The VO. Meter. Measuring your voice over progress.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. We’re doing things a little bit differently today because we had on our guest Armin Hierstetter from Bedalgo, and he gave us so much information that it actually went almost an hour in and of itself. So, we’re going to start with the interview, and then we’ll come back with our episode on pay-to-plays and some of our favorites.
Before we do that, I want to thank our sponsor, voiceactorwebsites.com, and to tell you a little bit more about it, here’s a word from fellow talent and VOBS host, Dan Leonard.
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So once again, we thank our sponsor, voiceactorwebsites.com. They’ve done my site. They are about to launch a site for the VO Meter.
Stay tuned for that. And we can’t thank them enough for being on board. So without further ado, let’s get to our interview with creator and founder of Vidalgo, Armin Hierstetter.
Hi, everyone, we are here in Bedalgo Call right now with the creator of Bedalgo Call. That’s right, we are talking with none other than Armin Hierstetter, the owner and creator of Bedalgo. He is also a voice actor and producer himself, and a recent recipient of the One Voice Arts Award for the best online voice job site.
So we are very, very happy to have with us Armin Hierstetter. How are you doing, Armin?
Hi, Jean, I’m doing really fine. Thanks for having me. A very nice introduction.
And may I add, I even got the other award as well for the best voice over services website service, which is actually Podalgo Call.
Wonderful, that’s amazing. And I should have mentioned this before, but everyone in the VO industry knows Armin as a true and metaphorical rock star. I mean, he’s just the amount of work that you do for the VO industry on an international level is incredible.
So we are very grateful to have you today.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Well, the awards are well-deserved. We have become de facto shills for the company. And we mention it in pretty much every episode.
And our fans know that we use Vidalgo Call for all of our interview segments, which we have with guests. So we’re really grateful and just so happy to have you here again. Welcome.
Yeah, and probably I have to excuse because I see you, well, the podcast listeners will not see that, but I can see in Vidalgo Call that you’re wearing headphones, you’re sitting in front of your nice microphone, and I’m just sitting in front of my laptop. So if my audio quality sucks a little bit, apologies, I will do better next time.
Oh no. Well, we’d love to have you back, but audio quality is not a requisite for this interview. So I’m sure you’ll make up for it with wonderful information.
I hope I do.
Exactly. So Armin, as we talked about, everyone knows you as the rock star who created Vidalgo, and Vidalgo Call. But how did you get started in the voiceover world in general?
What did you do before Vidalgo?
So before I did Vidalgo, I was working in publishing for almost two decades. After school, I became a junior writer for a computer magazine. And that was my first job.
And after like, I think nearly two years, no, two and a half, three years, I applied for a job with Penthouse magazine, like the Madden’s magazine, because I heard from a friend of mine that they were looking for a senior writer. And I was in the computer industry, everything changes so fast. So there’s always something new going on.
And I really, really liked that with writing for the computer magazine. But if you have written for computer magazines for three years in a row, well, yeah, everything changes, but it’s always computers. So I was thinking, could I go somewhere else?
And somebody told me, yeah, there’s this open position with Penthouse magazine. A senior writer just resigned there and they desperately need somebody. And I said, yeah, well, come on, guys.
I was like 23 at that time, or 24, 23 or 24. And I said, yeah, they will be just waiting for me. I mean, this is a top shelf magazine with hundreds of thousands of readers and I’m not really experienced.
But nevertheless, I applied for the job and I got it. So I was working for Penthouse magazine for two and a half years, two and a half, three years, becoming the youngest deputy editor in Germany at that time. When then a friend of mine called me and he was editing and developing a new magazine, a football magazine for kids.
And he asked me if I would be interested in doing that. And although I’m a football fan, I support Bayern Munich, the German team, you might know. And football was not really the topic I’d rammed off, but it was a weekly magazine.
And coming from a monthly magazine to a weekly magazine, that meant like, this is the premier league of magazines. It can’t get any more exciting than that, with all the pressure of deadlines, and you have to have the magazine out every week, and it’s really, everything is working on tight deadlines. So I thought that would be really cool.
So I did that. Then I did another teen magazine called Sugar in Germany. And I worked for the company quite a long time.
But then in 2008, like at the top of the financial crisis, I was the publishing director of FHM Magazine, which is also a man’s magazine.
I remember that one well.
A real man’s man, Armin.
