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\u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n
The listener doesn’t hear the mistake. They hear the join<\/h2>\n
A misread word is easy to forgive. A sentence that suddenly sounds like it was recorded in a different room is not. It pulls the listener out of the story for a second, and on a long book those seconds add up to a reviewer writing “the sound kept changing”.<\/p>\n
ACX, the audiobook platform run by Audible, puts consistency right into its audio submission requirements: “Your audiobook should be consistent in sound and formatting. This includes audio levels, tone, noise level, spacing, and pronunciation.” A pickup that’s louder, brighter, roomier or slower than the sentence before it breaks that rule even if it’s technically perfect on its own.<\/p>\n
Engineers have been warning about this for years. Recording an audiobook over several sessions for Sound On Sound, engineer Mike Senior says he “made sure to alert everyone that punching in to replace small sections of a previous session’s recording might not work, owing to timbral inconsistencies between different days.” Timbral is the important word. It means the colour of the sound, and it’s the thing that shifts when your mic, your room or your voice is even slightly different.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n
Write down the session before you walk out of it<\/h2>\n
The single best thing you can do for future pickups happens on day one of any long job. Before you start recording, note everything that shapes the sound, then leave it alone.<\/p>\n
Mike Senior’s habit on that audiobook was simple: “I made a point of photographing the first-session setup in order that we could recreate it reasonably closely on subsequent occasions.” A phone photo of the mic, the stand, the pop filter and the chair costs you ten seconds. Take one from the side, so the distance from mouth to mic shows, and one from behind the mic looking at where your head goes.<\/p>\n
Then write the rest down, in a notebook that lives by the mic or in a text file inside the project folder:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Mic and distance.<\/strong> Which mic, how far from your mouth, what angle. A hand’s width is a common habit; whatever yours is, measure it.<\/li>\n
- Gain.<\/strong> Where the knob on your interface sits. Photograph it, or put a tiny dot of tape on the dial.<\/li>\n
- Software settings.<\/strong> Sample rate, bit depth, any input processing, and the project template you used.<\/li>\n
- Room.<\/strong> Curtains open or closed, door shut, heating off, which blanket was hung where.<\/li>\n
- Time of day and what you drank.<\/strong> It sounds fussy. It isn’t, as you’ll see below.<\/li>\n
- Character notes.<\/strong> For fiction, the line where each character first speaks, so you can play it back before a pickup.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Author and narrator C.C. Hogan, who records his own books, adds a neat trick for the mic: “Once you find your ideal mic position, measure its distance from static objects so that if you move it, you know where to put it back to.” A wall, a desk edge or a shelf doesn’t move. Your stand will, the minute someone tidies the room.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n
Put yourself back in exactly the same spot<\/h2>\n
Most matching problems come from distance. Move a few centimetres closer to most microphones and your voice gets warmer and boomier, because of the proximity effect. Move back and you hear more of the room and less of the detail. Both changes are obvious when a pickup sits next to the original.<\/p>\n
That’s why a lot of narrators deliberately choose a working distance that forgives small movements. Mike Senior placed his mics “a good 25cm” away for exactly this reason, explaining that “positioning the mic a little further away meant that the sound would change less.” You don’t have to work that far back, especially in an untreated room, but the idea is sound: the closer you are, the more every small shift shows.<\/p>\n
Mark the floor. Two strips of tape where your toes go, or a mark on the desk for your elbow, will put your body back in the same place without thinking about it. If you sit, mark the chair height too. Standing to record one day and sitting the next changes your posture and your breath, and you’ll hear it. There’s more on getting that first position right in our piece on mic technique and angles<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Keep the gain where you wrote it down. If you’ve turned the knob since, put it back before you record a single word, and check your levels against the original, not against what feels right today. Our guide to gain and recording levels<\/a> explains why quieter is usually safer.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n
Your voice is the hardest thing in the room to match<\/h2>\n
You can tape a floor and photograph a knob. Your voice is less obliging. It’s lower and a bit rougher first thing in the morning, it warms up over the day, and it tires by evening. C.C. Hogan puts it plainly: “Your voice can change during the day, so some recommend recording at the same time.” If the book was recorded in the mornings, record the pickups in the morning.<\/p>\n
The same goes for how you are on the day. A cold, a late night, a big meal or a long talky lunch all change the sound. If you’re hoarse, it’s better to tell the producer you need a couple of days than to send fixes that sound like a different person.<\/p>\n
Then there’s performance, which is where most pickups really go wrong. In the middle of chapter twelve you were inside the story. Your pace was set, your energy matched the scene, and a character had a particular rasp. Three weeks later you’re reading one sentence cold. Hogan’s warning is worth taping to the wall: “if you have the inflexion wrong or your mic position does not match, you will never correct that satisfactorily.”<\/p>\n
