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The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Hi, everybody, and welcome to a very special episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Today we’re in between episodes, but we’re doing this special report about the interview I just did with the two local authors who I recorded in my studio doing their own book.
Yeah, I’m sure you’ve heard Paul mention on some of our earlier episodes that he’ll actually rent out his studio and record local authors to do their audio book projects and stuff like that, which I think is a really cool added value for having a personal studio. So it’s not something that all of us can do if we’re working out of a closet or have roommates and stuff like that. So that’s really cool, Paul.
Yeah, something I sort of walked into by accident. I had a friend, the first one was a friend of a friend who had written a book and they were talking about it on Facebook. And just sort of the Looney Tunes thought bubble over my head said, hey, I wonder if they’d like to do an audiobook.
So I asked and she said yes. And then we worked on it over the next couple of weeks. At first I approached her and said, do you want me to do your book?
And she said, well, it’s a book about working moms.
You know all about that though, don’t you? Your wife’s a working mom.
Yeah, my mom was a working mom most of my life. But anyway, I said, good point. Would you like to do it yourself?
And she said, yeah, I’ve actually been thinking about that. Tell me how it works. So we talked about the ins and outs and the dos and don’ts.
I sent her Sean Pratt’s video of talking to herself in the bathroom for two weeks to see if she actually liked doing it. And she said she tried it. And she said, yeah, let’s do it.
So we produced a book, put it out on Audible, and it’s been out for I guess about six or seven months now. So that was fun. And I said, hey, this is cool.
I like being on the other side of the glass for a change and just doing the editing and listening. So my local pastor, who we’ll talk to in a second, you’ll hear the interview I did, and his associate had written a book that was wildly successful. And I approached them about doing an audiobook about a year ago.
And they sort of said, yeah, we’re thinking about it. Maybe we’ll tell you when we have some time. And then they said, yeah, let’s do it over the summer.
We’ll make it our summer project, which you’ll hear in the interview. It was probably the worst time to do it, because it’s in the…
Oh, the heat.
Yeah, the East Coast and Baltimore and the humidity. They were locked up in this booth. And I tried to use the fan, but it was interfering with some of the recordings.
So that’s one of the things Pastor Michael actually mentions that that was the worst part about doing the audiobook. So you’ll hear that in the interview. But yeah, the book has been out now for a couple of weeks, and we’ve had good feedback from it.
And they actually have a whole series of books that I’m hoping to work with them on in the future.
That’s wonderful. Best of luck to both of you guys, or to all three of you, excuse me.
Thank you. Something you’ve considered at all? Have you ever rented out your studio or let somebody borrow it, either here or back when you were in Nagasaki?
Well, yeah, I did it all the time, actually. Well, mainly for what I do, like sort of the English e-learning modules that I do. I’ll have people…
And I’ve certainly advertised my studio to local talent, but just based on where I’m located, there’s not a whole lot of people who need it. But back when I was in Japan, if anyone had any audio recording needs, they had them like, oh yeah, sure, just come on by. And by the way, I need more narrators, so it was kind of a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your situation, which is what I’m sure you’re experiencing now.
You might have… Or you can trade your studio services for marketing services or any number of things, whatever you set your mind to, really.
Yeah, actually brings up a good point. I met with a local marketing strategist this week, a friend of mine, who I’ve known for 20 years, that’s also what he does. And we talked about that.
And he said he’s more or less doing only consulting now. And I said, well, how could we work something out where you help me with the strategic part of my business? And he said, well, let’s barter for it.
And he apparently volunteers with a local school at where his kids go and helps them with their production for their sports teams. So his son and some of their classmates produce videos for the football team, the soccer team. And they’re really good, actually, for high school kids.
Like awesome cross-phase and dissolves and epic soundtracks behind it. So they need some voice overs for that. And I said, yeah, I’d be happy to help.
You know, I have the studio here, just like you said. We can barter out the services and we’ll see what we can make happen. So that’s something I’m looking forward to, too.
And I’m sure that’d be a fun little field trip for some of the kids participating in that. Like, create your own professional voice over.
Yeah, exactly. We’ll figure out if I can bring a mobile setup to the school, because it’s not that far away. It’s basically the next town over.
So I could bring a mobile setup there to a class and set it up there. Or maybe bring them here. We’ll see how that works.
Maybe you can get our friend a deal involved and have them set up their own little professional studio with vocal booth to go blankets.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking anyway. But maybe you’re right, get a deal out to bring his van out there and do it for his benefit as well. That’d be cool.
Maybe not a van, they might be skeptical, but…
You’ll see the nice man in the unmarked van on the corner. Yeah, perfect.
So once again, the reason we’re doing this episode is to play the interview I did with Pastor Michael White and Tom Corcoran of Church of the Nativity here in Lutherville, Maryland. And we’ll talk about the book, Rebuilt, how they liked doing the audiobook and what challenges there were. And you’ll hear me trying to convince them to do another one.
Thank All right, so we are here in the interview portion of The VO Meter with pastor Michael White and Tom Corcoran, who are the authors of Rebuilt, the audiobook that was just published on Audible, iTunes, any place you can pick up audio books. And we’re talking about the experience and how the book came together. So welcome, guys, how are you doing today?
Good, thanks for having us.
Thanks, Paul.
So as I said, we just produced the audio version of this book, but obviously there was a print version before. Can you tell us the background story? Because the two of you work for the Church of Nativity here in Lutherville, Maryland, or do we call it Timonium, Maryland?
Mostly official zip code.
We say Timonium because people know the Timonium Fairgrounds.
Okay, so Timonium, Maryland, the Church of Nativity. But how did you come about writing a book about your experiences here at the church?
Well, I think a little bit was kind of both of us were new to working in a church. So for many years, we thought there was just an easy template. I think a lot of people think about church work that it’s kind of really easy.
We meet people all the time that come in from the business world, work at a church, and expect it to be very easy. And we certainly expect it to be easy. But we came in and found it much more difficult than we thought.
And also that in the Catholic Church, at least, there was no, the playbook or the template that seemed to be the way you would run a church, which made us think it would be easy. It was broken and not working. So over about five or six years, we learned that, that this is not working, that we need to do something different.
And that really a lot of places didn’t understand what the business of the church was and that this temple was not working. And so after having gone through that experience, frustration, and then learning some things that did work and seeing a growth and change in the church, we wanted to just share that story and share what we learned and think it was something that other people were feeling, some of the same frustrations that we had had, and give that a voice. So that’s kind of how the book came about.
Did you want to add anything to that?
Well, I think that you had the instinct to want to put our experience down on paper, and I responded accordingly. I think that was the basic exercise.
One good thing about kind of our partnership in writing the book is that I love a blank page, but I’m terrible at editing. I am awful, I can’t, you know, and Michael’s really good at editing and writing and rewriting. I like to say I’m not really a writer.
I just have ideas. I think Michael’s more a writer than makes the book readable.
Yeah, I don’t have any ideas.
Did you edit it and proof it yourselves or did you hire someone third party to do that?
Well, eventually we identified a publisher and he appointed an editor.
So you ran it through several hands before it was actually published?
Sure.
But that was the big obstacle for people who are trying to write a book. It’s hard to do, and so you have to go through a lot of different no’s. We got no’s many times and sent out proposals and did all that.
You either get nothing back or just get no form letters back. We actually got very lucky. Kind of the way it got printed was that we went to a conference where there was a bunch of publishers and we just happened to run into one.
I don’t know if you wanted to add that story at all.
Yeah, we were desperately in search for a publisher and we were at this conference where there were a number of them. And we ran into one sort of by accident and hit it off and struck up a conversation that led to our association, our publishers Ave Maria at Notre Dame University.
And as far as the audience for the book, what was your initial thoughts about who would read the book? Who was it for, basically?
For anybody in a parish that cares about the work of a parish, then I think, again, the way I think we describe it in the beginning is who feel like things are not going well, that love the church, want to see the church grow, want to see it be successful but feel like it’s not, and maybe aren’t sure why that is or what’s the path forward. So it was for anybody in a parish that cared about the church and wanted to see it grow and succeed and was not satisfied with the status quo.
You’re talking about staff or actual parishioners as well?
Either staff or parishioners, yes. We thought it could have a wider reach beyond just church staff and it has. It’s sold about, we’ve told, about 100,000 copies, I think, of Rebuild, 140,000 among all the books that we’ve, the three books we’ve written.
Full disclosure, I’m a member of the parish here and have read the book, and I know from the community that it really was well received and it sort of became a rallying point for the parish. Have you found that other parishes have been able to duplicate that and use it as a rallying point for themselves?
Yeah, there’s still, there’s some parishes that are doing that now. It’s still actually, even though the book was printed or published about five years ago now, almost, it’s still kind of early. It takes time for people to read a book, put it into practice, but definitely we see, we’re seeing fruit in other parishes, and that’s very satisfying.
I think probably the most satisfying thing about writing a book is, and this we were told by our editor of the book, that you wrote and put into words what people were thinking, but no one either had the courage or had taken the time to voice. And that kind of reminds me, you know, CS. Lewis said he wanted to write the books that he’d wish someone else had written.
And I think it’s cool to say you’ve written a book that all these other people wish they had written, but you wrote it and put voice to that.
Well, I think you both did a great job of getting that voice across. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between your writing voice and your actual speaking voice. And one of the things I like so much about the book is that knowing you two, it is your speaking voice.
When I read it, I hear your voices in my head. And that brings us to why we did the audio book, or at least in my mind. So let’s talk about how that started.
I think you had some thoughts about it, but I approached you both about two years ago to actually get it off the ground and see if it’s something you wanted to do. Did you have thoughts of the audio book before we talked?
Yeah, absolutely.
No, not at all.
Go ahead and say it. Ed, you explain your no. I’ll explain my yes.
Well, I just didn’t… It didn’t occur to me that anybody would have any interest in it.
Yeah, I mean, we had… People had come to me a few times and said, you guys should do an audio book. And our publisher at the time had said, yeah, we don’t do it.
If you want to do it, go ahead. But they just said, it’s not something we’ve found. I think since then, they’ve actually…
Come back around.
Come back around.
Said, oh, we’d like to do an audio version.
Because they had to read Already Worked With You. Oops. Yeah.
But, you know, but yeah. So I mean, a few people had said, you know, I never read, but I will listen to audiobooks. So the idea was out there, but…
It just makes so much sense, too, because people spend so much time in the car, in commute, at least in our community here in North Baltimore. And they’ve got plenty of time to listen, not much time to read.
So what were some of the challenges involved with doing the audiobook? First of all, before we started, what did you think it was going to be like? And then once we got into it, was it that way, or was it completely different?
I thought that it would be easy. I thought that it would be a no effort kind of exercise. And I thought that it was extremely challenging.
It was exhausting, actually.
Yeah, that’s the reaction a lot of people have when they think about it. I’ve worked with a coach where he has lots of people come to him and say they want to be audiobook narrators, and he has this video, I think it might have sent it to you, actually, Tom, where it’s a test that he gives everybody. He says, go in your house, his name’s Sean Pratt.
We talked about him on the podcast. But he says, go in a small room in your house, maybe your bedroom or the corner of your kitchen or maybe even a bathroom, and sit down with a book and read it for three hours every day for two weeks.
Oh my gosh.
And tell me what you think after that if you still want to be an audiobook narrator. And he said, at least half the time, people come back and say, yeah, this was not what I thought it was going to be. There’s no way I could make a living out of that or do that long term.
And then there’s others that say, yeah, it’s something I really enjoyed and I want to do it. But, Michael, for you, that was the challenge, the actual sitting down and getting through it? Absolutely.
And I speak for a living. I preach. That’s what I do.
So I’m no stranger to the exercise of the spoken word. But this was a challenging at a whole different level that I hadn’t anticipated.
So, when we started, I said right away that I thought the two of you were doing really well because I’ve produced some other books for narrators and it can be a bit of a struggle. But both of you did a great job, I think, in the actual dictation and picking up on pickups when we had to stop the recording and go back. Did you find it that after a while you got better at it or was it something that you think you still struggle with if you had to do it again?
Well, it’s interesting, you told Michael that he did really well. I don’t think you said that to me, Paul, but you said I had to get rid of my Philly accent.
Well, I’m saying it now.
Professor who actually connected Father Michael and I together, still might have said, before you handed every paper in, you should read it out loud. And it’s amazing the differences. I still haven’t taken that advice yet, but read it out loud because it does change.
You just pick up things you don’t know otherwise. And we practice a message that we’re giving. Again, we say, speak it into life.
So I think the audio stuff teaches you, again, that great connection, that thought that comes from both of the written word and the spoken word, and how the connection between the two. It might be a better way to say that, but…
No, that’s perfect. So the big question is, now that you’ve done a full audiobook, nine hours worth, would you ever do it again?
Not in the summertime.
That was the other challenge. It was like 125 degrees in that booth, because we were doing it in…
We could do it here in July.
Yeah, this is a nice space. We’re inside the media room at the church. And yeah, it’s apportioned very nicely for VO.
We could do it here.
All right, next time. That’s what we’ll do.
Well, guys, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. It was fabulous to work with you.
I was really excited going into it, and I’m so excited the book is out there now. Let’s give the title one more time. And with the subtitle, it’s Rebuilt, Awaking the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, Making Church Matter.
There we go, all together now. Thanks again, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Paul.
So once again, that was the interview I did this week with Father Michael White and Tom Corcoran from Church of Nativity. The book is rebuilt, and I’m so proud of the work we did, and it was also a lot of fun.
Well, that’s so cool that you got to work with sort of non-narrators and educate them a little bit about the recording aspect of audiobooks. Did it kind of remind you of your own journey getting into audiobooks and some of the challenges involved with that?
Yeah, for sure. And especially since neither of them had been in a recording booth before, I definitely could remember the struggles of sitting still, worrying about the clothes. One of the first things I had to do was tell Tom to wear a different shirt because it was rubbing on the microphone because he’s a big dude and inside this booth it was making noise.
Just those struggles that you don’t think about when you’re either speaking publicly or you’re reading to yourself and you’re thinking about doing audiobooks. Sitting still and making sure you’re on mic are two things that are so important. And I get to see those challenges as we develop the production.
Oh, absolutely. I’m actually working with a new talent, helping her set up her studio space. And just little things like giving yourself room to move, but not moving too much, making sure you have a chair that doesn’t make noise, that your clothes don’t make noise, that your mouth is clean and not too clicky, that you drink enough water.
It’s really, it’s amazing how many things we get used to just because we’ve been doing this for a little while.
Yeah, even to actually having somebody in the room, in the studio, but not in the booth. So the whole time they were doing the book, both authors were here. So if Michael was in the, I get to call him Michael now, it’s pretty cool.
If Michael, Father White, was in the booth, Tom was sitting on my couch in the editing area and vice versa. And for the first week, Tom had this awful cough. And if you listen really closely, you can hear some of it in the dead space, in the room tone of the book.
I got most of it out, but they weren’t available at the end to redo those parts and I had to do some magic with them, with Rx.
Don’t tell ACX that.
Yeah. So I had to do some magic to get those out. But even to that, you don’t think about those things if you haven’t sat in the studio before, that even outside this, what’s supposedly a soundproof booth, this whisper room, a loud cough is gonna come through.
Yeah, they’re not panaceas.
No, definitely not.
So what else did you learn about recording these guys, or kind of validate your experience as a burgeoning audiobook narrator?
Well, one of the things I learned is that I have an ear for talent, because one of the things, one of the reasons I wanted to do this book is because the pastor, Michael White, is such a great speaker in person. He’s actually booked on tours for speaking and is invited to parishes all around the country and even the world to speak about this book they wrote. So I knew he’d be good.
And the first day he came out, I was like a kid in a candy store.
I said, this is so awesome.
I knew you’d be good at this.
I’m so proud.
And then Tom, of course…
Put your agency cap on there.
Yeah, and then Tom, of course, said, does that mean I’m not? And I said, eh.
You have potential, maybe?
Exactly. We’ll get there, is what I said. But yeah, Father White was just a natural.
And I said, you could be an audiobook narrator tomorrow. And so they have their own podcast, actually, where they promoted the book. And Tom told that story and he said, yeah, Paul said that Michael was great.
I wasn’t so good that if the church thing doesn’t work out, Michael could be a narrator full time. So that was a funny story.
Well, I remember some of our guests, Mark Cashman and some of the other coaches we worked with, often mentioned pastors transitioning into voiceover, either when they retire or before, just because they’re natural storytellers and public speakers. And there are definitely a lot of crossover skills involved with that. So I mean, that’s great that you got to experience that firsthand.
And it was with your very own pastor.
Yeah, I mentioned in the interview that we just heard that their speaking voice comes across really well in the book. And it’s something you mentioned to Mark Cashman that when he writes, you can hear his voice in his writing. And for the two authors, Tom and Michael, it was the same thing.
And it came across in the audio as well. They were really good at getting their speaking voice like they do when they’re doing the messages at church into the audio book. And that really shows.
Everyone has this idea of what a voiceover artist or an audio book narrator is supposed to sound like. And the truth is, it’s supposed to sound like you. Yeah, you’re supposed to be clear and convey a story well, but unless you’re actually doing character voices, you’re just supposed to be your true self and let all of your natural personality and charisma shine through on Mike.
So once again, it was a great time working with these two gentlemen. The book again is Rebuilt, Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, Making Church Matter by Michael White and Tom Corcoran. You can find it on Audible, go through Amazon or iTunes.
Go ahead and buy it now. I’d really appreciate it. I wanna thank Michael and Tom for being on the podcast.
I had a great time interviewing them at the church. And go buy the book.
Before we go, I just wanted to thank Paul for his great idea of bringing his guests in and to our studio audience. It’s just a great reminder of how to add, like have that added value to your voice over business is actually renting out your studio and making it available to other talent. I know a good friend of mine, a co-worker of mine for the Global Voice Acting Academy, David Tobak, he actually rented his studio out to some very successful voice actors, Katie Lee, and you might know this one, Townsend Coleman, the voice of the original Michelangelo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, actually came to his studio to record because they needed that ISDN promo now.
And it was amazing. Yeah, it was really cool.
Townsend Coleman, keynote speaker at this year’s VO Atlanta, by the way.
Yes, bringing it all around. And so now when I meet him, I’m like, hey, you recorded with my friend. Can you sign my Michelangelo?
Cowabunga!
You’ve got an N.
I know, I know. You never know when those will come around. But by all intents and purposes, Townsend’s an awesome guy, and I’m sure he’ll be very friendly and sign whatever turtles you have when you see him.
Unless you’re maybe, unless it’s one of those backpacks and you want him to sign your back.
I guess you could say he was shell shocked. But anyways, that just about wraps up this mini-sode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Have a wonderful week, 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.
Hello everybody, and welcome to Episode 29 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Today, we’re going to talk all about P2P, or Pay-to-Play sites, those places you can go to get jobs. Some people call them Online Casting sites. We’ll take you through some of the lesser known ones, some of the really well known ones.
