As a producer, composer and voice artist, where much of my work is with corporate and documentary projects, I thought I might expound on a topic that I have experienced and found interesting as of late. I do hope it lends benefit to corporations, producers, other voice talent and others in the industry, or looking to be more involved in the multimedia world.
I take pride on delivering to my clients the highest in quality production value whether that is through music production or voice over production. With clients like Adobe, Kaspersky, SPIKE TV, PBS, ABC and others, I must be able to deliver that on a continued basis.
I receive demos from voice talent for projects all of the time. Most of the demos give the artist a good professional review of their work. These demos have been tweaked and edited to give the artist the best showing of their sound or voice. It is when I receive specific reads from them, for a specific project, that they have recorded with their own equipment is when things get interesting. In the professional recording world, there is a quality that is understood and generally adhered to, however, technology and software such as Garage Band or Audacity, has allowed nearly anyone to say they have a recording studio in their laptop.
You see, most voice artists today seem to have some sort of home studio or project studio set up that they work from. Some of those talents have spent thousands of dollars on creating a professional studio environment and some simply have a microphone, a digital converter, and a computer. The technology of the day has allowed either talent to create some quality productions. However, either talent and investment level in their equipment, can deliver either good quality or bad quality product.
Most voice artists were actors in high school, have a "good voice", know how to bring life to the written word, or all of the above. Many of the artists that I've come across are not studio engineers, or producers for that matter. However, in much of today's projects the voice artist is asked to deliver a read and act as producer, engineer, artist and tech geek for one low price.
If a client or producer asks for a read to be clean, with no effects, then the voice artist should deliver their tracks with no effects. If a producer asks for the files to be in aiff format v mp3, there is a reason for this request. A producer will give this request because of the fact that most voice talent are not studio engineers and are not familiar with the nuances of the compression that is inherent in an mp3 file. And how that compression is creating a dumbing down of quality to the recording world overall, but this is a discussion for another day. A voice artist is also generally not too familiar working with limiters, gates, or compression ratios that are used to enhance the voice quality or eliminate issues with the studio environment. Many times the voice artist will create a detrimental sound to their voice in order to mask off the noise of their recording environment, since it is just down the hall from their washer/dryer.
I feel voice talents and the voice over industry would benefit if artists would lend more effort to learning the art of recording and being able to deliver high quality product to their clients. Most clients I come across are willing to pay a bit more to be guaranteed that their product will be clean and professional rather than simply saving $100.
In the world of "Reality TV", that has pushed talented actors out of work and into the voice over world, it has put pressure on the voice over talent to step up, not simply reduce their price.
Email me if you would be interested in learning more.
This, the 320th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!
(c)Copyright 2007-2011 Doug Boggs
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