I was a subscriber. So, sorry, my funds didn’t keep your job.
And so, and I was the publishing director, and the sales were going down, like the magazine sales were going down, and also the advertising sales were going down, none of which I could stop. So they said, well, Armin is not worth his money, so we get rid of him. And that happened on the 17th of March.
And fortunately, just half a year earlier, I had the idea of creating a website for voice over talents. And this came along that way. I think it was in 2004 when a colleague, again a colleague, I think I live off all the ideas of colleagues.
A colleague told me in 2004, he was then overseeing FHM magazine, and he asked me, Armin, we need to do a new voice over for a commercial that is upcoming for our edition of FHM. And how can we do that? And I said, well, you compliment me all the time on my voice, let’s try me to do that.
And he said, well… And I said, come on, what do you have to lose? We go to the studio, we record.
If it doesn’t work, well, you lost nothing, and I don’t charge anything because I, well, the company owns me, so the company owns my voice too. So it’ll be fun. So we did that, and I went to this recording studio and the director there, I told him right in the face, listen, I’m not a professional voice actor, but I think I can knock it out like a 30 second spot.
I think that that should be fine. And driving in the car, in my car to the studio, I was always saying to myself, FHM men are like that. All the time, it’s the claim.
FHM men are like that. FHM men are like that. And I did that all the time, all the time to get in the mood and looking for, well, what would work.
So I did my stuff there, and then the director said, okay, yeah, I can hear you, you’re not professionally trained, but I think if you follow my directions, we have this thing recorded in no time. And 10 minutes later or 50 minutes later, he said, I think we got it. And so I was happy, and I thought, Armin, you now are a voice over talent.
Thank you for the laughter, because this shows exactly how naive I was. So basically what happened then is I thought I’m a voice over actor. So I grabbed a CD with my only demo I had, this commercial, and I wrote to all the German voice over agencies I could find.
And now guess what happened?
And lots of rejection.
No, I heard nothing. They didn’t even bother to reject me. They just kept silent.
And I was like, okay, that didn’t work really, did it? And I was looking then online for opportunities. I had no clue about voice over websites whatsoever.
I hadn’t got a clue about voice over whatsoever. So, but I found a website that offered the possibility to sign up with them to pay money, and they would then send jobs to you. But all those websites have been targeted to the English speaking markets, basically.
So I was trying to find a German website that does the same, and I could not find any. And I thought, well, that’s odd. Wouldn’t it be great to have a German website of that as well?
Now remember, this was 2004, when I myself had my first voice over. I signed up with this English speaking website, and I got my first jobs there. And I wish I would have still a recording for my first voice overs, because they must have sounded, oh God, I think I would cringe so much.
You’d be amazing how often we hear that. And I feel the exact same way too, because like you said, people who just get in, they have no idea what a VO should sound like. And the funny thing is, is it’s just supposed to sound like you.
But I mean, you can totally sympathize. It’s hilarious.
Yeah, but it was not only like my lack of how to give a decent read, but also like the technical quality of the audio. Well, I did music recording for a few years. I had my MIDI piano, I had a Roland hard disk recorded, and I had recording gear, and I had that.
I had a decent microphone. That was all of the problem, but I did not have a voice booth. So what I did was I was in my living room.
I had this, I don’t know if you know it from, I think it’s, is it SC Electronics that has this shield?
The reflection filter, yeah.
Yeah, exactly, the reflection filter, and I had that. And well, if you only have that, everybody knows it does not work. You have the room reverberation from all the sides, especially from the ceiling.
So it must have sounded horrible.
Still, the sound magicians at Mitro AV Online, a New York recording studio, they booked regularly with me because they did trillions of e-learnings, and they did it multi-language, so they always needed a German version as well. And I worked together with them, I think, at least for five, six years, at least, probably longer. And so this is where I started doing voiceover myself.
Of course, then I got professional training with a teacher that is working at the theater and educating actors, so I learned a lot from her. But still, all the time, I had this spark in my head. No, not this spark, this thing in my head that says, but Armin, why isn’t there a German version of the website that you get the jobs from?
Because there were not many German jobs, only just a few. So I was thinking about that for three, four years until there came the time, and I don’t know if you know that, but in Munich, Germany, there is the Beer Fest, the Oktoberfest. Yes, we’ve heard of it.
