 Hey! Guess what? It's time for VoiceOver Body Shop and our guest tonight is the one and only Debbie Derryberry. Hey! Hi! Wave and say hi. Hi everybody! I know if you got a question for Debbie Derryberry throw it in the chat room and Facebook or on YouTube or wherever you're watching you know send it up to Smoke Signals. We'll get to those questions in a little while and George and I will be right back and we'll have a great show. This is going to be fabulous. Stay tuned. It's time for VoiceOver Body Shop right now. From the outer reaches they came bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your VoiceOver audio and together from the center of the VO universe they bring it to you now. George Wittem the engineer to the VO stars of Virginia Tech Grand with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today and you Dan Leonard the voiceover home studio master a professional voice down with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio and each week they allow you into their world bringing you talks with the biggest names in the voiceover world today letting you ask your questions and giving you the latest information to make the most of your voiceover business welcome to VoiceOver Body Shop. VoiceOver Body Shop is brought to you by VoiceOver Essentials.com home of Harlin Hogan signature products source elements remote studio connections for everyone voice actor websites.com where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt. VOheroes.com become a hero to your clients with award winning voiceover training, JMC demos when quality matters and VoiceOver Extra your daily resource for VO success and now live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks California here are the guys. Well hi there I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Wittem and this is VoiceOver Body Shop for VO DS playing a fanfare now I hit the wrong dang button it's supposed to be this DS it's canned we don't even have to say it anymore we just let Jeff say it that's right we have to we have to forward Jeff's career a little bit because he's helping us out anyway welcome to our show we're here to help you with your your voiceover career and in order to do that we bring you some of the top people in the business and we talk about tech and we talk about all sorts of stuff but it's more important that you hear from the top people in the business who are really successful and what is it that makes them successful and our guest tonight is a voice that your kids probably know and you probably know but let's uh let's play a little real of her stuff so you'll know exactly who Debbie Derryberry is roll that suit I'm sad too since my brother Dan did become a rock star he got too big for his britches I don't wear men Nancy got her braces cotton chain link fence so Mr. Kanicki wants you to be on the computer club float right now he told you said we could go to dance over your dead body did you mean it and let's welcome to our show once again Debbie Derryberry there she is great to have you back how you doing um I muted am I muted now we hear you oh good I'm doing very well thank you so much for having me on your show that was a nice intro yeah well thank you for for joining us we really appreciate last time you were here we actually had a small concert that's right yeah we did and and today I have my guitar but I didn't prepare no music you don't know we don't have to we don't have to talk about music tonight we're talking about voiceover yeah I need to help everybody yeah but uh in the intro since the last time you were here you got married though didn't you I guess so it's been that long I've been married for a year and a half so it was a year and a year and a half ago that we did the concert here for the third time geez well ma also talk to you on that and so has has how has COVID affected your your business because I know you're really busy so I'm going to assume that it probably hasn't even had any effect at all well I um I feel bad saying this because I my heart hurts for people that have been affected so poorly by COVID but because voiceover can be done virtually from the booth you can see my booth right back there that you helped me build boys um I work at home and my business has never been busier I am able to go from session to session with no travel time and because everything is auditioned from home I can audition a lot more and because I don't have students here I have students virtually so my business has been very busy and I love it I've always loved it and I still always love it it's good do you think that because you already were like studio in place production and equipment in place do you think that had a little bit to do with it that you were like when as soon as the phone rang you're like I'm ready to go or is it just because you've been hustling for so long um both I think yeah I've had my home booth for I don't know seven or eight years now but it wasn't until the last two years that I made it really air tight and that was before I heard about the virus so it just happened to coincide had it not coincided I would have figured out some way to get the booth up and running to make it as tight as it is um I think the timing just kind of all fell into place but starting about 10 years ago I guess we started you know auditioning from home a little more a little more and it was really hard for me to agree with myself that I was going to have to learn how to do all this moon Dan came over and said you maybe you ought to try adobe audition because I couldn't multitrack on twisted wave or sound studio and a lot of