Getting Started in Voice Over
When people come to me for voice over coaching, they are at all different point in their VO journey. Sometimes they are quite experience but many are totally new to VoiceOver and are making the bold move to pursue their dreams. Building a strong foundation is extremely important, and my production partner Dave Scott and I work really hard to help our students learn things the right way from the start. Still, whatever regardless of when you plan to do your demos, it is really important to start practicing on an actual microphone with a preamp or interface in a studio setting for several reasons. Here are some thoughts to consider:
Learning Mic Technique
Good microphones are powerful. Whether you are starting out with middle of the road mics like the Rode NT1 or the Cad Equitek E100S, or investing in a more expensive microphone right away like the Neumann TLM 103, these microphones are condenser mics and will pic up all the sound in a large radius around them. You need to learn proper technique to best enhance your sound. Also, technique varies by genre. The way I work with my mic for conversational commercial reads or intimate reads is different. When I do video games I move around a lot and often back away from the mic, especially when I am shouting and doing effects. These are all skills I was taught and worked hard to hone, I did not wake up one day and just know how to do it. It takes time. And you do not want to walk into a studio for a job or worse for a booking and not have the skills necessary to rock that session!
Form Good Habits
Put simply, lessons are expensive. When you pay for a voice over coach or take a voice over class online, you are investing in yourself and your career. Whether it is the time spent with the coach in sessions, the time spent doing your homework in between sessions, or for daily practice, you need to be establishing good habits. You simply cannot do this without the pro equipment. You need to set up your studio so that you can prepare to be a professional. There is only one way to do this and you need to master your technique early on so that it is seamless when you launch your business.
You Might Have Diction Issues
No one in VoiceOver wants to have speech issues. Speech issues that I have had to deal with as a voice over coach range from diction issues, regional accents, articulation issues, plosives, and sibilance. If you only record on your computer and submit, it can be really hard for your coach to pick up some of these, or pick up the severity of some of these. Imagine speeding months coaching, getting ready for demo day, going to a pro-studio, stepping in front of a U87, and your coach hears a major diction issue they never noticed until demo day. What a disaster! This can, however, be easily avoided simply by setting up your professional home studio and working with your coach on real recording equipment.
The other side of this is that you need to become a critical listener of your audio too! You need professional headphones, or cans as we call them, that do not have a filter in them. You can not really hear how you sound without them, and you can not really hear what clients will hear or be listening to without them, so this is essential to your training!
You Need to Practice Recording and Editing
When you are working with a VoiceOver coach, you need to practice recording and editing they way you would when you would submit for an audition or a job. You can only do this if you have a functioning booth with a microphone, preamp or interface, computer with a DAW, and good cans. You need to practice editing your audio every day so that you get used to the ins and outs of your DAW and become efficient at producing pristine audio. Nothing else will suffice in this business. And it does not happen overnight, believe me!
Conclusions
I hope this has helped you better understand why you should not wait to set up your home studio! Timing matters a lot. While budget plays a factor for most people, even with cost in mind we can work with you to help guide your choices as your start to big gear for your home studio. It’s better to have it ready and get going and be well-practiced when your launch your business. For those of you thinking that you might get coaching, do your demos, then build your booth, that is not advisable. Read the blog again and re-think your plan! Now, best of luck in your VO journey!!
When you build a house, sometimes you are doing an update to make a space your own and sometimes you are doing a gut renovation. Either way, from the outset, you need to consider your goals for the project. In voiceover, knowing your goals enables you to have direction in your daily pursuits. If you know where you want to be, and if you have a clear vision for yourself, it is easier to work towards reaching those goals. And the goals you have might well be completely different from other voice talents you know. For instance, I do not do medical narration or audio books. Two of the women in my accountability group work in both of these genres, so their goals and their day to day marketing endeavors look quite different. As a professional voice over actor, I am very clear about my passions and where I want to spend my time. This is a key component of my mindset.
Even though I am a working creative, from the start I have run my business like a business. Our mindset and the choices we make determine whether voice over is a business or a mere hobby. Do you want this to be your career or something you simply dabble in? For me, from day one, this was going to be a career. There was no other option. When I decided to pursue voiceover, I did so in lieue of returning to teaching, so I had the luxury of plunging into VO full time from the get go. Besides working full-time, other choices helped establish this is a business. Using a CRM is essential. This helps you track all of your outreach, your costs, your bookings, your contacts… all of your efforts in one place. I have blogged before about my experience using Voiceoverview, but I truly believe this specific CRM is essential to the success of my business.
If you really want to succeed in voice over, and establish yourself as a professional voice talent, you need to have a professional studio. First, it is essential to maintain business hours. As a business owner, if you want to be available and accessible to your clients, you should have set business hours each day. For me, I typically work from 8 am- 6 pm, and schedule breaks for myself at my lunch hour for things like exercise classes or seeing friends. I also use my lunch hour to make myself available for consultations with new students or people looking for demo. But, the main point, is that I am available to clients all day, every day, during regular business hours.
