Welcome to My Blog!
The Very Latest…
The Ultimate Guide to DAWs
So many DAW’s…so little time! But there are common practices to match the brand DAW you prefer, that can boost your workflow. That, and a list of some great resources on this topic.
Just Before that…
Ode to COVID
Are the consequences of this pandemic good or bad? No, they just are.
The Pitfalls of “What if…?”
“What if…?” was a bad idea before the pandemic. Now it’s perfectly faulted.
The COVID-19 Long Tail Paradox
In the span of what seems to be a few short days, we've all had to adjust like never ever before. "Social Distancing". That new buzzword phrase perfectly connotes our greatest paradox: we cannot do what we all really WANT to do...come together to help each other....
Quarantine Query
We freelancers got this “work from home” thing down pat. Here’s how to capitalize on the know-how with your clients.
COVID-19 Conundrum for Voice Actors
{NOTE: As of Wednesday evening, 3-11-2020, Voiceover Atlanta organizer Gerald Griffith has agreed to postpone the event planned for later this month until a better time to gather people together after the COVID-19 threat has passed} People are relational. They tend...
Ah, the Mic. The Mighty Mic!
The mic is a voice talent’s axe.. While we can’t escape its necessity, there’s no reason to let it overburden us either.
Voice Over Education
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World Voices #WoVochat
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VO Business & Compensation
5 Ways to Minimize VO Isolation, Introspection, and Introversion
It's not your fault... You work a lot by yourself...in your booth. Maybe along with that you're (what they used to call) "shy"...and to top it all off, you spend WA-A-A-AY too much time second-guessing or doubting your actions. Any one of those behaviors can give...
Remembering….
... Taken to soon CourVO
The 3 Undesirable Consequences of a Successful VoiceOver Blog
Success Breeds Hangers-On Daily and weekly blogging is an offshoot of voice-acting for me. It started as an online record or repository of my own resources...the place where I knew I could go to call up that site, or fact, or technique or acting method I'd found and...
Voice Over Education
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Voice Over Hardware & Software tools
Revisiting the Tablet in Your Studio
Yesterday, Stephanie Cicarelli of VOICES.com asked a question on her FaceBook group "THE VOICE ACTING HUB" about reading copy in the studio. "Do you read voice-over scripts on screens or do you prefer printing them?" she asked. Honestly I was floored to find that...
Whittam Launches VO Studio Tech
Everybody's first choice in audio technical help is stepping it up. George Whittam is re-branding his top-flight audio services as VO STUDIO TECH. This is a smart move by George, and certainly shows a growth in his expertise, his clientele, and his ability to build...
Finding Your SmartPhone Voice
You think pre-amps, DAWs, and mics form a competitive market?! Ha! Nothing comes close to the smartphone industry! Perennial favorite Nokia is on the ropes, and resorting to a Microsoft OS. Former King-of-the-Hill RIM (Research in Motion) i.e. Blackberry is all but...
The Digital Audio Frontier
...and that's really the best way to think about it...as a frontier. Full of opportunity, but harsh and unforgiving territory that can punish and leave you empty. I'm enthusiastic about the start-ups that blaze new paths in the frontier. Early on, I was a big...
A BETTER Booth? Can it Be?
You wouldn't believe the shameless way I've prostrated myself to request prizes from people and organizations all over the VO map for VOAToday. Luckily, I didn't have to beg too hard, 'cause at every turn, I've gotten nothing but cooperation and generous donations for...
Speech-to-Text
No...not Text-to-Speech. Speech-to-Text. In the newsroom, the most hated, vilified, time-wasting, and tedious duty is manually logging interviews done in the field. We have desks with playback machines, a computer, and a video monitor that displays a time-code. ..but...
Monday VO Missives
This week, I'm moving the youngest of my three daughters into her new dorm room as a Freshman at the University of Goodbye Retirement. Blog posts may seem haphazard, off-topic, or downright pathetic, but on the other hand, it could be fun. Regardless, I couldn't help...
3Desk, Enable Talk Project, and VideoBlocks
Wednesday -- out of nowhere -- I got a rash of LinkedIn connection referrals to a new freelance P2P site called "3Desk" Like Elance, and Odesk, and Thumbtack, and about a gazillion other sites, 3Desk (it appears) is a marketplace for local freelancers, and...
