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.
Hello, everybody, and welcome, finally, to episode 40 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We’ve got a great show today. We have a guest that I’ve literally been chasing for two and a half years, none other than the announcer, Doug Turkel. We’re going to do some wrap up on current events, including my recent trip to APAC.
We’ve got loads and loads of questionable gear purchases, at least from my end.
From your end?
That’s shocking, I know. And we’ll talk a little bit about imposter syndrome and how they can affect your voiceover career.
All right. But before that, we’d actually like to welcome a new sponsor. You might know him as JMC.
It’s none other than J. Michael Collins of JMC Demos. So he has agreed to be a sponsor of the podcast, and we’re really happy to have him.
So are you looking for a professionally produced voiceover demo that will get the attention of agents, casting directors and other buyers? J. Michael will personally handwrite unique scripts for your VO demo that capture the pulse of the business, creating memorable impressions among those who are looking to cast now.
Walgreens, because it’s flu season, you live in a place with doorknobs and handrails and, you know, people.
We tried booking a vacation rental on one of those other websites. They don’t always tell you everything.
The stars take it to the red carpet.
We are back live from the red carpet.
California leads the way for change in America, and so does Kamala Harris.
Rated M for Mature, Claire Redfield.
And who exactly are you?
So, yeah, what hashtag should I use to describe a grown man in a tuxedo wrestling a goat?
And prior to 1933, many of them belonged to a variety of political parties that were now outlawed in Germany.
This is the story of how Q got Curly.
Michael here. Thanks for listening to the VO Meter podcast. It’s one of my favorites.
If you’re looking for a great demo like the ones you just heard, check out jmcdemos.com for more information.
So thanks again to J. Michael and JMC Demos for sponsoring the podcast.
Yeah, and segueing nicely into our current events, one of the things I’m most excited about is the demo I’m in the process of working on with JMC. We’ve had a prep session and we’re recording on Tuesday, so that’s going to be pretty cool.
Very cool, and I believe you said you were working on a political demo with him?
No, actually commercial.
Oh, okay, cool.
Yeah, so that’s one of their specialties among other genres like political you mentioned, but I need a new commercial demo and that’s where we’re putting our focus right now.
Very nice. I have a couple of demos that could certainly be updated, and I’m looking forward to getting a new e-learning demo with him because I know that’s an area that he definitely has a lot of experience and expertise in.
Yeah, of course. So speaking of other current events, anything cool happening with you, Mr. Daeley?
Other current events? I just play and catch up, I guess. Aside from my monthly e-learning assignments, I had a bunch of video editing stuff to do for GBAA.
Finally finishing up that. We actually have some great events coming up. We have a webinar on how to stay legal in social media with none other than Rob Siglim Paglia.
That’s actually going to be later today, which will probably be after we actually post this. But anyways, it’s just a helpful webinar on how to make sure that you aren’t saying anything on social media that might actually jeopardize you or your business. Things to protect yourself from, like copyright infringement, things to prevent you from accidentally saying anything libelous to any potential clients, and just maintaining a professional reputation on social media.
Once again, that staying legal on social media with Rob Siglim Paglia, and even if you can’t join today, you will be able to catch the recording if you like, if that’s something that you’re interested in on the GVA website.
Very cool.
Other than that, we do have another cool class coming up at the end of the month. We have Voice Over Villains with video game veteran Brian Summer. Brian is probably one of my absolute favorite character coaches to work with, because he gives such concise and precise feedback.
I mean, like, I’ve done multiple sessions with him, and I just feel like my character reads get so much better every time. And who doesn’t like to play villainous characters? So we’re really going to dive deep into sort of like the nitty gritty motivations that these diabolical characters have.
So that’s coming up on June 20th and June 27th, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific Time, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern. So go ahead and check out Voice Over Villains on the GVAA website if that’s something you’re interested in.
Very cool.
So personal VO stuff. I’m waiting on a couple of referrals. A good friend of mine actually is referring me to an e-learning client of hers who does a lot of e-learning for middle school students.
So I’d be very happy to work on that. And I actually got reached out to by a UK agent. So I’m in the process of going through their submission guidelines.
And hopefully in the next week or two, we’ll decide if that’s a good fit for each other or not.
So they found you?
Yeah, they were looking to increase their roster. So they were just looking at VO websites online, and they found mine. So it works, people have a good website.
Indeed. So that’s pretty much everything that’s going on in my VO world. What about yours, Paul?
I’ve been really busy, actually.
Yeah, you have.
Almost to the point where I was thinking of bailing on my part-time job. It had gotten that serious. Crazy.
But it comes in waves, so I’m basically just riding the wave for now and hoping that it won’t throw me off, basically. But if it does, then that’s even better because what I’ve been pursuing for the last couple of years would love to be full-time sooner rather than later, but I’m not going to force the issue if I don’t have to. But some of the things I’ve been working on, some continuing e-learning work for a client in Japan, I think I mentioned in the last episode, they’ve been sending me stuff every couple of days.
I did a job with you, which was nice. Thank you again for that referral. Oh, that’s right.
If you don’t mind, I just wanted to mention, I had a bit of a… So usually I get the scripts for my monthly e-learning client about the middle of the month, and so I have about two and a half weeks to get everything done. And then unfortunately this week, our scriptwriter had a bit of a delay, and so I got everything about 10 days later than usual.
So I only had about a week to get everything done. So I actually hired out Paul. I hired out our good friend Marisha, who does the intro voiceover for the podcast.
And it was great. I mean, usually when I do these, I’ll actually hire some local talent, and they’ll come to my studio and we’ll record that way. But it’s so nice just kind of sending it off to reliable professionals and knowing I’m going to have something usable and that’s edited down for me.
And it was a blast working with you guys again.
Yeah, that was great. Thanks so much for including me once again.
My pleasure.
So I did that. I was also found from just a web search and was hired for a short narration for that. Let’s say I did a job for Bikini in the UK.
That’s a motorcycle cover, a really minimalistic one, so that’s why it’s called Bikini. Instead of the big nylon ones that cover the whole bike, this just goes over the seat and the handlebars. So this was a really obnoxious video with the owner of the company talking about how to protect your bike with a bikini, and I’m the voice over for it.
It’s me saying, does size matter? Little cliché, but it’s fun.
It’s how you use it.
Exactly. So that was cool. I did my first job for Mr. Tim Page and our sponsor, podcastdemos.com.
I don’t know if he wants me to talk about the client, but suffice it to say, it’s a podcast, and I did the intro for them. And then finally, I just today had a directed session for some dubbing for a messenger app, and did that a couple of hours ago in a live session. And then the main thing I want to talk about is a little bit of current events, and then an actual event is APAC, or the Audio Publishers Association Conference, which was a couple of weeks ago in New York City.
And I attended that. As we talked about in other episodes recently, I’ve been really trying to make audio books the thrust of my business, and to that end, I attended my first, it’s a shame to say, Audio Publishers Association Conference. There’s one every year.
It’s done by the Audio Publishers Association, or APA, and it’s a gathering of about 600 people, not all narrators, but narrators, producers, directors, publishers, anyone involved in the audio book industry. And I have to say, it was really cool. I learned a lot, had some great times with friends and other narrators.
There’s a lot of parties involved, and that was cool. And then the day before, Johnny Heller, prolific audio book narrator and coach, has a workshop called his Splendiferous Audiobook… something, something.
That’s probably what he calls it, actually. But it’s Splendiferous Narrator Workshop, I think is what it is. With a lot of friends we’ve had on the show, including Sean Pratt, Johnny himself, Stephen J.
Cohen, and a couple other coaches. Let’s see, Paul Allen Rubin. I’m going to forget somebody I know.
Hilary Huber, PJ Oakland, Melissa Moran was involved, Greg Tremblay, Jeffrey Kafer, Pat Fraley, who was just on the show, was there involved as a panelist as well. And… Oh, and Simon Vance, who is going to be a future guest on the show.
And that was really cool as well. That was about a hundred people in the Baruch College Auditorium. It’s a panel discussion with some coaching on the side for some select people that won a lottery basically.
