Recording Guidelines

Our formula for the best narrations

Recording Quality

  • Aim for a "conversational" level of quality. Remember, your audience includes people on the road, in the office, at the gym, or relaxing at home. Your audio should flow smoothly and be entertaining, but not distracting from the content.
  • Avoid or edit out long pauses that interrupt the flow of the article.
  • Maintain a similar volume throughout the entire recording.
  • Keep narrations accurate to their source texts.

Article Audio Structure

Our narrations are formatted in the following structure:

  1. [Article Title] by [Article Author or Authors]
  2. [Article Body]
  3. “For more articles like this, visit [Website URL]” (Give the short URL, e.g. “sitename.org” or “blog.com”)

When Recording...

  • Change references to earlier lines of text like "mentioned above" to "mentioned earlier".
  • Skip things like repeated measurement/currency conversions that appear in brackets in the text. (e.g. "[100km/h]")
  • Skip sections such as "References", "About the Author", or bits at the end that seem promotional and separate from the main topic (e.g. “Follow me on Twitter to hear more!”)
  • Skip references to images or graphs that don’t impede the meaning of the article. (e.g. "See Fig. A").
  • If an article has too many of these, and you can’t figure out a way to get around it, let us know and we give you a more listener-friendly article :)

Things to avoid?

  • Lots of background noise.
  • Inaudible or hard-to-understand vocals
  • Excessive volume variation
  • Reading the text incorrectly.
  • Mispronunciations or other speaking errors
  • Monotone, grating, or otherwise unpleasant vocals
  • Inclusion of background music, sound effects, or noticeable voice filters
  • Lengthy pauses or gaps in audio

Format

Once your recording is complete, you can upload it in .mp3 format.


Questions?

Feel free to e-mail our narrator support team at Narrators@GystAudio.com. We're happy to provide clarifications and hear your suggestions. Reaching out means that you'll be helping other Gyst narrators, too.