Paul Stefano

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, Vocal Booth to Go, Podcast demos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, JMC Demos, and IPDTL. And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi everybody, we have a very special episode of The VO Meter. Sean and I were lucky enough to be guests on Rich Miller’s Audiobook Speakeasy podcast a few weeks ago. We sat down, had a few drinks, a few laughs, talked about audiobooks, and actually came up with some nuggets about the business.
So have a listen and let us know what you think. And thanks so much to Rich for having us on the show. We really enjoyed it.
My guests tonight are fellow podcasters. Two and a half years ago, they started The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress podcast. Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley, thanks for joining me in The Speakeasy tonight.
Hey, thanks for having us.
Happy to be here, happy to be able to drink and have an excuse to do so.
It’s always five o’clock somewhere, Paul.
Exactly.
That’s why you asked us to meet now. It all makes sense.
Speaking of which, Paul, what are you drinking tonight?
Well, I have quite the concoction. I’ve taken some local whiskey, a whiskey called, a rye called the Sagamore Spirit.
Oh, I know Sagamore Spirit. I don’t believe I’ve ever had that, but I have seen it, yeah.
Yeah, it’s very colloquial. It might not be out your way yet, but it’s very popular here. It was founded by the owner of Under Armour, Kevin Plank, and he bought the horse farm that’s based just outside of Baltimore that’s pretty famous for raising thoroughbreds all the way back to the horse war admiral that some of your fans may know from the movie Sea Biscuit.
So that match race that they had at the end was Sea Biscuit versus War Admiral, and War Admiral was bred at this farm that Kevin Plank bought, and then started making whiskey with the water that flows through the spring there. So the rye is done from the spring at the Sagamore Farm. And what I’m having now is a black-eyed rye, and that’s named after the Maryland State flower, which is the black-eyed Susan, and it has, let’s see, some simple syrup.
In this case, I used blueberry, fresh mint, and ginger beer on top of the Sagamore spirit, so cheers.
Wow, so it’s kind of a Kentucky mule with rye instead of bourbon, and blueberry simple syrup.
Yep.
Nice concoction, so I have never heard of that before, so is that from a recipe, or did you just make it up?
It’s a recipe on their website, but it’s the first time I’ve made it, and it’s quite good, actually, I have to say.
Well, what do they call it?
It’s called a black-eyed rye.
Oh, I see, I see.
Oh, gotcha.
So I thought that that was the name of the rye whiskey, but so that’s the name of their drink.
Yeah, and the whiskey itself is just called Sagamore Spirite, that’s all it is.
Got it, okay. Yeah, I know that I’ve heard of that whiskey, I just don’t remember where, and so I don’t know if they distribute out this way or not, but I’ll definitely take a look for it, I’m a big fan of rye.
Well, actually, I should say that the CEO, and I’m in no way being compensated for this, but the CEO of the company, the actual distillery, is a graduate of Northern Arizona University and has actually lived out there for quite a while, so maybe he’s working on bringing it out there, we’ll see.
Nice, yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely take a look for it. Sean, what about you? What are you drinking tonight?
Well, I admit, I don’t usually drink in the booth, so I try to keep it within a closed container, but we’re just having a Wiedmer Brothers Hefeweizen, the original American Hefeweizen, so maybe I shouldn’t use a German accent for it. But Wiedmer is totally a German name, yeah?
Nice, nice. I’m not much of a beer drinker anymore. In fact, I’m not a beer drinker anymore.
But back in my college days, I learned how to pack a little mini dorm fridge with five, six packs of Heineken. And back then, when I did do a little experimenting with beers, I actually really liked a Hefeweizen. That was one of my favorites.
Yeah, I drink the occasional stout, but usually it’s light or wheat beers kind of thing. And I actually got to go to Germany when I was younger as part of an exchange trip. I got to go to Munich in the big Hofbrau house there.
And I think since then, I just had this romantic idea of these golden wheat beers and just mead hauls.
Well, that’s great. All right, well, I am joining you guys in a variation on a theme. It’s a rum Manhattan.
I decided to, I heard this at one point. I think it was on the Whiskey Topic podcast. They were talking about just changing things up and taking something that you know and making it differently.
And I think that that was where I heard the first idea of a rum Manhattan. So I combined that with PJ Oakland’s triple bitters Manhattan, and instead of just using Angostura Bitters for this rum Manhattan, I’m using Angostura Plus Orange Bitters. Plus, because I thought this would go well with the rum, since one of my favorite rums is a cacao infused rum.
Aztec chocolate bitters. And so I am having a rum, a triple bitters rum Manhattan.
Very cool.
I’m feeling very out of my element here. I didn’t even know they had flavored bitters.
Oh my gosh, yeah, the Fee brothers make a whole ton and there are a bunch of different bitters companies now. And Jenny actually bought me, my wife Jenny actually bought me a do-it-yourself bitters book for Christmas a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I have not yet made any of my own, but I have big plans.
So anyway, this is great. It’s with Dictador 12 year old Colombian rum. And I gotta say, it’s pretty damn good.
Fantastic.
So thanks for joining me guys. Cheers.
Cheers.
Clank. The nearest thing was an iPad. I didn’t want to click that.
Oh no, not a good idea. No reason to clink with an iPad. So Paul, where are you from?
I’m originally from Philadelphia. I came here to go to a local university called Towson State University.
Where is here?
And I’m in Baltimore, Maryland, or just outside.
Got it, okay.
And met my wife here and I’ve been here ever since. So it’s been, let’s see, 20, 26 years, 25 years.
Oh, wow, so you grew up in Philly, but then as soon as you left for school, that was pretty much it.
Right, and it’s not that far away. It’s only about a 90-mile drive. So I do get back quite often.
Most of my family’s still there, but I have not lived full… Yeah, I mean, pretty much the whole Eastern Seaboard is really accessible by car. I drive to New York quite frequently.
I’ve even driven to Boston from here. But yeah, I came here after college and just sort of stayed.
Cool, I’m just not that familiar with the geography. I was talking to Tonya Eby recently, and she was talking about Chicago, and it’s like, you know, Chicago is one of the big four cities in the country, and I just don’t know anything around that area. I grew up in California, and I just didn’t get out very much when I was a lot younger.
So that’s cool. Sounds like you’re close to home. You still have family back in the Philly area.
Yeah, exactly. In fact, I was just there last weekend. So it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump, as they say, back in the home area.
90 minutes, not hard. Sean, what about you?
Well, I spent most of my life in Washington State. There was a brief stint in California when I was very young, like maybe a few months to six years old. And then, let’s see, then spent kind of a couple years back and forth between Washington State and Japan, of all places.
So when I was younger, my family moved over to Okinawa when I was like 10 to 15, and then moved back to Washington, and then finished high school and college there. And then over the summers, while I was getting my grad degree, I started going back to Japan, working at these like English summer camps. And then when I finally finished school, God, I was there, like I could practically have a doctorate with how many years I was there.
But anyways, when I finished that, I decided to pursue teaching there professionally over there for about four years in Nagasaki, in the southern part, and place the southern island of Kyushu. So for people who don’t know, Japan’s kind of divided into like four island areas. So Kyushu is the southernmost one.
So Okinawa from the US, that sounds, that just makes me think military. Are you an army brat by any chance?
Navy brat, actually.
Navy brat, all right.
So dad was Navy, mom was Air Force, but both of them actually had medical jobs. So dad was a developmental pediatrician. So he worked with a lot of families who had, I mean, who had, he was a children’s doctor and he specialized in kids with special needs.
And then mom was a nurse, but since the Air Force didn’t really have any hospitals, she went into family counseling. So, or what was called family advocacy. So she would kind of talk to parents and like beginning families about how to adjust to the military life, like when a spouse is gone for so long and how do you raise a family without them, things like that.
Do you ever think about going into the military?
No.
Nice fast answer there.
I’m too free of a spirit. I don’t like being told what to do.
Got it. So you did teaching for a while. And what were you teaching?
It was English as a second language. And so that was for… It was interesting.
It was through this program called JET, or Japanese Exchange Teaching. It’s one of the largest English teaching companies that has an agreement with the US. And it’s actually run by the Japanese consulate.
And so not only were we supposed to be like English teachers, but we were also cultural representatives. So that kind of thing. So we are expected to impart all of our American-ness to these kids in like 45-minute intervals over…
Yeah, I’m sure that that was a challenge.
Totally effective. Yeah, very well organized.
Got it. So, Paul, if I’m remembering correctly, you are or are not full-time voice over at this point.
I am not. I’m working my way there. I work part-time.
I’ll stop talking.
Well, I don’t want you to stop talking. So what is it that you’ve been doing for work for the past 26 years since you’ve been in Baltimore?
Well, I’ve had a multitude of jobs in various different industries. I started out in television. So I have a degree.
My undergraduate degree was in broadcast journalism. So I had a job doing master control at a satellite company. I started a couple of websites.
My first voiceover job was while I was working for the EasyPass system. That’s the toll collection service here on the East Coast. I’m not sure if they’ve gone out to the West Coast, but basically when you go through a toll on a lot of the highways on the East Coast, instead of paying money, you have this transponder that picks up the account.
Yeah, they had those for the bridges in the Bay Area when I lived in the Bay Area, but I did so little commuting that I never looked into it. I don’t know if it’s the same company or what, but they definitely had something like that.
Okay. So yeah, my first job voiceover related was that they didn’t pay me for it. I was doing customer service there, but they were installing a new phone system.
They said, hey, you have a good voice. Why don’t you record this for us? So I did that, and I think I’m still the on hold voice, if you call there to the Maryland Payment Center and are put on hold.
I think it’s still me saying, please hold me with you as soon as we possibly can. And then I did-
So friendly and soothing.
I’m not like my normal voice, right? So then I did a couple of internet websites. I started up doing quality assurance and stress testing, beta testing on websites.
Then I was a financial advisor, then I worked for the Baltimore Orioles, the Major League Baseball team.
Were you a pitcher?
And then I moved. I was not a pitcher, although during those years, I probably could have stepped onto the mound for the team. I just worked in the front office doing ticket sales.
And then I moved to my current company, where I still am for a couple hours a week as a data entry person in the registrar’s office of an online university.
So that is quite a few different jobs. What was it that convinced you that broadcast journalism was not where you were going to stay?
People telling me I wasn’t good at it. I tried, I tried like heck.
You should let that stop you.
I sent out, back then, tapes and CDs to every station in the country. I thought I was going to be on TV. I don’t want to be a news anchor.
So I sent out tapes and resumes to everywhere I could think of. And the only problem was I didn’t really want to move. And living on the East Coast, in between two large cities, as we mentioned, I’m from Philadelphia, and I now live in the Baltimore, or they call it the Baltimore Washington Market, I was never going to get a job out of college here.
So if I wanted to get a job, I had to move. And I decided it wasn’t as important to me as starting a family and making some money.
Yeah. I’ve heard that about all types of media, is that you really have to be prepared to move to wherever you can get the job, whether it’s the middle of Montana for a tiny station or some big market on a small station or whatever it is. But I’ve heard that for radio, TV, all kinds of media.
Yeah, Montana is the one I used to always reference. That was one of the only callbacks I ever got, was from a station in Missoula, Montana.
No kidding.
And I was like, nope, I’m not moving there.
I can’t blame you. Nothing against Montana, but I have an aversion to very cold weather that lasts for a long time. So I don’t know what the climate is like in Baltimore.
I suspect that it’s too cold for me.
It’s pretty temperate. I mean, we probably top out at, well, we get to 100 sometimes in the summer, but in the winter, we never really get colder than, well, 10, if it’s a really bad winter. But generally around the 30s is where we bottom out in the winter.
Yeah, here in Tucson, we tend to bottom out right around 30, but winter lasts like three weeks. So that’s good for me. So then you got into voice over sort of at one of your employers, and later on down the road, what made you think, you know, I should look into this more and do more of it?
Well, the same situation played itself out again at my current company. One of the things they do is online courses for college students. And they were looking for volunteers, again, not looking to pay anybody, to do voice overs for their online content, some e-learning.
So I did and had a lot of fun doing it and said, this is something I’d like to do more of. And I kind of always had that itch that I really wanted to do something media related. And when I started to do research and looked online at some of the places, like the VOBB, where we first met, you know, virtually.
Oh yeah, I remember.
And watching some other podcasts and webcasts, I learned that I could set it up pretty quickly with my past knowledge and get ramped up pretty quickly. So I did, and I’ve been pursuing it as hard as I can ever since.
Yeah, that’s great. How long ago was that?
It’s been three and a half years, coming up on four years.
Oh, that’s not long at all.
No, it’s not in the grand scheme of things. I kind of forget how recently I’ve really been trying. So yeah, it’s kind of ironic that it’s only been three and a half years.
Long distance race. So Sean, you were doing the teaching thing. What made you think about voiceover?
How’d that get into your head?
Well, to be honest, I feel like it was always in my head from a very young age. Really? Yeah.
I think, because I mean, I was doing voices with my brother as early as like five. I remember doing like Donald Duck with my brother Tristan. He was seven.
I was five. We were just going back and forth. Like, this one and so are you!
And stuff like that. And so, like I, I don’t know, I just, back then, as a child, like most of us didn’t understand that those are like people who are voicing the characters. I just wanted to live in a cartoon.
So, but yeah, that itch was always there. And as I grew up, I was like a pretty gregarious and rambunctious kid. I did like all sorts of creative stuff.
I was in theater. I was in band. I was like, yeah, like I said, I was a band geek and a drama nerd and just penultimate nerd, basically.
So you were in band. I’m going to guess brass.
Why do you say that? You’re right, but I’m just curious.
Because I was in band. And I’m just thinking, you know, the way that you’re talking and everything, I’m just thinking of the people that I’ve known. So I’m guessing brass.
I’m guessing trumpet.
Absolutely. Two for two. And you’re very right.
Trumpet players are always trouble. I was a band geek too.
Oh, no kidding. What did you play? I’m guessing woodwind for you.
Nailed it. Clarinet and saxophone.
That’s exactly what I did.
There’s definitely personality types who do certain instruments. And like you’re saying, brass tends to be the rambunctious and loud types.
Well, that’s great. So you did all kinds of creative stuff through school. Have you kept up with any music or acting on stage?
I did do community theater as I got older. As voiceover started taking off, though, I had less time for that. But I mean, that was kind of how I scratched that itch.
And ever since I was about 18, my brother and friends were trying to start a band, and then they were like, we need a bassist. So of course, that fell on me. And basically, I was like, I’m not dexterous enough to learn guitar, but maybe four strings, I can handle that.
There you go. So I played that for a while. Yeah, I love most creative endeavors, I like going to the theater, or going to the theater.
Like I said, I did. And when I was in school, I actually minored in theater just because I didn’t want to… I didn’t pursue it much more than that because everyone’s like, there’s no money in it, you’re never going to be successful.
And from an early age, I had always wanted to be an English teacher just because I loved the language, I loved the storytelling aspects, and even the grammar nerd stuff. And some of my most memorable mentors were English teachers. So I wanted to kind of share that love of language and love of communication with the next generation, if you will.
So that’s cool. So you did get into teaching and now you’re more on the creative side. Are you doing voiceover full time at this point or are you still teaching?
I’d say like three quarter time, just because the majority of what I do is related to VO. And like in my free time, I just kind of lifeguard and teach water aerobics and stuff like that. And I get a free gym membership.
Well that’s good. Free gym membership. Hard to beat that.
So that’s cool. So you’re both really pursuing it pretty aggressively. So Sean, how long ago was this when you got into voiceover much more aggressively?
I’d say about seven years ago when I was like…
So a little bit longer than Paul.
And I’m a bit of a slow bird. But anyways, yeah, so it was after my first year teaching in Japan, because that was kind of my first big boy job. So I finally had all this disposable income that I was of course spending completely on VO stuff.
So whether it was… Yeah, exactly. Oh God, don’t even…
Believe it or not, there was a time when I was actually afraid of those kind of purchases and I just like… Nowadays, I’m like, ah… Maybe it’s like…
We won’t go into a questionable gear purchase section just now. Just yet, just yet. I know that there have been plenty in both of your lives.
Yeah, but I’m recovering. I like to call that gear pressuring, but anyways. So, yeah, after my first year in Japan, I basically spent…
Once I knew that’s what I wanted to do, I spent an entire year just researching.
Oh, that’s fantastic.
Yeah, and that’s something that I wish I saw more of, frankly. But like I said, I spent an entire year just reading things. So I would buy books.
I would read the articles on Voice Over Extra or on VOBB, which is probably how I found out about you as well.
I mean, I’ve been on VOBB. I don’t visit it much lately, but I was not one of the original members, but I know that I found VOBB… Jeez, I’m thinking it must have been 2004, 2006, something like that.
I’ve had an account there for many years. That was where I met Kafer, too.
The old guard. Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
That’s too cool. But yeah, so I would just read as much as I could, and at that time, I didn’t understand all of it, but I would just try and read as much as I could between the VOBB and Voice Over Extra, and this was right around the time where you’re getting shows like Rob Paulson’s Talkin Tunes and VO Buzz Weekly and VOBS, like formerly EWABs. And so I just spent that whole year just trying to absorb as much information about it as I could, and reading blogs from like Dave Kravatsyay or Paul Strickverda and things like that.
I love Paul’s…
Strickverda.
You don’t have to say it so angrily every time.
I love his recent column, sort of geared towards new people in the industry.
I recommend that to anybody.
So quite a while, seven years, Paul three and a half, probably. But one of the main reasons I want to talk to you guys is because your focuses are quite different. Or your foci, bringing out the math geek in me.
Quite different. So Paul, you’ve done a substantial number of audiobooks. What made you decide to pursue audiobooks as part of your voiceover career for the past three and a half or four years or whatever it’s been?
Well, kind of like Sean, I’m not sure if he even knows this, but I spent probably six months to a year doing the same thing, just reading up on voiceover and ways to get started and researching before I recorded the darn thing. And for me, I thought audiobooks were an easy entry into the business, I have to admit. I know better now, but it seemed to me that was a quick way to start.
And I jumped in pretty quickly after I did that research into ACX and started putting myself out there for jobs. And I got some pretty quickly, almost immediately. And from there, I just kind of never stopped.
I always have one or two projects going because I found out I enjoyed it. And aside from my initial misconceptions about it being an easy way to get work, it’s where I still get hired the most. So I audition for all kinds of genres and I do a fair amount of work in all of them.
But audiobooks are still by far where I get the most bang for my buck, so to speak, on marketing.
So it seems to me that I heard you say that recently on the VO Meter that you were, because it’s been working well for you, you are putting that much more effort into it lately. Is that correct?
Absolutely. I didn’t really realize it was happening until I went back and one, did my taxes, and two, looked closely or more closely at where my work was coming from. And Sean and I are part of this meetup group that meets now bi-weekly, used to be weekly.
And sort of at the beginning of the year, all of us in this group sat down and did this assessment of where our work was coming from. And it was without a doubt, for me, audiobooks. So I’m definitely pursuing it more.
I’ve just this in the past two months, I’ve had my first job with a publisher, and I’m going to APAC next month. So I’m really putting…
Is this gonna be your first APAC?
This will be my first APAC, yes.
I will see you there.
Oh, awesome. So yeah, definitely focusing more on it now than I ever have, and it just makes sense because that’s where I was seeing all the results. So it just makes sense to pursue the genres that are working for you.
Yeah, that’s great to take that step of actually kind of analyzing what’s been happening instead of just going, doop-do-doo, oh, voiceover work, and actually seeing where everything is coming from. And the Meetup group that you mentioned, is that the one that you guys did a podcast episode on?
Yeah, exactly.
That was a great episode. I really appreciated the fact that you actually shared one of the Meetups that you did, so that it wasn’t just about, you should be in a VO Meetup group. Thanks, that’s it for tonight.
It was really, this is why. Here’s what we do. And people could get a good sense of what the benefits of doing that are.
And so it sounds like this was one of those benefits. You actually got to analyze what you’ve been doing and what’s been working. And so that’s great.
So you are focusing more on audiobooks.
Yeah, it’s funny, just as I say that, I’m hit with this giant e-learning project that I can’t climb out of several dozen hours a week.
Wow, no kidding.
That’s just how it works sometimes.
That’s a lot of work, several dozen hours a week?
Yeah.
That’s a big project.
It is, but it’s paying well. And soon as we get off here, I’m gonna do some more.
Well, that’s good. So a lot of your titles are, I mean, I looked you up on Audible and a lot of your titles are really short. Now, it’s frequently advised in the online groups that I know you belong to, that I belong to for audiobooks, that people getting into audiobooks don’t focus on short titles, but rather on full-length books that are the kind of books that they wanna work on for major publishers.
What is it that kind of drove you to those short titles originally?
I’m an idiot.
I mean, that’s part of it. I would certainly not say that about, anybody who makes that choice, but is it just one of those things where… Because I also know at least one person who has said that they did one short title that’s done very well for them, and that’s what they wanna focus on.
Now, from what I know, I don’t think that’s a good long-term plan, but for this one person, maybe it is. So I certainly wouldn’t say you’re an idiot. I’m just interested in why it is that that was something that you did, and as a follow-up, whether or not you would recommend that to anybody.
It sounds like the answer to that is no.
Well, I’m being partially facetious, but part of it was just pure gumption. Sean will tell you that I will try anything and hope that it sticks. And I had an initial goal of reaching this magic number of 25 titles because somebody told me that you could be an audible approved producer if you had 25 titles.
So I set that goal early on, and I thought the easiest way to get there would be to do shorter titles. And it worked. I got there pretty quickly, and I am an audible approved producer.
In fact, they reached out to me this week about being featured in an upcoming blog about being an audible approved producer. So I met that goal, and whether that was the right decision remains to be seen. I don’t know that it’s hurt me yet, but I also haven’t talked to anybody who’s told me that they think that’s a detriment to me personally.
I know from the industry standards it’s not the best way to approach the business, and I get that now. But just being stubborn more than anything, once I put that goal in front of me, that carrot, I really wanted to reach it, and I did. So I don’t regret doing it, but definitely now I’m focusing on longer titles that will be a better image for my portfolio, and I think that’s happening for the last couple of months.
I’m not sure if you looked up my pseudonym, and that’s another question. I apologize for jumping ahead, but all the titles I’ve done for my pseudonym have been longer titles, and they have been pretty successful.
Well, that’s a good question.
Advice is not wrong.
That’s a good question. Do you out your pseudonym, or is that something that you keep completely separate?
Frequently. I don’t think I’ve done it by saying the actual name, but I mean, I tell people in person, I’d rather not put it out on the podcast, because I haven’t done it on ours either.
Okay, that’s fine.
But suffice it to say, it’s due to being in the erotica genre, which I have no problem doing, but because I don’t want to mix those two portfolios, I do like to keep it separate.
Okay, no, that’s totally fair. I always ask people ahead of time, because I don’t want to actually use the pseudonym name, which I’m aware of in this case. And usually, well, half the time, I am aware of that somebody has a pseudonym.
But I know that there are some people who immediately say, oh, my pseudonym is, and they talk about the books that they do under that name, and they do it for a specific reason. And there are other people who say, absolutely do not do that. If you out me, I will never speak to you again, because I’m doing this for a very specific reason, and I do not want to be associated with that work.
It’s not that I don’t want to do it. It’s that whether it’s because they have small children or whatever the reason, they want it to be, or just marketing, they want it to be completely separate. And I totally respect that.
So if you don’t want to mention the name, that’s absolutely fine. But clearly, you’re okay talking about…
You’re aware of the name of mine?
Yeah, because you told me.
Clearly, I’m bad at keeping a secret.
No, in an email, you mentioned it.
Like I said, I’m not the best at keeping a secret in person.
So that’s fine. Clearly, you’re okay talking about the fact that you do work under a pseudonym, and it’s because it’s in the erotica genre. Is there anything that you have…
Is there any type of audiobook work that you have turned down or that you would turn down because of the type of work that it is?
No. And one is because I’ll take the money from anybody. And two, because I honestly feel that whatever somebody is into, for whatever reason, it’s their business, and I don’t need to be judgmental about it.
Right. I’m not just talking about erotica, though. I mean, there’s political things, religious things.
I recently did a book on… Sorry, go ahead.
Just, you know, there are people who have political boundaries and religious boundaries, and erotica boundaries, various different things like that. And so I’m just wondering if there’s anything, not just erotica, that you would take a look at and go, you know what, I’m not even going to audition for that because I wouldn’t want to put my name on that.
No, same thing. I recently did a book about right-wing conspiracy theories. No problem with that whatsoever, even though I’m a registered Democrat.
No, fair enough. And how’s the pseudonym work going?
Well, he… I’ll mention it’s a he.
That’s not a big surprise, Paul.
Yeah, I know. He is by far much more popular than I am. All of my highest-paying titles and most reviewed are by the pseudonym.
I have some of them that have over 50 reviews and are really well received, whereas most of the ones I’ve done in my own name do not get that kind of traction.
Cool, so it sounds like you have good reason to continue to put a lot of effort into the audiobook world as part of the VO career.
Yeah, and my only question now is whether I need to put full-time work into marketing the pseudonym. I’ve worked with Sean Pratt, who I know Sean has worked with as well, and I think you have too, Rich? Oh, yeah, yeah.
And he definitely encouraged me to do that, to just go full-bore marketing the pseudonym website, Business Cars, The Whole Nine Yards. I haven’t got to that point yet, mostly because it’s like Seinfeld. You ever watch that episode where he accidentally got into a threesome and he said, I don’t want to be an orangey guy.
I’m not an orangey guy.
That’s a pretty good cherry.
I don’t want to go down that road entirely. Right, right.
Well, that makes sense. So Sean, let’s move over to you. So I also checked your name on Audible and didn’t find anything.
And so that’s the reason that because you guys started your podcast when you were both fairly new into voiceover and you have clearly gone in somewhat different directions, depending on how much more Paul goes into audiobooks, maybe, you know, quite, quite different directions, but you have not focused on audiobooks. And so I’m really interested for you as a voice actor, why it is that that was not something that as you were looking at the various different parts of the voiceover world that you could get into, you chose not to.
Well, there’s a lot of different reasons. And it’s funny that like Paul, I actually viewed it early back in the day as a easy way to break into the VO industry and oh, how wrong I was.
Yeah, I don’t think that you two are alone in that.
And so to answer your question, there was a lot of reasons, especially because when I was researching this, I was living in Japan and it wasn’t, I did not have a practical place to record. I was recording out of a small apartment, but I happened to be on the street with a, let’s see, with a hospital, a police station, a fire station, and a street car.
It was loud, man. I remember that place. That’s insane.
Oh, that’s right, during our old VO Vanguard meetings. That’s right. It was horrible.
But yeah, so I mean, and when I was building my voiceover career and it was really pushing hard to kind of get my shingle out there, there was a six month period where I had my day job. So I would get up at 6.30, I would be at work from about eight to four or five, and then I’d come home. I’d sleep for five hours, eat something, and then record and edit from 11 to four, and then do it all over again.
Yeah, so just for people to have an example of the lengths you can go to to try and get your foot in the door.
I’ve definitely heard a few of those examples in audiobooks as well as other areas of voiceover and other careers as well. But wow, that’s dedication.
Thank you, thank you. But it’s funny because I mean, I do other forms of narration. I mean, the bulk of what I do is like e-learning or corporate narration.
It’s just a slightly different beast. Mm-hmm. But like there, and I will say I love audiobooks.
I love listening to them. I love researching authors and narrators and stuff like that. But I feel like just the way that I operate is a little bit like it’s, it was difficult because I didn’t have, I’ve done a couple like mainly volunteer stuff for Learning Ally or LibriVox and things like that.
Oh yeah, Learning Ally is a great organization.
Absolutely, and they like my stuff. So I’m like, all right, I do have the capacity for it, but it was like my own frustration with the process or not having a process that made it difficult. So like I didn’t realize that just the sheer amount of time it can take to do, like I’m not used to working on one project for two weeks to a month, you know?
And so, and also about a year ago when I was like re-examining it, I actually had a couple of health issues that I was dealing with. Some like a bad back injury, and I have tendonitis in both elbows from bass playing like we talked about before. So long periods of sitting, standing, or editing were not good for me.
And so like, but I’ll have you guys, you guys will be happy to know I’ve been doing written really good about the PT lately and like energy levels are back up. I can sit and stand and edit comfortably now. And that’s part of why I was kind of re-examining getting back into it.
And so like in other areas too, I would see on the various audiobook forums, people being frustrated with royalty share books. And I decided early on that I was not gonna do royalty share unless it was a subject that I was passionate about. And I had difficulty kind of branding myself, kind of like I’ve got like a young, but articulate sound and I didn’t know what would be appropriate for that.
And so, but like now it’s obvious. I was like, oh, YA lit, children’s lit, stuff like that. But even that was difficult to find on ACX.
And so, but here we go, like about a week or two ago, I found like five different per finished hour books that I would be interested in doing. So it’s just like, you know, mindset is important. So like sometimes when you have an openness to opportunity, they present themselves.
So I’m trying to take another crack at it. And I have, now I have a much better understanding of what’s required, both technically and systematically. So I think it’ll be much more positive results this time around.
Well, so when you first started, you were in Japan and you were on a busy street with sirens going off all night, and you had to record in the middle of the night. And I’m sure that even that was difficult with those things around you. You’re not still there though.
So what’s your recording environment like now?
Oh, it’s much better. I mean, I’m in rural Washington right now in a quaint little place called Port Orchard, senior Tacoma.
I actually know Port Orchard. My grandfather used to live there.
No kidding. That’s ridiculous.
Yeah.
Like, I’m… Man, like, I’m not as good at six degrees of separation as Paul is, but like, recently, we just talked with Pat Fraley and he’s a fellow Seattle guy. He actually lived about 20 minutes from where I am now.
In Bremerton.
Yeah, in Bremerton, exactly.
Yeah, I heard that on the little short clip that you posted for the podcast and I thought, yep, my grandfather lived there too. So, I’m actually, you know, vaguely familiar with that area. We went up there a couple of times back then and I had an uncle who lived out on one of the, you know, bazillion islands out in that way, but I can’t remember the name of it right now.
So, anyway, so now you don’t have a police station, a fire station, and a hospital right downstairs, right?
Thank God, yeah. Now we only have to worry about the neighbor’s dogs or our donkey every now and then. That’s pretty funny.
Like straight up, yee-haw!
I’m not sure that I even want to ask about that. So, the recording situation is better. What about the hours?
Are you still recording at like the middle of the night?
Only when I want to. Like, I’m naturally a night owl, so like if I’m up and I’m feeling productive, like I’ll work during those times, either editing or occasionally voicing stuff. But overall, it’s a much more conducive environment to that.
So, it wasn’t so much a survival situation of like I gotta do it now when it’s quiet, versus I have much larger blocks of time when it’s incapable of recording.
That’s good. So, it looks like right now, you are gonna be doing more in the audiobook world.
Yes, I definitely plan on it. And I’m trying to, like we said, focus on like Young Adult Lit. I’m a huge fan of sci-fi and fantasy, so I would love to do more books like that.
But as I’m listening to you and Paul, I do realize it’s important to branch out into areas of things that you’re not interested in so much. But I mean, as actors, it’s our job to make it sound like we are.
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I hear from, I have heard from several people, is they have turned work down, not specifically because they didn’t agree with the content, but because they knew that because of the content, they weren’t going to be able to do the kind of job that the work needed to be a professional, you know, this sounds great kind of thing. And I really respect that for somebody who is willing to do it, but then looks at it and says, I can’t do this to the level of perfection that you’re going to need for this or that you will want for this.
It’s definitely a perfectionist mindset, I find, because it’s just like, I mean…
Well, it’s a professional mindset, right? Well, that too.
Yeah.
If you’re being professional about it, you’re going to respect the craft and the writing. I just did this with a book with somebody from our meetup group, not because I didn’t agree with the content, but because the story took place in Northern Wisconsin and every town was a colloquial pronunciation that I could not do being from the East Coast. So I backed out of it.
I actually had the contract and I backed out and said, I’m not right for this. And I sent it to our friend from our meetup group, John Rorta, who’s from Chicago and already has that Midwestern accent. He completed it.
He nailed it. There’s already one review out there. That’s a five-star review.
So it’s just sometimes it’s the right thing to do. It is.
I had one of those as well where somebody who I’d worked with several times before that, and it was a really important project for him. But he said, there’s a lot of French in it. Do you speak French?
And I said, no. And I’m thinking to myself, no, but I’m pretty good with accents. It’s just something that hasn’t been super difficult, except for Scottish.
And so I thought, yeah, I’ll take a look at it. And so I looked at it, and as soon as I was only like five or 10 pages in, and there were already like five or 10 cities plus a paragraph plus something else, and I thought, you know, my wife speaks French and she can help me with this, but for this, there’s no way. I cannot do this justice.
It would take me forever to get this right, and he doesn’t deserve to wait that long for this product. And it’s probably still not gonna be quite right. And so I had to back out of it as well.
And I think that in those situations, like you were just describing, Paul, that’s the right thing to do.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s just called being a pro.
There you go.
Yeah, sometimes you have to accept that you’re not the best person for the job.
Yep, yeah, that’s great. Well, that’s good, Sean. I’m glad to hear that it sounds like you are going to be pursuing audiobooks.
Of course, it remains to be seen how much you like it, whether you want to continue with that. I mean, I think that is true for all of us in all genres, in all careers. It’s like, well, this seems like this might work out.
This might be good, but you’re not gonna know until you do it. Or do more of it, in your case.
No, absolutely. And like I said, I think for people who are interested in getting involved with this, like, try it out. Like, it can be intimidating.
And I know we just sort of talked about, like, oh, stay away from shorter projects. But honestly, I wish I had started with shorter projects. So I did not intimidate myself out of it before, while I was still interested, you know?
No, I do. And I would say, to follow up on that previous conversation we had about the short projects, is it is important to realize, I think, that there is a difference between high-quality short books and crap. And unfortunately, the reason that I think that this advice is out there is because the vast majority of the really short things that are, like, under an hour are not quality material.
But it is possible to get a short book that is only two hours, that is just sort of an informational type of thing, that has valuable information. So I just think that you can be discerning and find shorter projects.
And I love that you said be discerning. Do your research. Like, I’m not a fan of blanket absolutes.
So yeah, use your judgment.
Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to add this in because you asked and I forgot. But one of the short titles I did was on sales techniques and specifically emotional intelligence. It was about three hours of basically how to read people.
And that was worthwhile content. And to date, it’s my best selling title of any kind of book. It’s got over a thousand copies sold by itself.
It was a royalty share book that has done quite well for me. So like you said, if you pick the right content and it’s a worthwhile, it’s a well-written book that it’s worth doing.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I’ve got a couple that are that short that I would also say are high quality content and one that is not. You know, it happens.
You pick something and you go, I think this will be okay. And then you do it and go, oh God, I wish I hadn’t done that.
Oh, I have quite a few of those.
It happens. So Paul, what about your recording situation? I assume that you are recording mostly or entirely at home.
Yeah, I have yet to do anything outside the home. Yeah, so I have a studio set up in a spare bedroom in my 1970s colonial house with my wife and three kids, which makes things interesting. I think that’s my biggest challenge really is keeping the noise from inside the house, from getting in the booth.
I use a whisper room, a single walled one that I added some drywall myself to. That’s a lie. I hired somebody to put the drywall in.
No shame, no shame.
And then I treated it quite a bit on the inside with some blankets and some base traps. And then I use now, and as you’ve talked about in our show, it’s a theme that I have a different mic every week, at least I did for the first couple of years. But now I use an MKH416, a Sennheiser, for pretty much everything.
Although right now I’m talking to you from my Shure SM58, the stage mic that everyone tells you you should never use for voiceover, but I have like a dozen books out on this thing and it sounds good.
Well, it’s funny because, or sorry to interrupt, it’s just like a lot of people say that the 416 is another mic you should never use specifically for audiobooks. And I use it for everything, like long form narration, like audiobooks, when I do them. Like, it sounds fine, not for everyone.
Well, like you, Sean, I think that blanket absolutes are generally unhelpful. And I think that…
Nice joke in an audiobook speakeasy, Paul. But I’m pumped.
You gotta do at least third shelf here though, come on.
I respect Rich. I really don’t think that blanket absolutes are all that helpful. I will say that sometimes depending on the forum and I think that Facebook posts and comments where you’re really not spending more than a few sentences, sometimes a blanket statement is understandable.
But when it comes to microphones, I think that saying that a 416 is a terrible mic for audiobooks is probably not really gonna be true in 100% of the cases. I think that it’s gonna depend on room, treatment, and voice, just like it always does for all mics. So I don’t have a 416.
I hope to get one at some point. I also hope to get a U87, and I know that that’s complete overkill, but I’ve used one in studios before, and my voice sounded good on it, and I like the mic. And so I’m gonna buy one someday, and I’ll buy a 416, and I’ll probably buy a few other ones.
Some of them may be questionable gear purchases, but I’ll buy some other ones. And so if the 416 works, that’s great, the SM58, I gotta say, I’m surprised that you’ve used that on audiobooks. It sounds fine now, but we’re talking on Skype, so.
Yeah, I found that in some cases, because, in my case particularly, because of the sound I mentioned from the outside, because of the way it doesn’t pick up every little nuance, which I know is something you shouldn’t do for audiobooks, no absolute.
Or any nuance.
Right. It’s been helpful to me. When my kid next door is banging on his bedroom wall because he lost in Fortnite, this mic won’t pick that up.
416 will.
Well, I know another mic that you’ve used often too is like another Shure is the SM7B. And that’s like, it’s got its lovers and its haters because it’s a broadcast radio mic and stuff like that. But one of my mentors and prolific audiobook narrator, Carol Monda, that’s her main mic.
I love the SM7B, it’s a great sound. I found the one time that I used one, it was a good sound for my particular voice. I’m sure that’s not true for everybody because everybody’s different.
Yeah, what are you using now, Rich?
Rode NT1A.
Nice, oh wow.
I bought this mic.
Really?
Yeah, oh yeah, I bought this mic I think in 2002, 2003, something like that. Used it ever since.
Because that’s when you’ll hear, again, blanket statements from the Peanut Gallery on Facebook that it’s not good on deep male voices.
Absolutely. And I would, again, I would disagree as a blanket statement. Might be true sort of in general.
I don’t know, but it has worked fine for me. I know that the one comment that I’ve heard most frequently about the NT1A is that it’s brittle. I think that George Widdum was one of the first people I heard say that.