Having studio dogs is a luxury. As a working mom, I have blogged about this before, but I never knew if I would be able to have children. When I was 22 and I got my first Cavalier King Charles Spaniel of blessed memory, I was not sure if this fur baby would be my only child. While I have been blessed with human children too, they never changed the status of my dogs, who have meant the world to me. My dogs have been there for me and by my side on my best and worst days. For my greatest celebrations and for my worst sorrow. I believe that Barclay, Violet, and Daisy understand and connect with me in a unique and special way, and having them in my life is as much a dream come true as my professional voice over career is. I very much view having these precious fur babies by my side in my home studio as a luxury. Everything about my career, from my studio set up to being able to be present for my children is icing on the cake to being able to live the dream of life as a full-time voiceover actor. If you are thinking of getting a studio dog, I urge you to move forward without hesitation. If you are thinking about it, let me share the traits that have made my dogs ideal to be in the studio daily and give you some
Violet has always been a wonderful studio dog. Violet is a Blenheim cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Her temperament is calm, quiet, and she is eager to please. She rarely barks and sleeps a lot. Despite her angelic personality, there are several challenges to having this love muffing in the booth. When Violet sleeps, she often snores. Despite her tiny size of only 15 lbs, her snore sounds like a local train coming through town. The next challenge is that Violet, who was bred to be a lap dog, very much wants to sit on my lap. While she will sometimes settle down and snuggle with her sister, she will more often beg to be on my lap. Imagine that I am doing a long form narration or eLearning project and she is on my lab. If she exhales or shakes and her collar rattles, the mic will pic this up. While Violet is pretty close to being perfect, there are some hiccups sometimes and as human as she seems she still has no idea that I am doing actual work or that she can interrupt it.
For me, my journey started in the mid-1990s. I was a student at Columbia University in New York City. I was studying political science. My younger sister Julie also went to school at Columbia, and we went out to eat off campus often. If you know anything about New York, you know that lots of waiters and waitresses are also actors who have to pay the bills. Well my sister and I have always sounded young, but when we were young we really sounded young. We also had a habit of speaking in unison and saying the same thing at the same time. It became a pattern that we would got to places like Ocean Grill or Isabella’s and every single time our server would comment on our voices. It wouldn’t just happen there, it would happen at Bergdorf’s or wherever we shopped. It even happened in taxi cabs. Often the follow up to asking if we are twins, and we are not, is that we should be in voice over.
I remember the day clearly. It was winter during my sophomore year and I went to the famous Drama Book Shop in Times Square to research how to become a voice over actor. One of the perks of being a student in NYC is that all of this was right at my fingertips. I was able to learn so much just be talking to the people who worked at the book shop, and I left with some books and a copy of Variety in hand. What I quickly discovered was that while I was in the right city to pursue voice over, at that time everything happened in person. I would have to take my tape cassettes around, show up in person for auditions, and actually go to studios for gigs. Being a student at Columbia and doing VO seemed mutually exclusive at that moment. My studies were intense and they were my primary concern, so voice over was put on the back burner.
My chat with Marie gave me the impetus to get started in voice over. I began researching coaches, writing a business plan, and researching how to build a studio. In the coming months, I started to lay the foundations for my VO business. I began working with Anne Ganguzza, my first coach. I started planning for my VO website, and I started having my studio built. I also had tech training to learn how to record and edit. I also began taking advanced acting and improv classes at Papermill Playhouse, our local theater. Over the years I have worked with many coaches, many of the best in the industry. I continue to push and hone my skills, update my demos, attend conferences, and build. A voice over career does not happen over night. I am so thankful for the work that I have had, and I have big dreams for what is to come!
When everything is working perfectly in your booth, your bookings are solid, and you are happy with your sound, why shake things up with a gear upgrade? Well, life is not always so cut and dry in the voice over world. While I was really proud when I upgraded to the Avalon M5 preamp, and loved the way it sounds with my Neumann TLM 103 microphone, it is not portable. I’m at a point in my career where if I travel, which happens when there is not a pandemic, I need to sound the way I sound in my booth when in my travel rig. With an Avalon preamp and a Neumann mic, I sound pretty awesome. Even with a VOMO, it is hard to emulate that sound without bringing the Avalon, and if you have ever been in the presence of an Avalon then you know it is not portable. Thus, my journey began.
One of my VO besties, and all around favorite people on the planet, the amazing Kim Handysides, suggested that I work with the VO Tech Guru Tim Tippets. Kim said Tim does amazing stacks and would set up my travel rig. Initially I had not planned to change my in studio set up with the Avalon M5, just the rig. I reached out to Tim. Tim is amazing because he could just set you up and give you the answer, but instead he spends the time to educate you so that you understand the rationale behind his suggestions and why he is guiding you down a certain path.
To Start, I was limited because I was working on a 2015 MacBook Air. Even though my MacBook Air is running really well (knock wood), it only has one Thunderbolt 2 connection and the rest are USB ports. This posed some logistical challenges in terms of suggestions Tim wanted to make. Further, at the time, I was set up to mirror in studio on a monitor. So my MacBook Air stays in an office space outside the studio and I have a great monitor in my booth.
So this brings us back to the travel rig set up, which is also pretty exciting. After all, this entire journey started because of the travel rig, right? So, what is my travel rig set up now:
