The 2 most important effects for voice over artists - Voice Over Series - Part 4

(Please make sure you have gone through the Sound Better Series. Some of the concepts taught in the Sound Better Series are used as the building blocks of this Voice Over Series)

Two audio effects work wonders for professional voice-over work. I am talking about EQ and Compressor. 

But why do these 2 effects work wonders than the rest? Because these 2 helps to get the desired tone of the voice over.

The tone is very important for professional work. A commercial voiceover for an Ad and an announcer voiceover will not have the same or similar tone.

It depends on the script and the intended purpose of the voice-over.

You can think of the EQ and the Compressor as the controller effects for the voice tone.

However, those two effects are less understood by beginners and most used by audio engineers. 

In this post, I will explain what those 2 effects do and why they are important for professional voice-over.

If you have followed my YouTube videos or courses, you already know I suggest this sequence:

1. Normalize

2. Noise Reduction 

3. EQ

4. Compressor

5. Normalize

That is the most beginner-safe sequence. By “beginner safe“, I mean anyone can easily follow the sequence without worrying if it would degrade audio quality.

You are guaranteed to make some improvement if you follow that sequence.

The EQ and Compressor I show in my tutorials are simple & basic. I do not utilize the actual powers of EQ & Compressor in my tutorials.

You may ask why I do not fully capitalize the EQ or Compressor on the beginner-friendly videos. 

Well, using those to their full potential is not that simple. If I ask my clients, “Do you use EQ or Compressor in your effect chain?“

The most common answer I get is, “I use those because I saw them in your videos. I do not know what they actually do.”

I do not blame them for not understanding it. You can not learn the EQ or Compressor from a single video.

In fact, there are courses on EQ or Compressor alone. I do not have it yet, but thinking of building such courses.

Let’s talk about what EQ does first and then the Compressor.

EQ is the process of changing volume by frequency. You need to focus on two words here: “volume“ and “frequency“.

This means that EQ is a volume control tool. However, unlike Normalize, it controls volume by frequency.

When you use Normalize, the entire audio is affected the same amount. EQ does not work in a similar linear fashion.

It alters volume by frequency. That means it can increase the volume of some frequency, decrease the volume of some other frequency, and keep the volume as it is for remaining frequencies at the same time.

That is quite a technical way to describe it, but how it affects our listening experience.

EQ can shape the tone of the voice. It can make the voice sound rich and crisp. It can make the voice sound clear.

It can make the voice sound deep. It can reduce the harshness or sibilance of the voice.

EQ does all these things by altering the frequency combination. By increasing(boosting) or decreasing (cutting) the volume of specific frequencies, we can shape the tone of a voice.

But unlike other effects, you can not blindly follow a set of configurations for EQ. You have to educate yourself on how the different frequencies sound.

You have to understand how the voice changes with changes in some frequencies. 

All these require pretty some practice and proper ear training.

I recommend that you study the frequency chart in Producer Hive. You will get an idea of how different frequencies sound.

There are lots of things to learn about EQ, and the chart is the starting point.

So you get the idea that frequency manipulation is the cornerstone of shaping the tone.

But how can the compressor effect shape the tone? 

On the surface, we use the compressor effect to reduce the dynamic range. In other words, we decrease the volume of louder sounds and increase the volume of softer sounds through the compressor.

There are some techniques to do this compressor manipulation through several iterations. That kind of controlled compressor can make the sound fat or sounding rich.

By default, the compressor makes the sound crisp. People use multi-band compressors to make their voices crisp.

In my tutorials, you would usually see the single-band compressor. Multi-band compressor can be thought of as a combination of EQ and compressor.

The compressor technique does not end there. There are different types of compressor plugins available in the market.

Different types of compressors make different sounds. You may wonder what the basis of different types of compressors is.

Nowadays, we do everything digitally or with software. But imagine how it was before?

Audio manipulation was done through hardware. There were expensive hardware for EQ or Compressor or many type of effects.

So, there were many different compressor vendors, which sounded slightly different. 

Nowadays, different plugins try to mimic those legacy compressors. So you can get a vibe of those analog sounds.

All these discussions mean it is possible to get a quite distinct tone with EQ & Compressor.

As a voice-over artist, you may not find such time to invest in learning all this technical stuff. 

All I suggest at the moment is to learn some basic techniques to manipulate audio through EQ and Compressor.

Then you would know that your voice can be shaped in a way that is not possible in simple processing.

Unfortunately, I can not point you to such a learning resource of mine. These are bit advanced things and I may not get enough people interested in this.

However, I wish to make some courses on these advanced topics. For now, I suggest you become an exclusive member, where I will put some exclusive content.

» Click here to become an Exclusive member ($7/mo, cancel anytime)

To bring out the best EQ of a voice, I offer a custom EQ and macro/preset service. It is available both for Audacity and Adobe Audition users.

In fact, you can email me if you are looking for such a thing for another software.

» Click Here to check out my custom EQ & Macro/Preset service.

Regardless of whether you check my service, you should invest some time in learning the benefits of EQ and Compressor.

Once you learn that stuff, you will clearly understand what makes a good voice-over pop.

In my next post, I will discuss the correct sequence of effects for voice-over. For beginners, it can be confusing, and some people destroy their audio by following the wrong steps.

I will discuss that more in the next post.