Recording voice tracks

With your material—script, story, or notes—you’re ready to go, right? We shall start with a standard manual recording session.

The simple voice track

This is the simplest recording session. When you’re ready, carry out the steps below:

1. Open any Audacity project that you created previously (if it isn’t already open) on your computer.
2. Take a deep breath, and then click on the Record button, as seen in the next screenshot, and start speaking aloud your script.

   

3. Immediately, you’ll see the project view portion of your Audacity window change. A voice track will appear, showing your recording, live!

   

4. The left (L) and right (R) channels show the volume of your voice (shown in the bars in the upper-right-hand of the previous screenshot). The digital interpretation of your voice is shown in the audio track portion of the project view (the blue “lines”, or sound waves, that you see on your screen). Don’t let this make you nervous; just focus on delivering a great voice track.
5. Keep reading your script or sample piece as naturally as possible.
6. When you’re done, click on the Stop button.

   

7. As soon as you click on the Stop button, you’ll see that the recording stops, all activity in Audacity stops, and recording is over.
8. Save your track to the project folder so that you’ll be ready to start editing it. From the main menu, select File and then Save Project.

   

Recording Tip
Keep any paper (your notes or script) in a place that won’t interrupt the recording session when you lip the pages—preferably away from the microphone, or already spread out in front of you so that you can refer to them without touching them. We will learn how to “silence” these sounds later on, but having a clean initial recording always makes it a little easier.

That’s it, you’ve just completed your first recording session with Audacity! It really is as simple as that. But, as with the first time I used the software, I know there are likely things that you would like to change.

So let’s discuss some additional techniques for recording voice tracks.