This is the Pro Audio Suite podcast quick Bites. Welcome to another Pro Audio Suite quick bite. This week we're talking about auditioning and I start off with a bit of a story. After seeing the new Star Wars movie, it reminded me of one of my horror experiences many many years ago, the first in a casting far far away they shot, Yeah, that's right, they shot the first prequel in Australia with you McGregor and Liam Neeson, and I got a fax that shows how long ago it was. A facts came through asking me to audition for one of the roles, so I thought, oh, this would be cool. So along I went met George Lucas's casting director. She had flown in from the States, got into a hotel room. She goes, okay, you're ready to audition? They went yeah, yeah, sure, and then she rolled camera. I said are you going to film this as well? And she said yes, we're filming this. Do you want to do a run through? I okay, sure, And I picked up the script and started reading and she said you have memorized the script, haven't you? No? I thought I was doing a voiceover. She goes, no, it was an on camera role, and that was the end of that. So close yet so far, far far away, far away. So that wasn't you didn't have an agent sending you in on that job. I did. I did, but they did say to your agent. I didn't say anything. Really too embarrassed. I said nothing, but I just walked out and yeah, hey, I reckon. That opens up an interesting topic though, I mean, auditioning is a big part of things, not so much here in Australia, but certainly for those people who listen to us and work in the States. How do you prepare? I mean, George, you've worked with some of the bigger names. What's what's their sort of take on auditioning? Oh, yeah, boy, we've I mean in the US, certainly, auditioning is a huge, huge part of the time that most voice actors spend in their day. You know. It's like they're not necessarily marketing or or building their business or rebuilding the studio, they're they're auditioning. So in the ten or so years that I've been doing like full on doing voiceover tech stuff, you know, I discovered kind of early on that it definitely seemed clear to me that if voice actors don't have some kind of processing on their on their auditions, then they're going to be at a disadvantage competitively. And I don't it's too long ago to remember some of the first projects that I started setting up processing for auditions, so I can't recall like a particular name that kind of helped me launch this whole concept. But the bottom line is, like, if I use all these dumb analogies, oftentimes related to photography, because most people can get photography, you know, I'll say, if the mic isn't in the right place, it's like the camera lens being out of focus, that kind of thing. Yep. But in terms of sending out auditions, you know, I tell people, would you send in your eight x ten glossy or would you send in your a polaroid? You know, like, would you just send in like a completely unretouched raw image with just you know, as representing you to a casting agent. No, you never would do that. And so I liken that to the reason we process audio for auditions. Now, I think there's you know a certain point where voice actors or maybe celebrities don't really have to be so overly concerned about the quality of their auditions because you know, they become sort of a quite a bit of a known factor. But for everybody else who's going to be heard lined up against you know, two hundred other people, that processing can really help them get a leg up, you know. So it's it's something that I've been doing for a lot of people. So are we saying then that they're being judged also on the sound of their studio or are we processing just to make our voice sound better and more attractive in general. That's a great question. There's Yeah, there's two parts to it for auditioning. You know, if you think about it, when you listen to an audio file you asked, you actually answer me this question. When you listen to a file somebody sends you within the first say, two seconds, are you judging the acting or are you judging the sound quality? Me, I would be judging the acting of the voice, and then quality, I would suggest. Okay, so the acting would be the first thing that you would key off of. Yeah, then you'd start noticing. The because I would be looking for a certain characteristic in the voice that I was I needed for whatever it was I was doing. Yeah, right, Yeah, And that makes sense as someone who's casting, they would probably hear the acting from the audio perspective. As an engineer, of course, I'm hearing the sound quality. I obviously can't have any effect whatsoever as to what kind of performance that the voice actor client that I'm working with is going to give. But what I can do is make sure that when they do send in that audition, the sound quality will not be a distracting factor. You know, the first thing they hear isn't going to be hiss, rumble, glosives, you know, intense sibilance, deep booming base with no trouble from a ribbon mic. Whatever the case. I'm going to make sure at least that that quality they're going to send out there is going to take you know, it's going to catch their attention, and then the acting obviously is going to be the rest most of it. Really. So that's the way I've looked at the