The M600 Universal Microphone Mount.

I’ve written here about noise problems I had in my voice-over studio in the past and how I solved them. They turned out to be low frequency rumbles that were fixed by weighting my microphone stand (cost: $0). Occasionally I still get a bit of rumble due to external noise creeping in, and I wondered what else I could do to address this. I sent an email to Enhanced Audio last month to inquire about the M600 and the owner, David Browne, called me from Ireland. As soon as I learned that one of his U.S. distributors is my beloved Mercenary Audio, I was on the telephone to my guy at Mercenary to order one. Since they’re in my home state of Massachusetts, I had the M600 in my studio the next day. It took just a few minutes to put it up, for which this impatient gal was grateful.

The verdict: it makes a difference. It’s hard to describe the difference, and if you visit the testimonials page at Enhanced Audio, you’ll find that few people make concrete statements about how their sound changed with the addition of this microphone mount to their studios - or at least, they don't base their impressions on the physics behind the change in the sound. I think a lot of people are mystified by it because the M600 is a solid structure, and audio engineers are used to shock mounts with rubber bands that supposedly allow low frequency noise to be dampened. My impression of the difference the M600 makes was certainly not based in science either. The way it struck me when I first used it was that it made the voice go from sounding two-dimensional to three-dimensional – and the silence between sentences is much more silent. I am very happy with it indeed. If Enhanced Audio also offered a mic stand to go with the mount I’d get one in a second.

U.S. consumers can get the M600 at Las Vegas Pro Audio as well as Mercenary. ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles may soon become a dealer as well.

My voice-over team.

Most of us free-lancers start out in business alone. As voice-over artists maybe we get advice (good or bad) about what equipment to choose and how to set up the studio and where to get good deals on art work and business cards and how to approach marketing. There are as many ways to start as there are individual voice artists, and it’s possible that the best advice in the world isn’t going to make much difference at the beginning – we do what we can afford to do, with the resources available. That’s what I did. As a result, I went through numerous microphones and several pre-amps before settling on what I now have and love, upgrading as my business grew. I don’t think I lost much money there, as the audio equipment held its value and I was able to sell what I no longer wanted. I suppose I gained valuable knowledge about microphones, and really, one’s voice and use of a microphone evolve with experience, so I don’t think I have anything to regret there.

The kind of voice-over coaching one needs also evolves. I had excellent coaching at the outset, and have taken advantage of many opportunities to attend workshops with great teachers. My current coach is superb, and she doesn’t take on beginners, so I don’t have any regrets about the way I’ve approached my training, either.

What I do regret, though, is not having expert advice in dealing with the noise problems I had the first few years in business. I lost a few potential customers because of it, and I think a seriously good audio engineer could have helped me get to the root of the problems much sooner. As my friend Pat Fraley says, “experience is the slowest teacher”. Experience has taught me much about the many ways noise can be introduced into an audio chain, but it has been costly experience. An expert could have been invaluable early in my career.

One of the smartest things I’ve done as a voice artist is finally finding and hiring that expert. My particular expert is George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services – whom I contacted at the suggestion of my friend and mentor, Kevin Genus. George worked with me to find good ways to process my audio when I wanted to “dress it up” a bit for auditions. He installed Source Connect for me, saving me a lot of time. He has been available for any questions I have about my audio and about equipment choices. He also let me know that if I had any problems with my mobile studio while I was away on vacation last week, he would be available to help, using LogMeIn to look at my computer desktop. It wasn’t necessary, as it turns out, but the peace of mind it gave me to know he was just a phone call away was priceless.

My voice-over team also includes lots of dear friends in the business who are generous with their advice – e.g., about setting rates. But here is an area where again, it can be a wise choice to get an expert on your team, such as a trusted agent. The difference between what you might be able to get on your own and what a really good agent could negotiate for you could over time be well worth the commissions. This is something I’m currently working on for myself.

For a story about how a fellow voice artist used the “outsourcing” concept to increase her business, I recommend this article by Moneen Daly Harte at Voice Over Xtra. That bit about hiring a house cleaning service has tremendous appeal - the question of how to keep your home life from unnecessarily encroaching on your work time is material for another post. And of course, keeping your work time from eroding time with family is probably material for a book - or lots of books!

Mobile recording studio.

I don’t take very many trips, partly because I like my voice-over work and don’t want to miss any. But I couldn’t avoid it last week, nor could I avoid working, because I have a client who needs narration work from me almost every day. So, I finally allowed myself to be dragged into modernity, and assembled a little mobile studio consisting of the following:

MacBook (can you believe I didn’t have a laptop until now?) - 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive

MicPortPro

Studio microphone (I took my Neumann TLM 103, because it has a nice carrying case, and my permanent studio was sounding so good I didn’t want to touch a thing in it)

Vanderwall Collapsible Cube – I couldn’t find the right size locally but my friend Connie Terwilliger had an extra one that she sent me. Bless you Connie!

