Trust the Experts!

This week I learned a valuable lesson. Know what you know, know what you don’t, and most importantly once you seek the advice of experts, Listen to them!

I have been struggling with getting my sound right. I have spent months worth of time researching, tweaking, and researching some more. As a voice actor here in Baltimore, I had a local sound engineer based in Maryland, come out and listen to my setup. I sought out and paid for advice from experts all over the country. Even had the incomparable George Whittam set my up with his Twisted Wave stacks for processing auditions. I had finally gotten to a place where technically, my sound is quite good, dare I say “Broadcast Quality”? No, I would never use those words. The thing is, the results were not there on my auditions. So, off I went making changes. New mic, new interface, new mic position. “This has to be the reason” I told myself. Well, a few weeks went by and the results were largely the same. A few small gigs here and there but I was still being largely ignored by the big jobs.

Even further exasperated I went back to what was setup by the experts, namely the Twisted Wave Stacks. I also put back my existing mic and interface. I started working with George again and he told me my setup “Sounds Excellent!”. Additionally, I set off on completing a new demo with the great Terry Daniel. I wanted to create something from my space so that potential clients would hear a true representation of what they would get when they hired me. Terry assured me my space sounded “expletive deleted…Professional!”.

With two more reassurances, (and exclamation points to boot!) I started sending out auditions again. Wouldn’t you know it, I booked a job on a P2P just days later. Here’s the kicker. The job was supposed to be done via phone patch next week. The client not only hired me, but they decided to cancel the session and just use the audition in the final cut. They said “We don’t need the phone patch Paul, you nailed the audition!”

So, the moral of the story is…Create a good studio sound. Seek out good advice, and hire the people who know the industry of course. However, when you get a setup up that works, don’t mess with it, and by all means TRUST THE EXPERTS!

Thanks for listening.

Paul