It’s the biggest festival of its kind worldwide, and with all the beer tents and the Umf-Data music and so on, and a lot of Gemütlichkeit, as we call it. So I was sitting there with some friends. I had probably a few masses of beer.
A mass is like one liter of beer in a big mug. And I had a few masses of beer, and I was thinking, and this idea came back again in my head, like nobody’s doing that. I mean, if nobody’s doing it, you probably have to do it yourself.
So half-hammered, I walked home, started up my computer, and coded the very, very first lines of Boudalgo. I hadn’t coded for 20 years at that time, but there was a, or there still is, a programming language, probably 80% of all the websites out there are coded in, it’s called PHP. And this language is very similar to a language I already knew, which is called C, so for all the computer aficionados out there.
And I wanted to find out, Armin, do you still have what it needs to code this website? And I soon found out that, yes, okay, I think from programming, there shouldn’t be too many problems if I had known what would come after. I probably would have thrown in the towel a long, long time ago, because if you also have to do server administration and all of that stuff that I had no clue about whatsoever, it can be very, very frustrating, and it was very frustrating.
But nevertheless, after three months, it was really fast. There was a website, Functional. Let’s not talk about the looks anymore, because it looked horrible compared to modern standards, but it worked.
And then I had a website, and then I realized, okay, yeah, Armin, you have a website now, but you can’t approach clients to post jobs, because there ain’t no talents with your website, so you need to find talents. So what I then did is I looked up the biggest association of talents in Germany, wrote the president of them an email and said, listen, I created this website, and my plan would be if you would promote it with your 250 talents you have, like German talents, and they are all vetted talents, I would be willing to give them a premium membership for six months for free to have a critical mass of talents on board that would allow me to promote the whole service to clients. And surprisingly, the guy, although he was developing a similar website, well, or yeah, himself, at least he had a programmer that should have done, should have programmed the website for him, he never fulfilled his job.
He said, I like what you do and yeah, let’s give it a shot. And after one week, I had 70 voice over talents. I said, okay, now let’s promote it to clients.
And this is how it all started. Because in the beginning, the website was only in German.
Because at first, I regretted that I didn’t think it through completely right from the beginning. Because the website was coded that way, that all of the copy you could read on the website was hard coded into the website. So when I decided like, okay, I need to make this at least for the English market, I had to reprogram the whole website again with English copy in it.
And it was a complete and utter nightmare. And so, but I think it was in mid 2009, sorry, mid 2008 or end of 2008, when I had the English version of the website ready. And then I could also approach English speaking talents.
And well, then, of course, with English speaking talents, everybody who was able to read English could then join, well, provided they would be professional talents. So I had an international base of talents, attracting more clients too.
First off, let me just say that I love this sort of beginner’s mindset that you have. I mean, you mentioned before, if I knew what I was getting into, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But for better or worse, your own naivete kind of gave you the confidence to pursue it.
And as Paul was talking about earlier, we’ve already talked about some of the differences, like that really personal touch that you offer, that really hands on approach with Bedalgo. But I’d love to hear from your perspective, how Bedalgo is different from other online casting sites.
Well, there are a few things that I think differentiate Bedalgo from the others. Well, the first one, you just said it for yourself. It’s a very personal, direct, hands on approach.
Every mail I get, it’s me that answers the mail. Luckily, it’s not too many because that would take too much time. I coded the website that way that in theory, not many questions need to be asked because it’s so insanely easy to use.
So then a second point that is very crucial, right from the start, I said, okay, I can only have talents on the website that are professionally trained voice over talents. I don’t mind if somebody’s a real newbie, like he had his training and now wants to start, that is fine. But what I cannot have, I thought, was somebody that has no clue about voice over business at all, and just wants to give it a shot because he thinks an easy buck to make.
And I think by now I had probably, I don’t know, 40,000, 50,000 talents registering for Boudalgo, and only 7,500 made the cut. You get many talents where the demo, and I listen to all the demos of each talent that registers, and I approve or disapprove the profile then. Well, disapproved profiles just get deleted, and the other ones get approved.
And some of the demos, they sound like, shh, hello, shh, my name is Sean, shh, or Sean, shh, I am, this is my voice, I want to sell. Yeah, well, I don’t know what then comes after that, because by the time, well, I have deleted it a long time before. That’s the good thing about bad voice overs.
