The VO Meter Episode 42, Simon Vance

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