Nice… wicked… creative

My good friend Trish Bertram just sent me this. How we laughed…

Friday Fun – Andy Marriott and the Central tea tray…

I’d forgotten about this one, till Trish Bertram reminded me. My old mate and colleague, Andy Marriott, from his days at Central Television in Birmingham (circa 1999, I’d guess by the ident in use?)

A great example of what can happen when a nutty announcer finds a co-operative transmission controller to help out. Happy days…

Any more? Keep them coming! And have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – Mitchell and Webb do Sky Sports!

Sky Sports’ promotion effort is, to use the words of one popular UK retailer, “never knowingly undersold”. For years a large percentage of Sky’s promos have been voiced by one man: London-based Bruce Hammal. Bruce has a terrific and instantly recognisable signature voice, and he’s the one you’ll hear telling you that “live from the Sky News centre, this is Live at Five”, amongst other things.

But a pedigree such as his is ripe for rip-off, as demonstrated here by David Webb in the BBC’s “That Mitchell and Webb Look” in 2008…

“The giants of Charlton play host to the titans of Ipswich (making them both seem normal-sized…)”

Send me your suggestions for Friday Fun voiceover clips using the Comments field below – and have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – the all-action Almera!

Not strictly a voiceover parody this week, but a great ad from a few years back that made me laugh out loud. I give you Nissan’s “all-action Almera”, in the style of The Sweeney…

“You’re so uptight, Guv!”

“YES! Even my hair’s tense!”

Share your favourite voiceover spoofs and parodies via the Comments field and add to the Friday fun next week. Have a great weekend!

Film24 Promos Online

The nice boys at Film24 have been kind enough to send me some of the promos I’ve been voicing recently. Here’s one now…

You can find more from Film24 on Sky channel 157 and on their website at Film24.com

And you can see more of my promos on my facebook page – just click on the “Video” tab at the top of the page. You can also sign up as a “fan” if you like!

The paperless voiceover

For some time now I’ve been operating my voiceover business in a largely paperless environment. Sure, I still print out copies of invoices, remittance notes and the like for the benefit of my company accountant (who likes a paper file), but when I upgraded my voiceover booth last year I made a point of installing a flat panel computer monitor at eye height, with the intention of moving away from printing scripts and carrying them with me into the studio.

How does this work in practice? Well, it has its plusses and minuses.

On the plus side, I haven’t had to buy a ream of paper in quite a while, and my outlay for inkjet cartridges is at an all-time low. It’s also a lot quieter to use the scroll wheel on my cordless mouse to advance my way through the script than it is to turn a page, and it saves space as I don’t have to have a script holder propped up on top of my equipment rack.

On the negative side, it’s harder to annotate scripts with inflection marks and so on, though using bold, italics, underlining and highlighting go some way to making up for that. And for a while it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d have liked in terms of getting scripts from the Mac in my office to the PC in my voice booth. The first workaround for this was to give the booth its own email address and forward anything I needed in there to it. Then along came Dropbox, which has been one of my favourite tools of recent times and probably the thing which has changed the way I work most this year.

Dropbox is an online service – and free to use for someone at my level of usage – which allows you to deposit files in folders and then have them “mirrored” on all of your machines. So, I have a folder called “Scripts”, and when one comes in I just save it to that folder on the Mac. By the time I’ve walked through to the booth there’s a message telling me that Dropbox has updated the folder, and the script is good to go. This also means that I can make changes on one machine and then see them on the other before I start work.

Share and share alike

Dropbox also has a facility to share folders with other people. I work as a continuity announcer for Film24 (Sky 157), and I share those duties with two other voiceover artists: one in London and one in the Lake District. On an almost daily basis, cue sheets are emailed out to us for use when writing and recording the links for the channel. For months, we were constantly trying to keep our own individual systems up-to-date using email folders and there was a weekly round of “Has anyone seen a cue sheet for ‘x’?” Not anymore: I now manage a shared folder which allows us to keep a central repository of cue sheets, which has saved everyone a lot of time.

