Paul Stefano

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 24 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So today we’ve got a little bit of a… We’re going to do things a little bit differently. We’ve actually got a two-part episode this time because we got so many…
A two-parter.
Oh my gosh, To Be Continued. Didn’t you already hate that when, like, back when it was kind of a novel concept? I was just like, no, I have to wait a whole nother week.
Except it always meant something special.
Usually it did. I think it’s overdone now.
Probably, but let’s just go back in time and pretend like we had something cool to talk about.
All right. Well, we do. We do.
In fact, we had such an amazing panel of international voice over talent, some from the US, like Christina Melitia and Christian Lance, some from… or in Sophia Cruz, some from all over the world, like Simone Kliass and Humberto Franco… Oh, that’s right.
Thank you for pronouncing his name correctly. So, Simone’s all the way in Brazil and Humberto’s all the way in Portugal. And we also got Susie Valerio, I hope I pronounced that correctly, who is also a Portuguese talent but living in the UK.
And so truly international sound there. And then…
Oh, God. And Sophia Cruz.
And of course… Well, I mentioned Sophia. Yes, so another US talent who specializes in bilingual Spanish and English voiceover.
So we had such a huge information-packed panel, we realized that we couldn’t possibly fit it into one episode and still have time for our hour-long rant. So we made it into two parts.
Well, we put it off more than we can chew, which is typical fashion for the way we do things. But nevertheless, it’s better for our listeners.
Yes, yes, indeed. So even more information. Because we know this is something that I’ve heard and it kind of makes me chuckle when I see it online.
When people feel like they can’t pursue work where they’re at. Because they feel like there’s still this idea that you have to be in New York or Chicago or LA. And if you’re not in any of those places, then you just shouldn’t even try and pursue voiceover.
Couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only are there regional agencies throughout the United States, but there’s all sorts of work that’s not necessarily agent-based, but people need voices for their projects. They might be individual businesses needing a phone message.
They might need corporate narration. There’s really… The opportunities are only limited by our imagination.
And your background doesn’t matter either. The other takeaway from this panel that most of you will hear is that no matter what accent you have, there’s a market for it, most likely.
Exactly. Exactly. Especially if you’re living in another country and pursuing voiceover within it.
So, we’ll get to our fabulous guests in just a few minutes. But before we do that, we have current events. So what has been happening with you, Sean?
Well, I’ve been doing a lot of work for GVAA recently, the Global Voice Acting Academy. Some of you guys know I kind of… I’m the membership liaison.
I kind of… I’m your go-to guy if you’re a member with us or if you’re interested in becoming a member with us. And we’ve gotten…
We’ve got all these great workouts and coaches and events coming, and I’m really excited. I got to do interviews with Joyce Castellanos. You might know her as the promo queen or the VO mama.
Just an incredibly sweet woman who’s been a casting director for promo, commercial, and narration for over a decade now. And she’s just a wonderful woman to work with. We had a lot of fun doing our interview session last weekend.
And then I also got to talk with a video game veteran, Brian Summer. He’s just an amazing character actor. He’s done a number of games for Telltale Games.
He’s worked on The Wolf Among Us, which is sort of based on the Fable series from DC Comics, or Vertigo, I forget, as well as The Walking Dead series, and just a number of video game titles reaching back a decade as well. And we also have a new dialect coach and speech therapist, Eliza Simpson. So we’re going to have an interview coming up in a couple weeks.
But I’m really excited about that, because people who know me know I have a penchant for accents. I just love… It’s just like oral candy for me.
So that’s A-U-R-A-L, not O-R-A-L.
Big difference. Ew.
Well, most candy is the oral type, right? I mean, yeah, you eat it. But we won’t go down that rabbit hole.
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. This is dangerous territory.
Danger, danger, Paul Stefano.
Moving on.
Moving on. But yeah, so I’ve been having a great time. I’ve been leading a lot more workouts, too.
It’s kind of funny because some people have actually approached me for my coaching rates, and I’m like, ah, I don’t market myself as a coach. I love directing people. I love helping people improve their performances, but I am not a coach.
But I appreciate the compliment. I really do. And on top of that, just my regular voiceover work.
I got a new… I’m actually trying to cast a project for one of my main clients right now for English Anyone, and they had a really unique commercial that they were trying to cast, because they wanted a native, like either Chinese American or Asian American actor, to convey a very authentic sounding Chinese accent at the beginning of the spot, and then transition into an almost neutral American accent by the end. So that’s a tough cookie to crack.
And I’ve got a few submissions in. What was that?
It’s a hell apropos based on our current episode.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I love that some people, like nobody was like, why does it just have to be this specific person? Everyone was just like, oh, this person would be great.
This person would be great. And I was like, oh, man, I love this community so much.
That’s great.
So that’s pretty much everything going on with me. What about you, Paul?
Well, I had a very busy couple of weeks, actually. I know you have. You’re right.
So I’m glad you asked. Last week was probably my busiest week since I’ve been in the business, which was weird because there was no real rhyme or reason to it other than the themes of constant effort and marketing. So I did a series of narration dubbing from Russian for videos on cryptocurrency.
That was interesting. Interesting. Yeah, it was a funny story because the way it came to me, it was from one of the freelance sites that I worked with, and I’d been on the project and they sent it to me.
There’s a lot of negotiations about what I could do and what I couldn’t do based on the bid as far as matching up the voice. They did not want to pay me to match up the voice with the Russian version. I offered based on a fair rate and they said, well, just do it however you would and we’ll match it up because I offered them a fair rate based on the GBA rate guide.
Thank you, thank you.
Chain drop.
And then they asked, does that include dubbing? And I said, no, here’s what that would entail and I offered them another rate. I basically charged two-thirds on top of my normal rate to sync to video.
Yeah, that’s an incredibly time-intensive service.
Yeah, it almost doubles the work. And depending on what the work is, I sometimes will actually double the fee. If it’s something I think it was going to be that long.
So they balked at that, but then said, fine, we’ll pay you the regular rate. So long story short, or too long already, I did that job and was paid for it last week. It was about five hours of audio, so that was pretty intense.
And then I also did a live session for kind of a weird request. It was a video game, at least that’s how it was pitched to me. And this came from a studio who I reached out to two years ago, 2016.
I sent them an audition. It was at that point for a, I think a radio ad. They said, no, no thanks, we have somebody already, but we’ll keep your information on file.
And I thought, sure, they will, you know, they’ll probably just recycle it and I’ll never hear from them again. Lo and behold, two years later, they come back to me and say, hey, we have a video game we’d like you to do. So let’s do a session this week.
So we dialed up the studio on Wednesday of last week. And we did the voice…
Was it Codogo Call, I guess?
Actually, we used Skype. It was just a directed session. They didn’t need to record on their end.
I recorded on my end. But we just used Skype for that. And it turned out it was a video game for a human resources department of a company, a very large company, actually, that cannot mention, sadly say, but you would know it if I did.
But anyway, we did the session.
Wait another two years. Maybe you’ll get permission.
Maybe, yeah. So it turned out to be a video game as an interactive way to train their employees, which I thought was pretty cool. I hadn’t really heard of that before.
Yeah, I believe it’s called gamification, or just turning instructional, especially e-learning materials, into more interactive, entertaining media.
Oh, really?
I’m all about that, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, it was a new field for me, but I enjoyed it. It was doing two different voices, an alien, and sort of the mission control of a space station.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, it would be great for that one.
Yeah, I actually did a job like that a couple of months ago as a mission control for another video game, so that was kind of in my wheelhouse. So that was done, did that last week. I finished my first book for Findaway, which I’m just waiting to come out.
Findaway Voices, they’re a publisher of audiobooks that is out there.
I’m with them as well, I haven’t heard from them in a while, but I am.
So I have my first book done, I think I’ve talked about it in other episodes, and I’m waiting for it to come out on Audible. It’s out on some of the other services out there like Playster and Librio.fm, but it’s not out on Audible yet, should be out there any day. They said there was some issue with the cover art that they had to fix.
So I keep checking frantically the Audible results to see if it’s out yet, and you can find it soon, it’s called The Nimble Dodger, or you can look for my name, Paul Stefano, obviously, on Audible or Amazon. And then on a related note, my daughter’s audiobook finally came out, it’s been published on Audible. It’s called Bianca Finds Her Bounce.
It’s a children’s story about a little girl who suffers with depression, and it’s now rated by Anna Stefano, A-N-N-A. So check that out, and you can buy it now on Audible. It has two reviews so far, they’re both five stars, so pretty excited about that.
And wow, what a heady topic to tackle for her first book.
Yeah, it was something that was pretty easy for her to identify with, so she picked it up and did the story. It’s only four minutes long, so it’s not like it was labor intensive, but still the first one, and the first one is always the most exciting.
Well, I mean, it was way smarter for her to do that. I mean, my first book was almost 200 pages, and it took me forever to complete. Yeah, I’m sure.
And the last thing I want to mention…
Oh, no, go ahead.
And the last thing I want to mention, and hopefully it’s still there by the time I release this, depends on how quickly I can edit it, but I’m currently featured on Voice Over Extra, thanks to John Florian. So that’s Voice Over with an X, tra.com, and I’m one of the featured articles on the front page right now talking about networking, so that was a lot of fun.
Yeah, and if you want an organic Voice Over textbook, basically, there’s no better resource than Voice Over Extra. I’ve said this a few times on the podcast, but when I really started pursuing Voice Over, it was one of the first sites I could find. I studied it for an entire year.
I read all of the current articles they had, and then whenever they had a new one, I would read that. They cover all different areas. They have Voice Over Tech, ideas for editing workflow, or just workflow in general, marketing, different performance techniques.
Studio setup. It’s an amazing resource, and it’s free. I highly, highly recommend it.
We’re still featured there. If you go to the resources section or the bottom right-hand column of the front page, the VO Meter is there, front and center, with a link to our website. So check that out, too.
Is it front and center? It’s not like bottom right, tiny little icon?
It’s bottom right, but it’s the first one in the list. So that’s pretty exciting.
I just don’t want all our podcast fame to go to our heads, you know.
Too late for that, obviously.
Too late for that. Paul’s head just grows three times every time I see him. It’s just massive now.
So that wraps it up for current events. But before, er, it would not be an episode of the VO Meter if we didn’t cover some…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
All right. So I’ll start off this time because I haven’t had one for a while. I’ve actually been good to my wallet and my budget.
But I tried to go out and buy an iPad Pro to do all of my script reading and annotating for a script prepped for audiobooks. And it failed miserably.
Well, I’d love to hear more about that because so many people were like… Some people had had similar issues with the previous iPad models and that was the biggest complaint is the styluses don’t work or I can’t mark things up as fluidly as just a pen and paper. And then when the iPad Pro came out, you started getting more positive reviews because it’s a bigger screen and the stylus works and what have you.
So I’d love to hear a negative experience for once.
Well, what happened to me, and it’s a little bit of can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I did get the Pro that has the Pencil support built in, and it came with a keyboard and a camera connection kit to allow you to plug in a USB card for transferring files. But what ended up happening was the stylus wasn’t really usable for some of the things I was hoping it would be, namely editing on the go. So I downloaded the Twisted Wave app and was hoping that I could use this as a mobile recording rig as well.
And the Pencil is really done for annotating and maybe signing documents like PDFs or Word documents. You can’t use it as a stylus replacement or a mouse replacement.
Oh, so like you can’t really drag and drop with it or anything like that?
So I was hoping I could use the Twisted Wave app and the Apple Pencil to drag the playhead in Twisted Wave and it didn’t work at all. All it did was… well, it didn’t do anything with the Pencil.
You still had to use your finger with the Twisted Wave app. Now, that’s not to say that Thomas, the developer, couldn’t change that in the near future, but for that, it still doesn’t work. The Pencil is really just for marking things up on the iPad Pro.
So if that’s all you want it for, to mark up scripts, to sign documents, then it’s still maybe a viable option. But what I use my portable setup for is an actual laptop replacement. So I take it with me on the road to record.
I use the stylus as a replacement for the mouse. So you can drag Windows, you can actually click on applications and icons and double click, open them up, use it as a mouse replacement. And that’s not what the iPad is set up for yet.
So in my case, it really wasn’t anything that I needed. And I spent a lot of money for it, where it was basically something just… that was a luxury that I did not need.
So I did get rid of it, and I’m back to using the Windows computer with the stylus. And I guess audacity at this point, when I’m on the road.
I wish you could say you were happy as a clam, but the disappointment is prevalent in your voice.
Well, it was an experiment. And the reason people love the iPads is because they just function so well. It had great battery life.
It’s super thin. It’s like an iPhone on steroids, just wider and bigger. And for that reason, it would have been great to be a portable solution.
But for me, it’s just not ready for prime time yet.
And depending on what you’re used to and what you can get used to, the iPad can be a great… I don’t know. I personally view it as a supplementary tool.
I like using it as a script reader as part of my mobile setup. But I admit, even though I’m pretty facile about using Twisted Wave with just my fingers and stuff like that, it’s fun if you’re on a bus ride and you have nothing better to do, just edit some tracks. But yeah, for most people, I understand that it’s not the most conducive or productive way to edit audio.
I’m so much faster on just a laptop. So I don’t really have a questionable gear purchase this month. I do have a questionable gear sale that I’m in the middle of.
And I’m actually, after hemming and heying about it for a couple of weeks now, I’m deciding to sell my Neumann TLM 103. And I can already hear the collective gasp. In the interwebs.
So let me first say that the mic itself is amazing. It sounds great. But I have to be far more selective about when I use it in comparison to my 416.
Because, I mean, my space is treated, but it’s not isolated. And usually, in rural Washington, that’s not a big problem. But I just realized that this thing has sat, this beautiful mic has sat in its case for six months.
And that’s an atrocomacy to me. So I really wanted it to go to someone who could get better use out of it. And so right now, somebody from an audiobook production house is talking with me about selling it to them.
We’re still negotiating a price, but hopefully it will work out in both of our favors.
Did you tell them the history behind it and this show?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, I didn’t tell him this one. But I will back up a little bit because it’s kind of relevant.
So, like I said, MySpace may not be the perfect one for a $1,000 condenser that can hear… The most common analogy I hear is that it can pick up a mouse farting in another state, and that’s pretty true. Yep.
But the 416, I mean, I live with my family. They don’t have to worry about being as noisy and stuff like that as long as we’re a few rooms apart. And no one’s ever complained about my audio.
And the thing is, it’s like I realized unless someone asks me to use a different mic, do I really need one? You know? Like, I’ve used the 416 for e-learning, audio books, all the things that they say you’re not supposed to be able to use it for, no one has complained.
So it really got me to think about that. And the truth is, if like I love the 103, but it’s not my dream mic, it’s not the one that my dream future studio features, if you will. And that one is actually a similar mic called the Gefele M930.
So you might know that…
Oh no.
Oh no. Oh no. And it’s so silly because it’s just like, if you’ve been following the podcast, I literally haven’t had a questionable gear purchase in months.
Well, that’s all about to change. It’s all about to change.
Well, I’m not going to go rushing out and buying everything, but the thing is, it’s just like thinking of your business in stages. What is the best use of that investment? You’ve got $1,000 sitting in a box that you’re not using when you could be reinvesting it in any other area of your business.
For example, my laptops need an upgrade. That would be great. Or you might need additional acoustic treatment.
So it really got me to kind of rethink and kind of see that I might have been putting the cart before the horse a little bit and just kind of reanalyze where I really want to take my business, where I want to take my studio. Well, you really wanted to try it. I did want to try it.
You’re right.
The way you came about it was the same way I came about it. I said, oh, there’s a good deal on a 1.0. Well, you know the story by now.
Well, we thought it was a 1.0, too, which would have been fine in this environment because I hear it’s got a more controlled, smaller pattern.
But you always want to try the 1.03 in your studio, just like I did, and that’s why we traded and I sent it to you. And now at least you’ve had that experience. You can say the 1.03 was blank for me, and it wasn’t this, and now I know.
Well, again, it was not the audio quality that was an issue. It was sort of like the user interface, I guess. The 416 is far more user-friendly to use, and it’s lighter, it’s low profile.
Heaven forbid if I drop it, I’m not going to have a heart attack. Like, you know? And also, I freaking hate the Neumann shock mount.
I’m sorry. It’s two pieces that you have to connect with elastic bands, and it’s $120 by itself. And I’m just like, this is not…
After moving from a Rycote custom one, I’m just like, no, I don’t like this at all.
I had to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to connect it when I got it shipped to me.
It’s one of those… I mean, they’re very traditional and ubiquitous. The spider mounts that you see everywhere.
Neumann tends to use them for a lot of their mics. But it’s just… I don’t know.
The technology has changed enough that you can have a little bit more… I mean, me, I love the Rycote mounts. I found out about it from Paul Stracuerda and Jordan Reynolds.
They’re just these great little… I think they even partnered with Rode for the new NT1 kit. But it’s just these little adjustable shock mounts.
It works really well. They’re nice and compact. They’re easy to figure out.
And it’s great. So you can already see my tech lust coming in droves now. But the truth is, I can get a similar sound or a different condenser for a third of the price.
And I doubt anyone will complain.
Or not. And just save your money, like you said, or invest it somewhere else more wisely.
Exactly, exactly. So I have a little bit more flexibility. I have room to aspire, room to dream now.
And if I can help another talent have a wonderful mic, all the power to me. So before we get into our international panel, actually our VO Meter stick this month is from the husband of one of our guests today. So that’s Jason Bermingham.
He’s married to the lovely Simone Kliass. And he talks about being an American working in a foreign country recording in English. And a little bit about being a sort of a husband-wife VO team as well.
So without further ado, Jason, take it away with your VO Meter stick.
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.
Paul, hi, it’s Jason Bermingham here in São Paulo, Brazil. Thanks for including me in this. I’m Simone’s husband, and Simone brought me into the voice over market probably about ten years ago.
We met when we were both working with Pay TV, and she kept encouraging me to do voice over because it’s a big market, and I had no idea there was English language voice over in Brazil, and today it’s my main gig. Now, I’m sure Simone talked a lot about the work I do in English, and we’ve done presentations about our work at VO Atlanta with our accession for voice over in the global community, but one thing we don’t talk a lot about is the challenges of working together as a couple. You know, we have our own home studio, which we’ve built ourselves, and often I record Simone for international jobs, which means I’m basically her sound engineer.
Which can be a little trying sometimes because you get a client on the line and you don’t really want to introduce yourself as Simone’s husband because that’s not your role in that job. You’re basically doing what you do every day, which is working as the sound engineer, playing back takes, making choices for editing. So often I’m just introduced as Jason the sound guy.
However, sometimes during the sessions we let our intimacy show probably more than we should without really thinking about it, and Simone starts calling me Amor. And we start having a little bit more intimate conversations. Sometimes I think clients probably wonder what’s going on in that studio in Brazil.
But then if we ever catch ourselves doing that, then we do say, Jason is also my husband, he’s not just my sound engineer and everyone’s relieved. But it’s a challenge working as a couple. It’s wonderful.
It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done. We grow together, we work together. And I help Simone promoting her work in the United States, and she helps me promoting my work in Brazil.
So, we grow as a couple, and it’s been a wonderful, wonderful journey.
Thank So that wraps up our questionable year purchases, as well as our current events. And we have such great content coming up, we don’t want to waste any more time, so let’s get right to our Zoom room with our International Roundtable.
Hi, everyone, we are joining from Zoom right now, and I’m so excited because we are doing our first truly international panel. We have guests from three different continents, four different countries, and so we’re just gonna go ahead, rather than me introduce them, I’m gonna let them do that themselves. So why don’t we start off with Ms. Sophia Cruz.
Hi, thank you so much, Sean and Paul, for having us. And really touching on the international aspect of voiceovers, I feel that there isn’t enough information about this, so thank you so much for taking the time to have us here. My name is Sophia Cruz, and I’m a Los Angeles-based voice actor.
And I have been doing voiceover for the past 10 years as a professional talent. And I’m really excited to share about what it is that I do. I was born in Mexico, in the city of Orizaba, Veracruz.
And that is where I hail from. And obviously now I’m in the United States as an American. So I call myself the perfect blend of Mexican and American, because that is what I am.
I’m a bicultural talent, understanding both sides of the, you know, the countries and everything that comes with that.
Very cool. Thank you. All right.
Ms. Simone Kliass.
First of all, thank you so much for having me at your podcast. It’s a great show. And congrats.
And it’s an honor for me being with the other talents that you invited. They are great people and wonderful professionals. So it’s a pleasure.
So I’m Brazilian, as you can hear. I live in São Paulo. I have been…
I’m an actress since I was nine years old. And I’m in the voiceover area since 99. So yeah, basically that.
But there’s a lot of things to talk during this podcast.
Well, absolutely. I had no idea you almost had two decades of experience with that. All right.
Up next, we have Humberto. Wonderful. And what about you, Humberto?
My name is Humberto Franco. I live in Portugal. I’m a Voice Over Talent full-time that speaks English, non-American, non-British.
So it’s an international English. I speak Portuguese from Portugal, which is different from Portuguese from Brazil. And I also speak Spanish, but it’s a mix of Spanish from Spain, from Latin America.
So it’s also an international Spanish.
My name is Susie Valerio. I live in England, and I record in Brazilian Portuguese and in international English. I also speak Spanish, so I can do it like I have recorded in Spanish, but my main languages are Brazilian Portuguese and international English.
So thanks to everybody for joining us again. As Sean said, we’re really excited about this panel, and it’s something I think will benefit all of our listeners greatly. So the reason this came about was in Rio Atlanta, I was talking to Humberto, actually having lunch with him, and he was talking about the difficulty he had as a bilingual talent, specifically speaking Portuguese and being a native of Portugal, and looking for jobs and finding that there was a greater demand or a lot of demand for Brazilian Portuguese.
And later on, at Rio Atlanta, I met Simone, obviously, and said, hey, I think I have an idea for a topic. So that was where the initial conversation came up, and I think it’s a great one that we can tackle. But really, the first question I had for all of you is, as bilingual talent, which is your mother tongue, and which of the voices do you use more?
Is it your mother tongue or is it your region now where you’re living? So let’s start with Sophia.
Sure. So my story is a little bit unique, I think, in the sense that I was born in Mexico, but I was raised in the United States. However, no one, being an illegal immigrant in the United States, we didn’t speak English, obviously.
And so my mother actually to the state does not speak any English. So I only talk to my mom in Spanish. So when you grew up with a family that doesn’t speak, you’re in a brand new country, you don’t even understand the language.
It definitely presents itself as challenges. So I say that to say this, that I feel that I’m Native in both because to a certain degree, I am. I had no ability to speak English.
There was no ESL back in the day, not that I’m super old, but there just wasn’t those resources available in my elementary school. And so I didn’t learn English until ESL finally came to my school, which was in third grade. So up until third grade, however old you are then, seven, eight, I didn’t speak any English.
I only spoke Spanish. So my native tongue is Spanish, 100%. However, from third grade to eighth grade is how long it took me to master English and master it without an accent.
I feel that then I switched to natively speaking English because I work so hard to not have the accent and really learn all there is to learn about English. So from that side, I feel like I have to. And so to answer your question, I actually speak both fluently and well.
I get requested to speak both on a very frequent basis. And thankfully, the voice over market in the United States is to this point in time in 2018, a very important commodity that did not exist when I first started in voice over back in 2005. In fact, in 2005, I was dreaming for the day that today we have, which is that you can speak English and Spanish in the same project, voice over project, commercial or e-learning or app or whatever.
So today, I actually get requested to speak both of them in the same project. And I do book on the same amount of English and Spanish on a regular basis. So both of my work is 50% English and 50% Spanish.
That’s great. So a quick follow-up question that’s a little off script, but because you brought it up. My great grandmother was from Spain and grandmother was an influence Spanish speaker.
And she, my mom, tells stories about encouraging her not to speak Spanish outside of the house. Is that something your mom did as well? I know you mentioned that you only speak to her in Spanish, but outside the house in school, did she encourage you to speak English?
I remember my mom saying my grandmother would always be saying, English, Barbara, English.
No, I did not have that, actually. And I know there’s a really successful voice actor in Los Angeles. Her name is Silvia Villagran.
And she has that story where her parents told her she could not speak English in the house. I did not have that. My grandparents and my mom all were happy once I was able to speak English because I became the official translator in the house.
I translated everything, and every meeting, every work, I went to my grandparents’ work to do their employee reviews. I translated everything. My grandfather thought I was going to grow up to be a US embassy official translator because I translated everything, every document.
And that’s why I actually learned to not like Spanish because it just became such a burden to me. I mean, when you think about a small child having that kind of responsibility. And so I didn’t like it.
And so I kind of shied away from like translating even to this day. I have an official translator on my staff, Sophia Cruz, VO, because I don’t want to translate anything ever again. I mean, obviously I do it.
But yeah, but no, I was not discouraged. I was actually encouraged because I became a valuable asset to my family being the only person who spoke English.
Interesting. Well, thank you for that. And Simone, which is your native tongue and which do you use more often?
My native tongue is Portuguese and I live in Brazil. So most of my jobs I record in Portuguese or some of them, like Sophia, I can record in both languages, but only when they need a strong and Brazilian accent. Because I don’t record…
If they request native speaker, I can do that. I have a strong accent, so I have been doing, for example, I’m the voice of the International Airport in São Paulo, Brazil, and I do in Spanish, Portuguese and English with a lot of accent, with my accent. So because they requested that, because they said this is a Brazilian airport, so the voice has to have accent.
