Reducing Noise

Hi, I'm Daniel Perea, and I work for PMQ Pizza Magazine as the media producer.

Today, we're going to learn some tips about reducing studio noise.

Hard, flat surfaces can lead to a roomy-sounding recording.

Professional studios reduce these audio reflections by using acoustic foam.

If acoustic foam isn't in your budget, you COULD use the poor-man's sound reduction material - McDonald's drink holders.  This method was shown in the movie Hustle & Flow.

Heavy blankets and puzzle mats have also been known to be put on walls to achieve similar effect.

In addition, you want to turn off any electronic devices that are not needed to reduce electrical noise. This includes televisions and computers in other rooms, A/C units. Possibly even refrigerators. (Hopefully your session doesn't last long enough for your food to spoil.)  Anything can potentially leak electronic noise into the circuitry of your house or studio space - so give your area a thorough check for devices you might forget about, like a game console that might be in idle or sleep mode, but still using power.

Finally, make sure you get the mic as close as practically possible to whatever you're recording.  

This will make for the best instrument to room sound/noise floor ratio.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this has helped you out!

How to Record Spoken Word

Hi, I'm Daniel Perea - media producer for PMQ Pizza Magazine.

Sometimes a video project I'm editing needs a good voiceover to tie it all together.  In today's blog, I'm going to show you how to make a spoken word recording.

The three elements we need for this project are:

1. A microphone.

In this case a Seinheiser on a table stand with a pop filter.  A pop filter prevents those annoying wind noises from your breath from getting into the recording. Nothing makes a recording sound unprofessional faster than pops and breath noises.

2.  A mixer.

In this case, a Peavey PV6. This mixer has a USB output and also functions as our analog-to-digital converter.

3. DAW

For this project, we're running Audacity on a windows notebook, however you could also use Garageband or other DAWs on a Mac.

Once the mixer is plugged in, we connect the mixer's USB output to any USB port of our computer.

Then plug in our mic cable.

And turn the mixer on.  Then we can adjust our mic input gain

And levels

Until we get an acceptable sound level in Audacity.

For the purposes of this demonstration, we won't dive into all the various settings and options in Audacity, but will just operate on the Audacity default settings.

Now we hit the record button and record some sample audio.

And there we have the resulting sound recording displayed in our timeline.

You can edit out pieces of the recording or do multiple takes if you like. But for today's demo, we won't really dive into that. 

 For my video work, I generally record and just let the performer do multiple takes all in one continuous recording, and I prefer to just edit the pieces I need at a later time in my video editing suite.   So if we're happy with this recording, we can now export it as a wave file.

And here we see the resulting file - for demonstration, saved in My Documents. 

 You can choose to save a recording anywhere you need it. For a larger audio project, you would likely save it in a project file, along with all the project's other assets.  For my work, I usually save the audio files in the same project folder as the video clips of the project I'm working on.

I hope you've enjoyed this basic demonstration of how to record spoken word!  I'm going to end with a video project that features a voiceover that we recorded using exactly this method: my colleague, Brian Hernandez in an installment of Adventures In Pizza!