Episode 009 Wayne Henderson - Professional Voice Actor
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 09:59PM 
Wayne Henderson is a professional voice actor, having done voice acting for radio and television commercials, voice-overs for corporate videos, instructional and training CDs, videos, and website audio. He creates his own Podcasts and does Podcast intros and outros.
We wanted to see if we can learn something from Wayne that we can use to make the voice of our podcasts sound better, and also to talk about the benefits of using a voiceover guy to make our podcasts more effective.
Wayne and I start by considering the importance of the voice and how to take care of yours. Then on to mistakes podcasters make - primarily being too far from the mic and using a bit rate that is too low.
Wayne recommends getting the best mic you can afford. He uses two processing methods: the Aphex Aural Exciter on the hardware side, and Cliff Ravenscraft's "special sauce" applied with Adobe Audition on the software side. (Cliff, the "Podcast Answerman" is a great resource for podcasters.) Audition is complicated while Audacity is simpler and free, and you can achieve most of the same effects under Audacity with plugins.
Wayne points out the importance of having a plan for your podcast episode.
We talk about when a podcaster might want to consider a voiceover, and what options you have, like voices.com and elance.com. Wayne explains his approach to developing a voiceover for a podcast, and how lots of communication is important.
We also mention Daniel Lewis and his Episode 50 of The Audacity to Podcast, How to Improve Your Voice from a Cheap Microphone with Audacity.
Follow Wayne on Twitter at @TIWWH
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Reader Comments (2)
As my eight grade chorus teacher said: "the best thing for your throat is a shot of booze before starting". Then he said we couldn't have any.
I encode at 64k to save file space. 128k results in 1MB per minute of recording, and my bandwidth bill reflects it. I can't tell much difference between 64k and 128k, but I'm not (yet!) and audio snob. I guess with unmetered bandwidth from libsyn it's probably not a big deal, but I still prefer 15M files over 30M files when handling lots of old episodes.
I think 64 bit for mono (single track) audio that is mostly voice is usually fine. If stereo, then 128 bit (which is 64 bit per channel) is fine. If the music content is high, then a higher bit rate is appropriate.
If you compress to MP3 using iTunes, just be aware: if you set it to 128 bit and you compress a stereo file, you get 128 bit = 64 bit per channel. If you set it to 128 bit and compress a mono file to MP3, you get a single channel file that's 64 bit. That's not the way Audacity works. In Audacity if you set it to 128 bit you get 128 bit: either two 64 bit channels (stereo) or one 128 bit channel (mono).
Some people don't believe this, but try it and you'll see. I suspect Apple's logic is this: 128 bit implies a certain quality level. Set it at 128 bit and you get that same quality level, be it a mono or a stereo file. That quality is 64 bit per channel.
Maybe a good shot before recording a podcast helps improve the quality - you're more relaxed!