So, I think it’s a wonderful thing nowadays that people accept and the market accepts our accent. And I have been doing the same thing for Latin Airlines. I’m the voice of the Latin Airlines, airplanes in English and Portuguese with accent.
So I think it’s a wonderful thing nowadays.
I get quite a lot of requests for English. And I would say that it’s now shifting. It used to be that most of the requests I used to get used to be for strong Brazilian or Latin.
I still get quite a lot of that. But it used to be that I would do maybe 80% in Brazilian Portuguese and 20% English. And then as time has passed, now at the moment, I would say that it’s perhaps 60% in Brazilian and 40% in English, sometimes even 50-50.
I also get a lot of requests for accented English. But I will say 50-50 would be like the ratio of work in Portuguese and in English. And I’ve been, because I’m trying to reach out and get more into the American market, that English numbers are growing and have been growing since the beginning.
So I think it will be more English than Portuguese really soon.
That’s wonderful. And that actually touches on our next question. And you’re welcome to jump in this too, Sophia.
So, Simone, you’ve already explained a little bit yourself, but I’m just curious for the rest of our panel, when you’re asked to do a voiceover in English, do they ask for an accent or do they want more of a neutral, like more standard American dialectal English? And Simone, as you said, they actually request the accent. So I’m curious to hear what some of our other panelists have to say about that.
Well, here in the UK, actually, I have to say that most of the stuff I do in English is not for the UK, interestingly. Lately, I’ve been getting more auditions for America. Here in the UK, they are a little bit old-fashioned in that respect, I would say, maybe, I don’t know, if old-fashioned is the best way of explaining it, either that or maybe they’re not as diverse as you would get with the international market, because I feel that in America, you have more of a sense of a global market, whereas here, the work is more sort of local.
So you don’t really hear, you know, many accents on TV, for example, on TV commercials. Yes, if it’s a French product, you have a French accent during the commercial. If it’s an Italian product, they will have an Italian.
But unless the product is specifically from a country, they will use sort of a British accent. So yeah, at the moment, I would say that most of my work in English is actually for clients in the US.
How about you, Humberto, is there a request for English specifically in Portugal?
Not specifically, in Portuguese I work with a couple of production houses, two or three that give me regular work. All the rest of the Portuguese work that I do is through production houses in Germany, in the UK., some in the United States.
And then I get the feeling that the majority of the work I do in English is for the United States. For some reason, they like my accent that you cannot tell from where I am. I’m understood, but they don’t know exactly where I come from.
So the majority of the… I believe all of it goes to the United States, the work that I do in English.
That’s a spec I see a lot, even on my editions, where it says, we’d like him to have an accent not necessarily discernible. He has to be sort of mysterious, which drives me insane, because I don’t have any of that. I’m wondering why my agent is sending it to me.
No, I mean, I find… I was honestly so amazed in Atlanta to find out that there’s this whole massive wide world out there, because I mean, I’m with lots of agents here in London. A lot of my work is in London.
The stuff I do in Portuguese is always through agents. I have very good agents because as a foreign voice, I can be represented by many. I’m with the best guys in London.
I do have amazing agents, and I get really good jobs in Brazilian Portuguese. However, somewhere along the casting process, they don’t even think of anyone that is not British for adverts and stuff here. It’s just incredible.
It’s completely different to America. This whole thing of the mysterious international hasn’t really happened here yet. I’m hoping that it will change, you know.
If not, I might need to move across the ocean to the other side.
We’d love to have you.
I had people telling me, you know, if you lived here in the United States, you would book a lot more jobs than you are booking in Europe, because a lot of them, you have to be in the studio to record.
Get a flat together.
For instance, Sean knows we had a training session with MJ Lalo, and she just then emailed me and said, send me your character demo, because your accent is what a lot of people are looking for. I said, I don’t have a character demo, I have to do one. So that is the thing, that’s why I believe that the English with, not a Latin accent, but that accent that you cannot tell where it’s from, is being requested more and more and more in the United States.
And in my case, that’s good.
Yeah, I mean, like what Simone said, that I’m really grateful that finally we’re at a stage that accents are welcome instead of seen as something negative, because I was told that I would never be able to do any kind of national work because I have an accent. And so I’m thankful for that shift, and it’s a beautiful shift. And so today I would say that it’s not so much that they want an accent, as much as they want that there is a difference in…
It’s not general American standard anymore, it’s the coveted voice, that they want some ethnicity to your sound, and it’s not that it has to be a heavy accent. And so I can only speak to the Mexican, Hispanic accent, because that’s the stuff that I see mostly. But for the Mexican, there is…
You had said this earlier, and I didn’t answer your question, but there’s neutral Spanish, then there’s Latam, Latin American Spanish, and then there’s Mexican Spanish. Obviously, I specialize in Mexican Spanish, being Mexican. And so they will ask for an English with a slight accent, accented English.
I’ve had to relearn that. Never did I think that was going to happen. I had to relearn how to speak English with an accent, and that is now more…
I see that more frequently than I ever have. Now, most often, though, they don’t want it super heavy. Like when I go into like, when I was two, my mother brought me to America.
No, they don’t want it that crazy, right? They just want me to sound like me, which is I’m kind of a blend. I am a blend.
I don’t sound 100% American. I don’t necessarily sound like I’m Mexican unless I’m going to go, you know, or something like that. So they just want you to sound you.
And so that’s the beautiful thing is that I can sound like myself. I don’t even have to, quote unquote, put on an accent. I can just sound like myself.
And they’re like, oh, that’s good. That’s exactly what we’re looking for, even though I don’t really have an accent. So I think it’s beautiful and I’m really thankful.
And then there are times where they do want it more heavy. So it just depends on the project and how much they want it to be, quote unquote, neutralized and how much they want it to be depending on the market. But yes, there are more and more we’re getting asked for that English with the slight Hispanic accent.
And I want to add something. Can I, Sean?
Please.
They request me the accent in my case because I have accent. I am different than Sophia. I have a strong accent.
So, but for example, my husband is Jason, and he lives in Brazil with me and he’s American, as you know, Jason Bermingham, and he records, he records only in English here all the time, and they ask him to do a neutral accent. So, yeah, he has been recording for, I think, almost 10 years, and he has to neutralize his English because the jobs that he records here in Brazil, most people, it’s their second language, English. So he has to adjust and make it very clear.
So I think if you want to enter in the Latin America market, you should learn how to neutralize your accent to get more jobs.
Very interesting. I’m sure it’s something a lot of our listeners haven’t really considered or thought about. And where is Jason from, Simone?
Does he have a regional dialect?
He is from Oregon, but he was raised in California.
He might have a little bit of a Western… Not when you call it a drawl, but…
Yeah, he was raised in a farm. And in Nevada, in Phelan, Nevada, and in Paso Robles, California. So, he has to learn how to neutralize his accent to get lots of jobs.
Interesting. Very cool.
This is very interesting for you to have in mind.
So, I’m curious, and you can talk about this for both your native work and your English speaking work. Are there specific markets or genres that you specialize in for your various kinds of jobs? You mentioned that with your accented English work, you did a lot of work for Latin American Airlines, but are there any other large brands or markets or areas of Voice Over that you specialize in for each language?
So, I do a lot of radio commercials, and for my radio commercials, I do both English and Spanish, equally the same. And I also do a lot of telepony, and that’s also English and Spanish. I just booked a very big contract, e-learning contract for Spanish only.
But I do equally as much work in English as well. So, for me, I’m really half and half for everything. I also did an app, which I’m really thankful to say for the American Bar Association, for one of a kind for the Hispanic population in the United States.
I can’t disclose exactly what it is yet, but it’s very, very important, and I’m really thankful that I can lend my voice. And they had me do it for both English and Spanish, which I thought was really interesting, because I thought I was only going to do the Spanish aspect of the rollout, and they wanted me to do both the English and Spanish. So I would say that I find myself equally doing the same amount of work, whether it’s an app.
I’ve done Texas Speech. I was a voice for a GPS system in the Texas, and that was all Spanish. And they wanted someone that was authentically Mexican, even though they didn’t make me pronounce the words the way that they should.
So instead of saying Alameda Avenue, they wanted me to say Alameda Avenue, which I thought was very interesting. But nonetheless, I find myself really equally doing both English and Spanish. And I don’t know…
I think it’s how you brand yourself, and I have branded myself as that seamless, flawless English to Spanish voiceover. And so that works. It’s worked for me really, really well.
And I find myself booking those jobs on a consistent basis, which makes me really happy because that’s truly what I wanted to do. So I do commercials, e-learning, corporate narration, telephony, apps, text-to-speech projects all the time in both languages. Oh, and I have to say, I’m also gearing up to do the political season as well.
Ooh, very cool.
Great question. I have never thought about that, but you’re right. I do different jobs in different languages.
In my native language, I do commercials, I narrate TV shows, I’m the voice of Sky on air shows. I do promos in Portuguese. I do everything.
Not everything, but I can do much more in my native language. And in English, I do telephony, corporate videos. And now I’m thinking while I’m talking, I’m doing the projects that I’m recording voice over for virtual reality.
I have to do them in English as well because of the international market. So I’m doing this. But when they need a native speaker, I recommend Sophia and other friends, because I really think that it’s very important to know what kind of jobs you can do and what kind of jobs you can’t do.
And you have to recommend the right person. And that way, as you talked to me before we were live, we can have a strong relationship with our clients if you recommend a right person for the job. So I think we have to think what are our strengths.
That’s very important. Like you said, you look a lot better to a potential client if you recognize that I might not be the best person, but Sophia, she’s exactly what you’re looking for. And if you’re right, you both just look like superheroes to the clients.
That’s an incredible point, Simone. Thank you for bringing that up.
And vice versa. I never would try to even start with Portuguese. I know my limits.
I can do Latin American Spanish, but if they wanted to be… I know a ton of people in the Latin American market that could do it better than me. And if I felt that project would be better suited for something, I absolutely recommend people, refer people all the time as well.
It is important for everybody to know what their strong suits are. This is what’s so great about the Voice Over community, is that we have each other and we have a strong community and we know the people that are good in our community and we can refer them. I’m so appreciative of all the relationships I’ve been able to build and having Simone and Jason and knowing them and obviously Paul and Sean, you as well.
It’s good to know people and know what their strengths are so that you have an ability to refer somebody because we were saying that earlier. When someone refers me a client, I want to make sure that that client will go back to the person that referred me and feel incredibly grateful for having recommended me because then they know they got a true professional and I treat every client like they’re gold because they are.
And not only Sophia, but I can refer Susie because she speaks Portuguese and English fluently. She’s native in both languages.
That’s great. Well, both of you actually, Sophia and Simone, you answered my next question a little bit, so I’m going to rephrase it. Because what I wanted to know is when you see specs for a job and it says, in Sophia’s case, Latin American, Spanish, or in Simone’s case, it may say native Portuguese, do you ever try and pull it off and say, well, this person doesn’t really know what they’re asking?
I’m going to do it as me and hope that it gets through. Or is it something you absolutely will not do and refer to someone who you know is a native in that dialect? And Humberto, if you’re there, you can jump in on that too.
Never. Never. Because, for example, Portuguese from Portugal is totally different than Portuguese from Brazil.
I prefer speaking English with Humberto than in Portuguese, for example. Yeah, it’s like American and British English. Or I think it’s worse.
I don’t know. What do you think, Humberto?
I would compare Portuguese from Portugal and Portuguese from Brazil, like American and Scottish. The same base of the language, but instead of potatoes, they say nippies. So if you don’t know, if you never lived there, you won’t be able to understand them.
So if I go to Brazil and I speak my Portuguese that I speak daily here, for sure 75-80% of the people will not understand me.
And that’s really important. I think that that’s one of the things I would like to say, because I think that it’s important for us to remember that hopefully the buyer is an educated buyer and they’re going to know the difference. Maybe the casting director won’t know the difference, but the end buyer will.
And so trying to portray something that you’re authentically not, it’s going to come through and you’re going to look bad. And there’s no point in looking bad when you can look great and you can refer somebody who is qualified. So I too would agree that I never submit.
If I’m not qualified on the specs, I will not submit, or I would absolutely refer somebody else who would be exactly what the client’s looking for. So I see a lot of people for the Mexican market, for example. So I would just say like Mexican Spanish has become very popular in the United States.
It is the most requested form of Spanish just because there is such a big Mexican population here. And I’ve noticed that some other people who are not Spanish, native Mexican Spanish speakers, will say, well, it doesn’t matter. I speak neutral Spanish anyway, or I’m from Latin America.
That will work. And it’s like, no, it won’t. It actually won’t work because I know when someone isn’t a true native Mexican Spanish speaker, like I can hear it.
And so it’s just important. There’s no reason why we need to pretend to be somebody we’re not. I think it’s important to embrace our ethnicity and do that well and then let whoever has the right language, the right accent, the right everything do what they do best.
So that’s my two cents on the subject.
Does it matter based on genre? So for instance, eLearning, Glefiny, obviously they’re looking for an accurate dialect. If it’s a character, animation, does that change your point of view?
Maybe creating a voice anyway?
Right. I think… and Christina and Christian would be definitely the ones I’m sure they’re going to speak up on this, but I would say if you’re creating a voice, that’s a different story because you can definitely…
and actually one of the ways that I view accents is the way that Pamela Vandewaay teaches it, which is it’s not about neutralizing your accent. It’s about learning how to add on the accent that you want to have because who you are, who we all are, we all have accents. It’s not about my accent is better than yours.
It’s about learning how to add on the right accent that books you that next job that you want. So I would say with animation, absolutely, I can learn how to become a tortuga for Latin American versus the Spanish version, the Mexican one. So I think that there is room for you to learn how to add on other accents.
And if you master it, then absolutely, if you’re the right fit for the job, it should always be who the right voice is for the job. Now, if they’re looking for the right native person to have those skills, then it’s up to the native person to ramp up those skills so that we can book the job. So we shouldn’t be upset if somebody else who isn’t quote unquote native books the job if they have the right skill set.
So if we want more jobs to come to the native people, then it’s up to us to build up our skill set so that we are bookable and not find fault in whoever did book the job.
I heard somebody once say that, you know, like a bad imitation of somebody or a bad imitation of an accent when you’re talking about cartoons, probably it’s an amazing character. So I believe that Casey is very specific. But, you know, regarding still, for instance, the Portuguese from Portugal and Portuguese from Brazil, I receive a lot of scripts that they say it’s Portuguese native.
And I start to read and immediately I see that this is not written in Portuguese from Portugal. So many times the clients don’t have a clue. They just know that they have to do in X number of languages.
And Portuguese is Portuguese, so it will be understood in everywhere. And that’s not the way it is. I think we need to educate the clients also.
I agree with Sophia and with Humberto, because I also get a lot of stuff that is actually for European Portuguese. So, no, I wouldn’t try and just try and pull it off. I would speak to the client, if it is in Portuguese, and explain and say, look, it’s very different.
Because sometimes they don’t realize that actually the different accents are even there. So, I would try, first of all, approach them, speak to them. I do actually have a pretty good Portuguese accent from Portugal.
I have a lot of Portuguese family. So, I have recorded sometimes in an emergency, but I always say, I’m not native, I’ll give you a sample, you can pass it on to the final client, but if they want to go with my voice, then yes, but I’m always very upfront because I think it’s completely different, it’s a totally different accent. And if I see something that is Portuguese from Portugal, I wouldn’t attempt to do it without telling the client that I am Brazilian.
I think it’s sort of similar with the Spanish as well, because it is very different, they’re almost different languages, I would say. And certainly I would not try to pretend that I’ve got a Spanish accent, because I can’t pull it off as a native. You know, to my ears it doesn’t sound right.
That’s fascinating. And Humberto’s metaphor of comparing American English to Scottish English is perfect. That crystallizes my mind perfectly, because whenever I’ve spoken to someone from Scotland, it is like they’re speaking a completely different language.
And I will… Can I add in this two cents, because I think this is important. One of the things that I disagree with Spanish Voice Over Colleagues is the purity of language, of Spanish.
Because our job is to… My job is to give the best Spanish performance I can give to whoever is requesting… whatever client is requesting it.
But by the same token, I’d like to use the example, in the United States, there are a lot of people that book a British English that aren’t Native British, and from a Native British standpoint, their English sucks. But the market in the United States bears that kind of British accent as acceptable. It’s not a purest…
in any way, shape or form, it sounds awful to the UK people, but in the United States, it’s a marketable British accent. The same happens with Spanish. And so it’s really important for me to say this because there’s a lot of disagreement within the Spanish voice over community.
Oh, Sophia, the way you speak Spanish isn’t as good as it can be because you’re not super pure, you didn’t grow… you know what I mean? And it’s like, well, that might be true, but the market bears the kind of Spanish that I speak, which is this blend of being raised here and being born in another country and having that immigration factor built into my Spanish speaking.
And so there’s a market for that. And so I just want to make that clear because there is a lot of debate about this, but our job is to just… I’ve been working on my Spanish actually for the last five years, knowing that I was going to enter the Spanish market again.
And so I had to polish it up, for sure I had to polish it up. But there was this debate early on that, well, you’re not 100% pure, so therefore you shouldn’t be working in Spanish. And that’s like…
you can’t say that because the market bears the kind of Spanish… you know, that’s like saying somebody recently recorded a spot that was kind of like a Spanglish version of Spanish and English, and that’s acceptable too. So we are not the ones that get to say what’s acceptable.
It’s what the client is really looking for. And as long as we’re honoring what the client wants to the best of our ability, at the end of the day, that’s what pays the bills for them, is that they’re looking to connect to people that are like me from both countries, blended together, if they wanted to market to the Mexican people in Mexico, it’s even going to be a different Spanish than the one that we offer here in the United States and vice versa. So every market has its own need and marketability of different accents, and that’s something to keep in mind as well.
The thing with the Portuguese that is quite interesting is actually, that doesn’t happen at all. Like in Brazil, if you have someone that has an accent from Portugal, that will never be, you know, it just doesn’t work. People don’t even understand.
And same token, if I record something for Portugal, they will understand me, but the market doesn’t want my accent and the clients are not aware of that. And also, I think there’s one thing I’ve noticed quite a lot on a few sites is people, and I’m sure you get that with Spanish as well, people that speak Portuguese, I mean, you know, that speak Portuguese to a very good standard, but they’re actually selling themselves as bilingual when actually we can hear that they are not native speakers and that again in Brazil, for example, wouldn’t work because we don’t have that kind of in our market that doesn’t work. Even accents within Brazil, people from the Northeast will find difficult to work in the main markets because their accent, even though it’s Brazilian, it’s not the accent that sells.
So I think it’s a bit more, you know, with the Portuguese accent is a bit more specific, I guess.
Yeah, and that’s a good point. It’s just important for everybody to understand their market and what accents are really what that market bears, so that you are marketing yourself intelligently and will actually book the work that you’re marketing. Because I also specialize in marketing, so I have to say that.
You know, like, if you know how to market yourself well and your brand is exactly what you bring to the table, you’re going to book way more work than if you pretend to be something that you’re not. So I think it’s really important to understand the market that you’re marketing to and understand your own skill set, so that you can be able to sell yourself well. And book work.
Exactly, like Sophia said, because, Susie, I brand myself, my marketing is Portuguese, and when I talk and when I speak English, with a strong accent, strong Brazilian accent. Now, this is my brand, this is my marketing, so if I have a job with these characters, I can do it, but if not, I recommend I refer you, Sophia, you know, because you don’t have an accent. But talking about character animation, like Paul Esquedas, yeah, in this situation, we can do, we can try to do other things, we can try, always being honest, because I think the honesty is the rule number one that we have to have, but we can try in animation, you know.
And you need to be honest with yourself. If I try to record in Brazilian, in Portuguese from Brazil, you know, I’ve seen Brazilian soap operas since I was, I was born, basically. So, and they were very, very popular in Portugal.
And that’s why I can, you know, I can, joking around and messing around with friends, speak like Brazilian, you know, with the accent. And if you listen to Brazilian with Portuguese from Portugal, it’s like one is spoken, the other one is, it sounds like a song. You know, it’s very melodic, Portuguese from Brazil.
It’s, I usually do this comparison to this Portuguese from Portugal. It’s like a cube, it’s square, you know, like straight lines. And from Brazil, it’s like a circle is round.
It’s a round melodic language. So I would never emulate, but there are unfortunately a lot of people emulating Portuguese from Brazil. And when I listen to that, it’s like, wow, don’t you have ears?
Don’t you have self-pride? That’s, you know, I speak Spanish. I was hired once to do a TV commercial in Spanish for a South American country.
And I said, are you sure you want me to do this? And the client said, yeah, I want your Spanish with that accent that is not from Spain. It’s not from anywhere.
Okay, I’m okay with that. I can do that. You know, at this moment, I’m doing an e-learning recording and I am a guy speaking English with a Latin accent.
Latin is a broad thing. It’s like I’m Portuguese, I’m Latin, you know. So, but if it’s something specific, if I get an audition saying, you know, like English with Mexican accent, I cannot touch it because I don’t have a clue about the Mexican accent, like Sophia said, you know.
So I’m not going to touch it because I’m going to waste time recording the audition, and then the client hears it and say, oh man, this guy is trying to get some money and probably will take my name off his list forever. Why take that chance? It’s crazy.
Well, it’s good to hear that some of the truisms of Voice Over is coming through in the international market as well, and that you be true to yourself and market your own skills. For instance, I wouldn’t try to do an audition for a 9-year-old boy because I’m going to sound ridiculous, and it’s no different if I was trying to pull off a different language that wasn’t native to me or at least trained very, very well. So, to move on to our next question, let’s talk about some of the other challenges that are involved in being a bilingual talent, as well as some of the benefits that you enjoy being able to speak more than one language.
Anyone who wants to start?
It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s like, you know, this year I went and I met all of you in VO Atlanta.
Like, I’m trying to, you know, like, trying to get in a market that I don’t understand. But yeah, I’m actually, I speak three languages fluently. So, I want to use this broad spectrum that I have, you know, I have my market.
It’s not focused in one point because I speak all these languages. I have like a huge horizon where I want to reach. And I want to try to improve in getting into this market.
Even once I spoke with, I believe it was with Christina Melizia, and I asked her about, you know, do you think I can get like, can you advise me an accent coach so I can improve my accent? And the answer was, why you want to lose what you have that is unique? Why?
Don’t do it. So my English is this one. My Portuguese is native, and my Spanish is a mix of Spanish that I learned when I was in Galicia in Spain from working with people from Colombia.
And you know, it’s like a fruit salad. You know, everything is mixed, and I can pull exactly what I want. And many times the client hears it, and yeah, it’s different.
It will work for me, and that’s it. But it’s a tough job. And just try…
I just want to be myself. People will recognize my voice if they don’t see me, because they already know my accent and say, oh, that’s Humberto. And that’s amazing.
That’s amazing.
Yeah, I would… Gosh, I just… I can’t…
I hope this makes it to the final podcast, but I cannot stress enough how important it is to love what you bring to the table. Like everything. The beauty…
there’s beauty in not belonging 100% to one language, to one country, because you become this beautiful blend of all things, and that’s what makes us unique. And I think the challenge is, or at least I can speak to myself, the challenge for me was when I wasn’t willing to accept that, when I was bent on becoming 100% American because, gosh, I was so tired of getting bullied and being told that I don’t belong and that I’m not welcomed here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I ran away from my heritage and wanting to embrace this new one, and it wasn’t until I finally accepted, no, I am a mix of the two and that’s okay.
And not only is it okay, it’s awesome because it’s who I am. And so the beauty has come finally accepting that, including all the naysayers who thought your Spanish isn’t good enough, your English isn’t good enough. Like there’s a thing in Mexico called La India Maria ni de aquí ni de allá, but it doesn’t matter.
I am from both. And so for me, the challenge was when I wasn’t willing to accept it now that I have, it’s incredibly beautiful. And I book a lot of work with everything that I bring to the table today.
And that’s what makes me unique. And that’s why I love what Humberto said. Absolutely, don’t get rid of what makes you unique.
Add on additional things that you want because you want to book more work, but never change what makes you unique. Because if you can accept yourself, you’re going to see a lot more success because the confidence that you will bring to the table with your clients is going to be unlike any… I have clients who think I’m African American.
Seriously, I do because they don’t know where to place my accent. They’re like, well, she sounds not neutral, so she must be African American. I don’t care what you call me, just book me.
You know what I mean? You want ethnicity and ambiguity? Sure, I’ll be that.
And then I tell them I’m from Chicago. Oh, that’s why you sound that way. You’re from Chicago.
I don’t care. I could be from New York. Just book me.
So that’s the beautiful thing is that you can be booked for whatever the client wants you to be. Sure, that’s what I am. No problem.
I mean, I find for me, it’s quite similar. I’ve been in England for a very long time. And so obviously my accent has become more British as time progresses.
But here they booked me for Portuguese because it’s my native language. Even though I’ve been here for 30 years, what is my native language? And I’m now getting booked less for English because obviously I don’t sound as Brazilian as they would like me to sound because they sort of imagine someone with a stronger accent.
So for a while I was kind of trying to think about where do I kind of fit in because I come from an acting background. So obviously that has toned down my accent a little bit. To the English, I still sound foreign, but they can’t really place me.
And here they don’t really have the diversity you guys have in America of this sort of international accent. It’s not really quite here in England yet. Which to me was a revelation when I got to Atlanta and people were all mesmerized by my accent.