You instantly recognize them and can hit the delete button like after two seconds. So this is the, and I think it’s very important. And the reason why this selection has to be made is not because, is not that I’m a nasty guy that wants to criticize people.
No, it’s the fear that imagine somebody like that signs up, gets approved, puts out their credit card, and becomes a premium member. And then auditions for a job of a top shelf company. Well, what do you think?
Will the client think listening to demos like that? He will say, oh my God, where am I? I will never ever use this site.
They can’t be serious about what they’re doing. By the way, this is still what I just cannot get… where I cannot get my head around with other websites that do not vet talents.
I wonder what those clients think when they hear that and why they’re still using services that are, frankly, wasting their time. But that’s a different story. But that’s, again, one part where it completely differentiates from others.
And the third one is, I approve and disapprove every job that is posted. And if there’s somebody that wants to have a TV spot for 100 quid, well, it’s not happening. They are getting…
Well, first of all, the system semi-automatically scans for those things and will prevent the client from even posting that job. But if he does tricky things and says, okay, this is not a commercial, then this is, I don’t know, an audio book to get a different budget range, then I have… I look personally at every job posted, and if I see something that’s not adding up, then the client gets a mail from me where I say, okay, listen, this kind of job needs at least this kind of budget or it’s not gonna happen.
That’s great.
That’s wonderful. Yeah, we really appreciate that kind of quality control on both ends because some of the other… I mean, everyone is familiar with some of the controversies regarding some of the other online casting sites.
People wonder if there is an actual vetting process or if the business is more concerned by just making a profit through the volume of subscriptions they get through the talent versus matching quality talent with quality clients. So I can’t tell you how much Paul and I and the VO community at large appreciate the mindset and the approach that you’re taking with that. It’s wonderful, Armin.
Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, okay, I do that on the one hand because I’m a firm believer that there needs to be a certain level of quality to provide a great job, to make a great product.
On the other hand, I do that also because really I’m a true believer that it can’t possibly work otherwise because the whole thing would implode. And I’m still a gobsmacked when I listen to demos of people I see on other websites where I say, well, probably you’re not a premium member because you would alienate the clients big time and it would badly reflect on the website that you have registered with. So I’m really not sure what’s going on there, but well, maybe if…
Well, some websites, they invest so much money, thanks to Morgan Stanley, to promote their services, that they have so many clients that they simply don’t care and while you just have to browse those websites and the talents there, and listen to the demos, and some are really like… You want to have the earth below your feet opened and swallow you.
So Armin, we talked about the ways you verify talent coming in, a new talent that signs up for a membership. What do you do or is there anything you do to maintain quality for talent that are already on the roster?
Well, if somebody made the cut, then it’s because of two things. First, the technical quality of the demo, or demos he provided, is broadcasting quality. The second, the reads he gave or she gave support the impression that this is a professionally trained talent.
And that’s that. So once that’s done, I believe that people will not have their talent level decreasing over time. So I do not revisit the profiles to ensure, are you still a good voice over talent?
I think that’s not necessary. What I do, though, is if I see… I can see all offers.
I can… because, well, I run the website, I see all the offers, all the auditions. So what I do from time to time is on a random basis, I flick through the demos, I listen to them, and if I see something that bothers me, could be technical quality, could be a music bed before the audition, things like that, then I shoot out a mail to the talent.
Doesn’t happen very often, but it happens. And also what happens is if somebody is aggressively undercutting, then they should be prepared to get a mail from me where I say, OK, listen.
I can’t force you to have a decent budget that you’re asking for because that’s your sole decision, and by law, I cannot force you to stick with prices. But I would recommend that you consider the following, and then comes a little bit of what is good for the market, what is bad for the market. In another way, I do blog postings, not very many, not even close to as many as other websites do, where I try to answer the most important…
where I address the most important issues that I feel talents might run into, no matter how experienced they are. And everybody can read that on the Bodago blog. You don’t need to be a premium member.
You don’t need to be a member at all, basically, to read those. And a few hundred times a year, I get questions asked by email, and then I direct the people just to the blog postings where I say, you need to read that, and that makes all of it completely clear to you.
Well, that’s great. I kind of knew the answer to that, because I think I shared on another episode of the show, I got one of those emails from you that said, hey, there’s a little bit of something in the background of your audition for this job. And I played it back, and you were right.