But before we get to that, Sean, what’s been going on in your VO world?
Well, I just went to one of the coolest voice acting workshops that I’ve ever been to. So a little bit of backstory. I have wanted to work with Pat or Patrick Fraley for a number of years right now.
I grew up watching him on Saturday morning cartoons. He was Crang and Baxter Stockman from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was also on Brave Star, a filmation show about a space cowboy, which was actually pretty…
The animation and the subject matter at the time was actually quite deep for a kid show, I think. But anyways, I’ve wanted to work with him for a number of years. When I started training in Japan for my voiceover career while I was teaching, he offered a lot of online materials.
He was one of the first coaches to have these sort of home study courses that you could just purchase from his website. And he’s got everything from how to be a better audiobook narrator, on how to do various accents. He’s got this whole three-part curriculum on character voice acting for animation and video games.
And of course, like I said, audiobooks and now e-learning. So, cool thing about Pat is he actually grew up in Seattle, where I’m from. And so once or twice a year, he’ll actually come up here to do a workshop.
And I couldn’t really rationalize doing some of his other workshops, like the audiobook work or the character voice acting, because those aren’t my primary genres. But when I found out he was doing an e-learning one, and the tracks would actually be used for a bit of an e-learning demo, I was like, done and done, click, click. And it was everything I wanted it to be.
I mean, Pat is just such a generous spirit and such a wonderful storyteller and educator. It was just a joy to be working with him throughout the day. And it kind of confirmed some things that I knew I needed to work on, like just dialing down the intensity a lot when you’re doing e-learning work, because people want to be listening to their peers.
They don’t want there to be any emotional or authoritative distance between the narrator and the listener. And of course, he helped me fix some of my slash breathing techniques, like, that’s a slash breath, is when you get through a long line of text and you want to keep going. So you’re like, and then just enough air to get you going.
But that’s actually pretty poor breathing technique, and you really want to kind of bring it down and take advantage of, like, that oxygen will give you the energy and the focus to attack the next sentence with a lot more emotional intent and clarity, if you will. So thank you, Pat, for some of those incredible gems. I’ve been using them in some of the auditions that I got this week and some of my e-learning projects.
And not only am I much happier with my performances, but I’m also a lot less winded or tired after doing long form, because I’m not straining myself to sound how I think I’m supposed to sound. So, I mean, it was worth every penny, and I highly recommend his in-person and home study courses. So thank you so much, Pat.
Interesting. How big was the class?
He actually divided it into two weekends, because, excuse me, two days, because the demand was so high. But the first workshop had about 10 people, and then we lucked out, there was some crossover and cancellation, so we only had about six or seven on that second day. I was actually really concerned, because I was like, oh no, I waited too long, and I missed the initial day.
And then he was quick to inform me that they had added a second one. I was like, done.
Oh, cool. So really, really intimate setting, huh? A lot of face-to-face time.
Oh yeah, totally. Everyone only got about two reads, but we still got about a minute of material to use for our e-learning stuff. E-learning is an interesting beast in that it’s one of the few genres where you can have a self-made demo, but I was just like, how much better will mine be with that professional guided instruction?
And so that was kind of the mindset for that. And of course, I want to be better at my sort of bread and butter genre. So it was just, whenever you’re trying to decide the return on investment for certain training and things like that, it was pretty obvious to me.
So I’m very glad that I did it.
That’s awesome. Congratulations.
Thank you, sir.
Anything else you want to talk about?
Yeah, I mean, I could go on about that workshop for days, but I think you’ve heard enough from me. What about you, Paul? Almost called you Pat.
What about you, Paul?
Pat, Paul, if you want to call me Pat Fraley, I’ll take it, believe me. I have a few things going on. I had, let’s see, it’s been a few weeks since our last episode.
So a few things, actually. Since we last talked, I’ve had two audiobooks released, one for The Pseudonym, that’s the third book in that series. So I have one left.
So I have one left I actually embarked on just before we got on here, the fourth book in that series, the last one for this author. So that was something I actually never thought would happen to have an author contract me for a series, but this has been going on for almost a year now. This is my fourth book, and so happy to work with this author.
That’s fantastic. And the last book in the series for Find Away Voices about the history of the Balkans that I spoke about in the last episode, that’s been released too. So now the Balkan Network is released on Audible.
Please go download that one. And yeah, I would love to see some positive reviews on that one too. So far, the reviews on the first one are fantastic.
Four and a half stars. And I got one that said, actually put my name and said, Paul Stefano did a great job, five-star review. They actually wrote five-star reviews, so I couldn’t be prouder of that one.
That’s excellent, man. And actually, I did want to touch on something you mentioned, how you were surprised about to be working, or the relationship that you built with that one, or the author, in getting a whole series. So that was one of the cool things about the e-learning workshop was that, or Pat really encouraged us to network with each other, because basically, everyone kind of had shown their talent and skill at the workshop.
So we basically had our own private e-learning roster. So, for example, if we get a client who likes my voice, but we’re like, do you have anyone who could play like your parents, or like an older adult? I’m like, oh yeah, Paul Stefano and Lee Laird, or whatever.
And then, as I had mentioned before, I frequently cast e-learning narrators for one of my ELL clients. And so I’m always looking for new people. And so I was like, I got all your contact info, you’ll be hearing from me soon.
And so we talked about this in a lot of different genres, but it is important to network with other voice talent because sometimes you will prove yourself an asset to a potential client, even if they are not hiring you for your voice. So if there’s something that you know you wouldn’t be good for, but you can recommend someone, a client will remember you for being so helpful. So yeah, always try and make a good impression and keep people in mind for future projects.
Oh, definitely. I’ve talked about that in a lot of different episodes, how if you can be a resource, you’ll be a rock star yourself, even if you’re not doing the work yourself. Referring to somebody is the best sort of way to maintain a relationship.
Definitely, and it might take a while, but usually those ripples do come right back.
Yeah, exactly. So I was on vacation last week, and funny thing happened. I only brought minimal equipment with me.
I really planned not to work. I just kind of wanted to relax, do nothing. And then of course, two days in, my son gets a job.
Oh, no.
I had to make do, and I did bring one of the Producers Choice blankets from vocalbooth2go.com, and he and I basically sat under the blanket, like it was a tent, and rattled off these lines, so he could get his job done.
So you were the bass trap then?
Yeah, more or less. I think I helped with that. So we got it done, it’s an author client, and I mourned them.
Just, this is something you should probably do as a best practice. If you are in a situation where you’re not in your home studio and a client doesn’t necessarily know that, you should tell them. So I did.
I told the client, listen, we’re at the beach and this may not sound as good as the sample you heard. And they said, okay, that’s fine. So I set it off and they said, yeah, this sounds great.
So we got that one job done. So it’s Murphy’s Law. Even when you think you won’t need your stuff, you will.
Or if you’re having a dry spell, but the expression goes, all you have to do is book a hotel and you’ll immediately get an audition, right?
Exactly. Like I can’t tell you how many times, like if I bring the equipment, crickets, but if I don’t, I can’t get enough jobs, you know? It’s ridiculous.
Yeah, so at least we got that done and I was happy for my son to get that job done. Of course his brother and sister were jealous, but that’s neither here nor there.
You can turn them against each other. They’re like, just be better kids.
Yeah, exactly. Just suck less and then you can buy toys too. No, that would be terrible.
And the last thing I’ll mention just before I went on vacation is my demo for radio imaging that I did with the fabulous AJ. McKay was released. And I’m really happy with the way that turned out.
Responses have been great so far, both from peers and family. It’s the first one where my brother was actually impressed. Normally he’s like, meh, let me hear the next job you do.
I played this for him and he said, wow, that’s great. And then another friend said, yeah, and then another friend said, that actually sounds like it could be on the radio. And I said, good, cause that’s the idea.
And then finally, not to sound too pompous, but AJ, who some of you may know is good friends with Joe Cipriano. It’s a running joke that we have going on. He played it for Joe and Joe told him it was really good too.
So that warmed the cockles of my heart as we say. So really proud of that.
Yeah, that’s some high praise, both from AJ and Joe.
Yeah, I can’t thank AJ enough because it was so much fun to work on and I knew that he would produce a great product and he really came through. It’s the first time I was actually impressed myself. Normally I’ll hear myself and I’ll say, yeah, I hear some mouth flicks or, yeah, I should have done that line better.
This one actually blew me away. And AJ said that was what he was hoping for was to do one that actually blew you away.
That’s wonderful. And like I’ve enjoyed working with AJ a lot. He did a recent radio imaging workshop with the Seattle group that I practice with and just over Zoom.
You know AJ, he’s just like so lighthearted, but no nonsense. And like it’s really easy to feel comfortable around him and do some good reads.
Yeah, that’s some advice I would… It’s a big takeaway. And that I would give to people who are looking to do a demo, do it with somebody who you feel comfortable with.
And I knew this would be the case with AJ because he and I just get along great from all our time spent together at VO Atlanta. So I knew that would work. But it’s an important thing to know that you can actually have some sort of relationship and some sort of back and forth with a demo producer.
Don’t go with the best just because people say they’re the best because you may not actually jive with them. Make sure you have a discussion and some talks to make sure that it’s someone you can work with.
Exactly. And usually before you get, like before money changes hand or anything like that, there are ways to sort of test drive different coaches. And I highly recommend that because unless you’re restricted by budget and stuff like that, there is, I highly recommend working with a variety of coaches before settling with anyone.
Because like Paul said, even if they’re good, they might not gel with your learning style or your personality. So those are other things that you need to keep in mind.
Well, in lieu of a VO Meter Shtick this week, we’re actually going to play the two demos we talked about. So you can actually hear the differences between the styles and the different production techniques that were used in both. So let’s start with the imaging demo that AJ did for me.
And it’s a rock imaging demo. And we’ll play that now.
1067, The Eagle is sending you to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies. We’ll throw an airfare and hotel for two. This is your captain speaking.
Welcome aboard Eagle Airways.
You just get ready to party like a rock star with this year’s inductees. If it’s Classic Rock, it’s here. Yeah, we’ll definitely need more cowbell.
I gotta have more cowbell.
93.7, The Fox Rocks. From Paul Rodgers’ voice……to The Clash’s tough choice…
This is your home for Classic Rock.
Rock 101.1 on air, online, on your phone, and sometimes on your nerves. Jay and the Wake Up Crew. Classic Rock 92.9.
Made in Baltimore. Cloud all summer. And rock in the bay.
You play everything I want to hear. Locally owned, locally operated.
100.7, The Bay.
97X presents Summer Tip Number 327.
Don’t bother with the sunscreen. It’s far more likely that your poor lifestyle choices will cause your liver, lungs, and heart to deteriorate before your skin does. 97X.
WKBU New Orleans, home of the Saints.
You know!
At John Oshelon in the morning.
Shigella, did you know, causes diarrhea? One thing I like about this show, we try to learn something every day.
This is Classic Rock, Bayou 95.7.
That was really good, man. I stayed for, like, that was like a minute 30, maybe a minute 40. Listen to the whole thing.
That’s great.
Thanks, buddy. Yeah, it’s a little long. But AJ seemed to think that worked, and I’m not going to question his judgment.
Yeah, I mean, and your acting’s, like, your performance has improved. You really come into your own. It just sounds like, it just sounds like your website promo.
You’re, like, snarky, gritty, seriously, you know? Excellent work.
Thank you.
Now, up next, we’re going to show up my e-learning demo. Now, I admit, it’s probably not going to sound as interesting as Paul’s, just because since it is e-learning, the focus is not on the production aspects, on the music and the sound effects, but which are incredibly important for radio, obviously, because it’s completely audio medium. What I’m really happy about personally with the e-learning demo is just the improved performance and being able to engage with the listener and help, as Pat said, to be a teacher rather than a narrator and to teach them cool stuff.
So here’s my e-learning demo, courtesy of Pat Fraley. Sean Daeley. This video is for parents and grandparents, and for you, because you want your baby to thrive.
For a baby, touch is talk. Touch is the most developed sense a small baby has. Skin-to-skin contact is a powerful way to communicate with your baby before your baby can talk to you.
Give your baby the gift of feeling deeply connected to you. Make sure your child knows what positive touch is all about. Create a deep and lasting bond.
Years later, when your grown child gives you a big hug or confides in you, you’ll be glad that you gave them a special way of communicating with you. Welcome to the Morton Arboretum, home to more than 3,600 native trees, shrubs and plants. This virtual guide provides a snapshot of what to expect when you visit our Wheaton, Illinois location.
So first, let’s look at how to get the most from your virtual tour. See the five main tabs on the top of your screen. Of course, there’s Introduction, Trees, Shrubs, Plants, like I mentioned, and of course, Frequently Asked Questions.
The Introduction tab is highlighted because your tour automatically started here when you click the Enter button on the home page. So you use your mouse to click on a different key page. Each key page lists subcategories in its left pane.
Wow, that’s really good. I can really hear the difference between this and your previous narration demo. Definitely some of that fine tutelage from Pat rubbed off.
But yeah, so you can already see the very different requirements for sort of the intended audience.
So we’ll get to our main topic of the day in just a moment. But first, we want to thank our brand new sponsor. Well, not so new anymore.
It’s actually our second episode. But they’re still our very first sponsor for the VO Meter. We want to thank, once again, Joe Davis and voiceactorwebsites.com.
That’s right. Thank you so much, Joe. So say you’re like me and Paul and you’ve got some new demos or you’re in need of a website to put your shiny new demos on.
voiceactorwebsites.com is the place to go. And to tell you even more about them is our good friend Dan Leonard from VOBS.
As a voice talent, you have to have a website. But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don’t look right on mobile devices.
They’re not built for marketing and SEO. They’re expensive. You have limited or no control.
And it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what’s the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com.
Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control.
No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voice over website going for as little as $700.
So if you want your Voice Actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website shouldn’t be a pain in the you-know-what.
So thank you so much, Dan, for that awesome promo. And thank you, Joe, and voiceactorwebsites.com for the incredible services that you offer and for helping us out with our own websites when we need it. We highly recommend these guys.
So definitely check them out if you need a website or want to update your website for you and your voice over business.
So now we got that bidness out of the way. Ha ha, just kidding. Let’s move on to our topic of the day, and that is pay-to-plays, or P2P, or Online Casting websites.
So we’re going to start off with something that’s a bit of a taboo in the voice over industry, and that’s Fiverr, or fiverr.com. And we want to talk about why. So in case you’re not familiar with the platform, this isn’t just a voice over casting site, but it’s a freelance casting site for a variety of skills and products that people can do individually and just set up a profile and the basically…
This isn’t always the case, but you can basically do a voice over for $5. $4 if you talk about the cut that Fiverr takes for each job. So obviously, that’s not very much money.
And you can… A lot of voice talent are a little bit more business savvy and they will add additional services to it until it gets close to what might be a more acceptable rate, but still, the issue with it here is that it really gives clients the wrong idea on what a voice over can and should cost. And some people have argued whether or not this is really affecting the industry, and I think it is.
Granted, it does match low cost clients with low cost talent, because there are certain clients that like, this is our budget and we can’t or won’t go above it. And that’s fine. That’s not the issue.
What the issue is, is when you have a pro talent who is undercutting themselves and the industry as a whole by accepting working for lower rates, rates that are substandard. And so, or another part of this is, is that since there is really no barrier to entry, people will join Fiverr as an opportunity to learn while you earn and to build experience and build clientele that way. So, depending on what your ultimate goal is, like if you’re just trying to do this as a hobby or as a side income or as beer money is the common joke, then it might be okay for you.
But if you’re trying to look at this as a professional lifelong full time career, then you’re really making a bad impression because a lot of talent and a lot of people who hire talent do not look favorably at Fiverr.
Yeah, and that’s really where we are today, is that it has become a stigma for some people. And I can’t verify this at all, but there have been stories of people who say that agencies had dumped them or had dumped the talent they knew because they were on Fiverr, or an agent had seen a potential submission of someone who was on Fiverr, and they were essentially blacklisted from ever being added to that agency roster. I can’t verify that that’s true, but there is certainly a stigma out there for people who want to be considered professional voiceover actors or voiceover talent and still maintain a profile on Fiverr.
And it’s difficult. We’re just trying to give you guys a understanding of what the controversy is, so you can make that decision for yourself. There’s another famous article by a friend of the podcast named Stephen J.
Cohen, who’s a talent and audiobook publisher. He sort of documented the situation where voice casters will use Fiverr talent for, say, scratch tracks, tracks that aren’t ultimately going to air and are usually just to pitch an idea. So they want to save money on the scratch track, but they will make a note of who that talent was and blacklist them for any serious projects.
And so we don’t want anyone to shoot themselves in the foot by doing this service that they think is trying to ultimately help their business or to serve as sort of a stepping off point for them to sort of go into more professional waters, as it were.
Right, exactly. So moving on from Fiverr, there are other self-service, let’s say, casting sites out there where you create a profile. Again, there’s no barrier to entry.
Anyone can join. Sometimes there isn’t even a fee. Sometimes there is.
Some of those that I’ve looked at or some that I’ve actually been involved with are Voice Jungle, Voice Crew, Voice Hunter, Internet Jock, let’s see, voices.us, voicesdirect.com, and let’s see, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. In all these cases, again, you can sign up for a profile. There may or may not be somebody vetting the talent to get in.
Some claim they do, some claim they don’t. And what often happens is they’ll post auditions directly to you, and maybe a few a day, maybe a few a week, and you’ll submit a read to this client, and then may hear back, may not. I’ve had some success with a few of those, but more often than not, the audition goes into an abyss, and I have no idea what’s happening, whether it’s been listened to, whether it was a real client to begin with, whether it’s someone who’s ever going to hire me again.
So that’s really the issue I have with some of those, is that they’re very nebulous in the business practices. I have no idea who runs the site, and I don’t really ever talk to anybody. Sometimes I get paid, sometimes I don’t.
Not on jobs that I’ve done, but sometimes I have a job, sometimes I don’t. And it’s just another way to have your name out there. Do you have any experience with any of those, Sean?
Well, only what I’ve heard from you and some of our Meetup group. And personally, I was not satisfied with some of the stories that I was hearing with the amount of goal-digging you had to do to find decent jobs and this uphill battle that you have trying to get reasonable rates for yourselves. But if any positive stories you have, I’d love to hear more of.
Yeah, several of those actually have set rates. VoiceCrew is one, and Internet Jock is one, where it’s a set $50 rate, and that’s it. For whatever the job is.
Now, there aren’t any long-form jobs on there. They’re all quick hit, 30-second ads, 15-second tags. But the max and the minimum is $50.
So that’s something to keep in mind if you’re looking at some of these sites. Now, funny story about Internet Jock is I’ve actually been rejected from them for whatever reason. So it’s one I applied to, and was told I didn’t meet the standards for whatever reason, even though it doesn’t seem any different from several of the others where I was accepted.
So apparently I do have some sort of betting.
It’s like you’re saying before, it’s so ambiguous. You have no idea. You don’t know what their standards are, or if they’re just like some arbitrary reason why they don’t want to hire you.
Yeah. Do you want to talk about The Bunny?
Oh, The Bunny, yes. So here you have this, and it’s such an interesting thing because, so you might be familiar with Voice Bunny. It’s a subsidiary of Voice 123, which is probably the second largest online casting site available today.
Well, the parent company for both is Toray, by the way.
Oh, yes, yes.