Because I thought, wow, awesome, there’s a lot of work out there for people that can’t be placed. So I’m feeling super happy at the moment because I’m thinking, okay, so I am not actually a bilingual Brazilian. I have international English.
I kind of feel that I kind of found my accent and hopefully that will reflect in me booking international jobs, I guess. Because the amount of times I get it in English, I have to change my accent and pretend that it’s a bit stronger and then they think it’s too much. It’s quite a tricky place, like no man’s land kind of thing.
Susie, I have to tell you that your Portuguese is amazing. And you don’t have accent. I was impressed by your Portuguese.
I talked to you in Portuguese and you don’t have accent. I don’t know how, because you don’t live here. But your Portuguese is…
yeah, you’re totally… You can book jobs in Portuguese, whatever job is, because your Portuguese is amazing, really. Yeah, really.
You don’t have accent.
I mean, I do. There’s a lot of stuff in Portuguese happening here in England. So, you know, by default, that’s kind of what I do the most.
But I do… like today, I had a job for the BBC that they left me on a pencil for ages. And then in the end, they went with someone else because they felt that, oh, no, you don’t really sound kind of Latin enough for what we need.
So I’m just now kind of trying to find my feet in the sense that, okay, I’ve just done a new demo, completely new demos in English, focusing on this sort of nondescript international voice.
Yeah, because your English has a British accent. Your English has.
So, the voice of the world, your English sounds British, just so you know. What?
But actually even here, because sometimes people think I am from different places in the United Kingdom. Like even them, they can’t really tell where I’m from. Like they think I’m from here because I look British.
Yeah. So, there’s that kind of confusion when I go like, Oh, actually I’m Brazilian. They go like, what?
Because it’s sort of… Then I kind of… I think that’s what it is.
If I didn’t look… If I looked more Brazilian, then maybe they would perceive me differently, even though I’m working with voice.
You know, for instance, if I met Susie on the street and I spoke with Susie, I would know that she’s from Brazil for one reason. For the end of some words. Like, a British would say, will.
And Susie says, will. The final L is round.
No, but it could be from will. That’s the thing.
Here they think I’m from will. But it’s like I told you, everybody that’s… Those many years watching telenovelas, you get, you know, like, that feeling gets like in your DNA.
You know, so…
Yeah, when I went to…
Yeah, Sophia, go.
I’m sorry. I was just saying, when I went to Brazil, everybody knew I was Mexican. Every single…
When I went to Puerto Rico, everybody knew I was Mexican. Like, you just… We think we don’t know our own people, but people know their own heritage and race.
And I’m not surprised, Humberto, you can say that about Susie.
Yeah, no, but to be honest, like, I go to Brazil and people don’t think I’m Brazilian. In Rio, for example, they don’t really… They don’t know where I’m from.
I get a very non-descript somewhere else kind of thing. I never actually…
Because now you have a mix of both languages. You’re not British and you’re not Brazilian. You’re like a citizen of the world.
You have, like, a unique… You have a unique voice, a unique talent, a unique accent. That’s the amazing thing is that each one of us is unique.
And that…
We’re all snowflakes.
Yeah.
We’re all international snowflakes.
That’s a wonderful point, Humberto.
I love that, Sophia.
All right.
So kind of touching on the points that we talked about before, I love that you guys are all echoing each other to some extent because again and again, you see this, you have to have this an awareness of where you sit in the mix, and you need to understand how the audience is going to perceive your particular voice, but in the same vein, you can’t be too married to the sort of ethnic standards of various genres and markets because you have to be true to yourself. And so while it’s important to, like you said, to be able to add accent tools to your skill set, if you know that you can’t do a convincing enough, like Castilian Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese or what have you, you refer it to someone who you know specializes in that. So like already, we’re just getting so many great tips and recommendations for how to go about this if you’re trying to break into international markets.
So with that said, if someone is trying, like if they know that they’re a bilingual or potentially bilingual talent, what kind of steps or considerations should they make to try and pursue bilingual work?
You don’t need to be bilingual to work in Brazil or in Latin America. For instance, you, Paul, Sean, Susie, Humberto, Sofia, you can… Okay, you are bilingual, but okay.
Talking about Paul and Sean. I know that Paul has been working internationally, and he doesn’t need to be a bilingual artist to do that. So you just have to know the market, know a little bit of the culture and how the market works.
And you can ask me how Brazil works. You can ask Susie how British market and Humberto the European and Sofia the Mexican. You can ask your friends how can you enter and how is the culture in each country.
But as I told you, Jason has been working as a voice over artist in English, in Brazil. So you don’t need to be a bilingual artist to work internationally. This is gold.
The world is waiting for you. Especially in countries that English is not the main language. They need English voice overs.
And they don’t have native. They have a few. Susie, I’m sure she’s working for Brazil as well.
But also, I do, lately I’ve been doing a lot of work for other countries in Europe because more and more companies produce stuff in all languages. So, you know, you might have a company in Holland that is doing stuff in multiple languages and you can enter that market as well, which is fantastic, I think. I think the main thing that I think is to identify, like, are you truly bilingual?
You know, how, what is your level of, you know, the other, the second language? So, then you can actually just sell yourself, as we’ve just said before, you know, appropriately to the client, you know. So, that should be the starting point for everyone because, yes, you could be fluent in three, four, five languages, but that doesn’t mean that you can actually record in all of them, isn’t it?
That’s the main starting point. But that, after that, then, yes, it’s like Simone said, kind of research the market and maybe, you know, speak to people on groups, different groups, and then try and get information from people living in those places, really.
Absolutely. So, maybe reaching out to native speakers, like native voice talent, like yourselves, and be like, hey, would this work? Would this be marketable or, like, kind of, like, just a safe space for them to get feedback before they try and, like, make a bad impression with their bad accent?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think people are not very…
I think that you have to be a little bit honest with yourself and you kind of… Do I sound bilingual or, you know, do I not? So, maybe try and get a second opinion, I guess.
That would be good. But I think that also, I mean, I always… I love sending jobs to friends, you know, like if someone…
I have a Russian friend and I see someone that, you know, needs a rush, and I will always… I have like three or four people that I always suggest. It’s nice to pass work to other friends.
It’s quite important to sort of enter the bilingual groups and just sort of make friends, I guess, you know, and ask for help.
Humberto and Sophia, any thoughts?
Everything, I believe, it’s sad. It’s like, if you know if somebody comes to me and wants like, I don’t know, Spanish from Catalonia, and I know somebody, I will refer that person. And that’s through referrals, we can get, you know, like, I don’t care.
If I can do it, if it’s something that I don’t do it, I’ll give it to somebody, which in Portugal, that is not the general way of working, because, you know, even in Portugal, a lot of people, unfortunately, if they know about a job and they cannot do it, they will say, well, I’m going to keep quiet and I’m not going to tell anybody. And why? It’s, you know, just give it to somebody else and that person will refer you if something comes up.
And that’s it.
You just… Or not, you know, because you have to refer, not expecting anything, but yeah.
But usually, usually that’s, you know, like that interchange of information between voice talents that, you know, because we know each other, even if it’s through the Internet, but we know each other. So, yeah, just pass the job to somebody that is able to do it. That’s it.
Yeah, and I would say, you know, here’s the thing. This business is about building relationships. This isn’t about, I’m going to go knock on Sophia’s door because I can only speak for myself, and I’m going to see and get all the information she has about the Spanish market.
That’s never going to work. But if you are a person that genuinely wants to connect with me, you want to build relationships with me, a relationship with me as a colleague, and it’s a give and take situation, of course, that’s going to be more welcome than someone just coming to try to… You know what I’m saying?
So I think it’s really important because I know a lot of people will be listening to this podcast. This isn’t about finding Susie and we’re going to have Christian Lance on here. We have really…
We’re all professional people in voice over and we’re busy. And this isn’t about finding, oh, Christian, give me all your context for Disney and let me get… You know what I mean?
It’s not about that. We are a very helpful community, but we want the relationship more than anything else. And I think that’s what’s so beautiful.
If you take the time to build those relationships, go to the voice over conferences, get to know people face to face, that’s where you’re going to make the most out of your connections. And so I just need to say that because I think that’s important. But we are all here.
We are all available as best as we can. We’re all very busy. God knows trying to put this podcast together, right, Paul and Sean?
But we do love each other. We do support each other. And we do want people to see success in whatever market they want to be in.
But when I think about marketing and all my marketing students, I always tell them this. The secret is to focus on the one area you want to see growth in. Because where you put your energy, that’s what’s going to grow.
What I find that most people do, the mistake is that they try to be everything to everyone. And that’s why they look back and they’re like, well, I didn’t see any major growth. Well, that’s because you spread yourself too thin.
I’ve been focusing on the Mexican market. Guess what? That is where I have seen the most growth in.
The bilingual English-Spanish market has been my laser focus for the last two years. I just finished saying that I book work in English and Spanish nonstop because that’s where I’m putting all my energy into. It’s not trying to become a Portuguese talent.
It’s not trying to do, you know, Brazilian anything. It’s just Mexican Spanish and English. That’s all I focus on and that’s where I’m seeing the most growth in.
So that’s super important for everybody to pay attention because you’re not going to be everything to everyone. If you want to become an international voice actor, pick one country you want to expand on and become a master about that country and understand what works, get to know which voice over colleagues are in that country and start building those relationships and then you will see growth in that one area and then you can build on and keep going.
One thing I would like to say is that I think, yes, absolutely the meeting in person is fundamental. And from my experience, I mean, I love the internet. I’m always online pretty much.
And I was so surprised when I got to Atlanta and I actually saw everyone like in the flesh because I thought, I realized that I actually had, because I thought I was going to go with the British people I was traveling with. There were quite a few of us anyway. So I was like, okay, fine, we’re going as a huge group.
But I got there and I knew so many people. It was just awesome to meet, you know, Sophia, Humberto, Simone, and all the people that I had been talking to online for ages. And kind of just by building relationships on Facebook, essentially, I think it’s really important that you kind of try and communicate with people and try and be helpful and, I don’t know, just sort of just be nice, generally speaking.
Sorry. In our case, we met everybody here in Vio Atlanta. We have to be grateful for this wonderful conference.
And I agree with you and Sophia, this meeting in person, it’s very important for us. And the podcast that Paul and Sean are doing is not in person, but it helps creating this sense of community that we need. And to strong our relationship, like Sophia said, we have to be a…
I was talking to a friend here in Brazil today because we are struggling with this cachet, the money, the budgets, they are getting down here in Brazil. I know that they are getting down in other countries as well. So I was talking to him, let’s be strong together, let’s create a community and then we can fight with this chopping budgets.
We have to be strong and we have to be strong together. This is very beautiful. I’m very passionate.
I’m a Latina and this subject really makes me feel happy and I’m very happy to be with you talking about this and sharing with others our experience. So that’s why I’m so passionate.
Well, that’s a great note to wrap up on. I just want to say I appreciate everybody being here. Ever since The Atlantic, really, I wanted to put this together and I’m really excited that everyone was able to join us and I thank you all for your time and your comments.
Sean, any parting words?
Well, like Paul said, I just wanted to thank you all so much and I love that you were all on the same page and offered a lot of the same advice and mindsets to build that self-awareness to, like, more than anything before you try and jump into this. Like, if you know your strengths and if you don’t know them, find a coach or find a professional who’s where you want to be and reach out to them and get their feedback, get their advice before you, like I said, shoot yourselves in the foot. And one thing that I want to note is that even if you don’t specialize in being a bilingual talent, as far as I’m concerned, all of us here are international talent.
Any one of us could get booked for an international English voice spot.
Before we go, why don’t all of you tell us how clients can reach you if they want to hire you? Why don’t we start with Humberto?
Well, the clients can go to my website www.humbertofranco.com or through my e-mail, which is very simple, also Humberto at humbertofranco.com.
Great. And Simone?
I have a website in English, ourbrazilianvoice.com, and I have my website in Portuguese that is simonikliass.com. So, but thank you so much for having me, for having us.
Great, our pleasure. And Sophia?
Yes, I can be reached at sophiasophiacruzvo.com, sophia at sophiacruzvo.com if you choose to e-mail me, but thank you so much for having us.
Susie?
www.susievalerio.com, that’s S-U-S-I-E-V-A-L-E-R-I-O, susievalerio.com, and my e-mail is contact at susievalerio.com.
So, thank you guys so much for that validation, that encouragement, and just being here today representing your various countries. Thank you so much. Wow, so thank you so much to our international panel for just sharing that experience and giving us a whole new perspective on just not only if you are a non-U.S.
talent, how you might be able to integrate yourself into US or UK markets, but if you are a talent in North America, how you can sort of branch out to different countries and market yourself that way. So, but Paul, you wanted to talk about some of the little hiccups that we had as well?
Well, it’s just the theme being everyone spread all over the world was actually really appropriate because some of the issues we had, I think, were because of bandwidth in the home countries. So Humberto mentioned that he was having issues with Internet connection and actually dropped out and made a call to his Internet service provider in Portugal while we were on the call. So I appreciate him going the extra mile just to be with us, which is crazy, but we do appreciate it, Humberto.
Humberto’s fantastic, like on top of being a great talent, he’s one of our most loyal VO Pro members for GVAA and he’s so fun to work with and he’s such a humble guy and he’s always singing our praises. He’s really fun. It was so nice to meet him at VO Atlanta.
Yeah, and that’s actually kind of what sparked the whole episode, as I mentioned in the interview that talked to him about his challenges was what made me turn the wheels and say, hey, there’s an idea for a show. So I appreciate him sparking that in me as well. But like you said, everyone was so gracious, and I really appreciated their perspective because they definitely brought up some things I hadn’t thought about.
And they crystallized more in my mind how I should never, ever try and put on a fake accent for an audition. There may have been occasions where I thought about it or may have actually done it, but now I will never do it again. Thank you, everybody.
So the thing is that you can, for example, as Christina will mention in our next interview, you can work with a coach to get a more realistic, more authentic sound, if that’s within your budget. But you’re right, if you find… and this is true not just for accents, but for character, voices, or vocal types in general, if you don’t feel confident that you can do it in an audition, don’t audition, because they’re going to ask you to do that and ten times more when you get into the booth.
Even if your agent sends it to you. So, I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s a series coming out in the next couple of weeks, or has it come out yet?
The Netflix series, Spy Kids, starring Christian Lanz, who we just spoke to, or will be in our next…
Yeah, I mean, he’s… well, you’ll get to hear him more, but you might recognize him as, like, he’s probably the most famous voice double for Antonio Banderas. I recognized him back from the old Nasonex commercials, where you had that sexy 3DB telling you about the wonders…
Oh, that was him?
That was him.
Oh, I thought that was actually Banderas.
I don’t think so.
So anyway, what I was trying to say is that when that came out, I guess about a year ago, I got that from my agent, and they wanted me to audition for it. And I said, no, for Diego. There’s no way I was going to pull that off.
And I’m so glad that was one that I passed on, because that would have been ridiculous. Me against Christian for that role?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it might have been fun practice, but still.
Yeah.
And it’s just, like, remember your audience. If it’s for a video game or even a cartoon, depending on what the creative team wants, they might not want something that… They might want something that’s more evocative, that kind of connotes the idea of this place, rather than something that’s completely accurate.
But, like, again, if you don’t feel confident doing it, don’t. So that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So our next episode is going to be a little bit different. We’re not going to do our usual current events and questionable gear purchases. We’re just going to go straight into part 2 of our international panel with Christina Melizia and Christian Lance, and we know you guys are going to love it.
And then coming up later in the summer, we’re going to be featuring Peter Bishop, the British voice talent living in New York, and that’s going to be pretty exciting.
Yeah, Bishop’s been great, and he’s offered a lot of sage advice to both of us over the Voice Over Bulletin Board and in private discussions, and I always enjoy talking to him when I can see him in person as well.
Yeah, we had a great time at Uncle Roy’s and hope to do it again soon. And then finally, we have committed, the VO Meter that is, to broadcast live from MAVO 2018, the Mid-Atlantic Voice Over Conference in Herndon, Virginia, in November, November 9th, 10th and 11th. So I’m really looking forward to that.
And I will be joined by Ken Foster, who will be guest hosting, since Sean can’t make the cross-country trip that time. So, sorry to hear that.
He’s replacing me, guys.
I keep trying, but it never lasts.
No one can match my charisma, but…
Definitely not.
I appreciate that. I really, really wanted to go to Mabo this year, but it just didn’t make sense with VO Atlanta. And last year was a very travel-heavy year.
So I’m kind of going to buckle down and refocus and save my finances. But I hope you both have a wonderful time. Val Kelly always makes an amazing conference every time she does Mabo.
I know this year our keynote speaker is no less than Kari Wahlgren, just amazing voice talent. She got her start in anime with things like Foody Coody and Samurai Champloo. She’s a regular on Rick and Morty now, and she does numerous characters for Marvel and DC.
And she’s just all over the map. Wonderful actress. And on top of that, you have Sarah Sherman, voice caster for Disney, Sunday Muse, wonderful character talent out of Canada, and just so many other great guests.
You’re definitely going to learn a lot. It’s a small conference, but the content is huge.
Yeah, it’s going to be fun. So that’s it for now. Please join us for part 2 of our International Roundtable, and we’ll see you soon.
Have a great day, 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, everyone, and welcome to Episode 23 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Today, we’re going to talk about public announcing. It’s a really interesting genre of voiceover. We’ve got a whole panel of guests who are talking about how they transition from public announce into voiceover, and sort of the challenges and pitfalls that that might actually have coming with it.
But before that, we’re going to talk about current events. So what’s been going on with you, Paul?
Well, I’ve got a few things going on. I just finished my first book for Find Away Voices. I completed it and uploaded the audio last night.
It’s my longest book to date. It’s 41 chapters, total of about nine hours. So that was interesting.
I hadn’t done one that long before. It was sort of intimidating at first, right? I looked at it and said, oh man, how am I going to tackle this?
But it was interesting. I found that once I got into it, it was sort of like when you’re reading a book and you really get absorbed in the story, I just couldn’t stop. So I sort of set a budget of two chapters a night to try and get through it by the deadline they wanted.
I sort of kept going. Every night I kept doing more and more because I got into the characters so much and I didn’t want to lose the momentum I had. So it was interesting to see that play out.
No, that’s wonderful. I kind of had the… One of my first books was actually or Volunteer for Learning Ally and that one’s probably at least six hours.
I’m like, man, I really wish I had started with something like a children’s story or a short story other than that. But yeah, like you said, there are some days where you just get that spark of motivation and inspiration and you really get immersed. And those are, like, that’s what we live for, you know?
That’s ideally what you have every time. But I’m curious how you find that motivation when it’s, like, when you don’t wake up in the morning and you’re, like, feeling great and ready to record.
Well, for me, it was pure necessity. This book specifically had several voices and several different characters, and it was even more interesting. I won’t give the title, so people…
I don’t want to do any plot spoiling for people who may be listening once the book comes out, but it was about espionage and several spies working for the CIA and other world spy organizations. So, there might have been one character who had three different voices because she was speaking in English, North American English, and then speaking in British English and then Arabic. And I had to maintain the same tone with the same character for all three voices.
And basically, I didn’t want to lose that. So once I got down the character voices and I knew that I was sort of rolling with them, I wanted to make sure I could maintain that. So I was trying to get through it as quickly as possible so I wouldn’t lose those tones of voices.
And there was like ten different characters that were like that. So it was kind of interesting.
Very cool. And were you collaborating with the author, like sending like, hey, this is the voice that I want to do for this character? Or did they just trust you to handle it on your own?
Well, the first 15 minutes I did, sort of, it was through, like I mentioned, find a way, but they operate similar to the ACX model where you submit the first 15 minutes and the author approves. So in that, there were several different chapters they wanted me to do to make sure I could do the woman’s voice, to make sure I could do the British accent, to make sure I could do the Arabic. So they had already gotten a taste of all the voices.
Not every one, because there were 10 to 15 different characters, but they got a taste of the different dialects I could do to make sure it would come off as well as they would expect.
Wonderful, wonderful. Now I want to hear your accents, because you never really do them around me, actually.
And you’ll never hear them.
And you never will.
You never will. It will be a surprise. So you can go buy that book when it comes out.
Now that I’ve ruined the plot for some people, I’ll mention the title at the next episodes when it will actually be released on Audible so people can go download it.
Very, very cool. Oh, that’s some good mystery marketing there.
There we go. Some teasing, we call it, in the biz. But other than that, all of my focus lately has been with my VO empire as a friend of the show.
Marisha Teppera dubbed it.
AKA your family.
Right, exactly. So right before VO Atlanta, actually the day before, my son Matthew did a job for Bodalgo. And we sent it off to the client.
I got paid while we were in VO Atlanta, I think while I was talking to Armand, almost the exact same time. So I want to thank Armand for that. For those of you that don’t know, I think we might have mentioned this, but if not, it’s worth re-mentioning that Bodalgo offers free premium accounts to child actors.
So if you’re interested in having your child, or your child already is a voice actor, you can get a free premium account with Bodalgo, which means they can receive direct auditions and audition for jobs, and that’s what my one son did. He booked a job, got it paid right away from the client in Italy, and had that out on… It was a corporate video, so I’m assuming they’re playing it, I haven’t actually seen it, but yeah, we’re pretty excited about that.
And then my other, my daughter, who has been dabbling in it as well, is about to embark on her first audiobook.
Cool.
And interesting, actually, I don’t want to prompt you on how to do your job, but could you ask me how we secured that job?
So how did you go about getting that job? But actually, before I ask that, I just wanted to point out that it’s, if you do have children that you want to exploit, I mean, who are talented actors, and you should definitely look into, because Armand’s situation, as wonderful as he is, isn’t completely unique. You’ll find a lot of agencies are a little bit more lenient about how they hire younger talent, just because the jobs don’t come in as often, but I mean, they still need to be hired, obviously.
And so it doesn’t make sense for them to charge a child for a year-long membership if there’s only going to be two or three appropriate gigs. But there’s still a valuable resource to have when they do come in. So you might find an agent or a casting site like Bedalgo offering incentives like that.
So if you’re involved with Voice Over and your children are interested too, it’s something you should look into. But back to your daughter, how exactly did you get that audiobook gig for her?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Because it was part of an in-person marketing effort I put forth. I reached out to a local author who was a friend of a friend and contacted her about her book that I had seen was just published on Amazon, the print version.
And it immediately shot up to the bestseller rankings of this category. So it’s a book about a young girl who has anxiety disorder and how her mom helps her deal with those feelings. So I reached out to the author about doing the book, not necessarily for me, but for my daughter, sort of an ulterior motive.
And she ended up referring me to her publisher. So I went to the publisher, who’s also a local company, and we had coffee over a Tuesday morning. And we talked about all of the authors that might have some benefit from doing audio.
So this one was immediately put out there, and they said, yes, we’d like to have your daughter do it, so we’re going to work on that in the next couple of weeks. And then meeting with the publisher, she said, there’s actually several authors that we would like to maybe investigate doing an audio version. So that could be more fruitful than I even imagined to begin with.
So word to the wise, if you haven’t started marketing locally, do that because there’s opportunities out there you may not even know exist.
We’ve talked about this a number of times on the podcast. You really are only limited by your own imagination in your marketing efforts. And as you’re just getting started, as long as you have a certain level of competitiveness, like you have a competitive sounding studio and some training under your belt and demos preferably and all that, by all means, reach out, find out what local businesses are out there and just figure out what their personal needs might be.
Like do they have radio advertising? Do they need it? Do they have IVR messaging systems taken care of?
Or do they suck? And could they be improved? These are all questions that you should look into and not really feel like you have to just, like your first step should be finding an agent and expecting them to do all that work for you.
Because as we’ve talked about before, that’s only one egg in your basket. As lucrative and as like, I don’t know, what’s the word I’m looking for? As fancy and celebrity sounding as it does to have an agent or agents, you can’t rely on them for all of your work.
You still, they still expect you to be trying to market yourself and finding gigs for yourself as well.
Yeah, it’s a really good point. Now, speaking of marketing your local services, one more thing I want to mention, current events-wise, is I rented out my studio recently to a demo producer. So a friend of the show also, Terry Daniel, who’s a demo producer out in Minneapolis, as well as voice talent and coach, he was looking for somewhere in Baltimore to have a demo producer for one of his talent.
He actually had a bit of a bad experience with a studio he booked in the city, and said, hey, Paul Stefano, you have a studio in Baltimore? And I said, yeah, we’ve recorded out of it for my own demos, but anyway, it’s neither here nor there. He said, would you be willing to host this person?
You know, rent the studio out, I’ll pay you for it, and have her do the demo with me doing the remote session in Minneapolis. And I said, sure. So talent came over.
I sat outside the other side of the window and engineered while she did the remote session with Terry, and it came off great. So another way you can leverage the resources you have and the investment you’ve made in yourself and your business to maybe have some additional income. Exactly.
I just kind of want to just gush about Paul for a second. I mean, look at how… Because so many people focus on just one aspect of how they can help a client, which is with their voice, and that’s wonderful.
But as a voiceover studio, Paul has already got this whole list of possible, or added values for ways that he can help potential clients, and whether it be as renting out a studio or exploiting, I mean, hiring his children or…
And producing to local authors doing their audiobooks too.
Exactly. So don’t feel like… And it’s all building connections, and I’m sure sometime down the line, these are all going to come back to him in spades in opportunities for work and all other sorts of networking opportunities as well.