To cap it all, Dropbox now has a free iPhone application available too, which adds some nice features like picture sharing and so on.

But I’m getting off-topic. The fact is that I now print very little, and read from the screen a lot. I just set my audio recording software running, switch to my word processor and begin work, which speeds up the process and does a little bit for the planet in the process.

If you’ve got any stories to share, I’d love to hear them as always!

Gobs on the Web (w/e 25th September)

I’ve got a bit behind, haven’t I? It was the holiday that did it (Menorca, and very nice, thanks for asking. Most relaxing…) Nonetheless, here are the voiceover bits I’ve liked most in the last couple of weeks:

At Voiceover Extra, William Williams has just started a series on how to soundproof your studio – or whether you really can, in a domestic environment. Voiceover Extra also reports on Erik Sheppard’s thinking behind the new Voice Talent Productions website, where I’m pleased to be represented myself (you’ll find me here!) Cool and simple, as it goes.

Meanwhile, Mark Holden of The Invisible Studios in West Hollywood is embarking on a series of podcasts, starting with one that asks just how fancy do we need to get for voiceover auditions? Next week he’s going to look at microphones for voiceover recording, and as someone who is now the proud owner of not one, but two Neumanns, I’ll be interested in hearing his take on the issue!

Dave Courvoisier (how does this man find the time to sleep?) pondered whether two-year-old VO advice still had value - and then decided that, in the case of recording the spoken word at least, it did.

And Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices.com has been busy, as ever. This week their Voiceover Experts podcast notched up its 100th edition (that went quickly, didn’t it?) with this week’s centennial outing presented by the very lovely Julie Ann Dean, who I had the pleasure of attending this year’s Vox conference with. Meanwhile, on VoxDaily, Stephanie posted two pieces that caught my interest: the first is from Dan Hurst, on 5 Mistakes Voice Talent Make and How To Avoid Them. And the second is a cautionary tale from John Taylor about his nightmare with an errant coffee cup – another good reason to wear headphones while you’re recording, in my view.

On that point, I picked up via the Macworld website this week that Sennheiser have introduced a new pair of headphones the HD 380 Pros, which they’re pitching as professional monitors. Worth a listen, perhaps, if you’re looking for something new to cuddle your ears with while working.

Happy reading!

Friday Fun – Pinky and the Brain take on Orson Welles

Last week I brought you the famous Orson Welles “Frozen Peas” clip, and I promised that this week I’d bring you a reply to it. In this clip from the Warner Bros “Animaniacs” series, Maurice LaMarche brilliantly spoofs Orson Welles’s descent into despair in a Pinky and the Brain “mockumentary”.

I trawled the internet for this, as the YouTube video has been removed “due to a copyright violation”, which seems a shame as it’s a classic. My advice? Watch this while you can – but make sure you listen to the Orson Welles clip first, if you haven’t already!

“Get me a jury and show me how you can say in July and I’ll… make cheese for ya!” Nice twist for kids telly, compared to the original!

If you know of any great comic voiceover clips or spoofs, let me know using the comments field below and I’ll share them next time. Meantime, have a great weekend!

The Honour System… or do you pay for “free” software?

As my friends who write software will quickly point out, “shareware” and “donationware” are not “free software”. But you catch my drift, I’m sure. How many bits of software do you use that occasionally (or regularly) “nag” you to spend some cash and support the developer?

Human Nature is an interesting thing: many of us wouldn’t think twice about copying Photoshop or Office from a friend, or even buying a copy of dubious provenance. “Hell,” we think, “Those big software companies deserve it with the prices they charge!” (I hasten to add that both my copy of Photoshop Elements and MS Office are legitimate.) But the smaller guys give us license to avoid paying by making their software easy to download and use without too much hassle. It’s a balancing act: as a smaller developer, you’re more likely to find a wider audience for your program if you’re prepared to distribute it for free, then support it either with a “nag screen” or with advertising. But will anyone ever pay up?

