It’s time to record the next audiobook: Andy Nebula: Double Trouble. This is the sequel to the book I finished last month (Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star), which I hope will be released soon. Recording on the sequel commenced yesterday, though I was only able to complete the main narration for the first chapter. The non-narrator character voices for that chapter were recorded today, and will be spliced in now that the narration is edited.
Some people have asked me about this technique of recording the narration and character parts separately. Most audiobook narrators record the character lines along with the main narration. While this process works for some (and would be required if I were recording anywhere outside of my own studio), I found it difficult to get into for a variety of reasons, so I took a stab at recording the character bits separately. It worked quite well, and has been the process I’ve used almost exclusively ever since.
This process of recording the characters separately has worked really well for me for several reasons:
1) Vocal quality — Some character voices that I create are more taxing on my vocal cords. By saving the character voices for a separate pass, my natural/narrator voice doesn’t suffer as much wear over the course of each chapter. Because I can typically only record a chapter a day, this means greater consistency in the narrator voice between chapters.
2) Character consistency — When I record character voices, I do them in batches: all lines in the entire chapter for one character, then all of the next character’s lines, and so on. This allows me to maintain greater consistency in each character voice over the course of the chapter. I generally record secondary/background characters first, as they tend to have fewer lines, as well as characters with very easy voices to perform, saving those with more lines and more taxing voices for last.
3) Time constraints — I’m still trying to reduce the number of mistakes that I make when narrating long passages, so that adds some time to the recording process. Also, I often do several takes of each character line to hone in on the right emotional delivery for the moment. Because of all this extra time, recording characters in the middle of a chapter won’t work if I’m pressed for time. These days I’m pursuing voiceover and acting full-time, and can usually record the character lines immediately after the main narration is complete for each chapter. However, for the first half of the first Andy Nebula book, I still had a full-time day job, and was doing all my recording outside of that. Due to time constraints, I didn’t always have time to record both the main narration and all the character takes in one sitting. In at least one instance, the character lines weren’t recorded until several weeks after the narration was done. However, because my recording setup never changes, I’m very mindful of my placement in front of the microphone, and the characters are all different from my own natural voice, it’s virtually impossible to tell (in my opinion) that the whole thing wasn’t voiced in a single session.
I’m not saying that this process is right for everyone, and there may come a time when I change to follow the more common practice of voicing everything at the same time. However, it’s working really well for my current situation, and I’m glad that I took the chance to try it.