 Hey, it's time for Voice Over Body Shop, and our guest this week is Eliza Jane Schneider. We're gonna talk all about dialects and stuff, and we've got some tech. Oh boy, do we ever. We're gonna talk about some stuff that is so mystical to so many people. We'll demystify tonight. All right, are you ready? Yes. Are you ready? Yes. We're ready on Voice Over Body Shop right now. Two men, twin sons from different mothers, with a passion for voiceover recording technology and the desire to make recording easy for voice actors everywhere, together in one place. George Whidham, the home studio engineer to the stars, a Virginia tech grad with an unmatched knowledge of all the latest gear and technology in voiceover today. Dan Leonard, the home studio master, a voice actor with over 30 years experience in broadcasting and recording, and a no holds barred myth-busting attitude for teaching you how easy it is. Together, to bring you all the latest technology, today's voiceover superstars, and leading the discussion on how to make the most of your voiceover business. This is Voice Over Body Shop. Voice Over Body Shop is brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, home of Harlan Hogan's signature products, source elements, remote connections made even easier, VO to gogo.com, everything you need to be a successful voiceover artist, J. Michael Collins' demos, award-winning demo production, voiceactorwebsites.com, where your voiceover website won't be a pain in the butt, and VoiceOver Extra, your daily resource for VO success. And now, live from their super secret multimedia studio in Sherman Oaks, California, here are George Whidham and Dan Leonard. Good evening, I'm Dan Leonard, and I'm George Whidham, and this is VoiceOver Body Shop or VO BS. Well, episode 165. All right. It just keeps adding up and adding up and adding up. Stacks and stacks. It is, it is. Well, tonight we got a great show. As we do it every time you tune in to watch us. We don't do no junk. No, absolutely. Fresh content every week. And Eliza Jane Schneider will be joining us in just a minute. And we've, you know, if you've got a question for her, if you have, you know, after we talk to her, you're going to go, I got questions. I got things I got to ask. Yeah. Two segments. So you'll have a chance. You'll have a chance. So if you have a question, throw it in our chat room, or if they're on Facebook, throw it on the Facebook page, depending on where you're watching this live, because you're the smart people watching it live, because you get to actually interact with our guest and with George and I. So if you also have a tech question about your home voiceover studio, that's also the place to put it. So indeed, without any further ado, let's introduce our guest tonight. Our guest, Eliza Jane Schneider, is an actress and a voice actor. But she primarily right now is concentrating on the area of dialects. And she's got some clashes she's teaching and she's the best at this. So let's introduce our friend, Eliza Jane Schneider, everybody. Welcome. Nice to see you. Welcome. Thanks for coming. I'm buzzing tonight. Oh, look at that on the monitor. You can see the little bit, little bit of glare there. Never wear those types of. All right, we'll change it up next week. Go for the extra purple shirt you had. Oh, well, it goes without saying that this woman once kidnapped me in Portland, Oregon. Yes, during the Portland film festival, you just grabbed me by the arm and dragged me off to her house. And that was that was fun. I said, look at my studio and you taught me to put my mic upside down. I've been doing it right side up for decades. I know. And now it sounds great. Right side up is the wrong side up. I no longer have to do the Cindy Lauper pencil move on my lip. I know for plosives. Yeah, as close as the air is going down. You use the mic right, you don't need a pop screen. It's as simple as that. I keep telling you kids that, but it's so worth kidnapping you. That was that was when we met actually in Portland. Well, we had met the week before at voiceover mastery. Oh, right. And then and then you grabbed me and then you. So let's let's talk a little bit about you and how you got to where you are and how you're doing what you're doing. You're originally from, as I recall, from Rochester, Rochester, New York. All right. Yeah. We've both been able to lose our way upstate western New York accents. Well, you want a glass of water? I don't think so. That's nice. Thanks. Yeah. No, it's water. Get it right. Well, that's Philadelphia. That's, that's where I'm from. Western New York has its own sort of flat A sort of thing, which we'll get into, which is fascinating about dialects and stuff. But when did you come out here to California and to be an actress or did you start when I was 18 to play younger, which I geekily knew when I was 18 to play younger. I came out to UCLA because I wanted to try my chops on the West Coast and see if I can get into TV land. And I figured I'd end up in New York City eventually. So I just wanted to have that little buffer of college to ease into the fiercely competitive world I decided upon. Yeah. Not a, not an easy business to get into. No. It's got to be in your, it's got to be in your gallbladder. Yeah. Do you want to be an actor? Yeah. I have one of those Dr. Seuss, my book about me. Remember the yellow book where you filled in all the little things? And from age five, you know, there's like a zillion things you can be. And I think I started circling all of them. And then I realized the only way to do that was to be an actor. Makes total sense. So how long did you, I mean, you're still voice acting and stuff. But what types of things did you do? Oh, gosh, when like, when I first got to LA or oh, well, I did like two years ago. Yeah, two years ago when I first got to LA and I still had black and white headshots. I did Beakman's world. And the first thing I did was the amazing live sea monkeys, little known project with Howie Mandel, three life size sea monkeys and myself. I was the token female in that show. Very few people know this about Howie Mandel. He played a mad scientist. And, and I played this little Joan Jet wannabe. And I brought all my musical instruments to the audition and stuff like that. And then I ended up auditioning into the replacement Beakman's world. Same time slot Saturday morning, 10am, very often preempted by basketball. The only live action show to be seen in prisons across the nation. And therefore I got a lot of very interesting fan mail at UCLA. Yeah, I can see they're all sitting there and they're watching they're doing like, what? What's this? Yeah, they let them watch cartoons. Yeah. And then here comes Beakman's world. And you know, there's this girl in spandex and petticoats in a science lab, as you do. Yeah, so so that was that was my sort of first foray into the world of entertainment. Fun stuff. When did you start doing voiceover? 