Archives for December 2024

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 20 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a great episode for you today. We’ve got an audiobook narrator and casting director from Blackstone Audio, Mr. Grover Gardner. He’s a great guest.
He’s got over 30 years of audiobook experience today. But before we get to him, we’ve got current events. So what have you been up to, Paul?
So much! Unbelievable things happening!
All right, Jerry.
All right. Well, does that… why I went with that?
Okay. Now, a couple of exciting things, actually. I booked my first job on Podalgo this week.
So for all your… It was for an e-learning piece for a company in Holland, Netherlands. And for those of you who have been asking or worrying about your results on pay to play, sometimes it takes a long time.
I was discussing with somebody on Facebook about how I’ve been with Podalgo for two years now, and this is my first job booked. So not the greatest shooting percentage. But I stay with them because I love the founder and owner, Armin Hirschheder, so much.
And I love the way the company operates, that they are the only pay to play I’m with now. I think I mentioned that last episode. And finally, I’m glad to say I booked a job there.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
But yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to love about Podalgo. It’s probably got the most affordable plan for an online casting site. And they actually have more than one payment plan.
Most of the other ones, it’s just $400 a year. This one actually has a semiannual and a monthly one, which I feel is way more accessible. You’re not locked in.
You’re not going to regret it if your investment doesn’t come back at the end of the year. You wouldn’t be upset if you lose $20 in a month. You’re like, I tried it, it didn’t work, whatever.
Yeah, I did it month to month for quite a while, actually, and Armand will even let you put your membership on pause and not kick you out, so you don’t have to pay the monthly fee. So if you’re having a rough couple of months, you can stop the membership or pause it, and then when you’re ready, come back. So I actually have done that, too.
Yeah, and for being a one-man band, Armand is just… I mean, his customer service is flawless. He’s always available to answer questions or to help troubleshoot issues with the website.
He’s very open to listener feedback. The only thing I will say about Bedongo is that they do tend to have specific niches for the kinds of projects that they cast for. A lot of e-learning narration, a lot of narration that’s being translated from one European language into English, so overdubbing, things.
Like that. Corporate narrations, trainings, seminar audios that you might have in a big trade show audio for a boost and stuff like that. So if those aren’t niches that you’re strong in or that your voice is suitable for, you might not enjoy much success from that.
It’s just something to be mindful of. Also, since it is a foreign client, for the most part, they are looking for a mid-Atlantic neutral accent. Whatever that is exactly is debatable.
But it means as long as you’re easily understood, you don’t have any regionalisms to your voice, to your accent, then you might enjoy some success for them.
And one other thing I’d like to point out about Bodago is they do do quality checks. You actually have to have your audio approved by, I think it’s a production team, but I think it’s basically Armand listening. Probably Armand.
Right. And the standards are real. I’m here to tell you because last week I put through an audition and I got an email back from Armand saying, this audio has some issues and I’m not going to send it to the client.
And I listened back and once you know it, I copied over a breath into the room tone that I didn’t know I had done and put that through every dead space in the audition. So he was absolutely right. It sounded like garbage.
I had even more respect for the company because of that quality assurance being there. I didn’t feel slighted because he was right. It sounded like crap and he was right to point it out.
Yeah, that individual attention. Armand, if you’re listening, we love you. Thank you so much for Bodago.
So other current events, I had put together some demos for my children. I think I mentioned in one of the episodes that they were assigned to a casting agency in New Zealand because they were looking for parents who had kids around. They aren’t necessarily professionally trained voice actors yet, but they’re working towards it.
Yet. Right. So this agency was just looking for anyone who had kids because I guess they’re anxious to have some authentic voices on their roster.
So they were signed with them. And just for fun on a snow day, we put together some stuff here in the studio with my oldest two. And because I just have no hesitation about anything ever, I sent it to all my agents and said, Ed, you guys want some kids?
And I’m happy to say they were signed to four more. So I’ll give you mine. Right.
They’re now with four of my agents for a voiceover talent. So we’ll see if they get any traction. They have one audition in already and haven’t booked the job yet, but we’re hopeful.
Start earning your keep, kids.
Yeah, I was joking with one of our friends that the real reason is that I want them to understand acoustics and how much they’re banging on the floors downstairs when they’re trying to practice their roller skates in the kitchen or they’re wrestling with each other in the playroom. I can show them and say, look, your audition is ruined because of what your brother did downstairs. That’s my evil plan.
I thought you were just going to leave them in there to record and then you’re just banging pots together in the kitchen or something like that.
Well, the Whistler Room does have a lock. I think it only locks from the inside, though, so it might not work.
Careful. Don’t want them to pass out in the booth. I don’t know how good your ventilation is.
It’s pretty bad. So what’s been happening in your VO world?
Let’s see. This month, we’ve got some exciting new changes to our membership program with the Global Voice Acting Academy. We are sort of transitioning.
Originally, what we had right now, we had two peer-led workouts a month. This is an opportunity for people to work with myself or my coworker, Mario Nivale. You might have seen her on the various Facebook groups.
He’s an incredible talent and a real good ear for voiceover and some great directing. But anyways, we had two of those a month. And then we also had what was called these Elevation Q&A webinars, which is like an hour, hour and a half long webinar where you get to pick the brain of a VO pro.
Usually it’s Christina Melizia or David Rosenthal, but occasionally we’ll have another guest. But we noticed that as our membership grows, we, our attendance at our workouts started to be higher than our Q&A’s. So we’re like, huh.
So Christina Melizia had the brilliant idea, why don’t David and I lead workouts as well? So that we had like, so we officially, or effectively double our number of workouts. Everybody’s happy.
Everyone gets to practice giving and receiving feedback and getting some from a working pro as well. So everybody’s happy. So we’ll be announcing that at the beginning of the month.
And I’m really excited about it.
That’s awesome.
We also have a new coach that we’re working with, the amazing Carol Monda. She is a, does quite a bit of audio book work. She’s got 400 titles to her name, but she’s also very successful as a commercial, as a commercial actress.
She’s from New York, it’s okay. But as a commercial voiceover actress, she’s got some very large clients, like the Discovery Channel, Turner Classic Movies, the Guggenheim Museum, McDonald’s. Quite a versatile actor.
So I interviewed her yesterday to talk about an upcoming class that we have at the end of the month. So it was great, lots of fun. It’s all about subtext.
It’s for audiobook narrators. It’s called Subtext, Telling the Story Beneath the Words. So by the time this episode is released, the live webinar will have already happened on January 23rd, but you can still see the recording, but just by going to our website and purchasing it after the fact.
So if you want to know how you can… Yeah, definitely. So some more advanced techniques.
We’re trying to get those more nuanced and layered performances in your reads.
Cool. So, we will get to our featured guest in just a moment, but before we do, we’re back with this week’s…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
All right, so this month’s Questionable Gear Purchase is, I bought a 416. I’ve been lusting after them for a long time, and I finally found one at a ridiculous price. It started out almost as a joke.
I was shopping because Mo Rock, a friend of the show, was looking for one, and I said, I’m on the case. I’ll find one. So I started shopping on eBay and Reverb and Craigslist, anywhere I could find.
And right before I found this one, Mo actually bought Simon Vance’s, which is a great story, but she doesn’t need one anymore, is the bottom line. But I said I already found this one on eBay, and I said, I’m going to take it. So I brought it home and looked through all the online stuff I could find about counterfeit ones.
It looks to be legit. I actually opened it up and looked at the circuitry inside, and it looks pretty nice. So unless I’ve been duped really well, it seems to be legit.
Now, what I wanted to do was actually a comparison between the mic I have been using for commercials and promo and video game stuff. The Audio Technica AT4073A, it compares very favorably to the 416. I actually have them here lined up side by side with a mic switcher.
So I’m going to do a quick read with both. And you, the audience, tell me which one you think is better or if there’s really much of a difference. So first on the 4073A.
We’ve dreamed of this since Star Trek’s Holodeck. Immersive worlds that fool our senses and create augmented and virtual realities all around us. We want to interact with these systems and environments naturally.
Talk like we usually talk and use our body to convey meaning. And now I’m on the 416. Same bit of text.
We’ve dreamed of this since Star Trek’s Holodeck. Immersive worlds that fool our senses and create augmented and virtual realities all around us. We want to interact with these systems and environments naturally.
Talk like we usually talk and use our body to convey meaning. Alright, so again, that’s those two mics side by side. Let me know if you think there’s much of a difference.
I’ll tell you my opinion. They sound almost freaking identical. The audio technique is an amazing value for what it is.
And I’m having a hard time justifying having the 416 because they sound so close. But let me know what you think. Send us a comment on the website and we’d love to hear.
It’s a tough choice. I mean, I personally felt like the 416 had a little bit more clarity and might have been more sensitive. But as you’ve told us many times before, you don’t necessarily want the most sensitive mic.
And it’s a tough call because, I mean, it is an industry standard and it could help your brand if you list that on your website, but you have it.
That’s kind of the reason I’m thinking about keeping it. Yeah, I know. Okay, I finished.
I thought I know what you’re going to say.
I was just saying, some producers don’t give a crap about what mic you use, but others do want to know that you at least have some form of professionally recognized microphone. So, I mean, that’s a tough call. But I will say, because I use my 416 for just about everything, and it’s a wonderful travel mic, too.
It’s durable, it’s lightweight, it works well with any interface, even the budget ones, and I think it’s just a useful mic to have if you can afford it. But that 473 might not have been as accurate. It had the kind of…
I don’t know, I just want to say it had this kind of smooth… It smoothed the edges, that’s what it was. It was very pleasant on your voice.
So it’s a tough call. And I’d love to hear our audience’s thoughts as well. All right, so we will get to our interview with Grover Gardner in a few minutes.
But before that, we have our VO Meter shtick with fellow talent Stephen George. And Stephen’s going to tell you about how a little bit of confidence went a long way in joining his latest agency roster.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO Meter shtick. Oh, nevermind.
The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
This episode’s VO Meter shtick features Stephen George, voice talent based in Georgia. And he’s going to tell us about his very first agency and the unique way he went about getting signed to it. So Stephen, welcome.
And can you tell us how you got that agent?
Absolutely, Paul. Thanks for having me on. I was doing some research on some agencies because I had never really registered for one and really kind of wanted to get to know what was in the community and who was attached to what and that sort of thing.
And I came across this one and clicked on it and was reading around, looking at some of the staff and they also had a blog. So I jumped into their blog section and they had a fairly recent post about how they were trying to help their VO talent protect the rates that they were being paid. And that’s not something in this day and age that you hear a lot about.
And so I was really impressed with them with that. So I immediately sent them an email and just said, you know, hey, I appreciate everything you’re doing for us and trying to protect the rates. And that was it.
I didn’t ask to join any of that. So I sent them the email and didn’t get any response, which is not unordinary for us, right? We send out dozens of emails every week.
We might hear back from one. So it was not a big deal. Well, so I kept moving forward in my career and then over the holidays, I happened to be traveling where this particular agency was and on their website, it had said, you know, feel free to stop by and say hello if you’re a talent and be sure to drop off your demo when you’re here.
So I just thought, well, you know, I’ve got a couple of hours. I’m going to go in there. What do I have to lose?
So I walked in and introduced myself to the talent coordinator who was beyond friendly to me. And they also had one of their audio engineers there. Now, because it was the holidays, it was very slow and in the middle of the afternoon.
So they were very respectful of me just kind of walking in off the street. And they offered to even give me a tour around the facility. And when I…
before I left, they asked me to make sure that I submitted and follow up with them in a couple of days. And it was really a situation where, like I said, I had nothing to lose. And it was just an amazing opportunity.
And I sent them a follow up email two days later that just said, you know, thanks for letting me sort of bombard you unannounced in the middle of the afternoon one day and giving me a tour of your facility. I really appreciate it. And here’s the demo that you asked for.
Within a week, I heard back and they said that the demo was where they wanted it to be and asked me to join their agency. This was my first agency attempt. I had never even thought about going to an agency before because I was still fairly new in voice over and I wanted to make sure that I had the talent that I thought could bring something to the table.
A lot of people are gung ho about asking to join agencies and I really wanted to make sure that I had something to bring to the table. And like I said, the other piece, the most important piece of that for me is, I did that research up front. I would really just like to say thanks to Kelly and Jarrar and Ross.
They were all super nice and I’m excited to work for them and to see what we have in store in the future.
Hello, everyone, we are now moving into our Bodago Call Conference Room with the illustrious Grover Gardner. Now, Grover has over 30 years of experience in the audiobook industry. He’s won numerous awards for his narrations.
He’s got over 20 audio file earphone awards. He’s been nominated for multiple audio awards from the Audiobook Publishers Association, and has actually won one as well. He was even named the Audiobook Narrator of the Year in 2005 by Publishers Weekly.
So I’m sure he’s got a wealth of information to share with you guys. So let me present to you our guest, Grover Gardner. How are you doing, Grover?
Fine, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
So, Grover, our first question, really, that we ask all of our guests, but our first question for you this evening is, how did you get started in the audiobook business as a whole?
Well, I was a big reader when I was a teenager, and I was also interested in acting. Well, I was, and I thought that reading books out loud would be the greatest thing ever. And when I was in graduate school in Washington, DC, studying acting, I had decided that I’d never wanted to wait tables.
I thought there was something better I could do. And I found out that there was a studio at the Library of Congress where they recorded books for the blind and physically handicapped. And I thought, wow, what a great job that would be.
It took me about six months to work up the nerve to call them and ask for an audition because I knew there were brilliant people like George Goodell and Alexander Skourby and people like that reading books. I thought, well, I don’t have a chance. But I called up and they gave me an audition and I went in and I read and they hired me on the spot, which I later found out was very unusual.
Usually took six to eight months to get cleared for the work by their numerous red tape things. Anyway, so I started doing that and then about three years, that was 1981. And about three, four years after that, a woman who worked there, Flo Gibson, started her own audio book company so she could record her favorite classics.
And that was called Audiobook Contractors. And to support her own catalog and work, she decided to outsource to a company called Books on Tape, which was one of the big early audio book companies in California. And so she got a contract with them and she brought a bunch of us over from the Library of Congress studio.
And we would go over in the afternoons and record in her studio. And that led to work in the commercial audio book industry, basically. That was kind of it.
And then Books on Tape asked me to work at home because they needed more books. And that was something publishers were starting to do, was to set people up with cassette decks and things in their house. Nice equipment, but not too elaborate.
And so I started working at home in a studio, take a powder room and turn it in to put pillows on the walls. And then one thing led to another. So that was kind of how I got started.
And then I did things for Books on Tape for many years. And then Blackstone Audio contacted me and I did work with them. And then the big publishers started getting into the business and not hiring celebrities, but just wanting regular old narrators to do their books.
And so I started working for them. And then in late 2006, Blackstone, who I’d worked for for a long time, asked me to come out to Oregon and give a seminar for… They had set up a studio and they had hired a group of local narrators, actors, narrators.
But they wanted to give them some training. And so a couple other people who had come, who lived on the West Coast, and they said, maybe you could come out and work with these people for a few days. So we went out for a week, took my three-year-old daughter and my wife, invited us all out, and we did lovely sessions during the day.
And at the end of the week, the owner said, boy, I sure could use somebody to run this studio. And I said, oh yeah. And my wife said, honey, I think he’s offering you a job.
Well, it had just never occurred to me. I was a freelance narrator. What do I, what, what?
So anyway, that’s, so three, six, about three months after that, to my wife’s shock and surprise, we moved out to Oregon. And I’ve been at Blackstone as a producer ever since, and narrator.
Wonderful.
I was looking at your background and saw you’d spent some time in Baltimore at the Everyman Theater. And I don’t know if you know, but I’m based in Baltimore now. So did you move from Baltimore to Oregon?
No, we were always in the, we were in DC area in Maryland, just outside of DC in the highest field.
Okay, so you commuted to work at Everyman. I did. Yes, I drove.
Well, you know, that’s not, now people here say, oh, you mean you drove all the way over to, you know, Home Depot. And I said, there’s five minutes. It doesn’t bother me at all.
After years of commuting.
Yeah, you’re well conditioned on the Beltway.
Yeah, right, exactly. So yes, I did. And I worked at Woolly Mammoth Theatre for a long time.
I was a director and actor there. In Washington. And so I did a lot of theatre, but when my daughter was born, I said, well, that’s enough of that.
And I had plenty of audiobook work and decided I didn’t want to give up my weekends and evenings anymore. So that was that.
Wonderful. So you just mentioned that you did have some directing experience as well. Was it difficult to sort of transition into that more casting role versus narrating audiobooks?
No, not with my theatre background and casting because it’s really like casting the play or casting a movie. So, no, I did. In fact, I enjoyed it.
It was easier than casting a play. You only had to cast one person, you know, who you knew kind of would be able to handle the book well and had the right vocal quality and the right sensibilities for the book and would take the right approach. And so when you only have to cast one, that’s easier than 10 or 20.
Yeah, certainly.
But I look at them as the same thing. What you’re really doing, you’re casting not just a voice, but you’re casting a director. You’re casting a whole bunch of actors, all wrapped up into one person.
And you get to know the people who have different aspects of the skill set, and the kinds of books that you know they’re going to be comfortable doing. You know, I’ve been given books that I’m not… I wish somebody had thought a little harder.
Not often, but in the past, I’ve gotten books and thought, boy, I don’t want to turn this down, but I’m not, you know…
I’m not the guy.
No, I’m not the guy to do this. But I have turned down work. And you know, someone offered me a book about Vietnam grunts, you know, in the 60s, young, 27, and I said, no, I’m not the right voice for that.
You know, it was for a younger narrator with a tougher approach, not me. So anyway, but that’s what you’re doing is you’re really casting somebody who you know in their head just has a familiarity with the style and the people and the characters involved and is going to be able to direct the book themselves.
So what is the casting process for an audiobook like?
Well, you get the book, the audiobook, your publisher licenses a book, the rights, audio rights to a book, and then they send it down to the recording department and we take a look at it. I work with Brian Barney, who’s actually my boss, and he’s in New York and we have a bunch of people who work with us in the office. We’ve got some engineers who run our studios and kind of divvy things up and say, oh, you take these books, I’ll take these and so on.
And then we read the book and look at what’s involved, vocabulary, research. If it needs a lot of research, we have a research staff and we send it to them to do the research because we don’t want the narrators to take the time or to worry about getting things wrong.
Sounds wonderful.
Well, yeah, we’re pretty good about that. Then you read the book and you try to think of how it should sound. I mean, we have a stable of people that we work with, and it’s big.
They’re not all people we work with regularly, on and off. Sometimes, you know, they work with us all the time. Sometimes it’s just people we use occasionally.
But you try to think of a… You try to hear the voice of the book in your head. And then you reach out to a few people.
And hopefully, you know, you might ask for some auditions. Sometimes the author wants approval or the publisher wants approval over the narrator. So you find two or three people, four people who might be suitable and let them decide.
That’s much more common nowadays. Authors are much more involved in audio books. They used to not even know, you know, that their books were in audio.
They had no idea. But now they’re very aware of audio productions. And so it’s kind of an instinctive thing.
And you try to think of somebody you know, somebody you trust. You know, audiobook narrator relationships are based on trust. You’re handing somebody a 14, 10, 14, 20, 30-hour project, and you’re sending it off to them.
And three or four or six weeks later, you’ve got to know what you’re going to get back. You can’t take a risk. I mean, you know, it depends.
If you’re trying somebody new, you’re certainly not going to send them a project so difficult that you don’t know what you’re going to get back.
Well, that brings up a question. Sorry. Go ahead.
Finish up. When you’re sending out a project to somebody new, let’s say, or even if it’s somebody that’s been with you for a while, but it’s something you’re not quite sure how they’re going to approach it, what kind of choices they’re going to make, do you require check-ins, sort of like milestones? Five hours, six hours in, let me hear how it’s going?
No, no, I probably should, sometimes. Occasionally, yeah, occasionally I’ve said, oh, you know, I should have, you know, checked on that. But, you know, we have really good proofing staff, and so they’ll raise, often they’ll raise an alarm.
If there’s something going awry with the book, they’ll drop me an email and say, you know, the narrator’s kind of made this choice, I’m not sure, and it’s like, oh, okay. And you can always go back and fix things. It’s not the end of the world.
It’s just you’d rather not spend the time or waste anybody else’s time. But no, most of the time, people, you get some surprises occasionally, but most of the time, I feel comfortable. Once I’ve discussed the project and we’ve agreed, and sometimes I’ll say, send me a little sample.
But I kind of, you sense once somebody says, I understand, I get it. I say, I know what you want, and then it’s like, okay, fine. So no, don’t worry about it too much.
Once you’ve established that relationship.
So what I’m curious about, because I mean, you’ve been involved with audiobooks almost since the industry’s inception. So you’ve seen it change and evolve over the decades. Nowadays, we’ve got this, like, we have a real large change with the sort of advent of narrators recording from home and online publishers like ACX.
I’m curious if that’s really affected the production process from your side of things, from like the publisher’s perspective.
No. Well, you know, they started out, nobody, the business started out with home narrators. I mean, a company like Books on Tape or Blackstone, to produce unabridged audiobooks, there was no way you were going to spend money on a studio and a director.
Oh no. I mean, a 30 hour, 40 hour history book, like a Will Durant, you couldn’t afford to do that. The big publishers only did abridged versions and they would usually hire a celebrity or a semi-celebrity or, you know, someone like that to record two or three hour versions of the books.
Now, this was before CDs and before downloads. But the whole business started out mostly with home narrators, people sitting in their closets, as they used to disdainfully say, some of the big publishers. So we don’t use people who work in their closets.
Well, now they don’t have a problem with it because they want to save the money. But so, I mean, that was actually the modus operandi for the most part. Then the big publishers got into the business and they realized that they could make money on this.
So when CDs came around, they said, oh, we’re going to get a studio. We need perfect sound. We need to hire a real professional actor, narrator and all this stuff.
So that was fine. But the rest of us just kept, you know, going along with our big, long, unabridged books. What really changed everything was download.
That’s what changed the audio book business, was audible. And that was a huge change. And it just meant, it meant that all of a sudden, everybody was playing on a level field.
In other words, the independent audio book companies, audio book publishers like Blackstone and Books on Tape and Recorded Books, they had this unabridged thing, and the library market, and they made huge amounts of money from libraries, selling these big boxes of cassettes, plastic cases for $200, and all these library plans. That was a huge business. The download thing changed all that.
All of a sudden, everybody was playing on the same field. And so, it didn’t cost a big publisher, had no hesitation to put out an unabridged audio book. So all of a sudden, the smaller companies are competing for unabridged rights for all the books with the bigger publishers.
So that was an enormous change. But it hasn’t changed the way we produce books, and I’m actually kind of impressed for the most part. I’m impressed with the industry overall.
The standards have remained pretty high, but you have audio book listeners. You don’t get away with anything. They’re tough.
They’re a tough crowd.
I know, I’ve read my reviews.
Yeah, I know. They are. I’m here all week, folks.
They are a tough crowd, and I think that they have kept and audible with their ratings right up there, has, you know, they’ve kept the publishers honest. So because the feedback is immediate and vociferous. So I think that has helped to remind publishers that there’s a very, very selective and picky audience out there for books.
You know, you change the narrator in a series, or you don’t give somebody, you know, someone mispronounces a lot of books and a lot of words in a history book or something. Boy, they’re merciless. So, you know, the listeners, audiobook fans, keep everybody honest.
Well, Grover, you mentioned that the industry started very much with home narrators. Do you feel like the pendulum is swinging the other way now that people like Burt Reynolds, Betty White, even Bruce Springsteen are narrating their own audiobooks?
No, no, it hasn’t changed a thing. You know, it takes a tiny bite. More and more authors want to read their books, even if they’re not celebrities.
And especially for nonfiction. And that’s… you know, you really try to discourage them.
It’s awfully hard work. It is. It’s grueling.
And they don’t understand. They do it, and then they say, oh, that was exhausting. And we say, yes, yes, we told you it was.
And, you know, listeners prefer, unless you really need that authenticity of, you know, like a very personal story or something. Listeners really prefer a professional reader. They, you know, and you look on Audible and they say, oh, couldn’t they have gotten a pro to read this?
Why does the author have to read it? So sometimes it works out and some of them are good, but by and large, you know, as a producer, you really say, are you really, this is not a good idea. But no, no, it hasn’t, my gosh, I mean, we’re producing…
I mean, how many audiobooks a year are being produced now? We do, Audible must do 2,000 or I don’t know, an enormous number of books. Blackstone does, we do 60 to 70 titles a month.
So what is that? Six times, 700, you know, we probably do 800, 2,000 titles a year.
Wow, and that’s just one company, yeah.
Yeah, so you’re talking, I don’t know, 10,000 audiobooks a year coming out? No, between Audible and ACX and all that stuff, no. No, I know, the fact that Betty White reads her book doesn’t…
It’s too expensive. Actually, you know, in the old days, when they did abridged books, then you were competing with stars. And a big publisher like Random House or Penguin would never hire just a no-name narrator.
They would always get a well-known actor to read their abridged audiobooks. But they can’t do that now. They can’t afford to do that.
They’ll do it for a big… You know, there’s some celebrity readers, Will Patton, Ed Herman was gone now, very sadly, but you know, he was a wonderful reader. Will Patton’s a great reader.
Joe Montania did a lot of audiobooks. Tony Roberts does some books. You know, they’re out there, but they’re not taking the work away from us, the rest of us.
There’s plenty of work out there.
So with this sheer number of titles every year, I’m sure you guys are always on the lookout for new talent, and I’m sure you have plenty of talent reaching out to you, trying to see how to get on your roster. What kind of skills or qualities do you look for when you, for people that you try to hire on your rosters?
Now, now you ask the question, and you’re gonna get my answer. And a lot of people won’t like it. This is not a voiceover job.
And your listeners and friends need to understand that. This has nothing to do with voiceover work. And I’ve done voiceover work, but I don’t care for it.
It’s easier to do audio books, even though it’s more work, it’s just easier. This is not a voiceover job. The quality of your voice is really irrelevant.
It’s irrelevant. It’s not about having a nice voice. It’s the prerequisite is, yes, you need to have a voice that’s pleasant to listen to.
But that’s just the beginning. And the best audio book narrators have very unique voices. If you listen to George Goodell, or Ed Herman, or Frank Muller, or Will Patton, or any of the other really terrific narrators, they’re very different.
Mark Bramhall, I’m just throwing out some names. Alyssa Bresnahan, she’s a funny, quirky voice and a quirky approach, which she has, it is. But it’s a voice that reflects who those people are.
They’re interesting voices. They’re not beautiful voices. They’re interesting.
They reflect who those people are and how they think and how they treat the material, how they absorb the material, and how they convey the meaning of the story and the meaning of the book. So to get one thing out of the way people say, my friends tell me I have a nice voice. I should read audio books.
Well, it has very little to do with it. The second thing is, no, it doesn’t. It’s about a sensibility.
The nice voice is just the one piece, tiny little piece, but it’s about a sensibility. It’s about acting skills. You have to be a good actor.
And we commonly say in the business that really stage actors almost invariably make the best audio book narrators. They’re well-read by and large. They’re trained.
They go through a lot of training. They’ve studied Shakespeare, plays, language, different languages. They participate in a…
Stage actors participate in a process where they understand the whole arc of the process, of the play. They’re there all the time. You know, it’s not like a film where you’re brought in, it’s like, just do this scene, make a face.
Okay, here’s your little bit of the script and you don’t even see the whole script. And you just do this little bit and then goodbye, you’re done. Stage actors participate in a process of storytelling.
And they learn how to effectively tell a story and what it is to dramatize something. And they’re also very well, they’re used to playing multiple roles in the same evening sometimes. They’re used to doing character work.
They’re used to changing, immersing themselves in a character at the drop of a hat. They’re very good at audio book narration because they also, they watch directors work. Sometimes they are directors and they understand what it means to direct a story.
To cast a story in your head. They understand what it means to populate the story with people. They understand what it means to visualize the settings and wherever it is the story takes place.
So that’s one thing. It doesn’t pay all that well, not nearly as well as voiceover work, but probably for the average voiceover person or person trying to get into the voiceover business, it’s not bad pay compared to not working at all. And voiceover work, it’s such a competitive business.
But that’s the thing that it’s not a voiceover job and you can’t approach it. So when you approach me and say, I have a great voice and you send me a thing where I’m supposed to listen to your voice, I almost immediately lose interest because it tells me that you don’t understand what audio book work entails. Now, I’m not, don’t misunderstand.
I’m not saying voiceover people are bad at it. That’s not the case. And I’m not saying that I never consider people who go do voiceover work.
Some of the best narrators I know, Ed Herman did voiceover work. He was wonderful at it. But he didn’t, I think a lot of people trying to get into the voiceover business are encouraged, and you can correct me if I’m wrong.
They’re encouraged to develop a sound that distinguishes them from other people.
Now that’s the exact coaching almost everybody gets.
Right? Well, here’s the problem. You start focusing on that sound.
Now I went to the Voice Arts Awards last year in Los Angeles, and that’s a different world. It’s amazing. And it was actually very interesting to me.
And what was really interesting to me was that they’re guest of honor for the evening. And I’m not mocking. Please don’t misunderstand.
I thought it was fascinating. And I understand why they did this, but their guest of honor for the evening was the guy who, the ringmaster. And I forget his name.
I apologize because he’s pretty well known in the voiceover business. But the guy who developed the tag phrase, are you ready to rumble?
Oh, Michael Buffer. There you go.
And that was, he was their guest for the evening. And it was a big, they had a movie about him. And they, and he came out and he was lovely.
He was elegant and he was, you know, gave a beautiful speech and he was very generous. And everybody talked about what a lovely guy he was. But the whole point of the thing was, here’s a guy who conquered the voice, you know, who became a famous voice.
And this is, you know, something you should learn from or something, you know, you should admire. Well, here’s the thing, in the audiobook business, that’s the farthest thing from what you want. Does that make sense?
No, it makes perfect sense.
I mean, you guys, you want like a chameleon who can honor the author’s intent more than you want someone who just sounds pleasing to the ear.
Yeah, you know, what’s a compliment to me was when somebody says, I don’t remember who the narrator was, but the book was terrific.
It’s true. I’d rather people don’t even remember my name. But if they say, well, that was a wonderful story, that was a great book.
I forget the narrator’s name, but it was just, it was great to listen to. Well, great, you know, because then I’ve done my job. No news is good news in this business.
So that’s the thing for, it’s something that I had. Now that doesn’t mean the people who pursue a voiceover career can’t do audio books. That’s not true.
A lot of them do. Ray Chase, I don’t know if you know him. He does a lot of video game stuff and big time stuff.
He’s a wonderful narrator. And in fact, he just said, you know, guys, I can’t do books anymore because I’m so busy. And I was ready to cry because he was terribly good at audio book work, but he doesn’t have time.
And he’s making more money and making more quickly, you know, doing his video game stuff. So they can’t, they do do it. You can’t, it’s, the problem is if you don’t have the flexibility or the understanding to distinguish between the two and to make that crossover.
Ed Herman could do it because when Ed Herman did voiceover work, who did he sound like? He sounded like Ed Herman, right?
Well, yeah, that’s the gold, that’s what you, the golden rule is the same.
That’s the gold standard, right? Exactly. Alexander Scorby, he sounded like Alexander Scorby.
They didn’t put on something to try to attract attention, they just were who they were. And that’s of course, that’s a gold standard in the voiceover business, but it’s very difficult to achieve, I think.
It is.
And so people work to establish a sound that makes them. Now, here’s the difficult thing is when you come over into audiobooks, you have to forget that because here’s the rule. Whatever, as an audiobook reader, narrator, whatever you’re thinking about is what I hear.
And I want you to remember that because it’s absolutely rock solid truth. Whatever you’re thinking about, that’s all I hear as a listener. So if you’re thinking about how your voice sounds as you’re reading the book and how you’re making the sentence such an interesting inflection, you know what I hear?
I hear that.
And by contrast, when I’m thinking about when I’m making the kids for dinner, I hear that when I play it back too.
Well, exactly. But if you’re thinking about where this guy is, he walked down the stairs and he opened the door, the postman was there. Suddenly the postman pulled out a gun and waved it in the air.
He started screaming. The postman was screaming. Why was he screaming at him?
He looked around the neighborhood and he couldn’t understand. See, I’m visualizing that in my head. And you can see it.
And the best narrators, I can hear a visualizer in a second because I know exactly where their head is. And their head is in picturing everything that’s going on in that book. And if they’re doing it, I can do it.
If they see it, I see it. But if all they’re thinking about is how good their voice sounds or how nice they’re making that book sound, that’s all I hear. And I have to work to get past that.
I have to concentrate. I have to say, okay, God, this guy’s voice is getting in the way. But I’ll try to listen and try to get the story.
But it’s just distracting. I can’t lose myself in the book. So, and it’s hard because some people go into the voiceover business because they have a voice that draws a lot of attention.
And that’s why they go into the voiceover business because they have a really interesting voice. Okay, whatever. But when you turn around and think about audiobook work, it’s hard to get away from that for some people.
So, let me move on to the question about who, how, and how do I get people’s attention.
It’s a very strange business. There’s a lot of word of mouth. Oh, I have a friend who’s an actor, and I think he’d be really good at audiobook work.
You should audition him. He reads a lot, and he’s really smart. And he reads a lot.
That’s always a good sign. When longtime narrators recommend somebody to me, they don’t say, this person has a great voice. They say, he’s a really good actor, or she’s a really good actress.
And she has a nice voice, but that’s not the emphasis. So anyway, word of mouth, people get recommended to us. You know, Bronson Pinchot was in a show with a guy who worked with us, Ray Porter, who worked with us, narrating.
And he said, you know, I think Bronson would be a really good narrator. Well, he’s brilliant. And he’s very, very busy now.
ACX works. It’s a great training ground. And I’ll tell you, if you can deal with authors and all that stuff that you have to deal with on ACX, you’ve got a good head start in the business.
Some people, you know, I’ll get a demo from someone who says, I’ve done 10, 12, 20 books on ACX and I’m interested. Sometimes I think it’s good. Sometimes I think they need more work and more practice.
You can send… You know, it’s a catch-22. It’s hard to get work as an audiobook narrator unless you work as an audiobook narrator.
But you know, you can scout around. The thing is, you can try small publishers. If you can move your way toward…
If you’re doing some industrial work, industrial narration, even like training films or training audios, things like that, that’s a good way to start. If you’re good at conveying information, if you’re doing industrials and you’re good at that information thing, that’s a good start. And for me, that’s sometimes a key.
You may not have done an audio book, but I listen to some industrial work that you’ve done, educational work, something like that, and I say, yeah, you’re pretty good at that. And that can lead me to a motivational book or a non-fiction, a self-help book, something along those lines. And that’s one way to transition in.
Look for small publishers, independent publishers, even not on ACX, but outside of that. If you’re interested… Generally, to me, if somebody’s interested in industrial work, especially in training or informational or, you know, like manuals and things, where you really have to be clear, you have to be really good at settling down, not overdoing it and really selling the…
really conveying the information of the book. To me, that’s a good head start. So if that’s something that you’re currently doing or something that you’re interested in, that’s another doorway to me to do it.
Now, if you’re doing character voices, if you’re doing video work, video game, character commercial work, that kind of thing, that can work too, but you have to be careful because again, it’s not about how clever you are with character voices. It’s about telling a story. I recently did a training session with a guy who was…
boy, he said, I’m really good at character voices. I’m really good. And I said, oh, that’s nice, but you got to be better than that.
And he just desperately wanted to show off how good his character voices were. And I said, you know, that doesn’t matter. It’s really…
it’s a nice plus if you can do them. But this is not what this is about. And I really had to kind of hammer at him and say, it’s not about how good your character voices are.
