Voiceover Essentials with Jim Edgar (Part 2) – Advanced Techniques and Troubleshooting

Already history. Welcome to the pro Audio Suite. Thanks you guys, a professional and motivator. Thanks to try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian audio Making Passion Herd. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging site to the video Stars, George the Tech Whittam from LA and Me, Andrew Peters Voice Saber Talent and home studio Guy out and welcome to another pro audio suite. This is part two of our chat with Jim Edgar for another ramble into the hedges and beyond. I'm sure thanks to try Booth. Don't forget the code trip AP two hundred that will get you two hundred dollars off your try booth. Use the code and enjoy the try booth. They're very good, you know. And Austrian Audio Making Passion Herd working with people coming into the industry and this was something that sent me right off the Richter scale. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a it's on a Facebook in a thread of some voice over community thing, and there was a person who was setting up. In fact, the things it said my husband built me a studio. Well, I'll describe exactly what the picture showed me. It showed me inside a closet, a metal shoe rack with a USB mic on it, and a laptop. Okay, a no treat. Yeah, my husband built me as. What shoes were there? I was going to say birkenstocks. They were burken. I'm sure her husband performs well and other endeavors. It's funny I take a different view. I kind of looks like we all start somewhere. You know, we all start innocently, we all go, hey, this is all it takes cool, and as you move forward through your career you learn, you know, it's like you understand that maybe that's not right. So, I mean, you know, it's a shoe a voice booth. Of of course it's not. But at the same time, fuck, we all start somewhere, you know. I thought that. I thought the first thirty second commercial I made with a few sound effects in it was the greatest thing ever. And then someone went, actually, you've got two voiceover go, two voiceovers going at the same time. You know, would I do that now? Of course not, But. Back then, it was like, fuck, check out this great effect on the voiceover. You know, it's like, I don't know, you're in a professional studio, but that's the thing that they're learning. Curve is the studio, you know, that's the yeah, but it's not a studio. And this is a point. It's like terminology and you know what your expectations are. If you think I'm going to be a voice actor and then you sit there steering at a pair of birkenstocks on a steel shoe rack, it's do you turn up with plastic toolkit when you're a trade I don't think. No, you don't because as a trader you know better. But if you're starting out you don't know better. Maybe you should know better. So what on that topic, Jim, what's the worst thing you a scene as far as someone starting up. Well, I was told, I think and again my second or first class, that all I needed was a snowball. It was like it was this thing I could just plug into my computer, and I bought one and I plugged it in. I said, oh, I guess that's weird because I thought audio quality mattered. But again i'd heard, you know, I'd had some experience, I knew that, you know, what what stuff should or could sound like. I think what gets people into trouble is that they think they just are going to do something once and never have to correct it and so again. Kind of along the lines of making them aware of the sounds is imparting this idea that it's going to be an iterative process, that your space is going to sound better next year because you're going to continually refine it, that you're going to make You're going to get better at noticing problems, You're going to get into better at listening to issues. I have all sorts of photos from students who were saying, hey, would this work, and it's the same. It's yeah, it's kind of like that. I mean, here's a big metal, you know, copy stand and you know it's in a dry walled closet that has you know, one by one piece of foam in and it's like, that's not going to work. But I've seen these, you know. I mean, I share my first space, which was ugly, you know, I had to I had to record in the in the hallway of this house. And I would never show that to a client. I would never show I never showed it's my agent. But my sound was good. The residences were controlled, there was no reflection. It was you know, on Mike and present, but it looked uglier in hell, you know. And it was back you know, in the in the late aughts of this century, before anybody was doing all the you know, all the look at me in my studio kind of thing. I mean, my big thing right now is I think that a lot of people get sold a bill of goods with foam that I think foam is one of the most over prescribed solutions to solving a space, you know, because everybody goes searches on again a major internet retailer and finds the little one inch you know, cheap foam and they put that in their in their closet, and they spend way too much money