And I don’t disagree. There have been times when I’ve used it, you know that your own voice changes from different times of the day and different times of the week, and depending on whether you’re sick or how hydrated you are or whatever it is, there have been times when I have thought that there was a problem with the high end. I’ve never thought that there was a problem with this mic on my voice for the low end.
So, you know, I just think that every mic is gonna be different, and that’s why the best advice that I see frequently online is, you know, people can recommend a mic to you all day since you’re asking for a recommendation, but until you actually try these mics, you’re not gonna know until you listen to it.
Mm-hmm, absolutely. And it sounds great on you. I mean, like, you’ve got such a rich, bassy voice that it’s like, it kind of balances that out.
Yeah, it has worked for me so far, and so that’s what I’m using. And like I said, I look forward to upgrading the mic at some point when I can, when it makes sense, but for right now, it’s working, and that’s great, so. Anyway, so that’s me, and I think that you guys probably know, because I posted about this all over the place online, that I built my own booth a year ago, and it has definitely helped with keeping the sound out.
So you guys, what do you do when you are not narrating or working in your other jobs? Paul, what are you doing when you’re not? I know that you, with three kids and a wife and regular jobs and the voice over thing, which you are clearly putting a lot of time into, I can’t imagine that you have a whole ton of free time, but what do you do when you’re not doing this type of stuff?
Yeah, I have almost no free time. It’s all with the kids.
Yeah.
I do a lot of coaching of youth sports.
Oh, no kidding.
I don’t get too sentimental, but my dad was a musician, or still is a musician actually, and was really never around to be able to help out by coaching a team when I was a kid. He was always there to watch, but never was out there, the guy with the bat hitting the ball. So I sort of made it a point to be the opposite and coach everything.
So I coached my daughter’s soccer team and softball, both my son’s basketball and soccer and baseball. And so I’m always out doing something. In fact, I’m still wearing the clothes I wore to the baseball field an hour ago.
When I finished up with my 11-year travel team. Well, that’s basically all I do.
I’m glad I’m not in your booth with you then.
Yeah, it’s not a pretty sight. It’s all baseball dirt, and the hair’s all disheveled because I had a hat on for the last couple of hours. But yeah, I spend almost all my time coaching my kids’ sports teams or helping out with their activities.
My daughter is a musician now too. She plays guitar and sings, so I’m schlepping her around to different lessons and concerts. So that’s basically all my free time.
And I’m not complaining. It’s just how it goes when you have three kids who are under 15.
Sure, yeah. How old are you kids?
13, 11, and seven.
Oh man, that’s a lot of energy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I have a birthday party this weekend for my son who’s gonna have nine screaming other 11 year olds in my house all weekend. So there won’t be any recording done this weekend.
So 10 times as much energy then.
Exactly.
Sean, what about you? Do you have like four or five kids yourself?
Luckily, no. And hopefully none that I’m not aware of. Let’s see, free time, what is that?
No, let’s see, so I didn’t mention this earlier, but I also do a lot of work for Global Voice Acting Academy.
Oh, that’s right, yeah, I forgot about that.
So, and if you can, like if you’re trying to find survival gigs while you do VO, try and do it in the industry. So yeah, I’m what’s called the member liaison for that. I am responsible for the membership program and kind of making sure our members take full advantage of the benefits that we offer.
And other than that, I’m just hanging out with friends. I’ve recently become a bit of a D&D nerd or Dungeons and Dragons.
No kidding, wow, that’s great. I remember when that was pretty much brand new back when I was in college. Might’ve actually been brand new when I was in high school, but I didn’t know about it till I was in college.
And I know I have friends who have been in the past and continue to be big D&D nerds.
Well, what did it for me is that before I was leaving Japan, a friend of mine was letting me stay at his house because I no longer, the lease on my apartment was done. And so he was like, hey man, you need to watch the show called Critical Role, which is voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons together. So I had had a couple of middling experiences growing up that weren’t like, I don’t know, it was kind of bittersweet, wasn’t really great kind of thing.
And then when I saw what it was capable of, I was entranced, honestly. And then about a month after that, I met my current girlfriend and I played with her group. And then my friend got me to be a dungeon master for things.
And at first I was resistant, but I’m just like, it’s character improv, like nothing else, like honestly, like I’ve created characters on the spot and just like, and it really makes you like, and it’s not only like theatrical and performative, but there’s a whole bunch of logic and math involved. So you’re kind of using all of your, all gears at once.
That’s fantastic. So your girlfriend is involved as well?
Yeah, she’s actually a theater teacher. And so like we’re both kind of performers and that’s actually how we met. We went to college together and then we kind of went our separate ways when I moved to Japan.
And then when I moved back, she was in Hawaii, I was in Washington. And then she was like, you know, if you have never been to Hawaii before, I’ll be the hostess with the mostest. And I was like, I bet you will.
And then she came back.
That’s right. So we did long distance for about two years playing D&D on the weekends via Zoom.
Yeah, and honestly, I’d say it helped keep our relationship going. It was nuts. Because it gave us something to look forward to every week and we got to see each other for a few hours and play with her friends.
And it was almost like we weren’t 500 miles apart.
That’s fantastic.
So, but that’s not all I do, luckily. I mean, I still play music, love doing karaoke with friends when I can do, or have time to go out for that. And we have a lot of animals at our house though.
So we got three horses and a bunch of cats and a chicken.
And a donkey apparently.
That’s not our donkey, okay? No, no, that’s our neighbors. It’s our neighbors’ one.
Don’t we all have to keep out the noise from our neighbors, donkey?
My neighbor is such an ass.
Oh my God, that’s too much. I mean, I get doves outside and I have to deal with that noise. Fortunately, my booth takes care of that at this point.
But a donkey, I don’t think it would take care of that.
No, it’s hilarious. Like at 12 or one in the morning, you can hear, and then like a chorus of owls following afterwards.
Yeah, I don’t think hilarious is the word that would come to my mind when I heard that at one in the morning. So Paul, you have any words of wisdom for anybody getting into voiceover now and looking at audiobooks?
Yes, one thing I did take to heart early on was to outsource almost immediately your editing and proofing. Not only because you don’t see things that you’re missing, odds are if you make a mistake once, you’re going to make it again. But two, it frees you up.
I recently, well, the blog post I was talking about earlier with the Audible approved narrators that ACS asked me to do. I said it was like the heavens opened up when I was able to get the editing off my plate. Exactly, because I was able to do twice as much work.
I’m now almost always narrating two books at a time because I can send off the editing to one person, or one editor and proofing. Let me pick up on that, please. Sorry.
He’s passionate. He’s making mistakes. I finished my drink.
I got it. I understand.
In three, two, one. So now I can work on two projects at once because I can farm the editing out to one person with the one book, and the other book, I send out the editing to them and I get done twice as much work twice as fast and it’s just fabulous. So if you have the ability, and even if you don’t, I think everyone should outsource their editing and proofing as early as possible in their career.
Great. Good advice. I see that frequently.
Sean, what about you? As somebody who has been doing voice over for several years now and is now exploring it more, do you have any advice for anybody who’s looking at getting into audiobooks or who might be in audiobooks and might want to look at other genres?
Well, like I was saying a bit before, don’t try to jump in the deep end if you’re not quite ready. So find titles that you’re interested in, that you’re passionate about, because you’re going to give your best work that way, at least when you start. Then you can branch out and be like, all right, I can pretend to like this for 10 hours.
But do that, and start small, little things. Try some of the volunteer projects, like LibriVox or, what was I saying, Learning Ally, and to familiarize yourself with the process and have a process. Like, devote, I’m going to spend an hour on prepping this chapter.
I’m going to spend two hours on recording this chapter. I’m going to spend two hours on editing this chapter. Take lots of notes, make lots of…
I hear it again and again. Prep is what makes the world go round in audiobooks.
Yeah, no, that’s good. I like that. Well, this has been great, guys.
Where can people find you if they want to look for you online? I assume you have an online presence.
Go ahead, Sean.
Oh, go ahead? So, well, you can find me at my website. That’s daeleyvo.com.
It’s not spelled like my name. It’s spelled like you think. So dailyvo.com.
And you can also find me at the Global Voice Acting Academy website. So globalvoiceacademy.com.
That’s great. Yeah, we didn’t talk too much about GVAA, but I know I used to actually work with David Rosenthal. We worked on an ad campaign for A Place in San Jose.
It was one of those goofy things where it was through an agency that was representing me. And they were in San Francisco, and I lived in San Jose. And they were recording in San Francisco for this auto place that was about a mile and a half from my house in San Jose.
But every time we had to do a commercial, I had to drive up to San Francisco to do it. It was fine. It introduced me to some great voice actors for some really creative spots.
And David Rosenthal was one of them. We did several together.
That’s so cool.
So I worked with him. And then I actually coached with him for a short time when he was still… I think he’s in LA now.
Is that right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Santa Monica, I think.
Yeah. He was still in San Francisco at the time. And I coached with him briefly to try to work on the commercial side more.
And then for a number of reasons, I ended up sort of stepping back from the voiceover world. But he was great. I loved working with David, and I know that he is at the helm or was.
He’s still at the helm of GVAA, isn’t he?
Yeah, he’s still our president.
Yeah.
I mean, he’s a great coach and a good friend. Yeah.
He is a great guy. I would recommend anything that David offers as something that would be valuable, that they could get something out of. So I have a lot of respect for the GVAA.
So I think it’s great that you’re working there.
Well, thank you. I have a lot of respect for you, too.
So, Paul, what about you? Where are you? Do you have an online presence?
Or are you, like your pseudonym, just sort of hidden in the shadows?
I am everywhere. You can find me at www.paulstefano.com. It’s with an F like Fred.
Or at Paul Stefano on Twitter. Or Paul underscore Stefano on Insta, like the kids like to say. Blah.
All right, cool, I will definitely include all that in the show notes, so people can find you when they want to look for you. And of course, you have a podcast, which is called…
Oh crap, I forgot about that.
I didn’t think that was the name of the podcast. What was it again?
Yeah, it’s The VO Meter and the website.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Uh, we’re not doing the thing?
It’s called The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
And you can find it at www.vometer.com.
Alright. And I will say, and you guys aren’t paying me to say this, I have enjoyed the podcast. I’ve gotten a lot of interesting tips out of it.
I’m clearly not focusing on a lot of the topics that you talk about. So there have been a few episodes where I thought, yeah, that’s not really something that applies to me. But there have been a lot of just little bits of information along the way whether it’s about gear or whether it’s about, you know, dealing with people in this relationship business or whatever.
I’ve really enjoyed the podcast. I think you’ve had a lot of really interesting people on and they’ve shared a lot of good information. So I will definitely recommend it, even though you’re not paying me to say that.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Bring that cash to you, Rich.
I’m a big fan of your show. I listen to almost every episode.
Great. Great. And I know that, like you said, you mentioned Carol Monda.
She was one of my guests. And one of many who I have just a great deal of respect for. So many great people in this industry, both in audiobooks and in other genres.
And I know that Carol Monda crosses all those lines. She does commercials and all kinds of other stuff. So yeah, no, I’m glad you’re enjoying it.
And thanks so much for having us. This has been a blast.
Sure, yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for coming in.
I’ll see you in a few weeks.
Yes, absolutely. At APAC, I will be there.
Are you going to Johnny’s Splendiferous Workshop?
I’m not. I have been to Johnny’s Workshop the past couple of years, and this year, it just didn’t work out for me. And so I highly recommend it.
Are you planning to go?
Yeah, I’ll be there, too. I’m doing four days, actually, so I’ll be everywhere in New York that week.
Yeah, I highly recommend Johnny’s Workshop. The fact that I am not going this year is not in any way representative of my, saying there’s any problem with going.
The quality of content.
Absolutely not. It is a great workshop, and he has phenomenal people who participate in the workshop to give great information. So, highly recommend it.
I’m glad to hear that you’re going. I’m sorry I won’t be there, but I will certainly see you at the Boat Basin the night before. And at APAC the next day.
Sounds good.
And Sean, I assume that you are not going to be at APAC, or you would have mentioned it by now.
Oh, totally. I don’t feel like I’m not that constituency yet, but hopefully next year, I’ll have a bazillion titles under my belt and I’d be more than willing to go.
Oh, now see, I would say you do not need a bazillion titles under your belt to go to APAC. In fact, you want to start…
Oh, that’s great. I was not aware.
No, absolutely. You want to start building the relationships as quickly as possible in this relationship-driven business. So absolutely, I would not say to anyone that because they don’t have a lot of titles, that they shouldn’t go.
Just the opposite. Now, I realize at this point, it’s sold out, and so just hearing that from me, you’re not gonna get a ticket.
That’s the most expertly said.
It would be great for you, but you can’t go.
Yeah.
Too late at this point. Freaking elitists.
But no, I would absolutely recommend to anybody listening that if they’re thinking that they want to get into audiobooks, definitely recommended to go to APAC, even if they don’t have a single title. So, future reference, and hopefully next year we’ll see you there.
We’ve talked about industry conferences in the past, and I’m a big fan of saying that they’re a great way to just expose yourself to as much about the industry in a short amount of time. So I don’t know why I didn’t apply that to APAC.
Absolutely. And yeah, I would absolutely apply that to APAC as well. Really a good place to be.
Sweet.
So maybe next year we’ll see you there.
Hope so.
All right, well thanks guys for coming in. I hope the Hefeweizen was good and the, what was it again? The rye…
Black-eyed rye, yeah. I hope that ended up being a good drink, Paul.
Yeah, it was a little much. I drank like 32 ounces, but it was good.
A big gulp of rye. Yeah, not a good idea. So…
Your editor’s gonna get extra money this paycheck.
I will say that the Rum Manhattan, big thumbs up from me. And I think that half of that is the chocolate bitters.
Adding chocolate to this, perfect.
Thanks a lot for coming in, guys.
Thank you, Rich.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com. VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBoot2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, and IPDTL.
And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 38 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. We’ve got a great episode for you today. We are so excited to have voice acting legend, Pat Fraley, on our podcast.
Pat has been a long-time friend and mentor for me. I’ve been to a number of his workshops and have benefited from a lot of his home study courses. So I’m really happy that he was so generous to come on and share his decades of experience and insight into the VO business with us.
So you finally were able to wear him down, huh?
Oh yeah, definitely. Only took two years.
Our listeners will notice a theme with our upcoming episodes because several of our guests have come about in the exact same way with just sheer force of will from URI and making sure that we gave them plenty of reasons to not say no finally.
Yeah, seriously though, Pat is usually pretty… He’s been on a number of different podcasts and interviews. He’s always happy to share his knowledge, and he’s a real ham.
He likes to tell jokes.
With him, it’s just he’s so busy, and we appreciate that.
That’s true, that’s true.
So we’ll get to that interview in just a second, but before that, a word from one of our sponsors. Now you all must know about Vocal Booth to Go by now, but just in case you don’t, Vocal Booth to Go’s patented acoustic blankets are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing. They’re often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers, and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution.
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All right. Thank you so much to Vocal Booth to Go for being our sponsors. You guys know that Paul and I are huge supporters of all their products.
And but aside from that, it’s time to talk about current events. So what’s going on in your VO world, Paul?
Cool stuff. Always cool stuff. I bit my tongue really hard today.
That’s actually not so cool.
Sounds like a personal problem.
Yeah. I’ve been coaching my son’s baseball team and have the habit of chewing sunflower seeds. And I think I was trying to talk and chew at the same time, which is never going to be good, especially if you’re a voice actor and took a big chunk out of the tongue.
So that’s not good. But other than that, I have been working on a lot of e-learning. Picked up this great client a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve been throwing me tons of work every day, really.
This company’s been great to me. I’m doing a bunch of corporate training for sales staff. Two different companies, so I’m working with an intermediary who’s doing the production of the e-learning.
And they have some pretty big international clients, and I’m doing their corporate sales training. So that’s been pretty cool. Also, I’m proud to say I finally crossed the 4K, or 4,000 titles plateau with ACX.
So that was pretty cool to see. And so…
So is that 4,000 individual books? Or…
4,000 individual sales. So what that number is…
Gotcha, gotcha.
It’s books for which I’ve done royalty share. ACX tracks how many you sell daily, basically. Sometimes it’s a little buggy, but generally daily.
And I’m up to 4,000. So it doesn’t include any books I’ve done on a paid per finished hour basis. But 4,000 books just on royalty share.
And I was pretty darn proud of that, because I haven’t been doing this that long as we’ve talked about. And I wasn’t expecting to get there that quickly, honestly.
That’s great. Well, congratulations on both projects.
Thank you very much. And then other than that, I also was just at the audit laryngologist, actually technically the speech pathologist. We talked about this a couple episodes ago.
I’ve been doing the ongoing training, and I’m happy to say that we’ve seen some improvement with my stamina, vocal stamina, and ability to do more work at a time. I was having some real trouble with getting through some of the audio books I was doing, mostly because I was doing so many at a time. And some of the exercises we’ve done in stretching and warm-ups has really helped.
One thing I hadn’t really thought about is cool down. We talked about that today, which was sort of an epiphany for me. The pathologist said, what kind of cool down do you do after you’re done working?
And I said, nothing. I basically just crashed on the couch with a bottle of water or a glass of water.
I was about to say, or a beer.
Usually not when I’m working, sometimes on the weekend, but generally not when I’m doing voice stuff, because it’s really bad for you as far as your vocal health. But I had never thought about doing a cool down like you do when you’re going for a run or biking or any exercise where you’re physically exerting yourself. I guess the same holds true for the muscles in your throat.
And that was really something I had not thought about and something I think will help a lot to do exercises like you do for a warmup as a cool down, not as intense and they’re a little bit different, but basically trying to let yourself rest in a gradual fashion as opposed to just crashing when you’re done working. So that was really something that I had not thought about and I think will help a lot.
I’m so glad that you made that comparison of treating it like any other physical activity because I mean, granted, talking is not the most physically taxing thing the human body can do, but if you’re doing an exceptional amount of it, like most people we know record upwards of six hours a day, if not eight, I mean, having a proper warm up and cool down routine will only help you have longevity in your career and will prevent any horrible polyps or any kind of tissue damage from happening. So if you don’t already have a routine, there’s a lot of different things that you can look on, or like there are a lot of free programs you can look online, there’s a lot of great books on the subject, and of course, like there’s nothing like actually making an appointment with your ENT or auto laryngologist, or laryngologist if I said that correctly, and finding out or getting a diagnosis on what your current state is, and if you have any problems that need to be addressed.
Yeah, I highly recommend seeing a professional. I mentioned that when I first went a couple of episodes ago. And if you have somebody who specializes in performers, like I found here at Johns Hopkins, that’s just fantastic.
Although I will say I was getting a little geeky. We were doing some recording of the warmup routine, so I would have it for reference later. And I was like, oh, what software are you using?
And it turns out it’s the specialized medical software that allows them to analyze all the aspects of the voice so they can measure resonance and the amount of air that you’re putting through as you’re talking. So it’s not something we’d use as vocal performers, but I still have had it pretty cool.
Interesting. E&T Pro Tools.
Yeah, kind of, yeah, I forgot the name, but that’s basically what it was.
That’s so cool.
So what’s happening with your VO world, Sean?
Well, lots of stuff. It’s that time of the month again. But one of my largest client, or one of my largest eLearning clients, all of his stuff is always due on the, at the beginning of each month.
So now I’m just kind of making, I’ve got all the material recorded, now I’m just making the final edits, and we’ll send that in over the next couple of days. So on top of that, I followed up with a couple of clients who I had done a project with a month ago, because I hadn’t heard with them for several weeks, and they were a client through Bedalgo, and they didn’t know that only the casting aspects of the interactions are handled through Bedalgo. Once you kind of reach out and select the talent, all further interactions are between you and them.
So I followed up with them, I was like, hey, just wanted to make sure the status of the project. He’s like, oh yeah, it aired like two weeks ago. I was like, okay, why didn’t you tell me?
He didn’t ask for pickups or anything, so I just wasn’t sure. But anyway, so I just sent him the invoice after that, and he’s like, oh yeah, thank you. It worked out just fine.
It was like a local radio spot, but I got to channel my inner Wayne Campbell and do a little bit of a Wayne’s World spoof. It was a lot of fun. And then on top of that, let’s see, you’ve just been preparing this month’s workouts for GVAA.
We’ve got a great lineup. We’ve got our usual workouts with Joyce Castellanos doing promo, David Rosenthal kind of doing, we call it our Anything Goes workout because he’s kind of a jack of all trades and does commercial and character and narration and everything else under the sun. And then we also have an audio book workout with Carol Monda, and we’re actually gonna talk about kind of the mindset and answer any questions people have if they’re going to be participating in the APAC conference or the upcoming Book Expo that are happening in like middle to end of the month.
And other than that…
The end of the month completely. It starts on the 20 or some of the 29th.
Oh, okay. Got you, got you. So at the end of the month, excuse me.
And then like I said, mindset, how to approach authors, how to prepare for it, much like some of the other industry conferences that we’ve talked about in the past. And speaking of Carol, I’m actually gonna be working with her today on some audio book auditions, because after talking with you and after VO Atlanta and talking with some other compatriots, I really want to try and pursue it more earnestly, but I was just…
I’m sorry, we’re full.
What’s that? Sorry, we’re full.
Sorry, we’re full.
Oh, come on, but nobody sounds like me. You know it, but anyways. And she was really helpful.
She said she liked my most recent stuff, but she feels like there’s just one or two tweaks I could make that would make me much more bookable. So I was looking forward to that.
So it’s funny you mentioned Bedalgo. Did you see the new thing that Armand threw out into Facebook a couple of days ago? Yeah, I admit it.
I’m intrigued, but I don’t understand it.
Yeah, I’m a little confused too, but from what I understand, it looks like he’s starting another casting site completely free for talent. And he’s putting it on voices.net. So he bought the very popular domain voices.net.
Oh, that’s right.
And is trying to just completely disrupt everybody by making a completely free platform for talent. And that just sounds amazing. I’m really interested to see where that goes.
Yeah, definitely. He’s always a forward thinker, and he tends to have talent’s best interests at heart. So I’m interested to see where it goes.
Yeah, me too.
Very cool. Well, thanks for bringing that up. So other stuff that happened, some other cool training opportunities that I did recently.
I actually had this amazing documentary narration workshop with today’s guest of all people, with Pat Fraley, and a local Seattle talent named Debbie Harada. And she’s a wonderful, wonderful actress, wonderful, especially with documentary narration. I got to work with both of them in the booth, and it was just so nice, because I mean, we don’t, a lot of people don’t understand how little help we can get from directors sometimes, or if we’re just working on our, or buy our lonesome.
So it’s always so nice to have some other person to work off of or to give you ideas while you’re in the booth. And I always feel like it, like the rates are just exponentially improved when you have that resource. So in lieu of a VO Meter stick this month, I want to do a little humble brag showing of the documentary narration demo that came out of that workshop.
So I will say that there are many, like you should be incredulous of many demo, or excuse me, of many workshops where you get a demo at the end, but someone with the kind of credentials as Pat Fraley has, I’m willing to make an exception in that case.
Yeah, agreed. One other thing I forgot to mention, I’m actually doing some training with Tom Pinto right now.
That’s right.
And we are working towards a demo pretty quickly. And our last session, I did some records with him, and he said, if you want to even use some of these as a rough cut for the demo, and take them to the demo producer and say, here’s where we were going with these, it would be a good idea. And again, if you trust the person you’re working with, that’s definitely a viable option.
Very good. And I figure, I mean, if your booth is good enough to record your tracks, why not record some with your coach and then send it off to a trusted engineer to produce or something like that?
Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve recorded two of my demos right here in the booth, and I think that’s the way to go, like you said, if it sounds good.
That’s what I plan on doing with my next commercial demo, and it’d be great, because I’d love to have that opportunity to showcase, like, hey, guess what? I made that in my studio.
Yeah, it’s definitely something to do when you’re pitching it to a client, because they’ll say, what is your sound like? And you’ll say, well, you just heard it.
So before you guys humor me on my latest narration demo, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to one of our great sponsors, Podcast Demos, from makemyintro.com. So let me tell you about Tim and his Podcast Intro team. They’ve 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. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but Tim actually produced Paul’s and my podcast demos.
And all I can say is that he and his team were absolutely amazing. His script writer created original scripts that were 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 with the result. Tim is a consummate pro, a good friend, and so easy to work with. Thank you, Tim, and podcast demos.
There’s a mysterious ritual that dates back thousands of years. No other creature has survived it except the penguin. They have wings, but cannot fly.
They’re birds, but think they’re fish. Many penguins will mate with the same member of the opposite sex, season after season.
Wow, that was really cool. I can’t believe you got that out of that one session with Pat. He’s really fantastic.
The audio engineer was absolutely amazing. He had his headphones over one ear, and was mastering us while the workshop was done. So during the last hour, he was actually able to play back everyone’s tracks.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen someone work so fast.
Yeah, I had a similar experience when I did my first demo. I did it at a studio, and as I was walking out, the engineer was like, do you want to hear it? And I said, really?
He hadn’t done the same thing. He was putting it together. I guess they’re so used to this pumping out so many sessions at once that that’s how they work.
That’s how they get their work done in time. So it was pretty cool. Okay, so we’re actually going to go into our Questionable Gear Purchase.
But before that, a word from our sponsor, IPDTL. IPDTL is the Cost Effective ISDN Replacement. It’s great for interviews, outside broadcasts, voiceover, and of course, podcasts.
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And thanks again. All right, so time for Question O’Gear Purchases. So what itch do you need scratching this month, Paul?
I’ve been booth shopping again.
Me too.
What a coincidence.
Yeah.
I’ve been looking at some of the same models.
Oh yeah, which one were you looking at?
Well, there’s a couple that were in Washington that I was looking at. Both are kind of in like about 2300 to 2500, so about half off. And they were vocalbooth.com booths.
So you know that the materials are definitely high quality. Unfortunately though, one of them was massive. One was like eight by eight by eight, or like so eight feet.
It was so huge.
That’s like the entire size of the room where I have my booth. I have in a spare bedroom and it would take up basically the whole bedroom.
Pretty close to mine too. I mean, I could just move out and then live in there. That would work.
Yeah, but what would you do for like food? Could you put a hot plate in there?
Maybe, maybe it would be battery powered. It would be solar powered, I don’t know. I’m worried about utilities though.
Yeah, and maybe get some plumbing, you know.
You could just use the ventilation. No, nevermind.
No, no, it would smell horrible in there. Maybe just get one of those little like honey buckets outside. I’m sure we can make it work.
There’s another one in your area I saw. They had a broken window.
Yeah, it’s not, I don’t know. They were willing to replace it, but I mean, I’m kind of worried that it might affect the sound quality. So, I don’t know.
Like, I would prefer something that was in better shape. And I just remember it like, ah, I remember you were kind of gear pressuring me last summer, and there was these two boosts that were so affordable. There was one that was like 850 bucks.
Oh, I bought that one, remember? I actually bought it on eBay.
Oh, you did, but then you couldn’t actually move it to where you were.
And then I tried to sell it to you before I ended up returning it through eBay’s process and got my money back. But I actually paid for it. Oh, too bad I couldn’t pull it together.
Yeah, yeah, that was before the whole room redesign with the new carpeting and stuff. And it probably would have fit in here now. It’s about the same size as my current booth.
But it’s still pretty small. I don’t know… I’d recommend if you are…
It was like a 3x3x5 or something like that. Or 3x5x7, something like that. And kind of tiny.
It’s a little bit about as small, if not smaller, than my current setup. So I’d recommend if you’re trying to get your own ISO booth, at least starting with a 4×4. Maybe 4×6 if you can help it.
Yeah, that’s what I’m in now. I didn’t mind a 3×3 when I had the VocalBooth2Go booth here. That was 3×3, just like yours.
The same dimensions as yours. I could fit in there pretty well. And especially since it was flexible, I could kind of push the back leg of a chair out the side.
But then it does kind of defeat the purpose. But you can’t do it in a hard spot.
Yeah, how does that affect the soundproofing? But yeah, I mean, I’ve even had one other talent in here and we’re like shoulder to shoulder, but it gets real cozy. But yeah, so these are, I don’t know, for the moment until I find that one…
Like if I find another sub-$1,000 booth though, I will probably pull the trigger, I gotta admit.
Yeah, on the same way. I think I mentioned the reason I was looking the last episode, but if not, I had a studio tell me there was something wrong with my sound for the first time, really. They said they were hearing the highway rumble that has been the bane of my existence since I started.
Yeah, so I thought, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. So I started looking at moving everything into the basement. I thought about that anyway.
I have a fully finished basement down, well, in the basement, I was gonna say downstairs, duh, in the house, it’s an east coast house with a fully full basement that’s the whole footprint of the house. So there’s room down there. My only reason for not doing it before was because the main thing I was trying to keep out the time was the pitter patter of little feet because of all the childrens I have in the house and the dogs.
That’s right. But now that issue has moved upstairs because the kids are older, I have a teenager now, and they’re spending more time in their rooms, either talking to their friends, or my son is playing video games with his friends over voice chat and screaming and yelling. They play Fortnite all hours of the night, and he’s right next to me.
His room, the wall of his room, connects to the room where my studio is. So the noise from inside the house is actually more of an issue now. So I actually had a contractor come over here and look at maybe building something in the basement, and that’s still on the table.
But in the meantime, I’m still shopping for something that might be a more turnkey solution, and I think that’s the long-term answer, is to get into the basement. I had this great space with concrete surrounding everything. I may as well use it.
Mm-hmm.
Wish I had a basement.
But… Oh, man.
Oh, man.
Grass is always greener, or quieter in our case. Oh, that’s good. I mean, they’re one of the larger purchases that you can make.
And just a reminder, you don’t need one when you start, and you might never need one, depending on how quiet your environment is, or if you have the wherewithal or the budget to build a space, like one that’s specifically designed to be soundproof. I know Paul Stracverda actually has a great book on that, Building a Booth on a Budget, that you can find on his website on nethervoice.com. So if that’s an option that you’re looking into, that’s a possibility.
A lot of people do like ISO boost because of the modular aspect, the fact that you can disassemble and assemble them in different locations. It’s not that easy, but it’s possible.
They call it modular, even the Whisper Room I’m in. But I think I’ve mentioned that that was the most, that was the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done in my life.
I can’t believe you did that by yourself. I’m still amazed.
Because I’m huge.
I’m huge, yeah.
No, it wasn’t that. It was sheer force of will and several double hernias.
Oh God, I hope not.
No, I’m just kidding.
Now you gotta go to another doctor.
Well, enough about our questionable gear purchase.
More like questionable window shopping, you mean. Luckily, we didn’t buy anything this month, but I mean, when we do, it’ll be a doozy.
Yeah, exactly. So, we have a fantastic guest. We shouldn’t waste any more time.
Without further ado, let’s get to our interview with the fantastic Pat Fraley.
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This is Crang from Dimension…
Psh!
Are you there?
Yes, I am there and trying not to laugh myself silly because we have a very special guest today on the VO Meter. This is a man with over three decades of experience in all areas of voice acting and animation and audio books and corporate and e-learning, any kind of VO genre under the sun. We are very happy to bring you Mr. Pat Fraley.
How are you doing today, sir?
God, I was only sleeping myself because I had to. I think it’s more like four decades, Sean.
Four decades? Well, yeah, I was trying to be… Didn’t want you to date yourself, right?
Oh, yeah, really, put a bullet in my career. I hope I can slide over to the fridge to get some tapioca.
Well, you’re still standing, so don’t worry about that. But anyways, we have so much to talk about because you have so much experience. So first off, for people who might not know who you are, tell us a little bit about some of the characters you’ve played and how you came to be a voice actor.
Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, I’ve done about 4,000 characters over the last 40 years in LA. I’m a Seattle boy, and you’re from the Northwest, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Where are you?
I’m in Port Orchard. It’s near Tacoma on the other side of the Narrows Bridge.
Hey, I lived in Bremerton.
No kidding, yeah, 20 minutes away. That’s crazy.
Yeah, I lived there for a while in Bainbridge Island, but a lot of time in Lake City in Seattle, and I’m a Seattle boy. I love going back and teaching there. You know, over the years, so many different characters.
I did nine years working with Tim Allen doing Buzz Lightyear to Infinity and Residuals. But don’t tell him, because it’ll make him grumpy. I did 200 shows of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original, where I was the evil body that’s craaang.
And Sean, no matter what I do in my life, you know, we used to call it, it’ll be on my epitaph, it’ll be on my Wikipedia, craaang. It’s like one of my students, Nancy Cartwright, just brilliant, done so much work, guess what? She’ll always be known as the voice of Bart Simpson.
That’s the way we get it. But over the years, tailspin, doing Wildcat, well, who was that to rank you, Banana?
Doing Max on The New Centurions.
I mean, I started really doing Scooby-Doo’s, when I came to town here, and did the villains and, you know, over different decades, doing commercials and documentaries. But me, they kept coming back to me for cartoons. They loved me doing, you know, like my friend and comedian Brad Garrett says, Pat Moore’s not enough.
And apparently, you know, I was big enough that I fit into doing the characters for animation. And I don’t know, how I got into it was really, I never thought of doing voices. They paid me for the voice only, but when I arrived at the studio, and to this day, they get the whole performance.
They just don’t pay to see me.
Well, that’s really interesting that you mention that, because I mean, I’ve been blessed to be able to interview great actors like you, and I’ve watched a number of other voice actor interviews for my own research, and a lot of them come into voice acting that way. They are either character actors, or they were writers or producers, or some other area of the entertainment industry, but very rarely was voice acting the ultimate goal.
Yeah, you know, basically, we’re all failures at some other media. No, really, I mean, or they transitioned. I’m old enough that I got to work with the first generation of voice overs.
You know, Mel Blank, Dawes Butler, Don Messick, June Ferre, and they all came from radio, or they didn’t have a successful on-camera career. Me, I was doing Shakespeare when I realized that my career would be with cartoons. And yeah, so we came from other areas, and most of those areas included seeing us.
And so we really… And even the guys like Bob Bergen and Corey Burton, that wanted to grow up and be voice over guys, they still bring a lot to the party, physically.
So let’s talk about that, because you mentioned that you started with stage, correct?
Yeah.
So how do some of those performance skills translate into voice acting, and what are some differences that you had to adapt to?
Well, there’s a list of pros and cons. First of all, on the con list, you don’t have makeup to help you. If you’re in a movie, you don’t have location, but you don’t have to be that loud and hit the 25th row of the morosco.
And so there’s a pro and con list. But mainly, I came from theater, because when I was in Seattle and training at Seattle and Whitman, there was no other way for a middle-class white guy to learn than theater. We didn’t have improv classes or comedy classes.
And so I went that route all the way up until going through Cornell and getting an MFA and really emigrating to Australia to do Shakespeare. Well, I found out that I wasn’t as good at Shakespeare as I was doing Duck Voices. Really, you know, the transfer from, say, French farce, Fideaux, La Biche, you know, I was great because they wanted really vibrant big characters.
But when I got done a checkup, the pilot light kind of went out.
Mm-hmm, just that subtlety and…
Did you say a word called, like, subtlety?
Yes.
Yeah, it’s foreign to me. I’m incapable of being subtle.
You’re pretty gregarious. I’ve met you a couple of times in person.
Yeah, I’m gregarious, but it’s difficult for me to be subtle because I’m an exaggerated human being.
Mm-hmm.
I grew up in and around the deaf. My grandfather taught the deaf all his life in state schools in North Dakota and Idaho. And we’re an exaggerated kind of people.
And my family was very exaggerated. And here I grew up in, you know, Seattle, which is Scandinavian-influenced and very, very kind of dour.
Oh, my goodness. Couldn’t wait for the Fraley’s to get there at the barbecue.
They’re a hoot and holler.
It reminds me of my girlfriend. She often talks about her Scandinavian relatives. It’s always so good to see our Yumpen and Yali, Aunt Udi and Yuli.
Yeah, well, you know, Scandinavians aren’t known to raise their hands above their shirt pocket, except to shade their face from the sun.
And that don’t happen either.
You know, they always talk about the Seattle freeze. It’s not the most friendly place to live. It takes a long time to get a good friend.
And it’s not like, you know, LA., where the plumber is like your best friend. Hey, hi, dude.
Seattle is a really interesting place, because it’s filled with good and wonderful people, but there’s this layer of formality that you kind of have to break through first.
Yeah, at least it was that way.
I think it still is. But I’m glad that you brought out that exaggerated personality, that big personality, because I work with a lot of aspiring voice actors, and one area where they struggle is with confidence. They might be more comfortable in a performance, but in their everyday lives, they might be a little bit more soft-spoken, a little bit more shy or quiet, and it can be difficult to get them to go that 150 or 2,000 percent necessary to create these larger-than-life characters.
Yeah, Sean, you’re so right. I have lots of students, and I call them the who am I this time student or axe-murderers.
Oh, gee, he was so nice. I didn’t know.
He took his garbage out on time. Well, and then all of a sudden, right? Well, there’s that aspect of people, and I think a great deal of it has to do with fear.
Mm-hmm. Now, I grew up with no fear whatsoever. I was encouraged.
I was the kid. My mom would go, Oh, Pat, go downstairs and put the tea cozy on your head and do your Chinese, man. And I’d go up and, you know, entertain either our guests or our family.
I never heard a discouraging word, the perfect Western family. And so I didn’t know fear, and that’s a great deal of it, to be in front of people, because really what we’re doing, and forget about being paid eventually somewhere along the line, from four years old, I started getting paid for it. I don’t remember.
But you are lying in front of people, and I think your conscience is somewhere telling you you shouldn’t be lying.
Interesting.
And also just being kind of wild and woolly in front of people is unusual, and you see that more in theater and with performers.
It’s this really interesting paradox of having to convey authenticity and honest emotions while, like you said, being deceptive. You’re not in these circumstances. You’re not really experiencing these things, but you have to convey that.
Yes, and part of it is this. Is that actors or performers get into business to do either one or two things, either to reveal themselves or hide themselves. And I got in to hide.
I wanted to be anybody but me. Well, if you keep doing that long enough, you get better at revealing while you’re in character, and that’s what happened to me.
Well, that’s funny because, like I said, I’ve been studying a lot of voice actor interviews, and they talk about, like, so many people are like, oh, I can’t portray this character because I’m not like this character. It’s out of character for me. And the truth is, we all know what most emotions feel like.
We’ve all experienced anger or sadness or pain. So if we remember what that feels like, if we’re open to experiencing those comfortable emotions while we perform, we can channel that and create more engaging performances.
Absolutely. And the thing about it is, and of course, you just tapped into the fundamental skill of acting, is to bring yourself and your emotions to the party. But along the way, we get confused.
