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Solid voiceover career advice

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover

On my Recommended Books page, you’ll find a new entry at the top. It’s actually not a book, but an MP3 recording of a teleseminar that Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino presented in January of 2007. It’s $49.00 and worth far more than that in the solid content and guidance you’ll find. The same file is available through Nancy and Anna’s website Break Into Voice Over. On that site, you’ll find several more MP3 recordings of teleseminars by Nancy and Anna. Each one is worth far more than the $49.00 price tag.

Update: The audio is also available through Nancy’s main site BrainTracksAudio.com

Want to know more about Audacity?

General, Tools

Audacity is a remarkably powerful audio editing program that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. It also happens to be free. Yes, free. It’s part of a movement that’s called Open Source. Not only does it run on all 3 kinds of computers, but it looks and works the same on all 3. So, if you’d like to know more about Audacity, you’ll want to spend a bit of time with this post on the blog of my friend Some Audio Guy.

11 months isn’t a long time

General, People

Eleven months ago, on the 13th of March 2007 to be exact, my friend Jeffrey Kafer made his first post to his voiceover blog. In that first post he made a confession…

I’ve never gotten a paid VO gig.

Eleven months and 8 days later, on the 21st of February 2008 to be exact, Jeffrey added a post to his voiceover blog that represented quite an accomplishment. He was given the 2008 Voicey Award for Best New Voice.

Mighty fine work, Jeffrey. You’ve come a long way in a short time. I’m sure there are many more heights for you to scale. I know I’m going to enjoy the show.

Slow progress is better than none

General, People

My friend Dave Courvoisier has been wrestling with Pro Tools for several days now, a battle he has detailed on his voiceover blog. Recently there’s been some good progress. My heart really goes out to Dave because I’ve fought a few of these software/hardware/driver battles myself over the years. I’m glad to see that things are starting to come clear, Dave. I hope you’re able to run all of these glitches to the ground and soon.

Talent isn’t enough.

General, Tools

It’s your professional mindset that gets most of the acting work for you.

The title and first line are, together, a quote from one of the top ten grossing stars in the history of film. Reading, thinking about, absorbing, internalizing the valuable comments of other successful performers can give you extremely useful insights into your own career. Bob Fraser has assembled an e-book called I Wish I’d Said That–1001 Quotes for Actors. He’s selling it for just 7 dollars. (I, by the way, don’t get anything from him if you buy this e-book. I just thought you should know about it.)

The lost is found and all that jazz

General, People

My friend Rowell Gormon remains one of the most talented people I know. Recently, as we were talking together about his blog, in the background I was digging through some of the cached archives of his old blog and stumbled on the text of the one blog post he hadn’t been able to reconstruct. Sadly with the demise of that old blog, the multiple comments left there seem to be lost to the ages. But, you can once again enjoy Rowell’s fabulous wit and brilliant insights into jazz music and voiceover work, now that he’s posted the text on his new blog.

How does your room sound?

General

Setting up a voiceover studio at home is more complicated than you might think. For instance, in addition to a decent microphone, a way to get the sound from that decent microphone in to your computer, record that sound, edit that audio, and so forth and so on; you also need to be concerned with how your room sounds.

Not just are there sounds coming through from outside (though if there are, that is a problem that will have to be dealt with); but also what kind of coloration is your room adding to your recordings? And don’t imagine that slapping a bunch of acoustic foam up all over the place is the magic solution. Each room has its own unique acoustic characteristics and taming the challenges can be a time and money consuming process.

Recently I stumbled upon a wonderful web page with loads of information about Small Room Acoustics and Sound Theory. I hope you find some useful information there. I certainly have.

Update: Note, that page is geared toward music recording, but the same issues apply to recording voiceovers.

Sounding like a real person

Career Advice, General, Getting started in Voiceover

For quite some time now, with a few obvious exceptions, the trend in voiceover work has been away from the classic announcer sound and to a real or natural sound. Now, you might think this would be bad news for those of us who do voiceovers professionally. After all, just about anyone can and does talk and everyone who talks sounds like a real person. Right?

Well, sort of. First, what a casting director or voiceover producer means by “sounding natural or real” is kind of like what they mean when they say they want models who look like real people for their magazine or television ads. Somehow all the “real” people still end up looking pretty stunning, don’t they? The same applies to the world of voiceover. Real or natural performance is still acting, just different acting than it was 25 years ago.

My friend Caryn Clark recently attended a local networking event that helped her think through some of these ideas about why hiring a professional voice talent is still the best plan if you want to do the most effective audio and video projects. Caryn’s blog post caught the attention of Stephanie Ciccarelli, who in turn posted about the subject on Vox Daily. Both Caryn’s original post and Stephanie’s post resulted in some very interesting comments.

Cipriano at home and on the road

General, People

Joe Cipriano’s microphone of choice is the Neumann U87ai, according to this article at the ProSoundWeb site.

A couple of things stand out to me in this article. One being that Joe brings his Neumann with him on the road. I do the same. I always want to provide my clients with the best possible sound, even if I happen to be traveling.

The other being what Joe does to get good voiceover audio in his hotel room.

I always set up on a desk, and put a towel down on it. I’ll usually pull the curtains closed and put my back to them. I’ll take pillows from the bed or the sofa and put them angled in a V behind the microphone, so I’m talking into the microphone with pillows behind it and drapery behind me. It works out well and sounds pretty good.

I’ve been doing this for the last few years, too. While I know that several folks have had great experiences traveling with a portable booth made from a small, collapsible crate stuffed with acoustic foam; I travel often enough that I want to have as little to take with me on the road as I possibly can. Using the drapes and pillows as Joe’s described here works very well most of the time. A few times, under the worst of circumstances, I’ve pulled a heavy blanket from the bed and thrown that over my head, the microphone and my laptop as a kind of make-shift booth.

By the way, my thanks to Tim McLaughlin for the link to the article on his voiceover blog.