As an animator, one of the things that’s important to study is acting, because your characters have to be believeable. I’ve always greatly enjoyed this, and musical theater is one of my big hobbies (you can find me singing “Defying Gravity” at the top of my lungs whenever I’m in the car!). So it’s no surprise that I often record voices for my animations. I’ve been working on a web advertisement that includes characters like a little girl, little boy, mom, dad, and narrator. While I’ve been able to convincingly voice all the female roles (being a little girl is fun!), what I can’t seem to do is the male ones. My husband stepped in for the dad voice, and I thought my little brother would be perfect for the little boy…until his voice changed. Oops. Now I’ve gotta find some new free talent!

Anyway, the point of all this is that I want to really make my voiceovers sound a bit more professional. While I think the acting itself is decent, the sound quality of the recorded files always seems to have scratchy, echo-ey background noise, no matter what I do. (That’s the downside of recording at home…a dog barks, an airplane goes overhead, or the kids downstairs slam the door and ruin a take). The problem, as I’ve found, is not my microphone, but the setup of the room. Apparently sound waves are bouncing off my walls too much, and I need to “deaden” the sound. Except that portable recording studios cost a LOT!

So I was overjoyed to stumble upon this article. It teaches you how to make a little desktop recording booth for less than $40. Yes!!! I just ordered the audio foam from Ebay, and the cube from Amazon, and it came to about $30. I’ll let you know how it works. I’m hoping it will up my sound quality, which will allow me not only to have better-sounding voiceovers for my own projects, but also to record some decent demos for freelance voiceover jobs. 🙂