One of them who was Heather Masters, friend of the show. And she was fabulous. Just blew the crowd away to the point where everyone was glued to her performance.
Johnny did this great thing where in order to get her out of her comfort zone, he made her move around the stage. And at first, just because I was talking to her a lot about it, she was really nervous thinking, you know, this is complete anathema to what we do as audiobook narrators. We stand in one spot, try to make sure we don’t move away from the mic for the most part.
And moving around the stage, while she’s used to that as being a trained stage actor, was really kind of off-putting at first. But you could see the miraculous change once she was able to sort of free herself from that closed-in performance she was giving. And once she was able to move around the space, it was completely different.
And I remember Johnny’s quote at the end. He actually said, if you have that and you don’t share it with the rest of us, or he said, if you have that in you, basically, you know, her acting performance, you have to share it with the rest of us. Otherwise, it’s just not fair.
So…
You’re doing the world a disservice by…
Basically, that’s what he’s saying. So Johnny has a way of basically distilling things down to the basics in a really appropriate way, and that was just perfect. So congratulations to Heather on that coaching performance.
So one of the takeaways… Actually, I’ll go through a couple takeaways. The first was with regard to pseudonyms.
There was a panel devoted entirely… This is Johnny’s workshop. A panel devoted entirely to erotica and romance.
And there was a lot of questions about pseudonyms. And the takeaway basically was, if you want to use one, great. For whatever reason.
It could be you don’t want to have your name associated with a certain genre, a certain political stance. This goes for all VO, if you want to use a pseudonym for something. But the consensus was prepare to be outed, because it eventually will happen.
Especially with romance fans of audiobooks, because they get to know their narrator so well, that they will actually try to figure out whose pseudonym is what, and talk to each other on forums and Facebook groups. And not three days after I got back from APAC, there was a thread that was exactly this on the MM, the Male-Mail Romance Forum that I belonged to on Facebook, where somebody said, hey, I think so-and-so is this pseudonym. What do you think?
Who else can we figure out? And thankfully, I don’t know if they were an author or a narrator, the first comment was, you know, these people do this for a reason. I think it might be a little bad form to try and out people.
And then the person was like, ooh, I didn’t think of that. You’re probably right. But it perfectly proved the point at Johnny’s Workshop that this happens.
So if you’re going to use a pseudonym, be prepared to eventually be outed. And that’s what changed my whole mindset. Ironically…
I remember before you were going, you were actually debating whether to make a joint business card with your pseudonym on the back.
Well, I did, sort of. I ended up getting separate business cards. You’re right, I was looking at a dual business card.
And somebody, I think it was Mike Norgaard from our Meetup group, wisely said, that’s a really bad idea, because then you’re going to immediately out yourself to people who you’re trying to not have the pseudonym be known to. I said, good point. So I got separate cards.
I did do that. I got just about a hundred of the cards for the pseudonym. And I was correct in that I needed them.
I ended up handing them out more than anything else, because as we heard at APAC, it’s another takeaway that the romance genre is the biggest and the most popular. So having a separate card for the person that gets me the most work made a lot of sense. And I made some media connections that will probably pay dividends pretty soon.
So those are the two takeaways that I want to get out first. The business card and the fact that if you use a pseudonym, you’re probably going to get outed. So at some point, you may just want to use your own name.
So the last takeaway is this concept of imposter syndrome. And it came up first talking to Heather that we talked about. Heather was…
I asked her for permission to speak about this, but she was really nervous about being at one of these panels at APAC because it was called The Professional Narrators’ Way to Advance Your Career Further Work-Life Balance. And it involved Andy Arndt, Neil Hellegers, a couple other people. Melissa Moran was one of them.
And we were looking at the program together and Heather said, that doesn’t describe me. I’m not in this group’s league. And you know, I said, I think you are.
And I’m sure it’s not as elitist as you might have in your head. You’re conjuring up this image of one thing. And I don’t think it’s like that at all, especially knowing Andy pretty well and having her on this show, as well as Melissa having her on this show.
So we ended up going. And one of the things that Melissa talked about was the same thing, how she had the exact same feeling about not feeling like she belonged and feeling like the other people to her right on the panel were really more qualified to speak about it. But they had asked her to speak at this panel and actually Johnny’s Workshop as well.
So she obviously deserved to be there. And I am ashamed to not know that Melissa has done over 240, I think, audiobooks herself. Definitely over 200.
I had no idea she was that prolific. So definitely deserved to be there as well. And the point of this is that I think we all sort of feel this to an extent.
I definitely feel this whenever I go to an event and someone comes up to me and talks about the podcast. And it happened at APAC. I was talking to Michael Lenz, who has his own podcast, a Mike Lenz voiceover podcast, ironically about Rich Miller’s podcast, the audiobook Speak Easy.
So it was this really meta moment. I was talking to Michael about Rich, and as this conversation was happening, this other guy comes up to me and says, hey, Paul Stefano, I love The VO Meter.
So, a fellow’s name is Tim Jackson, by the way, another great narrator. So it just proves my point that I think to an extent we all sort of had this concept of imposter syndrome. And a couple days after we got back, I think because Melissa and I were talking about this, she posted on Facebook this story from Neil Gaiman about how he was at a cocktail party and was just sort of schmoozing it up, and in walks Neil Armstrong, the astronaut, the first person to walk on the moon.
And he had a conversation with Neil, Neil Armstrong, and Neil said, you know, in this room of people, I really feel like I’m an imposter. I really shouldn’t be here. I’m not that important.
And Neil Gaiman thought to himself, if Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, feels like an imposter, then obviously we all have that feeling of being slightly out of our depth from time to time. But I don’t know how you feel about it, Sean. I think if you’re invited to be somewhere, first of all, you should be there.
But secondly, I think you need to take stock of your own self every once in a while and how far you’ve come. Because it seems like however far you think you have to go, there’s somebody who’s looking up at you thinking, wow, I can’t believe how far they’ve come.
Exactly. And so I feel like the biggest issue here is that people are their own worst objective critic, right? And we tend to be our own harshest critic.
And then another thing is, is because I see this idea of imposter syndrome coming up a lot, I feel like if you’re, especially if you’re pursuing a creative endeavor, whether it be voice acting, acting on camera, writing or like being a visual artist, I feel like you’re going to have some form of imposter syndrome. Because I feel like being a creative, we tend to be perfectionists, we tend to be our own harshest critic. And even if we’re good, even if we’ve got 240 or 300 or 500 books under our belt, we have people that we aspire to and we have this idea of what the true successful professional looks like.
So maybe we just are kind of judging ourselves with too harsh of a meter, but pun unintended. But yeah, I honestly think, and that’s why it’s important to recognize when other people give you these accolades and ask you to be an expert in these areas. Just trust that you have something worthwhile to offer.
Like we said, and that is relevant to all sorts of fields. I feel like, one of the reasons we started the podcast is because we felt like we had something to offer because we had been doing this for a number of years and apparently the questions that we had been answering online were helpful to people. So we just decided to do it more regularly in an audio format.
So don’t be… It’s important to kind of check in with people that you trust. Maybe it’s a coach or a mentor or someone in an accountability group like our friend Heather and stuff like that.
And listen to your cheerleader sometimes. I mean, it’s not all about blowing smoke. It really is just like, hey, we think you’re great, so accept that.
And then that doesn’t mean that you should just sit on your laurels, but continue to improve, but don’t discount the progress that you’ve already made and just remember how far you’ve truly come.
Yeah, I think your last point is important too. I think that a healthy dose of humility is definitely good. You don’t want to be the pompous ass who thinks they do everything well and will only do one take for a director because it should be good enough for them.
You should definitely have an ounce of humility, and that will keep you hungry, so to speak, to keep trying to improve and get better.
But confidence is always useful.
True.
That’s where the fine line is. Yeah, don’t be arrogant. Just be confident in your abilities.
So what was it like at the conference itself? What kind of events did you go to there?
Well, there was different panels, usually two at a time. And let’s see, I think there was maybe four during the day. So it’s only one day right now.
I’m not sure if people know that, but right now APAC is just one day. There’s a lot of events going on by different organizations and even APAC itself on different days. So there’s a pre-social on the night before.