It’s about the story, you know, and what’s happening. We, as listeners, we have to be able to see what’s going on in the book. It’s the only chance we have to understand the story and to enjoy ourselves.
And if you’re busy, you know, showing off, that misses the whole point, you know?
So it’s not for people looking for validation.
No, it isn’t. And you get that sometimes. You know, you say, well, you get it.
Someone sends an audition and you say, well, it’s not bad, but you’ve got to kind of lose that voice over sound. You’ve got to not worry so much about the character. Well, I have done this for 25 years and I have, you know, and it’s like, well, I’m sure you have, but you can’t be defensive.
You know, when you send something off to an audio book company and they send back a reply and say, well, you need more work. You kind of relax a little bit. There’s too much energy.
You can’t either listen to them or don’t. But if you don’t, you’re not going to get anywhere. They’re very honest.
The other thing, the Santa Claus video with the ho ho ho, and he has to do it 500 different ways, and there are 18 people in the studio giving him suggestions on how to say ho ho ho. Well, we’ve all been through that. I’ve been in sessions like that where it’s like, can you say the a little differently?
And people are breathing down your neck. And that’s the voiceover business. And those people, they want what they want for very specific reasons, and we all understand that.
But the audiobook business isn’t like that. It’s not at all. People are looking to you to say, can you tell me a 12-hour story?
Can you relax and sit back and take charge and tell me a 12-hour story so that I can just… so that I can sit back and relax and just take it in? Can you do that?
Because if you can, that’s all we want. We don’t want to… We’re not going to tell you every…
to change every word or, you know, that you need to be a little higher or a little lower or, you know, any of that. We’re going to trust you to do it. The question is, can you do it?
Can you tell me a story and make me forget that I’m listening to you?
That’s amazing advice. I’m just like scribbling pages of notes right now. And I hope our listeners are too, because this is just…
you’re really just blowing up any misconceptions that people might have about trying to join the industry. So I really appreciate all of the knowledge you’re sharing with us today.
You’re welcome. The best producers will tell you, audiobook producers, when they get an audition, what they’ll do is they’ll put it in. And one producer spelled this out for me very clearly.
She said, I put the CD in my little boombox in my office, and I listen for about a minute. And if I get interested in the story and keep listening, I know that I have a potential. If I don’t, and I want to, you know, if I’m not interested and I turn it off after a minute, that’s that.
And she said, I listen to see how quickly I forget that that person is reading to me.
So simple, but so stage.
Oh, it’s hard. That’s hard, though. It’s hard because you have to you have to you have to forget about how you sound.
And that’s one of the that’s one of the hardest things for voice over people to do because it’s drilled into them that you have to pay meticulous attention to how you sound. But in order to do that, in the studio book work, you have to forget and you have to practice and practice and practice. Even someone who has good potential, they’ll come in the studio and you can still tell that there’s hesitation, that they’re, you know, they’re listening to themselves and they’re stopping themselves.
And you say, don’t do that. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. And after three, four, five books or ten books, all of a sudden it clicks in and you say, you know what, I don’t have to think about this anymore.
I don’t have to think about how I sound. I just have to get into the story and picture it in my head and just read the characters because that guy sounds like this because, you know, he weighs 400 pounds and this person sounds like this because he’s really short and he’s really small and he wears little thin glasses, you know. So all of that stuff is just coming out of how you visualize a story.
People say, should I pause more? Should I go faster? Should I go slower?
What do you… What do you see? What do you see in your head?
You know, those are… Those are choices… Those are things that have to come organically out of your sense of how you see the story happening in your head.
And then you just tell that story and go. And sometimes, yes, you need to slow down a little bit or you read too fast. But those are sort of overall adjustments.
But should I pause here? I don’t know. Do you need a pause there?
Is there something happening in the pause? Is he going to answer the door? You know, it’s like the old joke was that…
I forget who it was. One of the New Yorker writers at the Algonquin Roundtable, they were arguing about a comma. You know, he got up comma and went to the door.
And someone said, well, you know, why do you need a comma there? Because he has to have time to put his napkin on the table. He got up and went to the door, which was a joke, you know, that they were kidding each other about.
But it’s true. Do you need a pause? Because the main character is thinking for a moment or…
You know, all that has to be organic. It all has to come out. Right.
Does it help me as a listener visualize the story that’s going on? You know, I don’t hug the microphone. Don’t hug the microphone.
Because again, you’re worried about, oh, you’ve got to get nice, tight sound, deep bass on the microphone. I’m going to talk real close. No, put it away.
Get it back. Get it back afoot. Get it back 18 inches.
You know, seriously. And move. That’s another thing I’ve had people come in and say, well, you know, I just feel like I have to just be so careful about the mic.
Oh, forget it. No, you don’t. I’m all over the place when I…
You know, if someone’s calling from across the room, I turn my head. You know, hey, over there, you know. You have to use the microphone.
I gesture. I move my head. I’m terrible.
People say, how can you move so much in the booth? But, you know, I’m aware of the microphone, and I’m always directing my energy toward the microphone. But I don’t sit still.
I move around a lot. And it’s all kind of controlled. But that’s because I’m doing dialogue.
And one person’s sort of on this side of the room, and this person’s over on this side of the room. So it’s all being played out in my head visually. Does that make sense?
Well, it does.
I don’t want to go on too long about it.
No, no. Believe me, it’s just pure gold. And we’re just sort of sitting here, gap jawed, taking it all in.
We’re at rapt attention. Yeah, don’t worry.
But we have been talking for about 50 minutes now, so I don’t want to hold you up for too long. And there was one more question we wanted to ask. I think I know the answer given what you’ve just told us.
But given your vast experience, I want to hear your take on this. How do you think artificial intelligence and speech synthesization will affect the audiobook industry, if at all?
Well, they have a long way to go, for one thing. I just heard there’s a new thing called TACO or something where they come very close to the human voice. Here’s the thing.
When it can do… You know somebody at Amazon or Audible is working feverishly day and night on this thing. There are two things, I think.
It’s possible that they’ll develop something that will comfortably and convincingly read nonfiction. When it can do accents and character voices and convey emotion, well, maybe I’ll be worried. But I think there are ways from that.
The second thing is that you’re going to have to convince authors that a machine can read their book, their precious work of art, better than a human being. And that’s going to take some work. It’s going to have to be absolutely indistinguishable.
And I’m talking about for a complicated novel with a huge cast of characters. You know, you’re going to have to convince the author that no one’s going to know the difference or that the machine cares. That’s the other thing.
The machine doesn’t care about how your book sounds. It’s just doing the job.
And my only worry is that convincing will be done by price, where, like you said, Audible or Amazon will say, you know what, it’s free to use. And then we’re all sunk.
Free for who?
For the author. I mean, if they didn’t have to hire a narrator, let’s just say Amazon rolls it into the membership.
Oh, into ACX or something like that? Yes, exactly. Oh, well, that’s possible.
For ACX, yes. I think for any established author, they’re not going to buy a machine reading their book. And then you have to convince listeners that they’re actually getting the best product that they can.
I’m not… well, I’m old enough that I’m not going to worry about it too much.
Gotcha.
Because I think they have a ways to go. For younger guys, I don’t know, they said Pixar. That we’re going to…
there wouldn’t be any more acting jobs. Because everything was going to be animated. Well, it’s not true.
I’m sure there are people who take advantage of it. You know, it would be great for textbooks, for maybe for some non-fiction stuff. I don’t know.
They keep saying the machines are going to replace us, or, you know, animation is going to replace actors, and it hasn’t happened. And I just think there are some aspects, I mean, there are just some aspects of the arts, and of books and literature and things where people, they really just don’t want to hear a machine read to them. And you might be able to fool them, but if they find out it’s a machine, they just won’t be happy.
Well, let’s hope for all our sake you’re right.
Yeah.
I don’t know.
I don’t worry. There might be… I could be wrong, and there might be some use for it, but I mean, I’m trying to imagine like Robert Caro, those Lyndon Johnson biographies, like Volume 5, if it ever comes out, being done by a machine.
I just can’t imagine. Maybe for some people it would be good enough, but it wouldn’t capture what he’s put into those books. I don’t know.
So maybe you guys should worry about it. I don’t know. You’re younger than I am, but I don’t know.
I think I’ll hold out until then, but I think it’s going to be a tough sell.
How do you teach a robot to tell a story?
Well, that’s what I don’t understand. A character has a German accent or a French accent, or… I don’t know.
Not to underestimate it. They’re very smart about what they can do with these things, but I don’t know. It’s hard for me to imagine enjoying listening to a robot telling a story, but I could be wrong.
And since we’re recording this, and they might be listening 50 years in the future, we have no disrespect for our robot overlords.
No, seriously, I love you guys, whoever you are.
Well, I love your idea about us somehow getting it to co-exist, like having essentially automated narrators for projects that real people wouldn’t want to narrate. So maybe we can find that golden medium at some point.
Thank you guys. It’s been great.
Yeah, I just wanted to thank you so much. I mean, this has been a real treat. And just, like I said, just destroying those misconceptions about people who might be trying to get into audiobooks is like supplementary income or like an easy way to get into voiceover.
Not for you. People who are natural storytellers or want to develop their storytelling ability and who have solid acting and really want to just author, or excuse me, honor the author’s story. Then audiobooks may be for you.
It’s been wonderful having you, Grover, so thank you so much.
I’ll just say to be encouraging, for a lot of people struggling in the voiceover business, this could actually be a huge beneficial switch for them. They could be struggling to make some mark in this incredibly cutthroat competitive business, and then they turn to audiobooks and they say, well, really, I like this telling stories things about people flying in spaceships or dragons. And it could be liberating for them.
So I certainly hope that’s the case for some of your listeners.
Well, I’m inspired at least.
So am I. Grover, thanks again so much for being on the VO Meter.
You’re welcome. Thank you, guys. It was a pleasure.
So once again, thanks to Grover Gardner. That was just an amazing interview. What did you think, Sean?
I can’t agree with you more. I mean, he’s been in the industry for so long, for three decades. I mean, he’s been on both sides of the glass.
He knows exactly, I mean, he’s an accomplished narrator himself. He knows exactly what he’s looking for as a casting director. And like I said, just the information that he was sharing is just so useful for anyone who wants to get involved with audiobooks and who like it really challenges the current misconceptions that we see today as because every year, like you can just see the floods of new talent trying to get involved and then falling by the wayside when it’s like, oh, it’s not what I thought it would be.
But I think like we just need to direct into this episode and be like, see, that’s why you fail.
And once again, I want to say for the record, we three welcome our robot overlords. I love that line from The Simpsons.
I know, I know. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to thank our guest, Grover Gardner. Thank you so much for joining us.
And thank you to Sean Pratt, audiobook narrator and coach. He’s a fantastic guy. He actually referred us to Grover.
So thank you, Sean, if you’re listening.
So that wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. And as our good friend, Sean Pratt always says, tell me a story, damn it. Thanks for listening to The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 19 of The VO Meter…
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So we’ve got a very exciting episode for you guys today. It’s a new year, a time of new beginnings and fresh starts. We’ve got a great guest today.
We’ve got voiceover actor and coach, Marc Cashman.
And we’ve got our first fan taking advantage of questionable gear purchases, so you and I don’t have to.
I know. It’s something we don’t have to write off anymore.
Can’t wait for that.
But first, current events. What have you been up to, Paul? It’s been a couple of weeks.
Well, we had the holidays here on the East Coast and lots of snow and ice. We’re right in the middle of the bomb cyclone. I’m not sure if you West coasters have heard of this, but it’s pretty much like snowmageddon all over the East Coast, from Tallahassee to Portland, Maine.
Right now, in my neck of the woods, it’s 9 degrees above zero Fahrenheit. And the high… sorry, the low this morning was 4 degrees.
And it’s supposed to get even colder over the weekend, so I’m pretty terrified about that. But before that, I actually had a great week because my family and I took a cruise to the Bahamas.
Oh, yeah, you told me about that.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We did that right after Christmas. We did the whole Christmas thing here and then went the next day, which I thought was going to be a nightmare to get on the plane at the airport on the 26th, but it turned out pretty OK.
And we went to the Bahamas for our cruise that went to the Bahamas for a couple of days. We were back by New Year’s Eve and celebrated that with some family. But great holiday season with the family and friends.
And now I’m just looking forward to getting the New Year started in the voiceover world. What’s going on with you?
Oh, I was just curious. Did you get any work done over the holidays or was it pretty much lights off?
No, I turned it off, actually. In fact, I put a post on one of the Facebook groups where I said I was kind of itching to get some stuff done and got blasted by some people saying, take a break, you don’t need to be working. Some even had sort of tone like, you don’t have any work to do anyway, loser.
So I turned it off. And basically…
That was awful harsh, guys.
I mean, not in so many words, but there was a hint there. So it was kind of like, hey, real pros know when to take a break. So I did.
And I didn’t do any work at all, which is a nice change of pace.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I got a little bit, like I said, I’ve got this monthly e-learning client for englishanyone.com. It’s probably my largest and longest term client.
And so I wanted to make sure those get in. Just finished another batch. And yeah, it’s always…
For me, it’s funny because I feel like I don’t have a whole lot of work during the first couple of weeks of the month. And then I’m just like, the last week is always slamming to get everything done and pretty unpolished before we release it out to our subscribers. But it’s great.
I mean, I’m really happy for the work.
Well, that’s great. So one of the themes, obviously, of this episode is New Year’s Resolutions because it is the new year. Why don’t you talk about some of the New Year’s Resolutions you might have?
Well, I’d like to increase my number of agents. I’ve got a handful right now. I’d like to have two handfuls.
Maybe a bushel?
A bushel, yeah, or a baker’s dozen. Or a gaggle even. Just throw out any other hilarious collective nouns you can think of.
But other than that, just kind of maintain the good relationship I have with my current agents. Been actually getting a lot more interesting gigs from my on-camera agent here in Washington, so that’s fun.
Oh, cool.
So everything from being a fit model for a certain large clothing company to a lot of big tech companies that we have in Washington that I can’t talk about. But it looks like it’s in an interesting year. We’ve only messed up two business emails and of course our podcasting session today, so…
Awesome.
Off to a great start.
So you said fit model for a large clothing company. Does that mean plus size clothing company or a large in volume? I wasn’t sure how much weight you put on over the holidays.
I had the same conversation. No, I know, I easily put on 10 or 15 pounds, but then again, I tend to celebrate from October till now. But yeah, a fit model is actually someone who, it’s basically like a living mannequin.
It’s basically you try on different outfits in front of a panel of designers, and then they just take notes on the fit and feel of the clothing, because then they figure out like, oh, the shoulders a little tight, we need to adjust the stitching here, and things like that. Yeah, so it’s not like a fitness model where you have to have like an eight-pack and be able to wear underwear and people not run in terror.
But yeah, it’s interesting. The whole on-camera world still mystifies me. I still need to learn basic things, like how to address a camera and stuff like that.
But my agent has been sending me mostly positive feedback, and we communicate all the time, which is something that a lot of new talent are curious about. I see questions about this a lot, where it’s like, I’ve got a new agent. I never hear from them, though.
Is that good or bad? And we need to remember that our agents are very, very busy people. So unless they reach out to you, you’re not gonna hear from them very often, unless you book a gig, or unless you’re doing a terrible faux pas.
So it’s true what they say about no news being good news. So be excited about your new agent, celebrate that. But if you don’t hear from them all the time, it’s okay.
It’s not you.
Yeah, that actually brings up some of my New Year’s resolutions. To be, to have more personal communication, both with agents and clients. Something I did recently was reach out to all my agents by sending them a holiday gift, which is a simple thing.
I didn’t have to get out of the studio to do it. I sent Starbucks e-gift cards to all my agents and got a reply back from all of them saying, oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you very much.
So that’s a great way to find out, one, if your agent still is your agent. If that is a worry that you have, like you said, or if you haven’t talked to them for a while and you want to sort of take a temperature check, that’s a great way to break the ice and have them come back and talk to you. Because every one of them sent back a thank you note and none of them said, oh, by the way, you’re no longer with us.
You’ve been dropped. Can you imagine the person’s like, thank you for the gift. I’m not giving it back, but you’ve been dropped.
It could happen.
It could happen. There are terrible people out there.
But thankfully it didn’t. So yeah, I wanna have more personal communication with my agents and then with clients because my subscription to one of the pay to plays, Voice 123, just expired. And that leaves me with only Bodalgo as the online casting site that I’m with.
So I really need to find other ways to drum up business. So I talked to the president of our local chamber of commerce. He’s actually a friend of mine from a previous business.
So that worked out well.
And I thought you were gonna say to the president. I was like, wow, I don’t know if he’ll be able to help you out, but I mean, I like your initiative.
I live pretty close to DC, you never know. But this is the president of our local chamber of commerce. And we might actually be able to barter a membership with that organization where I do some voice work for them.
We’re in talks, as they say. And I’m reaching out to local companies as well to see if I can do some work there. Somebody contacted me just before the holidays to do their phone system.
So that looks like a promising lead. I really want to focus more on business-to-business marketing or even business-to-consumer marketing, because that’s really the best way to gain clients, long-term clients, because you may get an audition from a pay-to-play or online casting site, as we call them. And it may be a one-time job, but if you build a relationship with somebody locally, that normally turns into a long-term client, and that’s what I’m kind of hoping for.
And then, to that end, I’ve revamped my website. I hired our good friend Joe Davis at voiceactingwebsites.com. Or is it voiceactorwebsites.com?
Of course I screwed it up.
I believe it’s voice actor websites, but I mean, he’s a great guy. If you want something that’s responsive and really nice-looking website, definitely check out Joe. He’s pretty much the first person we recommend through GVAA, so highly recommend him.
All right, so Joe and his team, Karen Barth, who was the designer with me, just finished up and we published it on Wednesday, sort of a soft launch, because I really just had them recreate what I had done on Wix myself, because now it’s more professionally done, it’s SEO-friendly and, like you said, responsive, and just looks overall better and it’s easier to update in the future, which is a big deal. So that is out there now. If you want to check it out, go to paulsstofano.com.
Let me know what you think. I’d appreciate the feedback.
Hire him.
That would be nice too. There’s a nice contact form that actually works. I’m not sure my other one ever was.
So send me an email and let me know what I can do for you. So yeah, that’s my main New Year’s resolution, is to focus more on marketing my business myself, as opposed to relying on pay-to-play sites or online casting sites that really weren’t helping me that much anyway.
Excellent, excellent. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the whole online… Like I personally still get a lot of jobs from Bodago.
It’s the only one that I’m on. I’ve considered rejoining some of the other ones, but I haven’t had the $400 lying around to invest, so…
Yeah, that’s a barrier to entry for sure.
But I mean, it’s great practice, if nothing else. I mean, you have a steady stream of auditions, of a variety of auditions, and it’s something that our guest has actually talked about on a number of occasions. It’s just daily practice with real scripts.
So, if nothing else, you’re paying for your education. All right, but enough with current events. Up next, we have our questionable gear purchases, and this one’s going to be a little bit different because we actually got one of you, one of our studio audience, or internet audience, or whatever the term is, to submit a questionable gear purchase for us.
So, Paul, I believe you interviewed our friend Greg Thomas to talk about his recent questionable gear purchase. How did that go?
It was interesting. We found out there was a lot in common that won’t surprise the audience, but let’s let Greg tell the story, and we can talk about it when we come back.
Questionable gear purchase.
Okay, so I am now live on the Source Connect Now line with Greg Thomas, who is our first fan to take advantage of our fan contributions to questionable gear purchase. So, Greg, welcome.
Well, thanks very much, Paul. I’m glad to be here, and I guess I’ll be your guinea pig, okay?
I guess so. You signed up for it.
Yeah, I volunteered for this. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, so.
Yeah, exactly. So you reached out to me and said you had made a purchase recently that maybe didn’t work out so well. Tell us a little bit about your questionable gear purchase.
Well, what I bought was an Allen and Heath ZI-10, and the reason that I purchased it was because it had two features in the same box that I was looking for. It had multiple microphone inputs and it had a deal where I could, you know, play audio back to the client if they wanted to hear a part of a take again. You know, it had true mix-minus on it.
So I thought, well, you know, here, this is wonderful. This is great. So I bought it back in April, of all things, and I was gonna test it out and use it, but then I had a volunteer weekend that I had to do, and that was interrupted by having to go in the hospital for gallbladder surgery.
So it just kind of sat, and then it sat some more, and then it sat some more. And the first lesson out of all of this is, if you get a new piece of gear, be sure you test it within the 30-day window that the manufacturer gives you, because I went way past that, and they weren’t able to take it back in exchange, you know, just give me a refund for it. So when I plugged it up, it worked great on my blue microphone, and it worked great on my AT microphone, but there was this awful noise on my Michael Jolly Mod V250, which is the mic I’m on now, and the mic that I use all the time.
And so when your primary mic doesn’t work, you know, you don’t particularly want to use the box. So I talked with Alan and Heath, and they were wonderful, and they took it back, and they did some kind of modification. They said, this will fix the problem.
They sent it back. It did not fix the problem. Apparently, some microphones…
And after talking with the dealer, I found out that some condenser microphones, they need an external 48-volt power supply, which is what solved the problem. But so no more noise. But we couldn’t…
And I even worked with George Whitham on this. I bought it on his recommendation. I heard him talk about it on a VOBS episode.
And he and I worked together. We could not get it to work on Source Connect. My AGO3 works fine on Source Connect and on Skype, but we couldn’t get the Allen and Heath box to work right.
There’s probably a trick to it, but we couldn’t figure it out long distance. So I ended up… I posted the thing on VO Gear Exchange, and somehow or another, the for sale listing got posted on a bunch of other other Facebook marketplace sites in my area, and some guy about 70 miles away from me ended up buying it.
And so I came out okay on the deal, but it was just a… It was a headache trying to get the noise out, and then once I got the noise out, I was all excited, and then I was all let down because we couldn’t get it to work with Source Connect or with Skype. So it’s a great box for some applications, but it just wasn’t a good one for mine.
Well, it won’t surprise you, nor our fans, but I bought one of those once upon a time, too. Also, after watching the VOBS with George, and my deal was it was just too big. It was this giant physical box.
You probably had the same reaction when it first came.
Yeah, it is much bigger than what we’re used to working with in the VO world. It’s about, I guess, three or four times the size of an AGO3. I don’t know how big it…
You know, it’s a lot bigger than a Focusrite box, you know. So it is much larger than anything else. And if you’re tight on space, I can see how that would be a problem.
Yeah, that was my major deal. And in the end, it didn’t really do anything that the AGO3 wasn’t doing for me already, like you said. So having that giant box on what I use as an editing station is just an Ikea desk, a little small 24-inch table just wasn’t going to work.
So I ended up getting rid of it as well. But I’m glad you were able to tell us about the story. I thank you for coming on.
Well, absolutely. Glad to be here and glad to help out.
Yeah, I’m glad that it’ll help me not spend any money, hopefully, between this and the next episode. So, Greg, thanks again. The rest of you fans out there, send us in your questionable gear purchases to save me from buying anything else.
And also, we’d love to hear your story. Thanks, Greg.
You’re absolutely welcome, and thanks for what you do with your VO Meter program. I learn a lot from it.
So Greg, thanks for that. Sorry for the technical difficulties getting going with Source Connect, but we made it work. And sorry that didn’t work out, but at least you found out what works for you in your particular situation.
So Sean, what else are you working on in the new year?
All right, I’m actually really excited because this year I’m working on a cool project with my girlfriend and her family. Her father’s a writer, so we’re actually trying to adapt a sci-fi novel that he’s written into a sort of radio play series that we’re going to release in a podcast format. So I’ll be spending a lot of time over at their place with my carry-on vocal booth, which is actually my sort of questionable gear purchase for this month.
I actually bought a modification for it. They sort of featured it last year at VO Atlanta. They call it their Surround Sound Hood, and it kind of takes…
It gets rid of the fatal flaw of a lot of these portable solutions and that there’s no acoustic treatment behind you. So what this does is it actually attaches to the rest of the unit and then provides a sort of acoustic hood behind your head. And so basically I wanted something that I knew…
Like usually the booth works fine in most hotel rooms and in most carpeted rooms, but there have been some places where, for whatever reason, you could still pick up some reverb. So I’m… With that attachment, I am 100% sure that reverb will not be an issue.
So I’m excited about that and I can’t wait to get my booth back from the guys over at Vocaboot to go. So, and we’re happy… So yeah, keep your ears out for The Dissenters.
Hopefully it’ll be released sometime this year, once we get a few episodes recorded. Paul, I’ll have to reach out to you because we have some villainous characters that you might be suitable for.
Mwahaha!
That’d be great.
So other than that, without further ado, we want to introduce you this episode’s guest. He doesn’t really need an introduction. Marc Cashman has been in the industry for almost three decades now, both as a successful voice talent and as a writer and producer and voice acting coach.
So without further ado, let’s go to the Dowgo Call Room and Marc Cashman.
All right, we are moving into our Bodago Call Conference Room right now, and I am so excited about the guest that we have right now, because he’s probably the most enthusiastic guy you’ll find in the voiceover industry. Of course, I’m talking about educator, coach, voice actor, producer, writer, and casting director, and owner of cashmancommercials.com, Mr. Marc Cashman. How are you doing, sir?
I am doing great, guys. How are you doing?
We are great.
Awesome, so glad to have you.
Welcome, and thanks so much for being here. At the end of the year, has it been a good year for you guys?
It’s been a very good year for me. What about you, Paul?
Yeah, I can’t complain. Actually, for some reason, the end of the year has been very good to me, too, these past few weeks, so, yeah.
That’s terrific.
No complaints.
That’s a great way to end the year. Sometimes, it’s funny, we get to the end of the year, sometimes I ask myself, how did I make it through the end of this year? How did I make it?
And then the beginning of each year, I say, how am I gonna make it through the beginning, and through this year? And somehow, at the end of the year, somehow everything turns out okay. But you never know in this business, you never know.
And that’s probably one of the main reasons that I… One of my biggest tips for being in this business is make good use of your downtime. People forget about that.
Absolutely.
And we know that as in this business, we have, we wax, we wane, we’ve got busy periods and we got dead periods. And the smartest thing that you can do is when you have slow or dead periods, make good use of them because when you’re busy, you don’t have time to promote yourself and do all the other stuff that you’re supposed to be doing because you’re so busy. So that’s why you need to take advantage of the times when you’re not busy to do all the stuff that you didn’t get a chance to do when you were busy, which is promoting yourself, keeping yourself top of mind with clients and letting people know what you’ve done lately, organizing your stuff that you’ve done over the past three or four months.
Again, all the stuff that you don’t have a chance to do on a day-to-day basis, do that when you’re slow and then you’ll feel good about yourself. Even though, again, there aren’t jobs coming in, you are still being productive and you’re still moving the ball forward.
That’s great advice. Well, Marc, Sean mentioned all the things you’ve done in the voiceover industry. We know that you’ve been honored as one of the best voices, or the best voice of the year by Audiofile Magazine.
You’re a Clio award-winning copywriter. But our audience is primarily people new to the business, newbies, as we call them. So what we’re interested mostly talking about is your coaching business.
And the first question we have is, can you tell us a little bit about your coaching style?
Wow, okay, in a nutshell, I could give you my coaching style in one sentence. Once you work with me, when you work with me, I will tell you what you did right, I’ll tell you what you missed, and I’ll tell you what you need to do to fix it. No judgments.
So basically, when somebody comes, approaches me for coaching, and says I’d like to get involved in coaching because I don’t live in LA, I’d still like to take advantage of your expertise, but I can’t come there in studio and come into your studio and have classes. Could we do this virtually? And yes, that’s the beauty of now the internet, is that you can get training and education and be talking to somebody halfway around the world, and it’s like they’re right next door.
But basically, when somebody comes to me and asks to start coaching, it’s a pretty simple process. Again, everything is done via the internet, either on one of two platforms, Zoom or Skype. Everything is recorded as well.
And so at the end of the session, the student gets an entire MP3 of the one-hour session that we’ve done. Both sides, both sides recorded so that the student can listen to hear how they did. Did they make progress?
Did they hit it out of the park? Did they crash and burn? Did they get somewhere in between?
And they get a really good objective sense of their progress, of their performance. And basically my job is to give students tools that they will use for the rest of their voice over career if this is something that they want to pursue. If that’s something they want to pursue.
I want to just hold on to that just for a second. That’s a footnote there because not everybody is suited for this business. We all would like to be actors.
We’d all like to be readers. We all say, hey, I can speak English. I can articulate what is so difficult with the reading copy.
And then once they get that piece of paper and all that copy in front of them, they realize how much work and how much multitasking they are doing when they are performing because it is a performance. What people forget with voice acting is that they are legitimate actors, just like a stage actor, just like an on-camera actor. Voice actors are voice actors.
And acting is not something that you just say, okay, I’m just going to be an actor today. Well, if everybody did that, then there would be no auditions, there would be no plays, and no anything. So many people going into voice over forget that there is acting involved, a lot of acting involved.
That said, there are perks for voice acting. You don’t have to show up on set at 4 in the morning. You don’t have to worry about makeup.
You don’t have to worry about wardrobe. In fact, you don’t have to worry about what you look like. That’s the beauty of voice acting.
On stage and on camera, people are constantly judging your appearance. Voice acting, never a problem. I don’t know if you knew this, but this is a little story about Walt Disney when he started his animated movies, and he was recruiting voice actors for his movies.
He demanded to not see anyone who came in to audition. So that’s why everyone who came in to audition for Walt stood behind a curtain, and he just listened to them and cast them purely and solely on their voices and said specifically, I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want that to change my perspective or my decision.
So that’s the coolest thing about voice acting. Well, there are a lot of cool things about voice acting. It’s funny.
I don’t know which one of you mentioned it. I don’t know whether it’s Sean or Paul, but one of you mentioned the fact that I’m the most… What is it?
Energetic or happy?
You have this ebullience and just optimism about you, and like you’re saying, I love how you mention how when you work with someone, there’s no judgment because people really aren’t… I mean, you have to come from a place of vulnerability to get a decent performance. And for a lot of people, this is their dream.
And if they let themselves be vulnerable in front of the wrong person, it could just shatter it.
Oh, yes. Oh, there’s no question. There is absolutely no question that people…
I’ve known people who come up to me and said, you know, I studied with somebody about 10 years ago, and it was such an awful experience, I thought I would never be able to do this again. And I thought, oh, my God, what a waste of time and what a sad first experience to have. I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who’ve had that experience, unfortunately.
But the cool thing about voiceover is that you don’t always have to be an actor. Now, I talked about acting before. Yes, there are voice actors, and voice actors are needed for animated series and video games and audiobooks.
But there’s a whole other side of voiceover that is basically what’s called the non-acting part. And that’s the storytelling part. That’s the education part.
That’s the instructional part. That’s the part that doesn’t require you to be a character, per se, or be involved in characterization. Because the bottom line is, not everyone is an actor.
If everybody was an actor, I think I’d kill myself. I mean, it would just be crazy. It would just be nuts.
Not everyone is an actor, and not everyone wants to be an actor. I can’t tell you how many students I have who say, I don’t want to be on stage. I don’t want to be on camera.
I just want to explain things to people. I want to do explainer videos and e-learning things and non-fiction audio books and stuff like that. That’s my goal.
That’s my dream. And I say, fabulous. That’s absolutely fabulous.
You know that you don’t want to be an actor. Now you’ve niched yourself into an area that you are more comfortable and confident with.
Exactly. And I know that you yourself have talked about the importance of knowing your niche and being able to identify your place within the industry. Because there are so many people in there, you can literally find any one person for any one role.
It’s true. It’s absolutely amazing how much the industry has niched itself. It used to be in the old days, back in the 50s and 60s, when a voice actor had a demo.
They had, well, back then they had cassettes, and they had commercials on side A, and then animation and other stuff on side B. And that was, I just dated myself, but basically that’s the way it was. And it was everything in the kitchen sink as well.
So you could be talking, you could be singing, you could be dancing. How do you dance on your VO demo? Trust me, it’s there.
I’ve heard it. You can hear it.
It must have been tap.
Yes, exactly. Of course it was. Absolutely tap or tap soft you, but yes, definitely tap.
But the cool thing is that there are so many areas of Voice Over that people can niche themselves and get into and find what they are really, really good at just by exploring a little bit in Voice Over with different instructors. And again, you find it’s really good to know what your limitations are so that you can then put all of your strengths into something that you really, really are passionate about.
Wonderful. And I can tell you’re extremely passionate about Voice Over.
You know what? Just a footnote on that as well. I know a number of people in my business who have burnt out.
And people ask me, how come you’re still so passionate about this after 40 years? The only thing that I could possibly say is, when I got into it, it was something that I absolutely loved. It was never work.
It was a labor of love. It’s always been a labor of love. And it’s kind of like, I look at this, I look at voice acting like scientists look at what they do.
That the more they look, the more they study, the more they discover, or the more they delve into their subject matter, the more they discover. And when they discover these things, they say, oh, no wonder I was in love with this in the first place. No wonder this was so cool in the first place.
And so their passion drives them to discover more and more things. So my exploration of the voice over universe over the past 40 years has taken me into some amazing, amazing places. And it’s just so cool.
Again, it’s like peering through a telescope. I’m just peering… Well, I’m not even peering.
I’m listening, but the more I listen, the more I hear, the more I discover.
And I love you touched on that because it’s very obvious. I’ve seen your interviews and I know that you mentioned that you were an educator in the past. And you can really tell because I was a teacher as well.
I also have a master’s in education. I come from a teaching family. And we always say that teachers are lifelong learners.
And it’s so apparent in your zest for learning and your love of sharing knowledge, of imparting knowledge to others. And I feel like that’s something that’s been really integral in your success because you’re so adaptive. And you’ve changed with the industry and you’ve been able to, like I said, maintain that stamina when others might have burnt out.
And you know what? It’s not so much the stamina. It’s my passion.
My passion, again, overrides everything. So it’s not a matter of being strong enough. It’s just a matter of letting, loving what I’m doing to a point where it’s always a labor of love.
It’s never difficult. Am I exhausted sometimes at the end of a session? Absolutely.
But it’s the kind of exhaustion that goes with, let’s say, when you work out. At the gym, or you go for a great run, or a swim, or you have a great basketball game. It’s that kind of exhaustion.
That feeling of accomplishment.
Yes, and not just accomplishment for me. It’s really the accomplishment for the person I’m working with. That’s the key.
At the end of every class, and at the end of every recorded session, coaching session, I always ask my students or students one question. What did you learn today? What is the one top of mind sticky takeaway for today?
What is the one tool, the one thing that you learned today that you’re going to apply tomorrow? If I don’t hear, if somebody can’t tell me what they learned, I didn’t do my job. That’s why I always want to know, did I do my job?
Did you learn something today? Did I bring something new to the table that made you say, oh, that’s cool, oh, I could use that, oh, I never knew that before. That’s a great thing.
That’s a classic teacher training. Both my parents were public school teachers. And while I don’t teach, I do a heck of a lot of youth sports coaching for all my kids.
And I do the same thing at the end of every practice. I say, all right, what did you learn today? I go around, everybody raises their hand.
And it’s so rewarding when you hear that come out and you think, wow, that’s something we talked about and it actually stuck. When I thought they were playing in the dirt on the baseball field and not even paying attention, they actually heard it and it’s really rewarding.
They were learning. And also, again, not only does that make you realize, yes, I did my job, but what you’re also doing is you’re reinforcing that in their minds. You’re totally reinforcing that.
And that’s… Reinforcement, as you know, goes so far in learning. It’s one thing to say something, but when you reinforce it and then you get that feedback, that cements it.
