The more people I work with, the more I hear the same thing. "I can't do that many auditions, it takes me half an hour to edit one." Or "I finished recording the chapter, and then the editing took me all weekend."

Editing is where a lot of voice actors lose their time. Gabby and I did a whole live on it, and I walked through the exact workflow I use on my own audio. It's honestly ridiculously simple. That's the point.

Your time is money. The faster you can edit while still turning in something professional, the more auditions you send and the more books you can take on. And no, going fast doesn't mean it can't sound professional. We just have to get better at it.

Learn your shortcuts

Gabby said it best. For the love of God, learn your shortcuts.

If you're doing everything with the mouse, clicking through menus to find every function, you're probably taking twice as long as you need to. The keyboard is more important to editing than the mouse. One hand on the keys, one hand on the mouse. Gabby says she feels like a piano player when she edits.

I have about seven or eight keys bound to specific things I do every single time I touch audio. Audiobooks, commercials, auditions, all of it. Starting a file, saving it, running my presets. You don't need fifty. Pick the handful of things you do over and over and put them on a key.

Keep moving forward

This one sounds silly, but it makes a huge difference. You're always working forward, never backward.

In Adobe Audition (and most DAWs) you can press play and edit at the same time. So I press play, and while I'm listening I'm moving forward. I'm turning down breaths or taking them out, and checking gaps that need moving. It's one continuous pass. The only time I stop and go back is if I hear something really bad that has to be fixed right then.

A lot of people either don't know you can do that, or they stumble onto it by accident. Practise it until it's muscle memory.

Step one is your studio, not your software

My first lesson about workflow isn't about the workflow at all. It's your room.

If you're recording with a thin blanket and there's a lot of room tone, or you have a deeper voice and there's a lot of boom, you're going to spend forever in post trying to get rid of it. So spend most of your time making your space as good as it can be. The closet, the hobo fort, whatever room you're in. Aim for four to six inches of treatment if you can.

And don't let anyone tell you that you can have too much treatment. Singers like a little room sound. We don't. We want none. I treated my space to the nines, and that's why the rest of this is so short.

My editing and mastering chain, in order

First, record clean. Everything after this depends on it.

Second, EQ. Mine is simple, and it's built for my space and my equipment. I turn the high pass filter on (a lot of people forget it, and it takes care of low rumble like an air conditioner). Then a little boost to the high end and a little to the low end. That's it. If your room isn't treated yet, you can work with an engineer to find your problem frequencies and cut them, then save that EQ as a preset so it's one click every time.

Third, compression. I use a single band compressor, not a multiband. Single band means the whole file gets the same compression. A multiband splits your audio into frequency ranges and treats each one differently. I like simple. My settings are a minus 12 dB threshold and a 2.5 to 1 ratio. If you need more level, you can add a few dB of boost and a hard limiter on top.

Fourth, clean-up. I use iZotope RX, and both of these are saved presets. Mouth de-click set at 5.2, and voice de-noise in its dialogue mode. I don't touch anything else on them.

Fifth, breaths, by hand. I don't trust any plugin that removes breaths. They're unpredictable, and Gabby hears the problems all the time. They can clip your hard consonants like T's and K's. If you don't check the whole file, you send off a chapter with consonants missing.

That's my entire workflow. I do the exact same thing every single time on my own audio.

Do it in the right order

I've watched people run their presets three or four times on the same file because they did things in the wrong order.

Say you start by reducing background noise, then go do your EQ and compression and raise the level. You just raised the noise too. Now you have to go back and suppress it again. Do the shaping first and the clean-up after, and you only do each step once.

Breaths in audiobooks

You'll hear people say breaths belong in an audiobook. I've never listened to a book and thought, "what a welcome breath." But I've also never thought, "there wasn't a breath there." So for audiobooks, when in doubt, take them out. Or at least turn them down.

One thing to watch. Breaths do some work in a performance. They fill pauses and help with expression. If you take them out, you may need to adjust the space between phrases so it still feels natural.

The bigger fix is at the source. The more comfortable you get on mic, the fewer big breaths you take, and the less there is to edit.

Editing vs mastering

People ask this a lot, and I was confused about it for years too.

Editing is anything where you're physically changing the audio itself by cutting it or moving it around. Cutting a flub, fixing a gap, pulling out a click, dropping in a pickup line.

Mastering is the processing. EQ, compression, normalizing, anything that renders the audio through a plugin or preset. It's what makes your voice sound the way it sounds.

On a big project like an audiobook you'll lean on your mastering presets a lot. On something short like an audition you'll probably spend more of your time editing.

Don't over-process

If you find yourself doing 20 or 30 things to your audio, pull it back. Why do you need all that?

When I ask to hear someone's raw audio, a lot of the time it sounds better than their processed version. Your editing and mastering should never make your audio sound worse. When in doubt, cut the frequencies that are causing you trouble. Don't boost them.

Every engineer you ask will give you a different answer on all of this, and that's fine. Take what works for you and keep it simple. If something is slowing you down, that's your bottleneck. Go find a better way.

Where to go from here

If you're new to your DAW, start with the basics before you build presets. We have beginner courses for Adobe Audition For Beginners and Audacity For Beginners. And when your files are ready to go up, our post on formatting your audio for ACX in Adobe Audition walks you through it.

Want someone to actually listen to your audio and tell you what's slowing you down? Our live classes are open to everyone during Free Class Week, 12 to 15 October. It's free, you just sign up. When you're ready to train with us every week, that's here.

Go learn three shortcuts today. I'll see you in class.

Anthony