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The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMCDemos, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Welcome back to live at VOcation, sorry, VOcation 2019. I’ve been corrected several times by Jamie and Karen already, because I like to call it VOcation. It’s not correct, apparently.
No, it’s VOcation.
And now I’m here with Brad Newman, who’s presenting today. Brad, how are you?
I’m good, man. How are you?
I’m fantastic. We just had a nice lunch at Riverside Park.
Oh, I laid down on a towel. It was nice. I had pizza just fed to me.
It was delicious.
Yeah, I’m not from New York, so anytime I can get my hands on some legit New York pizza, I’m happy.
Man, I’m just happy that you fed me. I mean, I was laying down and you just kept serving it right in. It was amazing.
It was a little weird.
I didn’t know you served that way, but it was good.
But anyway, you’re presenting today. Tell us a little bit about your presentation and what you’re hoping to gain from the conference.
So it’s organizational marketing, but really it’s about marketing in a way that gets you out of a VO headspace. Voice over people always look at it with a VO angle, and I’m encouraging people to look at it from the angle of their buyers, instead as fellow VO talent. Look for ways that you can engage the buyers and where you can meet them and solve their needs and remove their pain.
So that’s the marketing aspect of it. So it’s literally stepping away from voice over marketing as a voice talent and thinking of the ways that you would solve other problems in the world because that helps you see it from a different perspective, a different view or a different angle.
Okay, so without giving away your whole presentation for those that didn’t pay to come to the conference, give me one or two key points.
So surround yourself around other people that have what you want. That will prove to be a tremendous value over and over and over because they can pick you up when they’re down, they can help you through problems. Everybody that’s done VO or most people that’s done VO have done something different in their life, so we all have these unique problems.
Maybe they help you edit a blog or they’re an amazing wizard in audition to edit something. And so we all have these talents that we can help one another. I call that favor debt.
I put people into favor debt and I leverage that favor debt when I need for either more exposure or opportunities that I need help on. And so I’m going to tell everybody about how to bring those two things together and look at this world of VO that we do in a different way.
Favor debt. I like that a lot.
I registered the domain. You can’t have it.
Well, there goes that idea.
favordet.com. There’s nothing there, but I own it. It’s good to know.
So in addition to being a presenter today, most people hopefully know you’re also a voice over talent. What are you looking for? What are you hoping to gather at the conference personally as a VO talent?
You know, I think every time you approach one of these conferences, you go in with an agenda of, oh, I would like to learn this. And what ends up happening is you sit down and you hear something that totally rocks your world and becomes that aha moment. And you didn’t realize that that’s what you’re going to walk away with from.
I’ve already seen that this morning with the Pro Panel. Maria Pendolino was on that. And I was literally sending her chat messages via Facebook while she was talking and how much of a rock star she is with the way that she was able to answer questions, remove people’s roadblocks.
She is like a VO whisperer or therapist to VO talent to identify and find problems and fix it. I didn’t come here expecting that. Rocked my world.
That’s going to be my takeaway so far. It was amazing.
Well, great. Well, hopefully you’ll enjoy the rest of the conference. Good luck with your presentation and we’ll talk to you soon.
And I’m looking forward to yours. Talk soon. Thanks, Paul.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.
The VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

“The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMCDemos, and IPDTL.

And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.

All right, we are live at VOcation 2019, and I’m here with Bonnie Optekman.

You did perfectly.

Tell me a little bit about what you’re looking forward to for the conference.

I’m very excited about this, since it’s the first one, and anything that Karen does has to be great. She has a positivity around her and a desire to help all of her fellow colleagues do well in the business. So I am looking forward to the intense breakout groups to learn more about specific things, things that I need to step up my game on, like the marketing and the networking.

So fortunately, I got here early enough to get into both, and plus it’s just fun to be with my fellow voice actors and exchanging tips and ideas. Everybody here, this community is a very giving and sharing community, and it’s great to compare notes and to get advice and meet in person everyone I’ve met through the Facebook group.

Yeah, it’s[…]”

From The VO Meter…Measuring Your Voice Over Progress: VOcation NYC 2019, Bonnie Optekman, Sep 21, 2019
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vocation-nyc-2019-bonnie-optekman/id1167313797?i=1000450633929
This material may be protected by copyright.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMC Demos, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
All right, so we are live at VOcation 2019, the inaugural conference, and I’m here with co-founder Jamie Muffet. Jamie, how are you feeling going into the conference? Have you gotten over the pregame jitters, or are you still getting things together?
Yes, yes. The pregame jitters were probably every day leading up to today, and I think today, now I’m in the city, now all the stuff’s here, we’re in the venue, and everything’s, all the bags are packed, literally. We’re ready to go.
I’m calm, cool as a keyboard.
And there’s pretty much nothing else you can do at this point. If you’re not ready by now, you never will be, right?
Right, exactly. Yeah, so there’s nothing I can do even if I wasn’t ever saying.
Not to jinx you. I’d imagine it’s kind of like, I haven’t organized a conference myself, but imagine it’s kind of like your own wedding. I know you’re married as well, just like me, and people say stop and make sure you look around and appreciate things, but until you get to that position and the things are actually rolling, it’s hard to get to that point.
Yeah, everything is anticipation up until this point, and now people are arriving. We are very early. What time is it?
It’s like 5.30.
5.30. Yeah.
So people are here, and now everything is set. There’s not as much to do, which is great, but it’s hard to get out of that mindset of, oh, I’ve got six million things to do. Now everything’s ready.
Now I can calm down. Karen’s out there working the registration table, so she’s busy. Yeah, it’s exciting, and I guess I have to just look around and appreciate what we’ll put in and see the fruits of it.
Exactly. Smell the roses, as they say.
Yeah.
So we’re all very excited. Thank you for having us here as official podcast correspondents. Is that what we’re going with, I think?
We’re really excited to be here.
Thanks, Paul. I really appreciate you coming and doing all this and setting everything up and winding your way from Baltimore.
It’s going to be great. If it’s not, there’s nothing we do about it now.
Exactly.
Thanks for listening to The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.
The VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMCDemos, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 43 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We are extremely excited about today’s guest because I’ve been chasing him since probably the first day I ever started talking to a microphone, or maybe professionally at least. But we’re pleased to welcome the one and only pig himself, Bob Bergen, who you may know as the voice of Porky Pig for the last several decades, but has done a number of other things as well, and we’re so happy to have him on the show.
That’s all folks. Actually, no, we have an entire episode coming up. But yes, thank you so much Bob preemptively for joining us on our podcast.
We are so excited to have you.
Walgreens, because it’s flu season, you live in a place with doorknobs, handrails, and people.
We tried booking a vacation rental on one of those other websites. They don’t always tell you everything.
We are back live from the red carpet. California leads the way for change in America, and so does Kamala Harris.
Rated M for Mature. Claire Redfield.
And who exactly are you?
So yeah, what hashtag should I use to describe a grown man in a tuxedo wrestling a goat?
And prior to 1933, many of them belonged to a variety of political parties that were now outlawed in Germany.
This is the story of how Q got Curly.
Michael here. Thanks for listening to the VO Meter podcast. It’s one of my favorites.
If you’re looking for a great demo like the ones you just heard, check out jmcdemos.com for more information.
We’ll have Bob on the podcast soon, but before that, we wanted to talk about some of our sponsors. First off, VocalBooth2Go. All right, so if you have been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that we’re huge fans of VocalBooth2Go.
VocalBooth2Go’s patented acoustic blankets are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing, often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers, and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution. We make your environment quieter for less.
Thanks to all the fine folks at VocalBooth2Go once again. As you’ve seen on all the social media channels, I’m always promoting their products whenever I can because I just love them that much. So thanks again to VocalBooth2Go.
So before we get to our esteemed guest, Bob Bergen, we’re actually going to go into our…
Voice Over Extra brings you the VO Meter reference levels. Uh, seriously guys, that’s the best you could come up with? Hey, it’s your show.
So Sean, what’s going on in your VO world?
Oh my gosh, a lot. It has been a crazy month. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff for my own VO career and for Global Voice Acting Academy.
I just represented them at VO North in Toronto about two weeks ago. I met a lot of wonderful new voice talent, got to reconnect with some industry professionals that we’ve seen at a few of the other larger conferences like VO Atlanta or MAVO, the Mid-Atlantic Voice Over Conference, had a wonderful time. And then I had an amazing training opportunity right in my own hometown in Seattle called the VO Roadshow with some amazing voice over coaches in various genres with Scott Parkin going over the importance of improv and in theater training and then Marilyn Whistler working on commercials and then working on promo and narration with Jeff Howell.
It was just so packed with VO knowledge and insight and just so many wonderful tips and techniques. It’s just an amazing day.
Tom Pinto was there too, right?
No, he wasn’t, unfortunately.
I wasn’t there for this one?
So Tom does work with the VO Roadshow, but the lineup changes depending on their schedule and where they’re going. Oh, okay. But yeah, so it’s usually…
It’s helmed by Marilyn Whistler, and then depending on who else can go, the lineup will change, like I said. So but if you ever have the chance, like this is some of the best training in the country, if not the world, that you can get. So keep an ear out for the VO Roadshow coming…
Like they do workshops throughout the United States. So definitely keep your ears posted for that. I just finished my monthly e-learning projects, and Paul, you actually helped me out quite a bit this month.
Like not only did he voice some scripts for me this month, but he also helped do some sizable editing for me. And my tendonitis thanks you very much.
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
Oh, hey, you’re a good, reliable talent, and you’ve got quick turnaround when I needed it. So thank you again. And then last but not least, I was helping my good friend of the podcast, Steven Reisberg.
He’s a booth director out of Hollywood, California, and he’s doing his Introduction to Commercial Voice Over class with Global Voice Acting Academy. So I was just kind of moderating that and making sure everyone got equal time at the mic, and just kind of helping fielding questions for Steven. So I guess the theme of the month has been education all around.
Yeah, you should never stop learning if you’re doing it right.
Definitely not. And I’ve actually been talking with some people, like with a friend of mine, who is kind of… I couldn’t help but notice that he had kind of not really progressed in the last year or two.
And a big part of that… Thanks, Paul. No, not at all, man.
You don’t sit on your laurels. You’re a rolling stone. But anyways, and that was the thing, is he hadn’t really invested anything.
And unfortunately, it was kind of the thing that was holding him back. He wasn’t investing in training or any kind of workshops or classes or anything like that. And he felt stuck.
And so I was just kind of like, you just you have to get back to basics. Like you can’t cut quarters or take shortcuts because you’re just shortchanging yourself and you’re not going to get the results you want if you don’t have a competitive product that you’re selling. So I think a lot of people kind of they enjoy some initial success due to their own their own talent and their own persistence and perseverance.
But then eventually you hit plateaus. And when those happen, I think it’s more important than ever to kind of get back to fundamentals and maybe get an outside opinion on your reads and make sure that they are as competitive as you think. And if they’re not, then train accordingly.
Yeah, we’ve talked about it before, but I like to make a lot of sports analogies and every Major League Baseball team has a specific hitting coach because even though they’re the best players in the world, they still need to tweak their technique every once in a while. Actually, they tweak it daily in some cases to make sure they’re on top of their game and that’s the way we should really approach it too.
Definitely. I mean, once you get bitten by the VO bug, I think you’re kind of like… you’re stuck for life pretty much.
There’s always more things to learn and more ways to improve.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, anyways, I’ve been ranting about my current events for a while. What about you, Paul?
I have a couple of cool things going on, mostly on the audiobook front, which is where I’ve been spending most of my time. I just wrapped a production on the sixth book in a series for my pseudonym, and another title also for the pseudonym, the fourth book in that series. And I’m about to embark on the fifth for the same author.
So that’s rolling well. And I also signed with a new agent, a local agent, sort of. It’s in Philadelphia.
As listeners may know, I live in Baltimore, but I’m from Philadelphia. So I was lucky enough to be introduced to an agency in Philadelphia by Lisa Leonard, who’s been on the show. We interviewed her at Mabo last year.
And I’m now proud to be part of the Reinhard Agency in Philadelphia. They do some on camera. They do print and film and TV, but also voiceover.
So I’m really excited to be working with them and looking forward to some cool auditions from them.
Very cool. Congratulations.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s something… I was talking to another talent, speaking of events.
Uncle Roy’s Barbecue is recently, and I was talking to John Henry Krause there, who’s also on that roster. And the main thing I really wanted to have was representation in what I still sort of consider my hometown. I was born and raised in Philadelphia.
So having that on my website… Yeah. So having that on my website as being represented in my home city makes me feel pretty good.
So excited about that.
Well, very cool. Well, speaking of reaching out to agencies and stuff like that, I actually was able… I was actually training to…
Or I’m kind of soliciting one agency that I’ve had in mind for a while, but they have a very stringent submission process, including two scripts that they have on their website that they want talent to submit. And so since I had worked with Steven Reisberg recently, I was like, hey, Steven, do you mind if I book some time with you and we can kind of look at these things and make sure I’m giving them what they want? And so, and that’s another thing I recommend when you have an important audition or like in a submission script like this, get an outside opinion, like a trusted coach or colleague or someone like that to kind of help you through it.
So like I feel I felt pretty confident about my reads before, but now now I’m extremely confident about my reads and I’m not really worried about submitting. So I’m just going to set it and forget it and hope for the best.
That’s great. Some coaches we’ve worked with or talked to in the past actually have a service for a fee, but a really reasonable fee. They will do audition-specific coaching.
Everett Oliver is one that comes to mind. He still has that service at myboothdirector.com, and I’ve used it a lot for really important auditions where he gets you ready for that one specific read and you feel much more confident afterward. Mm-hmm.
I mean, it’s all about confidence. It just comes across in the reads and then you just feel like, whether you get it or not, you feel good about the performance.
Right. And then two more event-based things we want to talk about. I was at the vocation conference, the inaugural vocation conference, and hopefully some of our listeners have listened to some of the mini-sos I’ve put out over the last couple of weeks.
That was really a great experience. I really want to thank Jamie Muffet and Karn Gilfrey for allowing the VO Meter, first of all, to be present there, and then also allowing me to present at the conference. We’ll have a whole episode devoted to that and VO North, but I just want to mention, if you haven’t already, go and check out some of those mini-episodes because I have to say, not to toot my own horn, but I got some really good interviews with some of the people there.
Definitely. I highly recommend it. I wish I could have been there too.
Yeah, but it was the week before VO North, and I really wanted to be in Toronto, but I really couldn’t do both, and I know you couldn’t either. So it was good we could divide and conquer like that and get to both events.
Divide and conquer. Exactly. It was great.
We’ll have to reconnect in Virginia or something. Who knows?
There we go. And the last event-based thing I want to mention is I’ve been invited to be a presenter again at the Camp VO Conference, which is happening April 30th through May 3rd. It’s going to be in Texas.
It’s being put on by Liz Atherton at Cast Voices. And some of the people you mentioned actually are going to be there. Scott Parkin is going to be the emcee and presenting.
Everett’s going to be there too. Uncle Roy’s going to be there. And a bunch of other coaches and talent all at an actual camp, which is going to be fantastic.
So everything’s going to be camp-themed. Y’all ride a campfire, singing campfire songs and roasting s’mores and sleeping in bunks.
There’s going to be an obstacle course?
Maybe. Maybe some canoeing, some kayaking. I don’t know.
It’s going to be really exciting though. I can’t wait. That’s a paddling.
So registration is open now. If you want, look up on Facebook. I know there’s an event page there.
If not, contact me and I’ll send you the information on how to register. There’s only 150 participants capped. So if you want to get in, get in now.
And we’ll see you at Camp VO.
Very cool. Well, congratulations on that too, man. It sounds like it’s been a big month for you.
Yeah, it’s been fun. So we’ll get to the interview with Bob Bergen in just a moment. But before we do, I want to tell you about our sponsor, Tim Page and Podcast demos.com.
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Now Tim has actually done podcast demos for both Sean and I, and all I can say is that he and his team were amazing. His script writer created original scripts perfect for my voice and personality, as well as reflective of current popular podcast genres. I recorded in the comfort of my own home studio, and Tim worked his mastering magic.
The whole process only took a couple of days, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Tim is a consummate pro and so easy to work with. So thank you again to Tim Page and Podcast Demos.
All right, thanks again, Tim and podcastdemos.com. So we’ll get into our interview with Bob in just a few minutes, but before that, it’s time for our…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
So, Questionable Gear Purchases. Do you have any QGPs this month, Paul?
I do, unfortunately.
I was joking.
We talked about this might be a transitional point for us on the podcast, maybe. I mean, seriously, I doubt it.
I don’t know if I can take it seriously, but we should tell them what we’re talking about first before they’re too confused.
Yeah, so you actually brought up the topic, so why don’t you introduce it?
So I was joking with Paul the other day, and let me just prequisite this by saying, I am very happy and blessed to have all the equipment I have. I’m very happy with the microphones I have. I’m happy with the setup I have.
But even so, I was looking on all the usual spots on eBay and Reverb, and the Sweetwater used gear marketplace and what have you, and I was like, oh, look at all those TLM 103s for $600. And then Paul was like, no, Sean, work off the ledge, what’s wrong with you, man? And I was like, I’m just looking, Paul, it’s okay.
This was me talking.
I know, and that was the weirdest thing. It was like a Freaky Friday kind of moment.
And so I think that’s part of it is that I mean, I’ve been using the same setup now for probably like the last, at least half a year, if not like eight months or so. And then I think the only other thing I’ve bought since then was the Apogee mic that I mentioned a few episodes ago. And again, that serves a pretty specific purpose.
But it was just funny to me, it’s like this idea that even though you’re completely happy with your setup, I mean, you’ve got all of your knobs dialed in and you’ve got all of your plugins or what have you, or everything is kind of adjusted to you. There’s still that little shoulder devil, that little voice in the back of your head that’s like, what if you had that 103 again? You used to love it.
You love the sound, Sean. Why did you let it go?
And distant stuff make the heart grow fonder, I guess. But, I mean, there comes a point where, I mean, you just have to put the practical hat back on and be like, no, you’re fine. It was too sensitive.
It was not meant to be. Maybe another time. And so, luckily, I was able to kind of prevent, I talked, or thanks to Paul, I kind of, we talked me off of the cliff and I didn’t make any questionable gear purchases this time.
So, yeah, we basically are thinking maybe we might have to sunset the segment. Again, I don’t trust myself nor Sean to really do that, but the idea is we think we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns, and I’ll go out with a bang with this last hurrah in the segment. I’m now using, for the third time, a RØDE ProCaster dynamic mic.
And the weird thing is I actually think I bought a defective one before and didn’t realize it. I ended up returning it because I didn’t like the way it sounded. But what happened was when I plugged it in, it had no gain whatsoever, and I thought that was just the way it sounded.
But it turns out that I must have had a defective one because I plugged this one in and it was just sweet, and I have enough… it’s a dynamic, but I have enough gain from my AGO6 that I can power it without any distortion whatsoever. And it’s kind of exactly what I need for the audio books and long-form narration.
And honestly, I’ve been using it for most everything lately. We had an interview that’s coming up in a couple of weeks, maybe a month, with the folks at Lotus, and they said, hey, that sounds great. So if they think it sounds great, who am I to argue?
And that’s my… the point I’ve come to right now is that I need to stop because I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have and know that because you’re booking work and people are paying you for it, you probably don’t need to mess with it.
Next month on Questionable Gear Purchases, Paul goes off the deep end. But…
Always… I make no guarantees.
I know, I know. I’m just teasing. But that’s the thing is it’s like, it’s so easy, and people go through this at all stages of their career.
This idea that the equipment will somehow give you, like, will give you an edge or give you the edge, you know? And it’s not true. I mean, just yesterday, I was helping a colleague of mine, Sunday Muse, who’s this wonderful animation actress who works out of Canada and LA.
And there was somebody there who’s just like, what is the best animation mic? Do I need that? I was like, no, you don’t need the most expensive mic.
Not everyone is going to benefit from a U87 or a 103. And I was like, there’s plenty of mics in the 300, 200, and now sub 200 category. That will be just fine for wherever you’re at.
And if you get to that point, and we also talked about whether or not an isolation booth, like a whisper room or studio bricks was necessary, and I really feel like you will know, like you will be able to answer for yourself these questions when they become an issue for you, because if you realize I need quiet 24-7, yes, you need a controlled space, which might be an ISO booth or a purpose-built room. Like if a studio asks you, do you have a 103 or a 416, then maybe you need those things to work with those people. But until you’re being presented with those questions, whatever you have, whatever you can afford, is probably doing you just fine.
Yeah, absolutely. So hang in there with whatever you have. We’ve quoted our friends at VOBS quite a bit, but I’ll say it again, Dan Leonard likes to say, the best mic for VO is the one you have.
With a few exceptions.
With a few exceptions, yeah.
So check back next month where we’ll be absolute liars.
Completely contradict ourselves.
But hopefully we’ll come up with something else to fill this hole in the episodes.
Sensible gear purchases?
Maybe.
Maybe. So that wraps up this month’s questionable gear purchases. Before we jump into our interview with Bob, I just want to tell you about one of our great sponsors, IPDTL.
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You can use a monthly or annual subscription, and it runs in the Chrome web browser. And the simple truth is, it just works. So once again, that’s IPDTL, the Cost Effective ISDN Replacement.
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Hi, everybody, and welcome to this interview portion of the VO Meter. Our guest today really needs no introduction, but his list of credits is so impressive, I’m going to do one anyway. So you probably know him as the voice of Porky Pig, but not only has he also voiced Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzales, and numerous other iconic characters from the Looney Tunes franchise, he’s provided countless voices for commercials, cartoons, video games, anime, and animated features for the last 40 years, including my personal favorite, Bucky the Squirrel from The Emperor’s New Groove.
In addition to this impressive list of credits, Bob has spent the last 30 years teaching and mentoring aspiring talent from all ages and walks of life. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today is the incredible Bob Bergen. How are you doing, Bob?
That was a little booming. I’m just kidding. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
It’s a pleasure to have you.
Bob, thanks for being here.
Fight over me, guys. Fight over me.
Bob, before we get started, I just want to say thanks, because you may not know this, but I’ve talked about this on the show, how there are a certain few people that I really credit with launching my career, a career as fledgling as it is. But you were one of those people that took me under their wing virtually early on and gave me some great advice. It really set me on the right path.
And I want to thank you in person to all of our listeners for doing that and being such a great mentor.
Well, I appreciate that. And let me just say that you were one of those people who I saw just asking the smart questions and asking those of us who work, guys, what do I need to do? How can I make this better?
So I appreciate that you were so driven.
Well, again, it’s mostly due to your expert tutelage along with the other people I mentioned on the show. But I just want to thank you again.
My pleasure.
And just tagging…
Or never mind, go ahead. It’s going to be too long if we just spend the next hour just talking about how great Bob is.
Although we could do that.
I just want to tack my thanks on to Paul’s.
My pleasure, guys.
So Bob, we have a lot of new talent that are listeners and subscribers of the podcast. And as such, the first thing we want to ask you is, now in the year 2019, how would you suggest people go about starting their career in voiceover?
I think they need to answer that question by asking themselves another question. What do they want out of their career in voiceover? Because the answer of how you started is based on what you want out of it.
