Voice Over Guide: How to Record One Yourself

What is a voice over?

A voice over is recorded narration laid over video where the speaker is not visible on camera. Documentaries, explainer videos, training modules, ad spots, and most animated content use voice overs. The term comes from the audio being recorded separately from the visuals and "laid over" the picture in editing.

In business video, voice overs serve three main purposes: narrating animation that would otherwise have no dialogue, explaining what the viewer is seeing in screen recordings or product demos, and providing a consistent voice across a series of training videos with multiple visuals.

How do I record a voice over at home or in the office?

Five steps cover 90% of business voice over work.

1. Find a quiet room with soft surfaces. Rooms with hard walls, glass, and bare floors create echo. Carpeted rooms, rooms with curtains, or rooms with a lot of soft furniture are better. A wardrobe full of clothes is genuinely one of the best recording environments because the fabric absorbs reflections. Avoid kitchens, bathrooms, and empty meeting rooms.

2. Set up a USB microphone six to eight inches from your mouth. The Blue Yeti, Rode NT-USB+, and Shure MV7 are the standard recommendations and all sit in the $100-$250 range. Plug it into your laptop, point the front of the mic at your mouth, and keep your distance consistent throughout. Use a pop filter (a $10 mesh screen) to soften the "p" and "b" sounds.

3. Open Audacity, GarageBand, or Adobe Audition. All three handle voice over recording. Audacity is free and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. GarageBand is free on Mac. Audition is paid but the most polished. Set the project to 48 kHz sample rate and 24-bit depth, which matches what most video editors expect.

4. Read the script twice from start to finish. Do not stop on stumbles. Mark the stumble in the script and keep going. The two takes give your editor sentence-level options to pick from. Read at a slightly slower pace than you would speak normally - voice overs almost always sound rushed compared to how they were recorded.

5. Edit out the breaths, mouth clicks, and silences. A clean voice over has no audible inhales between sentences and no two-second silences at the end of paragraphs. Cut them out in the editor. Keep small pauses (half a second between sentences is normal); cut everything longer.

What microphone should I use for voice overs?

Three microphones cover almost every business voice over need:

Blue Yeti ($130) - The default starter mic. USB, four pickup patterns, quality good enough for most explainer and training work. Sensitive to room noise, so it requires a quiet space.

Rode NT-USB+ ($170) - Slightly better sound than the Yeti, with a cleaner low end. The right pick if your voice runs deep.

Shure MV7 ($250) - The best of the three for less-than-perfect rooms. The MV7 rejects more room noise than the others, which makes it forgiving in a meeting room or home office.

You do not need a $1,000 studio mic for business voice overs. The room and the performance matter more than the microphone past about the $150 mark.

How do I write a voice over script?

Three rules cover script writing for voice over.

Write for the ear, not the eye. Long, complex sentences with subordinate clauses read fine on a page and sound terrible spoken aloud. Break sentences into short, punchy units. If a sentence has more than 20 words, split it.

Read the draft out loud before recording. Tongue-twisters, awkward phrases, and unintentional rhymes only show up when you say the script. Read the whole script aloud once, edit anything that tripped you up, and read it again.

Time the script. Most people read voice over at 130-160 words per minute. A 60 second voice over needs roughly 140 words. A 30 second cut needs 70. Write to the target length; do not try to make a 200 word script fit a 60 second video by reading faster.

What are common voice over mistakes?

The four mistakes that show up most often in self-recorded business voice overs:

Reading too fast. Voice overs always sound faster played back than they did when you were recording. Slow down by 10-15% from your natural speaking pace.

Inconsistent distance from the mic. Moving back and forth from the microphone changes the volume and tone every few seconds. Keep your head still and at a fixed distance throughout the take.

Recording in a noisy room. Air conditioning, fridge hum, traffic, computer fans - all of it gets picked up. Record at a time when the room is quiet, turn off the AC for the take, and close the windows.

Not editing out breaths. A loud audible inhale between every sentence makes the voice over feel breathy and amateur. Twenty minutes of editing breaths out of a 60 second take is the difference between professional and obviously-self-recorded.

How much does a professional voice over cost?

Hiring a professional voice over artist for a 60 second business video typically runs $100-$500 depending on the artist's experience, the usage rights, and the turnaround. Marketplaces like Voices.com, Voice123, and Fiverr Pro list thousands of voice talents at this range.

Studio recording sessions with engineer support add another $200-$500 per session. Most enterprise voice over work splits between in-house recording (training videos, internal explainers, throwaway content) and professional voice over (paid ads, brand films, product launch video) where the additional polish justifies the cost.

Should I use AI voice over?

AI voice over tools (ElevenLabs, Murf, Descript) have closed most of the quality gap with human voice over for technical and explainer content. They are useful when you need to localize a video into 10 languages overnight, when you are producing high volumes of internal training content, or when you need to update a voice over after the original recording is no longer available.

The two cases where AI voice over still falls short: emotional or brand-led content (a sympathetic tone in a recruitment video, a confident energy in an ad spot) and content where you want a specific recognizable voice (the CEO's tone in an internal comms piece). For most explainer and training work, AI voice over is now a reasonable production option. For external brand work, human voice over still wins.

How does Shootsta handle voice overs?

Shootsta produces voice over work three ways. For most internal video, the customer records the voice over themselves following the guide above and uploads the audio with the brief. For animation and explainer projects, Shootsta sources a professional voice over artist matched to the brand. For multi-language localization, Shootsta uses AI voice over with editorial review for production cost efficiency.

The deliverables that benefit most from voice over - product demos, training modules, and internal comms narration - flow through the standard 48-hour live-action edit cycle, while animated explainers run on a longer animation timeline of around 10 days. See animated video production for explainer work, product demo video production for SaaS walkthroughs, and compliance training video production for L&D applications.

Voice Over Guide: How to Record One Yourself

What is a voice over?

How do I record a voice over at home or in the office?

What microphone should I use for voice overs?

Produce more video for less

How do I write a voice over script?

What are common voice over mistakes?

How much does a professional voice over cost?

Should I use AI voice over?

How does Shootsta handle voice overs?

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