And that’s sponsored by the APA, and pretty much everybody goes to that as a way to sort of mix and mingle and talk to people. But then there’s events even the day before and the day after by other people associated with audiobooks. So I was at an event that Sean Pratt was hosting on Monday night.
So APAC was Wednesday. I was up there as early as Monday night, went to this cocktail hour, cocktail couple of hours with Sean and a bunch of other narrators and audiobook people. Then Tuesday was Johnny’s Workshop, which I think is in its third year around APAC, always the day before.
Then there’s APAC itself, which is the Wednesday. Then Wednesday night, there’s another cocktail party that used to be called the Not Naughties. When the audio book awards were at the same time as APAC, they used to be back to back one day after the other.
And this year, maybe it was last year, they split. So the Audies are a couple of weeks or months earlier, and then APAC happens. So this party used to be called the Not Naughties because it was the party that everybody would go to when they weren’t nominated for an Audie.
But now it’s called the Not Not Naughties because it’s still people who aren’t nominated for an Audie, but it’s also not during the Audies, so it’s a double negative Not Not Naughties. But it’s basically just another excuse to have a happy hour after APAC is over and everybody’s winding down. But then the conference itself had, I guess, I think four different slots of panels.
So the first workshop I went to was breaking down dialects, master class with Siri Scott, who was the head of acting and directing at the University of Notre Dame. And that was great. There were so many things I had no idea I was not doing, like learning IPA, how to use a primary source to figure out a dialect, how to practice it, how to make adjustments.
Just like I said, a master class, and she was kind enough to provide her whole presentation to the APA website. So if you remember, you can go look at it now. And it’s basically a step-by-step process on how to break down a dialect and use it in an audiobook if you need it.
So that was pretty interesting. Then I went to the one I talked about earlier, and here’s the whole list of people. It was how to have a sustainable career and a quality of life.
And it was all about life balance and how to not burn your voice out and still be able to do stuff in your personal life and set boundaries and have a set schedule. It was Angelo DeLoretto, Neil Helliger, Melissa Moran, Gabra Zachman, and moderated by Andy Arndt. So that was pretty interesting as well.
A lot of good tidbits about how to manage your career and still maintain your health and sanity. One of the biggest takeaways from that for me was the amount of recording that most of these people do. No one said six hours.
No one said five hours. Almost everyone said between one and three was their average per day. And that was really eye-opening for me because I always assumed a lot of these prolific narrators were just in the booth six, eight hours a day every day.
And I had no idea how they did it. So that was pretty eye-opening or ear-opening as it were. And then, let’s see, the last thing I went to was using…
actually, there’s two more. So there was four. And I should have actually counted while I was recapping them.
The next one was using archetypes to fuel character choices. And that was done by Hall of Fame and Audi Award-winning narrator Vikas Adam. And he talked about how to use these classic archetypes that we have in literature and movies and pop culture, like the sage, the siren, the king, and things like that to fuel your character choices when you’re doing books.
And the last one I went to was Understanding Point of View Masterclass with PJ Oakland. And he was talking about how to understand POV, or point of view, in order to frame the dialogue within a book. So it will change depending on the point of view, whether it’s first person, third person, and third person omniscient, which I hadn’t really known about until he explained it in this masterclass.
So all of those were extremely educational and brought up things, again, I had no idea I was not doing, and in some ways made me feel like a bit of an imposter because it’s one of those things where I didn’t even know I didn’t know it until I was in these classes.
Well, something that I noticed pretty early, I mean, you’ve always seemed to have like an innate facility, like just a good talent with audio books. I mean, it’s your most fruitful genre. So it’s just, but it must have been really revelatory for you to realize how much you had to learn about this genre that you’ve enjoyed so much success with.
Yeah, absolutely. A little daunting as well. A lot daunting.
I don’t want to discourage you though. I mean, you sound pretty pumped though afterwards.
No, there’s so many things I was able to take away. I took copious notes, which I haven’t done in a long time. My hand actually hurt because I was literally writing out on a legal pad like I was back in college.
And I’ll go back to those and be able to enrich my audiobook performances, hopefully.
Very cool.
So that wraps up Current Events for this episode. And that brings us to talking about one of our sponsors, who I mentioned a little bit earlier in Current Events that I just did a job for, podcastdemos.com, and our friend Tim Page. 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 know, 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 then I blew it all up, which you’ll hear about in a second. 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 podcastdemos.com.
So thanks again, Tim, and podcastdemos.com. Didn’t you actually run into him at APAC?
Yeah, actually, I spent quite a lot of time with him. We were both at the Splendiferous Workshop and sat near each other and talked a little bit there. Then we talked a lot at the Mixer…
Well, let me backtrack. Then we went from Johnny’s to the Mixer in the same cab, along with Heather and Sybil Johnson. And then we talked a lot at the Mixer, and then talked quite a bit during APAC itself, too.
So yeah, Tim, it was great to meet you in person. Great dude, and he’s just blowing up. You may have seen on social media today, he actually booked a couple of audio books with Marvel, and Spider-Man, so…
I know, I’m so jealous. I actually read those books as a kid. Some of them are the Diane Duane ones.
Yeah, she does a lot of books that involve Venom, like The Venom Factor, The Lizard Sanction, and the one that Tim will be narrating, The Octopus Agenda, which I’m sure you can, if you’re a fan of Spider-Man, you know which villain that one is about.
If I’m not mistaken, I think he landed this in APAC. I remember talking to the producer who was doing it, and Tim’s the one who got the job.
Very good. Well, congratulations, Tim. I mean, you’re an inspiration and an aspiration for many of us fellow talent.
And he also was doing some perspiration in APAC.
It was hot and sticky in New York City.
Oh, gotcha. But he’s from New York. It shouldn’t be anything new for me.
He’s from upstate New York.
Oh, gotcha, gotcha. I don’t know my geography. Anyways, before this rambling derails us any further, it’s time for…
Questionable Gear Purchase.
So for this month’s Questionable Gear Purchases, I was a good boy, but I hear someone wasn’t, so I’m just going to let him take it away. What you got for us this month, Paul?
So I think I started talking with this a couple of episodes ago. I did a complete booth tear down and rebuild with help from, well, I should say, with almost them doing the entire thing, with Jeff from vocalboothtogo.com, the owner, and his partner or employee Alex. They came over and so they took down the entire whisper room, took off the casters on the bottom, and laid the booth on top of some of their sound absorption mats, and then hung their Sound Proofer Mass Loaded Vinyl Panels all the way around the booth from the ceiling in order to create another layer or basically a room within a room using the Mass Loaded Vinyl instead of any more hard materials like drywall or concrete or wood.
Now the reason for that is because I’m on the second floor of my house and I was a little bit worried about extra weight in this booth on an old general construction colonial. I was worried that more than what I currently have, which is about 600 pounds without me in it and then more like 800 when I’m in it, being in the same spot in the second floor of the house. So by hanging these on the ceiling, we didn’t add any more weight to the setup and it still provides a lot of the same benefits.
So then we put the booth all back up, put all the acoustic stuff back in, and it’s been interesting. I think it has helped a good amount with the vibration that I was experiencing on the highway, but I still am having a little bit of issues. It’s not perfect by any means.
I wasn’t expecting it to be. All I wanted was to get it as good as I could in this current space, because Jeff and his partner actually went down to my basement. We looked around and thought about building a whole new booth in the basement.
That was the original plan, because Vocal With The Go is now starting this entire mobile installation business of booths with traditional construction materials, if you want, or adjusting and improving something you already have. So after the consultation, Jeff said, I don’t think this will improve anything, because of my furnace being right next to where I wanted to put it, and the foot traffic overhead is under my kitchen. So with all the kids, now there’s like six kids in my house right now, because it’s the end of the school year, and apparently there’s some sort of party going on, I wasn’t privy to.
But all that traffic would have been right over where the new booth is going to be. So Jeff said, here’s what I think we should do, we’ll improve your current space, I don’t want to charge you for building a whole new booth if I don’t have to, and we’ll see if it works. So I’m a test case, and so far so good, I think it’s helped a lot.