Okay, fair enough. So let’s say someone started their journey and they’re looking for information, or maybe even started jumping in doing some recording. What’s the biggest mistake people make when jumping into VO?
They’re starting to record. You don’t record because you want to. You study acting, you study improv, you become the best actor you possibly can.
Then you study voiceover, and you allow this process to happen organically. You know, those of us who are working in the business and those of us who started when I did, didn’t just buy home studio equipment and say, now I’m ready to record. You might be ready to push buttons, but you’re not necessarily ready to go out there and show your wares.
So my suggestion to anybody, no matter what you want out of your voiceover career, is study acting. Become a really, really, really good actor. Study improv.
Then you study voiceover, and you figure out where you fit into the industry, and that’ll also happen organically. As you hit the copy, as you take different classes, you might find, oh my gosh, well, everybody has to do commercials, but you might go, hey, I love doing commercials, I hate doing promo. I love doing promo, I hate doing narration.
I can’t stand audiobooks, but I love games. So that just happens with time and experience. But it has nothing to do with having a home studio.
So do you find that’s what, since you’ve worked with so many different acting students, do you find that’s what they struggle with the most is just lacking that foundation?
Yes and no. For what I do, I don’t allow anybody to take my class unless they’ve got an acting foundation. What I found is, and this has happened with, I’ve had Emmy and Oscar-winning and nominated actors take my class, and I found, oh, they can’t do it to a microphone.
They’re wonderful actors for a camera, but they have a difficult time adjusting technically for the mic. So that’s what they need to learn, is how to do the technical aspects of voiceover and still keep their acting authentic. But the majority of the people pursuing, at least animation today, are actors.
And they come to the mic, they come to the class with a solid acting background. Now when I say solid acting background, for me, that could be college drama, that could be high school drama, but you can’t use my class as your introduction to voiceover because you’re going to be spinning your wheels and wasting your money. I can’t take your check if I’m your first class because it’s a disservice to you.
Wow, that’s great to hear. So you actually turn people away if they’re not a right fit for your style and coaching curriculum, right?
Oh, almost every day of my life, someone will contact me and say, I’m interested in your class, and my class does have a long wait list. So if they don’t have any experience, I’ll still put them on my list and say, now you got three years to study acting. So if they’re really interested in doing this, they’ll take my advice.
If what I’m advising them to do, which is to become a good actor, turns them off, they’re not right for this to begin with.
So we were talking a little bit about sort of technical adjustments, like how on camera have difficulty, or on camera actors have difficulty transitioning to voiceover. You have this longevity to you because I feel like you have this adaptability when it comes to different genres and mediums, so do you really approach, say, like an animated feature differently from a video game or a commercial?
Not in the acting, but I do technically, because in an animated feature… Well, you know, it’s interesting you use those as the comparisons, because an animated feature, as well as a game, you’re working solo. Not Han Solo, by yourself.
So your scene partners are rarely, if ever, in the room with you. You mentioned The Emperor’s New Groove. I never in my life have been in a studio with Patrick Warburton, but we have fabulous chemistry together on screen because of a really good director.
For a game, you’re working all by yourself. The acting choices are identical. You’re still looking at the script, and you’re still thinking to yourself, all those acting choices that we have to do, be it voiceover or on camera, who am I talking to, what’s our relationship, where are we in this scene?
And how you deliver that performance is based on those choices. The difference is, your scene partner is not there. The difference in on camera is, you can’t rely on a glance, a look, that eye contact to convey your acting.
It all has to be done vocally. But as far as your acting technique, it’s exactly the same.
So Bob, I’m curious. You mentioned turning people away who don’t have an acting background for your courses. I’m curious how many people or what percentage of people that you’ve done that with.
You actually see stick around and maybe pop up a year or two later versus how many just put their head down between their legs and say, oh, well, I’m just going to give up then.
I don’t know. I mean, I can tell you that in the 30 plus years I’ve been teaching, and I vet people pretty well when they call me about my class or they email me just to find out what their background is, I think I can count on just one hand the people who the first time I saw them at the mic realized, oh, they’re not nearly as advanced as they think they are, and refunded their money right there and then. I’ve only had one other person, one person during that process who begged to stay in the class, and I said, okay, and it was a huge mistake because they wasted their money.
They were not, they didn’t have the skill set to make choices and take direction. Without that skill set, you know, I can’t advance you. I can’t take you from point A to point B.
My goal is to take you to point M if I can. But if I can’t take you a few steps more than what you came in with, it was just not a good fit. So now I’m a little bit more specific and strict with my own rule that I’m sorry, I just, I cannot in good conscience take your money if I don’t think that you’re going to grow in this class.
But those who contact me, I would say the majority of the people that contact me really do have an acting background. First of all, I teach my eight week class in LA. So the people pursuing voice over in Los Angeles have more of an actor’s philosophy than people who study voice over outside of Los Angeles.
And because animation is primarily done in LA, there’s a perceived, I guess, pecking order in pursuing animation voice over in LA. So there’s more actors, more of a serious actor mindset here than elsewhere. And I do teach weekend classes around the country.
For my weekend classes, I’m a little bit more lenient, because my eight-week class in Los Angeles is an entree. The weekend classes around the country, that’s an appetizer. I’m teaching those classes for the person who goes, oh, my God, I want to do this, and how do I do it?
Well, you got to move to LA. I’m booked. I’m teaching the weekend and the convention panels to look for that one person.
I’m looking for me. I’m looking for the person that mirrors who I was when I was starting out. And everybody else is going to decide, animation is not right for me.
I don’t have it in me to move to LA. I don’t want to work that hard. I just want to do what I’m doing right here in my home studio.
I’m loving my e-learning, I’m loving my audiobooks, and that’s fine with me. But sometimes you don’t even know if what you’re doing is what you want until you try other things.
Well, for our listeners to hear that, I want you to know that this is not Bob being mean or not wanting to help people. This is a sign of a good coach, someone that will actually turn you away if they don’t think you’re a good fit. So take those words to heart.
I also think that a really good demo producer won’t take somebody’s money if they don’t think that they’re at demo level. And any good demo producer can make any lousy actor sound brilliant with enough direction and some superb editing. But it’s a disservice to the actor, also a disservice to the demo producer when that actor tries to get noticed from that demo, gets a meeting with that agent, gets up to the microphone to fresh copy, and can’t live up to that demo, because that agent is going to say, who did your demo?
Because that agent or that casting director is going to make a mental note or even sometimes a written note to avoid that demo producer because they’re sharks. They will take a dollar from anybody who has a checkbook, and that to me is unethical.
Absolutely.
Wonderful. So we talked a little bit about skillset, and can you give us some basic idea of what you feel skills and mindset-wise are important for a successful animation voice actor?
Well, I will say that it is to your advantage to be versatile vocally, but it’s not necessary. You have to be a brilliant actor. The script is a skeleton.
Your job is to give it a body. You need to be able to see that script. And if it’s a full writer script, which has exposition and the other character’s dialogue, that’s gold.
We don’t always have full writer scripts. Oftentimes we just have the dialogue scripts. But if you have the full writer script, you’ve got things to act and react to.
So the really well-trained actor is going to see between the lines and find intent to react to. Where the untrained actor or the mediocre actor is just going to see their lines and read their lines, even by making choices, in a funny voice. Or just try to give it variety without the layers.
And there are many layers of specific intent that you’re storytelling, that you’re reacting to, that you make choices of what your character’s intent was before the scene ever started. Which is what makes your audition interesting. Which is what gets you a callback.
These are the difficult parts of doing animation that Dee Bradley Baker and Billy West and Debbie Derryberry, I can go on and on and on. Candy Milo, do without thinking. It’s instinct because they’re so brilliant at what they do.
It’s how Streisand approaches a song. It’s in her soul. It’s in her DNA.
I don’t think she has to sit around and go, how do I tell this story accurately? She just does it well, and she’s been doing it well since she did nightclub performing back in the 60s. I think you’re born with this skill, but I think what acting classes do is they teach you or they bring to you very specific techniques so you can recreate these skills at will consistently.
Well, you get to the point where it becomes muscle memory, right? Or even brain muscle memory. If you get to that point, you’re much better off focusing on your performance than having to focus on every nuance in the script.
When you’re at that point, you’re demo ready. It’s not, do I have enough voices for a character demo? When you’re at that point where you can take any script and give it a contemporary, believable read.
Here’s the other thing that people need to understand about cartoons. Well, I’ll ask you guys. Now you guys do various genres of voiceover, correct?
Yes, sir.
So you both do commercials?
Yep.
So when it comes to your commercial demo, you want to make a commercial demo that reflects commercials in 2019. You’re not going to take a piece of copy from 1980, right? Same with promos.
You’re going to do a promo for your promo demo that reflects programming today. That’s something that was on ABC in 1990, correct?
Correct.
Here’s the mistake people make in animation demos. They want to show off how many voices they can do, how many different characters they can do. Here’s what they’re not thinking about.
It’s the same thing that we think about for other demos. Where do I fit in today’s animation landscape? How do I fit into adult swim?
Let’s say robot chicken at midnight on Cartoon Network, as opposed to PBS Kids at 7 a.m., as opposed to Bob’s Burgers on Fox Network, as opposed to Cartoon Network at 3 p.m., as opposed to Disney XD. And who directs those shows, and who casts those shows, and who produces those shows? Because you’re going to know, if you want to do a State Farm commercial on your commercial demo, you’re going to research online, what is the State Farm’s current flavor?
Who is their intended audience? What are they advertising, and who are they advertising to? This is the layer to the character demo and the game demo that people don’t think about.
The ones that think about it get an agent from their demo, because they’re one step ahead of the herd, who are just going, but I’ve got great voices. It’s not about how many voices you do. How do you fit into the landscape of today’s animation industry?
That’s brilliant.
I hope our audience is taking notes, because first they got a master class on acting, and now they got one on marketing. So where to next?
Wherever you guys want to go.
All right.
Well, Bob, you mentioned how demo production has changed in animation. What has changed most about the industry in general since you started several decades ago?
When I started out, it was so much more difficult to break into voiceover. When I started out, I took my first class in 1978. I got my first cartoon in 1982.
At that time, we had three networks. These networks, all they had was Saturday morning cartoons, a three- to four-hour block.
The people working in animation, who were Janet Waldo, Dawes Butler, June Ferre, Frank Welker, Michael, they had everybody they needed. The opportunity to break in and play with these heavy hitters who could cover… And they didn’t hire kids back then.
They hired adults to do kids’ voices. And there were no animated features. Maybe one every five to seven years.
It was so much more difficult to break into animation back then. Cut to today. We have 24-7 animation networks.
We have every major studio in Hollywood with a thriving animation department. We have primetime animation on multiple networks. We have games.
We have webisodes. We have Amazon, Hulu, Netflix that are producing animation both for children and adults. There are more opportunities to break into animation today than ever before.
For people to complain that it’s difficult to break into animation should have tried in 1982.
Does that make it easier or harder for someone who’s looking just to get started? For instance, can there be a paralysis by analysis or an embarrassment of riches where they say, well, I just don’t know who to start with because there are so many networks. Whereas when you were coming up, you just had to contact three producers or three heads of a network.
And how did I find them?
Probably physically knocking their doors.
I actually had to wait to get an agent to introduce me to them. Now, I was fortunate that a family friend introduced me to Casey Kasem, who introduced me to his agent. I called Mel Blank at home.
I called Hannah Barbera, and they introduced me to Dawes Butler. I had a phone book. But people today, they’ve got the internet.
You can, from LinkedIn, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Instagram, there is not one person from the studio head to the working actor who is not accessible. The least people can do today is decide what they want out of their career. Let’s say what they want out of their career.
I used Robot Chicken as an example before because I worked on the show. Let’s say their goal in life is to work on Robot Chicken. You go to IMDB and you see that list of credits from writers to actors who have worked on that show.
You see the list of actors and you cross-reference who their agents are. You’re going to see the same agents. Atlas, DPM, CESD, SBV, AVO, Abrams Artists.
Logic tells you, you’ve got to be with one of those agents if you’re going to get called for this show. And when these actors working on the show are called, if you’re with the same agent, that agent can pitch you, along with that other actor being booked. So then you go to that agent’s website and you listen to their demos.
The availability to research what you want out of your animation career is so accessible and available to every human being on the planet. Now, you might also look at that information and go, all these people live in Los Angeles. Hey, the logical brain side of my head says, I gotta live in Los Angeles.
Da, da, da, ding, ding, ding, yay. So I’m telling you right now, it is so much easier to prepare and plan. I’ll tell you what else you can do.
If your goal in life is to do, let’s say, a Marvel animated series. Well, just research every Marvel animated series over the last five years. Who cast it, who voice directed it, who acted in it, who were their agents.
You will see casting directors, voice directors like Colette Sunderman, Christie Reed. Those are the two that come to my mind right now, because those are the two I’ve worked on with Marvel. Well, so let’s say you get to the point where you are ready for representation.
Hell, let’s say you’ve got an agent, and you get that audition from your agent for a brand new Iron Man series. And you say to your agent, who’s voice directing it, who’s casting it? It’s Colette Sunderman.
Go back to your research. Okay, she did three Spider-Man series. She did Marvel’s Avengers Assemble.
Let me watch a few episodes. I get the feel. Let’s see who’s producing this show that I’m auditioning for.
Ask your agent. Let’s see who produced these past shows. Ooh, a couple of the same producers.
I know the feel. I know the style. So you can prepare your audition based on what they’ve done before.
Is it what they’re looking for? You don’t know, but odds are pretty good. So my point is, people, there’s no excuse not to know how to pursue this business today.
There was a huge excuse back when I started because I didn’t know. But I’ll tell you what I did do, guys. I made sure that I met and rubbed elbows with Don LaFontaine, Danny Dark, Ernie Anderson, Frank Welker, Don Messick, June Ferre.
I made sure that I, for what I wanted out of my career, which was the top, I did not associate with anybody who was below the top, whether it was socially or through business. I worked my ass off. I didn’t want my name associated with anything less than what I really wanted out of my career, because that was a waste of my time.
This is gold. It’s so, I mean, it seems so incredibly valuable and so refreshing to hear, because even though the, obviously the means of research have changed with the internet, like that mindset of initiative and confidence in your own ability to find this information is a rarity these days. So I think it’s really important for people to take note of that and understand that they can, especially in this age of social media where you see people trying to reach out to the wisdom of the crowd to try and kind of help them plot out the point that they should be deciding for themselves.
Well, I will say this, and I’m not patting myself on the back, but I do think my kind of tenacity is a rarity, but it always has since the very beginning of show business. This kind of nothing will stop me. I know what I want out of my career and I will do anything to get it, has always been there for the likes of Meryl Streep, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Robin Williams.
I could go on and on, Dustin Hoffman, with the people who did not get into this to make a dime, got into this to be the best. There’s a difference. To this day, I don’t wake up every day auditioning hoping to book it.
I don’t wake up every day hoping to make money at it. I wake up every day blessed that I can act. And if I can get a booking out of it, that’s icing on the cake.
I was at a Christmas party a few years ago at an agent’s office, and I was talking with Rob Paulson at the buffet table. And I said, buddy, did you get into this to make money? He goes, I’m still not into it to make money.
I never think about making a dime at this. I’m fortunate. That’s a fortunate byproduct to make money at this.
I said, but buddy, everybody’s getting into this to make money. He goes, well, I know, and that’s a shame because that’s why people settle. That’s why people do Fiverr, because they just want to get paid at it.
They don’t want a career, and they don’t want to be the best. And when Rob and I got into this business, all you wanted to be was the best. The best actor you could possibly be.
So I believe we know the answer to this. I mean, you’ve got this, like we said, this incredible drive, and you were wonderful at researching your goals and kind of working toward them with this laser-like focus. But aside from being a great self-promoter, you seem to have an incredible relationship with your agents.
So I wonder, do you feel that they’re still important today, and do you think they will still have that level of importance in the next five or ten years?
Depends what you want out of your career. I was told early on in my career, do not base the kind of representation and respect you get from your agent on your income. If your agent says, yes, I want to represent you, you have as much value as the actor who’s making seven figures.
But what you need to do, because your agents are not psychic, is to know exactly what you want out of your career and give your agent the very specific tools to be able to agent you. I’ll give you an example. Here’s something I teach my students.
If you’re interested in working in animation, to tell your agent, I want to work in animation, who doesn’t? Everybody does. But if you want anything out of your voiceover career, the more specific your goals, the more specific in your results.
So for people at the level of having a voiceover agent for animation in Los Angeles, they’ve done certain things. They’ve probably trained, they probably have a great demo, they’re probably SAG-AFTRA, and they probably met a handful of the animation casting directors and buyers. So what I tell my students is, so let’s say you are with…
I’m going to make up an agent right now just for sake of conversation. You’re with AVO. That’s Sandy Schnar, who’s the animation agent.
Look at Sandy’s roster of actors, and you’ll see names like Candy Milo, you’ll see Gray Griffin, you’ll see some really just brilliant animation actors, and go to their IMDB and see where they’ve worked. Cross reference to who you’ve worked with, who you’ve had auditions for, who you’ve had callbacks for, and have a sit down with your agent, and say, now listen, I’ve met Colette Sunderman, I’ve met Wes Gleason, I’ve worked for Charlie Adler, I’ve had final callbacks with Christie Reed. You represent Gray Griffin, who was on this series with Christie Reed.
You work with Candy Milo, who was on this series of this series and this series with Colette Sunderman. When your actors get called for their series regular, please pitch me as an incidental. In fact, last week, I just did a cold reading workshop with Christie Reed, and it went really, really well.
So the actor represented by the agent has to sit down and give them a body of work and goals to represent. Most actors, the moment they get that agent, they’ll pop on Facebook, congratulate me, I just got an agent. Who cares?
That’s not a reason to post. That’s an ego brag, by the way. If you want to talk about how to ruin your career on social media, ask me that later.
But I don’t care if you have an agent. I don’t care if you’re with JE or Stars in San Francisco. I don’t care if you’re with somebody in Orlando.
You do the same thing for your career. You sign with a regional agent, you’re living in Dayton, and you sign with an agent in Portland, you fly out to Portland, and you have a dent… You take that agent to dinner, and you give that agent a road map for what you want out of your career.
99% of her actors or his actors will not be doing this. The cream floats to the top. And if you really want to have a career in mind, give that same information to every agent you’ve got.
It’s amazing how many people forget this is a relationship business. I’ve talked to so many people about contacting their agents, and they say, well, I don’t know if I should be bothering them. Should I be asking my agent this?
I remember one time I sent… I put a note on Facebook, which you’ll probably not like, that I sent all my agents Christmas gifts. And somebody said, wow, what a great idea.
I said, no, it’s not. It’s just common courtesy to be a human being. It’s a relationship business when it comes down to it.
It is a relationship business. I mean, that’s all actually it is, is just a series of relationships. I just posted on my Facebook page ways to get an agent’s attention when submitting.
And, you know, you don’t put seeking representation in a subject line because that’s what everybody says who won’t get representation. You don’t do a laundry list of jobs you’ve done because who cares? You give a list of the ad agencies, the commercial buyers, the casting directors, the relationships that you bring to the table, because that’s what you have that has value.
If the agent has the same relationships with the same buyers, you’re a very easy sell. If you bring a relationship the agent doesn’t know, you bring added value, but you nailed it. It is all about relationships, certainly talent, certainly your skill set, but there’s so many talented people out there that cannot get arrested in this business because they have absolutely no idea how to put the business in the term show business.
Yeah, it really is amazing. So Bob, you talked about how living in LA is still a must for doing animation. Do you think that will ever change?
And if so, how?
I do think it will change, and here’s why. Thirty years ago, if you had told me that the majority of voice over would be non-union, people could make a decent living non-union, and they would be living outside the major markets, auditioning for major products, I would have said, you crazy girl. Today, that’s the reality.
So I can remember a few years ago, I was working at Disney, and I asked the executive producer on a feature, would you ever consider hiring a voice over actor outside of Los Angeles? And he said, not today. But he said, he goes, look through that glass.
What is the difference between looking through that glass at the actor in the booth, or looking at a big screen TV over some technical marvel where we could direct them remotely? If they’re what we need, we’ll do that. But fortunately, we have enough actors here today to do this.
Now, they will go to New York to hire that Broadway actor who can’t fly to LA to sing the song in the animated feature. But I think we’re many, many, many, many years away from that technical reality. But I would be arrogant to say that will never happen.
Wonderful. So Bob, I find… We talked about this a little bit, and you see it on social media all the time.
This almost… This resistance, sometimes even bordering on animosity, of sort of pursuing the traditional channels of going through agents and going through the union to become a successful working actor. So I feel like a lot of people just don’t understand how the union can benefit their career and feel like they don’t always have our best interests in mind.
So I know you have been a huge proponent for the union and have actively worked within it to try and make more positive changes for the voiceover industry. Would you mind telling us a little bit about that?
Well, I mean, I’ll also be the first one to say that I do understand and appreciate why the union is not for everybody. But that’s only because over the last 20 years, the union has allowed the non-union landscape to grow. Why is the union important to me?
Well, again, I didn’t go into this to make money. I went into this to have a career. I could make money selling burgers, flipping burgers, selling shirts.
I can make money. I had four years of day jobs, night jobs, seven days a week, seven nights a week, to pay my bills so I could pursue acting in what was considered a professional way. What is professional?
It’s not getting paid for it. See, that’s the difference in today’s world. People will call themselves a working actor if somebody cuts them a check because they acted.
That’s not what I consider professional acting. I consider professional acting with professional standards, which comes with pension and health and residuals. You’re vested in your pension if you’re a union actor if you make benefits in ten years.
And benefits means you make a certain minimum every year. That was important to me because at 18, I knew someday I’m going to be 65. I knew that I needed health plans and whatnot.
That’s any smart business person. I needed legal representation in case I wasn’t paid. That’s what comes with working union.
But we’re generations in with actors making a fabulous living at Voice Over without the need of a union to supply their pension because they’re investing in stocks like most Americans do, and they’ve got private health care, and they’ve got Obamacare, whatever. So I totally understand people not wanting or needing the union. But here’s the thing, guys.
It was always difficult to join the union. It was always hard to get vested. It was always difficult to make the minimum for health benefits.
Nothing has changed there. The only difference is there are more people today going, I don’t want to work that hard. I just want to make a living at Voice Over doing what I love and the privacy of my own home.
And I’m happy making any kind of money. And oh, my gosh, now I’m making six figures doing this and I still don’t need the union. Well, that’s great.
So mazel tov. That’s terrific. But I will tell you guys, I get emailed every day of my life.
I’m doing really well in non-union. I’m making a lot of money. I’m supporting my family.
I’m living outside the major markets, and my cost of living is less, but I really want to do cartoons. Okay, you got to walk away from all that and come to LA. Yeah, well, I can’t do that.
Do not give me that excuse. I attended a taping of Inside the Actors Studio years ago, and Jay Leno was the guest. And he was asked about, you know, how difficult was it to get the tonight show?
And Jay Leno’s rolling his eyes. It’s always been difficult. It’s difficult.
It’s difficult to get into the comedy. It’s always difficult to get in front. Guys, it’s no different today.