processing thing, and and I do it based So I do it to enhance the genre, and I also do it to make whatever their studio signal chain and studio situation is sound as good as it can so. But there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into it. It's interesting because people can send auditions through with like really low level for instance, so if you're up against somebody else, you kind of disappear. Yeah, that's a that's a nail in the coffin, right if they hit play on that, you know, can you remember in many cases they're listening to a lot of these files in a row. They're not gonna feel like. It's kind of like resumes, you know, if they get a two hundred resumes and if there's something they just don't like, they don't like the color of the paper, they don't like the font, it can go right in their waist in the circle file. It's kind of like that with the auditions, like if there's something that's just odd or hard to listen to distract thing, or let's say the levels are really low, so they have to now hit the little volume key on their mac keyboard, you know, as people do. It's so funny to watch them do that to get the volumes. It's just distracting, and then when they get to the next file and they hit play, it's going to blow them out of the water. So I guess the hard part is what's the right volume? Right? So you know, because I'm trying to I'm trying to hit a target that doesn't really exist. There's no established expected RMS level or luffs or whatever it is for these auditions, so I'm just trying to just I'm just doing it based on the average of what I've heard over the last you know, hundreds of files that I've heard. It's just sort of a cumulative thing. It just sounds right to me in that context, and it's usually going to be above minus twenty rms and probably below mine. Fourteen minus thirteen or fourteen would be like really really in your face. So voice without giving away the George Withhham's secret source, what's what's your target? If you if I sent you my audition demo and said, give me a stack, what are you looking for in terms of a sound. Are you looking for a polished, almost broadcast quality. Are you looking for a sound that just makes me sound a bit more natural? Yeah? Good question. Yeah. The And just to define the term stack for some folks, sorry, stack is a no, it's okay. The stack is kind of a word that became adopted, but we sort of adapted into the vernacular a bit. It was really actually based on twisted wave. Twisted wave created this method of saving a stack of processing tools into one preset, and I don't think he was the first to do that, but many other companies are doing it. They call him stacks, audition, closet, a rack, Audacity calls it a macro. Used to be called a chain. You know, there's all these terms, but they all mean the same thing. But in terms of what I'm doing esthetically to the audio is I just wanted to sound familiar. Years ago, I was doing like a demo shootout on vobs. You know, we had a whole bunch of demos and we were kind of a few demo producers were rating them and listening to them, and the ones that we liked the most where it just sounded familiar, Like when you heard that spot, it literally just sounded like it came off the air. It just was contextually and you know, for the times just right. And so that's what I'm trying to do when I do that processing for people, I'm trying to make it sound when they've hit the play, They're going to go, Wow, that sounds like the spot. Yeah, that's the voice, And that's the way I'd want it to sound. And as a result, I hear all the time from clients on mine that say, yeah, I said in the audition, I never heard again. All of a sudden, I got a check in the mail and I'm like, how do that? It went so that you know, as we call it, going to finish, you know, you send in the audio and it goes to finish. Wow, it's done well. So you saying to your audition and we love it, we're using it. Is that pretty much? Yet? Yeah, we love what we're using because the quality is great, it's processed right. So it's just great for an actor to send in something that's as close to finished as possible on the audition. But for jobs, that's an entirely different situation because now you're completely having to figure out what it is they want if they're not going to tell you. And certainly Australia and most of the good markets there's a pro producer like yourself. And we've talked about this, you guys have said it one hundred times. Please don't process your jobs through your your files. But I just got off the phone with a very successful voice here in the US, female voice who does tons of promo and affiliate and stuff, and she's hearing these mixes and going, man, it's my voice is deep down in this mix. So I set up a processing preset called affiliate, So when she does a TV affiliate spot, it's going to make sense and it's going to sound properly mixed because frankly, there is nobody doing it at the station. Yeah. Yeah, So that's another genre where that's another kind of situation where that processing comes into play. Now, coming back to levels again, though, you talk about r Yeah, so if I was to do an audition what I normally do, if I send them over, I normalized to minus three, So I'll go through and manually take out some of the big peaks. Would that