Hi! I use Nuendo for recording and tracking. I began using Nuendo as a sort of learned beginner with the craft of voiceover, so I’ve opted for less processing and more transparent sound as time has gone on.
My chain for recording voice is typically raw recording → RX11 Mouth De-Click (if needed) → Noise Gate → EQ (Strip EQ, but I swap with Freq 2 if I need more precise edits) → Compressor, after having done editing and gain staging. I messed with my mic placement to get a good sound, and I really like how clean of a sound you can get through using the Strip.
That being said, to any other voiceover artists out there, do you use the Channel Strip more often? Or do you use the insert plugins more? Which do you prefer? For more professional projects, what’s your plugin chain like?
Typically, I’ll use a clean solid state mic preamp into an La2a compressor. After that, it is up to the mixing engineer, if it’s not me, to decide what to do with the voice.
As to plugins for a spoken word voiceover, well, again, it depends on what is needed. Book on tape? As little processing, maybe some more EQ to fine tune their voice so it sounds more like the person, and a tiny bit of compression. Movie looping? You have to match the original film’s vocal sound, so that can vary wildly from project to project. Need FX because it’s a wacky radio ad or TV ad? Well, more processing is needed too.
Our VO template is usually set in the following manner. We record directly in 32 bit float in Nuendo and use Direct Offline Processing where we first normalise to -3 and use insert Frequency HPF at 80 Hz and, next we use Izotope mouth declick, deplosives, deess to cleanup and a compressor at insert with a 2 to 3db makeup gain and the following settings Threshold at -6 with 20.1 HI ratio, 1mS attack time and 500mS release. We hardly have to do anything to the template except we closely match and average the roomtone to make the VO sound natural and part of the documentary.
These days we also use Silence Detection as you can watch here.
We take time with mic placement to eliminate mouth noises. We track through a hardware tube preamp to two compressors: 1176, Opto. After that almost nothing is needed.
When tracks were recorded elsewhere, VocalChain is really useful.