1997. My first job was Johnny Bravo. I played Penny, I think her name was. And, yeah, well, you know, I, I went across the country 10 times in a converted ambulance recording people's dialects on a Sony datwalk man. Right. Sort of at the end of Beakman's world, I had one month off because I'd taken the fall quarter of my senior year at UCLA off to finish filming. And so we had this hiatus of it was the first free month of my life. And I just bought an ambulance because it had AC outlets in it. And I could plug in my recording gear and my walk and I could cook surprise. Was this part of your program or part of your degree that you had a project you were working on? Yeah, actually, it was my senior colloquium thesis project. I had transferred from the theater department to the world arts and cultures department because I wanted to know what people really were like, you know, who weren't me. Which there are many. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I, yeah, it was I did American dialects actually asked my professor if I could do that and said we study third world countries here in world arts and cultures like China and Africa. And that was like the man in a PhD. So well, I just felt like an idiot trying to go out and become the expert on Ghanaian drumming or whatever it was we were culturally appropriating at that moment. And without knowing anything about my own culture or country. And having been told that there was no such thing as an American culture I just kind of wanted to go out and find out if that was true. Start here and then subsequently I just kept going I went to I went across the country 10 times and then I went to every English speaking country in the world where English is the first language recording people's dialects and accents. And I just did Singapore, which was the last one, except the Falkland Islands. So if I ever get asked to coach a project with a Falkland Islands dialect, I'll have to go there. But but for the most part, I've gone to people's hometowns and recorded these phonemes in their pure unadulterated form. Because you know, the minute you step foot outside your hometown, you start to speak differently. If you pick things up, that's how accents happen. Happens to me all the time. Yeah, constantly shift. So when you look on something like idea and you listen to somebody who was recorded at the University of Kansas after having been there for three or four years, you're not necessarily getting what you need. So I was trying to create this resource for actors and I have it now it's called the Dialect Database. It's a huge mess and if any of you'd like to help us with it, you can take some of my classes for free in exchange for being my slave. Yes, and archiving my research. Who's administering this database? My one of my students, Goldie, she is in Seattle and she's just starting out in voiceover and she's fantastic and she's helping me. She's got about 45 volunteers who are all going through about 7,000 interviews right now archiving them and cataloging them and making them accessible to actors. Yeah, that's great. And writers, whoever else cares. That's an amazing resource. Yeah, that's huge. I'm serious. I will trade a class tuition for people to help me with the database because I don't have minions, you know, that other guy with the dialect archive in the Kansas, whatever, he's got like, you know, like students. Oh, because it's a university thing. Yeah, he's got people to help him. You're doing it privately. Yes. So you'll own it and not some university. That's true. That is true. That's a good point. Yeah. So what is it about dialects? Did you do much studying as to why things would develop differently? Why is it the people in North Dakota sound like people in Winnipeg and why do people in Arkansas not sound quite the same as the people in Kentucky or the same people in Wales? Well, okay, so the first myth there is that dialects are defined by political boundaries. Interesting. So there's not an Arkansas dialect versus a Mississippi dialect, but there's definitely a mountain dialect versus a tidewater dialect. And it all has to do with immigration patterns, for example, the sort of two classes of Southern that we think of when we think of the American Southern dialect, you've got your plantation Tidewater Southern that goes all around the Mississippi Delta and all around, you know, North Carolina. And of course, there are about 17 distinct dialects in North Carolina, but like that, including the Outer Banks, where they tend to sound like Harry Potter or Hagrid Hagrid, the Hoy Toyters. But but yeah, so, so there's there's the plantation Southern, which is non-Rodic R-dropping. And they say, Yalla, I'm vatted to dinner. And then there's the mountain Southern, which you'll find in, you know, the the Ozarks and all through, you know, Arkansas and parts of Mississippi. And, and it's not necessarily the mountains, but it has to do with the immigration of the Irish and the Scottish that came up in there. And they have those hard hours like y'all are embedded in inner, you know, that's the hard. So it's really topographical more than it is political boundaries that define accents and that can kind of give you a sense of a regional accent. I'm from Pennsylvania. There's a at least 17 dialects probably, you know, in the eastern part of the state. Oh, yeah. Pennsylvania is crazy. Well, and of course, they've got the Amish and the men and knights. And I recorded a bunch of them. I was fascinated to find that they had cell phones. I had a girlfriend that lived in a town that is written on paper, Shenandoah. If you go into this town and pronounce it Shenandoah, they're going to follow you around and see you wait till you leave. Yeah. It's Shenandoah. Shenandoah. That's it. Shenandoah. Yeah. And you don't want to call Versailles Versailles in America. I've seen it done. But screwing up place names is one of the things that actors are really good at. And so that's one of the things as a dialect coach I get to do. You ever seen one of those goofy surveys that's probably been viral on Facebook where it gives you like 20 questions and it says, how do you say this word? Accent text. Yeah. And then at the end they say, you live and it works. Yeah. I mean, I went through it and I haven't lived in Philadelphia in a long time. But it asked me all these questions and at the end it said, you're from Philadelphia. Oh, that's cool. No, I've actually not seen that. I've seen the accent text that people tag themselves and say this is not. How do you say cherry, the word cherry? Do you know what Versailles is? One of them is cherry. It was a couple years ago. I'll find it. It is really, really fascinating. It was cool. Yeah. So now you're teaching this. I am. You have this massive database. Yes. And all of this built up knowledge and actual examples. Yes, I do. How are you using this to teach people this stuff? I mean, how do you teach a dialect? Oh, gosh. Well, I teach in three ways. It kind of depends on the proclivities of my student. Okay. Individualized, individualized