It’s just actually there’s more opportunities if you do want it. But why is the union important to me? Can I touch upon why there’s animosity?
Yes, please.
Absolutely, yeah.
Okay, so here’s what a lot of non-union people don’t understand. So when we see, oh my God, this paid… Is it called GVAA?
Is that what it’s called?
Yes. They’re a sponsor of the show, actually.
And my employers.
Well, when people say, hey, it needs the GVAA rates, that is good. That’s a great thing. People don’t understand.
We don’t give a shit. Can I say shit? Sure.
We don’t give a shit what our session fees are. That is not the value that we have on this voiceover job. It’s that this pays into our pension and health.
It’s that it might pay residuals. We don’t make a living on session fees. We make a living on residuals.
Now, over the last 20 years, 80% of voiceovers gone non-union. Let’s go back 20 years ago. 80% more of this work was union, which meant that 80% of this work paid into our P&H.
Now, every time an actor works in a union job, a portion of what the producer pays goes into the pension pool. Not for that actor, for the entire union. When I got into this business, if you made benefits, you had zero monthly premiums.
Once you made a minimum, you just got health benefits for a year, for you and your family. As the work started to erode, going more and more non-union, I can remember that that first premium payment we had to pay was 50 bucks a month. Now, the average working American is going, I wish I only had to pay 50 bucks a month.
When you go from paying zero to 50, that was a punch in the gut. But it was going away. The union work was going away.
It was being taken by these non-union actors. And as much as we begged them, please don’t do this to us. We wouldn’t do this to you.
See, before the internet, very few people worked non-union because they didn’t want to hurt their fellow actor. They didn’t want to drive the work non-union. They didn’t want to give buyers more non-union options to hire.
And as anonymity took hold because you’re working in the privacy of your own home, and as we got further and further away, both technically and geographically, from what a union actor was, people don’t relate to each other anymore. But it’s still… the outcome is the same.
Less of the work is union. It’s much harder to get union opportunities. I mean, let’s be honest, guys.
If you live in Dayton, how many union auditions will you see a day? You can’t just walk away from your thriving non-union career and go, I’m only going to work union. But we let that happen organically.
Now, I will tell you that I do have a proposal in play at the union to reclaim the union work. But part of my proposal allows today’s non-union industry to join the union and continue working with their non-union buyers for a period of time. It’s radical.
Wow, that’s huge.
It’s huge. It’s been approved by two major committees. I’m waiting to hear about more.
I’m not holding my breath, I’ll be honest with you. But to me, it’s the only way, the only way we’re going to reclaim some of this work. And it is to…
We cannot ask people to walk away from a five- and six-figure non-union income for the luxury to try to compete in the union world, especially when they just don’t see a lot of auditions. It’s asinine to ask anybody to walk away from that.
Again, these are smart business people. They have created a really great business life. And we have a very arrogant group at the union who don’t A, know what kind of money people are making in the non-union landscape, and don’t realize that they like it, and they appreciate it, and they’re having fun.
People forget that, and this is something I’ve argued online, people are bitching and moaning about fiber and the $50 job. I laugh because it’s relative. It’s the same conversation the union people had with the non-union people 20 years ago.
Please don’t do this. Well, the non-union people who are doing the GVAA rates, and they’re good rates by the way I’ve seen it, they’re good rates, are begging, please don’t do fiber. Please don’t do these tiny little pay to play things.
People, wake up and smell 20 years ago. This is the same repeat of history that we had with the union and non-union world. But when you make minimum wage, and you’re flipping burgers, and all of a sudden somebody’s offering you 50 bucks to talk in your pajamas, and you get to hear your voice come out of the television or the radio, you hit the lottery.
It’s all relative, and you can’t fight it, because you need one person to say yes. Sadly, there’s millions who will say yes to this deal. Just like there became millions who were happy to take a voiceover job that should pay $1,000 pension, health and residuals, and they were happy to take $500, even $1,000, for that session fee, and forgo residuals P&H.
And it has snowballed into what we now have as an 80% non-union voiceover industry. But it’s all relative, guys.
Well, I appreciate your frankness on that, Bob, and the way you framed it actually makes a lot more sense to me, because I’ve seen these arguments online a lot of times with you, arguing for the union, and I really… The way you framed it makes a lot of sense, and hopefully it’ll make sense to our listeners as well.
And by the way, I do appreciate 100%… There are a few people, I used to be one of them, who would be like, I won’t even discuss non-union… I won’t even discuss FICOR.
I won’t even talk. You guys have hurt me and my industry so badly. I remember the first time I went to…
I taught a workshop in St. Louis, and I never talk about union. I never talk about what you can make in cartoons, because A, they’re a union, and B, there’s a minimum scale. There’s no reason to talk about it.
But the first time I ever heard about a voiceover job being referred to as a client, and I was like, what do you mean client? A voiceover… That’s not a client.
You’re a client. The advertising agency has a client. That’s the person that owns the company they’re advertising for.
But your job… That’s not a client. That’s like a plumber has a client.
You’re not a client. They’re not a client. And I had to get educated that people today, when they’re hired just one time for a voiceover job, they now call that a client.
That doesn’t happen in the major markets. And here’s why it’s hurting people in the non-union markets. So let’s say that you guys do a job for McDonald’s.
Let’s say you do a corporate narration for McDonald’s. You’ll put on your website, recent clients include McDonald’s. Well, we’ve gotten to the point where you submit your demo to Buckwald, Paradigm, Atlas, et cetera, because you want to take your career to the next step.
That client list means nothing to the agents anymore because they know that any job you have, you call a client, and it could be a corporate narration for 300 bucks. In my day, and I hate saying in my day because it makes me feel like I’m a hundred, but in my day…
Get off my lawn.
In my day, a client was a contracted gig. You were the voice of. You were the voice of McDonald’s.
You were the corporate branded voice. So there’s no weight to a list of clients to the major markets, the major agents. It means nothing to them.
And I really think it means nothing to the smaller markets either. But it’s an ego brag for the voice over actor. They just don’t realize they’ve taken the value away from it by calling it a client.
But they do treat their job. And I get it now. It took me years to get.
They seek out. They do cold calling. They actually invoice.
Well, when you’ve got a small business, those are called clients. As a professional actor, I don’t do any of that stuff. I just act.
My agent does all that stuff. But I do understand the business mindset of today’s voice over actor who considers their hire a client. I get it.
It took me a long time to get it. I had to be kicked in the face by a horse.
Well, Bob, you’ve come around.
Well, I’ve come around, but I can also voice the damn horse. So there you go.
There you go. Well, moving away from the business talk for a little while, we want to end the, or at the end of the interview, really, we want to end by talking a little more philosophically. So you had this laser-like focus that Sean talked about, wanting to be the voice of Porky Pig.
Now you’ve accomplished that. And looking back, is there a genre you wish you had studied more, or even now could book more of?
Okay, genre of animation or voiceover in general?
Voiceover in general. Let’s say you always want to do audio books, and you just never got around to it. Is there a genre like that?
It’s a really, really good question. I can tell… The only genre of voiceover that I’ve never had a desire to do, nor will I ever have a desire to do, is audio books.
I would rather sit and watch a great food grow than sit and read a book I would not read for enjoyment. And whoever was the schmuck years ago who said, let’s take a fee based on our finished edited hour, screwed it up for everybody. Nowhere in the history of show business voiceover did anybody say, oh yeah, it should be based on the edited hour.
Because can you imagine actors being paid for 30 minutes worth of work when they do a sitcom? I just don’t enjoy the process of audiobooks. I’ve got many friends who are great at it and love it.
I know many people who wake up every day going, that’s what I want to do. Bless you because I love listening to them. And when I hear an actor who is a brilliant audiobook narrator and takes those characters and makes them real, I have such admiration for that skill, I don’t have it, and I don’t want to learn it.
Everything else, I do. I do because I work my ass off to get to it and to do it, and I train for it, and I still train for it. I work out with coaches.
If I have a major audition for a trailer or a promo, I will work with a coach, because if it’s a contracted job and I really want that contract, you bet I’m going to hire somebody to get me out of my head and take me to the next level. But there is not a genre of voiceover or an area that I sit back and go, God, I wish I had gotten that, because I’ve done it all.
Wonderful. So since you managed to accomplish all of your previous goals, what are some of your new ones for the future of your VO career?
To keep doing exactly what I’m doing, honestly. I mean, the nice thing about what I do is I wake up every morning and there are those new auditions and they’re new. And one of those cartoons might be the next SpongeBob, and one of those commercials might be the branding voice of Toyota.
And I might be the voice of a brand new network that has never launched. So what I love about this business is everything I’ve done for the last almost 40 years, I can continue doing if I knock wood for another 30 or 40 with the same enthusiasm. Guys, I approach every audition with, I get to do this again.
I drive onto a studio lot and go, really? Me? Still?
I have not lost that same giddy, oh my God, I’m doing this, that I had when I started out when I was 18. It has not changed one bit, which is why I still enjoy talking to new people. And I still get so excited when I talk to somebody who still has that, starting out that same, holy crud, I still get this.
And I’ve talked to famous actors who still have it. I mean, you know, I’ve had some famous actors take my class. Lily Tomlin took my class a few years ago, because she wanted to learn and grow.
And she and I have had many a conversation that she still, to this day, when she works on a film, is just as giddy and excited as she was when she first did Nine to Five and Nashville and some of those early films. So nothing has changed in my approach, in my philosophy, and in my enthusiasm and passion for this.
That’s fantastic. I have to think that’s probably… that the people who are still doing it successfully at a high level, they probably mostly have that same attitude.
Our last episode featured Kay Bess, and she just went back to acting classes a few years ago to tighten up her skills even at her advanced career stage. And I think if you have that attitude, it’s probably what keeps you young and keeps you working.
You know, what’s interesting is that people on Broadway during the day, they’re in dance class, they’re in voice class. There are people pursuing voice over. Rarely are they the people in the major markets.
It’s usually in the flyover states who get to this, I’m above training, I’m above acting classes, I’m above improv classes, where those of us who are still striving to be better than we are, we’re still trying to be better than we are. So again, it’s not about making more money, and it’s not about booking more. It’s about being great.
It’s about excellence. And I cannot stress enough that whether it’s an on-camera actor, a theater actor, a Broadway actor, a soap actor, or a voice actor, those of us at a certain level just want to be better.
Yeah, we’ve compared on the show frequently to professional athletes. I’m not sure if you’re a big sports fan, but every professional golfer from Tiger Woods to Roy Malkaroy, they still have a swing coach they work with pretty much every day. And it’s a very similar way that we approach being a great voice actor.
Of course, of course. But that word actor, that’s the most important word.
There you go. Well, Bob, you’ve been so gracious in the way you’ve helped the VO community, fought for union rights, and you’ve been so gracious with us today. We really appreciate your time.
I can’t thank you enough for coming on the VO Meter.
Well, thank you for dealing with my technical issues because… Our emails went back and forth. Yeah, my course is not connected.
My IAS is not DN, and I have no idea how to record this on my end. So, bless you guys.
No worries. We’re happy to do all the hard work for you. I mean, you have such an admirable and inspiring perspective into the industry and that striving for excellence, that laser-like focus and drive, and you’re a true gem and resource for the voiceover community, whether it be through your direct teaching or your mentorship or just your example.
So, we’re truly honored to have had you on the podcast today.
How many times has this happened to you? You’re listening to the radio when this commercial comes on.
Not unlike this one.
And this guy starts talking, not unlike myself.
Or maybe it’s a woman that starts talking, not unlike myself. And you think to yourself, jeez, I could do that.
Well, mister, well, missy, you just got one step closer to realizing your dream as a voiceover artist, because now there’s Global Voice Acting Academy. All the tools and straight from the hip, honest information you need to get on a fast track to doing this commercial yourself.
Well, not this one exactly.
Classes, private coaching, webinars, home studio setup, marketing and branding help, members only benefits like workouts, rate and negotiation advice, practice scripts and more. All without the kind of hype you’re listening to right now. Go ahead, take our jobs from us.
We dare you.
Speak for yourself, buddy.
I like what I do. And you will too when you’re learning your craft at Global Voice Acting Academy. Find us at globalvoiceacademy.com.
Because you like to have fun.
Thanks again to Bob for joining us on the interview portion. Like I said during the interview, I’ve been so helped by him, and so blessed that he’s been a friend and mentor to me. And I’m so happy he was finally able to join us on the podcast.
So yes, thank you, Bob. And amazingly, he’s been extremely helpful in my own career. We mentioned during the interview, we both met Bob through the VO Bulletin Board, and he both just kind of took us aside and gave us words of encouragement, and kind of put us on the right, gave us the right mindset, and set us on the right path to do this in a professional way with integrity.
And I know he’s done the exact same thing for hundreds, if not thousands, of voice talent everywhere. So before we leave today, I just want to remind you all to check out Bob Bergen’s site, bobbergen.com, where he actually has a whole voice acting FAQ page, where he talks about a lot of the things he mentioned in the podcast, and the same kind of professional mindset and pursuing voice acting with integrity that he preaches in all of his online postings.
And don’t forget to check out Ask the Pig, where he hosts a Facebook Live event. I think it’s weekly, actually. But check that out, and you can ask him questions, anything that’s on your mind, and as long as he has time, he’ll answer it.
Okay, with that, it’s time to wrap up Episode 43 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Coming up, we have interviews with Debbie Hirata, voice talent out of your neck of the woods, Sean.
Yeah, she’s fantastic. I met her at a documentary narration workshop hosted by Pat Fraley. So she was previously a student of his, and then she kind of went on to carve her own path and achieve her own success.
And she’s a multi-award-winning voice talent. She’s been awarded the Sovas Awards numerous times in numerous genres. And so we’re going to talk about what it takes to have that kind of versatility and longevity in voiceover.
And then following that, we have Jim Cannelli and Sam Euphret from Lotus Productions in New York City. And then finally on the docket is Tracy Lindley, who will tell you about the LinkedIn Edge program she has.
Very cool. Very excited to learn more about that.
So that’s it for this episode. We’ll 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 is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMC Demos, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 42 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We have a really exciting show today, one I know Sean never thought would happen, nor did I, but we’re featuring an interview with audiobook narrator and golden voice Simon Vance, so I’m really excited about that.
I’m so fangirling right now.
He had a lot to say about audiobooks and voiceover in general, and we’ll take you to that interview in just a second. But first, it’s time to feature for the second time our new segment, the…
VoiceOver Extra brings you the VO Meter reference levels. Uh, seriously guys, that’s the best you could come up with? Hey, it’s your show.
So, Sean, now that we’ve rolled out this official segment brought to you by VoiceOver Extra, what’s going on in your voiceover world?
Well, I just did a really cool workshop over the weekend, actually, called Adventures in Voice Acting. So this is run by anime and animation production studio Bang Zoom Entertainment. They’ve done a number of properties going back quite a ways, like Naruto and some very famous animes like that.
And it was a very intensive workshop. It was two eight-hour days over the weekend. And we did everything we practiced, like American style animation scripts, video game scripts.
We got to do a Walla mock session, you know, like a loop group or ADR where you’re just kind of background ambient voices. We were like at a cocktail party and we had to pretend we were having real conversations, but not really having conversations, nothing too distracting, that kind of thing in the background. It was a lot of fun and probably the most challenging thing.
And it was great because we had a lot of opportunities to do it throughout the weekend was actually dubbing to picture because if you’ve ever done foreign language dubbing, particularly with something like anime, this is something where you would very often go into a studio because of the equipment required and they would cue you in with a series of beeps. You get a three count. So it’s like beep, beep, beep.
And on the imaginary fourth count is when you start your performance. So we would record line by line and we would get the, you’d get the three count and then you’d see it in Japanese so you could get a sense of the timing and the pacing and kind of the emotional intent of the original actor. And then they would cue you in and then you do your line and hopefully you’d be able to match it up with the performance.
And as long as you’re not too slow or too fast, the engineers can usually just kind of adjust the audio to make it fit. But all in all, I was really, I was impressed with myself. I was happy with how I did.
And, you’ll be happy to know that I did not blow out my voice this time, unlike my last animation workshop. I did have this fun moment where I got to do like sort of a battle cry for five seconds. Probably the longest five seconds I’ve ever experienced, I think.
But all in all, it was a lot of fun. And if you ever have the opportunity to do adventures in voice acting with Tony Oliver, I highly recommend it.
That’s awesome. Where was the workshop?
So, this was at a studio in Seattle, next to Safeco Field, the ballpark, or now T-Mobile Stadium, a hate-branded stadium, anyways. So it’s right next to the freeway in Seattle, but it’s a beautiful studio. I’ve been there a couple of times.
I was there for an audiobook workshop with Pat Fraley a month before, and then of course for this workshop. And I know it’s probably where I’m likely going to have some new demos made, if I ever want to go into a studio to have that done. Because I know it’s got excellent staff, and there’s no doubt that the equipment is awesome.
That’s really cool. Now Tony’s not from Seattle, is he?
No, no. He’s a Los Angeles native. And the workshop itself is normally based out of Los Angeles.
But it was interesting. Two things actually. One was the number of LA talent who actually flew up to Seattle because his workshop was sold out in LA.
So you know that it’s good if people are going that out of their way to attend a workshop. And we also had people coming up from Oregon as well. And one of the crazy things is that one of the LA talent was this young woman named Breanna McDowell.
And she was actually just recently joined the GVA membership. So when I like pop into the studio, she’s like, wait a minute, I know that guy.
Wow, instant street cred.
Yeah, yeah, instant street cred. Now if I only shown up on time, that would have been better. But traffic was bad that morning, I’m sorry.
I made up for it the next day, but it was really cool because at the end of the workshop on Sunday, we talked about agents and demos and it was really interesting because there was no doubt that everyone there was very talented, but people were at different stages of their career. Like a lot of them didn’t have demos yet or their own website or an agent or things like that. And so Tony was talking about the importance of demos and having them professionally done.
And then he’s like, but I don’t do demos. And then he directed it to the engineer and he’s like, yeah, we record the demos, but if you want us to do script writing or the more work you ask us to do, the more expensive it’s gonna be. And then so I kind of just put up my hand at that point and I was like, if you guys need help with coaching and demo prep, GVAA.
Like, you know? And so I didn’t mean to step on anyone’s toes or anything, but it was just a service that they weren’t offering. So I was just like, hey, hit me up.
And then I handed out my business cards. That’s awesome. And I got that.
So that is another great reason to do in-person workshops because it shows people your skill level, your passion for VO, and you get to meet a lot of like-minded people. And it’s really fun to kind of keep in touch with people. Like we’ve said on numerous episodes of the podcast, you never know where your next gig’s gonna come from.
Sometimes the person that you worked with might be starting their own project, or they might have a voice that you know would be suitable for someone else’s project. So it’s always great to kind of be there, to be like, of course be open to learning and stuff like that, but view it as a potential networking opportunity as well.
Well, that’s really cool. I haven’t met Tony, but I did talk to him, if you remember, on the first trip we made to Oticon down in DC, he was one of the feature speakers there, and we had audio of me asking him a question live on the panel floor and responding back. He does seem like a great person to work with.
I think it would be fun to do that workshop at some point.
Very cool. I highly recommend it. I think the farthest east he goes is Chicago.
Maybe they’ll be doing some more Northeastern stuff that you might be able to join. And I actually talked to him about being on the podcast, and he sounded game. So we’ll see if we can get him on as a solo guest.
Oh, that’d be cool. Great. So anything else going on?
Well, it’s kind of crunch week for me. I’ve got a big e-learning project due at the end of the month. Had some exciting and lucrative audition opportunities come in that we can’t talk about, but I’m sure Paul knows what I’m talking about.
So yeah, I just kind of kept going at it. And like I just wanted to say, another great reason to kind of go to these kind of live events is that sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the studio, right? Like we fall into these routines, and sometimes like when the thing that you love is also your job, it kind of can affect your perspective of it, and you can kind of forget what brought, like why you fell in love with it in the first place.
So this was a really reinvigorating, re-inspiring kind of event to go to, because it’s like I really fed off of Tony’s passion. And he was such a positive guy, because he’s like, man, this stuff is hard. You don’t have to be any harder on ourselves, right?
He’s like all actors have that loud devil on their shoulder telling them they suck. Don’t listen to that guy. Listen to the angel on your shoulder, because we got one of those two.
Other than that, just kind of, it’s been same old, same old, just kind of my usual projects and just auditioning as often as I can. Preparing this month’s workout schedule for Global Voice Acting Academy. We’ve got some great workouts coming up in September with Carol Monda and MJ Lalo.
Other than that, though, you’ve got some exciting news, Paul. Why don’t you tell us about it?
Yeah, thanks, I have a couple of cool things going on. The first, I have some more audio books coming out and I’m now working on the fifth book… No, sorry, I think it’s the sixth, actually, for the author who started it all with my pseudonym.
And that series is finally finishing up. And then I had just finished a book, also for the pseudonym, the fourth in a series, although I had only done the last two. But the author liked it so much that he’s hired me to finish the series and then hired me for his new series to finish up that series as well.
So it’s something like eight books that I’ve booked for over the next couple of months. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do it all. It’s going to be interesting, but we’ll get to why that’s going to be made possible in the next couple of minutes.
But the other thing I wanted to talk about is something I took on about a month ago. I produced a full radio commercial for a local bar and local radio station. So it’s for ESPN Radio in South New Jersey, and the host of one of the shows there contacted me and said he needed a full production commercial.
Do you do that? And I said, well, sure, I don’t see why not. And it’s one of those things that we talked about where if you have the facilities and the training to do some of these ancillary tasks for voice over or production in general, you may as well make use of the technology you have at your disposal.
So I did, and what I did was I wrote some copy. I think I mentioned before that my initial undergrad degree was in broadcast journalism. So I had that writing background, and I’d done some copywriting in the past.
So I wrote some copy. I hired a friend of the show, Jamie Muffet, who was on a couple of weeks ago, to do one of the voices for me, and then did one of the voices myself, and then added some production elements and some music, and it came out really well. So I thought I’d actually play it here and let people hear it to get an opinion from them, our listeners, and let me know what you think.
Hello, lads and lasses. This be Seamus Fengrin for Josie Kelly’s Public House. If ye be wanting to grab a proper pint, dance a jig on over to Summer’s Point for…
Don’t listen to that, clown. Josie Kelly’s Public House is a real Irish pub with delicious traditional Irish fare like fish and chips and shepherd’s pie, a full bar featuring crepe cocktails and the widest selection of Irish whiskeys around. And of course we have Guinness, Harp and Smittex, as well as local craft beers.
Plus, Josie’s is a great place to watch your favorite teams. Catch Penn State Temple and Rutgers on Saturday, and Sunday, swoop in to watch the birds.
D-A-T-L-D-S-E-O!
Hi, this is Dermot Lloyd, owner of Josie Kelly’s Public House. I’ve been working Irish pubs my entire life. I like to think I brought some Irish charm to the Jersey Shore.
If you like good food, cold beer, live music, watching live sports, or maybe you’re looking to host a private event, then come down to Josie Kelly’s 908 Shore Road in Summers Point or visit our website at josiekellys.com. Hope to see you there.
Well done, man. That was awesome. That must have been a lot of fun to make.
