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Recording good voices

ClericSpeak clearly, my child, and close to the microphone.

Variety

  • 3–5 variants per event. Events that happen often – hurt, ambient, random – need more, or players hear the same line again and again.
  • Start with ambient, hurt, death and greeting. Thanks to the fallbacks, a pack with only ambient, hurt and death already works for every entity.
  • Record yes and no for villagers and traders (and drink_potion and disappear for traders). These events replace vanilla sounds; without lines, the vanilla “hmm” comes through between your voice's lines.
  • Give lines professions: the farmer talks about crops, the librarian about books. Profession lines are said half of the time, general lines the other half.

Personality

Give each voice a character – grumpy, cheerful, shy, greedy, overworked – and let it show in every line. A grumpy villager greets you differently from a cheerful one, and an unfriendly greeting (greeting_unfriendly) can be really rude.

Short lines

Most lines should be 1–3 seconds. Small talk can be longer, but long lines get interrupted more often. Combat taunts and hurt should be very short.

Sound quality

  • Record close to the microphone in a quiet room with soft furniture.
  • Avoid clipping – the studio warns you – and reverb.
  • No effects: do not add pitch shifting or reverb; the mod varies the pitch itself.
  • Mono: the editor exports mono, so the voice comes from the villager and not from inside your head.

Children

Child voices are best recorded by children or with a naturally higher voice. If a pack has no child voices, servers can play adult voices with a higher pitch (childFallback).

Witches and illagers

They have their own events like combat, patrol, spot_player, cast_spell or brew. Illagers on patrol talk among themselves, the captain gives orders, and the evoker of course needs a wololo. See Illagers and Witch.

Languages

One pack per language. A server with packs in several languages can give every village its own language, see Languages and villages.

Subtitles

Write the script in the studio: the text of each line becomes its subtitle. Players with subtitles on read what your villagers say.