Wonderful, happy to hear it. What other kinds of questionable gear purchases have you made?
I just bought a mixer.
I was curious because you were asking questions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It settled on…
I don’t have it yet, but I bought a Z10, an Allen and Heath Z10. I think it’s actually only a six channel mixer. It’s called 10 because of all the ins and outs, but I think it’s a six channel mixer, but I’ll figure it out when it gets here.
And I bought that because I’m taking on this new venture. One of the other things I’m doing, I forgot to mention in current events, is recording another author remotely and live booth directing for her as she narrates her book from New York. And that’s happening next week?
No, no, two weeks. Two weeks. So I needed a way to record the incoming signal and also route it back out.
Now, I’ve always been able to route the signal back out using either my Yamaha EGO3-6 or the Steinberg UR12, which I’m using right now. But I don’t have the ability to record the incoming signal, at least in a way that is reliable and doesn’t create loop back for the person on the other end. So I’m getting this Zed…
Name our existence.
Yeah, exactly. I’ve been trying to figure that out for years.
Three years now?
Yeah. I was talking to our friend AJ McKay, and he’s had a Zed 10 for a while. And I’m going to do a consult with him on Monday, so he can help me walk through it and try and get me up to speed on how to make this happen, now that I’ve committed to doing it.
But I don’t think it’ll be that hard once I get somebody that actually knows how to do it to show me how to do it. So that’s the other questionable gear precious. Although it’s for legitimate business reason, and I kind of need it, so we’ll see what happens with that.
Sort of sensible, I’ll give you that. It’s been a while. We got to fill the segment.
At least I know I put it on you for that.
But of course, all these changes are not without their pitfalls. Even though I set the booth back up the exact same way I had it 28 hours ago, the sound is not the same. You can probably hear it, Sean.
A little bit, yeah.
I have everything back in the exact same spot, same mic, same interface, but whatever is happening outside, maybe it’s what the Vocal Booth to Go people did. Not that they did a bad thing, but the change they made just was enough to tweak the sweet spot in the booth. So I’m having a lot of trouble getting the spot, the sound exactly back to where I wanted it to.
So we’ll see. Oh, I did buy one more thing. I forgot.
I’m staring at it. I bought a shelving unit for inside the booth so I can have the monitor inside. One of the issues with the new reconstruction is that I had the monitor that I used for the DAW and sometimes to read scripts off of on a shelf outside the window of the Whisper Room looking in so I could look out the window to see it.
With these panels now covering all the walls of the booth, the window is covered too. So I didn’t have a place to… There’s no way to access the window anymore.
So I need to monitor inside. So I bought this Better Homes and Gardens ladder shelving unit. You might have seen people have them in loft apartments a lot.
It’s a shelf that just leans against the wall. You could tack it in with some straps and some support straps, but since I just have it in the booth, I’m not doing that. But it looks just like a ladder, and it’s just leaning against the wall.
I have my monitor on there, my water, my phone, my headphones. So I got a whole new console inside the booth. That may be creating some of the reflections that I’m having trouble controlling, actually, now that I think about it.
So I may have to do some things to mitigate that, but that was another purchase. Again, I think sensible.
Bring out the towels. But yeah, that actually brings me up to a good point because one thing that people don’t really think of, especially when they just set up, say, a booth in a closet or something like that, is a shelf. Things to put things on.
Because you never know. Maybe you’re mounting a monitor or an iPad there. Maybe you have some kind of external monitor setup where you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse or trackpad or whatever.
You need shelves for these things or a desk for these things if you can help it. And like Paul was saying, you have to be careful about reflections. So you might want to make sure that you have some kind of padding, whether it’s a towel or a blanket on it.
But I cannot stress enough how useful it is to have some kind of shelving or desk setup within your booth if you can help it, if you have the space. So one thing, I might have talked about this on an earlier Questionable Gear purchase, but recently I picked up this little dongle called a Luna Display. And what that does is that you put it into the mini display port or the Thunderbolt jack on a Mac, and unfortunately it’s Mac only.
But they also have one for the newer model Macs with the USB-C. But anyways, you put that dongle into that jack and then it uses your computer’s processor and a Wi-Fi connection to turn your iPad into a second monitor. So you can either use this as sort of an extension, so you can position it to the left or the right of your monitor and have it be an extension of that monitor, or you can mirror it just by going into the system preferences and setting it to mirror the display.
And so that’s what I have. And so in my booth lately, I’ve been trying to do a lot more audio book auditions and long form stuff. And so what I’ll do is I have my mic suspended from the ceiling of my little PVC frame.
And to do that, I actually kind of like Frankenstein some of my stage ninja mic arms together. You can actually kind of pull them apart at the sections and make one longer just by like stacking them together like Legos kind of thing. So this thing’s reaching down.
And then in my lap, I have a little lap desk that’s got like a Bluetooth keyboard and the little track pad that I mentioned. So that way I can more… Because it’s so much easier working with…
Even though the iPad’s a touchscreen, obviously, it’s so much easier and so much more precise having the keyboard and the track pad to work off of. And so with those adjustments, I’ve actually been able to do like a true punch and roll in my booth, especially thanks to the latest update to Twisted Wave, which has very easy to use punch and roll function, which I’m very happy about. So yeah, I’m happy that I’m finally doing punch and roll in the booth.
But the funny thing is, is that I found out that Apple, with their next OS upgrade, they plan to have native iPad mirroring. So I’m just like, ah, it became a question for your purchase. Yeah.
So I don’t know, it’ll be good to have this backup. And my computers are kind of older. I’ve got a 2013 and a 2015 MacBook Pro.
So yeah, maybe that I won’t even want that OS upgrade. So I have something that will last me at least for as long as Thunderbolts are still relevant. Excuse me.
So we’ll have today’s guest, Doug Turkel, The Unnouncer in a few minutes. But before that, a word from our sponsor, Vocaboot to Go. Now, Vocaboot 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.
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Alright, so without further ado, let’s get to a man who I’ve been chasing since probably the first week we had this podcast to be on. He always said no, not because I don’t think he likes us, but because he’s just really, really unassuming. He’s The Unnouncer.
He’s also unassuming, but he’s a heck of a guy in talent. Please welcome Doug Turkel.
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Okay, and welcome to the interview portion of this episode of The VO Meter. I’m so excited to welcome this guest on. I’ve literally been chasing him to come on the show for about two and a half years, and he finally said yes.
I have no idea why. Now, you may not know his name, but you’ve definitely heard his voice. Over the past 20 years, this person has provided the voice for over 15,000 commercials over an impressive range of clientele including McDonald’s, Toyota, MasterCard, the Home Shopping Network, NBC Universal, and more.
He’s also become an advocate for the voiceover industry, helping to protect against scams and things that may have voice actors been taken advantage of. So, I’m so happy to welcome someone who’s been a mentor to me, Doug Turkel. Welcome, Doug.
Hey, Paul. Thank you very much. Great to be here, finally.
Finally. I’ll put all the blame on me.
It would be misguided of you to do that, but I’ll let you, you know.
But in all seriousness, I want to start out with a very public thank you because I’ve mentioned on the show before. I’m not sure if you had a chance to listen to any of our episodes, but out of the 37 episodes we’ve had, I’ve probably dropped your name at least a dozen times because early on in my career, which as our listeners know, has not been that long, you were very instrumental in offering me some advice and mentorship all remotely without asking for anything in return. And I’m so grateful for having that relationship and helping me to grow in my business as I got started.
And now I’m advancing a little bit and taking the career to the next level. So I want to again thank you so much for all the help you’ve offered me over the years.
You’re really welcome. And it’s very gratifying to hear that whatever little bits of information I gave you have been helpful to you and seem to have stood you in pretty good stead to this point. You’re doing great.
I’m definitely moving along, we’ll say. But yeah, again, it’s been such a blessing to me. And I’m just so grateful for all the help that you have given.
So thanks again for that. Now, along those lines, in recognition of you doing this not only for me, but for lots of people throughout the voiceover community, you actually were one of the finalists for the VO Atlanta Unicorn Grant this year. And congratulations to that.
How was that experience for you?
