I mentioned in my last posting that VOICE was coming up, in addition to a few other events this summer (I've no clue as to all of them, but Bettye Zoller has some upcoming stuff, Pat Fraley usually has a few workshops in the summer, the NATF has their yearly event, I'm also aware of a few events with the National Association of Broadcasters, probably BangZoom!, SIGGRAPH always seems to attract VO talent, etc.).
Well those are all fine and dandy. But what is the working voice actor going to do if they're trying to audition, meet project deadlines, and the like while they're on the road? Being from Philadelphia, I can tell you that I put more miles on the road for VO than I care to admit (despite being the fifth largest media market, it's simply natural that I've got to put time in other places in order to train, audition, book work, etc.).
Some days, I feel like I'm a Philadelphia-based voice actor who is based anywhere but in Philadelphia, lol.
Well, there's an article put out last year by George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services that is definitely worth your while, titled The Traveling Voice-Over. In it, George gives a brief, but detailed description and explanation of some of the more common issues which voice actors are going to face on the road, and some of the tools out there which can make your time on the road a bit more productive.
The article is definitely worth the time to read, if for no other reasons than the fact that it gives you new ideas on how to set up your own "VO2Go" kit. I'll admit that there are some items in the article which I disagree with, but that's mainly because I know what my own needs are when I'm on the road (for example, George's recommendation of netbooks is probably good for most folks, but I've yet to use one that I didn't overtax in a few minutes of normal usage... I'm pretty hard on the CPU with some of the stuff I do). That said, it's pretty apparent that this article is designed more as a means of providing options to the traveling voice actor than anything else.
In that regard, the article delivers in spades.
If you didn't catch the link to the article above, a direct link can be found here.
I don't normally shill for companies (unless they're paying me). The ones I usually purchase my recording equipment from can be found here, and I rarely deviate.
However, with the economy as it is, and with VOICE 2010 and a bunch of other stuff looming on the horizon, I know that a lot of fellow voice actors are looking to either upgrade their gear, or to fine those last minute items for their travel kits.
BSW currently has a 10% off sale (minimum order $99) until midnight 5/02/2010 PST (sorry, but I didn't see the e-mail until this morning). Those who are on their mailing list already know about this, but I'm willing to bet that most people don't. If you're looking for that little something and needed an excuse to get it, an extra 10% off couldn't hurt.
The code for the coupon is 057362 (hopefully not a one time usage thing). So if you need something extra this summer, might as well check out the BSW Website and use it.
Voice Over Xtra currently has part one of what I think will be a nice compendium of articles regarding home studio acoustics by William Williams.
From my own experience, I can tell you that soundproofing a pre-existing residential structure is problematic and expensive at best, downright impossible given most circumstances. You can do a lot to absorb and diffuse the sound, but true soundproofing requires DCID or ANSI style requirements to the room, and frankly there comes a time when even yours truly has to question the cost-benefit ratio (or in my case, the "would they lock me up for doing this..." ratio).
William takes a smarter approach IMO by assuming that the voice talent already has a setup and begins by addressing those items which can be removed from your recording chain that might be causing you to have a lower quality output than you should be, given the quality of equipment you're using (aka. "noise").
From an audio forensic perspective, I'm a huge fan of eliminating as much unnecessary interference from the chain as possible. This article looks like the first step in addressing such issues.
For those who are interested, the full article can be found here.
Since the question of "which microphone should I choose?" is one of the most common questions voice actors ask each other, it's definitely worth reading if you don't already know the answer to the question.
On the side, I think I have an unattributed quote in the article.
What is SWTOR you ask? Well that part is simple, it's the new Lucas Arts MMORPG, StarWars: The Old Republic. But for all of the voice over folk out there, here's a little something which we don't often get, a blog post written by Shauna Perry. Shauna is the Director of Audio and Localization for SWTOR, and she goes into the process of voice acting from the writing to scripting to speaking.
I've got to say that what they're trying to do in SWTOR is nothing short of huge. The game is going to be fully voice acted which could mean a greater sense of involvement in what happens within the game. We're talking hundreds of voice actors being recorded in five major metro areas with enough copy to fill more than fourty novels. If that's not the definition of huge, then I don't know what is. The project is so big that they actually had to develop an audio pronunciation guide in order to deal with all the regionalisms and dialects that the talent brought to the project.
This is probably the largest commercially available voice over project ever produced, and you can read about it all right here.
This might be the one MMORPG that I actually find time out of my schedule to play, if for the voice over aspect alone...