V123 PPS
Say what you want about so-called Pay-to-Play (P2P) services like Voice123.com and Voices.com, but they (and others like them) are usually at the heart of trends in this business...things like pay-scales, the job marketplace, internet prospects, and more. In that...
Diminishing Returns
When the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was in Las Vegas in January, I made a B-Line for the Blue Microphones booth so I could drool. I wrote about that visit in this January blog: CES for VO's...then again in March: CourVO on Blue Blog. I also met with the Blue mic...
Voice Over Events
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Listen to my Commercial demoVoice Over Niches
Pandemic Marketing
Courtesies. Sensitivities. Diplomacy. Nuances in this extraordinary time. Not just any old marketing ploy will do.
Ode to COVID
Are the consequences of this pandemic good or bad? No, they just are.
The Pitfalls of “What if…?”
“What if…?” was a bad idea before the pandemic. Now it’s perfectly faulted.
Voice Over Hardware & Software tools
Wi-Fi Fiddling
Through what broadband configuration are you sending your big audiofiles? How are you connecting on Skype? That big Source Connect job?...is it getting hung up on your slow internet speed? We all just put Wi-Fi in our home and forget it. Your upload/download speeds...
Attach Me
Have you noticed how just about every online site you've ever signed-up for is becoming uber-social? Voice Over people seem to like social, so we fall victim about as much as anybody to the promise of social networking. Plaxo started out as a place to sync your...
Cool Graphics
Since voice actors deserve respect as freelancers - providing specialty services -- we all appreciate the value of hiring other professional, qualified freelancers to help us with our business, right? I've hired webauthors, audio engineers, producers, blog-masters,...
Are You Seeing All This Stuff?
My mouse aggressively travels the WWW every day, and I have alerts, subscriptions, RSS feeds, and aggregate sites galore. I'm always keeping an eye out for VO stuff, or helpful hints for voice acting freelance businesspeople. Herewith a list of some of the jucier,...
My Five Fave Sites This Week
(1) Love love love LinkedIn for it's powerful, deep, and broad search tools, but LI has just a fraction of the population of FaceBook. What if you could do similar custom searches on FaceBook as you do on LinkedIn? You can with the techniques explained in the...
Next Gen MicPortPro?
JK Audio makes this little gem. Appropriately, it's called the BlueDriver in reference to it's built-in BlueTooth wireless connection. JK has a fine reputation for all sorts of audio interfaces, things like phone patch devices, wireless headsets, and products for...
SoundCloud & Pinterest
My gratitude to voice actor Karen Commins for her tip that forms the basis of today's blog. Despite the points I made in my previous article on "A VO's Place on Pinterest", Karen was still skeptical about the value in this new Social Network for her VO business. But...
Your Presence Needed….
...or is it? You get to decide...and at some point, you really HAVE to, or you're wasting your time. Remember the question I posed a couple of weeks ago: Can VO Be TOO Social? The question has also since cropped up on (of course) a FaceBook Group, with a wide...
SlideShare and Social Media
PowerPoint presentations are ubiquitous. Who hasn't done one, or at least thought about doing one? The ole .ppt is at the center of just about every presentation, webinar, and teleseminar I've ever held or attended. For instance, a PowerPoint slideshow was at the...
Tablet Transformation
Tablets are a game changer. Sure, your iPad is handy for swiping through copy as you read...easy to catch up on email while waiting at the doctor's office...but tablet computers are about to explode on the scene in ways you didn't expect, and the jury's still out on...
My Big Vegas Weekend
....and I'm not even going to be on "The Strip"! For the third time in the last several years, coveted VO Coach and producer Marice Tobias will be holding an "all-guy" weekend workshop. I see a lot of recurring visits by those "guys" for this event, but for 2014,...
The Closet
'Taking advantage of my brother-in-law's bedroom closet to meet a 24-hr 6700-word deadline for a good client. Zoom H4n + iPad (to read off of) + lots of winter coats to deaden the sound. Final edit in AA6.0 on my trusty Win8 Acer Laptop taking the sound file from an...
Christmas, A Week Early
To match holiday schedules with almost 20 people, I've had to move my family Christmas calendar up a week. I'm in the Midwest with lots of family and plenty of cold weather. And...true to Murphy's law for VO, one of my most reliable clients sent me a job of 6700...