That basically carves that new groove in their brain.
Yeah, exactly. So talking about the students you work with, when someone’s approaching you or you’re looking for students, what kind of qualities do you look for in someone who you think would be able to work with you? And what skills should someone have before they come to work with you on voice over specifically?
Well, I can honestly tell you that you need to be a really good reader. I always ask my students, when you were in school and the teacher said, who would like to read so-and-so? Did your hand go up?
Every time.
Exactly. I need to know that people are good readers. I need to know that people are…
Well, obviously, they have to… You’ve got to have really, really good articulation. I can’t really teach articulation per se.
I can hold their feet to the fire, the fire of articulation, but I can’t really teach them how to articulate. That’s going to be a speech teacher. That’s not me.
And so, if I hear something egregious when somebody contacts me, and I hear something really, really off, I will literally say, listen, before we start working coaching on voiceover, you need to get a hold of one person, whether it’s a speech teacher. A number of people are dyslexic. Dyslexia in voiceover is basically like not being able to walk properly when you want to run a race, where basically your legs aren’t working.
And so in that particular case, dyslexia is a challenge. There’s no question about it. Are there workarounds?
Yes, depending upon the severity of dyslexia, because dyslexia is on a spectrum. And so some people are mildly dyslexic, some people are profoundly dyslexic. And so basically we figure out workarounds depending upon where you are on that spectrum.
If you’ve got any physical problems like breathing and stuff like that, then I address that as well. So I always want to make sure that, one, you’ve got the physical capabilities of doing this. And one thing I’m going to mention also is being blind.
I’ve worked with a couple of blind voice actors. Now you might think, wait, a blind voice actor, that’s an oxymoron. I mean, how is that even possible?
Now it didn’t used to be, but now with technology and braillers and all sorts of recorded and machines and things like that, there are a few blind people out there who are actually making a living doing voice over. It’s nowhere near as easy as when you’re a sighted person. They have to do a lot of work, a hell of a lot of work to do that.
I mean, it’s like Oscar Pistorius, although he’s not going to be doing any running anytime soon.
Not in his current situation.
But yes, I have worked with blind people as well. And truthfully, the few blind people who I’ve worked with who are doing voice over, I literally, I bow down to them. They are people who are just beyond the beyonds amazing.
I just can’t even believe that somebody who is blind would actually consider doing, not just consider doing voice over, decide, I want to be a voice actor. That is astounding to me. And the mere fact that they are actually able to accomplish that is also obviously astounding to me.
And I will help them any way I possibly can to help them get better and be better. But for sighted people, your articulation, very, very important, your breath control, your breathing, your physical health, very, very important. Again, if you are dyslexic, you’re going to be challenged.
But if you are a really, really good reader and love the written word and are articulate and understand how to express yourself and admire actors who can do that as well, then you are a great candidate for voice acting. Now people say to me, do I have to have the voice of God to be able to do this? Do I have to have an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous voice to be able to do this?
No! That’s the beauty of it. No!
You don’t have to have a beautiful, gorgeous voice. However, if you’ve got some problems with your voice, if you’re sounding very, very hoarse, and you’ve got, let’s say, polyps and things like that, and your voice is difficult to listen to, there may be some physical problems going on there that need to be addressed before you get into voice acting. But for all intents and purposes, if you are coherent, if you can read, if you can articulate, if you can make sense of things, if you love telling stories, if you take your finger and your thumb on your left hand and put them together, your forefinger and your thumb on your right hand and put them together, those two circles that you’ve got, one is voice actors and one are voice overs, people who aren’t actors.
But if you put those two circles together and you join them like a chain, that space between them is called storytelling. And no matter whether you’re an actor or a non-actor, you still have to tell a story. That’s the key.
You’ve got to be able to tell a story. And if you love to tell stories, then voice acting is for you. I started voice acting a few years after I started writing and producing and casting commercials because a number of my clients said to me, Hey, why don’t you…
We’d love to have you be the voice of our product or service. And initially I would say, Oh, no, no, no, you don’t want me. There are people who could run rings around me acting wise.
You definitely picked from these people. But the more I got from that, the more demand I got from it, I realized, OK, let’s get into this voice acting thing. It snowballed down from there.
But there are so many people who don’t do voice acting, but can transition into voice acting because they’re already using their voice. For instance, singers. Singers make great voice actors because they understand intonation and projection and how to use a microphone and articulation and all sorts of, again, a sense of musicality.
Singers make great voice actors. People who are trying to transition from stage or on camera, they’re tired of the four to five to six weeks of rehearsal of a stage play. They hate getting up at three in the morning to be on set for on camera stuff.
So a lot of stage and on camera actors want to transition into voice over. Speakers, public speakers, they make great voice actors because they understand that audience dynamic and they’re confident and they tell stories and they can stand in front of 10 people or 1,000 people, it doesn’t matter. They can stand up there and talk about all the things they do and all the things they’re talking about.
Even ventriloquists.
Or puppeteers. They love voice acting. Again, they’re storytellers and they know how to use their voice.
I’ve worked with ministers, rabbis, pastors, people who speak in front of people all the time and do now podcasts and all sorts of things. So the coolest thing is I get to work with people from all walks of life who still ultimately want to tell a story.
Wonderful. So kind of jumping off of that, because we’ve been talking about the sort of criteria required, what was… Like, not only are you famous for having a very comprehensive voice over curriculum, but you’re also famous for having your VO report card.
So could you tell us a little bit about that?
Ah, my VO report card. You know, I realized as I was… When I first got into…
When I first decided to teach, I had been writing and casting and producing commercials for about 20 years, working with voice actors all over the world, and at Critical Mass, a number of people said, Why aren’t you teaching? Why aren’t you teaching? And initially I said, Oh, there are so many teachers out there.
There are so many good teachers out there. And then I got a number of people saying, I just took a voice hour class, and I really didn’t like it. I didn’t learn anything.
Why aren’t you doing it? So then I started realizing, okay, maybe I did have something to contribute. So when I put together my syllabus and worked on it, it took me about six months to put it all together, I realized, well, here’s a syllabus.
In every school, there’s a syllabus. And at the end of every year, there’s a report card so that you are graded on that syllabus. How did you do?
How did you progress? Here’s all the stuff that we’re going to show you that you need to learn. We need to know, did you learn it?
Well, yes, you could have tests, but ultimately, again, you need at least some kind of proof that you learned something, that you got something out of it. So I realized, well, duh, of course. I had report cards.
Everybody had report cards going all through school. Why aren’t there any report cards in this? This is teaching, this is learning, this is doing.
And then I realized nobody had a report card. All these teachers out there, no report card. So at the end of the class, what do they say?
Good luck!
No feedback? No telling people, explaining to people, or showing people how they did? No assessment of all the work that they put in for X amount of weeks that they were in it, or months?
That’s crazy. So that’s why I came up with the VO report card. And also, my VO report card does not have A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s.
Or F’s, whatever the case can be. I always thought that that was stupid. It was just stupid.
Because it’s a very subjective thing.
And it’s judgment, again.
Well, again, what constitutes an A, or an A minus, or an A plus? Some sort of a number cume. How do you grade…
give somebody an 89 on their storytelling? Where does that… I mean, it’s just quite ridiculous in my mind.
That’s basically why I came up with my report card. And I broke it down into eight specific categories that you need to be accomplished at if you want to be professional. First is breathing.
If you don’t understand how to breathe, you are not going to be a good voice actor, because voice acting entails reading and articulating tens of thousands of words, sometimes short, sometimes long. But the bottom line is, if you can’t breathe properly, if you don’t understand how to breathe properly, you will be exhausted by the end of the first page. So breathing is very, very, very important.
Timing. There’s another issue right there. Comic timing, understanding cadence, understanding rhythm, understanding where to take beats, understanding basically how we speak.
Timing, very, very important. Something that people don’t realize how important it is until they actually hear it, and then they realize, oh my gosh, absolutely. I can hear the difference here from take one to take two only because I took this beat, I understood the timing here, and that sounds so much better.
Another thing that I came up with was something that I call eye-brain-mouth coordination. That’s that loop where the words go in through your eyes, rummage around through your brain, and go out through your mouth. And that’s understanding, again, that’s being able to read cold, cold reading and understand what it is you’re reading, and make sense of what you’re reading, not just to yourself, but to the listener as well.
So your eye-brain-mouth coordination is extremely important because that’s that loop that you have, again, lifting those words right off the page. If that loop isn’t solid, if that loop isn’t strong, then you’re going to lose your place and therefore you’re going to crash and burn in the middle of a performance. So your ability to get those words off the page, super important.
Articulation, fourth thing in my report card, and articulation, obviously, we know how important that is. We always want to try to find that Goldilocks area, not too much, not too little, just right in there. That takes some work.
That definitely takes practice and practice and practice in articulating and making it sound like it’s just rolling right off your tongue, but everybody can understand exactly what it is you’re saying and not have any question whatsoever. Consistency, you’ve got to be consistent from take to take to take to take to take because that’s what this business is. It’s a series of takes, take one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
I always joke, why do they call it voice over? Because you’ve got to do it over again, and over, and over, and over, and over again. Consistency is a phrase.
They say consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. But in voice over, you’ve got to be consistent from take to take to take because if you listen to a 30-second spot, a 60-second spot on the air, and if you think that that spot was done in one flawless take, think again. That spot that you hear on the air is a patchwork quilt of sentences and lines from all different takes digitally sewn together seamlessly so that nobody would be the wiser, and it would sound like one beautiful full take.
In reality, it was multiple takes all sewn together. But consistency is very important because if the actor wasn’t consistent, they wouldn’t be able to put those elements together. Acting is another area that is very, very important.
If you want to be a voice actor, if you are going to go into characterization and do characters for commercials and characters for video games and characters on animated series and characters in audiobooks, acting is paramount. You have to really understand how to inhabit a character and keep that character consistent. So acting is very much a part of your overall performance.
Analysis and interpretation is another area where, again, you’re taking a story and you are analyzing it and interpreting it for the listener. And if you don’t understand what you’re talking about, then you’re just saying words. You’re just saying words in a vacuum.
You’re giving the words no meaning, no depth, no dimension, nothing. So interpretation and understanding the story, absolutely paramount. And last but not least, listening.
Listening to yourself, to hear what you did before and to make it better the next time. Listening to the director and do basically what they need you to do. And of course, listening as you listen to radio and TV, listening to your competition, listening to what’s on the air, listening to what the gold standards are, and of course, listening to be inspired.
I listen to narrators all the time, and some of them I say, Oh my God, how did they get that job? And others I say, Oh my God, I could listen to this guy read the phone book. Well, those are my eight areas of my voice acting, again, my VO report card, and people are graded on a 1 to 10 scale, not A, B, C, D, F.
So if they get one or two, basically, and there’s a key at the bottom, if they get one or two, basically, I’m saying you need work in this area. Three to four, I say improving, but you need more practice. Five to six, you’re starting to get it, keep at it.
Seven to eight, almost there, but you need a bit more polish. And nine or 10, you’ve got what it takes. So each one of these areas, I’m going to grade in that, in it with those numbers, and that way you can look at the report card and see, it’s like an x-ray of your skill sets.
I’m strong here, I’m weak here, I’m okay here, I’m great there, and you get a really good objective assessment of your skills. And that’s basically why I came up with the report card. And fortunately, now I’ve been teaching, this is my 18th year of teaching, nobody has come to me and said, I don’t like your assessment of my…
There’s not been one person who’s ever said that to me, because they can see that I’m very even-handed. They can see that I know where they’re strong, where they’re weak, where they need improvement, where they’re kicking ass. I’m showing it right there, it’s right there in front of them.
And I think I’m a pretty good objective signer there.
That’s absolutely wonderful, thank you so much Marc. And again, you can just really see your giving attitude as an educator and a lifelong learner. And one thing that I really love is that you’ve been sharing these tips on Facebook.
Not just one or two, but right now it’s something… I’ll let you tell it. How many do you have up right now that you’ve been doing every day?
Today was number 251.
Wow, that’s amazing.
And I’m going for… Here’s the spoiler. I’m going for 365, and that’s only because of what I’ve decided to do, is I’m going to give one tip a day for an entire year.
What’s really cool about that little story is this. My entire career, I’ve always tried to figure out a bigger picture, a higher purpose, than just teaching voiceover or just writing and producing a commercial. I always wanted to do something bigger than selling another bottle of soda or another car or another whatever.
Just selling another, just again in that advertising mode there. Yes, I’m doing what I love to do. I’m making a decent living.
I’m not a rich man by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m supporting myself and have been. But I’ve always looked at things like, okay, everybody does that. Everybody works and does what they do and make a living.
There’s got to be more. I’ve got to have a higher purpose. If I don’t feel like I’ve got a higher purpose, then I feel like I’m just do-do-do-do-doing stuff.
So when I first started writing and producing and casting commercials, I realized, okay, I’ve got a talent. How can I take this talent to beyond just making a living? And so I reached out, I started reaching out to public service organizations, nonprofits, who needed volunteers or donations or whatever the case may be to help their organization be better, like Adopt-a-Ped or Cancer Society, whatever the case may be, the homeless, the food bank, any place that needed some promotion and advertising that I could provide for free and they could get on the air and it would help them.
So early in my career, I started recruiting talent, studios, music libraries, sound effect libraries, and had everybody volunteer. I volunteered my time and I created the… I wrote it and produced it and everything else.
I basically volunteered my time, had everybody else volunteer their time, and produced every year a public service spot for a particular nonprofit organization that they could use and it was done for free. So I’ve been doing that and continue to do that. I’ve been continuing to do that almost every year.
When I did the tips, it started out just as a promotional thing. My daughter… I was talking to my daughter and she said, Dad, you need more of a presence online.
You should be doing something every day. You know it’s got to be content driven. And why don’t you just tell people what you know and glean these things from your book?
I said, okay, all right, that sounds… So I went… I did 10 days in a row.
And by the ninth day, someone said, Hey, are you going to do 10 more? I said, okay, fine, I’ll do 10 more. And after I got to 20, somebody else wrote and said, Hey, these are great, can you go to 30?
Okay, the gauntlet has been thrown. Yes, great, yes, okay, I’ll do 30. And then that turned…
ballooned into 40. And then 50, by the time I got to 50, I said to myself, all right, this is kind of like, you know, when I’m beginning of my career. What am I going to do with this?
What’s the point of this other than to just put that out there and promote myself? I need to have a higher purpose. There’s got to be a bigger picture here other than just disseminating my knowledge.
What can I do with that knowledge to turn that knowledge into something better and bigger? And then all of a sudden, I got an email that day from an organization called Vocal ID, which is a voice bank, a voice bank. And if I’m not mistaken, this voice bank provided Stephen Hawking with his voice.
Oh, wow. Okay, now that… And all of a sudden, the light bulb went off.
All of a sudden, I had an epiphany. I realized, oh my God, why don’t I do this? Why don’t I monetize these tips, do 365, charge $3.65 for a download, which is nothing.
Again, just make the price point irresistible. And have all the proceeds go to Vocal ID that would help somebody get a voice. Somebody who doesn’t have a voice, get a voice.
And all the proceeds would go for time immemorial, even after I’m dead. They would continue to go into their organization, and somebody would get a voice after the money accrues. I realize that’s the bigger picture.
That generosity of spirit is just so… Not only is it so representative of you, but what I love is, because I remember from an earlier interview, you actually said, well, my goal is to learn something new every day. I don’t know if I could learn 365 things in a year, but we’ll see.
And not only have you proven yourself wrong, but you’re giving that to so many other people, and all I can say is thank you. Such generosity of spirit is truly wonderful to see.
Thank you. I appreciate that, but I’m just happy that I was able to figure out a way to make something like this go farther, go beyond me. That’s the whole point.
Seriously, that is the whole point. If I felt that my… Again, it’s a little egotistical to a certain extent, because I’m talking about my legacy, but the thing is that I want my legacy to be that I thought beyond myself.
And I also want to… And truthfully, I want my daughter to be really proud of me and set an example. Well, basically, just set an example for a lot of people and basically just remind them that their talent can go beyond just making them a living.
And when they do that, then what’s happened is they’ve redefined who they are as people. And it’s a win-win. It’s a total win-win.
I count my blessings every day, and I never ever take for granted how fortunate I am and how fortunate I have been. And I never ever want to squander that. And life is just too short, and there’s just too many wonderful things out there that you can do.
The people I admire the most are the people who are changing the world and help other people. For instance, whenever I see a TED Talk, I listen and I say, Oh my God, these people are brilliant. These people are amazing.
These people are changing the world. These are game changers. These are absolutely amazing people.
Those are the people I admire. And if I could be just a fraction of that, I’d be happy.
Marc, you mentioned a lot of the tips are from the book, your fabulous book, VO. VO, tell us a little bit about the book and how that came about.
The book was very cool because I had been for the past, I don’t know, I think it’s been like 10 years now, there was an online company called nowcasting.com here in Los Angeles, and they had a column, they basically have columns, online columns for actors. And they approached me and asked me if I wanted to write a voiceover column, and that was about 10 years ago. And I said, yeah, sure, why not?
Let’s just have questions, and I’ll answer their questions. And so we started that about 10 years ago, and I started basically every month, people would write in, and so I had about 10 years of written and online, and I realized, boy, I had really accumulated a lot of material just in the columns alone, but then also with my teaching, in addition to bringing scripts into the studio, I would also write articles about different subjects to accompany the material that I gave, that I was teaching. So we’re talking about monologues, it’s basically how to work through a monologue, and a lot of how-to stuff, a lot of very, very practical stuff that would explain the material and help support the material that they were working on.
So I would break it down and give them a perspective, et cetera, et cetera. So after about 15 years of this, I realized I had a ton of material that I needed to organize. Well, the cool thing was is that 75% of the book had already been written.
I just needed to organize it. And then I realized, okay, and then after I put everything together, I said, okay, what don’t I have here? What am I missing?
What areas should I talk about? So I realized, so then I looked at, okay, I got about 75%, let’s do about 25% work, we’ll get all the other stuff that I need to get in here. And that took about a couple of years there because you got to work while you’re still doing the other stuff.
And so finally got it all together. And then it came down to deciding what the title was going to be. And so I realized that it, you know, I always try to go for the clever side.
I always want to try to stand out. I didn’t want it to be your typical thing here. So when I gave it to my wife and said, look through this material and tell me what you think.
And so she read through it and she said, the one thing that I came away with was, I read this and I read that, and I kept reading all these different things. And I said, oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, I didn’t know that.
Oh, oh, oh, I didn’t know that. And I said, oh, oh, oh.
So that’s why it was V-OH! I didn’t know that.
That explains it.
Wonderful. And that’s basically where that came from. And then people say, well, are you thinking of a sequel?
Yes, there’s going to be a sequel. VO2, Oxygen. And the working title is V-OMG.
Oh, nice.
It’s so current and topical.
Well, that’s what we… We strive. We strive.
Well, that’s something that I… And I’ve read this book, and it’s one of my favorites, because it’s like talking with you, your writer’s voice is exactly the way that you speak.
You know, somebody said… I get that all the time. They said, every time I read your book, I can hear your voice.
Isn’t that great? That’s so cool.
But yeah, it’s wonderful, because not only do you have a textbook that you can refer your students to and give them assignments with, but it’s just… I mean, it’s a… Like you said, it’s a legacy resource.
It’s got permanence, and people can look at it whenever they need some inspiration or a little bit of… Or just an aha moment.
Yes, and I wanted to make the information practical. I mean, I did not want it to be anecdotal. Anecdotal is kind of a passive learning thing.
I don’t know how much people get from an anecdote. I wanted to be very, very practical. I’m a practical guy.
I always tell my students right from the beginning, I said, you need to know one thing about me. I have zero tolerance for bullshit. I will not bullshit you.
So that’s the one thing that I did not want in my book, was bullshit. I wanted practical, specific things that people could use and apply. And also to keep the chapter short, too.
Short and sweet. It also helped me with my own… I recorded the audiobook version of the book.
I am halfway through editing. I was hoping to get the thing… I’m still hoping to get it completely edited by the end of the year.
But I’m halfway through editing the audiobook of my book, which will be up on Amazon and the other places and stuff like that. Because a number of people said, how come you don’t have an audiobook of your book? I do.
It’s in the process of being edited, and it will be out there, guaranteed, one of these years, hopefully. I’m working on it. I’m really working on it.
Well, that’s great. So it brings us to the end of our time, Marc. I feel like I could talk to you forever.
Wow, that was a quick… That went quick.
You think? Yeah. Time flies when you’re having fun, right?
Yes, it does.
We want to thank you so much for coming on the VO Meter. We are big fans of yours, and you’ve given so much information, so much time of yourself. We really appreciate it.
How can folks find you if they want to work for you, or work with you, or hire you?
Oh, it’s really easy. Yeah, it’s really easy. So I’m Marc with a C, not Marc with a K.
So it’s Marc at cashmancommercials.com, cashmancommercials.com. That’s my email address, Marc at cashmancommercials.com. You can go to cashmancommercials.com and see stuff, listen to stuff, all sorts of different things, get some info.
But the best way to do it is to just write to me or to call me. You can call, leave a message, and write. I answer my own phone.
Well, most of the time I’m in the studio, so I don’t answer the phone, so you can always leave a message. But yeah, you can contact me anytime that way, and I’ll get back to you. You can get my book on Amazon if you want there.
Oh, the cool thing is that just a couple of years ago, I started my online classes. So you don’t have to live in Los Angeles to be able to take my classes. Now, I still do in-studio classes in Los Angeles, my Los Angeles studio, and I work with beginners, I work with intermediates, I work with advanced and working pros.
Lately, my in-studio classes have been for beginners and intermediates, and they’re usually held on a Saturday in Los Angeles because most people are working during the week and they’re busy, and I don’t want people coming to my class tired at 7 o’clock at night after they put a whole long day in and they’re exhausted and they can’t learn. I want them refreshed, so that’s why I have my Saturday classes. And lately, I’ve been having classes online on Sundays, and that’s the coolest thing, because again, you don’t have to live in Los Angeles.
You can be anywhere in the country and participate online. Everything is recorded. It’s virtual, so we can all see each other.
The Zoom platform is like the Hollywood squares of Voice Over here. And so people, again, everything is recorded, and everybody gets a lot out of it. The only thing, they don’t get a hug from me.
They’ll get a virtual hug, but they won’t get an actual three-dimensional hug unless they’re here in Los Angeles. But they’ll get a virtual hug.
Worth the price of admission, I’m sure.
Marc, thanks again. Good luck with the rest of your year, what’s left of it, and the coming new year.
Paul, Sean, you guys have been great. I really, really appreciate your invitation here. And I know that this is a fairly new thing.
You’ve just gotten started here, but you guys are doing a great job. Keep up the good work.
Thank you so much, Marc. It was a pleasure having you on.
Thank you, guys.
Bye, guys.
Wow, talk about drinking from the fire hose. I mean, Marc is just so generous with his experience and its information. I’m really glad we were able to get him on.
What do you think, Paul?
Yeah, he made it very easy because I don’t think I said a word the entire time. He just kept throwing out the questions and answers. It was perfect.
It’s great. I mean, he didn’t even need us. We just kind of sat there and took notes, I guess.
I could have actually just hit the mute button and fallen asleep. Yeah, it would have been good. Not that I’m upset about it.
I mean, basically, he made our job easy.
No, that’s true. That’s true. That’s something, as an interviewer, you worry about.
It’s not everyone has that sort of public speaking experience like he does.
Right, exactly.
So we just wanted to say thank you to Marc again so much for coming on the show and telling us everything he’s about. And if you’re ever wondering what kind of, like, he’s just such a great example of how you can be a successful voice actor. I mean, if you just pay attention to some of the qualities he has, like that generosity of spirit, that persistence, that openness to work and loving the work, it’s like, there’s a lot to learn from him.
Yeah, thanks again to Marc. And I want to say thank you to our fans and listeners because in between this and the last episode, we actually crossed over the 5,000 download mark. So it’s really exciting.
We can’t thank you guys enough. I still can’t believe that we have that many fans, but apparently we do.
So all these people. But seriously, thank you guys so much. A number of you have reached out to Paul or myself to saying how useful you’ve been finding the podcast.
And that’s wonderful. That’s exactly what we want to hear. I mean, the whole reason we made it, aside from getting our names out there, don’t tell anyone, is to help you guys.
So we’re so glad that you’re finding it useful, that you’re enjoying the podcast. If there’s anything we can do to improve it, please let us know. Or if you want to be featured in our VO Meter stick or our new questionable gear purchase, let us know.
Just find us on Facebook at the VO Meter page, or you can send me an email, paul at paulstefano.com.
Or Sean, that’s S-E-A-N, at daily VO, as in every day, vo.com.
So with that, I want to wish everybody a Happy New Year and a great VO year. Very good.
You too. Happy New Year, guys. Hope you have a fun and productive 2018.
That’s it for this episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
See you next time, everybody.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 18 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a great episode today. We have the coordinator and executive producer of the VO Atlanta Conference. That’s Gerald Griffith coming on in a few minutes.
But first, we have current events. So what have you been up to recently, Paul?
Well, I had my first audition for my new agent, and that was actually the first of three from last week. So that was pretty cool. All signs point to that being positive.
We’ll see if I actually book it. But sent that off and was pretty excited with the results. And so, you know how it goes.
You don’t hear right away. They collect them. I think the actual due date for the first one was today.
So who knows if it’s even been submitted. But then the agent will submit it to the client, hopefully, and along with other agencies that the client has reached out to, and then they’ll come back with an answer. So hopefully that’s me.
Hopefully I’ll have an answer by next episode.
Well, best of luck, man. I’m really happy that you got that new representation.
Thank you. And then I have my first book deal with find-a-way voices. That was just done today.
So that’s pretty exciting as well.
Very cool.
What’s going on with you?
For me, well, actually, I don’t know. It’s like I’ve had this lull period for a couple of months, just kind of doing my regular e-learning projects. And then I talked about you a little bit before.
I was finding myself kind of going through what I like to call VO ennui. You know, you’re just kind of going through the motions. And it was kind of like starting to become a job and less…
and just finding myself enjoying it less. But then I just kind of like I had some really cool coaching sessions. I kind of like I actually got or joined a Christina Melitsia’s toys, games and mobile app character class.
And that has just been like in just in the first session, I just had so much fun. And I just got some like really applicable feedback and implementable techniques for how to improve my performances. Like for example, I’m a big fan of lead in lines, or just kind of ad libs to make things sound more natural or to kind of warm your voice up before you get into a script.
And she just said, before each line, just go, wow, or dude, or whoa. And then it really like pumps your energy up and you get excited about what you’re about to read. So that was that’s very helpful when you’re reading boring, dry, e-learning corporate PowerPoint slides all the time.
So that was good. I actually got some new audiobook opportunities. I’m still working on a couple projects for Learning Ally.
They asked me to do a… I’m a little nervous because they asked me to try a Syrian accent for one of the books they’re doing. And so that’s a challenge for me.
I want to be respectful of the material, but still evocative of that kind of Middle Eastern accent.
So do you have resources to study that?
Yeah. They didn’t send me any audio references yet aside from… they did send me a sample of the official book that they’d like me to read.
One of my favorite resources for this is something called IDEA, or the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s run by Paul Meyer, who is a dialectician, linguistics coach, as well as an actor himself. So IDEA is a free resource, but he does also have some paid resources specifically for actors trying to work on accents for stage or voiceover.
So I highly recommend that. It’s the first place I recommend if you’re ever working on accents or dialects. And other than that, someone actually posted an audiobook for a German-Austrian accent in the GVA community group I’m in.
And so I was like, I can do the Germans. So I submitted for that again. This is for a book that was actually based during World War II, so kind of sensitive subject matter.
So you kind of have to put your actor’s cap on and be like, all right, again, you just want to be evocative of the accent, not like over the top or offensive or anything like that.
It’s quite a challenge you’re giving yourself going from Syrian to German and an Austrian combined? Or is it an Austrian…
I sent in the audition for the German Austrian, and then the woman was so impressed, she immediately sent me another audition, which not only had another… This one was great because I was just reading the book and it described a tour guide with flawless English, but with a slight Tyrolean accent. So in case you don’t know, Tyrolean is in southern Germany bordering Austria and Italy.
And so it’s got little hints of all three of those languages. So I’m like, and you want a slight accent?
So for those ones, you try and just kind of go… At least what I did was just try and go for a more European sound. I’ve spent some time in Germany.
I have many German friends. And usually, their English is amazing because they learn it from a very young age. But they do have that hints of almost British precision of enunciation when they talk.
And that’s just kind of like the staccato nature of German shining through. But it’s fun. I mean, it’s kind of what I needed was to just jump into a whole bunch of things head first and sink or swim, you know?
That’s pretty cool. Good luck. So, we will have Gerald Griffith, the executive producer of VO Atlanta, coming up soon.
But first, we have a VO Meter shtick from Friend of the Show, Lauri Jo Daniels.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO… Oh, nevermind.
The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
Hi, I’m Lauri Jo Daniels. I’m an audiobook narrator, and I’m beginning to branch out into a few other areas of voiceover, but I’m still really new to this industry. Last September was the two-year anniversary of when I decided to actually pursue this as a career, and it also marks the month that I jumped in way over my head and did an audiobook when I really wasn’t ready to.
So I spent the last two years really focusing on learning everything I can and pretty much figuring out everything that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Of all of the resources that I have discovered over this two-year journey, probably the most valuable resource to me has been attending Voice Over Atlanta. So I’ve now attended the last two years, and I was an ambassador both years.
That’s what Gerald calls the volunteer program for VO Atlanta. Both years, I was able to work registration, which was really amazing for someone brand new because I got to meet a ton of people coming in and registering. Even better was the fact that the first year, I had no clue who anybody was.
I’m terrible with names. So they’re coming through and I’m meeting people and talking to them and having a lot of fun. And then finding out later that someone was the voice of a cartoon my kids love or a promo I always hear or an audio book I listen to.
And I know I never would have gone up to those people had I known who they were because I would have felt really intimidated because they’re so much farther along in their career. Now, any of you who have been in the industry for a while know that that’s just a silly attitude to have because voiceover is probably the most supportive and friendly industry there is. But when I started out, I had no clue that this was a fact.
And even now I’m still pretty intimidated by some people, not because they aren’t friendly, but because I just admire them so much and I’m a bit of a fangirl. So I kind of make a fool of myself if I do try to introduce myself. So a lot of times I just avoid doing it.
Even though a lot of people think that I’m just super outgoing and not afraid of anything, I actually have a lot of anxiety and I’m really insecure when it comes to meeting new people. So there are some people that I won’t make that effort to go introduce myself to because I’m just too nervous. One of those people was Johnny Heller.
I had friended him on Facebook and followed his stuff and I just really admire him as a talent as well as a person. We’d never interacted with each other. We’d never met in person.
And he was at this last VO Atlanta. I really wanted to meet him, but I was really nervous. But on the very first night, as everyone was mingling and having hors d’oeuvres outside, Johnny approached me and introduced himself.
Since that time, I have coached with Johnny. He directed my audio book demo. I’ve attended a couple of workshops that he put together.
And we have had multiple chats. But I still get really giddy and kind of can’t believe it when I think about the fact that I can actually call Johnny Heller my friend. And even though there are plenty of other people in the voiceover industry that I still am in awe of, people that I know and that I can call my friend, but meeting Johnny at VO Atlanta is by far the best experience that I have had in my voiceover career.
And it’s not just the fact that I met Johnny. It’s the fact that he took that time to come find me and introduce himself to me and to talk to me about my career goals. And it changed the entire trajectory of my career because I was ready to throw in the towel until I attended VO Atlanta that year and met Johnny and got to talk more about my career and was reminded how supportive this community is and was given back some confidence that I had started to lose.
So thanks again to Lauri Jo for submitting that VO Meter shtick. She’s a wonderful person. I’ve met her at VO Atlanta and at MAVO before, and she’s one of my VO mamas.
I have several. Not VO sugar mamas, very different. But without further ado, let’s move on to our questionable gear purchase.
Okay, so I think it hasn’t been that long since the last questionable gear purchase, but that doesn’t ever stop me. So I picked up a new shotgun mic based on recommendations on VOBS from George Widom. I really need to stop watching that show during the equipment recommendations.
It’s an Audio-Technica AT4073B, sort of obscure mic, and he mentioned it as a really close match for the Sennheiser MKH416. He said it was so close that he recommended another talent, a client. I think he mentioned the name, but I don’t want to just in case she doesn’t want me to.
One of his clients who uses the 416 and bought this mic specifically to use on the road as a sound match. And George said it’s the closest he’s found as a match to the 416. That’s not a 416.
And I don’t necessarily think the 416 is the best on my voice. I’ve had a, I think I’ve mentioned on the show, a 415 in here, which was almost the same mic, but a precursor to it and only runs on 12 volt power. And it wasn’t the best fit for my booth.
But I’ve really grown to be a big fanboy of Audio-Technica products. And I know, Sean, you’ve used those in the past as well. And it being a Japanese company, you’re a big fan.
So I’m kind of sticking to those and decided to take George’s recommendation and get this mic. I’m not using it right now because I have it mostly for promo and commercial work. And this is the podcast slash audio book mic, but I really like it so far.
I’ve only done a few test reads and I’m sick right now. So that may be accentuating the bass in my voice. So it’s hard for me to tell.
I’m gonna give it a few weeks.
Yeah, I was actually gonna say, I don’t think you’d sound bad, but…
But I like it so far and it’s really forgiving, which the MKH416 and also an NTG3, which I’ve tried in here, aren’t necessarily. They pick up a lot of mouth clicks on my voice and nasal sound. And this new one, the 4073B seems to help eliminate that.
Yeah, and that’s a common misconception, just kind of the way that they market that mic. And it’s easy to fall into that, because these are originally used for film and distance recording and stuff like that. So it’s like they got that laser-like focus and stuff like that.
But if you’re in that narrow pickup pattern, it’s super sensitive. So you still have to address it like any other high-quality microphone. But I’m curious, what was the price point on that mic, if you don’t mind?
Let’s see, I think retail is $5.99. I picked this up for a little under $300 from Poland, of all places. We’re just talking about World War II, curiously enough.
And this was shipped from Poland, a used model. But it seems to be in great shape. I don’t see any scratches or dents and no indication it had any smoke inhalation in the diaphragm.
It seems to be in really good shape.
Well, I’m just glad that you’re able to still save so much, even with the international shipping. That’s great.
Well, I wasn’t including shipping. Sorry, I did pay $25 for shipping. So $3.25 total.
That’s nothing. I spent over $100 when shipping my Audient ID22 from Britain to Japan. And then that didn’t even turn out to be my permanent interface.
So there you go.
So that’s actually it for me, believe it or not. Have you made any purchases this week?
No, I’ve been super good. And I feel bad because I’ve been contributing to all of these. I mean, like, don’t get me wrong.
I’m still gear-lusting after so many different things. And, but I did want to touch on a couple of things because it’s like, so many people are, I’ve seen again and again, like a lot of people asking for what’s an ideal microphone. And the truth is, nowadays you don’t like, especially if you’re starting out, don’t go for like a TLM 103 or a 416, like immediately get something in the 150 to $300 range.
You’ll be fine. And actually one of, I was talking with Julie Williams, who we had on the podcast a while ago. She actually sold her 103, her Neumann TLM 103, a supposed industry standard for an AT 4040, which is about a $300 mic.
You could probably find it for less on Reverb or eBay. And it’s just nice and clear and quiet. And it’s actually a lot of female voice talent use it and been very happy with it.
So don’t feel like that, I mean, we talked about it before, but there is a point of diminishing returns on your investment. So if you don’t have $1,000 to spend on a mic, don’t. Get a decent one for $200 or $300.
