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The Voice-Over Roadmap

VO Pro Tip: Setting Input Levels

Published 4 months ago • 1 min read

Input Levels

Hey Reader,

When you’re recording and processing your auditions or final files, you should aim for your absolute loudest peaks (usually a plosive or a sudden loud word) to land around -6 dBFS to -3 dBFS.

This crucial bit of space is your headroom. It ensures two things:

  1. Safety: You guarantee that you won't accidentally clip or distort your signal during an unexpectedly loud read.
  2. Flexibility: You give the client or the mixing engineer plenty of room to apply their own compression, EQ, and limiting without introducing distortion. It allows them to easily integrate your voice into their final mix—whether it’s for a whisper-quiet commercial or a loud movie trailer.

Finding Your Loudest Peak

So, how do you know where those loudest peaks are landing?

The easiest way is to use the metering tools built right into your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), like Audacity, Adobe Audition, or Pro Tools.

  1. Use the Peak Meter: After recording, play your file from start to finish. The meters in your DAW are designed to show you in real-time where your levels are. Most software keeps a small "marker" on the meter showing the highest peak that the audio has hit. Pay attention to that number.
  2. Use a Loudness Analysis Tool: Even better, most DAWs have an "Analyze" or "Statistics" function (sometimes called "Loudness" or "Normalize"). Running this analysis on your finished recording will give you a concrete number for your Maximum Peak Level—that's the number you need to make sure is sitting in that comfortable -6 dBFS to -3 dBFS range.

Great audio starts at the source, and your input levels are a huge part of that. If you're newer to VO, take this into account when setting up your studio. And if you are more experienced, it might be a good reminder to just double check your set up and make sure you are hitting these marks!

-Michael

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The Voice-Over Roadmap

The Voice-Over Roadmap is an educational platform for Voice-Over Talent of all experience levels to start, grow, and sustain a profitable business as a professional VO Talent. It is the creation of Michael Langsner, Professional VO talent with over 12 years of experience voicing projects for brands like Adidas, Google, Dell, Levi's and many others.

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