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