Voice Over and Narration Mic?

[JohnnyB]

Hi,

I am currently putting together a voice booth in my home and need advice on which mic would be best. Here are some specs:

The booth is about 7x7 feet and totally sound proofed.

I'll be mixing through a little 6 channel behringer and recording on either a fostex d-5 or a digigram vxpocket(<--any opinions on this device would also be greatly appreciated).

I'll only ever be recording voice tracks, never music or instruments.

I'll never be recording more than 3 people at one time.

Voice tracks will range from narrative to fully characterized (ie. cartoon voices).

The main subject voice belongs to my wife, who is a definite soprano. I would like to make sure she has a warm sounding mic, possibly even a tube mic.

Looking to spend less than $1k


Thanks all ;)

J-

[Kingsley]

I'm kind of in the same field myself and I can tell you that spoken word gives you little or
no place to hide anything that interferes with the mic's signal. I honestly don't know
about the Behringer's pre amps, but I'm betting that that's where you want to sink a
good bit of your money. If you don't have a nice, transparent mic pre, then whatever
mic you get won't sound very good. You might also want to consider a unit that has EQ
and compression so you have control over the various voices you'll be recording.
You can spend tons of money on these combination units but I'm sure someone can
steer you in the direction of something that does what you need it to at a price you can
afford. You can also fall prey to the big-ticket large diameter condenser mics, but I've
seen lots of voice over people rave about the Electrovoice RE20. It's a few hundred and
it's dynamic, but they like the sound of it.
Good luck on your project. Do you plan to import the recordings into a DAW for editing?
Just curious.

[Scott Gould]

Having dabbled in a variety of spoken word projects myself over the years, here's my take: The RE20 is pretty good, but you need several mics so you have a choice (and for those 3 voice things you mentioned). The AKG C4000B is a very warm sounding LD condenser at a reasonable price - should be great on your wife's voice. Ribbon mics were the standard for many years for voiceover and radio announcing, and there are some good ones being made today, but the best (Royer & Coles) aren't cheap - however, Beyerdynamic and Oktava both make ribbons in the few hundred $$ range. You're going to need a better pre-amp and EQ than you'll get on a small entry level mixer, as well as a good compressor. There are "channel strip" devices being sold now by several companies that basically give you one or two channels of pre-amp, EQ and compression in one box. Or you can mix & match. A Grace pre-amp, FMR RNC (Really Nice Compressor) and Speck EQ will work just fine, and cost less than a "channels strip".
Just some thoughts off the top of my head to give you a starting point.

Scott