And it’s Alex Toraynego is the owner.
Exactly. And so a lot of people actually like Voice 123. It is one of the more reputable sites that has been receptive to feedback over the years.
There are still some things that people don’t like about, namely their smart cast algorithm for how they cast auditions. And on paper, it’s not a bad idea because their goal is to simply discourage talent from trying out from everything under the sun and really being more selective with things that fit their voice and their ideal niches. And that’s good business practice, I think, for voice talent because you shouldn’t try to feel like a jack of all trades.
You’ll have much better traction if you specify in fewer areas but are amazingly good at that. But anyways, they also have this very…
Very different site.
Very different site called Voice Bunny, which again, they do vet you for that one, right? They have to listen to your audio quality, they need to know about your experience.
Yeah, I’ve actually been kicked out of Voice Bunny, ironically enough.
That’s so weird. And the way they do it is that they have these auctions for jobs, and you basically have to be on call 24-7 to really take advantage of these. And you can name your own price for most of these things, but it really encourages underbidding because of course the client is gonna go for quality at a lower price if it’s available.
So a lot of people complain about the sort of competitive like shark tank atmosphere of that. And of course, another unfortunate correlation that you find is very often clients who aren’t willing to pay much tend to be difficult to work with for some reason. I don’t know why this happens.
They might make unreasonable or unfair demands of you, just the amount of work that they’re asking for the price that they quote. And I’ve heard talent reduced to tears from some of the client or customer experiences they’ve had from that site. So that was another one that I personally steered clear from.
One thing I will defend about the money, and I’ve done it in the past, I think I mentioned on the show, is that they actually pay you for auditions. So it’s minimal money. It might be $8, it might be $20, but for every audition you do, they will pay you.
So there had been times where I would do 100 auditions in a month, and do pretty well monetarily. So in that respect, it wasn’t the worst of the sites. I did respect that.
But like I said, I was kicked out for poor audio quality, and that’s a whole different story where…
That’s bizarre. And a lot of people complain about that. And it’s almost like if there’s an issue with their uploading software or something, because people who normally have fine audio quality and decent studio setups are constantly being rejected.
Yeah, something was off about that. I mean, you’ll hear… You’ve heard my demos.
The one I just played was recorded right here on the microphone in the studio, the same one I used for the sample at Voice Bunny. And for some reason… This was after I was a member for quite a while, by the way.
I sent one audition, and their quality control people said, something’s wrong with this, you need to fix it. And when I sent it back again, again, they still rejected it and said, okay, well, until you fix your studio quality, you can’t participate anymore. So that was out.
Yeah, how do you defend against that? I don’t know. But if you want to learn more about Voice Bunny, I believe Doug Turkell, the un-nouncer, and Joe J.
Thomas, who’s got a voice actor blog as well, have written extensively about Voice 123 and Voice Bunny, even adding some interesting pictographics about some of their practices. So I highly recommend that. And then, who should we talk about next?
Well, let’s talk about the freelance site, as I call them. There’s one actually called freelancer.com. There is one called People Per Hour.
There is Upwork, which is a combination of what used to be two companies called Elance and ODesk. And now that company together is called Upwork. Gotcha.
And then there is guru.com. Those are four that I’m pretty intimately familiar with. I’ve been a member of all of them at some point or another.
Upwork, I was a member for about a year. And what you described about the clients wanting the most and paying the less is basically the norm there, at least in my experience, where I had clients asking me for a thousand word pieces, e-learning pieces for 25, 35, $50. And I was constantly arguing about rates, trying to raise the rates.
And ultimately, what ended my relationship there was that very issue. There was a job where the client, I was arguing rates basically with the client and asking for a payment on a session that was already done. And the client was refusing to pay.
And there was a sort of a grievance file with the client against me. And I said, all right, I’m gonna wash my hands of this. Just keep the money, I don’t care anymore.
It was like $50 that I was arguing over. I said, I’m just gonna cancel my account. Thanks for the memories, so to speak.
I was gone from there.
Thanks for all the fish.
Yeah, I did have some success there. Probably made several thousand dollars over one year. So it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
And some of the clients were good. But again, there were some issues with over demanding clients, is how I’ll put it. People per hour is one that has been very good to me.
It’s where I found some of my most high-profile clients. And that is based out of Greece, I believe. It’s definitely in the EU, and I think it’s Greece.
So the only issue there is a lot of jobs come in early and are looking for European voices, especially lately. It’s probably got something to do with our current government climate. But there’s not a lot of demand for American voices.
So that’s the only issue there. I may get one job a month there. But it has been good to me, and I have had some very high-profile clients from there.
And there’s freelancer.com, which out of all of those has probably been the best to me. I’ve had the most clients from there and definitely made the most money. They actually did a profile piece on me a couple of months ago about American success story for their front page of their website.
Cool.
And they gave me a free T-shirt to go with it. So what I want to mention about all of these is that they all work the same way. There’s no fee for having a membership.
You create a profile similar to Fiverr, actually, but they will take a larger cut of each job, a percentage. So I don’t remember the exact numbers for all of them, but all of them work the same way. They take a percentage of the fees for the job.
So you don’t pay anything upfront, but you will lose some of the fees in the backend. But those three specifically, People Per Hour, I’m sorry, those two specifically, People Per Hour and Freelancer have some really nice clients, legitimate companies you’ve heard of, universities I’ve worked with on there. So those have been good to me by and large.
And then the last one I mentioned is guru.com. That one is similar. And I’ve been on there for three years, never had a single job.
Oh, wow.
Nothing against them. They just have very few and far between voice jobs. All three of these sites have jobs for any type of work where it could be, they’re all usually clerical work, like you’re not gonna find a job steam fitting, but there’s writing jobs, proofreading jobs.
Transcription, stuff like that.
Transcription.
Oh, coding?
Coding, yeah, coding, web design, and instructional design, a lot of those. And then animators too. So one of my videos on my website actually hired somebody on Freelancer to do the whiteboard drawing, and then I did the voice to create that video.
So yeah, all three of those have been okay at one point or another, and I’m still with Freelancer and People Per Hour.
Cool. That was a world that I wasn’t too familiar with. So thank you for sharing your expertise on that.
And that’s another… I mean, you could even lump… Like, I’ve heard of people going to Craigslist and eBay for similar jobs, like that same kind of goal.
eBay, really?
Well, maybe not… Sorry, Craigslist, and there’s one other one that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Mandy?
Probably Mandy, yes. Mandy’s a little bit more specific to entertainment production kind of stuff, so it’s more like videographers, cameramen, actors, voice actors, that kind of thing. So it is a little bit more specified to what we do, but in the same vein, it went from being a free service to a paid one, and the voiceover jobs specifically are still fewer and far between than some of the other team jobs you can be doing.
Yeah, I have a profile on Mandy, and the only offers I’ve ever gotten are for live announcing.
Oh, well, that can be fun, but maybe not what you want to do.
Yeah, some of them are pretty cool, but they’re always in the middle of the day, and they’re always in Washington, DC. There’s nothing ever in Baltimore.
That’s another thing. Like I said, it’s a lot of its location work. You actually have to be in where the project is.
Exactly. Have you ever had any luck on Craigslist?
I haven’t. I heard the occasional story. Usually indie game developers trying to cast voices or they need a scratch track, stuff like that.
Yeah. I’ve had a few auditions, but I never had a job. But my kids have.
I actually had two jobs for the kids off of Craigslist. So maybe that’s where all the jobs are for kids.
But one thing that I like, whether or not you choose any of these sites for your business model, just look at the number of baskets you can have for your voice over business, the amount of opportunities. And that’s not even through direct marketing. Like there are definitely options.
And I would encourage you to think about the various ways how can you reach out to companies, whether it would be through an agent, through a mediary like an online casting site or a freelance site, or through direct marketing to clients in production houses and businesses individually. So there’s lots of options and you should never have just one or two baskets to put your VO eggs in, as it were. All right, so now we move into sort of the upper tier.
Ironically, these are some of the ones that you might be most familiar with just because of their marketing SEO and their larger budgets. But you have sort of the top four online casting sites that we’re gonna talk about right now. You have voices.com, or what many of our compatriots like to refer to as voices.com, which we can talk to ad infinitum.
Voice123, which we mentioned before, and then Voice Realm, which is out of the UK, I believe, and then Bodogo, so the owner of which we’re gonna be talking with in a few minutes.
I hate Bodogo, god, this guy’s a jerk.
I hate Bodogo, we just wanted to bash Armin for the next 45 minutes. He doesn’t know what’s coming.
Just kidding.
Yeah, no, we got nothing but love for Bodogo. But starting with voices.com, it’s a company out of Canada, and a lot of voice talent have had very unsatisfactory experiences with them, and they’re concerned about a lot of things. Their entrance fee has increased over the years from about $200 to $400, and a lot of people are concerned that there is no vetting process, that people who are willing to pay that much, they are just allowed on the website.
And if you listen to the demos on the profiles there, you will certainly find some subpar demos, both acting quality and audio quality-wise.
You also find a lot and lots of people. That latest claim, voices.com is claiming 500,000 members.
Wow, that’s even, I was going to say tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of competition. Granted, not everyone’s going to be great and not everyone’s going to have a similar vocal type to you, but that’s a lot. And that’s why you see some talent discouraging people away from online casting sites, is because there is so much available talent there.
And it’s only going to take a couple seconds for an agent or a caster to click next and to find someone else. There have been a number of issues with just the amount of money that Voices takes from each job. For example, they charge an additional escrow fee to make sure that you’re paid is what their logic is.
So they’re taking an additional fee in addition to the entrance fee to their website. So we don’t want to go into too much detail there, but if you do a search, you can find lots of stories and lots of reasons why you might want to be wary of Voices.
Now, I will say I did have… I wasn’t a member there for quite a while and had a lot of auditions, but I never got a single job. So about a year and a half of membership, never a single job.
Now, I don’t know if that says more about my talent or the competition, but it wasn’t a good fit for me.
Yeah, yeah. And ironically, this is… a lot of newer talent will look at an online casting site as a way to get a foot in the door, as a way to get access to real scripts from real clients.
There’s some validity in that.
Oh, absolutely. But the funny thing is, is it’s like, if you’re not at… if your skill level is not competitive, you’re wasting your money.
So, like, you have to be conscious of where you’re at and if you can actually make money off of these sites, because if you’re completely fresh or if you have no innate skill and don’t know… like, don’t have all the proper equipment, you won’t make your money back.
Yeah, that’s true. So let’s move on to Voice Realm. Voice Realm is similar in that they charge a fee, a membership fee.
It is a little bit cheaper than voices.com. And you can get on there with tens of thousands of your famous friends or favorite friends. And it’s a similar situation where you’ll see jobs and you’ll be able to audition, but you may not know how many other people are auditioning with you.
And it’s going to be a huge competition pool just like voices.com. So the only issue with Voice Realm that I had was their social media presence, where they spout off all the time about voiceover topics in a snarky and sometimes crude way. So I ultimately canceled my membership with them for that reason because they seem to be baiting other voice talent on Twitter and flat out making fun of them, which I was not a fan of.
Especially since we’re supposed to be, like, we are their commodity, you know? They are selling voice talent. And yet it’s very, it seems very apparent that they don’t respect talent very much.
And like you’re saying, it’s sound, it’s trolling, it’s bullying. They’ve had a number of upsetting social media campaigns where, like, everything from voice actors have more sex to pictures of butts and abs and whatever. And I’m like, one, what the hell does this have to do with voiceover?
Two, a lot of people are offended because they have underage talent on the site. They have minors on the site. And here you’re pandering sex and drugs with your voice actors?
That’s very unethical and wrong to me. I never had any, like, directly negative experiences with Voice Roam, and I actually liked a lot of the jobs that were coming in.
Yeah, I had some jobs there and had some success.
But I could not stand that kind of treatment of my peers. And some good friends came to me with just the way that they were treated. And I couldn’t stand for it, so I left as well.
Now, there is one more thing about Voice Roam to be aware of. They have a sister site called cheapvoicetalent.com.
Oh, yes.
And it’s worth mentioning that if you’re a premium member or above a Voice Roam, they automatically add you to cheapvoicetalent.com.
Yeah, and a number of talent have complained and left the site because of that, because they don’t want to be associated with cheapness. They are not cheap talents. And the fact that we have no control over that made a lot of talent upset.
So you can actually find out more about that via Mark Scott, a Canadian Voice Talents blog. Just look for Protecting My Brand, Why I Deleted My Voice Roam Account, over at Mark Scott Voice Over. So thank you, Mark, for detailing and archiving your experience so that other talent can learn and make a more informed decision.
And then we have one of our sort of the newest tier of these Online Casting Sites. We’re of course going to talk with Armin Hirstetter of Vidalgo, but now you have Kevin West with VO Planet, which is a newer site that just launched a week or two ago, actually.
Well, they’re newer in this form. They’ve been around for a while.
In this form, yes. I did want to talk about that. So VO Planet was another Online Casting Site with actually not the best reputation for a lot of talent about a decade or five to ten years ago.
It was just poorly managed under the management at the time. People didn’t get very many jobs, and when they did get a job, they didn’t have the best client experiences, and there was issues with payment. But anyways, a man named Kevin West actually decided to like, bought the site, and so it’s now under new management.
And over the last couple of weeks, he has been very receptive and very open to voice talent feedback in the features that they want in an online casting site. So honestly, I haven’t seen that kind of invitation for involvement from almost any of the other sites that we have just been talking about. So Kevin, really excited.
I wish you nothing but success in your new endeavor, and I hope that you and the talent that are a part of your site are just satisfied with the experience. And I believe Paul can give us first-hand experience because he signed up a few weeks ago.
Am I right? Yep, I remember. It’s been about three weeks, like you said.
I was there before the crash, unfortunately. Well, you know, it was probably a good thing in the end. The site crashed about a week after it relaunched.
But from what I understand, it was being run off the old code and they were going to redo it anyway. And as they were trying to upgrade it, the whole thing crashed and they had to build it from scratch. So probably in the long run that’s better because, as Armand will tell us actually later, having old code in a website is actually a bad thing.
So starting fresh is probably good for them. But anyway, I see several auditions a day. It’s been great so far.
Really good clients from what I can tell. I haven’t booked a job yet, but hopefully working towards it. But what I like about it is not every…
similar to Bedalgo, not every job will require a custom audition. What I found from my membership in all of these websites is, Bedalgo and, so far, VO Planet seem to have the highest percentage of people who will hire you off your demo. So they’ll put a job listing, and it will say, just send us your demo, and we’ll consider you off of that, which I like a lot because it saves a lot of time.
You don’t have to do a custom demo for everything. It’s the reason we pay thousands of dollars for professionally done demos anyway.
I was about to say, it’s a much more active and apparent return on investment instead of sending it to individual companies or agents. It’s great to have sites that are willing to accept this.
Right. So, so far, things look great. Like you said, I wish Kevin the best of luck as well.
Wonderful. And so, sort of to wrap up, the whole point of this episode was to kind of just let you know what the current online casting atmosphere was so you can make more informed choices for you and your voice over business. They’re not necessarily all evil or taboo as it were, but…
Or all good.
Or all good. Yeah, that’s a great point. But they might be a potential avenue for your voice over business.
So, like we said, we just wanted to give you as much information as possible, the experiences that we’ve had ourselves and have heard from our colleagues, and help you make the best decision for you and your business.
So with that, thanks for listening to this episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So coming up in our next episode, we have our feature from Otacon. Chris Dottoli sitting in for Sean will be joining me in two weeks now, actually only ten days now, down in Washington, DC for the Otacon Japanese Anime Convention. We’ll do some live interviews with guests and voice actors, and maybe some ambient interviews, man on the street type of things, and then we’ll do a quick wrap up, and yeah, should be a lot of fun.
Wonderful. At the beginning of this episode, you guys heard how stoked I was to be working with the inevitable Pat Fraley. He has actually agreed to be on our show.
We’d actually love to hear from you guys, since he’s got such a wealth of experience in so many different genres. What kind of questions do you want to hear? So feel free to reach out to us, or just to send a comment on the vometer.com website, and we’ll be sure to ask any questions that you might be interested in.
So, that’s it for this episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Have a great week, and we’ll see you in a month. 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.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. We’re doing things a little bit differently today because we had on our guest Armin Hierstetter from Bedalgo, and he gave us so much information that it actually went almost an hour in and of itself. So, we’re going to start with the interview, and then we’ll come back with our episode on pay-to-plays and some of our favorites.
Before we do that, I want to thank our sponsor, voiceactorwebsites.com, and to tell you a little bit more about it, here’s a word from fellow talent and VOBS host, Dan Leonard.
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No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your VoiceOver website going for as little as $700.
So if you want your VoiceActor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website shouldn’t be a pain in the you-know-what.
So once again, we thank our sponsor, voiceactorwebsites.com. They’ve done my site. They are about to launch a site for the VO Meter.
Stay tuned for that. And we can’t thank them enough for being on board. So without further ado, let’s get to our interview with creator and founder of Vidalgo, Armin Hierstetter.
Hi, everyone, we are here in Bedalgo Call right now with the creator of Bedalgo Call. That’s right, we are talking with none other than Armin Hierstetter, the owner and creator of Bedalgo. He is also a voice actor and producer himself, and a recent recipient of the One Voice Arts Award for the best online voice job site.
So we are very, very happy to have with us Armin Hierstetter. How are you doing, Armin?
Hi, Jean, I’m doing really fine. Thanks for having me. A very nice introduction.
And may I add, I even got the other award as well for the best voice over services website service, which is actually Podalgo Call.
Wonderful, that’s amazing. And I should have mentioned this before, but everyone in the VO industry knows Armin as a true and metaphorical rock star. I mean, he’s just the amount of work that you do for the VO industry on an international level is incredible.
So we are very grateful to have you today.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Well, the awards are well-deserved. We have become de facto shills for the company. And we mention it in pretty much every episode.
And our fans know that we use Vidalgo Call for all of our interview segments, which we have with guests. So we’re really grateful and just so happy to have you here again. Welcome.
Yeah, and probably I have to excuse because I see you, well, the podcast listeners will not see that, but I can see in Vidalgo Call that you’re wearing headphones, you’re sitting in front of your nice microphone, and I’m just sitting in front of my laptop. So if my audio quality sucks a little bit, apologies, I will do better next time.
Oh no. Well, we’d love to have you back, but audio quality is not a requisite for this interview. So I’m sure you’ll make up for it with wonderful information.
I hope I do.
Exactly. So Armin, as we talked about, everyone knows you as the rock star who created Vidalgo, and Vidalgo Call. But how did you get started in the voiceover world in general?
What did you do before Vidalgo?
So before I did Vidalgo, I was working in publishing for almost two decades. After school, I became a junior writer for a computer magazine. And that was my first job.
And after like, I think nearly two years, no, two and a half, three years, I applied for a job with Penthouse magazine, like the Madden’s magazine, because I heard from a friend of mine that they were looking for a senior writer. And I was in the computer industry, everything changes so fast. So there’s always something new going on.
