The Voice Actors Studio - Las Vegas NV

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Jacked Up: Posting on Social Media and Your VO Career

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Everybody has opinions. Social media lets you express them, but only YOU can control them. If you’re getting into business as a voice actor (or any other form of self-employment), you need to add a new filter: How would expressing myself on social media affect potential customers and my reputation?

Want to complain about (pick a topic)? Want to advocate for (pick a candidate)? Want to single out a bad client or lousy experience in VO?

THINK before posting. What benefit would you get for your VO business? What harm might there be? [Read more…] about Jacked Up: Posting on Social Media and Your VO Career

Tips for Practicing Your VO Performance

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Building your VO expertise shouldn’t stop when you leave class. Here are three tips for practicing your VO performance!

1. Learn the art of paraphrasing.

Being an excellent voice actor means you know how to get to the heart of the copy writer’s message. We turn written word into spoken word and make it sound natural. In order to do that, we need to understand what the heck it is we’re talkin’ about!

Sure, we want to tell a great nuanced story, work our exceptional mic technique, and be mindful of how we ‘sound’, but are you ever guilty of focusing too much on how your voice sounds and overlooking the key points the writer is making? (We’ve all done it!)

Remember in school, when your teacher asked you to summarize a book or a chapter in your own words? Paraphrasing, baby! As a voice actor, it’s critical to be able to understand the general message of the copy well enough that you can put it in your own words in a sentence or two—well enough that you can paraphrase it!

To paraphrase a script, ask yourself these questions: What’s the main objective of this script? What’s the big idea(s) the writer wants to drive home?

Then, flip the script over (so you can’t see it—no cheating!) and then say, in your own words, out loud, the general message that the writer is communicating. If you can’t say it in your own words yet, read it again until you can…

Boom! You did it!

Next, quickly flip the script back over and begin reading your script again out loud. What do you know? It sounds way more conversational and less announcer-y or read-y.

When you put the copy in your own words, you tap into a more conversational YOU. And that’s what producers want—you!

2. Fall in love with lead-ins.

Another great benefit to paraphrasing scripts is that you can use paraphrasing as a lead-in.

What’s a lead-in? A lead-in is an unscripted word or phrase you say right before you start reading a script. I describe it as a little performance “trampoline” you can use to bounce into your actual “script-reading.”

Holy cow does it help! It’s a miracle worker. Why is that? Well, when you start reading without a lead-in, sometimes it takes a sentence or two of reading before you find your stride or momentum—before you settle in to that script. If you add a lead-in, by the time you get to the first sentence of the script, you’ll nail it. This is super important, because do you know what the most important sentence of the script is?

You guessed it! The first sentence! How your first sentence lands on the ear will dictate whether or not that casting director or client will continue listening.

(Now, do me and yourself a favor and rock that read all the way through, but if you’re gonna stress over any part of an audition… make it the very first sentence. First impressions count!)

[Read more…] about Tips for Practicing Your VO Performance

Jacked Up: How Much Should You Know About Audio Editing?

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WHAT? I have to be an audio editor, too?

I recently listened to an online webinar where a well-accomplished audio editor gave a class on Twisted Wave, an audio recording app. It runs in the cloud as well as on Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads. It’s my go-to editing and processing app.

So, I wanted to listen in to see how the big-city pros use Twisted Wave. (Lifetime learning; always a good thing.) And I did learn some things about this app I’ve used for 6+ years. The app itself is simple, inexpensive, and easy to learn—and all the time, I discover features I didn’t know it had.

But I also heard something in the webinar that’s worth sharing here: being highly skilled in a craft means you know A LOT about the craft. It also means you could easily overwhelm a rookie audience.
It’s like signing up for a painting class. Rembrandt shows up to teach and starts showing you little brush-stroke tricks he does to make water look 3D on the canvas. Meanwhile, you’re just trying to figure out which brush to start with and how to get paint on the brush and not in your hair!

With VO, you spend months learning your performance skills, being creative, and following directions. Acting. Emoting. Now, all of a sudden, you and your computer have to get up-close and personal. You have to take some audio you just recorded, do “something or other” to it, and turn it into the “finished audio” that your client wants.

Gulp.

