Category Archives: Voice Talents

Voiceover tips, blog posts, discussions, resources for voiceover talents

Voiceover Training: Recording Voice Overs

Posted on by
Reply

Today, there’s a lot of great voiceover training available that teaches people how to actually do voice overs, even specific types of voice over. Well, sure!  But given the nature of the industry, it’s also essential to learn about recording voice overs. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve gotten a lot of piecemeal training in audio engineering and sound design, starting with analog audio and later in digital audio. It’s not like there’s an all-in-one voice over school out there covering the three components of a successful voice over career: performance, technology and business.

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.

WPaudio WordPress MP3 Player Plugin for Voice Over Samples

Posted on by
Reply

I found a nice, clean, attractive, fast-loading audio player plugin for WordPress today, the WPAudio WordPress Plugin designed by Todd Iceton. It’s very easy to install and customize (alter colors to fit your theme). Because it’s so streamlined, it doesn’t leave a big, empty gap in browsers that don’t support flash.

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.

SEO for Your Voiceover Website

Posted on by
2

Our company, Saco Media LLC, designs and manages web sites for Florida attorneys in addition to producing voiceover and providing network and IT support. Somehow all that fits together pretty well, and provides a nice package of services for our major clients.

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.