It's late, I'm still up reading chapters from a book on SOA (don't ask), and I've got less than four hours before I have to be up for my day tomorrow.
So let me pass along a quick trick that might just help you out the next time you're in a voiceover session. It's my way of passing the time before I can actually fall asleep, but also gives me a chance to teach a trick that you might be able to put to good use.
For this trick, you're going to need a half-decent preamp, but really any preamp will do so long as it has the ability to trim the output. I'm going to use a Great River MP-2NV to illustrate what I mean:
You can see that there's a gain knob and an output level knob.
Here's the trick. We want to make this discrete, transformer preamp sound like a tube pre. Piece of cake, but most people who use these for spoken word don't try it. Maybe they don't know, or they just prefer to use the top end of the preamp... I don't know. What I do know is that when we over-saturate the transformer in this preamp (or any preamp with a good transformer; I think the MP-20 might be another good example... and it was less than $500 when it was originally available on the market) we get that "tubey" sound caused by the harmonic distortion achieved by squeezing the input in this fashion. In a lot of cases, this is a really fun, and useful means of giving some character to our voiceover tracks (I've found it to be particularly good for narrations or something that required a "tubey" sound when I didn't want to actually use a tube preamp; on some preamps, you'll have an effect that is similar to using a compressor... each preamp is a little different).
Your recorded tracks will be a little more defined in the mix using this technique, but be warned that this is a trick you want to use sparingly. For the most part, it's smarter practice to track your voice over clean and go from there (and yes, you can run a prerecorded track into certain preamps and do this trick if you'd like; the LMNOPre is a personal favorite of mine, but personally I'm addicted to that preamp... God only knows how I'd react to an NPNG preamp).
BTW: you can also do this trick with tube-based preamps as well, but you'll probably notice that you quickly move from and extremely tubey sound to something that sounds like it just went through a limiter (especially with the LaChapell preamps using stock tubes for some reason).
Each preamp is a bit different, but that's part of the fun. You can find many different ways to get to the same end result so long as you have the skill.
C'mon... take a guess. What do you think the most important thing in your voiceover studio is?
I'll even make it easy, it's not the microphone (though God knows, most voice over folks seem to think that it is).
It's not your preamp.
It's not the interface.
It's not the room.
It's not even your voice (again, a lot of voice over folks think that it's all about the voice... I want to blog about this later, but I assure you that voice is just one part of voice acting, and not the most important).
Know what it is? It's your ears. Seriously, can you tell anything about any aspect of recording or voice over without your ears? If so, please let me know, because I can't tell whether a room has reflection issues without my ears (unless I want to crunch some numbers... walking around a room and using my ears while generating a tone is much easier), I can't tell whether or not a preamp, microphone, or other piece of equipment is doing anything for the track I'm working on without my ears, and I surely can't tell how my work as a voice actor is fitting in the mix without my ears.
You'd be amazed how hard it is for some folks to get the message. Just the other day I was reading a post from a well-known and respected talent who decided in their own clever way to take a shot at folks for the poor production value of their self-made demos and various other clips. It was a deserved comment (though perhaps not so acerbic, but that's a personal choice), but the one thing that really, REALLY concerned me about this person's comment was that they didn't explain the easiest way to identify and fix this problem. It was obvious that the folks doing the work had some talent, but whomever did the mixing wasn't trusting their ears. Anyone listening realized that was the main problem, but instead the online conversation focused more on other issues. The point, which was unfortunately lost, was that if someone had trusted their ears a bit more, the final product from their work would have probably been much better.
This brings me back to my original point; your ears are the most important thing in your studio. And yet, most voice talent don't give them a second thought, and even fewer spend the time and effort to find a good way to use them properly. If you're doing a voice over for a website, then by all mean use computer speakers at some point during the process since that's what most of your audience is going to use, but do not negate the need for actual studio monitors to use while tracking and during the later phases of mixing and mastering. If you're not doing the actual production of your recorded tracks then there's no need to invest a huge amount into your studio monitors, but it's still a worthwhile investment for yourself (it's easier to deal with issues when tracking then it is to try to edit them out afterward). Good studio monitors aren't going to make your work sound better, but they will give you a level of accuracy which will allow you to make your final product better. At the end of the day, isn't that the point?
If you're not sure whether or not your ears are sensitive enough to pick up issues in your tracking or mixing, there's only one way to deal with that... practice. Just like everything else, you've got to start at the bottom if you truly want to improve you skills.