So good on you, Paul. You always inspire me to get my butt to the pavement and make some phone calls and build some connections like that.
Oh, thank you. So speaking of, what’s going on with you?
What’s going on with me? Well, things have slowed down a little bit after VO Atlanta finally. I was riding high on all those positive energies and vibes for about three weeks, but things are finally starting to level out.
Still just been working consistently with my regular e-learning clients. My work with GVA has really ramped up, and I wanted to talk to you about that because you actually got to experience our membership program firsthand. Newt said some really nice things about it.
Yeah, I did. I signed up for your promotion at VO Atlanta and participated in one live coach workout with Steven Reisberg, and that was a lot of fun. Got some great feedback and reinforced some things I knew I needed to work on, and then took advantage of some of the marketing materials that were sent out.
So do you want to talk about how that works, and then I can talk about how I took advantage of it?
Oh, sure, sure. So yeah, we had this promotion at VO Atlanta where attendees were able to join their first month for $1. The usual cost is about $60 a month, $59.95.
And so for that level of our membership, it’s at our most exclusive tier, the pro level, you get one coach-led workout, which is led by one of our great coaches, like Steven Reisberg. He’s a Hollywood booth director. He’s even worked with greats like Don LaFontaine and some of the best in the industry, both celebrity talent and strictly voice-over talent.
Who else leads those? We also have Christina Melizia and David Rosenthal, as well as our other cadre of great coaches like Carol Monda and Katie Lee, MJ. Lalo, Brian Summer.
Brian Summer is great. He’s worked on a number of the Telltale Game Series, and he’s got a pension for Villain Voices, so it’s always fun to go to a workout or a workshop that he’s leading. And then on top of that, you also get a peer-led workout with myself, which is just kind of a safe space.
We’ve talked a little bit about accountability groups and workout groups in the past, and that’s essentially what this is. It’s just an opportunity to experiment with your performances and get feedback with your peers, and then practice giving feedback as well, because, I mean, it helps your ability to direct and self-direct by directing others. And so I know in my own experience, they’ve been just incredibly helpful just leading these things, and I’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback from the people who attend.
And on top of that, we also have just an hour-long Q&A session once a month where you get to pick the brain of a pro voice actor and get, like, career strategy advice or audition or demo feedback. And on top of that, we also send out just a small list of, like, production companies or agencies that have said that they were, or openly said that they are accepting submissions from Talent. So just a little, like, thank you and a little boost to your marketing efforts each month.
So as you were saying, Paul, how did you take advantage of those benefits?
Well, that last one, I took those leads, and they were from a marketing company, right, that you work with as a partnership?
Yes, it’s called Tailored Products Group, or TPG, and that’s with Al Richardson, who is another voice talent and has a number of connections with e-learning and video production companies. Excuse me, he’s got these large lists of companies that you can purchase in different regions, but he gives us a small sample of his current findings each month just because of the positive relationship we have with him and the Inspire Goodwill that way. But it’s a wonderful resource, and then that way for talent who are newer in self-marketing, this is almost a surefire way to get your foot in the door with a couple of these different companies and to build clients like that.
And you mentioned that you had quite a deal of success with this list.
Yeah, well, I mean, one. So the list was nine companies, right?
You lied to me!
I mean, that’s actually a pretty good shooting percentage, so to speak. So there was nine sample leads, three from each of the different lists. One was an animation company, one was a production company, and one was, I think, a production studio.
So I contacted all of them and immediately got a response from one of the production studios that said, yeah, we’d love to add you to our roster. So that may not sound great, but I mean, based on the thousands and thousands of cold calls I’ve done over the years, one out of nine is actually a really good percentage. So I was really happy with that.
And yeah, that brings up a good point, too, is just how much or how many contacts you need to make before you really start gaining traction and getting responses back. I remember I took Jonathan Tilley’s League of List Builders course a few years ago, and he’s like, if you’re limiting your potential contact list to a hundred or less, you are doing far too little. You need hundreds of potential contacts before you start really building those numbers into the dozens even.
So just keep building that list and keep building those potentials and then reach out to them every couple of months if you haven’t gotten a response back.
Right. So yeah, I enjoyed the membership with the GBAA. I was actually surprised to see how much work was involved from you.
I mean, I know some of the stuff is scheduled probably to automate the email process, but I was getting either Facebook posts or emails from you. It felt like every ten minutes.
I don’t know about that often, but it just depends on when workouts are scheduled and things like that because I’ll host a workout and then I’ll edit the recording of it and then we’ll upload that and then let people know that it’s available. Because not everyone can attend these things live, but one of the things that I love is that we have a huge library of all of our previous workouts and webinars. So even if you weren’t able to attend, you could still watch it.
You can still… And believe it or not, I’m a big fan of this. I think you can still learn quite a bit just from watching other people perform.
I know a lot of us really want to get that personal experience, that on-mic experience, and you can get that. But even just watching and taking notes, there’s still so much more you can learn from just doing that. So I think that’s a huge resource.
And we stockpile these things for an entire year before we start updating it with the current year’s workouts and webinars. So it’s just a huge, huge resource. And I love being a part of it.
Based on my previous educational experience in English teaching, it’s kind of like the perfect marriage of my educational experience and my love of voice over, because I get to teach people how to become better talent. I mean, it’s awesome. I love it.
Yeah, it’s good stuff.
Before we transition to our more light-hearted VO Meter stick, we did have some serious and downright startling news. A good friend and mentor of the podcast, Paul Struquerda, we recently discovered… He just suffered from a stroke recently, and it was just a shock to us, because if you’ve ever seen Paul, he’s just in the picture of health, and you would never have suspected him being liable to a stroke at his age right now.
But luckily, he’s his typical self. He’s in good spirits. He contacted everyone, letting us know that he was okay, and sent a few smiling pictures on Facebook, and just conducting himself with his usual grace and humor.
Paul, we just wanted to say we’re so glad you’re all right, and we hope you have a speedy recovery, and we hope that your family is doing all right as well. Hugs and healing thoughts going out to you, my friend, and we hope to hear from you more soon.
Yeah, same from here. It was really startling, like Sean said, but we’re glad to hear that at least you’re in good spirits and doing well so far. And as luck would have it, because of the Easter holiday, I’m actually going to be in his hometown this weekend, so I’m going to try and stop by and see him if he’s up to it and hopefully wish him well there in person.
I’m sure if he’s feeling well enough, he’d really appreciate that. That’s awesome, Paul.
Indeed. So we’ll get to our main discussion with our public address slash live event announcers in just a moment. But before we do that, we have our VO Meter stick.
Check.
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.
So this episode’s VO Meter shtick is actually done by me. Yay! Live and in person.
So I’m going to talk about a funny experience I had while doing public address for my local university, Towson University here in Towson, Maryland. So I was the public address announcer for the basketball team, and the men’s basketball team. And we were doing a game, I think it was towards the end of the season, the team was not doing very well, they were sort of out of contention for the playoffs, and I think the coach was tinkering with the lineup.
So, what you do as a public address announcer normally is get the lineup from both coaches, go over it and make sure you can announce, sorry, pronounce all the names in case you don’t wanna pronounce them wrong on the microphone and embarrass the kid, maybe his parents. So both coaches, you go get the lineups, go through the names, make sure there’s no surprises, make sure the star player is out that day for an injury, so on and so forth. So in this case, I got the lineup and the star point guard was on the bench and I wasn’t quite sure why.
So being also a fan and alumnus of this school, I was kinda perturbed. I thought, hey, why is he sitting this guy? This coach doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Ugh, frustrated, but you still have to do your job the right way. So the game starts and I’m doing the lineups and I go through the list, I announce the center, the forwards, I get to the point guard, and I announce who I think should be in the lineup. They get the star point guard that was on the bench.
I forget his name exactly, but I just go ahead and announce him and didn’t realize anything had happened. But then I look up and the entire bench and the coach are all giving me the stink eye, like, what the heck? What are you doing?
And then I look back down and thought, uh-oh, giant Freudian slip. So I had to say, excuse me, it’s actually Brian starting at point guard. Then everything was fine, we did the rest of the line up.
But I felt like an idiot because I had basically just inserted my own ideas of who should be in the line up into the live announce and that was not good. I came to find out later it was a disciplinary thing where the player had done something and that’s why the coach benched him. But it was just funny to see that reaction from the crowd.
Now I will say that was the last men’s basketball game I did. May have had something to do with it. After that I was relegated to just women’s basketball, soccer, field hockey and volleyball.
But just a funny little story about live announcing and how things can go wrong.
Your rise to PA announcing, or what was it, was that your journey to PA announcing ended before it began.
Yeah, I mean, it was just funny.
I’m actually really interested about our panel today because I dabbled in it when it was very young. We’re talking high school and college. They asked me to MC a few events at our school because I was in the theater program, and I remember having to announce Junior Prom, or whatever, the pep rally for that and stuff like that.
And I had to announce people’s names, and then one, I just straight up said the wrong girl who was coming up, but maybe I forget if it was how it was listed, or if I had skipped ahead on the list, or whatever, but I was just like, this poor girl just looks terrified as she’s halfway down the aisle, and then she just looks up at me. I’m like, oh, my bad. And then I just kept going.
17-year-old Sean, I didn’t care at all.
Well, that stuff happens all the time, even to people who have been doing it for years, as I’m sure our panel can attest to.
Yeah, and then, but like I said, I was really interested in hearing from a more professional side because my only other experiences was in college when I was doing this sort of media internship where we got to try all sorts of different aspects of media production, whether it be sports announce or color commentary or on camera work or working behind the camera and all sorts of things like that. And so I tried one of, or just color commenting, one of the basketball teams, and it was ridiculously hard.
I’d love to hear your perspective on that because it’s just like you have to be so attentive, you have to really familiarize yourself with these people’s names, and you have to be able to comment on what’s going on quick enough that it’s relevant, that people are actually able to see what you’re talking about rather than a few minutes afterwards and stuff like that.
Yeah, it’s a lot of hard work, as I mentioned. It takes a lot of prep. I would go to the game usually an hour, sometimes an hour and a half before, to make sure I had everything in my head and everything down on paper.
You take a lot of notes to make sure you don’t have to just remember everything in your head. And as our guests will tell us, it’s a similar situation for almost all sports or all events. There really is a lot of prep work both before and after.
Justin, during the call, Justin Brown mentioned that he was usually the first one there and the last one to leave when he was at Talladega, and that became an issue for him because he’d be leaving the racetrack after the race, two or three hours after the race, and it was a danger for him to drive home because people don’t necessarily take the best precautions when they’re at a NASCAR race as far as designated drivers. And it was bad, actually dangerous for him to get back to his house from the track with people weaving it out of traffic.
And wheeling around the parking lot, whoo, NASCAR!
But yeah, and I have friends even now that are still the announcers for local teams, and it’s the same way. You’re one of the first ones there, you’re one of the last ones to leave, and it’s in a lot of ways a thankless job.
Yeah, but you’ve got to be passionate about it, I’m sure. Like, otherwise, for each one alive.
I think that’s where it comes from, yeah. Everybody’s really passionate about what they do.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, we’ll get to that in a few minutes, but before that we have our…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
Why don’t you go first this time?
All right, so Questionable Gear Purchases. So, I’m in the middle of one right now, actually, because one of the coolest things about VO Atlanta this year is that, I mean, it’s… I’ve told Gerald Griffith and Ann Gangooza and all the head honchos or VO Atlantis, like, my life has changed for the better every time I go, because, like, the first time I went was when I was in Japan and I won the International Scholarship.
That was huge, and then by the end, like, I met Global Voice Acting Academy that weekend, and then that was the beginning of our relationship together, or, like, our working relationship together, and then by the end of that first conference, I won a 416, so, like, I mean, you don’t think you can even top that, but then the year after that, like, luckily I was able to pay my own way this time with my voiceover funds that I had made for my clients. Woohoo! And, but then I had been asked to do the team challenge led by Cliff Selman and I think it was, or, and Dan Friedman that year.
They tend to be the ones who lead that. And so this was something that I was completely unconfident in, and I was just blessed with a wonderful team that we had a great rapport with, and our team won that challenge, and so we got to come back to VO Atlanta again, and on top of getting some kick-ass headphones and a chaotic eyeball and some other cool stuff. And so we got to come back.
And then fast forward to this year, I find out that I have been nominated for the Unicorn Grant, which is just this amazing opportunity for where just a number of agents, casting sites, branding strategists all offer their services, or donate their services to one lucky recipient who kind of encapsulates the generous spirit of the VO community. And so just being a nominee, my travel and attendance were gratis, were compensated. And you don’t find out who actually wins until the last day of the conference, but the finalists end up receiving a $500 gift card to Sweetwater, which is like my favorite audio store.
And I’m like, woohoo! And so I was elected a finalist. I didn’t get the full grant, but I still got all of those wonderful benefits.
And then I had this weird situation where I’m like, I have $500 to my favorite audio store, but I don’t really need anything.
Oh, poor baby.
Oh, poor baby, right? I know, it’s just like a lot of people, like our audience just want to throttle me right now.
Yeah, they’re all vomiting in their booths right now.
But no, that’s the truth. And it’s just like, I mean, you guys know me and you know Paul, we’re just unrelenting, not gear snobs, but we’re always drooling over new gear and there’s all these things that… Like, part of me, honestly, I was like, this would just be like a line of credit and I’m just going to use this as an excuse to buy all the things that I want to review and then send them back.
Just try them out, make videos and then send them back. But the truth is, one thing that I don’t have in my studio, because I’ve got great mics, I’ve got a good interface and all the accessories you need, like cables and all the unexciting stuff or whatever, well, one thing I don’t have are studio monitors. And those are something that I had been putting off getting for a long time because it’s like one of those less fun aspects of voiceover and they can get pretty expensive.
Most people recommend that you spend at least $300 a pair on them, and I mean, that can be prohibitive for a lot of people. But, so I had limited my choices down to two monitors, one being the Yamaha HS5s and then the PreSonus Aris E5s, which are like a newer monitor thing. PreSonus has made a name for themselves with their Studio One software and a number of interfaces since their AudioBox units a few years ago.
And honestly, the quality of their products has just steadily increased over the years, and they’re really building a name for themselves. And they come in these… Appearances aren’t that important, but they’re blue and they look cool and they’re compact, and I’m just like, ah, I want them.
And so now I have an opportunity to get them, but it was funny because you see that one purchase and they’re like, all right, that’s great, but then I need to spend this much money on monitor stands to get the best out of them. And I’m like, oh crap, my desk is too small to accommodate that, so I need a new studio desk.
Oh my gosh, spirals, huh?
It really does. We talked about this a few times on the podcast. Rarely is one link in the chain going to cause an overall difference.
Your studio is only as strong as its weakest link, and you can’t just buy things willy-nilly and expect a world of difference. There is a level of thought and planning that has to go into it. So yeah, luckily, with the gift card, I’m able to get all of those things except for the studio desk because it’s not at Sweetwater, but I was able to find one that would actually fit inside my booth and would make a much more ergonomic and professional-looking space, so I’m really happy about that.
And whatever I decide to get, I just wanted to thank everyone who offered their advice and Gerald and J. Michael Collins and Marilyn Whistler and all the other contributors to the Unicorn Grant for giving me this wonderful, wonderful gift. And I even had some leftover to donate to our local music programs because Sweetwater has a wonderful donation suggestion where they want to contribute to national music programs because of their own love of music, and I think it’s a wonderful idea.
So thank you Sweetwater, thank you Gerald Griffith and Anne Gangusa and all of the contributors and coordinators of VO Atlanta for inspiring this wonderful grant and for choosing me, of all people, to be a finalist. It’s huge. It’s really huge.
So thank you very much. But I mean, that’s me. Sorry I’ve been droning on about that for so long.
But I mean, it really was just kind of just an amazing experience to be rewarded just for helping people out in the industry I love so well, you know? But enough about me, Paul. You got any questions or gear purchases you want to talk about?
Actually, no. I know. Well, I have some bills coming due, which is why I haven’t been able to do that.
So along with finishing that last book, I have to pay my editor. So until I get the funds from Findaway, I need to fund that myself. So I’ll be paying him.
And then I had one leftover bill from the redo of my website that I have to take care of as well. So yeah, definitely not a good time to make any purchases. Plus, doing taxes this week.
Yeah, there’s one for you. Do you have to pay those, really?
I know. I wish we didn’t. I guess it’s the next two weeks, but still.
Well, that’s fun. I’m sure your wife’s happy about that.
Yeah, definitely. So with that, we’ll bring it to the main portion of this episode, our interview with public address announcers or reformed public address announcers and how that might affect their voiceover career.
Welcome to the roundtable portion of this episode of The VO Meter. We’re really excited to have our Public Address Roundtable with folks who either are currently doing public address or have done so in the past. And the reason this came about is because I myself have done public address announcing.
I was the public address announcer for a state university here in Maryland, the Towson State University. Or sorry, it was Towson University when I was doing the public address announcing, but my degree still says Towson State. I’m kind of partial to that.
And I did, let’s see, women’s soccer, men’s soccer, women’s basketball, volleyball, and one men’s basketball game. Apparently, they didn’t like me very much because they only got that one chance. But we have people that have done public address for a whole host of other events.
We’re going to jump into how that might have affected their voice over career, either negatively or positively. So first, let’s go around the room and have everybody introduce themselves. Let’s start with on my screen, Justin.
How are you doing today, Justin?
Yes, I’m Justin Brown. I used to be the PA announcer for the Talladega Super Speedway.
Great. And where are you out of now?
I’m in Birmingham now and I’m currently doing radio.
Okay, great. Next we have Mike. Mike introduce yourself, please.
Well, I’m Mike Norgaard and I’m full-time voice over artist and part-time sports public address announcer. And I do Gravevine Colleyville ISD football and former college basketball and baseball at high school collegiate and professional levels as well. And hockey too.
Okay, great. And Jay, welcome.
Hey there. Hey, great. Thanks.
Yeah. Jay Harper, my name. And I’m actually in Charleston, South Carolina based here currently, and I have done voiceover work for, gosh, almost 30-some-odd years.
But doing Public Address Announcing VO, you know, for gosh, a good part of that time as well at the high school and collegiate levels, the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where I’m currently based, I’ve done a PA for baseball. I’ve helped with football pretty much at the high school level. Gosh, everything from hockey to soccer to baseball, softball, football.
It’s been an entertaining and educational experience to work all these different types of sports and get a real feel for each of these sports, being up in the booth and watching things from a PA announcer’s perspective.
Awesome. And Bob, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am currently the public address announcer for University of Maryland. I’ve done upwards of 12 Division I sports for them. This will be my ninth year on the mic for them.
I had been doing some internal voiceover for the federal government when I was employed there. And then as a long-term, long-time season ticket holder to Maryland basketball, I was watching their public address announcer and I said, well, there’s a guy behind the mic. So maybe I might give that a try.
And so wrote to the University of Maryland back in 2010 and was picked up for a number of their sports. I currently do men’s and women’s soccer in the fall, women’s basketball, gymnastics in the winter, and lacrosse and softball in the spring. So I’ve been doing that ever since.
I switched over to full-time voiceover when I retired from the federal government in 2013 and have been doing a host of different genres in that realm, including audio books, narrations, documentaries and things of that sort.
Okay, great. So thanks for going around the room and talking about your voiceover experience. What we want to talk about is how you got into other forms of VO and transitioned or are working on transitioning or if you’re just trying to do both at the same time.
So who would like to start with that? I think that was Justin, so go ahead, Justin.
Sure. I was in radio and have been and still am in radio, started back in 1990. And when I was in another market in Amarillo, Texas, I was contacted by a local studio that said, when you get off the air at 9 a.m., would you be interested in coming down and recording some commercials?
We’ll pay you for it. And I thought, well, that sounds like the best thing I’ve heard all day. So I went down and read scripts, and they wrote me a check on the spot before I got out to the car.
And that really intrigued me a lot. And so I kind of have been playing around with VO part time for the last eight or nine years. And then I finally, with my wife’s blessing and urging to build a home studio, have been able to keep a couple of clients, but not really a whole lot of work, just kind of side work.
And then I just happened to, down the hallway at one of our other studios, a friend that was actually a full time VO actor, Scott Chambers…
Oh, I know Scott. Scott’s a good friend.
He was down the hall, and word got around, and everybody started coming up to me one at a time saying, you know, he’s a full time voice over actor. So I asked him to lunch and started picking his brain. Next thing you know, I’ve got a coach.
I’m going to VO Atlanta. I’m sitting with you, Paul, in an X session with Mary Lynn Wissner. So things are starting to move pretty rapidly in that area.
So I’ve got a goal to transition out of radio before radio transitions out of me to get into full time VO if I can. So that’s the big goal for the next couple of years.
That’s awesome. So you’ve made this transition pretty quickly, over the last couple of months?
Yeah, I started in December and I reached out to Eric Romanowski and he suggested that I get a coach. I had looked back at my email from Scott Chambers and he suggested that I get a coach. There was one name that was common on both of those lists and it was Jody Gottlieb and I reached out to her and asked her if she would take on a new client.
She said yes. That shocked me. So my first coaching session was the week between Christmas and New Year’s and so I have had basically one session a month and now I’ve booked my flight and studio time to do my demo in Los Angeles.
So that will be in April, so I’m looking forward to see what the next step would be.
Okay, so Bob, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you started the transition to VO?
I had been doing some voice work for the federal government which got me the idea of trying to get into the voiceover world. As I was explaining to before, I’ve been a 35 year ticket holder for Maryland basketball and noticed the PA announcer behind the mic and I thought, well, there’s something I might be able to try. So actually, the PA work was actually my first outside paying gigs outside of what I was doing for the federal government.
Once I retired in 2013, I decided to branch out into other voiceover realms. And again, but just kept the PA announcing one. It was a nice paying gig.
It’s always great to get paid to watch Maryland sports as well, but I just saw it as an extension of the different types of voiceover work that was out there. My work as a PA announcer has led to transitioning more to live event announcing. I just had a demo produced by J.
Michael Collins on live event announcing. And so I’ve been able to market myself as a live event announcer to include work that I’ve done for the University of Maryland. So in that realm, in that vein, it’s worked out pretty well.
I still continue to pursue audio books, corporate narrations and the like. One thing I like about the PA world is that generally when you talk about being a voice actor, people always ask, is there anything that I’ve heard you in? And again, not referring to commercials or anything else.
I just tell them I worked for the University of Maryland and many of them have been out to games and have heard me there, just didn’t realize it was me on the mic. So it’s been a nice sort of foot forward when talking about the voice world, especially here in the Mid-Atlantic region. And so it’s kind of helped me from a marketing standpoint as well being a public address announcer.
Awesome. One thing I was curious about, Bob, because you had a similar experience that I did. When I first started, I had the same way I started with public address.
I looked down during a basketball game and said, hey, that guy is not a college student. I wonder if they’re looking for any more people to hire. And I sort of put an application and audition and eventually was hired.
Were you surprised that they weren’t having students exclusively do the work?
You know, I’ve seen them use students and specifically at Maryland and a few other schools that I’ve worked at. They tend to use students for the game operations, a lot of the videotaping and some of the radio work. They’ll use students who are majoring in journalism or that stuff.
But they tend to go with professional public address announcers actually. So yeah, I mean, I was a little bit surprised, but now that I’ve been in it now for almost 10 years, I really have only seen the PA announcer as the more, I’ll say experienced person in the press box.
Yeah, it’s true. And obviously Jay has the same experience. So Jay, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you’re working on transitioning to other forms of voiceover?
Well, Paul, for me, actually, I was and still continue to do the quote unquote, other types of voiceover. That’s what I was doing initially. You know, I started in radio 1978.
Yeah, I’m old. Actually was in high school. So, but in, you know, being on air and getting out and meeting people and those of our other guests here that have the radio backgrounds, you know, I mean, you get out and you kind of, depending on your size market, you know, you become somewhat of a known voice, perhaps a known quantity, and you get invited to be a part of things.
And that was kind of the way it worked for me to become part of the PA announcing realm of things. You know, I was already in the market on air and radio and was asked to fill in for some Public Address events. And that transitioned over into sporting events.
And this was all at the high school level. And we’re talking, you know, gosh, the last 30 some odd years, you know, being able to be a part of all that. But I’ve always enjoyed again with the radio background and the spontaneity that that affords you, you know, if you’re not voice tracking or what have you, but nonetheless, just having that, the ability to be spontaneous, granted, being structured and sounding somewhat structured, but not too structured in the live announcing world of things with VO and so forth for public address announcing.
You know, that in and of itself is a skill to be able to, you know, dodge and weave. And you know, you’re not calling the game per se on the public address announcer, you know, on the PA system, but still having the ability to do live reads, you know, that’s becoming more and more of a thing. You know, when I started, you didn’t do ads and stuff to the degree we do now from the PA booth, you know, so getting all the little promos in and all the sponsors in and all the little activities and whatnot that the gig demands you to be a part of now.
I have found, again, the radio background certainly helped with a lot of that. And then transitioning into other forms of VO. I too, you know, doing the audio books, the corporate narrate, I mean, just a little bit of everything.
And like one of the other guests had said through VO Atlanta, just attended my second one of those and actually met Paul the year before last. I was part of the ambassador program and kind of ran into Paul setting up mics and stuff there that first year, but actually sat in with him on some X session, I believe this year, and learned that there are a whole host of people out there that are continuing to kind of tackle all these different little types of voiceover work, but the training and the skills and the technique, while there are some similarities, depending on the area of concentration, if you think you’re gonna be, you know, Ron Radio doing a corporate narration or something, that doesn’t work. So anyway, just being able to immerse yourself in the different types of styles of voiceover work out there is one of the things I enjoy.