Thank you very much. It was surprising, to say the least, for a whole lot of reasons, one of which was that my assumption, I think, was always that the Unicorn Grant and award were something that focused on people who were newer to the industry, to sort of give them a really strong foundation of training and equipment and things they might need for their studio. Turns out that that is not the case at all.
But since I didn’t know that going in, I was shocked is a good way to describe how I felt when J. Michael called me to let me know that I had been, not only had I been nominated by a number of people, but I was a finalist for the award and was headed up to VO Atlanta to be there for the award ceremony.
Yeah, we actually had J. Michael Collins on a few weeks ago, and he said exactly that. So I think you weren’t alone in that assumption thinking that it focused on sort of getting somebody ramped up who was just starting in the business.
But he said on our show in no uncertain terms, that’s great if it can benefit somebody like that, but it’s really not the focus. The focus is to recognize somebody, or our peers recognize somebody who has helped the community as a whole, and you definitely fit that bill.
Well, thank you. It’s something, you know, everyone talks about giving back to the community. It’s something that’s a little difficult to do on a really large scale without a huge, expensive, concerted effort, so what I try to do is be as generous to anyone who’s looking for help as people were to me when I was starting my career.
I had some great mentors and coaches and friends and competitors who were incredibly generous, who gave me tons of information and helped correct mistakes I was making early on. Things that I can’t say that I wouldn’t have had a career without them, but it certainly would have taken me a lot longer and I likely would not have been nearly as successful. So any time I have the chance to help somebody sort of correct their course or help them figure out what their course should be in the first place, I’m happy to do it.
Well, you’re so great about that and I love that spirit that comes across when you talk about it. You can hear it in your voice that you really enjoy helping people and I love that. It’s actually one of the reasons we started this podcast because of help that I got from you and Sean has received from several mentors, mostly on the VO BB, some great folks there that we mentioned on other shows, including you, Peter Bishop, Melissa Exelberth, Philip Banks, all those people, Bob Bergen, all those people were so instrumental and still are in helping people get started that it’s just amazing.
Sometimes I describe it as I feel like I’m being punked. Like I’ll look around at some of the notes that people make and people giving direct referrals to clients, people giving out names of agents, and you think, that can’t be real. Is that really happening right now?
But it absolutely is.
It absolutely is. And everyone you mentioned is ridiculously generous with their time and their knowledge. A couple of them, Philip Banks and Bob Bergen in particular, are guys who are at the top of the game.
They don’t need to spend any time at all talking to anyone else in the industry if they didn’t want to. Bob, for example, will write pages and pages of information in response to somebody who sends them their demo, even if they’re brand new to the industry. He listens, he takes it seriously, and he’s so giving of his time and all the decades of information that he’s amassed.
It blows my mind. I mean, what those guys do makes what I do just pale by comparison because they’re so… Well, they’re way ahead of me career-wise, first of all, but they’re so willing to help people along that it’s inspiring to me and makes me embarrassed that I don’t do more sometimes, but just a little.
Well, let’s talk about VO Atlanta for a second because I feel like this year more than ever, and it may have just been my rose-colored glasses. I was extremely happy to meet you there, not meet, but see you there again. And when Bob was coming, that sort of lit up my spirit as well because like you, he has offered me, and like you said, he has offered me just millions of pieces of text of support to help with my career.
So having those people there certainly helped, but I think the overall vibe, even more than before, the last two years that I have been there, was a feeling of community and a feeling of helping people sort of get going and get excited or maybe even refresh. Sean and I talked about this on the last episode, that it probably was Kay, honestly. Kay, who also is just a light, Kay Bassett, who is also just a light for lost ships in the industry.
I think she set the tone. But do you feel that even more this year, there was that feeling of camaraderie?
Yeah, I absolutely do. And I’m someone who comes from the feeling that large conferences are really difficult to do well. You know, I had been to a whole bunch of the FAFCONs in the past.
For anyone who doesn’t know, FAFCON was really a small conference limited to about 100 people. There was no selling involved. Nobody was there pitching products or training programs or production services, any of that.
It was really just peer-to-peer sharing. And the structure of the event was built on the first day. You didn’t really know what presentations were going to be given.
It depended on who attended. Everyone who was there was encouraged to just share what they know. And I went to, I think, six different FAFCON events, and it was an amazing, not only a learning experience, but a bonding experience for those people who were regularly at those events, because we all sort of had the same idea of doing what we could to support our fellow voice talent.
The way I see it, and I guess the way most of those people saw it, there are no competitors, really, in voiceover. Even when I’m at an audition with you, Paul, you and I are not competing for the job. Yes, only one of us is going to get it, but it’s only, the only person who’s going to get it is the one who already sounds closer to what the producer already hears in their head.
We’re not going to talk anyone into hiring us if they don’t think we’re right for it. So I’m not competing with you, I’m just hoping to perform my best and then hoping that it’s appealing enough to the producer that they hire me to do the gig. So when you’re in a room full of people like that, it’s really easy to open up and share what you know.
By contrast, I used to think that big conferences had it all wrong and that it was just a show place for people to sell products and services to Voice Talent. To his credit though, Gerald has done an amazing job of making sure that there is a ridiculous amount of content at his events, at Voice Over Atlanta events, for people across all spectrums of experience in Voice Over. So if you’re brand new, there’s a ton of choices, the different presentations, the different sessions for you to go to, that aren’t going to be above your head, that are going to be at your level, and will give you a really strong foundation.
If you are more along the… in the intermediate section, you can choose some things that might be just a bit above you, so you have some maybe tech specs to aspire to. You can learn more about microphones or sound treatment or recording on the road, things that might be somewhat new to you.
And even if you’re a pro who’s been doing this for 25 plus years, like I have, there’s a ton of information from people who know a lot more about certain parts of the industry than I do, and there’s a lot for me to learn as well. So you can really tailor the event, tailor the weekend, to meet whatever your needs are. And I’m really grateful to Gerald for having done such a good job of making that possible for so many people.
Well, I’m glad you said that because, and to know it wasn’t just me with that sort of warm and fuzzy feeling. And you’re right, Gerald is absolutely to be credited for it. Because I know that there’s sometimes people that don’t come because they feel like they’re not getting out of it what they want to as either a business or a salesperson.
It’s because Gerald wants to keep it the way it is with that focus on really education and camaraderie. And I think that’s really to be commended. So this year, you weren’t even planning on coming before you were nominated for the award.
Is that correct? Tell me a little bit about how you felt afterwards.
That’s correct. I wanted to make it there. It looked like my schedule was…
There were a couple of things in my schedule that I couldn’t change. And then when J. Michael Collins called me to tell me that I’d been nominated and chosen as a finalist, I was able…
It gave me some real leverage, luckily, to change my plans. I wouldn’t have been so forceful in asking for those changes if I hadn’t been nominated. So I’m grateful on that account because it gave me the chance to be there for four or five days.
And the way I see these events, for me, it’s as much about just hanging out with a whole bunch of people who do what we do, who understand the… I’m overstating it here, but who understand the lifestyle of being a voice talent. Because not many people in our day-to-day lives can relate to what we do and why we do it and how it happens day-to-day.
So I just like hanging out with the cool kids. And this year, in particular, I met a whole bunch of new people who I hadn’t met before. I think a good portion of that had to do with just being part of the Unicorn Grant, in that people sort of knew my name.
People were willing to come up and say hello and congratulate me for having been nominated. I’m glad that it gave them an excuse to come up because it meant that I had the chance to meet scores of people who I’ve either seen before sort of around the edges and hadn’t spoken to or had never met before. And so I went away with a whole new list of friends and Facebook connections and all that good stuff.
Yeah, it’s great. You described basically what I said in our last episode, that it’s the camaraderie and being able to talk to somebody who knows what you’re talking about. I mentioned with Sean that I can’t talk to my wife about recording levels or audio interfaces because her eyes just glaze over.
And it’s not anything to fault her. It’s just not something that we have in common. So to be able to talk to somebody about mass in my booth and how to prevent low frequency waves from penetrating, that’s just cool.
I agree completely.