I mean, the other thing, and this is really true, Sean, it helps not to be really bright.
So that’s my problem.
Exactly. You’re too smart. I went to Whitman and Cornell, and I was around really bright people, much brighter than I.
And there is a hesitancy on the part of a smart person to commit to doing a 200-pound Scottish duck with a lisp. They think about it too much. When in fact, God gave me a gift of just being able to commit to anything.
And that helps. And a lot of actors and performers are not brain trusts. We think they’re smart because they’re given really smart words, not so.
And that’s another thing, is that like, brightness or otherwise, a lot of people just tend to overthink the character. And that just, like, it pulls you out of it, because you can’t be spontaneous if these things aren’t stream of consciousness, if you’re thinking about them while you’re doing it.
Yeah, you know, when I was at Cornell, I studied with a guy named William Sadler, Bill Sadler. And we were both kind of hicks. I was from Washington state.
He was from south of Buffalo on a farm. And while we would be thinking, we’d go into a scene, and we’d be thinking, you know, I’m going to piss this guy off, right? And other people would be thinking, you know, I think I’ll allude to the first folio of Shakespeare.
They were trying to do things they couldn’t, and overthinking the process, because acting is really simple. We’ve been doing it all our lives.
And I think another issue with what you just mentioned is it’s like, they’re trying to satisfy some internal need when you’re really trying to get a reaction from the audience.
Well, or a reaction from the person next to you. And I will agree that that was how I started. How do I make the audience like me or hate me or whatever?
But really, when you get deeper, and I work a lot and teach a lot with the audiobook narrator Scott Brick, who was 10 years in a Shakespeare company, and his focus is on affecting, well, really, when he does audiobooks, he’s affecting himself. He’s got that heckle-jide, jiggle-and-hide thing, right? But usually, it’s more important, and it helped me as I learned about acting, to try to get a rise out of someone I’m talking to or affect them.
And that gives me a focus which makes the listener or the audience more of a group of voyeurs. Interesting. Like we watch a movie, Robert De Niro, call me Bob, is trying to get a rise out of another person or affect them emotionally or intellectually.
And we happen to like watching that process. I never get the feeling from good actors that they’re trying to get a response from me as a listener or an audience member.
Interesting. So like I said, I work with a lot of aspiring talent. And as you said, you and Scott and a number of other voice actors came from some form of acting performance.
But I work with people who say might just want to focus on corporate e-learning or just commercial work. And some people even say, I’m terrified of character work. But I’m curious because you have this versatility and this adaptability about you that you’ve done just about any genre under the sun.
So I’m curious, like how has that ability to act helped you in genres that people might not expect, like say e-learning and corporate narration?
Well, good you bring that up. There’s only three things we ever do in any performance medium. Doesn’t matter what it is.
We touch, we teach, or we amuse.
Or we do a combination of them. Now, when you’re doing e-learning, for example, which is a difficult category for a lot of people because it’s just you teaching. And so it’s more about me like I’m talking to you.
That’s it. That’s all it is. And so what I’m doing there is I’m thinking of the audience member or the listener as a human being wanting to listen to me as a teacher.
That’s it. And so what I’m doing is I’m doing my best job at being a good teacher. In other mediums, it’s about how we go about the planet and, for example, amuse.
Now, the way I amuse, and I’ve got no choice in this, is I exaggerate. You know, bye, Barbara. Oh, I hate her.
You know, that’s funny because it’s exaggerated. That’s my personal style.
But again, you need that exaggeration because we don’t have any of the visual cues that you might get with on camera things.
Well, yeah, in some mediums you do. But when you do like video games, you better pick up your Oscar. You know, you really are acting and you’re affecting another character when they put it together.
And so there is that aspect to it. But there is a recognition and an acceptance of what God gave us on how we teach touch and amuse. And when you tap into that, then you can move from one genre to another almost, almost seamlessly.
Except for promo for me. I can never do promo. It always feels phony and I’ve been unsuccessful in that area.
Is it because it is such a structured kind of delivery?
It’s bad acting.
Oh really?
Yeah, Pat Duke says never use earphones except if you do promo. Because in promo, you need to love your voice.
Oh really?
Come here, she’s the sheriff.
And then a very special BJ and the bear.
You know, it really has less to do with acting in any other medium.
Interesting. That is too cool.
And you know, the joke is all the money is in promo.
So step one, become a great actor. Step two, throw it all away and then do promo.
Yeah, probably so. I don’t know. Something about it, somewhere inside me, I’ve got a little voice going, you’re phony, you’re being phony.
And it stopped me from being successful at all in that medium. The other mediums, I’ve had my modicum of success.
And you’ve done, like I said, you’ve done so many. And just wanted to thank you quickly because you’ve already touched and amused us today. But let’s talk about your teaching because you’ve got some of the best educational materials available for voice talent.
And you offer basically any kind of… Wherever people are at, you have different affordable options. You have different, say, more passive learning options, either with books or with follow along audio lessons.
Yeah, home study courses.
Exactly, home study courses. And like I said, they’re in so many different genres. I mean, you have documentary narration.
You have e-learning, character creation. You’ve got an entire curriculum on that. And accents and dialects and audiobook work.
So let’s talk about that. I think you mentioned it a little bit, that you came from a bit of an educational family, but I’d love to know just how you kind of transitioned from acting to providing these wonderful resources.
Well, it was always there, Sean. I always had a passion, and due to this day, for teaching and performing. And it started when I was young.
It’s all a gift. You know, when I was four, I was the kid playing army, and they all wanted to shoot because I died so well. That’s the performing part.
And then after I die, I go, okay, here’s how you die.
You roll over, arch your back, foam in your mouth.
I was teaching. And so I… I think it all comes from our early neuroses I had about trying to control the uncontrollable, which is your life.
But I found I could control characters. I had my little band like Jackie Gleason or Red Skelton especially. And I could control them.
And I not only loved doing them, but I loved saying why do you do them and what are they like? So there’s two aspects of me. One is the creative side and one is the analytical side.
And of course, to teach anything, you must deconstruct the skill. So you can take people a step at a time so they get better. You can’t just throw it at them.
That’s directing, you know. So that’s always been there. And I have a joy of deconstructing things and teaching.
And on my website, patfraley.com there’s everything. Free lessons, inexpensive, expensive. You know, in the context is my email and my own home cell phone.
Hey, I’m available till I go to heaven, then I won’t be available.
But it’s amazing because I mean, I first found out about your home study courses when I was in Japan. Or when I was teaching English over there. And so obviously I didn’t really have an opportunity to work with anyone else.
And this was five or six years ago. And the number of educational resources and voice over coaches that have exploded since then, it’s really difficult to decide what kind of materials you should work with. And then you get some people who are like, oh, there’s no benefit to online courses.
You should really just get yourself to a theater and there’s really no benefit to it. But I disagree wholeheartedly. I mean, whatever your circumstances are, wherever, like, maybe it’s based on location or, like I said, budget, they’re really…
Like, you shouldn’t be afraid to try something like this if it interests you, if it’s something that you’re passionate about. Because like I said, I was just like, I want to work on characters and accents. What do you know?
Here’s a whole curriculum on it.
Well, you know, Sean, it does have to do with where do you live, how much money do you have, but it does go back to what you’re talking about, and it really is a passion for an area. And, you know, people that study character and they live in the middle of the country and don’t have the opportunity to do cartoons, they still can enjoy it. You know, it’s like music.
I have no ability at music, and yet I have a huge collection of music because I love it. So there is that aspect. But I always think that a person should start with their passion.
Because the money will come and go. You know, you never know. But passion doesn’t.
Passion usually is there. You can get highly practical, but it’s kind of difficult to study something you don’t like. Then homework is a drudgery rather than a joy.
I’ve been struggling with this for myself for a while, because like I said, I always had a passion for characters and accents and stuff like that, but as I learn more about the voiceover industry, you see that’s a fraction of what the work available is. So you’re like, alright, I need a commercial demo and a narration demo, and then started pursuing those and became successful with narration work, but less so with commercial. And I was like, you know, I’m not so passionate about that.
Maybe that’s why.
Well, you know, there’s a lot of factors. One is, of course, we’ve mentioned it’s where you live. But, you know, and here, I’ve made my career in an area that’s a little teeny piece of the pie.
And as I mentioned to you, the big slice for money promo, I can’t do. Never could. So who knows?
I mean, you know, here, again, I grew up in Seattle. No character work. But I made my living doing character.
And, of course, when they said, you need a demo, a commercial demo, it was a necessary evil. And I did it. Because, you know, hey, you might as well put all the poles in the…
You know, you bait up all of the poles. And if the salmon are running, and you want the salmon, good. But if they’re not, it’s trout.
Guess what?
You land trout.
Well, that goes back to what we were talking about before, with voice over not being the ultimate goal, right? And kind of just being receptive to the opportunities that come your way.
Yep.
God has a plan, and we try to fit into it. We don’t know. I mean, we have no idea what moves us about the planet, and where we’ll be blessed, and where we weren’t, won’t.
But we do the best we can. You know, there’s no… There’s only notions, no rules.
I do think that people need to be encouraged and not be frightened. I think fear messes us up in all areas.
I agree completely. And like we were saying before, there’s a huge amount of vulnerability that happens when you perform, that people might not be aware of or expect.
Yeah, well, if you’re good, there is vulnerability. I was teaching on Saturday, and I have some really good performers, and I say, okay, in the middle of the performing, because you’ve got all those skills, you’ve got to give me a little chunk of you. And I’ve been working with a guy you know well, Jonathan Cotton, who is up in the Northwest.
Wonderful, versatile, creative guy with a lot of different voices and stuff. But the last time I worked with him, I said, yeah, but there’s a little chunk of you you have to put out there.
You know, it’s great to be a Scottish duck, you know, with a leash when he’s huge. But when you’re angry, you’ve got to put on all of that stuff. But underneath, if I scrape it all away, you hear Pat Fraley angry.
And that’s important, that the audience gets a sense of reality, even if it’s covered with a whole bunch of conventions and performance skills and dialects and, you know, pitch characteristics.
So this is something that took me a long time to discover myself, too. And it’s really funny that you brought up that story, because, like you said, a lot of us try and do character accents or voices to kind of like hide either our voice or ourselves. And we were talking about that fearlessness, that strong personality that so many actors seem to have.
And do you feel like you just need to have a strong sense of self before you can start layering characters on top of that?
No. I think, you know, in my experience, I didn’t give them anything but performance techniques and skills. I could do an old guy, I could do a dialect, but they weren’t getting anything.
As I got older, I realized the importance, and as I studied acting, I realized how important it was to bring myself to the party. But I was afraid. I didn’t want to show myself.
I wanted to hide. Well, as you get older and you don’t need money or a date, you go, why not? It’s my phrase, which I use in Barbara Harris, the ADR queen of casting of all time, loves this, and so does Brad Garrett.
And here it is. Why not? They’re already not hiring you.
What have you got to lose? Right.
There’s so little to lose. I mean, what are they going to do? Hate you?
No, they’ll love you, actually. That’s the reverse part. The more you throw it out there, the more impressed and have more appreciation for you, because it’s tough.
Yeah, definitely. But like I was saying before, I had the pleasure of working with another great character actor, James Arnold Taylor, recently. And I was trying to challenge myself by doing two very different characters, and my voice tends to be very high and sweet, so I was trying something a little bit lower and down here.
He was like, do it again, but do it in your voice. I was like, really? I don’t want to.
But he was absolutely right. I was able to emote more. I was able to immerse myself in the character.
And like you said, inject some of my own personality into those reads.
Yeah, you know, what you said reminds me of my friend, and I’ve done so many cartoons with him, Rob Paulson.
Oh, love Rob.
Yeah, now Rob is a high tenor. Just his voice is really high. Well, when we do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles together, there would be a thug.
And Fred Wolf, the producer, was so chief, we did everything. We had no guests. And so he’d point to me, you’re a thug, and Rob, you’re a thug.
Well, easy for me, because I’m a baritone.
So I could do a thug like that, no problem, right? Rob couldn’t.
If he did, it would sound phony.
So what he do is he do a high thug like that. Hey, boss.
And he found a way of bringing himself to the party and the casting event.
Very cool. So let’s… in your courses and in some of your…
even your free materials, you have this wonderful… I love the way that you describe creating a character, because it’s… like you said, you’ve adjusted from theater, and you know you don’t have that time to really immerse yourself in the world.
Who am I? What is my motivation? All of those things.
So would you mind telling us about how you go about creating a character or a voice for a character?
You know, I’m sort of like a plumber who’s done it so long. I could shift out a floater and a cistern in two minutes, and you’d go, Wow, wow, anybody who does it that long does it quickly. But when I was younger, I’m not historic for creating much of it all, but I am the first person in the world to deconstruct the character voice.
Because, again, I liked… I knew I could do it, but I’d go, What are you doing, Pat? So I broke the character voice down to its six elements.
Really, it was just a matter of… It was my first teaching job in Australia at a university, Flinders University. And I’d go in and go, okay…
And they all knew, my students, that my day job was an actor. And they go, Oh yeah, what you did today? Well, I did Walter Brennan.
Oh yeah, okay.
Well, give us a taste.
I went, well, I was Walter Brennan. I was low.
Need I get high?
And they go, no, no, mate.
What’s your throat?
What are you doing? And I went, wow. And so, the character voice was broken down to pitch, pitch characteristic, tempo, rhythm, placement and mouthwork.
There’s no more other elements. And the mixing and matching of those helped me get to the source fast. That’s what happened to me.
Later on, I started just imitating people and then make a character or I just talk to myself in a kind of notion of a character and develop them so they had an inner life. So my journey is different than others, but I do think it’s of great value to understand what you’re doing because it helps, it helps me.
And it’s helped me too, believe it or not. But you were just talking about imitations and impressions, and I know that you’re full of them. But I want to talk about that.
Because I know a lot of people, and myself included, got started pursuing voice acting because it’s an opportunity to create or to do, for lack of a better word, funny voices, fun accents. But I’m curious, for people who have a pension or a passion for impressions, what kind of work is available and are there any misconceptions about that ability, that mimicry that you’d like to dispel?
Well, first of all, there’s no money in it. Right? And second, we live in a litigious society.
Is that correct? Litigious?
I’ll take your word on that.
Let’s put it this way, you can get sued.
Ah, I see. Got you.
Right. So you got to be a little careful about that, but we all delight in impressions. And James Taylor is so phenomenal at that, by the way.
And it’s fun to do. It breaks the ice. I mean, I probably made, you know, two cents doing Jack Nicholson.
But if I come in and do Jack Nicholson, people adore it. You keep telling me about the good life, Sean, because it makes me want to puke.
You know, we love it. So the misconception is… Well, there’s no misconception.
All art starts with copying. That’s what we do. Then we get…
If we copy the right people, eventually it becomes part of our work and we don’t get caught. The creative process, in other words, is a finely honed skill at plagiarism. I mean, I was inspired as a young man by Charles Lawton, Ruth Draper, Lord Buckley.
But if anybody knows those people, they’ll hear some of that in my work. And Scott Brick… Oh, he’s a big William Shatner nerd and Charles Lawton.
But because his personal equipment is so different, you don’t catch him. And that’s sort of what happens along the way. But copying is a very good thing to do to begin with.
And impressions are very good. It’s just that at a certain point, somebody has to tap you in the shoulder, even if it’s you, and say, you gotta move on. You gotta make your own characters now.
Very cool. So something that I’m fond of thinking or saying is thinking of it as like, imitation is fine, and like you said, it’s an okay place to start, but move to emulation. Like pick a part, like use your own voice and maybe like, oh, I like the cadence he used, but I’m not gonna try to imitate his voice because I don’t like, we have different equipment, like you said.
So I’m so glad that you kind of blew that apart because there are a lot of celebrities who are like good at impressions. Like I just, like you mentioned James Arnold Taylor, and I just saw Ross Marquand at Emerald City Comic Con, and I’m a big fan of Jim Meskiman, but it’s a very, it’s a very small group. And it’s not necessarily, they might use these impressions as starting points for characters.
I mean, how often do you see like a muscle building like just a super strong athletic character who sounds an awful lot like Arnold, you know?
Yeah, that’s right.
It sounds like that. It sounds like he’s trying to make his voice low.
A little bit. And sometimes you have a nice, charming character who’s like… Yeah, like Sean.
No relation.
Well, we all delight in it, and I love doing it. It’s very rare I make any money. Now, Jim makes money at it because he does impressions.
Meskiman. But few do at impressions. And you’re right.
The emulating is important that moves you away from imitating. But I certainly started my career by imitating others.
Wonderful. So let’s talk about that, because I mean, you came into voice acting when it was so new, and like you yourself were a fast student. So can you talk about how you kind of threw yourself into the deep end and use that experience of working with other actors to kind of just learn the craft yourself?
Well, working with other actors, I can put in a different category. That’s acting, affecting other people. But I remember I was doing Shakespeare in Australia, and I was okay.
You know, Shakespeare was pretty good, Jack got bad. I went to a studio and did a commercial. I was some kind of rat dog.
Jimmy Cagney, rat dog, you know. And as I left, one of the producers said, oh, we like you. And I said, really?
Why? Oh, you’re so big. We can’t get the other actors to be that big.
And I thought, oh, that’s when I knew I needed to go to somewhere where I could do the best I could. I only wanted to be a performer, so I didn’t care. And that was my own gift.
Other people will find their own personal gift, but I think, for me, it was never doing a voice. I never thought of doing voices. I always thought of doing characters.
When I’d first start off doing Walter Brennan, I’d go into the studio with suspenders. I’d be dressed up like the character.
Very cool. And that’s something that people who don’t come from, like, an on-camera or stage background might think of. I mean, I know actors who will have props or will play music or do other things to create the atmosphere or just to…
or any little tips or tricks to just add that extra flavor to that performance.
Absolutely, because, you know, as I go back to the list of pros and cons, one of the cons, of course, is you don’t have any makeup or costume or other actors and you’re in the studio. A couple things. I think of Scott Brick.
When he has to do audio book narration on certain characters, he’ll get little action figures and put them around him. Wow. And he would look at one, and that helps him get into that character.
For me, you have more freedom in a studio in front of a mic than a two-button shot in a video or film. So I move around a little bit, and I have my hands up in front of me, and it’s as if I’m doing kind of symbols or of action. I can’t throw my arm out because you’ll hear my shirt, but I can see my fingers, and that helps me.
And again, when I first started, I was kind of dressed up like it. I know Scott, and I keep mentioning Scott because we worked together and we’re such pals. He went in to do a detective for me, and he came in with a 40s tie on.
It helped him. It helped him get into that character. And there’s really no rules about it.
You can do what you want.
And that’s another thing. A lot of people… There’s that fear complex that we were talking about again.
A lot of people are like, Oh, am I doing it right? And there really is no… Performance is very much a personal journey, and you really have to kind of carve your own path and follow your passion.
You’re so right, Sean, and especially in auditions. I’ve never done an audition that I didn’t ad lib within it. And Scott Burns, who lives up your way…
Oh, yeah, good friend….
does the same thing. He even produces some of his auditions because they don’t know what they want. They’ll know it when they hear it.
Even casting people are that way. And so the idea of breaking rules, which, by the way, like you said, intimated to, there are none. That’s the only stories I’ve ever heard of successful auditions is people breaking rules.
You know, showing up at the audition in a costume, sending a dozen roses to the director day by day until he gets the role. It’s breaking rules. Tom Wilson has a great story about doing Biff from back in the future.
You know, the bully Biff?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, he was taking his wife down to see a Bruce Springsteen concert downtown. He gets a call back on his cell phone in his car, you have a call back for that role. He’s mad.
You know, he wants to take his wife to the concert. He gets there, and poor Christian Glover, who is like 120 pounds is there, his scenes with him, there’s a long table, a dais, with all these directors and some producers there. Tom goes in, he’s six foot five, at least.
He grabs Christian Glover by the shirt, lifts him so high that he goes through the ceiling, you know, one of the best those things, or wherever they are, and he puts him on that table, the dais, and does his lines, and it’s meaner now, and wipes off all the notebooks and coffee and everything as he takes that poor actor down the dais or the table, props him up and says, is that it? Okay, bye. Tom is walking down the hallway way, he’s thinking, what have I just done?
I was up for a major movie, maybe three movies, and look what I did. Well, he got in the car, and before he managed to get his wife down to the Springsteen concert, they called and said, you got the role.
That’s amazing.
Little did Tom know, and I have no idea of what was said, but Steven Spielberg was at the table because he was a producer. And I’m sure when he left, people looked at each other and said, well, there’s no choice. That’s the guy.
And like you were saying, here he was. He was frustrated. He was probably a little bit angry, and he just drew from that and then didn’t give a dang about how he would be perceived.
And he just kind of gave his best performance and then left the room.
Well, you tapped into something that I haven’t done a lot, but I think it’s really good for movie work. And I just heard a story about an actor who didn’t know how to do something. It’ll come to you later.
And the director said, well, if you’re angry, use that. If you come in happy, use that. In other words, why not be a little more of what you actually feel like?
Now, that’s getting pretty heady. A lot of times, you know, if I’m supposed to… I’ve had an argument with my wife, Renee, and I’m driving to the studio, and I go, Pat, you’re gonna have to be funny in 10 minutes.
Well, I can’t go in there and be angry at Renee, but movie work’s a little different. But putting that aside, that aspect is interesting, about you use what you have and what’s going on.
So I wanted to… I’m gonna change gears just a little bit, but since we’ve been talking about such, like, strong human emotion, there’s been this fear recently of the improvement of, like, artificial, like, vocal performances, like, created through such places like Vocal ID or these, like, speech…
Virtual voices.
Yeah, yeah, virtual voices, synthesized voices, things like that. Do you think this is something that we should be concerned about as it becomes more sophisticated, or is there always going to be a place for voice actors in the marketplace?
Well, I don’t know about the word concerned. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it. A few years ago, a virtual voice sounded like this.
Hello, how are you?
Good to see you.
Well, it’s not that way anymore.
So convincing.
You hear it, and it’s astounding. But, see, here’s the big deal, and it’s about the money. We, voiceover people, are cheaper at telling a story.
You get into telling a story, and that’s the only reason they need us, by the way. It’s we can wind a story. We know that central to all story is conflict.
And so when we work the conflict, chances are we bump into or know the story. That’s what’s important. The day we are not as cheap as a virtual voice winding a story, we’re cooked.
I don’t know when that’ll be. Five years? Ten years?
You tell me. I never thought that I would be reading articles and watching cars driving without drivers.
Yeah, it is pretty insane.
It makes me think about my grandfather, who literally, his father was a cartwright. He literally spoke to wheels, covered wagons, and he grew up around horses. What was that like?
When it went to, oh no, horses, we don’t use those anymore. So, in a way, we can’t be concerned about it, but we do need to know how to tell a story.
Wonderful. So don’t be too afraid about it. Obviously, we can’t stop the technology.
People tend to push that forward, regardless of whether or not it might be a good idea.
It’s all the money, isn’t it Sean?
Yeah, yeah.
They’re looking to save money. Well, they’re saving it with us, and they probably will for quite a long time.
Okay, so just focus on being the best storyteller and the best performer you can.
Yeah, because they got everything on their own, don’t they?
Absolutely. So, if people want to improve their storytelling, improve their performance, how can they get a hold of you, either to work with you directly or do some of your home study courses?
Well, they can go to patfraley.com, and there they are. Or if they go to thecontacts.com, there’s my personal email, and I email people back. But what comes to mind is what Scott Rick often says.
He says, tell a joke. It’s all there. The beginning, the middle, the end.
All the timing, the pauses. It teaches you how to tell a story. And that can apply to voice over, in commercials, video games, animation.
Everything is about telling a story. By the way, if you get a commercial and there’s no conflict in it, you don’t have a story to tell. It’s only a description.
You have to decide when do I get to the point where I lose credibility because I’m so interested in mattresses.
And like you’re saying, the importance of conflict, like every commercial, should have that problem that needs to be solved by the product you’re trying to sell.
Well, you know what? That’s the case most of the times. It’s a problem, and the product or service solves it.
But we all know that on occasion, we get commercials that are just singing attributes. And that’s… What are you going to do?
You can’t add conflict. But you do look for conflict like a heat-seeking missile as a voice over in any medium, and you exacerbate or play it. We have a tendency to soften problems.
No, don’t soften them. Make them stronger. Because they’ll be a solution.
Wonderful. I mean, Pat, I can’t thank you enough for joining us today. You’ve been so generous with your experience and your insight.
It’s my pleasure.
So thanks again so much. Like you said, if you want to get a hold of Pat, or if you want to take advantage of some of his home study courses or his other materials, you can go to patfraley.com. And I highly recommend Pat.
I’ve done his home study courses. I’ve met with him at his in-person workshops. And it’s an experience you’ll never forget.
Thank you.
And I’m going to be up seeing you, I think, April 20th up in the Northwest.
Oh my gosh.
So we’ll have a visit. And really just have lunch or whatever you want. But it’ll be good to see you.
You too. Thank you so much, Pat. So thanks again, Pat, for joining us today.
I hope you have a wonderful day, sir.
You too.
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 voice over 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.
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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.
Wow, I mean, you guys could tell how much fun I was having over the course of that interview. And it was just a blast. And just to thank you again to Pat for being so generous with your time and experience.
And every time I see him at a workshop or just via email, he’s always so friendly and helpful. And if you’ve never worked with him, I highly recommend it. Either as home study courses or if he’s ever in a workshop in your area, just do it.
I mean, he’s one of the few voice acting coaches or teachers that everyone approves of, I think. So what have you got to lose, really?
Yeah, thanks so much for doing that on your own, too. I could not make it because that was the day I first went to the auto laryngeologist to have my laryngeal stroboscopy done.
Nicely done.
Duty call, as they say.
So thank you again, Pat, so much for being on the podcast. We’d love to have you back. And like I said, if you’ve never worked with him before, fix that.
So that’s really it for this episode of The VO Meter. We actually have some pretty cool things coming up. Our very next episode is going to be another…
I was going to say quadcast like we did with Anne and Gabby, but I guess it would be a tri-cast because we were guests on Rich Miller’s audiobook, Speak Easy, and that was really fun.
It was a lot of fun, partially because drinking was involved, but hey, he’s got a tight ship.
Hey, if people are going to make me drink, I’m going to listen.
I’m highly influential.
As am I. But it was kind of cool to just talk off the cuff and just enjoy the company, and that’s really what that show is all about. I’ve been a big fan since he started it, and it’s cool just to have a casual conversation as if you’re in a Speak Easy, and I think he really pulls off that schtick well.
So that’s coming up next.
After that episode of the audiobook, Speak Easy, we also have the un-announcer, the most non-announcery voice over talent you can find, Doug Turkel, who’s also a great, I don’t know, like a voice over paladin, I guess. He really kind of takes newer talent under his wing and kind of tries to guide him in his helpful but snarky way. So we got a lot of love for Doug on the podcast, and I was very happy to see that he was actually a nominee for the Unicorn Grant at View Atlanta this year.
I think he definitely encapsulates the spirit of what that award is about, and I was just very happy to hear that nomination. And we can’t wait to have you guys hear from, like straight from the unicorn’s mouth.
Yeah, he’s another one I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I basically had to wear down for the last two and a half years, but he finally said yes, and we’re so grateful that he did.
He doesn’t do public appearances.
And then following that, we have none other than the keynote speaker from this year’s VO Atlanta, Kay Bess.
Woo! Man, I cannot wait. I mean, where do you keep finding these people, Paul?
How do you get them to talk to us? It’s amazing.
Mostly drinking.
Mostly drinking. I see. Soften them up a bit.
I like it.
Exactly. We talked about how the community is so giving, and as a show is in the way people are willing to give back to us on this show. Mm-hmm.
And they’re just amazingly interesting people, too. I love hearing their stories. Well, that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ll see you next time, and hope you have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com.
VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBoot2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, and IPDTL. And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 37 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about this episode. We just got back from VO Atlanta. We’ve got a lot to talk about that.
We’ve also got our British Invasion roundtable. So we’re really looking forward to that, and letting you guys listen to that oral candy that is our lovely, wonderful voiced guests. 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.
Yeah, and apropos, we actually just spent a lot of time with the folks at VocalBooth2Go. Steven Coghill, their marketing manager, was there at VO Atlanta, and it was great to see him again. And I know they did really well at the conference because he sold almost all of the equipment that he came with, and that’s always a good thing.
So thanks again to VocalBooth2Go for being a sponsor of the VO Meter. We also need to talk about our good friend Tim Page at podcastdemos.com. Tim’s team has 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, as you’ve probably heard by now, Tim actually produced demos for 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. Thank you, Tim, and Podcast Demos. So before we get going with the interview portion of the podcast, we’ll start with some current events.
What’s going on in your VO world, Paul?
Okay, yeah, there’s actually quite a bit going on. As we talk about, the best way to get jobs is to book a trip, right? So that week going into VO Atlanta, I had a million things to do.
I’ve never had this much work to do in two days. Literally on Monday and Tuesday, I went down to VO Atlanta on Wednesday to get prepared. So on Monday and Tuesday, I just had this flood of work.
I got an e-learning job, a PSA for a really big airport, and also a local TV commercial. And for the local TV commercial, it was actually a situation where it was a friend of mine who was hiring me because he does video work. So I’m finally getting to that point where people are starting to realize what I do, even friends and family, because it takes a while, either they don’t trust you because they think you’re going to flame out pretty quickly, or they’re just not really sure what voiceover is.
But I’m getting to that point finally where relatives and friends that I’ve had for years will actually contact me for voiceover. So this is a friend of mine from college, undergrad, who contacted me, works at a local TV station, and he had a commercial to do, a couple tag lines for the end of a video. So they’re these PSAs for the transportation system where it’s kind of like, here’s an alternative to your crappy commute, get on the ride share.
So just three quick tag lines, and I was like, great, we’ll do it for this amount. I actually sort of quoted him a pretty good deal because like I say, he’s a really old friend. Then he comes back to me and says, just found out from my station manager we had to do this union, and we work with this agency in town.
Luckily, it’s an agency I’m with, so they already knew about me, but it turns out they wanted to make it a union job. So that means I had a Taft-Hartley situation, which is the Congress Act that says you can do a certain amount of union jobs before you’re forced into joining the union. That number is three.
So this is the first time this has ever happened to me. So it’s my first situation of being Taft-Hartley, as we say, which also means I will now get a SAG credit, a Screen Actors Guild or SAG-AFTRA credit to add to my resume, which is a really cool thing. And that was a pretty exciting job, but as I mentioned, the problem was it was on that Tuesday going into New York Atlanta.
So got it out, luckily, and there was no edits needed. So the station’s pretty happy with that, and it’s gonna be airing at the local TV market here in a couple of weeks. So those are a couple of really cool things, but again, always, Murphy’s Law, the worst situation will happen when you’re least expecting it, or in this case, a good one, because I’m getting jobs, but all those things just snowballed while I was at VO Atlanta, and it’s always funny how that works out.
So that’s pretty much all that’s going on with me. How about you, Sean?
Well, first off, can totally relate to booking out and then getting all these job opportunities coming in. I remember on Saturday at VO Atlanta, this car dealership in Oregon actually reached out to me saying they were looking for a friendly non-announcer announcer to do all of their spots for their web and radio. I was very excited about that.
So luckily, I told them I was at a conference and even though I had a travel rig with me, I would prefer to record for my home studio. So they were totally fine with that. So I knocked that out on Monday and then I was still waiting to hear back from them.
And I had a lot of great conversations with some audiobook narrators over the weekend like Scott Brick and Jeffrey Kafer, as well as some local talent. And I was like, you know, I think I finally built up enough vocal stamina to give it a shot. It’s funny when you kind of make those realizations because then I found this perfect audiobook audition on ACX.
It’s like this fantasy RPG style. If you’re a fan of RA. Salvatore or Brandon Sanderson or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever, it’s perfect.
I did that, was really confident about the audition, waiting to hear back from the rights holder. And then also a German client that I worked with through Bedolgo a year ago actually kind of came back to me and be like, hey, we loved what you did for us a year ago. Will you do this new script for us on Wednesday?
And so we had a directed session for that the other day and they were great. They gave me a music track, a sample track. We were in and out in like two takes in like 10 minutes.
It was great. So on top of that, after talking with a lot of people over the weekend and kind of reassessing my voice over goals, I actually dropped my on-camera agent out of Seattle. As grateful as I was, and I told this to the agent as well, as grateful as I was for the mentorship and the guidance into the world of on-camera and the opportunities that were coming my way, they didn’t really align with my ultimate VO goals.
And so I didn’t want to create a conflict with another regional agency. So she’s like, I understand that completely, our doors are always open. And she even gave me a referral to another agency that specializes or has a much larger VO department.
So just so you guys know, it is okay to drop an agent or a client if you do it with grace and professionalism. Because she’s straight up said, she’s like, you’re a real professional and I know you’re going to make it happen for yourself. So I was like, oh, thank you.
This is so great.
And you said, wait, you mean the guy behind me?
Just remember guys, it’s your business. So don’t ever feel like you have to take an opportunity just because it’s what’s presented to you, right? Think about it and then make an informed decision.
And who knows, it might even turn out in your favor. So one more thing I wanted to mention, and probably the coolest thing, is that I was in a cartoon. Woohoo!
So one of our animation coaches, MJ. Lalo with GVAA, was casting for this local studio. Me and a few of my friends got to audition for it.
And we created this awesome cartoon together. So it’s through Bim Bam Studios. It’s kind of a humorous retelling of the story of King David.
But the animation was great. The other actors were fantastic. And I felt kind of like Harry Shearer or Hank Azaria from The Simpsons, because everyone else was playing one or two characters, and I was playing six.
It was great.
It was a lot of fun. Every now and then, people will hear Donald Duck or Sean Connery during a workout just for funsies.
Or on here.
Very, very nice. So congratulations on that. I know you said that was a life achievement unlocked.
So really cool that you got to have that experience.
Thank you. Hopefully there are more to come.
So at least for me, and I guess it sounds like for you too, that week leading up into VO Atlanta was really cool. Let’s talk about VO Atlanta itself, because you and I both spent a lot of time there in different roles, but overall I had a really good time, and it’s typical this week right after where you’re sort of in that haze of great spirits and just sort of recapping what went on. Maybe a little sad because it’s over, but I think it went really well and I got a lot out of it.
How about you?
Yeah, the afterglow.
Exactly.
Definitely. But yeah, because I know you’ve worked at the conference multiple times, and I’ve occasionally done some hours at the GVA booth. This was the first year that I was there primarily as a representative for GVAA.
And so it was different. Because before it was all fun and rainbows and stuff, and this one, still plenty of that. But I didn’t even know what my schedule was going to be like until I got there.
So once I figured out that I would be primarily working, I was like, all right, you might go to a panel or two, like a breakout session or two. Don’t think you’re going to have time for any X sessions, so I didn’t schedule those, even though they had some amazing ones. Oh, my God.
Bob Bergen was there, like the voice of Porky Pig and Tweety Bird and Jennifer Hale from Mass Effect, for Powerpuff Girls from Johnny Quest, or like the real adventures of Johnny Quest. So many characters that I grew up watching. So hopefully I’ll get another chance to work with them in the future.
But still, it was great. Like even though it was just like working, a lot of people came up to us and thanked us for the rate guide or a great class or a workshop that they had done with us. People came up to me personally.
It was like, oh, you were so helpful recommending that interface or thank you for your Japanese pronunciation help on that audiobook. It was really, really validating and invigorating. And then on top of that, it was just kind of during my off hours, I just chatted with people.
Like 400 people. It was crazy that I know 400 people at a personal level.
Well, yeah, it’s interesting you had that experience working. So welcome to my world. As you mentioned, I’ve been working on the audio visual services team for the last three years and with varying degrees of intensity.
So this year was a little bit different. I was thankful in that the people that were running the team, namely Steven George, who was the boss of me, even though I hate to admit it, did a great job of… He did a great job of allowing me to experience some things as well.
And I went into it with the mindset of, I know I’m not going to be able to attend a lot of sessions, and that’s going to be okay. I’m going to approach this sort of taking whatever comes at me and just enjoying the camaraderie. And that’s really what happened.
That’s my biggest takeaway, I would say, is that…
Exactly, yeah.
Even more than years previous, I feel like everybody there was really open and understanding. And it may have been Kay Bess’ fabulous opening keynote where she talked about trusting and being brave. That probably set the tone for the whole conference, but even, like you mentioned, some of the biggest names in our industry, Bob Bergen being there, Jennifer Hale, Dr. Kell, who I basically dragged in kicking and screaming this year, those are people that have helped me for years, Bob especially.
So I was really happy to finally talk to Bob in person and thank him for all the help he’s given me. Oh, well, you’re so great about taking everything and running with it. You shouldn’t be thanking me.
It’s all on you. And that was just amazing. He has the greatest spirit and never wants to take credit for all the help he gives to the voiceover community.
Same with Dr. Kell. I’ve been talking about how much he’s helped me over the years on this podcast. And same thing.
All he does is deflect and say, oh, it’s nothing. Oh, shucks. And I feel like that was the whole attitude for the entire conference, was everybody willing to just trust in themselves and embrace the community as a whole.
Absolutely. And I feel like so many… Because, I mean, we’ve spent these last two or three years or however many times you’ve gone to the conference building these connections.
And so you feel like you really know these people at this point. And so I feel like a lot of people who are in that position kind of just dedicated time to just chatting with people, seeing what’s going on in their VO and personal lives. And it was great.
It was relaxing. It was refreshing, dare I say. And it was just a wonderful time.
I forgot to mention Joe Cipriano as well. Obviously, huge talent. And you mentioned how you thought it was hilarious how he was actually making fun of me on Facebook going into the conference because of some picture.
I’m a little jealous of the rapport you have with him now. That’s incredible.
Well, I have to thank AJ for that. Because even though he is all about deflecting as well, AJ has been a huge help to me. And he’s a fabulous engineer and voice over talent in his own right.
And he’s been nothing but gracious with helping me out over the years as well. So thanks to AJ and Joe Cip for all the time they’ve given to me.
He’s a good bridge. I will say that. All of them are.
And I did want to touch on one thing, like that Bob and them were all just like trying to deflect the gratitude. But also I feel like they’re just happy to work with someone who gets it. Right?
I mean, like you’ve been really receptive to all of their guidance over the years and you’ve worked your butt off trying to get to where you are. So I’m sure they deal with people all the time. What?