Yeah, I had a lot of fun being able to do all of it myself because normally, you know, when we’re doing voiceover stuff, we don’t get the chance to pick out music or hire other voice artists, but I got to do it all on this. And Jamie was great. The gist of it, obviously, was that this is a real Irish pub, and Jamie’s caricature of the Irish leprechaun was not very authentic, and he had fun doing that.
At first, he said, you wanted to be cartoony, right? And I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s the whole point.
So great thanks to Jamie for pulling that off.
No, that sounded really good, and I loved, like, the little biographical bit from the owner itself. That was really cool.
Yeah, we’ll say he, the owner, Dermot, did massage the copy a little bit himself, which is great, which is exactly what I was hoping for, because they gave me nothing to go on. They were like, there’s an Irish pub, and they show a lot of football during football season. That’s what we’re playing it.
That’s all I had to go on.
Oh my God. So you just kind of, like, did you just call him up, be like, hey, I’m making this commercial for you. Can you help me out?
I was going to do that, actually, but I was having trouble hooking up with him. And I have been there before, because it’s in my brother’s hometown. So I had been to the place at least once, and I just wrote a treatment, basically, which is, you know, like a first draft of the script, and sent it to them.
And they said, yeah, we love it. We’re just going to add a few of our own details, and that’s where we ended up.
Well, that’s cool. So, yeah, definitely think outside the box sometime. And that was something else that I noticed when working with Tony over the weekend was that, I mean, this is a guy who’s had a career that’s spanned over three decades, and I talked to him a little bit about that, and he’s like, yeah, man, you have to be willing to do anything in the entertainment industry, like if there aren’t enough parts to go around, direct, be a writer, produce, all these other things.
So for us as non-union voice talent, like you might, if you have the comfort and confidence being a producer, that’s just another revenue stream that you might be able to take advantage of. And if you’re not comfortable, then you can always hire your friends who are good at those things, and you can still take some sort of finder’s fee for supplying them with their work.
Yeah, that’s more or less where I ended up on this thing. Because I was paying a real rate to Jamie, I don’t mind saying that he got the bulk of the rate on this, because he was the much more seasoned talent. So I still made a profit, but I was happy to pay, using a GVA guide, actually, a proper rate to Jamie for getting this done.
Well, thank you for being a reputable employer.
So I’m going to get to my big news in just a second, but before that, a word from one of our sponsors, Vocal Booth To Go. So Vocal Booth To Go’s patented acoustic blankets are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing, often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution. We make your environment quieter for less.
Thanks to Vocal Booth To Go for sponsoring the VO Meter. Now, my big news is that I quit my job, which some of you may be saying, huh, what job? Now, I mentioned it on a few episodes, but I didn’t really publicize it all that much, but I’ve been working at what used to be my full-time career part-time for several years at an online university.
And with all the things I have going on, like producing commercials, in addition to doing my regular voiceover work and regular clients, it was just becoming too much. And this being the goal all along, to become a full-time voiceover talent, that’s the decision I made to make the leap and do that last week. So, happy to say I’m now a full-time voiceover talent.
Wonderful. Congratulations.
Woo! Now, it’s a bit of a stretch because one of the things that made this happen was taking on a new side gig. And I know Sean, you’re going to talk about how important that is to you in a second, but I’m also working with a company now called Twin Flame Studios, which is run by a woman named Tina Dietz, who some of our listeners may know from some of the Facebook groups.
And I’m now working as a project manager and producer on some of their projects, working on podcasts, production and editing, audiobook production and editing, and some other related skills that go well with what I do every day. So while I am a full-time voice over talent, there’s got to be another word for it now, right? Voice over, voice production, entertainment industry specialist.
I don’t know, I’ll come up with something, but that’s a pretty exciting leap for me as well, too, because I really like what Twin Flames is doing out there in the world.
Very cool. It’s so weird, it’s almost like we’re following the same paths in reverse. But just because like you are now, I have been working with a, I don’t know, industry professional entity for the last several years with Global Voice Acting Academy, and of course I also have my own voice over clients and projects that I do every month.
But recently, I felt like I had kind of, both creatively and financially, hit a plateau. So like I noticed that like while I was still retaining my clients, I hadn’t lost any thankfully, I wasn’t gaining as many new ones as I had in years past. So I kind of, and like I said, I was kind of getting a little like claustrophobic, kind of isolated in my booth.
And so this winter, like my girlfriend and I decided to get re-certified as lifeguards and work at a local community center. And just because the hours were flexible, the work itself wasn’t too exhausting. I could still come home and still have plenty of energy to record and do that stuff.
And the people there were very accommodating of the schedule that I wanted and how we could both help each other out. Like, so it’s great. Like, I mean, I guard, I teach water aerobics there.
So I get paid to work out basically, and I get all that exercise that I wasn’t getting before. So the reason we’re talking about this is that, and this is something that I struggled with as well, it can be very discouraging to think that you’re dependent on another job, even though like you might be current, like you might be getting paid to do voice work, or like we all aspire to be full-time talent. And like I said, there can be this shame or guilt that comes from like, oh, my income comes from other sources too.
Why? I mean, like, there have been numerous guests that we have and will have on the show that have just said actors since time immemorial have had to make do with survival gigs until their acting took president, right? One of our like friend and sponsor of the podcast, Tim Page mentions that you’ll know when to quit your job when you are losing money by not quitting.
So I haven’t reached that point yet. And even though I was at a point where I was sort of like spending, devoting all of my energy to voiceover, like I felt like it was good to kind of get back out the world, get some work experience. And if nothing else, it makes you that much more appreciative of what you get to do as a voice talent, the things we get to do and the skillset that’s required and like the various creative and intelligence that we do to create and record and edit all of these wonderful voiceovers and stuff like that.
So there’s that idea that first off, you’re not worried about paying your bills so much, so there’s less financial worry. And like I said, there’s that life experience and getting to work with other people and it can be really beneficial to your work as an actor, I think.
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s no shame in it. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ve heard our questionable gear purchases segment.
Where do you think we get the money for those?
Exactly. And those were entirely financed by my job at the university over the last three years.
My speedable gear fund? I love it.
But what it allowed me to do, like you said, it gives you the freedom to focus on training, focus on equipment, if that’s something you think you need to invest in, which we all do at some point, and not worry about the financial burden because we’ve heard from coaches a lot that if you feel like you have to get this current job when you’re doing an audition, you’re not going to get it. They’ll hear it and you’ll read it. They’ll hear the desperation that you’re so anxious to get this audition done.
So make sure you have a comfortable nest egg before you leap. And I actually was at that point, which is why I had to make this move right now because all those books I just mentioned that are coming up, I had no time whatsoever to do them. But the other point I want to make is that if you have the drive, working part-time or even a full-time job won’t stop you.
As we talked about, I was working this job 30 hours a week. I have three kids. I coach almost all of their sports teams, in addition to taking some to guitar and saxophone lessons.
And now it’s marching band coming up. So there’s a lot of things going on in my life to prevent me from doing voiceover. But if you have the drive and the determination, you’ll make it happen.
Absolutely. I mean, we’ve talked about this, like, I mean, my own journey into voice acting. Like my first two years of pursuing it, I had a full-time 40-hour job with like a three-hour commute.
You know?
Wow.
So, yeah, it was ridiculous. I mean, like total, not there and back, or like hour and a half each way. But still, I mean, you find a way, if this is important to you, you save the money, you don’t make excuses, right?
Like whether you’re too tired or you don’t have money. Like if you’re too tired, sleep more. Make time for sleep.
If you don’t have money, make money, right? Do your job, get a second or third job if you have to. So if this is something that’s really important to you, you will pursue it with a tenacity and a patience.
That’s what’s important because it can take quite a while to get a foothold. So if you need advice on how to kind of navigate and balance all of that, reach out to us sometime. We always love hearing from you guys.
All right, so we have our interview with Simon Vance coming up in just a few minutes. But before that, a word from one of our sponsors. Let me tell you about Tim Page and his team over at Podcast Demos.
Tim and his team have produced over 1,000 podcast intros for some of the biggest podcasts on the planet. Each demo includes custom-written scripts and hand-selected music, and is guaranteed to showcase your voice and talent in the best light possible. With a finger on the pulse of what podcast producers want, you can be sure your podcast demo will sound professional, current, and competitive.
Now, we’ve talked about this a lot, but Tim actually produced Paul’s and my podcast demos, and all we can say is that he and his team were absolutely amazing. His script writer created original scripts perfect for my voice and personality, as well as reflective of current popular podcast genres. I recorded in the comfort of my own home studio, and Tim worked his mastering magic.
The whole process only took a couple of days, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Tim is a consummate pro and so easy to work with. Thank you, Tim, and podcast demos.
All right, thanks again, Tim, and hope to get some more auditions from you, Mr. Page. So we’ll get to Simon Vance in just a second, but now it’s time for…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
All right, so I’m actually… Well, there’s a lot of stupid things I’ve done, but I’m going to save them and parse them out over the next couple of weeks and see how that goes. Maybe it’ll convince me not to do anything else stupid.
So, Sean, why don’t you start with anything you might have bought in the last month?
Well, I think at some point we need to do an entire Questionable Gear episode, so maybe…
Yeah, good idea.
We’ll figure it out sometime soon, but I just wanted to bookmark that, so I didn’t lose that idea. Anyways, yeah, you guys might be surprised. I actually bought stuff this month.
Oh my God, it’s been a while. So I got two things. One of my favorite mic stands to use in my booth, since it’s that typical PVC frame setup, is the Stage Ninja Scorpion.
It’s like a C-clamp, kind of adjustable mic stand, that I actually suspend from the roof of my booth and then have my mic hanging down. And what that does is that frees up the space in the booth so I don’t actually need to have a mic stand in it, and I don’t have to worry about hitting anything with my arms or my feet if I gesticulate. Stuff like that.
So I have a couple of these in here to hold my mics, to hold my iPad, things like that. And I got a little accessory kit. And what that does is it’s got a little extension neck, so you can make one of those…
These things are totally modular, so you can actually snap them apart like Legos, and then make them even longer with additional pieces, and kind of cannibalize the other stands you have and make them even longer. But so they have that. It also had a little Y section, so I can have two mic arms suspended from the same clamp.
So I was thinking of having my 416 on one, my iPad on the other. Maybe even have Mixerface on one, and then my iPad or iPhone on the other, things like that. And speaking of Mixerface, the last adapter piece is actually a little camera thread mount.
So adapter, so it allows me to hold an actual DSLR camera or an item like the Mixerface, which has that same thread drilled into the back. And my latest purchase, or questionable gear purchase, the Apogee One Plus. So yes, I went fancy.
So many of you probably are familiar with Apogee. They make wonderful preamps, interfaces, like they made such famous models as the Apogee One, the Apogee Duet, the Ensemble, things like that. And they also made one of the most portable USB mics on the market, the Apogee Mic.
Now, it’s been through several different iterations over the years, and I’ve even had one of the earlier ones too. I had the Apogee 96K for a while, but unfortunately, mine got wet because the included carrying kit, I did not realize, was not waterproof, and my bag got rained on, unfortunately. But anyway, so I got rid of that.
But a few years later, I was really impressed with the changes they made with the Apogee Mic Plus, because even though the mic was famous for having a great sound, I know Joe Cipriano even endorsed it when it came out.
Who? Who knows Joe? Nobody knows Joe.
Anyways, if that’s not enough to convince you, other great talents like Maurice LaMarche or James Arnold Taylor or Steve Blum have all used this mic as their primary, their sort of sub travel rig. Just something to put in the dash, keep in the car with you for those emergency auditions that come in last minute, and you just need something to record. But anyways, I was really happy with the latest iteration of this, the Mic Plus, but I was not so happy with the price tag, which is about $260 new.
Yeah, that’s a lot. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons why a lot of people… We’ve talked about USB mics versus XLR mics, and honestly, the gap of audio quality is shrinking every year.
USB mics sound better and better every year as the technology improves, right? And we’re able to cram higher quality technology into a smaller, smaller size. But the issue is versatility and upgradability, right?
Because once you reach a certain point, all of the components of a mic you can’t really upgrade, or of a USB mic you can’t upgrade. So if you want to upgrade, you have to replace it, basically. But anyways, I’m getting on a tangent here.
The point I was trying to make is for that price of $260, you can easily get an interface and a decent mic to start off with. And then you can just upgrade incrementally. But regarding this particular Apogee, I was kind of scoping around eBay, and I found an open box discount for $100 off, for $160.
And I almost couldn’t control my hand. I was just like, ah! Dang it.
So I’m still waiting for it to arrive, and I’m really excited to try it out. And like I said, I have all these peripherals that allow me to connect it, like my Jobe SmartRig and the new accessories that I got for my mic stands. So it seemed like a good time to have, and I wanted to be able to use it for some of the voiceover workouts that I lead, for whenever I’m doing a directed session, and I want the client to have an idea of what my studio space sounds like, or even if I’m working with another coach, and I don’t want to power up the whole studio setup.
So, I actually got the idea from James Arnold Taylor, because that’s what he does, is he’ll have his Apogee mic connected to his iPad in his studio, so that the client will call in on Skype or whatever, and they can get a sense of what his audio sounds like, but his actual setup is still free to record everything locally. So I thought that was really attractive as an option, and now, unfortunately, the iPhone no longer has that 8-inch connector for most headphones. So this is like a neat little interface thing that I can plug into and still take advantage of that connection for a few more years.
All right, but what about you? What’s on the QGP list for you, Paul?
Well, I got a little out of hand since the last episode.
Like every time?
And maybe it’ll sound out of hand to you. Maybe it’ll sound like a normal show to everybody else, but when I had the guys at VocalBooth2Go come in here and reconfigure the booth, I wanted to see if I could get another condenser in here that would work pretty well and not have a lot of outside noise for long-form narration or audiobooks. So I think I mentioned what I’m using right now is the Audio Technica BP-40.
It’s a dynamic mic, which I do like the sound of a lot. But I wanted to see if I could get that one more tiny bit of clarity and nuance out of a condenser like I had used in the past. So I bought a blue dragonfly, which I had always kind of lusted after.
Just sight unseen, but I had looked at them a couple of years ago where they were $800, $900, and I found one for about half that. So I took the plunge and tried it out. And it sounded really good.
I did like it. But I still couldn’t have it in here. It was way too sensitive.
It has a really big capsule. So I almost immediately got rid of that and didn’t keep it. And then I bought the Neat King B, which is another microphone that was pretty expensive when it came out.
It was actually created by former employees of Blue Microphones who went and started a company for Gibson, or a sub-company for Gibson, and made these microphones that were all B-themed. And this one was the Neat King B. You may have seen it.
It has this yellow and black alternating patterns for like a barber shop pole, but with yellow and black, and then a yellow pop filter.
You can definitely see the hints of blues aesthetic in those designs.
Yeah, definitely. But it’s all yellow and black to look like a yellow jacket. It comes in this crazy, huge case that is shaped like a beehive.
So it has a nice packaging to it.
Can I say, I always thought that the idea of a King B was funny, because I mean bees are a matriarchy.
You should have gotten on their branding team. Maybe that’s why they’re no longer in business.
Maybe, maybe.
They actually shut down the line. Yeah. They actually shut down the line, which is why it was so cheap.
But if you watched the latest episode of Voice Over Body Shop, they actually were laughing at me for purchasing this mic.
I want to check that out.
It was funny. But they had actually tried it out in a shootout a couple of years ago, too. And my point is, the price was just too good to pass up.
It was $100 now on Amazon, so I had to get it. And it also sounded really good. Like really, really good.
I was really impressed with the way it sounded. I compared it to the CAD E100 I used to have, the CAD E100S. It sounded almost identical in tonality and pickup pattern.
But that was also too sensitive, which is why I no longer have the CAD. So didn’t keep that either.
Didn’t you say it was quite bassy as well?
It picked up… I said it picked up low end well, which is good for me.
Oh, well, I misunderstood. Which was a similar problem you had with the CAD.
Ah, I got it.
Right.
So then I decided that maybe the neat worker bee would be a good replacement. Let’s try out the whole line. Yeah, because that also was on a fire sale, whereas that used to be around $250.
I got one for $50, so I figured I’d give that a try too. And it’s a similar aesthetic, except it’s about half the size of the capsule. It’s a small capsule condenser, as opposed to the large and the king bee.
And I also like that, but ultimately it wasn’t any better than 10 other mics I’ve had over the last couple of years. So I got rid of that as well. So now I’m back to where I started.
I’m still using the BP-40, and probably won’t change that anytime soon. That’s a lie. But at least I’ll say that for now.
Well, actually, there’s a couple of mics that you might be interested in, because I know you’re trying to find that kind of balance. One is kind of hard to find, but I did see somebody selling one recently. It was like the K-E-L-U-M-D, I think.
It was like a $200 or $300 mic. They said it was a condenser that sounds like the Shure SM7B.
Ooh! That is exciting.
Yeah, I thought that would peak your interest. I’ll try and find a link for you as well. And one of the mics that I’ve been lusting after for a while, and I wish I had gotten it when it was first released, is this dynamic, broadcast dynamic from Giffel.
They make the same company that makes my condenser mic, the Giffel M930, the MD300. And when it came out, it was like a $500 dynamic, which is not unheard of. But then they lost…
They don’t have as many US suppliers as they have in the past, so that price quickly went up to $770. And then it’s like another $100 to $200 for their shock mount. So I don’t know if I would rather get that than like a used 103 or something like that.
But like aspirational QGB goals, right?
So Giffel MD300?
Yes, Giffel MD300. I mean, you might save more money if you just flew over to Germany and see if you could get it locally.
Maybe I could get Armand to bring me one. Armand? When you come to New York, maybe?
I wonder what suppliers they have over there. But anyways, if you guys can glean anything from these stories, it’s that deals can be had, especially if you’re patient, right? I mean, both the mics that Paul got recently and the Apogee Mic Plus have been out for a couple of years now.
And whether they get discontinued or maybe a newer model is made, that’s an opportunity to really reap on some discounts. Unless, of course, you’re like us and buy multiple cheap mics. But anyways…
Yeah, it’s kind of like cell phone technology, right? If you don’t need the iPhone 10, what is it, 10 Plus R now, and you’re happy with the 8 Plus, you can save yourself about half the price and still have a heck of a phone. Works the same way with microphones.
I’ll take silver medals any day, man. Well, that pretty much wraps up our questionable gear purchases. We’ll get to our interview with Simon Vance in just a second, right after these sponsors.
Right, so let me tell you about our sponsor IPDTL, which is the Cost Effective ISDN Replacement. It’s great for interviews, outside broadcasts, and voiceover. There’s no special hardware or software required.
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So thank you to IPDTL for being a sponsor of the show.
How many times does this happen to you? You’re listening to the radio when this commercial comes on, not unlike this one, and this guy starts talking, not unlike myself.
Or maybe it’s a woman that starts talking, not unlike myself, and you think to yourself, geez, I could do that.
Well, mister, well, missy, you just got one step closer to realizing your dream as a voiceover artist, because now there’s Global Voice Acting Academy. All the tools and straight from the hip, honest information you need to get on a fast track to doing this commercial yourself.
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Speak for yourself, buddy. I like what I do.
And you will too when you’re learning your craft at Global Voice Acting Academy. Find us at globalvoiceacademy.com.
Because you like to have fun.
Walgreens. Because it’s flu season. You live in a place with doorknobs and handrails and, you know, people.
We tried booking a vacation rental on one of those other websites. They don’t always tell you everything.
We are back live from the red carpet.
California leads the way for change in America, and so does Kamala Harris.
Rated M for Mature.
Claire Redfield.
And who exactly are you?
So, yeah, what hashtag should I use to describe a grown man in a tuxedo rustling a goat?
And prior to 1933, many of them belonged to a variety of political parties that were now outlawed in Germany.
This is the story of how Q got curly. Quinn was crazy about curls, curly fries, curly straws, curly haired dogs.
Michael here. Thanks for listening to the VO Meter podcast. It’s one of my favorites.
If you’re looking for a great demo like the ones you just heard, check out jmcdemos.com for more information.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Our guest is Simon Vance, who began his illustrious narration career as a BBC radio presenter and newsreader in London and is now the critically acclaimed narrator of nearly a thousand audiobooks, winner of 70 audiophile earphone awards and a 16-time audio award recipient.
Some of his best-selling and most critically acclaimed performances include Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel and Rod, the autobiography of Rod Stewart. Other well-known titles include The King’s Speech by Mark Loge and Peter Conradi, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander series, all 21 titles, Frank Herbert’s original Dune series, Stieg Larsen’s Millennium series, which you might know from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Alan Moore’s magnum opus Jerusalem, something that took 10 years to write and was over 60 hours of final produced audio. Ladies and gentlemen, it is our absolute pleasure to introduce the man with more audio nominations for single voice titles than any male narrator on the planet, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Simon Vance.
How are you doing, sir?
I’m doing fine. Always fun to sit through. Thank you.
It was an audiobook sized intro for you. We are so happy to have you. So how are you doing?
I’m doing pretty good. I got terribly sick yesterday, but we don’t need to go into that. For some reason, I’m feeling remarkably good today, and it may be because I knew I was going to be talking to you and Paul.
Oh, thank you so much. So I mentioned in the intro that you started your career as a BBC radio presenter and newsreader. How exactly did you start from there and get to where you are now as a critically acclaimed audiobook narrator?
Well, it started because I… There’s connections that go back further than the BBC, but I’ll try and cut that short because we don’t have a huge amount of time, and I could go on for hours about this. But I had a school friend who went to the BBC to be a Radio 4 newsreader, and I visited him in his apartment, and he had a book on the side that I asked him about.
He said, oh, yeah, I record for the blind in my spare time. I do my regular shifts at the BBC, but in my spare time I give a couple of hours a week, an afternoon a week, to the Royal National Institute for the Blind’s Talking Book Service. I think it’s called something slightly different now.
But when I went up to the BBC, I went up in 1983 to Radio 4, and I hadn’t been in London before. I didn’t have a lot of connections, and I found I had a lot of weekdays free because I’d worked weekends, and I didn’t know what to do, and I thought, oh, I know. This friend of mine, Chris, had done the RNIB.
I love reading. I’ll go and do that. So I volunteered.
I took the audition, and they said, well, you’re okay. Yeah, so I went along for one afternoon a week, about eight or nine years while I was at the BBC, and I always look on that as my apprenticeship. It was almost unpaid apprenticeship.
They paid us something like five pounds an afternoon for travel expenses, but that was basically where I learned the trade.
Well, you obviously took to it, and you haven’t looked back, so to speak. So tell us, what do you like most about audiobooks versus other types of voice work?
I think this says something about me. I think one of the things I love about it, although I can be a bit of an exhibitionist, I can go up on stage and perform and do all kinds of things. I was an actor for years.
I rather like being on my own. I like being shut into this little six by four cubicle, and it’s all up to me. I’ve heard this, a lot of people have said it, that the great thing for an actor is that, as opposed to being on stage, where you have to listen to what the director says and you’ve got to work with all these other uncooperative actors, it can be really a stressful occasion.
In the cubicle, there’s no one else. When I’m working, I mean, I can occasionally work with a director, but it’s very rare. Usually I’m left to my own devices, and that’s the way I like it.
