Guide to Voice Cues

Use Voice Cues to fine-tune your voice's audio performance.
 

Voice Cues lets you hand-craft your voiceover to sound exactly how you envision it. Have you ever wanted your voice to read a sentence more slowly, or maybe you wanted your final sentence to read with more power, finality, or "oomph?"

With Voice Cues, you can prompt your voice to do just that. To access Voice Cues, start by selecting Project Model, "Caruso."
 

Available Voice Cues

Studio's Caruso project model offers the following Voice Cues. Need help finding the cue you're looking for? We're constantly expanding this list, so keep an eye out for new additions in Studio.
 

Verbal Cues

• Loudness: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase louder or quieter based on the slider setting.

• Pace: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase faster or slower, depending on the slider setting.

• Pitch: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase with a higher or lower tone.

Non-Verbal Cues

• Pause: Adds a shorter or longer pause where there is a comma or period between two sentences.

   

Note:  A pause cue cannot be added to the period at the end of the section.

Once you add cues to your script, the selected text will show a colored underline that corresponds to the same colored cue. These underlines will remain unless the cue is removed.

• Loudness: yellow
• Pace: blue
• Pitch: green
• Pause: red
• Multiple cues: text will be underlined in white with a tooltip displaying the applied cue values.

Adding Cues to Your Script

Voice Cues are built into Studio's Caruso and can be accessed by highlighting the part of your script you wish to adjust using Cues.

Here is a quick guide to get you started with Voice Cues:

1. Select the text to apply a Voice Cue by highlighting the desired text in your script.
    
2. Use your cursor to adjust the sliders for each desired voice cue in the right side rail.
    

Emotional Presets

Need a place to start? Apply one of the preset Cues to your section. 

• Happy
• Excited
• Calm
• Stern
• Serious 
• Secretive

Note: Emotional presets can only be applied to a full section. To view and adjust emotional presets, select the entire section and use the sliders in the right-side Cues menu.

To remove any verbal or non-verbal cues, highlight the text with the applied cue and click the Reset icon.

Previewing Cues

• Once you add a cue to your script, click the Play button to generate an audio take and hear your cue performance.
• Need to make adjustments? Just edit your cues and generate another take.

Tips and Tricks

Voice Cues perform differently across voices. Each voice has a particular vocal range, so the same loudness cue applied to Tobin may sound different when applied to Ava.

1. Add Voice Cues to different text lengths. Adding a cue to a single word may not be as impactful as adding that same cue to a full sentence. If you struggle to achieve the right outcome with your cue, try testing different text lengths to see if that improves the performance.
2. Get more dramatic results by combining cues. Here are a few combinations to try:
   1. Add loud + slow cues on a call-to-action to get the attention of the listener
   2. Use quiet + fast cues to shift emphasis
3. When in doubt, tinker. The best part of Voice Cues is the ability to dive in and hone each piece of your script. The more you play, the more you'll learn what works best for you and your voiceovers.

Common Cues Error

If you encounter the error "The text must be stripped of white spaces," it indicates there's an extra space after the last paragraph in your script. To resolve this, remove any spaces after the last paragraph's character (e.g., period or question mark).