And I really, really liked that with writing for the computer magazine. But if you have written for computer magazines for three years in a row, well, yeah, everything changes, but it’s always computers. So I was thinking, could I go somewhere else?
And somebody told me, yeah, there’s this open position with Penthouse magazine. A senior writer just resigned there and they desperately need somebody. And I said, yeah, well, come on, guys.
I was like 23 at that time, or 24, 23 or 24. And I said, yeah, they will be just waiting for me. I mean, this is a top shelf magazine with hundreds of thousands of readers and I’m not really experienced.
But nevertheless, I applied for the job and I got it. So I was working for Penthouse magazine for two and a half years, two and a half, three years, becoming the youngest deputy editor in Germany at that time. When then a friend of mine called me and he was editing and developing a new magazine, a football magazine for kids.
And he asked me if I would be interested in doing that. And although I’m a football fan, I support Bayern Munich, the German team, you might know. And football was not really the topic I’d rammed off, but it was a weekly magazine.
And coming from a monthly magazine to a weekly magazine, that meant like, this is the premier league of magazines. It can’t get any more exciting than that, with all the pressure of deadlines, and you have to have the magazine out every week, and it’s really, everything is working on tight deadlines. So I thought that would be really cool.
So I did that. Then I did another teen magazine called Sugar in Germany. And I worked for the company quite a long time.
But then in 2008, like at the top of the financial crisis, I was the publishing director of FHM Magazine, which is also a man’s magazine.
I remember that one well.
A real man’s man, Armin.
I was a subscriber. So, sorry, my funds didn’t keep your job.
And so, and I was the publishing director, and the sales were going down, like the magazine sales were going down, and also the advertising sales were going down, none of which I could stop. So they said, well, Armin is not worth his money, so we get rid of him. And that happened on the 17th of March.
And fortunately, just half a year earlier, I had the idea of creating a website for voice over talents. And this came along that way. I think it was in 2004 when a colleague, again a colleague, I think I live off all the ideas of colleagues.
A colleague told me in 2004, he was then overseeing FHM magazine, and he asked me, Armin, we need to do a new voice over for a commercial that is upcoming for our edition of FHM. And how can we do that? And I said, well, you compliment me all the time on my voice, let’s try me to do that.
And he said, well… And I said, come on, what do you have to lose? We go to the studio, we record.
If it doesn’t work, well, you lost nothing, and I don’t charge anything because I, well, the company owns me, so the company owns my voice too. So it’ll be fun. So we did that, and I went to this recording studio and the director there, I told him right in the face, listen, I’m not a professional voice actor, but I think I can knock it out like a 30 second spot.
I think that that should be fine. And driving in the car, in my car to the studio, I was always saying to myself, FHM men are like that. All the time, it’s the claim.
FHM men are like that. FHM men are like that. And I did that all the time, all the time to get in the mood and looking for, well, what would work.
So I did my stuff there, and then the director said, okay, yeah, I can hear you, you’re not professionally trained, but I think if you follow my directions, we have this thing recorded in no time. And 10 minutes later or 50 minutes later, he said, I think we got it. And so I was happy, and I thought, Armin, you now are a voice over talent.
Thank you for the laughter, because this shows exactly how naive I was. So basically what happened then is I thought I’m a voice over actor. So I grabbed a CD with my only demo I had, this commercial, and I wrote to all the German voice over agencies I could find.
And now guess what happened?
And lots of rejection.
No, I heard nothing. They didn’t even bother to reject me. They just kept silent.
And I was like, okay, that didn’t work really, did it? And I was looking then online for opportunities. I had no clue about voice over websites whatsoever.
I hadn’t got a clue about voice over whatsoever. So, but I found a website that offered the possibility to sign up with them to pay money, and they would then send jobs to you. But all those websites have been targeted to the English speaking markets, basically.
So I was trying to find a German website that does the same, and I could not find any. And I thought, well, that’s odd. Wouldn’t it be great to have a German website of that as well?
Now remember, this was 2004, when I myself had my first voice over. I signed up with this English speaking website, and I got my first jobs there. And I wish I would have still a recording for my first voice overs, because they must have sounded, oh God, I think I would cringe so much.
You’d be amazing how often we hear that. And I feel the exact same way too, because like you said, people who just get in, they have no idea what a VO should sound like. And the funny thing is, is it’s just supposed to sound like you.
But I mean, you can totally sympathize. It’s hilarious.
Yeah, but it was not only like my lack of how to give a decent read, but also like the technical quality of the audio. Well, I did music recording for a few years. I had my MIDI piano, I had a Roland hard disk recorded, and I had recording gear, and I had that.
I had a decent microphone. That was all of the problem, but I did not have a voice booth. So what I did was I was in my living room.
I had this, I don’t know if you know it from, I think it’s, is it SC Electronics that has this shield?
The reflection filter, yeah.
Yeah, exactly, the reflection filter, and I had that. And well, if you only have that, everybody knows it does not work. You have the room reverberation from all the sides, especially from the ceiling.
So it must have sounded horrible.
Still, the sound magicians at Mitro AV Online, a New York recording studio, they booked regularly with me because they did trillions of e-learnings, and they did it multi-language, so they always needed a German version as well. And I worked together with them, I think, at least for five, six years, at least, probably longer. And so this is where I started doing voiceover myself.
Of course, then I got professional training with a teacher that is working at the theater and educating actors, so I learned a lot from her. But still, all the time, I had this spark in my head. No, not this spark, this thing in my head that says, but Armin, why isn’t there a German version of the website that you get the jobs from?
Because there were not many German jobs, only just a few. So I was thinking about that for three, four years until there came the time, and I don’t know if you know that, but in Munich, Germany, there is the Beer Fest, the Oktoberfest. Yes, we’ve heard of it.
It’s the biggest festival of its kind worldwide, and with all the beer tents and the Umf-Data music and so on, and a lot of Gemütlichkeit, as we call it. So I was sitting there with some friends. I had probably a few masses of beer.
A mass is like one liter of beer in a big mug. And I had a few masses of beer, and I was thinking, and this idea came back again in my head, like nobody’s doing that. I mean, if nobody’s doing it, you probably have to do it yourself.
So half-hammered, I walked home, started up my computer, and coded the very, very first lines of Boudalgo. I hadn’t coded for 20 years at that time, but there was a, or there still is, a programming language, probably 80% of all the websites out there are coded in, it’s called PHP. And this language is very similar to a language I already knew, which is called C, so for all the computer aficionados out there.
And I wanted to find out, Armin, do you still have what it needs to code this website? And I soon found out that, yes, okay, I think from programming, there shouldn’t be too many problems if I had known what would come after. I probably would have thrown in the towel a long, long time ago, because if you also have to do server administration and all of that stuff that I had no clue about whatsoever, it can be very, very frustrating, and it was very frustrating.
But nevertheless, after three months, it was really fast. There was a website, Functional. Let’s not talk about the looks anymore, because it looked horrible compared to modern standards, but it worked.
And then I had a website, and then I realized, okay, yeah, Armin, you have a website now, but you can’t approach clients to post jobs, because there ain’t no talents with your website, so you need to find talents. So what I then did is I looked up the biggest association of talents in Germany, wrote the president of them an email and said, listen, I created this website, and my plan would be if you would promote it with your 250 talents you have, like German talents, and they are all vetted talents, I would be willing to give them a premium membership for six months for free to have a critical mass of talents on board that would allow me to promote the whole service to clients. And surprisingly, the guy, although he was developing a similar website, well, or yeah, himself, at least he had a programmer that should have done, should have programmed the website for him, he never fulfilled his job.
He said, I like what you do and yeah, let’s give it a shot. And after one week, I had 70 voice over talents. I said, okay, now let’s promote it to clients.
And this is how it all started. Because in the beginning, the website was only in German.
Because at first, I regretted that I didn’t think it through completely right from the beginning. Because the website was coded that way, that all of the copy you could read on the website was hard coded into the website. So when I decided like, okay, I need to make this at least for the English market, I had to reprogram the whole website again with English copy in it.
And it was a complete and utter nightmare. And so, but I think it was in mid 2009, sorry, mid 2008 or end of 2008, when I had the English version of the website ready. And then I could also approach English speaking talents.
And well, then, of course, with English speaking talents, everybody who was able to read English could then join, well, provided they would be professional talents. So I had an international base of talents, attracting more clients too.
First off, let me just say that I love this sort of beginner’s mindset that you have. I mean, you mentioned before, if I knew what I was getting into, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But for better or worse, your own naivete kind of gave you the confidence to pursue it.
And as Paul was talking about earlier, we’ve already talked about some of the differences, like that really personal touch that you offer, that really hands on approach with Bedalgo. But I’d love to hear from your perspective, how Bedalgo is different from other online casting sites.
Well, there are a few things that I think differentiate Bedalgo from the others. Well, the first one, you just said it for yourself. It’s a very personal, direct, hands on approach.
Every mail I get, it’s me that answers the mail. Luckily, it’s not too many because that would take too much time. I coded the website that way that in theory, not many questions need to be asked because it’s so insanely easy to use.
So then a second point that is very crucial, right from the start, I said, okay, I can only have talents on the website that are professionally trained voice over talents. I don’t mind if somebody’s a real newbie, like he had his training and now wants to start, that is fine. But what I cannot have, I thought, was somebody that has no clue about voice over business at all, and just wants to give it a shot because he thinks an easy buck to make.
And I think by now I had probably, I don’t know, 40,000, 50,000 talents registering for Boudalgo, and only 7,500 made the cut. You get many talents where the demo, and I listen to all the demos of each talent that registers, and I approve or disapprove the profile then. Well, disapproved profiles just get deleted, and the other ones get approved.
And some of the demos, they sound like, shh, hello, shh, my name is Sean, shh, or Sean, shh, I am, this is my voice, I want to sell. Yeah, well, I don’t know what then comes after that, because by the time, well, I have deleted it a long time before. That’s the good thing about bad voice overs.
You instantly recognize them and can hit the delete button like after two seconds. So this is the, and I think it’s very important. And the reason why this selection has to be made is not because, is not that I’m a nasty guy that wants to criticize people.
No, it’s the fear that imagine somebody like that signs up, gets approved, puts out their credit card, and becomes a premium member. And then auditions for a job of a top shelf company. Well, what do you think?
Will the client think listening to demos like that? He will say, oh my God, where am I? I will never ever use this site.
They can’t be serious about what they’re doing. By the way, this is still what I just cannot get… where I cannot get my head around with other websites that do not vet talents.
I wonder what those clients think when they hear that and why they’re still using services that are, frankly, wasting their time. But that’s a different story. But that’s, again, one part where it completely differentiates from others.
And the third one is, I approve and disapprove every job that is posted. And if there’s somebody that wants to have a TV spot for 100 quid, well, it’s not happening. They are getting…
Well, first of all, the system semi-automatically scans for those things and will prevent the client from even posting that job. But if he does tricky things and says, okay, this is not a commercial, then this is, I don’t know, an audio book to get a different budget range, then I have… I look personally at every job posted, and if I see something that’s not adding up, then the client gets a mail from me where I say, okay, listen, this kind of job needs at least this kind of budget or it’s not gonna happen.
That’s great.
That’s wonderful. Yeah, we really appreciate that kind of quality control on both ends because some of the other… I mean, everyone is familiar with some of the controversies regarding some of the other online casting sites.
People wonder if there is an actual vetting process or if the business is more concerned by just making a profit through the volume of subscriptions they get through the talent versus matching quality talent with quality clients. So I can’t tell you how much Paul and I and the VO community at large appreciate the mindset and the approach that you’re taking with that. It’s wonderful, Armin.
Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, okay, I do that on the one hand because I’m a firm believer that there needs to be a certain level of quality to provide a great job, to make a great product.
On the other hand, I do that also because really I’m a true believer that it can’t possibly work otherwise because the whole thing would implode. And I’m still a gobsmacked when I listen to demos of people I see on other websites where I say, well, probably you’re not a premium member because you would alienate the clients big time and it would badly reflect on the website that you have registered with. So I’m really not sure what’s going on there, but well, maybe if…
Well, some websites, they invest so much money, thanks to Morgan Stanley, to promote their services, that they have so many clients that they simply don’t care and while you just have to browse those websites and the talents there, and listen to the demos, and some are really like… You want to have the earth below your feet opened and swallow you.
So Armin, we talked about the ways you verify talent coming in, a new talent that signs up for a membership. What do you do or is there anything you do to maintain quality for talent that are already on the roster?
Well, if somebody made the cut, then it’s because of two things. First, the technical quality of the demo, or demos he provided, is broadcasting quality. The second, the reads he gave or she gave support the impression that this is a professionally trained talent.
And that’s that. So once that’s done, I believe that people will not have their talent level decreasing over time. So I do not revisit the profiles to ensure, are you still a good voice over talent?
I think that’s not necessary. What I do, though, is if I see… I can see all offers.
I can… because, well, I run the website, I see all the offers, all the auditions. So what I do from time to time is on a random basis, I flick through the demos, I listen to them, and if I see something that bothers me, could be technical quality, could be a music bed before the audition, things like that, then I shoot out a mail to the talent.
Doesn’t happen very often, but it happens. And also what happens is if somebody is aggressively undercutting, then they should be prepared to get a mail from me where I say, OK, listen.
I can’t force you to have a decent budget that you’re asking for because that’s your sole decision, and by law, I cannot force you to stick with prices. But I would recommend that you consider the following, and then comes a little bit of what is good for the market, what is bad for the market. In another way, I do blog postings, not very many, not even close to as many as other websites do, where I try to answer the most important…
where I address the most important issues that I feel talents might run into, no matter how experienced they are. And everybody can read that on the Bodago blog. You don’t need to be a premium member.
You don’t need to be a member at all, basically, to read those. And a few hundred times a year, I get questions asked by email, and then I direct the people just to the blog postings where I say, you need to read that, and that makes all of it completely clear to you.
Well, that’s great. I kind of knew the answer to that, because I think I shared on another episode of the show, I got one of those emails from you that said, hey, there’s a little bit of something in the background of your audition for this job. And I played it back, and you were right.
I had inadvertently copied a breath into my room tone that I pasted in every dead space of the audition. So it was like, today’s topic is about foot pain. And here’s how we’re going to address that.
And you were absolutely right to send that to me, and I appreciated the quality control.
And by the way, there is also what I call fast feedback that clients get, because the issue is always, you have like dozens and dozens of talents that audition for a job. Now, most of them have not received any feedback. Of course, the winning talent will receive a feedback, a very positive one, but all the others usually don’t get any feedback, because while you can’t blame the clients, it’s impossible to have a personal feedback sent to them, to all the guys that auditioned.
Some do, most don’t. So to have a little bit of feedback still, what I included like, I think, half a year, three quarters of a year ago, is next to every audition, there’s a drop down menu where people can give a fast feedback, and the fast feedback could be great voice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t suit this job.
Or just great voice, we like it, but that doesn’t say you get the job. But it could also say, I can hear room ambience, too much EQ, bad micing, things like that. And when people get, for example, if you get some over the quarter of, I don’t know, let’s say a few months to half a year, and you receive feedback that always says room ambience, well, then you definitely know something is wrong with your recording setup, because otherwise you wouldn’t get the feedback.
So this is awful. It’s only a tiny thing, and it’s not like that everybody uses it. But every little bit helps.
Any feedback helps all the time. And this is just another way. By the way, this works vice versa.
Also, the talents can… And I would suggest the talents should use it all the time. They can give a fast feedback to the client as well.
For example, if the script is badly translated, if the script is just plain bad, if the briefing is bad, and you can give that feedback as well. And if a client is constantly hammered with bad feedback, and it’s anonymous, they don’t know who gave the feedback. They just see 10 people said the description is weak.
And so this, of course, will then get the client to a point where they say, okay, next time I put a job up with Bodalgo, I spend 30 seconds more and explain a bit more what kind of voice I’m looking for. And of course, jobs that, or many jobs, that are really weak in the description, they get rejected by myself where I say, okay, this three-word briefing will not do the trick. You need to be more precise, and it’s for your own good, because the more precise your briefing is, the more relevant the auditions will be, and the better the job will be that you have at the end of the day.
So everybody wins, and for you it’s only like 30 seconds more time, but it saves you a lot of time down the road. So, yeah, these are like the major things where I try to constantly educate and improve the quality, and it’s really a long road, and it’s a long, hard fight, but time is playing for me. As long as there is Bodalga out there, it will educate the people.
I love that. And going back to what you said, all these little things to receive and give feedback between clients and talent, and it just goes back to your idea of quality control and trying to create quality voice overs for quality clients, and it’s amazing. You just don’t see that anywhere else.
Yeah, and I would not be angry at all if other websites would take this idea on board in there, because if everybody does that, that would help the whole industry so much. It’s like, for example, David Rosenthal. I have the…
And you’re with GVAA, too, Jean, aren’t you?
Yes, yes. I’m their social media manager and membership liaison. I head up their membership program.
And with the English-speaking clients, there is a link within the job posting right under the field where the budget goes that says, unsure about the budget? Check out this rate card.
I included that quite, quite some time ago. And these are also… Okay, of course, this rate card information is massive.
Probably not everybody is reading through this. But it’s there. And maybe they don’t do it for the first job or the second job or the third, but they see it all the time there when they’re posting jobs, and maybe somebody clicks on it.
And everybody that clicks on it is a good thing. And the information is there, and if it’s there long enough, it will trickle down.
Wonderful. Plant in the seed.
Yes.
Thank you so much, Armin. You’ve told us a little bit of the progression and evolution of Bodago. What do you see on the horizon?
What is the future for Bodago?
Well, the future for Bodago is the past of Bodago. The goal is the same, attracting more clients. I don’t know if you’re aware about that, but since the beginning of Bodago, Bodago has not made any marketing efforts towards talents.
I never did that and probably never will do. There’s only one exception, and these are my appearances at voice over conferences. Where I go to Atlanta, or I go to Gravy for the Brain, the Voice Awards.
The One Voice.
The One Voice. Thank you, Paul. And this is the only marketing effort I do to the talents, and I might reduce that a little bit in future.
Well, first, it’s quite a financial impact if you sponsor those events. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Gerald, what he does with the VO Atlanta. I think this guy is a wonderful person, first point.
And second, he’s an incredibly skilled entrepreneur. And I just love the passion and how he does that and how it looks like and how it developed. And that’s a really, really great asset, and it’s wonderful to be there.
Nevertheless, I attracted really very, very much attention on the voice talent side. And I don’t want to risk that there is a disbalance between the number of clients with Budalgo and the number of premium talents with Budalgo. Because if I run into a disbalance there, then nobody will be happy, because nobody will be getting any jobs, or not enough people, or the hit ratio will just suffer from that.
