• Antonio Banderas’ Nasonex commercials
• Antonio Banderas’ voiceovers in the Shrek movies
• All the voices in Monsters, Inc., especially Bob Peterson’s Roz
• Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo, and really all the other voices from that film
• The woman currently doing commercials for Liberty Mutual: “Responsibility. What’s your policy?“
• Robin Williams in Happy Feet and the Latino penguin rappers: “Soy tu Papi pingüino. . .”
• Majel Barrett Rodenberry for one of the best computer voices in space, you know, the final frontier
• Jim Dale’s narration for the Harry Potter audiobooks
• The female voice talent who did the Word 2007 and other Office 2007 tutorials on Microsoft’s site (tutorials can be grueling with bad or sing-songy voices)
• Mel Blanc’s Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweetie and other Looney Tune voices (I finally bought the Golden Collection DVDs)

Listening is becoming a lost art now that we live in the Age of Distractions. I really do appreciate all those voices who compel me to listen at least a little better.

• Preserving Equipment: there isn’t much you can do when equipment fails and you can’t replace it with similar models. Mics have their own personalities, as do some audio interfaces. Even changing out your mic cable can noticeably affect the sound quality. If you have a magic combo, a signal chain you’re really happy with, obviously do your best to keep your equipment in good shape. Protect it from power surges and moisture if you’re in a humid climate.
  • Microphone: I keep my mic in a sound booth covered with an anti-static bag that came with a new hard drive I purchased a while ago. The bag has one of those salt packs that keep moisture away from components. I replace the salt pack from time to time as I buy new gear.
  • Electronics: I don’t remove mic cables or plug and unplug items in my signal chain because I want to avoid wear and tear; but I don’t let juice run through it unless I need it. Flip the switches on your surge protectors and battery backups when you’re not using your gear. It’s greener for the environment and your wallet.
• Production notes: keep production notes for every project. Maybe you adjusted the gain +5dB, applied noise reduction, and then some EQ or compression. Whatever. For each project, write down what you did and follow the same steps in the same increments on future scripts you get for the same big project. All the while, use and trust your ears. Maybe you spoke a little louder or had a little more energy in one of the recordings and need to adjust the gain accordingly.
• Give the same performance: Obviously, you want to try to produce the same performance. Some theater actors have the ability to deliver a line the exact same way over seven performances a week for months during a show’s run. Others prefer to vary their performances a bit to keep them fresh. A voice actor who wants to achieve seamless continuity doesn’t have that luxury.
• Listen to older prompts: You can’t really provide the same performance if you don’t have a record of a prior performance. It’s generally a good idea to listen to older prompts on the same project before you go into the recording booth. Then during post production, follow those trusty production notes. And keep listening!  This will put you that much closer to seamless follow-up voice prompts and undetectable pickups.
• Save and backup your EQ and compression settings: once you set levels you’re happy with, levels which give your voice warmth and presence or whatever other quality you want to achieve, save those settings. And, back them up.
  • Adobe Audition 3.0 Settings: I recently upgraded my laptop and now have Windows 7 (which has improved my workflow). I use Adobe Audition 3 which saves EQ and other settings to a file called effect_settings.xml.  This is a simple text file which saves unique settings inside <KeyVal> tags. This .xml file is saved in different locations depending which version of Windows you’re using. I’m not sure where Vista puts the file, but here are the locations for XP and Windows 7.
    • Windows XP:  Documents and Settings > Administrator [or your user name] > Application Data > Adobe > Audition > 3.0
    • Windows 7:  Users > [your user name] > AppData > Roaming > Adobe > Audition > 3.0

Some things that can affect sound quality (like relative air pressure) are beyond our control. Still there are a few things we can do to improve our ability to produce seamless voiceovers for clients who come back for more a week, a month or even a year later.

Many of the audio engineering courses I encountered were boring or unnecessarily complicated or more focused on music production. And much of it was text-based. Imagine teaching audio without using audio! Although experiencing different approaches can be helpful, it’s always better to start with a clear and comprehensive course that’s well presented, easy to follow and actually shows you how to record voiceover.

I found it! Check out this terrific course by Dave Schroeder called Digital Audio Principles at Lynda.com. Dave has an easy manner and a good teaching voice.  His video tutorials explain key concepts of audio recording in a completely comprehensible way. He also provides video tours of microphones, audio interfaces and other recording equipment, instruction on microphone placement, even hands-on plugin applications in Pro Tools (EQ, compression, and noise reduction).