And if you want recommendations on those, we have a whole episode about it. It’s episode two.
Yeah, that’s now up to over 450 downloads. It’s our most popular episode.
Awesome, awesome. Cause people keep asking this question.
Yeah.
But so some of the things that I’m lusting after, we are talking about travel rigs and stuff like that. I’ve actually, I currently don’t have a USB mic and I’ve been kind of looking back into it because I do lead a lot of workouts and I do a lot of videos and stuff like that. It would be nice just to have something to plug in to my laptop and like a little less elaborate setup.
And so a couple of options that I’m looking for right now were the iRig Pro, which is kind of a USB, it’s a USB, iOS and Android microphone. It’s one of the only ones I know that’s native Android functioning. And I like that because you could just plug it into an iPad or an iPhone and you’re off to the races.
Only problem is that iRig, not all of their products are really well reviewed. Some people have complained about them crapping out after a while. Another one that I was looking at is the Sennheiser MK4 Digital.
And I was really excited. Or what was that?
Senn had it.
You tried it?
Oh yeah, I had one here. What?
You didn’t tell me.
Oh, sorry. You said the digital.
The digital one.
So sorry. Nevermind.
We both actually use the analog version of that mic. And that’s another really good one for like around two or $300, depending on where you get it. And it means some people even call it the Neumann TLM 101, just because it’s kind of like their entry level.
And some people even like it more than the 103, just because it’s a little bit flatter and doesn’t have the harsh high end that the 103 has been known for. So Sennheiser actually are teamed up with Apogee Electronics to create the sort of internal interface inside the MK4. So that tends to be the biggest concern with USB mics is that they don’t have decent preamps and stuff like that inside.
But I mean, Apogee’s kind of a purveyor and at the forefront of that technology. So that’s a pretty exciting partnership. The only problem, though, is for a travel mic, it’s not very ideal because it’s just like a large studio condenser.
You need a shock mount for it. It’s super sensitive. But yeah, I don’t think it would be an ideal travel microphone just because it is a large diaphragm condenser.
It’s got an open pattern. It’s convenient to plug into a phone or an iPad, but it’s super sensitive. And I don’t think it would fare well in a hotel room with vacuums in the hallway and refrigerators in the hotel room and stuff like that.
But then, I was just watching a video from George Whitham, one of his old NAMM videos, and this microphone company out of Nashville called MicTech, who’s kind of famous for having their own signature sound and having great microphones at affordable prices. They released something called the MicTech ProCast Mio, M-I-O. And it’s kind of like an Apogee mic slash Blue Yeti killer, because it’s got, like the Blue Yeti, it’s got zero latency headphone monitoring, it’s got a USB out and an analog out, an XLR out, and you can actually record to two different sources.
So you could have one hooked, or like the USB hooked up to one laptop, and then the analog hooked up to an audio interface hooked up to another laptop or whatever. So that’d be cool backups for that. And the main reason that I was excited about this is its pickup pattern.
It’s actually got a, what’s it, a super cardioid pattern, just like the 416 or something like that, which is ideal because it does cut down on ambient sounds. So I don’t know, I think I’m going to drop some hints, and maybe that might be a good stocking stuffer for yours, truly. But one last thing that we want to try that’s a little bit different is I feel terrible pressuring Paul to buy new stuff for this segment, but we want to prove that.
It’s true, he twists my arm every time.
But you’re keeping it alive, Paul, and I really appreciate your sacrifice. But we actually want to open up questionable gear purchases to our listeners. So do you have a questionable gear purchase that you’d like to share?
Or something you bought that was a disaster?
Something you bought that was a disaster? Why don’t you write us a story or even send us an audio clip, maybe even using that questionable piece of gear? Go ahead and just send us a comment on the VO Meter Facebook page.
You can also hit Paul or I up, send us a direct message on Facebook, or you can send me an email at.
Sean.vo.com Regularly scheduled segments. Without further ado, let’s take it to the Bodago Call room for our interview with Gerald Griffith.
Hi, everybody. We are joining you from Bodago Call right now with the coordinator and executive producer of the sixth annual voiceover conference, VO Atlanta, Gerald Griffith. How are you doing, sir?
I’m doing great. How about yourself?
Wonderful. I’m so glad you could join us today.
Welcome, Gerald. So, Gerald, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with voiceover or what drew you to the voiceover community.
Well, I actually, like many people, was looking for an opportunity to do something. I had always had an interest in public speaking and things of that nature. And so having been someone working from home and responsible for getting my kids off and things like that, I wanted to maintain some flexibility and somehow came across the idea of doing a voiceover and took a class, an intro to voiceover class some time ago.
And that’s how I initially got involved. And then a short time later, I decided to start a meetup group because I didn’t know a lot of people here in the Atlanta area. And that meetup group eventually grew to a size where people had an interest in doing training and things like that.
And so once we started doing that, I ended up spending so much time doing training and coordinating training that I had to make a decision. Am I going to coordinate sessions and training or am I going to try to continue learning more about voiceover and having some time in the booth auditioning and working on technique? And since my background has been more in planning and logistics and coordinating things, I decided to stick with the planning side of it.
And things have just kind of evolved from there.
That’s awesome. So our next episode actually is going to be about Meetup Groups specifically. Can you tell us if that was an in-person group or was it virtual or a combination of both?
Well, it definitely started off as an in-person group. It was all about the chance for people to get together and start meeting each other. And I wish I could tell you it was still as active as it had been at that point.
But it’s been more or less a lot of focus has shifted toward the conference itself. And it’s not as active in person as it is at this point as it was in the past. But it was a great thing and it’s still grown.
It’s about 800 to 900 people that are officially a part of that meeting group. And I keep them updated with things related to the conference or any other activities here in the Atlanta area that may be of use to them.
Very cool. So I’ve had the pleasure of joining at least two of your wonderful VO Atlanta conferences. Can you tell us a little bit of how the conference has grown and changed over the years?
Wow, sure. The first year’s conference was, as you might imagine, anytime you’re stepping out to do something for the first time, it can be a little nerve wracking and make you a little nervous and wonder how it’s all going to work out. But I do feel fortunate in the sense that I was able to talk to other people in the industry, other coaches and trainers and people who had their own events, and they were willing to give bits and pieces of advice.
They weren’t going to try to help you clone what they were doing, but they were willing to encourage and be supportive in that way to let you know that you weren’t by yourself and that you could do this. And so, it started out that first year. Pat Fraley was my initial keynote, and I was very thankful of, and had a great crew come out.
And I remember that first year, we had about 125 people attend, and I had one person from Bermuda, and I was so pumped up. I was like, oh my God, somebody’s coming from, you know, there’s water in between them and the conference, and they’re still coming. And that was year one, and, you know, one of the things I remember mostly about it was I was walking the entire time.
I literally lost 10 pounds in one week. I don’t know if I slept at all that weekend, but there was a lot of walking going on, and here we are, you know, this year having been year five, we had attendees from 44 different states in the US and 13 different countries outside of the US. Yeah, we were just shy of 600 people this year.
Wow. My goodness. So, this is something that’s a little bit near and dear to my heart because I’ve personally benefited from it.
One of the things that really makes VO Atlanta unique is your scholarship program. So, could you tell people a little bit about that and the different scholarship options you have?
Sure. I’ve been doing the scholarship program since probably the third year, second or third year of the conference. And I do that in conjunction with Anne Gengouza and the VO Peeps program.
And we make it possible for at least two to three people to come out to the conference and be a part of it. You know, the criteria is pretty straightforward. You know, people, they write something, they tell us about themselves and their situation, maybe where they are, where they’re trying to go.
And we also give them a little small script, just, you know, from a performance standpoint, to see where they are. And then there are a team of judges that Anne coordinates to go over and review everything, and they select a winner out of that. I’m not involved in the judging, although I do listen to the entries and everything.
But I can tell you that they’re just some amazing people that enter, and some of the stories, you know, they’ll have you laughing, they’ll have you crying, they’ll have, you know, sometimes feeling very empathetic toward people, and just other times feeling so excited about where people are and what they’re trying to do. And it’s just an exciting program to have. And we do an international, we do a national, and then we offer a youth scholarship as well.
That’s fantastic, so good.
Well, that’s great. It’s just an amazing opportunity you offer people. I know it’s changed the lives of all the winners in profound ways.
But aside from the scholarship, can you tell us other ways people can get involved in the conference?
Well, aside from coming as a regular attendee, we do have an ambassador program where people exchange some time for a discounted registration. So there’s an entry process for that, where they can apply and tell us what areas they want to help out with. We do have a very few volunteers who help out throughout the entire conference duration during their time there.
And those are probably the categories as far as how someone could come outside of the regular attendee process.
So I’m a little bit familiar with the ambassador program. Can you talk a little bit about how that might benefit somebody, or I guess allay some of the fears someone might have about being an ambassador and not being able to maybe enjoy the rest or participate in the rest of the conference like they thought they might be able to? Or is that not an issue?
Well, I think it depends on where people are coming from with it. You know, naturally, there’s a trade-off. There’s a time commitment.
But depending on where a person is and their thinking about coming, there are roles that actually would allow them to be an ambassador and not miss a single minute of the conference. Particularly if they’re in the Atlanta area and they want to help with, say, the load-in where we’re setting everything up or maybe the breakdown where we’re breaking everything down on Sunday. So in those cases, their time commitment is before and after the conference, not during the conference.
So it just depends on their availability and other factors that may factor into that. But there are other roles. It’s an eight-hour commitment for an ambassador, and we generally split it up into four-hour blocks.
So when they go through and review the options, it’ll give them a general description of what the possible roles are. And we try to work around that as much as possible.
Yeah, and I’ll offer up my own experience. I was a volunteer last year, and felt like I in no way missed out on anything that I wanted to do. I’ll say that you, as a executive producer, are more than gracious with allowing people to, like you said, get what they want out of it and still be able to participate.
So I thank you for that, and I’m sure most of the ambassadors would agree that they still got what they wanted out of the conference while still being able to help and feel like they were part of the team.
Right. Now we don’t run it like a… You know, it’s not a fast food restaurant or something like that.
It’s time for my smoke break, Gerald.
We want everyone to have a good time. And I mean, there are obviously things we have to get done, and there are schedules involved. But if you think about it, if you were assigned to work the door, at a particular session, and check for badges and things like that, once that session starts, we, you know, if you’re not involved in something outside of that, we encourage you to just go in, sit down at the back of the room, you know, so that you’re near the door, and watch the session, you know?
You know, observe it and be a part of it, to the extent you can. And then toward the end, you know, you wrap up your time there and you move on to the next thing. So we don’t try to say, well, how many seconds we can, you know, use you or keep you active.
We really want you to be a part of the conference as well. Because outside of that eight-hour commitment, you are a regular attendee. You’re able to participate in everything, sign up for anything, be in the contest or whatever else.
You just have that time commitment. That’s it.
Very cool. So I know this year you started a new program called VO Intensive. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Ah, VO Intensity. Yes. VO Intensity is a bit of an extension of our X-Session program that we do at the conference.
And the big difference there was that X-Sessions at the conference are three hours, which is a good amount of time. But for some, they want a chance to really, really go even beyond what you can do in a three-hour block. And so, I created this concept of VO Intensity where we have a select handful of trainers that come out.
And we did it at the same hotel where the conference will be in classroom settings. And it’s a full-day program, except you have the option of one presenter one day, one coach one day, and one coach on a separate day. So, for instance, this year, you know, you might spend a day doing commercial stuff with Mary Lynn, Wisner, but you might spend the next day working with Dave Fennoy in gaming.
And you have a full day of at least six hours worth of training with each of them. And so there’s much more intense focus on the workshop learning part of it. Whereas at conference, there’s the workshop, there are panels, there are breakouts, there are social, there are karaoke, there’s reception, there’s party stuff going on.
Intensity is really focused on training. It’s about the intense learning experience. And they’re just different in that regard.
Absolutely. And I love that idea of the more narrow focus, because I mean, your X sessions, if you like, just to explain to our viewers or our listeners a little bit, the X sessions are ones that you pay an additional fee to join, like Gerald said, they can be a two or three hour workshop setting. And it can be a little bit difficult to try and coordinate that along with all the other great activities, all the breakout sessions, which are included in your registration as part of your schedule.
So I love that you kind of added some time before and at the end of the conference to really give people that undivided focused attention.
Yeah, we actually have a few X sessions that are actually going to be pre-conference. We started it this year in 2017, and then in 2018 we’ll have, I believe, six sessions that’ll take place early on Thursday, the official start of the conference on the first of March. There are about six sessions that take place because we actually have a lot of people who come in on Wednesday, believe it or not.
In fact, there are so many people on Wednesday that I had to look at my watch when I walked through the lobby because there were so many people standing around for the conference. And I was like, did I miss something? And oh, it was Wednesday night.
People figured out the secret that Wednesday is the best party night.
Shh.
Yeah, because you’re going to be too exhausted for the rest of it to party, that’s for sure.
But yeah, so a lot of people do come in on Wednesday, which means they’re there on Thursday. And for those people who want to squeeze in a workshop early so that they’re not missing any of the breakouts or panels, they’re able to take them then. Or if they want to do the full day type training, we’ll be doing VO Intensity.
And I believe it’ll be in mid to late July in 2018.
Cool, cool. So a bit more of a sentimental question, I guess. You have so many great moments and events that happened during VO Atlanta.
I’m just curious what some of your fondest memories from the conference have been.
I’ll give you a couple. I’m a big fan of seeing just community come together and people have a good time. I come from a big family.
I’m the last of 11 kids.
Wow.
Was always around a lot of people when it was always a big thing for us. And so when I’m at the conference, I’ll walk around, say, during lunchtime, and I just see people connecting and enjoying themselves and having a good time and really connecting at a personal level. Sure, there’s that initial inclination to talk about voice over and things like that, and that’s great.
But then you start to see people talking about, where are you from? Where’d you grow up? Where did you go to school?
Do you have kids? Other things that just connect them at a very personal level. And that, I think, is one of the things that makes the conference so meaningful for people, is that it goes beyond just what you do, and it really opens the door to people connecting at the who you are level.
And so that’s a big thing for me. I often walk in the room, in the back of a room, and I’ll just stand there for a little while, and just soak in the fact that people are here having a good time, and that they’re learning, and that they’re engaging with each other. And then as a parent, my favorite moment is actually, you know, being able to involve my kids in an event.
My son’s 10, and half of his life, he’s been attending the conference, so. That was a little interesting with that. But as they’ve gotten older, you know, to know that they’ve literally had a chance to meet people from all around the world at the conference.
And people throughout the year, they’ll see me posting about them in Facebook and things like that. And so it’s a little odd sometimes, because people have seen so many things about them that when they’re at the conference, they’ll walk up to them and say, hey, Camille, hey, Grant. You know, they’ll start referencing things that they’ve done.
And of course, my kids are looking at them like, who is this person? But I think anytime, you know, as a parent, when you can do something and involve your kids in it, and see them learning and developing and growing and having a chance to meet people that are doing positive things. And I think that is a really, you know, thing I consider to be a blessing and I’m appreciative to have that opportunity.
Absolutely. And I’m sure whether or not they pursue voiceover as they get older, they’ll look back on this and very fondly and just be like, wow, that was so cool of my dad to involve me like that.
I hope. I hope that’s the story. I hope it’s not, man, he drag us out of this thing every year.
VO Atlanta again?
I think for them partly, it’s like they get to eat hotel food or just go swimming or something like that in March type of thing. And it’s interesting because in next year, we have a youth program on Saturday during the conference. So March 3rd is a youth day with Lin-Anne Zager for next year.
And so the kids attend that, but I’m actually going to bring them out of school one day and bring them down to the conference on, I think that Thursday night that the conference kicks off and let them spend the entire weekend there. And so my kids in conjunction with a few other select ones, we’re actually gonna have a youth ambassador program where on that Friday, we’ll get them involved with helping out with some activities, mostly just again to let them have a chance to meet other people in the community, participate in some other things before they spend the whole day on Saturday with the youth program.
Well, Gerald, you mentioned the personal relationships and I can certainly attest to that. I was recently talking to a coach with whom I’m going to start doing some sessions. And the reason I contacted this particular coach is because I spent so much time with them at VO Atlanta 2017.
And I said, because we spent so much time together, I feel like you know me better than almost any other person I could contact right now. So, who else would I call to do coaching with next? And it’s really going to benefit both me and my career.
So, I thank you again for the way you’ve set up the conference and just the attitude that you engender with it.
Well, I appreciate that. A lot of it has to do with the mindset people come with, quite frankly, and in most people’s defense, a lot of times when people go to something that’s networking related, it’s a very short activity. It may just be two hours, it may be an hour and a half.
So, the time they have to actually network and truly network, I mean, not just give them somebody a card or something, but to actually connect in some meaningful way is very short. But VO Atlanta is not a two-hour experience, or a three, or a four, or an eight, it’s several days. And so, I think it takes away that need for people to feel like I’ve got to jump in front of the line, I’ve got to climb over someone, I’ve got to follow someone to the bathroom to get in front of them.
You don’t have to do that. In fact, it’s very, very highly discouraged for people to behave in that fashion. And I think it does just create that space where people can connect.
And I try to add things to the conference as well. We have a conference app that we’ll be using in 2018 where people who are attending the conference will be able to create their profile within the app, and they can actually load their demos within it in their profile. So when someone looks at your profile, if you want to put a picture there, you can put a picture.
If you don’t, that’s fine. If you want to put links to your website, to your Twitter, Facebook, whatever, but then you can upload your voice over demos right inside the app. So, you know, I’ll just use Mary Lynn as an example.
If she were looking for someone for something, and she was like, hey, I’m going to the conference, maybe I can find someone, she can go right within the app and filter down on certain criteria and listen to people who’ve loaded their demos right inside the app. So it’s almost like, yes, there’s the conference, which is already a good opportunity in and of itself. But now, because I’m leveraging technology with that, it’s almost like its own opportunity for you to really be heard by a lot of people.
Multiple times. That’s wonderful.
Yes, yes. And so I’m really excited about that. And it just takes that whole pressure off of someone saying, hey, can you listen to my demo?
Can you listen to my demo? There’ll be a lot of people listening to your demos.
I was going to say you’re actually seguing perfectly to our last question. What else is in the works for the future of VO Atlanta or VO Intensity?
Well, one of the things I’m trying to do with it and moving in that direction is we’ll continue to define our various programs. So we have audio book, animation, gaming. So we’ll continue to increase or help those areas mature so that when someone’s coming and they’re really focused on a particular area, that they can get a full conference experience, even if they just focused on that particular area.
So, you know, audio books, for instance. If all you wanted to do was audio books, because that’s all you cared about, I want to make sure there’s enough content within that program for you to still realize a meaningful conference experience. And so we’ll continue to do that.
I’m continuing to work with agents and directors and producers and get a lot of their feedback about what goes into the conference, what’s meaningful, what’s needed, what do people need to know. And that’s one of the things I talk to them about is, what do you wish talent knew about? And then how do we convert that into meaningful training and exercises so that when they come to the conference, they walk away knowing that, hey, maybe that approach I was gonna take is a wrong one.
Maybe that demo I thought I was gonna produce, I need to rethink. Maybe that training that I have been putting off, I need to go ahead and get. Because I find that talent in general are motivated to do good and to move forward with their careers.
In many cases, unfortunately, they just don’t have accurate information about what they should be focused on. And so, I hope to continue to develop that type of thing where people do leave the conference with a really good game plan and really good information from highly qualified and respected sources so that they can continue to build their careers.
Wonderful. Well, I can’t thank you enough, Gerald. I mean, VO Atlanta is certainly one of the best voiceover conferences out there right now.
And for people who are interested and want to find out more or even register for the conference, where do they go?
VOAtlanta.me.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. I appreciate you. Thanks for the time.
Gerald, thanks so much. Sean and I will both be attending this year the sixth annual VO Atlanta Conference. And we will see you in just 100 days, right?
You posted the countdown today.
The day is 100 days.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Hard to believe, but it’s even more exciting because I know it’s closer.
It’s scary. You know, breaking three digits is like this psychological thing. It’s like as long as I have three digits to work with, I’m good.
I feel like I’ve got more time.
But when it goes to 99, it’s whoo.
I hear that. We’ll keep up the good work, and we will see you on March 1st.
Yes. Well, I think I’ll see you a day before that.
Well, that’s true, but I didn’t want to let everybody know that. They’ll all want me to buy them a beer. Thanks again, Gerald.
Have a great day, sir. Thank you so much.
You too.
Thanks again to Gerald Griffith, the coordinator and executive producer of the VO Atlanta Conference. If you’ve never been to VO Atlanta, or if you’ve never been to a Voice Over Conference, I highly recommend it. There’s something for everything there.
It’s not just for beginners. Honestly, I’ve made friends and connections that are going to last a lifetime. I’ve made friends and mentors.
I’ve even gotten an agent or two. It’s just so great not to be able to work or to meet people who all share the same passion for Voice Over that you do.
If you come this year, you’ll be able to come meet us.
And you can meet us. Say hi. We won’t bite you.
Hard.
Hello, 90s.
But yeah, it’s a wonderful event. And if you can make it in your budget to attend, I highly recommend it. Once again, if you’re interested or want to register, the website is VOAtlanta.me.
Once again, that’s VOAtlanta.me. I’m Sean Daeley with my co-host Paul Stefano for the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Have a wonderful holiday season. And take it easy, guys.
Happy holidays, everybody.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com. Come on.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 17 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Well, we are gonna get right into the nitty gritty of today, which is our VO Meetup Roundtable, where us and some other In The Trenches voice actors kind of share our stories, get to know a little bit more about us and the people we work with, and talk about how this Meetup Group has benefited the progress of our careers. So without further ado, Paul, why don’t you tell us about how we started our own VO Meetup Group?
Fantastic. So yeah, we’re talking about VO Meetup Groups or affinity groups, another word that I like to use is accountability group. And this is a concept that’s been around for hundreds of years as far as business to business marketing, but we decided to try and make it work back around two years ago now, where a lot of us were interfacing on the venerable Bolton Board, the Voice Over Bolton Board or VO-BB.
Some of you are familiar with that. We’ve talked about it kind of ad nauseam on previous episodes, but specifically Sean, John, John Roorda, who we’ll talk about in a second, and Mike Norgaard were members of that group along with Heather Masters. And we used to post messages and see each other’s faces and after about six months of me rambling on there constantly, I got a phone call from Mike Norgaard, voice talent out of Texas, and scared the bejesus out of me because first of all, I didn’t know how he found my number or why he was calling me.
And basically the discussion was, how are you advancing in your career? And I said, what career? What are you talking about?
But it pointed out that there should be and could be more interaction among people that I had been interfacing with all these months and getting help from. So after speaking with Mike, I decided to try and get together a group of like-minded individuals from the VO BB. Initially, we called it the New Guy Group.
It was myself, Mike Norgaard, Sean Daeley, and John Roorda. And we met virtually every week over… I think initially it was Google Hangouts, but we’ve used various platforms across the different years.
And we just talked about the business. Initially, it was kind of challenging because Sean was living in Japan at the time, and Mike is in Texas, John’s in Indiana, and I’m in Baltimore. So we had some technology issues trying to get us started.
But the point was we were talking every week and really started to grow our businesses by helping each other. And eventually, we added Heather to the group and then Marisha Tapera. And that made us less of a new guy group and we had to change the name.
But I was happy for that because it brought some new variety to the group. And now for a little over a year, the six of us have been talking every week, not always the same number of people. We don’t have any sort of requirements.
There’s no fees. We just talk when we can. Somebody has something going on that week, like a kid’s soccer game or taking their dog to the vet or traveling.
Obviously, we don’t hold them to it, but we get together as much as we can, and I think we’ve all become better for it. So with that, I want to introduce all the members of the group and let them talk about themselves and their businesses and anything else they want to promote. So let’s start with, well, Sean, you know, hopefully you’ve listened to the podcast before, but Sean, tell us a little bit about your business and how you came to the group.
Well, yeah, actually, you reached out to me via the VOBB and sent me a message that you were trying to get this group together, and I was like, hey, why not? And so, like you said, there were some tech issues and scheduling issues trying to get everyone to meet up because me being in Japan, the local time was tomorrow. So that was a little bit difficult.
But other than that, I think the biggest benefit is just being able to talk shop, like you said, and kind of make sure that you’re on the right path. I mean, we’ve talked about everything in these groups from potential clients or client platforms, like Freelancer or Mandy or what have you, like how to approach agencies or even confirming bad feelings about a client who reached you or a project or something like that. So it’s been incredibly helpful, and it’s something that I always look forward to when I can make it.
And let’s go to Mike Norgaard.
All right, well, I guess I was here as one of the semi-founding members of the group. And Paul and I, like Paul said, I’d reached out to him by phone. We actually used to frequently bid against each other and still do on a certain freelance platform, not Fiverr.
And… Let’s throw that in there for the industry, folks. And I actually had a question about the platform and some technical issues that have been going on and with their accounting and so forth.
And so I called Paul just to see if he’d shared any of those and we began chatting and we had a, I don’t know, probably about a 30 minute conversation. And shortly after that, he said, hey, I’m getting this group together, let’s do it. And so we did and here we are.
In terms of my background, I come from a radio broadcast background, so I’ve worked hard to kind of lose some of that and go warm and friendly and millennial sound, as they say. And I think that this has been a great opportunity. I mean, to me, this is sort of like the virtual water cooler at the office.
I think many voice overs work in isolation kind of from everybody else. We’re sort of in our own little bubble. So to have that opportunity to network and have some professional contact and talk to people who are actually excited to maybe hear the things that we’re talking about, as is supposed to just our spouses all the time, or whoever, and just have that opportunity to professionally network has meant a great deal.
And I think, as Sean said, has really helped grow the career. So it’s been a great opportunity to be a part of that.
Great, thanks Mike. And John Roorda, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Well, I first stuck my toe into the VO Waters just ever so slightly before you did, Paul, in early 2015. At that time, I was in radio sales. I had a background prior to that of corporate training and tech support.
But enough time at a radio station, burning through the phones, people start asking you, well, why aren’t you doing something with your voice instead of selling? So that was about the time in early 2015 when I first ventured out. Very shortly after that, I started seeing this Paul guy over the VO BB like a rash.
Well put.
A nice rash if they’re… And not long after that, Paul reached out to me and asked if I would like to be part of our little weekly get together. And as Mike said, working in isolation in this little box in your basement, you don’t really have a point of reference as to what success is, what other people in a similar stage of the journey are experiencing.
And is that guy on Fiverr or whatever other freelance site really serious when he says that? What? So it’s been a tremendous learning opportunity to see what my peers, what other people in this stage of the game are up to and where they’re at.
And it’s been a huge motivator to see that, yeah, the success really is out there and you just have to reach out and grab it. So it’s been great to see the success that everybody else has been having and that’s definitely helped to spur me along.
Awesome, thanks for that. And Marisha, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Well, I’m one of the most recent additions. I met Paul on a panel that we did with World Voices about rates, rates for people who are just getting into the industry. And the interesting thing for me is that I’ve been kicking around in a pretty part-time capacity since 2002.
So even though I’m technically not new, the as new, I should say, I was absolutely and still feel like I’m absolutely new to working at this at Voice Over as a business, and at the level that I’m hoping to start to work at. So Paul was kind enough to invite me into the fold. And I think the best thing for me has been just this sense of community that’s actually fairly intimate.
It’s really wonderful to have a group of people that have your back. And I think you guys have always been so available to answer questions, to run reality tests with, and then literal testing, A-B tests, that’s one of the, sort of the greatest features of the group. And I think the other thing that I love so much is having people to cheer on myself.
I just get such a huge charge out of how hard you guys are working, how you’re kicking butt, and the interesting ways that you’re finding to conquer obstacles in your businesses. And as John said, it’s such an education and it’s so inspirational and it is really fun to hang up and think, oh, you know, that’s amazing that this person is doing this. I feel proud of you guys.
So yeah, that’s been my experience so far.
Heather Masters, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do in the VO world.
Cool. Okay. Well, I got into VO about three years ago.
I had a theater degree and little children at home and so I had no idea what to do with it. And one day when I was listening to an audio book, I thought, hey, I have a theater degree. Wonder if I could do that.
And so I did, and thus began the journey. And so I started with audio books. I have since transitioned a little bit.
I’m still working on audio books, but I’m working more often on commercial e-learning and video game and character work. Those fit a little bit better with my schedule, so I’m trying to gear more for projects that are not quite so long-term. I studied with Nancy Wolfson of Brain Tracks Audio, who I adore, and that really-
Name-dropper.
Name-dropper, it’s happened. Yes, she’s awesome. And I really feel like she’s the one who, going through her program, really gave me the confidence to feel like, okay, I’m for real, this is for real now.
I have the skills, I’m not just pretending at home with my homemade set up. And so I think that gave me the confidence to pursue, to really pursue, and things have been going wonderfully ever since, so yee-haw.
So Heather, what kind of groups have you been involved with, and how have you found this particular meetup group to be beneficial or maybe not beneficial?
You know, the very first interaction I had with any form of human contact in VO was on the VOBB, which was a real lifesaver for me in terms of getting knowledge. And the people on there are just… they’re fantastic professionals.
They have incredible credentials, and yet they are willing to help nobodies. And they’re so free and so giving with their advice. And that was a real lifeline for me.
And what kind of segued off of that, which was even better, was this guy named Paul Stefano, who… no, I know it’s Stefano. I can’t do it right.
Paul Stefano contacted me and said, hey, I think we’re putting together a group of kind of all the people who are newer so we can help each other out. And I was like, sign me up. And that has been massive for me because I feel like not only are there people who are willing to help me out, but there’s sort of a mutual connection.
And I feel like I have real friends. I feel like if I run into trouble, that I can ask for help. And I’m also willing and able to give help, because these are people I’ve gotten to know and that I really care about, and I love that dynamic.
It’s kind of transformed a little bit from me being newbie, I don’t know anything, somebody, anybody, please help. What do you know? What can I glean from you?
To more of a, okay, we’re all kind of getting our bearings here. We’ve got some experience under our belt. We have got experience in various genres, and how can we help each other?
And I think that’s been massive for me.
Well, great. And I won’t bore the audience with my background, but I will echo the sentiments that I am really happy that we all get together. I’m so proud of all the accomplishments that all of you have made as well, and love just cheering everybody on and seeing what everybody’s up to every week.
So with that, I want to throw out to Sean, who’s going to talk a little bit about networking in general, because he has more experience, I think, in networking in the VO world than almost anybody I know, with the exception of maybe Ann Gangusa. But Sean, tell us a little bit about how networking is beneficial in the VO world.
Absolutely, because I understand for some people, I know even you, Paul, like this idea of like an accountability group was kind of a foreign concept. You just wanted to bring people together and talk show. And so, like, we’re at this kind of interesting time where these meetup groups can take all sorts of different forms.
I mean, as Paul mentioned, I’m pretty active on social media. And that’s kind of like, I mean, these groups are sort of becoming accountability groups in themselves. The only issue is, is there’s like four or five hundred members in it.
So, but I mean, there are some great ones. I know the Global Voice Acting Academy has a free GVA community group. We also have a paid membership group as well.
There’s VO Peeps and Voice Over Pros and Voice Over Camp. And just make sure that you really kind of get a feel for each group. Just kind of that those are the people that you want to learn from and that you’re really understanding what each group is about because they do serve different purposes.
But kind of moving away from social media, we have like what we’re doing because say people who want to get to meet up, they might be isolated from other actors. So they might only be able to do it digitally or online. And now we have all sorts of conferencing apps, whether it be Zoom or Bedolgo Call or Skype or any of the other usual suspects.
And so you can meet up regularly that way as well for either for free or for very affordably. Another thing that I love to do is if you have the option are in-person ones. So this can be anywhere like at someone’s house or at a restaurant or even in a recording studio and those ones are always great because it’s always good to be able to like shake someone’s hand and like get to know, make that personal connection that much more quickly.
So what exactly do we talk about when we have a meetup group? As we talked about before, like they can be pretty much just kind of camaraderie and talking shop and bouncing ideas off of each other. I know that when we first started, it was kind of much more performance based.
Like we would actually all come in with auditions or scripts that we were working on and then we would take turns reading and then practice giving and receiving feedback. And that was also extremely helpful because as we’re all trying to figure out our signature sound and trying to sound natural and not too exaggerated or unrealistic and stuff like that, that was immensely helpful. But that’s one form of group that you can have is one that’s strictly performance based.
And then the other one like we’ve been talking about before and what this group has really turned into is much more of an accountability group where we can set goals with each other. We can even have an element of friendly competition with each other as we’re kind of trying to progress at our own pace. And like Marisha was saying before, just being able to troubleshoot obstacles or challenges we have, whether it’s like, oh, I’m trying to learn this new platform or I’m trying to reach out to this agency or I’m trying to negotiate a higher rate or my signal chain sounds terrible.
What can I do? Just having some friendly people who are just calm and supportive and cool headed and very honest with their feedback has been invaluable. And so it’s been really fun watching everyone move, progress all elements of their business, whether it be the studio tech aspects.
Everyone’s audio sounds amazing, by the way, our agency lists or our client lists or the number of books that we’ve done. And that’s just another wonderful thing about this is that everyone’s experience and expertise is so different. I mean, I know like Mike and Paul do quite a bit of audiobook work.
So when I started trying to do some projects as well, like I just like berated them with questions and still do when I have them now. And so, and it might be like someone might be better at character voices or someone might be better at dissecting a script. And everyone shares all this knowledge, like nobody really bogarts it to themselves.
And it’s kind of like this microcosm of the support of the VO community that we see everywhere, which is like, and it’s just great to have our own little section of it to ourselves, kind of our own little secret, as it were. And then one last thing that like we were talking about networking a bit at the beginning is that you can get recommendations for all sorts of things. Like we can recommend each other to clients looking for a specific voice.
Like I know if somebody’s looking for like for an older gentleman voice, I might refer Mike, John or Paul, or a female voice, I might refer Marisha or things like that. So we’re able to refer people to clients, to agencies, to projects. We might recommend Gear or Voice Over Coaches or all sorts of other ideas.
So it’s a great networking opportunity to get to know the people, whether they be locally or like online, like what we’re doing right now.
Yeah, so whatever direction of a group you want to pursue, I highly recommend you find one, get involved and stay active, and it will really help your career in the long run. So with that, we’re going to conduct this meeting, the rest of this meeting, as we normally do, and sort of demonstrate how we conduct our little corner of the Meetup world, and that’s by talking about what’s going on in our business from the past week, from when we met last, and just go in a roundtable format to give everybody a chance to talk. So we’re just going to do that now, listen along and see how it operates, and then maybe start your own group or join an existing group and see if you can do the same.
So with that, let’s go reverse order this time. Marisha, what’s happening news-wise in your VO world?
Well, I had a very interesting week. It’s so funny. I love you guys, and yet it’s still very hard for me to say this out loud.
I’m not sure why. I’ll be happy to do it. Well, okay, I’m going to practice.
This is one of the wonderful things you guys have done for me. You’re giving me an opportunity to kind of practice being a big girl and talking about these things. I was incredibly honored to be nominated for a Voice Arts Award this year, and so I went to New York.
I decided to head up to New York and attend the event because it seemed like a wonderful opportunity to network and just to enjoy the spectacle. I really was excited to just participate, and it’s obviously something that Joan Baker and Rudy Gaskins have worked extremely hard on, and Anne Gangusa, who was the producer, director, and coach, for the piece that I was nominated for, had also obviously worked extremely hard, and we worked together. And so I really decided to kind of go for it and go up there, and it was a beautiful drive.
The fall leaves were turning.
Oh, come on, what happened? You’re killing me.