I know there are a number of that they find their niche and they hang with it and hey, that’s cool. That bores me. I like to tackle a little bit of everything, but certainly knowing my limits and not going out there and tackling something that I would suggest, hey, you need somebody else for this, that’s not gonna be me.
That’s great. And you’re right about the X session. I was surprised actually that I think of the 12 that were there, eight or nine of the people, maybe even 10, including the three of us that are on this call said, yeah, we’ve done some live announcing, some public address work and I found that to be eye-opening.
And this is why I actually re-energized myself to schedule this episode because Bob and Adrienne, I had talked about this almost a year ago.
And again, there are so many other realms to this. I mean, I have hosted award shows for corporations, live event award shows here at the Convention Center in Charleston, for example. So it’s not just, a lot of people think public address, they think primarily sporting events and whatnot, but as we know, there are certainly more avenues to tackle than just that.
Right, so you mentioned VO Atlanta and I actually met our next guest, Adrienne, at the Mid-Atlantic Voice Over Conference last year, although it turns out, as often happens in this area, we have a lot of mutual friends. But Adrienne, welcome again and tell us a little bit about the other types of VO you’re trying to get into.
Well, I really enjoy audiobooks and I’ve done a lot through ACX. So I’ve really found that I enjoy, especially the non-fiction, the crime books. But I also like to delve into a little bit of everything.
I do annually the Merkle Awards, which are held out in the West Coast and I record them here in my home studio. And it’s people from all over the world that have won awards in advertising and it’s their little own kind of Emmy thing. And I’m looking to do more voice work.
I’m so spread out between the Bowie Bay Sox and Georgetown. I do about six of their sports that sometimes I feel my time gets limited. But I have done some like on Sirius XM, the Fantasy Sports Channel, I’ve done some of their promos that are airing right now.
So I really try to get out there, but I do find limitations when you’re spread thin.
And Mike, Mike Norgaard, tell us a little bit about how you got into other forms of VO, which was first, the chicken or the egg, so to speak, was it Public Address or was it voice over?
It was the chicken. No, similar to Jay, I’ve got a radio background going back into the mid-1980s, and so I was on the radio for a while, and then I was kind of out of voice over and radio for a while, about 20 years or so. And as home studio equipment sort of became more of a viable option, I started exploring, well, I wonder what I could do from home here to generate some voice over stuff and get back into that, because I’ve always really just loved, let’s just clump it under communications.
In general, and so I’ve always loved communications in general, and voice over being part of that, audio books being part of that, you know, e-learning, you need your voicemail, you know, whatever. I just love voicing that stuff, doing that stuff. Did get back into radio eventually, just about four months ago, part-time radio job back here in Dallas where I hadn’t been on the air in forever and ever and ever, and hopped back on and just, you know, really enjoying that.
There’s no money in it anymore, but it is still fun to do. At one point, I was actually standing at a Chinese food restaurant behind the assistant athletic director for my local school district. And it just sort of on impulse, I said, hey, do you guys need any help over there with Public Address at the stadium?
And he said, well, is that something you’ve done? And I said, nah, I’ve never done any of that, but I do voiceover stuff and I bet I could do it. And he said, okay, I’ll tell you what, I’ll put you on the list and if we get any, you know, third party sort of engagements that come in, we’ll give you a call.
And about two weeks later, I got a call and they invited me to come out and do women’s professional football. Yeah, which was really kind of a neat thing. Unfortunately, we had two local teams and they both folded since then, but it was really neat while it lasted and it was here.
It was the WFA, the Women’s Football Alliance, and you can look that up online if you’ve got time and interest in doing so, but it’s kind of a neat thing. It’s full contact women’s football. And boy, when they’re out there and padded up, you can’t tell it’s not guys on the field.
They are serious about it and they have a good time. And it’s a lot of fun to announce as well. So enjoyed that.
And then that springboarded into some high school football. And then that expanded into college baseball and then college baseball into college basketball and volleyball and softball and every other ball that kind of came along. So got into that and I’ve been working pretty steady.
Hockey came along as an opportunity about five seasons ago. So I’ve learned a lot about hockey in the meantime. So had a lot of fun with that.
But again, there are a lot of opportunities, not only sports, but I think Jay and Adrienne were both talking about some of the interesting different things, graduations, for example, or awards banquets. A lot of those go on locally in almost every community. So there’s that opportunity if you’re interested in getting involved in this side of it.
The other thing that’s been a route that I’ve heard a lot of people have taken into getting into the sports side of it, A, just to sort of see how they do with it, B, help a team out that otherwise wouldn’t have any announcing or would have sort of subpar announcing, and C, sort of get your foot in the door, is to approach a local high school or maybe even a junior high school if they have announcing facilities available where they play various sports and see if there’s any level of the sport that doesn’t currently have an announcer and just volunteer to jump in there and do it. And I think that that’s a great way for, if there’s anybody listening today that’s in VO that’s interested in, hey, how do I get started in this? That’s a great way to do it.
You can just pick up and call your local high school baseball coach or softball coach or whatever coach and say, hey, does your JV team have announcing? And if not, would you like me to come out and do that for you? And nine times out of 10, what I’ve found is the answer is, yeah, come on.
We’ll give you a free hot dog and a cap. And then you’re in and you’re started and you kind of at least can begin building that groundwork. So I think that’s kind of a neat avenue that a lot of people kind of take to get in.
That’s great. So talking about helping out your local school, your local rec council, if they have those facilities, that’s fantastic. But there’s a question I had before we jump into how The Public Address has maybe affected your reads and other genres.
What’s the biggest arena or stadium that each of you has announced in? I’ll go first. With the crowd was the 5,000 seat Towson Arena, or CQ Arena is called now.
And for an audition where I actually met Bob for the local arena football league team was the Verizon Center. Oh no, now it’s the… Oh, what’s it called?
Capital One Center? Bob, help me out. The Capital One Arena in Washington.
I got to do an audition there, and ultimately did not get the job, but to hear my voice in an 18,000 seat arena was pretty cool. So how about everybody else? What’s the biggest venue you’ve heard your voice?
Well, for me, it’s definitely Capital One Field at Maryland Stadium, which holds a good 50,000 plus. When I do lacrosse there, especially when Hopkins comes into town, we’ll generally have about 15,000 in there. After that would be Xfinity Center, which holds almost 18,500.
And when Connecticut came to play Maryland women, we had a full house there. So that’s the largest crowd I’ve announced in front of, about 19,000 people. And generally for women’s basketball, it will be anywhere from 5,000 to 7,500 people that you’re doing the work for.
That’s great. Adrienne.
My biggest one was the Baltimore Orioles, and I’ve done about 15 games for them. And on some of the games, there’s been about 42,000 people, some days less. But that was definitely the largest facility.
And I hope they’ll ask me again this year. It’s just incredible to do it at that volume and that amount of people and the energy you get back from the people. It’s just an amazing experience all around.
So my largest is the Baltimore Orioles, Cannon Yards.
Awesome. Mike, how about you?
The largest facility that I have worked is AT&T Stadium in Arlington. And well, I’m not sure, Cotton Bowl in Dallas as well. So I’ve worked both of those rooms.
And those are interesting. The Cotton Bowl was a very interesting experience for me. It was my first high school football game.
And it was the ESPN kickoff classic that they were showing, I think it was nationally on ESPN. And so we had a pretty full house for that. And it was kind of a neat experience.
But they’ve got this little bitty tiny thing, looks like a lapel mic on a stick at the Cotton Bowl. And you walk in there and I was like, oh my gosh, what in the world could this little tiny mic possibly do? And I popped it and did a couple of test announcements.
And I was very, very impressed with what that little tiny microphone could do. So I guess it’s not the size of the mic, it’s the punch behind it. And then AT&T, I did, that’s probably the biggest room that I’ve been in, but-
Is that the baseball stadium where the Rangers play?
That is the Cowboy Stadium.
Oh, okay.
And it’s about 100,000, I guess, is the seating capacity there. And we probably had about 4,000 for the game that I worked because it was a high school sort of reunion football weekend thing where they had a couple, three games go on. So I announced those.
So it certainly was not to a full house, but nonetheless need to be in there and be working.
Awesome. Jay, how about you?
Yeah, as I said here in Think Back on things, that’s a great question because I never really thought about that, to be honest. You’re just kind of in the moment and like the other guests here, you just, hey, you want to be a part of stuff and you enjoy doing it, whether there’s six people sitting out there or 60,000. But for me, I guess the biggest building would be the Superdome in New Orleans.
Granted, kind of like Mike was just saying, we didn’t fill the place up for the high school state championship that I was PA announcing for, but that was the biggest facility. I guess it’s the Mercedes-Benz Superdome now. And in terms of actual crowd, that would probably be my Arena Football League PA announcing Nashville Cats.
We’re going back a ways here. The facility’s gone through a myriad of different names. It was the Gaylord Entertainment Center back then.
It’s the Bridgestone Arena now, and that facility holds about 17,000, 17,000-something like that. Close to 18,000. And I’ve done a number of events there where they packed that place.
So I guess those would be the two up there for me in terms of size of facilities.
Okay, great. And I saved the best for last because I know he’s going to win. So Justin, can you still hear me?
What’s the biggest facility you’ve announced for?
The biggest event that I’ve been a PA announcer for is roughly around 200,000 people. It was the Talladega Super Speedway, and I tried not to blow that out of proportion. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and they had, at its peak, had seating for 175,000, and then when you add in the RVs and the people that are in the infield, it’s easily 200,000.
They joke about when the race comes to Talladega, it turns into the third largest city in the United States, in the state of Alabama. So it’s a pretty large venue and bigger than anything that I’ve ever been able to try to recreate in a stadium or an outdoor gathering. I’ve had 25,000 people I’ve been in front of on a stage, but to be able to be in that booth and on the microphone, realizing there’s 200,000 people, it’s just mind-boggling.
Yeah, that’s awesome, Justin. I knew you would win with that story. That’s why I wanted to have you last.
So now we’ve talked about our public address experience specifically. I wanted to talk about how doing public address or live announcing or maybe even radio has affected your auditions or work with other more traditional forms of voice over, commercial, narration, audiobooks. Because one of the things I noticed is that once I’m doing that kind of work, or I get that in my head, especially for specs that are announcer read, loud commercials, I get into that mode where I’m punching the end of sentences and getting really loud at the end to try and pump up the crowd.
And it’s hard to get out of it where they want to have a more conservative or conversational read. Has anyone else noticed that happening to them when they’re doing those types of reads?
I would definitely say that. I have not.
To me, being in front of a live crowd is just a whole different mindset. I think I’ve got a completely different hat on than when I’m in the studio doing reads. And I would say that probably initially I had to work pretty hard at getting rid of kind of the radio part of it when I started non-radio voiceover.
But I think that transition was more difficult than any sort of interference, at least in my case, that I’ve seen from bleeding over from live PA.
OK, who else had a comment? Was that Jay?
Yeah, I would agree with Bob. I mean, for me, getting out of that wrong radio thing, I mean, I still do radio today. And so being able to, you know, you gain experience and you get a little older and you’re able to kind of ascertain what kind of presentation is appropriate, then you’re able to transition between these different types of VO work.
But I’ll admit it, I find myself still falling back at times into the kind of Ron radio stuff and the, that in some PA situations, it’s kind of appropriate, but yeah, being able to just kind of weave in and out of that stuff. I mean, it takes some, at least for me, and that’s one reason I go to these conferences and do the coaching and work with various other professionals to just get different takes on things and to how to get my mindset and my presentation and my breathing and my vocal style and so forth to meet the needs of the project that I’m currently working on, whether it be live, recorded or what have you.
Bob, I think you started to say, how have you found your experience on a live mic has translated to your audiobook work and other voiceover types?
Yeah, I would echo what Jay was saying. It seems like I’ve been doing public address announcing now, this is my ninth year, that that type of read, that type of genre, that type of energy in the arena, I’ve developed sort of a muscle memory in terms of how to read it, how to punch it, how to get excited, when to get excited, and it comes very naturally to me. When I sit down in my booth and do a corporate narration, like Jay said, that idea that you have to consciously now take that level down and not punch in area, not punch in too much, you want a little bit, but at the same time, just keep it much flatter than you would say in an arena.
And for me, that has been a bit of a difficult transition. As I’ve worked with different coaches, they immediately hear the announcer and provide me with techniques to sort of tamp that down a bit. And that’s really helped me in the last couple of years to develop as a voice actor in other genres as well.
Well, for me, I believe that it affected me negatively. I’ve heard both sides of the issue. But for me personally, and Paul, you were right there with me in the X-Session, when I’m trying to do…
I’m instructed to do a level above a whisper. And in my mind, what I thought was a level above a whisper, I was stopped in the middle of my first sentence that said, if you were doing that in my ear, you would have knocked me on the floor. So I think when you’re normally trying to project and you’re trying to get everybody rowdy and you’re trying to get people to cheer and you’re in the midst of a sporting event or you’re mentally trying to figure out if everybody can hear you, you probably project more than you normally do.
And for me and other people that have been in radio, the way that it was been described to me is that when you’ve been doing this a long time, it’s kind of in your DNA. You have to work really hard to get to a conversational read. So I think for me being a PA announcer and a radio announcer, I’ve heard and learned the hard way that it’s a complete different animal when it gets to VO work because it’s not about your voice in VO, it’s about the acting.
Yeah, and that’s the same experience I had. Your experience with Mary Lynn, as well as Jay and me, is what made me ultimately decide to do this episode now. I planned it a long time ago with Bob and Adrienne, but they were the only ones that I actually had on board to say yes.
And then when we had that experience, because I felt like all three of us were in the same boat where it was the same thing. What we were hearing in our heads was not quiet and above a whisper at all. And the way you made that turn at the end, it was so impressive that I thought to myself, wow, there really is something there.
And wishful thinking is that that’s part of what’s holding me back right now, because I’m not booking a ton, and I’m wondering if there’s other reasons. And that might be it, because I had the same issue where when I finally hit one with a coach and it’s conversational, it sounds to me like it sounds unnatural, and that it’s not even my natural. It’s not even my real voice, because I’m so used to hearing what’s coming out of the cans either at the stadium or on the radio.
Sure. And by the time that I got through with that read for the pomegranate juice, and I was having people in the room applaud for me, I thought that was the worst read that I’ve ever done. And Mary Lynn said, no, you’ve found your sexy voice.
And so I’ve tried to recreate that for a few auditions. It hasn’t booked me a job yet, but it is nice to know that I’ve got techniques, just like when I saw the technique that you used that was brilliant. When you walked over from the corner of the room, I don’t know if you were describing what you had for breakfast or whatever, but you didn’t take a beat and you started reading your script.
The amount of change from what we think in our head is a conversational read to those triggers and those techniques that a coach can give you is really, really necessary, in my opinion, to be able to get to a different type, one of those five different types of reads that we learned about.
Yeah, that was amazing. But pretty much everyone that Mary Lynn worked with, the transformation was amazing, it’s a matter of remembering that when you’re alone in your soundproof booth.
But that’s been the beauty of coaching. I’ve worked with some coaches just recently, Jay Michael Collins, for instance, and the techniques that he provides you specifically helped me instantly, one, to realize it, but two, to be able to immediately address it, and it’s almost a stair step, start completely flat, and then work your way up, whereas public address announcing, I mean, you’re at level 10 to begin with, and the idea that you very rarely actually come down from that. The other drawback to public address announcing, I do almost 80 events a year, it does put a bit of stress on your voice, and with all my other voice work, I’ve had to actually tailor that a bit.
If I know I have something to narrate, I’ll narrate it prior to my announcing gigs, and then use the following day where I can’t use my voice that much, and use that for editing and other things.
Good point. So Adrienne, how has your public address work affected your work in audio books?
With audio books, I feel that I transfer and change that hat, so to speak, pretty well. But I have noticed, as you said, when I’m doing voice overs, that it becomes a little staccato, that it’s not flowing as well because I’m so used to emphasizing points and putting a lot of emphasis on a certain word or a certain thing they really want to get them across at the stadium. So when I am trying to do voice work, I definitely feel that my sentence isn’t flowing as well as it should, and I kind of have to really redirect and bring the volume down and bring my energy down and sound a little bit more natural.
But in books, I feel like I get so into it that I don’t feel a problem in audiobooks, per se.
I guess at that point it all becomes about the acting chops and making sure that you’re getting your characters right.
Right, and I just get so… When I’m into reading and I get into the characters, I just get so involved because I love to read, I get so involved in the book I’m not thinking about it, and it just flows naturally. But I realize that occasionally when I do commercials, that it becomes a little more staccato.
Right. Any other further comments on that before we move on? So our last question, and we’ve talked about this a little bit, some of you mentioned it in your intros, but for those of you that are still doing PA or those that have stopped, what are your plans for the future?
Do you think it’s something you still want to continue to do? Or if you stopped, like me and Justin, is it something you think you might get back into? Or are you focusing more on commercial audio books, narration, those types of genres?
Why don’t we start with Bob?
Yeah, I’m going to continue with it. It remains a revenue stream for me for RJ Voices. So until I have something that overtakes that revenue stream, which maybe one day it will, I’m going to continue doing it.
Plus, I really do enjoy it. It does take a bit more time, though, than your normal voice over work. You might have a two-hour event for a PA announcer.
You have to get there a good hour ahead of time. And with traffic in the Mid-Atlantic region, for a three-hour game, I’m often away from the house for six hours at a time. So in that realm, it does put a bit of a time suck on things that you can do for other work that you might have.
But yeah, I’m going to continue it. Again, it provides me with FaceTime, if you will. It allows me to advertise, especially for women’s basketball, where people have more of a tendency to want to come up to you.
A lot of people say you have a great voice. I hand them a card. And just like that, they want to work with the Public Address announcer for Maryland basketball, women’s basketball.
So yeah, I’m going to continue it. I enjoy it. I like it.
And I think as I’ve gone through a lot of the training and conferencing, you often hear in the voice over world that where everyone might want to do commercials because that might pay the most. You really want to focus on a genre and just get really good at it. And for me, I kind of like PA announcing and I think I’m really good at it.
So I’m going to continue with it until something better comes along. But for me, as a lifelong Maryland Terrapin, I don’t see me leaving the Terps anytime soon.
Well, you are good at it, Bob. I’ve heard you live on several occasions and I’ve always been a fan.
Thank you very much.
And Adrienne, who I’ve also heard live, tell me a little bit about what your plans are for the future.
Face Talk starts out on April 5th. I’m still doing Georgetown Cross right now. And I’m really hoping to get into some voice work, more voice work.
I’m finishing up a book right now, a science fiction book. And I’m really hoping to start pursuing auditioning for more voice work and getting an agent like yourself. That is my…
Pursuing, I really want to be out there doing more commercials and online and e-learning.
Okay, great. Mike, how about you? Do you plan to continue your live announcing work?
Well, for the time being, yes. I always take the approach, particularly with sports and live PA, that if I’m having fun doing it, then I’m hoping the crowd is having fun with me. And so at whatever point it becomes, I’m not having fun doing it, then I’ll know that that’s probably the time to step out.
And same thing with radio. You know, I pretty much just do that for the fun and enjoyment of it. There’s no money in that anymore, really, unfortunately.
So voiceover, studio voiceover work is really what pays the bills, followed by PA, followed by radio. So I think that’s kind of my answer is, as long as I’m still having fun doing it, and they’ll still have me behind the mic, I’m happy to be there. And if either one of those two variables changes, then it’s time to hang it up.
Good advice. Jay, how about you?
Yeah, I was sitting here thinking what Mike was saying. I felt like just saying ditto. So much of what he said is kind of right, kind of where my wheelhouse is currently.
And he’s right about the radio thing. I mean, I’m just doing it for fun these days. It certainly doesn’t really pay that many bills, but still getting an opportunity for that live interaction.
I’m a sideline reporter for Citadel football and color analyst for Citadel baseball on radio. So those experiences have kind of morphed into other things that I truly enjoy. But for me, it’s the studio work that pays the majority of my bills, everything from the commercial work to the e-learning, the on-hold messaging, so on and so forth.
And the radio just kind of, as we know, the cliché, getting your blood and all that stuff. And it’s true. I mean, it’s just an itch that I scratch that only seems radio can do it in one particular way.
And then the public address announcing for me, it’s all about the fun, frankly. I’m not doing it to the degree I once did, but I do get called occasionally to handle some things. I will be honest that I’m so pressed for time.
As one of your guests said, I believe it was Bob. You know, heck, you can put a good six hours into the one event gig there. And not that you’re not willing to put in the hours, but hey, you got to economize and maximize and prioritize.
So there are times when I just don’t have the time, frankly, to really actively go after the PA sort of announcing gigs. But I really do enjoy them. I do enjoy that live energy that everyone has spoken about.
And for me, PA announcing has just become a fun thing that if I could do more of and make more money at, yeah, I’d probably do it. But it’s not something that I’m out there marketing myself as.
Well, I didn’t really enjoy it as much as I thought that I would on paper. Being a PA announcer, I thought was going to be fantastic. I did a little on the radio at my first radio job as a color commentator at a high school football stadium.
But when I got the opportunity to fill in at the Talladega Super Speedway, I thought, boy, that’s the cool factor to be able to tell people that you’re the PA announcer at Talladega Super Speedway. It went great on Facebook, but when you’re there live and you’re only reading ads while MRN is taking their break, it gets really stressful because you’re having to wait for somebody next to you looking at the radio producer, giving them a countdown for when they go back live and you have to wrap up your script. So you’ve got people tapping you on the shoulder, giving you a wrap-up signal, and you’re basically reading whether or not, you know, who the sponsor is for the caution flags or when the bar opens at 10 a.m. in the infield or please don’t throw trash on the racetrack.
So it wasn’t as glamorous as I had hoped that it would. Plus, it didn’t pay that great. So that’s why I’m not planning on doing that anymore and hoping to transfer and transition into full-time VO work.
My wife just recently gave me the green light because I told her that you were kind enough to invite me to be a part of this podcast, and I was excited about being a part of it. But she said, well, you know, if you really want to do that again, that’ll be fine. And I said, you know what?
Getting there before the race starts, getting your credentials and having to get up in the exterior outdoor elevator and you’re sharing a bathroom that doesn’t have a cover over when you’re waiting in the rain with all the TV folks is not the most glamorous thing. And then when you have to be there after the race is over with and you’re the last one to leave behind all of those drunk people trying to drive home on a back road and almost getting hit head on kind of made me say, no, you know, I think I’ll just stay out of that and watch it on TV if I wanted to keep following the race.
Yeah, that makes sense. PA in general is much more work than I think people think.
Yeah, it’s really high stress and high pressure and low pay.
Yeah, I remember going hours early to a game and you have to interview each coach to make sure you know how to pronounce everyone’s name. You have to find out if anyone didn’t travel with the team so you don’t have them on your substitution list. You have to know which number goes with each player.
That can be a lot of time out of your schedule.
Well, I also had my job threatened one time when I was a color commentator for the high school football team and I was challenging the coach’s decision to keep rotating in and out quarterbacks. And I made the comment that I didn’t think that the offensive line ever got into the rhythm that they needed to because once they got used to one quarterback, they would change them to another quarterback. Well, the coach decided to call up the radio station and tell them in no uncertain terms he did not want me ever broadcasting for their high school football game again.
Oh, my gosh. What would they pay you, like $25 a game?
Maybe. Then you would have to help break down the equipment, bring it back to the station, and then get up to be on the air at 5 o’clock the next morning. It really didn’t pan out the way that I really wanted it to.
Well, that’s great. So Jay, you mentioned studio work pays the bill, so let’s try and help you do that. How can folks find you if they want to hire you for their project?
Sure, sure. Well, thank you, Paul. That’s kind.
Yeah, you know, like everybody, I’ve got the website that at the moment is… Seriously, I mean it is in transition, so when you do open it and go, eugh, then, you know, it is… I’m telling the truth, it is in transition.
I’m just moving it from a San Diego provider to a local provider, but jharperproductions.com, J-A-Y-H-A-R-P-E-R, productions.com, all spelled out. They can track me down there and hear a couple of demos and stuff, but again, here probably in the next two weeks, you’ll have a more concise, streamlined site that will be a little more user-friendly.
Great. And Mike, how can folks find you?
Well, if you’re looking for me, I encourage you to search Fiverr, and when you don’t find me there, then you can come to my real website at voiceovermike.com.
Great. Adrienne, how can people hire you?
Adrienne underscore Roberson at hotmail.com. I’m also on a WIC site web page under Adrienne dot Roberson. And at Facebook, I really…
At Facebook and LinkedIn, I believe LinkedIn has really helped me get a lot of work, especially in the sports community.
Okay. And Bob, how can we find you?
I’m at rjvoices.com. I just updated my website with new corporate narration, explainer and e-learning demos, as well as the live event demo that I just did to help me transition, really, some of my work that I’ve done with PA Announcing over to other type of live event work. So, rjvoices.com.
Well, thanks everybody for joining us today. As I said at the beginning, I was excited about this. I’ve been thinking about this probably for about a year and a half, ever since I ran into Bob at the Capital One Center for that arena football league audition I mentioned.