So never record a pickup without listening first. Play the paragraph before and after the fix, out loud through your headphones, two or three times. Read along under your breath. Then record, still with the playback in your ears if you can, so your pace and pitch lock on to the original. If you use the punch and roll method, this is exactly what it’s built for; we walk through it in punch and roll recording<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n
Run the pickup session in a fixed order<\/h2>\n
Pickup sessions are short, so it’s tempting to rush them. A steady routine makes them faster and saves you from sending a second batch of fixes for your fixes.<\/p>\n
Start by rebuilding the setup from your notes and photos. Warm up the way you did on the original sessions, because a cold voice won’t match a warm one. Then record room tone. Karen Commins’s glossary describes it as “The background noise in your recording space, which should be as close to silent as possible,” and advises, “Record at least 10 seconds of room tone in each session so that your editor can copy and paste room tone as needed to cover extraneous noises.” Your room may sound different today, with a new fridge hum or traffic, and the editor needs to know.<\/p>\n
Now work through the list in book order, not in order of difficulty. For each one, play the original, say the page and line number as a quick slate so the editor can find it, then read the full sentence two or three times. Small variations help: one take matching the original read, one a touch slower, one with the emphasis the proofer asked for. The editor picks the one that fits.<\/p>\n
\n“Nobody remembers a misread word. Everybody notices a sentence that sounds like it came from another room.”<\/p>\n
The Voice Realm<\/span><\/div>\n
Character pickups need one extra step. Before any line from a character, play their first line in the book, and the line just before the fix. Accents and voices drift over a long recording, and you want to match the version the listener heard most recently, which isn’t always the version from chapter one.<\/p>\n
Check the join before you send anything<\/h2>\n
If you edit your own audio, drop each pickup into the original file and listen to the sentence before, the fix, and the sentence after, in that order. Listen on headphones and then on a small speaker or a phone, because a mismatch in brightness often shows up more on small speakers.<\/p>\n
Things to listen for:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Level.<\/strong> Does the fix jump out or sink back? Match it with plain gain, not with heavy processing.<\/li>\n
- Colour.<\/strong> Is it boomier or thinner than its neighbours? That’s usually distance. Re-record rather than reach for EQ, which rarely fixes it fully.<\/li>\n
- Room.<\/strong> Can you hear more reverb or a different background noise? That’s a room change, a door open or a curtain moved.<\/li>\n
- Pace and pitch.<\/strong> Does the sentence feel faster, higher or brighter than the reading around it? That’s the voice, not the gear.<\/li>\n
- Breaths and gaps.<\/strong> Is the space before and after the same length as the original reading?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
ACX also asks for “between 1 and 5 seconds of room tone at the beginning and end of each file,” so if a pickup lands near the start or end of a chapter, check those edges too. If someone else edits for you, send the pickups as Commins describes, usually as one file, clearly slated, and include your room tone. Our editing pass order<\/a> covers the rest of the cleaning.<\/p>\n
If you’re not sure whether your room itself has changed, measure it. Voice Edit Suite’s free Home Studio Analysis<\/a> lets you record a short sample and see your background noise and room sound, so you can compare today with the day you started the job.<\/p>\n
Fewer pickups next time<\/h2>\n
The cheapest pickup is the one you never need. A few habits cut the list down a lot.<\/p>\n
Prep the script properly before the first session, including every name and odd word. Our guide to researching pronunciation<\/a> saves you from the classic pickup, a name said one way in chapter two and another in chapter nine. Keep a running pronunciation list as you go and check it before each session.<\/p>\n
Listen back to the end of each session’s audio before you start the next one. Five minutes of listening catches the dropped “not” or the swapped character voice while the setup is still exactly as it was, and the fix takes seconds instead of a whole rebuild.<\/p>\n
And keep your setup notes for every long job, even after it’s delivered. Producers can come back months later with a change, and on that day the notebook by the mic is worth more than any plug-in.<\/p>\n
Pickups are a normal part of the work. Every narrator gets them. The ones you’ll be proud of are the ones the editor drops in without a single note back, because they sound like they were always there.<\/p>\n
Sources: Karen Commins, Narrators Roadmap, “Audiobook Production Workflow”<\/a> and “Glossary of audiobook-related terms”<\/a>; Billie Fulford-Brown, “How do you narrate an Audiobook?”<\/a>; ACX, “ACX audio submission requirements”<\/a>; Mike Senior, Sound On Sound, “Session Notes: Recording An Audiobook”<\/a>, December 2016; C.C. Hogan, “Audiobook Recording Tips”<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How to record audiobook and voice over pickups that match the original: setup notes, mic position, time of day, listening first and checking the join.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,95,504],"tags":[542,895,334,556,894,505],"class_list":["post-6950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-narration-voice-over","category-voice-over-studio","category-voice-over-tips","tag-audiobook-narration","tag-audiobook-pickups","tag-home-studio","tag-punch-and-roll","tag-voice-over-pickups","tag-voice-over-tips"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
- Colour.<\/strong> Is it boomier or thinner than its neighbours? That’s usually distance. Re-record rather than reach for EQ, which rarely fixes it fully.<\/li>\n
- Gain.<\/strong> Where the knob on your interface sits. Photograph it, or put a tiny dot of tape on the dial.<\/li>\n