How’s it going, everyone! Sean here with Inlustris Audio, and today I’m finally back. It’s been almost a year, I think, since I started posting consistently, and I really want to start doing that again for you guys. I want to give you cool tips and tricks with audio that I find interesting and that I love doing. So, without further ado, let’s discuss how to turn an audio dialogue voiceover into something that sounds like you’re speaking through a radio.
In Pro Tools, we have a blank dialogue, and I’m going to turn off all the effects to show you what we’re working with.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
The first step is to clean up the microphone, removing any room noise with an EQ. I did a little bit of cleanup work and boosted the clip gain to help give it more volume when editing.
Next, we’ll use a creative equalizer. We want this to sound like it’s coming from a radio, and radios typically don’t have a lot of low or high end. They tend to boost the nasalness of the person speaking. So, I took away the highs and lows, and I boosted a little bit of that nasalness around 1k. I used the lo-fi plug-in in Pro Tools to create the radio effect. If you’re using another program, there are loads of other tools that can emulate the same effect. I’ll link them in the description below. Some are free, some are not, so choose carefully. I played around with the sample rate, the sample size, the anti-aliasing, and added some distortion and saturation very subtly. I could have added noise if I wanted to, but I didn’t think it would have helped too much for what I was going for. With all those effects in play, this is what we got:
How’s it going, everyone! Sean here with Inlustris Audio, and today I’m finally back. It’s been almost a year, I think, since I started posting consistently, and I really want to start doing that again for you guys. I want to give you cool tips and tricks with audio that I find interesting and that I love doing. So, without further ado, let’s discuss how to turn an audio dialogue voiceover into something that sounds like you’re speaking through a radio.
In Pro Tools, we have a blank dialogue, and I’m going to turn off all the effects to show you what we’re working with.
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
The first step is to clean up the microphone, removing any room noise with an EQ. I did a little bit of cleanup work and boosted the clip gain to help give it more volume when editing.
Next, we’ll use a creative equalizer. We want this to sound like it’s coming from a radio, and radios typically don’t have a lot of low or high end. They tend to boost the nasalness of the person speaking. So, I took away the highs and lows, and I boosted a little bit of that nasalness around 1k. I used the lo-fi plug-in in Pro Tools to create the radio effect. If you’re using another program, there are loads of other tools that can emulate the same effect. I’ll link them in the description below. Some are free, some are not, so choose carefully. I played around with the sample rate, the sample size, the anti-aliasing, and added some distortion and saturation very subtly. I could have added noise if I wanted to, but I didn’t think it would have helped too much for what I was going for. With all those effects in play, this is what we got:
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
It really just fills out what the lo-fi plug-in was doing and adds some more character to it. I think I will add in very subtly some of that electrical buzz, as it really helps to create that radio atmosphere. But that can be annoying to listen to continually, so I’ll turn it off for now.
Next is the compressor. Radios are notorious for compressing audio, both in the broadcast standard and within the device itself. So, whenever you’re doing anything for radio, compress the audio a lot, just squash the living daylight out of it. You don’t want any peaks, just a full-on wave sausage. I changed the ratio to about 10, the attack to about 1 millisecond, and the release was very long. With those settings, this is what we’ve got:
“This is test audio for creative dialogue editing.”
It’s admittedly a bit much, so I’m actually going to pull that down a little bit, mess with the ratio, and lighten up on the attack and release. Audio is all subjective depending on what you want, but this is just a foundation for you guys to start with. It’s okay to go in there and change things if you make a mistake.
For the last effect, you can use any plugin that has an exciter or saturation feature. In this case, I’m using iZotope’s Neutron plugin, which is not free as far as I know. However, they may have had a free version for Black Friday or other promotions. It does go on sale quite often, so check iZotope’s website frequently.
For this effect, I like to use the tape saturator and blend it moderately at 56% (dry/wet). The blend determines how much of the processed signal is mixed in with the dry signal, and the drive controls how hard the saturator or exciter is applied. Let me play the test audio for creative dialogue editing. Before the compressor, it was ducking a little and didn’t have much character to bring out what was underneath. The saturator fills it in with the gritty tape emulation character we love to hear in old-time radios, which is what we’re going for today. This is just a starting point, and you can add more plugins and effects, go in, and change it. I don’t want you guys to copy these settings and move on.
Audio is fun and artistic; you have to figure out what you want, hear it in your head, and use these tools to replicate it. Oftentimes, when I start with tips like this and begin playing around, I start hearing sounds that I wouldn’t have thought of before that I really like. So please take this as a starting point and not as a means to an end. Just go nuts! That’s it for today’s quick tip. I hope you guys enjoyed it, and as always, I will see you guys in the next video. See ya!
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