Lance Blair Atlanta Voiceovers Goes Upmarket (Neumann TLM-103, Speck Electronics 5.0 Mic Pre)

Okay, enough of the whining about things going downmarket with the bad economy. How about helping a fantastic American audio company like Speck Electronics by adding the Speck 5.0 Mic Pre to the Lance Blair Atlanta Voiceovers studio arsenal? Sounds good to me!

The Speck 5.0 has 70db of clean gain (great for my PR40 dynamic and my ribbon mics) and a lovely switchable output transformer that has a clean tone for character and narration voiceover without being overbearing. There's a -20db pad, phase reversal, and sweepable HPF, a whole "mix matrix" and a linkable option to their amazing EQ unit or additional 5.0 Mic Preamps. Ted Fletcher of Boston's Mercenary Audio has compared it favorably to Millennia's HV-3C...adding that the Speck's sound has an added "opulence" that the Millennia lacks. That's more than good enough for pro voiceover work...and now I'm proud to offer it as a part of my signal chain. I tried a Speck out a year ago with the fine folks at Atlanta Pro audio and I should have taken one home then. I wasn't going to make that same mistake again.

I've compared clips of the Speck 5.0 against two other vo preamp champs, the Great River and the John Hardy. I'll admit that the very low end on both are a bit better than the Speck...you know, the bit that gets taken out of the signal in post. However, the transistor in the Speck is much more tasteful for vo...if you want more grit and color leave it to the project's engineers. What really won me over, was the "opulence" that Ted Fletcher of Mercenary was referring to: this opulence comes from how the Speck creates a greater sense of three dimensional space than the John Hardy or the Great River. They might sound bigger or have more presence at times, but the Speck sounds naturally intimate - much better for voice acting and helping the voice connect to the audience. The sound seems to come from all around your ears more than just from a point in front of you; at least as much as a mono voice signal can without processing. Good stuff.

Yet what's a microphone preamp without a good microphone? Got it. Now I have the Neumann TLM-103. I've turned my nose up at this mic in the past because it sounds very harsh on more nasal and thin/cutting American voices. Thankfully, that doesn't apply to me. I borrowed one from my colleague Mike Filosa from Advanced Field Production to check my signal chain as a part of my continuous QC. My thinking was "I know how the 103 can be harsh, let's see how harsh it is in my studio". I was shocked. Even through my plain old Yamaha monitoring board I sounded great on it. No sibilance issues. No harshness. Plenty of low end. No muddied mids. What I liked best was the amazing focus and articulation which I've heard the 103 lend to quality voices. There's no second guessing if the verbs are past-tense or not (did he say "walked" or "walk"?) that you find with the woofy mics. There's no crazy shrillness that you find with dozens of other mics in that class range. Finally, I was surpised how the mic is focused on the voice. No excessive ambience or mouth mechanics. All this being very surprising to me because I've heard too many DYI voiceover talents suffer with the TLM 103 from a.) poor mic placement - you can't crowd this mic! and b.) simply not having the right voice for the mic. If you check out the mic test at transom.org, the guy with a rich low voice sounds like an ace on the 103 (better than on the U87ai, I might add) while his more nasally thin typical American guy partner sounds like an utter dork on it (and the 103 may be the worst mic of the lot on his voice).

So I'm man enough to admit I was wrong about the TLM 103. It has its many uses, and fortunately a really good use for this mic is to capture my voice! Paired with the clean "opulence" of the Speck Electronics 5.0 mic pre, I've found myself really nice set of tools to make great recordings. That's what it's all about, really: I find myself much freer and more confident to make the right choices in the vocal delivery knowing that my chosen tools are up to the task. If I push them loudly, they respond without saturation. If I whisper, they don't let me fall away. If I make brash consonant sounds, nothing distorts. I can even physically act out my characters without worrying about going off axis. It's a beautiful thing.

PS: I still don't like the TLM 49 or 93. The 49 sounds a lot like my PR40 dynamic, which is just flat out wrong for a $1500 condenser.

Voice123 Goes Downmarket

As far as pay-to-play internet voiceover sites go, Voice123 has been a pioneer and a standard in the industry. That's still true, but now the site forges ahead with new standards of going downmarket. Largely, it's been a victim of its own success. The number of talent subscriptions has at least doubled in the past few years, which has thoroughly diluted the talent pool. It's harder for good talents to be heard or found which is bad for both the quality talents and quality "voice seekers" from potential clients. I know many high quality talents (even some personally, not just on the internet) who left voice123 because they simply could not get gigs through all the rabble. As of today there are 3342 talents (not all have Premium Subscriptions whereby they can audition for leads) fighting for the handful of gigs which pop up each day. Most of these leads are for jobs under $250 (less than the subscription cost).