and they use way. And they wonder why it sounds like everything sounder sounds like this the whole time. So received people wrap the foam around the mic stand literally around the whole poll of the mic sound. Seeing that, let me ask you, and I guess George, you fall into this too, so maybe both of you might have any input on this. I had I was sort of forced into a situation where I had to use a sort of you know, bottom let's call it bottom of the wrung voiceover provider agency here in Australia last week for a community radio station client of mine who don't have the money to pay, you know, three hundred dollars for a thirty second commercial because they're they're charging their client two hundred. But I got sent this voiceover. The voiceover booth was obviously under the stairs somewhere because it had that really hollow, yucky sound, and then they obviously tried some noise reduction and the noise reduction threshold wasn't low enough, so occasionally there was this noise kicking in and it was just horrible. But the point. I make right is that yes, the voiceover talent should be responsible for that, but then also it came through their agent and then to me. So the question I have is for them, was are you not giving your voiceover feedback that you hang on a second? This isn't right, I need you to redo it. But the question for you two that comes for me from that is do you find when people come from you that people will say, I've had a client tell me this, or someone else has told me that about my recording or is it purely just people going this is the problem I'm experiencing, because to me, there's some sort of responsibility on people who were receiving these shit files to go, you need to sort this out. And I don't know that that's happening. Yeah, I think that's sally anybody who's going to do with that until it's way down the line and no one is able to re record because it's all done. I'd say there's a third option, which is a lot of people come to me saying I'm not sure my stuff is good enough, and I think that's the right perspective on it, that they kind of know they have to sound good, but they just don't have the vocabulary for it. They don't have they know it's wrong. I mean, by the time you know, we're hitting twenty or whatever, we're starting to go into voiceovers, we've ingested a lot of a lot of material. We kind of know what things should sound like, and we know that you know, that echoe thing if we pay any attention to it whatsoever, or if we've got that horrifically muffled thing, we know it doesn't sound right. We just don't know how get from A to B. So I get a lot of people who say, I just I'm going to start applying to agents, and I want to make sure my sound is good. And you know, if they're folks I haven't worked with before, I know George has had this too, you have to say, no, it's not you know, whoever told you this is good? Not good enough? I've heard a good YETI on your show. Yeah, but it's you know, I. Had this happened with a client the other day. They or you know, they're an audiobook narrator. They were trying to get some work there, instituting some workflow things, and you know, I just said, hey, you know, have you ever tried moving your mic slightly? And they did, and I've never seen a picture of their space, and it sounded horrifically bad. And they sent me a photo of their space and they have a reflection shield and some weird handles around it, and they had found the only place in their tiny little closet that it sounded good, and by moving the mic two inches to the right, it all of a sudden we were getting forgetting comb filtering and all sorts of weird stuff back so we had to move everything back where we started because the space didn't allow for It was just a little you know two by two you know, you're under the stairs place, which they'd managed to make sound good, but it was it. Probably they lucked into it. I would say, well, yeah, I think they did. But that's the sort of thing again, I you know, preaching a lot of the stuff I post is that it's always going to be an iterative process. That you know, if you think you're done, you're not. You know, the when when everybody had to suddenly start doing stuff out of the house, you know, there were a legion of people who were suddenly using source connect, who suddenly weren't going into the local studio, and you know, they were saying, hey, you're this isn't going to work now in our area. They definitely listen to your audio before you get signed. They say, we want to sample from your space. Most I think most agents, you know a value, will you know, set the bar high enough that that you can actually that they'll actually test your audio. Yeah, it's clearly then clearly this this agent wasn't listening. He's just like, oh yeah, okay, we got it. Here we go forwarded onto the client and. They probably listened through their you know, through their laptop speakers, so that's the other thing. Well then then then then then the interesting thing for me was it wasn't like, oh, should we screwed up? He's your