How to Record Guide

The 10 Simple Steps to Good Audio Recording:

Please follow these really simple steps when recording. They'll save you a lot of time and make the overall composition of Skywind Voice Acting more balanced and professional. We recommend using Audacity for beginners and a microphone of equal or better quality than the Samson Gomic.

1. Make sure you have a "pop-filter" for your microphone. This will reduce your "P" and "S" sounds and make your recordings sound much more professional. They're cheap to buy or you can even make one yourself if you can't get one. This is mandatory and pretty easy so please do it!

2. When recording you must set a couple of basic settings: You must record your files as 44100Hz 16 bit mono files. This can be set easily in the red and purple box areas in the screenshot above. Always save files using the .WAV format.

   • If you are recording a creature that will be worked on by our SFX team, please record in 96000Hz instead!

3. If you have a physical volume control knob on your microphone setup, known as a "pre-amp" set it to about a 1/4 to a 1/3 of it's maximum volume to reduce the chance of distorting your recording. Most people will not have this.

4. Now we need to test our input volume. Hit record and talk as loudly as you would during your normal conversation lines and then hit stop. If the blue audio wave of the recording is ever goes higher than the Green marker bar in our screenshot, you will need to lower the microphone volume controlled in the yellow box area. Test again until your audio is in that nice middle range.

5. Listen to the file with the best headphones you've got. We want to listen for two things:

   • Does the voice sound distorted at all? If so, you should move away from your microphone a bit as you are probably being too loud for you microphone. Also check that your recording is not higher than the Green marker bar. Remember, it's best to be about a 20-30cms/10 inches away from your pop-filter for even and undistorted sound. If you're unsure, back away from your microphone and record again and see if the second one sounds more natural. If so, then you'll want to be farther away.

   • Does your voice have an echo? If it does, the room you are in probably isn't naturally quiet enough and you will want to use blankets/pillows around your microphone to reduce the reverberations of the room. Trying a different smaller space with carpeting can also help. We're very picky about this. You want no echo at all ideally.

   • Now re-record and try it again. If you're unsure about the quality, always feel free to send us a sample on Discord!

6. Time to record! Whenever recording lines, leave 20 seconds of room tone at the very beginning of the file. This period of quiet should not contain any anomalies such as creaking of chairs, breathing etc. We're trying to capture the background noise so we can filter it out later.

7. Record your lines in big chunks and we'll chop them up and do ALL the sound editing. Do not worry about doing noise removal/EQ work/compression etc. We've got you covered. The only thing we ask is that you leave one recording for each line so pick your best take and delete the rest.

8. Please leave at least 1/2 second of silence between lines. This is needed to help our VA mixing /mastering team out. If there are clicks or breaths in the half-second period before/after the line, please trim them out. It helps to view the waveform in decibels rather than linear, and be sure to trim at points where the waveform crosses between positive and negative values.

   • Please do not insert silence; we want to have room tone before or after the lines to help with noise reduction. If you insert silence, it will be harder for our mastering team to reduce noise in the spoken part of the lines.

9. When recording your combat lines, you will need to repeat step 4 and 5 while trying to yell as loud as you will be for your combat lines and adjust the microphone input volume in the yellow box area as needed. This combat recording SHOULD be a separate file as it makes it much easier for us to normalize and mix (Thank you for doing this, it saves us a lot of time!). Combat lines and other loud lines are grouped together in your script, so it should be clear when to switch to a separate files. Remembering your microphone volume settings when you do this will make switching easier, but always double check once done recording a new clip.

10. Do not do ANY editing other than deleting duplicate takes and trimming breaths, clicks, and long pauses. We've got talented mixers to handle noise reduction, compression, and overall mastering all of the voices of Skywind, so please do not do these things yourself.

    • Please do not use a noise gate under any circumstances! Noise gates will make it much, much harder to remove background noise from the parts of lines where you are speaking, and will make the overall quality of your in-game lines worse.

11. When saving your audio please save them as .WAV files then attach your audio to your trello card and move it to the appropriate column as outlined by the instructions in the top column cards. .MP3 is not allowed due to the quality degradation.

Good luck!

Skywind Scripts

You can find your script attached directly to your card on Trello. If you do not have a script attached to your card, please harass @km816 until he gives you one.

Script Formatting

Below is an example of a Skywind script. The first row contains information about the character(s) being voiced. Things like names, race, etc... Row 2 is some helpful links (like to this page!). After that, we have the script itself, where Row 3 are the headers and Rows 4 and onward are your lines. 

• Column 1 is the filename for this segment. This isn't something you need to worry about, but we need to know it for checking and implementing your lines.

• Column 2 is the speaking NPC.

• Column 3 is what the player asks about or does to get this NPC response. This may be blank for things related combat, detection, or idle NPC behavior---in that case, look to the acting notes instead.

• Column 4 is the line the that you should read.

• Column 5 is the facial expression the NPC will have in game, and also gives you a tip about the emotion you should be using. Note that these are not always very descriptive (it's constrained by the game engine), so it's okay to take some liberty with it. If Acting Notes ever conflict with the Facial Emotion, go with the Acting Notes.

• Column 6 is any acting notes for this segment. This includes pronunciation guidelines and Dunmeri translations.

• Column 7 is where our reviewers will leave any notes for you for retakes.

Additionally, you may notice that at the bottom of your script, there is a second tab named "Reformatted". This provides the same lines, but with prompt and notes presented vertically rather than horizontally. You may use whichever version you prefer.