Gruff, Manly Voice

Bluewave07

Bluewave07

Active member
Hey guys,

This may be a stupid question. But, I'll never know unless I ask.

For movies like Watchmen, Sin City, etc...where the central characters
have really scratchy, gruff voices, is this something that the actors do
during recording or is it tweaked in PP sound design.

I always wondered this and am doing a superhero movie soon, so I would
like to know if there are certain things you can tweak to add that gruff,
deep sound to voices.

I'm assuming adding bass is a good place to start, but what else??

thanks a lot,
Matt R.
 
Start with the performance. There are plenty of ways to exaggerate a gruff voiceover, but you're just pushing on a rope if the actor doesn't deliver the goods first.

Once you have the tone and character of the performance right, you'll need to experiment with different mics until you get the sound you're looking for. The Sennheiser MKH416 is a classic "voice of doom" mic, and the proximity effect on it can really bring out the thunder in a male voice. I've also known some folks to add a tactical throat-mic to add mass to an effect voiceover.

EQ can be used to further sculpt the sound, but the key there is subtlety. Simply boosting the bass will leave the track sounding muddy and muffled. A nice warm compressor will further smooth out the voiceover, making the whole thing much beefier.

If you can get your mitts on a rectifier (eg. digidesign's Recti-Fi) or some other sub-harmonic synthesizer or bass-extender, you can add an additional layer of subharmonic growl without effecting the clarity and intelligability of the track. If you still need more bite, you could try running the whole track through a guitar amp simulator (eg. amplitube) to add a tiny bit of analog distortion.
 
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