Hi everybody, Clara here. This is a short and sweet tutorial about voiceover.

So you’ve shot your prerecorded class. You’ve done it in a beautiful location where you didn’t want to wear a microphone because of wind and all the other things. You’ve decided that you’re going to do the voiceover now.

What do you do? First and foremost, you invest in a microphone. I’ve left the microphone in the frame so you can see a bit of it. I’m speaking using the microphone that I use for voiceover. This is called a Yeti Blue microphone, and it’s only about 125. It’s a very good microphone.

It was created specifically for podcasts. So it picks up the voice very, very well. So you get a Yeti microphone. And then the next thing you do, you see this little black thing on top—classic. It doesn’t come with the Yeti, and this is known as a windscreen. And so you want to get one of those because it helps.

You want to practice all your spitting sounds so they don’t go directly into the microphone. The next thing you need to get is a pop-screen. A pop screen goes before your microphone; see. It sounds like any of your pah, bah sounds. All those sounds help ensure that the top part of that sound, bah, the top part, doesn’t go into the microphone.

Both filters create a smoother sound, so there isn’t as much peaking in the dialogue you’re using. This is helpful. So I would get these two things. The other thing you may want to get with the Yeti microphone is a mic stand, and I own one.

I don’t have it here today because of the way that I’m shooting this. The mic stand that I use is for musicians who sit on the floor, so it’s lower to the ground. And, yeah, that’s what I would use. So, you’ve got your microphone. I noticed that when I’m further away, the sound is different.

The other part you want to do is ensure you have headphones. I’ve got classic headphones that come with the iPhone, but I’m in a location with little sound. It’s very, very quiet here. I wear my Dre headphones when doing voiceovers at home because they cut out many other sounds, so I’m more sensitive.

I can hear what the mic is picking up more. This is because, especially if you’re doing it at home, sometimes you’re unaware of the sounds being picked up by the microphone. These little earphones don’t pick up as much, but the others are more sensitive.

Now, from here, you want to choose your location. Classically, when you’re doing it at home, and you don’t have a studio, you usually do it in your closet, or it’s recommended that you do it in your closet. Your clothes dampen the sound, creating a smoother sound without bouncing off walls.

You can start to hear the echo in the room because nothing is absorbing the sound of my voice. It goes all over the place, so it creates that echo sound. My editor is good at helping me have that and limit that echoey sound, but if you’re making sound by yourself or want to limit the number of things you need to edit, that’s fine.

Go into your lovely closet. Do it there because your clothes will make a good sound studio. The other thing I did in my closet was make my doors out of metal. They weren’t wood doors, so I actually put blankets over the doors or pinned blankets to the door.

When I closed the door, instead of hearing that metal-tinted sound, the fabric absorbed the sound of my voice, which is helpful for creating a clean sound. Why is this all important?

People will either listen to you when you’re teaching yoga on headphones, like I’m doing now, or on a speaker, and the better your sound is, the less distracting it is.

You want to find the right level for you regarding how loud you speak. The next part of that is that they have something called a gain dial on your microphone. The gain dial is how sensitive your mic is to picking up sound. My editor recommended it, and it’s worked well for me to keep the gain low on my microphone.

It doesn’t pick up; it’s not as sensitive to the sounds, but I usually have to speak slightly louder. So, there are a few things to consider when recording VO. Okay, so I’m set up. I’ve got my laptop going, and I’ve got Garage Band going. And then what I do is I have two windows open.

I have my garage band window open, and then I have the window of my video open. When recording video, like when doing voiceover, look at the video and watch the model, which would be yourself, doing the pose and essentially just saying what they’re doing. So don’t try to anticipate what they’re doing.

Watch them lift their leg and downward dog. Then you say, “Lift your right leg and downward dog.” You’re giving the cues a second or two behind the movement. Then, what you do from here is you get your editor, or yourself if you’re the editor, and you move the sound forward about two or three seconds so that when it’s being watched, the sound, the cue, is happening first, and then the model is doing it.

This has been helpful, at least for me. It’s hard sometimes to anticipate what I’m doing because I’ll have shot this class either a couple of weeks or months before. So I don’t remember what I was doing. So you just look. I’m looking at my laptop right now.

You look at your laptop, watch the person, then say what they’re doing a few seconds behind, and then move it over. Also, here’s a side note about when you’re shooting the video on location. Like I was talking about in the other tutorial about setting up for a live class, the same thing here is to move two to three beats slower than you would in real life because I’ll tell you, if you move fast, you’re going to have a hard time cueing to keep up with the movement.

And I’ve been doing this 15 years, and there are still moments where I’m like, man, I wish I’d gone a little bit slower through that transition because trying to explain that transition, I can’t keep up with the movement. So move slower. And then what I usually do is, especially if the sequence is complicated, once I’ve gone through something difficult. I’m in a pose; I typically stay there longer so that it gives the voiceover a little bit more leeway to catch up.

If you need to, from here, I’m sitting down; I’m doing the VO. Take it nice and slow. I usually start with a theme and end with a theme. And what I’ll ask my editor to do is usually the theme. I speak longer than how long I sit for at the beginning and end of class. So I asked the editor, or if you were doing it yourself, to elongate that period of the meditation or the yeah, meditation beginning end.

Also, I do that with Shavasana. I usually get them to elongate it. So they can either slow down how quickly the frames are moving through or loop the image repeatedly until you’re done with your intro. So those are a couple of little things to remember when you’re shooting a class and bringing it back in or shooting a class and getting prepared for the video.

Regarding how I prepare myself, ensure you drink plenty of water beforehand. It’s generally recommended not to overeat dairy because it creates phlegm, which creates a sound in your throat. Again, you only realize the stuff once you do VO. And then you’re like, “Oh, my voice sounds thick.”

And you’re like, that’s from the coffee, the cream, the cream of my coffee this morning. The other thing recommended is not to eat too close to doing VO because that again also creates phlegm, which makes that kind of sound on the back of the throat, which you can pick up on a microphone.

So try not to eat too much and not too much dairy beforehand, drink a lot of water, and have water on hand. I’d also recommend that when I used to shoot for another online platform, I would essentially sit in the voiceover box for about six or eight hours at a time. Your brain becomes fuzzy in a tiny, enclosed, warm room.

I noticed my voice wasn’t as enthusiastic by the fifth hour because I was tired. So now, I usually shoot no more than an hour’s worth of VO at a time. So I block it off to ensure that I, but to the best of my ability, don’t have to do that much VO at once because your voice is essentially carrying the class.

If you’re like this, because you’ve been sitting for an extended period and you’re hot, it’s hard to be enthusiastic in a fiery practice to motivate people. So, I try not to shoot too much VO at once. 

But the thing about VO is you’re by yourself, so it can be hard sometimes to draw inspiration. I would recommend, in terms of the theme, to write it down and think and chew on what it is that you’re trying to say and have a strong sense of what you’re trying to say before you come into it come into the VO or to the recording.

My experience of listening to my voice and taking other pre-recorded classes is that if people are not super engaging and know what they’re talking about right away, I check out, at least as a student. 

My one last tip for voiceover is to speak slowly and enunciate a little bit more than you would in person because, again, people can’t read your lips, or there’s something lost in terms of us not being in person together that is not conveyed through recording.

So, you want to be very clear in how you say things. When you’re doing VO, the next little part is when you hand over your voiceover. If you’re doing this with an editor, you hand over the two files: the video file and the audio file. Make sure to be clear that you want your editor to move the sound two to three seconds earlier so that, ideally, the verbal cue happens before the visual one does.