audio, will get it done straight away. It was like, oh, we'll redo it, we'll be back to you tomorrow. It's like I need this now. You know if I oh, well, you know anyway, you know it's going to air tonight, so yeah tomorrow. Yeah, tech, I've only got a client who was expecting to have it today because you promised me the audio today. But that's okay, don't worry about it. Yeah. I love the session that seems to happen once a year where someone hooks up on source connect records and then finds out later from the engineer or the other side that it's not good enough. And the classic mistake is not selecting your main microphone and source connect because of whatever, Like you know, you unplug your scarlet and then you launch source connects. So it found the only thing it could find, which was the built in microphone. So you see the meter bouncing, You think it's good. You connect with someone who should be saying like uh, Instead they're just like do a whole session, then go hey, do you look the good audio? And the actor's like what you're talking about. And that's sort of unconscionable from the engineers. That's what they're doing. That's what they should be doing, is listen. It for that. It's amazing that it happens, but yes, yeah, yeah, it's like when you're doing sessions and they're actually monitoring on zoom and you're capturing the audio at your end, all right, and they just assume good absolutely fraught with danger, you know, because you don't really know what you can never receive, or. You come out and you didn't a cord. It's like, oh, well, well you look around and it's actually stopped or crashed. Yeah, all of the. Well, but that's all the stuff. Yet you know that we've been asked to do increasingly in the last five years. You know that that wasn't you know, I mean, that wasn't as expected as I think it is now. So again, much like we have to keep reinventing and asking ourselves as our is our space, competitive, is our gear competitive? You know, we need to know enough technically that we don't do things like that. I wonder if there was a reality where back when ISDN was still happening and voiceover talent were kind of using the ISDN like capability is a sort of club against each other, like, well, you don't even have to hire a studio because I have my DN and that culture of a talent not charging for their studio, and I just wonder if there was ever an alternate universe where talent are allowed to have their fee from being a talent, and then if they're expected to do the recording, god forbid, actually present it with you know, like anything more than one long file, you know, where you're separating files or even doing edits, and the talent should be paid for being the engineer that they're forced to become in a way on some level. But it's like it just never happened and. It never will now because. It would take an alternate universe at this point. I mean, you look at the investment if you if you're serious about you know, even if you're keeping it to the bare minimum, the investment as a voice Yeah, if you're doing it right. It's ten grand. Yeah, at least you know, you gets in a microphone and another five hundred dollars in a pre amp and a couple thousand in a booth. Probably by the time you're done messing with it, if at least or treating a closet for I mean, George, what's the least you could treat a closet for it? Maybe like four hundred bucks. Yeah, three, two to four hundred dollars, yeah, yeah. But that is that quiet on demand? Or is that? No? Is that I can get away with it, That can get away the hours when my neighbor. Is not idling there hardly, you know, the night on the shower, Yeah, exactly upstairs. No, I would say quite on demand. You're probably not even getting close unless you're spending probably like two grand. You need to spend minimal on your booth and a lot of coiludes. You can get to the dog stool. Oh why in my pre flight list, we have a we have a terrier here at the house, and and uh, my pre flight list has closed the shades in the front of the house because if she sees somebody walking in front of us, she'll start barking. And that's it. It doesn't quite come through my booth, but I can hear it. Enough that it's like, I know it's there. Just yeah. Yeah. Here in Evanston, they apparently they banned gas leaf blowers. Did they really? Oh really they did that in my areas. Unfortunately we're in an an unincorporated area which doesn't follow the city regulations. But yeah, they did that in La too. They were that past. Did the Panta Monica least Yah, Santa Monica. Did not La. I live in LA and trust me they did not. Okay, well, I'm guilty of charged on the petro blower, so guilty charge works better than anything else. Brush cuta and. Yeah, but I mean we need to develop a suite of plugins rawbo that are you know, specifically designed to tune out your one. This one does the right ivy, this one does the Meida, this one does that. There we go there exactly. You you retire in. Each country because of the different frequencies of the power. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah you could have the waves still. Yeah, you could refine it. My wife and I'll be fine. Leaf flower to make a leaflow proof booth, I think you're spending some serious coin, or at least putting a lot of time and a lot of trips in home depot, but it's going to be a construction and it's a commitment, and and a lot of people still kind of treat this as like this like side job and they're just going to like clear out half their closet and they might get a few gigs and some people end up with a quiet closet. But in certain places it's hard. I mean New York. City, yeah, or I was going to say that, yeah. But having said that, there are plenty of talent in New York City to get it right too, though. There are, yeah, the heaviest geographic area that was reaching out in the first months of the pandemic because they were all going into studios. I mean, I know plenty of you know, working union talent who were still doing iPhone auditions in New York City and then going in you know, for the for the work that that idea that we have to do this here. Oh, that's very different. There's there's this place in New York City. Actually we throw a party at the AES convention at but basically it's a really interesting story. So there's this big post house and they had all these like serious booths, like the metal ones that are they're like thirty grand each. I don't know if you've seen those types of like Industrial Acoustic Design Booths is one company that makes them. They're so insane insanely heavy, Like there's. Some ones that you float in water or is that that's different. That's like, I know these are like the wall panels are made out of metal and like one four by whatever eight foot wall panels like four hundred pounds, Like once you own one, if you're not using it, it's just like a burden. So essentially this posthouse goes out of business. They've got something like ten or more of these things and they've got to you know, they got to clear out the building. It's going to cost them thousands of dollars to get rid of them. So voxpod comes in and says, hey, we'll buy them for we'll get we'll get rid of them for you. They get them all for basically the price of getting rid of them, and they put them in this place, and so talent and podcasters and whoever. Because it's New. York, it's all very walkable. They just have this ten booths, each one with a microphone and a mac and everything you need, and you kind of have like a membership and you can just have a completely seriously pro setup and it's it's like going to the club, going to the gym. Yeah yeah, yeah, interesting. Actually took you that Cunningham's in LA. When you go there, they've got the same thing, that whole row of booths in a huge room and it's probably about the same six ten or whatever it is in a space. It's massive, massive. You can you can do that in a big city where the commute is not as bad as the construction and the cost, because the right gig, you're going to make your money back on that gig. Well, the good thing about New York in that respect is that people do tend to walk or jump on the subway. I mean, it's a much easier city if you're going to do that, because everything is accessible. Exactly if there's only a few cities in the world we can get away. I don't even like La would be kind of hard to get away with that because it's so. Sad, I think, Robert, I think your use of the phrase kind of hard is understanding significantly. You'll spend an hour going two Mileslance. It's fucking impossible. Yeah. Yeah, Well, it's the same as Melbourne, Sydney. It's just a nightmare. Now, Jim. You also, as we mentioned before, you do teaching. So what's the company and where is advised? Well, I do most of my classes through Voice One, which is located in San Francisco, but most of the classes are online, so you can. They do some inpert. They have an in person facility kind of near the waterfront in San Francisco, but a good portion of their classes are also available to anybody who has Internet. And then I do my own stuff, kind of like George. I'll do little webinars on twisted Wave or other stuff through my just ask gimvo dot studio site, which has been around. I know Robert and Robo and I have kind of fighting just Ask monikers. But I'm gonna be honest. I never knew until until I kind of went, ah. That's all right that I you know, it's one of those things where you know, I kind of backed into this. It was one of those things where I was, you know, doing voiceover, and people were saying, hey, I need to set up a home studio, and so it's like, okay, we'll do that, and then like the third person called me up and said, well, so and so said I should just to ask Jim. It's like, oh, I love alliterations. So that's where that came from. Well, that's all right, I can see my new company. Yeah exactly, asked Andrew anything on some of the others Andrew demand exactly. Oh I like that. So how did you? How did you? I'm interested because you said you got into Voice two thousand and seven. What we did before I worked, I did a lot of