So I might reduce that a little bit. You will still see me there. But yes, I might reduce that.
And at the same time, enhance the efforts on attracting new clients. And there is an issue that… Somebody just posted that country call, who it was on Facebook, where he was talking about the SEM efforts of voices.com and other websites.
And I think Google AdWords, for example, because this would be the first place you go to. If you want to promote your business, your online business, Google AdWords had been a wonderful thing for quite a long time. But this changed for the voiceover world a few years ago already.
When I had ads out there with Google AdWords, a few years ago, the people that were clicking those ads were clients looking for a voiceover talent. So imagine there’s an advertising, I don’t know, cast the best voiceover talents in the world, the usual blah, blah, blah. So now those ads in majority are no longer clicked by the clients, but by the talents.
And the reason behind that is not because they want to book, they want to have other talents auditioning, no, they are looking for, oh, is this a website I can get jobs from? So they click on the link, go to the website and find out, is that a new potential resource for them to find new jobs? So they are killing the budget.
And I saw that really massively two and a half years ago, where I saw from the signups, oh, it’s now 80% talents that end up signing up from all the clicks that I get from the campaign. And it’s just not working anymore. But there are different ways, which I’m not going absolutely into detail because David Cicerelli probably hears that as well.
So SEO is still key if you’re trying to promote your website. So it shows up in the search engine result pages, like the, what do you call it? Not the paid traffic, but just the normal Google traffic.
Organic traffic.
Yeah, thank you. That’s the word I was looking for. So this is still very, very important, of course.
Also, what really helps is that the client base of Podalgo now has reached a level where word of mouth is really, really helping. And there are other bits and pieces with PR, for example, that help drive the clients. And there’s another thing.
I saw that this year. Job-wise, Podalgo has a plus of 20% compared to last year. But the number of clients is not as high.
The number of new clients is not as high. So the clients that are with Podalgo are posting more and more jobs. And this is a very good sign in my book.
Well, that’s great to hear. So we talked a little bit about the future of Podalgo. But you haven’t stopped with just Podalgo.
You actually have ventured into some new businesses. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of your other ventures? Yes.
There’s one in particular that… I’m not sure whether this is of great interest to the audience right now.
Do you have any idea how many voice over artists are geeks?
There’s a lot of us.
So there is this new website that I’ve been working on for now for close to even more than 18 months. And it has… A beta started in January.
And it’s a marketplace again. But this time it’s a marketplace for retro video games. So you maybe remember all those consoles from the 80s, from the 90s, from the 2000s, and many of us have played with them.
And a friend of mine approached me in… end of 2000, hang on, 16, beginning 2017, if I would be interested in encoding a marketplace for that. And I was telling him, yeah, that’s a very great idea.
Thank the Lord, there is no eBay and Amazon. But while I was saying that, I said, hang on, eBay is ridiculously expensive when you want to sell a game, and Amazon even more. It’s 15% plus close to a dollar per item.
It’s enormous. And there are no dedicated websites for geeks and nerds and gamers. So I said, well, hang on, wait a second.
Maybe you have there something. Are you sure there is no dedicated marketplace for retro video games out there? And he said, well, I’m pretty sure.
So I did my own research, and it’s hard to believe, but actually it’s true. There is no website worldwide that is dedicated as a marketplace to retro video games. Of course, many game shops have their own website where they sell games, but that’s not the idea.
The idea is that every user can buy or sell games. So a real marketplace like Amazon or like eBay, but it’s not an auction. It’s just you can buy and sell this stuff for a fixed price.
And this is what retroplace.com is all about. And it launched beta in January, and in August there’s a fair in Cologne, the biggest games fair in Europe, the Gamescom. And this is where we have officially introduced the marketplace bit of the website.
On the website, you can already manage your collection. There’s a database with 110,000 games, which makes it incredibly easy to say, OK, I have this game, I have this game, I have this game, I have this game, I have this console, I have this console. And the nerds and geeks like to manage their collection in one nice place.
And this is what RetroPlace already does, and does it in a wonderful way, incredibly easy. The collection never looked greater than on that website. And the core of the website will be the Marketplace, and that will launch officially in August.
And then it will get really interesting, because the Marketplace is, of course, where the business model lies. So we take a 7% commission on every game sold there, which is a third or a quarter what Amazon takes, and it’s kind of half what eBay takes. So it’s really, really, really cheap.
And, well, let’s see. So far we have a thousand users on the website. Almost did no promotion at all.
This will change. And, guys, I want to have your take on that. When…
Yeah, because that could be interesting. When the website really starts, like officially the Marketplace and all, and if I see, OK, the Marketplace works fine, there are no big bugs, I was wondering, would it be absolutely fishy if I dropped a mail to a selected number of talents of Bodago and said, listen, you guys know me, there is something I want to tell you about, and would you help me promote it if you’re interested in the topic? Would you think that’s completely no-go?
I think if you weren’t you, maybe, but given the goodwill you’ve built up with your user base, I don’t see a problem. Like I said, I’ve already signed up just on word of mouth about it.
I’m pretty sure you signed up because I saw your profile.
I did.
No, I think it’s a great idea. And just like with Bodago, the fact that you really feel like it’s a partnership when you work with you, Armin, I love how you try to get everyone involved no matter how they’re affiliated with your website. So yeah, I don’t see why not.
I still have to think about it because it can go down really bad with some people, understandably. And I don’t want to offend the people. But as I see Bodago as a family business, and it’s so personal, so I feel I’m connected with everybody on Bodago so personally.
One final question, and it’s kind of taking a different slant, because you’ve already outed yourself as a bit of a geek and a gear head. So I know you’ve got some pretty impressive studio equipment, and Paul and I are Unabashed Gear snobs or sluts or whatever. We’re not snobs, we just like gear.
So we’d love to hear what your studio setup is, so maybe you could give our listeners some ideas on how they can improve their own sound.
Let’s start with the hardware, and I mean the non-technical hardware. I have in my room, which it’s a pretty old building, where the flat is in, it’s from the beginning of the 20th century, so it’s a very high ceiling. So I had to have a room within a room.
I built myself a vocal booth. Do you call it vocal booth anyway?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, a vocal booth, isolation booth, whatever works for you.
So I did that with walls that I built myself, and I can only tell you that I think I’m a firm believer. There is a foam made out of melanin. It’s called Basotec.
It’s made by, I think, the company Bayer. It’s a chemical company, but you can buy it. You should be able to buy it in any decent store that sells record gear.
It’s called Basotec. And I think this is the acoustic foam to go, no matter what. I haven’t come across anything that is better than that.
It’s pretty expensive. Like, four square meters will be $100 or something like that. So it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty expensive.
But I think it’s just the trick. So this room in a room has this… is built with this Basotec.
Inside the vocal booth, there is a Neumann U87, which is a great microphone, no question. I just think it doesn’t suit my voice. So it would be a good idea, reminded to myself, next time before you buy a $2,500 microphone, try it first.
Yeah, but it’s hard to get that out into your own studio, you know, unless you work out an agreement with who you purchase it from.
Every decent store should give you a test opportunity, and if they don’t, you go away. And the guys would have done, happily, I just said, ah, nah, it’s fine.
It’s a U87, what could go wrong?
It sounds wonderful, but I also have a Browner Phantom Classic, and that sounds so crisp. It has this… I can’t describe it.
It’s really like… It’s just a very crisp sound that is also maybe because I’m a baritone bass voice, and it really helps this voice. So these are the two microphones.
I also have the Sennheiser 416. Never used it so far. Yeah, I come to that point in a minute.
So then the audio interface that I have is an Apollo Twin Duo, which I rate for its price range. Absolutely king of the kings. I have not come across anything at all that comes even close to what this thing does.
It’s especially useful because usually you have effects in your DAEW, and the effects are rendered in your computer, which gives a little bit of lag time. But this thing has the effects executed with a digital signal processor within the device. So you have no…
It’s not called lag. What is the word I’m looking for?
Latency.
Latency, thank you. You have no latency whatsoever, which makes it wonderful for many other purposes as well. And yeah, I think it’s just wonderful.
It has two channels, wonderful analog digital converters. They’re just awesome. It’s about, I think you can get it now for $700, $800 probably.
How about that? Yeah. And did you mention, was that the solo or the duo?
I have the duo. The solo probably would do for me, because really I have only one effect running in it, and that’s like a channel strip, and that’s basically it, what I’m doing, because I hardly do any… I don’t do any cueing on my voice.
Okay, well, that’s not completely true. I do a little bit of… In the 100 Hz, I go like 2 dB down, and then just because I like it in the 12 kHz, I give it like a 1.5 dB+.
It just adds a little bit of air to the voice, which I really, really like. And nobody ever complained.
That’s what matters.
Absolutely. And there’s one… I think it’s magic.
And I have to say, I hate waves for their DRM system that they have. It’s so uncomfortable to use. Well, if you have once set it up, it’s fine.
But if you change the computer, it’s just a nightmare. I hate them for that. But they have a plugin called Renaissance Vox.
And this is a compressor and gate. And it’s the most easy gate compressor combination I’ve ever seen. It works like magic.
It’s a very, very great gate, because the gate doesn’t… It’s not like… But it’s really…
And when there is like a… You don’t have to cut your breathings out, because when you trim it correctly, it will not get the breathing. But it doesn’t cut it off like with an X.
It really pays it out so nicely, so naturally, that it sounds awesome without any editing. I really, really love that, and I really recommend it. It’s called Renaissance Vox.
It’s pretty cheap now. I think you probably can grab it for 69, 89 dollars. Maybe even cheaper, because it’s a very old plugin, but I think it’s just wonderful, and it does magic.
And for the computer, it’s an iMac. i5, now it’s like two, two and a half, three years old. It’s doing its job great.
Well, for voice over recordings, you don’t really need that much power. So any computer will do. But with me, it will only be a Mac.
I’m not against PCs, but after I came from the Atari ST in the 90s, the first computer I worked with in the next job was a Mac. And well, then it was just natural to buy a Mac for my flat as well. And that’s why I ended up with a Mac.
So I’m an Apple fanboy. Now, all you haters, you can come after me.
I’m a fanboy too. I don’t know how I feel about all the USB-C stuff that’s coming out now, but it’s still overall, I think it’s just a reliable system to use. And for our listeners, if you’re interested in the Waves Renaissance VOX app, it’s actually on sale right now for…
or excuse me, plugin, not app, for $45. So about $30, $40 less than what Armin would say.
It’s really a no-brainer, especially if you already have Waves plugins. So you went through all this DRM obstacles that they put in the way. Maybe they improved by now, but if you already have a Waves plugin, well, yeah, spend those $49.
If you are not happy with the gate… And the gate thing really is a thing, because even if you have a great, really extraordinarily well-set up audio chain, you still have, even with the best microphones in the world, you have at like minus 70, minus 65, depending on your microphone, maybe even minus 80. If you have a Neumann TLM3, which has a really…
The floor noise is like non-existent, but you still have this little bit of hiss, like so really, really tiny. So I am a noise Nazi, so to speak.
And this thing is so fantastic, killing that. I have not come across anything that is like that, and definitely not that easy to use. It’s just wonderful.
I never thought I would, but I would recommend Waves to that respect.
Very cool. So once again, that’s the Waves Renaissance Vox Plug-in with a gate and compressor in it. I tend not to play with plug-ins that much, but for $45, I might give it a shot.
So Waves, if you don’t use it, they also have a popular D-Breather plug-in, as well as a nice D-Esser, and they’re well known for having pretty affordable plug-ins compared to some of the other competition that’s out there. And of course, if you have your UA Apollo, it’ll play very nicely with that.
Well, Armin, you mentioned the word Renaissance, and that’s a perfect way to wrap up, because you are really a Renaissance man in every sense of the word. You went from publishing to coding. You obviously know your way around the studio.
You’re an audio engineer, a voice talent, and now a retro gamer marketplace entrepreneur. So we’re so happy to have your talents shared with us here on the VO Meter. We can’t thank you enough for being with us.
Thanks again.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Armin.
Paul, Jean, thank you so much for giving me the chance to chat with you. It’s really highly appreciated. Thanks for having me.
To all the listeners, hope you enjoy that. And I see you next time.
That’s it for this episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Stay tuned for part two, where we talk about online casting sites and some of our favorites to work with. See you next time.
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 27 of The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Today, we’ve got the lovely, squacky VO, Val Kelly, the coordinator for MAVO, the Mid Atlantic Voice Over Conference, and we’ll be talking with her in about 20 minutes right now. But first, we have current events.
So, Paul, tell us what’s up with you in current events.
First of all, I’m kind of gassy. I just burped while you were doing the intro. Hopefully, I didn’t come across the microphone.
They have a mute button for a reason, pal.
Yeah, I know. I should really make use of that. Well, the currentest event, I don’t think that’s a word, but it’s the last day of school for the kiddies here on the East Coast.
So, it’s about 9.15 here on the East Coast, and it’s happy hour, and we’re celebrating the first day of summer for the kids. Just got back from the pool, and yeah, like I said, celebrating the first day of official summer for the kids. So, that’s pretty exciting.
Very cool, very cool. Got any big trips planned for the summer?
We do. We have a couple of beach trips. We’re lucky that we have family in two different beach towns.
So, we always go visit my sister-in-law, who has a house in Duck, North Carolina. Our fans may remember I recorded an episode from there, last year, where we interviewed Paul St. Perida.
With all the crickets and cicadas in the background.
And the dump truck that was dumping sand, I think during that time too. Then we go to Ocean City, New Jersey, where my parents actually live full time. So we’re basically freeloaders the whole summer.
But we take advantage of it while we can. And you know, the family likes to see us and the grandkids and nieces and nephews too. So that’s a lot of fun.
Just charm them with your presence. Maybe do the dishes every once in a while. It’d be fine.
Yeah, something like that. As far as work, I do have a couple of exciting things going on. I just, while I was at the pool, actually, with the kids, I got to notice that my second book ever with Find A Way Voices has been approved for full production.
So they have a quality control process that they go through when you submit the files. I submitted those, I guess, about two weeks ago now. And today I got the note that the author approved it, passed quality control, and they should be sending it to retail to appear on all the usual suspects in a couple of weeks.
Very cool.
And this is the sequel to the last book I did. I’ve had a three-book deal with the same author, all about the Balkans. And this is the second one that’s called The Balkan Network.
Nice, Tales of Military Intrigue.
Yeah. And along those lines, I’m in the throes of the third book in that series. I’m about a third of the way through.
This one’s called The Credible Dagger. It’s the same cast of characters, but a prequel to The Balkan Network where all the characters that were retiring or older in that book are now in their 20s and 30s. So it’s a look back.
Sort of like the Star Wars franchise right now. This is a prequel to the ones I’ve already done and that are published.
I wonder if they’ll ask you to change their performance or their vocal types a little bit to make them sound younger.
Well, I thought about that because there’s one character where he passed away in the book as an older character just on the last legs of life, and now I had to do him as a youngster. So in that last book, I sort of did a real raspy and heavy breathing book almost like on a respirator. Not book.
Heavy breathing voice, almost like he was on a respirator the whole time. So now I have to think how I can incorporate some of that raspiness into this younger, 20-something person, and it is interesting. But I think I’m pulling it off.
Excellent, excellent. You’re in your element.
Yeah, exactly. So I think that’s really all that’s going on with me work-wise. I did have a couple other leads out there.
Oh, I do have one cautionary tale, which I always like to throw in. Oh yeah, go for it. I had a job on Craigslist today, where I guess, admittedly, I didn’t read it all the way through in the beginning.
I just saw a documentary film and I was excited, so I sent off my standard cover letter and my demo, and the person came back and said, yeah, we love your voice, we think you’d be a great fit for the project. You’ll get an IMDB credit. And I said, uh-oh, wait a second.
Exposure bucks.
So I went back to the listing, and it literally said, you’ll get exposure and an IMDB credit. So, ugh, I replied back and said, I didn’t even address that comment. I just said, great, looking forward to getting started.
I’ll do this for $250. It’s just a couple of minute piece. And I haven’t heard back yet.
I probably don’t expect to.
But hey, that’s good, right? You never know. They’re like, oh, maybe once they work with a few free talent, they’ll be like, maybe we should pay someone.
Yeah, that could be the case. Or maybe they’ll come to their senses when they realize that they really like my voice. So we’ll see.
Absolutely.
And who wouldn’t?
Yeah, of course. So that’s it for me. What’s happening with you?
Well, speaking of fair compensation, we just had an incredibly amazing and just… I’m speechless. I can’t even describe it.
But we had an incredible event this week on Tuesday with the… It was several groups coming together. It was…
I represented GVAA, Global Voice Acting Academy. And I was there alongside David Rosenthal, our CEO, and David Tobak, our CFO, our Chief Financial Officer. And then we also had some great guests from the VOAA, or the VO Agent Alliance.
We had Deborah Duckett from DB Talent. It’s a Texas voiceover agency. We also had Stacey Stahl from In Both Ears.
It’s an agency out of Portland, Oregon. And then we had Eric Sheppard of Voice Talent Productions and Jeffrey Umberger of the Umberger Agency. So on top of that, we also had some representatives from WOVO, or the World Voices Organization.
We had our previous guest, Peter Bishop, and Dave Pravasier, who are both sort of champions of the industry in trying to defend fair compensation for voice talent in various genres and just kind of maintain the overall integrity of the business and offer a lot of educational and mentoring opportunities for talent in trying to make sure that we’re all kind of at a competitive professional level so we can defend professional rates. So I was honored to be alongside this panel of just eight amazing paragons of change in the VO industry. And then we had over 500 attendees.
It was amazing. Apparently people were watching it together in their homes, like the Super Bowl or something. It was amazing.
Did you get to participate as a panelist? Did you talk?
I talked a little bit. My job is mainly talking about GVA’s involvement and our goal to really educate talent of all experience levels in the industry and basically create competitive quality talent to ensure that the quality of the industry itself does not degrade. So I got to talk a little bit.
I definitely felt like the neophyte in the room. I was just like, wow. I’m the closest to an audience member it could have been.
But I did get a few good words in and it was just a really amazing, empowering experience for everyone involved. And I was so happy to hear so many people who were just getting involved, who had no idea about some of the issues we talked about largely. It was about how the fight for compensation has never been tougher because there’s just so much work out there and people have been agreeing to less than acceptable rates for a long time now.
And there’s just so much going on between the growing influence of pay-to-play sites and their control over the industry. Was that a good or bad thing? How much control can we take back?
What exactly are agents doing to try and defend rates? Like, what was their job before? A lot of talent don’t know all the work that agents do to try and make sure that they are fairly compensated.
And then, so we really got some invaluable perspective from that side of the business. And we talked about a lot of things that talent can do individually to ensure that they can make a sustainable living wage on this. Because so many people when they’re just getting started, like you said, might be willing to work for very low pay or no pay or exposure to get themselves out there, to build experience.
But the truth is, is this is not an experience-based industry. This is a talent-based service. So if you have the talent, if you have already proven that you can be competitive and that people want your voice, your product, then why not charge professional rates?
And then you’re welcome to reevaluate your rates each year and raise them accordingly, but start at a minimum accepted level. So we talked about all these things and a whole bunch more. And if you’re interested in this and you weren’t able to see it or if you want to watch it again or if you want to share it, it’s over on the VO Agent Alliance YouTube channel and we’ve actually sent several links up in the GVA Community Facebook group and business page as well.
So once again, that’s the VOAA Town Hall Meeting and you should be able to find that on their Facebook page, on the GVA Community page, and on our GVA Business page.
That’s great. I’m so glad you were able to pull that off. I saw that, I was not able to attend.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Just being like a fly on the wall at a moment in VO history. It was pretty amazing.