Oh, you want to know what happened? Oh, I’m sorry. My goodness, what’s wrong with me?
No, seriously though, I could not believe it, but I won. I won my category.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much. I mean, you guys are just the best. I have to say, Anne dominated that category.
She had five nominations total in that category. Absolutely unbelievable.
What was the category again for our listeners?
Oh, I’m sorry. It was for outstanding narration demo. So this is for a demo that I worked on with her about a year ago, actually.
So at any rate…
And how many nominees in the category?
There were six people in the category. Incredible, incredible people, including Anne. So I just could not be more honored and humbled by the experience.
And it was a beautiful event. So well run, incredibly enthusiastic, and just extraordinary people at this event. And it was an incredible night.
And I had a few mishaps, you know, getting up to Lincoln Center. I had will call tickets, and I just knew it was Lincoln Center, and it was the day of the New York Marathon. So I had already mapped everything out, and I knew I was going to be able to drive, and I drove in with no problem, drove down 42nd Street, and was looking at like these crazy electronic billboards that are now there.
I haven’t been to New York in a while, so it was quite an eye popping experience going up 42nd. Everything was beautiful. Got a cab over to Lincoln Center, and the cab driver said, this is as far as I can take you because we’re hitting the street closures now, but here you are.
So that’s great. And of course, when I went inside, there was no one there. And that would be because it wasn’t at Lincoln Center.
It was at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Which is apparently not the same.
It’s apparently not the same. And despite living in New York for quite a few years, granted that was quite a few years ago, but yeah, I missed the boat on that. And so lucky for me, I had some, those little, you know, hey, your heel, your high heels are hurting your feet, so you can slip on these ballet shoe things.
I had those and I had to hoof it up the street to get to Jazz at Lincoln Center because the streets were closed. But it was, yeah, I got there, got in, and all else was well.
Well, that’s great. Congratulations again.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Not that that’s not enough, but is there anything else you wanted to bring up this week?
No, other than, you know, I did also go to visit one of my clients in New York. The next day, I had an additional day there. Exactly.
No, but seriously, that was a big deal for me also because I really was trying to make a point of putting myself out there and also, you know, trying to build a relationship. And having a face-to-face meeting with my client was an incredible opportunity. I was really lucky that they were, you know, ready and willing to have me in, and I got a chance to have a really wonderful experience with these two production assistants at this production house that I’m working with in New York.
So that was a fantastic experience also. So overall, it was a great trip, and I really have to say that it was… I really am feeling…
I can say I feel very proud of the fact that I showed up for all of that and like got in there and did it. So yeah, that is my story for the week.
That is awesome. All right, John Roorda, what is happening in your VO Corner?
Well, my VO Corner is far less exciting, but it has been a bit of an interesting week on the audiobook front. So I had kind of put audiobook work in general kind of on the back burner. For over a year, I had done a couple of small royalty share products early last year that just flat didn’t sell.
And honestly, that kind of discouraged me from looking at audiobooks as a whole. But after hearing the success that the rest of you have had, I decided to start pursuing it with vigor again within the past couple of months. Just got another royalty share project that went up just a little over a week ago and has actually now outsold the one that has been up for a year and a half in just a week’s time.
Granted, it is a hot and timely topic, Bitcoin, so that’s getting at some attention, but I’ll gladly take anything that I can get. And over the course of the past week, I had another Bitcoin title, which I had actually had to back out of my contract on because it was so poorly written and translated. Even after backing out of that contract, the rights holder came back to me and said, hey, I got it rewritten.
Would you like to take another swing at it? As well as another royalty share offer based on a positive list that the rights holder had had from a per finished hour project that went live about a month ago. So it’s been a busy week on the audiobook front.
So keeping me busy, I’ll definitely take all the activity I can get there.
Awesome. Congrats.
Yeah, that’s excellent. Oh my goodness.
Mike Norgaard, what is happening with you?
Well, I’m glad you asked.
I’m glad that you’re glad I asked.
Well, and I shared earlier and I’ve been sort of ranting on Facebook a little bit, speaking of audiobooks, the ACX platform seems a little bit buggy these days. I don’t know if anybody else has experienced it or not, but the dashboard reporting doesn’t seem to be up to date. I don’t think it’s reporting bounties correctly, and I don’t know if any of you have had any experience with that or not in the last two to three weeks, but something’s not right there, I think.
Mike, did you say that you had been able to… that you’d heard anything from ACX?
I did.
I got an email back from ACX, in fact today, Sunday, that said they were not aware of any problems and then kind of boilerplate standard, this is what a bounty is and this is how it works, definition from there. But I just didn’t know if anybody else had noticed any peculiarities or abnormalities with it.
I have a book that has zero sales since Halloween, but that’s not necessarily abnormal for me.
I’m sure I have several of those as well. That’s not necessarily out of the norm.
I mean, it was released on Halloween. It still has big, fat zero in the column, but yeah, again, this happened before.
I have a book that has zero sales since April 16, so…
Nice.
But that’s about it, just still kind of recording. I did get a fairly substantial per finished hour offer for a book that should start sometime next week. If I can get in touch with the author, he’s…
I’ve been communicating with his staff members, his underlings or whatever, and I think I finally get to talk to the boss this week to put together the final details on this, but they asked me to send in a written proposal and they had selected me to do the project. So that’s good news. It’s a 9-
or 10-hour book starting sometime next week.
Mike, is that one of the longer books you’ve done?
Most of my books are kind of the shorter nonfiction. For me, I found that that tends to be kind of a niche that I work a lot in. Although lately, I would say I’ve been expanding more into longer form stuff.
Three, four, five, six hours. I’ve got one that’s 16 hours. That’s my longest book.
Wow.
And one that’s about 13. But those are the outliers. Those are the exceptions.
How are you finding that? How are you finding transitioning into longer books?
It’s good. You know, for me, I think there’s… I think that there’s sort of a point of diminishing returns in terms of book length on ACX because I think at about six hours, the pricing structure and the incremental increases per hour from there forward, to me, seem to sort of diminish the return on investment.
So if I do anything beyond about six hours or maybe five, depending on the book, usually I’ll want to do those on a per finished hour basis. All of my longer ones are. Because I just don’t…
To me, the way that audible prices from about the six hour point forward, it’s not enough incremental difference per additional hour of audio, to me, to make that worth pursuing a lot of those on a royalty share basis.
And this is why I love our Meetup Group because I never would have figured that out on my own.
I mean, you hear me taking notes over here. Absolutely.
There’s an exception. Recently, I recorded a book that, at the time that it was given to me and offered, was on the New York Times top ten bestseller list. And that one was about seven hours long.
Well, I’ll make an exception there, and had it been 12, I still would have recorded it. On a royalty basis. But again, that’s kind of the exception to the rule.
Typically, with longer books like that, I would be looking for a per finished hour thing. So, moving away from audiobooks, one question I wanted to bounce off the group is that I do have an issue this week with a client who I’m having difficulty collecting from. It was a Voice 123 job, and it was just a short IVR.
It wasn’t anything big. But I’ve been, you know, communicating with them, and they’re, oh, yes, no, we’re happy with it. Oh, one little change.
Okay, no, everything is good now. It sounds great. I’m going to have my billing people go ahead and complete payment for you.
And it’s been, I don’t know, going on 10, 12 days now, and I haven’t heard anything. It’s a little small nonprofit. And I’m wondering, you know, how quickly and or assertively I should be doing some follow-up there.
I don’t think that I would get assertive until you at least cross the 30-day threshold.
Yeah, I was going to say a month.
Exactly, anything less than a month, and I kind of just shrug it off.
There’s a lot of companies will pay, they’ll pay invoicing only monthly. And if you don’t get to that point, then, you know, it’s possible it may drag on, but I would, yeah, like John would say, at least give it a month.
Yeah, the one time… The one time that I found myself in that situation where, you know, I look back, I was 45 days plus, and I realized I hadn’t gotten paid on it yet, simply using the reminder function in PayPal to follow up on the PayPal invoice I had previously sent, that PayPal reminder got me paid within 24 hours.
That’s great. In fact, that’s ironic, because that’s what I was going to say. You know, I could send a reminder, but I’m not sure at what point to go ahead and pull the trigger on that, just to keep things on their radar.
Yeah, I don’t think I’d make a scene about it until at least 30 days, but yeah, 30 days, send that PayPal invoice reminder, and that did it for me.
And check your mail, too, because I had a situation like that also with Voice 123, where they were sending me a check, and I didn’t know that. So I was waiting, I was checking PayPal. I actually sent them an invoice over PayPal, too, and was checking feverishly, and then a check came in the mail and got it that way.
I didn’t even know that until the check arrived. And lately, I don’t get a lot of real mail. It’s mostly, especially around the holidays, it’s mostly catalogs for stores trying to sell my kids’ stuff.
So I throw most of it away, and luckily I was able to find this check.
Oh my gosh.
Well, it may be something like that. Maybe I’ll follow up and just say, hey, just wondering what the window may be, or if you need an alternate. They don’t have my street address because I didn’t put it on the invoice, because I try to encourage online payment when I can just to streamline things.
Man, that’s another gem. I never would have thought of that. My street address is right on the invoice.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I don’t think it hurts to have it there, but typically I’ll put if PayPal doesn’t work, let me know and we can make alternate arrangements. I’m wondering if in advance on these small one-off things like that, if it would be beneficial to clarify specifically the expectation of the payment timeframe upfront.
Absolutely, yeah. I know plenty of philly sectors who include that in their contract, and if I don’t get it by net 60, within 60 days, there will be consequences kind of thing. Or even project must be paid or invoice must be paid 24 hours after audio is submitted or something like that.
I mean, make the terms, get them to agree on it, and then go from there.
You may have seen Rob Zygampaglia on VOBS last week, but he said this before. He says he doesn’t do any work without a written agreement, and that’s probably a little bit further than I would be willing to go, but some people take that route, where they don’t do any work without a written contract.
Well, and with certain clients, I would be comfortable doing that. For somebody who I’m just recording a 45-second voicemail, I think they might really consider that intrusive and overkill to have a signed formal written paper contract for that.
I think it’s interesting that there’s been a lot of discussion of the idea that you kind of do a bit of a statement of work in the exchange, the email exchange where you say, this is what I’m going to do for you. I mean, just that simple email exchange where you say, oh, okay, you know, what do you need, and this is what I’m going to do, that actually does technically serve as a contract. So just adding a line in a response email seems like it fits the bill.
I think the question of sort of trying to set terms, payment terms in advance is an interesting one, and it’s interesting to me to hear you in particular say that that wasn’t something that you necessarily established, because you are trying to follow the lead of the client. What do they need? What are their circumstances?
Some people I know get a deposit or they get in advance payment, and then others are willing to say, okay, well, if you can’t pay on receipt and you’re saying to me that you’ve got some sort of billing department that only cuts checks on such and such a date every month, then we need to talk about that. You need to let me know, and I can agree to that if it’s going to make our work together flow a little better. But you’re right.
It would be nice to know those things in advance, and the question is, can you… Is it reasonable to ask? And I suspect that it is reasonable to say, hey, this is what my…
I think what I’ve been doing recently is if I send an invoice, I’ll say, do on receipt, because I’m just trying to leave it open to them paying right away. But then I’ll say in the email that I’m attaching the invoice to, my invoice is attached, and please let me know if there are any concerns or any issues with the terms, or something along those lines, just to say, hey, this is what I’m saying. And then sometimes people will say, oh, no, those are absolutely fine.
And then it turns out, no, they meant that it’s 30 days. They didn’t really read it or whatever. So that’s a risk that you take.
If you wanted to sidle into that discussion, you could do it that way. Or you could just do what Sean was saying and spell it out. But in your case, it does seem like, especially a nonprofit that has a little accounting department, a receivables department, or a payment department, it’s highly likely that it’s a 30 day net 30 situation.
I just don’t know if at this point it’s worth asking retrospectively for more clarification, specifically about when that’s going to go down.
Yeah, very often the person who hires you is waiting on someone else. They’re in the same boat. But since going back to this idea of contracts, I know a lot of people get either confused or intimidated by it.
It doesn’t have to be an extremely formal document. We were talking about Rob Siglen Paglia. He actually has in his book, Voice Over Legal, like copyable documents that you have permission to use in your own…
That’s right.
But for example, when… I know a couple of us are on the online casting sites, and you’ll have all of these client templates for when you do an audition proposal, that’s essentially a contract. Because they’re like, I’m going to get this to you in 24-72 hours.
It’s going to be free of mistakes or mouth clicks. And I’ll give you however many pickups before you have to pay more and stuff like that. Exactly.
And I’ll do something very similar in my email correspondence. But at the end, I will say, if you agree to these terms, please write, I agree to these terms in your reply. And then that way I have a paper trail to protect myself.
Yeah. One of the things in particular with the freelance websites that are out there that I run into by not always necessarily dictating specifically. And if I’ve got like a long e-learning thing that’s going to be 40 minutes long, usually I’ll break that into three milestones and say, hey, let’s do this one chunk at a time.
You can pay the milestone, I’ll move on to the next stage of the project. So on larger budget stuff, I do protect myself in that way and it seems to work out well. But particularly for, oh, I don’t know, product video narration, explainer video type of things, which are pretty common these days, kind of do a lot of those in their short form.
They’re minute, two minute, three minutes. Then what you get is, oh, I have to go run off to my client and I have to get them to approve this and then they’re going to like it and then once they pay me, then I’ll pay you. As opposed to payment on delivery kind of thing, which to me, it’s interesting.
I got thinking about it the other day and I said, you know, that’s kind of like going to a bakery and saying, give me three dozen donuts and I’m going to go feed them to people at a conference. And if they like them, then I’ll come back and pay you for them. And if they don’t, then, you know, not so much.
You laugh because it sounds ridiculous when you put it that way. But that’s really what they’re doing. I’m going to go feed my client these donuts and see how they like them.
And, you know, if they’re good, I’ll pay you for them. And if not, well, you know, then we’ll have to do something else.
I love that metaphor. And the thing is, that happens in so many… I think that this is a freelancer issue in general.
Every… I think so many, you know, areas of freelancing have this same problem where people are saying, I’m not going to get paid by my client until such and such. And so I’ve got it.
That’s how I’m going to get the money to pay you, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, speaking of…
I’m thinking about it from the other side. Like when I do audiobooks, frequently I’ll outsource the editing and or the proofing and or both. And I wouldn’t dream of not paying the person that does that work at the time the work is done.
And then I’ll get paid by my client on the other side. But I understand that that’s a cost of doing business, and it’s going to come out of my pocket on the front end as the project coordinator for that particular thing. And I’m outsourcing part of the labor to them.
Well, I’m not ever going to ask them to wait until I get paid to get paid. I pay them when they deliver the work. So I don’t know.
Maybe I’m just working from a different frame of reference.
Well, speaking of protecting yourselves, let’s protect ourselves and say that any advice given here is purely our opinion. Please contact your legal professional and or tax professional for how you might approach your own VO business. And with that, let’s give Sean a chance to talk about what’s been happening with him this week.
Oh, thanks. Well, so recently, as some people know, I’ve been getting more work with the Global Voice Acting Academy.
Woohoo!
So as their social media manager, and everyone’s been incredibly supportive of that. So I get to learn a whole lot about social media marketing for my own business. And that’s what’s…
I’ve been talking about this with my friend and coworker over there, David Toback. We get to learn so much about running this larger scale business that we get to pull all of these kernels out and how to improve our own. And so that’s really cool, too.
And so I’m learning all sorts of things about writing copy for marketing campaigns and trying new avenues and different CRMs to try and make things go more… or to make our workflow more efficient and stuff like that. Voicing-wise, I did have an interesting job recently from an international client.
And it was funny because they sent me an email at like eight in the morning. And then I was actually out of the office that day because I was helping… my family has a couple of horses.
And so we go into a nearby city to pick up hay from a local farmer and take… it’s like a half-day trip. But anyway, so I didn’t respond to the email because I was going to do it as soon as I got back.
And then they actually called me while I was gone. And they were like, did you get the email? Can you do the project for us?
I was getting a little intimidated. It sounded a little sketchy, but I was like, yeah, I did it. And then I looked over.
It was like this three-quarter page narration. It was like less than a… it was like a three-minute, four-minute job.
And it was like, all right, will you do 350? And they were like, yeah, that’s fine. But the whole project was like court…
like they were communicating with me throughout the day. Like, are you finished yet? Is it due?
And then all of my questions, though, like, oh, like about pronunciation issues and stuff like that, they were slow to respond to. But I… don’t you love that?
Or it’s like, oh, we can’t… or they were trying to send me phone audio over WhatsApp, which apparently only works in WhatsApp. Which I do not have.
And it was such a stupid mistake because I assumed that it was for this company called MexiCAM. But I thought that since they were trying to reach out to English-speaking markets, they wanted MexiCAM. So I did the whole thing like that.
There was about 10 or 15 sentences with the product name and the title. And then they’re like, oh no, we want you to do it like MexiCAM. I was like, oh no.
And it’s like 10.30 at night at this point. And so I had to do all the pickups. And then I sent it off.
I stay up to like 1.30 in the morning to make sure that I got the OK. And apparently they’re just working on this project all day because it’s like go, go, go. And then finally they’re like, yeah, it’s great.
Thank you so much. And then they call me the next day. Can you just say the word MexiCAM five times?
I’m like, OK. And so I was like, but that’s still within my policy. So I did.
It was just such like it wasn’t a negative one, but it was such a weird like bordering on sketchy experience. But luckily they like they paid in a reasonable amount of time. It was about 10 days after the project.
And I just kind of checked in to make sure they didn’t have any issues. And I wanted to talk about this earlier. Make sure when you ask, when you send reminders that you’re polite like it’s usually there are extenuating circumstances.
So just like, Hi, just wanted to make sure you got my earlier reminder. Make sure you don’t have any issues. And if you need any help navigating my preferred payment system, please let me know.
And if you like your thumbs, send it right now.
I know where you live.
I’ve got a drone outside of your window, right?
So any other interesting stories this week, Sean?
Not too much. Just resettling down after my little, my quarterly vacation. Yeah.
Well, I say that, like, I mean, as everyone knows, I’m in a bit of a long distance relationship right now, but she’s in Hawaii, so that softens the blow a little bit. But while I’m there, I’m still working. So like I brought my travel kit with me.
I didn’t have any new jobs come in, thankfully, because, I mean, it’s not just because you can record when you travel doesn’t mean you always want to or should.
Yes. Oh, my goodness.
It’s just like the stress factor, because we were talking about before, Paul, like how we can be so perfectionist, especially with audio quality. And like, it’s just like, I’m amazed. Like, frankly, I’m amazed at quality I’m able to get in a closet and like recording between helicopters and like millions of cicadas outside my window.
It’s just, oh, my God. But it’s just so nerve wracking to try. And like, so when you get home and you’re back in your booth, and you’re like, oh, this is how it should always be.
Yeah. Booth, sweet booth.
I’ve done both, and I definitely prefer studio sound.
Oh. Well, that’s great. And Heather, what’s been going on for you this week?
I have been pretty busy. I’ve been working on a couple of audio books and trying to get those taken care of, to get everything off my plate so that I can enjoy the holiday season. I don’t know.
We’ll see how that’s going to work out. So I’ve been working on a few audio books. I’ve done a few commercials for projects, for products, commercials for products and video game.
So this week was really fun because it was kind of varied. You know, I got to dip my toe in a bunch of different pools, which I have found really is what I love to do. I’m pretty certain I’m pretty ADD because I love a little…
I’ve got that whole up thing, you know, the squirrel with the dog. I feel like that’s how I live my life. So it’s been a good week.
What’s the dog’s name? Doug? Squirrel.
I love you.
I feel like that all the time.
That’s awesome. So the video game you’re working on, is there anything you can share or not yet?
It is not. I have to say, that’s the hard thing about video games, is I feel like in so many of the other genres, you can like, hey, here’s what I’m working on or here’s what I just did. And in video games, it’s like, I’m working on a video game, and I’ll tell you about it next year when it comes out.
Yeah, it’s a nice problem to have though.
Yes, yes. And I am so thankful because character work is my favorite. It’s where I get to kind of stretch my acting muscles, and that’s creatively just what I love the best.
So it’s nice when I get to throw those in with other areas. So, yeah.
So as far as my week, I have one cautionary tale I’ll share from one of the freelance sites. And I think I shared this in last week’s group, but for our listeners here, I’m going to share it. I took on this job a couple of weeks ago for a big e-learning company in India.
And it’s a decent rate, the low end of what would be a union rate for the e-learning project. But they want me to do the pieces individually. So it’s 10,000 words, I should say.
They told me this up front, that it’s 10,000 words. And I’m one of the characters in this e-learning project. I play Khalid.
Do I sound like a Khalid? So anyway…
I would have thought Ahmed.
So they send me these pieces where it’s a PowerPoint slide. And there’s like three sentences. And they want me to do them piecemeal like this.
And I’m sort of trapped in this loop where I don’t even know what to do about it. So I’m billing them each time at the moment. So I’m sending them invoices for $13, $8, whatever they send me to work.
Because they’re sending me things like every day. And Mike suggested last week, and I think it’s a good one, to sort of set some boundaries and say, just don’t send them to me until you have an hour’s worth. Or I’ll bill you once I’m done an hour’s worth of work.
And I’ll just throw that out to the group again if they have any other suggestions on how to deal with that because frankly it’s kind of driving me crazy at this point.
If you’re doing a lot of small projects over a long period of time, do a bulk payment plan. Because if you’re using something like PayPal or something like that where they take a processing fee, then you’re going to lose $3 right there. And that’s almost a quarter of the fee.
And the fact that you’re doing multiple payments like that means that’s really adding up.
Yeah, well, thankfully this is through, well, I’ll just say, it’s freelancer. And they have their own payment system without a fee attached to it. So in that way, it’s helping.
There’s a project fee, but that’s done up front and it’s already been paid. So luckily I’m not getting charged in the backend for fees.
It’s interesting because just listening to you describe that, the whole idea of batching jobs like that, and again, it’s in any sort of communications industry, makes a lot of sense. I mean, you can just be more efficient and it would seem to me that you’d be able to be more efficient and it would be more of a best practice in terms of just kind of getting warm and getting into your character and being able to deliver more at the same time versus having to kind of ramp up and find the vocal placement and all the performance stuff, much less the technical stuff, trying to match sound and all of those things. So it’s interesting when you’re dealing with a client that does want a piecemeal like that, because you’re just saying, are you guys trying to economize?
Like, what’s happening here? But yeah, it does seem to make sense to… I guess this is kind of a learning experience, because then you say, okay, you know what?
This isn’t really working for me. And so yeah, future and possibly if we are going to continue to work together, we need to kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit.
This almost sounds like it would be a good scenario for the Upwork time tracker function, where it logs your time to a specific project and takes periodic screenshots, et cetera. I personally haven’t used that in a while. The one time I did use it, it left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth because I wasn’t quite able to track time accurately, just because at that time I was using a separate booth computer.
So, essentially the time that I was in the booth, actually recording, was untracked. But, you know, obviously that’s not everybody’s scenario, so that would depend. I can’t recall if Freelancer has something similar to that available, and if that might be of benefit to you in a situation like this.
Yeah, I’m not sure they do, but it’s definitely something to look into, and I just want to put that out there for our listeners, that if someone tells you they have a multi-thousand hour project, definitely figure out how you’re going to invoice or get paid, because it can be a huge headache. So, on a more positive note, I signed with a new talent agency this week. I signed with the Atherton Group, or Tag Talent, out of Austin, Texas, so I’m super excited about that.
Congratulations. Oh, my goodness.
That is phenomenally huge, and I can’t wait to hear as the weeks and months go on as to how your experience is with them.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, thank you so much. I’m super excited. I haven’t gotten any work yet, but it was just on Wednesday, so they haven’t dumped me yet, I don’t think.
I was talking to Cam Cornelius, some of you know him, on Facebook. He gave me a congratulations, because I was blabbing about it on Facebook. He said, welcome aboard, because I guess he’s on the roster too.
And I said, thanks, I’ll try to have to sink the ship.
Aww.
Ba-dum-bum, pssh.
No, but that is extremely cool. Oh my goodness.
Yeah, and actually Heather, this was signed to them as well. I’ll put that out there as well and say congratulations to Heather.
Congratulations to both of you.
My biggest curiosity, as time goes on with Atherton, is to see the kind of auditions you get. As we’ve had the experience with the agencies that we’re with otherwise, is that some stuff kind of… It has the appearance of getting blasted out to everyone.
As long as you’re a male or a female somewhere vaguely close to that age range. Or not. Or not.
I’ve recently gotten some stuff asking for the surfer dude sound, must have a British accent, et cetera. Stuff that’s just off on another planet somewhere. I’m curious to see if this new relationship is going to mean that you’re getting auditions that are actually more suited to you.
If something’s actually hitting your inbox because someone back there said, hey, that sounds like a Paul kind of gig. I’d love to hear as time goes on the type of auditions you get and how closely tailored they are to you.
Yeah, me as well. Because I’ve had that experience like you described too. And we’ll see how it goes.
They are part of the Voice Agent Alliance. Did I say that right? Yes.
So hopefully that will help. And we’ll see if some good things come. Hopefully they will.
So that wraps up the normal process that we go through with this group. Hopefully you got a chance to see how it works and the dynamics that are involved. And maybe take some ideas away for yourself that maybe you can start an affinity group or accountability group either locally in your hometown or online.
Sean, anything you want to add before we wrap up?
Well, we’re all great friends here. And it’s really cool because we all just bonded over Voice Over and we all have different niches and all that other stuff. But I can’t tell you how much I look forward to these Meetups and how much I learned from just listening to you guys, just being a fly on the wall.
And like Marisha said, I’m always taking notes, like, oh, that’s a great idea. Why don’t I do that in my business and stuff like that. And it’s really great to have that validation and support and encouragement because it’s a little bit of both.
I mean, you got the warm-hearted value, but you also got plenty of honest feedback when you need it. Like, if you’re trying to get people together, I highly recommend it, as Paul said, online or locally, depending on who’s available, where you’re at. But try and figure it out.
Without further ado, I’d like to give our wonderful guests one more opportunity to talk about themselves and how they can be reached via their websites. So why don’t we start off with John?
So I can be reached at johnroorda.com. That goofs everybody up. It’s R-O-O-R-D-A.
If you want to shoot me an email, it’s john at johnroorda.com.
Thank you. Up next, we got Mike.
All right. It’s… let’s see.
My website is voiceovermike.com, mike.com, and the email is easy enough. It’s mike at voiceovermike.com.
I get it. Next we have… Then we have Marisha.
Continuing the theme, I’m at marishavoice.com, and that’s M as in mother, A-R-I-S-H-A, voice.com, and my email is marisha at marishavoice.com.
Thank you. And last we have Heather Masters.
Feel free to contact me on my website, heathermastersvo.com, or shoot me an email at heather at heathermastersvo.com, and you can also follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is iheathermasters, which I think sounds like I’m swearing an oath.
I like that. I, Heather Masters, do solemnly swear to limit myself to 280 characters.
I know. Yeah, so that’s where to find me.
Thanks again, everybody, for allowing us to record this mess, because normally we do this off the cuff, and I appreciate you all being willing to come on here and let us record the meeting, and hopefully it will be helpful to our audience out there who want to start their own networking group. So that’s it for Episode 17 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
See you next time, everybody.
Thanks for listening to The VO Meter, measuring your voice over progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 16 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
All right, today we have an exciting episode. We have booth junkie Mike DelGaudio coming up in a few minutes. But first off, we have current events.
So what have you been up to lately, Paul?
Let’s say a couple of things. I’m finishing up the second book in a series for my Gnome Divox. I don’t really know that word, but Sean Pratt uses it all the time.
I prefer the word pseudonym. But yeah, the second book in a series for him coming out. And three more were released since our last episode.
So that’s really rolling along nicely. And it’s pretty exciting the way that’s taking it off as far as the audiobook work. And also related to the audiobook work, I was recently audible approved or listed as an audible approved producer with ACX.
So that’s pretty cool as well.
Very cool. And what are the requirements for that? Isn’t it something like 15 or 25 titles?
It’s kind of a nebulous target. Nobody really knows for sure. It’s sort of like a double secret probation type of thing.
If you’re an Animal House fan. But the general consensus is that if you have 25 titles, then you should probably go ahead and apply. And the rules are that you have to have, again, nebulous definition.
But the definition is a demonstrated record of success on the platform. So that’s sucking. Yeah.
And truth be told, I did apply once before and was actually rejected because there was an issue with one of my books that wasn’t my fault. There was a cover art discrepancy where the cover art that was initially published or put on the offer on ACX was different from the final cover art that I submitted. So it was sent back to me as the producer as rejection.
So when I applied, ACX said, well, you know, you have this nick on your record, but otherwise you’ve been doing well. Send us a few more titles. And I think they said three more titles and then apply again.
This was all back over like last spring and summer. So I did. And then after about two more months, I was finally at the badge.
Wonderful. Because I mean, like you’ve been doing audiobook work this entire time. So I just like, the fools, they didn’t realize what they had.
Yeah. I have over 40 titles out now between myself and the pseudonym. So there’s definitely a demonstrated record.
Now, what does that mean? I’m sorry, go ahead.
Speaking of nebulous definitions, that Gnome de Vox, I mean, Sean Pratz is playing off of Gnome de Plume, which is like a writer’s name or a pen name. It’s like, it’s the French translation of pen name, essentially, because pens used to be written with feathers or blooms. So there you go.
Oh, awesome. Thank you. Your etymology lesson for the day.
Thank you.
Wait, we need etymology correctly.
Yes.
Yes.
So anyway, what it actually means, again, so there’s debates about that, whether it helps you or hurts you. But I will say, I had a response to an audition today from a rights holder where they said, I like your audition. I took a look at your profile.
I saw the audible approved badge. That really makes me feel confident that you are familiar with the platform. So let’s talk a little bit more.
Haven’t gotten the deal yet, but it seems pretty good.
But it is a selling point. That’s good to know.
Yeah, I was actually glad to hear there was some return on it. So let’s see. Other than that, I did recently sign with a new talent agency as well.
I’m now proud to be part of the family with Tag Talent or the Atherton Group out of Austin, Texas. Pretty excited about that.
Very cool. Congratulations. So did you have to do any special marketing for them or is it just another name on your list?
Well, I hadn’t applied to them before and was summarily ignored. Wish I don’t blame them. It happens with agencies or busy people.
But funnily enough, I was watching Liz Atherton, the owner, on VOBS last Monday. And during her interview, she said… Well, somebody asked her, how do you get on her roster?
It actually might have been me. I forget now. In the chat room, some of the questions.
And she said, well, we only take people by referrals from people on our existing roster. So if that’s something that you can do, then go ahead and submit. They said they really don’t listen to any others.
And that clicked in my head. Well, that’s why they haven’t listened, at least. That was my rationalization and hope at that time.
So I contacted my good friend, Ken Foster. I think you’re friends with him as well, Sean. And he’s actually done a VO Meter stick for the show.
And he’s a member of their roster. And he was kind enough to provide a referral. And within the hour of him contacting them, I got a call from the, or should I say an email, saying, please call us.
And didn’t know what that meant. It was a little nerve wracking. But I made the call.
And Jimmy Cobble, my agent there now, said, welcome to the family.
That’s amazing. That’s so great. And I’m really glad you told me that, because I know several of the talent on their list.
So I might have to buy them a coffee or a beer.
Nope, sorry, they’re full.
Sorry.
There’s no availability whatsoever.
We totally are in the same wheelhouse of voice casting.
Yeah. So that’s my news. What’s been happening with you?
Very cool.
Cool.
Probably the biggest thing that’s happened is I got a new job with the Global Voice Acting Academy. So beforehand, I was kind of responsible for their membership program. I was their member liaison, and I still am.
But I’m also now their social media manager. So I manage our content, I create new content, and help promote our various services through our Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn pages. So, and for someone who spends as much time on Facebook as I do, that’s actually nice to get paid for it.
That’s awesome. How did that come about? Was that something you pursued, or did they ask you to expand your role?
My predecessor, the incredibly talented and very organized Mariel Navalle, was moving into a new business venture with her husband. They kind of moved across the US to the East Coast. And so she realized that having her own VO business and starting a restaurant would probably take up all of her time.
I had already been working with GVAA for about a year at that point, and they thought that I was probably the best replacement for her. So I humbly accepted, and here we are.
That’s fantastic. Congrats.
Well, thank you very much. I haven’t broken anything yet, but that doesn’t mean anything. So social media marketing is hard, and I’ve had to do quite a lot of personal research on how to go about it in the best way possible.
So it’s exciting and intimidating at the same time.
Yeah, I’ll bet. You know who you should contact? I hate to make referrals on the podcast.
No, I don’t. Who am I kidding? You should contact friend of the show, Chris Dottoli.
That’s what he does as well, part time, when he’s not doing voice work.
Excellent. Yeah, I would definitely do that.
Cool.
And we should have him on the podcast. I know we’ve talked about it before. I’d love to have him on just an episode, because I know he helped you with your recent con episode, or your con escapades.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun.
Yeah, he’s a definite friend of the show.
So what else is going on with you?
Well, personally, I made, what is it, my fourth trip to Hawaii in about a year to visit my girlfriend. And you guys know about Rachel, I think, at this point. I mean, we knew each other in college, and then we went our separate ways, and she moved off to Hawaii, and I was like, I’ve never been to Hawaii.
And then one thing led to another, and now I try to make it there quarterly.
Terrible excuse.
Terrible, terrible excuse. But we had a wonderful time. It’s actually about a year since we became a couple, so we got to celebrate our anniversary together.
Aw, woo! Funny story, though, because we knew October was a good month, but our anniversary’s on the 13th, so I was like, would it be better to come on the 13th or for Halloween? And she was like, Halloween.
I was like, yes, I love this woman. And anyone who knows me on Facebook knows that we dressed up as the Joker and Harley Quinn from the 90s animated Batman series, which is my favorite version of those characters. And she did an amazing job with the makeup.
I got nothing but compliments, both in person and online. And we even made a little Halloween greeting where we got to just practice our best Joker and Harley impressions. And considering that most of my friends are voice actors and they gave me some really positive feedback, it was really encouraging.
I enjoyed it a lot.
Yeah, that was cool. I have to admit, I didn’t understand the exact timeframe you were going over, which was a version of the character. I was thinking it was the Cesar Romero Joker, because that was the makeup I recognized most frequently.
Well, it’s really funny, because he is, like… I mean, he spans so many generations. To be honest, I call this kind of like my fusion Joker costume, because the costume itself was based off of Heath Ledger’s costume in The Dark Knight.
But the makeup was much more inspired by the Cesar Romero, the animated series, or even Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in the first Batman film. And then The Voice, of course, was based off of Mark Hamill, with his sort of like, his interesting, graspy, kind of almost British, but not quite, and ups and downs and all that kind of thing. So it was a lot of fun to do.
Awesome. Yeah, that was a cool video. Although I have to admit, I was terrified at first.
It should be. He’s a scary character. I mean…
Well, then you must have done a great performance.
Thank you, thank you. I got a lot of comments from people who are like, ooh, I peed a little.
So we have the Booth junkie, Mike DelGaudio, coming up. I know you guys are excited about that. Some of our fans have clamored for it.
But first, we’re going to have a VO Meter stick from friend of the show, Derrick Dorsey.
See.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick. What did he say? It’s time for the VO…
Oh, never mind. The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
Hi, Derrick Dorsey here for the VO Meter shtick. I first want to thank Paul and Sean for inviting me on to the podcast. I’m a relatively new voiceover talent, but I’m also a bass guitarist and touring musician of 30 plus years, performing all over the world for the military and civilians alike.