Sonex foam to line the cube (I had some leftovers that I took with me)

Mini mic stand (I removed the boom)

To state the obvious: the signal went from me, to the mic which was sitting in the Sonex-lined cube, to the MicPortPro to the Macbook. And no printing of scripts, I just read them off the client’s emails.

I recorded using a trial version of Twisted Wave, and edited in Audacity. I don’t like either of those as well as Adobe Audition, but since all of this was new to me, I really haven’t given them a fair trial yet. I’m not a gear head – I like this stuff and think it’s cool, but it’s a means to an end and I don’t have time to get all ga-ga over it. I just wanted it to work so I could get the audio to my client in a timely manner and get back to vacationing. And everything did work (it wasn’t the equipment’s fault that I had to stay up way late to record, in order to avoid the sound of lawn mowers and traffic).

For more about this kind of set up see Harlan Hogan’s website – he came up with the idea of using the collapsible cube for a "portabooth". The Vanderwall variety may be extinct (it was a special purchase last month at Aldi’s, which is where Connie picked up her extras), but there are other possibilities. Search on collapsible cube at Amazon. It just has to be 14”.

The MicPortPro is used by lots of voice-over people and was discussed in detail here and here. It’s simple and wonderful, measuring about 5 inches in length and with a user manual of about 2 paragraphs. For several days prior to this trip I had been trying out various other mobile studio configurations: a usb mic connected directly to the laptop, or a Zoom H4 recorder as an audio interface. Neither solution was satisfactory. I ordered the MicPort Pro at the last minute and had it sent to my destination. I love the Zoom recorder and even figured out all its buttons and menus (that is one complicated device), but I think I will get more use out of it as a stand-alone unit for recording bird song and human dialects in the field. I don’t think anything can beat the MicPort Pro for ease of use. You just plug it in, push the little button for 48 V phantom power and you’re in business.

I must say it is fun to travel with a laptop, especially one with an Extreme Airport card so I can get email and play on teh intarwebz and upload files and not bother with cables. And nice that it can do other stuff, like play DVDs in the car. Heh. Who knows - I may take another trip someday! My one regret is that we did not have time to stop and visit anyone along the way.

Listen to that inner voice.

You know what your voice-over services are worth, and you know there is a minimum fee below which you are not comfortable. Sometimes you do a job for less because you just feel like it, and sometimes you accept an assignment against your better judgement. Last week I went part way down that path, and got off before things went too far, but it left an unpleasant taste.

I responded to a notice for a low budget job. I have no idea what possessed me – maybe I thought it would be a quick bolus of cash to pay for a few tanks full of gas for our vacation trip. The first sign that it was a mistake was when the client (she turned out to be a talent agent of some kind, and the fact that she was posting online for voice talent indicates that she doesn’t deal with voice-over very often) wrote me to request an audition of a few paragraphs of the script and said that, if chosen, I would be paid after the audio was delivered along with any changes the client requested. I usually require a 50% deposit. I went ahead and auditioned anyway. Just before our trip I got another email from the agent, stating that her client was trying to choose between me and one other talent, and could I please audition the whole script. It was a short script, and probably my ego got in the way, telling me I had made the cut and wasn’t that nice. As it happens, I had removed a piece of Sonex from my booth since I needed it for my mobile recording studio, and that little change livened up my room a bit and the audio sounded particularly nice. I sent the audio off with confidence that the client would be impressed. I was so taken with the sound that I sent the file to my friend George Whittam, since we had been talking about such things recently and I wanted him to hear the change. He was impressed too.

While away I received an email from the agent, forwarding comments from her client:

“We need Mary to read the script straight through, it sounds a little choppy and edited. Have her send you 3 different read throughs un-edited, with different inflections. Have Mary include two more lines at the end of the read [the additional lines were included in the email].”

We are still talking about an audition here! I finally came to my full senses and wrote back:

“I'm very sorry, but I'm not going to be able to help you. For a low budget project like this, it simply is not possible for me to do 4 different complete reads for an audition. And if your client is this demanding in the audition phase it's only going to get worse.

Best wishes &c”

The agent wrote me back an incoherent email, the gist of which was, “don’t ever darken my door again”.

I felt rather bad about it, because I don’t like conflict. If it had gone the way I initially envisioned, it would have been nice to get gasoline money out of it. But it went the way many low budget projects go – the way of completely unreasonable expectations. It just isn’t worth it, unless it’s for a client you already know and like and they need a favor and you trust them not to go overboard. Otherwise, you are in effect saying, "my time and talent are not worth much - go ahead and abuse me."

I make a lot of mistakes. That was one of them. I hope I have finally learned to resist the temptation to respond to such requests in the future. They always seem to bring me into contact with unpleasant people.

Ugh. You know?

Fortunately I got some nice new clients right after that who paid for my vacation. A reward for being sensible, undoubtedly.