be loud enough? There's nothing wrong with that. And because you are manually leveling the audio by reducing the big peaks, you're essentially using compression. You know, you know, you're doing manual compression. Compression is like the reducing of dynamic range. So when you take the big peaks and lower them, you're reducing the difference between the loud stuff and the quiet stuff, and so you're reducing dynamic range. And then now the overall level is dropped, the average level is dropped, and then you're using normal wise to make up the level and get it overall louder. That's probably gonna be fine. You probably don't need to do much more than that. But for certain genres where the final production is so hot, you know, like promo or something, then it may sell a little bit better if you know, you take it another level, maybe use some limiting, you know, to really just bring up the average volume. And nothing brings up the average level. The RMS easier than a limitter. I mean it's yes, you can overcook it, sure, you can really overcook it, but you can hear it. I mean you can hear when it gets overcooked. And limitters are usually in the plug ins world, one of the simplest plug ins in terms of having only a couple of things to adjust, and they're pretty easy to just use as a method to make it louder. So if you don't know anything about processing, as long as your audio quality is clean, you've got good technique. If you want to make it a little bit louder, a limitter tool can do that for you. Just again, just don't overcook it, don't make it too loud. So what about from an artist's perspective then, ap, I mean you've done a few auditions over the years. Do you do you do one read or do you send them a couple of variations? How do you go? Well? It was funny because when I first started doing it after going to the States for the first time, I'm working with Jim Kennelly at Lotus. I'd never auditioned before, so I had no idea what was expected. But I learned obviously a lot very quickly, and I realized that even if you're slate, you've got to keep your slate really short because there's a good chance they'll play five seconds and then gone. If I don't like it, gone right, So. It leads to the first part of the audition. Yeah, so keep your slate short and bang straight into it. But also you don't need to do multiple takes. I mean, I hear people saying, you know, Fred blogs three takes, then maybe you can listen to the first one, so there's no point that it lasts too, are redundant. Just make sure that the first one is it. So if you're reading the script and say you can hear it read a couple of different ways, will you put those three ways down when you're recording your audition? And then pick which one you reckon they'll go for, or yeah, i'd probably record. I probably do multiple takes actually, and then I'll cut them all up and then listen back to them all maybe disappear if I've got time to be somewhere, come back and fresh years and have another listen, and just make sure the first five seconds or ten seconds is good. But I'm talking about what about in terms of picking like style and cadence and how much smile, how little smile? How do you figure out? Half the time, you've got to guess it because you can guarantee the brief is going to be kind of sketchy at best, so you just look at the script and go, okay, well, my guess is it's going to be this. And sometimes also when you see some of the notes, you kind of think, well, if I do it exactly as you've said, I'm going to sound like everybody else. So I'm going to toss the coin here and I'm going to do it the way I think it should be done. And if you don't like it, well, so be it. But it just may be the one they go, wow, that's different. Listen to that again, and then you know it could work, but you wouldn't do that with a Star Wars. Yes, let's the Star Wars. You wouldn't do that with a Star Wars script. Right, No, Yeah, Like yeah, I've heard people say, like, the bigger the budget, the less risks you're going to want to take. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's pretty much. That's not a bad attitude either, is it. There you go? But sometimes I think people actually really don't know what they want. They think they know what they want. You know. It's like when you go to hear it. Yeah. Yeah, like when you're in a session and you know it's like yeah, okay, and then you go, well do you want to try this? And you start moving it around all of a sudden, you know this rubbo and then someone will hit something which you didn't necessarily direct them towards, but they just hit something that you didn't expect to go, that's it, We'll go. That's the way we're going to go with this thing. It's funny though, I mean I could take I mean, I don't do a lot of casting these days, but back in my advertising agency days and external sort of audio facility days, I did a lot of casting, and it was back because we don't audition here, and in days before the Internet, before people had demos on the web, we used to just get CDs from the voiceover agents. And it's interesting how many times I would have something in mind for something the client wanted to do. I'd stick the CD in, say from RMK or Morrissey or whoever it was, and start skipping through the voices looking for someone, and all of a