I was the bassist for the alternative rock band Jimmy’s Chicken Shack out of Annapolis, Maryland back in the late 90s and early 2000s. The band had a little bit of radio play and had a few videos on MTV. We also toured the US extensively with other bands, like Stained, Incubus, Fuel, 311 and Godsmack, just to name a few.
A few years later, I was the bassist for the Kelly Bell Band, which is a real cool blues band out of Baltimore, Maryland. Not only did we perform locally and up and down the East Coast, but we also toured worldwide, performing for our US military. When I decided to finally take that dive into the VO world, I admit having a sense of both excitement and apprehension.
But as I explored this voiceover thing a little further, I couldn’t help but notice that VO and my career as a musician had many similarities, which allowed me to draw from my experience and ease my anxiety. What I realize is that to even have a viable career as a voiceover artist, a professional musician, or any field in the performing arts, these few elements are crucial for a chance to be successful. And those elements are talent, passion, coaching, performance, practice, business, marketing, and persistence.
Now, I won’t go through every element that I just listed, but there is a couple that really resonated with me that I like to share. The first one was performance. Now, for me in the music world, it was nothing for me to play to a crowd of 50, 60, or even 70,000 people.
But in the voiceover world, performing for just one person was a scary proposition. I don’t have that guitar to hide behind. It’s just me, the microphone, and my voice.
And that’s where practice comes in and working with a good coach to help eliminate that fear and give you confidence behind the mic. The other area that also had similarities with the music biz is with regard to business. As a VO talent, you are a sole proprietor to your business, so you need to treat it as such.
You also need to file the appropriate tax forms that reflect that. Next is marketing. In VO, you have to have the ability to market yourself in order to get jobs.
This is so similar to the music biz. Now in the music world, for a local band or solo artist, you must be able to market yourself with an effective campaign to get people to see and like your band. You have to promote yourself months and weeks in advance, before and after shows, in order to build that fan base.
To give you an example, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack were able to market themselves so well that they were able to sell 20 or 30,000 of their own CDs before a major label even looked at them. So my point is this, that this is a numbers game when it comes to marketing and VO. So keep that hustle and remain persistent.
And that’s my time. Thanks for listening. And I wish you all continued success in your voice over journey.
Okay, Derrick, thank you so much for that. Funny story about Derrick. He was in a very popular band based here out of Baltimore called the Kelly Bell Band that I was a huge fan of.
I used to go see all the time at local bars back in the early part of the 2000s, even in 1998, 1999. It’s one of those bands that you go out and see and you’re like, these guys are gonna be huge. And they never got quite as big as I think Derrick probably would have hoped, or even I would have hoped, but he’s transitioned to voiceover and we’re happy to have him in the community.
So booth junkie Mike DelGaudio will be with us in a few minutes, but before that we have our questionable gear purchase. So I’ve had a strict no buy policy for the last couple of months, so why don’t you tell me about your escapades?
So yeah, speaking of booth junkies, I made some adjustments to my booth. We talked in the last episode about how I and then you tried to buy a double walled whisper room and eventually decided that was a bad idea. So what I had done was made some adjustments to my existing whisper room.
I think I was just starting that process at the end of the last episode. So that’s done. What we did was add, I had a contractor come over and we added some double walled drywall, not quite two layers, but Quiet Rock.
It’s a brand name that has two layers with a layer of absorbing material in between. And we put that on all the walls except for the door, then dropped a piece of plywood, or a piece of Quiet Rock on the floor with a piece of plywood over it. So I had basically almost a double walled whisper room, but sort of homemade.
And it’s helped a little bit. It hasn’t been the panacea I was hoping it would, but it has dropped my noise floor by about negative three or four dB, which is good. I do still have some rumble issues, which sort of led to me searching for mics again.
And what I decided to do was look for a less sensitive mic for audiobook work, because I was listening to my files, and or I should say my editor that I send most of my work to was listening to my files. And a lot of the notes that came back were noise in the background, hearing noise in the background. It’s all that stupid vibration that’s coming through the expander where I’m talking.
It works great. The expander works great to keep it out when I’m not talking, but when I’m actually doing the reading of the audio book, a lot of it still bleeds in at times. So I’m trying a less sensitive mic that I’m talking to you all on right now.
Familiar theme for the show, this is now an Audio Technica AT4051B. It’s a boom indoor dialogue mic that is used for TV shows, movie, filming. It’s similar to an Octava MK12 or there is a Rode…
Might need to choose a less obscure reference than that one.
Yeah, there’s a Rode K5, or N5 that some people might be familiar with. It’s basically a pencil mic, small diaphragm condenser that you put overhead, most of the time, that’s how I have it, pointed straight down at the source. So it’s in front of me, and I’m talking basically past the diaphragm.
I did some pretty extensive testing with this and my CAD E100S, and the AT875 shotgun that I still have. And this was by far the lowest noise floor with the expander on. I was able to actually turn the expander down a little bit from where I had it for the CAD, which is my entire goal was to have a less aggressive expander and still have the same sound.
And so far it seems to be doing a pretty good job. So I’m halfway through another audio book with it, and, you know, maybe by now we’ll see how it goes. But so far so good.
I was curious how you came upon that, Mike. Well, first off, I didn’t realize that small diaphragm condensers were used for indoor dialogue. Because, I mean, very often you’ll use something like the Sennheiser 416 or a shotgun mic like the Rode NTG3 or something like that on a boom arm.
I didn’t realize they had smaller pencil mics for that as well. And, I mean, Audio Technique is a great company, but what brought you to that particular mic?
So, I was watching a YouTube video by a fellow named Curtis Judd, who’s a videographer and mostly does corporate films by his own account. And he was doing a review between this AT4053B or 4053B, I’ll get to the distinction in a second, and the Rode NT5, which are both pencil mics, and comparing it to his existing NTG2, which is sort of like you were saying, more familiar shotgun mics that people use for overhead booming. And he said he really liked this Audio-Technica and became his favorite based on his tests, because it was easy to position and had the best self-noise and just sounded the best.
So there’s a predecessor, which is the AT405-1, and I bought that because it’s basically the only one I can find. They’re actually quite expensive if you’re looking for retail. The 405-3B retails for about $599, and the 405-1 was the same when it was first released.
So I found a used one at Guitar Center that was a little bit more reasonable, and that’s how I got into my booth.
And it sounds nice. I mean, it sounds very natural, very accurate, maybe a little bit softer than some of your other mics, but that’s kind of what you were looking for.
Yeah, exactly. So, again, I’ll probably not keep it, but for the time being, until I finish this next book, at least, it’s going to be in the booth.
Well, that’s awesome.
That’s it for me, believe it or not.
We would have a segment. I’ve gotten to the point where it’s like I really… and probably my girlfriend has played a part in that too.
She’s like, don’t buy any more stuff. But it’s gotten to the point where I would have to spend a lot more to really get any noticeable improvement. And I can always improve the acoustics and stuff like that beforehand.
I’m pretty happy with the mic interface combo I have right now.
Yeah, it’s true. And I think there’s a valid discussion that we should probably have about… there’s a point where you’re probably hearing more than most of your clients and an audience would hear.
So our friend Mike Norgard brought this up. He’s going to be on the next show with us. About how, at least in my personal case, my studio sounds great and there’s really no point in messing with it.
And he said I probably hear things that most people wouldn’t hear. And I found that to be true when I was recording the local author in my booth. There was a couple of pickups that I wanted him to do.
And it was basically him hitting the mic with his leg, I think, or the mic stand with his leg. And it was a little boom, boom, that thud you get when you have a low-frequency rumble in the booth. And I played it back for him over these monitors I have in the studio.
And he’s like, I don’t hear anything. I did it like ten times. And he said, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
I still hear nothing. So it’s worth mentioning that as voiceover artists and producers, we probably have ultra-sensitive hearing to issues that for the most part aren’t going to matter, especially if it’s behind music or other dialogue on a video.
And it’s funny because, I mean, as you practice doing this more, I mean, it’s something that you develop. Because my ears definitely were this sensitive to it before I started. When I listen to some of my older tracks with like my Porterbooth and my Blue Yeti, I just cringe because I was like, how did I not tell that it was awful?
It just sounded boxy and echoey. It was just ugh. But the funny thing is I still have clients who have that in their stock audio and will reuse it.
I’m like, why? Please let me redo that for you. But like you said, it’s just something that we pay more attention to.
But once you get to a certain standard and it doesn’t have to be the thousands of dollars studio, you can ride that for most of, not all of your career. So there’s other things that you can invest in that might be more helpful to your business, like a new marketing strategy or more training. So it’s just something to think about.
Now, if you like gear like me and Paul do, that’s a different story. But just accept that that’s the reason while you’re looking at new gear.
Yeah, fair enough. All right, so we won’t keep our fans waiting any longer. There’s been a huge response to us even floating the idea of having him on.
And we’re so excited to welcome the booth junkie, Mike DelGaudio. So welcome to the interview segment of this episode of The VO Meter. We are so excited for our current guest because Sean and I have been fans for a long time.
And frankly, can’t believe he actually agreed to come on. But joining us now is Mike DelGaudio. How are you, Mike?
Doing great. How are you?
Fantastic.
Thanks for having me on.
So, Mike, for those who don’t know or if you just want to sort of plug yourself, tell us a little bit about your background in VO and what you’re currently working on in the business.
Sure. Let’s see. I’ve been doing this professionally now for probably five years or so.
And I got into it because, you know, like many people, I’ve heard for most of my life, hey, you’ve got a great voice for radio. And when I was a younger man, a much younger man, I actually thought radio was going to be my career. And then I met some radio DJs and it turns out that it’s a really hard job.
It’s a hard life. And it’s not nearly as much fun as they make it seem when you’re listening to it on the radio. And so it didn’t necessarily pan out.
But I’ve never sort of lost the love for wanting to be behind a microphone. When I was a kid, they used to have infomercials on TV. And they would be, you know, the whole commercial break would be an infomercial.
At the end, there would be a blue screen with an 800 number, and it would say, $495 plus shipping and handling. Call now, 1-800-555-1212. And I was like, that’s the guy I want to be.
That was the guy I wanted to be. I never wanted to be on camera. I always wanted to be the guy behind the microphone that just had that great big voice and was doing the real announcer bit.
And, you know, that sort of, thank God, has fallen out of fashion. But some years later, as the technology allows us to work out of our home studios and actually create professional quality audio, video, movies, whatever it is, it sort of reinvigorated my desire and love for speaking into the microphone. And so I went and met with a coach and found a mentor, took a class, and as luck would have it, I just really fell into it, really fell in love with it.
Had an agent right away who started helping me find work, and it took off. It took off. And at that point, I was still going to the studio for much of things I was hired for.
And I realized I have somewhat of a background in technology. I was a programmer for a long time, so technical stuff was never really terrifying for me. But I realized that there was an awful lot that I didn’t know.
At first, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And then once I actually started to look at it, I was like, Oh my God, there’s a ton of this that I don’t know. I’m going to try and figure it out.
And that’s sort of what prompted me to learn about home studios and to create my YouTube channel about that. And luckily, now that I’ve been able to figure this out at home and set it up at home, it’s led to lots of different work. I’m going to work for Anheuser-Busch next week, and I work on the No Sleep Podcast.
If you guys are familiar with that, I read for the New York Times once a week on Audible. You know, lots of stuff. If anybody wants me to say something, I’m always happy to try and lend my voice to it.
And it’s just I’ve fallen in love with it, sort of re-fallen in love with it, and I try and work just as much as I can now.
That’s great. So you mentioned only five years full-time, or at least five years pursuing it as much as you can. Did you have any training in college or time on the radio?
No, other than college radio. I ran the radio station in college in my junior and senior year, but it was nothing to speak of. It was totally volunteer-driven.
It wasn’t an academic program in any way. I did not have… I didn’t take any classes as a kid.
I took some classes as I got older, and I am lucky enough to be married to a woman who is very involved in the American theater. So she’s very comfortable working with actors. She’s a director.
She really knows how to direct. She is really… I get to live sort of with a coach, an acting coach, which helps a great deal.
She really helps me with script interpretation and line readings and so forth. She’s really awesome at it.
Well, that’s awesome. So one of the things that the audience by now must be getting sick of is me finding people who I have some sort of commonality with. And you mentioned the college radio.
That was at Loyola College, correct?
That’s right.
So that’s here in Baltimore, where I am broadcasting from at the moment. And I went to a school just up the street called Towson State. Probably when you were there, it was still Towson State like me.
And I was on the college radio station there. So that’s sort of where I got my start. And similar to you, I sort of took different paths.
But I’ve come back to it over the last three years.
Your radio station was the station I listened to because my radio station was only on closed circuit. Towson State and Loyola had a very significant size difference. And Towson’s radio…
I probably listened to you quite a bit because I was a big fan of Towson’s radio station.
Well, maybe. I was on Sunday mornings. I turned on the transmitter and was on Sunday mornings from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. So maybe you weren’t listening then.
At least I hope not. Maybe you were having some more fun. So thanks for the information about the background.
But what most people know you from is your YouTube channel and the Booth Junkie series. So let’s talk a little bit about that. How did that start?
Well, as I mentioned, I started to really investigate and try and learn about what I needed to do in order to have the best possible quality sound here out of my house. Because there’s a lot more work available to us if we can work out of the house and we don’t have to necessarily book studio time. And when I first started, I found lots of good studio-related stuff.
How to use a DAW, how to set up a studio. But not a lot of it, for me, was around professional quality voiceover work. There was lots of set it up so you can play music or do music production.
But I was really interested in learning about what VSTs, what plugins do I need to use? How does my preamp need to be set up? What sort of microphone do I need in order to sound like the guys on TV who are narrating television shows, who are the voices of commercials, or doing audiobooks or anything like that.
And I found that I wasn’t finding as much. I’d have to translate what I was learning for music production and translate it over into voiceover. And I was very grateful for all of those people who made those videos.
And I thought, well, I’m going to… First, I started with, I’m just going to document what I learned. I think my first video was how to put together my whisper room, because I could find nothing on how to put together this whisper room that I’m in, that I bought secondhand.
I had no idea. I was like, oh my God, I’ve got to figure this thing out. And I bought it disassembled.
I had no instruction. I had to totally figure it out. And so that sort of had me think about, okay, what else didn’t I know that might help the next person?
And the thing that really got me jazzed about it is I was learning the… My preferred DAW is Reaper. And I put together a whole series of everything I needed to know in order to start doing voiceover in my DAW.
And so I just did a whole series called Reaper for voiceover. And that was just really getting myself set up, getting it configured, what plugins do you need to use in order to do that? My first couple of people who found it were like, why aren’t you charging for this?
And it was really just, I want to pay it forward. So many people put this stuff out for me. I want to put it out for the next person.
I’m a firm believer in good karma. I don’t really charge… I may someday create a master class or something, but right now I just want to put it out there.
Put it out into the world. It’s been very good to me. People are very kind in return.
They loan me their equipment in return. So I believe in the good karma of it. I just want to put stuff out there and help the next person.
You can really sense the passion for helping others in it. And if you’ve never seen the Booth Junkie videos, especially like the Reaper for Voice Over, Mike does a fabulous job of really breaking down this kind of intimidating, or what can be intimidating, concepts and just making it really accessible to people who are just getting started and don’t know where to get started. So I’m curious, do you have an educational background at all, Mike?
Not formal. In a past life and a past job, I was just a corporate trainer. I’d stand up in front of groups and I would train them and create PowerPoint presentations and stuff like that.
So I learned how to become comfortable in front of groups. I also learned things that made my class more enjoyable for me to teach and more enjoyable for the students to take, professional students. And so some of that probably translated back into my videos.
I liked to have scenario-based training. I like to make it somewhat snappy, not overly bland. I try to keep them moving.
I’m not sure. I was still pretty new to a lot of it in my Reaper for Voice Over series. I probably should go back and watch it and see if it still applies.
But I do have some amount of just corporate background in that from past jobs. And that’s how I did it. I just used some of those same techniques that I learned in the 90s when I was making training videos.
I love that style personally. One of the first things I saw from you was the Whisper Room video that you spoke about. And it helped me tremendously because I did the same thing.
I bought it at Whisper Room. Sight unseen. Brought it back here.
Wasn’t even sure I had all the parts. And I said, oh my God, what did I just do? And thank goodness I found your video.
And it helped me tremendously. Put my own Whisper Room up. And yeah, it was really helpful.
But I love the way you have that sort of Ferris Bueller type style of breaking the fourth wall. Although I know you’re talking to the camera anyway. But I love when you have something that you either forgot, like you forgot to bring the mic pop filter in, and you just go and get it in the middle of the video and come back.
I love that style where you’re so informal. It’s really engaging. That’s good.
That’s good. Because many of my videos, I just vamp. You know, I try and research them, but I don’t script them.
So I do vamp and all of a sudden I’ll go, oh my gosh, I should go mention this thing. And I just walk out and I try and edit out. I mean, sometimes they’ll be might…
I might leave the camera running for 10 minutes, and luckily I’ll just try and snip that stuff out. But I want it to feel like it’s you and me talking.
Well, it definitely gets that… It definitely accomplishes that, I think.
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. I’m glad it doesn’t feel too disjointed.
No, no. I mean, you’re very personable, and like you sound very genuine when you do these videos. And like you said, it’s just like you’re talking to us, and it’s not too formal, and people don’t really get…
It’s just accessible, like I said. People want to listen to you talk or teach them these things.
That’s cool. Yeah, I’ll share a story. We actually were talking…
We weren’t talking about booking you quite yet, and another fan of our podcast reached out to me and said, you know who you should talk to? Mike DelGaudio. And I said, yeah, that’s a great idea.
Come on, let’s do it. And that’s when I reached out to you. So you’re resonating.
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. I really…
It’s very gratifying to hear. Sometimes what we do on YouTube, it’s a little bit of a vacuum. We get the comments, but it’s a little bit of a vacuum.
You never know if what you’ve made is any good until you put it out there. And there’s some videos I go, I don’t know if I did this well or not. I’m going to put it out there, and hopefully people don’t completely tear me apart on it.
There have been a couple of videos where, like, this was not your best effort. Okay, I’m going to learn for that. I’m going to move forward from it.
But you do… I’m very lucky that in my little tiny, tiny, tiny corner of YouTube, people tend to be pretty kind, because YouTube doesn’t always have the reputation as having the kindest comment section. But I’ve been very gratifying to see.
So tell us a little bit, because like you said, as you got started, a lot of it was kind of sort of archiving your own journey and what you’ve learned and sharing it. But you’ve also kind of moved into this other branch of product reviews. Can you tell us a little bit about how that got started?
It… I have just sort of backed into it by accident. It really…
It wasn’t the thing I intended to do. It turned out that I really liked doing it. And it seems that it resonates with people, because my reviews are not like…
You know, I’m not like Marques Brownlee. I’m not doing these really in-depth technical reviews. I try…
The thing that I try and do, especially with the microphone reviews, which is the part that really seems to resonate with people, is I want people to hear them, and I want people to have a way to compare them to at least something else. And so that’s why I almost always do my microphone reviews with two microphones, and I try and swap back and forth. For me, there was nothing more frustrating than to watch a microphone review, and they talk on some other microphone for five minutes, and then give you 30 seconds of the way the mic sounds.
That’s not enough time for me to judge. I want you to hear the whole thing on the microphone, and let’s just back and forth between something else. That way you have a point of reference, a point of comparison.
And so that’s how I want it to be for me, and so I hope that’s how other people enjoy hearing it. And I try and anticipate, if I would want to hear this particular microphone that I’m reviewing against something else, then I try and figure out of my small inventory, small but now growing inventory of microphones, which ones would sound better against each other. And I try and do the side by sides as much as I can.
But it was really… I didn’t go into it with any intention. It started with other people who were watching my videos, and there have been a few people who have said, I got this thing.
Do you want to try this thing? I’ll send you this thing, and you can keep it for a couple of weeks and try this microphone and send it back to me. And for whatever reason, they trusted me.
Thank goodness they trusted me. I’m a trustworthy person. But there have been a few folks that have sent me, at one time, like $4,000 or $5,000 worth of stuff.
And we’re internet strangers. But I always return the microphone. I always, you know, and I give it back.
But that’s sort of how it has happened. I don’t… more and more companies now want to send me things.
And sometimes I say yes, and sometimes I say no. But it… and I try whenever it’s, you know, something that a company has sent me, I just set it up against something else, and I just talk.
And I try and, you know, I’ll give you the specs, but I want you to hear it. That’s going to be the best way to anticipate. And I always try and say, if it’s good for my voice.
My voice is not yours. My voice is not anybody else’s. I try and say what sounds good for me.
And as people, now that I’ve gotten a whole bunch of them, you can sort of say, oh yeah, I hear these drastic differences. And in many cases, the not so drastic differences between a $200 mic, a $500 mic, and a $2,000 mic. So, I mean, that’s a long way of saying I backed into product reviews.
It really wasn’t my goal, but I’m enjoying making them, and people seem to enjoy watching them, so I’m going to keep doing them.
Oh yeah, I know I enjoy watching them very much, and I like making my own product reviews as well. So I’m curious, is there any advice that you can offer, like camera techniques, or… You’ve sort of touched on it a little bit, but what your goal is when you do a product review?
Well…
Free stuff?
I wish I was… The thing I’m learning is the photography part of it is much harder than I expected. I thought the photography part was going to be super easy.
The photography part, and it’s maybe because my space is very limited, and my equipment is pretty limited. I try and use as much duct tape and bubble gum and PVC tubing as I can to try and do this. I mean, I have probably 100 feet of PVC tubing, and I do everything with PVC if I can.
But the things that I’ve learned is the photography is hard. It does require an investment. I still am just using HD cameras.
My cameras don’t have microphone inputs. I have to synchronize everything after the fact. Yeah, and anyway, my camera is outside the booth, and I record to SD cards on my Sony cameras.
It doesn’t go into the computer. I synchronize it all after the fact.
Oh, wow. If anybody doesn’t know how hard that is, that must be a labor of love.
Well, that’s why you see me in many of the videos. That’s why I clap in the beginning. That’s the classic, just synchronize.
It makes it really super easy to synchronize it. Synchronize it that way. And luckily, everything seems to line up.
I’ve got a couple of these little entry-level Sony cameras, but it’s hard to find them with a good screen that flips up to see.
I now have my technique. I do all my video editing in Reaper, the same DAW that I use for all of my audio. It’s all one really straightforward workflow for me now.
So I’ve got my process fairly well wired at this point. But I think learning your tools, and you don’t have to overdo it. My videos are pretty low-fi.
I have virtually no effects. I have no transition. I don’t do motion tracking.
My cameras are always shaky. But I think it’s… I try to make it as good as I can, but I don’t fetishize my photography.
And I think that’s sort of how I come to my own style. I remember… Sorry, forgive me this one tangent.
I remember watching a documentary with the three guitar guys. It was Jack White and Jimmy Page. And I should have prepared this story better.
Anyway, Jack White was talking, and he said, I like to… I play with a Montgomery Ward guitar, and the action is really high. And I like to put my amplifier just out of reach.
I want it to be just a little bit hard to do. And that makes it so that I work harder to do it, and it makes me have my own style, as it were. Because everything has to be just a little bit harder.
Not impossible. But I want to have to work for it. And that’s sort of how it has come to me.
That has resonated with me for whatever I’m doing. And I try and optimize my workflow, and I do try and make things so I can work efficiently. But I do try and make it just a little bit hard on myself so that I have to work for it.
I don’t want it to just be effortless, effortless all the time, especially when I’m creating the videos. I want to have to work for it just a little bit. And I think that’s how my style has evolved.
I don’t know if that makes sense. I don’t know if that makes sense.
No, it does. I mean, you’re challenging yourself and meeting the task. I like it.
I think it’s a common theme among creative people. I just… You may have heard the episode where I went down to Oticon, the anime convention, and we talked to the guys from Men at Arms.
They build these crazy weapons based on video games and anime, and then bring it to the renaissance festivals and other conventions. So the one creator there said, his biggest tip to the fans was, do the hard things first, and the easy things will come easy. Because you challenge yourself to do the hard things, and then it won’t seem so hard the next time you do it.
And it’s a really great sort of life lesson.
That is a great piece of advice. Tackle the hardest part first, because then it only gets easier. Don’t put the hardest thing till the end.
Right, exactly. So you’re an unapologetic gearhead, as are Sean and I both. You seem to be more of a collector versus me who is a flipper.
And I wanted to find out what some of your favorite mics are.
I am not a flipper. That is correct. Some of my favorite mics, and let’s see.
In order of preference, my typical go-to microphone, the one that is in my stand by default, is the Sennheiser MKH416. That’s what you’re hearing me on right now. That shotgun microphone.
Love it. I think it’s perfection for my voice. It really makes my voice exactly the way I want it to sound.
It stays out of the way, but it’s not the perfect microphone. There are some situations where it doesn’t necessarily work. My next favorite is probably the CAD E100S.
Oh, you’re hearing that right now as well from my side.
Oh, very good. If you get one, and I feel bad about this because a lot of people have bought that microphone on my recommendation, but CAD does seem to have a touch of a quality control issue with that microphone where you’re going to flip a coin whether or not you get hiss or you get no hiss. If you get one with no hiss, that microphone is glorious at its price point.
It is neutral, it’s easy to use, it’s easy to work.
It’s forgiving at the same time.
It’s forgiving, yeah. It’s really a nice microphone. If it is silent, if you hear that microphone making a sound, you’ve got to send it back to CAD and you’ve got to be like, you’ve got to fix this because it should be quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.
You should not hear that microphone at all. And unfortunately, I hear too many people tell me that there’s a hiss.
Well, I felt like you really did us a service with some of your videos because I feel like CAD was a lot more resistant to address the problem until they’re like, or like, look, we’ve got a video showing that this mic is louder than it’s supposed to be. Like, please do something about this. And then I feel like there was just waves of people sending in their mics and actually getting it back.
Well, followers of our podcast know, we have a bit of a spotted history with the CAD E100S. I was someone who, and I was actually living in Japan at the time. So I found a great deal on Massdrop, but they told me it was going to be like something close to two months before I got it.
And then first mic got lost in shipping. Second mic came later than expected, but was, or excuse me, first mic was noisy. Second mic got lost in shipping.
Third mic never got processed, so they just refunded me my money. So it was just a very sour, sour experience. And then about a month or two ago, I just like, I felt the itch again, possibly because of your videos talking about how great it was.
And I decided to get another one just to try it out against some of the other mics I had. And it did sound great, but I just didn’t need it at that point. So I knew someone who did, who we’re also talking to right now, and I sent it to him, and he loves it.
Very good.
The thing I do recommend to people is, if you can find a vintage E100, the one from the 90s, I have no experience with the E100 II or E100 squared. I’m not sure how you pronounce it. But the old E100s from the 90s, with a 9-volt battery in it, I love that microphone, too.
And that one you can often get for like $200. And if it’s still around after this long, there’s a good chance that it’s going to be nice and quiet. You just pop new rechargeable batteries in there, and you’re good to go.
I’ve got two of them. I love them. Because I buy them on Craigslist.
If one comes along on Craigslist, and it’s under $200, I’m going to go buy it just so I have it. And maybe someday I’ll flip it, but I’m more of a collector myself.
That makes two of us.
So any others you recommend, Harley?
Any other microphones I recommend, Harley? There’s one that I don’t own that I hope to own at some point. There’s a studio here in town that I’m in front of this microphone every time I’m in their studio, and it’s the Peluso P87, which is a vintage…
I guess after the patents on the Neumann old vintage U87 ran out, a bunch of people made these 87-style microphones, and the Peluso, I love the way I sound on that one, and it could be combined with their outboard gear that they run me through, but every time I’m in front of that microphone in that studio, I’m like, what is this secret sauce? This sounds amazing. It’s smooth, it’s robust, I sound great, it sounds great when I’m close, it sounds great when I’m six inches off it.
I just love the way that microphone sounds. And it’s like… It’s a thousand bucks.
It’s an expensive microphone. But in retrospect, I would put that up against my TLM 103, my Neumann. I would definitely flip a coin on where my $1,100 was going to go between the Peluso and the TLM 103.
I have the 103, and so that’s what I stick with, but I definitely would have considered the Peluso had I known about it at the time.
Excellent. So what are some of your… I mean, because you’ve reviewed so many different products and so many different microphones at different price points, but you’ve also got some of these more eclectic videos where, say, you’re reviewing a portable preamp or even a handheld recorder.
So what are some of your favorite videos to do and what kind of inspires you to be like, well, nobody knows about this product, I’m going to make a video about it?
I try and review… A lot of the things that I’ve reviewed have been things that I have been trying to find for myself. A lot of the portable stuff has been me…
I often have obligations that if I’m traveling, either for vacation or for whatever reason, that I still have to audition, I still may need to punch in a recording, fix something, or I may need to actually record something. The New York Times doesn’t wait. The New York Times is Friday night, and if I’m in a hotel in Kenosha, I want to record for The New York Times.
I don’t want to say, you have to find a substitute for me. And so a lot of it has been, is there a USB mic that I can take? Is there a portable recorder that I can take?
How can I take this and not put my equipment at risk? How can I take this and not have TSA confiscate it? What can I do?
And so I’ve run through a whole bunch of stuff, and I have not found my perfect secret travel stuff yet. I’ve gotten close. The sound devices stuff is really good.
If you can get past the price point for it, that’s definitely pro-level gear. The Zoom H5 has been an extremely resilient, robust piece of equipment for me. I have not had a ton of luck with any USB microphones.
I’ve got an Apogee 96K that’s sitting on the shelf that I have to do a review for. I’m just waiting to actually use it out in the field a little bit more. But so much of this stuff, there’s a Saramonic little tiny portable recorder that I thought if this works, it’s going to be the greatest device ever.
This little Saramonic supplies phantom power, and it was the size of a couple of matchboxes. And I thought, this is going to be perfect. I can just plug my shotgun microphone into it and I’m going to pack it in my bag, and that’s all I need.
And it turns out that the preamps kind of sucked in it, and so I haven’t settled on it. But to circle back, the reason I do many of these is because they’re something that are trying to fulfill a need that I have. To make my recordings better, to make travel easier, to make my studio life so that I can work and get the sound that I want.
A lot of it is for my own needs. That’s where I come up with this stuff.
Do you take requests, or is that something you might look to in the future? Like a reader comment says, hey, I want to hear about the new RØDE NTG1. Would you do that?
Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I do. I get so many people that say, have you tried the Aston Origin?
No, I haven’t. Have you tried the Aputure Deity? No.
And my response is, if I can get my mitts on one, I’ll absolutely review it. Because there’s lots and lots of it. I kept hearing about the NT1, the RØDE NT1, which I hadn’t used.
And so finally, I did send a message to RØDE. I said, hey, if there’s ever an opportunity for me to use this mic, I’d love to try it. I don’t reach out to companies very often.
I’ve done it a couple of times for companies that I’m really interested in. But under most circumstances, I don’t. There have been some companies that have approached me.
Mostly they’re Amazon sellers. I get them every day right now. Somebody from China is trying to send me their no-name microphone.
And most of the time now, I have to say no to it. But I’ll always… Yeah, if I take requests…
It’s hard, because many times, it’s me outlaying my own money, and a lot of this equipment isn’t cheap. So that’s why I’m always very grateful if somebody sends me something, and I take very good care of it. Anybody who ever sends me a microphone or a preamp or anything, if somebody sends it to me, I take very good care of it, and I ship it up, and I package it very nicely, and I send it back.
But a lot of times, that’s how I do it, because it’s not like this stuff is pouring money into my bank account right now. It’s something I love doing. I’m really enjoying doing it, and as long as I have the love for it, and it gets to introduce me to people like you guys, where I get to talk this business, I get to meet other people, and just sort of spread the good karma around.
That’s why I’m going to continue to do it. But yeah, I’ll take requests, sure. If I can figure it out, I’ll definitely do requests.
Great. What’s next for Booth Junkie? Is it going to be a continuing labor of love, or do you have some plans to make it your entire business?
What’s really next for the channel?
You know, it’s a good question. What’s next for the channel? Right now, to just continue doing it as I’m enjoying it.
I don’t really have these grand designs and turning it into a media empire. I have thought about if there was a way to do the audition and connection between voice actor and company better. I’ve spoken with some people…
Not to actually build a product or anything like that, but I’ve spoken with people about the way the industry is currently being disrupted with some of the pay-to-play websites that are out there. Of course, we all make money, but I do feel like there’s a lack of transparency. I feel like there’s probably a better way to connect voice actors to products in a way that is both ethical and transparent, and everybody can still, in quotes, make money.
Everybody can still make money. That’s why we’re all in business, is to make money. But I feel like there’s a way to do it without some of the consternation that happens in the marketplace right now without going into the whole politics of it.
And I’d certainly like to do that, because it’s something, again, that I have experienced for myself. And I know lots of people, it’s how do I find work? How do I connect with that work?
How do I charge for that work in a way that makes me competitive but doesn’t price me out of the business or injure other voice actors by undercutting the market? How can we do that in a way that works for everybody? And that’s certainly something, that’s where a lot of my interest is for the future.
How can we do that? How can all of us folks back in our bedroom, now that we have our studio set up, how can we connect with the people who want to hear our voices and want to pay us for our voices and how can we lend our voices to their products? And so that’s something that I would like to, I would definitely like to investigate in the future.
Every once in a while I sketch it out. I was a web developer, showing my age. I was a web developer in the late 90s, early 2000s.
I made a lot of websites in my life. And so every once in a while I go back and I’m like, I should just put fingers to keyboard and start to code that. But it’s not where my head is right now to write that code anymore.
But that’s the kind of thing that I’d like to do. I feel like there is a model out there that can help voice actors find work and have companies find voice actors without the issues that are currently surrounding the pay-to-play. I think that’s available to us.
That’s great. I look forward to hearing where you take that. Me too.
Such a charitable soul. That’s wonderful.
You know, I’m not opposed to people making money, but I do feel like there is a lot of swirl and consternation around it that doesn’t need to be there. And hopefully somebody, me, you, them, somebody will find a better model and hopefully it will catch on.
Great. Sean, any other questions?
No, I think that pretty much wraps things up.
Well, Mike, where can people find you if they want to contact you or just absorb your content or hire you?
If you want to find me, just go to boothjunkie.com. That’s just a redirect. It’ll take you right to my YouTube channel.
And so I love for people to watch the videos and hopefully enjoy them. I’m at boothjunkie on Twitter. I’m at boothjunkie on Instagram, although I don’t use Instagram as much as I should.
I’m bad at remembering it. And you can also send me email, mike at boothjunkie.com. And I don’t mind putting that email address out there.
Feel free to contact me. I do try and answer. I get a lot of questions.
I get a lot of questions right now. I do try and answer as many questions as I can. So if you do contact me directly, I will definitely try and get back to you if at all possible.
Sometimes I can’t, but I do encourage people to reach out if they have questions, and I’ll try and help you. Sometimes it will say, can I turn it into a video? And sometimes that’s how it works.
Great. Well, Mike, we thank you so much for being here. As I said, Sean and I are both big fans.
I feel like we are on sort of similar trajectories. The reason we started this podcast was for the very same reasons you mentioned, that we’ve received so much help from people in the VO community. It’s the most giving community I’ve ever been a part of as a business person, and we’re just trying to pay it forward just like you.
It’s the way to be.
So we’ll talk to you soon. Wish you the best of luck.
Thank you. Same to you. Thank you so much for having me on.
And we’re back. First off, I want to say thank you so much to Mike DelGaudio of Booth Chunky. I’ve seen a lot of comments that a lot of people are just like, oh man, he seems so down to earth and so nice.