I had inadvertently copied a breath into my room tone that I pasted in every dead space of the audition. So it was like, today’s topic is about foot pain. And here’s how we’re going to address that.
And you were absolutely right to send that to me, and I appreciated the quality control.
And by the way, there is also what I call fast feedback that clients get, because the issue is always, you have like dozens and dozens of talents that audition for a job. Now, most of them have not received any feedback. Of course, the winning talent will receive a feedback, a very positive one, but all the others usually don’t get any feedback, because while you can’t blame the clients, it’s impossible to have a personal feedback sent to them, to all the guys that auditioned.
Some do, most don’t. So to have a little bit of feedback still, what I included like, I think, half a year, three quarters of a year ago, is next to every audition, there’s a drop down menu where people can give a fast feedback, and the fast feedback could be great voice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t suit this job.
Or just great voice, we like it, but that doesn’t say you get the job. But it could also say, I can hear room ambience, too much EQ, bad micing, things like that. And when people get, for example, if you get some over the quarter of, I don’t know, let’s say a few months to half a year, and you receive feedback that always says room ambience, well, then you definitely know something is wrong with your recording setup, because otherwise you wouldn’t get the feedback.
So this is awful. It’s only a tiny thing, and it’s not like that everybody uses it. But every little bit helps.
Any feedback helps all the time. And this is just another way. By the way, this works vice versa.
Also, the talents can… And I would suggest the talents should use it all the time. They can give a fast feedback to the client as well.
For example, if the script is badly translated, if the script is just plain bad, if the briefing is bad, and you can give that feedback as well. And if a client is constantly hammered with bad feedback, and it’s anonymous, they don’t know who gave the feedback. They just see 10 people said the description is weak.
And so this, of course, will then get the client to a point where they say, okay, next time I put a job up with Bodalgo, I spend 30 seconds more and explain a bit more what kind of voice I’m looking for. And of course, jobs that, or many jobs, that are really weak in the description, they get rejected by myself where I say, okay, this three-word briefing will not do the trick. You need to be more precise, and it’s for your own good, because the more precise your briefing is, the more relevant the auditions will be, and the better the job will be that you have at the end of the day.
So everybody wins, and for you it’s only like 30 seconds more time, but it saves you a lot of time down the road. So, yeah, these are like the major things where I try to constantly educate and improve the quality, and it’s really a long road, and it’s a long, hard fight, but time is playing for me. As long as there is Bodalga out there, it will educate the people.
I love that. And going back to what you said, all these little things to receive and give feedback between clients and talent, and it just goes back to your idea of quality control and trying to create quality voice overs for quality clients, and it’s amazing. You just don’t see that anywhere else.
Yeah, and I would not be angry at all if other websites would take this idea on board in there, because if everybody does that, that would help the whole industry so much. It’s like, for example, David Rosenthal. I have the…
And you’re with GVAA, too, Jean, aren’t you?
Yes, yes. I’m their social media manager and membership liaison. I head up their membership program.
And with the English-speaking clients, there is a link within the job posting right under the field where the budget goes that says, unsure about the budget? Check out this rate card.
I included that quite, quite some time ago. And these are also… Okay, of course, this rate card information is massive.
Probably not everybody is reading through this. But it’s there. And maybe they don’t do it for the first job or the second job or the third, but they see it all the time there when they’re posting jobs, and maybe somebody clicks on it.
And everybody that clicks on it is a good thing. And the information is there, and if it’s there long enough, it will trickle down.
Wonderful. Plant in the seed.
Yes.
Thank you so much, Armin. You’ve told us a little bit of the progression and evolution of Bodago. What do you see on the horizon?
What is the future for Bodago?
Well, the future for Bodago is the past of Bodago. The goal is the same, attracting more clients. I don’t know if you’re aware about that, but since the beginning of Bodago, Bodago has not made any marketing efforts towards talents.
I never did that and probably never will do. There’s only one exception, and these are my appearances at voice over conferences. Where I go to Atlanta, or I go to Gravy for the Brain, the Voice Awards.
The One Voice.
The One Voice. Thank you, Paul. And this is the only marketing effort I do to the talents, and I might reduce that a little bit in future.
Well, first, it’s quite a financial impact if you sponsor those events. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Gerald, what he does with the VO Atlanta. I think this guy is a wonderful person, first point.