That’s how much work is required? No, thank you. But I mean, you’re really, yeah, like I said, you’re open to feedback and you work to fix the things that they suggest.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And same with you.
I mean, you’ve grown over the years tremendously as well. You just got your first cartoon, as we talked about. Woohoo!
Only took seven years.
It’s kind of like you said. Maybe you and I are at a place now where it’s a different experience because of the work we put in and not to pat ourselves on the back, but I think that’s part of it. And I was so thankful to talk to some of our fans who came up to us and said, Oh, your podcast.
I love your podcast. Somebody told me they were an ambassador. Somebody told me they signed up to be an ambassador because they heard about it on our podcast, and that was just really cool.
Yeah, we say this all the time, but we really never thought that it would have such a positive impact on so many people. And they say they love the format. They love that we’re just chatting about our experiences.
They love our dynamic. It’s really… I’m just so grateful that people are finding it helpful.
So now that we’ve said all this, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows at VO Atlanta. And mainly I just want to talk to people because sometimes you can’t invest in a conference like this. It can be expensive.
Honestly, I think you want to invest about $1,500 to $2,000 just to get there. And depending on what your goals are, you might be doing additional X sessions, which can add up very quickly.
Depending on how much you party afterwards.
Yeah, depending on how much you party afterwards and if you’re the generous type who likes to buy rounds for everyone. But I just want to emphasize that as useful as these are, I cannot emphasize how helpful this has been in my career because you build those face-to-face connections, and there’s no substitute for that. And there is a level of dedication that you showed just by investing in something like this.
That being said, these experiences are not for everyone, and they may not align with your goals. Namely, it may or may not be the best investment of your time and funds towards your ultimate voice-over goals. So do your research.
I mean, they’re a lot of fun, they’re wonderfully educational, and the networking… I think that is the biggest benefit for me is that I have become such a better networker and a confident interactor with people, I guess. Because I’m an introvert, honestly.
I need my time. After VO Atlanta, it takes me a good week of sleeping in a little bit and of quiet time to kind of recharge and get back to normal. And so, like I said, I think at some point in your career, you definitely should give one of these a try.
You don’t have to go to all of them, and you don’t have to go every year. But it’s something that if you think is worthwhile, you should try it because there are a few ways to learn more about the VO industry at once and to get this access to some of these industry greats, like both in an educational capacity and just a chatting capacity, right? So do your research, ask yourself if this is something that’s going to be beneficial to you, and then decide.
Don’t feel like you have to go just because everyone else is because it certainly feels that way on Facebook sometimes. Or around this time of year. Do your research and then make an informed decision on whether it’s right for you.
Those are fair points for sure. You have to take into account your own budget, your own level of comfortability. If you’re the kind of person who just will not go talk to people, then it may not be a good investment for you.
You may be better served sending out more emails, making more cold calls. But for me, I would say the one thing to keep in mind is try not to be such a number cruncher when you’re looking for a return on investment. Because I think the intangibles far outweigh the actual numbers you can crunch when you get back the week or maybe months later.
Because in my mind, because we spend so much time standing in a 4×4 or 4×6 box, you can’t duplicate that sort of experience of the camaraderie you have with 699 other people that do exactly what you do. Just having the opportunity to talk about shop. For instance, when I talk to my wife about recording levels, she has no earthly idea what I’m talking about.
There’s really nobody else to talk to other than you, Sean, when we do this podcast. So getting out of the booth and having that common experience to share with people is just invaluable and it will grow your soul, in my opinion.
Alright, so we’ll have our British Invasion Roundtable in just a minute, but before that, it’s our Questionable Gear Purchase.
I’ll start, and for a change, I don’t actually have anything stupid to report, so Sean, this is all you this time.
What?
I’m just kidding. But I’m happy for you. So I have one or two little things that I picked up recently.
One was a new phone. I went from an iPhone 6S to an XR, so that’s like four generations, so I was like, oh, the technology. It’s insane.
So I’m happy about that, and it’s a great little… In case you don’t know, I’m a big fan of mobile recording, so I love using my smartphone for that. And actually, I still have an old one that, at this point, it’s like a 5S.
It’d probably only get like $20, $25 for it. But I still have it as a backup, because Twisted Wave still works fine on it, and so does the Twisted Wave remote. So it’s a great little tool, like little extra tool to have as a backup recorder.
So don’t throw out those old iPhones if you don’t, like, if they’re not that, if you’re not going to get a good trade in on it. So as a father, I’m sure you just give them to the youngest. Give it to someone who will appreciate it.
Or just save them to throw at a drifter while you’re driving down the street.
Just don’t aim for the face. But…
But other than that, one other cool thing that I got recently is this little device that plugs into my mini display port on my MacBook Pro. And it’s got an accompanying app on my iPad. It’s called Luna Display.
And it turns my iPad into an actual second monitor for my computer. So now I can actually have my script and check levels and twisted wave and even adjust them if I want to and do a true punch and roll with my iPad. So right now my booth is a little small for a larger monitor, so I was really looking for something that would allow me to use my current gear in that capacity.
So Luna Display does it perfectly and I’m really happy with that. And it works with, depending on what model computer you have, it works with both the mini display port or they have a version that works with the new USB-C. So if you have an iPad lying around that you want to turn into a second monitor, might be an option for you.
So we are going to get to our British Invasion roundtable, I promise, in one second. But we have an extra special treat. This person was not able to join us for the roundtable, but was kind enough to pump out a VO Meter stick right after she took a trip to Hong Kong.
So we really appreciate having UK talent, Shelley Avellino, Shelley, we love you, doing a VO Meter stick for this episode.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
So hi, guys. This is Shelley Avellino, full-time voice actor, director, and coach. And stories from Shelley’s booth.
There’s so many. I think being a British voice actor in America has its quirks for sure. It’s nice being a niche, though, I have to say.
It is very nice being a niche. And because of that, I get a lot of e-learning work. They say that us Brits sound way more intelligent.
They couldn’t be further from the truth, but you know, I’ll go with that. So I do get a lot of e-learning work. I do a lot of that.
But I’ve got so many stories, and a lot of my students tend to ask me, what is your favorite piece of work that you’ve done? Or what has been the most challenging? And I think there’s a couple of stories, actually, which I’ll try and fit into another minute and a half.
One was with the way e-learning is going these days. There’s lots of gamification and virtual reality. And more and more in this genre, you see characters come up more and more, which I love.
As voice actors, most of us like to do character voices. It gets our acting chops going. So, in this one particular scene, I had to be an office parrot, which doesn’t sound like it was that bad.
But I said, you know, do you want it to be a stereotypical parrot? Is he well spoken? They wanted the typical pirate on the shoulder parrot, with squawks and everything.
And that was pretty fun. But when they got to the point where they wanted this parrot to squawk the word no in seven different ways. No, I’m unhappy.
No, I don’t want that. Or no, stop. That was pretty funny doing different squawks for that.
And then the second story, which I love doing, I was doing an audio book, and I had to do probably about 30 characters. And it was a Scottish love romance. And this one particular scene where there were seven Highland Scottish brothers having a conversation.
And I had to come up with voices that was different for each one. So, you know, when it comes to the seventh one, I’m like, oh, jeez, you know, what am I going to kind of do for this? So I kind of stood in the booth, and they gave a little bit of a description of this guy, big, huge, burly, you know, ginger beard with stocky.
So I kind of stood in the booth, you know, trying to put this stance, and I made my neck really small. And I came up with this kind of a really gruff kind of voice like that, you know. And it kind of reminded me of the, you know, the fat bass bleep from Austin Powers.
Yeah, you know, that guy, the big fat guy. Which worked really well. I eventually got there, and the author was really happy with this book, and we kept going back and forth and throughout the chapters.
And I only, I double checked, it was only two chapters that this voice needed to be in. And she came back, she went, oh my gosh, Shelley, I love all the voices. They were all great.
You’re doing such a great job. However, you know that Seventh Highland brother? I forget what his name was now.
That voice didn’t actually work, because he’s actually the sexy love interest in the next book. Ha! So that one wasn’t quite right.
But those are my two favorites. Quite fun.
All right, thanks again to Shelley Avellino for donating your VO Meter shtick. We’re very sad that you weren’t able to join us for the roundtable, but we are so happy that you included yourself in this episode in that way. So, speaking of our British roundtable, we’re gonna hop over there in just a second, but before that, a word from one of our sponsors.
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Because you like to have fun.
Okay, welcome to the interview portion of this episode of The VO Meter. Our British Invasion, Part Deux, or Part Three, Part Rumour Numeral Four, whatever you want to call it. I’m joined locally in the iHeart Radio Studios, graciously hosted by Stanley Fisher, by Chris Sharpes and Lillian Warkentin.
And on the line we have Jamie Muffett. Sean is joining us as well, of course, from Washington. And we’re hoping to have Mike Cooper join us.
Hopefully he’ll join us momentarily, and we’ll talk to him as well. So first I want to give Stanley a chance to introduce himself. He’s our gracious host here at iHeartRadio.
Stanley, thanks so much.
Yeah, you’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. It’s good to see you again, too.
I haven’t seen you since Mabo 2018.
Yeah, oh, what? Two months, right? Three months?
So yeah, no, it’s my pleasure. What do you think of the studios here?
It’s really, really cool.
Yeah, they’re nice. I’ve been working here for about a year and four months, and they’re doing a full… There’s a total redo of all these studios, and they’ve done a really good job with a lot of these.
They look very nice.
Yeah, as we talked about, I live about five miles from here, and I haven’t been here since the whole shopping center and offices were redone, and it’s really impressive. Lillian reminds me of the area around Nationals Park where they’ve sort of…
Redone everything there….
gentrified that whole area, and now it’s like another mini city, so it’s really kind of cool.
Yeah, we’re about a block away from Johns Hopkins University, and this parking lot out here was just bare. And they built this five, six-story apartment high-rise living right here in the parking lot and added like 30 shops. Oh, wow.
Mainly food. I know I’ve been to all of them, so.
And there’s more coming as we talk about this. Pretty cool.
Yeah, so anyway, you guys are welcome. Let me know if you need anything else.
All right, thanks again for hosting us. And we’ll talk to you soon. So I want to give everybody a chance to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about what they do.
So let’s start here in the room. Lillian, why don’t you start, please.
Hi, what do you want to know first? I have been in the States for off and on about 28 years. Half of that, maybe less than half of that has been in Europe.
My husband was military, so we moved backwards and forwards across the Atlantic every three to four years. But I’ve been in the Washington, DC area for about eight years.
Okay, great. And Chris?
Similar story. I’ve been here in the States since 2001, and I lived in Virginia for about eight years. Was back in the UK for about a year, and then here in Baltimore since 2009, so it’s almost 10 years.
Scary. Yeah, that’s about it, really. And I lived in Dubai for a year.
That’s the exciting factoid about me.
Really? Yes.
That’s cool. Before, it was nice. It was awful when we lived there, so.
What are my most exciting jobs was done in Dubai. It’s a video that’s currently playing at the top of the Burj Khalifa. Oh, wow.
That’s cool. It’s pretty cool. Nice connection there.
Okay, so, about 10, no, nine years ago, on a trip to the US for a vacation on holiday, I met an American and ended up bringing him to London to live with me, and we ended up getting married so that he could stay in London. And four and a half years later, much to our surprise, everything had changed in terms of the laws around gay marriage, and he was finally able to get me a green card, and we’d always said that we would jump on that if that were ever to become a possibility, so we had this short list of places, some were West Coast, some were East Coast. I had a notion in my mind that I would probably carry on working with clients in the UK and Europe for at least a time, and that it didn’t seem necessarily like the wisest idea to move.
What for me at that point was a seven year running voiceover business, my full-time job, moving it eight hours in terms of the UK or nine hours in terms of Central Europe to the West Coast didn’t really seem like a viable proposition. So we started looking at this list of places on the East Coast, which would mean it was GMT-5, CET-6. One of the places on that list was this little rinky-dink town or so I felt called Asheville, North Carolina, which people have been telling Mark, my partner, for years that he needed to go and check out.
So we ended up coming and checking it out, absolutely fell in love with it like a lot of people do. Just to give you some perspective, this is a town of 80 odd thousand people that gets something like 7 or 8 million visitors a year. So it’s a destination location.
It’s lots of fun. It’s very progressive. And I kind of always thought that my American dream would involve me living in a city, New York, LA or something like that.
And what we ended up with was 19 acres almost of national forest, 13 miles outside of Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Well, I’ve been in America for about 10 years, so I’m a relative newbie by comparison. And I currently live just outside of Philly, just north of Philly, but I was in New York up until a couple of years ago. And yeah, grew up in the London area and my wife’s American, hence why I could move over here.
And yeah, that’s where I am right now.
That’s awesome. Well, what are the things I’m most curious about? And the reason I wanted to do this episode is because each of you lives in what would not be considered the top media market in the US.
Chris lives just around the corner from me outside of Baltimore. Lillian is in Northern Virginia. Jamie, I know your town very well because my aunt lives almost across the street in Newtown.
Right, yeah.
Spend a lot of time in Newtown.
I’m sorry?
I spend a lot of time in Newtown.
Oh, okay, great.
Got a great coffee shop there.
So even though you’re just outside some major cities, how have you established your careers in the town in which you currently live? Is there a reason you pick the towns you currently live in?
Yeah, most of my work is done outside of the town I currently live in, although I have done some work with local companies, telephony work and such. I think because our work is all digital, pretty much most of my work is some in England and some in the rest of Europe and some publishing houses in the States. But yeah, it’s harder to connect with a lot of local companies for me because I don’t represent their local brand with a British accent.
So that can be, I don’t know if you’ve found that, that can be a sticking point. Sometimes. Big international companies love it, especially my natural more mid-Atlantic accent, which isn’t the straight British, it’s the Knicks.
So that represents an international company very well, but the British accent, they don’t necessarily want, you know, your all-American British company doesn’t want a British person representing them on the phone or on their webinars or on their e-learning. It’s a mixture, yeah.
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I worked the New York market quite hard when I was there. I was there for about eight years.
So, you know, I’m a little bit out of the city, but it takes me like an hour and 20 minutes to get into New York. So I’m in there every week for various projects. So my market really is still New York and stuff I record from home.
So that’s anywhere else. I do sometimes work in Philly. I’ve done a few sessions in town, but like Lillian was saying, the local area really doesn’t supply any work for me because local businesses want, like you were saying a second ago, a sound that’s sort of local to them unless they’re going for some sort of quirky David Attenborough or something like that as a sort of comedy effect.
Yeah. But yeah, that’s pretty much how it works for me. You’re sort of in a, yeah.
In some ways you’re a little bit in limbo when you’re in America because you don’t have access to the huge pool of work, which is obviously in the UK. And then you’re also, you’re slightly more isolated from that, and then you’re also really niche in America. So, you know, it’s sort of an interesting…
The runway is very much smaller. Very much smaller for us.
Yeah, exactly.
And we all fight over the same pieces. I see the same names and the same short listings for a few things, and I go, them again, okay.
Damn, that Chris Sharpes.
But no, it is telling though, with some of the local stuff, I tried to sort of, even like Mini of Baltimore tried approaching them and they were like, nope, and their ads are all American. I’m like, that seems silly to me, but you know, they want what they want, so they want a regionalized commercial, so it isn’t too jarring for them. But to Lillian’s point, the international companies, they love it.
I’m weirdly popular in Amsterdam, I’m not sure why, but I have quite a few clients in Amsterdam, I just don’t know why they like my voice, but they do.
I’ve had a couple of jobs from Italy, which I thought was strange too, but I’ll take it.
My six year old booked a job in Italy.
Nice.
That’s cool, that’s very cool, what was it?
It was an e-learning piece for a company there. It was on Bedalgo actually.
Yeah.
So, take that Darren Altman.
And that was a hard edit, hard edit. I’m going to drop the music real quick.
I’m so glad that some of you guys touched on it a little bit in your introductions, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of the challenges you face being a non-native VO in the US and some of the benefits.
Well, for me, challenges is simply just collating enough opportunities to be able to put yourself out there, because it’s not like if you’re a native person in that land where you’re getting 20, 30 auditions every day, and if you book 10%, you’re going to make a really good amount of money. Our booking ratio probably has to be higher because we have fewer opportunities, but of course the talent pool is so much smaller, because a lot of people will want… In America, if they want a Brit over here, they’re looking for someone on the ground or in a similar time zone.
So, yeah, we’ll see each other… Rarely do we see who else is going for it, but you can pretty much be damn sure that we’re all going for similar jobs. So the talent pool is smaller, so you stand a higher chance, but I think you do have to have a much better booking ratio if you’re so niche.
I don’t know what you guys think.
I think it’s also… It depends on what you do, as far as what genre you’re in. I do quite a bit of video game work, and so for me, they get reeled in by the British thing because any fantasy medieval game ever, they go, oh yeah, get Chris.
But then I did one game where I did the auditioning British accent following shortlist audition, same thing, and we get the session, he goes, how’s your American accent? And I literally had a panic attack. But I got through it.
I mean, it was probably, all of our colleagues were probably cringe at it at the moment, but it was passable. I mean, but it’s still just, it’s amazing what they want, or they want it, the best way I’ve heard it is, they want it, an American who’s trying to sound British, that’s how they want you to sound sometimes.
The kind of that mid-Atlantic thing again.
Yeah, kind of like…
That mixture that when I’m talking to an American and their eyes start to glaze over because they’re not actually listening to what I’m saying, they’re just listening to my accent, and then I adjust it and I naturally fall into more of an American accent so that they actually are listening to what I’m saying.
Or if you’re ordering water at a restaurant.
Oh, Jamie, Jamie, that is the cursed drink.
I always get someone else to order because otherwise you end up saying it six times.
You want a wawa? Yes, a wawa. That’s exactly what I want.
He has all that wawa. That drink is a curse. I actually do fake an American accent when I’m ordering food.
I do.
Water and tomato.
No, someway I don’t do it. I don’t order that at all. I skip that topping completely.
I don’t want the conversation. I just don’t want it.
My head whips up and they look at you like you said something different.
Are you Australian? Yes, I am. That’s exactly right.
Or South African.
But I do think it’s dependent on what genre you’re in and what your clients prefer really. That’s kind of the big thing to do with it as far as your approachability, I suppose.
Some of the challenges are, as some of the others have said, finding work here for A British Voice can be more challenging. I fell into a trap early on. I think the people who were telling me this were doing it with the best of intentions, but when I first started signing up with agents and production companies here, particularly people who like to gather auditions, a lot of people were saying, oh, we should put you in.
You should be the wild card. We’ll give them the American options that they want, but having a Brit in there would be a really good thing. So I spent most of my first year auditioning solidly for everything that came in, whether they’d asked for British or not.
And 99 times out of 100, if they weren’t wanting British, they didn’t want British. So I learned that lesson, and in the end, I started saying to people, just send me the British jobs, which immediately slashed the number of auditions I got probably by nine-tenths or something like that. But what it did do was it meant that I was paying attention to the things that were more likely to happen, and my booking ratio from those went up.
The difference between the UK and the US markets is that the UK market is far less, or certainly used to be far less audition-based. People would book you from your demos, whereas here people, even if they’ve heard your demos and love your demos, they still want to hear what you sound like on their script and whether they have difficulty making that jump or whether it’s just cultural here. It’s like you walk into a supermarket and somebody’s giving you things to try.
The culture of let’s sample first is much greater here than it is in the UK. So those are some of the challenges. In terms of the benefits though, in terms of when somebody does want a British voice, there are far fewer of us here providing those services.
Culturally, I think in the UK it’s a little different because we’re used to dealing with people across Europe and so on and being a country within a bunch of other countries, although politically that’s slightly iffy at this point. But here in the US, I think people do want to deal with people who are at least in an adjacent time zone, who they can pay in dollars, can you give them a W9 form, that kind of thing. I think those are bigger things for the US market to get over than clients in the UK find.
I think you have to be quite adaptable, right, as well. You have to be able to work in a lot of genres because there’s that reduction in the amount of opportunities that you have, so you have to be quite good at a lot of areas of the industry because you can’t really specialise within your niche. Otherwise, there just isn’t the volume of work there to support that, you know.
I think that’s spot on and that’s definitely something I’ve found coming into the industry and trying to find my niche. And I’m finding most of my work comes through audio books, and so that is my niche, but then I need shorter projects to go in between these long, big, long projects that I have. Sprints and marathons as well, yeah, exactly.
So I’m like, I’ve got to work on, you know, the other genres and put myself out there to other genres to get that, because like you said, it’s a niche.
It’s hard, though. It’s hard to switch gears. I think getting good at one, like audio books is definitely a huge skill.
I mean, it’s a marathon thing, and it’s just like, I’ve done a couple and I’m like, whoa, that’s a loss. And we have to edit them and stuff, but with like narration, quick explainer or video game, you’re like, that session, two hours and you’re done. There might be some pickups later, but that’s it.
And when I do that, I’m like, sweet, I’m done already?
But I don’t really have any experience to the commercial side of things. Auditioned plenty, but haven’t really landed anything on that. And that might just be experience as it comes up.
But Jamie, I mean, your commercial style is very specialized. I did chuckle a bit when I recognized you from the Barocca commercial. I was like, oh, that is you.
OK, I thought that sounded familiar. But that’s a very niche example of it. Like, I want a British guy yelling this thing.
And it had the perfect intended effect. But when they want an American, they will push you to Jamie’s point, push you out the side, and you’re in a very small lane, unless they want that stereotype sound or the posh sound.
I think that culture really does exist here. People want to hear what you sound like reading their bit of copy, even if your demo has a much nicer produced bit of copy that has all the effects and the music or whatever. They want to hear you read their bit of script, and they’re not going to be happy until they get that.
For me, culturally, that was a difficult thing. I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall to start with, but now I just get that it’s part, culturally, of how business is done here and how the voiceover business works here. So you can bang your head against a brick wall as much as you like, but you’re not going to change the way people want to do business, right?
Sometimes you can get British work with American production companies, which is quite good. I just did something for Flonase in the UK, and it was through Hogarth. So there are obviously big offices here in New York, or well, in New York, but they’re producing it for the British TV.
So sometimes that’s an avenue for the commercial world as well, if the production’s here.
I’m taking Flonase right now. I actually forgot to take it this morning, so thanks for the reminder.
Can you list the benefits of said Flonase, or would you mind plugging them in real quick?
Do you still have your sense of smell?
Right, yeah.
Interestingly, it’s called Pyrenees in the UK, and I didn’t realize that, but that’s the brand. I don’t know why they changed it.
Some legal debacle, I’m sure. Yes, yes.
Well, Lillian made me think of something when she was talking about adjusting her accent. I’m going to go off script for a second here, Sean, because Sean mentioned code switching earlier in the conversation. Maybe even before we were live.
But I’m wondering if you find yourself doing that in normal conversation. I’m sure you do, living in America full time. Do you find you have to brush up on your British accent at times to make sure it’s more authentic?
Because we had an episode with Latin talent, Spanish-speaking talent, a couple of months ago, and they said the same thing, that they have to practice it or they lose it. Is it the same with a British accent?
So far, so good and not. There’s a couple of things in play there. I think I do an OK American accent that will work for short things, like if it was promo or if it was imaging, that kind of thing.
I can get away with a US accent on that where it’s more stylized, more character and less natural. I can’t hold an American accent convincingly for an American market in conversation. My partner cringes every time I try to do one, so I’ve worked very hard on developing that niche where I’m the British guy.
And when people come to me and they say, Oh yeah, but can you do an American accent? I say, No, I try not to. I know lots of really good American voice overs.
I am happy to refer you to any of them. I’ll give you five. Don’t ask me to do American, but I’ll happily refer you to somebody who can do it much better than me.
And then hopefully those people remember who I am when somebody comes to them asking if they need British. I do do Australian, and the only reason I’ll do Australian is because I find it an easier reach from my natural accent. And you know, I lived with an Australian for six years and was around Australians, and I feel more comfortable with that, but I won’t do American so much.
But I do stand out like a sore thumb. You’re absolutely right. And part of the reason for that is I started doing some work to help out our local NPR station, Blue Ridge Public Radio, here in Asheville a couple of years ago.
The net result of which is that I probably now have one of the most recognizable voices in western North Carolina. So I will go… We have a small holding here, you know, with goats and chickens, and the first time I realized that people were hearing me was when I walked into the feed-and-grain store and ordered a bag of food for the chickens, and the guy behind the counter said, Are you that guy off the radio?
And I was like, yeah, I am. And now it happens all the time. So it’s weird because my clients are overwhelmingly not in the Asheville area.
I do have a couple of local clients who call on me occasionally, but really my clients aren’t here. But I do get recognized from my work on the radio.
It is, yeah. Well, for me it is, for sure. When I first moved to the States, I definitely…
I wanted to blend in, and I didn’t want to stand out, and I lost my British accent completely. My parents were like, who are you? And then I was really embarrassed.
And even now, my natural… If I’m recording, it’s different. I pay attention to my accent.
But when I’m just talking, if the British people listen to this podcast, they might listen to me and go, oh, she sounds kind of American. But American people will listen and go, oh, she sounds very British.
And that’s very true.
If I need to record a British, British accent, I need to pay attention to it. And there’s certain words where it’s different. It could be pronounced the same, but the emphasis will be on a different syllable.
The inflection is huge. The inflection.
Like weekend and weekend.
Yes.
Just little things.
So basically, because I look like James Corden’s stunt double, I actually… I have that sort of voice where it’s sort of like, it’s the Americanized British, you know. It’s sort of…
The lot of softening the T’s, the D’s, all the cons is a lot softer. But then when I talk to my dad, it switches right back to being super British and everything is super punchy, you know, it’s punchy, punchy, punchy.
Everybody can tell who you’re on the phone with.
Exactly.
Because if you’re on the phone with your parents, they’re like, oh, you’re talking to your mum? Yeah, I can tell.
But Jamie, I think we’ve talked about this privately. I mean, they’ve told you to scale it back, correct, when they say, no, not so British.
Sometimes you’ll get the direction, can you just be a bit less British? Which is interesting, because you’re like, what does that mean? Do you want me to go more like Iranian?
Or like, what does that mean?
Which I know what they mean.
Russian twings, please.
Yeah, exactly. I know what they mean. It is like what you were just saying, softening the t’s a bit and pronouncing words that are with American emphasis and stuff like that.
Not quite so Downton Abbey.
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, when they say British, they mean, you know, little Lord Fauntleroy, that’s what they want. And then they go, oh, that’s not what I want.
And then you’ve got the bit that we haven’t touched on yet, and the bit that kind of infuriates me is the American actors faking it and getting away with it.
Yeah, we won’t. Really, we really want to go there.
We’ve got lower standards. We have no idea what we’re listening for. But I wanted to touch on, because you all kind of implied it a little bit.
You were talking about the mid-Atlantic accent or like also referred to as the neutral accent if there is such a thing. But do you guys find it interesting that you’re almost asked to create this artificial hybrid accent for like any number of different jobs? Like do you find that you actually use your own voice for a lot of the work you do?
Are you often being directed away to, like I said, this artificial accent?
I mean, I tend to get audition, get jobs from custom auditions, so they either like it or they don’t, I suppose, but you do inspects here and see Mid-Atlantic or whatever that is. I often think of that as sort of the Frasier accent, like very well articulated American, you know? Yeah, exactly, that’s right.
Or maybe just taking my accent and just using some American sort of inflection and phraseology, because sometimes the phraseology is just different, you know? But yeah, it’s a difficult one. I mean, I saw J.
Michael Collins posted a video the other day about his sort of nondescript Mid-Atlantic accent, which was quite interesting. That was an interesting take on it. If anyone saw that.
It’s an interesting sort of lane to be in. I will admit to one audition secret. When people say, can you tweak it a bit?
I just change the file name sometimes. That sounds great. Pro tip.
Please still hire me. Please still hire me. But that’s honestly…
Sometimes you just say, yeah, tweak it for you, no problem. And it’s in their head. Sometimes it’s just in their head of what they want, and then you go, here’s the same thing twice.
But sometimes, I mean, for me personally, with character work, I have to… I mean, some sessions it was 14 different characters to be unique, and that’s challenging. It’s very challenging.
It’s fun. But after a while, I go, this sounds the same as number two, but okay, here it is. But the whole Mid-Atlantic thing…
There are some VOs out in LA that do the Mid-Atlantic. They specialize in that. But to that point, I actually got with an American accent coach to test out if I could do it.
And I know I’m not doing it now. It’s gun-shy. But for character stuff, I can do it, and it’s possible, because the coach actually said, are you messing with me?
And I said, no. And she goes, well, you’ve got it down almost 90 percent, so I don’t think we need any more lessons just yet. But again, doing it in a conversational manner, I know I can’t do.
I actually have to put it into the lane of a character to actually speak like that, otherwise my brain just does not compute. And that can be advantageous to do it that way, to sort of get clients in that think, oh, you don’t only do British, you do some other stuff too, or stuff we can pass up as American.
I don’t know how you guys feel, but I mean, you mentioned it a little while ago, Chris, that if you’re ever asked to do straight American, I’m okay with accents, I’m pretty good, but if there’s something about straight American, then maybe it’s just being here and you’re super fussy about it, but I find it so difficult, like to be authentic and comfortable. Just this is why I never offer it.
Yeah, it’s very challenging. I started doing it, it was very sort of Bob Barker, come on down, sort of voice, and it was like, no, no, no, but once you… But in conversations, sometimes at my day job and stuff, people will say, I don’t hear an accent, and everyone kind of turns and goes, you don’t hear his accent.
So apparently I’m doing something at some vocal level where I’m using enough to pass by and my wife says, you sound like an American faking to be British, and I said, well, you know, that’s not true either. But that is the trap you fall into. But conversationally, it is challenging.
It’s very challenging to blend in and not sort of have someone tweak when they look at you. They hear that one word or two where it sounds like you weren’t born here.
Yeah, for the straight, general American, very hard. I took some accent coaching for the general American accent, and there were just a couple of vowels. There’s the O’s and A’s, that flat A, and I was saying it again and again and again, and I’m like, I’m just not sure.
The transatlantic or the midatlantic, I’m fine with that, but that general American, maybe if I went full on southern… I mean, I lived in Mississippi for three years. I could do the full on southern, but that straight general American is very difficult.
Just got to put clothes pins on the side of your lips, right? So wide and flat.
If I had a couple of whiskeys first, I’d just like chill and relax a bit.
Slur everything up a bit, it’s right.
I will say this, you reminded me, British people, especially on-screen actors, Benedict Cumberbatch is a prime example of this. Every R sounds like a pirate. He’s like Thor Odinson.
It’s just like, oh dear, we know that’s not American.
But he’s Benedict Cumberbatch, so he can do anything.
He’s Sherlock and Doctor Strange, he’s so talented and dreamy.
He can do documentaries about penguins, we’re happy with that.
We can’t say penguins.
Who directed that one? Forgot 6.
So back to my initial question, it must be especially hard for those of you who live in a town on the East Coast where it’s very colloquial. People, especially in Baltimore, Chris, you know, don’t move from the block they grew up on.
They do not.
So when they hear someone speak with a British accent, it must be especially jarring, and it must be like, oh, you’re not from around here, are you? Same thing just outside of Philadelphia.
They call lice usually first.
Again, so far, not so much. I mean, we watch quite a lot of British TV, which I think helps and helps keep me on point. We listen to a lot of British radio in the house.
We’ll quite often have the BBC on in the kitchen. So, yeah, I think I keep myself in check pretty well. And I think because I’m not pushing myself, I don’t feel pressure, because everybody here knows me as the British guy.
I don’t feel that peer pressure, perhaps, to lapse into a Southern drawl or even that kind of transatlantic, midatlantic thing that the others were talking about. I don’t really… It doesn’t really happen for me so much.
It is. I mean, you do stand out, and it’s actually reversed for me, Lillian. I actually didn’t want to assimilate.
I guess my ego wouldn’t let me, because someone’s like, look at me, look at me. I’m not from here. Come talk to me.
And then after a while, you don’t want anyone to talk to you, because it initiates a conversation of where you’re from. So, you know, I go to Starbucks with a series of monosyllabic grunts now to order my coffee, because I don’t want to initiate any sort of background check. But no, it is difficult.
But, Lillian, from that, it is jarring for people, and they don’t know how to deal with it. And I think that does, like, trickle up to casting directors, too. They put you in a box very quickly.
I was talking to a couple of coaches, and they said, you need to pick a lane. You either do American or you do British, because they won’t know what to do with you doing the same thing at the same time. And I was like, that’s interesting, but I don’t know if that’s 100% true.
But as far as being marketable, if you’re British, you’ll be with the luxury brand, the smart person, the little owl from Travelocity, or the Gecko Geico. But you’re a character. And that’s, I think, where we shine is the little character voice.
And that does work, but those jobs are so narrowed down and probably the biggest agencies are gating those, I’d imagine.
It’s funny, because we are the exact opposite, but again, going back to our Latin episode where Christian Land said he’s most marketable by being able to do both, because he’ll get into the studio and someone will say, wait, you don’t have an accent. We had the English version all booked. Why don’t you just do it now?
And he says, okay. And he gets booked for two jobs at once.
But I think there’s a whole industry for the Latin voice in this country because there’s obviously such a huge population of Spanish-speaking people over here.
I agree, yeah.
The jobs for Brits are sporadic, to say the least. So there isn’t that sort of infrastructure probably there. I found that when I first came over, and I initially tried to blend in a bit by putting on a bit of an American, it just confused people even more.
It was more trouble than it was worth. So then I was like, oh, sod it, I’m just going to be Brit.
We’ve talked about that a lot in just the importance of specificity and finding your niche. I mean, there’s no harm in experimenting with different genres you’re interested in, but once you figure that out, stick with it if it’s profitable for you. So you guys kind of touched on this as you were talking about the scarcity of jobs in the US.
So I was curious if you get hired more by US clients or clients abroad.
Okay, so I was looking at this before we got online, and I’m not a stats nerd, but I do keep a spreadsheet of everything that I do, and one of the columns in that spreadsheet is a column that tells me which country the work came from. So overwhelmingly, my work comes from a combination of the UK and the US, and then outside of that, you know, there’s the Netherlands, there’s Germany, there’s the occasional things that comes from Australia or Singapore or whatever, but overwhelmingly my jobs come from the UK and the US. What I looked at in terms of value of jobs is that in 2018, my UK work was almost half, in dollar terms, what my US work was worth, and that’s something that really has changed for me in the last couple of years.
So before I left London, I was certainly doing work for clients in the US, but it was maybe 15, possibly 20% of my overall turnover. Now the US work is almost twice what my UK turnover is, and that even takes into account that some of my UK work is a little higher value, because I have a TV campaign running over there at the moment. But yeah, that US work has almost doubled, and that really has been as a result of doing a lot of outreach and a lot of follow-up.
The thing that I have as my biggest challenge, my biggest pain point, if you like, is I write to a producer in Baltimore, or write to a producer in Dallas or whatever, and say, hey, I’m a British voice over, and I’m in the US, and you can pay me in dollars, and I have Source Connect and IPD and all that stuff. The thing is, if they’re not looking for a British voice at that point in time, it could be three months, it could be six months, it could be a year, or it could be next week. I have to keep blipping on the radar and saying, hey, remember me, I’m the British voice, when you want me, I’m here.
Trying to do that and find a point where it’s keeping in regular contact enough and semi-automating that process so it’s not just me sitting here banging out email after email after email was something that I took a while to get on top of. But it seems to be working pretty well now. And because this is, I think I’m right in saying, this is my 12th year full time as a VO, my website and my SEO are pretty well set at this point.
So I’m fortunate that I’m one of those people that when people Google, I’m one of the people that comes up. So I’ll get usually a few inquiries a week where people say, oh, I found you by Googling. And those inquiries are as likely to come from the US as they are from the UK or anywhere else, to be honest.
Me, mainly US, but really it’s all around. I do a fair amount of work in the UK too. They find me in the usual places.
I don’t have an agent in the UK because it’s just virtually impossible if you’re outside of the country to get an agent in the UK. Yeah, really, really challenging. But they find me online or they work with me before.
It’s through American company, like I say. And yeah, there are all the kind of e-learning, explainer videos and stuff that, you know, they just find you that way. But the vast majority of my work is probably American based.
I don’t know about you guys.
Yes, I think probably most of my work is American based or working directly with British authors, not companies. And then Europe.
Explainer videos redubbing from the original German or Italian into… with the British voiceover.
Yeah, for me, 50-50, I think. Since I’ve started talking to more of these US-based game devs and stuff, for me, personally, that’s sort of increased my US clientele. But I also had, I think, Portugal, I had one game dev in Poland, UK, and one guy in Australia, it was his own private business, but it was a random one.
But it’s definitely right down the middle for me. I mean, I would like to get more New York stuff, and really my eyes on sort of the New York market progressing from here because I just don’t know if LA is for me. It gives me anxiety thinking about it.
In two years, I’ll move there. Mark this day. Chris is a hypocrite.
But New York seems like it would be more of a hub for the people that want the British stuff. Jamie has the right idea, I think, with that sort of approach.
Well, Chris and I actually work on the same game. We’re both cast members of a game called Winds of Change. Winds of Change is out now on Steam.
Where are they based out of? Do you know?
I have no idea. I have no idea.
Which character are you? I didn’t have a chance to ask.
I think it’s like Haley and Darmek. They’re two of the characters. It’s a visual novel one.
I’ve been playing through it, trying to pick out your voice. Now I got it. On a related note, do you ever travel back to the UK?
When you do, do you find you’re able to gain more work there? Have you ever recorded jobs either in studios in the UK or from a home studio you have either at a hotel or with a relative?
You know, I didn’t travel back to the UK for the first three and a half years that we were here, and I wasn’t really in any rush to go back to the UK. After I left, the whole thing with Brexit started, and I just kind of felt comfortable being where I was, and then circumstances meant that I needed to go back to the UK. We have a friend who turned 90 last year, and so I took my first trip back to the UK since leaving, and found it actually wasn’t so bad after all, and now I’m going back to the UK a couple of times a year.
I always take travel kit with me wherever I’m traveling. I have a 416 that I keep in a grab bag ready to leave town whenever I need to, and sometimes I have the Harlan Hogan Porter booth. Do you know that one?
It works really well for me. It travels as your musical instrument bag on most airlines, so I think I’ve only… On one budget airline I had to take it on, but everywhere else it’s traveled with me for nothing.
And sometimes I’ll travel and it doesn’t even come out of the bag. Other times, I think on my last trip back to the UK, I booked a job for a client in the US that was worth several thousand dollars, so it pays to take it. Whether I do any actual work in the UK, if what you mean by that is have you been booked to come into a studio in London while you’ve been in London?
