VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[vkuehn]

Just received from ACX a newsletter that tells us all about "The Award Winning Corey Snow". Congratulations man!

In the part that you prepared, you talk about "mastering" your book narrations. I guess we all try to adhere to the technical specs provided by ACX. But I got the feeling that "The Corey Snow School of Matering" attempts to go above and beyond the 'minimum requirments".

Are you sharing any secrets?

Now that my first books are out there, I listened to the "Retail Sample" on line and muttered "Whu'the h........" Apparently they do a reasonably steep roll-off of everything below 300 hertz or so. Is that standard... or did they do something very special for me?

I've got to go in sometime this week and obtain copies of the books and see what else I can spot.

Does anyone add any "secret recipe of spices and herbs" to their ACX (or other book publishers) material?

[Jason Huggins]

Hey...congrats Corey! You rock. Keep it up my man.

[cyclometh]

Hey, thank you! I don't have any official awards, so I hope they didn't say I was an award-winning narrator. Oddly enough, I haven't seen the newsletter you refer to! ACX emailed me the link to the blog entry but I guess I'm not on the newsletter list, heh.

As to mastering, I just did lots of experimenting and reading about it. Actually, I learned a lot from Jeff Kafer, who showed me that less is more. The less you have to manipulate the final audio, the better.

My mastering setup is usually a very light application of the Waves NS-1 (set at 5 out of 100), some very mild EQ to roll off bass, and a little bit of compression/limiting.

I try to balance the dynamics with the reality that a lot of people listen to books in their cars or in loud environments like a bus or train and on less than perfect equipment. You can crush all the life out of it if you go too far, but if you don't go far enough, it may not be very easy to listen to when you're on the stair climber at the gym and the weights are clanking behind you.
_________________
Corey "Vox Man" Snow
http://voxman.net

[Fran McClellan]

WTG Corey!!
_________________
Back into the murky lurk from whence I came
--
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon

[Lizden]

That's really nice!
Well done!
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Liz de Nesnera O.A.V. ~ Livin' The VO Dream!
English/French Bilingual VO w/ ISDN
HireLiz.com / liz@hireliz.com