Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Balthazar's vocal sound design question.

Hi there!

I love the way Balthazar's voice sounds in the game, from the acting to the sound design. There's like some sort of audio layering happening I imagine, he has this very bass heavy, grumbly undertone to his words when he speaks. I'd love to recreate this vocal effect and I was wondering if anyone has any idea how this effect was achieved and or have their own methods about creating a similar sound?

Oh man, I also love Balthazar and his voice.

I don't know if anyone here can answer- but I think there's a chance that if you look for people who worked on the sound for BG3 you can reach out to them and ask around, perhaps?

Ooh, good question.

I don’t mess around much with vocals much, so might not be much use, but I had a quick play.

I think it’s basically reverb or a very short delay, but there’s probably more to it than just that.

I got something sort of similar with a reverb eq’d to only affect the lower frequencies, plus an envelope follower to bring it in more when the voice is raised.

Couldn’t get it quite right though. Might need to use gates or multiband compressors or other things I’m not very good at.

Also might help if I had a good bit of vocal performance to work with instead of random things from YouTube.

What toys do you have to experiment with?

Thanks for the responses guys!

That sounds like a good idea with a low frequency reverb, I'll have to play around with that idea!
I've got adobe audition and FL studio that I can tinker sound stuff with.

Also, I would love to get in contact with a dev from the sound team, I've always been fascinated with the ways people comes up with the cool sounds you hear in games and movies.

Yeah, so many voices are just fantastic in BG III, and Balthazar is certainly one of them. Voice recording is a difficult thing. Assuming you start with a skilled voice actor in the first place, the next piece of equipment is the microphone. The old standard Shure SM58 is OK for live performances, but in the studio I can really hear the difference when you upgrade to something like a Rhode, Sennheiser or similar in the $1,000 price range (!) along with a good preamplifier. After that, compression and EQ are essential. A tight delay with wide spread between right and left channels can give a very pleasing and commanding effect, and a little reverb adds ambience appropriate for the setting (room, cave, outdoors, astral plane, etc.) It is definitely an art to find the sweet spot with all these components in the sound processing chain.

Yeah. I skipped over the whole black magic of general recording and processing, and went straight to the specific effect.

Obviously you want a good recording of a good performance first, then do all the regular stuff to make it as good as possible before trying to do anything fancy with it.

Some good points above, but talking about 1000 dollar mics seems a bit overboard. If you’re recording vocals you need a good large diaphragm condenser mic, as opposed to dynamic mics used on stage. The Rode NT1 always gets great reviews for good quality at absurd value. You can get one for more like 150 with a pop shield and shock mount (you’ll want both). But you’ll also need a compatible audio interface with decent preamps and phantom power. These don’t have to particularly expensive either, but it all adds up.

USB condenser mics are a thing too, which you can plug straight in to computer. I believe these are generally aimed at people doing podcasts and videos where they don’t need the best quality. They might be OK at a pinch, I don’t really know.

Then there’s the room you record in. A whole other can of worms.

I don’t know anything about audition, but FL should be fine.

Amazon is selling the AKG Pro Audio C414 XLII for about $1,099. It's a studio standard, but the price is a bit, uh, untumptuous.

Not disputing that’s a good mic used in lots of studios. Professional studios will generally have a bunch of different mics for different things, to get a different sound or just for personal preferences. Not everyone likes the same ones.

But I don’t think the OP is a professional, and it’s really not necessary to sing the praises of ridiculously high end gear. It’s perfectly possible get a very good recording with something decent and much much cheaper.

It’s more important to learn how than spending a tonne of money.

You were right to point out that something like the SM58 isn’t up to the task though, because it’s the wrong type of mic.

Who knows, maybe the OP has lots of money to burn? The Rode NT1 is indeed very good.

But I would bet $10 that Balthazar's voice was recorded with a top-end mic. As the saying goes, you can't enhance something that isn't there in the first place.

I would like to say that I understand the need for a good audio setup/ or getting recording done at a studio, and ofc having a talented voice actor. This is mostly just something I want to dabble around with in my free time, I have means to make my own recordings, albeit with not the best equipment. Maybe I should have worded my question better, but I'm more interested about the post production of the effect they got with Balth's voice, instead about the recording process of the voice actor.

I do appreciate the comments though, recommendation of mics and some of the other effects talk!

I just listened to a Balthazar dialog, and I think the one effect I have not mentioned yet is the pitch shifter. The audio track has a pitch-shifted, octave down component mixed in with the normal voice. I believe that, along with a good mic of course, is what gives you the low grumbly tone. A vocoder could do something similar (a la Mr. Roboto), but I am pretty sure we are hearing a pitch shifter in this case.

This reminds me of the developers' commentary in Portal, and how they explained in a fair amount of detail how they made GlaDOS's voice. Including saying that a human voice actor could sound much more like a sci-fi computer than a real computer does. It included some things that the actress did to her voice, some standard processing done to everything, and some specific processing actions (like sudden pitch changes) IIRC.

And then I thought how cool it would be if developer commentaries had taken off outside Valve and we had one for BG3

Oh for God’s sake. Of course it is! Feel kinda stupid for not thinking of that.

Just tried with Gale and made him sound a lot more sinister talking about Mystra. Think there’s probably a bit more going on, with reverb and possibly some modulation, but that seems to be the key thing.

I bow to your superior sound design knowledge.

So ignore what I said before.

(Except about buying a mic, I stand by that)