Tag Archives: commercials

Voice talent and landscaping.

August 23, 2016Commercials, Generalaudio production, Commercial, commercials, creative radio, production music, radio, radio account executives, radio production, radio sales, radio scripts, radio spots, radio stations, script writing, scripts, voice over artists, voice talentOvernight Radio

Who doesn’t love to save money? It’s one of my favorite hobbies.

I mow my own lawn…I buy my own groceries. Imagine having to pay for that? A lot of money wasted, especially since it’s relatively easy.

But the hobby of saving money buy doing it yourself has diminishing returns as you move along the scale of tasks from easy to hard.

Sure I save on landscaper costs when i mow my own lawn, but when i try to add sod or cut down large trees, I run the risk of doing it improperly and inadvertently costing me more in the end when i need to replace the sod i laid down incorrectly or when i need to pay for my neighbors roof repairs when the tree i chopped down fell onto his house.

The same is true for any profession. In my industry, people try to cross lines all the time. Writers think they are voice talents, voice talents think they can write, producers think they can predict what commercial will work and what won’t.

For the most part, none of the above scenarios work. Because each professional is trained in a different yet similar aspect of the radio industry. Sometimes they overlap, and that’s where the confusion enters.

Let’s take the producer. He/she works with scripts every day of their lives, and to some extent, their opinions on a scripts worth, is…worth something. They’ve seen it all, from good to bad and all in-between. BUT, that ability to pick out a bad or good script, does NOT mean they are writers. All it means is that they have a general awareness of something they see every day. Like a building you pass by on the way to work. You know the one side of it’s wall very well. But there is a whole building inside you know nothing about…have yet to enter and probably wont.

It’s not that the producer knows nothing…they know a lot…but 99% of their knowledge is about production, and how scripts relate to their line of work. The inner workings of how that script came to be are unknown to the producer, and as such, renders what they know about writing to being very limited.

Let’s take the voice talent. They have a microphone, a computer and an audio program to record their voice. They have the basic knowledge of how to turn it all on, get a signal, record, and render to an mp3 or wav. Which is all they need to know – because their focus has always been on the read, the sound and cadence of their voice, as well it should be.

Some notice in their audio program, the ability to compress, eq and other effects. They have heard of these, so why not do it myself? Of course, this is similar to saying you know how to properly cut down a tree because you know what an ax is.

When voice talent start moving into the producers field, all sorts of accidents can happen. Too much compression, improper eq, sometimes even reverb is added. This has the same effect as the tree. It will cost you money since producers will shy away from using you since you have already pee’d in the pool.

Just like scripts are not a producers forte , a voice talent’s eq and compression settings are not theirs to handle. Put the ax down.

I know voice talent who tell other talent to compress the heck out of their voice, as if it will help them sound better and in turn get more work. It does not. It’s like your neighbor telling you to poison the heck out of your lawn so you won’t have to mow it anymore. Sure, you don’t have to mow it, but it’s also dead. The neighbor has no ill will, they are just ill-informed. Which makes them unprofessional.

You, and your voice, or your scripts or your productions, SHOULD be professional. Stay in your lane, and let the others do their job. Make sure what you’re doing helps the other professionals in your surrounds to do their jobs. ie: record a clean signal of a great read, don’t add ANYTHING to it, render it to the preferred format, and done.

The goal here is to let the landscaper do their work. Mowing the lawn is one thing (akin to recording your own voice) but landscaping is quite another. Let the professionals do their thing, and you can do yours.

To Sound Cool, Look The Fool.

June 15, 2016Commercials, Generalannouncers, audio production, Commercial, commercials, creative radio, radio account executives, radio production, radio sales, radio scripts, radio spots, radio stations, script writing, scripts, targeted advertising, voice over artists, voice talentOvernight Radio

Radio production is fun. In many cases, it requires a funny looking face to voice the spot in the correct way. Even when the topic is not funny. Voice talent scrunch their faces to get the word out just right.

I have found that i cannot voice ANY spot without putting my arms in the air like I just don’t care. Apparently this helps me get the words in my head out to the mic.

If someone asks you for a hard sell, DO an actual hard sell. Yell if you have to (turn your gain down of course)…but do what you have to do to get the desired read for your client.

If you cant do it because you are in your home closet and your child is asleep in the next room, then do it later. Or more importantly, re-assess where you are voicing from.

Do not voice slightly louder than normal and hit send. That is not a hard sell. That is a slightly louder than normal read.

But this isn’t about hard sells, it’s about looking like an idiot.

If a script requires you to laugh, do an ACTUAL laugh. Think about something funny, ask your loved one to tickle you…tickle yourself! Start fake laughing till it sounds so funny that you actually laugh at it.

If you are asked to sound conversational, literally try and work that into your actual conversational voice. Think about how you speak to your friends or spouse and use that tone. Newbies and professionals alike have trouble with this one. Not only because they are in front of a mic (some are transfixed by it), but often the text is not conversational.

Which is a fair point…BUT if you can fit those words into your natural cadence, the job will still get done…a conversational read with non-conversational words. Then it’s the copywriters problem to revise it upon hearing it if it still sounds disjointed. But the point is, YOU as the voice talent did your job.

