 Have you ever wanted to sound like these cool announcers from Unreal Tournament or Quake? In this video, I'm going to show you. Hey, I'm Anfa. I'm an electronic music producer and sound designer, but I only use open-source software and Linux. You know, in my free time, I'm sometimes working on a game with a friend, and it's a multiplayer FPS, and we thought, we need some announcer for that. So in this video, I'm going to record actual lines we're going to use in the game. I'm going to show you how to do all that using Ardor, which is a free and open-source digital audio workstation. After we're done with recording, I'm going to show you how you can process the recordings to get that deep, manly voice. And after that, I'm going to show you how you can export all the sound effects so they are ready to be imported into a game engine. Me personally, I use Godot, which is open source and awesome, but I won't judge you if you use something else. Actually I will. Use Godot. You proprietary b****! All right, let's get going. The first thing you want to do is have water at your disposal, because recording vocals requires a lot of hydration. You don't want to be recording vocals when you're dry. All right, so here is an empty Ardor session. I also have all my lines written down. I'm going to show you. This is a text file where I have written all of the lines I need to record. You don't have to see this. I may have this on screen here, but really it's not that important for now. What is important is we need an audio track to record anything. So right-click, audio tracks. I want to create a mono track. I'm going to call this an announcer. One track. Let's edit and close this dialog. Now I need to check the inputs. This is a Shure SM57 microphone, including the A2WS windscreen, which, if I'm directly pointing towards the front, it can take some pops. It won't take pops if you go from the side, but from the front, it's pretty good at it. All right, so I need to make sure this is the microphone I'm using. I'm going to select this track, enable recording, uh, uh, uh, uh, okay, that's the track. Another important thing when recording anything is, of course, to ingest your gain. So I'm going to make a louder voice, huh, huh, huh, huh, all right, and I've turned my gain up only so that when I'm going to make the sound, the loudest sound that I possibly can during this recording session, it's going to clip. So right now we should have as much, um, volume in our recording as possible. Also making sure we won't clip because clipping means distortion means the recording is bad. Okay, now for the boring part, which is actually performing the lines. If you want to record your lines yourself, and that's what I expect you who want to do if you're watching this, then I may give you a little bit of hints as to what to do. Um, I'm going to actually turn on, turn up my monitoring. And one thing is that if you're listening through your, uh, audio interface with zero latency monitoring, I'm actually listening through Ardor so I can apply some effects. And it's pretty quiet. So I'm going to right click and insert a ACE, ACE compressor, which is a stock Ardor plugin. I'm going to use this to compress it a little bit and make it up so I can hear myself louder and you will be able to hear myself, to hear me, my voice louder as well. Now, if you're doing software monitoring like I do, you need low latency. I'm using a jack buffer size of 128, which is pretty short. This way I can hear myself through the software without a jolting delay. And this is important. Also, if you want to record anything, you need close back headphones because if you have open back headphones, the sound from the headphones is going to spill back into the microphone and that's not going to be great for your recording. Another thing we can select this and hit F to make the track full screen. And the only thing left right now is just to listen to your voice and find the sound you want. I'm going to maybe make this a little bit smaller. I am going to read my lines and like get ready, prepare and test. Actually, wait a minute. I'm going to swap these. Okay, I need to get comfortable like it's very important to get your throat loose. You don't want to be clenching. You don't want to be like pushing hard. If something is hurting, you're doing it wrong and it's never going to sound good if it hurts. Okay, it may sometimes, but not for long. So I want to go for a bassy low voice, but not too low because I'm going to use a pitch shifter later to make my voice more manly and deep. And I want to actually stay in a pitch that is comfortable for me because that's going to give my voice confidence and fullness and I can lower the pitch later. So I'm not going to struggle to sound like. Double kill. Double kill. When I'm going to strangle myself trying to get so low, I'm going to go maybe for something more double kill. It's a little higher, but more confident. And the confidence I can't like restore it with a plugin. I can't change the pitch with a plugin. So we need to prioritize that. Okay, I'm going to go a test run and try to record all of these maybe first. All right. Double kill. Triple kill. Double kill. I feel a little uncomfortable. I'm going to lower the microphone so that I don't have to hold up my head and I can just be comfortable and make sure my throat is loose. Not tense. I don't want to have, you know, don't feel tension. So when I'm feeling tension, I want to move my microphone into a more comfortable position. Maybe this is a little too low actually. This is, you may think that what am I doing? This is not