retail work. I was managing stores. I was in the bike business for a while. I went did marketing and store in store display meant well, we had thirteen stores, and so it was more you know, getting stuff together, sending it out, and then calling all our stories to make sure they put them up, which is actually kind of one. Of the early is called planograms. Uh they are called planograms, but there are these things called lazy store managers that you need to call up and say, hey, you know, the sale is tomorrow, we need to have that stuff up. But it was kind of like one of the early times. When I mean, I mean honestly, you know, growing up by all my closest friends were animated characters, so I kind of always I think was destined to do this, but I had called up, you know, I was on store number ten, you know, told them, hey, this is you know, happened in this weekend, and make sure you get all your all your trainings in order and everything has to be this way. Went to the next door to call them and I got you know, somebody said, hey, so and so at store tens calling you back. It's like, what's up? And the guy just lit into me and he said like, if you don't care what you're talking about to me, you know, just don't even bother. And he just went on and I was like, wow, that's interesting, and it sort of made me realize that, you know, the excitement in my voice and the energy in my voice was very much a component of the message that I was trying to put across. And so it was like light bulb number one goes on. And then my wife, not too long after that, gave me a little weekend voiceover class because I think she was kind of tired of our dogs singing and talking to each other a lot in public. I had a wife while you worked in the bike industry. Oh yeah, we go back quite away as actually, but no, she we were it was one of those things where you know, I kept you know, I'd like, see this thing about voiceovers, like, man, I got to do that. I got to do that. I got to do that, and never did. And then she, you know, for actually one of my birthdays, said hey, little two hour class, you know, learn about voiceovers, Like okay, here's the gateway drug. Uh. And I walked into that class and it was like coming home, and I knew he needed to do it. So you know, started investing. You know, I didn't have acting and acting background. I didn't know it. Well, I'll argue that retail is really improv every day, so I think I had a lot improv draining. Uh. But I took. But uh, you know, hit classes pretty hard and you know, got my skills together and started doing some work directly, and then got signed with the local agency, well Stars agency here in San Francisco. Uh and kind of was was doing both the retail gig, and at that point I'd moved under the kind of more outdoor industry, kind of general outdoor retail stores and so I was the boss so I could come in late, I could give myself the afternoon off for sessions, which was nice. And then eventually made the jump full time, and it was kind of in the middle of that that again, stars you know, told their roster it's like, you can't come into the studio anymore to do auditions, and so all these people were suddenly saying, how do I do this? And they say that before before the pandemic. In two thousand and seven, for like the first couple of classes, one of the pitches from the teachers was when you go into your agency to audition, you know, go find a quiet corner because you have to you know, you'll be all sorts of have all sorts of distractions. And then about you know, three months later, they stopped saying and then the word got around. It's like no, they just they just told all their talent that they have to figure out how to do auditions at home. And so I think the Bay Area was early and that I know that. Yeah, LA agencies were still bringing people in right up to the pandemic. I think in some cases some will. Yeah, it was interesting because when I went there, I'd never seen that before, and it was visiting agencies and particularly in LAA. You walk in and there were booths there and engineers right like what this is bizarre. I mean for the sessions. I mean you're your time out for the auditions, for the auditions, yeah enough, the session happening in person or they also because I mean I'm not sure when, but certainly by two thousand and. Ten or fifteen, it's like every especially being in Chicago. So if you're in LA or New York, you're doing a lot of local sessions. There's a lot of talent there, but in Chicago there's there's talent here. But it just began to be mostly remote sessions many years ago, you know, to the point where it's like you almost could get away with if you wanted to having a mixed studio with no booth, because like most of your talent is this remote. Interesting. Yeah, we definitely had, you know, I would say we started seeing more remote sessions locally, but we'd still be going into you know, Polarity Post or One Union or even you know, Stars had their booth still which had an IDN connection. So if you book something for that, you'd go into