It was a pleasure speaking with everyone at the Charlotte Voiceover Meetup Group last night.
Big thanks to:
Gabrielle Nistico of Voicehunter.com
Beverly Penninger of Naka Productions
and
Eric Simendinger of Voicehunter.com
Also, thank you to all of the new and experienced talent who participated in the event. It was a pleasure meeting you and I look forward to hearing all of you in the near future.
Dan
Two of the biggest ongoing issues in the voiceover world are gear and rates. It seems that voice talent (or voice talent wannabes) are always looking for the latest, greatest, smallest and cheapest piece of gear that is good enough to record audio. They also seem to want the ability to do this from just about anywhere. The issue of rates is always a big concern. Job offers for payments that fall considerably short of generally accepted rates frequent the internet. These offers are often discussed as being reprehensible or even laughed at on social media. So, is there a correlation between cheap gear and low rates?
Portability and the ability to respond quickly to client requests are key factors that drive the need for much of this gear. The desire to provide for clients is essential to your VO business and let’s face it, the gear is often pretty cool and some of it sounds quite good. But the environment plays a much bigger role in your overall sound and just because you can record from your car or a hotel room, doesn’t mean you should. Other than your voice and performance, nothing has a greater effect on your sound than the environment you’re in.
Consistency and quality are critical for great sounding productions. These can only be guaranteed when the environment is a professional one, usually a professionally equipped recording studio or home studio. Consistency is especially critical when it comes to revisions. Even musicians, who are the largest consumers of recording gear, know that most of this low-end gear is for laying down ideas and for doing pre-production. When they are ready to make an album, serious musicians will usually go to a professional recording studio.
One of the biggest complaints about the voiceover industry, from those who are in it, is that so many people think that voiceover is easy and anyone can do it. Well, it should come as no surprise that when people brag about recording from their car, on their smart phones and through the multitude of cheap pieces of plastic that are now available at the megastore down the street, outsiders may believe that this is not all that difficult. Newbies don’t always understand performance or quality, but they usually understand the concept of making money from anywhere for very little investment.
On the flip-side, clients who (to their detriment) don’t always care about quality are not going to offer higher rates if they think the job can be done anywhere and/or with nothing more than a USB microphone plugged into a laptop. Clients who know better are usually willing to pay for the quality and service that come with a professional talent, who records in a professional environment, on professional gear. They understand that, just like in their own businesses, to be among the best requires an investment in time and money. Clients can justify higher talent payments more easily when they know that the audio will be professionally recorded and will be consistent from one session to the next.
Having higher-quality equipment and a proper recording space helps you to justify demanding a higher price for your work. Good clients understand the correlation between your investment in training and gear and the value that results.
If you are a voiceover talent, who loves and respects this industry, you will hopefully continue to work towards providing the highest quality audio possible and consistency from one session to the next. This doesn’t mean that you should not provide for your clients in emergency situations… you should. It also does not mean that you must have the most expensive pieces of gear. It simply means that you will continue to seek out the best equipment for you and your situation until you reach the point that any change would not provide a significant improvement. Do not stop at “good enough.”
I recently wrote a blog post entitled: The Best Voiceover Coach is Your Ears. Well, yesterday another one of the best voiceover coaches, Nancy Wolfson, shared this on Facebook. So much of your success in voiceover is dependent upon your ability to hear (and listen). This is a very cool presentation. Check it out!
Recording Magazine sends out a newsletter to its subscribers every few weeks. The newsletter is (coincidentally) titled “Sound Advice” and this month it features the third in a series about room acoustics. Room acoustics is one of the biggest concerns for Recording Magazine readers. I know that this is also a big issue for those of you in the voiceover world. Like I did last month, I asked permission to reprint this newsletter (and will ask to reprint the others in the series as well) so that those of you with home studios can also benefit from the information. I want to personally thank Brent Heintz, VP/Associate Publisher for granting permission, allowing me to share this great information with you.
Please visit Recording Magazine‘s website and Facebook Page.
Catch up or skip ahead: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.
Welcome to Sound Advice on Acoustics! Last time we introduced the idea of standing waves and modes in a room, and introduced a simple formula for calculating them. In this month’s installment, we’ll run the numbers for a few sample rooms and learn what sorts of relationships between room dimensions are best, and which ones will get you into trouble.To determine what specific modal frequencies will be present in a rectangular room, we can use the simple formula given last time (1130÷2L, where L is the dimension of the room you’re checking) for each room dimension (length, width, height) to find the primary axial modes and their first few harmonics, and list them in a chart—we’ll do that for three rooms.We’ll be looking for two main things: (1) to find and avoid coincidences and near-coincidences (where the same modal frequency develops between two or all three pairs of parallel surfaces), and (2) to achieve relatively even spacing and avoid wide gaps between the frequencies of the modes that are present.Number one is fairly obvious—if the same modal frequency occurs for, say, both height and width, then the imbalances at that frequency will be twice as bad. This will occur if two (or more) room dimensions are the same, or are multiples of each other (the worst-case scenario would be a cube, L=W=H)—one of the examples will illustrate this.Number two is based on two assumptions. First, if a lot of closely- and evenly- spaced modes are present in a room, the overall effect will be more of a general reinforcement of the low frequency range. Second, if a few widely-spaced modes are present, musical notes whose fundamentals and harmonics coincide with these modal frequencies will be altered in timbre and noticeably boosted or attenuated in level relative to other notes.In a bad room, this can be very obvious—imagine a scale played evenly on the bass, with some notes almost dropping out and others booming excessively, depending on the listening position.
There’s no absolute consensus as to what the best distribution of modal frequencies might be. Even spacing is preferable, and it’s been suggested that modal frequency spacing of greater than ~20 Hz will result in audible unevenness, to be avoided or minimized to whatever degree possible.
