People

His name is better known in radio circles that the voiceover world, but legendary radio programmer and consultant Bill Drake has just died. Here is the news from Ken Levine’s blog. My thanks to my friend Willie Edwards for posting the link on the VO-BB.

My friend Zurek (formerly known in the Voiceover Universe as Rick Party) has blogged about his name change and other matters of importance. I hope you’ll take a moment to stop by, read, and ruminate.

There’s an article in Variety that talks with several ladies who are involved with this question in one way or another, including Sylvia Villagran who linked to this Variety article on her Voiceover Universe blog.

My friend Peter O’Connell is in Charlotte on a business trip and we were able to spend a very pleasant dinner together along with my youngest son, Brian. We talked about voiceover, of course, especially marketing since Peter is something of a mentor to me in that regard.

After dinner, we took a few shots with Peter’s camera in the restaurant (read Peter’s take on our visit and see one of the shots from his camera on his blog) and then when we got him back to his hotel my camera had just enough power to take this shot of the three of us in the lobby.

From left to right, me, Peter O’Connell and my youngest son, Brian.

My friend Liz de Nesnera blogs about her experiences this past weekend studying with Harlan Hogan and Elaine Clark at their weekend workshop in the Washington DC area.

Joe Cipriano is back with his latest Ask Joe video.

Find more videos like this on voiceover universe presents…

It is so cool to hear that Fox promo session recorded in rather unusual circumstances to say the least! And then to follow up with the other live session. Very, very cool.

Trish Basanyi has a brand new logo and it’s just about as beautiful as she is. (Look at her photos from my New York friends post yesterday if you have any question on that score.) Great stuff, Trish. Wow.

The logo was done by Nikki Saco who is obviously gifted not only as a voice talent, but as a graphic designer as well.

Check out this charming video from the studio of my friend Philip Banks.

My friend Philip Banks has posted a brief video of his work in his voiceover booth.

I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Update: For those interesting in Mr. Banks’ microphone technique, you might want to read through this article from Mix Magazine. My thanks to my friend Bill Ballenberg for posting the link to this article on th VO-BB.

Today was the first of our two days of study with Marice Tobias. As with every time that I study with Marice the experience was stretching, challenging, uplifting, encouraging, mind-boggling and honestly I can’t come up with enough superlatives. The most interesting this is that while Marice always has lots of valuable ideas and thoughts to share with us, her unique gift is her ability to guide each of us to greater heights that we thought possible.

Among my friends there were Rick Party, sitting here next to Melisssa Exelberth.

Rich mentioned that he’s doing some updates on Voiceover Universe about this weekend, so be sure to check over there for his point of view and photos.

And as we were wrapping up the day, the four VO-BB members (we’ll be joined by a fifth tomorrow) got together for a quick photo.

Mary McKitrick, Anthony Mendez, me and Melisssa Exelberth in the lobby at Pirate in New York City for the Marice Tobias weekend, November 15, 2008.

We have another day of mind-stretching, heart-stirring play and study tomorrow. And then a fun meet-up we’re putting together with several voiceover friends from here in New York. I’ll post more when I can, but it may not be right away tomorrow night because of the schedule I’ll have to keep between Sunday night and Monday morning.

I’m in New York City for a weekend workshop with Marice Tobias. Friday evening I was able to catch up with a couple of my friends here. Patrick O’Connor picked out the restaurant, a wonderful place on the West Side called Kennedy’s. After dinner we took a couple of photos. First Patrick asked the age old question “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” And then pointed us in the right direction.

Then Patrick, Melissa Exelberth and I were able to flag down a nice gentleman who was kind enough to snap a shot of the three of us in front of Carnegie Hall.

We had a wonderful time. Now, some rest and then we hit the ground running at the workshop with Marice in the morning.

Oh, the answer to that age old question, in case you don’t know: practice, practice, practice.

Mae Laborde is a remarkable woman who re-invented herself at the tender age of 93 as an actress. There’s a wonderful interview with her on the Growing Bolder site. My thanks to Bob Fraser for his email with the link to this delightful story.

John Florian publishes a superb resource site for voice actors called VoiceOverXtra.com. If you haven’t signed up there, I commend the site to you. It’s filled with lots of good stuff. Here are a couple of items you’ll find on the front page today.

A fabulous article featuring the new book Voice for Hire: Launch and Maintain a Lucrative Career in Voice-Overs from Peter Rofé and Randy Thomas. The article is an excerpt from chapter one of the book.

Dan Lenard does a ton of consulting on home studios and he provides some excellent guidance on how to keep it simple while building a good home studio.

Oh, you’ll also find an article I wrote (and originally published here) about some of the painful lessons I’ve learned along the way in my voiceover career.

With thanks to my friend Tom Ackerman for posting the link to this news story on the VO-BB, I’m sad to report that long time NBC Nightly News Announcer Howard Reig has died. He was 87.

Update: I noticed just a moment ago that Howard’s son created a tribute site to his Dad upon his retirement.

Deb Munro has released her latest newsletter and podcast.

My friend Joe Szymanski blogged about one of the greats the other day, Ann Dewig. Joe points out that Ann has mastered the art of making even her bloopers work for her clients.