Not yet, but it could happen.
I don’t get to travel back there very often. I went back last summer. I took my travel rig with me.
I did a couple of auditions while I was there, but I connected with someone who had a studio I could use in case any work came in while I was there so I could record it properly, not just on the travel rig in my parents’ bedroom. But no, I haven’t had that opportunity yet.
I go back about twice a year if I can, usually at Christmas time. I’ve actually just bought a desktop because the whole travel thing has never really worked for me. I’ve tried to bring stuff to hotels and stuff, but there’s never any reason to record when I’m on holiday, so for me it doesn’t really seem worth it.
But for me, no UK work really. I’m usually just there to see family and then not really networking at that point. I probably should, but I don’t.
Yeah, similar for me. I don’t go back very often. I haven’t been back in a couple of years now.
But when I do, I take something with me. I’ve got the little Apogee mic and I take the top of a pop shield just so I can hold it in front of my mouth when I do it. Really lo-fi.
But it does the job. I don’t know, I’m trying to think if I’ve… Last time I was there, if I did any jobs, I usually just send notices around saying I’m on holiday.
But I’ve definitely done certain… I remember sort of building a pillow fort.
The hotel fort, yes.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I haven’t really done the whole networking thing around London or anything like that, because the industry is very centralised, I believe, in sort of Soho. And I haven’t really bothered to do that.
I think probably in any major centre, London, LA, New York, trying to network in like a week is not really going to get you too far.
It’s hard, yeah, very hard to do, yes.
Yeah, that’s where I am.
Very cool. Yeah, well, and I love that we got some different perspectives on how much you should market or do you bring the travel rig or not when you travel, especially when you have a good excuse to go, or to travel between continents. So thank you guys for that.
So I was curious, what would you guys recommend to someone who is a non-U.S. native starting out in the States, who wants to start out their VO business?
I think you’ve got to make sure that you’re good at what you’re doing before you start these days. It’s more important than it ever has been. I’ve said this many times, but there’s no bar to entry in this business.
Anybody can set up a website, buy a microphone, and start telling people that they’re a voice over artist. I think the bars to entry or the bars to success are the same here as if you were working anywhere else. There are lots of things in play here.
You can be a US voice over artist in the UK. You can be a UK voice over artist in the US. I know UK voice overs who work out of places like Thailand and Singapore.
I think if you’re good, and if your marketing is good, and if you reach the right people and do good work, then you can be a success anywhere. But you’ve got to make sure that this is, well, A, in your wheelhouse to start with. So when people write to me, I get inquiries from people who say, how do I get into voice over?
And I have about a page of stuff that I send them that has links to things I’ve written, things people like Peter O’Connell have written, and Doug Turkell and whatever. So they get a whole range of what do you need to be successful at this? Make sure you know the technical stuff.
It’s not just sitting down and talking. You’ve got to know how to edit it. You’ve got to know how to put it right when it goes wrong.
You’ve got to know how to market yourself and make sure that you’re comfortable with running a business. I think those things are pretty universal at this point. And it’s not so much about, oh, I’m a Brit in America, what will I do?
It’s more about being savvy about who you market, finding who your clients are and finding the best ways to reach them. And it’s been said many times, you know, don’t suck.
I mean, I would probably echo what I was saying earlier in terms of you need to be quite flexible. So I would really work on a lot of areas of the industry to try and get good at. So promo, commercial, video games, audio books, all those things.
Because if you have got this smaller pool of work, you’re going to have to put yourself forward for pretty much everything that comes in the door. So the better you are at all of those things, the more chance you’ve got of making a good living from it. So I’d say these days, education and voice over education is really good and easily accessible.
I would say that’s something you should really invest time and effort in.
I would follow up with that about the thing you mentioned earlier or Lillian mentioned about time zones. It does play a factor. Clients don’t want to wait for you to wake up.
It’s a thing. They’re like, Australia, I’ve got a guy here. I don’t need you.
And that’s the honest truth of the matter. If you’ve got clients that are repeat business for you and they bring you money and they’re happy with your work and they pick you out of all the ones they could pick, because that’s always a nice email to get when you say, we thought of you first, Chris. That’s a good feeling.
It’s also helpful because you’re trusted. You’re a trusted source. And that’s really the book of business you want to bring across.
You want to build that trust relationship with your clients first, and then you can branch out. What’s your base core business? You can start branching out the genres, test the waters, and some things may not work.
Admitting failure on this is important, like to say, I can’t do this. And it’s okay not to do this, because there’s some genres I can’t do. I just can’t get into, like, audio books.
I want to. I just don’t have the stamina for it. I can admit that.
I can do five minutes a day.
For the next two years. There you are. But it is just people get very…
I think the old adage of the, oh, video games animation, that’s it. That’s all people see. And video games are fun, but they don’t pay a lot.
That is an absolute fact. And even the non-union indie stuff I’ve done, it pays above scale, but it’s so infrequent, you can’t really rely on that as a steady source of income. That’s why people like the audio books, because it’s quite a nice chunk of change for the time spent recording.
Not as much as you would get, say, in commercial. Oh, no. Again, it’s not one of those cha-ching things that you’re, I’m going to get rich from audio books.
People do make a living from it, but that’s really…
Yeah, but depending on commercial, because that’s the whole can of worm with the commercial rates and everything else. You read that all the time on various groups and things not being where they should be or where they once were with the prices.
Nothing is.
But we know people out in LA at certain echelons are making those prices, so it can be done, but you’re talking at 5% of everyone that’s doing this. I would just say that it’s really focusing on what you sell, your niche, whatever that may be. That’s kind of the cliched part of it, is that you don’t know what that might be.
Focus on your niche, but diversify.
Diversify your niche, exactly. That’s the way.
I think you’ve nailed it.
When people ask me my niche, I’m just like, I’m British guy.
Yeah, that works.
That sort of leads us to our final question for the group. Where do you see your individual businesses going in the future?
Where do I see my business in the future? I mean, I really hope to continue to carve out this niche of being the British guy. And of course, I get that Chris is the British guy and Jamie is the British guy.
We’re all British guys in America. The thing, I guess, that puts us in competition with each other is who’s the first one you think of. And I may not be right for something that Chris is right for or Jamie is right for.
I get all of that. But I think being visible and being available and finding ways for people to reach you is what’s going to make your business a success or my business a success in the future. I think in some ways those of us that work in a niche may even have an advantage at this point.
We’re seeing such a lot of homogenization of the voiceover industry. I’m hearing really impressive things come out of Amazon, like their new Alexa voice. I don’t know if you’ve heard that one, the one that can read the news.
It’s getting to the point now where some of this text to speak stuff is almost indistinguishable from an average voiceover. And it’s certainly going to be the case, I think, in years to come that it gets better and that for a lot of applications, text to speech will be good enough. So I think those of us finding your niche, me finding my niche and me being able to deliver something that the machines can’t, is probably what’s going to keep me going as a business, hopefully, for longer.
And I think the more people who start to adopt that attitude, rather than chasing the same work everybody else is chasing, rather than chasing the TV commercials where we’re fighting to keep the rates up or whatever, look for the things that are going to be harder to do for the machines. Look for the niche work. And I think that’s probably…
You may not have such a broad business in future. I may not have such a broad business in future. I’m fortunate.
I do a bunch of different stuff, and there’s a load of stuff that I don’t do. Fortunately, a lot of the stuff that I don’t do isn’t the work that I would see necessarily being there in 15, 20 years. So I’m hopeful, but I think it’s always trying to stay a little ahead of the curve.
Whatever I can get.
I’ve got to get into that one.
Okay. Where do you see it going in the future? Oh, big time, baby.
That’s it, she’s out.
I mean, how far in the future are we going? This year? Focusing on actually learning to market myself better, I think that’s what my focus is this year.
I’ve built a base for my business. I need to, like Jamie was saying, I need to diversify more. Now I’ve got my niche, now I need to diversify.
And market myself to a wider range. Sub-niches. Yeah, to a wider range of people.
But, yeah, definitely expand from the audio books into more e-learning and explainer videos. But the thing is, you know, if someone’s going to offer you, someone’s going to offer you, if an opportunity comes to audition for a game or something, you know, you’re just going to throw yourself into it 110%. Nothing to lose by doing it.
Exactly. So I don’t really know where my business is going to go in the near future, but it’s going somewhere because… Because I’m not going to take anything less.
Positivity, yeah.
It’s going somewhere. I just don’t know where.
Hey, persistence and positivity go a long way.
I think that’s a very honest…
At least I’ve got that.
Yeah, I think that’s a very honest answer because I don’t know anyone that could be, could tell you with any certainty where their business, their voiceover business is going to be in five years because who knows where the industry is going to be in five years. In general. You know, I’m the same.
I do my best to throw myself into every opportunity and there are times when I’m just phoning it in. I know I am with auditions and I’ll catch myself and I’m like, no, Jamie, go back in there, do it again, do it properly, spend the time. You know, even if it is a relatively low profile gig, it matters, you know, just doing everything 100% doing it to your fullest ability.
Personally…
It never forgets, right? It’s all out there in the ether at some point.
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, even if you’re just submitting things through your agent, then your agents are going to be like, oh, he’s kind of, you know, he’s maybe not top of mind for me from now on. I want to be top of mind all the time.
I’d like to do a bit more documentary narration work because I really enjoy that. But I mean, really, I said glibly, but it’s true. Anything I can get, you know, you take everything and you throw yourself into everything and then it all sort of works out somehow.
Yeah, I’d echo what you both said. It just, it’s, the uncertainty is a bit scary, but I mean, for me personally, I’ve seen repeat clients come back and that’s a first, which is, you know, kind of a big thing to say, hey, they say, we don’t want to audition you, which is, that’s wonderful.
I get that a lot, but not for the same reason.
But I’ve got my own plans as far as what I want to do, you know, attracting sort of eight other agents and stuff and getting myself in a position where, you know, you get some of these bigger gigs. And it isn’t for the sake of the money, it’s the sake of just, you know, elevating your work because a sort of better perspective is not where I am in five years, but wherever comes since I started. And for me, it’s been kind of quite a quick acceleration, but it’s not like every single job rolls in and it’s like a win every time.
There are hundreds and hundreds of un-listened, rejected auditions that I have and it’s just, you know, it’s one of those things. You kind of get used to it, but it’s a weird thing to get past mentally. But once you’re there, you can start looking at what you can build up.
And I think that’s kind of where I’m at. It’s probably still a building phase, honestly.
But you’ve got to have a focus of where you want to go. Otherwise, you’re not going to get anywhere, are you, if you don’t have a goal in mind?
Oh, no plan is the worst plan, absolutely.
You’ve got to have a goal of where you want your business to go so that you can actually take steps to get there.
And to know where your weak points are.
Exactly, the chinks in your armour and everything else, but also knowing your limitations, too. Of knowing, you know, again, you’re good at ABC, but I’m not going to invest in DEF because it’s going to be a waste of energy and time and things I could be putting towards where I know I’m going to be successful. I think that’s a big thing, because people do get mixed up, because someone will say, oh, we should try this and this and this.
And that’s where people get distracted from their goal and their business plan. And I think that’s one of the pitfalls, I think, when it comes to trying new stuff, it’s fun, but you want to stay focused on what you book and what gets you clients to come back and pay you money.
Your niche again.
Your niche, diversifying the niche, one more time, yeah.
I think you’ve nailed the slogan, somebody should write that down on a T-shirt.
Well, speaking of growing your business, we’re just about done, but I’d like to give each of you a chance to promote yourselves and tell people where they can hire you if they want to have you for their job. I’ll start with Lillian.
Okay, well, my website is lillianrachel.com, and my demos are there. I’m mostly plain British. I’m straight up British VO, but also mid-Atlantic.
What do you call it, mid-Atlantic or trans-Atlantic? I think it depends which part of the states you’re in, but anyway, that mid-Atlantic.
I always think of trans-Atlantic as the flight more than the voice.
But mid-Atlantic is like, we live in the mid-Atlantic region, so if you say mid-Atlantic here…
Yeah, that confuses me as well.
That confuses the issue. Sorry, that wasn’t your question, was it? lillianrachel.com, thank you very much.
I’m over at chrissharpes.com, and I’ll spell it because no one ever spells my last name right. It’s sharpes.com. And I’m pretty much a video game, narration, explainer.
And I do accents, so I’m not just a one-trick pony with a British thing. So that seems to be the way I get hired. So it’s come see me, come give me some jobs, please.
That would be nice.
That’s right.
I’m not above begging Jamie, it’s fine.
Yeah, we all do it. My voiceover work is found at yourbritvoice.com, and my general website, which covers a few things that I do, is jamiemuffett.com. Everyone spells muffett.com.
Muffett wrong, it’s M-U-F-F-E-T-T. And that’s that.
Well, my website is mikecoopervoiceover.com. You can also find me at MikeCooperVoiceOver on Instagram. I think I’m MikeCooperVoiceOver on LinkedIn, and MikeCooperVoiceOver on Facebook.
I’m pretty much MikeCooperVoiceOver wherever you go.
All right, well, thanks everyone for being here. As I said before, we went live. I don’t know what’s going on in my brain, but lately we’ve had the UK on the mind.
Our last episode had Peter Dixon and Hugh Edwards from Graveyard for the Brain, and now we have you lovely people. Maybe it’s the current political climate. Maybe I’m wishing to have a trip to England.
Jamie, the Eagles had a trip there this season that was pretty successful, so maybe that’s what I’m thinking about it. We’re so happy to have you here and talk about your various VO businesses and how your career is going. Thanks so much.
I just wanted to thank you guys again. This was incredibly informative. I know as VO is becoming…
Everyone knows it’s a global industry, and they might think being that unique commodity in another country can be a unique selling point, but it’s not without its considerations, as you guys have kindly reminded us. Thank you so much for that incredible insight, and thank you for being on the podcast.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure. Thank you, guys.
Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Sean.
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So thanks again to our participants for the British Invasion Roundtable. That was so fun to have in person. I want to thank Stanley Fisher again at iHeart Radio for having us in the studio and allowing me to bring Lillian and Chris in person because you just can’t duplicate that kind of in-person fun.
It was really cool to have them in person to be able to talk to. And thanks again, of course, to Jamie and Mike for joining us remotely. So what was your biggest takeaway from the conversation?
We talked a lot about the episode we had with the Spanish-speaking talent, and there was a lot of parallels, but what would you say is the biggest takeaway from the discussion?
Know your strengths, but be versatile.
Yeah, I would agree. And don’t be afraid to take chances. The thing that struck with me was when Chris mentioned that he had a few producers telling him to try your American, and I’m just going ahead and hiring him for it.
So don’t look a gift horse in the mouth is the expression that really makes sense in that case. Don’t tell somebody you’re not willing to try, but also know your strengths and weaknesses.
Mm-hmm, that’s right. Come from, like, I’m trying to help you. And he’s actually had a similar conversation with a video game actor named Brian Summer.
He’s like, I worked with this one woman who’s like, oh, I don’t do British accents. He’s like, well, have you ever tried? And so she did.
He’s like, it was beautiful. I would book that. So yeah, don’t tell yourself what you can’t do.
Before we go, we want to thank our sponsor, IPDTL. They are the cost-effective ISDN replacement. It’s great for interviews, outside broadcasts, and voiceover.
There’s no special hardware or software required. It works anywhere with an internet connection. There’s monthly or annual subscriptions.
It runs in the Chrome web browser. And the best part is, it just works. So thanks again to IPDTL for sponsoring The VO Meter.
All right, so thanks again to our wonderful guest. It was such a joy to have you on. Stay tuned for our next episode.
We have a voice actor with almost 40 years of experience in the industry, four decades, Mr. Pat Fraley. So if you’ve grown up watching cartoons in the 70s and 80s, all the way till today, you’ve probably heard his voice a lot. And he’s also one of the premier voiceover voice acting educators that is available today.
So you’re going to have a lot of great conversations with him. So stay tuned because we’ll have even more great guests coming in the months ahead.
So once again, that’s it for this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com.
VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBoot2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, and IPDTL. And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 35 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So today, we’re talking about VO education. We’ve got some excellent gentlemen from Gravy For The Brain joining us in just a few minutes, and that’s going to be Hugh Edwards, Peter Dickson, and J. Michael Collins to talk about some exciting developments that they have over at Gravy For The Brain.
But before that, we’re going to talk about our current events and questionable gear purchases.
Yeah, it’s going to be a great episode. Can’t wait.
Awesome. So first off, as we always do, current events. So what’s going on in your VO world, Paul?
Couple of cool things. My latest audio book is out. It’s called Falls, and it’s a supernatural thriller where Samuel Branch tries to figure out who abducted his friend’s sister and how he can help rescue her with the help of some supernatural friends.
So that was a lot of fun to do. It’s the first in a series, and I’m looking forward to the next. You can find that on Audible or Scribd or Downpour.
Is that how you pronounce that? Scribd. Scribd.
Oh, Scribd? That makes more sense. Scribd.
Or Downpour. Anywhere you can download audio books. Please give that a listen.
I was pretty happy with a coaching session. I did last night, actually, that you hosted with Carol Monda at the GVAA, one of our fine sponsors. I actually did an excerpt from this book, and I wanted to see if the performance that was already out there was a good one based on Carol’s opinion.
She gave me the stamp of approval on my one character voice, so that was pretty cool to hear. And then another thing that’s going on is my youngest son has been on fire lately. He’s had several auditions, and tomorrow he has a live directed session with a client in New York.
About a podcast that he’s doing. So that’s going to be ridiculous. He’s actually done it once before, but it wasn’t this long.
The PC did before. It was a little like 30 second explainer. Now he’s doing sort of an episodic read where he plays a character, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he pulls it off.
So I’m going to be outside the booth with the headphones on and helping to direct him while he’s also being directed via phone patch by the director in New York. So I’m pretty excited to see how that turns out.
Man, that’s incredible. You must be super proud.
Yeah, well, not yet. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
Not yet, yeah. Well, super nervous, and then hopefully super proud.
Yeah, I’m super proud of him for at least getting the job booked, and it’s going to be fun to have that happen tomorrow. And the last thing I want to mention is a couple of e-learning gigs I picked up. So we talked about this before, but there’s definitely peaks and valleys in this industry.
I got to tell you, I was feeling pretty down in the beginning of this year because there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Just weeks on end with me finding no work at all coming in the inbox. And this past couple of weeks, I’ve started to pick up the e-learning again, which is a welcome surprise.
So some are repeat clients, some are new, and some are clients I have talked to over a year ago that have contacted me again for another job. So it just goes to show if you’re patient and you’re good and you know what you’re doing and you’ve done your marketing, those things will come back to you in spades if you look out for it. So that pretty much wraps up what’s going on with me.
What’s happening with you, Mr. Daeley?
Well, the same monthly grind, keeping my repeat e-learning clients happy. Got some lucrative auditions, no major projects that I can talk about yet, but I’m still staying positive. We’ve got some huge changes coming over to GVAA, to Global Voice Acting Academy right now.
We’re actually kind of doing a bit of an overhaul over our membership program. We’re kind of changing the benefits that are offered with each tier because we realized we didn’t have sort of a recorded content package for people who might not have either the budget or the schedule to get regular coaching. So we wanted to provide a membership called our VO Basic membership.
It’s going to be released sometime next month in March, where it’s all of our recorded content, like everything from… because we record all of our coach-led workouts, our peer-led workouts, our elevation Q&A webinars. So literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of just performance feedback, of industry questions being answered by industry professionals.
And I’m really excited about that. And on top of that, we kind of just honed our other membership tiers and tried to make them a little bit more affordable and kind of pack as much value into each one as we can. So we’re really excited about that.
Like I said, it should be launched sometime during mid-March around that time. Definitely before VO Atlanta. And if you guys are actually going to be at VO Atlanta, we will be presenting in the exhibit hall.
So you should definitely come and say hi. And if you’ve never heard of us or you want to learn more about us, come bring us your questions. We’d love to talk with you.
All right, cool. Excellent stuff. Looking forward to that.
Anything else going on?
Yeah, actually, I’m really excited because every March in Seattle, it’s our Emerald City Comic Con. And this is actually the first year that I got a pro badge as a professional voice talent to actually spend some time interviewing some of the guests that they have there. So they have a huge number of voice acting guests.
I have no idea how I’m going to fit it all in. But they have the entire, or almost the entire cast of Critical Role. Their tagline is basically a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons.
And so it’s got great people like Matt Mercer, Marisha Ray, Laura Bailey, and Travis Willingham, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, and Liam O’Brien are all going to be over in Seattle talking about Critical Role and their individual careers. But on top of that, they also have even more voice talent coming from Will Friedle. He was Terry McGinnis in the Batman Beyond cartoon, as well as Lion-O in the revamped Thundercats cartoon.
Lion-O! Not the original one, but the remake. And then who else do they have?
They have James Arnold Taylor, one of my all-time favorite voice actors, as well as Vanessa Marshall. And they’re going to be talking about some of the recent Star Wars cartoons that have come out. I mean, Rebels, Clone Wars, all that stuff.
So I’m curious. I have some of my own questions planned, but if there are any that you guys are interested in, let me know, and I will definitely try and field those questions for you. So I’m really looking forward to it.
I’m going to take lots of pictures and video and photos and should be a lot of fun.
Cool. We’ll have to play back some of that on the podcast when you get back.
Most definitely.
What are the dates on that?
So that’s going to be March 14th through 17th.
Oh, wow. So you’re backing that. You’re going to that and then going right into Vio Atlanta.
And then Vio Atlanta two weeks later. It’s going to be a crazy month.
Okay. I hope you have a lot of frequent flyer miles. Well, I guess you’ll be driving to Emerald Comic Con, right?
Yeah, that’s not going to be an issue. My girlfriend and I actually got a nice little vacation home just like 10 minutes from the event. So we’re just going to like Uber over there and back.
Wait, got a vacation home? Like an Airbnb or you bought a house? Oh, I…
It’d be nice to buy a house, but no. We just… We rented a vacation home.
Oh, okay. For a second there, I was like, wait a minute. When did you buy a house and move in together?
I should have said that in current events, I guess, but…
Yeah, exactly. Well, cool. We’ll look forward to that in the next couple of months.
Thank you. Yeah.
So we have a brief discussion on questionable gear purchases, right after these words from sponsor Global Voice Acting Academy.
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 voice over 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.
So thank you so much to Global Voice Acting Academy for being a sponsor of this podcast and my employer.
So up next, we have Questionable Gear Purchase.
Yes, and what would the show be without one of us doing something stupid? So I’ll start this time. I bought an Apogee Duet Firewire.
And if you’re a fan of the show, you’ll know this is not the first time I’ve bought this. But I found a good deal on Facebook Marketplace, which I never used before. But I’m actually kind of liking it.
I bought a desk for my son on there, too. And I found this Apogee Duet Firewire, the original, the silver one with the white breakout cable, for 60 bucks. And I just couldn’t resist.
I wanted a backup interface anyway, something that could plug multiple things into, maybe to do the podcast on the road. I had been using the Yamaha AGO6, but I now was using that for my main interface. So I wanted something where I could plug in multiple inputs for the podcast.
So I bought this, and I’m liking it a lot. I’m using it now, and it sounds pretty good. I can’t really complain about the sound at all.
And it has the other added feature, which is the remote monitoring and remote control of the mixer, the Maestro software. So as some of you know, my editing area is outside the booth, and I don’t have control of the interface when I have it out there. So I actually moved the AGO6 in here for a little while.
I swapped the mic cables all out, and then I spilled water all over the booth. Oh no. I managed to avoid the interface, but it scared the bejesus out of me enough that I said, okay, I’m gonna get this out of here because I know I’m gonna spill something else in here.
And that’s probably a good idea. But then I couldn’t control the headphone monitoring, I couldn’t control the mic inputs when I was doing that. So I swapped it back out and put the duet back out at the editing bay, and I can control the volume inside the booth.
So that was my crazy reason for doing it. But like I said, it sounds good. And in the process, I actually may have stumbled on a new way to find work because I inquired with…
Buying stuff from engineers.
Right, so I inquired with the person I bought it from. I saw that he had a website that had the word studio in it. I can’t remember what it was called now, and I probably shouldn’t give out anyway because then you all bother the poor guy.
But I noticed it had the word studio in it, and I said, hey, what do you do for a living? And he said, I run an audio production studio. And I was like, oh my goodness, do you know what I do?
And I told him, and he said, awesome, so maybe we can do something. So I found a new way to search for leads. Just buy stuff and then contact the person you’re buying stuff from.
So that’s my story for this episode. Have you done anything crazy, Sean?
Well, I don’t have any questionable gear purchases, but I did want to talk a little bit about travel rigs because I know a lot of voice actors are traveling at this time of year. So mine is, it’s changed over the years, but now it’s fairly simple. So I use the VOMO as my acoustic solution.
I know it is pretty large. I wouldn’t recommend traveling or flying with it because unfortunately most planes have changed like the sizing requirements for true carry ons. And after a few, after checking it a few times, I can tell that as durable as it is, it wasn’t necessarily meant for that.
So, but if you’re just traveling, driving around those kind of trips, it’s absolutely perfect for that. Just leave it in the trunk. But anyways, so on top of that, I have my new mixer face and my 416 and a little desktop stand that I have in that.
And I absolutely love the mixer face because of all the different ways that I can connect it inside the vocal booth if I want to. So I can either have it plugged directly into the 416, I can have it going into a cable if I’m trying to separate it from my computer or something like that. And on top of that, I can either save, or like I can either record directly to the mixer face because it’s got a little SD card in it.
I can even do that in addition to recording to my iPhone or my iPad or my laptop. So I absolutely love how versatile the unit is and as long as it’s charged, I have a whole bunch of different options that I can use it with. So like I said, I often say that my travel rig is probably more sophisticated than most people need, but it gives me the confidence to pretty much record anywhere.
And I don’t have to worry about having a consistent sound. I myself was traveling, I was house sitting for a friend of mine and I was comparing the tracks with my stuff at home. I didn’t notice a difference at all.
It was pretty amazing. And so hopefully that says good things about the VOMO rather than bad things about my studio. But it was really nice knowing that I had that kind of consistent sound that I could rely on.
That’s awesome. Incidentally, I was at the vocal booth to go warehouse yesterday in their offices and they told me they’re coming out with a new version of the VOMO, some new and improved features. I don’t know what they are yet, but Steven Coghill, who I spoke to out there, is pretty excited.
Very, very cool. And the interesting thing about my previous VOMO, so when I got it, it was like their 2.0 version and at one point they actually sent me their updated model, the 3.0 with the acoustic hood and all that, and I didn’t realize, but they didn’t really give me any instruction, so I didn’t know how to attach the acoustic hood to it. But I found out that even my previous model had the appropriate loops and stuff like that on the unit to connect the acoustic hood.
So I thought that was some very forward thinking on Jeff’s part on creating that product. He had a very clear idea of where he wanted to take it. So I thought that was a little bit of added value.
It was cool to know that they were still compatible.
So speaking of Vocal Booth 2 Go, they are one of our fabulous sponsors, and if you’re not familiar with the company, they create patented acoustic blankets that are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing. They’re often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution. They make your environment quieter for less.
So thank you very much Vocal Booth 2 Go for being one of our glorious sponsors and one of my favorite portable acoustic solutions. So up next, we have our interview with Gravy For The Brain founder, Hugh Edwards.
Okay, everybody, welcome to the interview portion of The VO Meter. Today, we are pleased to welcome an award-winning voice director and casting director. He has worked on over 200 games, films and television shows, including Harry Potter for Connect, Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls 4 and Oblivion.
He’s also a BAFTA judge, and you know what? He’s also a mean drummer. So please join me in welcoming CEO and founder of Gravy For The Brain and High Score Productions, Hugh Edwards.
Welcome, Hugh.
Hello, how are you all doing?
I’m great. I’m fired up on tons of coffee. How are you?
I’m pretty good. I’m on the diet coke, so I’m getting there as well.
Good.
Wonderful. Well, we wanted to start off, Hugh, by telling us a little bit about how you got to where you are now in being the CEO for Gravy For The Brain and how that got started.
Sure, yeah. Okay, so originally, I mean, my main kind of, I suppose my job title originally is that I’m a voice director, and that’s kind of how I got into this caper. I always had an artistic and theatrical flair when I was younger.
And then I ended up, funnily enough, starting a company with my best friend, a guy called Jeremy Paul Carroll, back in 2002, I believe it was, which was doing music for computer games. And that became very successful, and we did pretty well there. And then this games company came to me, and they said, listen, you do dialogue, right?
And we went, yes. And so we then got given this first dialogue game, which was a snooker game with a UK snooker world champion called Steve Davis. So I went and got some more directorial training and went back to sort of theatrical roots.
And the rest in terms of my voice production and voice direction is kind of history. I did a lot of games in a very short time. I mean, at one point, we were doing sort of 40, 45 games a year, something like that.
It was just a massive, yeah. And on top of that, promos, theater and radio clips, and all the kind of things that go along with voice production, and then moving into corporate, of course, as well. But at the time, my love was gaming.
And then one day, I was actually a producer on a film, a film called Little Big Men. And it was quite a cool film because it was about these five kind of… It was for kids, right?
And it was about these five kind of gangsters who, in a sort of caper-ish, mutley kind of way, ended up getting caught by the Karma police and then shrunk into children. And the funny thing was is that the children kept the voices of the adults. And their kind of goal throughout the film was to get, you know, put back to real size, and the Karma police didn’t want to let them do it.
The long and the short of it is, it was a very low-budget film. And when I say low-budget, I’m not talking kind of Hollywood low-budget like a million. You know, we’re talking sort of five grand.
You know, it was really low. So, we ran out of budget very quickly, and we finally needed to get a voice over done, and we had no money left. So, I called up one of my friends, one of the UK’s best radio drama producers, a guy called Neil Gardner.
And I said, listen, I needed a voice over. Can you help me out? And he said, well, there’s always Peter Dickson, and he’ll kind of do anything.
So, I rang up Peter, and Peter agreed to come and do it. And in actual fact, he paid to work on the project, because he paid his own petrol to our studio. And this was…
I mean, this kind of goes to show Peter’s temperament, that this was at the height of his X Factor career. It was prime time. He was working on absolutely everything, and he seriously didn’t need to do this at all.
But he just came and did it out of the love of doing things like this. So, he came and did the film, and then maybe a month later, I got a game, which was a National Geographic game, and I then kind of gave Peter a role in it as a thank you for doing the other thing for free. And on the way up to that thing, my girlfriend at the time was saying, oh, why don’t you get him to record us a telephone answering machine message, because he’s got such a distinctive voice that…
I mean, your US counterparts may not know it, but in the UK., it’s like a household sort of voice, you know? So we got him to do that, and I thought to myself, well, if I want it and if she wants it, then someone else is going to want it.
So we started up this business, which was called My Ready Voice, which effectively was like a concatenated… I mean, it was like early TTS, I suppose, but it was creating things where it would say, you know, Paul, it’s your birthday, in that kind of way, and the Pauls would all be recorded. Yeah.
That’s a pretty good impersonation, actually.
Yeah.
So, and that kicked off and was amazing, and then within two or three weeks, totally flopped as we realized that the world didn’t want ringtones anymore. But it led us to a liquid lunch, and this liquid lunch was when we were talking about games and game voice and all that kind of stuff. From that lunch, we basically worked out that, at least in the UK at the time, and remember, this is back in now, sort of 2005 or something like that, there were very, very few people doing voice work in gaming.
And, you know, two or three pints later, we set the world to rights about why that was, which was basically that all the people who knew how to do it knew how to do it. And everybody else who didn’t, I was having to train in front of Electronic Arts and Sega and Square Enix and all these people. And so we decided to do something about it, because it was a bit embarrassing, you know, but embarrassing not only for us of having to train people, but also for the voice artists who should know how to do all that work.
But it was in the infancy of gaming, and so we started this workshop. I think the first one was 2006. And that was, although we didn’t know it, that was the beginning of Gravy For The Brain.
So we then decided to do an online version of that in 2008, and that exploded around the world with the Voice Over for Beginners course. And we kind of didn’t really look back from there. And then in 2013, we thought, this has just grown to be a monster.
We’re actually going to have to create a formal business around this. So that’s when we incorporated. And we incorporated then with version one.
And we’ve just released our version five platform a few days ago.
Well, congratulations. It sounds like a well-deserved rise to the top.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. I love that story about Peter, and we’re going to actually talk to him in a future interview. And his attitude is just so down to earth and so great that you’ve probably seen those auditions.
You mentioned people may not know his voice as well in the US., but he’s the equivalent of the audition request or the voice match for Morgan Freeman or Sam Elliott. Every audition I get says, we’d like it to sound like Sam Elliott and Morgan Freeman or some combination thereof.
In the UK., it’s Peter. So I had this audition that I had from an overseas client where it actually was a marketplace, and they said, we’re looking for a Peter Dickson-like voice.
And I actually got on there sort of tongue in cheek and said, why don’t you just ask Peter? And I said, if you like, I’ll ask him. So I did, and he said, sure, I’d be happy to help.
Just give me the details. And that’s just the kind of attitude he has. It’s really fantastic.
Yeah. And I’ve said this in a few courses as well, that there are some people who think that, you know, that’s the kind of people who say, you know, I’m not getting out of bed for less than $300 an hour, you know. But Peter’s a living proof of the fact that putting yourself in the position where luck can happen to you is really important.
And he didn’t need to do it. He had easily enough money. He had the fame.
He had the big Saturday night TV shows. But he came and did that thing just for the fun of it. And it led to something else.
And I often think that people say to me, God, you’re so lucky being in the position you’re in. It’s like, well, yes, we are. But we’ve also put a lot of hard work into it.
And we’ve also put ourselves into the position where luck can happen. And it’s a nice trait for people to have.
Right. So you talked about the beginner course on Gravy For The Brain that was so successful to begin with. Talk about some of the specialties you have now in helping people train to be a voice actor.
Yeah. I mean, our aim, really, with Gravy For The Brain has always been to provide everything. Now, I know a lot of people say that, but we’ve really kind of done our level best to make it happen.
So we have 16 different voice over courses, ranging from the core ones, like Voice Over For Beginners, Advanced Voice Over to Professional Standard, all the way through to things like creating your own amazing demo reels, or at least prepping for working with a good director, improving your casting chances, how to do commercials, how to do gaming. The list is up to 16, and there’s a lot in there. We still have more to do.
There are still four topics that we’re going to be working on this year. But the main courses are there. And then we do webinars, which are effectively kind of like, I suppose, lecture-based webinars with a Q&A on them.
And the idea of Gravy For The Brain is that… And this is not to be negative about any other training companies, but what we wanted to do was bring the cost right down so that it’s affordable to everybody. So rather than have the model where you pay for one course and then you go and pay for another course and then you pay for another course, the idea was that whilst you’re a member, you get everything and nothing is upsold and nothing is charged.
And I suppose one of the main reasons that was happening is that we also have a mentoring area. And one of the things I found very early on was that people would have a specific problem and I knew that Webinar X or Course Y would solve that for them and was a 15-hour course and so I wasn’t going to tell them everything in that 15 hours. So I would kind of say to them, well, you can fix this by going and take Course Y or whatever it may be, but I always felt uncomfortable with it, the upselling thing, it never sat with me.
So making it all accessible to everybody was a good thing. So then, as I said, we have the mentoring area, and that comes twofold. We have a day-to-day forum-based mentoring, and we employ mentors and ourselves to stay on top of that.
So whether that’s for voice artist clips or whether it’s for home studio or business marketing and branding, there’s always someone there to come and talk to you about that. And then we have a live mentoring-based thing where we all jump on Zoom once a week and we do various different things. Sometimes we’ll go through home studio and tech stuff.
Sometimes we’ll go through a general Q&A. Sometimes we’ll get a load of scripts and everyone will go and read through them. So it’s very kind of empowering for people and it also helps them in public and with their confidence and that kind of thing.
And then we have just a huge array of tools. I mean, really a lot of tools. Things like we’ve just released an escrow service, which would hopefully help people be able to charge clients they’re either not sure of or for high-paying jobs or non-paying clients or whatever.
We have the VOID, which stands for Voice Over Internet Database. And I should say one of the things…
Also describes my career.
One of the things that the degree of success that Gravy For The Brain has had is that it allows us to go and do cool things for the community and not charge them. So the VOID is completely free. It’s void.gravyforthebrain.com.
And it’s basically a completely open online database of all production companies, agents, conferences, resource companies, software companies. Anything that’s to do with Voice Over, it’s all in there. And what we don’t have in there…
I think we’ve got like 1800 companies in there so far. And anyone can add companies to it, and we then moderate them. Which means the database is going to grow, and it’s all free.
So if you want to go and look up agents in Australia, and go and get yourself all the agents in Australia, you can go and do that. Or if you want to narrow it down to agents in Iowa, then you can go and do that. And it’s all completely free for everybody.
So we have all that. We’ve got all these resources. And then the main thing that happened with Version 5 is that we’ve decided that…
Well, I think we’ve seen since more than decided that actually we as a UK-based company… I know a lot about casting and direction and Peter about voicing, but it is, to be fair, UK-centric. So there were some people in America who have been very gracious to us and who’ve really accepted us.
And there are some who perhaps rightly think, well, there are things you don’t know about the USA. And that goes all the way around the world. You know, France, for example, has a completely different structure and setup and rates and unions than anywhere else in the world.
In fact, they actually have university courses designed for voiceover. So all the regions around the world are totally different, and we’ve decided basically to go and localize into all of these countries. So J.
Michael Collins is our territory controller for the USA. Then for Spanish-speaking Latin America, we have Sophia Cruz and Rona Fletcher. And for France, we have a guy called Stephane Cournacard.
And basically, the content is going to be completely localized into each area, but the great bit about it is that anyone who’s a member can go and access any part of content from anywhere around the world, and that’s all included in the same membership price. Plus, we’re doing good things like having a rate guide for every single country, which we’re going to database. So I mean, our goal is to help people as much as we can.
You know, in the early stages of the career, help people and support people as much as we can in the intermediate to advanced stages of the career, and then give people tools for free that should be free that you don’t need to pay for.
Wow, Hugh, I’m a little concerned about your designs on world domination.
No, I’m just kidding.
I mean, I suppose like Gandalf said, you know, I wield this power with a desire to do good.
Well, thank you so much, Hugh. I mean, it sounds like such a fully featured, well-rounded service that would be useful for VO talent at any stage of their career. So thank you very much for creating it and building it into what it is today.