teaching. Yeah. So if I have a celebrity say that has zero time and is running to the set, I listen to them first, see what they're doing wrong, and sometimes we'll just tweak a few things. Or we'll make a different choice about their character's backstory on the fly in keeping with what they're actually doing. That's something you do when you have zero time. But auditory visual and kinesthetic is the three pronged approach. And we all use all of these things when we're learning, but some of us are more auditorily inclined. Some of us are more kinesthetic. We have to have our costume on to get into character. It's sensory. It's physical sensory. Yes. Yes. Yes. And then some of us are more visual. We take notes. We're note takers. So for those people, the International Phonetic Alphabet or re-spelling really helps. For example, when I'm teaching a Scottish dialect, I will say, say the word settled. Say the word settled. Now replace that S with a W. Swettled. No, replace the S with a W. Waddled. What in the waddled are you talking about? What are you talking about? So it tricks people into doing something they didn't think they could previously do when you do some re-spelling with rhyming words like that. So that's for my visually oriented people. And on my dialectmasterclass.com and my websites that my students have access to, you can pretty much choose whichever way works best for you. Now this is important for voice actors because they're always asking for dialects. But most of the time, they say, it's got to be dead on. You've got to be able to relate. It's got somebody in the tide water because you're doing a commercial for somebody in Virginia Beach. You've got to be convincing of it. Yeah. I mean, that's true for commercials. That's true for video games. A lot of them take themselves very, very, very seriously and they want you to pass as a local, which is definitely possible if you study a native speaker. Right. To me, studying these native speakers, studying two or three native speakers, finding the commonalities in creating this avatar of your own version of this dialect, is like learning to play a concert or playing some music. So I'm learning the dialect itself is a different instrument. I'm reshaping the inside of my mouth. My vocal posture is changing from flute to recorder. And then the character and their monologue is the song I'm singing within that instrument. So you can memorize as many songs as you want. You could do a whole set list if you have this kind of method down and you know what you're doing. And you can pass as a local. This is 101, but maybe, can you explain really, what's the difference between dialect and accent? Well, okay. So the dictionary definition is different than the common usage definition. So the dictionary definition, absolutely different, is a dialect is defined by a variation in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Whereas an accent is simply a variance in pronunciation. However, in common usage, it's usually, oh, he's got a foreign accent or he's got a different regional English dialect. So they'll say that somebody from Manchester has a Manchester dialect versus somebody who came from France and is speaking English has a French accent. That's usually how it's used. All right. Thank you. It happens. So you went traveling across. I'm imagining that you probably had some interesting adventures collecting some of these, some of the more interesting ones that happened to you. Oh gosh. And what did you learn from a dialect perspective? What's the rating on this program? Ella has her earbuds in watching sitcom, Ria. Yeah. I can say whatever you want. Oh, fascinating. Well, the one time I turned on my lights in sirens, that was fun. You were in an ambulance. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it was in North Carolina and I heard these girls. So apparently in, I think it was Richmond. It was a long time ago. But the hangout in the region where I was, was the Burger King. All the girls had Keds, those little white shoes, and all the boys had trucks that were custom painted that had at least nine woofers lining the back. And I heard this girl talking at the top of a hill looking down on a parking lot going, oh, shit, shit, shit. And I was like, oh, and I said, step into my ambulance and let me record you. I have a box of wine. And she and her sister got into my ambulance on the condition that I turned the lights and sirens on and went down and I said, I'll go chase your boyfriend down. We see him down there. We'll go, we'll go get him. And he either wet his pants or spilled his beer because when we finally pulled him over in this Kmart parking lot of water. Yes. In this region. Yes. Yes, he was. I mean, he was very nervous about having been pulled over by an ambulance. I'm being chased by an aunt. Wait a second. With my girlfriend in it, and her sister. And so ultimately, I mean, I ended up with one of my favorite interviews. These girls were just one upping each other right and left. And one of my favorite quotes from that session was, when I was little, she used to try and kill me by sticking baby powder up my nose. I did not. I like the puff balls that the powder made. If you're just joining us and wondering what on earth is going on, we're talking with Elijah J. Schneider, who is a dialect coach for actors and voice actors. And for anyone else, I take it who really needs to sound like there's somebody else in another place. If you've got a question for it, throw it in our chat room, our interactive chat room on our web page or on if you're in Facebook, you can throw it in there too. And we will ask that question of her when we get the opportunity to do that in our next segment. So how I mean, you're explaining how you teach. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your classes and they must be fascinating. Well, we have a lot of fun. And it attracts a fascinating type of person at my classes, I have to say, attract a really intelligent demographic. Everybody is so smart and they're so talented and they're becoming so adept at just, you know, switching back and forth. And they're all pretty much training to do what I do, which is be a utility voice and, you know, be super extra helpful. But so, well, there's dialectmasterclass.com is where it all started. And I have this sort of European centric kind of massive material that for me was the most marketable when I started this four years ago. You know, you've got your various regional American dialects. And in that module, I also teach the auditory looping method, which has become the mainstay of, you know, voice matching dialects accents and even teaching lawyers how to use more powerful voices. I mean, I have this method that apparently transcends voice teachers all over, getting really excited about it. I was asked last week to go to Orlando to present these methods to all these voice and speech teachers at a big conference as the master presents. And it's really