October 2022. Baby, I'm back!
Updated: Nov 26, 2022
My domain name SheSays.com has been sitting dormant for many years. I previously had it redirected to my old voice over website, VoiceAdvertising.com but when I deactivated that one, of course SheSays had nowhere to go.
Wow, doesn't time fly eh! It's been about 'that' long since I've been heavily involved in voice overs but it's so great to be here and I just can't get enough of it. I've immersed myself into the world of voice overs again, so hungry for all the information I can get. It feels like I've been starving, like I couldn't find anything to satisfy that creative side of me and yet it was right there, right at my fingertips ... it was my old 'side hustle' and now, I'm aiming for it to be my full time hustle - YEAH!
A bit more than a few years ago, I stopped doing voice overs as a side hustle to focus on something I really don't enjoy at all. Oh ok - maybe I enjoy my current job a teeny tiny bit (secure pay and lovely colleagues) but overall ... nope, I don't feel the inspiration or motivation to keep doing it. I enjoy the beautiful team of people I work with, in fact, they are the main reason I keep turning up (plus the secure pay) and yet, if I leave, I can still see them. I can have nice catchup lunches with them - after all, it's not as if I'm leaving the country. Yes ... I can imagine those now and they will be nice catchups. :-)
You know when it's time to leave a job don't you? It's that time when all you can think about is escaping, getting out of the grind and feeling the freedom. Visualising yourself not having to deal with those constant difficult situations that aren't ever going away. They just change from time to time where a different person brings you the situation but the situation is exactly the same, it just has a different face and is laid out on a different platter.
All that being said, it's time to move forward and on to the next best part of my life and, I am ridiculously excited about it! (Oh, I do have to keep my current job for the moment which is a real hard thing to do because I just want to focus on voice overs! I'm sure you know what I mean.)
So, moving on to the next stage and being able to start voicing again I needed to get my microphone, my pre-amp, a computer and digital audio software which in this instance, I chose to go back to Adobe Audition. I chose Audition because I had used it before and felt that even though I have to pay a small monthly fee, it saves me a lot of time because I already know how to use it (well, I used to). On that note, muscle memory is astounding because I opened Audition and my fingers automatically moved to my old shortcut keys for things like the parametric equaliser and normalisation. Amazing!
I set up my recording area ... guess where? ... in our bedroom cupboard. Yep, in our clothes cupboard and I'm not talking about a large walk-in robe, I'm talking about a two door built-in cupboard with all our clothes hanging on the rack and a shelf up the top. Believe it or not though, because our bedroom is at the rear of our house, this cupboard has a very low noise floor (when the neighbours dog isn't barking or birds aren't chirping happily outside that is). We pushed the clothes apart as far as we could, screwed two shelf brackets into the wall and used a shelf from our old kitchen on top of the brackets.
We couldn't screw the shelf on to the brackets because we needed to be able to remove the shelf when I wasn't voicing so, I use a clamp to keep the shelf secure. I put the Scarlet Solo, the microphone and my laptop onto the shelf and voila! We have a workable home studio. :-) While this is working in the interim, it's not a permanent set-up and we are currently working on the new 'booth' that will replace this current set-up. (Stay tuned for that blog and the TikTok videos that will come with it.)
Talking about home studio set-ups leads me to the question: What's the most important thing for a voice actor when they're starting out?
1. A microphone?
2. A DAW (digital audio workstation)?
3. A recording booth/studio?
It is definitely your recording area/booth/studio. While it's important to have a microphone of reasonable quality, the mic certainly isn't the most important thing. There are so many microphones out there, my advice is not to drown in reviews. Work out your budget then go and buy a microphone that you're happy to pay the bucks for and learn to use it properly. Mic technique is really important and there's lots of YouTube videos showing you about mic placement etc.
Now, back to your recording area/booth/studio ...
I can say from experience, having a noisy recording area is something that will drive you absolutely nuts! Until you start trying to record a voice over, you won't realise how loud those pretty chirping birds are, or how loud the wind is, or how many helicopters fly over your house every day, or how Jim up the road has bought a new V8 ute and drives it like he's at a race-track EVERY day on the way to work and on the way home. You'll be standing out in the street shaking your fist at Jim and his new green V8 ute any minute now but alas, those are your neighbourhood noises, your ambiance if you like. These are sounds you are going to hear every time you're trying to voice a script and they will seem to be highly amplified because you will be hypersensitive to them. You MUST find a suitable place to record so that you don't go nuts, truly, that's REALLY important.
And on that note, I'm off to search for voice over work so that I can go back to the cupboard. ;-)