You may have taken all the necessary steps in terms of acoustically treating your space, purchasing high-quality recording equipment, and learning proper recording techniques, but having clean raw audio is only half the battle. Equally important is knowing what settings to use in your recording software, placing your cuts with surgical precision, and applying effects in a way that improves your audio rather than making it sound overly processed. When you book an hour of coaching with GVAA, we’ll take the time to answer all your questions and give you detailed feedback about how to refine your editing process.

It doesn’t have to! As a matter of fact, you’re probably wasting valuable time if you’re nitpicking everything wrong with your auditions. Potential clients aren’t expecting perfection when they listen to your recordings, but they are expecting them to sound professional. During your one-on-one editing training, we’ll walk you through all the common “red flags” that will catch people’s attention while listening to your auditions, and more importantly, how to avoid them! We’ll also give you some workflow tips that can potentially cut your editing time in half!

Our philosophy at GVAA is pretty simple. If we can hear where you placed a cut or used an effect, then your editing needs some improvement. The best recordings are the ones where it sounds like you nailed the script in one take and didn’t need to apply any effects to touch up your audio. To be clear, the goal isn’t to avoid piecing together multiple takes, it’s to cleanly edit out your breaths while maintaining a natural pacing.

Voice actors can get in the habit of relying too much on the visuals of the waveform, and as a result, they end up making sloppy edits that easily could’ve been avoided. The good news is that you don’t need the ears of a veteran audio engineer, you just need some basic ear training. We’ll give you clear-cut examples of what overly-processed audio sounds like compared to raw and unpolished audio, that way you have a good frame of reference for how your recordings should sound before you export them.

Unfortunately there’s not a straightforward answer to this question. You’ll find plenty of resources online that will tell you that using effects like compression or equalization are essential, but that’s not always the case. You’ll also hear some people recommend the use of gates or limiters, and those types of effects can oftentimes be detrimental to your audio.

Generally speaking, a high-pass filter to cut out the bass frequencies, some gentle noise reduction, and normalization to boost your levels are a great starting point as far as effects go. When you book a one-on-one session with us, we’ll make personalized recommendations rather than give you generic advice. Some people can greatly benefit from effects like de-clickers and de-essers, while for other people they would just be an unnecessary step in the editing process.

No need to worry if all this editing jargon sounds like gibberish! GVAA takes pride in breaking things down for you in a way that’s completely easy to understand!

There’s definitely a learning curve to editing voiceover, but the good news is that it’s probably not as steep as you think it is. Some people pick it up faster than others, but the important thing is to practice your editing consistently, carefully, and deliberately. GVAA will walk you through how to do this step by step, and once you get in the habit of holding yourself to a higher standard than most other voice actors, you’ll stand out in a way that gives clients an extra incentive to hire you!