That’s great. It actually reminds me of something else I forgot to mention that I’ve been doing. Dave Courbassier asked for some help on, I think, the Facebook group for World Voices organization in booking the Race Roundtable that they host.
It’s usually every couple of months. Maybe it’s quarterly. I don’t know the exact timetable.
I think you’re right about quarterly, maybe every three months.
Yeah. I appeared on one a long time ago. Some of you may have seen that.
It’s also that same discussion about upholding rates and standards in the industry, so it’s a great forum as well. I’m helping book the guests for that, so I can take some of that off of Dave’s plate. They actually recorded it yesterday.
The guests were Gabby Nistico, Brad Newman, Hugh Edwards, David Rosenthal. I’m not sure where he found the time to record both of these.
Right?
Ramesh Matani, Dave, and then Anne Gangusa were the hosts, and then Allie Murphy was on as well. If you’re listening to this, go ahead and check out that race roundtable. It should be published by the time we publish this episode.
Yeah, and if you’re not familiar with some of those talents like Ramesh and Allie, I mean, they’re offering an international perspective from Europe and from the Canary Islands of all places. These are always incredibly informative events, and if you’re ever wondering about if you want to stay current on the sort of compensation trends on newer forms of media, on newer kinds of projects, this is a great way to stay informed, to ensure that you’re charging proper rates. And this kind of gives me an opportunity to give a quick little shout out to Paul.
I think he’s absolutely perfect for this kind of position because you guys may not know it, but he’s actually responsible for the scheduling and the coordination of all of our guests, and I am so grateful to Paul for that. Sometimes I joke that all I have to do is to show up. So thank you very much, Paul, for all the work that you do for the podcast.
And actually, I’ll go ahead and let you cover our next announcement, but because of that work, tell them what you want to tell us about our current event for the podcast.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. What?
The subscribers. We haven’t talked about the subscribers.
Okay, and pick up. Yes, we are really excited to announce that between the last episode and this, we crossed over the 8,000 download mark for our podcast. Woo hoo!
So thanks to all our fans. That is amazing. Yeah, it’s amazing.
Like you’ve been fond of saying, I didn’t think we’d have aah listener when alone. 8,000. So thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and listened live.
We really appreciate all the support.
Yeah, and lately we’ve been getting a lot more requests or questions, and we absolutely love this. We like to address them on the podcast. We love to just help you guys out because we’ve either been there or we’ve seen these pitfalls or obstacles like come up into Aspiring Talents’ wake, and we really want to do what we can to kind of lend you guys a hand.
So we’re so happy to hear that you’re finding the podcast useful, and as long as you guys are listening, we’ll keep pushing them out. So thank you all so much.
Yeah, again, thanks to all of our fans and listeners. We can’t do it without you. Well, we could, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
Well, you know Sean, we actually have one other very exciting bit of news. We have our first sponsor. Very cool.
I know. So voiceactorwebsites.com, fine purveyors of voice actor websites, as the name would imply, is the very first sponsor for the VO Meter. I actually am a client of theirs and love their work.
I love what they do with my site. And they’ve done so many other voice actor websites out there. We’re extremely happy to have them on board.
And so let’s hear a little bit more about them.
As a voice talent, you have to have a website. But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don’t look right on mobile devices.
They’re not built for marketing and SEO. They’re expensive. You have limited or no control.
And it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what’s the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com.
Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control.
No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voiceover website going for as little as $700.
So if you want your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website shouldn’t be a pain in the you-know-what.
Thanks to Dan Leonard for providing that commercial. You may have heard it on his show, The Voice Over Body Shop, or VOBS, that he does with George Widom every Monday night. And we thank him for letting us use it.
So we talked about some of the events. What else is happening work-wise for you, Sean?
Work-wise? I’ve actually been getting kind of just all sorts of different auditions from various agents. I don’t know if it’s just because of the season and maybe everyone’s preparing for the fall, but all sorts of interesting projects that I’d love to be a part of, like corporate narrations, commercials, even a couple of video game things that sound really fun.
And my local agent, Colleen Bell Agency, out of Bellevue, Washington, has actually been sending me some cool mixes of VO and on camera and sort of hybrid projects. I got this really cool one for sort of an educational product for something I’d really love to be a part of. And the spec was pretty much just like, we need a teacher with a unique and fun personality.
I was like, well, I was one of those for four years. Maybe I could be good for it.
Not according to your students. Bum bum.
What was that?
Not according to your students.
Oh no. Why did I publish those surveys? Anyways, but it was really fun.
I got to show up. I got to read to a teleprompter for the first time. They were incredibly helpful.
And it’s just really interesting comparing the on camera work versus the VO work because you get a thing or something in your inbox, and then you just go into the booth and you record it. Might take you an hour at most to kind of like do your research and figure out what read you want. But with on camera, depending on where you are, you might have to drive an hour to the audition and like just prepare and wait and then drive back for an hour.
And then for something that could be five or 10 minutes. So it’s a really interesting, it’s a different world. Then it’s interesting to experience different aspects of the entertainment industry and figure out where you want to present yourself as an actor.
That’s great you’re able to do that. I actually signed on with a local casting agency a couple of months ago where they send me those roles. I just don’t have time to do it.
So I basically blow them off every single time. I’d love to be able to try and do some on camera stuff at some point, maybe when the kids are in college.
Yeah, yeah. Well, absolutely, that’s the things like when you have time for it. Cause I mean, if you can’t clear like half or a whole day for it, depending on the project, depending on the audition or the shooting schedule.
Absolutely. So, but Paul, I’m sure when you started with this agency, you explained like, hi, I’m primarily a VO talent. So I might not audition for some of these on camera things.
I did explain that, and yet they keep sending them to me.
And yet they keep sending it to you.
Maybe they just love me that much.
I’m just trying to chip away at your resolve.
Yeah, it has happened. There has been one where I applied where I was like, okay, fine, I’ll go.
Here are my headshots, you bastards. No, we love our agents. And if you don’t, then you should, because you need to watch that VOA town meeting and see just how much work they do for you to maintain the integrity of your business.
And speaking of loving our agents, today is the birthday of a shared agent we have, the super talented and lovely person, Liz Atherton. So happy birthday, Liz.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday…
We’re not gonna finish it.
Oh, okay, let’s do it again. We’ll pick it up.
Happy birthday dear Liz. Happy birthday to you.
And you smell like one too.
I don’t know if she’s a listener, but I hope so.
Yeah, and she’s an amazing agent. She sent me some really interesting projects lately that I’ve absolutely loved. So thank you so much, Liz.
And I hope you have a wonderful birthday because you’re a wonderful person.
So that pretty much wraps up our current events. But before we move to our interview with Val Kelly from the Mid Atlantic Voice Over Conference, we have our…
Questionable gear purchase.
I don’t have anything, so it’s all you this time.
Oh, wow. Okay. Well, nice.
Well, actually, first off, I’ve been actually getting a lot of questions on some of the equipment that I use because I’m pretty generous with the pictures I put up on Facebook of my setup. And primarily, people have been asking me about mounting gear, like how, because I got kind of a PVC…
Hey, keep it clean.
I don’t even know where to start with that, but like, what do you mean? Wow. Welcome to the Taxidermy Podcast.
But anyways, so, wow, conversation derailed. But anyways, it’s like I was saying, I have a PVC framework with a blanket booth or with an acoustic hanging booth setup from VocalBooth2Go. And I’ve experimented with a couple of different configurations, but one thing I found out is that I don’t really like having a traditional microphone stand in here because it really takes up, even though it can take up almost half of the space.
And of course, it’d be so easy to hit the mic when you’re trying to be really expressive and freeing in your gestures and stuff like that. So I tried to think of a way that I could mount things to the ceiling so I had more room to move around and to gesticulate and stuff like that. So I’m a huge fan of the Stage Ninja Mic Arm.
So you can find that at B&H Photo, Amazon, Sweetwater, all the usual suspects. And then a couple more things I use to keep the, like to make those even more efficient for swapping out mics or holding an iPad or a phone is that I have these sort of these quick-release connectors from OnStageStands. They’re only about $10.
And there are more expensive, more sophisticated products, but I’ve had these for years and they work just fine. And I actually got the idea from James Arnold Taylor, who’s incredible, amazing talent. And he’s like, he highly recommends them.
He doesn’t recommend you getting anything more expensive than that. Like they hold heavy mics upside down for years. So don’t worry about that.
And then depending on the sort of thread adapter you have on the shock mound or the microphone mount that you’re using, you might need what’s called a, I hope I get this right. So five eights to three eights, female to male mic adapter. So you can do another mounting gear joke there somewhere, Paul, if you want.
But anyways, so that’s a five eight…
Those come with a lot of mics, by the way.
What’s that?
Those come with a lot of mics in the package. I have like six of them that came with different mics I purchased over the years.
Oh, interesting. So don’t confuse them with the little ones that come inside of the shock mound that you can kind of screw out with a screwdriver. So these ones kind of, or like I said, it’s just a five, or that, because I’m trying, I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite, like male to female or whatever, versus the female to male that you would need to get this to work.
But anyways, once you have all of those, you can easily, like if you have multiple mics, you can swap them out easily, or if you put any other mic accessories, like a pop filter on one or something like that. And then one last thing that I have is a tablet holder or an iPad 2 holder from Koenig & Meyer, that’s K&M. And they have a variety of different, they have universal tablet mounts, they have ones for specific iPad models, like the Air, the Air 2, and the Mini.
And it’s just been such a nice way, like it can even turn between vertical and landscape mode. And it’s just been so helpful in having like just a, like I said, I just mount that on the ceiling with all my other stuff, and then you just have a script right there at eye level. You don’t have to crane your neck.
And it’s just really, it’s been great for my workflow. And I just wanted to pass that on to you guys. But anyways, I do have an actual purchase this month that I’m excited to talk about.
And so a little backstory, a friend of mine who’s actually a member of our membership program through GVAA, reached out to me about getting her first microphone, like her first big boy, big girl voiceover microphone. She had a budget of about $300. And there’s a lot of great candidates in this category.
Like for example, I’ve been really happy with the Rode NT1, not NT1A, the cool black one with the kit, not the old one. I swear you have to make that distinction every time. But anyways, so I had great success with that.
Before that, I was using the Sennheiser MK4, which is another great clean, quiet, no frills mic.
The CAD E100 fits in that range.
Which one was that?
The CAD E100S fits into that range?
Oh yeah, the CAD E100 definitely fits in that range. You can usually get it used or refurbished anywhere from like 230 to 450, depending on when and where you get it from. So like another great mic, Paul and I have both used it.
Certainly competes with the 103 and the 416. And then, and to tell you the truth, so do the Rode and the MK4. And recently I’ve heard of another great mic from MicTech, who was recommended by audio engineer and voice talent, Emmett Andrews, who’s actually a former Sweetwater rep.
And that’s the MicTech MK300. So by all accounts, this guy kind of punches above its weight in sound quality, sounding both clear, but very warmth and punchy and stuff like that. Like almost like a thousand dollar mic, or if that’s important to you.
But lastly, I had my eyes set on this mic from Lewitt in that price range called the LCT 440 Pure. So part of their latest generation of mics. And Lewitt has really been kind of stealing the stage for being like really innovative and just having a unique style and just really feature rich microphones.
You might’ve seen reviews on their LCT 640 and 940. I believe Jordan Reynolds wrote one for, what was it? I can’t remember which sound magazine it was.
Maybe it was Sound, or Sound on Sound. That’s what it was a long time ago. And then some of their other microphones like the LCT 550 and the 240 have been on Booth Junkies videos.
But I really wanted to try the Pure because it’s like right at that competitive price point of $300, it’s got a full kit. It’s got an integrated pop filter and shock mount. It’s really compact.
It just looks really professional and nice. And unlike the reason why it’s so affordable compared to some of their other models like the 640 and the 550, which are about $900, $700 range, is that it doesn’t really have a lot of extraneous features like an attenuation pad. That’s for when you need to kind of knock down the signal by 10 or six or 12 dB to ensure that the mic doesn’t clip.
Far more useful for recording like jet engines or really loud guitar cabs than voiceover. So you don’t really need that. And then another one feature that’s missing from this mic is a high pass filter.
So, and we’ve talked about that a little bit on some of our other, excuse me, on some of our other episodes where that really just kind of allows the higher frequencies beyond a certain fresh threshold, threshold, usually 80 to 100 hertz, and that just helps eliminate like bass buildup, lower frequency stuff and rumble from, or just kind of helping reducing your ambient noise in your room by removing those lower frequencies that aren’t in the human voice. So even though that sounds useful, very often the high pass filter in a microphone is not as good as the one you can get on a preamp or in your software, because sometimes it can actually introduce noise into the mic because it requires a little bit more power and stuff like that. So frankly, that sounds kind of like they really slimmed it down and this would be an absolutely perfect microphone for voice talent, for audiobook narrators, for podcasters.
And so I’m really excited and I’m so grateful that Anna Maria was willing to let me try out this mic before her and make sure I was giving her a decent recommendation. So if you’re listening to this, Anna Maria, thank you so much. And if any of you other guys have gear you want me to review, please just send it my way.
So Paul will probably take you up on that too.
Yeah, definitely. I’m always interested in trying out new gear. And as booth junkie Mike DelGaudio said, I promise to pack it up real nice.
I know, absolutely. We’ve actually bought and sold mics to each other and we always make sure that they’re well packed and they’re in great condition when they get to you. So like I said, if you want to take us up on that, we’d be happy to recommend stuff for you and review it for you.
Manufacturers too. You listening there, Sennheiser or…
Or Neumann or Lewitt, if you’re listening, please.
Yeah, exactly. So before we get to our interview segment with Val Kelly, we have a VO Meter stick from Brad Hyland.
And…
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter schtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO Meter… Oh, nevermind.
The VO Meter schtick? Oh, got it.
Hey, Paul and Sean, thanks very much for having me on the VO Meter. I do have a quick funny story, at least it’s funny to me. I do a good bit of video voiceover stuff for German customers that I got through Bedolgo.
And some of the work is really, really fun. It’s different. Some is sort of promo.
Others are more like e-learning or training. But this one that I got is for a product for high-end restaurants in Germany. And it’s a product called the Dryager, which is a huge walk-in meat cooler that you can see while you’re in the restaurant.
It’s like part of the decoration with all the fancy, beautiful, giant cuts of meat you can pick from. So I did the video and he said, everything is perfect, and this is just my, in my brain is what I’m hearing. Everything’s perfect, Brad, but we need you to say the product name correctly.
And I’m thinking, how do you, Dryager, just, you know, D-R-Y-ager, how else do you say it? I asked him to send me a file with an example of how he would like me to say it. So he went to several non-English speaking members of the firm in Germany and sent me a quick wave file of how they want it to say.
And the way they said it in the file was, the three samples was kind of like this, Dryager, Dryager, Dryager. So I had those three samples of how to say, Dryager, the way they wanted it. So I just sort of sped it up and I said, Dryager.
And it sounded better for them. Anyway, so sometimes getting help from customers with pronunciations really isn’t that much help, especially if they’re not native English speakers. But man, I love my German customers and I love Budongo.
And I hope I get a lot more. And thanks for letting me be part of your schtick section. Have a great day.
Awesome, well, thank you so much for your VO MeterStick contribution. Up next, we have the lovely and talented Val Kelly, the owner and coordinator of MAVO, the Mid Atlantic Voice Over Conference. So without further ado, we’re going to take you over to BDALGO Call.
Okay, everybody, welcome to the interview portion of this episode of The VO Meter, and we are very pleased to welcome Val Kelly. Val is a bilingual French and English voice actress. She started her career in 1999 and has been actively booking voiceover work for years.
Val’s specialty is invoicing characters for cartoons, talking toys, apps, video games, children’s e-learning, radio and TV commercials, and short films. Some of her clients include Hasbro Toys, Hungry Howie’s Pizza Place, Roman Wander, Me Muna, I hope I pronounced that right, The Foreign Candy Company, Theory Films, and many more. In addition to being a voice actress, Val is the owner and president and CEO and executive producer of Mid Atlantic Voice Over, LLC.
And with that, Val is in charge of running all aspects of the company and is the executive producer for the Mid Atlantic Voice Over, Get Inspired Conference that takes place in November. So Val, welcome to The VO Meter.
Thanks so much for having me on today. I appreciate it.
That’s great. We’re really excited to have you.
You’re very welcome, Val. It kind of takes me back to two years ago when I met you at Uncle Roy’s Barbecue and was like, hey, do you mind if I promote your Mavo event?
Oh my gosh, that was so much fun.
It was. I can’t believe it’s already been two years. But anyways, thank you Val for joining us today.
It’s so wonderful to have you. And please just tell us a little bit more about how your career got started in voiceover.
Well, basically I’ve been in the industry for quite a while now since like 1999, which makes me sound completely ancient, but it’s true. Let’s pretend I’m not. But I kind of was told my whole life that I had an interesting or unique voice and that I should do something with it, and so I basically got into some voiceover classes.
There was someone offering a class near my hometown, and so I went and it was one of those sessions where the guy like listens to your voice, and then he’s like, I’ll call you the next day if I think you have any talent, you know? And so you’re like, okay. And so he called the next day, and he was like, what are you doing with your life?
You need to be in animation. And I was like, really? Oh my gosh, okay, let’s go.
But I lived in upstate New York, which is where I grew up, and there’s really not a lot of animation work there. At least there wasn’t back then. And so from there, I just kept pushing forward and just took a lot of training, took a lot of classes, trained with Edge Studio, and have trained with a number of coaches over the years.
And then had some demos made and started marketing myself. And yeah, everything has kind of gone from there.
Oh, wonderful. It sounds like you definitely took the right path in trying to… Because I mean, too often you find people with this sort of like horse before the cart mentality, like, I’m gonna get a microphone, and then maybe I’ll get some training and demos, but after the money comes in…
You know, as much as I wanted to do that, I really just didn’t have the knowledge to even say, like, this is the equipment I need and all of that. That really didn’t come until later when I sort of… I didn’t give up on Voice Over.
I just kind of put it to the side after college for a little bit because I didn’t know how to get into it. So it just kind of basically fell back into my lap in 2011, which that’s a big gap of time, and I never really forgot about it, but I just didn’t know what to do with my first demo that I had. So I was like calling radio stations and being like, hey, don’t you want to use my voice?
And they’re like, yeah, you have a great voice, but not for radio. And I was like, oh. I was like, oh, they’re like, you should move to California and do animation.
And I was like, okay. But I grew up in upstate New York my whole life, so I didn’t know how to make that move. It was really big for me to try to say, I’m gonna move to LA.
And so in 2011, I basically, I had my second daughter. And at that point, I was just like, I can’t give up on this. It’s my dream to do this.
And I really just need to do everything possible to make it happen. So I kind of just told my family this was what was happening. And hopefully they’ll accept it.
And they did, they just kind of went with it. And I have just kind of, like I said, pushed forward from there and just really started training and training with a lot of different coaches. And I still to this day, of course, continue to train and try to improve my skills and work really hard and just audition as much as I can.
Wonderful. That’s not an uncommon story. It actually sort of mirrors my story.
My initial undergraduate degree back in 1996, also dating myself, was in broadcasting. And I thought I was gonna be on the radio or maybe even TV. And I did try to send out at that point, demo tapes to people and get some traction that way.
And it just didn’t really happen. And I did the same thing. I sort of put it in the back of my mind and said, all right, it’s time to get a real job, start a family.
And then when we had our third child, my six-year-old son, who’s now a professional voice actor. Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
