Recording Your Narration

October 9, 2008

In an April post, I made my case for narration in eLearning. As a learner, I love it (when done right). So as a developer, I like to create narrated courses. Many of us, for budgetary reasons, have to do our own in-house narration work. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I made the point in that earlier post that professional voiceover work can sound synthetic if you don’t get the right voice for your project. And I won’t even start griping about those robotic text-to-speech tools that are being foisted upon the eLearning development community (note my rant on that topic in the earlier post as well).

In addition to the cost savings, doing your own narration recording makes it quick and easy for you to go in and make changes - which, based on my experience, your customer will ask for. No matter how many times they’ve supposedly “reviewed” and “approved” the script. (Note to self: I need to better explain the definition of the words “review” and “approve” to my customers.)

While I won’t claim to have been born with a professional voiceover voice (far from it), I have managed to create narrations that sound good despite the lack of golden vocal chords and the budget for an expensive recording setup. I thought I’d share with you my setup as it may be helpful if you’re just getting started yourself. Or perhaps you’re not happy with the results you’re getting from your current equipment.

Personally, I have never been able to get decent results from a headset microphone. I even purchased the headset recommended by the folks at Articulate (a Plantronics model), and while the results sound OK, they don’t sound good. I would love the convenience and script-reading ease of a headset mic, but until someone creates a really good one, I’ll stick with my desktop mic: the Blue Snowball.

Now, professional narrators would probably never consider using a USB microphone. But I don’t want to deal with a breakout box/mixer for an XLR mic. I like the convenience (and small desktop footprint) of a simple USB mic I can plug directly into my computer. There are now a handful of good desktop USB mics that are well-suited to narration work. I chose the Snowball. It sounds good. And it looks good. I added the ringer shock mount (which is probably overkill for my needs) and a pop filter (which I consider a must-have accessory). I picked up my metal-screened pop filter at Guitar Center for around $40. The Snowball can also be found at Guitar Center, or various online outlets.

To squeeze the best possible sound out of my budget setup, I created my own little desktop sound booth with four 16″ acoustic tiles from Markertek glued to 16″ square pieces of foam core I bought (and had cut to size) at a local art supply store. You can see my setup in the photo below. Note in the photo I don’t have the pop filter attached, which I always do when recording. When I need to record, I place a towel under my mic and stand three acoustic tiles around it. Laying the fourth tile on top keeps the whole thing from toppling over (note the big open gap in the back top edge is not normal - this was a quick rush setup for the photo).

My rig won’t win any awards for looks, but it gets the job done on a budget. The only real downside is the difficulty in reading my narration script. I record at an angle, looking off to the right to read my narration script. Sure, I’m a bit cross-eyed by the end of my recording, but the angle helps reduce the plosives and the foam tiles give me pretty good sound isolation.

Once I’m done with my recording and editing, I simply stack my tiles under my desk and slide the mic back out of the way until the next project. Cake. And who doesn’t love cake?

For software, I use Apple’s free (with any Mac) GarageBand, which has been a great tool for narration recording. I will detail my process and the narration-friendly features of GarageBand in a future post.

My iMac is whisper quiet, which helps. You don’t realize just how noisy the world is until you’re focused on trying to achieve complete silence. My old desktop PC sounded like a vacuum cleaner compared to my iMac.

So this is my setup, and it works well for me. The whole thing (minus the iMac of course) was around $200. More than the $75 I spent on that Plantronics headset mic, but the results are far better.

If you have a different setup that works well for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Happy narrating!

Posted in Audio, eLearning Development Tools