important. What are we watching this? I came here for the sound effects, but, you know, you need to get some things right before you can do something. Well, you can't fix everything in a post double kill. Oh, now I feel more much more comfortable and I can get a lower voice with more confidence. A lower voice with more confidence and fullness in it without it feeling like I'm going to strangle myself. Double kill. Okay. My lips actually hit the microphone. I don't know if it's going to be audible. Double kill. It sounds a little bit muffled. I think I'm going to actually lower my chair a little bit. Double kill. I don't want to touch the microphone. Double kill. Double kill. Double kill. Double kill. Triple kill. Quad kill. Pentakill. Sextakill. Sceptakill. Oktakill. Nonakill. Decakill. Okay. I'm not fully confident all of these are going to be great. Double kill. Double kill. Double kill. Double kill. Triple kill. Double kill. It's always good to have multiple takes. I'm going to mute this thing here to like mark it for myself that these takes should be fine. It's always good to have two takes because later we're going to sort and find the best ones. So I'm going to record this again. Double kill. Triple kill. Triple kill. Quad kill. Quad kill. Quad kill. Pentakill. Pentakill. Sextakill. Sextakill. Sceptakill. Sceptakill. Sceptakill. Oktakill. Oktakill. Nonakill. Nonakill. Nonakill. Okay, I think it's easier to have like two takes for every line right away than to repeat this whole sequence twice. I'm gonna have a sip of water. I feel a little strain on my throat. I used a little bit of a distortion, kind of a little growly, and I think I'm not properly warmed up yet to do that, so I'm going to try and maybe tone that down a little bit to avoid tiring my vocal chords and just making my performance sound awful and also me hurting. But I think these lines are good. Let's listen a bit. Deca kill. That's quite loud. Sexta kill. Okay, I think this is gonna be good. I think we've got enough stuff to cut out great takes. Two in one. Two in one. Three in one. Three in one. Four in one. Four in one. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Four in one. Okay, I think that's gonna be good. Head shot. Head shot. It's gonna be an important one. Head shot. Head shot. Head shot. Sorry. I've been listening to the original announcers from, you know, Unreal Tournament 1991, 1999, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3, Quake 3 Arena, Quake Champions and these announcers often say things very slowly, so it's like overly, like meaty and very, very readable. There's no way you can confuse one line with another. And I think I maybe don't want to go as slow at some points because sometimes I'm not fully like on board with what they're doing, but yeah, I want to find my own sound in here as well. So I don't want to copy paste their work. It's like it's already been done. Who wants to do this again? All right, let's see our head shot. Head shot. I'm going to try it again. Head shot. Head hunter. Head hunter. Head hunter. That's weird. Head hunter. I'm going to try the lower. Head hunter. Head hunter. That's a weird, like. Hunter. Head hunter. Head hunter. Hunter. Head hunter. Okay, the making weird gestures with my hands is going, is helping me do the right performance. So when you're recording, like, feel free to, like, I don't know, stand up if you feel like it. I don't know, maybe shake your head, maybe jump a little bit, maybe do like to pump yourself up with energy. I don't know, just get your blood flowing. I don't know, whatever you need. Make sure you're comfortable. And I'm more comfortable when I'm, like, sometimes doing this. It may look weird, but you know, when someone is going to be playing the game, they're not going to see me recording it now. They're going to hear my voice. So the voice is what matters. But also don't hurt your voice vocal cords. I don't want to destroy your instrument, so yeah, take care. Let's take a sip. By the way, don't be tempted to use something like, you know, don't use fizzy drinks. Don't use Coke, soda, anything with sugar. Just water because sugar is going to die hydrate your vocal cords and your throat instead of doing the opposite. Maybe there are some things that hydrate better than water for this kind of stuff. It's going to work. I don't know. I just use water. Sometimes I'm tempted to use coffee or something else, but it's really not the greatest idea. A hunter. All right. I think I'll be able to edit something out of this headhunter thing. Let's go further. Bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye, bullseye. I'm not sure about this sound. Bullseye. It may be cool. We'll see. I think I have a bullseye. I have a little bit less and a little bit more. I can't fully eliminate it. Maybe I'll try one take where there is no bullseye. That sounded lame. I think that doesn't sound great at all. Bullseye. It sounds like a recording that a non-voice actor would do. Weird. Okay. Ragequit. Ragequit. Ragequit. Ragequit. Ragequit. Did I clip, by the way? I think I did not. No, I didn't clip. Yeah, this was close. We were at negative 0.5 decibels full scale. It was 0.5 decibels from clipping, but I did not clip. I just wanted to drop in a line, kernel panic. Not real reason I just like this. I'm not sure where we're going to use this in the game. I don't know. Maybe when it crashes, but when it crashes, you can't really play a sound when it crashes. I don't know. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. I'm sorry. I have permanent ... I have some trouble with my nose. That's why I need to do these sounds. I try to cut them out in my videos as much as possible. Also, I could remove this because why would I ... Sorry. I'm just going to delete this stuff. What was the last thing I recorded? Kernel. Okay. Let's try it again. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. Kernel panic. I know I'm making weird faces when I do that. Kernel panic. Maybe that's a little bit overly sharp. Let's move on. Okay. These now. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. Payback. No, no, no. Too close. Payback. Payback. I'm listening to what it sounds like in my headphones as I'm recording it. Sometimes I hear that the recording isn't what I like. Payback. Payback. Payback. Like you hear there's way too like the proximity effect of me getting much closer to the microphone. Makes this recording sound much much different and I need this to be consistent. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. Okay, I think I'm going to cut it here. I don't think I can get blood to sound as I want it. You suck. You suck. You... No, that's not it. You... No. You suck. You... You suck. you suck you suck you suck you suck well maybe i can make like 20 variants for every single voice so that the announcer sounds like unique i don't think games do that like at least not these arena shooters did that because maybe like the the sound needs to be consistent because it's like a like a signal so it needs to like you need to be easily be able to super quickly identify what that sound is and if you have five different versions of the same lines it would be a bit confusing i think or maybe they just thought one good line is enough let's not add ourselves more work where we don't need to okay i think first you suck is gonna be good owned owned owned owned owned merciless merciless merciless make it stop okay this is a little bit harsh on my on my throat yes unfortunately i am using a little bit of distortion i am tiring my vocal apparatus a little bit i should have done a warm up so i'd like to sing hum and like you know spend an hour just warming up my voice also you know doing like exercises like waking up your face muscles so you have better better pronunciation flexion is that inflection i'm not sure let's try it again or listen to what we have make it stop okay stop is the merciless merciless is cool make it stop doesn't like make it stop make it but stop no no make it stop make it stop make it stop stop stop i think my p is a little bit too harsh stop yeah this is very a very hard plosive make it stop i can tone it down with automation of course just do this no big deal okay let's go let's go with another ones awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome i think we should have it awesome i think this last one would work very well nice nice nice nice nice nice i'm not sure if it's nice nice i think so okay sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet i must be making really funny faces right now i'm just realize when my face might pass be looking like sweet this sweet i should do another intonation sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet i'll need to eq this a little bit let's try one more time sweet i was a little bit further away from my sweet i'm not so happy about this okay sublime sublime sublime i think the first one was the best sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime too fast sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime it's losing my uh i dropped listen my jaw sublime sublime yeah a little bit more cool a little bit more chill aim sublime i think this more chill is going to be better actually but you could try a little bit more intense sublime sublime aim bot aim aim this aim really hurt me let me check maybe i do have the the good take aim bot i think this one is perfect really aim bot aim yeah let's keep that this one take is good i'm just going to sublime okay now we're gonna be counting down this is less exciting i guess five minutes left five minutes left three minutes left maybe it's too fast five minutes left five minutes five minutes left three minutes left three minutes left three minutes left one minute left one minute left 15 seconds left 15 seconds left. 10. 9. 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 1. Overtime. I think the digits went pretty well. 1. Except for this last one. 1. I just, I am a little worried this might be not as intense as it should be. 2. 1. Yeah, maybe a little bit more distortion. I'm gonna try and drive it a bit harder. 1. 1. 1 ring to 1. 1. I'm not sure it's better. Let's move on. I think we have what we need. I'm gonna save this by the way. Victory. Victory. Victory. Victory. Merciless victory. Merciless victory. Victory. Defeat. Again, I need to loosen up. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1 Embarrassing defeat. I know what I need to add in here. These two lines. I written them for a different game but they're not going to be used ever. So let's put them somewhere. I don't know where to use them yet, but they are cool, I want to have them. Glory. Glory. Glory. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Get ready. Go. Go. Okay. Go. Go. Why is this empty? Go. I need to cut off this. I think it would be good. Okay. So that's their recording phase. Now let's move on to processing. Okay. I'm going to maximize order now and we're going to work on our processing. First thing I want to do. I already done. It's a compressor. Second thing I want to do is a pitch shifter. Now what pitch shifter should I use? Pitch. AM pitch shifter is very simple and it sounds pretty glitchy. I think the best one is actually rubber band and mono is very good because it's important that we process this in mono because pitch shifting and stereo always adds stereo width, which may be unwarranted. Let's try this. Merciless. What about one octave? Merciless. That's way too much. Let's try three semitones. Merciless. Four. Merciless. Two. Merciless. Merciless. Make it stop. I've choked. You suck. First blood. Choked again. First blood. That's pretty nice. First blood. This is also pretty cool. I think I would like something like two and a half bit semitones down. Let's try preserving formats. Okay so two and a half semitones. I'm going to actually mute this one. I'm going to compare it with other plugins that could do the same job. I want to find a pitch shifter that can give me the best results. I'm going to try a bunch of them. Phase evocated based pitch shifter. That's one also nice. Pitch scaler. Rubber band mono, tap pitch shifter, x40 no MA pitch shift was also... oh it's not there. Alright let's insert these and test them. One after the other. So AM pitch shifter. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. Oh that's weird. First blood. First blood. First blood. Okay. First blood. That's really close. Let's try high quality, higher quality pitch shifter. First blood. It sounds so bad. First blood. Oh my goodness that's just embarrassing. Steve Harris you've made so many awesome plugins. This is not a higher quality pitch shifter. First. This is really bad quality pitch shifter. I'm sorry. I love your plugins but this one the name isn't matching. It should be very metallic pitch shifter. That's what it should be called. First. What is this in? First blood. Okay that's semitone. So three and two and a half. First blood. Let's try compared with rubber band. First blood. First blood. I think rubber band is a bit cleaner. Let's try tap pitch shifter. Semitone. Two point five. First blood. This one is also not as clean. Rubber band wins. First blood. Rubber band wins. Ladies and gentlemen rubber band is the awesome. So pitch shifting is done. Actually maybe I should do it before compression because that's going to. First blood. Let the rubber band the pitch shifter work on a more natural looking waveform and after that we can cross squish it with compression and we will a lot. First blood. Actually squish it more. First. Not as much. First blood. First blood. Okay I think editing of this is going to be like the least important part. Maybe I'm going to show you like two minutes of that. So it's just going to be uh I don't know or maybe I will record that in another video in another day but I'm going to actually put this in one video or split this into three video. I don't know. Okay we've got compression. What do we need all absolutely every single time we have any vocals whatsoever is a de-esser unless you're recording only and no sibilants but let's see what de-esser I can use. Actually I often use called de-esser. First blood. First blood. First blood. I'm going to monitor. First blood. Ah painful. Yes. First blood. First blood. That's better. It is a little I'm going to delete all these pitch shifters I don't use. Okay what else. I definitely want some multiband compression so let's go and we could actually use zam multi comp. Can we? Multi comp. Lv2 please and this is zam multiband compressor. We can enable all of these. First blood. I need to lower the threshold. First blood. Let me just see what we can do. First blood. You know so use master trim to apply makeup gain. First blood. Let's try without. First blood. And with. First blood. I think it's a little much but it's pretty nice. Maybe we can increase the knees a little bit to like maybe lower the ratios. First blood. First blood. First blood. I like this. I like that sound. Okay another thing we need to do is an EQ. Let's use X42 EQ actually mono because we're all purchasing this in mono so far. First blood. I'm going to enable I'm going to enable spectrum analysis. First. Make this bigger. First blood. And I'm going to hype as it. Maybe 50 hertz. Be more. First blood. First blood. We do want lows in there. First blood. Oh no. Can I cut this out? First blood. Okay I can. It's going to be clean. All right. I was afraid because that's a good take. First blood. So I think I will need to maybe like lower these parts. First blood. A little bit because they're quite like very first blood. Yeah that's good. I could actually make a region range for this like okay crossover for editing. I'm going to make a range. I'm going to call this first blood. First blood. Okay let's go back to the EQ. First blood. Maybe we can try and add a little bit of brightness. First blood. First blood. That could be nice. We can now try and like remove some of the mids build up. First blood. First blood. First blood. Maybe here. First blood. Another one. Let's try. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. First blood. I think that's better. We may need to apply our de-esser after this. First blood. And maybe back it off a little bit because it's triggered way more. First blood. Okay okay that's good. Alrighty I think that's like the raw part of it. Like after that what we could do is add first blood. Like this could already be used in a game I think. However okay it couldn't. We need to add a limiter. I'm going to use X42, X42 DPL which is digital peak limiter and we can use the stereo version. Let's see what happens. First blood. First blood. Oh it doesn't touch it. First blood. That's good. But just in case we don't want to clip. First blood. We seem to be clipping though. I'm not sure what's that about. How is, how does it not touch it? First blood. That's a mystery. Okay could replace it with LSP side chain. Sorry LSP limiter stereo. Try this one. Let's see what it says. First blood. All right this one peaks. So this one registers. Something's going on. A good idea is to like try and limit the dynamic range. This is going to occupy just to make it easier to mix in our game. First blood. So probably I'm going to lower my. First blood. First blood. Okay yeah. Also it's good to not touch zero decibels. I'm going to go with negative one. First blood. You see we're catching a little bit of peaks and like usually probably this announcer will not be played as loud in the game so that we would need to do it but imagine there's a lot of action going on. We have explosions and also the music. The more dynamics everything has the harder we need to work a master limiter in the game engine to avoid clipping. So if I can take a little bit of dynamics out of some stuff to make that easier I think that's going to be a win in the long term. First blood. Okay I think this is pretty nice. We can I'm going to just show you now how to export your files. Let's do two lines. Just first blood. You suck. You suck. You suck. You suck. You suck. You suck. You suck. Okay I think I like the K from this one because this one just like it. But the rest from that first one is really nice. I'm going to remove this. You suck. Oh I removed the wrong one. Okay let's go like that. I'll align them. You suck. Very nice. I'm going to make this fade in. You suck. And so I'm going to create a range marker. Call this you suck. Okay now for exporting. What I'm going to do is hold hit alt E for export and in here we need to do multiple things. First thing is create a new profile. Let's hit new and I'm going to call this announcer actually going to this lib last announcer because the game is called lib last and now we want wave session rate 16 bit shaped noise dithering and what we want also is trim silence at start and trim silence at end which is going to try and remove any silence that we may have in our file before and after that means I don't have to put these range markers exactly precisely on the start and end and also this is going to help us mitigate the trouble that the plugins that have some latency might give us because the pitch shifter is going to delay the signal by a certain amount and the latency compensation and RO should take care of that and align it back to our markers but it may be that we are going to have some silence at the start and some clipping at the end so having a leeway and then just enabling trimming is going to help us with that also we don't need to export this as stereo it's going to be a waste of space I'm going to go to the channel section and just switch to one that means we're going to export in mono and third thing let's go to time span and here we have our regions let's go select all and disable session session is what we have between the start and end markers in our session and we don't need that we eat first blood and we do suck so now i'm going to hit export and here is our exported files you can see that we have trimmed some silence from the start and the end you see that this thing this yellow bar is here it should be here that means there was silence in the end but because there's a bug I reported this this this is misaligned and we're hitting zero negative one disables to peak which is exactly exactly what we wanted to get to hit with our limiter and on you suck we also hit that which is good because we're using utilizing all of our dynamic range and that's great and we've also he see that our silence was nicely trimmed fantastic I can hit open folder and we see the folder where the files have been exported and you are free to drop them into your game that's all I hope this video was useful and interesting if you have any questions or suggestions for other videos I could do please leave them in the comments also I would like to thank all the people who are supporting me financially if you dear viewer would like to join them please go to patreon.com slash anfa or libera pay.com slash anfa or you can give me a buck or two every month and I'm really happy to see every bit of support I get from the community especially these recurring donations because they build up to a steady monthly income that one day hopefully will let me do these kind of videos as my main job which is exciting so yeah that was a long video but I hope you you have been inspired and I hope I was able to give you something valuable show you some ideas you might not have had before show you some tools and that you will have fun making your own announcer voice lines oh and if you would like to check out the game I'm making this for it's called liblast and here's the link you can find it on github or somewhere else too and I'm going to put the links in the video description as well also what if you would like to try Linux and open source software for audio production and you don't know where to start it's a good idea to start on my community chat at chat.anfa.xyz where you can find a lot of people who are using Linux and open source software for audio work and who will be happy to help you solve problems and get you started in case you have trouble and I can also recommend you videos I made that were relevant to your situation yeah so that's all now go record some awesome announcer lines oh I I initially thought this video is gonna take like 15 minutes boy oh yeah we've got some really nice lines I just I'm gonna need to just edit this off and we have 14 minutes of audio recorded oh wow that's gonna be fun