Author: Mike Pascarella

Let’s establish at least one thing from the get-go; if you’ve decided to go through the trouble of producing a voiceover - the spoken message is very important to you. So the best quality possible is a given. There’s a lot that goes into creating a voiceover, including understanding your target audience’s needs, crafting the right message, hiring the right talent, and making good production decisions. For the purpose of this article, I’ll be mostly discussing recording and production.

We love overdrive, that gentle push over the line into a round and harmonically rich distortion. Some of the best sounds in recorded music have utilized it. But have you ever wondered why applying overdrive sometimes sounds glorious, and other times resembles a muddy grainy mess? The culprit might be low frequencies.

These are exciting times for those of us with project studios. The tools at our disposal are simply astonishing - powerful DAWs, virtual instruments, and just about any audio processing effect you can imagine. Not too many years ago, maintaining a collection of your dream gear required patience, a small fortune, and a large warehouse. Today, it all fits in your computer. Having access to so many of these tools allows project studios the ability control all aspects of the recording and production process, including tracking, mixing, and mastering. Today, let’s focus a bit on audio mastering.