So we’ve gushed enough about VO Atlanta. Lord knows our listeners are sick of hearing me talk about it. But to sort of pivot off of the conference, one of the reasons you were there, as I mentioned, is because of your steadfast way you protect the VO community and help people from being scammed basically out of either a bad demo or from a phishing email.
You’re really vocal in the social media as well as some of the old school bulletin boards we talked about in helping people avoid those things. It started out with your blog, and it sort of pivoted to being able to help people in social media. So tell me some of the ways that you’ve been able to pick out scams.
How did you basically get involved in seeing these things before anybody else does?
Well, to go back a little further than you’re asking about, really, but maybe it helps explain things, my parents were very much social activists, very active in the civil rights movement back in the 60s and early 70s. And so we were raised, my brother and sister and I, were raised with a really strong sense of right, of doing what’s right, of making sure that people are treated well and properly and respectfully. And even though my attention that I give to these kinds of things that you’re asking about is not anywhere near on the scale of being a civil rights activist, within the small voice over community, I started to see that there were a number of people in different ways trying to take advantage of voice talent.
And that really, really made me angry. And then I realized that there were a ton of voice talent who didn’t see those warning signs. Exactly why I saw them or the first instance of it, I don’t really remember.
But for example, there’s the overpayment scam, which I’ve written a huge blog post about, I think it’s 8,000 words or something, called The Anatomy of a Voice Over Scam. And if you just, for anyone who’s interested, search that, you’ll find the blog post pretty easily. Every, I don’t know, five or six years ago, every couple days I saw someone else posting, hey, this job seems a little bit sketchy or unusual or odd.
And they would go on to describe the first, the opening salvo in the standard overpayment scam.
The game show host.
The game host show scam, yes, exactly. It’s mostly written in broken English. There’s some psychology behind that, actually.
It’s not by accident. And I’ll try to encapsulate the scam really quickly because it’s a pretty involved thing. But you get hired, I’m doing air quotes, you can’t see it now, but…
You get hired to voice a job… Sorry, I should not have underestimated you. I know better.
You get hired to voice a job at, quote, a studio near you, and the person who hires you explains that what they’re going to do is, let’s say, it’s an $850 assignment for you, another sentence from the scam. They’re going to send you, say, $3,000. They want you to deposit the check, take your 850 out of it, and give the rest to the quote-unquote contact who will meet you there at the studio at this supposed session.
Just no going in, there is no studio. And even if the studio does exist, there’s been no session book there. There is no job that you’ve been hired for.
It’s all a scam. It’s all fake. Because the check that they send you is also fake.
You deposit it, and then they ask you to withdraw whatever the overage amount is, hence the name overpayment scam. And they want you to send it… I misspoke a second ago when I said you give it to a person at the session.
You don’t do that. They want you to send them the money, actually a money order in most cases, or a cashier’s check, to their address. By the time you’ve done that, your bank then realizes a few days or a couple weeks later that the check you initially deposited is fake.
You’re on the hook for any fees for having deposited a fraudulent instrument to the bank, and you’re out whatever money you sent back to the scammer as payment for producing the session or the engineer or whatever excuse they might have given you. So, when I noticed that a lot of people thought something was iffy about that, but weren’t really sure, I started being really vocal about explaining what was going on and why they should be skeptical. And then some people started pushing back.
I have to imagine that they were so desperate to get an $850 job that they just didn’t want to believe, couldn’t accept that it wasn’t real. So they went ahead and they accepted the check and they sent in the money, and then they realized that yes, it was a scam. And over the years, I’ve now heard from probably 35, 40 people who have lost money.
Oh my goodness, I wasn’t aware that happened.
Oh yeah, there have been a ton of people who have sent money back to these scammers, and just off the top of my head, I think it’s anywhere from about $700 to $2,100 that I’m aware of people having lost. And so that told me a couple things. One, there is a group of scammers that are usually based in Nigeria who circulate these scripts, think of it that way, as the template for running a scam.
And they don’t just do it to voice over actors, they don’t just do it to creative types, they do it if you’re selling a couch online. They’ll send you money and ask you to send… Oh, sorry, I sent you too much.
Can you send the rest to my partner who’s going to come pick it up in his truck but he needs money for gas or to repair the truck or whatever it is. So it happens across all different types of negotiations. And every few months, that script or another scammer in Nigeria must come across this one and they start working the voice over industry again.
And so they get email addresses from some of the pay to play sites or from mandy.com or from your own website. They might send you an email, they might send you a text to initiate the scam. So I learned that that was going on regularly, repeatedly, cyclically.
It kept coming back over and over again, which is why I ended up writing the blog post so I didn’t have to explain every couple of months, didn’t have to rewrite the warnings. But it also told me that there are a ton of voice talent who are either just unaware that scams like this exist, and I wanted to make sure that as many people as possible knew about them, or, like I mentioned earlier, were so desperate to get work that they just wanted to believe that these things were true, and they kept believing until they lost money. That was really my…
the motivation behind being as vocal as I could, because I didn’t want anyone else to get scammed. I didn’t want the scammers to win every time that they sent out more of these requests. And all the blog posts, all my responses on social media seemed to have at least made a lot of people aware of this who weren’t aware in the past.
And from that sense of doing good and doing right and making sure that people weren’t getting screwed over, people started complaining to me, and I started noticing there are a couple of… more than a couple. I’ll call them opportunistic voice, quote-unquote, coaches out there, who aren’t so much coaches, aren’t terribly interested in teaching you how to do voiceover, as they are information marketers who are very focused on getting people into their sales funnel.
And they’re sort of easy to spot too, but again, if you’re desperate to get work or if you’re just completely new to the industry and you’re excited about it and you read an ad or you end up on somebody’s website and they’re telling you how easy it is to do this work and you can make tons of money, they’ll be backing the trucks up to your house and just unloading sacks of cash and follow my step-by-step system and you’re guaranteed to be successful. You’ll start seeing a lot of all caps, you’ll start seeing a lot of exclamation points and hyperbolic promises about how quickly and easily you can make big money. It’s not true.
Ask anyone who’s been doing voice over for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Yes, it’s a great way to make a living, but it doesn’t happen quickly. There’s nothing easy about it.
There is a predictable path. There are some pieces of advice that you can take that will certainly help your career, but nobody can guarantee you success. Nobody can guarantee you big money.
Being chosen to do this work is completely out of your control. So you need to become the best you can be. Voice actor, you can be as good as you can be at doing the work.
That gives you the best chance of landing gigs. Following someone’s step-by-step program to make huge money in voiceover is never going to do it. So when I started learning about those coaches, those predatory, opportunistic coaches out there, I also wanted people, particularly newer to the industry, to be aware that that…
I don’t know that it’s really a scam, that that sort of approach existed and that there are tons of qualified coaches with good hearts and great information. But if you fall under the spell of one of these information marketers who are trying their best to squeeze money out of the voiceover industry, not only are you likely to lose a lot of money and not necessarily get a lot of great information, but they’re not likely to help your career much, if at all.
Yeah, it’s a shame. Like you, I was instilled in early age to be honest and always do your best, work hard. I was a Cub Scout from early on and eventually became an Eagle Scout.
I’m every bit the cliché of honesty to a fault. So I totally understand that attitude and I appreciate it, obviously. I think sometimes it’s people who are not only new to voiceover but are new to just the business world in general.
As we’ve talked about, I’ve been doing this for just about four and a half years now. But obviously, well, maybe not obviously, I’m in my mid-forties. So if you didn’t know that, surprise!
But I’ve been working my entire life, practically, since I was 16 years old slinging burgers at Burger King. So I’ve been exposed to the corporate world in a lot of different ways and even been through sales training and jobs I’m not so proud I had. So it’s easy for me to see through those scams.
But I think a lot of times, it’s people who are just not used to dealing with people on a business-to-business level, and they fall right into that trap. Because like you said, this isn’t new. This happens in vacuum cleaner sales, it happens in insurance, it happens in IT.
Every possible industry out there, these scams crop up, and you just have to keep your eyes open all the time.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And there are some coaches who really do their best to… Well, I keep saying newcomers to the industry.