Cyberduck is a case in point, for me. It’s my Mac FTP client of choice (see below). I like it because it’s “Mac-like”, whereas a lot of FTP software looks like it fell out of a timewarp from 1996 and gives me the shudders. I’ve been using Cyberduck for (this is embarassing) nearly two years now. I use it regularly, because my work as a Continuity Announcer for the History Channel here in the UK requires me to download the latest versions of programme billings, and some bits of video, before I set to work crafting the week’s links. But I never paid for it, dismissing the gentle invitation to “Donate” whenever it came up, often because I was busy doing other things, but on other occasions because the bit of my nature that likes the idea of getting something for nothing got the better of me.

Cyberduck is one of the nice guys: it just asks me politely if I’d like to donate, and then even gives me the option not to be nagged again until the next software release comes along.

Then yesterday I did big voiceover job which involved editing and recording a lot of files (a lot more than I’d bargained for, actually). Once I’d finished uploading my ninety or so files to an FTP site somewhere in India, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I can’t remember the last time somebody actually wanted me to send something via FTP, rather than using YouSENDIt.com, to be honest, but doing it reminded me just how much I rely on Cyberduck in a pinch. It performed flawlessly all day, and yesterday – desperate as it was – would have been a whole lot more so if Cyberduck hadn’t been there for me.

Once I’d got my breath back, I clicked the “Donate” button and sent the developer some money. There wasn’t even a suggestion of how much I should send, which made it interesting, so I sent €25 as a token of my goodwill (gosh, did I send enough?) and immediately felt better about the whole thing.

Then this morning I woke up to an email telling me that version 3 of my Mac RSS reader, NetNewsWire, had finally come out of beta. It’s been a very difficult birth: the developers decided they’d move away from using their own syncing engine and bundle it all into the Google machine, but to my eyes it was rushed, premature and has resulted in two months of (almost daily) betas, each one attempting to use sticking plaster to cover the deficiencies of the previous, before we got to today and a proper release. I like NetNewsWire: it keeps my RSS feeds in order across my two Macs and my iPhone and caches material locally – which is where it scores over using Google Reader on the web or Google’s own iPhone web app. NetNewsWire’s own proprietary syncing was always a bit hit-and-miss for me, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt with the Google move. So far, so good.

And you know what? I’ve just paid up. It was £6.44 (+UK VAT @ 15%, which always rubs me when you don’t see it till the final page). And if it works, it’ll be worth every penny. Plus, I won’t have the distraction of the ads in the corner of the page. And, just as importantly, I’ll feel like I’ve done my bit.

FTP? WTF?

You could be forgiven for not knowing about FTP. If you’ve come late to the party you might not have noticed it (it was probably in the kitchen, where the most interesting people invariably are on these occasions). You probably got accosted in the hallway by YouSENDIt, TransferBIGfiles, FilesDIRECT, and many other pretenders to FTP’s throne, who all seem to feel a need to assert their status by spelling part of their name in CAPITAL LETTERS.

But before all these wannabes appeared with their offers to take your “files too big for email?” and send them to “anyone, anywhere!”, there was File Transfer Protocol – an old and trusted method of doing exactly the same thing.

FTP has an air of mystique (and probably goes to the same sorts of voiceover parties as Phone Patch and ISDN) but once you get talking, you realise there’s less to him than meets the eye.

All we’re talking about, really, is a directory (or folder) on a machine like the one you’re using now, that you keep your documents or audio in. Except this folder is on an internet-connected server, so it’s available to anyone who knows its address and login details. Some “Anonymous FTP” sites don’t even require you to log in, but in our line of work that’s unusual (no one wants their work being seen by the competition, or downloaded by the wrong person) so there’s generally a username and password involved. Once you’re in, you can deposit your files, download any files your client thinks you might need, and so on. Depending on what privileges your login has you may even be able to delete and rename things or even create folders of your own (in which case be careful as there’s generally no way to undo your deletions!)