I am the voice of God in the book, as it were. I am everything. I’m all the characters.
I dictate everything that happens. So that’s perhaps one of the main aspects of it that I love when I look back on why I’m doing it. And I think the other things I do, I mentioned I love reading, and I love immersing myself in other worlds.
I think I might have been one of the first to mention it. I know way, way back. I’ve heard many people say this since, but back in 2008 when I got the book list, Award Voice of Choice, I mentioned in my speech that it’s a little like stepping into a TARDIS, because back in 2008, not everybody over here knew about Doctor Who, but I don’t know where I’m going to go.
And it’s an adventure. Every day is an adventure. Every week is a different…
It’s a completely different adventure with a different book. And it’s that. I could almost be accused of being ADHD perhaps, but I’m not.
But I think it’s the kind of a job that appeals to people who like change, and I love to change. I love the change up that happens between books.
So, speaking of that, I mean, nowadays you hear the importance for actors to kind of… to find their niche, to really get super specific and focused. But you, on the other hand, I mean, you’ve done almost a thousand books from just about every genre and have managed to win awards from many of them, including fiction, nonfiction, mystery, history, science fiction and fantasy.
How does each genre affect your approach to how you prep and narrate a certain work?
Well, just go back to the first part of your question. I was very lucky. I came into the business when there weren’t that many narrators.
I mean, 40, 50, maybe a few more. I don’t know. I only knew maybe a dozen.
And I got to do everything. There wasn’t a question of, is it this genre? Are you good at this genre?
I think I auditioned for the Stephen Matron, Jack Albury books, Patrick O’Brien’s books. I did audition for that, because I think they wanted to see if I could narrate a battle scene. But I’d already been narrating for about 12 years over here by that time, and I was pretty good at just about everything.
So I’m very lucky in that sense, and I often wonder how on earth I would have found my way into the industry these days. Because I don’t know what genre I’d be particularly good at if I were to start now. I mean, I do so many different things.
Does it make a difference to me what genre I’m going to be reading? Not really. I mean, not from…
not from the sense of how I read. And that may be blasphemy to some people, because I know people teach in sort of styles, and you narrate this way if it’s that book and this way if it’s that book. But you’re always telling a story.
And I think the only differences for me are from a technical standpoint. A fantasy is going to have a thousand odd words and names that you’re going to have to either make up or negotiate with the author as to how they should be pronounced. I say negotiate.
The author has the final say, of course. The author can provide lists and so on. But apart from that, it’s an instinct, it’s a mindset.
I’m not somebody who can say, well, now it’s this book, I’m going to read it this way. I think probably if you look back at how I’ve narrated a mystery and how I’ve narrated a horror and how I’ve narrated a fantasy, there are probably subtle differences. I don’t know what they are.
If I step into a room, it’s like… Here’s a metaphor I’ve suddenly come up with. But if you step into a room, you don’t know…
If you don’t know what’s in the room or who’s in the room, you don’t know quite how you’re going to behave. But there are certain ways, if you step into the room and Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of England, is in the room, you’re going to behave in a different way from if you walk in and there’s your best mate from the pub. And it’s sort of a little bit like that.
That’s a metaphor at the top of my head and may not entirely work, but it just seemed to come to me that that’s the way it is. You start, you look at a book and you go, oh, this is this kind of book. Okay, this is what I’m going to say.
I’m going to speak it like this. And I don’t think there’s hard and fast rules from one… I think you can read a horror like a murder mystery.
You can probably read a romance like a thriller. So many things, because often there’s an aspect of everything in every other one, if that makes sense.
Well, on a related note, let’s talk a little bit about your characterization choices. Do you approach it the same way for each genre, or does it kind of depend on the source material?
Well, it does. I mean, in that sense, perhaps the genre. But it depends how the author…
Well, and the examples would be, you know, if it’s Charles Dickens, the very broad characters. And I know that well, that’s an easy word. And there are writers who will write like that.
If it’s a comedy, if it’s a humor book, then you’re going to have some liberality with the way the people are. And you’ll get sort of eccentrics and so on. If it’s a murder mystery, you don’t want too many huge broad characters.
You don’t want to indicate who people are necessarily, because you might be giving away the plot. I’m very unprocess worthy, if that’s a word. I tend to go by instinct all the time.
And because I work alone and don’t have a producer, director, and studio time to pay for, and all the rest of it, and engineer, and so on, if I feel like something’s not working, I can stop and go back and do it again. For the most part, I feel like it tends to work. My instincts are pretty good.
I was just looking, because in an audio file magazine, in June’s audiobook month, they had profiles every day of their golden voices. And I was one of them, and they mentioned Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. And the comment they had from somebody reviewing it was that all the voices fit perfectly.
And I thought, oh, that’s good. I’m so glad. It’s like, oh, I guess they did.
I feel like, you know, I’m telling a whole story. I don’t want to do anything that jars the listener out of the story. I think that’s a good rule.
You don’t want to be picking a character that doesn’t fit. Otherwise, the listener is going to be sort of thinking about you or that voice or that person, and they’re not going to be listening to the story. So whatever you do needs to fit with a story, and that, in a sense, will mean that certain genres may get different voices.
I mean, obviously, in fantasy, you’re going to have a lot of orcs and trolls, and you don’t have a lot of trolls with high-pitched voices talking very delicately. I suppose we could now. I don’t know.
But most of the time, they’re all like that, so that’s the kind of voice I do for that. So it does vary along across the way, but it’s usually, as I say, instinct.
Very cool. So extending from that, do you find that you have to tweak voices since it’s such an instinctive process, or is it you just make that choice at the beginning and that tends to be the one that fits, that feels appropriate to you?
Yeah, I think it’s important. Tweaking something later on is difficult, because then you might have to go back and read it again. But no, I get it.
Here’s an interesting thing, though. I was responding to… Somebody sent me a friend who knew somebody who liked books and had a couple of questions.
And one of the questions they said, it felt more like a criticism. It was like, why do voices vary sometimes? And it’s like, oh, God, do they?
Which one did I do where they vary? You hope they don’t. And yeah, I mean, that would be a mistake.
I think it comes immediately or not at all. And so I don’t find myself double-guessing later on. I think it’s rare that I’ve ever…
I mean, the thing is, you tend to review the book. I hesitate to say prepare by reading it 100% because I’m very experienced. I can pick up a lot from scanning the book.
I tend to scan the book. If I’m looking for words, then I scan words. Sometimes I’ll read it solidly.
I’m right in the middle. You mentioned The Girl with the Dragon there, too. I’m about to start recording the sixth book in that series next week.
So I’m actually reading that solidly because it’s the kind of book that you need to know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. And there’s a lot of characters coming back from previous books, so I’ve got to find out who they are and refresh my memory on the voices. But generally speaking, I will get the idea of the character by scanning the book, and that’ll be enough.
So when I commit at the beginning, I’ll stick with that voice.
Well, we talked a little bit about this at Johnny’s Splendiferous Workshop, how somebody asked this question about going back and readjusting characters, and I can’t remember if it was you, but I don’t think it was. But whoever it was said, well, I like to think that the character grows in the story, and I reflect that as I’m growing into the character with my vocalizations. So in some ways, it’s a give and take, and I guess if you do it right, then the character should be a little bit different at the end of the book than they were at the beginning.
Would you agree with that?
It depends how long the book is, and I think… I don’t remember precisely, but I don’t know whether they were talking about a series. And obviously, characters will change over a long series.
And I think one of the things that came up… I know this came up recently. I don’t know if it was then, but where you give a particular voice to one character who’s a small character in the first book, and it turns out they’re the main character in the fourth book, and you gave them an impossible voice in the first book.
So somehow, they’ve matured enough to change their voice into something that you can do for three or six hours by the fourth book.
I think that was Johnny’s story about how he had a little boy who was asthmatic, and he made him completely over the top with sort of choking on every word, and then he couldn’t maintain that for the standalone book.
Yeah, so the doctor somehow found a cure or at least alleviated the sound of his voice by the fourth book.
That’s definitely a danger.
So we spoke about some of the awards that you’ve received over the years. One in particular that I found particularly impressive was in 2017, you received the award for Best Male Narrator for Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. I mean, not only was that an epic project, but I’m just curious what your experience was narrating the book and what it was like to receive such a prestigious award like that.
The awards… It’s fantastic when that happens. As you listed, I do have a few of those.
But the one for that one, particularly the amount of work I put into that book, it was like, yes, you know, I did what I needed to do. The actual process I went through with that, they asked me, Recorded Books called me on this, and I was like, Alan Moore? Oh my God!
And I contacted, I know Neil Gaiman vaguely, and I contacted him because I wanted to share the news, and I didn’t think it was anything I’d talk about publicly to him. And he said, Oh, do you want me to put you in touch with Alan? And I said, Yeah.
And he said, You should go over there. You should go visit and spend some time with him, because he always writes about his hometown in Northampton. And I thought, I didn’t have time.
And it turns out, because then I went to APAC, the audio publishers conference, and there were big banners everywhere for Alan Moore, Jerusalem. I thought, This is an important book. And I thought, I’d better see if I can find space.
And I actually have four or five days just before I was due to start recording it. They wanted it at the end of June, and I had about four days at the beginning of June, so I flew to England. I got Neil to come to get through to him and arranged a bit of a rigmarole, trying to get in touch with him, because Alan doesn’t carry a phone with him.
You have to leave a message at his home anyway. We eventually got in touch. I went over there.
I met him for an afternoon. He wandered around the town, and it was wonderful to spend time with not only the author of the book I’m about to read, but such a fascinating man. And I flew there, flew back, started recording the next day, and it was, as you say, 60 hours.
I managed it in just under a month. I think there were 30 chapters, and I tried to do about one chapter a day, something like that.
That’s incredible. That’s about 20 hours a week, yeah?
It was a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
No, it was probably about 12, 15 hours. But it was extraordinary because each chapter was mostly a story unto itself. Some of them did connect, but some of them focused on one thing, and it just split up nicely.
But so much variety, so much incredible variety, and it wandered through time, and it wandered through heaven and hell and everything else. It’s an incredible book, but it was a tough one. And there was one chapter that Alan had described in one of his pre-publications, interviews as frankly unreadable, for which I thanked him.
And I said, can you give me any clues here? He said, well, read it with an Irish accent.
It’s going for Joyce, huh?
And that worked. Well, it was basically… He did chapters styled on authors.
So he had… I can’t think of the authors he chose, but various different authors. And this was one that was James Joyce, like Finnegan’s Wake.
Is it Finnegan’s Wake? Is that the one that’s incomprehensible?
Ulysses, I thought, as well.
I’m going. I don’t know. Yeah, Ulysses, possibly.
No, it was the one… Yeah, anyway, it was the one that takes years to understand. Anyway, I did it, and I sort of understood it, and I had to have a director actually listen in.
I wanted my director to listen in on that. Normally, I was fine with everything. And he did.
But after the first few hours, he said, You’re fine on your own. Keep going. And it was just…
The whole thing was quite a mammoth exercise. So, as you say, finally, to get the award at the end of it was thrilling and sort of justification. Yeah, it was worth it.
Well, you mentioned APAC, Simon, and I attended my first APAC this year, I’m ashamed to say, but I had a great experience, especially as being a first timer. Can you tell me, as such a veteran of the industry, what do you look to get out of a conference like that?
It’s hard to say what I get out of. I mean, I get out of meeting… I meet people.
As I said, I like to sit in this box on my own. I like that most of the time, but I also like to meet people as well. And it does give me a chance to meet, you know, other people who work within the industry, a lot of my old friends and publishers and so on that I’ve known for years.
I’ve been narrating in the States for 27 years, something like that. And there’s always something to learn. Sitting in on some of these, I’m trying to think what I watched this year, but there’s always going to be little things.
And sometimes it’s not that you’re learning something new. It’s just refreshing your memory about that. Oh, I should keep that in mind when I’m working.
I think there was a lot of stuff I missed this year, unfortunately. I went to a few of the sessions, but I hear there’s some very, very good sessions. APAC is an extraordinary opportunity for narrators new to the business or not long in the business, because it really can expand your horizons.
It’s difficult. You don’t want to go running up to people and say, employ me, take me on, or answer all my questions, please. It’s the beginning of a social connection.
And I’ll tell you, when I was working in my little box in the corner of the garage one or four years before, I went to New York for an APA event. My first one was a kind of a speed dating thing. It’s not like it is now, but I got to stand in front of an audience of 30 publishers, and I read for five minutes, and then afterwards we went and talked to each of the publishers doing the sort of speed dating thing.
On that occasion, I had nothing to do with APAC. It wasn’t a conference, but I got to meet people from Tantor Audio, and two years later, one of them employed me. Prior to that, I only worked for Blackstone and Books on Tape.
But it was the beginning of meeting people, and it was a few years after that that things just exploded in the industry, and I was able to take advantage of having met the people at APAC. It’s a little different now, and people ask me, how do you get into the industry? What’s good to do?
And so on and so forth. And I’ll still say going to APAC is very good. But it was easier in my day because there were fewer of us.
It’s a very delicate dance you have to do, as I say, between getting noticed and getting noticed. You couldn’t get noticed in a good way, or you can get noticed in a bad way. And it’s that delicate dance of, okay, just be a nice guy.
And I hope I can say this on your podcast, because I was just in a vocal master class, and they were talking about other areas of voiceover, and they had agents on the panel and stuff, and they said, here’s the rule number one, don’t be a dick. And I think that is so true across almost every industry, probably. But it’s important.
You know, be a nice guy. Be a good fun person, people like you, and you don’t have to go and say, hey, I’m a brilliant narrator. They’ll find out if they get to like you, and you’re at APEC.
It’s a given if you’re at APEC, you’re either a narrator or a publisher. So they’ll find you somehow.
So speaking of sort of guiding newer aspiring audiobook talent, you actually coach as well. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got into doing that.
Okay, I don’t coach regularly. I will turn up at Johnny Heller’s Splendiferous Workshop on a panel or two, and I’m actually going to go off to his New England narrator retreat this year. But I don’t do…
I don’t coach in the same way that Sean Pratt does or Johnny Heller himself. I don’t have a regular coaching group, and I don’t… Because here’s my thing.
I don’t… I think you may have guessed by now, I don’t know exactly what it is that I’m doing right. I have some ideas, but it would need me to sit down and write those ideas down.
I’m a very lazy person. I love it when they come out instinctually. I love it when I can sit with a panel, I listen to people, and I go, oh, you know what?
Do this or think this. Oh, this is what I do. Oh, I think maybe that’s what I do.
Why don’t you try that? I’m very messy in that respect, so I don’t want to take people’s money on false pretenses. Now, it may be, down the road, I shall have formulated…
I’m way better knowing what I’m doing now than I was 10, 20 years ago. I have some idea of what it is that I’m doing right, but I don’t have the language to make it clear to a student. Scott teaches at the UCLA now, Scott Brick, and they have courses and so on and so forth.
I know I’m good. That sounds very modest, of course. I know I can do this.
I know I must be doing something special, but I don’t know quite what it is. And I mentioned this vocal master class I went to. We did a vocal jazz aside thing to warm everybody up beforehand, and they were splitting us into parts, and some guy came in and said, Oh, people doing that part, put in a little…
and it was so instinctual for this guy to say, this will make it sound better. And it did. It was fantastic.
But I looked at this guy and said, this guy lives and breathes choral singing or chorus singing, backing singing. He knows instinctively what it is. I sort of know instinctively what sounds good, but I don’t have the language necessarily to have people pay me lots of money to be able to nail it in one hour or something like that.
You just need a translator. One of the highlights of Johnny’s workshop was Simon saying a phrase at the panel, and then Paul Allen Rubin would jump in and say, wait, wait, wait, what Simon actually means is this. And he would go on for another 10 minutes explaining what Simon wanted to say and probably did it better if I’m hearing your opinion, right, Simon?
Well, Paul is wonderful. I love Paul, but he’s not a guy I would have thought of as being concise. He can talk.
So I felt slightly insulted that I thought I was being precise, and he would come in and say, well, I think I can say what Simon’s saying in fewer words.
I love Paul. It was a funny moment, and we played on that joke through the rest of the day. In fact, he’s going to be out at the New Hampshire retreat, so I think I can try and get my own back on him.
That’s good.
But I wouldn’t feel too guilty about that, Simon. Because in any profession, there are people who can do it and people who can teach it. Like you said, it’s a different skill to be able to articulate what you’re doing to someone else and guide them to that path.
But like we were talking about before, I think your air of spontaneity, your confidence, and your instincts are definitely useful for aspiring talent to pay attention to. So I think you can bring value in that direction.
Well, that’s good of you to say. It gives me confidence when I see Johnny’s next critique. It’s a funny thing.
I used to do a class. There was Voice One in San Francisco. Elaine Clark runs that school, Voice School.
And I’d go in there and do sight reading and stuff. And I think I’ve done a couple of audiobooks once. And I’d be terrified in the weeks leading up to it.
Like have I… What am I going to do? How am I going to do it?
On the day, in the moment, I loved it. I love teaching in the moment. But it’s the prep.
It’s trying to figure out, worrying about whether I’m going to do the right thing and the fact that people are paying me. Oh, God. So, no, it’s nice to know.
But I think I may for now anyway continue with the off-the-cuff coaching, if that’s what you call it, the sort of in the moment.
Very cool.
Well, Simon, one thing I was curious about is your performance. You mentioned being in the little box most of the time. Do you ever record as an ensemble, either in a studio or in a production house?
Doing a multi-voice or something like that? I mean, I have gone and been directed. I did last year, I did George RR.
Martin’s Fire and Blood, the first part of the…
Yeah, I’m actually listening to that right now….
the first part of the history of the Targaryens, yeah. And that because of, I think, for… Well, they wanted to keep security, and also I think they just want to make sure it was done right.
And they brought me into their studios here in LA in Woodland Hills.
I love it so far, by the way.
Say that again?
I’m listening to it right now, and I love it so far. I’m about two-thirds of the way through.
It was a wonderful thing. And in fact, I’m looking for a chance to shake hands with George RR. Martin at some point.
And I see he’s doing a New Zealand conference next year, and my wife is doing one on voice at exactly the same time. So I’m actually going to go out there, and it’s the World Science Fiction Convention 2020. It’s in New Zealand.
So I’m going to go out there, and hopefully I’ll be able to meet George and thank him for that. You know, the first Dune, they did that as a kind of a multi-voice, and I did all my bits, and then my bits were attached to their bits. And I’ve done a bunch of books that have multi-characters in them, multiple narrators, but I’ve never sat in the room.
I would have loved to. I did Dracula. That was one of the Audi winners.
I had Tim Curry and Alan Cumming in it, and it was a great cast. I would have loved to have been in the room and recorded with them, but I never got to meet them. I had to do it on my own, my little bits.
But no, so I haven’t. I haven’t done any ensemble. I mean, I went into the studio recently.
My colleague who used to be at the BBC, two Dirk Maggs, he does a lot of audio drama, and he was recording the William Gibson Alien 3 script. And he’d done a lot of the supporting characters in London. They’d all been recorded and done, but he came over here to get William Beale and Lance Henriksen, who were the two actors from Alien 2, who were going to be in the William Gibson script, and he had to do them separately.
So he had me and my colleague Elizabeth Knowledon, another narrator in LA, and we sat in and we did all the other voices so that Lance Henriksen and William Beale could give life to their characters by acting off us. And we were all in the same room at the same time doing that. And that was a lot of fun.
But for narration, no. That’s not happened.
Very cool. So moving back to your studio, your happy place, I’ve seen in previous interviews that you’re a bit of a gearhead, like Paul and myself. So I was wondering if you’d mind giving us a little studio tour, like what kind of microphone or booth do you like to use?
It’s interesting. You know, over the years, and I suppose this is when people come into the industry, you start relatively cheap. You’ve got to get something that works.
These days, you can get stuff that works relatively cheaply. And I can remember I used to use Windows computers and so on and so forth. Everything needed replacing every two or three or four years.
And it was just a pain. And I think I’ve had this set up for about 10 years, something like that. The microphone, to begin with that, is a Neumann U87.
I had the TLM 103 before that. Oh, I used a Sennheiser 416 for a brief period. What happened was I was looking for other microphones, trying out different ones, and I thought, oh, I’ll try the U87.
I hope to God I don’t like it because it’s so expensive. And it seemed to be the one that unfortunately fitted my voice perfectly. But the thing is, it’s worked solidly for years.
It’s a good investment for me. It works for my voice. It doesn’t always work for everybody else’s.
My cubicle is a little 6x4x7 vocal booth.com. I’m sitting here. I got a solid iron chair.
I don’t have one of those sort of fancy Harman Kardon or whatever they call them chairs.
So the Aaron Millers or whatever? Harman Miller. That’s right.
Together we can make it.
There you go. But it’s a good solid one piece thing. It’s never going to creak because it’s got a cast iron frame.
I read off an iPad Pro. I was just reading off it today thinking, I wonder if I can find an excuse to buy the new iPad Pro, because that’s what it’s all about, is finding an excuse to buy the new one. But it’s the big one, because I did have the smaller iPad, but I’m getting older and once the iPad Pro was introduced, I leapt on that because it takes me back to the days when you had pieces of paper in front of you, it’s that size.
And back in the day, I would have piles and piles of paper. I have a screen in front of me, it’s a relatively large one, I think 20 inches across, I think. What else is in here?
So everything else then leads through a hole in the wall to my Mac Mini, and I’ve had that for many years. I have an Apollo… Is it Apollo 1 Solo?
I’d have to leap out and have a look, and that involves me walking away from the microphone. I don’t think you’d like that. I have a Grace M103 is my preamp, which is a bit fancy.
I don’t really need that. I did try the valve one, because I thought that might bring warmth and stuff. But the difference was negligible, and valves deteriorate.
The difficulty with recordings, you don’t want anything deteriorating on you. I used to have a microphone. I can’t remember which one it was, way back, but it had a sort of battery inside it.
It was an American-made thing.
Oh, was it the CAD? CAD E100?
Oh, it could be, yes, but it was the first one. Yes, yes, it was. And the thing is, I went through a period of time where I would be recording for an hour, and the volume would be dropping off, and I wouldn’t be aware of it until I looked at the file.
And I can remember boosting the volume of the game. In my post, after I’d been in the studio, I had to boost the end of the chapter to try and make the whole thing sound normal. That was…
you don’t want to cut corners. You need the top gear. So, yeah, so that’s my…
the idea of a valve thing that could deteriorate and I wouldn’t absolutely know what was happening. And I’ve had that experience with preamps, that cheaper, smaller preamps, something starts going wrong, and you don’t really know it’s going wrong until it’s really wrong. And then you wonder what on earth have you spoiled that you’ve been recording for the last month or two.
But I think that’s pretty much it. I tend to… I have the files on the Mac Mini.
I’m extravagant. I have an iMac 27-inch in the office outside here that I then… I transfer the files to that.
I have a storage that I put them on first, and I transfer it over, so I’ve got lots of backups. That’s important. And I record…
and I do my editing on that. The software I use, because… not because I think it’s better than anything else, so don’t suddenly rush out and buy it because I said so.