In my first two years on voice123 won a few auditions each year and received a handful of jobs through private leads. One of these leads became my best e-learning client for whom I continue to work, and I'm thankful to voice123 for these opportunities. Also, I received many direct calls for jobs by people who heard me on the site and decided to go right to the source and call me. So in the past, voice123 has been a great marketing tool for not a lot of money...especially since I spent very little time actually auditioning.

In the past year, I've auditioned nearly a hundred times. I won a decent job for the voice of a DVD manual and another for a podcast introduction, but received only four private leads. I intentionally market myself as an Atlanta Voiceover talent, but I'm buried in their search engine. A talent from Phoenix came up as their #8 Atlantan voiceover talent the last time I checked. Certainly nobody deserves gigs: you earn them, and luck has a bit to do with it too. However, I've heard from many other talents who are frustrated with the diminishing ROI that voice123 provides. Again, the source of this problem is their success in attracting more competetive talent, but also a sinking boat full of wannabees. I listened to 50 v123 talents at random yesterday and honestly, four were of a pro level and two of the four were nondescript (boring). When you're with an agency, you're not one of 3342 roster talents. Also, most of those 3342 aren't rank amateurs who don't know what a pop-filter is.

As a result of the dilution of the "talent" in the Voice123 talent base, it's clear that the quality voice seekers have been turned off by the service. There is an increasing number of revised auditions from seekers dissatisfied with all of the talents who initially replied. Most leads these days are cheap, paying less than going market rates; and cheaper than those of other pay-to-play sites who have also seen their service go slightly downmarket, it should be noted.
Too many of the jobs are for joke sites or animations of no real marketable purpose, un-ethical nutritional supplements and get-rich-quick tutorials, or vague international products written with even vaguer rules of grammar. Voice123 has become an excellent downmarket marketing tool for the bottom-feeding clients and voice-talkers to get together and share shoddy services in exchange for hissy unprofessional files and late low paychecks.

Has Voice123 become the Black Market of voiceovers? No, but as the economy sours and desperate amateurs flood the talent roster, this Market has a darkening shade of gray.

Voiceover Scripts Made Easy

Hi. I didn't write what you're reading right now.
It's all a transcription of me talking into my
microphone in my recording booth.  I want to make
some points about writing scripts for voiceovers.
You'll notice, first of all, that  even though I'm
speaking very quickly for just one minute there
really aren't that many words. This goes to show
that there's only so much information a person can
say in a minute, never mind understand. The sentences
are very short, allowing for natural breathing.
Also, the verbs are largely active.

I want to drive the point home that while some say
that voiceovers are just "voice talking" or reading,
that it's somehow simple, that view is dead wrong.
It's trying to take a script, breathe life into it,
be a character even if it's the spokesman of a product,
and make a connection with just one person. That's a
difficult thing to do.

I'll leave you with this thought raised by my Professor
of English, Stephen Boyd, from the University of
St. Andrews from years back. He asked us why George Orwell
was the best selling author on the Penguin Classics
roster. Lots of people brought up his politics,
but I got the answer right. I said it's because
he's the easiest to read. 

ART MPA Gold Microphone Preamp

The first preamp I ever bought was an ART Tube MP. It was noisy and picked up WBOS, but when I could get it to settle I could get an okay sound out of it for $30. Lately, I've seen a few threads about people putting good tubes into low end microphone preamps with pleasant results. One preamp with which people had varied but interesting results was the ART MPA Gold. Unlike many of ART's other products, the MPA isn't a starved-plate low voltage device. Well, let's just say that it has a high plate voltage setting which is noticeable in its effect on the sound. This reminds me of the recent Joemeeks: they're okay as is, but when you employ the "Iron" button, you've got yourself a pretty good piece of gear for not a lot of money.

The tubes with which the ART MPA comes with are terrible. They only say "China 12AX7B" on them. 'Nuff said. You can do better with almost any old $8 replacement tube. I went with a $19 JJ/Tesla 12AX7 (or "ECC83S") for one channel of the MPA, and with a $29 Tung Sol 12AX7 for the other (each with gold tips). Both are newly made tubes and sound decent: they certainly make the MPA a workable preamp with some good tone. The Tung Sol really works well with my Heil PR40 microphone, but I will probably upgrade the JJ to a GE NOS tube in the near future.

