So there you are, struggling to figure out a place to record, a place to set up your first studio!

Try this: keep it simple. If you have a carpeted walk-in closet, golden! Is it full of clothes? PERFECT. Leave them there. Don’t empty the closet! [Read more…]

Free tips.

The internet is awash in information. Some of it is great, some of it is, well, flushable.

But among all the noise there are some gems. And there’s a host of free information for voiceover that can augment your VO education. [Read more…]

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Wikipedia says this proverb came either from Joseph P. Kennedy (President Kennedy’s father) or the Notre Dame coach, Knute Rockne. It’s all about standing tough, manning up, and all that GI Joe kind of thinking. [Read more…]

A voiceover career is primarily a creative enterprise. You get to walk into a small room, talk to a microphone like it’s your best friend, record that sound, maybe edit it (and other audio engineering tasks), become a master of your computer, the internet and social media, market yourself online and at conferences, have a “so what do you do?” elevator speech…all sorts of cool stuff, right?
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One of the things about VO is that nobody’s experience (AKA “the journey”) is quite the same as anybody else’s. Two people can sign up at the same pay-to-play site, for example, put up essentially similar demos, and do everything like each other, and one will succeed and the other won’t book anything.

Each voice resonates with each client in a unique way, often having more to do with the client’s current situation than the talent’s. That said, the trick in VO is figuring what piece of the advice you get from a given voice actor actually makes sense for you.
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A question came up in a recent audiobook class about pseudonyms, and whether you need them in other areas of voiceover.

The short answer is no. You generally don’t need a pseudonym for elearning or commercials.
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When my two sons were in high school, I had a rule: Tell me where you’re going and when you’ll be back. Call me BEFORE you’re late.

In any business, clients can’t read the minds of those they hire. But they do judge behavior. If you’re friendly, easy to work with, knowledgeable, and reliable, then repeat business is in the cards. [Read more…]

Mistakes

Most of us can’t remember what it was like when as babies, we learned to walk. In fact, research has found we can’t remember much about life before age 3. That’s probably a good thing.

There’s a lot of hard-knocks learning going on in those years. Wobble a step or two and crash. Reach for something shiny. Crash. Oops, my pants! Reboot. Nap. Ouch, my new teeth! I want to eat NOW!!!

So, welcome to the baby-step time for your VO career. Read two lines, muff a word, crash. Grab the mic, ooops, sorry. Cough into the mic, deafen the engineer and sicken your colleagues—oops, sorry. [Read more…]

At some point in your voiceover journey, you’re going to start auditioning and booking jobs. You’ll be producing audio files—remember to record, edit, and process in .wav or .aiff formats—not in mp3—you may deliver an mp3 to the client, but your work is in one of the two high quality formats.

And so what do you do with those audio files after you hit “submit”? Well, what would you do if a client replies to an audition by saying, “We loved it! We’ll use your audition. Just send it to us in a FLAC format.” Or what if in two years a client comes back and says, “Hey, we want to change the phone number in that commercial you did for us, but keep the rest the same.”

What if you just want to listen to yourself in 3 years to see how you’ve changed? [Read more…]

Copy can come in a variety of forms.  Sometimes it’s buried in an email from an agent.   Sometimes a pay-to-play site makes you copy the copy with your mouse and then paste into something useful on your computer.  And then there’s long stuff, like elearning or video game sides.  These can come in formats oh so handy for the client, and oh so UNhandy for you, like in a spreadsheet!  Ugh.

The copy can not only tell you what the client wants you to say, it can also tell you (with help from your word processor) tell HOW MUCH they want you to say, via a word count.  That in turn influences how much you want to CHARGE!  Yet, that word count can be hard to figure out when copy is spread out in a few dozen spreadsheet cells. [Read more…]