Not that anybody would. But I use Steinberg’s WaveLab 25 years ago, because I started recording on to computer hard drives in 1996, which is probably before a lot of people did. And I went to find software, and this guy sold me the Cubase thing, the whole thing, which is a music recording software, and like 25 CD disks and stuff to load it onto the computer.
And I found this WaveLab 1.0 in the middle of this, which worked perfectly. It was all I needed, and I’ve stayed with it ever since then. And now we’re on WaveLab 9.5, is what I’m on now.
I’ve got Elements in the studio, and I have the professional one in the office. But I think Elements is actually… WaveLab Elements has everything you need for audio book recording.
But as you say, I’m a gearhead. I like to have way more than I need. I think that covers pretty much everything in my recording chain, as they call it.
Well, that’s great. I mean, it’s a very simple but elegant setup, and I think you can just hear all of the tongues of gearheads everywhere just salivating from the description of your studio.
Well, I think back to when I started in the corner of a garage in Walnut Creek in Northern California with moving blankets hanging over the sides, and I had, I think, a $50 Shure microphone, and a little, I had a two tape deck, a two cassette tape deck, and you could sort of do a, you did this punch and roll. I don’t use punch and roll, I use straight record. But back in the day, it was a sort of punch and roll.
It was the only way you could do it, with a cassette. You just, you’d make a mess, so you’d run it back, you’d listen, and then you’d drop it in the record and pick up, and very manual.
Yeah, gives you a whole new appreciation for what’s available now.
Oh, it’s just that, I mean, kids today don’t know how loopy they are.
Kids in their MP3s.
Do you know who I learned, you engineers?
That’s right. It’s a bit like that, yeah.
Well, that’s great. Sounds like you’re right at home in your little cubicle of the world. I was wondering about the booth, because I almost bought your old booth.
I know that you had sold it to Sean Pratt at one point. And I was training with Sean at the time, and he was getting rid of it when he was moving back to Oklahoma. And he said, do you want it?
It was Simon Vance before me. And I said, ooh, it’s very tempting, but in the end, I couldn’t have the space for it in my house.
That was a Gretsch can. Yeah, because I moved up to thevocalbooth.com, and I think Blackstone Audio bought it from me, and then Sean bought it from them, and I don’t know where it went. But then, because for a couple of years, I was working in both around San Francisco, where we owned a house, and where we were renting down in LA.
There was a whole complicated life story in there, but we were down here for other reasons as well before we finally moved down to Los Angeles. But I had to have two studios, and I actually had one of those made ones… Scott Peterson.
Scott Peterson, yes. In the two places, I had the vocalbooth.com up north, and I had the Scott Peterson booth down south. And then when we finally moved down here, I had to move Scott Peterson booth out because that was hard to move, hefty old thing.
And Andrea Ems bought that. And she actually had me sign it. So she pays a little tribute to me, apparently, every time she gets into the booth.
It seems to be working for her. She’s doing awfully well.
Well, actually, I was curious, which model vocalbooth.com booth was that? Because I know they have different, like, silver and gold and diamond.
Which one? The one I have now, or the one I sold?
Your current one.
My current one is, well, I can’t… It’s double-walled.
So that’s the platinum.
I think it might be diamond.
Is it shaped like a diamond?
No.
That’s the platinum.
It’s got to be about ten years old, I think. And I’ve taken it down and put it up so many times. I’m going to do it one more time.
I’m building an outside, down at the bottom of the garden, in this house we bought near Pasadena. And we’re going through a nightmare of permitting with LA County. It’s taking forever, but I’m going to have a room down there.
It’s going to be like 14 by 22 feet. And I’m going to put this in the corner of that until I get to the point where I want to be, I want to build one into that room. Probably use George Whitham for that, who is a very good engineering guy.
Yep, good friend of the show.
So I’ll… but this has been great. And it’s not the easiest thing to take down, but actually my wife and I have managed it just between the two of us, and ideally three people, but I highly recommend their booths.
So they’re good stuff.
Very cool. Well, thank you for that. My gear list is satisfied for another week.
So before we go, Simon, I want to know what’s next for Simon Vance. I mean, are there any projects or titles that you’re excited about that you can mention? I mean, you talked about the one in the Millennium Series.
Are there anything else that you can talk about?
Yeah, well, yeah, the Millennium Series is just starting that one. Then the one, the big one that’s coming up in a month or two, and I’ve been looking forward to it for four years or something, Brent Weeks writes a fantasy, and he’s extremely successful. He had a whole series that was New York Times best-selling, and this is the Lightbringer Series, and he hired me for that many years ago.
I did the first, actually did the second part first, and then we went back and re-did the first part, and then it was supposed to be a trilogy. This is now the fifth part, and it’s been coming for about three or four years. It was supposed to be ready last year, and it is, I just got the main script, or at least an advanced script, and it’s about 35 hours long, and it’s the conclusion to the series, and I’m just so looking forward to it, because he is absolutely one of my favorite writers.
He has a great sense of humor, great plotting. The story, it’s fantasy. It has to do with creating colors and fighting with colors, and it sounds nonsense, but somehow he makes the logic of it work.
And as I say, his characters are wonderful, and I can’t wait to get into it, although it’s a huge 35 hours. Oh, God. There’s a part of me going, I want…
No, I don’t… Yes! No!
Oh, God.
Oh, come on. That’s half as long as Jerusalem was.
It’ll be fine. But Jerusalem was in the past. That’s done.
I don’t know if I could ever do… I guess it’s… You deal with what you’re given.
You know, I would love to think, oh, yeah, I’ll just do 10, 12-hour books from now on, but every so often, somebody drops this huge thing on your doorstep, and you go, oh, yeah, I can do that. One bite at a time.
Yeah, I know that feeling. Well, Simon, we’ve come to the end. We can’t thank you enough for being on the VO Meter.
I’ve been a big fan of yours ever since that Dune Series we talked about, and just love your work, and we’re so happy that you were able to join us today.
Well, thank you so much, Paul. It was a pleasure to meet you at AIPAC as well this year. It was great.
Yes, and Johnny’s Workshop. I really enjoyed your insights when you weren’t being not interrupted.
Yeah, I don’t think Alan will ever live that down there. Paul, I mean, Paul, yeah.
So I just wanted to extend my thank you to Paul’s as well, and is there anything that you want to promote before you leave? Where can people find out about Simon Vance?
I have a website which I’ve been supposedly renewing over the last two years. I haven’t got around to it yet. I did have a Wikipedia page, but apparently some pirates have attached some links to it, so Wikipedia has just taken it down.
We’re in the process of trying to put it back up. Not that that’s terribly expansive anyway. But yeah, the website simonvance.com.
And yeah, I do Twitter. I’m at simvan, S-I-M-V-A-N. And I do have a Facebook page.
I don’t contribute to my professional page very much, but I’m on the other one too. You can spot me a mile away.
Wonderful. Well, thanks again so much, Simon. It was a real pleasure.
And for me, thank you. It was great.
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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.
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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.
Well, thank you, Mr. Vance, Mr. Golden Voice himself. That was really, really cool to have him on the show. It’s been a lifelong goal.
That’s not true. It’s been a several-year goal for Sean. I’m not that old.
I was really excited when he reached out to us, actually, and just flattered that he wanted to be on our show. And I thank him so much.
I know, like, for those of you kind of pulling the curtain back a second, like, after Simon actually reached out to us, and he said, man, you guys have had an audiobook roundtable, a British roundtable. Where was I? When can I get on your podcast?
And you’re like, uh, now? I was a little beside myself, to be honest. I was really excited, and we quickly coordinated that.
And here we are. So thanks again, Simon, for being on the podcast. You are a wealth of information, and I loved hearing your stories.
So, that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a lot of great things coming up, so definitely stay tuned to the podcast.
Yeah, our next episode of the show will actually feature the pig himself, Mr. Bob Bergen. And then coming up in the middle of September, September 13th, 14th, and 15th, I will be at the Vocation Conference in New York, where I’m actually recording the podcast live, hopefully getting Sean in as well on some remote broadcasts, and then also presenting a session on networking. So if you go to the web page, you’ll see the information on my session.
Try not to laugh yourself silly when you see who else is presenting at the same time. But if you want to come by and say hi, I’d love to have you come to my session.
Very cool. I know you’re going to rock it, man. Thanks for listening, guys.
We’ll see you again 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 is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBooth2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMC Demos, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 41 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. We have a pretty exciting episode this week. We always say that, but sometimes it’s actually true.
We are featuring the reigning keynote address speaker from VO Atlanta, Kay Bess, and we’re really excited to bring you the talk we had with her. But first, before we do that, we’re proud to introduce a brand new segment for the VO Meter. Sean, tell us all about it.
All right, so you guys know the format of the podcast by now. One of the first things we do is our current events. Well, while it’s accurate, we wanted to think of a name for that segment that kind of fit our VO Meter, VU Meter theme.
So we came up with the idea of VO Meter reference levels. You guys should know by now, but one of the first things you do whenever you’re recording a voiceover is you check your levels, right? You set a reference level.
Since we’re kind of checking in with each other each episode to see where we’re at in our VO world, we thought that would be the perfect name for this new segment. So, ladies and gentlemen, may we give to you VO Meter Reference Levels.
We tried booking a vacation rental on one of those other websites. They don’t always tell you everything.
The stars take it to the red carpet.
We are back live from the red carpet. California leads the way for change in America, and so does Kamala Harris.
Rated M for Mature. Claire Redfield.
And who exactly are you?
So, yeah, what hashtag should I use to describe a grown man in a tuxedo wrestling a goat?
And prior to 1933, many of them belonged to a variety of political parties that were now outlawed in Germany.
This is the story of how Q got curly. Quinn was crazy about curls.
Curly fries, curly straws, curly haired dogs.
Hey, J. Michael here. Thanks for listening to the VO Meter podcast.
It’s one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a great demo like the ones you just heard, check out jmcdemos.com for more information.
In addition to what Sean said, the podcast has always been about referencing our own VO careers as well. It’s the tagline we use every time we introduce the episode. So having the voice over reference levels is a way for us to check in with each other and how we’re progressing in this crazy business.
And we’re really excited to announce that from here on out, the VO Meter reference levels will be brought to you by none other than VoiceOver Extra. So thanks to John Florian over at VoiceOver Extra. We’ve talked about them in the past, but as you probably know, they are the voice actor’s daily resource for building voice over success.
They are an online publication that has served the VO community for years, and John has become a really good friend of the show, and we thank him for allowing us to be featured on the publication and as a sponsor on the VO Meter reference levels.
VoiceOver Extra brings you the VO Meter reference levels. Seriously, guys, that’s the best you could come up with? Hey, it’s your show.
So thank you very much for that, John. I’ve talked about this a lot, and if you’ve ever talked to me in person, you know that VoiceOver Extra was very instrumental in my own progress and my own research for becoming a voice talent. I literally spent an entire year reading everything on their website, and it took about that long to get through everything that they offer.
And since then, they’ve added about another year or two’s worth of content. So I highly recommend that resource for any questions you might have regarding studio setup, performance technique, what to look for in a coach, great technology you can use in your business, anything under the sun to help improve your voice over business. So thanks again, John, for being a part of our podcast and for providing this great resource.
So now that we’ve gotten the LoveFest out of the way, what actually is happening in your VO career, Sean?
Well, I just actually wrapped up what’s called a peer-led workout through our GVA membership program. I always feel so good at that because I get to help talent get better at their reads. And it’s funny, I never really thought that I would get so much experience directing other talent, but I feel like it has really helped me or improved in my own performances.
So it’s something that I encourage people to try out if they ever have like an in-person or online workout group. Try giving each other feedback and see if it helps improve their reads and kind of use what you learn from your own coaching to kind of share that with others and see if it helps you really make those concepts more concrete in your own performances. In addition to that, I’ve just been, I just finished my regularly monthly, are you learning project?
Felt really good about that. And actually got another big project from a returning client. It was like an 80 page PowerPoint slide.
Unfortunately, it’s from a foreign client and there, while it was largely translated well, there were a lot of like odd preposition usages or just kind of unnatural native English sounding phrases. So as I reviewed the script, I took pages of notes and kind of gave them what I call translation suggestions. Cause like you don’t want to insult the client by saying this is terribly translated and things like that.
But I did want to kind of emphasize that, hey, I’m part of the team. I want to improve your message. So you’ll have a better response from your audience.
If you ever work with either like say an author or a foreign client whose work might not be or could probably do good with another round of editing, just have to be diplomatic in presenting that to them. And like, hey, here’s some ideas to help make this message a little bit more clear for your desired audience. And hopefully they’ll agree to it.
And that’ll make my performance a lot more easy because then I don’t have to worry about how to make non-conversational, poorly translated English sound conversational. Don’t be afraid to point some of those things out. And like I said, be prepared sometimes for whatever reason the client is like, nope, the script is the script.
Please read it as is. But who knows, if you’re confident and you put your foot down, you might be able to make those changes.
Sometimes you can even charge more for it. I’ve actually worked that into a fee before where it’s a long-term client and I’ve had to do so many corrections on the fly that I said, look, I’ll do this, but I’m gonna charge you for it. And it’s not a huge fee, maybe an extra 25 to $50 per script, but that can add up if you’re doing several projects over the course of a week or month for a client.
Oh, definitely, I definitely think that’s a service that you should have as a bit of an added value if you’re comfortable with that. Like for example, I come from an English education background, so I’m pretty confident in my abilities to edit a script. If you’re not confident though, maybe you have your own editor in mind that you could kind of pass that work to and then include that in your fee as well.
So these are ideas on how you can kind of build that partnership and make yourself even more of an asset to your client.
Yeah, for sure. So anything else cool going on?
So other stuff going on. So we have some more upcoming workouts this week through GVAA. We’ve got one with my good buddy, David Toback on Thursday.
And we’ve got another one with commercial booth director, Steven Reisberg. So Steven is one of my favorite commercial coaches that I’ve worked with. He’s got a lot of great ideas and he’s very much an actor’s director because he came from a very theatrical background and worked with some very close students of Meisner.
He specializes in the Meisner technique, if you’re familiar with that school of acting. But anyways, so if you’re a member with us, you can get those workouts for free as part of your membership. If you’re interested, you can head over to the GVA website and check out our membership levels.
And then check it out. I highly recommend it if you wanna get kind of an affordable, accessible resource for improving your performance. What’s going on in your VO world, Paul?
I’ve had a few cool things happen the last couple of weeks. Right before I left for vacation, which I’m just wrapping up, my first dual point of view romance novel came out.
Cool.
It’s called All I Know, Paradise Beach Book One. It was done with AV. Page, and it’s now available on Audible.
So check that out if you get a chance. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my parts, or both parts, or the book in general. And by all means, go buy it.
So I’m curious, when you do like a dual narration like that, how much are you collaborating with the other narrator?
A lot. In this case, it’s somebody I actually know. So we did a lot of back and forth about what sort of tone to take with the voices, where to place the, you know, as far as the vocal placement for the male, because she was doing the male voices as well.
So it’s one of those where it’s the whole story, as seen from the male character, and then also the whole story is seen from the female character. So the other narrator said, tell me which voice you’re going to use, because I want to try and match that as much as I can. Oh, cool.
Yeah, so that was something that I hadn’t really taken into account. Luckily, my partner took that into account, because I would have just done my normal voice and never given a second thought. But yeah, we tried to match up the male perspective as much as we could, and then me with the female characters as well, because they also appeared in my sections.
And there’s actually an episode where the two… It’s about a couple, and I guess they actually didn’t read the whole book, I just read my parts. But I think they eventually get married, and I had a scene with the two mothers, and my partner said, oh, I’m really glad you told me about that, because now I’ll know where to take the direction with the two mother characters.
So that was pretty neat. But a lot of collaboration about pronunciations, because there was one female character whose name could have gone two different ways, and in one section, it was pronounced Natalie, and one that was pronounced Natalia. So actually, together, we caught this sort of continuity error in the book.
And my partner was able to go back and talk to the author, who was also the rights holder in this case, and said, listen, which one is it? It was a good thing we did that, because there’s another book that’s coming out that features this character prominently that I think we’re both going to be doing as well. And now we know how to pronounce it, and did it right the first time.
So to answer your question, tons of collaboration, almost every day.
Well, that’s great. That’s really cool, because I know that’s not always the case. Like, I’ve certainly heard works where it could either be an ensemble or a collaboration, where it doesn’t seem like there’s that level of collaboration.
Like, say if it’s a larger publisher and they’re just recording the actors individually. So that’s really cool that you guys can be a lot more proactive in your collaboration.
Yeah, that’s true. In this case, it worked out really well. So another thing I did, again, just before vacation, was record another author doing their audiobook.
And I did this all remotely for the first time, which was really interesting. So…
Yeah, I can imagine.
I recorded here, kind of like I’m doing now with the podcast, and the author was in New York, and we just did it over IPDTL, and recorded the whole book about six hours remotely like that. So the way I did it was basically live booth direct, but remotely. So whenever there’s a mistake, I stopped, rolled back, and did a live punch, stopped for any sort of extraneous noise, and also something that I hadn’t thought of, but I guess the real reason this isn’t done more often is there were some dropouts.
Now, IPDTL is a great product. They’re a sponsor of our show, as everybody knows, but it’s still not a perfect situation, especially for a long-form genre like an audiobook. So there were some pickups that had to be done strictly due to internet dropout on either my end or the author’s end.
So all in all, it was a great experience. The book is done. It’s being uploaded to Audible as we speak, and I really enjoyed the experience.
That’s really cool. Like I said, I mean, that kind of goes into like wearing multiple hats, like practice directing as well as voicing, as well as that added value service, being able to provide your studio to other people. Because very often you’ll find sometimes you’ll be in a situation where there are only so many roles to go around, so you might not be able to act on a project, but you might be able to be the engineer or the director.
So it’s great to have that skill set as well.
Yeah, in this case, from a wallet standpoint, it was nice as well too, because I was the director and charged for studio time, and I also did all the editing and mastering for the book. So it was a nice little week I had there on my way to the beach right before, so it was a nice way to end that. And then the last thing I want to talk about is, while I was at the beach, as we all know the best way to get work is to book a vacation, right?
So I took my equipment with me, more than I usually do, actually. I’ve taken the approach the last couple of years of just not bringing anything with me because I can’t match the sound I have at home. But I thought, you know what, I’m going to bring it just in case because now I have the Vocalboot to Go Vomo that they supplied to me, so I figured I may as well use it, and I brought it with me along with one of my shotgun mics.
And sure enough, that first night, my long-term e-learning client said, we need you to do one piece and we need it this week. And I said, OK, it’s going to sound not as good as it normally does. Are you OK with that?
And they said, yeah, it’s fine. So I did the job, and actually, the first time I used the Vomo for a full job, I was really impressed with the way it sounded. Especially with earbuds, which is what I was using most of the time to edit, it sounded almost as good as the studio.
That’s really cool.
And this was with the ambient noise of the beach, and my kids and my mom and dad also in the background. I asked them to be quiet as much as they could, but you can’t control five people in the house all the time. And it really came out well.
I have to say the VoMo was really performed admirably. So if you have a vacation coming up, and you need a portable solution, I highly recommend the VoMo unit.
Yeah, I’m actually going to put some new videos together on how to use that and kind of comparing it to my more permanent setup with the VoMo, because I know there are some proponents and detractors for portable acoustic solutions, and I mean, they’re not for everybody, and I don’t recommend them as a long-term solution if you can help it, but as an entry-level solution, absolutely, and definitely as a travel one, because that’s what it’s made for. But I was recently recording some e-learning stuff. I was over at my girlfriend’s house, and I was recording her and her mother for my monthly e-learning stuff, because the client will actually ask for non-actors for these things for whatever reason.
And I mean, they had the furnace on in the background, they had television upstairs, and it didn’t get picked up. I was amazed. Granted, I was using a very directional microphone, and we were kind of positioning in a way that it would not interfere, and we did have some closed doors and levels of the house to help with that.
But I was really, really impressed just how little of that ambient noise was picked up. Granted, it’s not a panacea, it’s not a cure-all, it’s not a soundproofing solution, but it will knock a couple decibels down, and all in all, it really does do a good job of attenuating those echoes and reflections and stuff like that. But I definitely would recommend experimenting with the setup before you take it out on the road just to get more familiar with it and get ideal placement, because sometimes, depending on the microphone you’re using, you can get a noticeable bump in the bass frequencies just because you tend to be addressing it more closely.
And so be mindful of that, and you might need to do some EQing to make it sound a little bit more neutral. But all in all, it’s my favorite portable acoustic solution out there, and I can’t wait to get the newest model, because they’ve really kind of taken the feedback from myself and other voice talent on how to make it more durable. I understand they made a new carrying bag for it that allows it to actually be checked in without too much damage or anything like that.
They just made a bunch of incremental improvements that really shows that they listen to feedback that they’re given, and they really try to make each upgrade be very thoughtful and really try to improve the product.
Yeah, I totally agree. Now, one thing I forgot to mention, and realizing how much I crammed at this last week before I went on vacation, but also the end of June, I attended the Hot Genres Workshop with J. Michael Collins in Washington, DC.
So this was all about political and e-learning genres and demos, and we did some live reading, as well as had a background lecture from J. Michael on those two topics independently. So we had e-learning in the morning, had the overview, did some live reading, then lunch, a really nice lunch, as you might expect from J.
Michael Collins at the French restaurant, at the Intercontinental in Washington, right across the street from the White House, no less. And then we had the political background and then live reads in the afternoon. And really cool stuff.
I learned a lot, a lot of things I hadn’t even thought about, and really great people as well. I walked in knowing everybody, which is not uncommon if you know me.
It’s always great.
But it’s always more comfortable when you’re reading with people you already know, at least from social media. I think there was only one person I hadn’t met in person that was Andrew Wareland, but I know him pretty well from social media, too.
And I imagine you had some pseudo-celebrity status with the VO Meter podcast.
A little bit, yeah. There was even some tidbits where J. Michael said, this is not for attribution on your show, young man.
And I will not mention those, of course, to honor his request, but it was okay to talk about being there and how much we learned and how much fun we all had. So thanks to J. Michael Collins.
That was a great experience.
So hopefully without stepping on those guidelines, so just an idea of what Hot Genres is about. That’s a kind of a focus on like e-learning and political voiceover, right?
Well, right now, I think he’s planning, or maybe even in the past, has done other Hot Genres, but right now he’s on a little mini tour in the US doing just those two. So I think he’s in Boston right now and was just in Nashville and Austin and DC. So yeah, he’s going around the country with just those two genres on this little mini American trip.
Well, very cool. And that you just reminded me of some recent training that I got to do recently. A few weeks ago, I did this amazing animation workshop with friend of the podcast, Everett Oliver.
You might know him from his website, myboothdirector.com, where he’s got some affordable coaching and things like that. And it was so cool to see him… I’ve worked with him online before, but it really was a different experience in person, because, dare I say it, he was very animated in his direction.
And, I mean, guy didn’t sit down for like six hours straight. But he really, like, through his direction, and you really got a sense of the energy and the intensity required to bring these larger-than-life characters to life. Because I find that very often when you have people who are coming from, especially like narration or kind of more straight-laced styles of read, they can kind of struggle with the amount of energy required to do an animation delivery.