If you are asked to do a silly voice, do a silly voice – this usually requires you to be loud and look like an idiot. And I realize, you need self confidence to do this. But if you are in the voice talent industry, you won’t last long without it. So get some, and start sounding silly.

In my experience, voice talent that don’t want to look the fool while voicing, look the fool later when they are being sent the same types of scripts over and over again. This means you are considered to only have one type of read…ie: not versatile.

If you aren’t versatile, jobs that would have come your way (the old lady character, the mouse character, the angry boss, the busy bee, the goofy mom, the old prospector) are going to someone else.

And what’s left for you, is the announcer tag. BUT there are already a million announcers willing to voice a dignified tag. And you better have a super fine announcer voice to compete with all the others.

If you don’t…then you’d better be willing to look the fool while voicing…because ANY voice willing to look silly, is going to get work.

Because in the end, looking stupid will make you sound great, and that will make you FEEL great when you see all the work in your inbox.

1 Dollar Voice-Overs?

June 13, 2016Commercials, Generalannouncers, audio production, Commercial, commercials, creative radio, radio, radio account executives, radio sales, radio scripts, radio stations, scripts, voice over artists, voice talentOvernight Radio

It’s a new world…and everyone is invited…even people that don’t know what they are doing.

That’s why whenever the floodgates to an industry are opened, everyone already involved gets scared. Like when the internet broke the previous music industry. It did indeed break the model that was then the way to make money with music. But inevitably, if a product is good enough, people will pay for it. And while there is an amazing amount of music available now because of the internet, it didn’t remove the money available to the talented people who seriously make a living at it…the ones who tour, licences their music, have youtube clips worth watching, t-shirts, and the like. They are STILL able to do this, despite the flood gates opening and letting a zillion more people in to compete with them.

Why? Because more people does not necessarily mean destruction for all. Because with a level playing field like the internet, of course comes of that new competition of yours, BUT it also comes a whole new population to market too. Yes there is more competition, but there is more buyers too. So the equation stays the same as it did before – be good, stay good for a long time, and buyers will find you.

It is the exact same thing with the voice-over industry. There was one before the internet, and now there is one after. There were challenges with the old system…you needed expensive equipment, you needed to have existing connections in the industry to get any work, you needed to work very hard and often it cost you more than you made to keep your business open.

Now, post internet, equipment costs are negligible, you can be set up for $300 or less. . You can have a website up and running for almost nothing.

All you need now are clients. So what do you do?

You can get a profile on voices.com or other voice websites, and apply for jobs though those sites. Done and done.

Except of course, that’s not the end of the story.

While these websites make you feel like you are part of the industry, the reality is, that you still have to work hard, make connections and be great at voice-overs.

Uploading your demo and trying out for jobs on these sites seems like a great idea…except that literally hundreds of thousands of people had the same idea. The field is now level…of course, the field is now FILLED with people.

In my opinion, if you only use these sites, you will probably have the same amount of luck as you would have before the internet. Probably very little.

While it’s great to have a profile, all it is in the real world of voice-overs, is a place holder…or something else on top of other items on the internet that point to your website.

Anecdotally, I have heard stories about people paying a lot of money to be represented on websites without any return on investment. It’s not to say that it’s the websites fault, it could be many things. Maybe your read is not up to par, maybe your demo was poorly produced, maybe you just aren’t different sounding enough.

All of those things would have been corrected along the way to success by doing your homework, ie: making cold calls to potential clients, getting involved at local radio etc.

Because when you are actually working at a goal, you can’t help but get better.

Jumping in to voice-overs via a website that looks like it’s going to solve your business problems is not the answer. It’s a great side-dish, but it’s not a meal.

To prove my point, we used a site promising voice-overs at almost NO cost. Amazing right? What a deal.

Of course, you always get what you pay for…and what we got was, A) poorly read, B) a distorted recording and C) a waste of everyone’s time.

Clearly this was someone’s who’s demo was produced somewhere legit, uploaded it to a voices site and assumed everything would take care of itself. He had no idea how to edit, no idea about gain, length of read and other basics of the industry.

There is a reason that voice talent see little gain from these voice broker sites, it’s because for the vast majority of voice talent on them, there is little to nothing for the customer to gain.

Best to just call the professional voices you already know and stick with them…because prices can be negotiated…talent cannot.

Precise Goals = Disappointment

March 29, 2016Commercials, Generalaudio production, Commercial, commercials, creative radio, music beds, production music, radio, radio account executives, radio production, radio sales, radio spots, radio stations, script writing, scripts, targeted advertising, voice over artists, voice talentOvernight Radio

To get anywhere, you need a goal.

When you are young, goals can be very precise ” ‘i want to be a race car driver in nascar”.

As you get older and see more of the world, your goals tend to broaden: ‘i want to be a race car driver”.

And then go even broader: “i want to work with race cars”…and finally, ‘i want to work with cars’.

The last one is a cup half full/half empty situation. Some people would see it as a loss (no longer heading to nascar) and others as a gain (you have so much more opportunity to find your true self with a wide net).

