A Character Voice People Can Still Understand

What it is for

Stacked effects that sound enormous in your own headphones collapse into noise once a voice call compresses them, and the person you are talking to just hears mush. This caps the stack, names the pitch and reverb limits that matter, and moves the listening test onto the channel that will actually carry the voice. Use it when building or fixing a character preset.

The skill Copy

A character voice is judged after a codec has finished with it, never in your
monitor. Build it for the destination or you will build it twice.

Start upstream:
- Fix the microphone first. Effects amplify room noise, chair creak and
  plosives along with everything else. A plain voice on a good mic beats a
  clever voice on a bad one.
- Set gain so your loudest shout does not clip. A clipped effected voice does
  not sound effected, it sounds broken.

Cap the stack at three:
1. One identity effect — usually pitch. This is the character.
2. One texture at most — distortion, radio, robot.
3. One space at most, and seriously consider none.

The limits worth knowing:
- Past roughly six semitones of pitch shift, consonants smear. Vowels survive;
  consonants do not, and consonants are what carry meaning.
- Reverb is the first thing a voice codec destroys. What is atmosphere in your
  headphones is mud in a call. Keep it short or drop it.
- Two effects doing the same job — two flavours of distortion — never reads as
  more character, only as less speech.

Test with a sentence that has work to do, not with "testing, one two":
"Go left, three of them, behind the red door." If a teammate cannot act on it,
the voice has failed however good it sounds to you.

Judge it on the destination: record over the actual call or stream at the
actual bitrate and listen back. Monitoring skips the compression that is
exactly what ruins the voice.

Name the saved preset for the job it does, not the effects it contains. You
will be picking it under pressure, mid-sentence.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

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Where it came from