That was a big lesson for me. And it was also a big lesson because I was playing kind of a very deep-voiced, monstrous character that’s kind of… because I was challenging myself.
So, and it was like, at one point, he’s like ripping doors open. He’s screaming at the top of his lungs. My voice needed about a week to recover after that session.
So, it was very revelatory about how much warm-ups might be required to do that kind of work safely. So, highly recommend if you’re going to pursue some of those, like, screaming video game and animation stuff, that you warm up for 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour, however long you feel is necessary to not hurt yourself.
I’m curious, did he pick scripts for you, or did you pick what you wanted to read?
It was both, because he wanted to see, like, the first two scripts, he wanted to see what we felt comfortable with, and then one that was challenging, a little bit outside of our wheelhouse. So, like I said, my voice is a little bit higher, a little bit younger, so I was doing, like, a much deeper and grittier kind of voice. And then after that, he started picking ones for us.
But it was amazing, like, in these workshops, I’m used to going once or twice, just because of how long it takes to get through 10 participants. We did, like, five rounds of reads. It was amazing.
Yeah, J. Michael worked at the ladder, where he picked all the scripts for us. And I think it’s because he had a familiarity with almost all of us, and maybe even all of us.
I know several people had had demos done by him, so I think he knew our wheelhouses pretty well, so he picked the scripts for us. I was perfectly fine with that. It worked out well.
And something that’s really cool about that is if, because I’ve done a similar workshop before with another coach named Dave Walsh, and he requested that we all send links to our website and our demos so he could get a sense of our sound, and then he picked scripts for us. And isn’t it amazing when you have a script that is custom fit for you, that the performance is almost effortless. It’s so much easier to get to a pleasant, engaging read if you’re like, man, this really speaks to my personality.
Right, and that’s why sometimes doing auditions is so hard, because the same process kind of follows when you’re doing a demo. A good demo producer will get to know you and pick your scripts for the demo the same way. And sometimes it’s hard to replicate that on a live read when you’re self-directing.
So it’s always a challenge we face as voice actors.
I mean, the goal, right, as voice talent is to be able to fake it, pretend that you love every product script that comes in front of you. But as you’re learning, it’s that much easier to get a powerful read if you actually are, like if you like what you’re selling, right?
Yeah, and you feel good about it when you’re able to pull it off too.
Definitely, definitely. Like, yeah, yeah, I don’t suck. Awesome.
I don’t suck as much as I thought I did, yeah.
So just in case you guys are wondering, highly recommend any form of training whenever you can afford it, like in person, online, whatever. Never stop training.
So that pretty much wraps up the VO Meter reference level segment this week. We’ll have our interview with Kay Bess coming up in just a moment, right after our questionable gear purchase.
But before that, a word from one of our loyal sponsors, VocalBooth2Go. VocalBooth2Go’s patented acoustic blankets are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing, often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution. We make your environment quieter for less.
So, I’ll start because I’ve done a lot of dumb things and never seems to stop. So, I’m using a new mic.
Hi, I’m Paul Stefano. I’m a gear head. Hi, Paul.
I have a problem, yeah. I’m using a new mic at the moment. I don’t even sound excited about it because I’m such a moron.
I’ve actually had this mic before, and this is the second time. So, this is the Audio Technica BP40. It’s a large diaphragm dynamic, which I didn’t even know existed before I bought it, the first time, about a year ago.
And I picked it up again due to my recent booth reconfiguration that we talked about last episode. I’m looking for something a little less punchy, actually, for long-term narration in audiobooks, something that I can sort of just record at the right levels and forget it without a whole lot of massaging either for clicks or plosives or even compression. And this fits the bill.
It’s got a huge capsule. They say it sounds almost like a condenser, condenser-like feel, and I tend to agree. And I just like the way it sounds, so…
Yeah, it’s not bad. It sounds pretty neutral for a dynamic.
Right.
If you don’t mind, what did that cost?
Let’s see, new, I think it’s about $300. And I got a little bit less than that because I bought it from Guitar Center.
Cool. If you can help it, guys, never buy anything new. At least when it comes to gear.
I generally don’t, especially with Guitar Center, because you can return their used gear, not their new stuff.
The beauty is, is that a lot of people are actually pretty kind to their equipment because they’re trying to sell it and get as much back as they invested. They can pass on the savings to you, right? Recently, I was doing sort of like a studio tour video.
So if you’re curious to check out what I’m using on my YouTube channel, you can check out the Daily VO 2019 Studio Tour. You can see exactly what I use. But anyways, during my research, I was just checking what my interface, the SPO Creon, was going for right now.
New at the time I got it, I think it was going for like $600, and I bought it for about $325, because I found a great deal for it on Reverb. So I double-checked now, and I found a couple of refurbished units for like $200 and $300. It’s amazing.
So this is something, I’ve talked about it before, it’s very similar to something like the Audient ID22, in that it’s got a lot of expansion options. You can have two pairs of monitors hooked up to it. You can put in a channel strip or an external preamp, and bypass the internal preamps, if that’s the direction you want to go.
And it’s got lots of buttons and hardware stuff that is great if you want something a little bit more tactile, rather than just adjusting everything in software. But yeah, like I said, this is more than a 50% off decrease of an item that unfortunately I think is discontinued, but it’s still a very great interface, and I highly recommend it for someone who wants a little bit more, like paying for their buck in like a $200 or $300 interface and something that’s going to last them for several years. But yeah, always be on the lookout for some of those popular interfaces and microphones, because you can probably save several hundred dollars if you’re patient and thorough in your research.
If it’s something we talked about here on the podcast, I’m probably reselling it too, so just go ask me.
Because I’m curious, because I know this isn’t the only mic that you’ve gotten recently, right? Did you already talk about your reacquisition of the 18897s?
No, I don’t think so. That was next on the list. I sound like Huckleberry Hound.
No, I have no other mic to talk about. I bought two. Count them, two.
18897. They’re a shotgun mic, similar vein of the 416, the Sennheiser. A little bit longer, but the sound is very, very similar.
And I’ve got a two-for-one deal. I’m not sure why somebody is selling two of them, but I got two for what you normally would pay for one used on eBay. And the one is the one I took on the road that I was talking about with the use of the VOMO, and the other one I’m using now in the studio.
I’ve, at the moment, retired my 416.
It’s too sensitive.
That’s the deal, man. I’ve gotten to the point. I’ve maxed out, I think, everything I can do in this booth to make it sound proof and deal with all the extraneous sounds I have to deal with.
And even the 416 is a little too sensitive, so I’m not going to use it for the time being.
That’s really important to talk about because shotgun mics are great, but they’re not a panacea. Much like the portable acoustic solutions, they’re not going to solve all of your acoustic and sound proofing issues. They’ll help, but just because the pickup pattern is more narrow than your standard cardioid pattern doesn’t mean that if there’s noise that can still get to that point, it’s going to get picked up.
It might come with its own slew of problems that you have to troubleshoot anyway.
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s exactly what I’m going through. The 416 sounded great, but it was still a little too sensitive. So this AT897 kind of works the same way.
I know our friend Mike Norgaard was a big fan of it when he was first starting out and hadn’t gotten a 416 yet. And I’ve gone back to it. This might be the third time I’ve bought it, actually.
I know, I told you not to get rid of that.
Yeah, I know, it’s not smart, but it gives us something to talk about.
But now, I mean, you got an incredible price for it. Do you mind sharing?
Yeah, the two together were $1.99, which is kind of ridiculous.
If you were buying them both new, that’d be like $500, because now they go for about $249 new. Right. That’s amazing.
So I’m not sure I’ll keep both. I probably won’t, knowing me, but I have one mounted right now that I’m using for short reads. And even then, not all the time, but if I need something where I really want to get up on it and be the voice of God, then I do use a shotgun.
And I do have one other thing I bought, along with the 897 for my recent trip. I bought a new portable interface, which I had not heard of. I know you were aware of it when we talked about it, but I picked up the MXL Mic Mate.
It’s very similar to the Sentron’s Micport Pro. It almost looks exactly the same, but it’s made by the company MXL, which makes decent mics. It makes things like the 990, and they actually make the Harlan Hogan mic, and he brands it with his name on it.
So it sounds really good, and it does the job. I was happy with it. Really low noise floor, and super portable, only about the size of maybe two chat sticks stacked on top of each other, and works great.
So if you need a portable solution, and you’re looking for something like the Micport Pro or the Shure X2U, this will also fit that bill, and it sounds great.
I first heard about the Micmate several years ago, back when I was doing all of my gear research, and just dreaming and lusting over equipment that I couldn’t afford at the time. But anyways, so recording hacks, this is run by Matt McGlynn, who also does microphoneparts.com, and I believe actually made the… was instrumental in making the RAVO microphone, or the RAVO, or RAVO microphone.
From Roswell Audio.
The one that Jordan Reynolds made?
Yeah, exactly. The one that he collaborated with Jordan Reynolds for. But anyways, they got this great USB interface shootout of the Sentron’s Micport Pro, the MXL Mic Mate, and the Blue Icicle.
And, as I’m sure you found out, the MXL Mic Mate did pretty well in that comparison. So, as long as it’s quiet, got good clean gain, what else can you ask for? So yeah, I actually bought some stuff this month.
One of them was just a little thing that I wanted to use for my mobile rig. It’s from Joby, the guys who make the GorillaPod kind of really modular, adaptable camera stands. And they made a little mobile smartphone rig.
I forget the exact name of it. I think it’s just the Joby GorillaPod smartphone rig or something like that. So this thing can securely hold your smartphone, which as we talked about is a great way to record using Twisted Wave or Audio Evolution Pro or whatever platform you’re on.
And it’s also got these additional arms on the sides. It’s got the adapter for like a camera mount. So my portable interface, the Sentron’s Mixerface, actually has a thread on the back that works with that.
So I can connect it to that, and then I can either have my 416 plugged directly into Mixerface, or I can have it positioned on top of my smartphone because it’s got like a little camera shock mount adapter for that. I don’t have the correct thing to connect my shock mount to it, but eventually I’d like to do that. So it’s a little bit less heavy on that one arm with the Mixerface.
But so that’s been great. So I’ve got this little setup pretty much cable free, and aside from the one USB cable going from Mixerface to my phone, and so it’s like truly portable. It’s kind of more for like a videographer setup, but for our purposes, it works well too.
So that’s the Joby smartphone rig. And then, so one bit of software that I like to use to keep my Mac clean is CleanMyMac. So I’ve been using them since their like second version, and then recently they made an update where not only do they have a lot of great things to kind of get rid of gigabytes worth of unused storage, I’m really terrible about…
I do a lot of videography work, so I’ve got all of these old video files that I don’t necessarily need on my computer and CleanMyMac just cleans them out. But it’s also got these great security features to it now. So it’s got malware protection and virus detection, so I’m just like, sweet, yay, upgrades.
So if you have a Mac and you’re looking for ways to kind of save data and kind of get more life out of it, highly recommend CleanMyMac.
Very cool.
So that will wrap up our questionable gear purchases. We have Kay waiting for us right now, so why don’t we head over to our interview segment.
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Hi, everybody. Our guest today is a versatile voice actress, a passionate podcaster and an inspiring public speaker. Her eclectic resume includes commercial campaigns for Apple, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Hidden Valley Ranch and Oster Appliances, promos for CNN and NBC, narration for Discovery, E!
Entertainment and video game characters Persephone Brimstone from Agents of Mayhem and Anna from Lara Croft, Rise of the Tomb Raider. We are very blessed to have with us today the witty, the wise, the deep, the daring Kay Bess. How are you, Kay?
I’m well. I’m so much better now that I heard that intro.
Thank you.
Only when he does it in one take. Very nice, my friend. Thank you, thank you.
So Kay, thanks so much for being here.
My pleasure.
We are so thrilled to have you. Our first question is, tell us a little bit about how you came to be a voice over artist or voice actor.
Well, I started voice over… I came to Los Angeles to… and I’m not from far, just a hundred miles up north.
I was raised in the Santa Barbara area, and so I came to Southern California, to Los Angeles to study acting. So it was really my road into voice over really came by way of acting. That was at the time, that was sort of in the mid-1980s, and voice over was really thought of as an extension of the on-camera acting world in commercials.
So it just felt like it was a nice little extension where a person like me who’s rather introverted could, I could participate in the world of commercial acting without being on camera. So that’s really how it started, and I took a workshop, which was very rare back in those days, and from that workshop I was directed to a class, and that happened to be taught by Tom Pinto, and I took that class, and he thought I had an affinity for it and suggested that I make a demo, which I did under his guidance, and I submitted that demo to three, just three. Isn’t that funny?
I mean, there were many more, but I just picked the top three. Because I didn’t really know what I was doing, yeah. The top three agencies.
And I got a call from the William Morris Agency, from Nina Niesenholtz, who was the head of the department at the time, and they were interested in representing me. So that’s how quickly it happened, and from there, a month later, I got my first job, and I really just kind of rolled from there. And a lot of ups and downs, mind you, but that’s really where it started.
That’s how it started. I came to Los Angeles to study acting. I had a little bit of acting training under my belt, and thought it was a nice, comfortable place for me to be in the extension of the on-camera commercial world.
So that’s how it began.
I love Tom Pinto. I’ve been working with him for the last several months, and just got an email from him this morning with scripts to work on for next week, so love that guy.
Yeah, he’s great. He’s great. And he’s one of the good guys.
He really is. He’s just a great guy.
There are so many of those in VO, yourself included. I mean, we’re blessed to have you today, but there was a lot more of us that were blessed to have you as the keynote speaker at this year’s VO Atlanta Conference. So can you talk a little bit about how you came to be this year’s keynote speaker?
Well, you’d probably have to get inside the mind of Gerald Griffith to figure that out, but…
What I want to is to…
Well, last year, in 2018, Mary Lynn Whistner asked me to participate in the promo section of the conference to teach an X session. And I was thrilled to be able to do that. And I also did a breakout.
I was asked to do a breakout session. And the breakout session I did in 2018 was titled A Woman’s Place is in the Booth. And it kind of resonated, I think, with a lot of women.
And so it was a full breakout session. And my X session sold well. I felt a little…
It’s funny. I felt a little out of place doing a promo X session. Even though I have done promo for 30 years, it’s so different for women.
You know, we’re generally not the voice of networks, you know, a la Townsend Coleman and Steve Mackel and, you know… And Tom. Yeah, Tom Pinto, Reno Romano.
You know, voices that are just attached to the branding of a network. That generally… I can’t even name a female for whom that is true.
I know Anna Vocino did work for ABC for the Thursday Night Lineup, which was a really big deal, you know. But that’s not even the voice of the network. That’s just a voice of one night of a network, you know.
So I felt a little funny, you know, coming in as an expert in promo, even though I do have quite a bit of experience. It’s just a different position that women have in the realm of promo. Anyway, I kind of just got over that, and I realized, you know, you do have experience, and you do have something to teach, and you’ve been asked, and you should do it.
And there I was sort of uncovering the truth that I had all of this information to teach. And so that was a very enlightening thing for me in 2018. And then when I sat with Gerald after the 2018 VO Atlanta, and he asked my opinion of a couple of things, and what would I do to improve, and all those kinds of things.
And I told him that, you know, as I think most of us who have presented feel, it’s such a great conference, and it’s a wonderful place to be. And I also said that I thought that the conference could use an acting track that so much of voice over requires, is really benefited by having some training in acting. Not just video games and animation, but also narration and commercial work.
And those, you know, acting skills can be really useful for those arenas. So I suggested that to him, and then I said, if you want, I would be really happy to head it up for you.
Oh, don’t ever suggest to head something up for Gerald.
Well, there you go. So he said, great, it’s yours. And so I was really thrilled about that.
And somewhere, maybe a couple of months later, Gerald had sent me an email that he wanted to talk to me about something, and I just assumed he wanted to talk to me about this acting track. And so I said, yeah, you know, I’m on vacation with my family. I’ll get back to you.
I think we finally connected like three or four weeks later. And he had sent me an email in the meantime, and I skimmed it. I was somewhere on a lake in Canada, and I skimmed the email, and it was talking about keynote, keynote, and I thought, oh, he’s going to ask for suggestions for people for keynote speakers.
So I started running through people in my head, and then I got to kind of the end of the email, and I realized that he was asking me if I wanted to. So I was a little stunned, and I immediately called Townsend Coleman, and I said, help. Should I say yes?
What do I do? I’ve never done anything like that before. So Townsend just laughed.
Oh, he laughed. It was very funny. So that’s how I came to…
And I said yes. But I really had… I’ve never done a keynote before.
It’s not something I’ve ever pieced together. I’ve never spoken in such a capacity. The closest thing that I have done to that, I would say, is just doing that breakout session in 2018, where I just spoke a bit about my experience as a woman in voiceover.
So that’s how it came about. That’s kind of a long and twisted story. But that’s how it came to be.
And then I spent probably six months thinking about what I wanted to say and how I would organize it and really letting this organic process take place, of kind of allowing past experiences in my life kind of come to the fore naturally, as I would think about my life and my career. And certain stories would come up. And then I just started to write them down.
And I would try to see what seemed relevant and what seemed that I could connect, stories that I could connect to each other. And it wasn’t until Christmas, Christmas dinner, Christmas dinner, I had some friends over for dinner. And I don’t know how we started talking about it, but that was the time that I remembered the dream I had, which was kind of a focal point of the keynote speech.
And I told the story of that dream, and I realized, oh, wow, I need to tell that story. Because I realized that dream had sort of worked its way through my life for many years, but I never articulated the dream to anyone. So then it really came together in the first couple months of 2019.
Yeah, it was a really interesting experience, really, really challenging. And I felt like I learned a lot, and I learned something new about myself, a capacity that I had that I didn’t really know I had. So it was a great experience, really great experience.
Well, I can say that you inspired everybody in that room with your keynote speech. I was watching from the backstage, as you probably saw, actually running a camera on your face. And I was looking around the room and noticing how everyone was glued to every word you said.
And it’s a testament to how great you are connecting to an audience like that.
Thank you.
Fantastic job. We wanted to ask… We would want you to share the entire story, obviously, for those that weren’t there.
Can you share some of the key takeaways from the story that you think would resonate with the rest of the community?
Sure. The focus of the keynote was kind of a modified phrase that came from something that my father imparted to me all growing up. And it took me a long time to understand what he was telling me.
It’s a confusing phrase, I think, for a young person. But my father, who is a retired American Baptist minister, he used to say to me and to my siblings, whenever we were facing challenges or difficult decision or didn’t know what to do or questions about how to live your life, he would say, trust God and sin bravely. And that was his way of saying that you have to be willing to take risks in your life.
And risk taking means guaranteed failure. It’s just part of the deal, you know, when you leap out and take chances. And I sort of modified that phrase for the keynote to say, trust and be brave.
And I modified it because I know that not everyone shares my particular faith, and I think it’s important to be able to connect and to speak to everyone, no matter their faith or their world view, because I think there’s something to take away from that phrase. So it went from, for me, trust God and sin bravely, to trust and be brave. And I told a couple of stories of the ways in which I stepped out and trusted, and only in hindsight did I realize that I was being brave, but I think that’s the nature of it, right?
All we feel at the moment is scared, and perhaps vulnerable, and like we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing, but that’s the nature of risk. And so, and I think then we turn around and see, oh, that was really, that was a brave thing to do. And so that was the essence of the keynote, and I think it applies to us in so many ways.
The other piece of the keynote, I would say, is really coming to embrace who we are as individuals, and that that’s what’s required for us to be our authentic selves. And we’re all trying to differentiate from one another in the world of voice over so that we can stand out and people will take notice of us. And the tricky thing, I think, in voice over land is that we’re all so much in a hurry to get our demos done and to get our websites online and to have a brand or a slogan.
And there’s just a tricky piece in there because if we do all those things before we actually know at least a good part of who we are, then our branding and our websites and our demos, they’re going to ring false. There’s just going to be the sound of a pretty voice and pretty pictures on a website, and there’s going to be a disconnect between you and what you deliver. And so the other piece of the keynote was really stepping out to be brave in knowing and declaring who you are.
And that includes things like what you value, what you love, what your shortcomings are, what your fears are. Knowing all those things about yourself is… And being able to accept those things about yourself is really key to being authentic and living boldly so that you can live authentically in the world.
And if you’re in a place like that, then your branding, your voice, the kind of work that you do, it will all gel and you will be a whole. And that, I think, is what will make each of us stand out just by being really who we are. So those are the two takeaways, I think.
Well, speaking of standing out and living bravely, I mean, you yourself, you could just tell by just your manner of speaking that you’re a very confident and brave woman. But even in your earlier interviews, you’ve mentioned that it wasn’t always the case. But as I said in your introduction, you’ve got this amazing eclectic career of commercial and promo and seemingly disparate genres of video games and animation characters.
So how does that risk taking play when you’re trying to… Because as you’ve said in the past, you had this very strong sense of your identity as a commercial actress in doing these kind of straighter laced reads. How did you transition into something that people have all these preconceptions about, like those wild and crazy video game and animation characters?
Yeah. Yeah, boy, that’s a really good question. I think that I was blessed with the particular vocal cords that I have.
I had nothing to do with it. They are, you know, they are what they are. I, you know, I think people who have beautiful sounding voices, that’s just the case.
We can’t really take credit for them, you know. And I think that very early in my career doing commercial work was very safe for me. And I came, you know, my time in college was riddled with anxiety and panic attacks and, you know, all those kinds of things.
And I just never felt safe in the realm of acting at the acting world. So, so critical what you look like, what you look like on camera. How much do you weigh?
You know, all of those, you know, I felt so insecure and not pretty enough and not thin enough and not tall enough and all of those things. And the realm of commercial voice over acting felt like a very safe place for me, where what I had were these, you know, was an ability to read, copy, and a nice sounding voice. And so I think I, I think it just was a safe world for me.
And nobody’s watching me. I was comfortable in front of a microphone because I had been a singer. And so I spent many years being safe in voice over.
I would say the vast majority of my career was all about safety. Then there came a time when, for voice actors who began, you know, before the advent of the internet, that changed everything. That was sort of the perfect storm.
The capacity for people to have home studios, voicebank.net becoming a clearing house, you know, for a copy which changed the relationship you had with your agents and casting directors, and it opened the world, you know, the entire country, and you know, at that time and now the world, you know, to reading all the same copy that used to just go to New York, Chicago, and LA. And so it was really when there was kind of this perfect storm of change in the voiceover landscape that I had been accustomed to for a good 15, 20 years. The bottom felt like it dropped out for me and for a lot of people.
And a lot of people didn’t survive it. You know, a lot of people went on to do other things, and they just stopped doing voiceover. But for me, I realized, you know, I’m very good at…
When rotten things happen, I spend a few days, you know, crying under the covers, and then I re-emerge and I go, Okay, how am I going to make this different? What am I going to do to carry on? And that was one of those things.
And I thought, you know, you came here to be an actor, Kay Bess. That’s why you came here to be a voice actor and do commercial work. You came here to be an actor.
And while all these decades had passed, and many of my friends that I went to college with are all now very successful television actors, and film actors, and Oscar winners, and, you know, all those things, I don’t have the theatrical resume that they do, right? So starting out again on-camera acting would be quite a feat, you know? But I did go back to acting school, and I did take some on-camera audition classes.
