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Necessity is the Mother of Invention. You have heard the adage a thousand times. I experienced this again this week. It was 100 degrees in Charm City several days this week. Heat index (still not sure this is a real thing) makes it “feel” like 115 degrees! My booth, made up entirely of sound absorbing panels gets to 90 degrees in the middle of winter. Imagine how terrible it gets when the temperature outside gets this hot? Oh, and did I mention, with the city of Baltimore being nearly at sea level, we also have 100% humidity. Yay!

So something had to be done. I looked around for some turn key ventilation systems and found them to be overly complicated and expensive. So, I did what any self respecting personal studio owner would do, I MADE THE DARN THING MYSELF. After all, my actual booth is really a drum shield, that I cobbled together to make it more sound proof. After I was done adding sound absorbing blankets to the walls and surrounding windows, I started affectionately calling my space “Franken Booth”. It is so lovely. Massive space hog on the outside, yet with only 3.2 by 2.8 feet of space on the inside. I get the worst of all worlds!

Anyway, I digress; back to ventilation. I went online to Amazon to buy an exhaust fan, typically used for venting pipes or air ducts. Mine was a 4 inch wide model. Then I bought some 4 inch flexible aluminum duct, 25 feet of it. The space I was shoving this contraption into was only 2 inches wide so I also needed a 4 inch to 3 inch duct reducer. Finally, I used a 2 inch PVC elbow joint as the lead into the booth. All product links will be at the bottom if you want to see the full list. After all was connected (with some hello kitty duct tape from my daughter) I pushed the whole line in through the cable pass through of my booth. Now here’s the fun part. I needed a way to turn on the fan remotely. The fan has no switches by default, it only powers on or off when it’s plugged in. For this 10 minute project I was not about to install a junction box and switch assembly. So, I plugged my old Clapper into the wall, and the fan into it. Now to turn it on, I just clap on! I do need to open the booth door for the device to hear me, but it’s a minor inconvenience. Lastly, I did figure out, with some help from facebook friends, that the best way to ventilate a booth like this is to actually SUCK air out as opposed to blowing it in. I did test both ways and found this to be true.

The results? Not bad! I can feel it noticeably cooler when I’m in the booth for long periods. it raises the noise floor by about 2 db, but that is not enough to get into my microphone. All in all a great process!

If you’d like to see the video I made outlining the process you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6Yen66UgU

So here is my first epiphany on the personal studio. You know what your space sounds like, right…right? Most coaches and engineers will tell you it’s hard or nearly impossible to know what you really sound like. The way sound resonates in the human body colors your perception of your own voice. So, how then can you tell if your space is up to snuff?

GET SOMEBODY ELSE IN YOUR SPACE!

I don’t know any other pros nearby, and even if I did, I would feel guilty putting pressure on them to come to my home and help me tune my studio. So I did the next best thing. I stumbled upon this quite by accident last week. I had my 10 year old daughter get in the booth and record a short passage from Alice In Wonderland. The genesis of why is not important but I am going to tell you anyway. I had a client ask me if I had any kids around to help with a short project. Not being a professional, we didn’t have a demo ready for my daughter, so we thought we would just quickly throw something together. So, we recorded, and played it back and my first thought was WOW, that quality is GREAT! Now I have worked hard to make my personal studio sound great. I’ve done tons of research, asked advice and experimented, a lot. After all of that ,however…I reached out to George Whittam and he got me sorted. Still, I had no idea how great it had become. Remember the point above about not hearing your own voice accurately? All it took was for me to hear another voice in the space to appreciate it.

So voice actors, when you are creating, or even fine tuning your space, consider listening to something other than your own voice for once. You might just find out you are a better engineer than you thought.

This weekend marks the 4th of July holiday, in America. My apologies to my colleagues in or from Great Britain…Too soon? The custom for many in the land of milk and honey is to take this weekend to head to the beach. In New Jersey, they call it “Going Down the Shore”. In other places it’s “Heading to the Beach”. In my particular corner of the world it’s called “Going Down The Ocean”. Interestingly, the local accent tends to mash the middle words together to create a very strange hybrid phrase that makes it sound like people are saying “Downy Ocean”. Ahh, Maryland, the land of pleasant living.
All of this beach talk got me to thinking of how much the Voice Over business comes and goes in waves, just like the ocean. A few weeks ago, I was having a bad week. I had sent out audition after audition with no responses. It was late Friday afternoon and I was ready to shutdown my computer for the weekend, when suddenly, I got a referral from a fellow voice talent. His client needed a new voice, and they hired me on the spot to do a series of Youtube videos. Literally, while I was closing that deal, I got a phone call from another lead I had contacted. They wanted me to produce a full audiobook for them, and then hire me for a series of audio hypnosis sessions. What was going to be a miserable week, suddenly turned into a great way to start the weekend!

Similarly, this week was also pretty slow. I sent out requests to a few agents for representation. One response was “maybe”, two more were “thanks but no thanks”. Then a request I had sent to partner with a studio came back “Let’s get started”! Much like that bad week before, within minutes, another studio which I had contacted weeks ago, responded that they wanted so sign me.

I had heard about these “waves” of activity from colleagues, but it really has surprised me how true it is. As we head into this holiday weekend, I’m going to watch for the waves in my business, as I watch the waves of the ocean.

Have you found a similar ebb and flow in your business? How do you manage it?

As a voice over artist (or Voice Actor as most of us like to be called) random tips and tricks come up nearly every day. More accurately, they are shared by other industry pros, and we adopt them! I have been fortunate enough to get advice from some of the greatest minds in the voice over world, and I can never hope to repay it all. Still, I intend to use this space to share just some of what I have learned, and maybe offer some of my own insight. Along the way, I’ll share some random musings, and maybe, just maybe, a little levity. Stay tuned!