And it’s something I’ve always wanted to talk about, and I appreciate everyone taking their time and sort of dispelling some myths, as well as confirming some of my thoughts about the live announcing and public address as it relates to other forms of VO.
I appreciate it. Thanks for including me.
Same here, Paul. I enjoyed meeting the others as well.
So once again, that was our PA Public Address Panel, or Reformed Public Address Announcers Panel. And I just wanted to say thank you to all of our guests, and apologize that I was not able to join you in this meeting. We had a couple of glitches trying to get our conferencing software to work.
I think we were really just kind of pushing the limits of what Bodago Call was capable of, trying to have a conference with six people, some being on phone, some being in areas with questionable internet connections. And so, I just thought it would be easiest if I removed myself from the equation and tried to put less of a choke on the bandwidth that way. So thanks again for bearing with us in those technical difficulties.
And hopefully we can have a more stable call if we try this again.
Yeah, still, it was interesting there. It was fun putting together and challenging putting together. Really tested my editing skills.
But in the end, it was a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to put this together for a long time. Way back at the last Mid-Atlantic VoiceOver Conference where I met Adrienne and we talked about our experiences doing Public Address, I really wanted to get some people on that had had a similar experience to me.
And I was glad that we were finally able to do it with the awesome cast of characters we had.
So thank you for that, Paul. And thank you to our guests once again. So that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Stick with us. We’ve got some exciting episodes coming up in the months ahead, particularly our International Talent Roundtable. So why don’t you talk about that, Paul?
Yeah, that’s gonna be a lot of fun. This came together after Voice Over Atlanta, where I met a bunch of people who were international voice talents. We’re gonna have Simone Clias from Brazil, Humberto Franco from Portugal, Susie Valerio from, I think she lives in the UK, but she’s a native Spanish speaker from Spain.
And we’re going to have Sofia Cruz, and as well as Christian Lanz. So we’re really excited about that panel. I can’t wait to hear what they have to say about how their international flavor affects their voiceover career.
Ooh, fancy. So I can’t wait for that panel. I’m really excited about the guests that we’re gonna be having on, but I just wanted to say thank you to our audience for listening in every month.
We hope you’re enjoying all the things that we’re spouting out, and we hope that… I don’t even know. I don’t know, Paul, what am I trying to say?
Say goodnight, Gracie.
Goodnight, Gracie.
Thanks for listening, everybody. We’ll see you next time. And once again, get well soon.
Paul Strickverda.
Get well soon, Paul. Bye-bye. 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 there, and welcome to our live stream from VO Atlanta, The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. All right, how are you? And popping the mic as we do it.
And pop, pop, pop. So I wanna apologize, we all have the dreaded con voice today. It’s the third day of our con, but if you want any deep voice radio or audio book romance reads, now would be a good day to do that.
But right now, I’m here with my friend and coworker, David Toback and Paul Stefano. We’re on our third day of the VO Atlanta voiceover conference. How are you guys doing?
I am super excited. But I do have the lurch voice too. I think we did a little too much screaming at each other last night.
Actually, David and I were talking quite a bit last night. And that, in retrospect, was a bad idea. How are you, David?
I’m doing good, all considering.
You sound the best out of the three of us.
I’m starting to think it was an evil plan. He’s like, let’s make Paul talk, to make him sound terrible the next morning. So we’re going to run this pretty much like a normal show, where we have a couple of our preset segments, and we’ll do those, and maybe get some audience participation, maybe.
But first of all, the current events. What’s going on with you, other than VO Atlanta, Sean, or at VO Atlanta?
Other than VO Atlanta? Why wouldn’t we cover the conference while we’re here?
We’ll do that too.
So, right now, spent quite a few hours over at the GVA booth at the exhibit hall. You should definitely come and check us out. We’re talking about our new membership program.
We’re really excited about that. Something that we introduced about a year ago, and now we’ve expanded it into multiple tiers. So, we have our VO Beginner, our VO Cadet, and our VO Pro membership tiers.
So, we really wanted to cover basically any situation based on people’s individual schedules and their budgets, and we’re really proud with what we came up with. We feel like we have a really comprehensive program of just ongoing training and support. So, no matter where you’re at in your voiceover career, whether you’re just getting started or you just want access to additional resources and support, we can give you that.
So, if you’re at VO Atlanta, you should definitely come visit us at the GBA booth to find out about what we’re about and see which one of those tiers might be good for you. So, what about you, Paul?
We talked to both of those smiling faces too, mostly.
Yeah.
Smile for the camera, by the way.
I’m happy to be here. We’re just like, I’m tired today, man.
We should mention, by the way, we’re streaming live on VO Atlanta TV. So, hi, everybody.
Hi, everybody.
We’re not used to being on camera, so.
No, I know.
Actually, Sean is. You’ve done some on-camera stuff, but I’m not used to being on camera.
Oh, my.
So, yeah, obviously, it’s all VO Atlanta all the time right now, and I’m just having a blast. I’m so happy to meet all of my friends and coworkers and colleagues. It’s really like a big, happy family when you show up here after the conference starts, and even before, Wednesday was just a lot of fun.
So lots of hugs, lots of reminiscing, and just great to see everybody.
So for people who might not know what your role is, because you’ve gotten quite involved with some of the inner workings, the sausage making, if you will, of VO Atlanta. So what kind of tasks do they have you doing?
I haven’t made any sausage, but yeah. So for those of you that don’t know, I’m with the Audiovisual Services team here at VO Atlanta, and I am behind the scenes mostly, except for right now, I guess, setting up equipment, making sure the presenters have everything they need. I’m in charge of all the X sessions, except for right now, our pal and show contributor, John Rorder, is actually handling the coverage for me.
So if Tom Pinto or Kay Bass have any issues, John will be happy to handle that while I’m blabbering on right now. So thanks to John for that. I really appreciate his help.
He’s been an extreme help. But yeah, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes. It’s really like a full production, and it’s fun, but it is also a lot of work, I have to say.
But we love every minute of it.
It’s really apparent, and honestly, this conference wouldn’t be what it is without the work that you guys do. So I really appreciate it. And our viewers might recognize John as the guy who does our on three.
One, two, three.
Oh wait, let me cue it up.
Oh, okay. Well, I was just gonna do an impression of him.
Okay, do that first, then we’ll compare. All right. All right, here we go.
Our Questionable Gear Purchase.
Okay, and here’s the B sample. Questionable Gear Purchase. Give it a B plus.
It was one of my better ones. I’m telling you, the convoice helped, but it’s just because, I mean, he’s got such a lovely base tone.
Do you have anything you’d like to report this week? No, and I haven’t.
I remember in times past, I had my own sort of like iPhone mobile rig attached to a selfie stick kind of thing. I used some of, like, sure came out with this motive line of products a few years ago where you can just kind of hook it up into a phone, either into the audio jack or through the lightning connection right now. Unfortunately, with Apple’s change to like USB-C, that stuff’s all obsolete, unfortunately.
At least until I upgrade my phone. But no, long winded story longer, no, I did not have any question…
It’s kind of my style.
Yeah, it kind of is. Rambling, I’m rambling, R-A-M-B-L-I-N. Anyways, Toback, what about you?
No, none yet, almost. I was looking at me buying a new computer, saw some people getting some Apollo twins, made me very jealous.
I know, oh my god.
I almost, but I stood strong and saved my money for other things. All because I listened to the show. For wise investments and training?
What would you do that?
Well, I have been sort of drooling over at the BSW booth, excuse me. So that’s Broadcast Supply Worldwide, I think. And so they’re one of the exhibitors here, and they’ve got the, speaking of Apollo, they’ve got the shiny new Apollo Arrow.
Oh, do they, really? I haven’t seen that. It’s in the hall?
It is, yeah, it’s tiny.
I was too busy talking to you fools when I was in the exhibit hall, I had to go check that out.
It’s like, so sort of, we have a perfect visual prop, but we’ve got these nice tabletop stands. It’s about the size of the base, actually. It’s very compact.
And the Apollo Twin units were already pretty compact themselves. A lot of our viewers probably are familiar with it. Paul uses it.
I’ve gone back and forth about whether I’m gonna get one. I don’t need it, but I want it, and everyone has one. And it’s so shiny and pretty.
But anyways, it’s a cool little compact interface that has DSP, digital signal processing power. And what he said, yes. And the reason why the Aero kind of stands apart is not only is it even smaller and more compact than the previous models, but since it’s running on Thunderbolt 3, I believe, or USB-C or whatever the connection is called, it’s actually, it doesn’t have a power cord.
Like the data in power cord is like that one connection. So it’s even fewer cables.
Yeah, it is Thunderbolt 3. That’s the one downside. So if you have an older Mac or a PC, an older PC too, you can’t really use it.
So actually, I almost made a questionable gear purchase.
Two questionable gear purchases, it would seem like.
But I don’t have a computer that has that port right now. And I went so far as to even start shopping computers, but that was just a bad idea.
Oh no, that’s another rabbit hole for another day.
Can you not have a dock connector or like Thunderbolt to you as well?
No, it does not. You can’t use a dock.
It has to be direct.
Oh no.
It has to be native, yeah.
That’s horrible.
Because I researched this, obviously.
How can I make it work? I got a cherry-rigget. But it’s funny because it really was Apollo’s sort of way to kind of lower the price and lower the cost of entry into their great line of products.
But I mean, whatever money you save is gonna be going to a new Mac or PC, which can still do that, also has that connection as well. But anyways, any other questionable gear purchases?
I have not, actually. And what we wanted to do, really, was throw it to the audience. We have one audience member right now.
What’s your name? Keela.
Keela?
Have you made any questionable gear purchases?
Are you familiar with our show? Have you listened before? Okay, so.
Well, thank you so much for coming. Yeah, so we’re all about a bit of tech geeks and stuff like that. And particularly Paul, has a terrible habit of buying new equipment before each episode.
And then we commiserate about how much we spent and how it’s made our lives not as easy, not much easier than we thought. So the idea always is to buy something because you think it’s gonna make your auditions better, you think you’re gonna book more jobs with it. And as most of the coaches here will tell you, that’s really not usually the case.
It’s not the equipment you use, it’s not the mic, it’s you, our friend Dan Leonard is fond of saying. So that’s why we created the name Questionable Gear Purchases because that’s what really it has become. It’s not really to make yourself better, it’s to make yourself feel better sometimes.
Well, exactly, and it’s not, I mean, we’re unabashedly about it. You know, we understand that it’s like, like you’re saying, Dan, it’s always like, will it help you read better? Will it help you perform better?
Well, you can talk about the confidence aspect, like in, I like looking at the shiny buttons. But yeah, we do understand that that’s not the best investment. Once it’s, and nowadays, it’s, we were actually talking, Dan Leonard and I yesterday, because I asked if he was excited about any new gear.
He’s like, no, I’m still using a 2i2 or a Yamaha 803. They haven’t really made anything that’s wowed in that way. And honestly, the cost for studios, or for studio equipment just goes down and down every year.
So nowadays, what used to cost easily $1,000 to get a mic interface and some kind of acoustic solution, like a booth or what have you, is now easily $500 or less. So it’s far more attainable for people. And if you want any recommendations for equipment, just go back into our early episodes.
We have, I know our second episode was all about microphones. We talked about maybe two dozen different kinds that we had either tried or had referred from other talent. And then of course our interface episode, which we had also, well, not as many, about a dozen that time.
Yeah, but still too many.
Still too many, seriously. But that’s just us. And we don’t want, as we say a couple of times on the show, don’t follow our example.
That’s the whole reason why we have it, is so that you don’t have to make these questions.
I do what I say, not as I do.
Exactly, exactly.
You just say it at the same time? Wow, that’s awesome.
We need to get him on here more often.
Synchronicity.
That’s right.
Our dads must have been alike. Yeah.
Feet, legs. So the next part of our show that we usually do is the VO Meter shtick. And because Sean was so kind as to do even more work than he normally does.
So if you’ve been to the VO Atlanta before, you know Sean, he’s all over the place volunteering. He’s actually up for the Unicorn Award. Or Unicorns…
Grant.
Grant, thank you. This year, he’s one of the finalists, along with Scott Chambers and… Susan Mazel.
Susan Mazel, thank you. So you’ve probably seen Sean around. If not, you should come talk to him because he’s just a heck of a guy.
Oh, thank you. But anyway, we’re gonna do our bumper that Sean was so kind as to get me before the show for the VO Meter stick and see how it goes.
Cheers.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick. It’s time for the VO Meter… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick?
So, this is the segment where we talk about something funny that happened to us, either at a conference… Hey, there’s a tie-in.
I was wondering what the segue was. I was like, he’s being so nice to me, but then we’re gonna do our funny, like our funny segue?
Or something that happened to us at an audition, or just some faux pas we might have made during the last week or since our last episode. So Sean, do you have anything that’s happened to you? And if not, we’ll throw it maybe to Keela to talk about how she’s enjoying the conference so far.
What do you think?
I like it so far.
Yeah? Let me grab you a mic. I’ll bring it over.
Oh, cool.
Woo. I’m gonna tangle it here.
Oh, was it live? Or she could just come up here.
Yeah, why don’t you come over here?
Is your back to the camera?
Tell us the best part of the conference so far for you.
I have learned about marketing, how to start doing some direct marketing, cause that’s a goal. I’ve been asked twice if I was part of the kids group, which is very flattering. I just turned 30, so I clearly am doing all right, and I look like I don’t know where I’m supposed to be.
I might do that. See how far I can get with that angle? Yeah, I haven’t been to where the gear is yet.
Oh, it’s in the exhibit hall.
Yeah, there’s a couple of booths.
I know SE Electronics has one, and then BSW as well.
It has the banquet level right next to the grand ballroom. This is my VO Meter. People always would ask me for directions, not just the exhibit hall or where the events are, but the bathrooms, where I can find water.
I’ll ask you where something is later. I brought candy, I’ll give you candy.
Come prepared.
She’s great, awesome.
Impressive.
Anything you’re looking forward to?
I’m just looking forward to learning as much as I can. And I’m really new to voice over, and so I wanna just take it all in and then leave feeling like I’m ready to just hit the road running.
Absolutely, no, I understand. That’s probably one of the best advantages of something like VO Atlanta, because a lot of people who don’t come to the event, they’re like, oh, it seems like such an investment, is it really worth it, what’s the direct return? And that’s gonna be different for everyone.
It’s really hard to measure that. But one thing I can say, it’s just the networking, the friendships that we make at this event, pretty much make, like, yeah, it’s worth the cost of admission alone. And like you were saying yourself, it’s really motivating just because, and some people come in wherever they’re at in their career, they are usually able to just get one golden nugget and find a direction and find a focus and then build to progress their business throughout the year from that starting point.
So if you have an opportunity to go to an industry conference like VO Atlanta, highly recommend it. So make it happen, folks. I mean, you can volunteer, you can get involved with it and reduce the cost that way, but highly recommend it, or maybe join one of the smaller conferences that are in your area.
But definitely build that network, meet people in person, shake some hands, and yeah, just spread the joy, spread the love.
And if I can interject, I mean, I think something that’s really good about our industry in general is how supportive everyone is, and you can come in here and talk to Townsend Coleman, who’s a teenage manager, a star in the industry, and he’ll just sit down and have lunch with you and talk to you. So you can learn a lot from the greats, and so that’s really encouraging.
Well, and that’s what I love, is because there’s a lot of big talent here, but there are no big egos. It’s wonderful. Everyone is so genuine, and they’re really open and supportive and generous in spirit, and it’s really motivating to behold.
I know my friend Jatem, we were actually on the team challenge last year together. She’s an on-camera actress as well. She’s spent many years in theater, and she was tearing up, because she’s just like, it’s so cutthroat compared to what we experience.
Yeah, thank you so much, Keela.
Since we had an audience, I figured we might as well use it. Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Keela, for our extemporaneous interview and joining us. Speaking of interviews, though, we have two wonderful guests today who have joined us. Like I said, we’ve got my buddy David Toback from the Global Voice Acting Academy.
Not only is he our Chief Finance Officer, but he does just about everything else. So, David Toback, for people who aren’t familiar with you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with GBAA?
Sure. Well, I guess I’m the Operations Manager, but as you said, I do…
The everything guy.
Everything, yeah. So I manage the finance, the accounting, the purchases, the marketing, the website, and everything in between, making sure that the day to day happens and that we provide top level education to people consistently and with no hiccups. No, we wanna make sure things are at a professional level, not having…
We have a lot of classes and things, so there’s a lot of things to coordinate and organize, make sure that people know where they need to go. So just kind of all the day to day, making sure people get what they need when they need it and make sure they get the education that they’re looking for.
David, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on was because you’re a veteran of VO Atlanta. Can you tell us a little bit about what it means to come back as a returning talent and what you’ve enjoyed as… What’s your third or fourth?
Third year, yeah.
So as a third year member of VO Atlanta, what’s been good for you?
Well, I think every year I try to find something I wanna specialize for that year. I mean, my first year, I was a national sponsorship winner, or is it sponsorship?
Scholarship.
Yeah, he was actually, yeah, because I was the international winner and he was the national one, and that’s how we met for the first time.
And I came in and I was, like I’m sure, Kayla, right?
Kayla.
Sorry, I pronounced the bell wrong.
Nailed it.
You know, when you come, you’re overwhelmed. Well, the first time, you may not know that many people and it’s overwhelming and you kind of just fumble around and not really know what you need to do. And the next year, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna have a plan this year.
And so I tried to do that every year. And I think this year, my main focus has really been the GBA. So I do work full time for them.
So this is kind of a cross between a work conference for me for our purposes and then for myself, a educational. So I wanted to make sure I get an accession and go to a couple panels. But, you know, I’ve been able to see a lot of friendly faces, like you said, Paul, you know, I got off the shuttle and people were just running and hugging you and it’s just a really good time to recharge.
I actually had experience on the shuttle. I was waiting for the shuttle kind of by myself and all of a sudden Uncle Roy comes up and then Brad Hyland and John Rorda. So it was like a big party even before we got to the hotel.
It was awesome.
Exactly, and as I’ve been saying…
There were some poor schmoes who were not with us that were not going to our hotel. And I was like, oh my gosh, these poor people. Blabbering on non-stop the entire ride.
We were doing, what was it? We were doing voices in our Lyft drive last night. We were like, we’re sorry, we’re voice actors.
We’re at our conference. You probably get this all the time.
That started on the plane for me because there’s a talent that’s in Orlando. I live in Orlando. And we always wind up being on the same flight every year it seems.
And this time we sat next to each other. And from the minute we sat down, we didn’t stop talking until we landed. And I said, luckily it’s only an hour and a half flight, but these people must be pretty tired about hearing all this stuff around us.
But hey, at least it wasn’t a baby crying.
Yeah. You just have to entertain them with sock puppets or something.
There’s some present voices.
So David, as a returning person, I had this problem where I feel like there’s too much to do because when I was first coming, I didn’t really know a lot of the presenters or a lot of the sessions. So I didn’t know what I was missing, but now I do because I’m looking at the schedule and saying, oh, I need to go to that. How do you balance that, knowing all the things you want to go to?
It’s a challenge, I think. I think it’s even more challenging this year because there seems to be even more available. So there seems to be at least three things that seem to be pretty impactful at every time slot.
So I think it’s, again, finding that your goal for the conference, and is it marketing or business for this year or is it performance related and try to cater to those panels and try to find the things that are gonna be valuable for your business where you are right now. Some people, like, oh, I wanna go to a promo panel, or I wanna go to a promo breakout session. Are you studying promo right now?
Or is that something that you’re really gonna be looking to do or are you just doing it for fun? So I think putting too much on your plate can kinda scatter that. So I like trying to be a little bit more focused and try to pick the things that you think will be the most valuable for where you are right now in moving towards your goals for the next year.
Absolutely. Like we were saying, it’s almost like there’s four conferences going on at once just because there’s some pretty clear paths that you can take. For example, there’s a big focus on e-learning and narration this year.
There’s a bit of an animation track. And of course, the business and marketing. And so you really have to figure out…
And we’re not saying that you shouldn’t have any fun at all. Of course, you should take advantage of that. I mean, where else are you gonna be able to meet Michelangelo or The Tick or some of your favorite animation stars or idols in the areas of promo or what have you.
So definitely make time for that. And you really should… Like it’s impossible not to have a good time.
But for example, find the balance. Like for me, I’m trying to go to a few e-learning panels, but we’re also balancing our time promoting GVAA. And just for fun, I’m personally doing some character demos this year so I can actually rationalize going to a few of those funner animation character based sessions.
I don’t think that’s a word by the way. Funner.
Funner? More fun.
Oh God, I’m an English major. Shh, we can edit that.
You know, I would just say the other way to approach that is if you don’t have time to get to everything, try and find the people you are going to see as a presenter or as a host, and talk to them when you’re at lunch. And that’s one of the great things about VO Atlanta is we have these community lunches where everybody gets together, and there’s no pressure and no egos. You just go down, you can sit down with somebody, have a conversation about your kids, about your dog, about your favorite sports team, and maybe not even talk about VO, and everyone is really happy to do that.
Yeah. I think to segue on that, or not segue, but to take off on what you said, the first day, wound up eating lunch with Dave Fennoy, and it was with Brad Venable and a couple other people, and we were just chatting about all kinds of things. And all of a sudden, a real life situation that we were talking about came up, and Dave said, wait, I want to teach right here.
He started talking about how, you see how you were just doing this, you can apply that to VO. And he kind of had a teaching moment because he loves doing that. So even if you’re making a relationship with there’s a coach or a presenter, usually those people that are coaches, they’re coaches for reasons, or for reasons.
See, I’m doing it too. For a reason.
Maybe they have reasons.
But a lot of times they like helping people. And so you can get valuable lessons too while you’re networking and making friends.
Yeah, absolutely. So David, thanks for joining us. We actually have another guest who we want to introduce.
So Heather, would you mind saddling up next to me? Our open seat here. We are proud to introduce Heather Masters, who is a first timer here at VO Atlanta.
And what are you drinking? What is that?
That green tea. Or a magical confection. Label out.
Awesome.
Videoing? Oh yeah.
We’re live streaming to VO Atlanta TV.
I’m not an on camera actor.
There’s a lot of acting here.
As a first timer, Heather, can you tell us what you’ve enjoyed so far?
Well, I’d like to, but having been sitting here for the past 10 minutes, I believe everyone stole everything I was gonna say. That was really great. I appreciate it.
Would you ask me what I learned?
What are you enjoying so far? We’ll get to that. That was my next question, but thank you for stealing it.
Okay, because I have something for that. What am I enjoying so far?
Like has already been said, but it’s the truth.
I think the biggest thing for me is just the opportunity to be with everyone and to build these relationships. I’ve only been to one other conference, and that was WolfCon, and I came here with the thought, okay, I met people in real life there. Can I build on those relationships at that point, or am I gonna come here and have to start all over?
And they’re like, I have no idea who you are.
Who are you?
And because, which is reasonable, because they met me once. I think that’s been my biggest kind of moment, is that it’s not been like that at all. The people that I met there, they’re gracious enough to remember me and to talk to me.
And I feel like things, relationships, that kind of got initiated.
Kindled.
Started.
That’s the word, it worked. I’m a speechifier.
We’re here on the Synonym panel. They’ve been able to be slightly expanded here, and I feel like built upon. And that, more than anything, makes me feel like, and so I’m gonna come again.
Because if, okay, we met here, built a little here, well, I feel like that’s gonna continue. And for future conferences, we can build more like, okay, so what did you do this past year? And build real relationships, which is so important and vastly grander than, I like your Facebook picture.
Well, I mean, but I’ve just been watching you interact with some of these people who are like stars and idols for all of us here. But I mean, you would never know that this is her first time, that if she’s just going there, she’s composed, she’s confident, she’s funny and engaging, and she’s having a great time and she’s leaving a good impression on people. So it’s just like…
As far as you know.
I paid Sean to say that.
Just laying on the…
Can I?
No, go, my bad.
Well, I was just gonna say, what’s really funny is that I would like to say a little hint to people who are perhaps not naturally extroverted, which I fake it really well, but I’m actually not. I’m actually an introvert. And were it not for the fact that I had met a few people and could kind of like…
I told Paul in the very beginning, I was like, Paul, I may just kind of glom on to you. And so people that I met before, because I was brave enough to come to one, or brave enough to instagate, initiate at one point…
Every time, Heather, okay.
But because of that, then now, because I feel like the first conference I went to, I very much did just kind of stand in the back and just kind of made a few connections, but was very intimidated. And so I feel like for this one, those people that have been kind enough to remember me, now I kind of am bold enough to be like, I’m gonna come stand next to you. And that’s all it takes to be able to have a friendly face that you can recognize, even just come stand next to, and then conversation starts.
And then it’s organic and natural and hallelujah.
Lots of smart networking. I mean, that’s kind of Networking 101, which maybe you didn’t know, but you’ve created it now. But yeah, you find a wingman basically, or wing person to be a PC.
Heck, a lot of people will come with a friend or a partner or an accountability buddy or whatever you wanna call it, and to just kind of, like you said, have someone to fall back on. And it’s really cool, cause it’s like, and like we were talking about before, people wonder what you get out of the conference, exactly what you put in. So if you isolate yourself and you’re just kind of a wallflower, I mean you can learn a little bit, but I mean if you get actively involved and you push yourself out of your comfort shell, or lending things together.
I mean, economical.
It’s worth noting though that that only works when…
Walking on egg zones over here.
