Ah, cigars and whiskey. Why didn't I think of that? :)

I'm sure you're all too right about voice, angle, microphone, etc. I'm just wondering what the pros do when the audio is "already in the can."

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pick up some J.D.

uhh, excuse me *hic* I had to put down the bottle before I *hic* finished typing this...

A couple schools of thought... reverb, and Antares Mic Modeler... may help...

A touch of reverb (however, this is tricky and works best with some kind of background music or noise) and a boost in the 800k area (4-6 db gives a boost in presense).

Running the file through Antares Mic Mod. can give you some of the "fat" sound, however, it's still not as good as having a good mic and a good pre-amp to begin with.

The_Voice

A totally dry vocal booth and good (Valve or Condensor) mic is a good place to start.

The vocal booth should be full of acoustic foam.

Make good use of the proximity effect of the microphone, the closer you get, the thicker and more bassy the sound.

Now into the plugins....

You want a heavily compressed sound... and some heavyweight plugins are required.

The 1176SE or LA2A on the Universal Audio UAD1 plugin card will do the trick nicely.

otherwise, you might want to try some of the waves renaissance plugins, though you probably won't be able to recreate 'that' sound that the hardware modelled plugins have.

Of course you could always get a hardware compressor, but that slightly defeats the benefits of the DAW.

I do VO for a living and your first suggestion - the best mic you can afford is where you want to start. Also getting that tube mic into a nice tube preamp in your signal chain BEFORE your VO gets to the computer is the secret. I do very little processing after my VO is printed. For 99.99% of my clients, they want my work as dry as a desert. No reverb...no EQ..no nothing....

I am currently using a very sweet Rode NTV tube mic with the Mindprint Envoice preamp....no problem getting good sound with this combo. But 20 years of VO experience helps as well:)

Cheers,

Cuzin B

...And in the BLUE corner: Mr. Plugin Overkill!

1: Noise gate, extremely well-tweaked. Edit manually if you have to, but get as much noise out of the signal as possible.
2: EQ cutting all ultra-low frequencies (below 70) and some of the very high ones (above 10k)
3: A nice compressor, just to even out the dynamics
4: The "trick": Give the bottom freq (typically around 80-120 Hz) a good boost while cutting out the fundamental frequencies (a rough guess would be 150-250 Hz), this will create a much more "boomy" sound.
5: If you have access to a multi-band compressor, now is the time to use it. Hard.
6: The "magic": Either use a bass enhancer around 70-90 Hz, or throw the signal to a bus with a pitch-shiter on it. EQ out all but the bassiest freqs and pitch them somewhat downward, correcting the EQ according to taste before mixing it with the dry signal. This is a wild shot, but sometimes it works well.
7: BRICK WALL LIMITER!
8: Another EQ to compensate for any artifacts or changes in timbre
9: A final limiter if you're concerned about perceived volume.


But, as many people here stated, if you have a good mic you don't need to do any of these things except for maybe steps 4 and 7.

I used to have a pitch-shiter, but I got rid of it because I didn't like the interface.