I said, you know, I need to find something that I can do where I can be with the kids a little bit more. And that’s where I started looking back into voiceover, a little bit less time on the relaunch than you. So back in 2015, I started doing this.
And you know, ever since then, I’ve gone full throttle as much as I could. But that sort of brings me to my next point. I haven’t really publicized this much on the podcast, but I do still have a part-time job and it’s 30 hours of my week where I’m working for a university.
And I understand that you also work as a teacher, Val. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how you managed to balance it all?
Yeah, that is definitely one of the biggest challenges in my career is just that I am a full-time, I’m actually a full-time French teacher as well. So I’ve been teaching for 19 years and I studied French in college, French in education, and my intent in college was to do something with French. And then by the time I got to my senior year of college or late in my junior year of college, my professor, my advisor was like, okay, Val, what are you gonna do with French?
And I was like, speak it? And he was like, Val, that’s not a career, Val. That’s not a job.
Just speaking French, like no one’s gonna pay you for that. And I was like, oh man, now what? So which I was kind of disappointed, but reality hit and I was like, okay.
So he was like, you can go two routes. You can either go the education route and be a teacher or you can do the business side of it. He’s like, but let’s be real.
Your math skills are not what they need to be to do international business. So I was like, okay. So I went into, you know, French education and I didn’t know still when I graduated if I wanted to be a teacher or not.
And so, but I did, you know, and then that was kind of like right around the same time. I graduated from college in 1997. And, you know, at that point, I, my dad was still like, you really, you know, if your passion is to do something with your voice, then you should do it because I had acted in college.
I had kind of fallen into the voice over thing in college with a professor who was like, you have a great voice. You should try out for this play. I did, you know, audio plays in college and things like that.
And so it was always sort of there and part of my life. It’s just that the stable part of what my parents were pushing me for was to be a French teacher, you know? So I have done it for all of these years and I love it.
You know, there are days when I’m like, I don’t want to do this anymore, you know, because voice over is my complete passion. It’s what I love doing and I want to do it all the time. So I try to balance it.
I try to, you know, put my full attention as much as I can into my teaching during the day, during the school year. And then basically every second that I’m not teaching, I spend on voice over. I spend doing auditions and working on, you know, things for my company and promoting and doing coaching, taking coaching and doing coaching and marketing myself and things like that.
So it is tough to balance it. It’s very tough. But if you love it, it doesn’t seem like work.
So that’s kind of how I try to balance it.
Wow, that story sounds so familiar. I feel the exact same way. I’m glad to hear you share that experience, thanks.
You’re welcome.
Yeah, I definitely sympathize with that because our listeners know I was a teacher in Japan as well as a part-time voice talent before I transitioned and came back to the States. And it’s exhausting, but like you said, it’s completely rewarding. And if you’re passionate about it, you find the time and the energy to just keep pounding the pavement.
But as if that wasn’t impressive enough, aside from being a full-time teacher and voice talent, you have also found time to create and coordinate an amazing voice over conference. So tell us a little bit about MAVO, where it came from and how it’s grown since you came up with the idea.
Well, MAVO has been my baby since I started it. It was really a long kind of thought process that went into it, but it was an idea that had always, I think, sort of been in the back of my brain. And then I actually had gone on a trip to France with my students.
And while I was there, one of my friends, one of my good friends that was chaperoning the trip was like, you know, what if you started your own company? What if you, you know, did this? And I also had been training with Sunday Muse at the time.
And we had been to Voice Over Atlanta. And I was like, this is a really cool thing that they put together. And it’s a great way to bring people together.
And excuse me, Sunday had suggested, you know, why don’t you do your own thing? Why don’t you start your own meetup group and kind of get something going in your own area because you’re so good at putting things together. And so I was like, okay, maybe, you know, and I thought about it and I thought about it.
Then I went on this trip to France. My friend was like, you should just start your own company and then go from there. And so this small idea that initially started out as me saying I’m gonna start a meetup group, then turned into, guess what, I’m gonna start my own company and I’m gonna run a conference.
And everyone around me was kind of like, um, Val, that’s like, that’s a big, you know, I think that’s a really good idea, you know, like I had, I literally had people calling me, other people in the industry, they were like, okay, so it’s great that you started your own company, but maybe you should just like start out, you know, like gathering people together in your area first before you start this like conference, you know? And I was like, no, just go big or go home. Like that’s how I run things.
And they were like, okay, so, you know, so the first year, our first conference had 28 people, you know, so it was like a meetup group, you know, it was not, it was not a huge, huge event. And it’s not, it’s still not a huge event. And the reason behind that is because I wanted to have something really on the smaller side.
I didn’t want to have a massive event because I knew that by myself, I couldn’t handle planning something to that capacity. Now, it’s grown, we’re coming up to our fourth event this year, and it’s grown from about 28 the first year to in 2016, we had about 78 or 80 people. So it’s still not a massive event, but my goal in starting this was to bring people together, not just from the Mid Atlantic region, but from all over the country, and bring in some of the best people in the industry, as far as coaches, casting directors, and other types of talent in the industry, and offer that training to people in this region, because the Mid Atlantic region has so many voice actors, but there’s not a lot of opportunities for people to get training from the people that are living in Hollywood and living the dream, and doing all of that.
And I wanted to offer that opportunity to people here.
And you’ve actually gone international too, haven’t you? I know in 2016, we had Sunday from Canada, and Mark Scott is coming this year, and then Anna Clements from the UK. So you’ve actually gone international too, huh?
We are international. In fact, this year for 2018, we have all of our sponsors are international. So our platinum sponsor is Gravy for the Brain, who’s based in London.
And then our gold sponsor is the Voice Over Network, also based in London. And then our silver sponsor is Bidalgo. So we’ve reached international capacity.
Yeah, I don’t know what to call it.
That’s so wonderful, Val. And it’s absolutely right. I’ve talked about MAVO in the past on the podcast.
And even though it’s a smaller conference, it’s really only reflective of the size, because I mean, the guests that you bring in each time and just the quality of the content in the workshops and the activities that you have going on throughout the weekend, it’s just huge. And this small size is actually a benefit, because you really get to know all the other attendees and you can build that sort of a bit more intimate of a connection with them. And you really feel like you’re enjoying the experience as a whole group, which you might not get if you’ve got like a 400, 500 attendee guest list.
So I’m so just thrilled and impressed with what you’ve created with this amazing small conference.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, that was, like I said before, that was my intent was I really didn’t want to have a large number of attendees. Like we’re looking this year to max out at 120.
And so we want to see the growth obviously, but I don’t really ever want to go bigger than that because I feel like then I would lose that sort of, almost like a family feeling to it, you know?
Absolutely.
You guys were both there in 2016. And I think that the feedback I got from everyone last time was that you really get to, like you said, talk to almost everybody there. And the training sessions are, the workshops are so, they’re small.
They’re 12 to 15 people. So you really have a chance to get to know each of the guest speakers and they’re so approachable. But at the same time, I also wanted to make sure that the people that I bring in and that I choose as guest speakers are really impressive, outstanding people in the industry.
You know, maybe people that you’re not gonna see at every other conference because I think sometimes you go to conferences and you see the same people over and over again. And yeah, there’s some overlap with that. But I’m really excited about, you know, all of the guests that we have this year.
Yeah, you talk about the family atmosphere. I went in 2016, as you mentioned, and I’ve talked about this on the podcast episode following, but I only came for the one day because I was sort of trying it out and I was also busy coaching a soccer tournament that Saturday, because I am local, just in Baltimore. So I came down just on Sunday.
And when I arrived, it was like walking into a family reunion. Everyone started coming up to me and saying, Oh, oh, you’re Paul Stefano, because the way you had set out the name tags where they were sitting there on the table. And because I hadn’t picked mine up on Saturday, it was still there on Sunday and all day Saturday.
So I guess everyone was looking at the name tag and wondering, what happened to Paul? Yeah, what happened to Paul? Or how come the schmuck didn’t show up?
So when I got there, at least 10 people came up to me and said, Oh, hey, we were waiting for you basically. And that was so great to have that sort of family atmosphere.
Yeah, I think it’s really important. Like, I just, I remember taking the group photo and having our great photographer, Ed Lue, take the group photo and just, we do one kind of serious one, we’re all kind of normal. But even in that one, everyone is just so smiling and everything, because the event is almost over at that point.
And then we do like a fun one and everybody was just so goofy. And at that point, everyone has had the chance to get to know each other and be in sessions together. And there’s really, you know, you kind of break down any sort of walls that there might have been when you started.
And if you were nervous to walk in, all of that just kind of goes away over the weekend because it’s just such a fun event. Everybody is relaxed and there to learn and everyone has the same goals of mind, you know?
I will offer one word of caution, if you can call it that. When you go to the conference, you’re going to be, it’s going to be interactive and you’re not gonna be able to help it. So I was in the one session when I first got there on Sunday and I was kind of not ready to participate.
I was kind of still kind of waking up. I made the drive down 66 and I was really kind of still in a fog. And next thing I knew, Jason White was throwing me a strip and saying, all right, you’re up, dude.
And I was like, whoa, whoa, I was not ready for this. So you will participate, but you’ll be better for it when you’re done.
Yeah, definitely. That is one of the things that I emphasize most to every guest speaker is that I don’t want it to be an event where people sit in a room and listen to people lecture because although that can be great and although you can still learn a lot that way, I really want it to be an interactive experience because I feel like that’s what you’re paying for. You’re paying for the chance to get to practice skills that you’re learning with these great people on the spot.
You know?
Yeah, it’s great. Absolutely.
So let’s talk about some of these great people for a second. So when we went in 2016, we had some amazing guests. You had Sunday Muse, who you’ve talked about before, who’s a wonderful character and animation actress out of Canada.
You also have Sarah Sherman, who’s been a repeat guest, the casting director for Disney. You might be familiar with her or some of the projects she’s associated with. And of course, you’ve also got great actors like Jason L.
White and Kara Edwards. I personally enjoyed my little anime dubbing workshop that I did with her. She’s amazing.
And then of course, you’ve got Sean-Alan Pratt, the non-fiction specialist and just a wonderful audiobook coach. And it’s just amazing. These guests come from all over and the quality of the content and the interactivity of the workshop is just so much fun.
So, can you tell us a little bit more about the guests that you have coming up?
Well, I thought that 2016, honestly, I didn’t think I could top that because Sarah Jane Sherman from Disney, I mean, it was just like, her keynote address was like off the charts. I mean, it was so good. I mean, everyone from 2016 was amazing.
So when I decided to skip a year to kind of revamp and get things together, I thought, okay, if I’m going to come back in 2018 and do this, I need to go like seriously, you know, bring someone like amazing in. And so the lineup of guests this year is like outstanding. I can’t even hardly put into words how excited I am.
So we have our keynote speaker is Kari Wahlgren. And Kari is one of the top voice actresses in Hollywood. She’s booking like everything.
She’s on every show you could possibly imagine, not only in animated series television, but she’s been in anime shows, she’s been in video games. She’s got her hand in the, or I should say her voice a little bit in everything. And so I don’t know how I come up with these ideas.
I guess I do my research, you know, and I think who would I really wanna meet if I had the chance to meet anyone in voiceover, you know? And I start from that and I kinda make a list. And then from there I go, now how realistic is it that this person is gonna agree to this, you know?
And that was really what it was with Kari because, you know, she is really, really pretty famous in the voiceover industry as an actress and she’s very, very busy. And I was like, I’m really not sure she’s gonna, you know, say yes, and we had been connected on Facebook for a while, but you know how Facebook is. It’s like, yeah, we’re friends.
Put the air quotes. Yeah, you know, put the air quotes there. We’re friends on Facebook, so that makes it real, you know?
And so, so I reached out to her and I said, this is, you know, this is what I’m doing. I would be honored to have you as a keynote speaker. I am such a fan of your work and, you know, because she books a lot of roles that are things I would love to do someday.
You know, everything, she’s been on Phineas and Ferb. She’s on…
Rick and Morty in The Avengers.
Yeah, Rick and Morty. So many great, there’s such a list of shows, it’s like hard to even name all of them, you know, but those are some of the bigger ones. So yeah, and I, so I reached out to her and she was like, that’s so far away, because this was like about a year and a half or more before the event, so a while ago.
And you know, she’s probably, she probably read the email and was like, I don’t even know what I’m doing like two days from now, much less what I’m gonna do. You know, most people don’t plan that far ahead. And so, so at the same time, I reached out to Sarah Jane Sherman and I said, hey, you know, this is, I, I invited Kari to be our keynote speaker, you know.
Do you have any like advice on how I can get her to agree to this? And she’s like, oh, actually I’m really good friends with her. And I was like, what?
So could you like, you know, maybe have a chat with her? And so, yeah. And so that’s kind of how it happened.
I don’t know if Sarah said anything to her or what she said to her, but Kari agreed to it. And she was like, I would be honored to be your keynote. And I’m so, so excited.
And she’s been great since then. You know, we’ve talked a number of times about what she’s gonna do and she’s gonna offer, you know, obviously the keynote address, but she’ll also offer a breakout session where she actually does, you know, coaching with people. And that’s so rare because Kari very rarely teaches when she goes to events.
So this is like a really, really rare opportunity to learn and train hands on with her. And then also, she’s also gonna do an animation panel. So with the animation panel, it will be Kari and then Sarah Jane Sherman is also coming back again.
And then Sunday Muse will be on the panel and then Herb Moore will also be on the panel. So we’re gonna do an animation panel where guests will have the chance to ask their questions about anything, you know, animation related, which is, that’s gonna be outstanding. So that’s our keynote and a few other people.
We also have Dan Friedman will be back. He’s kind of our tech guy. So he’ll be doing something about Home Studio at least.
And then probably a few other sessions. So we haven’t like decided all of the sessions yet, but Dan will be there. We’re so excited and happy to have him back.
And we’re also having Tom Deere this year. So that’s gonna be great because I feel like for me and for a lot of other people in the industry, something that’s really missing is the business side of voiceover. You know, how do you pay your taxes and how do you organize your stuff in a manner that’s gonna make you more productive?
And so Tom is gonna cover some sessions on the business side of it and helping people to get organized with that.
Tom is great. We’ve had him as a guest as well on the show.
Yeah, he’s so great, right? He’s just like, this is what you need to do step by step. And it’s so easy to follow.
And he just kind of…
Yeah, it’s so simple, but so eye-opening every time I talk to him.
Yeah, I always take like five pages of notes when I talk to him.
Mm-hmm.
And also Mark Scott. So Mark Scott is gonna be there as well, and he’ll cover obviously the marketing side of the industry because he’s a pro. And the same with Mark.
Every time I talk to him, I’m like, hold on, Mark. I need to get a new notebook so I can fill it up. And it was funny because I had him as a guest on my Live With Squacky show.
And I was like, hold on, Mark. I need to write all this down. And he’s like, Val, you could just rewatch the show.
And I’m like, oh, yeah, hold on. Let me write all this down. Hold on, let me write this down.
He was like, oh, my gosh. So I took all these notes in the middle of an interview with him. It was so funny.
So Val, something you haven’t mentioned yet is the children’s program, which I personally am pretty excited about. I plan to sign up two of my kids who have been starting to dabble in the business. So tell us a little bit about the children’s program this year.
Yeah, the children’s program is going to be for part of the day on Sunday, the 11th. And so basically Sarah Jane Sherman is coming in to run that program for us. She’s one of the top.
She’s an Emmy nominated casting director. She used to work for Disney. And so I thought, who better than to run this program for us and offer the children.
So children need to be between the age of 10 and 16. And I think we limited it to 12 total for the program, so that they really have a hands on experience. So yeah, that will be part of the day on Sunday and we’ll get a really great animation experience with Sarah.
That’s amazing. And like you said, you got that really intimate, just small group, and those kids are going to feel like rock stars by the end of the weekend. It’s going to be amazing.
Oh, definitely.
So one of the things we’re looking forward to is the VO Meter representing our show at the conference. And we’re going to be recording live, hopefully getting some guests. And we are so looking forward to that.
We thank you so much for allowing us to come back.
Oh, it’s an honor to have you guys on board. I’m so excited to have you there. Thank you.
I’m just blushing.
So those of you who are coming by, come to our spot and say hi, and maybe we’ll get you on the mic a little bit.
Yeah, definitely. I’ll encourage attendees to stop by and get interviewed. That’ll be great.
All right, so that’s all we really had. Is there anything else you want us to promote or talk about?
We do have a great event lined up. We have Johnny Heller and Gabby Nistico and Celia Siegel also coming to the event. I want to make sure I don’t forget anyone and her more.
And Sunday Muse will be back. And Hugh Edwards from Gravy for the Brain will be there. And we’re just so excited about the great lineup of people that we have.
I think the content this year is going to be really outstanding. So people have that to look forward to.
I’m really looking forward to it as well.
Well anyways, Val, thank you so much. So, I mean, we’ve already talked about this a little bit on the podcast, but sadly, I will not be able to attend this year. But you should still come and visit Paul.
We also have another great representative for, who’s going to be my surrogate at the event. But if you’re in the area, or even if you’re not, I’ve flown out from Washington with Stopping U.
Val, tell us the website.
So you can visit midatlanticvo.com to register for MAVO 2018 today.
All right, Val, thanks again for coming on the show. And we look forward to seeing you in November.
Yep, November 9th through 11th. Don’t forget to register.
So thanks again to Val for coming on with us, because we had such a great time at the last one, where we were actually recording live. It was our first chance to record live for the show, and I think it went really well, don’t you?
Yeah, I did. And that was like the second time I met you in person, right?
Yeah, it was kind of a whirlwind where I was like, hey, nice to meet you, and let’s just do this.
Yeah, pretty much. First, they kind of blend together, because that first time in New York was really brief. It’s like for a coffee, like in between you packaging, like moving a booth to and from Fifth Avenue.
It was nuts.
Yeah, there’s a trend going, because I met you that day, and I was just dripping sweating bullets because I was moving furniture. And the exact same thing is happening right now, because it’s the first day where we crossed like 85 degrees here on the East Coast, and I’m in a booth just sweltering. Even though I had the fan on, it gives me air so I don’t die, but it doesn’t really help with the temperature much.
Next episode, booth ventilation.
Yeah, it’s not a bad idea. But anyway, we’re looking forward to recording live at this year’s conference. We’re going to have Ken Foster sitting in for Sean because sadly he cannot make it, but I’m looking forward to having Ken by my side.
And I think that’ll be a lot of fun.
Well, if you guys miss me too much, you can always but I’ll go call me in or something.
That’s not a bad idea. That’s actually what I was going to do in VO Atlanta for one of the podcasts. We should try and pull that off maybe.
Yeah, let me know. Sounds great.
I know I can do it because I did it, I tested it at VO Atlanta before we went live. I know it works. So assuming I bring the same gear, we should be able to pull it off.
Maybe I won’t be as starstruck by Kari Wahlgren from that distance. We’ll see.
Yeah, that’s my worry too. We’ll see.
All right, well, I hope you and Ken have an amazing time. Ken has contributed an amazing VO Meter stick to us in the past. So if you haven’t heard it, should definitely check it out.
And just really just couldn’t find a better contributor for the podcast. So I’m super stoked to see what you guys come up with.
Yeah, and it’s appropriate because that’s where I first met him was at MAVO 2016. So it all comes full circle.
Full circle.
So that’s it for this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
See you next time.
Bye guys. Thanks for listening to The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.