And it’s absolutely true. He’s just such a real nice guy, and he’s got great advice and just a really good outlook on trying to give back to the community, which is something that we see so often in the voiceover community, and I really, really love to be a part of it because of it. Anyways, so that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a lot of great episodes coming up. We’ve got the… or next episode, we have our VO Meetup Roundtable, where we have some other up-and-coming voice actors, or VOs that have been in the trenches, that got started about the same time we did, and that we’ve worked together with over the years, just kind of think tanking new ideas and trying to progress our careers together.
We also have Gerald Griffith, the coordinator of VO Atlanta, the Voice Over Conference, which is coming up March 1st through 4th, I believe. And then we also have some great voice actors and voice coaches, David Rosenthal, my boss from the Global Voice Acting Academy, and Mark Cashman, author of VO, that’s V-O, like as an O kind of thing, which is a great book. And he’s a great coach, so I’m excited to have both of them on.
Yeah, I can’t wait to talk to all of those gentlemen, and we’ll look forward to speaking to them coming in the new year. So for my co-host Sean Daeley, I’m Paul Stefano for the VO Meter. See you next time, everybody.
Have a great day, everyone. Thanks for listening to The VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 15 of the VO Meter…
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So we are very excited because we have our Audiobook Roundtable coming up in a few minutes, but we have an interesting episode for you today because several of our little mini-shows, I guess, our questionable gear purchase, our current events, and our VO Meter stick are all related. So why don’t you start this off, Paul?
Questionable gear purchase.
Okay, well, we always like to start with current events, and current events for me was attempting and poorly to improve my recording space again. So I found this ridiculous price on a double walled enhanced whisper room that happened to be located in Beaverton, Oregon. So obviously that’s a little bit further, a little bit of a distance from Baltimore, Maryland, let’s say.
And I had to have it shipped out here. It was a sale on eBay that I found. And because I’m me, I just went ahead and bought it and paid the money and said, I’ll figure out how to get it here.
It’s a great price. Who cares? I’ll figure out the shipping later.
Then I started to do a little research on just how freaking heavy and big an enhanced Whisper Room is. And one found out that it weighs just about 1200 pounds. And that’s about double of what my current Whisper Room weighs.
Makes sense because it’s almost the same size. The one I was buying is a 3x5x5. And the one I’m in is a 4×4.
This is feet. So because it’s a double walled booth, it makes sense it’s about double the weight. When I started to look at where I would put it in my house, I came across some structural engineering issues.
So queries. Right. It’s something I had in the back of my mind.
I have a local friend who’s a contractor that lives up the street. And we talked about this before, that if I were to build something, I had to be careful of that because I keep my booth on the second floor of my house. Really no other option because the floor, the ceilings in my basement are pretty low.
And plus, because of impact vibrations where people are walking on the floors, it never would work in my basement with my three kids trampling around all the time upstairs.
So I want to back up a little bit, though, Paul, because I remember when you first told me that you got this, my first question was, why? Maybe you already have a booth. And most of our listeners probably are assuming, like, that’s the end game, right?
Like, you’ve got a booth, you’re in. That’s just when, like, that area of your studio upgrade should be done. Is that, like, how is that not the case for you?
Well, I’ve talked ad nauseam about the giant highway in my backyard, and the vibrations from that that creep into my recordings, and they still do. I use an expander on my Apollo Twin interface to keep it somewhat at bay, but I’ve been doing, I’ve been engineering a book for another author, I think I mentioned, and in listening to those files back, when it’s not my own voice, especially, I can hear that vibration creeping in through the expander during the dead spaces, and it’s just annoying. I’d like to be able to somehow end it once and for all.
So that was my thinking anyway. So that’s why I thought double-walled booth, and also I should mention, in doing some consulting with our friend George Widom, he had told me at one point that he thinks a double-walled whisper room would be enough to block all that external highway noise based on what he’s heard in my files. So that was my motivation.
And so people who might not… As you can guess, not all ISO booths or even whisper rooms, which is a brand of vocal isolation booths, are created equal. Of course you’ve got different height and length and size dimensions and weight, as you can tell.
There’s almost a 600-pound difference between the single wall that Paul currently has and the double wall that he was looking into. But what that extra mass does is it increases the amount of acoustic dampening that you have of sound isolation. And so as he was pointing out, it would actually hopefully get rid of those vibration problems that he’s been fighting for almost two years now.
Yeah, to eliminate sound waves from penetrating your space, you need mass, whether it be concrete, wood, lead would be the best, but I’m not lining my house with lead.
And it would save you from Superman.
So the denser the material, the better it is at blocking sound. So back to the structural design. In looking at the code for most US states, every state is different, sometimes even counties have different building codes.
The amount of weight you’re supposed to have on a residential floor, second floor, is about 30 pounds per square foot or 40 pounds per square foot if you’re a little bit more conservative. Or sorry, the other way around, 30 pounds if you’re conservative, 40 pounds if you really want to push it. And doing my math, my calculations, it seems that it would be more like 50 pounds per square foot for this 1200 pound booth on my floor.
And those weights that are based on the building code are usually based on moving weight, not dead weight. So a booth is, in my opinion, is an issue because it’s dead weight. It’s going to sit in one spot forever or until I no longer do this job, which hopefully is not sooner rather than later.
But that’s just dead weight that’s going to sit there forever. So people will argue, well, you don’t panic when you have 30 people in your house for a cocktail party. True, but they’re moving around and they’re getting drinks and they’re getting food, they’re going outside.
They’re not standing in one spot 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. So ultimately I decided this was not going to work. And I called up my good friend Sean and said, hey, you’re near Oregon, or at least closer than I am.
Why don’t you buy it?
And at first, I will say I got very excited. I mean, this was an amazing price for, because like we were saying, a lot of people have gotten these single wall units from either Whisper Room or someone else, and they weren’t satisfied because they didn’t completely get rid of the noise issues, which is why most people get an isolation booth in the first place. So it’s very unfortunate when people have to make that additional upgrade or even sort of like add a room within a room to the existing space to get rid of that extra sound.
But I mean, for me, I was so excited. I thought it was similar enough to the current setup I have that it wouldn’t be too disruptive. So I had the same concerns about weight.
And but after talking to a few engineer friends who were kind of able to like to calm my fears, my dad and I started measuring out the dimensions of the potential dimensions of the booth. And we just couldn’t find anywhere in the house that would have been an ideal working space. I mean, if I wanted to be surrounded by like the furnace vents in the laundry room, then yeah, I could have gotten the booth and put it in the basement.
But I’m like, the whole point of having that office, that studio space, is to sort of have like a very creative, conducive atmosphere, you know? Isn’t that what we all want who are trying to pursue this full time? So, unfortunately, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I realized that maybe now is not the best time to put a booth in here.
And I mean, my house in rural Washington is pretty much quiet 90% of the time. So I don’t have a lot of the noise issues that say someone in a larger city might or who’s near a freeway might have.
Right. So, the worst part about this whole thing was that I had already put my booth on for sale on a couple of the voiceover groups and on Craigslist. Some of you may have seen it.
This is very telling of your personality in general, Paul, or both of our personalities that we handled this.
I got some people’s hopes up, including our friend of the program, Bob Johnson, who is going to come on and talk to us in a few minutes about the experience as part of our VO Meter shtick. Shtick.
Okay, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO Meter… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick?
Oh, got it. So we are here with Bob Johnson on the VO Meter shtick, and I’m here to talk about, or talk more about the ridiculous booth purchase that never was, because Bob, as I think we talked about in the intro, was on the other end of the transaction, or at least supposed to be, where I had posted my booth for sale and was going to sell it to Bob who lives not too far from me. It looked like a match made in heaven, and then I done went and blew up the whole thing.
So Bob, I wanted to first apologize in front of the whole world, or at least our 3,000 listeners, and say I’m sorry for reneging on the deal, but as you’ve heard, it just couldn’t be helped.
You absolutely do not have to apologize, but it is kind of Johnson luck. Have the opportunity to get a nice whisper room at a decent price, and then all of a sudden, it devolves into a discussion on floor loads and things like that. So, we learn a little bit more in the industry, and I am still looking for a whisper room, so to speak, but no, you absolutely do not have to apologize.
Well, it’s funny, it actually sort of became a value add for the entire industry. I’m not sure if you followed Sean’s post in Facebook, where he was asking people about structural load in his house, and other people jumped in and said, wow, I never thought of that. And that thread has now grown to like a hundred responses with people adding…
I did see that, and again, after talking to you about it, and then seeing Sean talking about it on Facebook, I’m thinking, wow, maybe this is something that people do need to pay attention to. And again, I’m the same way. I didn’t really think about floor load or things like that.
I’m fortunate that I record in the basement. Again, the only thing I was worried about, of course, I wasn’t worried about it, my wife was worried about the aesthetics of our basement with a whisper room in it. So that devolved more into how can we spruce up the whisper room to make it look more amenable to our downstairs area.
Yeah, I think Sean admitted in the intro that that was part of his decision, too, that he’s living with his parents. He’s much younger than you and I, and he’s back with his parents while he sorts out what he’s doing long term, and they weren’t too keen on having the big black monolith in their living room either.
I did agree that we could put a window box outside of the whisper room as well as a welcome mat, and I’ll put some plastic trees around it, so at least it’ll look like a little, as I call it, my retirement home.
Well, that’s fantastic. Well, I will certainly keep an eye out for other deals. As fans of the show know, I’ve actually done this before.
This time last year, almost. Sean and I had almost an identical discussion where I purchased a booth and was trying to unload it onto him as he was coming back from Japan. And it’s because I was looking for one up in the northern part of New York, and I actually put friend of the show, Patty Gibbons, onto it, and she ended up buying it.
So that story worked out. Hopefully there’s still some way we can work things out for you and see how it goes.
No, I’m okay now. And again, I’m just looking for the whisper room specifically. You know, just to improve the room tone a little bit, but also in my quest to upgrade microphones as well.
I tend to do this in a stair step method. I don’t want to go high end microphone, but not have the proper sound area for it. So I’m fine with where I am now.
As we said on the phone, you know, it’s not a priority for me, but at the same time, I think many of us, especially at my level, are always looking for a little bit more to improve. And that’s why I like listening to the VO Meter. I’ll give you guys all a shout out as well.
As well as a voice over body shop as well. I mean, you learn so much from that. Some of it’s really technical, some of it’s baseline, that it helps a little bit of all of us in the industry learn and continue to develop.
Well, thanks for the kind words. And it sounds like you have taken some of that stuff to heart, talking about not getting a good microphone until you have the space to record it. We’ve been preaching that, and George and Dan preach that as well.
Just makes perfect sense. But tell us a little bit, Bob, about your professional resume and the environment you do record it in now. We’d be curious to hear.
Actually, I’ve been in the voice over business for about 10 years. I kind of started differently from most people. I was already in the federal government, in the Intel community, and used to do a lot of their classified narrations, documentaries, e-learning.
So kind of started from the inside. And then when I retired three years ago, I decided to do much more on the outside, which has proven a little bit more difficult than I thought.
We’ve all found that out.
Many people in the voice over world. For me, it was more the technical side though, because I was recorded more of a classified nature, everything I did was in a studio. So to actually step out from that world and have to create my own studio environment in terms of recording, editing, mastering, and all of that, that’s proven to be much more difficult.
But at the same time, something that I’ve actually enjoyed learning how to do. So right now, I’m surrounded by AuralX panels in a five-foot cove inside of our downstairs in our basement area, which actually is a great recording area because I have three solid walls. So really, I only have to fill in one that I use with some AuralX paneling.
I have two four-foot AuralX panelings that I use behind me. And the sound floor and the noise floor is usually pretty good. I do get a little bleed in from either whatever is happening outside, whether it’s the pressure of the house or the temperature of the house.
So in that way, with a whisper room, I want to be able to control that just a little bit more.
Well, Bob, like I said, I will still be on the lookout for you, see what we can do. There’s always deals popping up, and hopefully we can work something out for you. But I do appreciate you being on and sharing your story with us.
No, and you don’t have to apologize. And again, I thank you and Sean for all that you do for the voiceover world. And I always look forward to tuning in to you guys every other week and Voice Over Body Shop, as well as Julie Williams.
I mean, I listen to her podcast. So there’s a lot of people out here who are not really that active on the Facebook posts. But at the same time, there’s a lot of people on the sidelines who learn quite a bit from you guys.
Fantastic. Well, we’ll try and keep up the good work.
All right. And I appreciate the apology, and I appreciate you looking out for me.
All right. We’ll talk to you soon, Bob. Take care.
Thanks. Talk to you later.
Bye. Later.
So Bob, once again, my apologies. I’m glad you’re still a friend of the show and willing to talk about it and talk to me. But in the end, it all worked out because Bob is pretty happy with his recording space at the moment, and I was able to get my money back from the person I purchased it from on eBay, more importantly.
And last I checked, it’s gone off of eBay, so it looks like he must have sold it, and probably for a better price than he gave me. So, as they say, all’s well that ends well in love and more.
Well, we both had learned a lot from it, I think. I mean, like something I’ve learned from you, Paul, is to always have to be on the lookout for not just incredible deals on boosts, but on audio equipment in general. I know you’ve frequent your local guitar center and have been able to like gotten some incredible deals on mics and interfaces that way.
So it’s good to have like your sort of finger on the pulse if you’re looking to upgrade, because you can usually save quite a bit of money if you’re a little patient and persevering.
Yeah, indeed. So my plan now is to sort of retrofit the existing booth I have, because the other thing I thought about is that one of the worst experiences of my life was lugging this whisper room into this second floor all by myself. And I don’t want to do that again.
So at least I’ll try and reinforce what I have in here. Maybe either some extra MDF that I can buy myself or some plywood and see if I can at least mitigate the sound enough that I can expand it out with the Apollo and hopefully we’ll be done with it. Stay tuned.
Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I think, like, I’ve hired you out for narration projects and thought it sounds fine. So, like, so I think we both kind of realized that maybe we were trying to solve a problem we didn’t necessarily have or just was trying to find the wrong solution for it.
Yeah, it definitely could be the case.
All right, so that pretty much covers everything for questionable gear purchase and VO Meter schtick, but we don’t want to keep you guys away from all of the awesome information you’re about to hear during our Audiobook Roundtable. Now I have to give some credits to Paul. He really did his homework and gathered some people at the top of their game.
We have some A-list narrators like Scott Brick, Sean Pratt, Andi Arndt, some Audiobook Producers like Steven Jay Cohen and Debra Deyan. And we just got a really nice, well-rounded panel who’s just filled with so much experience and insight into the Audiobook industry today. So without further ado, let’s take you to the Zoom room.
Welcome everybody to episode 15 of The VO Meter. And we are so excited because we have our Audiobook Roundtable. We scheduled this some time ago, and we are so excited to have a distinguished panel of Audiobook narrators, producers, and even coaches.
And we want to get right to it. So starting, going clockwise, I guess, on my screen. Why don’t each of you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got started in the business?
So Andi, would you please start?
Well, my name is Andi Arndt, and I am a narrator and producer and coach. And I have a background in both public radio, and I say public radio because public radio tends to value an authentic voice more than a morning zoo, boomy voice. And I also have a background in theater.
I taught acting and voice at James Madison University theater and dance department for 12 years. So to me, theater plus radio is like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that adds up to audiobooks. So that’s how I got into it.
I mean, that’s not the actual first job I got, but that’s the background that I have.
Fantastic. And Debra, Debra Deyan.
Oh, hey there. Yes, I am a producer in Los Angeles and been in the audiobook business since 1990. My husband, who’s since passed away three years ago from ALS, Bob Deyan and I got into the business together after we were first married.
He worked in radio and he had an extremely long commute once he decided to marry me and move to where I live. And so in those days, he used books on tape and recorded books, were selling an abridged book, like taking a book and abridging it down to three hours and having two cassettes in a package, 45 minutes on each side. And they were also doing unabridged books on a rental basis.
So Bob wound up getting a copy of This Present Darkness, authored and read by Frank Peretti. And he listened to it in the car and came home shaking the package and said, oh my God, this is what we’re going to do. And so I sat and listened to it that night with him and he said, well, I don’t know how we’re going to make this or how it’s made, but let’s figure it out and let’s be part of this thing.
It’s going to be big. And I said, okay, so we studied the package and it said that it had been produced at Mark Rau Studios in Burbank. And so we called, Bob said, oh my God, I know that guy.
I met him at a party, you know, so he called him. You know, this was over the weekend. And so we called him on a Monday morning and Mark actually remembered who Bob was.
And he didn’t think he was crazy for asking him how we were going to make this thing. So Mark taught him his craft for six months. And then Bob went off on his own.
And thanks to Jessica Kay, you know, who at the time owned the publishing mills, she helped us to buy our first equipment. And we then built her, you know, little by little for it, or actually, you know, took it off her invoice. And the rest is history, you know, back in those days, it was reel to reel, you know, machines and razor blades and blue tape.
And then the digital age didn’t come until much later. So, yeah, it was a lovely start. And we were young in our 20s.
And it took about 18 years of going to bed every night and wondering how in the world we actually paid our rent before audiobooks hit, you know. We didn’t even find a name for audiobook until 1994. It was a committee of people who decided that it would be an audiobook rather than a recorded book or a book on tape or whatever, you know, people were calling it, all sorts of things.
Well, that’s fantastic. Thanks for that backstory. And Sean Pratt.
Let’s see here. I was in Washington, DC in 1994 doing a play at the Shakespeare Theater. And one of the actors in the cast was an audiobook narrator.
David Hilder is his name. He’s a playwright now in New York. And one day we were in the green room and I said, what do you do when you’re not working?
And he said, I do audiobooks. And I was like, wow, that’s really cool. I wasn’t really interested at the time.
I was just more curious. I was working off Broadway at the Pearl Theater as a company member and doing classical theater around the country. But about two years later, I moved to Washington, DC.
And he introduced me to Grover Gardner, who is a real icon of our industry. And I tell people that the main reason I got into audiobooks was I was tired of hanging sheetrock because I had lined up all this theater work to see me through when I got to Washington, and it all fell through. So I really wanted this thing to come through.
So I set up an appointment with him at his house. We talked and had a really great day-long discussion about books. And he cut a little demo, and he said, I’ll shop this around, maybe send it to a few people, see what happens.
And Grover is a very good friend of mine, and I always joked that if he had known what was about to happen to him, he probably should have thrown me off his porch. Because I was so desperate to get something going, you know, I saw the potential immediately, just as a performer. You know, I’d grown up and showed business like, oh, I could do this at home, I could make good money.
It’s really interesting. It’s challenging work that I cajoled and, I don’t want to say bullied, but I’d show up at his house in the afternoon, oh, I just happened to be in the neighborhood with this bottle of scotch. Would you like to have a sip and let’s talk about audiobooks?
I pestered the poor man to death until he finally contacted Blackstone and BOT, Books on Tape, and said, oh, for the love of God, give me something. This guy’s driving me nuts. And Blackstone and Books on Tape were my very first two clients.
And I started narrating at his place. He had some booths that he would rent out for time. And that was the beginning of it.
That was 21 years ago, and 935 books.
My goodness. Wow, thank you so much.
My name is Steven Jay Cohen. You can find me online at stevenjcohen.com or the new business name. It’s now spokenrealms.com.net.
And there will be a.org eventually. All those things are happening. It used to be under the title, Listen to a Book.
And we’re doing a whole sort of pivot rebranding with that. How I got started in the business. I actually came up in this business.
Well, I came up in stage and sound, actually. So my first professional work was, well, where a lot of people in New York, who would be trying to make it in the theater would have a day job working, driving a cab or waiting tables, my day job was doing lights and sound. So I was auditioning part of the time, and then I was behind either the light board or the sound board, the other parts of the time.
And so I’ve kind of been doing that work all the way through. I did that on Theater Row and up into Symphony Space and did some work on selected shorts and some other pieces there before life kind of took me in lots of different directions. And maybe about, yeah, about nine years ago now, could be 10, some people who I was still doing some sound editing for said, you know, we had a lot of fun when we would act with you on stage.
Have you ever thought about getting back into acting and coming back to this side of the mic? And I did what I needed to do and ask people a lot of questions and said yes to a lot of things and slowly found my way into working with some independent publishers on ACX and from there into some of the other publishers and built that out and slowly worked from there towards becoming a publisher and distributor on my own. And that’s what Listen to a Book and what is now Spoken Realms is about.
Awesome. And finally, Scott Brick.
When I got started in the business, mumble mumble years ago, I can tell you the day, it was June 10th, 1999, when I did my first job at Dove Audio. There’s a very different landscape. You could get in back in those days without doing a demo.
You could just go in and audition for someone if you knew, you know, if you had some kind of connection to the people who were doing the auditions. A buddy of mine from UCLA that I played baseball with every Saturday, Bob Westall. He was working for, he was working for Stefan Ridnicki and Gabrielle Decure, who now do Skyboat here in Los Angeles.
They were running Dove Audio at the time. And so he got me an audition. And I thank God for Bob every day.
I’ve taken him out to so many dinners. And you know, I thought you drink for free around me from now on, because I wouldn’t have a career otherwise. Stefan and Gabrielle gave me my first job.
I did a couple of short stories for them. And that day, Dan Musselman, it was Dan Musselman, who is the executive producer of Penguin Random House Audio here in Los Angeles, he was leaving Dove Audio. He used to work with Stefan and Gabrielle.
And he had been hired away by this company called Books on Tape, which wound up being bought by Random House Audio. And he said, hey, it’s your first day, it’s my last day. I’m going off to make audiobooks for a new company.
Gonna go build a studio, why don’t you give me a call? And he gave me his card. And I thank God for that.
I have every day since because, I don’t know, 850 some odd books, I’ve probably done easily over 500 of them have been for Dan.
So thank you everyone for your personal history getting involved with audiobooks and a little bit of an abridged history of the audiobook industry itself over the last 20 years. So now is really an interesting time for audiobooks because I feel like they’re more popular than ever before. Everyone’s listening on their commutes or when they’re doing their errands at home.
And everyone is interested in pursuing it from all walks of life. So I’m curious, based on your experience, how do you recommend someone new to the business try and get started today?
Well, the first thing I get in email, at least an email a week, if not more, from people literally around the world. Some who have English as a second language even, who are interested. And I kept getting asked about this for years and years.
And so finally about maybe 10 years ago, maybe I guess, I made a little video on my YouTube channel. And on it I have what I call the test. So when people contact me, I say, go take the test.
And if you pass, then contact me and we’ll talk about something. And basically the test is, you know, get a book you like, set up a small space to work in, a confined space, and read out loud for two to three hours a day for 14 days straight. And, you know, and if you make a mistake, start the sentence over.
If you hit a word you don’t know how to pronounce, go look it up, you know, and read it to someone, don’t just mumble your way through it. And I say, if you can pass that, then you might have the temperament to be an audiobook narrator. Because I found over the years that not only in show business, but in audiobooks, it’s not the talent factor that’s, to me, the deciding thing.
It’s their temperament. Can they direct themselves? Can they stay focused when they’re working by themselves?
Can they work in a confined space? I get emails all the time from people who’ve taken the test, who say, thank you so much. Now you’ve inspired me.
I’m going to go on to ACX and see what’s there. But I also get emails from people saying, I took your test and you have absolutely positively convinced me that I never, ever, ever want to do this for a living. And I feel like I’ve done a good service as a coach.
I’ve saved them a lot of heartache and money. And so that’s what I do. That’s what I do.
And anyone expresses any interest. I’m like, go watch the video, go take the test.
Anybody else have a comment on that?
Yeah, this is Andi. I actually am in the process of selecting a small number of students to start from scratch with this fall because I put something on my Facebook page, my narrator page saying, you know, I’m going to take a small number of students and here’s how to apply and what to send me. And so the first test is actually, do they meet that deadline?
Because we have to meet, you know, it’s a deadline driven business. So if they can’t meet a deadline for me, then they’re not ready to put out a shingle and say, I really do this professionally. So I heard from a handful of people, and actually two of them are like, Debra, I’m going to be sending them your way in short order.
They’re like really amazing. Yeah, I was so impressed. I’m really excited to work with them.
And another one is fine, I think, talent wise, but was talking about wanting to sort of make extra money on the side doing audiobooks. And my perspective on things is that it’s not an extra money on the side kind of endeavor. It takes so long to get any traction, to get a foot in the door, to get your name out there, that it just takes a higher level of commitment than that.
Excellent. Debra, any thoughts?
Yes. Sean and Andi are absolutely amazing teachers and coaches, and I highly recommend them. We actually have a school as well, Deon Institute, and PJ Oakland is a teacher out here in Los Angeles.
And he does a great job teaching intro, intermediate, and he does a dialect class, and he’s just terrific, just terrific. So I recommend that people that are new to the business, they really need to get into class, they really need a coach, they really need a business coach. There’s a lot to this, and Andi’s right, it takes a lot of hard work to get your foot in the door and to get rolling.
It takes a lot of effort, a lot of marketing effort and a lot of going to events and being involved.
It really takes having a personal relationship with the different publishers and the different producers. It’s not enough to just hang a shingle or work off of the ACX system and think that you’re doing it. There’s a lot of work involved.
Nowadays, obviously, totally different landscape, and it is vital that you have a demo nowadays. My advice is to learn as much as you can before you go into the booth, because especially if you’re coming at this from another type of voiceover, you exercise different muscles in every different type. I work with DJs a lot, people who have spent their time in radio for decades, and they assume that they can just keep using those same muscles and those same skills when they do an audiobook demo, and it’s totally different.
I would say, whatever ability you’re able to learn, sometimes financially you can’t afford to get a coach, but there are so many free resources online, YouTube videos, you can watch interview shows. VO Buzz Weekly is a marvelous gift to any kind of voiceover artist, whether you want to get into audiobooks or promos or what have you. They interview professionals in every aspect of voiceover.
So you can watch a two-hour interview, hour and a half video, an hour and a half a video of hearing people who do it talk about the craft. Then go into the booth and sit down and create your tracks. You know, start sending out submission emails, query letters basically, and just one little word of advice.
Make sure to link directly to the page with your demos. Don’t go to your main page and then have them click again to get to the demos. You never want to be more than two clicks away from that person hearing your voice.
Wow, that is really insightful and something I had never thought about before.
Yeah, people lose so much interest so quickly. And the more clicks that you make them, the more hoops you give them to jump through, the quicker they’re going to lose interest.
So, Scott, a lot of our listeners are new to the business. That’s why we asked that first question. But a lot of the people that we talk to that are just coming in look first to ACX as a way to sort of get their foot in the door or maybe start in the business.
Do you see ACX as still a viable option to either start in the business or even to continue a career in the business?
I think, and this goes contrary to my initial thoughts about ACX, when I first heard about ACX years ago, and I think a lot of veteran narrators, let’s say, people who are already into their career, a lot of us shied away. Jeffrey Kafer, when I remember taking him out for a drink afterwards to say thank you, and he gave me the best advice. He said, if you are not using ACX as a way to put out royalty share books, you are leaving money on the table.
So I have absolutely revised my thinking on it. When I took the advice that Jeffrey Kafer gave me that night, it had an immediate financial impact on my career and my bank account. I think it’s absolutely a viable way to get in.
And I say this as anything derogatory about ACX, I say the same thing to people who work for one company all the time, even if it’s a major publisher. Always have an exit strategy. And by that, I don’t mean stop working for them.
By exit strategy, I mean a way to transition from working full time in this realm as you’re cutting your teeth and getting your sea legs under you, whatever metaphor you want to use. Once you’ve done that and you’re ready to work with the major publishers, the independent producers, what have you, always have a goal in mind about how to transition out. And absolutely, you can break in at ACX and you can make your career and your finances thrive on ACX.
Steven, how about you? We were talking about new people to the business approaching ACX as a way to break in or get their foot in the door. Is that still a viable option or is ACX still a viable option in general as a way to promote your audiobook business?
And what other ways are there for narrators to seek out work for themselves?
What I’ve noticed over time with ACX is that in the beginning, when the platform first opened up, there was a huge backlog of demand that simply had no place to go. Couldn’t figure out what was going on, and suddenly there was this marketplace. So there was a lot of really high value product that suddenly became available, and it was like panning for gold during the gold rush.
Whereas now, anyone who looks at ACX and is purely looking at it as a place to audition is missing at least half of what’s really there. Whether or not what’s sitting on ACX right now is something that you think is worth auditioning for, what ACX gives you by having an account is your own personal publishing platform. So you getting out and going to things like writers conferences or other things and being the one audiobook narrator in the room, you get to actually have the conversation and when the person says, and how are we going to distribute this, you have the answer in your back pocket.
So yeah, there are other things that are coming out now. And part of that is the longer that it goes on where Audible is the largest player, the more people start talking about alternatives. But also, the longer that goes on, the harder it becomes for somebody to build an alternative of scale, something that can handle that.
And we’re seeing some of that with Kobo coming on the scene, and we’re seeing Findaway, which for a long time was a business-to-business back-end system. They were responsible for a long time for moving audiobooks outside of Audible. In many cases, Findaway was responsible for how those books made it into the libraries, or make it into the little kiosk in a truck stop, and all different things like that.
Findaway was responsible for a lot of those other pieces, and now they’re turning around to be a place with their voices division, where they’re trying to reach out to authors. So it’s going to be interesting looking in the next couple of years as these different alternatives start to crop up, because the talk, when you talk to independent authors, is about what alternatives are there to Amazon, the parent company behind Audible. That’s really what I see is that when people simply look at ACX as a place to audition, they really are missing most of the value that’s there.
One thing that often does happen, though, is people will come to me and they’ll say, I want to do this through what was Listen to a Book. Of course, as of today, probably many of you have seen this, we’re going through a rebranding and moving the content under the new business name, which is Spoken Realms. The audio production network is what was Listen to a Book.
If you still have old links to listentoabook.com that still works, but you can go over to spokenrealms.com, spokenrealms.net, and see what’s going on there as the content is being migrated and things show up. But often people will come to me with a project that’s actually more appropriately an ACX project, and they’re kind of surprised when I turn them back towards ACX because I understand some more of the ins and outs of the platform and can point out where by doing something else, they may be leaving important information, data, money, something on the table. And, you know, the last thing I would like to do is just, you know, you come to me and I take your project and then six months down the road, you figure out there was something better.
If there’s a better fit, I’d rather focus on that. So really, what was Listen to a Book that’s now Spoken Realms, we’re focused a little bit more on projects you cannot do through ACX. So whether that means you’re working with material that is not available as an e-book that you can claim is your own.
So that could be you want to do a public domain work. It could mean that you have a script that is not originally a book and you’re trying to get it into the same marketplace. It could be that you want to do something that doesn’t fit for a different reason, like you’d like to do a dual narration piece, but you’d like to do it as a royalty share, and ACX doesn’t have a mechanism to pay to narrators.
So all of those kinds of projects are the kinds of things that can be done through spoken realms, through the audio production network, that you cannot do through the other platform. Personally, with what I’m doing and how I like to work, it made more sense to try to… You know the square peg in the round hole metaphor?
When I built the system that I built, I built a square hole so that way you don’t have to try to shove that square peg into the round hole. So when somebody comes to me, if they’ve got a round peg, I say, you really want to go over there.
I would say if you go on to ACX right now and look under just the wide open, how many producers have listed themselves there, it’s like 46,000 producers, which is really, really daunting. But then you start to look at the samples that people have uploaded, and the amount of not following directions that weeds out, I don’t even know, maybe a third of those people right off the bat, is stunning. Like people who put a car commercial demo up on ACX, or they’re reading something and you can hear a dog barking in the background, or there’s just not a sense of market with a lot of the people who’ve listed themselves there.
So you can really give yourself an advantage by thinking about who’s looking for narrators, not car companies, and what are they looking for, and what is your… If you work with a coach to know your brand, your niche, your sound, then you can actually leverage your ACX profile in conjunction with networking with authors who write in the genre that you might be interested in. Then they have a reason to go look at your profile and not just the entire ACX site and go, eh.
Excellent. Sean or Debra, any thoughts?
That’s really good advice.
I think so too.
Well, the other thing I would say, one of the things that I do personally and that I teach my students and I’ve taught… I’ve used to teach classes on the business of show business for years at acting schools and with acting groups. And I said, you know, it says, you know, your question is, is it still a viable option?
Well, that implies that you have a goal in mind. And a lot of people get into show business without a specific goal. And I stress to my students that they pick…
I always pick five goals for the year. And I work those goals throughout the year, and then at the end of the year, I can then see, well, how did I do this year? And that’s the only yardstick I use for my own success.
I don’t judge it against anybody else. And so what I try to tell them is that oftentimes, when they get to ACX, they may not know what ACX can do for them. They may have an overblown sense of what its possibilities are.
And I try to sort of lower those, especially with my narrators who come from a performance background. I tell them initially they should be thinking of ACX like if you’re an actor doing summer stock theater or black box theater, where you’re going to work your butt off, you’re not going to make any money, but you need the resume credit, the experience, the connections. And that’s just part of the learning curve.
You know, I said, yeah, go ahead and audition for the per finished hour stuff, but just know that your recording and your experience level now will be going head to head with someone who’s got 30, 40, 50, 60 books on there. So, you know, you should be thinking about, in my opinion… Now granted, you want to do books that are of a certain quality.
You’re not going to just take anything that comes your way. But you should be, to me, more focused initially, if you’re a raw beginner, on getting the experience, you know? So some of those books may not be, you know, they ain’t all Hemingway, but at least you’ll have the experience.
And so if you start out looking at ACX in that direction, and then as you get more savvy as a narrator, savvy as a business person, and savvy about the site, then you can begin to start picking and choosing and navigating the possibilities that are out there. But initially, you know, think of it more as that, you know, like I said, working in a black box theater in Brooklyn for ten bucks a show or something. It’s a learning experience more than it is a revenue stream.
Well, excellent points, everyone. It really helps kind of… So apparently, yes, ACX is still a very viable if misunderstood option for people who don’t realize the potential value it could have for them and their audiobook business.
And so, Steven, I love that you went into such detail because very often you find that as narrators grow their careers, they often become publishers in their own right. And so, a lot of people assume that, like other areas of voiceover, audiobook is all about the performance, it’s all about the voice, but the truth is that there are a lot of other skills involved, particularly technical skills. So I’m curious just how much technical skill is required to start, and is it really essential to have a home studio for people trying to get involved with audiobooks?
Yes, unless you live in New York or LA.
Simple enough.
I know. Anyone else want to weigh in?
All right.
Let’s phrase it a different way. How many of, in this case, Andi and Sean and Scott, how many of you actually still work from home and what percentage of your work is done in your home studio versus at a production house or a publisher?
Well, I don’t live in New York or LA, so I have done all but two of my books from my home studio.
Yeah, from my experience of the 930-something books I’ve done, probably a handful, maybe five in 20 years, because it was just an accident of geography. I became an audiobook narrator based out of Washington, DC., which is arguably one of the nexus points of audiobook narration because of Library of Congress and Learning Ally, and they needed narrators there, and out of that was the natural pool of talent for the audiobook companies when they were looking for home-based studio narrators.
So I started out working in a studio, my own booth, from the very beginning. So I’m really an autodidact. I taught myself everything I needed to know over the successes and failures of doing that on your own.
So you do need it for that reason, because that’s also where the industry is headed. It has been heading for many years now. The other thing too is, this gets back to say like demos on ACX, you do need to have a quality studio.
So the sound booth itself has to meet a certain standard. The equipment needs to be a certain standard. And there’s ways to talk with people and get that to that standard.
But also things like demos. Whereas in commercial VO, you go into a studio and they do all this really cool, sexy stuff with music and sound effects. And you have a really great producer who puts it all together for you.