That only works when the community in which you’re interacting is welcoming. And that’s, again, it’s worth mentioning. That’s a great part of the voiceover community, is that everyone is so welcoming.
I’ve been in other businesses, as we talked about, in previous lives, and it’s not always like that. You can go into an event and you try and talk to somebody and it’s like talking to a wall, either because they’re not good at networking, or sometimes because they just don’t want to talk to you.
Yeah, or they want to withhold their information.
Yeah, that too. That’s the other great part about the community for voiceover, is that there’s no secrets, for the most part. People are willing to share what they’ve learned and sort of pay it forward, and that’s just so fantastic.
I have to say that that is something that I’m continually like, for real!
Because even, you know, I come from a theater background and sometimes in a theater world, I come from a very tiny pool of theater. And man, when I went there, I was like, hey, you know, I have a theater degree, I should be one of you, and they were like, we don’t know you.
I know.
And that was it. Like, they completely dismissed me, and I kind of laughed, because I was like, oh, you’re not LA.,
you’re not, you know, you’re a tiny little place, like really.
Yeah, where was this place that you mentioned that?
Well, Alaska, the foremost theater.
Right, it’s worth mentioning that this was Alaska.
Right, right, which is, yeah, but that kind of made it even more so, when he says things like that, you know, from an outside perspective, you’re like, but really? You know, and that’s one thing that I’m continually baffled by, because I don’t think it’s that way in the rest of the entertainment industry, but the people here, they genuinely want to help. I just passed Elly Rae Hennessey, who’s kind of a big deal.
Amazing.
In the hallway, and she may have been coming from an accession or, no, whatever. She was coming from something. And just people…
People… But people were stopping her as she’s walking, and you know what? I’m sure she’s tired.
I’m sure, you know, she has been going non-stop, but it wasn’t like, you know, she didn’t have her handlers by her that were like back off.
Ellie Ray is in the DaVinci room right now, on the lower level.
But she stopped. And she was completely engaging and completely friendly. And I just don’t know where else you can find a community like this.
Yeah, it’s so true. I had a business life in my previous life, and you know, people step on you to get over you, and here people take out the ladder and prop it up to help you come up as well, so…
They will offer you their shoulders.
Yeah, they’re like, here, get on my back. And I think it’s because there’s a common struggle that there’s no guidebook to voice over. You can go into the theater, and there’s schools and programs, and you can kind of have a guide, and here you just kind of fumble around until you figure out.
And so everyone has that same experience, and I think there’s also that ego at play. There’s not as much of a drive to be on camera, and I think it has something to do with just our personalities in general. And so it’s really refreshing.
I know Paul’s coming from different lives, and it’s so refreshing when you come into a place and you’re like, this can’t be real. This can’t be real.
Yeah, and it’s like you’re saying, so we were talking about people who might be, like believe it or not, I’m an introvert too. A lot of people are like, but yeah. And I will say, you gotta make time to recharge and self-care, but if you’re worried about being able to interact with people, keep in mind, this is an entire conference of 500, 600 people who love the same thing you do.
Except for the fine folks from Cotter Airways. I rode in the elevator yesterday with like four flight attendants and a pilot and all their luggage. It was kind of cramped.
Oh man, yeah.
Those poor people, I feel so bad for them.
What’s going on, this is so cool.
Yeah, I think they were kind of.
If I can make one suggestion as a VO Atlanta veteran, for other people, when they start to come back, find that person that looks like they’re a deer in the headlights and say hi to them. Pay it forward, because I think I found some people there, they look like they’re new, and I’ll just be like, oh, hey, how you doing? Don’t you know who I am?
Not at all. And then sometimes it gives them a better feeling, or that they’re, oh, okay, loosens things up and they feel like maybe I can talk to people or hopefully someone else will do the same. So if we all do that, then we’ll make everyone else feel comfortable.
There we go. I’m gonna throw a shout out to my friend David Gilbert. You should practice the three feet meet method.
Have you heard of this?
Oh yeah, if you’re within three feet of someone. So instead of just awkwardly acknowledging them quietly, just like, hey, and everyone’s got name tags. You can be sly and try and learn someone’s name that way.
It looks great as a hashtag, and I’m totally not being serious. That was a joke on Facebook. David put that out there and I said, David, did you say that out loud or look at it in print?
Because it comes out a little different. A friend of ours, Rob Marley, he’s got a fabulous blog about just the various, like getting into voiceover and stuff like that. And he’s got a great series on not just VO Atlanta, but networking events in general.
Like, everything’s from, like, pretty solid advice, like bathing, you know, having a breath in on hand. Yeah, exactly, because you want to leave a good impression, not just be like, not a stanky face over there. But…
But that might have been where he got the three meet greet rule. But like we were saying…
No, it’s three feet meat. You gotta get it right.
Oh, no wonder. Yeah, I hope he used the right vowel combo there.
All right, enough shenanigans.
Oh, God.
So we’re about a little over halfway through the conference, and I’m wondering what everyone is still looking forward to. What’s the thing you’re most excited about going into Saturday? Heather, why don’t you start?
You’re already like visibly backing away.
I’ll start. I’ll start then. I’m looking forward to the closing ceremonies because last year that was very inspirational, where the inaugural…
Oh my God, I used that word again. The inaugural. We started our podcast journey with that word and it didn’t go very well.
So anyway…
It just sounds like one of those words, like I’ve only seen it in books.
So the very first Unicorn Grant was presented last year to Jen Henry and the response and just the outpouring of support was just amazing. There were tears everywhere. And I’m hoping that is a repeat on Sunday or tomorrow at this point.
Yeah.
So what people, for people who might not be familiar, they introduced this new thing called the Unicorn Grant and basically, it’s just a huge step up into the industry. And it goes to someone who really encapsulates the giving spirit, not only the hard work and the talent that you would expect from a voice talent, but really that support and willingness and generosity of spirit to help out and give back to the community that’s been so good to us. So this included mentorship, demo production, money from studio equipment.
A lifetime subscription to Bedalgo.
Lifetime?
Yeah, a lifetime membership. And I’ve talked to Armie, he’s like, we’re not always going to do that. But it’s an incredible gesture.
And the thing is, this is huge, and it would be really easy to be jealous or envious of someone getting all of these wonderful benefits, but it couldn’t have gone to a more deserving person. And I’m going to use this to say, we’re going to talk about myself, but I…
If you weren’t, I was going to, so.
Okay, well, thank you. And for people who don’t know, I have been nominated as a finalist for this same grant. And just to be this far, because apparently finalists already get their own list of benefits, so it’s like…
It’s amazing, because it’s like basic. Some people are like, what are you going to do if you lose? I’m like, I already won.
It’s like they basically told like, hey Sean, you won, and you might win more. So like, how can I be disappointed about that? And I’m alongside two wonderful people, Scott Chambers and Susan Maisel, who I’ve met at VO Atlanta and have become fast friends.
And we already said, like, no, even if we lose, we win. Okay, because we have an entire community of people who recognized, like, it’s not like any of us were actively doing this for accolades or praise or anything out of it. We just wanted to help people.
And the fact that the community has seen that and recognized that and validated us is huge. I honestly…
I’m gonna… It’s gonna be epic.
It’s gonna be epic. And so if you’re here tomorrow, and like, no matter what happens, I know I’m just gonna be like…
Just watch the stairs this time.
Yeah, watch the stairs. So thank God nobody saw a recording. But when my team won the team challenge last year, I was so excited that I was just like, I don’t know, I ran up there like a baby giraffe.
No, I almost hit my temple on the freaking stair rail. I don’t know how I just kind of… No, it was ridiculous.
No, no, no, I don’t know how this happened. I kind of like, I tripped right as I got to the stairs, and then my arms kind of gumpied out or spider monkeyed out. I grabbed both and I kind of just like shimmied.
Like I was a kid on a jungle gym, and I managed to just barely graze my head on my hand. And I was just like, seriously, I’m going to knock myself out right now. They’re going to have to stop the conference.
That video is out there. You should YouTube it. David, what are you looking forward to other than Sean falling again?
That was it, really.
What was your biggest part of the conference?
Well, I’m looking forward to heading back to the GVA booth, but I’m also going to be looking forward to the Rates panel that’s going to be going on today at 2 p.m. I may be going up and talking, so we’ll see. I’m going to be in the audience. I think I’m going to be in audience participation, but for those that don’t know, the GVA introduced a rate guide about two years ago.
We’re coming up on two-year birthday, so that’s been a big player in the industry, and we’re going to be talking about that.
Don’t undersell it. You were incredibly instrumental in that. You technically spearheaded that.
Can I say that I have that printed out? I use it all the time. Because I’m in Alaska, and I have only been in this industry for four years, so, I don’t know.
And so, it’s been such a godsend to be able to have something that’s like, okay, well, I know that this is… I’m not selling out my industry. And it’s fantastic.
And we just came out with a brand new update, so if you’ve been using it and you didn’t catch our live stream or get our email, we did do a massive update, so go back and check it out and enjoy it, because it’s pretty good.
Yeah, and we want to remind people that it is really a resource for everyone. It’s a free resource. And we just want to maintain the quality of the industry and fair compensation for all talent.
And a lot of newer talent undersell themselves, because they’re like, yeah, I’ll work for exposure, I’ll work for experience.
It’s $200 for a national commercial.
That’s good, right?
But it’s just unconscious incompetence. And it sounds bad, but it just means you don’t know what you don’t know. And so you have this example, and it is a guide, it’s not a gospel, okay?
It’s just to give you ideas, like a starting point. Because you can negotiate up or down based on those rates, but it’s just to make sure that you’re not damaging the industry as a whole. Because as we continue to see, there is a fight to maintain fair rates for us.
Absolutely.
And people have embraced it. There’s some cool stuff. There’s some pay to play that have embraced it.
And there’s one that mandates that their clients have to acknowledge that they’ve read it before they post every job. And there’s others that are putting it into the algorithm so that there’s going to be rates that will be standardized. So that’s really cool.
So every year it gets more adopted. And we’re hoping the goal is for it to be kind of a non-union industry standard. And I think we’re heading that way.
I think it’s there already.
It’s amazing.
That’s great. Fantastic work on that. So Heather, have you had a chance to think, what’s the thing you’re most looking forward to the rest of today or tomorrow?
Okay, so I’m torn because part of me wants to give like this scholastic answer that’s really going to like, you know…
Give us the real answer.
The real answer is…
I’m really excited about the imbrab tonight.
How often do I get to go to a show? Come on. So I’m excited about that.
And just because last night was really great as an opportunity kind of outside of everything just to talk with people that I was in X sessions with and kind of like, wow, yeah, it was just a really great after hours. Yeah. So that’s what I’m looking forward to.
All right. That’s great. So we’re almost out of time, unfortunately.
I can’t believe how fast this went. But any parting words anyone wants to impart on our audience, either in the room or live on VO Atlanta TV?
Yeah. First off, I want to thank our audience member, Keila. She was charming enough to fill the room, guys.
But I just want to say for any attendees who are here, who see this, please come see us at either the GBA booth, or if you see Paul or Heather walking around, say hi, introduce yourselves. And again…
Do you know where the bathroom is?
I’m happy to answer those questions.
I know everything.
He can help you out. Whether or not you have access to a conference like VO Atlanta, find your tribe in other ways. It might be through social media.
It might be through a workout group in person or locally. Build that network to help you maintain your accountability and give you something like a leaping off point to keep you accountable and…
Maybe a leaning point. Maybe to lean forward.
This podcast was brought to you by VO Atlanta.
Lean forward.
Lean forward.
I just want to say thanks to everybody for watching live one of VO Atlanta TV. Thanks to Gerald for allowing us to do this. Yeah, absolutely.
And helping me set it up, honestly. Equipment wise. Thanks to Brandon Faxton and Cam Cornelius for setting up the streaming.
And thanks to Kerry Donovan for saving my bacon right before we started where we had a tech issue. So, appreciate all the help and thanks for having us. That’s it for The VO Meter live at VO Atlanta.
All right, so can you guys join it? Well, first off, we didn’t thank our guests. Oh, sorry.
They’re sitting right next to us. Thank you to Heather Masters.
And David Toback for coming on.
And Keila for coming on the spot.
Yeah, very brave.
All right, so since we have you guys here, we’re going to wrap up. Paul and I are going to say thanks for watching The VO Meter and then you guys say measuring your voice over progress.
It has to be one take.
It has to be one. I know. You already got your practice.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Episode 21 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got lots of stuff to talk about. We’ve got a great episode coming up for you today. It’s a short month with lots of stuff to fill it in.
We’ve got a great guest with us today. It’s Tom Dheere. He’s a voice actor and marketing specialist and coach.
And he’ll be coming up with us in a few minutes. But first up, current events. Current events.
Right. Current events. So, things that are happening with me.
First of all, this past weekend, not VO related, but I’m celebrating because I’m a native Philadelphian. Is that the right way to say it? Yeah.
Philadelphian. I’m always thinking of Ron Burgundy when he says, San Diego, San Diego, Philadelphian. And my Eagles just won the big game.
So I’m super excited about that. Can I get a Fly Eagles Fly? Fly Eagles Fly on the road to…
No, nobody wants to hear that.
Too much sports in for this non-sporter.
You’re not a big fan, huh? Not a huge fan.
I appreciate the event, the experience, but I’m not a huge fan of football.
Yeah, anybody who knows me knows that I, most recently, have not been either, and it was kind of a conscious decision. I didn’t want my kids to grow up to play. They both are…
I have two boys, and they both were interested in it early on, and I tried to steer them away from it. But once the Eagles were in the big game, for the first time ever that they actually won it, we jumped right back on the field.
They’re kind of near us. It’s your team.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not that far from there now, and we actually drove up to spend the time with my parents and my cousins and aunts. So it was a good time to just experience that camaraderie and fun. So that was this past Sunday, and we had a great time.
I, unfortunately, was not able to watch The Big Game because I was busy editing a large audio project, but other than working with some return and regular clients, lots of stuff is going on. I’m taking some character coaching to work towards a character demo with the awesome David Rosenthal, the CEO for the Global Voice Acting Academy.
It’s been a lot of fun. Right now, I’m working on a swaggery anti-hero voice. Think Jack Sparrow, but a little bit more articulate, less drunk sounding.
A little bit of swagger to him, kind of going in the deeper register there. Very sexy-like. So that’s fun.
Other than that, just been doing a lot of work for GVAA. We’re introducing some new membership tiers that we’re going to talk about officially when we launch them at VO Atlanta next month. We’ve got this great new webinar coming up with talking about the new tax laws and how they might affect you and your voiceover business.
We got a friend…
Very timely.
Yeah, very timely indeed. We got an actual CPA, John Lascoe and Rob Siglund…
You said Matthew Lascoe?
John Lascoe. So I don’t know if they’re related.
Do you remember Matthew… I accidentally met Matthew Lascoe. He used to do these crazy government tax self-help books, and he would dress up in a blazer covered in green dollar signs.
Oh, yes.
You can say, millions of dollars just by signing up for government programs. That guy.
That guy, yeah.
Not related, probably.
Kind of like Maury if he had been on amphetamines for too long.
Yeah, exactly.
But no, we got an actual CPA and Rob Siglim… I can never get his name right. Rob Siglim Paglia.
Siglim Paglia.
Who is a voice actor and entertainment lawyer himself. And so that webinar, once again, is New Tax Laws and You. It’s going to be happening live on February 27th at the end of the month, at 530 Pacific Time, 830 Eastern Time, and it’s only 30 bucks.
It’s $29.95. So, I mean, we’re going to learn all sorts of stuff about how these new laws can affect you. So if you’re interested and or you’re just getting started and you want to figure out more legal or some of the legal ramifications of a small voice over business, then this webinar is for you.
What about you?
Yeah, I have a few things going on. I recently started a new vertical in the business, actually several new verticals, in bidding for e-learning jobs. I decided to try and eliminate the middleman, so to speak.
So, there was a lot of jobs on some of the various freelance sites, where I was getting hired as the voice actor, and then being, the service being sold to another client. So, essentially, there was a middleman between me and the end client. So it was usually a video producer who was hiring me as the voice and then selling the whole package of the video and my voice to an advertising agency or a computer, an IT firm, so they could use that for their training.
So I started gathering up a list of contacts that I had from doing all these jobs and bidding myself as the video creation company. So I’ve actually started a separate entity. It’s something I might want to talk to Rob Sagan Pugley about.
But I’m now bidding on jobs as a whole project where I have several animators and graphic artists that I work with and we bid together on the jobs. So I’m taking the lead on getting the voice done first and then the animation and then it’s a whole package for the client.
Cool.
So like expanding into production. Yeah, more or less. And what that’s done more than anything is allow me to bid with fair rates because what typically happened was people would think of the voice last and it’s not only in the voice and the people I’m working with but there’s a lot of projects where the voice is the afterthought and what I’m trying to do is get that out in front and say the voice is probably the most important part because it’s the tone of the project you’re working on, especially if it’s a video or a presentation.
And in fact, when I set up this sort of, I put out a contest on one of the freelance sites to get these people to come and apply to work with me. And one of the first comments was, isn’t it usually the other way around where the voice is an afterthought? Actually said afterthought.
And I said, no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. The voice needs to be the lead and the most important part of the project. So I’m hoping this works out where we can gain some traction this way.
So far the results are pretty positive. I’ve had a ton of people get back to me and I have several projects I’m working on right now and we’ll see how it goes.
So, what is the next step for Stefano Productions?
Actually, I’m glad you asked. Because the other vertical I was talking about is marketing my kids as voice over artists. I’ve mentioned this before and I think my oldest two have actually had demos done when we did the last episode, but now all three, I’m proud to say, have demos out there and are signed to multiple agents.
The same ones that I’m with, no new agents, but they each have five agencies that are representing them around the country and in Canada and are getting auditions and my middle son is going to be working on an audiobook starting next week, so things are really picking up for them as well. It’s like a whole family affair now.
That’s really, really cool. What about your wife? Is she doing any voicing or is she just the accountant?
She’s the accountant right now. We actually thought about it because we’re working on a project where I needed a mom. They wanted a whole family of actors and my wife just wasn’t around because it is tax season and she’s a CPA, so I did bring in a colleague to work on that to play mom, but maybe down the line we’ll see what happens.
It’s your work wife.
Right. And then finally, the last thing I want to mention is that I am now a graduate of the Sean Allen Pratt Narration Coaching School.
We’ve been going at it for almost two years with a hiatus built in there, so don’t be scared away by working with Sean. He doesn’t always take that long, but he is pretty flexible if you have to take a break and come back, which I did for a while. But after two years we have finished and he’s mailing me a certificate, actual certificate that says I’ve graduated the program.
So this is just strictly for narration coaching. He does do other forms of coaching now and actually offer it to go forward with fiction. But I’m going to try and do some other things and see how that goes before I go back with him.
Maybe at some point I will do some fiction coaching with him, but right now I’m going in a different direction for the time being.
Yeah, when it comes to nonfiction, there’s fewer coaches that you can do better with. Sean is fantastic. I’ve done a couple of sessions with him as well, and I can’t recommend him highly enough.
Yeah, he’s been on the show as well. So if you want to listen to that episode, what was it, Episode 14?
Yes, our audiobook roundtable.
Yeah, go back and listen to that episode. It’s one of our most popular ones. There’s a whole lot of information there with not only Sean, but Stephen J.
Cohen, Andy Arndt, Deb Dion, and Scott Brick. Just a fantastic cast of characters.
And one more cool thing that’s happening to the both of us is we are actually going to be doing a podcast live next month from VO Atlanta.
Woohoo!
We’re going to have a whole room for it. Gerald Griffith is doing an entire room, sort of a mini event for different people who have their own voiceover-related podcasts to actually have a space where they can even have a live studio audience or just do an episode and comment on the event as it’s happening. So I think that’s a really cool thing.
And we’re kind of spearheading it, aren’t we, Paul? He’s actually asked us to be the sort of administrators for the podcast event within VO Atlanta.
Yeah, which means you and I are going to be crazy busy because I was already on the tech team, so I have a lot of work to do, and now we’re doing the podcast thing as well. And you’re going to be pretty busy with some other activities as well, aren’t you?
I’m going to be at the exhibitor booth for Global Voice Acting Academy. So if you’re at VO Atlanta, come say hi and talk about or ask us about our new membership. And some of the other services we offer.
And add us on the app. If you’re going to come to the conference, there’s that new app by Zorista. Look that up on Google Play or iTunes and add us and come say hi.
Yeah, it’s Zorista or Z-E-R-I-S-T-A. And then do you just have to put in whatever login information you used for VO Atlanta. You might have to do an email or username for that.
And then it should be able to find the appropriate event. And then you can adjust your profile, figure out what your personalized agenda is, connect with other attendees and even some of the agents and big names who are going to be there. And yeah, just get a…
That’s a pretty cool thing. Have you had a chance to check it out yet? Sounds like you have.
Oh yes, just a little bit. I’m still figuring out all the nitty gritty navigational details, but it looks pretty… I mean, Gerald went above and beyond this year as he always does.
But I mean, I think inner conference communication is sort of the theme that he’s trying to tackle this year based on some of the connectivity problems we had last year with just like hotel Wi-Fi and stuff like that.
I will say the app caught me off guard. I wasn’t aware it was even out. I guess I missed that live broadcast.
Sorry, Gerald. But I all of a sudden started getting all these ads from people. And at first I was kind of blown away.
I was like, wow, David Rosenthal just added me. He knows who I am.
Marilyn Whistler just added me.
Oh my gosh. And like Tom Pinto. And then, right, exactly.
And then I was like, oh, okay, it’s the app. I was wondering where all these connections were coming from. First I was like, oh, my new website is awesome.
And then I said, oh wait, it’s VO Atlanta. Not that it’s still not awesome, but it took me a while to realize where I was coming from. So it just, again, it goes to show how much effort Gerald has put into the communication.
I think it’ll help a lot. So we’ll get to our featured guest, Tom Dheere, in just a moment. But before that…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
So believe it or not, I was kind of tame with the questionable gear purchases. I only bought one mic this time.
Chest-wide.
And the reasoning, it doesn’t make sense anymore. I’ll give you my cockamamie reasoning behind it. But, and you just laugh at me.
So I don’t mind being a comic relief. So I bought a Shure SM7B for long form narration and audio books. And I’m using it now, which I usually am during the podcast, whichever Mike DuJour is up.
And my reasoning for it is because it’s not that sensitive. And we talked ad nauseam about my issues with long form. And the other reason is because it’s another one of those quote unquote industry standards, not necessarily for voiceover, but it’s a mic that most engineers…
Right, recording in general, and almost every engineer will know very well. I had been using the Audio-Technica BP-40, which I think I talked about in the last episode, another large diaphragm dynamic like the Shure, and similar sort of capsule and form factor. But it’s a mic nobody knows, almost nobody knows.
In fact, it’s the first time I really had trouble reselling a mic. So it took a bit of a bath on the resale on that. And I’m happier now that I have two industry standards that if I do a live session or send it off to an engineer, they’re going to know the Sennheiser MKH416 and the Shure SM7B.
They can work with that.
So again, it’s crazy logic, but it’s some sort of logic in my head.
Well, it’s something that I’m hearing a lot too. I mean, thanks to you, I now have two industry standards too as well. So I’ve had the 416 for a couple of years now after winning at VO Atlanta two years ago.
But then a few episodes ago, you’ll remember Paul’s and mine’s interesting exchange where I thought I was trading him for a TLM 102, which is a great mic, but it’s not necessarily an industry standard, whatever that means. But it turned out that it was actually the larger and more well-touted 103, which neither he nor the previous owner happened to like on their voice. So it was like, bonus.
And honestly, since then, I just haven’t gotten another mic since then. It’s that simple. Like I still drool over him sometimes, but it’s just like, I don’t need any other mics.
It’s a little sad, really. Still, I mean, I’ll still go through interfaces and stuff like that though, but it’s just like, what’s the point? And I was actually listening to our friendly competitive or friendly competition, VO School.
They had a great episode on microphones recently. And they were mentioning, it’s like, yeah, these industry standards may not be the absolute best mic on a given voice, but chances are they’re gonna be pretty close and they’re certainly not gonna sound bad. So with that in mind, it’s like, if you’ve got the budget in the time, yeah, find that perfect mic that’s custom tailor-made for your voice.
But if you’ve got the budget for it and you can afford an industry standard, there are far worse choices out there.
And I always wanted to at least try a TLM 103 and a 416. So I can know.
A couple of times over.
But I mean, several years ago, when I was first looking into the business, I thought, oh, if I could only hear how that sounds, you know, this 416 especially has this sort of aura around it. Right, this legendary status, this magic mic that should be great for everyone. And it’s not always, like you said, but I always want to at least try it, and now I can say I have, and I’m still using it, believe it or not.
I know. Well, I actually was thinking about you the other day because I was reading another article about microphones. So like, obviously the sickness isn’t dead, but…
But at one point they are mentioning it’s how you should never actually sell any microphone that you’ve used on a previous project, because you never know if they come back and they need to do like pickups, even if it’s years down the line. And now first off, I thought that was a little exaggerated, but still I was just like, good luck Paul, because I mean, how many different mics have you gone through at this point? I’d say two dozen easily right off the bat.
Yeah, I was going to say 20, but yeah, 24 might be more accurate.
Oh, man.
Of those, I still have four.
Oh, good.
So, yay!
You can redo those four projects.
So we’ll get to the interview idea with Tom Dheere in just a few minutes. But before we do, we have this episode’s VO Meter stick, this time brought to us by Barbara Quesada with a funny story about her dog voice.