This can all be done by purists (for which, read “nerds”) from the command line, by typing in lots of Unix commands. But for the rest of us there’s FTP client software, which issues all of these commands in the background without us having to remember them, and presents us with a nice window onscreen that looks very much like a directory listing of a local folder. All you need to do is drag-and-drop as needed, then wait while the files make their way across.

Some filing systems used on the internet don’t handle special characters very well (£,$ and the like), and some don’t even like spaces, so good working practice is to use dashes and underscores to break up words, and keep things simple, so “Mike’s FANTASTIC £5,000 voice track – version 2″ (yeah, I wish…) becomes “mikes_fantastic_5000_pound_voice_track-version_2″, for example. If you’re uploading a lot of files your client will often tell you exactly how they should be named.

As for software, it’s up to you to choose some you feel comfortable with. There’s plenty for all the platforms, and though Cyberduck is my Mac client of choice, your mileage may differ. Wikipedia keeps a list here.

So, there you have it: FTP isn’t scary at all. You just need to remember that a stranger is just a friend you don’t know yet – and go up and introduce yourself.

Mike’s mics. Or Neumann TLM 103 vs TLM 193

Back in December I decided that my Christmas treat to myself would be a new microphone. I wanted a Neumann of some description, but was having trouble making up my mind which one. In the end I plumped for the TLM 103, and I must say I’ve been very happy.

But part of me has been curious this year as to what the similarly-priced TLM 193 might have brought to the table, so I’ve had a “saved search” running on eBay for a few months – just in case one came up at a price that was too good to miss. This is a really useful feature of eBay, if you haven’t used it, whereby you get an email alert every time someone lists the thing you’re looking for. If the “thing” has a “Buy It Now” price, and if you’re quick, then you can bag it before anyone else gets in on the bidding, and this is exactly what happened to me the other night when I checked my email on the train home.

The TLM 193 is currently available – from online retailers – for between £1,000 and £1,150, so we’re not talking pin money here. If I tell you I picked mine up on eBay for £550, bundled with an EA-1 shockmount (normally an extra £150 or so on top), you’ll appreciate that this was one of those deals that was too good to miss, even if I came to sell it on again myself.

On this point, it’s interesting to note that gear has been getting more expensive this year – especially here in the UK where the Pound is currently weak. If I’d wanted to pick up a 193 in December 2008, I could have done so for about £800. The TLM 103 I bought cost me £700 in a bundle with the EA-1. Even at the time it was a bargain, but now the 103 is retailing for upwards of £730 on its own. Many retailers put their prices up in the first few months of this year, so we’re now in a situation where you can actually make money on the kit you bought before the slump. My first microphone – the Audio Technica AT 4040 - cost £200 when I bought it two summers ago, and is now on sale from the same retailer at a breathtaking £363, which means that I’m now in the position to be able to sell mine for more than I paid for it. (Even I’ll gleefully admit that I’m “doing the recession” on this one.)

So, my thought process went a bit like this: Buy the 193, run it in my setup and compare to the 103, then keep the one I liked most and sell the other without loss (or possibly for a profit!) With this in mind, I hit the “Commit to buy” button. Two days later my new microphone turned up and I set to work doing some objective tests to see how they sounded and which I preferred.

The moment I connected the 193, I noticed the change in my headphones. Suddenly there was a “presence” and warmth to my voice that hadn’t been so apparent with the 103. Not only that, but the very distinctive high frequency response I’d become used to was gone. The 103 is somehow both sweet and sharp at the same time on my “ess” sounds. It’s never unpleasant on playback, but while it’s great when I’m doing radio commercials, it can become a bit, well, ”fatiguing” in my cans on a long read. I was interested to notice straight away that this element was gone. But of course, we can’t trust everything we hear in our headphones now, can we?

Why can’t we trust what we hear in our headphones? Well, it’s because of a couple of things.