my auditions come from you know Disney kids shows Nick kids shows where they send you the track and you got a karaoke it and so I had to be able to so between Dan and Carson back and you and I said I gotta learn this so I did and every day I learned something new and I'm really trying to stay open to it it's sort of like you know when you get a new device it gives you anxiety because you have to learn all the new features and that's how it is you know with home sound studios and recording but you just have to take your anti anxiety medicines and step up yeah really it's sort of well it's really I think for a lot of people the anxiety is sort of like being afraid to jump into a cold pool and but once you're in there you get used to it and and then you're fine and then you know you know which way to swim and you know where the outlands and stuff like that anyway so you've been really busy what have you been working on you know series wise and stuff because apparently you're all over the place now well we've just finished uh which you won't see till later this year uh season five of epic for family the bill burr uh irreverent and raunchy cartoon which I do like seven voices on and I'm so lucky I get to do so many voices you saw a few of them on the opening clip super fun um finished season two of Tigtown which is a tip mouse show over adult swim and I play healthy this sort of androgynous monster purple thing that regenerates his limbs and he's helped he's Tigtown's sidekick so I'm the co-star on that and it's a super uh different show sort of like a rolled doll meets game of thrones okay very very interesting um and uh Guild Wars two is still going strong um and I have a couple other projects that I'd really love to share with you but I can't so I'm just NDAs you know non-disclosure agreement for those of you who don't know what they are when you get a project that's really cool they make you signed an NDA non-disclosure agreement that you will not talk about it and so I can't talk about it so that could be an animation series or it could be a game I mean it could be a commercial too commercials too really okay yeah like say you're doing a campaign that won't be released for another couple months for Apple phone or for Audi that has a gadget coming out and they don't want anyone to know so um there's a lot of stuff happening and I'm busy all the time and uh in addition to the voiceover you know I I try to keep my finger in a lot of different pies I have the second edition of my voiceover book coming out I just I have this other voiceover book if you guys want to know about what I know about voiceover it's on Amazon and um I just finished New Head Shots which as an actor you know is the bane of our existence having to do headshots having to take the picture and and pay somebody to photoshop it and touch it out especially getting all those characters to stand still for long enough yeah you know they are squirmy little buggers have you I guess one of the problems with you know doing all this stuff from home is any ensemble work being done or has it always been done individually there is some ensemble work doing going on especially that when you're doing seven characters that's what I know I um I did a commercial this week with um on zoom with uh you know a source connect going in the background and me recording it for backup and we I read against my partner and we recorded it ourselves so we sent our individual files to the their engineer and let them put it together and then I did a loop session the other day for a well-known cartoon and there were like five of us I'm still getting a kickback and echo kickback somewhere we all we are getting a little bit it's the key is not running the headphones too loud we're all getting a little bit of a minor headphone bleed I'll turn my headphones on a little bit source connect over the years it's kind of like that so um we are able to do group loop sessions online and it's most challenging I think for the engineer who has the uh the files coming in from everybody and has to line it up and then I've done a couple singing sessions this month where it well last month because we're the first of the month where um you know I'll hear the track I'll sing along with it and then the producers hear it out of sync and then the engineers line it up and play it back for the producers and the producers give comments and then you come back do it again and the producers have to know not to listen to the first time because sounds right for me sounds wrong for them then you wait and the engineer does their thing so there's a few extra steps yep and there's different um platforms that we've all learned to work like um session link pro or source connect or apple diddle ip dtl or the zoom you've probably learned more new things in the last year than you probably did the 10 years prior you're absolutely right george I've learned so much and I think if I can learn it anybody can learn it because come on I'm not 20 well it's like learning languages you once you've learned six or seven you know learning two or three more it gets easier right I think so the other thing I've been uh I meant to mention this I've been busy with um my son told me that I'm nobody if I don't get on tiktok so I got on tiktok last year and started making videos and I guess he knows what he's doing um I've got 800 000 followers and 16 million views so go figure yeah yeah my son went on tiktok and he did one video and had over a million hits and then a bunch of people were copying what he was doing but I've been watching some of those videos and they're