The same is true when it comes to radio commercial scripting and production. When you have an idea in your head for a client…it sounds and feels a certain way. The proper way of course – (like the nascar dream).

Then when you see it in script form, you realize that there are barriers to your idea, timing, length, word restrictions, all things that whittle down the idea.

After you get through all that, your idea is finally on the page and although it’s not as good as the one in your head, it’s still pretty good (you are still a race car driver) and it looks like a winner.

Now, comes the production. You of course had a voice in mind, and are there for the session to make sure it goes exactly like you planned on the script. Of course, the voice over artist says things a bit differently than you do, or the cadence that is natural for them doesn’t quite match the initial feeling of the script. So you change it up a bit to match the talents strengths, and the parts that didn’t change, sound different from how you voiced it in your head…but it’s still a great spot.

Then it’s off to production, where the music choices just don’t have the perfect beat, the bass line, or feel you were looking for, but they open your mind to adding a sound effect that perfectly compliments the script addition you made for the voice talent earlier.

The spot you have created is an A-1 commercial, ready to air and garner results for your client. This is the part where you realize your nascar dream, turned into a real goal of working with cars.

Instead of being disappointed that it’s not the same sound as inside your head, you realize that nothing stays the same from birth…including people…i certainly don’t look the same as i did when i was a baby, and to expect your creative idea to be exactly the same as in your head as when it is finally finished, is to put unrealistic expectations on your baby/idea.

Going into the process knowing your idea will grow and change will help you realize your goal. The goal is to be a success, whether it’s to work with cars, a baby, or your script.

Know that being in the world changes things, and usually for the better. Because it’s only in the real world, that results can happen.

Broaden your expectations for your creations…you can’t get results from a dream.

Why so many voices?

January 13, 2016Commercials, Generalannouncers, audio production, Commercial, commercials, creative radio, production music, radio, radio account executives, radio production, radio sales, radio scripts, radio stations, script writing, scripts, targeted advertisingOvernight Radio

Radio spots are like cooking…too many ingredients…and you spoil the meal.

So when you received a script to produce with multiple voices in it…99 percent of the time, it could have and SHOULD have been done with one voice or two. The radio is already chalk full of voices already, asking the audience to do way too much in the way of paying attention to their spots.

Multiple voices, (more than one or two) for the most part, equal clutter.

So when you have your own 30 second spot packed with voices, asking the audience to discern between female 1 and female 4 in a fast paced frenzy, you are literally asking too much. In my opinion, you are asking the audience to tune out.

Usually it’s one of 2 issues:

1) Neophytes: It’s easy to see why you would add so many voices when you first start out, as with anything, you just throw it at the wall and hope it sticks. But, once you become good at script writing, you realize that the less ingredients the better, because it shows how much more you can do with what’s perceived to be so little.

2) Client interference: I’ll admit, there is not much you can do about this…BUT it really is the same issue as #1…as the client is a business person, not a creative person…and certainly not in a position to see their shop from a potential clients point of view. Having the client involved is akin to having a beginner work on your script.

The only way to avoid the first one, is time…you will get better, you will find more tools in your arsenal than just more voices. You will find spacing, nuance, interesting conversational words, and hopefully, a voice or team of voices that can translate your beautiful script into a beautiful piece of audio that helps get the client more sales or puts them at top of mind for potential customers.

Number 2, client involvement, has only a couple of possible fixes, but even those are hit or miss. First, (and this is my choice)…you need to do more work. Ie: create their spot as best you can. AND create a BETTER spot with less clutter to present to them as a value added bonus. It seems like a lot of work to do, but in my experience, if you don’t do this, the only other way around it is…

Teaching the client: Some people are great at this. More power to them. I am not. But if i were, I am sure i would have been able to avoid producing multiple cuts of the same spot. Guiding a client through the process and teaching them the in’s and out’s of airing a commercial on broadcast or satellite radio is a tedious gig, and sometimes it doesn’t pay off at all.

Which brings me back to my first fix – provide multiple versions. It could be one extra version, or three. Whatever you think it takes to show the client that their over-crowded spot would be much clearer, much more to the point and probably much more classy as a one voice (or even bring it down to 2 voices) production. If you are a creative director, this means writing an extra script. If you are a producer, this means producing another spot.

Even if you think it might not reach the client after the account exec gets a hold of it, it’s still a weapon for the sales team to use in case it’s needed.

To be clear, I am not saying ALL multi-voice spots are clutter…i am arguing that a lot of them are…but for reasons beyond anyone’s control, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Moreover, providing an extra mix or script really goes a long way for your team AND you.

It could be for so many other reasons beyond voice numbers. The spot could be too long (even with one voice)…or the music the client chose is copyrighted, maybe they voiced it themselves and they need to hear something in comparison before they waste their money…whatever the case, it’s worth it to provide the extra work.

Because if worse comes to worse and corporate cuts your stations budget – who would want to get rid of the producer that actually helps out the sales team? Who would want to cut the writer whose extra script saved the sale that one day because they KNEW that the 4 voiced spot was just too cluttered to make any dent in sales.

Not me…i would fight for their survival…I would voice my opposition to corporate on their behalf. With one voice of course. Anything more is just clutter.