Voiceover Engineer

Greetings, With much excitement, and a little trepidation because it is a new venue; we at voiceoverengnineer.com are going to be at the CCDEXPO in Loomis, CA. This is a program that for two days highlights the Content, Creation, and Distribution of music, film, marketing, and self promotion. In other words if you are in the “business” you should be attending. If you are a provider in the business you should be exhibiting. Voiceover engineer will be exhibiting. We will be talking about voiceover work, foley sound, and how we can help with your project. Whether it is corporate/industrial, narration, commercial, or even narrating a film. Yes this will be the event to attend not to mention the learning sessions available. Free to attend as a visitor, classes are very reasonable, and there will be concerts, camera shootouts, and keynote speeches in several areas of content, creation and distribution, thus the name CCDEXPO. For more information go to www.CCDEXPO.com mention my name… it won’t get you anything except a thank you, and I don’t receive anything for the referral, but you will at least help the planners and organizers know that we are creating a little promotional buzz. Until next weekend keep on recording, and as always; May the Force be with you. Always.

A whole new world in editing. I have been looking at control surfaces. You would be surprised at the number of them out there. I am beginning testing as my business is picking up and I need to complete work faster. I am looking at several different types as I am also learning about video editing. The Nucleus by SSL. Audient asp 2802 for audio. Audio and video I am looking at the Euphonix system, and Future Video for their control surfaces. Both Euphonix and Future Video state that they can do both as a control surface. I am looking for a solution that will allow me to record, and control the daw, and video software. So far it is not a reality, but that is a preliminary search. I will keep you all up to date on the search.

On another note. Just got back from Germany where I had a great time enjoying watching my son getting married to a really lovely woman. The city I was in is called Stockelsdorf. Right next to a city called Lubeck. So close that if you missed the sign you would not know you were in a different city. Such a beautiful part of the world. Congratulations to Jason, and Maria-Christina Smith. Yes I know that this is not part of the blog, but I am quite proud of my son. And at least one more digression for a proud father. With so much divorce in the world. I am happy that my daughter Jeanie has enjoyed 15 years of marriage and has three wonderful children, and one of them is a princess that has figured out how to control grandpa completely. Congratulations to them as well. May the love be with you all. ss

Have you stepped into the ring yet? Have you competed in the competition? All of this boils down to the fact is that you are standing on the side line waiting for something to happen instead of making something happen. Nothing is going to work for you unless you do it. What ever “it” is. I don’t care if it is voiceover, acting, or professional baseball unless you take the first steps and try you will never be successful.

I am a Toastmaster and have been for a number of years. It is a great program that teaches people how to speak more effectively. When a new person comes into the room, we as club members do our best to have the new person speak as soon as possible. Not necessarily in a speech atmosphere. No we just get them started in telling us who they are, and where they are from the very first night. After that we assign them a mentor and help them learn a very basic role that allow them to speak in a role that is scripted or at least has guidelines so they speak in a way that is not intimidating, or threatening. It allows the newcomer to learn more about the club and learn about people in the club so that when we ask the newcomer to give their icebreaker speech they are talking to friends.

Not every club has this system in place. Nor does every type of business or endeavor that humans are inclined to do. Sometimes you have to borrow someone else’s belief in you until you believe in yourself. Or in less elegant terms fake it till you make it. There is a learning curve on everything we do in life. The old saw that someone was or is born to do it is a crock. Yes I hear you out there saying that’s not true. Reality no one is born to do anything. We have our likes and our dislikes. If you don’ t like sitting in one place making sound come out of a box by pounding on ivory keys, and having those keys strike a steel string tuned to a certain frequency then maybe being a concert pianist is not your style. By the same token if you enjoy throwing spears at a circular board made with pig bristles, and you can do it with reasonable accuracy and you can repeat that behavior over and over again. You could be a competitive dart player. Regardless of the skill you must learn the nuances, the history, and help create the future of it by being a part of it, by committing to the first step.

If you want to be a voiceover professional go to a practice, or class start learning the trade and have fun. It is a fun and rewarding career. Plus you will make some incredible friends along the way, and maybe learn how to play darts and become a speaker as well. Good luck and may the force be with you, always.