cool. Basically what I do, I'll spill the beans. Okay, spill the beans. Well, you can you can give a lot of the what just not a whole lot of the how. I loop it forward. I take a pet like a phone number size sound bite of a native speaker. I loop it 14 times. I mute four, six, eight and 10. So you end up with a chant rhythm kind of happening. I put it in your left ear, it goes into your right brain. You get this intuitive sense of what this person sounds like. And then you record yourself on the next track, you put your your own voice in your right ear, and you're analyzing it on the fly as you chant and you repeat what this person is saying. And by the time my students are done, whether they be Australian dialect coaches themselves who are trying to learn a Nigerian accent, or, you know, some celebrity that's got to shoot a scene in five minutes and has to completely change the way they sound all of a sudden because production never gave them time, you know, three minutes, sometimes it takes to get 90% of the way there, it eliminates 90% of my teaching time, this method. So it's fascinating and fun and fun to watch everybody's ears pop when you play it back for them and they go, oh, I'm doing this. Oh, I'm doing that. And I just sit back and I don't have to teach. I want to nap for that. So yes, the dialectmasterclass.com. But this year, finally coming up September 10th, same day my movie comes out. Which is? Or can you talk about it? Yeah, Curious George 4. I can finally announce. Curious George 4, the royal monkey. I played a straight man to Curious George's boy balls. It's actually the first time I'm ever using my own accent in a project. I'm pretty sure. She's just being you. If only my daughter was paying attention. She was a huge, she was probably still is, but she was a huge fan of the original, you know, few shows or few movies that came out. Oh, yeah. Well, my son went to the screening with me at Dreamworks on Sunday. And he's eight and it's just so touching and charming. And what I love about Curious George is the space. They give each emotion a moment to land and you get these beats that you just don't get in the fast paced world of Ninjago and, you know, the Lego movies. It's just everything else is so in your face really fast all the time about the sound effects. And Curious George gives you the time to just be a kid in the feel for the monkey. And he just went all through facial expressions. Yeah, yeah, it's really lovely. I really liked it. I mean, I liked it as an adult. I could see the what was so different about that, the way it was produced. So they're continuing that same kind of pacing, that same kind of energy and mood. Yeah, really talented team. Keef, the guy who edited South Park when I was on it, was the editor on this movie, too. So they want the same demographic to keep coming. But it's not like I think of Harry Potter movies because Elle is really into Harry Potter, right? So the six as the movies go on, they are they expect the audience to be growing up. Oh, yeah. The characters. Yeah. So we just watched one of them. It was freaking scary. I know, right? Right. It was scary. I was like, and this is like this is a kid's movie. But we're but with that show, it's a timeless show. Yeah, that's true. They want the same audience, not the same audience to grow over with it, but they want to keep bringing the same kind of kids. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my son, I'm making him read the books before he watches the movie. So we're on number five right now. And hopefully he'll be 12 before we actually watch it. It's brutal, man. It's pretty intense. Four was intense. Yes. So you're actually starting the same day. Tell us about that. Yes, yes, September 10th. I am launching the Direct Masterclass again. But anybody who signs up now in the next week or so for the Direct Masterclass will get one of these new electives that I am teaching for the first time. You know, I've been researching dialects around the world and I've been performing dialects around the world for a long time. But now we're in this incredibly exciting time when casting directors are recognizing that, hey, if I've got a Chinese character, I really want to find a Chinese person. I mean, it's actually, if I've got a Chinese character, I want to find an Asian person at least, right? So if you are Asian or from the, you have ancestry from the continent of Asia, my distinctions in Asian dialects class elective is something you can take in tandem with the masterclass. And you'll learn Korean, North and South Japanese. You'll learn Cantonese versus Mandarin one week. You'll learn Singlish versus Singaporean and like the four different kinds of Singlish. With Petrina Cao, who's a voice teacher from Singapore. So I'm bringing in my friends from these voice and speech teachers conferences from all over the world. And it's interesting because I feel like there's one of me in every country. I keep finding these women who are like, the voiceover person, utility person who also teaches. Like the super geek. I found my geeky people. So you have a whole worldwide network of these people. It's really cool. Yeah. So I'm offering this for the first time, starting September 10th. You can sign up by going to dialectmasterclass.com and clicking on the free training in the upper left corner and you'll get a 90 minute free training. If it's for you, you buy it and you won't see this on the page. This is news right now. Very exciting that you get this elective as well. The place you'll find the electives. There's dialects for black characters. There's dialects for basically your audition type. Latine X characters. There's Middle Eastern. You know, when they ask for that Middle Eastern mission. Yes. So we've got survey courses basically going on in tandem with the master class. So you can really go deep and really authenticate your stuff. The way Steve Bloom said it is, I've been faking it up until this point. I don't know why I took your class. Now I know what I'm talking about. But yeah, so you'll find that at characteractingacademy.com forward slash electives. And that's where you'll find the elective that you're going to get with your dialect master class. All right. We'll give those out again a little bit later too. Once again, our guest is Eliza Jane Schneider. We're talking about dialects and how she teaches them and how she can teach you and that sort of thing. Again, if you've got a question, now would be a really good time to ask it. And we got some. When we got some. So we're going to take a break. We got one. Yes. And we're going to be right back with Eliza Jane and your questions right up there after these incredibly important messages. I think I heard the voice of a body shot. I did. I did hear the voice of a body shot. Little body shot. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice to announce her guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? This is virgin radio. Well, okay, we're not that innocent. There's jeans for wearing and there's jeans for working. Dickies, because I ain't here to look pretty. She's a champion of progressive values, a leader for California, and a voice for America. It's smart. It's a phone. It's a smartphone. But it's so much more. It's the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song. It's the end of the road for Rick. It's just you and me, Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 from BMW. Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish? Hey, it's J. Michael Collins. Bet you think I'm going to try and sell you a demo now, huh? I think they speak for themselves. But I will give you my email. It's jmichaelatjmcvoiceover.com. Now, if Dan will stop waxing his mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show. Hey there. It's David H. Lawrence, the 17th, and I'm very excited, very happy to announce that as of today, Viotagogo's sponsorship with VoiceOver Body Shop is over. Longstanding relationship. Bye-bye, Viotagogo. And the reason I'm happy and excited about it is that we're about to embark on a brand new sponsorship arrangement with VoiceOver Body Shop with the new name of our website and our company. The name is now VioHeroes.com. And there's a big reason for that. I think that VoiceOver Body Shop and our company share a mission. And that mission is not just to teach you how to do VoiceOver really well, but to really help you become heroes to your clients. Your clients don't come to you just to do VoiceOver. Your clients come to you to help them, to save them, to help them sell products and services, to help them explain their company, to help them narrate their audio book. There's a million reasons why they come to you and it's all about making their lives spectacular. And that's what we're going to do at VioHeroes.com. The new website is up. I'd love to show it to you. VioHeroes.com front page is basically a very modern, clean look that tells you everything you need to succeed. It helps you meet our coaches, what we do in three simple steps. We let you figure out if VioHeroes is right for you. We think it usually is if you're watching the show. We have the same classes, but they've been heroically updated for VioHeroes.com. And again, the look and feel is fantastic. And the big thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to get off Facebook because people have been telling us we don't want to be on Facebook. So now ProConnect, which is our discussion group, is on VioHeroes.com. When you want to talk about things with your fellow pros in the VioHeroes curriculum, you'll be able to do it right on the site. Log in, get all of the stuff that you want, the workouts, the classes, the discussion, the labs, the recordings, everything right there on one site, clean, awesome, lovely, and I'm very excited about our future. Now in a couple of weeks, we're going to be launching officially with a great package, great price, lots of great bonuses. Stand by for that. You'll hear about it on VoiceOver Body Shop. In the meantime, stand by for more VOBS. I'm David H. Lawrence, the 17th from VioHeroes.com. They're not built for marketing and SEO. They're expensive. You have limited or no control and it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what's the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com. Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control. No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voiceover website going for as little as $700. So if you want your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what. And we're back here on VoiceOver Body Shop and we're talking with Eliza Jane Schneider, talking about dialects and stuff. But also, you were on South Park? Yeah. Tell us about that. Five years. Five years. You must have played a lot of different characters on that. I played most of the females on that show. Really? Yeah. That's quite a distinction because they don't like to use too many other voices other than their own, right? Yeah, it was pretty much me, Matt Tray, and Isaac Hayes for a little while there. And Mona Marshall. Godfather of Soul. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know it was awesome. That was crazy. What was that like? I mean, they're nuts. There's that show they did on Netflix, The Doc, Six Days to Air. Is that what it was called? I don't remember. It was a doc that did about the show, about how to do it every week, turn it around. I actually remember going to the craft Emmys with Seth MacFarlane. He won an Emmy for the dog voice, a song that he sang. And I remember there was a little film strip about the way South Park creates the show. And we're getting interviewed and they're like, yeah, we do all the voices. And I'm like, what am I, Chuck Living? Yeah, what the heck? But yeah, yeah. I mean, that's how they kept so current. But interestingly, now with the streaming, it's not as pertinent to keep that current because people are always binge watching, you know what I mean? But like when alien gazales got dragged, and they had it like the next day in animation, whereas Simpsons took like nine months. So we would be doing ADR at two o'clock in the morning, the night before the broadcast. Oh my God, that's incredible. It was insane. Yeah, and everybody's working around the clock. It is an intense working environment. Yeah. How many years? Those guys are awesome. Five years. Five years. Five years. Then I asked for a union contract. Okay. So once in a while, you have to speak up for yourself. Yes. That will play on for a while. Like an annuity of Europe. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. It's in a van with my principles. Me and my principles hang out playing chess for a while. It's been a lot of time on our hands. Yeah, no, it was awesome. I love those guys. I think they're hilarious. Book of Mormons, one of my favorites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Anyway, we're talking with Eliza Jane Schneider. We have a couple of questions from our vast worldwide audience. They're watching all over the place. They're having lunch in Australia right now, but they're watching. So what do we got, Mr. William? Yes. Yeah, first one in the queue here is from Fred North. I've never done any dialect. Never thought I could. Can an old dog learn new tricks and where to start, if so? Well, sometimes. The answer is sometimes. And it is contingent upon whether or not you have an ear for it sometimes. You know, it's possible to teach someone kinesthetically, sort of like, you know, miracle worker style, you know, like creating these. Yeah, if you create a different mouth position, you look like I showed you with the re-spelling. You know, you can trick yourself into doing something you didn't imagine you could do, but you know, everybody's born with the same tools, you know. So it's just a matter of what your ear selects for in terms of what your brain decides is important when you're basically up to four months old. This is why I was suing their