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REX ANDERSON

VOICE OVER ACTOR

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AUDITIONS

Reducing Noise In Your Voice Over Recordings

VOICE OVER RESOURCES

There are days when I want to rip my mouth off and flush it down the toilet. Mouth noise is the bane of my existence. Over the long, winding course of my now-several-months-long career, I’ve found a few practices and tricks to reduce or eliminate those annoying pops, clicks, whirrs, and ca-chunk-a-chunks your mouth makes. NOTE: If your mouth is ca-chunk-a-chunking involuntarily, please consult a doctor that specializes in face carburetors.

De-Click Your VO Performances

For the clicks created by spittle on your gums, eat an apple. A green one, preferably. I know you like honeycrisps better, but trust me. The juice from sour apples will burn off the spittle and reduce your saliva production, allowing you to speak high consonants without any troublesome noise. This trick has saved me from a meltdown in-studio once or twice.

When all else fails, edit! Pops look like little spikes on your waveform, appearing before and after sounds (well, the easily editable ones do anyway). Slice them out without taking the empty space around them. Voila! No more spittle grossing out your client.

Voice Over is Breath, Breath is Life

Ah, breathing. You necessary, no-you-no-life little punk. I’ve been playing around with my breathing since I first started voice acting all those days ago. First lesson was to stop breathing through my nose. It’s way sharper, not that much faster, and sounds really obvious and terrible when picked up. Next is to breathe with your diaphragm. Pulling air into your belly will make you avoid sucking in air, which in turn makes you avoid the sound of sucking in air.

To reduce the impact of plosives (p- sounds, hard f’s, any other morpheme, phoneme, or diphthong that sounds like you just blew hot air straight into the mic), experiment with setting your mic off-axis. Most decent wide condenser mics will have a wide cardioid  pattern, meaning you can move around a bit and still capture clear sound. Put your mic a little to the side to avoid blowing directly into it. This should also help a bit with breathing.

The Nose Noise You Must Remove

This next sound’s a little difficult to explain. It sounds like you’re kind of clearing your nose, like a short snore or like you’re getting ready to spit. I notice this happens when I accidentally push a little air into my nose, which causes a sound not unlike blowing my nose in the distance. Just concentrate on where your air is supposed to go and keep it even and well-supplied. Don’t swallow your breath, if that makes any sense.

Those are the biggest problematic sounds coming out of my face so far. Now, if you’ve already committed a take to your DAW and just can’t bring yourself to throw it away, pull out your tape and scissors. It’s audio-cleaning time.

Get it Right Before It Goes ITB

Don’t look for plugins to solve these kinds of problems. People profess to need all manner of noise gates, expanders, limiters, compressors, de-essers, etc. etc. I use almost none of these in my chain. You hear noise, prepare to find it and cut it out.

Most spittle appears as a small, sharp little spiky looking waveform, generally just before or after a sentence, or even in the middle of words. Zoom in on the area in which you hear the sound and study the shape of the waveform. After you’ve seen a few, they’ll be very easy to spot. They’re short enough that you can then pull the audio over without hearing any noticeable stops or gaps.

That’s all for now, good luck banishing unwanted bodily noises from your recordings!

<3

Rex

Filed Under: VOICE OVER RESOURCES Tagged With: AUDITIONS, VO TECHNIQUE

Review: Voices.com One Month Subscription

PAY TO PLAYS, VOICE OVER REVIEWS

I did a fair amount of research into to Pay-to-play type sites available out there and VDC consistently came out atop its competitors. There is quite a lot of trepidation about the P2P model in general, and I can totally understand why. The idea of paying for leads, basically for the privilege of contacting clients, can feel a little unfair at first glance. However, I’ve come around on my thinking of the model and decided that it is worth the cost of admission.

Speed Up The Auditioning Process

Over the last three weeks, I’ve adjusted my approach significantly. When my account first activated, I spent hours auditioning, cutting each one together and sending them off one at a time. About ten hours later, I had auditioned for about fifteen different jobs. A couple days in I decided to filter by deadlines, take the ones that were ending that day, and record/edit all the auditions in one go and then send out the auditions. At this point I’d already drafted a cover letter template that I have barely altered since. This cut down the amount of time I spent auditioning dramatically.

Try, Learn, Repeat

After doing some more research, I changed my approach. I turned email alerts back on and auditioned for jobs as soon as they came out. This has definitely improved my ‘listen’ and ‘like’ rate. I’m now sitting at 93 jobs answered, 91 demo listens, 10 likes, and four jobs complete with a fifth one in process. While the money is still firmly in part-time territory, this means I’d earned enough in one month to pay for a yearlong subscription, which includes increased visibility on the site. I also have enough fodder to start cutting together demos specifically geared toward different types of jobs (internet, video games, business, etc). Once I have all of those in place, that should improve to book gigs without having to produce a custom demo for each job.

What is Your Voice Over Strategy?

Worth the price of admission? Well, that’s up to you.

While I was pessimistic about the chances of Voices.com working out originally, it has proven itself to be a great tool for finding VO gigs. I’ve been fortunate enough to garner the attention of a few clients within my wheelhouse, which, turns out, is video games. I’ve already had repeat clients, which is pretty mind-blowing considering I’ve been at this a little longer than three weeks. If you’re able to put the time in and quickly produce quality demos, Voices can absolutely work for you. Just know that it takes a flexible schedule (it is essential that you respond to jobs as quickly as possible, because they fill up fast) and a fair amount of work making auditions. The good news is, after making all those auditions, you can turn around and improve your hard marketing system whether they get you the job or not.

I never thought I could start my VO career with this much momentum. While VDC hasn’t been my only source for work (aiming for 35 different, consistent sources by next winter), it’s certainly been the biggest. It certainly seems like there’s room for growth with this model and I am looking forward to a fruitful year with them.

<3

Rex

Filed Under: PAY TO PLAYS, VOICE OVER REVIEWS Tagged With: AUDITIONS, VO HUSTLE, VO STRATEGY

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