So do you have… I know you just released the latest version, but do you have any plans for the future right now? Any ideas?
Well, do you know, someone said to me on the launch webinar, when’s V6 coming out? And it literally took us a year and a half to build V5, and I think it was 14 people we had in total to build it. It’s a pretty big monster.
I know exactly what V6 is going to be, but I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you.
Oh, okay, okay.
I mean, what I will do is I’ll say that we have incremental things coming out. So I mentioned the other four courses that we’re going to be bringing out. With the kind of globalization around the world, our aim is to get to 25 different territories within five years.
And in the background, we’ve already signed another five of those. So by the end of this year, I would hope that we’re on sort of nine to ten territories around the world. And yeah, I mean, there are lots of little things we’re going to be doing, things in the CRM, like linking the CRM up to Mailchimp and just little incremental things that are going to help everybody.
But V6 itself, that one is… Well, that’s going to be something else, so I’m not going to spoil the surprise for that one, because I mean, with some of these things, I mean, things like the Void, I mean, that was not something that existed anywhere, so we had to make sure we could do it and that it would work functionally and be accessible to everybody so that it would work the way it should do. Otherwise, it’s kind of not worth doing, you know?
So, Hugh, we know that from seeing you at various events and functions, we just spent time with you at MAVO in 2018, you were really a subject matter expert when it comes to all things voiceover, so we thought we could talk a little bit about some of the issues that affect voice actors all around the world, and one of those that we hear a lot about is rates, and you actually spoke about this at MAVO in your opening address. What are some of the challenges you see in the rates discussion for voiceover people and voice actors around the world?
Well, rates is kind of a hot topic, right? It’s been a hot topic for, I guess, over two years now. The thing is that we live now in a status quo, but the status quo is moving, so we have pay-to-play sites, and some of them are good, some of them are bad.
Some of them are doing active things to try and stop the race to the bottom. Some of them are actively trying to be at the bottom. And this, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, this is capitalism, you know, so this is always going to exist in some way or another because people take opportunity and they run with it.
I think the issue for the voice industry as a whole is really one of education because I think the people coming into the industry don’t understand why the rates are set, what is in their minds, so high. You know, they come from jobs which are, you know, paying maybe not minimum wage, but, you know, $20, $25 an hour or $30 an hour, and then they look at an hourly rate from the voice over industry at $300, $350 an hour, and they think, well, that’s just amazing, and actually I’m quite comfortable undercutting you at $150 an hour, but they don’t see what’s behind the figure and why they’re kind of set the way they are and why they’ve always been that way. So I think it really is a case of education.
The rate guides are definitely helping, you know, whether you use ours, whether you use GVAAs, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re basing it on something and well-educated. And after that, I believe that people have their own choice to do what they want. So, you know, if they want to go on Fiverr or cheap voice over beers or whatever it may be, as long as they go in with their eyes open and they know what the score is, then, you know, then that’s fine.
They can do what they want. So, but then the second issue is one from the business side. And what a lot of the pay-to-plays aren’t doing, and in some facts, the agents aren’t doing either, is actually educating the hirers.
And that’s really important because I think, you know, if you do a Google search for voice over and go down to the bottom of, you know, page one or whatever it may be, you’re going to find cheaper alternatives as well. And there’s always, you know, the guy in the office who can do it or who says he can do it or whatever it may be. So again, it’s about educating the industry people, the industry hirers to see why it matters to have someone who’s, you know, an expert in their field in the same way that, you know, a carpenter would be versus some total amateur putting up a shelf, or why the system is based the way it does and how the quality is going to affect the perception of their brand.
So it’s a tough argument to have either way, I think. And, I mean, I don’t know about the states, but price fixing is illegal here in the UK. So it’s a difficult subject matter.
The one thing I do think doesn’t help is the people who do the whole posting of, you know, I can’t believe this, look at this, it’s a national spot for $80.
The browbeater, basically.
Exactly. And it just brings everybody down. And what they don’t realize for themselves is that everybody’s watching, you know, and it’s always the same people who do it, and I personally see them as very negative and wouldn’t want to hire someone like that because they’re probably going to badmouth me somewhere down the road for something I’ve done, you know, or whatever it might be.
So I think as long as it’s done constructively, and you know, I mean, all the conferences are doing good things, they’re all putting up rates, discussions. Wovo’s doing a good job pointing to all the rate guides. Most of the education companies, ourselves, GVAA, we’re all doing good things about rates.
So I think it’s stabilizing and it’s moving. And as long as we accept the fact that everything is going to change and that, you know, this time in two years’ time it will be a different industry again, then we’ll all be okay.
Wonderful. Well, I hope your predictions come true for the most part, like cautiously optimistic. Well, thank you so much, Hugh, for joining us today.
I learned so much about you and your wonderful company, and we’d love to have you back another time.
I’d love to come, Sean, thank you.
So Hugh, you mentioned conferences. You yourself are part of a conference that takes place in the UK for voice acting and voiceover industry. Tell us about the One Voice Conference.
Well, the One Voice is… Well, there are actually two conferences in the UK. One is One Voice Conference, and one that’s been running a lot longer, which is the VOX Conference.
As it turns out, as of last year, we now run both of them, but they’re different things. VOX is for the local radio industry, and One Voice is an entire voice-over industry-based thing. In the UK, the One Voice Conference is by far the biggest.
And actually, in terms of the number of people who attend, I think it’s around sort of 300-ish. We’re going for 350 this year. It’s the second biggest in the world after VO Atlanta.
And I don’t mind saying that VO Atlanta is a really special conference, and we kind of modelled it on the same ideas, because it’s just so good. And so, One Voice itself is a UK version of a really good conference model. We have an awards ceremony in there, which is different.
By the time this is released, the One Voice Conference awards will have been… The submissions will be open, and so you can enter. There’s also an international male and female category this year.
And we’d just love to see people there. We really make sure we pay attention to the amount of good quality speakers we have there. For example, the keynote speaker is a guy called Hugh Bonneville, who’s a very famous British actor, and you’d probably recognize him from the Paddington films and from Downton Abbey.
He’s the Lord of that… Lord Grantham in that. So we’re going for a very high caliber level of people.
What’s also really lovely about it is the position of it. It’s right on the Thames, just opposite Canary Wharf, and it has its own pier and its own boat ferry, which takes you across every morning, which is special.
That’s great. Well, hopefully some of our audience will be able to attend. I’ve actually talked to a few people that are attending, and that should be exciting for them.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the trip across the pond this time, but it is one of my bucket list items for sure.
Next year.
Yeah. Well, Hugh, thanks again. Is there anything you’d like our audience to know that we haven’t covered or how they can reach you if they want to sign up for a membership?
Sure. Just go to gravyforthebrain.com, and you can either take… We’ve got lots of free stuff on the front page.
There’s lots of free webinars you can go and take without being a member. As I said, there’s lots of free content on there that you don’t have to be a member to get. For example, the escrow service is free.
The void is free. Our calculators and our rate guides are all free. There’s even a little intercom button at the bottom right where you can get directly through to Harry, who’s our support guy.
Oh, I love Harry.
And actually, I have an offer for your listeners, which would be, let’s say, Podcast 2019. And that will give you a little discount if you pop that on there as well.
So type in that code, Podcast2019, and they can get a discount?
Yeah, exactly.
That’s great. Well, thanks again, Hugh. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon for you, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you, gents.
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Hi everybody and welcome to our interview portion with the wonderful Peter Dickson. Known to millions simply as Voice Over Man, Peter Dickson is the best known and most sought after voice talent in the UK and arguably the world. So Peter’s voice has been featured on over 30 AAA game titles including Fable and Kinect Sports.
He has voiced over 30,000 TV and radio commercials, been the promo voice on over 60 channels, been the featured voice on over 200 TV shows, and he was the voice of the London 2012 Olympic Games beach volleyball. Please join us in welcoming Gravy For The Brain founder and Voice Over deity, Peter Dickson. How are you doing today, Peter?
Hello, Peter. It’s a marathon just to get to your intro.
I know, I know. I’m exhausted just listening to it. No wonder I’m tired.
Mind you, that’s been a career right there lasting over 40 years, so you’ve compressed it very nicely. Thank you for that wonderful intro.
Right, so you can just stop now.
I wish I could.
Leave some for the rest of us for crying out loud.
Oh, come on.
Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining us this morning or this afternoon for you, this morning for Sean and I. As you are in the UK. And we want to start out by talking about your background as a voice actor.
Tell us a little bit about how you got started in the whole world of voice acting. And then tell us what brought you to founding or helping found Gravy For The Brain.
Okay, good question. A good opening question. What I would say, first of all, is that my love for voice and for all things spoken word goes back to a very early childhood, actually.
When I was about five years old, I remember listening to my father, my father’s radio set or radiogram, as it was known then. This was a rather elegant wooden case to fair, inside which were impossible-sounding orange-glowing German valves and these wonderful fruity voices that emanated from this radio set. And I, as a young child, remember distinctly sitting at home in my living room in those early days, many years ago, listening to these voices and thinking, wow, this is just a whole different world in there.
Of course, at age five, I naively assumed that people lived inside the radio set. And so I can also remember looking through the grill to see where they were. And imagine my disappointment when I didn’t see anyone.
But that was what sparked my interest in radio. And so radio was my first love. And when I graduated from university, I did a degree in psychology, which has stood me in good stead, actually, working in this industry, because there are quite a few lunatics in this world of ours that we live in.
Nice lunatics, nicely mad. There’s nobody I’ve met, actually, who’s been in any way unpleasant or difficult to deal with. But that aside, I think the degree was useful.
And while I was at university, I also did some work in media for the BBC. I was working part time for them while I was a student. And then when I graduated, I joined the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation full time as a radio reporter.
And then subsequently transferred from journalism into on air announcing. So I was an on air talent. I was reading news bulletins.
I was announcing in between programs. I was introducing record programs and shows. So that was my basic founding in voice, in using my voice.
And after about 10 years when I subsequently went to London, of course this was all in Ireland where I started, then I came to London. I again worked for the BBC for about eight more years in national network radio. It was a fantastic experience.
And I learnt everything I know now, a lot of what I know now from those very formative eight years when I was in my 20s, early 30s. And after I had had enough of that, and I definitely had had enough because I felt I wasn’t learning anything new and I wanted to explore new ways of using my voice in the corporate world and in advertising and in games and all the other things that were exploding around me at that time. It was just at the beginning of the explosion in digital media and the multi-channel environment had just come upon us.
And so I left the BBC to go freelance. One of the scariest things I think I ever did, I was just recently married and had a mortgage and a house and family on the way. And I was just thinking, well, this is a hell of a risk, but boy, I was glad I took it because it was a matter of timing, I guess, as well.
I just hit the rising wave. And I’m not saying it was easy. It was pretty difficult because back then there were a few voices on the circuit, on the market, and they had, from what I could see, stitched it up completely.
And so they were working a marketplace that was virtually shut to everybody else, which I was determined to break down that wall, of course, and managed to do that in small increments. And so, you know, literally 40 years later, I kept pushing and got through the wall, and here I am on the other side. And it’s, you know, I’ve just had the most fortunate career you could imagine.
I’ve enjoyed every second of it. I’ve rambled on very long there. That was a very long sequence.
But I hope it’s put into context, it’s put into context, you know, where I come from and what I do.
But actually, that gives us a great segue, because Hugh actually mentioned your tenacity and your passion for acting being some of your greatest attributes in sort of pursuing that work. Can you think of any other experiences or just kind of attitudes that you have that you felt were helpful for people who want to break into acting or voice acting in general?
Well, it’s, this is one of the reasons why Hugh and I both set up Gravy For The Brain, the online mentoring education platform, because we both felt that not enough was being done in that area for people. There was, there were ad hoc courses here and there. Of course, there are excellent voice coaches.
And I’m sure that, you know, if you ask Hugh, he’ll tell you that, you know, those are all fabulous. And of course, I would encourage people to do one-on-one coaching. But the problem with that is that it’s not always suitable for everybody at the initial stage of their career, or even if they’re just considering dipping their toe into the water to see if they like it.
So because of the financial barrier that that presents, because it is one-to-one coaching is and can be, you know, a relatively costly exercise because you’re engaging in other professionals’ time. And again, not to say that that’s not worth it, but it is worth it when you get to the stage where you need to have it. But in the initial stages, we felt there was a gap in the marketplace for identifying a business that would help people get into voice over and show them all the various components and aspects of it and teach them the basic rudimentary skills and show them what’s required.
And whether or not that’s for them, then they can then make that decision later on down the line, having spent a relatively small sum of money, to then go on to seek one-to-one experience and training and mentoring with other professional people around the world. So that’s why I started it. As for personal attributes, I think you definitely need to have a thick skin, because part of the stock and trade of voice artists, in fact all actors, voice actors as well, is the ability to withstand constructive criticism and rejection.
And believe me, if you can’t take constructive criticism and direction, then this is not the business for you, because every day all of us, and I include myself in this as you do, I’m sure Sean and as you do Paul, we get rejected on a regular almost hourly basis for most things that we do. But it’s more than made up for by the occasional times when the client says yes. So I always say to people, you’ve got to be prepared to be tenacious, you’ve got to be ambitious, you’ve got to have a thick skin, and you’ve got to be creative in your business approach as well.
Many years ago, when I started as a freelancer, I used to sit and wait for the phone to ring. I had an agent back then. I was very fortunate.
I got an agent early on. I thought, well, I’ve made it now. I’m going to sit here and wait for the phone to ring.
You’re laughing now. I can hear why.
We’ve talked about it on the podcast many times.
Yeah, I was disabused. How naive was I? The phone didn’t ring.
It rang very occasionally. I remember on many occasions picking up the phone and ringing my agent to see whether they were still in business, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But at the end of the day, no.
You have to make your own opportunities. Your agent is there to support you and to negotiate contracts for you when you get them, and indeed also to put you forward for jobs. But the main bulk of the work, I think, for all independent freelance voice artists must come from yourself.
You have to self-start. You have to self-find work. That work, of course, can be then subsequently handed over to your agent for negotiation, and believe me, that can be very worthwhile, particularly if you’re starting out and you don’t really know the true rate or the worth of the work that you’re being asked to do.
So those are the qualities, I think, that anybody considering a career, or indeed who has just recently embarked on a career, should certainly consider whether or not it’s right for them. So that’s all I would say on that at this point.
Well, you talk about the self-starting entrepreneur attitude people have to have in order to get into the business. One of the great ways they can do that is by accessing Gravy For The Brain. So tell us a little bit about some of the specialties that Gravy For The Brain has to offer to aspiring and even veteran voice actors.
I’m glad you mentioned veteran voice actors, because there is a perception, I think, in our industry that Gravy For The Brain is just for newcomers. It is for newcomers, of course it is for newcomers. As I mentioned earlier, it’s the first port of call for many people considering a career in voice over.
But Gravy For The Brain is so much more than that, as I’m sure you know, having used it and worked with it yourself. It is something that is infinitely useful to people who are already in the business and even to those who have established careers. As I said, part of our ethos is to educate and support and mentor.
And we do all those things in so many ways. We have currently 16 bespoke courses on all the genres that you could possibly want to work in in voice over. We have live mentoring 24-7s, so you can get assistance on any topic or question that you want to ask that’s bothering you or you need answers to.
Either on the creative side, the studio side, or indeed the business side. We have experts and people who will be able to mentor you through those issues. We also have the webinar library.
We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of hours of topics, all independently searchable and relatable, that you can find a topic if you need help on any particular subject pretty quickly. And we also run, as you know, social events throughout the year in the United Kingdom currently, but very soon we will be expanding that social element to the United States, so that’s going to be very exciting for us with J. Michael Collins, who is now working closely with us on the US side, so hopefully you’ll be seeing some social events in the very near future.
I do emphasize sociability in this industry, because it can be very isolating and rather lonely working on your own, as you do day in, day out in your own little space. It’s fun while it is, but when you end up some days not speaking to very many people, it’s rather nice to get out and socialize one-to-one, face-to-face. That face time is very important, not just talking to your own colleagues, of course, but also interacting with potential employers and agents, engineers, people within the business, because it’s in those social interactions, I think.
You mentioned earlier one of the qualities for success. I firmly believe that as a voice artist, your success will increase exponentially. The more parties you go to, the more conferences you attend, the more people you speak to.
Those connections and interactions will lead eventually to more work. And so…
Does time at the bar count towards that?
At the bar, absolutely. I would caution the bar. I would say yes, to a certain extent, but the problem with the bar is that if you…
Promises can be forgotten at the bar.
The next morning you forget everything, you see. So that’s the problem. You can’t remember who you spoke to.
Yes, I’ve had that experience.
Or take business cards. The business cards are great, but then you wake up the next morning and you can’t remember who anybody is, even by looking at the business cards.
Or you can’t remember if they’re still going to talk to you. So I’m glad you’re actually here, because we had a long discussion at Uncle Roy’s, of which very little seeped into my memory banks, but I’m glad you still agreed to come talk to us.
I know. Who are you again? Sorry, I forgot.
Socializing is very important. Absolutely.
Well, I’m really glad that you mentioned that, because I know a lot of voice actors and actors in general are surprisingly introverted types or personalities. So I think it’s really important to realize that even though you might be pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, that social networking is so important, especially if you are in a place where you do have a lot more local opportunities, like a larger city like LA., New York, or London.
Yeah, absolutely. I would just issue one word of caution about social networking and socializing online is that you will know who the culprits are yourselves in your country, and certainly I know who they are in the United Kingdom, is that there are certain people who will spend their lives on Instagram and on Twitter and various other platforms that they’re endlessly outputting on. The problem with that is, that’s all very well, but you create the impression that you’re not busy, because if you were working in this business to the extent you should be, then you wouldn’t really have the time necessarily to devote to extensive ramblings on social media.
So by all means, do use social media. LinkedIn is very good, Twitter is very good, Instagram is good, but in limited quantities, and keep it relevant and brief and interesting for people. But don’t overwhelm them with endless daily posts about what you’ve had for lunch or where you’re going for your holiday.
Keep it relevant and keep it brief, and keep it minimal, because otherwise you give the impression, you serve the impression to others who are watching you, and some of those people may be your potential employers, that you are what you might call a mouth on a stick, and not particularly busy.
Yes. And keep it positive, right? Be grateful for the industry you work in.
Oh, keep it positive, yes. There’s no room for negativity on social media, or indeed what you might call irony, you know, because irony only works when you can see the whites of the eyes of the other person, or you know them intimately enough to know that what they’ve just said is contrary to their own view. So, you can be misunderstood so easily on social media with a flippant remark, an ironic remark, and it could be misinterpreted and could actually act against you in so many ways.
So, yeah, keep it positive, keep it lovely, keep it nice, and give praise where it’s due to people who you want to work with. And, you know, you can use it in so many positive ways. I don’t see why people need to use it negatively.
Wonderful, absolutely. My philosophy is if it can be misinterpreted, it will be misinterpreted. So keep that in mind.
One of the things that I love about Gravy For The Brain is that throughout the year you actually have a number of contests. So it might be a fun, say, a poetry reading or a tongue twister reading, and they usually have some wonderful prizes involved. So I’d love to learn a little bit more about what started that and other ways that you try to contribute to the VO community.
Well, you’re very, very observant. I’m glad you’ve noticed that. We do like running contests because it engages people’s interest and it also serves a double function of enlarging the footprint on our website.
So we do… We’re self-serving in a way, in that respect, but we are also giving back. We are literally giving some really fantastic prizes like microphones and interfaces to people who win.
So, yeah, it’s good to do. We run those from time to time. We also have recently…
Well, last year, in fact, we ran our very first conference, the One Voice Conference in London, which I was so gratified to see so many people attending that. Literally 30 different countries came to that. It was a fantastic event.
And for our inaugural event, it was nothing short of amazing. It was really great to see so many people there. And this year is setting up to be an absolutely brilliant conference again in May of 2019.
So we’re very excited about that. And also the awards that we run in the same weekend, the One Voice Awards, which is, I think, probably without doubt the fairest and most equitable awards you could imagine because our judges, and we have quite a broad, wide panel of judges, all at the top of their game, stellar names from the industry, some of them voices, engineers, agents. They don’t know who each other is, so they’re all in isolation.
They don’t know who their other fellow judges are. The entries, the voices who put their entries in are randomized and anonymized, so the judges don’t know who they are or where they’ve come from. So everyone is judged basically solely on how they present themselves on their entry rather than favoritism or maybe you might know somebody, or the judges themselves, could collude.
So I think it’s a very fair contest, and so we’re always at Gravy For The Brain coming up with initiatives. We have just recently launched V5. We’re already working on V6 of our platform.
We’ve got some other great ideas to come, and so I just see this business of ours evolving and expanding. We’re now moving into other areas of the world. We’ve got global ambitions.
So I’m so pleased that what started out as a very small seed of an idea at a bar… See, there you go.
Ironic.
One day, many years ago, with Hugh and I and a few other people, we were chatting. And this small germ of an idea has literally just grown into something that is a global enterprise. And I’m so proud and delighted to have been associated with it and long may it continue.
Well, that’s great, Peter. One thing I wanted to ask is about the name, because some of the nomenclature that you use I feel may not be as familiar with our audience. For instance, V5.
Hugh was talking to me about that for months, talking about how that was coming out. I had no idea what the V stood for. So that means version, right?
Version 5.
Are you serious, Paul?
I’m absolutely serious.
Where have you been? Do you own an Apple product?
No. But to that point, tell us where the name Gravy For The Brain came, because it may not immediately be associated with Voice Over to some people.
Well, again, a good question. It is a name that goes back to when we started our business, Gravy For The Brain, at the very early days, in fact, day one, we had Voice Over content, Voice Over, we had a Voice Over course on there. But our joint aim was to make the business a global educational platform, not just for Voice Over, but for all topics related to the entertainment industry, so singing, public speaking, playing the drums, playing the piano.
There’d be all kinds of courses on there that we would be able to add on over time. So the word voice didn’t really sit comfortably in that early concept. So the name Gravy For The Brain came to us from Patrick Stewart, the actor Patrick Stewart, who in a movie has a line, I think, where he’s injecting some kind of serum into somebody, and he goes, the guy says, what’s this you’re giving me?
He says, don’t worry, it’s just gravy for the brain. So it comes from Patrick Stewart. And the name, of course, was intended to be an umbrella name for an overall educational online educational company serving content on all subjects to do with the entertainment industry.
But then we realized that actually we didn’t know an awful lot about some of these other subjects. And it was difficult selling individual courses because that requires an enormous amount of sales effort to sell individual courses, access to individual courses. So we completely rewrote our business model and aligned it with the business model that’s used by, say, Netflix or Sky in the UK, where individual subscribers pay a single, simple monthly fee and they get access to absolutely everything that we do with no further charges.
So that model right there completely revolutionized our business overnight and it makes it much more simple, easier to understand. And because there are no contracts and no exit fees, people just love it.
Well, that’s wonderful. Yeah, there’s no confusion because it’s all essentially the same product and it sounds like a very wonderful service. And it’s a very memorable name, too.
I was actually curious about that one, even though I understood V5.
Now, now.
I’m just teasing. I’m just poking fun. But it’s a great name.
I mean, it conveys richness and decadence for your mind. So I love it.
I like that. I like the decadence bit. Gravy For The Brain.
Well, Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. I was just curious, where do you see the future for Gravy For The Brain and what’s the best way to learn more about it?
Well, you can find out all about it if you go to www.gravyforthebrain.com. That’s our website. That will take you to our landing page and everything is on there that you would ever need to ask, all the questions, frequently asked questions.
We also have lots of free stuff on there as well. So if you want to just go and have a look and dive in, you can take some sample courses. You can look at all the different things that we do and even get some scripts and tips and ideas about voiceover.
If you’re curious about it and you want to know what we do, then that’s the absolute one stop shop for everything. And if you do like the idea, you can dive in and get a month’s access to everything we do. And if that’s as far as it goes for you, that’s great.
You can leave without any questions after a month. If you want to stay on, of course we do hope you do, then we’ll help you build your career in voiceover and show you exactly what you need to do, what you need to be looking at and doing on a daily basis. And we’ll hold your hand all the way through that journey.
And so it’s something that we’re here and committed to for a very long time. And we are, as I said, V6 or Version 6 for football.
I’m slow on the uptick.
You just needed to add like a decimal in there or something. 5.0. Oh, I got it.
Oh, I see, yeah. So V6, Version 6 coming up later this year, we hope, or early next year, will be absolutely incredible. Or as you people say, awesome.
So we’re looking forward to that very, very much indeed. So I do hope that if you’re listening and you’re in any way remotely interested in voiceover, even if you’re an established voiceover or you’ve just been working at this business for, you know, six months or a year or two years, please check it out because there are some fantastic resources like our Career Planner Tool, we’ve got our Voice Over CRM, we’ve got a whole live voiceover job. Every voiceover job in the world is updated every five minutes on our site so you can see all the jobs that are being offered.
We’ve got an internet database that’s open to everybody, not just members. Our voiceover internet database is called The Void. So it’s void.gravyforthebrain.com.
Go there and you’ll get access to all the suppliers, to our industry, all the studios, all the agents, everybody who works with voiceover is in that database. That’s being added to and increased and built up over time right now in live, real time. You can build your own career profile website.
We’ve got voiceover blogs. We’ve even got an escrow service now. So if you’re ever worried about a company or a client abroad not paying you, this is an increasing problem now.
Clients are booking voices and then they don’t get paid. Well, the escrow service, the Gravy For The Brain and escrow service puts paid to that. You know, the money goes into escrow and the voiceover gets paid when the audio is delivered.
So it removes all that risk for both sides actually, not just the voiceover but also for the buyer. So we’ve got it all covered and we’re building this thing all the time. So it’s everything you need, everything you’d ever possibly want.
Peter, what currencies does the escrow service accept?
It accepts UK pounds, euros and US dollars.
Oh, okay, great. That’s fantastic to know.
Yeah.
A wide margin, wow.
Well, Peter, thanks again. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon or evening it’s getting close to for you, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Well, thank you very much indeed, and thanks for having me on The VO Meter. It’s been fun.
You’re very welcome, Peter. It’s been a pleasure. So thank you so much to Hugh and Peter for telling us about Gravy For The Brain.
Up next, we have J. Michael Collins to bring an American perspective onto some of the recent developments they have over here. But first, a word from our good friend Tim Page over at Podcast Intros.
So let me tell you a bit about Tim and his team. They’ve 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.
They’ve got a finger on the pulse of what podcast producers want, and you can be sure your podcast demo will sound professional, current, and competitive. Now, we talk about this a lot, but Tim actually produced Paul’s and my podcast demos, and all I can say is that he and his team were absolutely amazing to work with. Their script writer created original scripts perfect for my voice and personality, as well as being 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 with the result. So, I can’t say it enough, but Tim is a consummate pro, and he’s so easy to work with.
So thank you, Tim, and podcast demos. Hi, everybody. We are in our IPDTL-sponsored interview room with the incredible J.
Michael Collins. So J. Michael has over 20 years of professional experience as a voice actor.
He has worked with some of the biggest companies, brands, sports leagues, and organizations on the planet. In addition to this work in the classic agency-based world of VO, J. Michael has established himself as a leading authority in the online casting marketplace, and has become recognized as an industry-leading talent coach and demo producer as well.
J. Michael is a 16-time Voice Arts Award winner as a voice actor, demo producer, script writer, and casting director. So please join us in welcoming J.
Michael Collins. How are you doing, J. Michael?
I’m doing better now that you put together that little publicist package for me. I’m going to have to hire you guys.
You know, everyone feels so good after that.
My tail’s wagging. I got my ego rubbed. That was very sweet.
Happy to give you a little ego stroke there.
Very nicely delivered, too, Sean, I must say.
Oh, sure.
It’s almost like you’ve done this before.
I know. I know. Thanks.
I’ve been practicing. Welcome, J.
Michael.
It’s so great to have you here today.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure to be here in one of my favorite industry podcasts that I know I’m a devoted listener to.
Which one?
Very yours. This one.
We made it, Paul. Oh, my God.
This is being recorded.
Oh, wait.
Yes, we are recording. You’re right.
Whew. I’m glad to be here, guys.
Well, thanks for the kind words. So as you may know, as an avid listener, one of the hallmarks of the podcast is us finding some six degrees of separation between the people we have on the show and ourselves. And one of those ways is that you started your career, or at least started your life on this earth very close to where I am based in Baltimore.
You were down in Northern Virginia, correct? Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and how you started voice acting maybe at a young age.
Well, it’s actually funny. I mean, we got to Northern Virginia after bouncing around elsewhere for a while. I had sort of an itinerant upbringing in that my father was, over time, became a pretty well-known guy in the corporate communications and public relations world and sort of went from company to company fixing problems.
So I was actually born in DC at Sibley Hospital. Oh, cool. By the time I was two, we had moved to Paris, France, came back to the Boston area at age four or five, was there until age seven or so.
Then we were in New York and then finally wound up in Washington at about 10 or 11 years old and that became home for a while. Yeah, it’s not where my… I did some gopher work for a couple of radio stations there.
I wouldn’t say that’s where my career started because I wasn’t on air back then, but I was telling somebody else a story recently that even when I was a little boy, five, six years old in the Boston area, there was a radio host named Jess Kane who was a friend of my father’s. At five or six, this guy would call me up before I went to school. He just thought it was really cool to have a little five-year-old come on the air for some reason and would just chat me up.
I guess I gave him something interesting content-wise because he kept calling. That was the morning drive show in Boston. That was sort of my first exposure to somebody who wants to hear your voice, and the ego just grew from there.
That’s awesome. Well, I know, unfortunately, you’re a Redskins fan, and even though I’m in Baltimore, I grew up in Philadelphia. So that’s the only bone of contention I have with you being from the DC areas.
I know you still love the Redskins.
I don’t have a lot of hate in my heart for the Eagles. I reserve most of that for the Cowboys, although the Patriots are my number two team, so I wasn’t too pleased last year.
Yeah, I’ll bet you. But we can have a common enemy in the Cowboys.
There you go. There you go.
Well, great. So Sean, we’re going to talk a little bit about the industry. Why don’t you start with the first question about industry trends and how J.
Michael can offer his expert opinion on that.
Well, absolutely. Well, people who are familiar with you, J. Michael, know that you’re sort of this paragon of online casting.
So why don’t you talk about your own experience getting involved with the online casting or the pay-to-play site world and how you’ve sort of become a champion and mouthpiece for people who are looking to get involved with it.
What was that word you used, paragon? That’s a lot of syllables.
It’s only three, come on.
Well, you know, look, online casting, it’s controversial. There are people who hate it. There are people who…
I don’t know if there’s anybody who adores it. It’s just a matter of the reality that we live in today. I happened to start on the various sites that were out there pretty much when they first came into existence.
I had lived this sort of charmed life as a just very moderately successful voice actor up until about 10, 11, 12 years ago when these sites started coming around. I was living on a golf course. I was going out and playing sometimes 36 holes in a day.
I was doing auditions maybe four or five times a week through my one or two agents that I had at various times. I was booking enough to make a decent little living, but I thought, hey, this is cool. I’m working five hours a week, ten hours a week.
This is awesome, and I don’t really need anymore. Then all of a sudden these sites started to come out, and I realized that… Because I never wanted to do the LA thing.
I never wanted to do the New York thing. I’m not a traffic guy. I’m not a smog guy.
I know those cities have redeeming values, and I don’t want to knock them, but it’s just not my cup of tea. So these sites came along, and I had a lot of people at the beginning tell me, what are you doing? You’re going to ruin your reputation.
You’re going to ruin your career. You’re never going to make any money on this. This is nonsense.
I said, look, guys, this internet thing kind of seems to be going somewhere. Maybe what we do is going to go in that direction as well. And as I started to see some of the work that was showing up on those sites, the broadcast work always paid a little bit less than it should, and in some cases a lot less than it should.
But, you know, the core of the work that I’ve always booked online has been the corporate narration, the learning, the explainers. And that’s always paid relatively fair rates. In fact, in many cases, more than you would make as an agency or union talent on a lot of that work.
And so I just took a look at it and said, well, wait a minute, this is real money. And oh, look, I’m booking. Well, let’s see where this goes.
And over the years, it evolved into some pretty substantial results. And then, of course, it really has changed our industry so much in the past five or ten years. But it’s not going away.
And I think that despite all of the controversy out there, that one of the messages I’d like a lot of people to take home from this interview and this podcast and the state of the industry in general is just that look at what’s happening now. The new sites that are coming out, all they’re talking about is transparency. All they’re talking about is how do we make sure voice actors get paid what they’re worth.
All they’re talking about is, you know, what do we need to do to serve you as a community? Voice 123, despite the substantial problems that they’ve had since their rollover, they’re trying to make the right noises. What do we do to serve the talent as well as the clients?
We have been making an impact on the way that online casting works. And there’s no running away from this. This is, you know, a line…
I don’t remember who said this recently, but I think at some point I agree with this, which is we’re going to have to stop talking about online casting and just start calling it casting, because that’s pretty much where we are at this point. We can’t get away from technology. We can’t get away from the fact that we live in an on-demand society and a market that wants our skills available to them now and on demand.
So what we can do is we can dictate how it’s going to unfold and how the future is going to look. That’s the message that I’m trying to bring to the industry.
Well, that’s wonderful, because I know a lot of people feel powerless in this situation where it’s just… I mean, like you said, rates are going down. We have no control over it, but you do have these sites that are actually listening to us, and there are people who actually care enough about their careers that they’re being vocal about what they want, and they are trying to get groups of people to jump on that, to prove to each other that, yes, we do have the power to control the direction this is going before it gets out of our hands.
My only follow-up to that is, do you think that the push for transparency is real? We’ve seen it with certain players. Armin Hirstetter at Bedalgo is a prime example.
He’s walked the walk for the last couple of years, and he’s definitely genuine. But do you think there’s a bit of labeling, people taking advantage of that term and using it where they don’t really have the means to back it up?
Well, certainly. I think anybody is going to jump on anything they can to boost the visibility and the positive profile of their site if they can. Armin, obviously, is the gold standard that we like everybody to follow.
I think Kevin West has been doing a pretty good job with Being Planet of engaging the community and trying to lead his site. I kind of refer to him a bit as an American Armin. I think it’s going in that same direction a little bit.
You know, look, it’s degrees of transparency. Voice 123 could be better. They used the word in a blog post recently, which was a little laughable.
But at the same time, you know, there’s things that could be better and then there are things that are abusive and dangerous to our industry. And I think that they still kind of land on the right side of that fence, whereas others don’t. And we’ll continue to monitor that.
You know, we all know how a lot of us feel about voices.com. We hope that they’ll make changes. There was some commentary recently that they were about to make some changes, and then all of a sudden, we see that their website went back to the same old language, so we don’t know what’s going on there.
The new site that’s coming out, voiceover.com, Matt Dubois, the guy who runs Voice Casting Hub, you know, his model is sort of a hybrid of the other ones. But, you know, from everything I’ve seen so far from him, he’s out there telling everybody exactly what they’re doing, exactly how it’s going to work. You can agree or disagree with certain elements of that, but I think that all we want from these sites, you know, even…
One of the jokes that I used to make was that VoiceBunny, for as much as everybody hated VoiceBunny, they had a pie chart up there for a long time that said, hey, we’re taking 70 percent and this is where it’s going. You know, look…
We don’t have to work there, we don’t have to like it. All we ask of these sites is that you tell us what you’re doing, how you’re doing it. If you’ve got some wacky algorithm, tell us how it works so it’s not a mystery, so we know how to behave ourselves in a manner that’s going to allow it to favor us as much as possible.
If you’re involved in taking money, tell us exactly how that works. Don’t hide anything. And if it’s more than we’re comfortable with, then we’ll just work somewhere else.
It’s too tight of a community. This isn’t like Walmart where the widgets and the cat food is not going to talk back. We’re the cat food here.
We talk back because there’s only so much of us to go around. There are only so many of us that are capable of doing this on a high level. You have to communicate with us and you have to be honest with us.
If you can do that, you can almost do whatever you want. We won’t like it, we’ll complain about it, but at least tell us what you’re doing. I think that’s where a lot of the controversies come from over the years.
Totally makes sense. In addition to your work as a voice actor, as we talked about in Sean’s eloquent introduction, you also direct and coach. Your company, JMC Demos, produces demos as well.
Tell us a little bit about JMC Demos and how your approach to coaching helps the voice actor.
I’ve become passionate over the years about careful always how I answer this question because obviously I’m making money doing this. You never want to phrase something as giving back when it’s profitable. That’s not what coaching and demo production is about, but at the end of the day, I think the coaches who do the best job are the people who take real satisfaction in seeing talent advance their careers.
The phrase I like to use is sending the elevator back down because we’ve had a pretty good run. Being able to say, okay, let’s take this next generation and help lift them up. As a coach, which is something that I don’t have as much time for as I’d like, I only keep a handful of people on, but when I have the opportunity to work with folks, especially new talent, it’s amazing to sit and watch them develop and to see them take skills that are raw.
For me, I don’t work with anybody who I don’t believe has a pretty strong chance of going out there and building a successful career. It’s amazing to watch them from just the beginning, when they’ve done a talent evaluation or that cliche that we all hear told them they had a nice voice, when they first talk to a coach and say, okay, maybe you’ve got some chops, let’s see where this goes, and then watching the light come on, like hour four, hour five, hour six, where all of a sudden they realize it’s not just talking, that it’s acting, and they’re starting to speak to me as a character and not as themselves. That’s an amazing transformation to see.
And then when they actually do go out and turn it into a business, it’s really heartening. Demo production is something that I take just an absolute joy in, hearing the diversity of talent that are out there and the skill level that they’ve gotten, and the way that we can make those demos come to life. You guys know I work a lot with AJ.
McKay. He’s the lead audio engineer for JMC Demos. Yeah, he doesn’t suck.
And the stuff that we come up with, the way that we’re able to highlight the skillset that these talent have and put them out there in a way that is marketable, that allows them again to sign with top agencies, to go out and get on production company and ad agency rosters, to go out and do their own marketing and book their own work. Again, we’re making money doing this. It’s not giving back, but it’s amazingly rewarding to watch people take the work that we’ve helped them do and go out and turn it into a business.
And so, yeah, it’s become a passion really in the last seven or eight years for me to help people down that path and to kind of send that elevator back down when I can.
Very cool. And like you’re saying, it’s kind of like, it’s difficult to say like this is philanthropic work, but we really do appreciate it because you’re helping maintain and ensuring the integrity and the professionalism of a whole generation of voice talent. So, I mean, that is something to be grateful for.