Even though he teaches using Pro Tools, his course isn’t Apple-centric. Dave covers common DAW components and key design elements in different audio programs, so that you can find your way around popular audio editing, multitrack and loop-based software. Seriously, I was immediately able to find and use the same features Dave talked about on my PC-landlocked Adobe Audition.  (Will Adobe ever make a Mac version? And no, Soundbooth doesn’t count!)

Seriously, Digital Audio Principles isn’t just a great introduction to digital audio but an essential overview of audio recording in general.  A lot of people who want to learn how to get started in voice over will flounder around for years trying to pick up the basics for recording voice overs. It’s so important not to lose precious time re-inventing the wheel when someone has actually taken the time to put it all together in such a nice neat package. I definitely recommend this course to anyone who wants to start a voiceover career and even veteran voice overs who, like me, got most of their initial training in analog audio recording.

————

Lynda.com provides hundreds of tutorials on all kinds of audio software and business applications. At my company, we’ve referred many of our clients to the Microsoft and Mac courses, and finally became affiliates of Lynda.com. The link to the Digital Audio Prinicples course  in this blog can earn us a couple bucks, but you can bypass it if that turns you off and just go directly to Lynda.com. The learning materials they provide are incredibly helpful and the first few chapters are free, so you have a chance to see whether the presentation is something that appeals to you.  You can buy hard copies of specific courses on DVD or CD or get access to all their courses a month at a time for $25.

We have our own monthly subscriptions at my company so that we can learn more about all kinds of subjects (like web accessibility or Adobe’s CS5 apps) and also review training options for our clients.  It’s a great investment.

If you have flash, here’s what the player looks like:
El Sanctuario Promo - English.

Although I had created a page with Html5 tags, I didn’t like how long the page took to load on my iPad. Using this page, gives everyone a faster loading front page for my voiceover demos. Then, iPhone OS users have the option to click on the Html5 version.

There are many audio player plugins for WordPress, but like the standard Html5 audio player, many flash-based audio player plugins load pretty big players. WPAudio is the first one I’ve seen that keep’s things nice and thin. Love it. And you don’t need to use special tags in your post. Just drop in your mp3 hyperlink and the plugin does the rest. Very nice. Thanks Todd.

But my flash-based audio players disappeared from my website! Not nice. Since I had never joined the iPhone bandwagon, I didn’t know until recently that my voiceover demos weren’t available to web visitors coming to my site from their iPhones, or from iPads which use the iPhone OS. People could download my demos, but I didn’t even add download links until earlier this year! And none of my profiles on the voice marketplaces I’m still affiliated with currently use supported audio players. That’s particularly unfortunate for paying subscribers.¹

I know what you’re thinking: what’s the big deal, Nikki? Your flashy audio players work just fine in Internet Explorer and hardly anyone uses their iPhone for surfing the web. And Steve Jobs will eventually cave in and support flash on the iPhone OS. Yes, and crude oil will become water soluble.

Like most of my hungry voiceover colleagues, I would like my website to work as well as it can on whatever devices or browser a site visitor uses.  In fact, many of my new contact emails are coming from iPhone users. And this was before my upgrade.

So here is the upgrade, a cleaner design with a bit more contrast and these few content coding changes:

• A background image behind the flash player on my home page so that iPhone visitors don’t see a big empty space.
• Html audio tags with embedded audio. This required minimal coding and the addition of .ogg versions of my demos for browsers that don’t support .mp3 in html5.  The most universal syntax for the audio player seems to be to separate out the source tag like this:

<audio preload=”auto” controls=”controls”>
<source src=”voiceoverdemo.ogg” />
<source src=”voiceoverdemo.mp3″ />
</audio>

The “controls” option loads a rather ugly player in every browser except Opera. Most browsers will also support an autoplay option which I find obnoxious and don’t recommend. The preload option (formerly “autobuffer”) is still being adopted by browsers and will be great when it works more universally but I would only use it on the first couple demos.