“The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 26 of The VO Meter…

Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.

And today is going to be a very special episode. We’re going to spend the whole time bashing Terry Daniel. Woohoo!

Take it, Terry.

No, not really, but a little bit. We’re excited to welcome our special guests, Trish Basanyi and Peter Bishop. Trish and Bish.

We’ll talk to them in just a minute. But first, we have our current events. Sean, what is happening with you?

Well, I just got back from Hawaii, some personal stuff. My girlfriend is moving back to Washington after two years abroad, or actually six years abroad. Why?

You ask this every time.

I know, I cannot fathom leaving the islands.

Oh, yes, for the ever-gray state. But she grew up in Washington, she’s been in Hawaii for the last six years, finishing college and working over there. And she just wants to be closer to family and some guy, I don’t know.

And some guy. And some guy. But yeah, so, I mean, we had a wonderful time up there.

And I swear this has something to do[…]”

From The VO Meter…Measuring Your Voice Over Progress: Episode 26, Trish Basanyi and Peter Bishop, Jun 12, 2018
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-26-trish-basanyi-and-peter-bishop/id1167313797?i=1000413547957
This material may be protected by copyright.

“The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.

So welcome to part 2 of our International Roundtable episode, and this time we’re featuring two special guests who due to scheduling had to join us at a different time, but also we want to give them enough time to talk about their experiences, and it just became so much content that we wanted to give it its own episode. So without further ado, here’s part 2 of our International Roundtable.

So got to admit, I’m a little intimidated to introduce our next two guests, because not only are they extremely talented and generous with their time and all of their experience and expertise, but one of them is actually my boss. Oh my God. That is the amazing and talented Cristina Milizia.

And then the other one has been just making incredible strides in the last couple of years in the voiceover industry in both the English and Spanish markets. He’s done animation, commercial, promo, in just all various forms and formats, the inimitable Christian Lanz. Hello, hello.

Cristina, thank you both for coming today.

You got it.

Delighted to be here. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. So for people[…]”

From The VO Meter…Measuring Your Voice Over Progress: Episode 25, The International Roundtable Part 2, May 22, 2018
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-25-the-international-roundtable-part-2/id1167313797?i=1000412067471
This material may be protected by copyright.