The Definitive Voiceover Guide 2020

I can’t stress this one enough – you need to have a quiet environment in which to record. People usually forget how important sound is in a video, so they tend to neglect this aspect and record in weird places such as a coffee shop (arghhh!)

You want to record in a silent room, without any other people around. Preferably, without any other people in others rooms too (if you can). No car noises from the outside, no fridge sounds in the background, no people yelling or chatting outside.

If you have a great microphone, believe me, it will pick up even the “hum” sound of your fridge or the AC that’s on in the other room. Again, you want to have it AS CLEAN AS POSSIBLE.

For the love of God, please don’t use the in-built laptop microphone to record your voiceover!

It’s good for Skype calls or anything like that, but that’s about it.

For this step, you will need an external microphone.

However, to have audio that sounds professional to 99% of people, you don’t actually need a professional studio microphone that costs four figures.

In fact, you can get amazing ones for around $100 or less.

Here’s the one that I use: Blue Yeti Microphone

Blue Yeti Black
(it looks so good!)

Here’s the one that I use: Blue Yeti Microphone

And I absolutely love it! Literally, everyone that I know who has any sort of online business or YouTube channel uses the Blue Yeti microphone. If you ask me, it’s the best USB microphone out there! It’s ± $100 and will be well worth the investment.

Other honorable mentions at ±$50 point mark

• Yeti Snowball
• Audio Technica

There are literally a ton of new ones popping up every day, so it’s impossible to list them all, but you can’t go wrong with either one of the above!

I also recommend using a pop filter, to block our weird breathing sounds or P’s that sound kinda awkward and unprofessional. Yes, it’s that weird thing you’ve probably seen before and always wondered what the hell it is.

If you’d like to see this step in video format, you can do so here:

I’m literally blown away with how great this software is. Of course, it’s not Adobe Audition, BUT – it does absolutely everything you need!

After that, the magic happens, you click the big red button to start recording!

After that, the magic happens, you click the big red button to start recording!

Give it a go. Maybe a couple, actually. You will have to do a few takes until you get it right. NOBODY ever gets it right the first time. Even if you think you did, do it again!

Don’t be afraid to take pauses in between sentences, if you need to take a breath, grab a glass of water real quick, etc. You can easily select and delete those pauses later.

Now the real fun begins!

A little bit of post production to really make the voiceover sound better!

The way this works is fairly simple. Works in 2-steps, actually.

To do this, you have to select a part of the voiceover that is completely silent, preferably at least 1-second long. This is like “clean noise” and it will instruct Audacity to figure out all the noise in it and use that profile to remove it later f rom the entire VO.

PRO TIP: always leave a few seconds empty at the beginning or at the end
of the recording to use to generate a noise profile

After that, you go on the top menu to Effect -> Noise Reduction

Leave everything as it is by default and click Get Noise Profile.

Then go again to Effect -> Noise Reduction, and this time on the bottom half at step 2, just click Ok to Apply Noise Reduction on the entire voiceover

The problem when you have too many options is that you don’t know what to choose.

And with a voiceover, and usually, everything about your brand, you want to think it through before hand.

You don’t just want to jump in and select anyone.

There are a few things to consider.

Most importantly, you want the voiceover to be relevant and relatable to your target audience.

This can get a little tricky. You have to think about your target audience here.

Is it mostly made of men? Women? Is it equally mixed?

If you sell makeup products that an audience of 100% females, it’s not a good idea to get a man to record the voiceover.

Are you talking to a demographic of middle aged men interested in improving their golf swing? Pretty obvious answer again.

However – when it’s a mixed demographic, there’s no wrong or right answer. You’ll have to go with your intuition here. Or simply, just your taste.

Again, pretty important.

Making a real-estate investment video that will be seen by 45+ years old high net worth individuals?

Maybe don’t use someone who sounds like he’s in his early 20s.

Making a video for a social media app predominantely used by teenages? Same, don’t use somebody in his or her senior years.

It’s pretty simple really.

This one is still connected to your target audience, but also has something to do with the purpose of your video.

Are you selling something?

Are you educating people?

You can tell the voiceover artist to interpret the text in so many ways.

A few words you can use to describe the style: professional, warm, corporate, casual, friendly, upbeat, energetic, enthusiastic, etc.

Don’t rush on this.

If you’ve been online for a while, you probably already know what I’m about to suggest. I’m talking about a freelancer marketplace called Fiverr.

Long story short, when it first launched around ten years ago, all services on it cost just… $5! As you can imagine, that’s not a lot of money, so things evolved and prices increased.

However, you can still get some very affordable high quality services on it sometimes. That’s especially true for voiceovers.

So let’s get started

First, you need to sign up and register your new account.

Then it’s time to browse the talent pool of Fiverr and find some voiceover services. Go to the top navigation menu where it says Music & Audio and click on Voice over

Now, you want, you will check out a few options, but ideally, you want to refine your search even more by using filters.

Here, you can select language, gender, age and a lot of other things. But also, most importantly, you can also enter your budget. Keep in mind though the usually the price you see displayed is for 100 or 150 words, so you’ll have to do the math.

Check out a few options, listen to a few demos, see what’s available.

Personally, because I’ve done this hundreds of times and have a ton of experience with voiceover artists, I like to give a chance to new artists as well.

But in your case, if you’re just starting out, the safest thing to do is to get someone with a gazillion reviews.

As you can see below, finding people with more than 1,000 reviews on the platform is not unusual. It’s very hard to go wrong with that!

Once you’re on his profile, you can enter how many words you have on the right, so it calculates the exact price. Once you’re done, just go ahead and order the “gig” (Fiverr terminology).

After that, it’s all pretty simple.

Say hi, describe your project real quick, attach the script and send any specific instructions you have.

24-48h later, you get the voiceover sent to your inbox.

It’s as simple as that!

Be nice and leave a review after that, it really helps the artists.

Same as Fiverr, we will be using a 3rd party provided for this. But this, we’ll use a platform that deals exclusively with voiceovers, which tends to attract the best talent in the world.

You won’t be surprised to find artists on this platform that have worked with some of the biggest brands in the world.

Introducing… Voices.com!

Get a free account and on the top right corner, click Post a Job

You will have to fill in a form with all the details about your voiceover.

Be as specific as possible, because it really helps the voiceover artist and it gives him or her a lot of context to work with.

Once you’re done and you post the job, it’s time to wait for people to send in auditions. In my experience, give it at least 2-3 business days to start seeing a good number of people sending auditions. I rarely ever get less than 50 auditions for projects I post here.

The good thing about Voices.com, is that they read a sample of your script. So you don’t just hear their general demo, you actually hear them reading the words from your project.

How cool is that?

Keep in mind, those auditions are usually recorded in a rush. The actual final quality of the recording, both in terms of creative and technical, will likely improve once you select the winner and hire him/her.

A very useful features of Voices.com, when you work on client projects, is that you can select a few good options and make a shortlist that you can send to your client to check.

Not only that, you can also pass it along to your colleagues, partners, friends and get them to vote on their favorite options and choose your voiceover artist like that.