built in peak limiter which can be handy with character voices - rarely needed for straight narration.

That is a fairly cheap limiter, but sounds good.

That's it. A $350 mic, and I have used a 57 ($100) when a client asked for it and been perfectly happy wth the sound.

A $250 limiter - and a dbx 266 ($150) woud probably work just about as well for this.

I have very nice preamps in my console, but in point of fact, the preamps in a Mackie 802-VLZ3 ($199) would have worked just fine in this application.

Voice is easy.

Some people here seem to obsess endlessly about gear, and seem to think you always need the very most expensive stuff to be 'pro'. What you really need is just what will get the job done. No less, but also - no more.


-Mike

I have very nice preamps in my console, but in point of fact, the preamps in a Mackie 802-VLZ3 ($199) would have worked just fine in this application.

-Mike

A note concerning Mic Pre amps.
Some of the Dynamic mics out there like the RE20, RE27, SM7b, SM5b, MD421 and such require a bit more mic pre gain than condenser mics when doing voice work.
Just something to think about when selecting a mic pre for use with a dynamic.
As some ill mic pres can distort when trying to achieve proper levels.

First of all thanks to all my budget is $1000 so what kind of gear should i buy with $1000 ? Tamim.

First of all thanks to all my budget is $1000 so what kind of gear should i buy with $1000 ? Tamim.

We need a listing of your other gear so we know what to include / exclude from list.

Do you already have... console / monitors / headphones / mic stand / mic cable / audio interface... Or do you need everything?

But as Bill has suggested, A pro talent can sound great using an EV 635 hanging from a coat hanger.

Darn David! Stop giving away my secrets!

BTW, I just updated my commercial and narration demos.

Ty Ford VO and On Camera Demos (http://web.mac.com/tyreeford/Site/VO_and_On_Camera_Demos.html)

Regards,

Ty Ford
AFTRA/SAG

Oh, I just had an epiphany.
Instead of the coat hanger, a series of bungee cords used as a giant shock mount web.

That's (and a velcro jumpsuit) are good for the talent, but not so good for the mic!

Ty Ford

David w. Jones i have sennheiser shotgun mic shure fp33 mixter mac pro fianl cut pro
Sennheiser EW100ENG G2 Wireless Mic that is all .Tamim

With your very limited budget, you might consider something similar to one of Guitar Centers Mbox-2 recording bundles, which comes with a mic and monitors, and use the other half of the cash for room treatment.

Truth of the matter is, $1K is not a huge budget for VO gear, but it's a start.


As an example, this past week I had VO sessions in rooms that had the following Mic/Pre combos...

AKG C-414 B into Digi 002
Neumann U47 fet into Digi 002
Neumann TLM 103 into Digi 002
Neumann TLM 193 into John Hardy M-1
Neumann U 87 into John Hardy M-1
Shure KSM44 into Presonus Eureka
Sennheiser MD421 into Yamaha ProMix 01
Sennheiser MKH416 into John Hardy M-1
MXL ??? condenser into Yamaha DM2K
MXL V88 into Mackie Onyx 1620
Blue Dragonfly into Avalon Vt737sp
Audio Technica 4033 into Digi Mbox
Audio Technica 4060 into Presonus Eureka
Shure SM58 into Yamaha 01V96
Shure KSM32 into Mackie 1604 VLZ
Rode NT2 into Aphex 107
Electro-Voice RE27 into Digi Mbox 2

Good Luck with your project!

I agree - the mbox comes with Protools, whch is a pro standard.

I'd stll suggest an SM-7, as they are much more forgiving if the room has less than perfect acoustics, and are more beginner friendly.

The SM7b is a good mic, but not everybody sounds good on it.
It would run around $350.00, add a cheap mic stand w/boom arm for $90.00, a mic cable for $30.00, a cheap pair of headphones for $100.00, Digidesign Mbox 2 for $385.00,
and your at $955.00 without tax.
And still no monitors, cables, pop screen, room treatment.

Don't under estimate the importance of room treatment!

Expensive mic or cheap mic, it will still record the sound of your voice "in the room".
So if you can hear traffic through your window, or the air-conditioner blowing, or your computer running, or a big booming echo when you talk, the chances are very good that the mic will hear them too.

I do a fair amount of voice over work. I do own a U87 and a bunch of AT4033's, but for my own voice, I use a fairly inexpensive SE2200 microphone that I really like. It's got a nice hi end bump. Next, you want a pop screen. After that, you need a mic pre that offers compression. In my case, I use a Focusrite Twin Track Pro because it offers an "air" button that adds a bit of presence to my voice. Finally, make sure the room your recording in is quiet and relatively echo slap free. That's about it.

You don't have to spend a fortune to get pro results. As it's been pointed out, the most important piece of the puzzle is the voice talent.

Just to prove you don't always need expensive gear...

One day my Pro Tools system went down and I needed to rush a voice over to the local TV station. I had nothing to record the VO to. Until I remembered my Zoom H4. That's right. I simply spoke directly into it.. no pop screen, no compressor... no ability to "enhance" the performance. Then transfered the mp3 file to my computer and emailed it off. No complaints from the TV station. Not sure they even noticed the difference!

And still no monitors, cables, pop screen, room treatment.

Don't under estimate the importance of room treatment!

Expensive mic or cheap mic, it will still record the sound of your voice "in the room".



I was agreeing with your Guitar Centers Mbox-2 recording bundle recommendation, which does include speakers. But what looks like a very cheap mic.

So $499.99 + $350.00 leaving $150 to get stand, cables, and steal all your wifes duvets. :-)

I was agreeing with your Guitar Centers Mbox-2 recording bundle recommendation, which does include speakers. But what looks like a very cheap mic.

So $499.99 + $350.00 leaving $150 to get stand, cables, and steal all your wifes duvets. :-)

I think protools is overpriced for what it gives you. For that price you can get a full bundle of Presonus or Echo gear (which sounds better than the cheap Mbox crap that is affiliated in name and software *which, softwares are almost all the same features and sound wise* only with protools).

Echo audiofire and a Kel Hm-7 or At3035 would be the best bet. Buy a stand and use a cable you already have. Get a pair of RP-5s, they will blow the crap out of the Fostex monitors they threw in there since they really aren't studioish but rather hifi sounding from what I've read.

The AT2020 isn't really bad at all, especially for the price though. I keep some on overheads for drums all the time :). Too thin for voiceovers in my opinion though. Also, I don't see anything more useful than freebies in the plugin pack other than melodyne essential, but I don't know how much that will get used on voiceovers.

All together, save your money and get an Echo, a good mic, and real monitors. The Mbox isn't known for sounding good for the money, but check into the Echo vs other interfaces in the range. Or the Emu 0404... There are a lot of better deals than the Mbox (unless you ABSOLUTELY NEED protools... at least, a version without OMF and AAF support that comes free in all the other softwares...)