cute and they're you know it gets you out in front of everybody let me ask you this how do you stay on top of your game I mean clearly you know you're at the top echelon of the animation business how do you keep yourself there I mean we know the effort and the time and the training and the you know the auditioning and all those things that go into the yeah the competition you know which we can talk about a little bit later how do you stay there what what's the real what do you think your key to success is and say some of your your other colleagues um first of all I have to uh digest that you're saying I'm at the top of the game because to me I feel like I am competing and working and auditioning for everything just like everybody else is I don't feel like I'm at the top of my game but I'm hearing you say that and I want to address that as if I was but I want people to know it's never a cakewalk I don't live in luxury I work really hard I had to audition there's a show coming up that I did 20 years ago that everybody had to audition for my part I had to audition again for my part and it was very hard emotionally for me but I get it that's kind of the way the biz works and I don't book a high percentage you know the people uh some of my students have this flavor the month this um the vocal fry millennial voice that's out there right now I'm talking about like I'm going to pizza hut and uh like I can put it on but it's not my nature so those are the ones that are booking and you know they may be booking 15% of their stuff currently I'm booking about one out of every 150 200 auditions wow I work hard it's a lot of time in my booth but the things that like say you just book one thing say I just booked enough is for family that's seven years for me right it's a long time plus it's a lifetime of residuals so it's I mean I meant to ask you so you have seven seven roles yes did you audition for seven roles or did you audition for more did you audition to one and then once they got you they were like oh we got ideas because you could do how did that work I auditioned for one and then the callback was they knew they wanted you to be able to be versatile so they threw things at me at the callback that I hadn't seen before but as you guys know part of vo is being able to look at a piece of copy see that character dive into your uh roster of voices your your wheelhouse and say oh that one's a little kid in diapers he looks like he's from the south um maybe a combination of southern and the character from bobby's world and then comes candy and gave him a cold on top of it so um you're like a girl in queen's gambit what visualizing the chessboard on the ceiling so yeah you're picking out all the different parts of combined to find your characters immediately but I've been doing this so long that I have a pretty easy hold on those characters so getting back to your question in the callback they'd say okay let's just try this character and they had told me briefly in the waiting room in the green room to prepare for those so I did my best but I think what they're looking for is being able to switch from one character to the next with commitment and believability and being able to call on you for that right during a session I mean not that I always jump from voice to voice I'll run through the script with one character then I'll go back to the beginning you know only a few people like Rob Paulson of course he can do that because he's the wizard of all geniuses of all voice over that ever was yeah that's amazing so yeah I mean it must be much easier to keep track of what you're doing with the character when you get to read through all of that character's lines and then come back so I was hoping I answered your question on what keeps me on top of the game is I'm always doing something I mean I do a lot of podcasts I teach I really try to pay attention when I'm auditioning sometimes it's a heavy audition I will ask my agent for feedback if I've worked this hard on it I think I have earned the right to ask my agent for feedback not all the time I still coach I coach with Dave Walsh Alison Packard I coach with people if I feel like I'm not hitting it you know if I'm not in the pocket and I know I'm not vocal fry millennial but I can do some other voices you know we we just keep trying and I like it yeah let's let's talk about your coaching for a second you know as long as I've known you you've been coaching people in animation voicing including me and a bunch of people I know it seems like an obvious question but how does animation work differ technically from commercial and long format stuff script wise animation differs because I ask actors and I do this myself to stray from the script a little in commercial because you're married to a time 30 second 15 second 10 second and those words have had to pass so many levels like say it's a McDonald's spot do you know how many people have had to approve that copy you can't mess with it but in animation you really can't mess with the story or the copy but it is acting and it's all acting but when you're on stage there's a line but there's all this mugging and facial stuff that happens like say I'm on stage Dan you know so the line is Dan what are you doing there's so much can happen with stage work and face work we don't get that with animation so I asked my actors to fill it to fill all that face stuff with noise to give the animator something to do and I call it pre-life and mid-life and post-life which is a little before the line a little in the middle and a little after and and I'm always looking for the shift