Good tips! For monitoring, I love the Beyerdynamic DT 100 headphones. Being closed-back, you can be acoustically separated from your recording space, allowing you to hear its acoustical characteristics (which is the reason why engineers in studios sit in separate spaces from the musicians). You’ll be able to hear the effects of your experiments with duvets :)
Like the parent says compression is also quite important. It’s a big part of what makes radio voices sound radio, for example. Seeing it simplistically it is basically about lowering the dynamics of your sound—make the loud parts softer, so you can make the whole thing louder.
Any audio editing software comes with basic compression plugins. It takes some exercise to get right. Also, as you are making parts of your recording louder, any bad acoustics, noises artefacts are amplified.
Some recording software allows you to monitor effects while you are recording—this can help in finding the right acoustics. Of course there will always be a slight delay—a dedicated hardware compressor solves this problem.
One more thing: you should definitely look at the Reaper recording software: http://reaper.fm/
It has honorable pricing, an unlimited trial, and every feature you could ever need. It's particularly well suited for the kind of stuff you're doing: it has ripple editing, automatic alignment of repeated takes and so on. Can't recommend it enough. Make sure to read the manual though, it uses the mouse buttons in an unusual way.
Like the parent says compression is also quite important. It’s a big part of what makes radio voices sound radio, for example. Seeing it simplistically it is basically about lowering the dynamics of your sound—make the loud parts softer, so you can make the whole thing louder.
Any audio editing software comes with basic compression plugins. It takes some exercise to get right. Also, as you are making parts of your recording louder, any bad acoustics, noises artefacts are amplified.
Some recording software allows you to monitor effects while you are recording—this can help in finding the right acoustics. Of course there will always be a slight delay—a dedicated hardware compressor solves this problem.