Absolutely. So you mentioned that you’re not able to coat so much on your own, but I know that you’ve actually partnered with Gravy For The Brain to create sort of this Gravy For The Brain USA, which is a bit of taking their products and sort of localizing it to more of a US market. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Well, Gravy For The Brain USA is something I’m really proud to be a part of. I watched Hugh and Peter kind of wander into the US market over the last couple of years, and I think like everybody else about three years ago, we all just went, who the hell are these guys?
I remember seeing them in person at VO Atlanta thinking that exact thing, especially when Harry strolled in.
Right, and great gravy for the what?
I know, I was like, what does that even mean?
And so it’s kind of, you know, it’s interesting, it has been very interesting getting to know them over the last few years and discovering that there just aren’t too classy or gentleman out there other than the hosts that I’m currently talking to here. But they’re really tremendous guys. They’re very, very, you know, people find the British a little poncy sometimes.
Once you get to know them, they’re so down to earth. They’re two of the nicest human beings you’ll ever meet. They have the interests of the industry at heart.
And I’ve had the opportunity over the years to work as a coach and doing webinars and things like that for a variety of different coaching organizations. All those ones that I’ve worked with, I’ve always been able to wholeheartedly support. I’ve had the opportunity to talk about either starting my own or investing in one at some point.
That’s not what happened with Gravy For The Brain. I’m not actually an investor there. This is a situation where I just finally saw something that said, okay, they’ve got the whole package here, by which I mean they’re bringing content over that has already been well developed.
But it’s been well developed, even though it has the US market in mind, largely with the UK market in mind. So I have the opportunity now to localize this content, to redo a lot of their videos, to make this content more relevant for the American market, to give talent access to vital information that allows them to help get a head start on their career without spending a whole lot of money. It’s an opportunity to…
We’re going to do a couple of webinars every month, hour and a half, two hours of just deep diving into this month we’re doing e-learning. Last month we did ad-libs and the conversational read. And we’re just going to cover every topic that you can possibly think of.
We’re going to bring in guest speakers. We had Celia Siegel and AJ McKay last month for a demo session. We’re going to be doing one with Joe Zee just soon for anime and dubbing.
We’ve just got a great lineup of people that we’re going to be working with. And it’s the library of content that already exists, that’s going to continue to grow, that is global in nature. So if you want to access any of the stuff that they’ve already got or any of the stuff through any of the other different country portals that they have, even if you’re just a member from the USA portal, you’ll have access to that.
And then long term, it’s things that they’re offering like The Void, which is this information database where you can go in and find ad agencies, production companies, coaches, demo producers, you name it, any resources that you’re looking for in the industry. They’ve put together an escrow service, which is not an evil escrow service that somehow mandatorily takes your money. It’s the kind of escrow service that you want to use, which is one that if you are dealing with a client that you have found on your own and you don’t want to take it to an agency for whatever reason, but maybe it’s a big number.
They’ve got an escrow service that you can come and use now that’s going to take a fair, small percentage, but allow you to protect your interests. The client can deposit their funds. The client then releases the funds when they’re happy with the work that you’ve done.
Therefore, you’re protected. You don’t have to worry about getting paid if it’s something that you’re concerned about. Probably not something you want to use for a $100 or $200 job, but if it’s for a big gig, there you go.
They’re just constantly thinking of new resources. It’s an organization that really has taken stock of all of the feedback the industry has been giving over the past few years with regard to integrity, with regard to rates, with regards to not being a demo mill, not trying to take advantage of people, and it’s one that I’m really proud to associate with.
That’s fantastic. So are you doing most of this, or are you doing it all online and remote? Do you ever get together and have a few at the pub with you and Peter?
We have had a few at the pub. Actually, when we do the video localization, I’m going over to their studios to record that live. I’m not going to speak to their judgment with regard to putting me on camera, but I guess somebody had to make that mistake eventually.
In any case, we do get to down a few pints from time to time.
That’s awesome. What are the other plans for the future for JMC demos and your business as a whole?
To be honest with you, I think we’re in a place right now where it’s time to just catch our breath a little bit. The demos brand in particular have been pretty aggressive over the past couple of years. Building that up, I wanted there to be another player on the scene that offered just absolutely world class quality where you know that you’re going to get a personalized experience where every demo is going to be scripted and targeted to who you are as a talent with your feedback as a part of that process and your collaboration and then targeted to what the market is currently looking for.
And in a manner again, we talk about fairness and transparency. One of the things that I’m super proud of with JMC demos is that we offer an unconditional satisfaction guarantee or your money back, no questions asked. So you work with us, there’s no risk.
You come in the door and if any reason at the end of that process you’re not happy with the demo that you have, I will refund you 100% and we won’t have to talk about it again. And I’ll still have a drink with you if you want. But I think it’s important that, you know, demo production is such an esoteric and amorphous…
That was a multi-syllabic word there. That it’s so hard to nail down sometimes what is amazing, what is the standard, that some people are worried when they get into paying a demo producer a lot of money, and it’s not cheap. If you hire somebody like me, or Chuck Duran, or Uncle Roy, or any of the people out there, or Nancy, or any of the people who do really, really good work, you’re going to pay a lot of money, because we’re good at what we do, but on top of that, what you’re paying for is the fact that we’re taking time away from the other things that we do, in my case, voice over.
It’s not an inexpensive process, and I think it’s so important that when talent go into the demo production process that they have the peace of mind of knowing that at the other end, one of two results is waiting for them, either the demo of their dreams or no financial loss. And so that’s one of the things we take pride in. I think this, you know, the future, the next couple of years, it’s simply about offering the quality service that we’ve set out to do.
We’re still going to be present at a lot of the conferences, and AJ is going to be speaking at quite a few of them on my behalf, and I’ll be attending a few of them as well. And we’re just going to be there to support the industry as much as possible, and we’ll see where it goes from there.
I have one related question that just came to mind as you were talking about the demos, and with regard to your new partnership with Gravy For The Brain. Have you noticed, or are you planning on changing your approach to demos for your clients in the European side? Because there’s that disconnect where some European companies or people that are hiring for Voice Over jobs sort of get offended if you have something on your demo that you didn’t actually do.
Isn’t there sort of an unwritten rule that you don’t put a spot on your demo if you’re a European talent, if you haven’t done it? Whereas in the US, you’re showcasing maybe major brands that you just want to show you can do, whether or not you’ve actually done their commercial?
I think that’s less of an issue in the UK market than it is perhaps in the continental European market. I know that comes up a lot with German clients and French and other continental clients. The UK market, I think, now is trending more towards what the American market does and doing demos that are created from scratch.
One of the reasons, Paul, I got into doing demo production was if I went back eight or nine years and listened to the demos that I had then, most of them were spots that I had done, that I had put together into a compilation. I think you go back 10 years or so, most people’s demos were still largely composed of work that they actually did. The demo production as an art is kind of something Chuck sort of got going, and then a lot of us kind of followed in his footsteps over the years.
But if you listen to real spots, you guys all know. I mean, anybody who does VO knows how often it happens that we do this incredible, national, wild campaign, and we’re just so excited to get the audio back and put it on our website or put it on a demo, and then we get it back and we go, ugh, what did they do? And so I think that we’re in an era now where a demo production team or a demo producer who understands content, who understands scripting, who is able to nail the content, to again, feature the talent and meet the market, who obviously has the technical prowess to produce the demo to an industry standard level and the directorial prowess to do that, can put together something that is ultimately going to sound better than real work.
So I don’t see that as an issue in the UK market, and I think over time, I would imagine that probably the rest of the world would follow that pattern as well.
Yeah, I guess it only makes sense as the skills of not only the demo producers, but also the voice talent themselves and those of us that do a little engineering on the backside, they had to go in that direction. I recently had a client where I was doing a series of medical narration for them, and they were posting on the YouTube channel. Some in excess of 15,000 views.
Great for my YouTube channel, right? Great publicity. Until suddenly, they got lazy and stopped putting background music behind it.
So now, every breath, every pause is accentuated and it sounds like garbage. So I had to stop using them because they’re no longer a good showcase. And I thought about maybe pulling them down, adding my own music and doing a re-edit, but what’s the point of doing that if it’s work that’s already been done?
So, to your point, now that everybody is sort of on board with the same process, it makes sense that it would trend in that direction.
Very cool. So you were talking about earlier how you and your team try to make a lot of appearances at some of the voiceover cons throughout the US and throughout the world, actually. And if you’ve ever been to an event where a JMC is involved, you’re a speaker, you’re an MC, you have contests at your exhibit hall booth.
I mean, you’re so involved in, like I was saying, you’re an MC, you’re an active speaker at a number of the different panels. And you’re also involved with a very special grant that is very close to my heart, the Unicorn Grant. And for those of you who don’t know, the Unicorn Grant is an award that goes out to people who sort of exemplify the giving spirit and the work ethic of the voiceover community.
So I was very honored to be named a finalist last year, but I’ll let JMC talk a little bit more about the origin of the grant and how he got involved.
Well, I think you summed it up pretty well. It’s meant… It’s the VO Atlanta Unicorn Award or grant, and it’s meant to recognize one individual each year who’s just genuinely exemplary character.
We’re looking for the kind of people who give back without asking anything in return, which disqualifies most of us. But what we do now is we select three finalists based on public nominations, and Sean was a very, very worthy finalist last year.
Oh, shucks.
Yeah. And actually, the nominations are currently open. When is the podcast actually released?
This won’t air probably until the first week of March, second week of March.
So by the time you hear this, the nominations will be closed. But take a look at it next year. But the Unicorn Award is a…
It’s something that… It’s a special moment. And, you know, it’s funny how it came together.
I’ll give you guys a little bit of the backstory about how it started. It literally started as AJ. McKay and calling me up one day saying, hey, we should do something special for Jen Henry at VO Atlanta this year.
She’s just helped everybody out so much. And me doing what I do, I couldn’t just, you know, buy her dinner. It suddenly kind of turned into this thing.
And before I know it, before we knew it, we had, you know, pretty much every, the who’s who of the voiceover industry contributing something to this special moment, to this special award. And we talked to Gerald, and Gerald agreed to make it part of VO Atlanta. And the first year, the idea was we were going to honor Jen who, I don’t know how well you guys know Jen Henry, but she’s given a lot to a lot of people over the years in the VO industry.
And again, without really asking for anything in compensation for that. And we just felt it was someone that we wanted to recognize. So we created this.
And we, just the community in general kind of came together and agreed that she would be the first person to receive it. There was no process at that point. But once we did it once, and it sort of brought the house down, we decided, okay, this is probably going to have to become a yearly thing, and we want to, we want it to be this special moment at VO Atlanta where we recognize, you know, somebody who isn’t out there, out front every single day, whose face you don’t see on every webinar or every conference poster, who’s not trying to sell you something.
Coaches are disqualified. Demo producers are disqualified. Anybody who’s selling paid services to talent is not qualified for the award.
So we’ve, again, continued to work with some incredible industry partners. I mean, I think we have 30 or so people contributing again this year. All of the major coaches you can think of, all of the major demo producers, for the most part, that you can think of are giving coaching, they’re giving demos, they’re giving gear, some are giving cash contributions, which we often use to get a sweet water gift certificate.
And the nominating process right now is ongoing. We select three finalists for the Unicorn Award. The Founders Committee, consisting of myself, Anne Gangusa, Cliff Zellman, and then Jen, who was the original winner.
We are the judges. The nominations are open to the public. There’s no fee to enter.
You don’t have to be attending VO Atlanta. You don’t have to have any intention to come to VO Atlanta. The only stipulation is that if someone actually is nominated as one of the three finalists, that they have to agree to come.
We pay their airfare, we pay their hotel. We bring them in and give them the whole weekend. I don’t think we give them a food budget yet.
We should probably start doing that. But I guess there’s food at the conference, right? There is.
In any case, we pick three finalists. Then whoever had the highest score among those three finalists is the person who winds up being declared the winner of the Unicorn Award. Something we’re doing a little bit differently this year for those who are coming to VO Atlanta is that we are…
This will probably irritate, Sean, because it’s a year late. We’re spreading the prize pool out a little bit more among the three finalists. What we’re doing this year is there’s still going to be one winner who gets the ceremonial unicorn statue that they keep custody of for a year, and then they bring back to VO Atlanta and pass on to the next winner.
But this year, out of this massive prize package, it’s worth about $70,000 worth of VO goodies. The winner, we’re going to do kind of a fantasy football kind of draft after the winner is declared. We won’t do this live on stage.
This will be done privately later, but the winner will get to choose two items from that list, and then each of the runners up will get to choose one. Then the winner gets to choose two more, and each of the other finalists get to choose one until they’re all gone. We’ve had some feedback that some people thought, okay, it would be great if we could just give a little bit more to each of the runners up as well.
And I think we all agreed that would be a good thing. So that’s just a little format change this year. But other than that, it’s still going to look very much the same, and we will find our unicorn.
We’re actually in the process of closing nominations in the next few days, and then the judging process will begin. And the other thing I want to add before I finish on that is it’s not… what I think makes this a little bit different than any of the other scholarships or grants or anything like that that are out there is that this isn’t about hardship.
This isn’t about somebody who’s struggling financially or is otherwise in need. We will take that into consideration when it comes to evaluating the submissions. But what this is about is character.
We’re looking for somebody that makes us all want to be a little bit better. And I think that in the first two years with Jen the first year, with Susan Maisel last year, and then Sean and Sean, we had two Sean’s as our other finalists last year, Sean Daeley and Sean Chambers.
Scott Chambers, yeah.
Scott Chambers.
Two S’s.
That’s as bad as me calling you Peter, Paul.
That’s a tradition.
That’s a tradition. But in any case, we found the kind of people that we want to really highlight and that make us want to be better. And I think that’s what this is all about.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for all of the hard work that you and all the other contributors do.
So that basically wraps up the questions we had for you, J. Michael Collins. We’re so happy you were able to join us.
You are a consummate talent coach, and you have the look, along with Hugh and Peter, to go ahead and just take over the world. And we expect to see great things from you, young man.
Thank you, sir, and I appreciate the limited use of excessive syllables.
Well, we’ll see you at VO Atlanta, and have a great rest of your February.
See you guys there. Thanks so much for the chance to talk to everybody.
So thanks so much to J. Michael Collins, and again to Hugh and Peter from Gravy For The Brain. Those developments are really exciting.
Now, our interviews were brought to you by IPDTL, and IPDTL is the cost-effective ISDN replacement. It’s great for interviews, like you just heard, outside broadcasts, voice overs, and of course, podcasts. There’s no special hardware or software required.
It works anywhere with an internet connection. You can have a monthly or an annual subscription, and it runs in the Chrome web browser. And the best part is, it just works.
So thanks again to IPDTL for being our sponsor. So Sean, exciting stuff across the pond, huh?
Hugh and Peter actually donated a Gravy For The Brain membership to me for being a Unicorn Grant recipient last year. And so I got to see firsthand all of the resources that they’re offering. So if you’re interested in some premium voiceover education, check out gravyforthebrain.com.
And it’s okay that they’re trying to take over the world if they’re benevolent, right? You heard in the interview with Hugh where I said I was a little concerned about his designs on world domination. But it’s okay because Hugh, Peter, and J.
Michael Collins are all respected pros, and they’re all just fun to hang around with, actually. I’ve had several libations with each and every one of them, and it’s always been fun. All right, so that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Coming up next, we’re going to have an episode with Celia Siegel, branding expert, and following that, we’ll be at VO Atlanta. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to do any content on site, but I hope to, so stay tuned for that.
After that, we also have our British Invasion podcast. That’s a roundtable featuring British voice talent who work in the US., and you can talk about their unique experience with that, so I’m really looking forward to that.
Aside from all of that just wonderful oral candy with all those British accents in the same room, I’m really looking forward to that. So, we’ve got all of those coming up. As I mentioned before, I hope to be getting a lot of interviews and videos from Emerald City Comic Con next month, so stay tuned for that.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to pepper some of that audio into the podcast. So, thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. I’m Sean Daeley.
If you’ve got questions, you can reach out to me. It’s Sean, S-E-A-N, at Daeley, D-A-I-L-Y, vo.com. That’s Sean at daeleyvo.com.
I always love answering questions from you guys, and if you guys have any questions or submissions you’d like to send us for the podcast, just let us know.
And I’m Paul Stefano. You can find me at www.paulstefano.com or at PaulStefano on Twitter. I love to answer questions.
I also like to eat, so if you want to hire me, look me up. Thanks.
So thanks again. Take it easy guys and have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter.
To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com. VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBoot2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, and IPDTL. And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hello everybody and welcome to Episode 34 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We have a great show today, some fantastic guests, and some cool things to talk about. We’ll start off with our current events, but first, here’s a word from our sponsor, voiceactorwebsites.com.
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Thank you very much, Voice Actor Websites, for being our sponsor. And we are so happy for everything you do. And I know where I’m going to turn to when I make my new website.
So up next, we have our current events. Anything new with you, Paul?
Yeah, quite a bit, actually. We talked about in our Meetup group, our Voice Over Vanguard group a couple weeks ago, how several of us feel like we’re going through a midlife crisis. I think one person actually said those words.
I’m not quite to that point, but I have been re-evaluating my Voice Over career and how to approach things. And what I’ve decided is that I need to chase the money, basically. So I’ve been doing a little bit of everything, and still do, and still plan to.
But I’m going to focus primarily on audiobooks while those are providing me some sustainable work, because it’s by far the genre where I get most of my work, and I’ve been pretty successful at it lately. So, that’s what I’ve been focusing on. And recently, actually New Year’s Eve, right before the new year, my new book, The Happiness Paradox, that is done by best-selling author Richard Ayer, came out.
And that has done really well so far. It’s been a couple of weeks, and it’s sold over 20 copies, which may not sound like a lot, but I have books I’ve done two or three years ago that have sold less than that. So it’s off to a good start, and I’m excited about that.
And then I have another book in the can, so to speak, all the recording is done. I’m waiting for the rights holder to approve it. It’s called The Falls, and it’s a supernatural thriller.
That’s pretty exciting. And it’s also a series. So the first one’s done, and the next one is out there, and I’m waiting for the rights holder to talk to me about it and officially offer it up.
But we’ve talked about it, and he said, yeah, I’d like you to do the series. And that’s book two of four. Now the other two, three and four, are not written yet.
The author is currently working on them. In this case, the author is the rights holder. But it looks pretty promising to have two more books on the horizon as well.
No, that’s great. And I remember you talking about this, I think, last episode where you had just gotten this deal and it’s rare where it’s like, hey, I love you guys so much, I want to keep you on for multiple books. And I definitely think that’s a wise decision of yours to try and focus on where you’re getting the return on investment.
And I actually just finished leading a workout today where we talked about the importance of identifying your niche and where… When you get started, sure, you want to experiment and try a variety of genres, a variety of scripts to figure out what your wheelhouse is. But when you’ve been doing it for a while, like Paul and I have, you kind of figure out what elements are in your wheelhouse.
And I’m kind of in a similar boat right now where it’s just like, I can see where I want to get with my voice over career, but a lot of it is patience involved, right? And like I’m trying to just kind of like build a nest egg for myself and kind of invest in some training and some new marketing materials to kind of bring myself up to that next level.
Yeah, in fact, this book I’m working on sort of brought me to this conclusion and I shared it with the rest of our workout group who I thought it might help. It’s all about noticing the things around you that are making you happy. But you can also relate it to work.
The author talks a lot about serendipity and how he equates that to taking the cues from the world around you that are telling you the direction to go. More in line towards personal growth and happiness. But while I was doing this book, it also applied to the work I was doing where I realized I was getting a lot of notice in these books.
I had several auditions that have come recently to me through my website where people just reached out to me for auditions for audiobooks. That doesn’t happen with anything else for the most part, honestly. I don’t get hired off my character demo very often or my commercial demo where people are actually reaching out to me on my website.
But audiobooks it does. As it was happening and I was doing this book, I thought to myself, hey dummy, this is actually happening to you. Pay attention and follow what’s going on.
That’s super important.
That’s wonderful. I don’t know where your opinions fall on it, but you shouldn’t have any shame in being a good audiobook narrator. It’s a very specific skill set as far as VO goes and one that not a lot of people are good at.
I even do similar projects, long form. The bulk of what I do is corporate or documentary narration stuff. Even me, I can do hour long projects, but 12 hour ones is difficult.
It’s not something I don’t like doing, and don’t get me wrong if it sounds like I’m saying I don’t enjoy doing it or there’s a stigma attached to it. It’s not that. Really it’s the first thing that I had success with, and that should have been my clue three and a half years ago.
Because I’ve been chasing all these other types of VO, just like you said, to find my niche because I didn’t really think I knew what it was. I’ve done a lot of workout groups. I was supposed to do one tomorrow actually.
I was supposed to go to Philadelphia to do an in-person workout with Everett Oliver and a bunch of the Philly meetup group. So Everett’s going to be on Zoom and the rest of us are going to meet at Martha Mellinger’s house and we were supposed to do that in person. But we’re getting our first snowstorm of the season and we actually had to cancel it because it’s about to snow any minute here on the East Coast and we had to put it off.
But I still do workouts with Everett. I do workouts with several other coaches and don’t plan to stop because, as we talked about, we have several agents and they’re not going to stop sending me auditions, at least I hope they don’t. Please don’t.
I’m going to keep doing those, but it’s good to have a defined focus, like you talked about.
So yeah, and it’s great because it’s important every couple of months or annually to kind of sit down and reassess, like you said, where am I getting the bulk of my income from? What areas should I focus on? And that doesn’t mean that, say, maybe Paul has a passion for character work, like he said, or he might need more training or something like that.
So you want to try and recognize as quickly as you can where your strengths are, what your potential weaknesses are, and then get both to a competitive level. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get bought is if you have something that’s undeniably good, right, or a product or performance that the people want.
So yeah, totally makes sense. So that’s basically what’s happening with me lately. What’s happening with you?
Well last, I know a lot of people complain that like this time of year is very slow, and it can be. For me, honestly, I kind of needed a break. Last month was very difficult for me because on top of all of the usual, just like the nature of my work, I mean I kind of worked throughout the winter break and stuff like that for doing my own VO work and GVAA membership stuff.
But I got sick for like three out of the four weeks of December. It was really frustrating. And of course, it was mainly like throat-based illnesses, so I could…
there was long periods where I just couldn’t voice anything, and it was very disheartening. I don’t know about you guys, but I get a little sad when I get sick, because I’m just like, well, not going to perform today.
Unfortunately, you can’t really help that, because it is your instrument. So if you can’t talk, you can’t work.
Yeah, and we know all the shortcuts, right? I mean, my pantry is loaded with throat coat tea, and I have vocal sprays that I like and all that stuff, but none of it is a good substitute for rest and recovery. So some things that I did do to fill the time, I figured out everything in my business that I could be doing other than voicing actual stuff.
I researched some more. I reached out to potential clients, heard back from some potential clients, so that was good. And figured out, kind of went over my expenses for the year, figured out what my goals for the year would be.
So there’s definitely things that you can do during your downtime to sort of make it feel like you’re not just sitting on your laurels, in case you’re just ridiculously sick because I had a couple of days where I’m just like, I can’t do anything. And sometimes you just have to listen to your body. And like, if anything, I feel like I was kind of just burning way too many candles trying to like trying to be there for family and friends and try and get all my work obligations done.
And so you have to like, self care is very important, right? So you can’t let your you especially when you’re trying to build a business, whether you’re working part time or not, you just have to be it’s even more important to make sure you’re eating enough, that you’re resting well enough, that you’re like washing your hands often enough. And like, because like we said, your voice is your instrument and you just can’t afford to get sick for long periods of time.
Luckily for me, it happened during the holiday season where everyone else kind of just shuts down anyways. But you really have to be mindful of the circumstances that might have caused that so you can do your best to prevent them in the future.
That’s awesome.
Even in sickness, we can learn.
Right, exactly, because most of the things you mentioned, I still have to do to close out 2018 and haven’t really done any of it, which is a problem.
It’s alright, you still got three-ish months.
Yeah, exactly. Although 1099s are due. If you hire any independent contractors, the 1099C has to go out by the end of January, so get on that.
I did, but it was under the monetary requirement.
Yeah, $600 I think is the last check, the monetary requirement.
But who might we be employing, Paul, just for our audience who you might not know?
Well, the editors that work on my audiobooks, so I’m not going to give names.
I have a couple of editors that I work with who, now that I figured out punch and roll a little bit better, I don’t have to use them as often, but it’s still great to have if you just have a high volume of projects that you’re doing. So definitely, even if you don’t intend to use them, at least get familiar with a few, because you never know when your workflow is just a little bit too high for you, and you just want to get your projects or make sure that your projects are finished on time or even earlier within deadline. So those might be expenses that you might have to pay out for.
You might be working with an audio engineer or someone like that to sort of dial in your studio sound, so that would definitely fit if you spend that $600 towards that. Or even paying someone like Joe Davis at Voice Actor Websites to help you get a new website up. Things like that.
It all applies.
Oh, right. I’m glad you mentioned that.
I’m glad I reminded you.
Yeah, and I was going to say sometimes hiring other talent for jobs too. We hired Marisha Tapera to do our intro, the fabulous new intro we have for The VO Meter. So yeah, sometimes when you’re hiring colleagues to do joint projects, that applies too.
So yeah, so we just want to instill in you guys that even though for the most part, freelance voice talent are one man bands, at some point in your career or several stages of your career, you might want to build a staff that you can work with to help you out, to either improve your efficiency with projects, to do some of the tasks that you don’t feel strong or as confident in or don’t like to spend time on, say email marketing or client or reaching out to new clients, things like that. So again, it’s all just about thinking how to be an actual business or however big you want it to be.
Yeah, some people I know actually hire virtual assistants or in-person assistants, sometimes the family member who might be in the house, to do the clerical work for them. Sometimes that even crosses over to marketing. People will hire people to do cold calls for them or cold marketing.
Again, it’s all about figuring out what makes you a more efficient business person and sometimes, yeah, you’re spending extra for staff, but again, what is the return on investment? If you’re able to make more money because you have staff, power to you. Keep working with that system.
Exactly. So this is totally unrelated, but because we’re talking about current events, it’s something that came to mind. My family and I went to Florida for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and we went to Busch Gardens Tampa.
So we’re on the tram ride out of the parking lot on the way to the park, and I hear the voice saying, Welcome to Busch Gardens Tampa, please enjoy your tram ride as we make our way through parking lot A or B or whatever the heck it was called. And I said to the people with me, I know that voice. So I thought about it a little bit more, and I was like, it’s Sean Caldwell, who, as you may know, lives in that area.
So I emailed him while he was on the tram and said, Are you the voice of the tram at Busch Gardens Tampa? And he’s like, I sure am, and a few of the safety features for the rides too, so listen up. And then sure enough, later on, we were on a roller coaster.
And again, I was like, Oh, there’s Sean, I hear him, where is he? And it was the ride next to us as he was giving the warning to strap yourself in. And that’s just so cool whenever that happens when you’re somewhere, you’re not even thinking about VO.
Like I was just talking about the roller coasters and how exciting it was to go to the park. And here I hear Sean in my ears over the tram loudspeaker, it was really cool.
That’s really awesome. At first I thought you were going to say Terry Daniel, just because I know he does a lot of amusement park rides. It’s so cool when our friends, we get to hear them doing their things.
Yeah, the ironic part was Sean was actually in town at that point. He was in Tampa and said, do you want to get together? And I said, well, we’re going to be at the park and I got six kids with me.
We were with another family. So it didn’t really work out. We just spent the whole day eating cotton candy and riding roller coasters.
But it would have been cool maybe next time, Sean.
Still sounds like a productive day.
Indeed.
Well, that pretty much wraps up everything for current events. Before we get to our questionable gear purchase, we have a quick word from our friend Tim Page over at Podcast Demos. So let me tell you about Tim’s team, who has 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. And you guys know this, but Paul and I actually got our demos produced by Tim and his wonderful team.
And all I can say is that those guys are 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.
And Tim, as you may know, has recently ventured into audio books himself as a narrator, and has talked about how much he’s enjoying it, and I’m listening to a book he’s doing right now, and he’s really good.
He’s just an amazing talent all the way around. I mean, he’s just an inspiring individual, and I’m not just saying that because we both love Marvel Comics, but he’s just a really cool guy, and I just feel like if you want to see someone who was able to kind of make… did everything right, got all the right training, had very clear goals of where he wanted to take his career, he’s definitely meeting them.
You can hear him doing promo in Sketch VO for the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and he’s just killing it in various markets and wherever he sets his VO goals to. So, Tim, great work, man. We’re rooting for you.
We hope you have a great and successful 2019.
Yeah, so the audiobook I was talking about is called Ancient Echoes. It’s by Joanne Pence and narrated by Tim Page. If you haven’t looked him up based on our glowing reviews, it’s P-A-I-G.
So, look him up and download that book.
Very cool. Awesome, Tim.
Questionable Gear Purchase.
All right, so questionable gear purchases. I’ve done a lot of stupid things. Well, it remains to be seen, I guess.
Do you want me to go first or do you want to start?
I don’t really have anything. I can’t think of it.
I don’t know. All right, so I’ll start then. I have actually sold a lot of things this month or this last couple of months.
And the reason is because of what I talked about before with my greater focus on audiobooks. I am starting to do everything I narrate or everything I do standing up. I used to sit down both when I did this podcast and when I did audiobooks.
And I think it was kind of constructing my diaphragm where I found I was running out of breath a lot. And that is not good for either a podcast or audiobooks. So I stood up for the last couple of audiobooks I spoke about.
And I think it made a big difference in my delivery. So with that, I started using my Sennheiser 416 exclusively. And as I did that, I didn’t need as much of the processing on the background I was doing with my Apollo Twin audio interface.
I was using some of the live plug-ins. The… what’s it called again?
USP processing? DSP processing. DSP.
I was using a lot of the DSP.
DSP processing.
Right. So I was using some of those plug-ins at digital signal processing, and I don’t really need those with the 416. So, and as I mentioned, I was using the SM7B while I was sitting down.
So I got rid of all of those and have simplified my life considerably. And also made a nice…
You finally got rid of the Shure? Really?
I did get rid of the Shure. I know, I liked it for a while, and you know, it’s still a venerable mic. In fact, we’re doing a mic shootout.
This is what we call a tease in the biz. We’re doing a pretty involved mic shootout in our upcoming episode, where you’ll hear that mixed in with a bunch of the other mics that we have on hand. And it still sounds good.
Oh yeah, and I think you’ll be surprised, because we kind of, like, I don’t know, we had a weird variety of microphones in Paul’s and mine studio. So everything from very affordable microphones, like the Shure SM58 and the MXL 990. I’m sure you know the 58.
It’s a very popular, like, live performance microphone. Very durable, affordable, dynamic microphone. Then the MXL 990 is another $99 mic that’s very affordable, but certainly surprisingly useful for voice over.
And it’s also very popular to be, like, modded by, I know that, what’s his name, the guy over at Octava Mods.
He actually retired, Michael Jolly.
Yeah, he actually retired. But you can still get one through microphoneparts.com as well. A lot of my engineer friends were like, ooh, mod that MXL 990.
I was like, I can’t, it’s my uncle’s.
I actually bought one and tried to mess around with it at one point, of course. Of course.
You know you can pay them to replace those parts for you.
I thought it would be a cool project to try. I didn’t do a whole lot. I just cleaned out the mesh in the head gasket and tried to improve the sound.
It wasn’t bad.
That’s cool. You get to know your tools a little bit. We’ve got those.
We’ve got some interesting dynamic microphones thrown in the mix. I happen to have an interview mic on hand for field audio interviews and stuff like that. Tried that out.
Of course, we also had our 416s and some higher level microphones as well, at least in the price department.
So both those videos are out now. We actually both did videos to showcase it. If you’re so inclined, go check those out now and let us know what you think.
Then you’ll have the full shootout in an upcoming episode.
Absolutely.
But the point of all this was simplifying my process and my booth. Now I just have the 416 in here. Don’t even have another mic mounted anywhere.
I’m using my Yamaha AG-06 audio interface, which surprisingly I did keep. And I’m still using that now.
Well, I know you use that a lot in some of your own field audio situations and stuff like that, taking it to sports events and things like that.
Yeah, we use it in Maybo to record all the interviews too.
Indeed, indeed. And that’s another… That’s something that I’m seeing a lot.
If you’re ever debating on buying a really expensive piece of gear, like will it really help my sound? I’m seeing more and more people with, say, just a nice industry standard mic, like the TLM 103 or the 416, and a really affordable interface, something in the $150 to $300 range. So, while it’s important to have aspirational goals with the kind of gear and setup you want, I think people are finally discovering that the financial barrier to entry with a quality sound is much lower than you might think.
And I matched those sounds pretty closely. I sent it to you and all of our friends at the VOV, where I did the onboard DSP processing with the Yamaha and what I was using with the Apollo and the 416. It was almost indistinguishable in my mind.
It’s crazy. Keep in mind, Felix, this is like a $200 interface versus a $700 interface. So, like I said, the proof is in the pudding.
So…
So, yeah, questionable gear purchases? Not so much, but maybe smart financial decisions? That’s not as catchy.
I know. It’s sensible gear purchases, right?
Yeah.
But for me, I actually… You guys know a few episodes ago, I finally got my own dream microphone, the Gefele M930. Something that was really fun about doing the mic shootout for me was really getting to put this through its paces, and I got a lot of compliments on it.
So I was just like, oh, thank God, I justified the decision to get it. Are you using it now? No, not now.
I think maybe next episode I will. But it’s just a beautiful microphone. It’s very different.
Some people compare it, saying it sounds very similar to the Neumann TLM103, and I’d say they have similarities about it in the level of clarity and in the super low noise floor that they both have. But they have their very own distinct sound. I loved how the Neumann sounded on me, but like I said before, I was not a huge fan of the shock mount it came with.
The mic itself is surprisingly heavy. The build quality, you want that kind of confidence in it, but it’s also, despite that heaviness, that weight, it’s still very fragile. You never want to drop it.
It had this wonderful, rich, almost… I was telling my friend, it had a really ballsy sound to it. It sounded great, but I felt like the Gafel was kind of captured things more as they were, with maybe just to smooth everything out.
It was just really pleasant. So I’m really happy that I have it, and I hope for the time being my gas has been cured. So speaking of questionable gear purchases and sort of slimming down your audio chain, we have a VO Meter stick slash questionable gear purchase from one of our listeners.
But before that, a quick message from GVAA.
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Not unlike myself.
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Because you like to have fun.
Hey, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick.
What did he say?
It’s time for the VO… Oh, never mind.
The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
Hey, everybody, this is Curt Bonnem here, and this is my questionable gear purchase. Sorry, I had to. Anyway, I was in the mood for a new mic.
I think it’s because I’ve had this microphone of mine that I’m talking on now. It’s a Mojave MA-201 FET. I’ve had it for about six months, and I really loved it when I got it, and got a great deal on it off of eBay from an engineer that only used it in an animation studio.
It was in perfect condition. Got it for $400, a few hundred off of the new retail price, and really liked it. But I think over the past six months, I sort of got ear fatigue listening to my own voice through it, and started to pick apart every little thing, and decided it wasn’t right anymore.
I’m looking at frequency charts and saying, oh, I’m pulling out frequencies that it’s boosting, and maybe this isn’t the right mic for me. So I decided I was really interested in the Sennheiser MKH416. Everybody knows it’s an industry standard.
A lot of big pros use it. It’s in a lot of studios. I actually used it at the SAG VO lab to do all my commercial spots that I recorded for my demo, and I thought that would be great.
Unfortunately, it was out of my price range. I just really couldn’t afford that right now. So I decided to take a look around and see if I could find anything comparable that would be something I could afford.
And I stumbled upon a YouTube video comparing the 416 to a Rode NTG2, and it was done in a professional sound studio, highly controlled environment, matching gain levels, no effects, no compression, nothing raw audio. And to my ear, they sounded the same, practically. And I thought, fantastic, this mic is way cheaper.
I can try this out and maybe get what I’m looking for. So I went and looked around online and decided on eBay, I found a deal for $199, new, no shipping charges. Discovered later, I could get it brand new from BPH photo, BHP photo, I forget what it is, for $179.
Hope you won’t talk about that. And I pulled the trigger and got it. While I waited for the seller to get back to me to ship it, it took about five days.
And in that time, I started looking around again and found a cheaper one and decided, well, I’ll go ahead and get that and try and cancel my other order, which I couldn’t, or I’ll just sell one, you know? And I ended up pulling the trigger on that. So then I had two NTG-2s on the way to my house.
And I got them on the same day, very excited, headed into my studio here and hooked one of them up right next to my Mojave and decided to do my own, you know, mic shootout for my own sake. And pretty much immediately realized how much better my Mojave sounded. There was a marked difference in their sound.
Not to say that the NTG-2 is bad. It sounded good. It just didn’t have the resolution or the crispness.
The Mojave seemed a lot brighter, more detailed, also warmer. I did a shootout that I posted on a few of the FB pages and everybody pretty much seemed to agree on that, that the Mojave sounded better. So here I am with two NTG-2s that I now am going to get rid of.
I don’t really need another mic right now. And since it’s not working for me and I’m not going to be doing fieldwork with a shotgun at any point soon, I think I will probably have to just go ahead and sell them so I can take that money and put it to good use in something else, like some X-Sessions at VO Atlanta or maybe a ticket to APAC or something like that. So that was my questionable gear purchase.
And I know now to be a little more careful and I’m going to just keep loving on my Mojave, which actually sounds fantastic and I’m very happy with it. So thanks all, love The VO Meter and hope to see you all in the new year.
Thank So thank you, Curt, for that. As I was listening, I was thinking about my own stupid questionable gear purchases. I had a very similar experience, but with a much higher price item, boots, if you remember an early episode, where I did almost the same thing he did, where I had two boots that I had to buy.
But yeah, I’m so glad that you brought that up, Curt, because it’s very easy to romanticize about, will that new microphone or that new piece of gear cause an improvement, a really noticeable one? And sometimes, no. So do your research, get the best gear that you can afford, when you can afford it, and just use it for as long as is necessary.
Yeah, thanks again, Curt. So we’ll get to the interview portion in just a moment. This time we have two thirds of The Voice Over Collective.
We have Brad Venable and Tim Friedlander. And we’ll get to them right after our word from our sponsor, IPDTL. So if you don’t know, IPDTL is the cost-effective ISDN replacement.