in animation where the happy meets the sad where the loud meets the quiet where the anxious meets the relaxed those sorts of things you have to study and work at yeah yeah that's one of the things you know when I I talked to a lot of people you know we're helping them with their studios and they're just getting you know beginning a lot of times I'll say you know I do a lot of funny voices and it's like and your point um you know it's it's not about that is it I mean I mean because I'll do funny voices but it's there's more to it than that as you were explaining it's acting it's very little about I mean I can't you know how many times the emails come in people say I have a good voice yeah super great but that's really has nothing to do with the voiceover it has to do with acting and your um ability to handle the business of the acting which is so much work and it's um studying the craft in all the different genres it's different for promo than it is for narration than it is for commercial and as for vo or mocap or video games they all have their specific skills and I can say that I feel very competent in animation commercial mocap video games promo is not my animal I don't do it I don't really I don't do narration there's things I don't do but the things that I do do I I said do I heard that try to study and learn from people who are more successful than me in that I think that's key too in anything you want to surround yourself with the people maybe a step up from you not a step up in any way that they're better than you but maybe they have succeeded or they are where you want to be yeah so in coaching I forgot the question but how does animation differ from other stuff thank you you gave me the right answer oh sorry that's EG great people around me my best friend is EG Dale and she was calling me she has a special duck duck ring ring um so let me just tell people you know if you're just wondering who we're talking to we're talking with Debbie Derryberry one of the top animation voices if you have a question for throw it in the facebook chat room or in the chat room in in uh where are some of the other places they can throw this Georgia you know youtube or facebook chat both of them show up in our feed so yeah so if you've got a question for Debbie throw it in there and Jeff Holman who's getting far more publicity maybe deserves will be putting it into our chat room um let me just finish answering your last question differences between animation and commercial um in animation I think I mean in commercial sometimes you're auditioning for campaigns in commercial in animation you're auditioning for a character in a part that you're hoping will recur and recur um and you usually have to pick a character stay in that character and go through all different emotions in that character I think in commercial you kind of stay in in one area and it's a different level of emotion in in animation there tends to be more highs and lows I tell people if they're you know looking for microphones what do you do mostly you know if you're mostly commercial go on with your Neumann and your sandheiser or your scarlet but for me I gotta have an Apollo twin if I'm going to be doing animation otherwise it's fallen off either side of the chart because there's so much variation in the levels right George is like yep yeah yeah yeah I mean it's it's not so much the equipment it's knowing how to use it but and that's you know what you've been talking about is like I had to learn how to use this and I had to learn how to use that well since you brought it up okay the Apollo twin so so this is a this is a big thing so with voice actors doing animation and character work I tell them you know set the gain at the point where you need to capture the point in the script with a character really kind of goes nuts right the loudest point in the script set your gain for that and then leave it there right but you're finding that you're using the Apollo twin as a way to control that dynamic range and you're doing that for the actual gigs as well or just as a means to make the auditioning process easier both I find that when I've used the scarlet it and I don't know if the Apollo twin again you're the guru on the equipment but the when I go through the Apollo it tends to keep it in the lines if I ran the same levels the same thing through the scarlet it'll fly off the chart easier I mean of course I apply my stack afterwards with my ices zones isotope isotope isotope and I guess you could do that with the scarlet too I'm not bad melting the scarlet it's a great piece of equipment well it's it's a simple device right it just takes your mic and increases the level and pipes it into the computer where the Apollo has way more going on underneath the hood yeah so you tell me why it keeps it within range with the Apollo well did you have other things in the Apollo chain quote unquote a unison plug-in preamp or any other bells and whistles or is it just are you just using it as a preamp I don't know there's your answer something on it and it's and it's staying that bottom line is it's working for you yeah right there was a problem when we first started doing virtual when you were on source connect and zoom and Apollo twin there was this horrible bug that happened and you couldn't get rid of the feedback the the talk back and I don't know how they figured out what to do but you can't just go mute on zoom you have to leave audio which sounds like it does the same thing but for some reason it wasn't doing the same thing zoom and uh the Apollo have some uh yeah there's a lot of weird things