Suddenly, you’re back to Square One on the learning curve. EQ? Compression? Normalizing? Room tone? Special pasting? Effect stacks? Racks? “Sweeten the audio?” Huh?

There’s a whole world of audio editing knowledge and skills that take time and practice to learn—just like with VO performance! You can decide that you want to be a skilled practitioner in two fields: performance and audio editing.

Or, you can keep the focus on your performance skills but learn a simple, straightforward way to process audio that works for most situations and is good enough for the client*.

You can “call it good” forever or just for now, until your brain can handle taking on another learning curve.
Eventually, if your passion leads you to VO work that regularly requires full editing and production (like some e-learning jobs and audiobooks at ACX and a few other publishers), maybe by then you can hire out the editing and processing to competent engineers. Let them flick their “paint brushes” like Rembrandt to make your audio soar. And while they’re busy with your audio, you can be busy making more audio for another gig.

*Contact TVAS to set up a private lesson with me on using Twisted Wave to fully produce your next e-learning gig or ACX audiobook.

5 Things I Learned as a New Full-Time Voice Actor

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Back in February of this year, I finally said, “To heck with it.” (I actually said something else to that effect, but it wasn’t G-rated, and this is a G-rated blog). I’d had enough with only tip-toeing around my lifelong dream of being a voice actor; I wanted to go after it full-time.

So I quit my full-time job. I quit a secure paycheck. I quit predictability and dove into my booth and only surfaced for air in between auditions for more coffee (and occasional Frasier binges, because come on, girl’s gotta have a break). [Read more…] about 5 Things I Learned as a New Full-Time Voice Actor

Are You Doing the VO Cha-Cha?

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I say it all the time, but our VO journey is a marathon, not a sprint, with many starts and stops along the way. Sort of like a VO cha-cha!

For a while, you might feel some major momentum with your VO training, but then, something pulls you away. Life happens, work happens, being human happens. At TVAS, we totally understand. We’ll never make you feel bad if you’ve had to hit the pause button on your VO training because another part of life needed your attention. We get it—we’ve been there. (Just know we’ll be happy to see you when the time is right, and we’ll never grill you on where you’ve been! Ever!) [Read more…] about Are You Doing the VO Cha-Cha?

Jacked Up: Carts and Horses

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It happens every few months: a voice acting student I know is morphing before my eyes into a working voice actor, having been at it for six, nine, or twelve months. They come to me all excited. “I booked my first gig!” (Usually when I hear about that it also includes, “my first audiobook!”)

Oh, great, I say. Are you ready technically? Got your studio together, have your process in place?

I’m greeted then with either a blank look or a confident-sounding, “Oh, I’m setting up my studio this week.”

My reaction (that I keep to myself) is, “How did you do a decent audition without a place set up to record? And why would you accept a job without a place to record it?” [Read more…] about Jacked Up: Carts and Horses

Top 10 Steps for VO Success

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Everyone’s voice over journey is different. It may take some people a few months to cut their demo and other people a few years. Some people want to go after voice acting full time, while others like it as a side gig. Some folks are animation and character wizards, while others prefer corporate, commercial, and narration work. The variety is what makes VO so special and unique to you! [Read more…] about Top 10 Steps for VO Success

Mic Technique & Style Tips

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Voice acting is so much more than just talking into a mic. When you’re interpreting your scripts, you should not only think your performance choices like mood/attitude who your audience is, and how you want them to feel—you should also think about the how you’re interacting with the mic itself.

For example, if it’s a conversational script, keep it—you guessed it!—conversational! Think about the volume level in which you’d speak if you were talking to someone sitting right next to you. [Read more…] about Mic Technique & Style Tips

Joy’s Talent Spotlight: Andrea Balsa

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Andrea Balsa is a fascinating young woman who is setting the world on fire with her outstanding talent in bilingual voice over. The day I interviewed Andrea, I was sitting in my home in Las Vegas, NV and she was sitting in her room…in Poland! Yes, Poland, doing a huge voiceover project. She was hired to do a job for a big U.S. department store, and had to hunt for a studio to record the project in Poland. That’s just one of the projects Andrea is currently working on. [Read more…] about Joy’s Talent Spotlight: Andrea Balsa

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