Archive for April, 2009

Don't Swallow the MIC! grrr

April 3, 2009  |  Articles, Edumification, Voice Over Misc  |  5 Comments

Morning all… I found this article on Voice Over Extra link and since I like rants and people telling other professionals off… and bone picking in general!!..I decided to paste it here… many thanks to Juan Carlos Bagnell aka Some Audio Guy for his great article.
‘Please Don’t Swallow The Mic!’
Rants From An Audio Engineer …
By Juan Carlos Bagnell
Audio Engineer

OK voice actors. I’ve got a bone to pick.

I regularly run into actors who don’t know what they’re doing in front of the microphone. Actually, to be fair, they often know what it is they’re doing, but they rarely know why they do it.

A prime example of this is the proximity effect.
Loosely put, this states that the closer you get to a directional microphone, the more pronounced low frequency sound will become.
This is a good thing for a VO person to know. If you need to enrich the voice a little, well, move a little closer to the mic. Neat! Now we can all sound like James Earl Jones!
Yeah, but no …

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Skype As A Phone Patch or ISDN Alternative

April 2, 2009  |  Articles  |  1 Comment

Hello All… I was contemplating not posting today… Didnt really feel like it (I think maybe we all have our Grrr days) … then suddenly I stumbled on something that I felt had to be shared with my loyal readers (and those who stop by every once in a while… its ok I’m not upset… you’re busy… you have your own life… you never call anymore… why dont you call anymore!!… hehe) so yeah back to sanity… I came across a forum discussion at Voice123.com … cause as you know I am such an avid reader of their forums (pause).

Here is an exerpt of that discussion… I thought this would be one way for you to start moving away from the ISDN / phone patch option and moving toward a more 2009 welcome to Al Gore’s Information Superhighway (pause)..alternative. Read More

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Stephanie from Voices.com Answers my Allegations of Marketing Negligence

Well Folks, It took her a little time but Stephanie Ciccarelli co-founder of Voices.com eventually got back to me on why Voices.com seemed to be burying their Ebooks section. Effectively unmarkating their marketing books. Here is my original post dated March 31st. link Here is her answer and rebuttal for my publishing haste: Hi Mahmoud, Thank you for emailing me. I read your article earlier this morning. The eBooks used to be promoted through the Voices.com Help section and in other places on the website. When the site was redesigned it was an admitted oversight to not include them in a more...

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How Much Should You Charge? What Rates Should You Use?

Whether you belong to a Union or Not there is always an issue when it comes to how much you should charge for a job. Some of our members believe that the Voice Over casting sites  ( I guess now I should upgrade the term to be the 3 Vs…. voices.com, voice123.com and voplanet.com) are driving the rates down… are taking jobs away from the pros and are generally causing havoc in the universe. I was going to cut and paste the contents of a few resources here… but I figured that the post would be around 10 pages long… and it would take you 3 hours to scroll to the end of it so I decided I would just cut and paste the links to the Voice over rates and rate related calculators that I have found. Read More

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