And second, he’s an incredibly skilled entrepreneur. And I just love the passion and how he does that and how it looks like and how it developed. And that’s a really, really great asset, and it’s wonderful to be there.
Nevertheless, I attracted really very, very much attention on the voice talent side. And I don’t want to risk that there is a disbalance between the number of clients with Budalgo and the number of premium talents with Budalgo. Because if I run into a disbalance there, then nobody will be happy, because nobody will be getting any jobs, or not enough people, or the hit ratio will just suffer from that.
So I might reduce that a little bit. You will still see me there. But yes, I might reduce that.
And at the same time, enhance the efforts on attracting new clients. And there is an issue that… Somebody just posted that country call, who it was on Facebook, where he was talking about the SEM efforts of voices.com and other websites.
And I think Google AdWords, for example, because this would be the first place you go to. If you want to promote your business, your online business, Google AdWords had been a wonderful thing for quite a long time. But this changed for the voiceover world a few years ago already.
When I had ads out there with Google AdWords, a few years ago, the people that were clicking those ads were clients looking for a voiceover talent. So imagine there’s an advertising, I don’t know, cast the best voiceover talents in the world, the usual blah, blah, blah. So now those ads in majority are no longer clicked by the clients, but by the talents.
And the reason behind that is not because they want to book, they want to have other talents auditioning, no, they are looking for, oh, is this a website I can get jobs from? So they click on the link, go to the website and find out, is that a new potential resource for them to find new jobs? So they are killing the budget.
And I saw that really massively two and a half years ago, where I saw from the signups, oh, it’s now 80% talents that end up signing up from all the clicks that I get from the campaign. And it’s just not working anymore. But there are different ways, which I’m not going absolutely into detail because David Cicerelli probably hears that as well.
So SEO is still key if you’re trying to promote your website. So it shows up in the search engine result pages, like the, what do you call it? Not the paid traffic, but just the normal Google traffic.
Organic traffic.
Yeah, thank you. That’s the word I was looking for. So this is still very, very important, of course.
Also, what really helps is that the client base of Podalgo now has reached a level where word of mouth is really, really helping. And there are other bits and pieces with PR, for example, that help drive the clients. And there’s another thing.
I saw that this year. Job-wise, Podalgo has a plus of 20% compared to last year. But the number of clients is not as high.
The number of new clients is not as high. So the clients that are with Podalgo are posting more and more jobs. And this is a very good sign in my book.
Well, that’s great to hear. So we talked a little bit about the future of Podalgo. But you haven’t stopped with just Podalgo.
You actually have ventured into some new businesses. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of your other ventures? Yes.
There’s one in particular that… I’m not sure whether this is of great interest to the audience right now.
Do you have any idea how many voice over artists are geeks?
There’s a lot of us.
So there is this new website that I’ve been working on for now for close to even more than 18 months. And it has… A beta started in January.
And it’s a marketplace again. But this time it’s a marketplace for retro video games. So you maybe remember all those consoles from the 80s, from the 90s, from the 2000s, and many of us have played with them.
And a friend of mine approached me in… end of 2000, hang on, 16, beginning 2017, if I would be interested in encoding a marketplace for that. And I was telling him, yeah, that’s a very great idea.
Thank the Lord, there is no eBay and Amazon. But while I was saying that, I said, hang on, eBay is ridiculously expensive when you want to sell a game, and Amazon even more. It’s 15% plus close to a dollar per item.
It’s enormous. And there are no dedicated websites for geeks and nerds and gamers. So I said, well, hang on, wait a second.
Maybe you have there something. Are you sure there is no dedicated marketplace for retro video games out there? And he said, well, I’m pretty sure.
So I did my own research, and it’s hard to believe, but actually it’s true. There is no website worldwide that is dedicated as a marketplace to retro video games. Of course, many game shops have their own website where they sell games, but that’s not the idea.
The idea is that every user can buy or sell games. So a real marketplace like Amazon or like eBay, but it’s not an auction. It’s just you can buy and sell this stuff for a fixed price.
And this is what retroplace.com is all about. And it launched beta in January, and in August there’s a fair in Cologne, the biggest games fair in Europe, the Gamescom. And this is where we have officially introduced the marketplace bit of the website.
On the website, you can already manage your collection. There’s a database with 110,000 games, which makes it incredibly easy to say, OK, I have this game, I have this game, I have this game, I have this game, I have this console, I have this console. And the nerds and geeks like to manage their collection in one nice place.
