Are your self-recorded auditions not getting you the results you had hoped? Most voice actors ruin their recordings in post-production by making a handful of technical mistakes. You do not need expensive plugins to fix your sound. With a few sharp, practical post-production tweaks, you can deliver broadcast-ready files that help you secure competitive voice acting positions. Let us walk through the exact steps to clean up your audio and keep your work out of the bin.
1. Clean Up Your Edits Without Creating Artefacts
Enable Snap to Zero Crossings and Apply Baby Fades
Trimming unwanted space from your audio seems simple enough, but slicing a waveform at an active voltage point creates an audible digital click. Enabling the “Snap to Zero Crossings” feature in your editor ensures your cuts only happen where the waveform amplitude hits zero.
Always apply a tiny fade at the start and end of every trimmed section to smooth out potential pops. Leave a fraction of a second of silence at the very end of your file. Some poorly designed playback engines stop outputting audio a few milliseconds early, which can chop off the end of your final word.
- Turn on zero crossing snaps: Ensure your editor selects points where the wave crosses the zero line before hitting delete.
- Add baby fades: Apply a tiny fade-in at the top and a fade-out at the tail of every edit.
- Leave tail headroom: Keep 50 to 100 milliseconds of room tone at the end so audio players do not clip your delivery.
Stop Butchering Your Natural Breaths
Completely stripping breaths out of a narration track makes you sound like a synthetic robot. Human speech needs breaths to maintain natural rhythm and emotional connection with the listener.
If a breath sounds too harsh, fade in the first half of the breath waveform rather than deleting it. For tight commercial scripts where every millisecond counts, silence the breath and cut roughly half the remaining gap to keep the timing natural.
- Preserve human rhythm: Keep natural breaths in your long-form narration and corporate reads.
- Fade the attack: Apply a short fade-in over the start of loud breaths to soften their entry.
- Trim gaps in half: When editing commercial copy for length, remove 50% of the breath gap instead of slamming words together.
- Master human editing: Learn more about natural breath management by reading our guide on how to debreath your voiceovers the human way.
The one exception to this is if you are specifically asked to remove breaths on a commercial, Otherwise, breathing is a human condition and recordings sound so much more natural with them left in!
2. Precision Fixing: Clicks and Plosives
The Full Wave Cycle Trick for Manual De-Clicking
Automatic de-clickers are handy, but they often miss stubborn mouth clicks or ruin vocal clarity. Removing a click inside a word requires precision so you do not create a low-frequency bump.
Zoom down to the sample level where you can see the individual sine waves. Select a complete, full cycle of the wave from zero crossing to zero crossing before hitting delete. This removes the click completely without introducing a new artefact into your vocal track.
- Zoom to the sample level: Locate the click visually within the waveform display.
- Select complete cycles: Highlight from the start of an upward wave through to the end of its downward wave.
- Avoid partial cuts: Slicing half a wave cycle alters the fundamental frequency and causes a low-end thud.
Fix Plosives with Subtractive EQ
Never re-record an otherwise perfect take just because a burst of air hit the microphone capsule on a hard consonant. A plosive is simply an unwanted burst of low-frequency energy.
Select only the section of the waveform containing the plosive hit. Apply an equaliser with a high-pass filter set at 80 Hz directly to that selection. This eliminates the low-end boom while leaving your natural vocal tone untouched.
- Isolate the pop: Highlight only the specific consonant where the air hit the capsule.
- Filter below 80 Hz: Use a high-pass filter to strip out the sub-bass energy.
- Check hardware setup: Ensure your studio equipment is dialled in correctly by reviewing how to choose series: Audio Interfaces, DAWs and Microphones.
3. Compression and EQ: Less Is Always More
Set Thresholds at the Waveform Shoulders
Compression reduces the dynamic range between your quietest whispers and loudest shouts so your voice sits cleanly over background music or other audio. Sliding a threshold blindly or using a factory preset has a very high chance of over/under compressing your audio.
Look at your raw waveform and locate the average height of the main body, often called the “shoulders” of the wave. Set your compressor threshold right at that shoulder line. Combine this with a 2:1 ratio, a fast attack, and a release around 500 milliseconds for a natural response.
- Find the shoulders: Ignore high isolated spikes and target the dense average level of the waveform.
- Start with a 2:1 ratio: Keep compression gentle to avoid an artificial, pumping sound.
- Watch the noise floor: Remember that compressing brings down high peaks, so turning the track back up will also raise your room noise.
Always Use Subtractive EQ
Equalisation should be used to clean up problems rather than artificially alter your voice. Boosting high or low frequencies adds extra volume to the signal and risks clipping your audio interface.
If your room has a low-frequency structural rumble from traffic or air conditioning, apply a high-pass filter at 80 Hz across the track. If a specific frequency sounds harsh or boxy, cut that specific narrow band downward instead of boosting everything else.
- Cut instead of boost: Reduce problematic frequencies to achieve balance rather than turning up good ones.
- Filter out low rumble: Strip away frequencies below 80 Hz that human ears cannot hear anyway.
- Trust your source sound: If your room treatment and mic positioning are correct, you rarely need aggressive EQ.
4. The Post-Production Danger Zone
Ditch Effect Stacks and Presets
Saved effect chains and automatic processing stacks are a complete trap for voice actors competing for major voice acting positions. Because every performance varies in volume and projection, a fixed compression setting will process every file differently.
If your input level is slightly lower on one take, a preset compressor might do nothing at all. If your next take is slightly louder, that same preset will slam the signal into severe distortion. Process each step manually based on the actual file sitting in front of you.
- Avoid static stacks: Process compression and EQ individually for every single project.
- Evaluate raw levels: Adjust your settings based on the specific gain and dynamic range of that take.
- Understand hirer standards: See what casting directors listen for by reading how casting directors choose voice talent.
Why Noise Gates Destroy Vocal Performances
Noise gates might seem like a quick fix for background noise, but they are built for drums, not human voices. A noise gate abruptly shuts off audio whenever you stop speaking, creating an obvious, jarring silence.
The moment you start talking, the gate snaps open and brings all your room hiss back with it. Listeners instantly hear the room noise pumping in and out behind your speech. Focus on deadening your recording space at source instead of relying on a gate.
- Avoid vocal gates: Never use a noise gate to hide ambient room noise on a dialogue track.
- Prevent noise pumping: Eliminate sudden jumps between dead silence and background room tone.
- Treat the space: Add acoustic treatment to your booth to lower your real noise floor naturally.
Peak Normalise to -1 dB
Normalisation turns up the overall volume of your track based on its highest peak. Setting your peak normalisation to 0 dB is a common mistake that leads to clipped files.
When a 0 dB WAV file gets converted into an MP3 for client delivery, the compression algorithm creates inter-sample peaks that push past 0 dB. Always normalise your final audio to -1 dB to leave safe headroom for conversion.
- Set a -1 dB ceiling: Give digital audio converters room to process your file without clipping.
- Protect MP3 conversions: Prevent inter-sample peak distortion when exporting compressed formats.
- Refine post-production skills: Explore more production workflows in our tutorial on how to post-produce your voice recordings.
Hugh Edwards
Oct 2026