If you’re on a web-compliant Internet browser (unfortunately that means any popular browser except Internet Explorer), you should be able to see what an Html 5 audio player looks like here:

That’s it as far as coding. Until browsers are updated to incorporate more of the html5 web standards (which are still being vetted), my preference is to keep it simple. And since Internet Explorer isn’t expected to adopt enough of these web standards any time soon, it’s probably a good idea to use both a simply flash audio player and html5, which is what I did here.  Of course, I’m still into making things look pretty so I opted not to use the html5 tags on the home page and instead prominently featured my Voiceover Demos link so that it’s part of the first screen content mobile browsers will see.  Yep, not the best way to go for a voiceover web site, but probably the way I’ll keep things until I can make html5 audio controls more universally appealing.

Personally, I’m looking forward to more browsers adopting html5 open web standards, especially the audio tags. Embedded audio is just a better, cleaner concept for web development. I also like that visitors can right-click the player and download the files when they need to so you don’t really need a separate link. As for making it look pretty, a little javascripting and use of the new <canvas> tag will ultimately improve the look and functionality of media players on the web.

Hope you like the new site and that you find it much easier to navigate. Let me know!

One of our biggest challenges has been to better position our clients’ web sites on Google search results. For Florida attorneys this has been particularly difficult given recent Bar guidelines which significantly restrict their web content. Nevertheless, we’ve managed to consistently get clients on page one of Google search results for specific searches. Considering the number of Florida attorneys out there, that’s a tricky endeavor.

These experiences have helped us develop a better understanding of what works. Here are some of the ways we’ve improved our clients’ search standings. These are tips which you can implement today without spending a fortune for search engine optimization:

Treat the entire web site like a collection of specific landing pages. This allows you to market a specific service or highlight a unique selling proposition (USP) on specific pages. From the outset, this also compels you to utilize other best practices for search engine optimization.

• Target a specific audience
• Keep page content shorter, optimally under 3 paragraphs unless it is an article.
• Keep pages focused, on topic, specific, on point. Grandma’s spicy pumpkin soup recipe can be shared on Facebook.
• Use rich keywords for the page content. If you sell pink widgets cheaper than anyone else then cheap, pink, and widget would be good keywords to weave into your text, your title and your meta tags, more on that below.

Optimize each page of your web site for specific keyword searches and page content. You’re wasting virtual real estate if every page just generally describes you as an English male voice actor. Use one page to promote your uncanny ability to sound like Morgan Freeman; another page might promote your extensive experience narrating military training videos; and another page might showcase your live voiceover work at industrial trade shows. Your meta tags for each page should then match the page content.

• Textual Content. You can optimize your page content, the actual text a site visitor can read, by using specific formatting.

• Use header tags like <h2> or <h3> for your page titles
• Bold keywords like voiceover and IVR.
• Use bullet points or numbered lists

• Non-Textual Content. You can optimize non-textual content, like images or audio files, by using alt tags or link title attributes on non-textual content like audio files or images.

Use unique title tags specific to the content, target audience, USP for each page. The title tag is the meta tag which displays a page title or short description at the top of the browser window for most browsers or as part of the browser tab. The title tag is html code nested within the <head> tags of your page code and might look something like this:

<title>Voiceover Web Site Search Engine Optimization Tips</title>

Don’t give up on other meta tags, keyword tags and content description. Although some web developers speculate that meta tags are losing importance, search results repeatedly show that Google and other major search engines continue to give significant weight to meta tags as long as they are supported by related page content.  Your keyword and content meta tags should be tailored to the specific page content.

Bottom line: focus is the key to effective search engine optimization.  Everything about a specific web page should be focused: the page itself, the page content (what your site visitor can immediately see) and the meta data (the extra information in the background code for your page).  Even if you’re a jack of all trades, you can develop web pages for each thing you’re good at.  Then, drink two or three espressos and you’ll be well on your way.

How Jeff Bridges Voice-overs Imperiled Hyundai’s Oscars Blitz
by Brian Steinberg - Published: March 01, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Hyundai Motor America was all ready to bombard this year’s Oscars with a raft of commercials — seven different spots were locked, loaded and ready to go. With just a few weeks to go before the March 7 ceremony, however, the company was told its commercials were unfit for air.

The problem? Actor Jeff Bridges has been doing voice-overs for Hyundai since 2007. But Mr. Bridges is also a nominee for best actor in this year’s contest for his role in “Crazy Heart” . . .

I feel bad for the car company, worse for their ad agency. That’s a tough spot to be in. Hope they work it out.