And all of those things really benefited the idea that I was going to take my acting skills into the realm of animation and video gaming. And that’s where I chose to kind of merge these two loves of mine, right? Acting and the world that I had already gained a lot of experience in and success in.
And those are the arenas where those two things lined up, you know? And I stepped in a way, you know, I took off proverbially, I took off my headphones and stopped listening to myself. And instead, I started to engage the copy and the characters on the other side of that copy.
And that’s what I think has made me a versatile voice actor, is that, again, I’m aware of the sound of my voice, the thing that, you know, God gave me, and I’m utterly willing to stop listening to it. And I think that’s a really big thing for a lot of voice actors. Even in commercial work and narration work, if we could just stop listening to our own voices and how pretty they are and how good they sound on mic and start engaging in our minds the people we’re talking to, our reads would become very different.
They’d become far more engaged and interesting to listen to. But that’s, I think, the key to versatility, right, is to be able to stop listening to yourself and engage the copy and engage the imaginary characters on the other pages, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and trust that you’re capable of delivering an effective performance.
Yeah, and the performance comes from the engagement of the script and the story and the characters and the person that you’re playing opposite, as opposed to the sound of your voice. And I think we get stuck there. We get stuck with pretty sounding voices.
Oh, absolutely.
Right? I mean, we really do. Yeah, me too, totally.
It takes a lot. And that’s a risk. That’s stepping out and being brave, to trust that if you take your headphones off, that you can do different and better work, that you don’t have to monitor it all the time.
And that’s really where the best work comes from, is when you’re not monitoring it.
Well, continuing the theme of being brave, another way in which you are brave is in launching your podcast. Or maybe not, because clearly with Sean and I, any two of you can do it. But you have an entirely different focus.
Tell us a little bit about The Beehive. When did you start it and why?
Yeah, well, I should say, if anybody listening is familiar with the podcast, I just want to give a big apology because I haven’t recorded a podcast in about a year. But I do have some in the shoot, and I intend to resurrect it, if you will. I’ve just been so swamped in the last year that I haven’t had an opportunity to make that happen.
But as I think most creative things, that totally came out of a dark period in the life of Kay Bess.
I think I was in the middle of this transition from more commercial work into gaming and animation. So there’s always this, like, I’m auditioning like mad, and I’m not really booking much. And all of that is, of course, laying the groundwork for future work.
So I recognize that. It’s super important to keep auditioning and to know that your auditions have value, whether or not you’re booking things at the moment. But it was definitely a period of time where I felt disconnected from my career and from the people that I know and love and voice over that I had gotten to know in Los Angeles over the past few decades.
And so I decided that I wanted to, you know, I really just wanted to connect. I wanted to connect to my friends. It really started there.
And I wanted to also kind of sing the praises of other people, because there are so many great voice actors, both male and female, who, you know, do the lion’s share of the work and nobody knows who they are. And I realized that for many of them, that’s how they like it, that they don’t want to be known, and that’s part of why we do voice over. But it’s also, you know, it’s nice to be recognized.
And so that’s where it came from. And so I just decided I was going to set up my microphone. I had one mic, and I could do kind of a…
I don’t know what you call it. It was like the little figure eight sign on the microphone.
Like see if you could record two people. Bidirectional, yeah.
Bidirectional, yes. So I set that up, and I have this little room that’s attached to the garage that I just turned into a studio, and I just started inviting women over. And I decided that I was going to interview women because women just don’t work as much as men do.
I mean, the lion’s share of the work is still for men. And so, you know, when people have podcasts, and they invite sort of legendary voice actors on with their characters and things, it’s usually men. And that makes sense, of course, because most of the characters are men.
So I just thought, I’m going to interview women. And there are women out there whose voices that you hear all the time, but you just don’t know their names. And so I was kind of all about that.
Like, I want to tell you who these women are. So that’s what I started doing. And, you know, eventually, I want to say maybe five or six episodes in, Townsend Coleman, God bless him, he came in and he was like, yeah, you have to redo your studio, and you have to get each person on mic.
And he loaned me… I have a 416, but he loaned me a 416 for a while so that I could get both voices on their own mic. And he just helped me to set up the room so that it was more conducive to recording.
And he’s a stickler like that, you know? He really loves it. But then he always follows through.
It’s sort of like, well, you know, he doesn’t just say, you should have a better studio. He’s like, and here, I’ll help you, I’ll help that happen, you know? So that was kind of awesome.
Let me, you should be better, Kay. Let me help make you better. So I just love him for that.
I truly do. I really, I just love him to death. And so anyway, so then I started recording, and sure enough, you know, I’m not very good at, you know, at business plans and marketing and, you know, those kinds of things.
It was kind of a slow build to the popularity of the podcast. But, you know, I have a small but mighty following, and they’re all kind of disappointed that I haven’t, you know, released anything in about a year. So I definitely owe, I owe people.
And actually, I’ve recorded, I have about four or five that I recorded well over a year ago, and I’m sure those women are like, wow, you know, did she hate my interview? It never went up, but that’s not the case. They’re all lovely.
I just haven’t gotten to them, to editing them yet. But that’s how that came about, and I do hope to continue, and I’m actually thinking about kind of adding, you know, a little side thing to the podcast and having men on, because they’re just, you know, there’s so many people I would love to interview and who have such wonderful stories to tell, and so I’m thinking about that. Then things got busy, and I just had to let that go to the back burner, largely because I edit everything myself, and I’m very particular about editing, and if I could let go of that, you know, I could put out a lot more, but like, wow, I guess I’m very controlling in that way.
Well, here’s hoping. I’m a big fan, and I love the way you… Thank you.
I love the rapport you have with all the guests. It sounds like you’ve been best friends with everybody for years, which in a lot of cases I think you are, and it comes across in the podcast.
Oh, that’s so sweet, you know? I have to say, like, I love people. I’m really fascinated by everyone’s story, and I think I just love to connect with people one-on-one.
And it’s funny, in fact, that one guest that I had on, Sally Safiotti, that was the first time that I had met her, really. I think I met her at a party once and had a conversation with her over a glass of wine, but that was the first time I’d ever had a long conversation with her. But from that, we became fast friends, and we’ve been friends ever since.
And so, yeah, there are several that I don’t… I’ve known as… They’re my colleagues, but not really close friends.
They’re a couple in the beginning I had my closer friends on because that’s just an easier conversation to have. But I love people, and I love to hear people’s stories. And so, maybe that’s the thing that makes it sound like we’ve been friends forever.
I’m actually and truly interested in people.
Well, it really shows. I know your own, just in your own conversations, in your own kind of personal mantras, very much finding your voice and sharing it with the world. And this is sort of your opportunity to do that for your friends and colleagues.
It’s really wonderful.
Yeah, yeah, thank you. I have loved doing it, so… And it’ll be back.
I was curious, Kate, because you’ve got such a varied career. What were some of your most memorable projects or ones you were particularly proud of?
Well, there was a period of time when I thought, you know, being a commercial voice actor, I’m not going to be remembered. You know, it’s like, how would I want to be eulogized? You know, that sounds like a crazy question, but how would I want to be eulogized by my colleagues?
You know, I mean, I think that’s a… It’s an important question to ask when you’re dreaming about the kind of career that you want, you know? How do you want to be remembered?
What do you want to be remembered for? And I thought, well, nobody’s going to remember the clear blue easy pregnancy test TV commercials that I did in 1996. You know, like, who cares?
No one cares. And it was at that… You know, in answering that question, I thought, you know, I really want to be remembered as being kind and generous.
Kind and generous with whatever I have. And so that’s how I decided I was going to continue to behave, you know, and be in the world of voiceover. And it was really funny because at some point a few years ago, I went on YouTube to see if I could find…
Because commercials are everywhere on YouTube. Old, you know, old commercials, right? That are just…
Like, people post the weirdest things. And so I went online to see if that clear blue easy TV spot was, you know, if somebody had put it on YouTube. And oh my goodness, there it is.
And it happened to be a TV campaign that was directed by David Lynch.
Really?
And it… Yeah. I didn’t know it at the time.
I had no idea, right? So I just remember thinking, this is a really weird voice over. I mean, the way they directed me was very kind of quiet and very…
And you know, I was sort of the queen of understatement. And so it was completely understated, but even more understated than even I would do. It sounded to me like really boring.
And so I don’t know that I… I don’t remember ever seeing the commercial at the time when it came on. So there it was.
And it’s like the reason that it’s on YouTube is because it was directed by David Lynch. And the woman in the spot, it was the actress who played Laura Palmer on… Oh my gosh, I just completely lost…
Twin Peaks?
I just completely lost the… Yes, on Twin Peaks. Thank you.
Sherrilyn Finn?
Yeah, I think it was Sherrilyn Finn. And so…
Not that I’m a fan or anything.
I just thought that was sort of hilarious. That the one… You have these at the drop of a hat.
You know, so here I am sort of making fun of the fact that no one would remember me for a TV spot. And it happened to have been like probably the most interesting TV spot I’ve ever done in my life, right? So I don’t think that I…
That was not a milestone in terms of my career or something that I think, oh wow, I was really proud of that.
It was just a TV spot.
But just sort of a funny anecdote about how we think of what we do as being so trivial. And then it just turned out to be this really weird piece of sort of David Lynch weird art. Anyway, I would say the things that…
The milestones were the first syndicated package of promos that I got. That was a really, again, just a terrible show called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. But it was a down payment on a house.
You know? So it was like a… It was a big deal to me.
And also, you know, a female doing a syndicated promo package. That was sort of a big deal. And then really voicing the TV series, The Property Brothers, on HGTV.
I did the first four seasons of that show, and it was probably the best, most fun job I’ve ever had. The production company, Red Arrow Productions, they’re in Knoxville, Tennessee. I just loved the directors there.
You know, they were so lovely, and they were so kind, and they were so much fun to work with. And I did… You know, they trusted me.
They were on the line with me, but they just trusted my sound and what I brought to the show. And I just… It was just my favorite job ever.
Favorite job ever. And then I would say doing Lara Croft, Rise of the Tomb Raider, was a milestone because it was my first real role, you know, like a good, meaty role in a voiceover game. And I actually had replaced the voice.
The person who did the performance capture, they decided that they needed a different voice. And so I replaced her, and I recorded all of… I had to do a lot of recording.
This is unusual. There was much of the artwork that had already been done, and so her phrasing was in the renderings and stuff, in the creation of the character. And so I had to…
It was like I had to do… It was almost like doing looping, you know, for some of the scenes. I had to kind of match her lip flaps and that kind of stuff.
So that was an unusual thing, but it was really, really great. It was really fun. And again, I had a great director, Philip Bach.
It just was wonderful. He just loves actors, and so it was very freeing and liberating, and, you know, he let me go. You know, he let me fly, which was great.
And then doing Persephone Brimstone in Agents of Mayhem was, like, two and a half years of doing that character, and she had sort of a Euro-French accent, you know, and this sort of sophisticated, smarter-than-everyone-in-the-room kind of a person, and maintaining that accent and the character under the direction of Amanda Wyatt, who was, again, wonderful. That was really memorable, because that was a really big role. It was a big role, and to be consistent over that span of time, you know, with that character.
When you’re… When you… All you get are your lines.
You don’t get… You don’t know the story. You know, you don’t know the arc of the story, how it’s going, you know.
So you really have to trust the director, and you build the arc of the character together. You know, so those two video game roles. And then the first animation thing that I did, which I don’t even think I’m allowed to talk about yet, because I don’t think it’s been released.
It’s not… It won’t come out till 2020, I think. But just winning my first animation role, like, you know, I saved my script.
This is really exciting for me, you know, as a person in midlife, you know, to have kind of cracked open a door and gotten my foot in, this is just exciting. But I would say that those are the highlights.
Loads of some great stories.
And I hope there’s, you know, more to come.
Loads of some great stories. And I have to thank you personally for the Property Brothers role, because that’s the first time when I was talking to my wife, where she really sort of got it. Like, I’ve been doing this for several years, and I’ve been to tons of conferences, and I’ll come back and say, oh, I met so-and-so from this video game or so-and-so from this TV show.
And it’s usually like, that’s nice, dear. But when I said that I had met the voice of Property Brothers, then I was a star. So I thank you.
It just validated your career.
Exactly. I appreciate it so much. My pleasure.
I wish I could do it again.
Well, we’ll hope the best for you. So talking about just getting your first animation role and how that happened at the midpoint of your life, what are some things you’re still looking forward to in the future, some of your goals for your VO career?
Well, I hope to continue in animation. I think that that is the most exciting thing to me, and I look forward to being a series regular on something. I just booked my first recurring role on an animated series, but they’re in development, right?
So I don’t think anything that I have done is coming out until 2020. So that’s an interesting thing, right, to do the work and then not be able to talk about it. And then it’s not, you know, it’s two years before things show up.
I really would love to work as part of an ensemble in animation. That I think would be really, really fun. I had a taste of it on something that I booked for Nickelodeon.
My first thing for Nickelodeon. And all of us were in it. And it was just really exciting.
And there I was with, you know, seasoned animation actors that I sort of grew up in voice over with. But they were off on the animation track, and I was off on this commercial track, you know. But we’re on the same roster, you know, that kind of thing.
And here I am, you know, I feel like I rounded this corner, you know, to where I’m sitting in the room with them, and they’ve got the leads and stuff like that, and I just have incidental characters. But that, you know, that was super exciting. And so I really hope for more of that.
That’s what I see in my future. The world of video games, man, that is rough. I feel like a couple of games that I’ve done, I’ve trashed my voice a little bit, and it takes a while to recover from stuff like that, and it has affected my singing.
And so I’m still trying to piece that together about, how do I… Because I love doing them. I really love doing them.
And I think it’s an amazing art form altogether. Like, the creative collaboration to make a video game is astounding. When you talk about, you know, performance capture and, you know, motion capture and all of those things, it’s an extraordinary art form, of which voice thing is just a small part, you know.
And so, I love that collaborative thing. And so, trying to figure out how games fit into that, and do I need to be more particular about the types of games that I audition for. There are some things that are worth losing your voice for, but there are other things that aren’t, you know.
And so, I’m trying to weigh those things right now. And right now, animation is to me the most exciting thing and the most challenging thing, because I have been my whole life sort of the queen of subtlety and understatement. Animation requires a 180 from that.
It requires big, broad choices, highs and lows, really impeccable comedic timing. And so, those are all… I get them.
You know, I get them in my head, but to get them out of my mouth, you know, is the challenge, to be able to do that really consistently. So, you know, I look at auditions that I get, and I go, okay, who am I going to create here? You know, and how is this going to…
How am I going to… What am I going to end up with, you know, on tape, if you will? Can I say tape?
Sure. That’s not tape. You know, you know what I mean.
What’s going to end up in the sound file, right? And that’s the most exciting thing to me. So animation, recurring, series regulars, that’s my dream, that’s my plan.
And if I can say, I’m a member of a theater company in Los Angeles, the Actors Co-op in Hollywood. And I just produced my first show there with the company. Yeah, I was lucky to have been asked to produce an adaptation of Anna Karenina.
And I had a great director, a wonderful design team, a beautiful cast. It was such a great experience really being behind the scenes and seeing how productions are put together. And I even spent time assistant stage managing because our stage manager had an…
We extended, and so our stage manager, who was calling the show, and it was a very light and sound cue, heavy, very heavy show in that regard, a lot of sound cues. So he had another show that he was committed to. So our assistant stage manager took the reins there for a couple of shows.
And then I decided I was just going to assistant stage manager backstage. And I loved that experience so much because I got to see how much actors are supported by the backstage crew, and how necessary everyone is to a successful production. And it was an amazing experience, and I loved it.
I loved it so much. I didn’t start out loving it. The first month, I was like, yeah, I’m never going to do this again.
But by the end of it, I grew to love it. I loved the experience. And I was just cast in a show that opens May 10th.
It’s a production of a play called The Christians by Lucas Naeth. I think it’s how you pronounce his last name. And the last time…
Well, the only time it was in Los Angeles was at the Mark Taper Forum in 2015. So this is the first production of it in the Los Angeles area since then. And it was a critical success.
And the playwright is kind of on a run right now with some other stuff that he’s doing. But I’m super excited to be on stage again. And I think all of that, both working as a producer and then being back on stage…
And I haven’t been on stage since 1984. You all can do the math, but it’s a lot of years. And so again, it’s a challenge to me.
And I’m afraid. And I’m stepping out and being brave, you know? And it all matters, you know, in the realm of what we create as voice actors.
It’s really all the same. It’s all… All of that is risk taking.
And so the more you do it in other areas of your life, the more comfortable you get doing it in the booth, you know? The bigger the choices that you make are, especially with animation and gaming, right? It’s like you gotta make big, bold choices.
So all of that matters. So I also hope to continue to work on stage and in other areas of acting, all of which will just bolster my confidence in the booth. So there you go.
Thank you so much. I mean, Kay, it has truly been a pleasure. I mean, I’m sure you’re tired of people telling you how inspiring you are, but it’s true.
I mean, you’re an example of confidence in finding your… Yeah, I’m gonna lay it on thick just to warn you. But your confidence, your openness to growth and willingness to adapt to new challenges, it truly is inspiring.
And it has been a pleasure and an honor to have you with us today.
Thank you so much. I do want to say, you know, I think it’s really important to know this about me. Here I am, 57 years old, and I do have a measure of confidence, and I do have a measure of understanding.
But that’s now, and I just want to encourage anybody who’s starting out, that I didn’t start out with this much confidence. I started out with a lot of trepidation. And again, just reminding you that I came out of being somebody who has panic attacks and is scared to step on stage or to do a bold character.
So I spent 20, 23, 24 years being afraid to audition for something in animation. I turned everything down. I turned everything down.
I passed on everything. So I think small moves into the darkness is how it happens. You just take small moves into your fear, right?
And pretty soon, you’re taking bigger and bigger steps, and you realize you’re kind of now standing in the light, that you’re not afraid anymore, because you’re still here. You’ve survived it. You’ve survived the risk.
So I just… I know that on Facebook and in interviews and everywhere, we all show our best, most successful selves. But there’s still…
there has been and there still is struggle, you know, in all of it. But I think I… I think you’re right in that I have at least gotten to this point where I feel like, okay, you know, what is there to lose?
You know, I… I’m just going to do it. And if I suck, I suck.
Oh, well. And then there will be the next audition, and maybe that one will be better, you know. And I send off stuff all the time that isn’t up to par, you know, not because I am not trying, but I realize this is not a fit for me.
I did my best, you know, but I’m not going to book it because it’s not me. So I just want to make sure that people know that it’s the accumulation of experience and the accumulation of taking tiny little steps into the things that I have been afraid of that have made it possible for me to take bigger steps. And so, you know, so anyway, I just want to clarify that.
But it’s important that…
Thank you very much for that.
But it’s important that even though you’ve reached this part of your career where you’re comfortable, you’re not taking it anything for granted. And that comes across in the way you’re so gracious to everybody and are just a delight to talk to. So once again, we thank you for coming on and being just such a great guest and really fast friends, like you said, with some of your guests on The Beehive.
We haven’t known each other that long, but I feel like we have for a long time.
Yeah, yeah, I totally get that too. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
And I appreciate the opportunity and you guys letting me tell a part of my story. I do appreciate it.
Our pleasure. So lastly, where can people… Where can they hear your voice on any recent projects that you’d like to share?
Or how can they get a hold of you? If they’d like to hire you for a project or even as a coach?
You can find me at kaybess.com. I do a little bit of coaching. My coaching page is not…
It’s not a public page, because it’s not primarily what I do, but I do… I definitely do a bit of coaching for sure. So if you’re interested in that, you can always send me an email, and then I will send you a link to my coaching page about what that’s all about.
But you can find me there. You can contact me from there. The email on my website goes directly into my inbox, so that’s a very surefire and accurate way to get a hold of me.
And then, what can you hear me on? It’s funny, most of the work that I’ve done of late won’t be released for a while. And so I don’t know where…
I think… I hear rumor that you can still find me on the Property Brothers on seasons one through four, because it just sort of lives forever out there, wherever that show is.
I found the Clear Blue Easy ad, by the way. It’s still out there. While you were talking, I looked it up.
And it’s terrible. I mean, it’s terrible, isn’t it? I listen to that voice and I go, oh, wow, what an awful voice over.
But I guess it’s just what was going on at the time. But yeah, it’s funny. I mentioned in my keynote, having done my very first promo with Don LaFontaine, and I have…
Somewhere I have that promo. And I just… I’m so bad.
It’s like… Because I truly… I had no idea what a promo was.
They were perfectly happy with it. But I just listen to it and I go, oh, wow, I just had no idea what I was doing. Don, of course, he sounds like Don, and he’s fabulous.
But I just sound so young and inexperienced. It’s kind of hilarious. Yeah, so there are all kinds of clips on my website, in truth, that my demos are there.
Which, you know, all of that stuff is work that I have done. And then I’ve also got links to YouTube stuff where you can hear clips of the video games that I have been in, stuff like that. So my website, kaybess.com, is really kind of…
That’s where you can hear stuff. And then sometime in 2020, things will be popping up on Netflix.
How many times has this happened to you? You’re listening to the radio when this commercial comes on.
Not unlike this one.
And this guy starts talking.
Not unlike myself.
Or maybe it’s a woman that starts talking. Not unlike myself. And you think to yourself, Geez, I could do that.
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Because you like to have fun.
Well, thanks so much to Kay. That was amazing. I was inspired by her at VO Atlanta, as much of the room was, I think.
I could see as I was looking around, everyone focused intently on her as she was giving her wonderful speech. And especially at the wrap up on the morning after, on the last day on Sunday, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really feel blessed to have Kay on the podcast. I mean, she was so, like I said, has just learned so much from her personal experience.
And I feel like what resonated with me is that she’s just got such a, like such a confidence in her personality and in her performance. And she really encouraged others to find that confidence within yourself, even if you’re not getting a lot of feedback from the world, you know? So like, just being patient and persistent, and then being open to opportunities when they present themselves.
So being confident and being like, yes, I deserve this opportunity. And then just attacking it with that confidence and giving 100% of yourself to it.
And to still push forward even when you don’t feel like you’re progressing. I think the biggest thing that struck me about the talk was that how she didn’t always feel confident. And most of us feel that way.
We talked about in the last episode of Posture Syndrome, we all have this feeling of not feeling like we’re moving forward. And as long as you keep looking for new opportunities, be open to them, they will eventually come.
Absolutely. So thanks again Kay for being a guest on our podcast. It truly was a pleasure to have you.
So that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Thanks again to Kay Bess for being on the show. Coming up, we’ll have a great interview with Karin Gilfrey and Jamie Muffet, who are the co-founders and hosts of the VOcation conference in New York. Coming up in September, where we will be featured as a podcast partner.
So really excited about that.
As you might have noticed the play on words VOcation, vocation, this conference is a little bit more focused on the marketing and business aspect. So I’m really excited to see what Jamie and Karin come up with for the itinerary for that conference.
Yeah, and I’m excited to be presenting there as well. So we’ll see how that goes.
Awesome. And that pretty much wraps up this episode. So thank you guys for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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