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.
So I thought in honor of Valentine’s Day, I would tell a voice over love story. Well, it’s sort of a voice over love story, but it has to do with voices anyway, so I guess bear with me. Like so many voice over people that I know, I make animals talk.
Specifically, I have, at this point, a geriatric miniature dachshund named Taylor, who’s 16 years old. But he was much younger when I first met and started dating my husband. And I, of course, in some of our dates, would just start talking to him as my dog.
And the fact that he didn’t run away immediately tells you that he’s a special kind of person to put up with that. But, you know, he would just let me chat away with him, pretending to be my dog, talking to him as my dog. And he also had two miniature dachshunds at the time, which is kind of how we met, but that’s a whole other story.
And anyway, we’d been dating for some time, and, you know, I’m talking to him as my dog always. And one day, he talked back to me as the dog. And that was the day I knew he loved me.
And then we got very crazy and, of course, started talking to one another as the dog, having entire conversations as the dog. But that tells you what kind of crazy people we are, I guess. And now we have two children, a six-year-old and an eight-year-old, who try to do the dog’s voice, but they’re not that great at it.
But they will ask to talk to the dog and, like, mommy, no, I want to talk to Taylor now. And so, you know, it’s just… It’s become a very special, special thing for our family.
And, of course, Taylor has more than just a voice, he has a personality, too. That’s right. I’m awesome, and I brought this family together.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Now go away and just let me sleep, because that’s all I want to do.
Thank you.
Thanks for that, Barbara, that was a charming story. I always love when we can involve our families in what we do.
All right, so our guest for this month is Tom Dheere. Of course, he’s a voice actor, but he’s also a marketing specialist and coach as well, helping talents of all stages of their career develop business plans, financial plans, and just get a better understanding of the marketing aspects of a voiceover business. So without further ado, let’s take it to Tom Dheere.
So now we’re getting to the meat of our episode, our interview with this week’s featured guest. He’s a voice actor, a coach, an icon in the world of business marketing. The H is not…
The H is silent, but he’s not. Please welcome to The VO Meter, Tom Dheere. How you doing, Tom?
Icon.
Icon.
I’ll take it.
I said it.
I’ll take it.
I said it. How are you today? I’m good, Paul.
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for being here. So, Sean and I, well, I should mention that Sean is not able to join us today. He had an in-person audition, which is pretty exciting for him.
So, it’s a good reason not to be able to join us for an interview, but we will miss him dearly. But Tom has been kind to still do the interview with us. And we are both so excited to have you here because we planned this a long time ago, or at least planted the seeds.
And we’re so glad you could join us.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
So, tell us a little bit about your background. Like I said, you’ve been in the business for a while, and most people know you, but a lot of our listeners actually are new to the business. We tend to attract a lot of newbies, as it were.
So, tell us a little bit about how you got into voiceover.
Okay, so I dropped out of graduate school in New York City. I went to the National Shakespeare Conservatory in Manhattan a long time ago for… I originally wanted to be a classically trained New York-based Shakespearean actor.
That’s what I wanted. I had a very specific goal of what I wanted to do. For various reasons, it didn’t work out, so I dropped out.
And I’m at home with my mom. She’s reading New Jersey Monthly Magazine, is looking at the back of the magazine and says, what’s voiceover? And I said, I don’t know, you talk for money.
It turns out I was absolutely right. And she said, there’s a coach nearby. You’ve got a good voice.
You should try it out. So I went to this coach, Hope Noah, and did a diagnostic. She said I had some potential.
So I worked with her for about six months. And then I went to a nearby studio to cut my commercial demo. Cut the demo.
And then she gave me a little certificate of completion and a ream of Xerox copies of production company directory listings and said, okay, start your cold calling and good luck. This was 1995. So there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, no Bedolgo, no pay to play sites.
You know, most people didn’t have home recording. So basically all you had was a demo in a dream. And you just had to, you know, figure it out.
So yeah, that’s how I got my start.
So what was the toughest part initially once you had that sort of, well, basically pushed off the ledge by Mama Bird? What was the toughest part to get started?
The toughest part was figuring out, and it took me a really long time to figure this out, is that if you want to be a successful artist inside the booth, you need to be a successful business outside the booth. You need to be an effective business. When I started in 1995, you know, there was a very small amount or much less voiceover talents out there.
They were in the big cities, and almost none of them had home recording facilities. So you could have a career by functioning as an employee, as an artist. Now you can’t do that anymore.
You have to be a business. And the people who think like artists, employees, starving artists, the American Idol chorus line, God, I hope I get it mentality, you’re going to fail, and you’re going to fail hard, and you’re going to fail fast. You have to think like a business and have effective systems of thought and systems of execution like a business to even have a chance at being successful in this industry nowadays.
Okay. So what were some of the ways you overcame that initially?
I didn’t. I sucked.
I struggled for a really long time because I didn’t know how to think about what I was supposed to think about. What changed everything for me was going to my first voiceover conference. TheftCon 3.
This was 2011. So I started pursuing voiceovers in 95. I got my first gig in 96.
I struggled doing this while having a job in 2005. I got fired from the last job I ever had, which was probably the best day of my life. And that’s when I really needed to figure out what was going on.
So I joined the VoiceOver Bulletin Board. I learned how to build a home recording studio. And then five years later, still kind of figuring this out, but making a living, I went to my first voiceover conference, FAFCon.
And it taught me that I deserve to be here. I deserve to be successful professionally. And I realized a huge thing.
And this is what has been pounded into our heads since we were born, is that if you’re not a star, you’re a loser. And there are no stars in the voiceover industry. There are just people trying to do this.
There’s no celebrity voice talents. There’s no famous voice actors. There’s movie stars who do voiceovers, like Morgan Freeman or Kiefer Sutherland or George Clooney or Alice in Janey.
But you can’t find someone walking down the street and go, hey, do you know who Joe Cipriano is? They’re going to be like, no. Do you know who Bob Bergen is?
So once I rubbed the stars out of my eyes and realized that this was a job, it was a business, and the only person who’s going to make the phone ring is you, that was a big help. The other big help is when I realized that the most important ingredient to my success as a voiceover talent is my fellow voiceover talents. Just a couple weeks ago, I did a cost-benefit analysis class, and I showed them a breakdown of my revenue, not how much I make, but how much I make per gig and by genre and how I got the gig.
Two percent of my work came from agents. Fifty-nine percent of my work came from recommendations from fellow voice talents. Wow.
So who’s more important to you in your industry? The agent who’s going to make you a star or your so-called competition? The answer is clearly your so-called competition.
And they’re not your competition. I truly believe there is no competition in the voiceover industry. That’s how I turned the corner of my voiceover career when I discovered that my friends and colleagues were my secret to success.
Not the things that we’ve been told our whole lives are the secret to your success, which is getting discovered and getting your big lucky break, whatever that even is.
That’s great. Well, that cost-benefit analysis you mentioned sounds pretty in-depth, and that brings us to one of the reasons we wanted to have you on, because you are known for your marketing strategies and your business acumen, quite frankly. Tell us a little bit about your consulting business and the work you’re doing with Edge Studio.
Okay, so I am known as the voice-over strategist or VO strategist, and you can check it out at vostrategist.com. And I’m a voice-over business and marketing consultant. I’m not a performance coach.
There are others that are far more qualified and interested in that. I do voice-over business consulting. There’s very few of us in the country that does this.
And I started doing it because I realized there was a big need that needed to be filled. And I also figured that that was the best way that I could give back to an industry that has been so good to me. Because a big part of being effective as a voice-over business is having the ability to be a contributing member of the community and being able to give back.
I’m a true proponent of karma, and that’s what I like to call my karmic penance, is being the VO strategist and helping out and sharing with everybody all the things that I wish I knew 20, 15, 20 years ago that would have saved me a lot of time and energy and money. So as a voice-over strategist, I function in a couple of different ways. One, I do one-on-one business consulting, where I do a diagnostic of your business and ask you a series of very uncomfortable questions about your business, help you figure out where the holes are, and then we come up with an action plan.
And it’s not just for aspiring voice talents. I work with voice talents of all levels, regardless of experience, because sometimes you need to tweak your voice-over business model or overhaul it, because times change, and what worked even a couple of years ago doesn’t work now on a business and marketing level. So you need to look at what your business is and what genres you need to explore and how strong your goals are and how specific your goals are.
One thing I’ve also learned is that vague goals will get you vague results. Specific goals will get you specific results. So I work in a one-on-one capacity.
I also work for Edge Studio, and I teach webinars. I also work for Abacus Entertainment in New York City, and I teach webinars there as well. Live sessions and group sessions on Skype or actually Zoom, our go-to webinar on Edge Studio, and I use Zoom at Abacus.
And I also do live appearances at conferences like FAFCon and VO Atlanta. I’ll be appearing at the Mid-Atlantic Voice Over Conference in November this year. So my job is to help you figure out how to think like a voice over business and how to execute like a voice over business.
That’s fantastic. So you mentioned the one-on-one consulting and some of the group work you do. Something I wanted to touch on is the conferences you just mentioned.
I was going to promote you at MAVO, but you did it for me. Thank you.
Oh, you’re welcome. And thank you.
We actually did a recording of an episode there the last time it was held, 2016. It’s a great conference. I highly recommend everybody check it out if they can.
We’ll be there again this next time. So what can a voice actor gleam from a conference that they may not be able to get in a one-on-one atmosphere or as a prelude to consulting with you one-on-one? Is there some key takeaways you try to get across to a larger audience like that?
The most important benefit from an aspiring or veteran voice talent to attending a conference is the ability to be a part of the community. We are all trapped in our little booths all over the country, all over the world, frankly, and have become overly reliant on the internet as a marketing tool. There is no marketing tool that is more powerful than interacting with a human being in person.
I define marketing as the art and science of developing meaningful relationships. And the only way that you can truly develop a meaningful relationship with someone is if you interact with them in person. That’s why, like I said, FAFCon 3 was so monstrously successful for me.
As a result of attending that conference and speaking there, I got picked up by Edge Studio, and that turned into The VO Strategist, and that’s how you and I got here today talking about all this fun stuff. So go with an open mind, go to learn, go to give, and don’t view the other attendees as competition. Like I said, they’re the biggest part of my voiceover business.
So go to learn, go to give, and go to think. Go to think about yourself and learn to think objectively about who you are as a voice talent, what your relationship is with the industry, and what you can do to be the most effective. And I mean that in what genres can you master and what relationships that you can form.
And not so you can claw your way to the top, because I think that’s a lot of garbage. The voiceover industry is not vertical, it’s spherical. It’s not about being more and more and more successful.
I mean, we would obviously all like that, but that’s not always how it works. My first audiobook that I narrated was Danielle Steele. You know, only the Bible has sold more copies than Danielle Steele.
That and 50 cents got me a phone call, because what am I going to do, just narrate the Bible for the rest of my life? No, I don’t have the voice for it anyway. I sound like I’m 19 trying to get into a bar.
So your voiceover business is spherical. It’s learning to make as many meaningful relationships with as many people as possible. Clearly, agents aren’t the most important people in my voiceover business.
My fellow voice talents are. And so are the recording engineers and the receptionists and the interns and all the other people that make all of this stuff work. They’re just as important as any union rep, as any agent, as any big honking end client.
I think they’re more important, frankly.
Yeah, I agree. Let’s stay on that networking theme for a second. When you’re at a conference, in spite of you saying there are no VO celebrities, and to a large extent that’s true, but there are those in the industry that are put up on a pillar, rightfully so, and people that are new to the business or seeing them for the first time can be a little starstruck.
You mentioned Joe Cipriano. Who else did you mention earlier?
Bob Bergen.
Oh yeah, Bob Bergen, obviously. So people like that, you see them in person the first time, it can be a little overwhelming. Now I don’t have this problem, because I spent years cold calling people in other businesses, and I have absolutely no filter.
But for someone who’s approaching a conference for the first time, what do you do to approach somebody like Joe Cip?
You remember the old cliché that, you know, Joe puts on his pants one leg at a time, and he’s there to learn and he’s there to give. So you should be there to learn and you should be there to give. So a couple of things.
Number one, don’t try to impress anybody. I don’t care who they are. Everybody, like a Joe Cipriano, has fresh batteries in their BS detector.
And they can smell you coming a mile away. So I have a couple of rules when I go to events like that. Number one is, if I’m trying to develop a meaningful relationship with anybody, a Joe Cipriano or a first time voice talent, I talk about everything but voice overs.
The reason why is because people work with people that they like. So I don’t care what microphone you use. I want to know how your daughter’s soccer team is doing.
I want to know how many dogs you have and what music you like to listen to. Because I want to get to know you as a person. I’ll put it to you this way, a few years ago I wrote a blog about questions you should and shouldn’t ask other voice talents.
And a voice talent asked me, is there some form of insider click that gets voice talents’ gigs via agents through their demos and not through their auditions? And I said, yes, there is a click. I said, the conspiracy is massive.
The conspiracy is that people work with people that they like and trust and have developed a relationship over a long period of time because as voice talents we have demonstrated that we not just have the talent, which is by the way the least important part of our business model, but we show up on time, that we take direction, and we’re not a jerk. So yes, I audition almost every day, but also agents say, hey, I booked you for this gig, you know, be here at this place in this time or they’re going to call you and lay it down. Because my representation is communicated to those end clients that this is a guy that will get the job done.
So if you consider that a conspiracy or a clique, call the FBI.
Yeah, it’s so true. And it really goes back to just, it’s a business. And if you’ve ever done any other business in your life, you know that the best sort of business or best client comes from referrals.
And if you can get a referral from another voice talent, that’s the best kind of endorsement you can get.
Yeah, referrals are everything. Relationships are everything. And another myth is don’t audition all day.
Auditioning all day is one of the biggest wastes of time you could possibly have. Most people audition all day because they don’t know what else to do. And they say, well, Tom, what else should I do?
Well, the answer is everything, anything. Auditioning is part of a balanced breakfast. But that means you’re just focusing on the starving artist, employee part of your business model.
And you’re not focusing on developing your craft or developing relationships or just becoming a student of the industry. Also, if you’re auditioning all the time, you’re not looking for relationships. You’re just looking for jobs.
I don’t want jobs. I want relationships with clients, long-term relationships with clients, where I wake up in the morning and there’s a few emails in my inbox from clients I’ve worked with for years saying, okay, this is the gig we’ve got for you this week. And I bang it out and deliver it and invoice them and go to the next one, which is what my business model is like right now.
Sure, I audition regularly, but I don’t give a rat’s nose about the audition once I’m done with it. I don’t care. It’s such an arbitrary lottery-like system that audition is anyway.
I don’t care because if I get it, great. If not, that’s okay too. It’s just part of the things I have to do.
I consider auditioning part of the… making sure I have enough staples in my stapler. It’s just a thing I have to do, but I don’t fixate on my stapler all day.
It’s a nice one. It’s a lovely one. It’s a red swing line.
I was told I would get my stapler back.
Right. Exactly.
Thank you.
You got the office space reference.
Oh, funny. So, that’s great. Obviously, relationships are the best way to build a business.
But one thing I’ve been dying to ask you is about cold calling, because I know you’ve done a ton. And in the most recent episode of The VO Meter, we featured our friend Stephen George, who just got signed with his first agency by literally walking in the front door and introducing himself, which was probably below the mind of most of the people who are listening to this episode. So, I know you’ve done a lot of cold calling.
How did you build your business using it? And is it still a viable option in today’s VO world?
I would like to state for the record, Paul, that I hate cold calling with the burning passion of a thousand dying sons.
Agreed.
I hate it. I avoid it as often as I can. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve done an actual cold call in at least five years.
Oh, good for you.
I don’t do them because they’re largely ineffective. Because you’re just wasting their time. Here’s the thing, Paul, is that most marketing techniques that you’re going to be taught these days just don’t work anymore.
Whether it’s cold calling or emails or postcards or whatever, most of them don’t work anymore. And the reason why is because there’s just too damn many of us now. Every yut with a deep voice in a USB microphone is trying to do what we do for a living.
And they are constantly bombarding these poor bastards that are the voice seekers and agents and marketing reps and recording studios with their horrible demo-milled demos and their cliche two-dimensional pitches and their lack of branding and lack of efficacy. So it’s exponentially harder to be effective when it comes to marketing these days. So I don’t bother with cold calling anymore.
I don’t bother with postcards anymore. I do a newsletter and that helps a little bit, I guess. If nothing else, it keeps top in mind.
So the thing that I enjoy most about sending out a newsletter these days is updating my contact database with all the people unsubscribed. That’s where I get my jollies now. Because it’s like, oh good, now I don’t have to deal with that person anymore.
Not that there’s anything wrong with them, but it’s like, okay, they don’t want a relationship with me? Fine, thank you for letting me know. I’m going to focus on this group of people now.
So yeah, cold calling. I mean, it sounds all romantic and stuff that Stephen George, is that you said, did that? It sounds great.
But also, you know, for every… you try that 10 times, you know, eight times security may escort you out.
Yeah, that’s a good point.
You know what I mean? So you got to be really careful about stuff like that. I mean, I’ll be honest, I cold called almost everybody in the Audio Publishers Association Directory, and that was 2005, 2006, and that got me Danielle Steele.
But that’s when there was a heck of a lot less of us running around. There’s just too many of us to do that. Because think of it this way.
Every agent, every agent’s assistant, every casting director, casting assistant, every voice seeker or anyone who’s in the office of every voice seeker has a physical mail inbox. They have an email inbox. They have a text messaging inbox.
They have a Facebook messenger inbox. They have a Twitter direct message inbox. They have a LinkedIn inbox.
And you can even get messages on Instagram nowadays. All of them are full to the brim every day. And it’s like fighting back the ocean with a broom to be able to keep up with all that stuff while they’re still trying to do the other parts of their job.
So I’m not saying you should never email anybody ever again or cold call anybody ever again or do some form of analog marketing campaign ever again. Just keep in mind that there are 2,000 schmucks just like you trying to do the same exact thing in the same exact way. So what are you going to do about that?
How are you going to make yourself distinct? How are you going to provide value to the voice seeker that those other 1,999 yutzes aren’t? And the answer is that’s entirely up to you because you are you.
You are your own distinct, individual, unique little snowflake who has your own set of background and culture and education and training and value system. So you got to figure out who are you, what’s important to you, what values do you have, and what value can you provide to that voice seeker to make you different from that tsunami of solicitations that they’re getting from everybody else in the voice over industry.
So let’s talk about some of the strategies that you suggest to people without giving away too much of your secrets. What are some things people can do to make themselves different?
I don’t have any secrets, really. I mean, I’m not a particularly talented voice talent, and it’s not like I drop thousands of dollars in my marketing campaign. I mean, basically, rule one is just, you know, don’t be a dick.
You know, be, you know, be a decent human. Like, be a good human, try to collect good humans. Try to attend as many live events as possible, and try to let your honesty and personality and sincerity shine through.
Be there to help. Be there to realize that even if you are a new voice talent, you do have something to offer as a human being, because nobody as five years old says they want to be a voice talent when they grow up. Being a voice talent is most often a second, third, fourth, or post-retirement career, which means all of you have skill sets and abilities that I guarantee on some level will be of value to you as a voice over business.
My friend Liz Ayala was a nurse, and now she’s a voice talent who specializes in medical narration. Sometimes it’s just that simple. So use what you have.
You have a lot more to offer than you think that you do, and try to interact with as many humans in a live setting as much as possible. Some of you may think, I’m in this business because I prefer staying in the closet because I’m terrified of people. And a lot of people are.
A lot of you are introverts. I’m lucky, I’m kind of an extrovert. I like to call myself an extrovert who needs to recharge frequently, if that makes any sense.
So if you see me at FAFcon, there’ll be 10 or 15 increments where I just won’t be around because I’m in my hotel room just lying on my bed for 10 minutes just going… And then I just get up and I go back downstairs and I dive right back in. That’s just how I operate.
Well, here’s a secret about that. There are quite a bit of introverts in the industry, which means if you’re not, or you can at least pretend you’re not at an event, you can just rock the house and get all those referrals and business for yourself, while those people who are a little hesitant are standing in the corner like a sixth grade dance.
Right. Amy Snively, who is the golden goddess of FAFCon, says that whenever she goes to a networking event or a conference or a live seminar, she refuses to leave until she has gotten help from somebody and helped somebody, and she will not leave until that happens. And it’s not necessarily a voiceover-related referral or recommendation.
It can be anything. It could be like sharing a recipe for peanut butter cookies or recommending a landscape or anything like that, just so you can make a connection with somebody, making a connection on a human level. If you can do that, even with one person at one event, you’re off to the races.
Yeah, I wrote a very similar blog post that was featured on Voice Over Extra a few months ago where I said the exact same thing. You put two people together and make a connection for them, then you’re the star of the show and people remember that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, Tom, we’ve been talking for almost 30 minutes now, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your tips and some of the ways you got to where you are in the business today. Is there anything you’d like to tell our listeners about how they can hire you or book you for coaching?
Oh, sure, absolutely. You can find me at edstudio.com and Abacus Entertainment. You can also contact me directly at viostrategist.com.
Just to give you an idea of some of the stuff that I do, I’ll just give you a list of my upcoming appearances. January 25th, I’ll be talking about the sales funnel for Ed Studio. Monday the 29th, I’ll be appearing on The Voice Over Body Shop at 9pm.
Thursday the 15th, I’ll be teaching Ed Studio Business and Money 201 students, plus anyone else that wants to join in, how to build an effective rate sheet. I’ll be teaching a basics of marketing class at Abacus Entertainment, which will be live in New York City on Tuesday the 20th, but you can also attend online. And Thursday, February 22nd, I will be teaching for Ed Studio four words that will kill your marketing, just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that I offer.
Well, Tom, that’s fantastic. Go out and check him out. Hire him.
We really appreciate you coming on, Tom Dheere, and we will talk to you soon.
All right, great. Thanks for having me.
So once again, thanks to Tom Dheere, that was a fantastic interview. You know, we had quite a bit of technical problems on this. First, it was an issue with Chrome, which is kind of a widespread issue, I found out, where a lot of people are having trouble, and me, for the last three weeks now, where I cannot hear incoming audio on any of the OPUS-based programs on Chrome only, which is a problem because a lot of them recommend Chrome, and some only let you use Chrome, so I can’t listen to incoming audio on Bodago Call, or Skype, or IPDTL.
None of them work for incoming audio, or Google Hangouts, which is run by Google. So it’s really annoying. So Tom and I tried Google Hangouts, we tried Skype, we tried Source Connect Now, we tried Bodago Call.
Turns out that I think he’s also having a problem with his interface. So the way we actually did it was a double-ended phone patch. Wow, that sounds dirty.
Oh, God. It depends on where you’re putting the phone.
So I had ear buds in my ears listening to Tom. He had ear buds in his ears listening to me. And we both recorded on each end.
And then he sent me the file. It was a nightmare, technically. We actually had a reschedule where we were scheduled to start at three, I think it was.
We ended up recording until 4.30 because it was such a mess. So if you had any problems with Chrome, it’s not you, it’s Chrome. There’s something going on.
It’s not you, it’s Chrome.
I put in tickets to Google.
You need to make a T-shirt.
I put in support tickets to Google, and I have a thread going on the Hangout Support that it’s all over the place. And actually, another friend of ours, a competitor, Jamie Moffat, and I had a call a couple of weeks ago where he was losing his mind thinking that his hardware was crapped out. And he put out a SOS on Facebook and said, is anyone able to help test, put the alcohol call with me?
So I jumped in and again, I said, no, Jamie, it’s everybody, it’s not just you. And he was like, oh, that makes me feel a lot better, although we both are still having problems technically. So the only workaround I found is using another browser.
They all seem, all the Opus Codecs seem to work with Mozilla and Safari if you have either of those. I haven’t tried Internet Explorer just because I don’t have it on my Mac, but or Edge, I think it’s called now. So that might work, but that is a workaround to use a different browser.
I don’t really have anything to add, aside from this terrible forced update thing that… Er, I don’t know. It just seems like all the larger tech companies are just continuing to update their products without working together with other companies to make sure their products work.
I don’t know, it’s frustrating. I’ve had issues.
Which ones, then?
Oh, like you were saying, Google, Mac, Microsoft.
Oh, yeah.
And various levels, but that’s just a diatribe for another day.
Well, I think a lot of it is they’re chasing malware, like there’s this huge Spectre meltdown bug that everyone’s trying to chase down, so I think that’s part of the problem. I think that’s when Google last updated when that came out. And that’s probably the issue, but they have yet to fix it for the incoming audio.
It’s a minor concern, probably, for them, as opposed to the millions of other users they have that aren’t voiceover people. But it’s frustrating for us.
So enough about paranoia about forced updates and conspiracy theories. Once again, I just wanted to thank Tom for coming on to the podcast and sharing his wisdom and dropping some knowledge. And if you’re at VO Atlanta next month, come stop by, come be in our live audience, or just come visit us in the exhibit hall, if you have a minute.
Yeah, we haven’t lined up any guests yet, so if you want to be on the show, come by and say hi, and maybe we can squeeze you in.
That’s right. So you got a funny story or an interesting one, you could join in our VO Meter stick. Of course, we once again are opening the floor to questionable gear purchases of all sizes and budgets.
So if you’d like to be on for a few minutes, just come by and be great. It’ll be fun.
So that wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. 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 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.