With this in mind, let’s look at a few simple examples of room mode charts (feel free to analyze your own room this way as well).
We’ll look at the axial modes for three different rooms, first listing the first four axials under the room dimensions, then listing the first twelve axials for each room in ascending order. We’ll arrange the dimensions from greatest (L) to smallest (H) because this makes it easy to spot the numerical relationships.
As you can see in Figure 4, Room A is not at all ideal: there are wide gaps between modal frequencies, and there are coincidences. Since the 16′ long wall is twice the dimension of the 8′ ceiling, the 2nd (harmonic) mode of the length (70.6 Hz) coincides with the 1st mode between floor and ceiling, also at 70.6 Hz. Since 8, 12, and 16 are all multiples of 4, at around 141 Hz a three-way coincidence occurs, which will be sure to make the imbalance of any notes/harmonics at that frequency really stand out!Room B is somewhat better: there are still some uneven, wide spacings, but there is only one coincidence, at around 141 Hz, and it only involves two modes rather than all three.Room C is even better—the spacings are more even, and there are no exact coincidences.This last set of room dimensions, 15’5″ L x 12’10” W x 10′ H, was based on one of a group of recommended “Golden Mean” room ratios; these ratios have been analyzed to provide the most even modal distribution (of course, in addition to the Axial modes they also take into account Tangential and Oblique modes).Here are a few of these Golden Mean room ratios, from various sources. In theory, it doesn’t matter which number applies to which dimension of the actual room, but building practicalities will mean that the shortest is usually the height; since many control rooms are wider than deep, the other two dimensions could interchangeably be width or length, but for consistency’s sake, let’s list the middle dimension as the width and the greatest dimension as the length of the room.
We’ll talk more about these Golden Ratios, and what you can do about room modes in terms of practical room treatment, next time. See you then!
The phone company is seriously crippling us today. ProComm Voices offers 15 ISDN connections, 13 of which are exclusively toll-free. This allows other studios and voice over talent to connect with us free of charge. But today, through no fault of our own, all toll-free lines are down. Needless to say… this is not helpful. Thankfully, we have a backup plan.
Anytime there are problems that are beyond your (or in this case… our) control, the first rule in dealing with these problems is clearly stated in “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”… “DON’T PANIC”.
Even though many of our local talent connect to us via ISDN, we’ll have them come in to our studios today. It will be nice to see them. Anyone who was scheduled to do a live audition with one of our producers will have to record those on their own at home. While it is always helpful to have a second set of ears on auditions, the voice talent will have to trust their own ears today (or even better, have another colleague listen). We’ll notify our clients via email that it will be necessary to contact us on our local lines and that our producers will call them at session time instead of them calling us. Because this is an emergency situation, we’ll use Source Connect today with our VO talent who also have it. We still have ISDN connectivity over local lines. Therefore, we will still be able to connect with our talent and if necessary stagger our schedules to accommodate sessions.
What do you do when something goes wrong that can’t easily and quickly be fixed?
If you are a voiceover talent, working from your home studio, you know that there are many advantages. However, when something goes wrong, you may not have the resources to work around the problem. Do you have a backup plan? Consider these scenarios:
– Its fifteen minutes before session time and the script has not arrived yet. This is not necessarily unusual, but you wonder whether you should check on it. After a few minutes of wondering, you finally check your computer and discover that your internet is down. You aren’t getting your emails. You don’t have a fax machine. What do you do? What is your backup plan?
– You turn on your computer and your hard drive freezes up. Nothing happens. What is your backup plan?
– A thunderstorm blew through the area last night and knocked out all of the power in your neighborhood. You have a 9AM session with a brand new client. What do you do?
Being prepared for these and any of the multitude of issues that can occur is critical to your success when dealing with problems. Be sure you have backup plans in place, contact names readily available and even extra equipment on-hand. Speaking of “backups”, backup all of your files regularly and keep several copies of your backup drives.
What are you prepared for? What aren’t you prepared for? What are your backup plans?
Last night I had the opportunity to spend some time with one of my Faffcon friends Peter O’Connell. If you haven’t heard of Peter, than you simply haven’t been paying attention. Peter is a fantastic voice talent, coach and marketing genius… and a very funny guy! He had me laughing all through dinner. Peter and I had talked years ago but met for the first time at Faffcon2 in Atlanta. He promised that if he ever made it to Asheville he would let me know and we would try to get together. Being a man of his word, we met yesterday and had a great time.
I gave him a tour of ProComm Voice’s Studios and then brought him out to my home studio. After that, Peter, my wife and I went out to dinner and talked at length about our kids, travels, histories and of course our voiceover work. Aside from all the laughter, I learned a great deal from our conversations. I’m very thankful to have had this opportunity to hang out with Peter and look forward to many more in the future.
As voiceover talent and studio people we spend a great deal of our time in quiet, dark and secluded spaces. It can be difficult to find time or make the effort to get out and connect with other people in the industry. The internet and all of the social media groups, while helpful, are no substitute for face to face interactions with colleagues. This is why “getting outside of your bubble” is so vital to your career and probably your overall well-being.
Meeting people who are not only helpful to your career, but who can also become lifelong friends is probably the most rewarding part of Faffcon and other industry events. I strongly encourage anyone who is serious about working in the voiceover industry to get out there and participate.
Thanks Peter for coming down to Asheville and hanging out with us. I look forward to seeing you in Hershey in September. I also hope to meet many more pros who I can learn from, perhaps teach and most importantly, who I will also be able to call good friends.
By the way, if Mr. O’Connell makes it out to your town and you are trying to decide where to go for dinner, take him somewhere that has rack of lamb. The kitchen ran out right before they got his order… that steak sure looked good though!
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