What I really like about the MPA is that for $300 you get two channels with plenty of clean gain and each has their own sweepable high pass filter and their own sweepable input impedance (up to 3k). The Heil PR40 is a really bright mic, and sometimes it needs to be slowed down a touch to a 2k impedance even though that's against the recommended ratios. With condensers, the sweepable impedance isn't as important as it is with dynamic microphones that I like to use.

My True Systems P-Solo has been replaced. While that unit is fantastic for guitars (both as a DI and for micing acoustic guitar) the ART MPA Gold is working for me, and I'm getting comments on my sound and more importantly my voice that I wasn't ever getting with the P-Solo. It feels funny going back to a brand that I started out with, but it's kind of fun having a piece of gear and tricking it out - customizing it for your own needs, and making it your own.

Next I guess I should get some cheesy stickers and rhinestones to put on it. Someone might mistake it for an Avalon then.

Echo AudioFire Soundcard

In another nice upgrade for the voiceover studio, I now have an Echo Audio AudioFire soundcard/interface in the signal path. This is a substantial improvement over the Presonus interface I was previously using and was never happy with. It took some time to research and choose the right replacement soundcard for my studio. I wanted something simple, since I usually only record two channels at a time at most. I also wanted something reliable that was rock-solid for recording and provided quality audio and would work with my computers. E-MU was a contender as they make very good products, but they are going out of business. The Apogee Duet was also intriguing. Echo Audio's AudioFire was the winner, as they have a great reputation and will be around to provide support and driver upgrades (they upgrade their drivers very frequently). I also like that my AudioFire is small and runs without generating much heat (the Presonus was like a toaster). Thanks to technical gear maven and voiceover pro Gregory Houser for his opinions on the Echo.

The Presonus was rock-solid for playback, very flexible for routing, but was not rock-solid for recording and did not provide the level of quality audio that I wanted to provide to my clients. The Presonus, in the end, was a fradulent device incapable of providing the 96kHz recordings it claimed that it could. A long-delayed replacement driver from Presonus may have solved the issue (some people claim that it's still not a 96kHz device even after the upgrade), but it introduced an unreasonable amount of noise. I'm glad that the Presonus experiment is over and that I can move on to a much better device with Echo Audio. The improvement in sound is obvious: the Echo is much more present, detailed, and rich while the Presonus relied on the crutch of smeared hyped frequencies at the low and high ends to mask the fact that it lacks midrange detail.

If you're more concerned about playback and signal routing, by all means buy a Presonus product, they're great in that regard. If you want better recordings for the same money go with Echo Audio.

Recent Work & Going Tubular

I've had some nice work recently for some excellent people. I just finished up a piece about Cellular Biology for Genzyme with Blue Wave and also a website voiceover for Nortel with Mars Productions. Both production companies are Boston-based: I suppose you can take the lad out of Boston but you can't take the Boston out of the lad. I do quite a bit of work with Boston clients still, which is one of the joys of phone patch voiceover sessions.

The Nortel piece was interesting because I did it with my transatlantic pan-British accent which was my main speaking voice for a long time. I developed it while living in Scotland for five years and didn't let it go for ages; only in the past four years have I made a concerted effort to re-Americanize my voice. Being a voice talent, i can pretty much turn it on and off like a spigot (or spicket...see?). The fine folks at Mars and Nortel didn't realiz(s)e that they were choosing a Yank. I'm rather pleased about this because they were trying to find a voice to match spots done with born and bred English talent.

The Genzyme voiceover "Cell and Organelle" was a hoot because of the oral acrobatics which the copy required. "MPS, glycoproteinoses, glycogen storage lysosomal diseases (i.e Pompe), and other LSD's" was my favourite list in the copy.

Today I ordered a twin-channel tube mic preamp with sweepable input impedance and HPF. I also made sure to order two nice tubes to go with the unit: one for the Violet Designs condenser channel, and one for the Heil PR40 channel. Yet another weapon in the arsenal.

Atlanta Tornado Disaster Relief

Over March 14 -15 2008 much of Northern Georgia was pounded with numerous tornadoes and hailstorms, the most notable being the F2 tornado that ripped through Downtown, Old Fourth Ward, and Cabbagetown in Atlanta.

While the affected areas are too dangerous for the general public to enter at this time, once the damage is properly assessed and contained, there are many ways that people can help.

One good way to help is to register as a volunteer at HandsOnAtlanta.org and they will contact you with information about volunteer disaster relief projects that you can work on.