Your Production Music Library

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Building up a production music library is a good idea if you routinely provide full voice production services, mixing voice, music and maybe some sound effects. You can get a good start to your royalty-free production music library by visiting Lazertrax.Com. They have a 14- CD collection with a variety of tempos, and they provide a buyout license. There are some services that provide pay-as-you-go (needle drop) licenses which can be cheaper but are going to slow you down in production (if you have to stop to purchase). It’s definitely nice to have a few CDs with music you’re most likely to use for the work you do. The Music Bakery and Flying Hands Royalty Free Music have stunning music and you can buy by the clip, which I have from time to time. Really, I love their stuff though they’re a bit pricier. Definitely review their licensing. But Lazertrax is great and I use them for a lot of on-holds. They aren’t loop mixes. You don’t want that for the price CD buyouts will generally run you (varies).

That’s not to say loops are bad. They can be boring and repetitive unless you find someone who really knows how to put them together or you learn yourself. If you have Adobe Audition (I have 1.5), you can put loops together and really come up with nice compositions. You’ll also be happy to know it comes with a loop library (“Adobe Loopology“). The loops work great with Audition’s multitrack system.

A loop is basically just a clip of music that can be looped (clever name) so that you can drag it out on the multitrack for as long as you need the sound to repeat. In Audition you can also change the key and tempo. As you can imagine, with this kind of functionality, you can create tons of music beds (if you have the time to put them together) and avoid ever having to buy any production music CDs and licenses. If you know even a little music theory, this method may work best for you; but you don’t need to know music. A good ear can be enough. You can make literally all your background music from these loops. Adobe offers many categories. If you have Audition, you’ll definitely want to get the Total Training DVD for Adobe Audition 1.5 which is taught (very well) by Jason Levine, the guy who did most if not all their loops.

The other great thing you can do with these loops is create some interesting audio for imaging. Here is a audio clip I threw together just playing around. It also contains a vocoder of me saying “serious beauty.” I love vocoding.

The Lazertrax collection is really decent, but definitely listen to some clips from The Music Bakery. You’ll notice you get full orchestration, not computer-generated midi sounds. There’s software out there, like Finale 2006, that comes with a virtual orchestra, The Garritan Orchestra. I bought that and it was BIG bucks; but the sound is unbelievable. I can play the violin without ever picking up a bow. Again, if you know music theory, Adobe’s Loopology collection and Finale may work better for you. And with Finale, you can create compositions you can turn around and sell to other voiceover talent for their music beds. Not bad.

Voiceover Forums

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In my attempts to fix computer issues, learn web development, PHP coding, and do a little comparison shopping, online forums (discussion boards) have been a solid source of information — not all of it good, and that’s probably my fault as much as anyone else’s. Obviously, like with any information from any source, you have to analyze it and determine whether there’s any value in it. It may all be good, or some or none. The point is other people have publicly asked the same questions I need answers to. How cool is that!

 

The other bonus of online forums is the sense of community available to you if it’s a forum you frequent enough (is that redundant?). The only forum I regularly visit, and contribute to, is VoiceOverSavvy.com, an online community for voiceover people sponsored by Voice123.com — a voiceover job marketplace for voice talent and talent seekers. The discussion board is a great place to share information on the voice industry. The people who hang around there are very supportive, routinely polite, and definitely talented if a bit frustrated by changes in the industry. You’ll see. Whether you’re a voice actor or a talent seeker, I think it’s worth a visit. In general, online forums can be a terrific resource. For voice talent, talent seekers, and especially Voice123 members, VoiceOverSavvy.com definitely is.

Too Much Copy, Too Little Time

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I had a client who needed Spanish voiceover for a local TV commercial. They had :45 of script for a :30 spot. On my best day, in heated conversations, in any language, I’m not a speed-talker by nature. I know there’s this voice artist out there who won the Guinness World Record for speed talking: she recited The Three Little Pigs in :13 (I think that’s like 12 words per second). Of course, no one can fully understand her. They need a machine to replay her recital in slow motion to make sure she pronounced each word accurately and she did! Super. But there’s a speed threshold between what the human ear can hear and the mind can decipher at that speed. It’s literally too much information. (Of course, she’s a talented voice artist by the name of Fran Capo and knows when to slow it down; just because she’s a speed demon doesn’t mean she rushes through every copy.)

Well, I gave that :45 copy for a :30 spot a try. My voiceover friends and I had a good laugh at my attempt and the client actually appreciated it (they wanted to see what it would sound like). Ultimately, they cut the script and paid me an additional voiceover fee. It was still a fast-paced spot, but manageable and more importantly understandable.

I had done few broadcast voiceover jobs at the time. Most of my early experience was story narrations and cold readings of legal documents for court proceedings. Broadcast voiceover is an entirely different animal. So, I asked my peers at VoiceOverSavvy.com with more broadcast voiceover experience how they handle ECS (excess copy syndrome). All agreed that you need to let the client know right off the bat, which I did. Always let the client decide whether to cut the script at the outset, or move forward with the long script and retain you for revisions later.

Additionally, my friends were able to provide a few rules of thumb both for voice talent and talent seekers to help evaluate whether the copy will fit the designated time slot. Although few things beat a cold read through with a stopwatch, generally speaking (no pun intended), a normal paced read will yield these numbers —

:15 spot: no more than 45 words of copy
:30 spot: 85-95 words
:60 spot: 160-180 words