Greetings to 2011, and welcome Voiceover Artists, Producers, Vendors, and consumers. What a year 2010 was. From floods to economic disaster again. What are you doing to stop the bleeding. Most people begin to shut down operations, and stop spending money. Money used in advertising. In other words our jobs. Lets look at this for a minute. When you stop advertising you lose name recognition. You lose name recognition, and you lose credibility, you lose credibility, and you lose customers. You lose customers and you lose your business. Gee that looks like a slippery slope. Or if you are a psychology fan, it is called Spiral Dynamics. It all boils down to things start going bad and it will keep going bad until you change something drastically to change it. Cutting your advertising while stopping spending money is good in the short run, but is disastrous  in the long run. Yes we all need to save money… (you see I heard you in the back there). The point being you need to be judicious in what you cut your money for. Advertising and name recognition or top of mind marketing is important… no not just because it is my job, but because it affects your business too. People by themselves are looking for the easiest answer to their problems. That is why we like to do business with people we like. If it is a friend, or someone we like we feel like they (the friend) can help us with our problem easier than someone we don’t know. We want someone to take our problems as personally as we do. We want someone to know that it is truly important, and will take it seriously. We all know that there is no more important person with a problem than us, or our customers if they come to us… So let’s make this our first New Years resolution. To take our clients problems seriously. To make their challenges our own. Why is this important? Well without reiterating the top paragraph here I will quote a famous person. Zig Ziglar says “if we help enough other people get what they want, we will get everything we want”.

What else does the New Year bring to us. To begin with it is a chance for renewal. A chance to turn around whatever it is we are doing and make a new begining. An opportunity to turn around our own fiscal future. I learned an interesting bit of trivia in December. There are only about half a dozen Voices working full time in the Sacramento region. Why is that? There are always new advertisements being developed in the area, there are also new trainings going on the internet, new marketing pieces, and new messages on hold. There are 28,000 small businesses in Sacramento. What are you doing to make contact with them? Obviously this piece of trivia is focused on Sacramento, CA, but I can gurantee that it is being repeated all over the world. Voice123.com, and Voices.com are counting on you to keep that attitude. Also so are the half dozen voices that are working full time. What do I mean by all of this? Simple as long as you are counting on the pay to play sites, and not pounding the pavement literally, or virtually by sending out marketing pieces you are not competing with those that are making money. You are passively waiting for something to happen. Guess what nothing will.  I am not saying that the pay to play sites are wrong… what I am saying is that if you are not doing everything possible to get your voice out there and to be part of the solution than consumers are not going to come looking for you. Be realistic what is a consumer trying to do with their business. They want to make sure they are known to the world, community, or person that is going to buy their product or service. So are you. Find a way to help the business owner. It does require learning a little more about your craft. Learning about marketing. Learning about sales. If you think your business is only about voiceover you are wrong. It is about marketing, promotions, sales, accounting, training, marketing, presentations, marketing, taxes, marketing. Perhaps you are seeing a repeating pattern here? We need to know as much about marketing as we do about voiceover perhaps even more since we are not going to get work unless we help people find us. You must help people find you to change your fiscal future. To refocus your business make sure someone knows about you… I heard it said that being in business without markeing is a lot like peeing your pants with black pants on… yes you get that warm feeling but no one knows you did it… let someone know you are out there.

Last topic in this blog and I will put this to rest. I have said it before and I will say it again. How much do you know about public speaking. Yes I know that we speak for a living as voiceover artists, but what do you speak about that teaches the community about how to use your business. Have you been to the Chamber of Commerce in your community to become a speaker to let the members know that using a professional messge on hold will enhance their sales? Have you told them about how to have a video loop in their waiting rooms can help educate the consumers so that they can increase sales. If you are a professional voice. Do you know of all of the places you can use your voice and then teach the public about it? That is why I discuss public speaking in this forum. This is the most effective way to let people know that you are an expert in voiceover work, and can help the consumer because you are also an expert in marketing… wait I heard you say you aren’t an expert in that … yes yes I know.. but did you know that you can become an expert in just about any subject in about a year? You didn’t? Well here let me show you how. First of all become a member of Barnes and Noble’s discount club. Borders has one as well. Then subscribe to a couple of the periodicals of what ever subject you are learning about. Go to the bookstore and start browsing the topics you want to know about. I will stay with marketing. Find the authors that are more prolific, usually they are the ones people are reading or else the store would not carry them. Start with a basic book about marketing. Read another one, and aother one. repeat weekly for one year. By the end of the year you will hve collected 52 books on marketing a dozen of the periodicals and learned a tremendous amount on the topic. Hopefully you have been implementing what you have learned and now you are an expert and prepared to help the consumer with your skills. You will have become successful, and all of us will be reading your formula for how to become successful in voice over. I look forward to it actually I always like to learn a new and effective way of marketing… if you don’t let me know what your system is that’s okay. You can usually find me down at Barnes and Noble… in one of those big cushy chairs reading in the evening trying to find another book… yes I am there on Sunday afternoons, and evenings reading and learning. I then start on Mondays with new tools, ideas and techniques to help my clients.