I think those are the people who are the most susceptible, because they just don’t know what they don’t know. And those coaches’ sales pitches are more likely to fall on an audience that’s accepting, that is willing, more willing to believe the outlandish, ridiculous promises. They don’t know enough to know that they’re outlandish and ridiculous.
So those are the kind of people who say, hey, all the other coaches out there, everybody else in the voiceover industry, whose ads you might be seeing or whose websites you might be landing on to try and hire someone or pay for a coaching program, all those other coaches don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve figured it out. You should pay me because I’ll teach you how to do it.
That’s a lie. It’s not possible. If everybody else had been doing it wrong for so long, nobody would be successful.
And that’s simply not the case. So don’t be so willing to believe that these coaches know what they’re saying. At first, be a little bit skeptical of all of them.
What I recommend is, as soon as you start looking for coaching or before you spend any money, ask around. On the VO BB, you’ll find people who are very willing to share their experience and their opinions. On social media, it’s so easy now to jump into a Facebook group and ask, hey, I’m considering this program.
What do you think?
Yeah, but not so fast, my friend. I’ve seen, especially lately, some, let’s call them trolls. People who insert themselves in these conversations, pretending that they’re advocates, but are clearly representing one of these sales funnel coaching programs.
And you and I can probably sniff it out, but there’s probably people who are being taken advantage of within these social media realms because they don’t know.
Well, I’m sure that’s true. In fact, I’ve seen it. And in a couple of cases, on the more well-known Facebook groups, for example, I see that, you know, let’s say 10 people answer someone’s question about Coach X.
And then an 11th person writes, hey, wait a second, I love this person. They’ve been great for my career. I’m making this much money.
They taught me everything I know. And then a couple of people respond to that one person and explain why they might be skeptical about it. But if you ask across a couple of groups or on the VO BB, on Facebook, anywhere else you might have some contacts in Voice Over, people who have more experience than you do, that’s important.
I think you’ll really quickly start to notice a trend. And if 15 people say, you might not want to go in that direction, and one person says, oh, this coach is great. You couldn’t make a better choice.
To me, I would hope that at least the person who asked the question initially has a pretty good chance of noticing the trend and not just believing one person over everybody else in that group, you know? Maybe I’m overoptimistic, but…
Yeah, I think that makes sense. Well, let’s talk about some resources that are out there. It may help somebody who has a question, like about the business or about a coach.
It would be fair, I don’t think, to recommend specific coaches or training programs, but I think some of the free resources, some that Sean and I have mentioned over the years, make a lot of sense. So, I’ll do a couple of my favorites. There’s the archives of the Voice Over Cafe podcast, because I don’t think they’re recording new episodes, but all the folks there, Bish, Trish, Terry, Sean, Jordan, and…
am I missing somebody? I think that’s it. Oh, Matt Kalrich.
A couple of people who’s… Matt’s there too, but yeah, and then a couple of others who sort of drift in and out.
Right, so they have a fantastic archive of information if you go back to their backlogs. A couple of free blogs that I like a lot. Paul Strickvare’s blog, fantastic information.
Yours, of course, we mentioned. Tom Deere, the Not Silent blog, fantastic. Offers mostly business and marketing information, but invaluable to the stuff we’re talking about.
What else? What are some of your favorites?
I really like… I want to be a voice actor.com, which is written by Dee Bradley Baker, who is one of the most successful animation voices in Los Angeles. It’s not just about animation, though.
It’s really about getting started in voiceover. And he’s brutally honest, very straightforward, it’s completely free, and it’s got a really good… It’s a really good starting point for anyone who’s just considering voiceover.
I also like Peter O’Connell’s voiceover entrance exam, which again is brutally honest and holds nothing back. It tells you exactly what it’s like, realistically, to get started in voiceover. It’s not a, hey, start this now and you’ll be making $7,000 a month in no time.
It gets down to brass tacks, really bare-bone stuff that gives you an honest, realistic approach. There’s another website, I cannot think of the name of it. An agent in California just started, and it’s about getting started in voiceover.
I’m not familiar with that. While you’re thinking, though, one we already mentioned, live question and answer on Facebook, Ask the Pig. Bob Bergen does that every couple of weeks, and he’ll just answer any questions you have on Facebook Live.
And Dave Fennoy does the same thing, Ask Me Anything. So those are two resources. People absolutely at the top of their game, I mean, Bob’s freaking porky pig.
How much bigger can you get? But he’ll sit down and answer as many questions as he can in that time period on his Facebook Live.
Yeah, Bob’s amazing. And you can also just ask him on social media, and he’ll answer your questions there.
Or in private email. I sent him dozens of private emails over the years, and he never fails to answer. Well, I shouldn’t out him like that, but he’s just so giving, I don’t think he’ll mind.
No, I don’t think he will. And I’ve seen him write before. Anytime you have a question, just email me.
Here’s my email address. So he’s accessible, he’s easy to find, and he’s willing to answer questions, which is completely ridiculous, but he’s happy to do it.
So a new scan that’s come up fairly recently, but I stiffed out right away, is this one where someone tries to send you a Trojan to your email, and it has either a zip document or an EXE file, and it might be password protected, or it might be just an executable file, like an EXE, like I said, that will open on your computer. And all you have to do is click on it. So they’ll bait you with something like, here’s my proposal.
I actually got one this morning from a program director at a radio station. I woke up and said, great! They answered my email about doing imaging.
And then it said, here’s a proposal. Open the zip file and the password is 123456. So I knew it was a scam.
And basically what happens is, it’ll download some information to your computer, and either grab your contacts and send it out to them, or it will put some malicious code on your computer that could try and mine your banking information or your keystrokes to get your passwords for certain accounts. So that’s what I’ve seen a lot lately on some of the smaller freelance sites like freelancer.com, Upwork, People Per Hour. It seems like they are being just inundated with those kind of requests.
Are you familiar with that one, Doug?
I have not gotten that one, at least not as it relates to voiceover, but that’s more just general good internet hygiene and knowing better than to open unknown zip files or EXE files. If you’re really not sure whether you should open one, send the person who sent it to you an email or give them a phone call and say, hey, did you send me an EXE file or did you send me a zip file? I would never open one of those just that showed up in my inbox out of the blue.
Yeah, again though, that’s years of internet savvy or business savvy that I’m aware of. And I did exactly what you suggested this morning. I emailed that program director directly and he said, nope, I’ve been hacked.
But you know what? It gave me an excuse to call the radio or contact the radio station again, so that wasn’t the worst thing.
Right, you can always turn it into a positive. It’s just another excuse to contact a potential client.
Yeah, exactly. So pivoting off of scams, because frankly it’s kind of depressing, we want to talk about some of your specific voice over business aspects that you’re known for. What is your impressive mic locker?
Not all of them working, but tell us how you became basically a collector of mics.
eBay is the real answer. They were available. And I’m just a big fan of those.
If you’ve seen any of the pictures of my mics, you know that they’re all sort of from the same era, the 40s and 50s, maybe early 60s. But that machine age, big chunky metallic look today’s microphones sound incredible, but don’t always look so impressive. They’re not great to put on display.
You know, a 416 doesn’t look like much.
It does at airport security.
In an entirely different way. It’s impressive, but not in the way that you hoped. Yeah.
The Shure X2U also throws them for a loop every single time, it seems. But those old microphones just… Aesthetically, I love them.
Most of the ones I have, like you said, don’t work, but that’s not why I have them. They’re also cheaper if you’re collecting them and you want to buy them. It’s cheaper to get ones that don’t work than it is to find ones that still do.
So I have way too many of them. I need to start selling some of them off, as a matter of fact. But I thought it was an interesting way to decorate my studio, and it gave me a good excuse to tell my wife why I was buying more and more microphones.
Luckily, she thinks they’re pretty cool looking, too, so it was never a big argument. But it’s just something I do for fun. I had threatened at some point to try and refurbish them, at least the looks of them, not the wiring and all.
I haven’t started doing that yet, but maybe…
Maybe one day when I retire, I’ll start doing that.
But at least I’ll have some stuff to work on.
Well, kindred spirit there. I don’t know if you know, but we have an entire segment on our show called Questionable Gear Purchases, where we talk about all the dumb things that we’ve purchased over the last weeks or months, depending on how long it’s been since an episode. Luckily, we’ve calmed down a little bit.