sudden you just hear something that was completely out of left field that you weren't even looking for in all of us, and you'd grab the script in you'd read it and go, fuck, actually, that's not bad, you know what I mean, It's kind of and so you're kind of right. And in that I think in terms of you know, sometimes that left of field, not not even left to field, just that little bit of difference can actually throw up an idea in someone's mind and they go, well, geez, I was thinking this, but you know what, actually this might be better. And it's really funny how some people will send in an audition or make a demo that's so overly produced that you really have no idea what they can actually do, and you end up booking them and they come in and they can barely read. Yeah, I've come across that a couple of times in the last few years, and it's I suppose it's a well indictment on where we are as an industry that you can spend four or five days building you know, a two minute demo, but then when someone expects the work to be done in five minutes, it doesn't happen. We did. We covered this before, but you guys said that crept me if I'm wrong. Primarilys are reels like it's actually a compilation of actual job, that's right. And here people will spend three to five grand to have someone produce a demo and coach them, you know, within an inch of their lives to get that perfect demo. So I'd say here it's far worse of a problem because they have to then show up in that big studio with that room full of you know, reps from the writers, and now they have to do that under the gun. They may not be ready. So yeah, that's that's interesting. What I think is missing in the industry. And because we've got home studios and internet, I'm surprised that no one is actually doing live auditions. So you send out a costing call people book a slot, and then they just go from using Source connect for instance, just go from one home studio to another, to another to another. It would be logistically more difficult, but yeah, with something like Zoom, for example, like I can have Zoom open and I use it for my consulting all day long because it does remote desktop and video and all kinds of stuff. And I can have Zoom sets so I have a waiting room and so people can call in. I can be in the middle of a session. The next guy will call in and he's just sitting there in the waiting room. And so with that, you could have a whole bunch of voice actors queued up in the waiting room and you could just bop from one to the next to the next. In your waiting room. The really bad podcasts or YouTube videos and ten year old videos or something like that. I wish you could do that. Yeah, I don't know what they hear or see. I think they're just in the abyss waiting. But if you can cueue up some or some bad elevator leave music. Playing. But yeah, really, but you're right, I mean, that would be really I mean in a world where it's like everything's gone virtual and people are becoming a lot very accustomed to live streaming. That seems like a really great idea, like a for really important jobs, you know, and I know people here are doing coaching and directing people on auditions virtually. Yeah, like you can hire them to get that big audition. You know. It's like, oh man, this is the payday right here. I need to get this. So you'll spend fifty to one hundred bucks and pay a director to direct you on that audition, like the old days where you'd go into the agent and sit down, because that's what they did here in the US. You'd go into William Morris, sit down in one of their booths and be directed by a director on that audition. That was the way it was. So to be able to do that virtually now is a thing and people are doing it. The other thing about doing these live is because it's you might have someone who can read, who understands the script, but can they take direction? Oh yeah, yeah, that's right exactly. And you can't tell if someone can take direction when you listen to an audition. You only find that out when you get them in the studio. Yeah. Well, there you go. I reckon, we've maybe helped a few people get a few a few more jobs in twenty twenty. What do you reckon? I hope? So, hey, can I plug plug it away? Well, if you want to get your own stack rack whatever it is, head over to George the dot Tech. That's George the dot Tech. That's my website, and that's where I you can purchase those. They're a flat rate. You just drop down the papal menu, choose the doll that you use, and in your files and back you get your presets, templates, whatever it is for that system. So take it a look. Here you go. Very good. Also, I should mention that we also got some feedback from our friend Vin at whose podcast called it the Door Bench. He's a new podcast, but he just said, uh hall George going fanboy on the podcast. This is in reference to last week's Twisted Wave special. Audio quality for all you guys was great. The new roads working well. Happy new year by the way, thanks, yeah, beautiful love a bit of feedback. Yeah cool. Well we'll catch up next. Week, I suppose. So all right, you guys speak see you two. This show was mixed by Voodoo Sound, edited by Andrew Peters using source connect now and road microphones with technical support from George the tech wittem don't forget to subscribe and like us.
