These are notes to keep in mind when practicing on getting a good recording. Once you start recording though, best to focus on the acting and character and worry about sound quality later.

CLIPPING

For this, lowering input volume may help. A good homework assignment would be to practice saying “Fastest gun in the west!” with a shit-ton of emotion but trying to find a way to

A) not make it clip and

B) not have a lot of echo (meaning, you aren’t backing away from the mic to get your results. Some backing away you can get away with, but that’s usually only necessary in combat)

so here, we have FASTEST and WEST. The fastest is obvious, but the WEST is a sneaky clip. It’s not touching the top, but you can tell it’s squared off. Mostly you can tell by listening.

Ultimately, it comes down to adjusting gain levels, practicing yelling, and getting a good feel for what your mic is willing to tolerate and how you can get a good, non-clipping take without sacrificing emotion.  Ideally, low input levels are the best and first defense.

In audacity, the input slider is here

Clipping is pretty bad because it makes your ears burn after a while. Like, I don’t think humans are engineered to tolerate it for long periods.

PITCH

This is the easiest to correct. Just use your normal voice. Anything higher sounds artificial methinks.

Here’s an example of a good voice then pitch change

And here’s a higher pitch one

With the second take, I can’t really raise the pitch without it sounding artificial, because it’s already pretty high. At the same time, it doesn’t sound like a kid either. So yeah, normal voice like in the top is best.

Your natural pitch is pretty much golden for this sort of thing. I raise the pitch on my voice and it sounds like a tin can. But with some people, it sounds totally natural.

WIBBLES

Your favorite thing in the universe. As I said in the email, I think it’s fatigue. It’s only a theory, could be complete bupkis. For example, on this track:

Both wibbles were at the end of each sentence. Jelly, and Together. But notice how you say “Jelly” in between with zero problems. Leads me to believe it’s something that’s correctable.

Obviously short vowels like “Sick” or “Apple” are probably the most common offenders regardless of their location, but the “gas” take you did on the redos was perfect, so it’s not impossible to get it done.