In audiobooks, ultimately, you need to be doing your demos on your own mic in your own space, because that’s what they’re hiring in the end. Because if you went to an expensive studio in New York to get a really cool audiobook demo put together, you know, and then suddenly the quality of your studio where you do the book is radically different, it’s a bit of bait and switch. So yes, having your own studio is part and parcel with the industry, except, like Andi said, if you’re in LA or New York.
I never advise somebody to leap into a voiceover career, and first thing you do is get a home studio. I always say, test the waters. Make sure you have enough work to justify this expense, because depending on how intricate or detailed and really involved you want to get, you’re going to be spending a thousand, five thousand, I know people who spend a lot more than that on their boots.
And why do that if you don’t have the right skill set, or you’re the best in the biz, but nobody will listen to your demo? I mean, I hate the idea of spending all that money in your studio lying fallow, basically. So what I always say is, even though it might mean less profit up front, if you’re getting your per finished hour fee and it’s flat, there’s no leeway, there’s no wiggling room, that you spend part of it and you find the cheapest, best option for you to use somebody else’s studio.
And you use part of that per finished hour fee to do that. And then when you start getting those phone calls and emails a lot more often, and the publishers or whomever you’re dealing with is knocking on your door a lot more, especially when they start making inquiries like, hey, I’m curious, do you have a home studio? Ever thought about putting in a home studio?
Let that be your sign. Yes, go out. But it’s the same way that I always say, people ask me what kind of microphone, how much should they spend?
Should they pop for a really expensive one up front? Say, get one that makes you sound professional. And then at some point in your career, when you want to be taken seriously, when you want to be taken seriously as somebody who’s moving on to the next level and working for the majors, that you invest more, and you invest a little more into a better microphone.
Again, I hate the idea of somebody going to a great deal of expense up front. And the same goes for the technical side of things. It depends on how steep the learning curve is.
I know just enough about the technical aspects of audio to be dangerous. I knew that the learning curve, that’s not where my skill set is. So, you know what I want to do?
I want to rely on the people who really know their stuff. I want to rely on the best in the business. And there’s a part of me that’s just like, hey, you know what?
I’m an American. I get a lot of benefit by being a member of society. And I don’t want it all to go one way.
I don’t want to just take the benefits. I want to give some, too. So I hire editors, and I hire proofers, and I hire engineers.
You know, I can… If I focus on what I know how to do, rather than spending money on training, or spending time on, you know, watching a ton of YouTube videos, if you want to, by all means, do it. I know a lot of narrators who do, and they thrive on it.
Simon Vance loves playing around, you know, and doing his own editing. That guy, God, that’s an extended yawn for me. So it makes me happy that I’m hiring people, and I’m putting money into the economy, that I’m helping my associates, my peers, the people who really know their stuff.
I think it is all dependent on the person. What is your learning curve? What is your level of interest?
Also, what is your level of fear? I work with a lot of retirees who are trying to, as they come to take my classes, they want to reinvent themselves, and they don’t want to have to spend a lot of time or money because maybe they don’t have a lot of either one of those. I said, well, then don’t.
Do as much as you want and try working with others to get you to the next step.
Yeah, and to add on to where Scott was going there, and this is an open question for the room, how many people in this room knew how to fix a car or build a car the day they got their driver’s license? Still don’t. And this is the thing that most people think about.
They think, oh, I’m going to do everything. That’s the right way to go about it. When I first moved to the area that I’m in and I was doing some of this work, first thing I did was I contacted every studio in the area to see if anyone had actual experience either recording voiceover or spoken word.
I found a couple of studios that were semi-local. At least one had ISDN who said that sure, I could advertise that I’m an ISDN talent, and this is how I schedule time in the studio. And I work with him on and off to this day, not because I need that anymore.
I’ve got stuff set up here, but because we’ve become friends and we send work towards each other at this point. So there’s that component. And a lot of people make the mistake of trying to figure this all out at once.
And then when they go back to listen to their early work, they wind up with that cringe-worthy, oh my God, oh, you know, they have that feeling about what’s happening there. And this is one of the things… So when I…
I’ve called ACX a pay-to-play, but then people point out to me, you don’t pay a fee, so why do I call it a pay-to-play? I call it a pay-to-play because a royalty share, in a lot of ways, is them asking you to gamble whether or not you’re going to make money. You know, it’s a stock market.
And you’re paying your time.
You’re paying your time, right, your time and futures based upon your labor. And so people say, well, it’s not costing me anything up front. They’re not understanding that part.
There’s a lot of people who will do their first book without pre-reading it, and then only find out in Chapter 19 that the character they’ve been doing with that high squeaky voice is described as having a rich baritone. And they have to go back and re-record because there are things like that. So finding local studios, going into your local libraries and getting to know the reference librarians who are incredibly helpful because when you need to look up pronunciation…
Those are people who look up things for a living, and that doesn’t cost you anything, and neither of those things actually cost you anything. And when you are working alone, when you start working by yourself and you’re going to plan to work in a padded room talking into a little stick, you need to create those outside connections to the world. And so now there’s two local libraries near me, and when I walk in, about half of the reference librarians know who I am, and they’ll ask me, what book are you working on?
Because I need pronunciations of local names, of things like that, and they’re happy to help. So there are ways to plug in to the community around you to get things done. And again, going back to the, I didn’t know how to fix a car when I first got my driver’s license.
Why, when I get my first microphone, would I be expecting to do that? So absolutely, find a local studio, do your jobs there, but invest at that point in a very basic kit, and actually talk to those studio people as well as the online forums, people that you trust, anyone who will talk to you about equipment, and you’ll be able to get kitted out in professional equipment at home that you can use for quick auditions, because the thing that a lot of voice over people don’t really remember is that you don’t need the perfect space for most of your auditions. You need the perfect space for your job.
There’s an understanding that the audition is, you know, they’re listening for your delivery. They’re not listening at that point to say, ooh, his studio is noisy. If you’re the right person, they’ll hire you, and you’re pointing out that you’re going to be recording that in another studio.
So having an audition-grade studio, let’s call it that, at home when you start is a lot cheaper than running out and trying to figure out if you need a $10,000, $8,000, $12,000 booth in your home.
Can I also… there’s something else I’d love to point out, because the idea that our fellow narrators, our brothers and sisters, I think are being taken advantage of in one particular way, and it drives me crazy. This isn’t a thing about the technical aspect of audio, and yet nevertheless, it is something that can so easily be outsourced and solve one of your problems.
Some publishers, they will have, you know, they’ll offer a job, let’s say they’re offering $200 per finished hour for a book. Okay, great. You take the job.
Then they tell you, oh, you know what? If you want to do all the research yourself and handle that part of it, we’ll make it $250. Or $225.
Let’s say it’s $250. And what do we do? Like lemmings, you know, like sheet.
You know, we go, great, I want that extra $50. And what a sucker’s bet that is. Oh, my God.
And I understand, my friends are, you know, the publishers in some cases are my friends who are making me this offer. And I’m looking at them going, oh, my God, you’re so taking advantage of us. Because think about it, right?
You’re getting, let’s say, $50 extra per hour, per finished hour. You know, if you’re making $50 per finished hour to do the research, but you’re making $200 per finished hour to do the narrating, why don’t you pay somebody $25 an hour to do that research for you? And you make $200 an hour in that same hour on a different book.
It’s outsourced. Please, God, you know, I haven’t done my own research in close to 10 years now, because I can make more doing what I know how to do.
And Debra, you work with producers and narrators within your award-winning studio. What percentage of your work is done with narrators in-house versus in their home studios?
Yeah, yes. You know, we’re in LA. We’ve got two studios in LA.
One has four booths and the other has five. We run them seven days a week, double shifts. So we’re doing quite a bit of work in our studios.
But Sean is absolutely right. The industry is moving towards home narrators. Of all the work that I receive from clients all over the world, 80% of it I’m still hiring a home narrator to do the work in their own home booths.
20% of the work that I’m doing is done here in my studios or in studios in New York, London, Toronto, big cities. Authors wanting to read their own books are still coming into studios. They obviously aren’t going to have their own home booths.
Celebrities, actors like Broadway actors, we hire a lot of those. So those people are recording in studios in New York or here in LA. But yeah, if somebody is serious about doing audiobooks and they don’t live in Los Angeles or New York or London, they really have to have a home booth.
It just is the way it is.
Yeah, and I would also add that I have done shorter form voiceover work. And when I was doing a two or three minute commercial and my neighbor was using a chainsaw, I could, you know, quick fit it in when he went in to have a drink of water. But if I’m trying to do an eight hour book, which takes me the better part of a week to finish, and my neighbor’s having a chainsaw party, I got a problem.
Yeah, that makes sense. So we talked about doing work in a production house, like Deon Audio in LA. How does a narrator who’s looking to partner with such a business contact them?
Or what’s the best way to market yourselves to production houses?
Yeah, in regards to production houses and publishers in general, everybody on their web, all the publishers have on their websites exactly how you can become a narrator for them and work for them. Every single publisher operates differently. Sometimes that can be frustrating for actors, narrators to navigate, but it’s really, really clear on every single publisher’s website how to contact them, how to upload your samples, how they work, how they hire.
I’m really clear about how I do it. All they would have to do is email me debradbra.deonaudio.com, and we have a very clear set of instructions on how… People don’t…
There’s kind of a bit of a myth about ACX. People seem to think that they have to have some sort of… A bunch of credits in order to get my attention or the attention of the publishers.
It’s absolutely not true. And sometimes it’s really frustrating because somebody will have… Will work really hard and get 60 credits or something crazy, some big body of work on ACX.
And will do all these kind of royalty share kind of things and do a bunch of free work and thinking that if they do a bunch of free work, that they’re going to somehow build up all these credits and get my attention because they have a lot of credits. I feel sorry for people who are misguided that way because I would have listened to their sample without any credits to their name, and I would have decided whether I like them or not based on their sample. So I don’t know about other people and whether they feel like they need you to have a bunch of credits or not, but I can tell you from my perspective, I do not.
I know what I like. I know within a few seconds of hearing you read, if I want to hire you or not, it’s that simple for me.
Excellent. So sort of going on that question, Debra, do you critique demos for people who might not, who are just asking for feedback, not necessarily wanting to be hired by you?
I’ve never done that, really, because people that are contacting me want me to hire them. So I do critique a lot of people’s demos, but not for the fun of it.
Oh, I see. So everyone’s pretty much… Is this hireable?
Is this bookable?
Yeah, if they’re contacting me, they want a job. And rightly so. We’re the world’s largest producers of audiobooks.
I stopped counting. I had produced 15,000 titles four or five years ago, and I just stopped counting. We do thousands a year.
If they’re calling me, they’re looking for a job, and I don’t blame them. They should be calling me.
So what is sort of the etiquette for contacting a production house or a publisher? I mean, you mentioned that they all have their own idiosyncrasies, but since you are a producer yourself, what do you look for when someone reaches out?
I’m just simply looking for somebody to write me an email that says, Hi, I’m looking for a job, and how do I go about working with you? And we write back very clear instructions on exactly what they need in order to be asked to be part of the roster. And then once they’re asked to be part of the roster, we start looking at them as a possibility of someone who can be hired.
Somebody has to be on the roster in order to get hired, because it’s just too complicated for us otherwise to remember who you are and it’s just better for us. We have five casting people working here, and that’s what they do 40 hours a week. So it’s too hard for us to meet somebody at a party or whatever and to remember who they are.
It makes much more sense for us that if they give us their headshot, their bio, their demo, then once we have a marker for them, a banner, then the relationship part starts. I saw somebody at a mixer or somebody participated in APA speed dating or some other form where I somehow see their face over and over and they become ingrained in my memory and hiring them and for them to be able to stand out. And that’s what Sean had talked about, your brand, and who you know.
Andi had said knowing who you are and how to market yourself and what your brand is, and that’s all true. You have to stand out somehow.
Absolutely. You can approach anybody. You the narrator, be bold.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined. Let’s put it this way.
Think about it from this perspective. Every single one of those publishers and every single one of those independent producers, Deb can tell you, you know, Deb Deyan can tell you that they are always looking for new talent. Always.
They may not have the time based on the, say, the budgets, the timetables, the deadlines that they’re dealing with on a certain project to go find somebody right now, but they are always on the lookout. It is always on their radar. It is always on their radar.
Find the new guy. Find the new woman. And you, basically, you do so by writing a query letter.
Do a Google search. Query letter. I used to write them when I was writing magazine articles all the time, and I had to approach a new publisher.
And I would basically say, this is who I am. This is what I’ve done. You know, attached are some clips of things, you know, attached are some articles I’ve written in the past, or in this case, you know, you’ll see a link here to books that I have narrated already, and those obviously are ones that you’ve done on ACX, or, you know, whomever you start your career with.
And you say, I think I would be a good fit, because, and you point out that, you know, well, Blackstone Audio, they don’t do a whole lot of young adult. They do some, but they do a whole lot of, you know, whatever it is. You point out, you know, I’ve noticed you do a lot of romance.
I’ve noticed you do a lot of erotica. If you’re talking to Random House, you say, I know that Listening Library, I know that your Listening Library imprint does, you know, by far the most young adult books in the industry. And you find these things out by doing the research.
And you basically, you’re showing them when you send an email like that, or a letter if you want to get old school. You’re showing them not only that, with your links, hey, I do what you do. When you show them that you know about their company, and you’ve taken the time to research it, that you know about the industry.
You’re basically saying, I’ve done what you do, I do what you do for a living, and I can help you. Look at all these other people that I’ve already helped. It is in your best interest for me to help you too.
That’s the subtext of your letter. Write a very good query letter, have somebody read it, vet it for you, make sure that your spelling and grammar are perfect, because you know what? This is the publishing industry.
And start submitting. Now, you may not get traction with Simon and Schuster. I’ll tell you, I’ve been doing this for coming up on 18 years now.
The first 15 years of my career, they wouldn’t answer my phone calls. I should say that. They were always very polite, but they were like, Yeah, we’re not looking for anybody right now.
And then finally, I started working with them. Remember, the same thing happened with Harper. I only started working for them less than a year ago.
Remember that every person that you were approaching, every company that you’re approaching, always keep in mind, this is still an audition. And when you do your first, when they give you your first chance, whether it’s one of the voices in the multi-voice recording or a short story in the collection that they’re doing, whatever it is, remember that that first job, you may have booked the job, but you haven’t booked the publisher yet. You haven’t booked the room.
You haven’t booked the casting person. They’re waiting to find out how you execute the chance that they’ve given you. And I always say, keep that in mind with every single new person you’re approaching.
And I think if you go into it with that intent and with that knowledge, things usually go well. They definitely go better.
Fabulous points. Wonderful. Any thoughts on that, Steven?
I think when you’re doing that outreach… I’ve heard people do this, and people have a hard time really celebrating the work that they’ve already done. They tend to minimize.
And so writing that query letter can be a very hard thing. But I want to point out that if you look at any ACX book, not a single one of them claims that ACX is the publisher. ACX is simply the platform, in that case, where you as a narrator have connected with a rights holder, and the book has gotten done.
So you have done zero books for ACX. You’ve done a whole bunch of books for some independent publishers. And so if you’ve done 12 books for eight different rights holders, then describe it that way.
Talk about how you’ve done something for this indie horror label, and for this LGBT label that does mysteries and other things like that. Realize that all ACX did was introduce you to somebody who needed a book to get done. You’ve done zero books for ACX.
You have done books for these independents. And yes, when you talk to people, you’re going to do that with as much confidence. Your portfolio is you, and you want to be hired.
This isn’t about you being a shrinking violet, but this is about you saying, Here’s what I can do, and here’s how what I can do can be a service for you.
Andi and Sean, any advice on approaching publishers specifically?
Sean? Well, it’s a complicated thing. I mean, just as Debra has her philosophy, other publishers are different.
You know, there was, I won’t name names, but at the recent APAC conference, there was a casting director at one of the forums who said, Don’t send me anything. I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want emails from people.
I don’t want anything. And you’re like, well, how do you find new talent? You have to be…
Debra’s taking, in my opinion, the correct approach, which is, I come from the theater background. I grew up in the theater. And like it or not, if you’re in casting, for a theater or casting office in general, you’re going to be inundated with talent, trying to reach out and trying to say, Hey, I’m new.
Pay attention to me. I think I could be an asset for you in some way. And so you have to be open.
That’s just… It comes with the territory. It comes with the job description.
So that being said, learning about marketing and advertising, the nuances of that, about putting together a resume, about showing them some of your reviews, about having a very good demo to showcase your talents, learning the nuances of that are tricky. You know, it’s not something I can answer in a… in just a quick response to this question.
It takes finesse, it takes time to learn how to package yourself, your brand, what are you special at, and so on. But all those pieces are out there. You can learn all of that stuff, not only from coaches, but it’s free on YouTube and on the web.
There are videos and articles and things you can actually spend the time to read and learn from that teach you how to craft an image, how to craft a good resume or a good demo, and how to get it in front of the right people.
I have a, like, don’t do this type story that’s not a very long story. I was at a networking event, an industry event, and I was speaking with somebody who hires narrators from a particular publishing company, and we were talking about something I had produced that he listened to that had not anything to do with what he produces, just something he personally likes, and we were talking about some funny parts of the book and blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden, someone came and broke into our conversation, so there’s already, like, lack of sensitivity to the fact that two people are having a conversation, and just started talking about himself and shoving the business card in the guy’s face, and talking about, well, I want to do business books.
I want to do all these business books, and I just wanted to say, do you realize that the person you’re talking to never, ever produces any business books? And if you had done your homework, this would not be a connection you’re trying to make. He’s in a totally other part of the industry, and this is not a good match for you, and you made a really bad first impression because you just interrupted a conversation that we were having.
And that man’s name was Sean Pratt.
It’s like if we were at some kind of… Yeah, I didn’t want to blow his cover. He was having a bad day.
Thanks a lot, Andi.
He’s so considerate.
I wasn’t saying it was you.
He does a lot of business books.
So, I guess if you go to a networking thing, pretend it’s dating, right? And, if you see two people talking, don’t break in and start French kissing that one other person. It’s like, common sense.
They’re having a conversation. Wait your turn. And, who is that person?
Do you need to meet them? The first networking event that I went to, there’s this summertime thing that’s a lot of fun. The first time I went to it, the host of the event sends out the guest list the night before.
And you better believe I was on Audible looking up all these people. What do they record? You know, I was completely stalking people.
And what I found was that there was somebody who narrated a book set in the town where my daughter was born in China. And I was like, oh my gosh, I read that book. I love that book.
So now I can talk to that person about that book. And there’s one person I can talk to tomorrow.
So the theme is it’s not different than marketing yourselves in any other business.
Right. Do your homework. Be savvy.
Yeah.
And I love that you had such a proactive approach to it. Because yeah, I mean, with any new business endeavor, there’s a level of unconscious incompetence where you don’t know what you don’t know. But there really is so much research and sort of building of a skill set behind the scenes that you can do before you make a fool of yourself like that.
So what I’m curious about is because some of you either work with students or hire narrators or do both, what kind of skills or mindsets do you look for in a narrator or a student?
What I’m looking for is temperament. I always interview my… When someone reaches out to me, I have them fill out a questionnaire and I review it first.
And if I see… I’m looking for a background, preferably with some level of performance, because, like it or not, performers just do better as narrators where they have an acting background of some kind. There’s a general statement.
But I like to… I always interview my potential students. I want to get a feel for them.
I also tell them what to expect when they work with me. I’m a strategic coach. I’m not a tactical coach.
A tactical coach… You can learn a lot from a good tactical coach. Someone like Johnny Heller is an excellent tactical coach.
Scott Brick is too. Isn’t that right, Scott?
Sean Pratt, you are a master of the transition. I tell you what I do. What I look for when I’m…
When I’m basically auditioning talent, trying to figure out, you know, who would be a good fit. I don’t do a ton of it, but what I do, I want to make sure that, you know, obviously it’s the right voice for the authorial voice. Does it match?
And… is when I listen to somebody’s stuff, I listen to several samples, and I make sure that their style changes with each author. Because every author has a unique authorial voice, and we, you know, we shift what we do to match it.
You know, my version of… of The Red Badge of Courage shouldn’t sound like the Nelson Demille books that I do, right? They’re both fiction, but they are by no means the same kind of fiction.
So, you know, the Vampire Detective series that I did for Blackstown, the Charlie Houston books, they don’t sound like any other books that I did. So, I basically look for… and I can see it in…
when I’m working with a student in the studio, in the classroom, and I can hear it when I listen to samples. I know when a narrator is connected, when the narrator that, you know, the person I’m working with or listening to has connected to the text, because you know what? It is axiomatic.
When we connect to the text, the listener does. It’s 10 times out of 10, 100 out of 100. And that’s the moment where you reach them and where it becomes personal for us.
And I always listen for that. Is the sample that they’ve sent me, does it show that? I think we need to pay attention to that when we’re clicking.
I think we need to pay attention to that when we’re choosing the samples that we put up for streaming on our website. That it’s a section of the book that really choked us up, or that we really connected to and were able to make it funnier, because, oh God, this has happened to me. Because it’s those moments that make people go, oh wow.
And the very first time this ever happened was with Alex Hyde-White. I knew I wanted to work with him, because in class one day, he read an exchange in a book about Truman Capote. And there was somebody in his life, I want to say that he called Big Mama.
And Big Mama said, I love you, Truman. He says, no, you don’t. Big Mama said, no, Truman, I absolutely love you.
And he said, no, you don’t, you can’t. She says, what do you mean, I can’t? And he says, because nobody can love me.
And he did it, and he was so… God, he just connected to it. I don’t know how to…
and I don’t want to imitate it. But I went, oh my God. And I gasped when I listened to it.
Because that was the moment. And I knew that when he said that, he was remembering a time in his life when he felt like that. Because I’m telling you, everybody who hears that line remembers a time in their life when they felt unable to be loved, unworthy of love.
And I went, that’s the moment. He connected? Great.
I want to connect with him. I want to work with him.
And Steven?
In my case, when I’ve had people coming to me, I’ve had more success casting people whose work I’m more familiar with than just their demo sample. And sometimes, it may be that I have only heard the demo sample, but then I’ve actually had enough interactions with the person that I have a sense of who they are. Because sometimes you can have a really wonderful demo, but sometimes that person has a hard time delivering on a regular basis what they delivered that one day in the studio with the director right there with them.
A good example of a wonderful match that works in this way is not a case where I was casting a project that came to me, but I had listened to Johnny Heller’s The Education of Littletree, which, done with Crossroad Press, it was beautifully done. It was just so amazing. And the next day after that was done and it was reflecting upon how that story went, I just kept saying to myself, he would do a wonderful Huckleberry Finn.
And so the next time I was in a place where I could mention that, I reached out to him and I said it and he thanked me for it. And about nine months later, he said, I really want to do that Huckleberry Finn. So we made it happen.
And so what will happen for me is it’s either in direct interactions with people or it’s the fact that I’m an avid listener of audiobooks myself. And so I’ve had authors contact me to help get their stuff done and I start running through people in my head who I’ve listened to who feel like they would fit the project. So in a lot of ways, I’m doing that work the same way Scott is because the memory of those feelings is like, ooh, I’ve really got to call Sarah Moller-Christensen.
I really have to call Tim Campbell. So it’s when you hear about the project and the passion of the project from the rights holder’s point of view, sometimes that right fit of a narrator will just come back up because of the direct experience of having experienced their performance.
Yeah. And so the idea is that a tactical coach deals with what they have right in front of them. You’re doing the read.
They say, do this, try this, try this, do a different thing. And that’s not how I work. I work as a strategic coach.
My stuff is about here’s the concept, here it ties it to the material. Now go away and you have to teach it to yourself. I walk you through that and answer questions and give them examples, but I come from the school of thought that you only really learn something when you have to suffer through it on your own, as it were.
And so when I talk with them, I’m giving them a heads up about what to expect when they’re going to work with me, and I can tell immediately whether or not they’re going to be receptible to that. The other thing I’m looking for is a certain level of temperament, a realistic outlook about what they could be doing, how long it’s going to take. I get this question a lot.
Well, if I work really hard, do you think I’ll be making X amount of dollars in a year? And my response is always the same, which is this is show business. There is nothing that is certain.
And if you actually encounter somebody who tells you a dollar figure, then you should put your wallet in your pocket and get the heck out of there because they’re about to scam you. You can work six months and make a fair amount of money or work six years and just limp along. There is no structure.
And I want to make sure they know that going in. I want to align their preconceptions with reality and also introduce them to the way I teach. And then, I guess lastly, it’s just a matter of temperament.
Do I feel like they have the temperament not only to work with me, but to hang in there and do this? I keep coming back to that word, but I’ve just been in show business a long time. Talent is not the ultimate arbiter of your success.
It really is about that tenacity, that temperament. Can you hang in there? Can you stay focused on it?
I’ve had a lot of friends who were very talented who left the business. They just couldn’t handle this other part of the… the other demands of temperament and tenacity.
Jumping off from that, I think, Sean, I would probably be more of the tactical type of coach. Most of who I work with are people who are already working narrators who have run up against a problem. For example, women wanting to strengthen their menu of male voices that they do or people feeling like they’re in a rut or they’re maybe exploring a genre that they think I’m familiar with, like romance, for example, and they want some coaching in that genre.
But this week, looking at these possible new students, I was looking at much the same thing, for sure, and I had them make me an MP3 that was just two minutes. The first minute was, tell me about yourself, and the second minute is, read me something. So I wanted to hear if there was a difference between their connectedness telling me about themselves and was there a disconnect when they started reading, because ideally, I want to feel like they’re telling me a story, not that they’re holding me at arm’s length and lecturing to me.
So I was listening for those kinds of things. But usually when I coach, I start my session with working narrators by saying, you tell me what we’re going to work on today.
And that’s fundamentally different from what I do. I have a curriculum. Every time we meet, it’s a new idea, there’s a structure, and also as we move through the stuff, I go back and say, well, are you working with this concept now?
Are you working with this one? And there’s a great deal of value in both kinds of coaches. But Andi put her finger on it.
If you’re going to work with a tactical coach, you need to be a savvy enough student to know what you need to work on. You can’t expect Andi to know your weak points. That takes time, a long time to figure that out, back and forth.
So if you’re going to work with someone who has the skill that Andi or Scott or Johnny has, or PJ as well, if you’re going to come in and work on accents with PJ, you should find out which ones, where is your weak point, and know that’s what you want to work on and focus on. Because there’s only so much you can pack into a 60-minute session.
So awareness of self is certainly a useful skill to have in that situation. So Debra, you’re much more in the hiring professional narrators rather than working with students. What kind of skills do you look for in the narrators you work with?
I’m really looking for an acting background. I really, really love hiring theater actors. You know, I’m looking for people to give me a sample of what they love to do.
Because I think, you know, what Sean was saying is, you know, people either stay in this business or they don’t. They either have it for the long haul or they don’t. And I find that people have to love this thing in order to stay in it for the long haul.
And I can tell you that my husband, Bob, who’s now gone, that he and I love this with every breath. You know, we jumped out of bed every day and, you know, love this thing. And we were just, you know, poured to the bone for almost two decades out of sheer love and out of knowing that it was going to be big someday.
We just knew it. We just knew it. I think that that’s something that I’m looking for.
And when I hear somebody greeting, I just hear it. I hear the love in it. I hear the theater background.
I hear something more than just the talent when listening.
So let’s flip the table a little bit. When someone is looking for a coach, what are the qualities they should seek when they’re shopping to maybe be their first coach? Or like Andi said, if they’re looking for some sort of hurdle to overcome as an established narrator, what are the qualities in a good coach?
I was looking on a platform where you can look up any subject and take a course about it, and I wondered if that platform had audiobook lessons. And so I entered audiobooks, and indeed somebody had put up a course, and I looked her up on Audible, and she has two books. So, you know, I wouldn’t want to learn from somebody who has barely done the thing I’m trying to learn how to do.
So I would look up their professional reputation. I would look up what other people have to say about working with them as a coach. I would see if they offer a group workshop-type classes, which tend to be less expensive because the cost is spread out over, you know, 10 to 20 people instead of you working one-on-one, and try them in a group environment.
And then maybe if you feel like you would work well with them one-on-one, approach them about the one-on-one coaching. But prepare to settle in for regular coaching. It’s definitely not the kind of thing where you just, like, it’s been an hour and you’re like, yes, I’m ready to do all the books.
I couldn’t have said it better, Andi. Absolutely.
Well, I would just… There’s one thing I would say is that in general, Andi put her finger right on it. But that being said, learning to be a coach is a different skill than learning to be doing what we do.
There’s a… When I decided that I wanted to coach, I’d been doing workshops, and they were a lot of fun. I had a great time doing them.
But I’d done workshops, like I said, on general show business topics for 20 years. And I felt like I needed to learn how to be a coach, especially because the kind of coaching I wanted to do. So I talked with friends who were coaches in different, you know, other walks of life, who coach people on different kinds of things, and got ideas from them.
I read books. I practiced and built slowly over time my own skill, because especially with audiobooks, it’s mainly a self-taught experience. And so if you master the craft, whether it’s audiobooks or woodworking or gardening or whatever, that’s one thing.
Learning to teach it is a totally different skill set. You have to learn to go, all right, what is this thing I’m doing intuitively? Let me isolate it.
Let me describe it. Let me give a name to it. Let me create an exercise to show a student how to use it.
And then how do I respond to what they do and teach them in the moment? There’s a number of steps involved. And so I’ve seen some narrators, or I’ve been in the room with some narrators, who have a great deal of experience as narrators, but they didn’t come off as very good coaches.
They weren’t very articulate. And it’s that old Einstein quote about, if you can’t explain a complex idea simply enough, then you don’t understand it well enough yourself. And I’ve seen on occasion someone who has years of experience, they need to go and learn how to be a good teacher.
So there’s… I think… So getting back to the bigger question, ask around.
That’s what private messaging is for on Facebook. Ask other people or start a thread. Say, hey, I’m interested in working with such and such a coach.
If you have thoughts or opinions, please contact me privately and let’s talk about it. I encourage my students when they contact me. I give them a list of former students and I say, do your due diligence.
Don’t just take their word or a couple people’s words for it. Go find out some from other people. In fact, I…
At the end of my meeting with my prospective students, I don’t allow them to say yes or no. I say, go away and take 24 hours and think about this. There’s no special two-for-one sale here.
There’s no you get a pony. I’ve laid out what it’s like to work with me. Go think it over and then if you’re interested, then send me an email.
And also that’s a nice sort of, I think, a graceful way for them to really think it over. And if they realize it’s not for them, because I don’t take brand new students. I mean, people, they have to have several books under their belt because, in my opinion, narrating non-fiction well is just more difficult than fiction.
And if you don’t have any experience at all as a narrator, the stuff that I teach is going to leave you just running in circles. So I want to give them a graceful way to acquiesce and say, you know, I don’t think this is right for me right now. So those are some things to think about too.
Excellent responses. We hear some of the same themes over and over again. You need a very specific temperament of tenacity and perseverance to really…
or just passion for audiobooks. It’s not a quick, rich scheme by any means. And you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not fully invested in it.
So with that, I just wanted to thank our wonderful panelists for coming today and give you the opportunity to say goodbye, promote your services, maybe even provide contact information for people who might want to get a hold of you.
Sure. You can find me online at seanprattpresents.com or send me an email directly at SeanPratt at comcast.net. You can follow me on Facebook at SeanPrattPresents or on Twitter at SP Presents.
I’m always available to be contacted through any of those platforms.
I’m Debra Deyan, owner and producer at Deyan Audio Services. That’s spelled B-E-Y-A-N, audio. You can send me an email at Debra, D-E-B-R-A, at D-E-Y-A-N audio.com.
I’d love to have you on my roster if you’re ready. And we certainly have some great classes and coach available to you through the Deyan Institute. You can follow us on Facebook, Deyan Audio.
You can send me a personal friend request on Facebook. I’m under Debra Deyan, D-E-Y-A-N.
You can find me on the web at andiarrndt.com and there’s a contact form right there on my website to send me a message. My narrator page is on Facebook at Andi Arndt narrator and my Twitter is at Andi underscore aren’t. So I’m happy to hear from people with questions or help in any way that I can.
Very kind of you to ask. My website, you can go to scottbrick.net or brickbybrickaudiobooks.com or scottbrickpresents.com. They all go to the same place.
You can reach me through my website. You can, you know, if it’s teaching related, shoot me an email at scottbrickteachers.gmail.com. And yeah, connect with me on online and social media as well.
And finally, Steven.
And you can find me at stevenjaycohen.com. You can also find the newly reorganized business at spokenrealms.com and.net. If you go to both sites, you’ll see some slightly different points of view on what’s there.
You can find me on most social media with my full name spelled out, steven with a V, jaycohen.com. That counts for Facebook, Twitter, and almost anything else you can imagine. If I’m on it, usually that’s the handle that’s there.
I love that name, by the way. Spoken Realms. It’s fantastic.
Well, thanks again, everyone. Like I said at the beginning, we were so excited to have this discussion, and you guys did not disappoint. We thank you all for your time and your wonderful services.
Thank you.
Oh, thanks so much.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
So that was some fabulous discussion. We want to thank all of our guests once again. We can’t thank them enough for being with us and donating their time.
So our audience can be more clued in about the world of audiobooks.
So I don’t know about you, Paul, but I mean, this really got me more motivated to more actively pursue my own audiobook work. And so some of our listeners might be wondering ways that they can get involved too. So we have a number of events coming up, some as soon as next month.
So a lot of our narrators or members on the panel today are a big fan of fellow narrator named Johnny Heller. And he’s got a retreat, an audiobook retreat coming up in October 13th. So that’s actually going to be in Rhode Island.
And you can… I’m not sure if registration is still open for it right now, but this is an annual event that you should really look into because it gives you a very… It’s not so much like a very large conference atmosphere.
Like you’re actually at a sort of resort retreat with maybe less than 50 people who you can really network with and get to know better and improve. And it’s just a wonderful opportunity to kind of improve all aspects of your audiobook and voiceover career.
Steven did say it was called the New England Narrators Retreat.
Yeah, it has a couple of different ones. There’s also Johnny Heller’s Splendiferous Relaxathon. It’s kind of an inside joke among the narrators.
But usually it’s called Johnny Heller’s New England Narrator Retreat. So you can find out more information about that event at Johnny Heller’s website. That’s johnnyheller.com.
johnnyhelleralloneword.com. And definitely check that out. I had the pleasure of meeting him at VO Atlanta last year, and he’s an incredible character as well as narrator.
Well, the other big event that most narrators would want to mark down their calendars is APAC, and that’s the Audio Publishers Association Conference. And that is on May 31st, 2018 in New York City, the location to be determined. But that is part of the Audio Publishers Association, which is an organization I highly recommend everybody join if they’re serious about doing audiobooks.
There are special events that only members can get into at APAC. So definitely look into that. If you want to join the APA or, like I said, Audio Publishers Association, it is at audiopub.org.
Definitely check that out. I think all of our panelists are members of that association.
And certainly advocates of it.
Yeah, exactly.
And you don’t have to be a member to go to APAC. So if that’s something you’re worried about, you don’t have to be. But like Paul was saying, you do get some extra perks for being a member.
And you even get some discounts for the registration of the event itself. So definitely look into that if you’re really serious about pursuing audiobook work full time.
So that pretty much wraps up this edition of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We want to thank all of our guests for the Audiobook Roundtable. Scott Brick, Steven Jay Cohen, Debra Deyan and Andi Arndt, and the irascible Sean Allen Pratt.
So thanks again to our wonderful panelists today. We learned so much, and I feel so invigorated, and I’m going to start narrating some chapters right now. So on behalf of our guests, Paul and myself, I hope you all have a wonderful day, guys.
Bye, everybody.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vomete