Well there you have it. How to be successful by Skip. No it is not get rich quick. It is work, and it is fun. I hope you are all having fun with this. If you aren’t having fun why are you doing it? I look forward to seeing you someday and putting those dulcet tones to a face, and name. Have an awesome year, and oh by the way I am reviewing the zed 12fx mixer by Allen and Heath in the next couple of weeks. A system I use. I think you will enjoy it. Talk to you soon, and above all keep having fun and learning. And remember the force is with you always.

My Grandkids have given me their Christmas list. Pretty cute. I have to admit I would like to be in Kid mode again for about the next 50 years. Then I could grow up. Gee that would only make me about uh…. well lets just say it would be triple digits. But I guess I should be responsible. I should ask for world peace, an end to famine, illnesses to be cured, but that would not be the Kid attitude. So to be an adult with a Kids attitude, although with an eye to voiceover work I will give you my ultimate voiceover wish list.

 First a new house with two master bedrooms. Looking at a lake with lots of forest, no road noise, or close next door neighbors. First master bedroom will be my bedroom… but the second would be my studio. I would put a large whisper room in the bedroom for great quiet studio work as my control room/personal studio. I would convert the walk-in closet for a second quiet room for another artist(s) so that I could record multi voice productions. I would also have the rest of the master bedroom to be my office for my VO work. phones, computers, desk outside of the studio… very cool that way… studio, and office in the master bedroom. bathroom, whisper rooms, office couldn’t be better.

 Equipment: ah here is where the list is large and expensive. I will start with the microphones. I would like a group of about 5 microphones. Start with the Neumann U87, to the Sontronics Saturn, next would be the MXL Revelation, or Genesis (haven’t decided which yet), next the MXL V88, and finally the Rode NT3, or the Sennheiser 416. Yes the high and low of it… all great mics. I still need to audition a couple of them to compare and contrast them. Will do that next month at the NAMM show.

 The next part of the equipment list is preamps. I would love to have the Schoeps VSR 5 preamp a very clean, transparent preamp. a Universal Audio Twin finity 710 combines tube warmth, with solid state. and finally an Avalon M5.

 I think now I want a new control surface. As long as it is Christmas I will ask Santa for the Solid State Logic Nucleus control surface, mixer, preamp combination. It does all of that plus so much more. What a great control surface. Compatible with Pro Tools. I don’t think it gets much better than that. Of course incredible cables to go with all of this.

 Computer. Mac, or PC. Currently all of my software is PC. So I will probably stay with that. I think I want a custom built computer with as much RAM as I can stuff in the little bugger. Nope not a laptop either. I want a desktop with the fastest bus speeds, most ram, and dual hard disk drives. All of my software on a 160gb solid state HDD, and a 500gb solid state HDD to record and save materials on. Of course with a 1 tb external backup hdd.

 Of course I want all of my marketing materials to be incredibly successful, and to draw the most prosperous, generous, and easy going clients to work with.

 I almost forgot web access. Dedicated OC 3 line. In case you don’t know. a T1 line runs at 1.54 mbps. a T3 line runs at about 45Mbps, and an OC 3 line is optical and runs at 155 Mbps. There shall be no slow downs at Studio S.

 Recording software. I want Pro Tools to offer me the ultimate Voice offer software. Take out all of the bells and whistles that VO artists don’t need and create a simple platform that instead of instrument plug ins. It has sound effects plug ins, and access to all of the Music Bakery’s music for Royalty Free music. Plus you get free updates forever.

 Well I think that about covers it. If any of you want to assist Santa Claus this year let me know… I will be glad to let you know where to send the toys. If you have the house let me know that as well and I will start packing this studio up. For now though that about sums it up… my wish list for the next year. Of course after the NAMM show in Southern California in January I am sure I will be adding to the list, or changing my toy list, but for now that is it.

 Most of all I want to thank everyone I have worked with this year, and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous future. May you find the relationships you want, and rekindle the ones that have been lost but not forgotten… remember it is relationships that make this world go around. Just in case you are wondering what to get me for my birthday. you will have to be fast. It is only 6 days away. Please refer to list above. yes the ubiquitous smiley face. My thoughts, dreams, and prayers are with you all. Skip