nursing my kid watching Vietnamese television for hours. At 3 o'clock in the morning, but hopefully someday if he ever needs to know Vietnamese, he'll have the tools. That's the fun of having an antenna, as opposed to just cable, because you can like pick up all the Vietnamese stations. Right. Especially here in LA, get all the ones out of Orange County. But where you start, if you're curious, is the free training at dialectmasterclass.com in the top left corner. You click on free training, and it'll give you some tools, and you can try your hand. And then, of course, you can go to the dialect database, which is a huge mess right now, but you can certainly download a couple native speaker samples and try the method, the looping method that I teach in that free training. And if you want to go deep, sign up. We're starting classes September 10th. Cool, and you do it online. Yeah, online. From the comfort of your own home studio. Another one. This is a, there's two questions from Jonathan. And Ella, you're going to have to supply your own electricity. I don't know how you're going to do that, but you're going to have to figure it out. So good luck with you. It's talking to his daughter. What was the most challenge from Jonathan Aurora? Or Aurora. That's a name that's misread the first time. By millions. Sorry, Jonathan. What was the most challenging accent or dialect for you to learn? What did you work on? Welsh. Welsh? Welsh was hard for me. I just didn't have it in my ear. And those, the lateral plosive that cloned roost, you know, that double L. They actually also have that in the Plinkett tribe in near Juno, Alaska. But it's a very rare thing to do with your mouth. Klingons do it. Klingons. It's a plosive that goes this way. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. Klingons. I don't know. Yeah, like. Like this. Klingons. Is a Klingon term of endearment and insults simultaneously. I love that about Klingon. But we digress. So, yes. That is good. Welsh. The second question. What's your current recording set up for home and travel? Oh, God, you should see it. Are they different? I actually, it's the same. And, you know, at first, you know, I had the $10,000 mic. Not at first, but, you know, eventually I was like, I've got to get this all dialed in. But, you know, now I'm running around with an AT2020 with a rubber band holding it together because of the last time I dropped it off of the balcony. It's over here. Yeah, I was just auditioning with it. I got it. I got to get a new mic. But yeah, just USB. I find that, you know, I was running around with them, because I do quite a bit of traveling, recording dialects. I was running around with a cooler bag, you know, because it's padded with my M-Box and my laptop and my XLR cables and everything. And I just found that not having an interface was way, way easier for me. And I, you know, now people, especially celebrities, are recording on their phones. So they're really becoming used to. It's really actually, it's not bad. It's not bad. Yeah, simplicity. I'm all about the simplicity. And I've stopped trying so hard to create a completely soundproof studio. I had to wait out the propane tanks in Topanga the other day and the dogs barking and whatnot. But you know, you do what you need to do. Yeah, well, my work here is done then. Because you've been listening to us and simplifying, which is what we try to tell people. Don't overthink this stuff. Yeah. You know, if you don't know, you don't know. And you don't know what you don't know. Well, I'm all gypsy, but I'm a hoarder and it's a talent to balance being a gypsy in a hoarder. Welcome to Los Angeles. Yeah, we're having gypsy hoarders. I take the books that I've hoarded. I surround myself with books, you know, and then the clothes that I've hoarded. And then there's my soundproof booth pretty much anywhere I go, including my van. I just recorded a bunch of stuff on the way down the coast from Portland. That's actually a really good idea for a cheap makeshift booth that I've literally never thought of. Just making, using books as bricks and just making a wall around you. Oh, they're great for diffusion and stuff. Yeah, they're heavy. Yeah, they don't let sound in. They diffuse sound. It works pretty well. And you're here first. It's just invented. Yeah, unless, of course, they fall over, which then you got to start all over. Yeah, no, you got glue, books and clothes. A bunch more actually. Ron Garner says, how does a person start to help with the database? Well, you start by, let's see. You can email us at assistantatdialectmasterclass.com and say, hey. Do they have to sing it? No. Okay. Not through email. Sing to me through your email. Yeah, just email us assistantatdialectmasterclass.com and we'll get you all sorted and hooked up. And we have a free webinar coming up, or it's not free. There's a promo code. You have to, yeah, but if you email that same email address, we have a webinar on Wednesday with Jennifer Hale at 6.30 and it's called Beyond Money. And it has to do with, you know, how do you navigate the world of acting and deal with your finances as a contractor? And Jen Hale, it holds the Guinness World Record for the most prolific video game actress. Oh, really? Yeah, she's amazing. And she's helped me with my financial decisions, financial decisions, being an actor. You know, it's hard. But anyways, yeah, so we're having this webinar on Wednesday and if you look that up, you can, I suppose I should have a link or something. That'd be on August 28th for the people who are time shifting this on podcasts. August 28th at 6.30. But yeah, anytime you can go to Dialect Masterclass, you click on the free training and it'll give you all kinds of options to get in with us and start working on the database or your own work or the character acting academy. You can also, if you go to CharacterActingAcademy.com, you can click on Apply Now and you will get a 15-minute audition with me. But please don't do that unless you're really an actor and you really want to audition for the Character Acting Academy. I'm really serious about it. Yeah. Here's one from Noah DeBiasi. DeBiasi. Thank you very much. South Western New York needs you. Noah DeBiasi, Eliza. Ever one and two an American accent that was so utterly unintelligible. Despite them actually speaking English. I don't know if it was working 10 or working ham, I forget, but it's the southern coast of England. It was in America. Oh yeah, Gullah. The Gullah on Helena Island, there was one, I was looking for pure Gullah as opposed to people who studied how to do Gullah and perform in Gullah, but code switch and the rest of the time. Okay, I'm the one here that doesn't know what you're talking about. Gullah. Island off of South Carolina. Well, Helena Island is the island. It's one of the islands and Beaufort versus Buford, I always forget which is which, but basically there's a lingering lingua franca, which is the English, basically the English morphology with the