Firstly, if you’re monitoring yourself reading live then what you’re hearing is a combination of what’s coming through your cans plus the sound that’s being transmitted to your ears through your own body. That’s why people are often surprised when they hear themselves played back for the first time – we all think we sound one way, whereas to the rest of the world we sound rather different.

Secondly, though headphones are great at getting you so close to the recording that you can hear every distracting click, pop or mouth noise (that’s why I insist on using them), they rarely sound the same as a set of studio monitor speakers (and those that do generally lack the amount of low end “tilt” that gives us VOs confidence in the booth).

With this in mind I constructed an objective test, and read a few short script excerpts on each mic in turn, without making any other changes to my setup, which is a Focusrite Voicemaster Pro with digital ADC, feeding directly into an M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard on my PC. For the purposes of the exercise I read a piece of TV continuity for the History Channel, part of a training script, and a typical 20″ radio commercial offering to add a conservatory to your home at a low, low price. Three suitably different scripts which would get me some different results. I also recorded the output of the mics when I wasn’t talking – what we refer to as the “noise floor”. The TLM 103 has famously low self noise (that’s the amount of noise the microphone generates from its own electronics) and the 193’s is, on paper, several dBs higher, but would I be able to hear that?

What were the results of all this? Well, why don’t you judge them for yourself? You can download a ZIP file of the clips I made from my website here. Have a listen before you read on.

If you listen to the tracks one after the other on a reasonable system you’ll spot the difference, I’m sure. But is the difference enough for you to pick a favourite if you heard it solo? One point here is that there certainly is more noise from the 193, and the 103 is indeed clearer, as advertised. Whereas the voice tracks are both “normalised” to -3dB, the noise floor track is as it comes, straight out of the preamp. The 193 needs a fair bit more gain to get the same level out of it. The 193 also picked up mains hum being transmitted through vibration in my rig to begin with, and I had to dampen the mic support to avoid this being noticeable to my ears.

I’ve been using the 193 as my main microphone for over a week now, and I have to say it’s grown on me. Both of these mics demonstrate that “Neumann sound” which so many of us like, but they demonstrate it in slightly different ways. The 193 is definitely more “reigned-in” at the top end than the 103, which I’d expected by looking at the frequency response graphs on the Neumann website. My initial thought was that it sounded “splashy” where the 103 was clean and shiny, and that there was less “punch” at the low end. Doing a radio ad didn’t get me quite so excited about the sound of my own voice as it usually does (hey, I’m a voiceover artist – cut me some slack here!) But extended listening began to endear the mic to me. The 193 has a “fuller” sound and handles the mid-range especially well, lending a presence to my recordings which I rather like (most of the human voice is in this range, after all).

The bottom end on the TLM 103 appears to roll off at a slightly higher frequency than the 193, and perhaps this was why I found myself stopping recording yesterday in my basement studio when some arsehole pulled up in the street outside with one of those bass rigs that – literally – shakes the foundations of my house. With the 103 I’d felt this kind of low frequency noise from time to time more than was apparent on the playback, but on the 193’s waveform there it was: thump… thump… thump. Fortunately such arseholes – and such mobile bass rigs – are rare, even in my corner of South London, so this isn’t, in itself, enough to sway me on the subject.

I’m left in a quandary: the truth is I like them both. The 103 sounds great on radio commercials, and I do a fair few of those. It’s “deep”, and “crisp” (if not particularly “even”) whereas I’ve just recorded a two-hour audio CD and really appreciated the 193 – both in my headphones while recording, and when editing, due to its nature of being a “smooth operator”. In short, it’s been an expensive lesson in why sound engineers keep cupboards full of mics for different applications, and I now have to caution myself against “trying out” any more, just in case this turns into an expensive hobby.

There’s one more thing I’ve been keen to trial though, and that’s a change in preamp. eBay did me proud again this week and offered up an Avalon VT-737SP. As I write, Parcelforce says it’s “out for delivery”, so watch this space for an update once I’ve had a chance to play some more.