And this is what RetroPlace already does, and does it in a wonderful way, incredibly easy. The collection never looked greater than on that website. And the core of the website will be the Marketplace, and that will launch officially in August.
And then it will get really interesting, because the Marketplace is, of course, where the business model lies. So we take a 7% commission on every game sold there, which is a third or a quarter what Amazon takes, and it’s kind of half what eBay takes. So it’s really, really, really cheap.
And, well, let’s see. So far we have a thousand users on the website. Almost did no promotion at all.
This will change. And, guys, I want to have your take on that. When…
Yeah, because that could be interesting. When the website really starts, like officially the Marketplace and all, and if I see, OK, the Marketplace works fine, there are no big bugs, I was wondering, would it be absolutely fishy if I dropped a mail to a selected number of talents of Bodago and said, listen, you guys know me, there is something I want to tell you about, and would you help me promote it if you’re interested in the topic? Would you think that’s completely no-go?
I think if you weren’t you, maybe, but given the goodwill you’ve built up with your user base, I don’t see a problem. Like I said, I’ve already signed up just on word of mouth about it.
I’m pretty sure you signed up because I saw your profile.
I did.
No, I think it’s a great idea. And just like with Bodago, the fact that you really feel like it’s a partnership when you work with you, Armin, I love how you try to get everyone involved no matter how they’re affiliated with your website. So yeah, I don’t see why not.
I still have to think about it because it can go down really bad with some people, understandably. And I don’t want to offend the people. But as I see Bodago as a family business, and it’s so personal, so I feel I’m connected with everybody on Bodago so personally.
One final question, and it’s kind of taking a different slant, because you’ve already outed yourself as a bit of a geek and a gear head. So I know you’ve got some pretty impressive studio equipment, and Paul and I are Unabashed Gear snobs or sluts or whatever. We’re not snobs, we just like gear.
So we’d love to hear what your studio setup is, so maybe you could give our listeners some ideas on how they can improve their own sound.
Let’s start with the hardware, and I mean the non-technical hardware. I have in my room, which it’s a pretty old building, where the flat is in, it’s from the beginning of the 20th century, so it’s a very high ceiling. So I had to have a room within a room.
I built myself a vocal booth. Do you call it vocal booth anyway?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, a vocal booth, isolation booth, whatever works for you.
So I did that with walls that I built myself, and I can only tell you that I think I’m a firm believer. There is a foam made out of melanin. It’s called Basotec.
It’s made by, I think, the company Bayer. It’s a chemical company, but you can buy it. You should be able to buy it in any decent store that sells record gear.
It’s called Basotec. And I think this is the acoustic foam to go, no matter what. I haven’t come across anything that is better than that.
It’s pretty expensive. Like, four square meters will be $100 or something like that. So it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty expensive.
But I think it’s just the trick. So this room in a room has this… is built with this Basotec.
Inside the vocal booth, there is a Neumann U87, which is a great microphone, no question. I just think it doesn’t suit my voice. So it would be a good idea, reminded to myself, next time before you buy a $2,500 microphone, try it first.
Yeah, but it’s hard to get that out into your own studio, you know, unless you work out an agreement with who you purchase it from.
Every decent store should give you a test opportunity, and if they don’t, you go away. And the guys would have done, happily, I just said, ah, nah, it’s fine.
It’s a U87, what could go wrong?
It sounds wonderful, but I also have a Browner Phantom Classic, and that sounds so crisp. It has this… I can’t describe it.
It’s really like… It’s just a very crisp sound that is also maybe because I’m a baritone bass voice, and it really helps this voice. So these are the two microphones.
I also have the Sennheiser 416. Never used it so far. Yeah, I come to that point in a minute.
So then the audio interface that I have is an Apollo Twin Duo, which I rate for its price range. Absolutely king of the kings. I have not come across anything at all that comes even close to what this thing does.
It’s especially useful because usually you have effects in your DAEW, and the effects are rendered in your computer, which gives a little bit of lag time. But this thing has the effects executed with a digital signal processor within the device. So you have no…
It’s not called lag. What is the word I’m looking for?
Latency.
Latency, thank you. You have no latency whatsoever, which makes it wonderful for many other purposes as well. And yeah, I think it’s just wonderful.