Sierra Leone syntax. So that's where you get he gone, he be gone, and he been gone, being three different verb conjugations with three different levels of meaning to them. But it's Gullah, Gitchy. There's a show called Gullah, Gullah Island. It was on PBS. I met a man when I was researching the Gullah dialect who wrote a Bible in the Gullah dialect. Yeah, there's a Gullah Bible. It's sort of like the Brer Rabbit Tales, if you have no reference for it. It's an island essentially established by freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. And they created their language. And these are places where for 100 years or so, there weren't very many white people at all, but people were sort of being forced out of their language and being forced to speak English. And anyways, that when I met Butch at the Steamer restaurant on Helena Island, and he hadn't been to school and so he was still speaking Gullah. And he would sing and speak and I had to listen back several times to be able to really understand it. But I was going to tell you about Workington or Workingham and that was a place in England where the dialect was so thick I really couldn't understand it at all. And parts of like under bridges amongst the people who living houseless in Glasgow very difficult for me to understand at first. But when you listen back several times you can start to understand it. Yeah, I find like if I'm listening to my gardener Raul who's Salvadoran, he's talking in the Spanglish that he is talking and I'm like, what? I close my eyes and I tune into him. I hear exactly what he's saying. Yeah, you have to kind of reenact what it was like to be a baby before you knew everything or you decided that you knew everything and you have to be open to the meaning that's coming. There was a very short span of time there between the two. I mean, how was that the goa? Different from like a Cajun dialect. Cajun? Cajun, sorry. Cajun, well Cajun is literally a French language. No, but it is a lingua franca. It's two languages that met each other. It's sort of like a pigeon. Yeah, but it came from Acadia in Canada. A lot of people think that it came from down south, but it actually came from the north and came down and it's a white, mostly white people speaking with the Cajuns. It's the Creole that's more close to the Gullah and more heavily influenced by that. Oh, Creole is more like the Gullah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, this is awesome. Yeah, I'm geeking out. Yeah, I coached all that for Mafia III because it was a period piece and I got to coach Haitian Creole Cajun and get really deep and specific about that. It's fascinating. If you've ever been to Belize, in Belize, it's sort of like people from Jamaica. It's a Creole with English and some other things mixed up. I mean, and this guy could cross talk between them. Oh, yeah, code switch. He could code switch and it was pretty good. It's like, could you explain this to me? Well, okay, it's... And he demonstrates. Right, and it's like, okay, whatever. Let's go on to the river that we were going to on this bus. Yeah, Cajun, the Cajun people I spoke with would switch back and forth between French and English quite a bit. That's great. That's amazing. So we have got more, but I think for the interest of time, what do you think? What's getting as many as we can? Debbie Smith says, what dialect is the most requested and most... Well, these are several questions for those requested. Most requested, usually British. British, general British. Most marketable. Most marketable, neutral American. Neutral American, yeah. One that you might recommend for a female from Southern California. Neutral American. Neutral American, learn the difference between the Southern California dialect and what a neutral American sound might be, which is very subtle. And map your idiolect. We all have an idiolect, which is like... It doesn't mean you're stupid. I was gonna say, my wife calls me that all the time. You know, there's a regional dialect, but then there's your own sound, what a single human being sounds like. That's what makes as unique as voice actors. Sound different from each other, yeah. So there's a way using the international phonetic alphabet and various musical terms to map your own sound and figure out what your vocal posture is versus even a family member. And it's always good to really get to know your point A so that you can more easily and with more facility switch to a point B, any point B, you know. I'm gonna go right to this last one because it's really kind of interesting from Noah again, Noah Debiassi. What can you tell us about voice feminization for a biologically male actor? Well, I'll tell you that it's not what you think. It's not, oh, I'm gonna pitch my voice up and sound like a woman. Some of the best female voices like Roz, you know, you can do that with a male instrument really well, whereas a woman would really have to shred her cords in order to get to those places, you know, like that big heavy smokers boy. Like, for example, when I'm doing like my octogenarian couple, my male voice, honey, honey, I've got the condom, so you're ready for me? And then the woman, I'm moist-harrowed, I'm ready for you. She's pitch-wise lower. Yeah, she's lower, yeah. Everything about what you said in the last 30 seconds is fascinating. We have a lot of fun in my class. I clearly, clearly, once again, let's go over some of the URLs so they can take these classes if they're interested. Oh, okay. So if you want to audition and just get into the mentoring program for the whole year with me and my fabulous all-star crew of teachers, which include Steve Bloom, Jen Hale, Pat Fraley, Dave Finoy, Bill Lamar, Debbie Berry, Barry, if you look on... Bunch of lightweights, yeah. Yeah, those guys. If you look on CharacterActingAcademy.com, I have basically assembled my favorite team of fantastic teachers who also perform for a living. They also do this. And I think it's really important when you're navigating this sea of very helpful people who are willing to take all of your money to train you to be a voice actor, that you work with people who are in the business and do it. So CharacterActingAcademy.com, if you click on Apply Now, you'll get an audition with us and you'll get a 15-minute phone call with me where I get to hear your voices and we get to determine where to place you. And if you're interested in one of these electives that are being offered for the first time, you can scroll down and find them. You can sign up just for the elective if you've taken the master class. And if you are ready to take the master class, the dialect master class, you can go to dialectmasterclass.com, take the free training, sign up for the master class and get one of these electives as part of your deal right now. Eliza Chang, always a pleasure to hang out with you and thank you for being with us tonight. My pleasure. Good to see you. We'll be right back so John and I can say goodbye. This is Anthony