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So without further ado, here’s the interview with Brad and Tim.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the interview portion of this episode of The VO Meter. We are honored to welcome two stalwarts of the Los Angeles voiceover community who have also taken upon themselves to do something to make it easier for working pros to practice their chops and hold up the industry standards that are so important to the VO world. So let’s welcome first Tim Friedlander and Brad Venable.
How are you guys?
Hey there, very well.
Well, thanks for joining us. I know that it was a bit of a struggle to get going today because Tim is actually with Sean in person in Washington. Guys, how’s the studio out there?
It’s really nice.
Yeah, this place is awesome.
Yeah, it’s a place called Binary Recording. I’ve actually come here before for some of a… So we’re in more of a control room, so if there’s some echo, I apologize.
But anyway, so I came up here for some narration work one time and the guy was just great. It’s like, he’s open 24 hours and I sent him an email at like midnight begging for openings today. And he’s like, oh yeah, it’s fine, just come by.
And he even remembered me too, it was nuts.
That’s awesome, yeah, it’s a great… It’s a place I actually grew up here and I had never been here. In the 20 something years I lived up here, I never came to the studio until I moved to LA and came back to Washington and then came to the studio.
And it’s actually in a barn. I drove up and I sent Sean a text, I’m like, is it in like a big red barn looking thing? And it is, and it is awesome.
It’s very cool, and it was so crazy because I remember, I think it was like two years ago, like Tim and I had reached out to each other. I was still in Japan, but I had seen him mention something about Western Washington University, which is where I went to college. It was like, dude, you went to, and there was this like bromio and bruliet from then on.
And here we are back in our old college town.
That’s right, causing trouble and painting the town red.
Yeah.
That’s awesome.
Well, the barn’s already red.
The barn’s already red.
That’s right, that’s a good point.
That’s awesome, I’m so glad we could make that workout.
Yeah.
So guys, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about yourselves and how you got started in voice over, or started in voice over. Who wants to go first?
Tim, go ahead, buddy.
Okay, hey, thanks. Well, my name is Tim Friedlander. I am from Bellingham, actually I’m out front in Washington, but we’re in Bellingham, Washington right now.
I actually started in voice over in about 98, 99 or so in Seattle, studying with a coach in Seattle called, her name was Veronica Weichel. And she was kind of the only coach that I knew of. My dad actually was in theater and he kind of tracked her down for me.
And that’s how I kind of got into voice over. But, you know, obviously the differences between 98, 99 and here we are in 2018 are substantially different. And so kind of this transition, it took me, you know, 15, 16 years or so to actually get back into voice over and learn how to do it correctly and to get caught up with the times and to get caught up with, you know, the trends and things that were happening in voice over.
And I got back into voice over in about 2014 or so and went full time in 2016. And here we are in 2018. And, you know, working in voice over full time and flying to Washington for interviews.
Living the dream.
It’s great, yeah.
And Brad, how about you?
Well, I’m Brad Venable. And I grew up in the hotbed of voice over activity that is Eastern Oklahoma. And I say that with tongue firmly, firmly in cheek, so much that I could probably bite at every other word.
Yeah. About the biggest claim to fame is the fact that Carrie Underwood and I grew up in the same hometown and her mom was my fourth grade teacher. I always say that because she played softball with my sister growing up.
And so it’s so fun to see her be successful. And I’m like, you set that bar so high, it’s like all I need to do is just be the second most remarkable person from my hometown and I’m great. So what’s funny about my way into this industry is, Tim already said it, it’s funny because I made a comment the other day of some folks I was working with about how panel discussions go, especially with these really hardcore established people who are wonderful and awesome in their given area.
And they’re like, tell us about how you got started. And they go, well, in my day, I’m kidding, but they talk about how things were in the early 80s and late 80s and early 90s and getting started when there was literally like 35 people in the industry. And I’m like, that’s great.
It’s awesome to hear. And it’s really great for the people who are totally lay people and just interested in voiceover as a construct and a concept, but it doesn’t help you at all because how you get started in the 80s and 90s is so not how it happens now. And thank you for saying that, Tim, because I mean, if you didn’t say it, I probably was gonna say, yes, when I got started, this is not how you do it now, just so you know.
But what’s funny is, though, is that there are some things that I did getting started that I actually would say are a good thing to get started. And that was, I was a huge fan of every cartoon on Earth as people of a certain age are now, and nerds in general, of course. And I was a big, huge fan of the GI.
Joe’s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Transformers G1, and all this other stuff that was just integral parts of it. And found out that there was this really, really just wonderful fan community that took a whole lot more of what we knew as cartoons, like Transformers specifically. And my good friend Daniel Ross and I did this together, just to preface it, which is really great.
And they have these fan dub projects where they take Japanese versions of Transformers cartoons that never made it over here and are never going to see the light of day in an official English release, a dub almost like anime. And so they basically took all of the sound effects and the music beds and stuff from various iterations of Transformers and made a complete audio track, almost like Riff Tracks does, when there wasn’t such a thing as MST 3K for the longest time. And that’s kind of how I got started doing character work, is basically doing the Optimus Prime characters and a couple of these rando, wacko voice characters on these Transformers fan dub projects.
And like I said, my friend Daniel Ross, who’s also here in LA with Tim and I, he is now like one of the voices of Donald Duck. And so it’s like two of us from back in the day, fan dubby projects. And this is only 15 years ago or less.
But I got started with live announce really, if you wanna get technical. I mean, the fan dub stuff was like, oh, this is the fun stuff that I’m gonna learn how to do character work, or I’m gonna teach myself, or I’m just gonna face plant, whatever. But I did live announce for sports.
I was the announcer for all the Olympic sports at the University of Tulsa, where I went on an opera scholarship. So it’s a weird hodgepodge of vocal weirdness that I had that got me into the industry, and then realizing this is a crazy business, and one, and two, I’ll never do anything in Oklahoma because nobody does any commercials on the radio or TV unless you own a car a lot, or if you’re a radio jock that’s making $15,000 a year and only making more because they do sales in radio. And so I left because there was just no place for me there.
And I went to Dallas in 2010 and got some good coaching because I started a company called Superhero University, which sole purpose was to bring coaches to me so that my large girth did not have to muffin top into an airplane seat and travel all over the place. Made you laugh. So I kind of worked on that from there.
And two years ago, June in 2016, my wife and I moved from Dallas to LA. And the first night I was in Los Angeles, I visited Tim’s studio. And Phil Bakke was there that night.
And that was my first experience connecting with Tim in person. Jay had connected us through the Collective and stuff outside of that. But it’s been just kind of like a whirlwind ever since.
It’s crazy how it’s just taken off in so many ways for us.
I didn’t know about the live announce stuff. Did you know we actually had an episode on that a couple of weeks ago? Because that’s how I started as well.
You mentioned it, or I scanned it. I didn’t listen to the episode, but I knew that it was a thing. So I was like, I’m definitely going to mention this, because that’s going to be one of those I’ll be damned kind of moments.
I mean, you guys didn’t thoroughly research our podcast before you joined. So funny story, Brad.
I actually found out about you from your VO Superhero website, and the funny story is I wanted VO Superhero to be my business name.
So this was back when I was getting established, and I was like, but… I mean, first off, loved the site, loved the comic book appearance and everything like that, but I was just like, but… dreams deleted.
But now that I know you…
That URL is for sale if you want it. I’m kidding. I will eventually get rid of it, but I don’t know.
It’s just one of those things. There’s too many things going on here now to keep that thing going as a thing.
Absolutely. We’ve talked about the importance of just kind of being… Marketing yourself as yourself, like Brad Venable VO versus VO Superhero or whatever else.
There was just so much gold in your guys’ stories that I wanted to unpack that a little bit before we moved on to the next question. Because both of you said you see these industry pros with 20 or more years of experience. We actually had an episode recently where we went to a comic or anime convention, Otacon, and so many of them would start their stories with, well, you can’t do it like I did.
We’re aware now that that’s not…
Thank goodness.
The avenues for entry are different now, and it’s not really relevant. It’s great. It’s more important to learn about the skills and the mindset and the attitude of these people that helped them be successful rather than exactly how they went about it.
I think one of the things we’re at right now is that there are so many different ways to get into it. There’s so many different opportunities, so many different ways to make your own avenues into this. Absolutely.
I’ve been saying this for the last couple of years, is that we’re in the VO Wild West right now, and yes, there are still certain do’s and don’ts and things along those lines, but for the most part, if you want to do it, do it. Try it. If you have an idea, try it.
If it doesn’t work, there’s no governing body of voiceover that’s going to tell you what you can and can’t do. I think that that kind of opens you up to different ways of getting into voiceover, different ways of creating content, different ways of getting heard that you couldn’t have heard… even five, six, seven years ago, I think that weren’t as available as they are now.
Absolutely. And Brad, I’m actually really glad that you brought up fan dubbing, because I know that it’s not thought of very highly in the professional VO community, and I can understand why. There are a lot of amateurs and hobbyists who want to do it, but in the same vein, there’s fewer opportunities for better character practice, and you’re practicing being part of a production team.
So those skills are useful, and if you’re interested in it, it might be your only way to practice or get involved with it until you can afford to invest in training and things like that. So I think as long as you go in with that mindset of practice, rather than, I wouldn’t want to send anything that you’re doing, I wouldn’t advertise that to agents or anything, but like I said, you could build connections, and who knows, maybe the person that you did a fan dub with became a producer or a caster, and they want you back.
On that same note, the assistant that you’re dealing with now, the person getting you a coffee, whoever it is in the studio, they’re going to be the agents in a couple of years. They’re going to be the ones who are going to be making the new content. They’re going to be the ones who are hiring you in the future.
So, be respectful of everybody that you work with, regardless of where they are in the chain.
Especially people at the bottom of the totem pole.
Yeah. That’s just general, I think, just general respect, but know that it’s things… I’ll use this as an anonymous example, but somebody that I first met in 2014, who I’ve come across…
crossed paths with over the years, came across and very blatantly and personally insulted a group of voice over talent that I was with and has no idea that they did this. And years later, this is somebody that when I cross paths with, I don’t really care to engage with because of something that happened four years ago because it was a bunch of newbie talent that we weren’t… We were nobody.
We were just a bunch of people in the corner of a room talking and somebody decided to come up and either show off or something. And now all of us who were in that room are working actors who are now peers with this person, who are now sharing opportunities and now crossing paths with this person.
Or withholding opportunities.
Or withholding opportunities or ingratiate them very nicely into a community.
So it’s very easy to forget that this is a people-centric business. And very often we work in isolation, but we work with people. So whether that’s in person or online, just be respectful.
Don’t be a douche. Nobody likes douches.
Well, Tim, you mentioned when you were a newbie, some of the things you observed. Let’s talk about that a little bit because a lot of our audience, honestly, is still people getting started in the business. What are some of the mistakes you think newbies make when they’re getting started in the business?
You know, I think the biggest mistake I have seen recently in the last few years, and I think this is with the rise of some of the movement to the online opportunities, is that people think that it’s going to happen faster than it is going to happen. They expect it to be, well, I’ve been doing this for a year and I’ve done 50 auditions and I haven’t booked anything and I’m just going to quit, you know, and that is, you know, you’re just getting started. You’ve got another few years of doing this.
And then I think also, I think it’s one of the things that I say in the workout groups that we run is like, I love you all, but get out of here. Go somewhere else. And I think, you know, it’s great to have like a coach or somebody or a home place to work with that people know you.
But, going back to what I was saying before, a coach’s information and feedback is subjective. And there’s lots of great coaches and there’s lots of great feedback. And take what works for you, but you need a different perspective.
And if you get stuck working with one person for the entire duration of the beginning of your career, you’re just getting kind of one element of this. And I go back to kind of like Brad, I come from a music background. I got my…
originally I got my degree in clarinet performance. And kind of coming through that, as a musician, the idea of coaching and training and taking lessons is something that is just… expected in what we do.
And I think that same thing can go for voiceover. People are like, well, I trained for six months and I got my trainings done and I’m ready to go out there and be a professional. Well, you keep training, you keep learning, you keep having somebody…
You need a different ear to be able to tell you what you’re doing, where you can improve, to hear all the things that you don’t hear. Because no matter as good as we are, we don’t really hear ourselves authentically, I don’t think. I think we hear ourselves through our own filter of what we think we’re going to sound like and through our own filter of how we’re feeling in that moment and our emotions.
Exactly.
Plus your ego gets in the way.
Absolutely true, no, absolutely true.
I use a sports analogy a lot that Tiger Woods still has a swing coach all these years later and every baseball team has a hitting coach because you just have to keep training the entire time.
Absolutely.
Well, the funny thing is that I feel like that’s the area of biggest resistance for new talent is pursuing coaching and it’s usually financial reasons why. I understand most coaches charge about $150 an hour and up, but you just, like you guys said, it’s expected. It should be expected.
I mean, we are doing Olympian level vocal gymnastics and the fact that people don’t think that requires any training is really upsetting.
It’s just talking, Sean, didn’t you know?
It’s just talking. How can I forget that, right?
I wouldn’t expect… I play guitar mainly now, but I wouldn’t expect to pick up guitar at 35 and just watch a bunch of stuff on YouTube and be a great guitar player. You know, I mean, that is an avenue and not to dismiss anybody who can do that.
For me and for most people I know, that’s not an effective way to be as good as you can be. And so, you can learn at 35, you can learn at 40, you can learn at 50, whatever age you choose to get into music or acting or any of these artistic endeavors that you choose to get into, you can do, and it’s so much easier if you have somebody helping you along the way. Learning, passing along all that information.
I use this as like, you know, the best example that I use is like, you know, great, I’m learning how to play all these scales and I’m playing what I think is a D major scale, but the entire time I’ve been playing the D7 scale and I’ve been playing it for years and I sound so great, but it’s the wrong scale and it takes one person to walk in and go, oh, in three seconds I go, oh, sorry, you’re missing that one note right there, and now all of a sudden you’re going to be booking all those jobs because now you can play the right scale when you thought you were playing the wrong scale. Yep.
So, like, long story short, why coaching? Objective feedback.
Yeah, absolutely.
That’s… When I moved to Los Angeles two summers ago, I kind of made it a point of pride for the first year I was here to take a class or attend an event every single week. And the only really…
I remember that. That didn’t happen. And that was…
And a lot of people would say, okay, that’s a bit much. And it’s true to a degree, it was a bit much, especially poor Charlie Adler, who I love. He’s like, who’s my father in this industry?
I mean, I’m not kidding. He’s a VO dad to me. Last time I went to his class, I guess it was probably summer, May of last year, 2017, he’s like…
And I can’t repeat what he said.
He’s got a mouth on him.
Because he walks into a room, and sailors run out screaming. So, he was like, what are you doing here? I’m like, you’re my safe space.
What can I say? And he’s like, well, you need to get more dangerous. So, but yeah, coaching is everything, everything.
I did that in 2015. I worked with a coach every week in 2015 for the entire year.
But, yeah, to put things in perspective, some people actually recently asked me to lead a workshop on choosing a voiceover coach. And I had done some research in preparation for it, and I was like, wow, over the years, I’ve been with 30 different coaches, either at just like one day events or like, yeah, they weren’t all like extended periods. They might have found out about them from various things.
But yeah, it was amazing. And for me, it was more about just kind of exposing myself to as many different perspectives as possible. And just because I fricking love VO, I wanna learn as much about it and be able to experience different perspectives and different genres.
Because I mean, not everyone’s good at everything.
Yeah, absolutely true. And you need that different perspective of other people. And you need, kind of this goes to kind of the education side of things.
I think Brad would chime in on this as well. You know, is that you need, not everybody explains things in a way that everybody understands. And I think it’s, you know, I come from education as well as music.
And I think it’s being able, kind of the secret to being a good teacher is that you need to be able to explain the same thing 500 different ways so that 500 different people can understand it in exactly the same way that you understand it. And being able to explain something of like, well, you know, I just do it. And you know, that’s how it works.
Some of my best, the best musicians I’ve known have been some of the worst teachers because they didn’t know, they just did what they did naturally, but didn’t really understand how to explain their process or how they did what they did in a way that somebody else could emulate it.
Wonderful. And you see talent who get frustrated because I worked with this like, highly recommended top of their game coach and it wasn’t satisfying for me. Or like, I didn’t feel like I got anything out of it or just had a frustrating experience.
That doesn’t mean that you’re a bad talent or they’re a bad coach. They just might be a bad fit for you. Well, it may.
Given the benefit of the doubt, guys. This is a positive. This is a glass half full podcast.
But that’s the thing. It’s like, it’s important to try and don’t feel like you have to be married to this coach if you’re not feeling like you’re getting the most out of it. So now there’s a glut of voice over coaches available.
So whatever your snowflake educational needs are, you can find someone.
You can. And along those same lines, explore it. Ask people who have worked with them.
Find somebody who works for you because not every coach is going to work for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s not like, same thing, you go to college here in high school, people are like, oh man, my favorite teacher is this person. You’re like, God, I hated that person. They were the worst.
How could you like that person? It’s who you connect with. And are they a better or worse teacher?
Well, for you, there were a better teacher. And for somebody else, they were a worse teacher. So don’t be afraid to move on if who you’re working with doesn’t give you what you need.
And along the same lines, just because somebody comes highly recommended does not mean they’re the right person for you.
Absolutely. So that took a really interesting turn on the importance of coaching. But I love that we’re all on the same page.
It is important. And like I said, there’s lots of opportunities to do it or to try different coaches in more affordable ways, like maybe at a workshop or a webinar or a digital product or like our convention. So there’s lots of different…
Maybe.
Or maybe.
Maybe at a weekly workout.
That’s a great idea. Maybe we should look into that.
We should check into that.
Speaking of…
Yeah, speaking of weekly workouts.
Speaking of, you two have, along with Jay, have started yourselves a weekly workout to do with the exact thing we’re talking about. Get working pros to hone their craft and get some practicing. Can you tell us a little bit about how that started?
It was in direct response to the substantial changes of the industry that happened last year in August or so with some of the consolidation of the players, these big players in the game.
There we go.
Diplomatic, bringing it back.
One of the things that disappeared or that we thought was gonna disappear was this opportunity to do these online workouts that was offered by one of these companies last year. And going back to education, I come from education, Brad comes from education. I just finished my master’s in education about a year and a half ago.
And so, for me, I know I can bring the education side of things. There’s no way that I could compete, that any of us could compete against the juggernaut in helping, in posting jobs and trying to find a workup for these. But I sure knew that we could compete with them when it came to education.
Brilliant.
So we took that component of it that we knew was missing and which, unfortunately or fortunately, we were absolutely right. As soon as this consolidation happened, the education portion disappeared. And the online workouts disappeared instantly.
Not even like, hey, they’re gonna go away. It was like, they’re there one week and the next week they’re gone. And so we kind of jumped in.
I think we heard about the change at about seven, eight o’clock in the morning. And by noon, I had the website domain. And by the end of the week, we had already started talking about it in advertising and had the first mockup of the website done.
And we went live, I think, about three weeks after that. Which is something, you know, it had been in the back of our minds something we had been talking about, that at least Jay and I had been talking about for a long, for about a year, but no reason to do it when there was opportunities out there already. And as soon as that opportunity disappeared, we knew that we could step in and fill that void.
And it’s, you know, it’s been great. It’s been challenging. It’s been exciting.
It’s been frustrating. It’s all these things that you do with, hey, let’s do it.
Great.
That was our plan.
How?
Well, let’s, we’ll put it together and see how it works.
It sounds like our podcast, actually. That’s how we started that.
Now, why don’t we get along so well?
Absolutely.
And going back to what we said before, it’s the Wild West. I mean, who do you have to get authorization from somebody to do a podcast? Do we have to get approval from somebody to do an online workout?
Do we have to get, you know, again, going back, you know, this isn’t to say that just go out there and, you know, run over everybody and do exactly what you know, what you want to do, regardless of what, you know, maybe some of the social conventions of Voice Over may be. But that there are, if you have a good idea, you see an opportunity, you see something that’s there, do it.
After a thoughtful research and…
After a thoughtful research.
Yes. Yes.
You know, take your time. But, you know, like, you can put it together. We didn’t go, you know, we definitely consulted with agents and people who had been guest before with talent to see if this is something that they would be interested in.
You know, we, I did a mock-up and had a few people run through it to see, hey, is this going to be beneficial? Is this better than what was happening before? Is this going to be more, you know, bulkier than what was happening before?
And, you know, we’re here a year later. We’re still running, actually. Just posted, you know, our newest workout yesterday, which went live.
You know, we try to do it every week, but it’s, you know, life gets in the way, work gets in the way. We don’t always can’t follow, we always find a coach that’s available every week. We do our best to try and do it every week if we can, but, you know, it’s also something that we just, we do for the community in, I say free time, I don’t know when any of us have free time, but, you know…
In our made time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we make time for this, but it’s also something that we do because we know that it’s needed.
How does it work exactly? Because not all of our audience, I’m sure, is familiar with it, and if they want to get involved, tell us a little bit about the process.
Sure. Well, it’s voweeklyworkout.com, and basically what we’re trying to do is give people a chance to be heard and to try something and have an opportunity to get heard on a regular basis, which if you’re not in LA, New York, Chicago, some of the larger areas where there is a bigger community, it’s a little difficult. It can be lonely.
It can be isolating. I mean, it can be isolating in LA. You know, I was in LA for 12 years before I even knew that there was anybody else in voice over in LA, which is just insane.
But what we do is we have a special guest each week. It could be a cast director. It could be an agent.
A lot of who we have are agents. That’s a lot of who we have our connections and friendships with. But we post up a script or a variety of scripts.
You get to download that script. You get to read one or two takes of that. You upload it back to the website and the guest director will listen and provide feedback.
Very cool. After that, then everything gets posted on an archive page with everybody else’s reads, everybody else’s feedback. So you can go and listen to what other people did.
If you got a specific feedback, say, hey, try doing this, you can find somebody who read it the way that you wanted to read it. Listen to what they did. Exactly.
I think one of the greatest things is somebody gets feedback on something that you’ve been doing. You listen to them and you go, oh, okay, well, I hear what you’re talking about. Now I hadn’t heard it when I did it, but to hear somebody else do that, now I understand what you’re saying.
Man, that’s huge. I love… because a lot of people are so focused on improving their own performances that they forget to listen to others and to learn from the interaction of them and the coach, or just maybe just being around another talent.
Be like, wow, that was a really great technique. I should pay more attention.
Absolutely. And I think that you can learn more. This goes for any of the workout groups that we do in LA and all the classes that we go to.
You get your 10 minutes or so in the booth. Use the other rest of those three hours and learn. You can see so many of the people in that booth.
You can hear all this feedback. You get to hear all of this stuff. Take those notes.
Take what other people are doing. What are people doing great? And try that.
Here’s somebody stumbling over something and go, I remember when I used to do that. So how did I get out of that? You know, let’s see if this person gets out of the same way that I did.
And use that time to learn. And this kind of goes to the conventions. This goes to working with coaches.
This goes to doing any of the workout groups. You will get out of it what you choose to get out of it. And if you just go in and say, okay, give me all your knowledge and just throw it on me and I’m going to take this out of here and leave, you can leave very frustrated.
You can leave not feeling like you learned anything. But if you take the time and really pay attention to other people and what they’re doing and what they’re learning, listen to that feedback. Read the feedback.
Listen to people’s takes. Listen to some really great takes. Listen to some stuff that people need to improve on and learn.
I love that. You can definitely tell that you come from an educational background. But just the way that you approach it from this level of conscious critical awareness and critical analysis.
Absolutely.
And so, because as we’ve said many times on the podcast, you need to know what your voice sounds like, what it’s capable of. And you need to be able to analyze and articulate performances. Because if you can articulate something, you can do it.
Yeah. One of the things that I always… We do the in-person workouts at my studio a couple of times a week.
A lot of times, people give a great read. And instead of me saying, that was a great read, I say, great, tell me about that read. What was it?
How did that feel? What did you do that changed? What did you do?
Explain to us why that read was different. I know why it was different. I want you to explain to us why it was different, so you can articulate what it was that you did to make it different.
And going back to kind of one of the earlier questions about one of the mistakes that newbies make, I think one of the biggest mistakes people can make is just going into this passively. And not… One of the things that I found is the very first convention I went to, which was Voice 2014, was how insanely friendly everybody is.
And welcoming. And, you know, we always say like, oh, I mean, the voice of people are so nice. I keep waiting for people for that to change.
It’s been four years now. It’s not changing. We’re all…
I mean, everybody is… You know, everybody is just… Everybody is nice.
Everybody is helpful. And everybody wants to help. But if you just sit in the corner and expect things to come to you, it’s not gonna happen.
You have to go out and make it happen.
Yeah, it’s just like, you know, okay, I’ve signed with an agent. Now I’m just gonna sit back and wait for the phone to ring. That’s the same attitude that gets you that subsistence at best, honestly.
If that, yeah.
Yeah, if that. If you’re lucky that. But then again, there’s also the mindset of, okay, an agent is gonna take 10% of what you do.
You need to be doing the other 90% of the legwork.
Mm-hmm, yes.
So I mean, that right there, to me, it changes the mindset completely to, oh, they’re the gatekeepers to the work opportunities, but you need to be doing things, too, and making a partnership. So that whole idea, Tim, everything Tim said, it’s like we’re straight in a parallel line when it comes to approach. I know that I would never have been able to absorb as much stuff from workouts and workshops and seminars and everything if I had been passive, and I only go in there to go, I’m going to do this, I’m going to try to wow them, and then I’m just gonna sit there on my phone the rest of the time.
I mean, what’s the rule, Tim, when you walk in, phone’s down, right?
Put down your phone, yep, put down your phone, or at least let us know that you’re taking notes on your phone.
Exactly.
Because that’s now.
Because I mean, I lead a lot of workouts, too, through Global Voice Acting Academy, and even Paul and I will occasionally work out together. But anyways, I get so frustrated when I see people who are obviously muted, but practicing their next take. And I’m like, that’s great, I know you wanna do a good job, guys, but you’re no longer present and you’re missing out.
And I love that you brought up the word gatekeeper, Brad, because I feel like, and this is going back to that sort of antiquated idea of how you get in, we don’t view ourselves as gatekeepers to our own careers. Like, we always assume that someone else is going to get us in, to give us access. And agents do give you access to jobs that you might be unable to find on your own, but that doesn’t mean they do all the work for you.
Yeah, so like you guys are saying, you get in what you, or excuse me, you get out what you put in, and if you’re extremely active, you can see the people who just, you guys probably know who I’m thinking of, but just in a year or two or three have just gone from zero to full-time. And the drive is apparent. It’s obvious in this person and their interactions.
So that, more than anything, is just don’t sit on your laurels and just constantly try and move forward in your career.
Yeah, and I think it’s, sorry, go ahead, Tim.
Oh no, go ahead, Brad, I’ll pick up after that.
What’s funny is that it’s a balance to strike too, where it’s like there is a, you need to be doing more than the minimum of beating the pavement and doing what you need to do to be well known amongst your peers and everything, but then there is a limit on the upper side too, where you don’t want to end up being the person that’s introducing themselves to new people with their resumes and stuff.
Yeah, yeah. That goes back to being respectful and understanding what you’re doing, because agents don’t want to be solicited at a workshop.
Oh, God, no.
Yeah, that they don’t. And we’ve worked with agents in our work groups, and one of the things that more than one of them says is, don’t come in here and show me what you can do. Don’t come in here and show off.
This isn’t a showcase. Come in here and work. If you’re not here to work, then let somebody else come in here who is here to work and get better at what they do.
And it’s a big distinction between workshopping and showcasing.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And agents can see that, and casting directors can see that, and people know.
And it goes back to that, like, I mean, VO is a collaborative effort. It’s not, like, you’re not the star of the show. And if you’re going in this for fame or recognition, like, then stop.
Like, it’s not for you. Your job is to help give agents, casters, directors what they want. And so, like, there’s a partnership there that you need to respect.
Very much so.
Well, Tim, you talked about your workouts having the phone be… check the door. You’re talking about the in-person workouts at your studio, Soundbox LA, right?
Correct. Let’s talk a little bit about that. How did you start this studio, and what kinds of work do you do there?
Man, that was… I started this place in direct response to the fact that I had no idea what the heck I was doing, and I was failing at voice over, and I basically am a great example of how to do everything wrong. Get a demo, make a demo made.
Good, I’m done. Move to LA. Great.
Send that out to agents. Great. Nobody picked me up.
Okay, great, I got an agent. Well, let me take another year, and a year I’ll send out that. And in this year, I’m not going to study voice over for that year.
And let me take another couple of years off from voice over, and then I’ll go out and try and get an agent. And then I’m going to wonder why the agents don’t want to listen to what I’m doing, because I don’t sound like me. And let’s just isolate yourself and not talk to anybody and not know anything.
And part of that is the fact that it’s as overwhelming as it is, you pick up the Voice Over Resource Guide or look for a list of coaches. There’s what, three, four, five pages of coaches? They all look the same.
I can’t tell it’s between one coach or another. If you don’t know anybody, don’t have anybody to ask, don’t have anybody to hear feedback on, you don’t know, it’s like, here, let me pick, I can’t afford to go to every university I want to go to to find out which one I like. So then you just don’t go to any of them.
So I didn’t coach with anybody. I didn’t study with anybody. I didn’t train with anybody.
I would send out demos once a year and then wonder why I didn’t hear back from anybody. So talking about being passive, I was doing all the wrong things. And I was hours away from quitting Voice Over, and I decided to get out of bed and go to Voice 2014.
And there I met a bunch of people who were, as I say, failing the way that I was failing. And all of a sudden I was like, well, wow. So I’m not an outlier here.
I’m not completely lost in what I’m doing. And I have a great opportunity. I have the space.
So why don’t I invite some people over and we can all just kind of learn about Voice Over together and we can maybe all fail together. And from there, it kind of became a place that I kind of have built around the community. I built the studio was never supposed to be public.
It was supposed to be just a place where I do music and where I practice. And people came over and they needed opportunities or they needed a place to record. Well, here, let me come over.
You know, you need this mic. Well, okay, I’ll have this mic for you next time you come over. And I guess you need this and we need this kind of connection.
You need ISDN. Well, let me look into ISDN and see about this. ISDN kind of grew around the needs of the community and kind of became just, you know, I had this, I had a place and I wanted to share it with people and not keep it to myself.
And it’s grown into this, into something way beyond anything I had ever thought it would be. And we actually, you know, kind of opened two satellite studios earlier this year, one in Studio City and one in Sherman Oaks, where we’re going to start, you know, the responsibility of offering workout groups at those locations as well at some point. I do three workout groups a week most of the time, two that I run myself and one that Jay Preston and I run together.
And we don’t, I don’t advertise, it’s all word of mouth. And I just try and give people a place that feels safe and comfortable, and you can come in and do the best work that you can do because it feels like being at home.
That’s amazing. So I’m sure Brad will agree with me on this. And we were just talking about how amazingly, just generous and kind voice over people are.
I feel like Tim is an exceptionally kind VO person. Just a cut above. Because of all, I mean, just this idea, you’re incredibly community minded, and you’re always thinking, like, I don’t need all of this stuff, but someone else does, and I would like to provide it.
It’s amazing. I mean, I even saw a post recently, he’s like, I’m out of town this week, anyone need my studios? Keys are in the box.
It’s amazing.
Yep. The man does yeoman’s work. I mean, to use an antiquated term, but still.
I mean, it’s just so wonderful to know that that whole story of this being the most wonderful industry and everything. I think some people, they only scratch the surface when they understand that to a degree, because we circle the wagons and we take care of our own. I mean, I don’t know of any industry, especially an artistic one, where a person gets an audition and goes, you know what, this is not for me, but I know two other people that would be great for this.
I do that all the time. I’ve actually walked people to my agent. Well, I say walk, not physically, but just last week there was one where I said, I have a colleague who would be better at this than me.
You want to hear from him and maybe sign him? And they were like, yeah. So we did it.
Brilliant. Honestly, guys, thank you both so much. It’s not just about getting out what you put in, but you guys have given so much to the community and continue to do so on a daily, weekly basis.
Just to circle back to the weekly workout, Brad, what was something that surprised you from one of those weekly workouts, either from the presenter or the guest director or from a submission?
Oh, I’ll tell you what’s been surprising, and it shouldn’t be surprising. The funny part is I should have seen this. We should have all collectively seen it coming, but there is so much varied types and level of verbosity, if you will, of feedback that you get, because some of our most wonderful, great coaches that we’ve gotten wonderful relationships with over the years, they’ll sit back and they’ll record live, like what we’re doing here for the podcast.
They’ll record an audio version of what they have to say to any person that participates in the workout. Then there are others who are extremely concise and waste no words. And then there are others who type long, huge…
This is specifically what you did that I did like, what you didn’t like, and here’s how to improve it. And what’s been the greatest thing, the greatest gift, I think, out of all of this and all that variance of the kind of feedback that they have provided is the insight into the industry as a whole. As the fact that there are people whose whole reason of existence is to give feedback and lift others up and push them aside, push them further in their careers and make them better actors.
Then there are some who is like, I am a business person, and I’m going to give it to you straight, and I’m going to give it to you in a way that you may not like, but you’re going to hear something that you need to be more self-aware of. And then there are those who, you know.
Are moving yourself from that box, right? You’re no longer in isolation. You find out what…
You hear from people straight from the horse’s mouth. What is hiring? What people want?
What is the popular sound? So you’re able to provide it, ideally, because you’re listening and you’re just learning as much about what they want as you can.
The one thing that I really want people to take away from what both Tim and I and Jay together do versus what we do individually is, is we’re always trying to lift everybody. We really are. I mean, it’s not like we’re trying to do it to have people have high opinions of us or anything.
It’s just that this is what this industry needs, because we have seen corporate entities come in and just waylay the industry and try to literally, quote unquote, take over the world. I mean, it’s like a real live version of Pinky and the Brain some days, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. So we just want to make sure that we realize that we in Los Angeles have really a glut of wonderful coaches and agents and casting people that we all call friends, and we want them to know people that may not have that opportunity elsewhere.
And I think that has been one thing. Between Weekly Workout and between my old friends in Dallas who have been starting to poke the bear of Los Angeles and providing them an air mattress in my studio has been something I just want to make sure anyone knows, that when they come in from out of town, they generally, if they know me at all, then they have a place to stay with me. And it’s been great to see some of the projects that have actually been shown to be going live this week.
You know, something that one of my friends did, she just announced this week, and I remember a year ago when she was hanging out with us, my wife and I, here, and staying in our second bedroom, which is the studio, and now all of a sudden, here’s this thing that she was working on a year ago that’s now seeing the light of day, and I’m just sitting there just like shaking my head.
We’re like, oh my gosh, how does this all come together? And it just makes us feel like a giant spider web that we’re all interconnected in some way. And I just want to make sure that we do whatever we can to make this industry a better place and not a worse one at all.
Well, you guys are certainly putting a Herculean effort forth in that regard. I mean, honestly…
Well, one of us is. Tim. Tim is doing that.
You’re all great, but honestly, guys, I feel like you’re definitely kindred spirits. I love… I’m so happy to hear you.
And you can hear the joy in your voice from recounting people you’ve worked with succeed and excel. Yeah. It’s amazing.
He’s tearing up on me now. Big softy. But, I mean, honestly, I’ve felt for a long time that the biggest tool we have in maintaining and hopefully improving the voiceover industry is education.
And you guys are providing that in spades and you’re really bettering your part of the voiceover world. So thank you both so much. Or thank all of you guys.
Before we go, tell us where people can find you if they want to hire you as a voice actor or if they’d like to participate in the weekly workout.
Yeah, well, the weekly workout is just is voweeklyworkout.com. And you can see all the information is on there. There’s a login section where you can sign up.
And when you sign up, you get an email with all of the information about how it works, why we put it together, and kind of our goals with that. And then to find me online is just timfriedlander.com and it’s Friedlander like Frydlander.
Well, I’m not going to revisit the weekly workout because Tim made it more than clear where to find us there, but voweeklyworkout.com. And you can find me at bradvenable.com. That’s V-E-N like Venn diagram, but with one N, able, able to do things, or at atlastalent.com, one of the two.
All right, thanks, Edelman. We really appreciate you being here. It was a fantastic discussion.
Tim, thanks for making the effort to come to a studio in Seattle, or Bellingham.
Bellingham.
Hey, I had to drive farther than he did.
But you work here.
Sort of, sort of.
And we’re going for burritos afterwards.
Yeah, it’s a labor of love. And lay burritos.
Nice. Well, hopefully we’ll see you soon.
I see what you did there. Yeah.
I like portmanteaus. I miss you, man. Definitely.
And thanks again.
So thank you so much, Tim and Brad, for being on our podcast. And thank you, Voice Over Collective, for just offering an amazing resource. I highly recommend you check out their workouts and get to know a little bit more about them.
So you can find them at thevoiceovercollective.com or at their Facebook page, Voice Over Collective. It’s a wonderful community. It’s a great place to network and workout with your peers and just kind of practice those performances and maybe even get your ear in front of some very worthwhile casters.
So thank you guys so much for being a guest on our podcast. As you might have seen in sort of the promotional video teasers for this interview, Tim actually came up to… Tim and I actually recorded on location in a place called Bellingham, Washington.
I actually used to live up there when I was going to college. I was visiting my family that week, my brother and his family, and Tim actually had family, had grown up there himself in a neighboring city. So he came up for the afternoon and we recorded at a studio that I’ve worked at at the wonderful Binary Recording Studios in Bellingham, Washington.
Thank you, Bob Ridgely. And we actually used sort of… We weren’t in the actual studio per se.
We are in the kind of live room. So we used the VOMO, the Voice Over Mobile Booth, from our good friends at 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. So thank you so much to Jeff over at Vocal Booth to Go for supplying us with that VOMO.
And thanks again, Tim, for coming up. It was so great to meet you in person.
Yeah, thanks to both Brad and Tim from The Voice Over Collective and VO Weekly Workout. We really appreciate their time. The interview was really great.
Well, that wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Come join us next month, like we said before, we have that epic mic shootout where we get to try over about a dozen different microphones at various price ranges, various polar patterns, just some really interesting choices.
Some other upcoming guests we have are Sarah Jane Sherman, casting director, marketing guru, VO marketing guru, Celia Siegel, and Peter Dixon and Hugh Edwards from Gravy for the Brain. Lots of good content coming up over the next couple of months.
Very cool, so don’t miss an episode, guys, because we’ll keep churning them out as the year goes by.
So that’s it for this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Bye, everybody.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com. VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.