It has two channels, wonderful analog digital converters. They’re just awesome. It’s about, I think you can get it now for $700, $800 probably.
How about that? Yeah. And did you mention, was that the solo or the duo?
I have the duo. The solo probably would do for me, because really I have only one effect running in it, and that’s like a channel strip, and that’s basically it, what I’m doing, because I hardly do any… I don’t do any cueing on my voice.
Okay, well, that’s not completely true. I do a little bit of… In the 100 Hz, I go like 2 dB down, and then just because I like it in the 12 kHz, I give it like a 1.5 dB+.
It just adds a little bit of air to the voice, which I really, really like. And nobody ever complained.
That’s what matters.
Absolutely. And there’s one… I think it’s magic.
And I have to say, I hate waves for their DRM system that they have. It’s so uncomfortable to use. Well, if you have once set it up, it’s fine.
But if you change the computer, it’s just a nightmare. I hate them for that. But they have a plugin called Renaissance Vox.
And this is a compressor and gate. And it’s the most easy gate compressor combination I’ve ever seen. It works like magic.
It’s a very, very great gate, because the gate doesn’t… It’s not like… But it’s really…
And when there is like a… You don’t have to cut your breathings out, because when you trim it correctly, it will not get the breathing. But it doesn’t cut it off like with an X.
It really pays it out so nicely, so naturally, that it sounds awesome without any editing. I really, really love that, and I really recommend it. It’s called Renaissance Vox.
It’s pretty cheap now. I think you probably can grab it for 69, 89 dollars. Maybe even cheaper, because it’s a very old plugin, but I think it’s just wonderful, and it does magic.
And for the computer, it’s an iMac. i5, now it’s like two, two and a half, three years old. It’s doing its job great.
Well, for voice over recordings, you don’t really need that much power. So any computer will do. But with me, it will only be a Mac.
I’m not against PCs, but after I came from the Atari ST in the 90s, the first computer I worked with in the next job was a Mac. And well, then it was just natural to buy a Mac for my flat as well. And that’s why I ended up with a Mac.
So I’m an Apple fanboy. Now, all you haters, you can come after me.
I’m a fanboy too. I don’t know how I feel about all the USB-C stuff that’s coming out now, but it’s still overall, I think it’s just a reliable system to use. And for our listeners, if you’re interested in the Waves Renaissance VOX app, it’s actually on sale right now for…
or excuse me, plugin, not app, for $45. So about $30, $40 less than what Armin would say.
It’s really a no-brainer, especially if you already have Waves plugins. So you went through all this DRM obstacles that they put in the way. Maybe they improved by now, but if you already have a Waves plugin, well, yeah, spend those $49.
If you are not happy with the gate… And the gate thing really is a thing, because even if you have a great, really extraordinarily well-set up audio chain, you still have, even with the best microphones in the world, you have at like minus 70, minus 65, depending on your microphone, maybe even minus 80. If you have a Neumann TLM3, which has a really…
The floor noise is like non-existent, but you still have this little bit of hiss, like so really, really tiny. So I am a noise Nazi, so to speak.
And this thing is so fantastic, killing that. I have not come across anything that is like that, and definitely not that easy to use. It’s just wonderful.
I never thought I would, but I would recommend Waves to that respect.
Very cool. So once again, that’s the Waves Renaissance Vox Plug-in with a gate and compressor in it. I tend not to play with plug-ins that much, but for $45, I might give it a shot.
So Waves, if you don’t use it, they also have a popular D-Breather plug-in, as well as a nice D-Esser, and they’re well known for having pretty affordable plug-ins compared to some of the other competition that’s out there. And of course, if you have your UA Apollo, it’ll play very nicely with that.
Well, Armin, you mentioned the word Renaissance, and that’s a perfect way to wrap up, because you are really a Renaissance man in every sense of the word. You went from publishing to coding. You obviously know your way around the studio.
You’re an audio engineer, a voice talent, and now a retro gamer marketplace entrepreneur. So we’re so happy to have your talents shared with us here on the VO Meter. We can’t thank you enough for being with us.
Thanks again.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Armin.
Paul, Jean, thank you so much for giving me the chance to chat with you. It’s really highly appreciated. Thanks for having me.
To all the listeners, hope you enjoy that. And I see you next time.
That’s it for this episode of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Stay tuned for part two, where we talk about online casting sites and some of our favorites to work with. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to the VO Meter. Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.