So the next time you're sitting around thinking about what wonderful toy you have to have for your studio, think about your ears for a bit and figure out what they need to do their job. Sure, that shiny Neumann looks nice, but for the money I'm willing to bet you that a nice pair of Klein & Hummel, Adam, or Dynaudio monitors will end up giving you a lot more bang for your buck. And don't get me wrong, you'll love anything from those guys, and even the boutique manufacturers, but any studio monitor that's got a relatively un-biased sound will do the trick and they can be had at nearly all price points. Price is not necessarily a barrier to entry for good monitors, at least not quite as bad as it it for other pieces of studio equipment.
In the end, the important thing is that whatever you do to your recording environment and whatever gear you get, if you feel the need to get anything at all, so long as you learn to trust your ears and give them the right resources to judge your recording sessions, then whatever cash outflow you've expended will eventually be returned to you with interest, whatever time you spend learning to train your ears to be more sensitive to the things which plague any voice over production will make you more efficient and profitable.
Hmmnn... adding value to the business. Regardless of how you do it, isn't that the very definition of success?
Okay, let me clarify that statement. I don't like most microphone shootouts, especially for voiceover. Here's a few reasons why:
Most people doing them don't know how - I'm sorry for having to be the one to say it, but I am. You need to maintain a certain standard of quality and impartiality when you do any kind of comparison, and normally I just don't see it in the shootouts people use on most boards and websites.
Different sources are used for different microphones, which makes it impossible to judge any of the microphones used - I want you to think about this. How can you know how one microphone sounds when compared to another when two different sources are being recorded. A microphone sounds different from person to person, so once you've injected two people on two different mics, you've just invalidated your experiement and any conclusions that you draw from it. Sure, mic A might be darker than mic B, but if one of the sources is a low baritone and the other is a tenor 2, then how much difference can I really tell is between the two mics tested? The answer is "not much".
Different mics are used on different recording chains - If reason #2 didn't point out the problem, then the fact that so many "shootouts" and "comparisons" use different preamps, cables, DAWs, EQs, etc. (i.e., your recording chain) should raise a big flag to you. In the recording chain, your microphone and preamp are two of the biggest factors in the quality and characterization of sound that are going to affect the recording of your source (the source itself and the environment of the recording space are the most important things to any recording, but for the recording chain, your mic and preamp are the biggest factors to take into consideration IME). If I'm recording a U87 using a John Hardy preamp and trying to compare that mic to an AK-47 recorded through a D.W. Fearn, then I'm going to have a really difficult time being able to determine where the line is drawn between microphone and preamp. It's going to be impossible to properly compare the two microphones. You need to have consistency within the recording chain so that when you change one element within that chain (the microphone) to compare it to another, the listener can habituate everything else in the chain and concentrate on the two items being compared. Makes sense, right? And yet few people compare microphones that way.
Observational bias and sound quality - If you don't like one brand of microphone, then you're going to be hard pressed to be subjective about it when your compare it to other brands. That's observational bias and it's a common trait. If you're human, you've got it... accept it and move on. There's not a whole lot you can do about it unless you're the listener, in which case you need to learn to recognize when you're doing it. The quality of recording though... different story. Most microphone shootouts I hear use MP3 formatted clips. It's a lossy format, so I know from the start that I'm not getting the full sound that I ought to be getting. That's kind of bad. What makes it worse, is that some folks reduce the bit rate of the recording to the lowest level they can in order to save space. Listen, I know that you don't want folks to have to download a 100MB file just to hear a pair of microphones, but the more you take away from the quality of the recording, the harder it is for the rest of us to be able to judge the difference in the two sounds. In the attempts to make life easy for the listener, you've just taken away our ability to properly critique what you're doing. It's not worth it.
It's not you that they're recording - This is the most important factor to consider when dealing with a microphone shootout. Everybody sounds different, so every microphone is going to sound a little different. The same holds true for your recording environment. Put it together, and you quickly realize that the best way for a person to understand which microphone is going to work best for them is for them to take the microphone into their own place and record it with their own voice. It's going to be the most accurate way to learn how two different microphones affect a source. Microphone shootouts (when done properly) can give you a good starting indication, but until you get some face time with the tools themselves, you're working from a generalized point of view instead of your own working knowledge of the device,
Transom Tools has one of the best microphone shootouts I've ever heard. That the shootout is over three years old and is still considered to be one of the best comparison of voice over mics out there is a testament to the care and quality they put into their testing. If you're looking for a mic shootout, I can't think of anything online that is as well done as what these guys put together.
If only they could have offered the files as WAV... still, they're light years beyond anything else I've found online.