I just did my taxes, or I should say my wife just did my taxes, and she said, how come you don’t have as many equipment expenses this year? I said, because I finally stopped being so stupid and didn’t buy a whole lot of bikes. But nevertheless, we always find something to talk about that’s related to the business in some way and basically just gives us an excuse to buy stuff.
Yeah, and thank you, by the way, for being kind enough to call my stuff gear. Since it doesn’t work, it’s really just decoration, but it looks like gear, so I’ll take it.
There you go. Well, the other thing that you’re kind of famous for is your unique branding and your slogan, The Unnouncer. Tell us how you came up with that and how it’s worked for you over the years.
Yeah, that also sort of came out of necessity because I’m one of those guys, and I’m not offended by this. It doesn’t piss me off at all. But I have tons of friends for whom this isn’t the case.
No one has ever told me in my everyday life, wow, you have a great voice. You should be on the radio or you should do voiceovers. You know, I don’t get booked because I have a big, deep, rich, sonorous, resonant, impressive voice.
I sound like a guy. Nothing unusual, nothing particularly easy to put in marketing materials. Hey, everybody, guess what?
I sound like an average guy. Hard to put an exclamation point at the end of that and sell it to somebody. And for years, when I first started doing voiceover, it didn’t really matter much, because everybody else in South Florida who was going after voice work had a big, deep, rich voice.
And so I was just the younger sounding guy, or the average sounding guy. It was relatively easy to get work. But once there was more competition as the non-announcer, I started thinking, wait a second, I really need to find a way to set myself apart.
And I started on a branding experiment to see what I could come up with. And what worked for me, there’s a ton of different ways to do this, but the technique that ended up working was this. I figured that my branding already existed.
I just wasn’t really clear on what it was. I didn’t have a good handle on it. And my clients were telling me every day how they thought of me.
Not directly. They weren’t calling me or emailing me and saying, hey, this is why we hired you. But I realized that I could figure that out if I took the specs from, I think, at the time I took the last six months of commercials I had been booked for.
Projects, whatever it was, commercial or not. And I compiled all of those specs into one document and started looking for the common thread. And to shorten the story, it’s pretty clear, the common thread for me was not an announcer.
We’re looking for someone who’s not an announcer. We don’t want a big impressive voice. We want your next door neighbor, a friend you talk to over a beer.
We all see that stuff in specs. But that was in all of my specs. And so I narrowed it down from this huge document with all those specs to a page with a bunch of those key words and started trying to narrow it down and really focus it down to one consistent thought.
And the last few that I came down to were not an announcer, not anounsery, and that word announcer kept coming up. And I actually don’t remember the day that I came up with unnouncer, but at some point when we hit on that, it was like angels started singing. Because for a number of reasons.
One, it perfectly described what I did. It turned what wasn’t necessarily a negative, but also wasn’t a positive. It was a pretty neutral thing.
I sound like a guy. Into something that I could encapsulate in one word, which is kind of rare. Actually, I got really lucky with that.
Also got lucky with the fact that it’s a made up word, so the domain name existed, and the trademark existed, so I could register it, which I did. And instantly, I had a handle. I had a word, a concept, that I could teach, I could use to teach my clients when to hire me.
My goal, my overoptimistic goal was, hey, anytime somebody needs someone who’s not an announcer, they should come to me. And I would define that by calling myself the unnouncer. And it worked spectacularly well.
It’s memorable, it’s interesting, it’s unique, it’s a talking point. Clients ask me all the time why I use it, what it means. Well, they know, hopefully, what it means, but they want more detail behind it.
And I consider myself lucky more than anything to have come up with it. And it’s funny because about six months after I registered that name and had the domain name and the website and all that stuff, I was looking through some old marketing materials. I used to keep a file of artwork that I liked or fonts that I liked, things I might consider when I was ready to do a new postcard mailing.
Remember postcard mailings, everybody? And I had ripped a page out of a clip art book, and there was a picture of a little cartoon guy yelling into a megaphone. And I did this, by the way, 10 or 12 years before I came up with Unnouncer.
I drew a red circle, the international no symbol, red circle with a line through it.
Like Ghostbusters, yeah.
Exactly. Over the guy with the megaphone, and underneath it I wrote Unnouncing. And that’s where that thought ended.
I had it, I put it in a file, put it away with all the other stuff, and maybe I saw it again over the next few years, maybe I didn’t. And then all those years later, I came back to Unnouncer and found that it worked perfectly for me.
Well, it really has sort of defined you. I often hear people just refer to you by your brand name. Dan Leonard does a lot on VOBS.
Another great free resource, by the way. I don’t know how I forgot to mention them. George and Dan, fantastic stuff.
So Dan will say, the Unnouncer, Doug Turkel, has a question. It’s just great.
Yeah, it’s great when something gets that closely attached to you. And branding is sort of hit and miss. I think some people try to come up with a clever line that does or does not define them very well.
But in the few times that it ends up being gold and working really well for somebody, it’s always because it’s incredibly accurate and descriptive of who they are, what they do, what they sound like, and what clients come to depend on them for.
Absolutely. Now, do you remember? You said you don’t remember the day when you sort of wrote it, but pen to paper.
But do you remember what year you launched the new website?
It had to have been 2009.
Okay, so 10 years. Solid 10 years.
Yeah.
So do you think… This is a lot to put on your shoulders, but I’m going to do it anyway. Do you think you’ve in any way influenced agents and casting directors putting out specs even more so listing not announcer-y by being so successful with your voice over career?
I don’t think there is a remote possibility that that happened.
Fair enough.
I think the timing is happenstance more than anything. I think the industry shifted towards a less announcer-y sound at the same time, but it absolutely had nothing to do with me.
You were just on top of it.
No, I don’t think I was even on top of that shift. I didn’t know it was happening. I didn’t encourage it.
I hoped that it would have happened maybe, but I don’t think I had anything to do with it. It just so happens that around the same time, that’s when the industry started shifting towards a younger sound, a more natural sound, and it just worked out. It wasn’t because of anything I did.
That’s for damn sure.
All right. Well, Doug, we’ve come to the end. Well, almost.
Before we go, if you’d like, please tell people where they can go to hire you or have you booked for their voiceover job.
Yeah, it’s easy. I’m at unnouncer.com, spelled exactly the same way as announcer, except mine starts with a U instead of an A. Un-nouncer, not an announcer.
And they can find all my contact information and demos there.
Great. Well, I want to thank you again for coming on. I’ve literally begged you for years, and I appreciate you finally caving and coming on.
Just fantastic stuff that you’ve offered up to the voiceover community. Always have, and I assume always will.
Well, thanks, Paul. Great to finally get the chance to sit down with you and talk to you. And I’m looking forward to the next chance to do this.
Fantastic.
Did I really say that out loud?
I think you did, yeah.
Well, thanks, guys. I really appreciate the chance to come and finally do this and sit down and talk with you.
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, 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.
Classes, private coaching, webinars, home studio setup, marketing and branding help, members only benefits like workouts, rate 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.
All right, and we are back. Thank you so much, Doug, for being a guest on the podcast. It’s great to have a fellow Unicorn Grant recipient on there, as well as someone who has really gone above and beyond in sort of mentoring newer talent and making sure that they kind of protect themselves as they enter the Wild Wild West, that is the non-union voiceover community.
Yeah, Doug has always been a champion for the little guy, so to speak. He’s always helping out people on Facebook, in person. He’s the kind of guy that will reach out to you in a private message and just give you an hour’s worth of advice for no cost and nothing expected in return.
He’s just that nice. And he’s always been a mentor to me, even if he didn’t know it. So that’s pretty much all we have for this episode of The VO Meter.
Before we go, we want to tell you about our sponsor and the way we’re recording this podcast right now, IPDTL. IPDTL is the cost-effective ISDN replacement. It’s great for interviews, outside broadcasts and voiceover.
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So that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Stay tuned because we have a wonderful episode coming up with the incredible Kay Bess next month. Other than that, we hope you guys have a wonderful day and keep listening to The VO Meter. Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter.
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