Mendez and you're watching VoiceOver Body Shop. Labor and shipping cost increases. Not to mention tariffs and the straw that broke the camel's back, a big hike in storage cost. They had to raise prices on the booths by just a little bit. Just $10 on the Port-a-Booth Plus and $20 on the Port-a-Booth Pro. But our wonderful VOBS viewers can still get either of their booths for their original price for the next two weeks. You should go to, of course, voiceoveressentials.com. Easy to get there at the bottom of our page. Just click the picture of Harlan there and put either of their booths in their shopping cart and enter the promo code Booths24 in the promo code field and click the submit promo code button. That'll get you $10 off the Plus and $20 off for the Pro. Get a Port-a-Booth now at the original price at voiceoveressentials.com. Thanks a lot Harlan. This is the time of the show where we get to talk about one of our wonderful sponsors Source Elements. Those are the creators of Source Connect. That is a software that voice acting pros are being demanded to have in their home studios by the commercial studios of the world. How do I know this? Well, I've set up software for everybody on every platform and in every scenario you can imagine. And this is the one that people are being requested to get. It's a standalone application, doesn't run on a Google Chrome browser. So you have a lot more stability involved. And this software has been tried and true, tested and proved the whole nine for well over 10 years now. So if you really want to be establishing a business and voiceover that works with the top studios in the world, top agents, that kind of thing, make sure you have Source Connect locked and loaded in your studio. Absolutely important. Go get a 15 day free trial at source-elements.com. 15 day free trial. You don't need an iLock little USB dongly thing to get set up with Source Connect standard right away. So go give it a try and tell them we sent you. We'll be right back right after this. And we are back. Fascinating the stuff you learned. That was way more exciting than I anticipated. No, no, no. That was a fun, pleasant surprise. I knew she would be great. And she can go on like that for a long time, as you found out. And she knows her stuff, which is the most important thing. Thanks again to Eliza Jane Schneider for that. Next week on this show, it'll be Tech Talk, and I am correct this time, number 16. Okay. We've caught up. Yes, we're now, you know, it's time to going on. So make sure you're there for that next week. And then we've got some other great guests coming up as we get into the fall, even though it still feels like summer here in Southern California and we'll probably feel that way until November. But who are our donors of the week and we appreciate their help? Got a pretty good list going. You'll probably recognize these names because a lot of them subscribe, which means we say their names a lot on this show. Yeah. Ant-Land Productions. Uncle Roy. Christy Burns. Michelle Blanker. Sarah Borges. Phillip Sapir. Trey Speaks for You. That's Trey Mosley. Trey Mosley, you know Trey. Tom Pinto. Patty Gibbons. And George Wittem Sr., actually. That's my dad. Thanks, dad. All right. Thanks, guys. Your donations do help a lot and that's why this show is technically magnificent every week. Absolutely. It's like doing actual live network TV and it's all because of you guys. And so all you have to do is go to our website and vobs.tv and click on donate now and subscribe. Please do. We appreciate that. Join our mailing list too. Those of you who are watching who are on our mailing list know who is going to be on tonight. And you knew that she would be here and that you could tune in at 5 o'clock Pacific, 8 o'clock Eastern Time, 7 o'clock Central. It also helps you plan because if you're going to be in town and you want to be here live in the audience, you'll know exactly when we're taping who's going to be here. So subscribe and then you can sign up to be here in the studio. And there's our producer. She's the reason why the show looks pretty good tonight. But we have this empty studio. We'd like you in here. Ella, come on. Get on with your post. All right, there we go. Yeah, so yeah, you could be in our studio. All you have to do is write to us at theguys at vobs.tv and say, you know, I'm in the greater Los Angeles area or I'm visiting. We've had lots of people in here who are visiting and they're like, oh, I could go see vobs. Add this to your list of, you know, tourist attractions. It's this, the Watts Towers, Colosseum. Griffith Observatory. Griffith Observatory, you know, Topanga Canyon. Yeah, Topanga Creek Outpost, Mountain Biking. Come on out Saturday mornings at 8 a.m. All right. Also, show us your booths. Whose booth? This is Tom Johnson's booth, which you can clearly see is in his closet. This is a legit closet voiceover booth. Probably sounds better than some studios here in LA. Yeah, I can vouch for that. Yeah, I know. It's amazing how simple you can make your studio. People keep thinking, I got to spend all this money on a booth? No. But if you've got a booth and you want to show it off, we want to see your voiceover shrine and send it to us again at theguysatVOBS.tv and make sure it is in landscape, not portrait. All right. Let's see. If you need help with your home studio, come see us. You want to work with George? You go to GeorgeTheTech.com. This is my whole menu of services, and it's all right there. Dan also is available online over his website. Homevoiceoverstudio.com. Send me your audio. Let me give it a listen. You know, click on the specimen collection cup, and for $25, I will analyze your audio. We'll see if you're where you need to be. We need to thank, of course, our sponsors, like Harlan Hogan's voiceover essentials. Voiceover extra. Source elements. voheroes.com. Voiceactorwebsites.com. And J. Michael Collins demos. Along with the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for the Betterment of Live webcasting and recorded webcasting, we've had to add a little bit to the foundation. The title is growing. Yeah. This day is like, you're not for profit. You've got to have this step-down podcasting on there eventually. Right. Mike Marlino for doing a fabulous job in the chat room. Thanks, Mike. There were a lot of questions in there for Eliza Jane. His mom, Sum Marlino, who is our amazing director. We did a great job tonight as well. And Lee Penny simply for being Lee Penny. Come visit us, Lee, please. Well, that's going to do it for us this week. You know, we try to bring you all the good stuff. Let us know. Write to us at the guys at vobs.tv. Who would you like to see on the show? What kind of stuff do you want us to be talking about? Yeah. And we'd really appreciate that. So until next week, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whittem. And this is VoiceOver, Body Shop, or VOBS. And remember, if it sounds good, it is good. All right. Have a great week, everybody.