the agency to record it, but it would be all it would be remote. But I don't think the expectation was there. I mean, I you know, I got to risk Connect two or three years before the pandemic, because you know, I kind of knew that there were a bunch of auditions I wasn't getting because I didn't have Source Connect, And so as soon as I got that as like all that, you know, I was seeing different opportunities than I was before I got it. Uh, and then when the pandemic hit, it was like, oh, you know, everybody else now needs to do this. So that's did you go more remote than local before the pandemic or did it really take the pandemic to it was edge. I think it was a harder sell for a lot of producers. I mean, you know, I think every the expectation was We're going to go to the studio and the talent will be there. And you know, I would push a lot of times, say hey, we can do this remotely, and you know, a couple out of ten, one out of ten that had planned to go in person might say, yeah, let's do that. That's you know, that lot'll work. It got turned up to eleven when when the pandemic hit. You can always tell you could always tell the session by the time it was booked during the day whether they would accept you working remotely or dragging you in, and it would be either late morning, lunchtime or afternoon drinks. So if you're going to be called in the studio, it's going to be free food, free drinks. If you know it's one of those time slots you're going in no matter what if it's like nine o'clock in the morning, no one wants to be there. You can work from the home's I would. I would say that there's data to support that. Yes, I mean the lunch bill. I think for most of the sessions I used to do years ago, was probably more than I got paid. And then there was the cocaine on top of that. Yeah, yeah, well that was that was radio. But it's funny you talked about the sales thing, because I do remember when I got into radio, as you know, on DJ, it took me a while to click, but I but I was in retail before that, so I did a few years in selling stuff and it clicked one day. And it was because there's a guy here who was a talkback kind of host who has had a syndicated show across Australia. And one day I was listening and I thought, you know what this guy is probably the best salesman in Australia because everyone thinks of him being a radio personality, but he's actually a really good salesperson and that's why he's so big. And then you click, it's like, yeah, well that's what I'm doing. I'm selling stuff. Whether it's selling a record that I'm about to play or a promo, we're doing whatever, you're actually selling it. I think we have, you know, a great detector as a listener that we recognize when we're getting one of the things that people are trying to push us to stuff. And so, you know, I was always kind of a little more pulled back on the sales floor. There were definitely people who were you know, out of their face and going to make their commission and got to sell that extra stuff. And I was just always confident that's like, hey, I'm going to tell you what it is. It happened for yeah, exactly exactly. And so I think that that's, you know, one of the things that helped my transition into voice over. I didn't have to undo that real hard cell kind of AM radio voice or anything like that. You know, do you know who Dave Pasquays is. I've heard the name. I don't know, so back. In like the late nineties, and we would do a lot of McDonald's spots and be like McDonald's and he could read anything like he just didn't give a crap about it, but he had a way of really like it was bizarre, like he didn't give a crap, but it was cool because I don't know is this And we used to always joke about that because he would just come in and be like, yeah, McDonald's and the clients would be like, oh, that's amazing. It's like you just throw it off, like. Blame for this, like throw toss it away. They call it the throwaway. Yeah. Un announcer read. Well, that's the that's the whole man next Door sort of thing, which which was which was born out of, you know, people being bombarded with advertising. You can't watch YouTube without being advertised at you can't turn on the TV, the radio, you can't do this. You can't listen to a podcast without being advertised too. So the whole idea was with with the with the man next door read is sell me without selling me so eat so, and that's where that's what is born of. It's born of the fact that there's just so much out there where. Mentally we just switch off noticing that that fake yeah, that's being scammed in our emails. So you know, anything else that's trying to sell to us now gets lumped into into that scam sort of don't sell me, I'm over it sort of attitude. Well, I should end this episode by saying, try this, get one? Why not exactly. You want? Really sure? The audio suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. We take support from George the Techo Don't. Forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say good day. Drop us a note at our website dot com