that happen between those yeah things so that's curious to hear that so and I don't dare upgrade to the new ios yet until they get the new ua stuff all yeah there is no hurry to upgrade to big sir for quite some time yeah especially since the road just broke oh the big sir ha ha that was like a double on time for a good one good all right good one yeah so you know there there are it seems there's a talented few who've always dominated the animation industry at different time you know mel blank does butler in more you know more recent times we mentioned rob polson terry strong eg yourself but i maybe we need to be some encouraging here have you seen an influx of really great new talent getting breaks um i've seen an influx of talent there are still the select few that i listen to and go wow they really have it they can jump around those people are versatile there's a lot of people doing it and there are people who know the people who wrote the shows there are on camera celebrities who want to be in vio so there's a lot of people doing vio but as far as us rank and file every day vio animationers we're the ones that can jump around and step up to every single task and bring them what they want and give them that versatility because you know the animation contract they get you for two voices and it's only a 10% bump for the third so it behooves them to hire someone who can bring them a few different voices and then in the streaming contracts they don't it doesn't matter they use you for as many voices as they want aka fs for a family and it's just the one rate but that's fun for me so i don't know i i would like to say i i see the cream at the top spreading you know out over the world but it's it's still kind of a smallish group although like i said since on camera is a bit down our agents are just flooded with on camera people who want to do vio and it as you know looks easy but there's a lot to learn and sometimes the producers don't want to wait on that learning curve they're just like give me the people who can give it to me now or they'll be calling me saying deb who else do you know they can do this well it's it's easy when you're a celebrity that just happens to sound like a zebra right you are george yeah anybody know who i'm talking about yeah yeah if uh if you're just joining us once again we're talking with debbie dairyberry we still have room for some questions in our chat room so throw them in there we're gonna take a quick break and we will continue this conversation with her right after these messages don't go away yep this is v obs proven anybody well hello there i bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voiced announcer guy on your new orientation training for snapchat were you stick around you don't want to miss this at target we want you to come as you are be comfortable okay maybe not bathrobe comfortable pants for the customer on aisle four please watch anywhere anytime on an unlimited number of devices sign in with your netflix account to watch instantly at netflix.com the ice cream maker is a big risk that can have huge reward until you forget to turn it on well that's it guys time is up hey it's jmc thanks for watching the voiceover body shop if you're demo ready or looking to get there check out jmc demos dot com and see a sample of our work now let's get back to dan and george and this week's tech wisdom getting into v o is quite an accomplishment and accomplishing anything in the world of performance can be really tough getting great information is tough getting the right advice and mentoring is tough simply getting ahead is tough and the best way to get ahead is to simply get started let's make it simple to get started in voiceover the best way is with v o heroes free online course getting started in voiceover you'll learn everything you need to know to create a successful satisfying and profitable voiceover career the link is really simple here it is v o heroes dot com forward slash start again that's v o heroes dot com forward slash start get ahead in voiceover simply by getting started go to v o heroes dot com forward slash start so for the first time ever 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in our business and i mean in the time that you know that i've been doing it and george has been working on people studios and and he and george and i have been working on a lot of screen actors studios in the last uh you know in 2020 that was the mainstay of our business i got a new voiceover and uh there was not a lot of tech savvy there but we got a lot of them going but there's so many people trying to get into this business right now and how do you succeed everyone what's the magic formula and i generally say well be better than everybody else but deb what is it you know it voiceover really about sticking out from the crowd how do you get somebody's attention with all of this din with all these other people out there competing as you were saying you you know you've got you know for every 200 150 auditions you do you might get a gig out of that how do you get yourself to stand out well um i'm gonna answer that oops am i muted no you're good okay i want to answer that but then i want to go back to the last question okay which was do i how do you come above the cream of the crop and and do i see a lot of new people in voiceover but um the question you just asked was how do you stand out and what i do is i look at the copy and i read it the way that i see it the first time and i give a good read and then i think all right that's my starting point that's what everybody's going to do so where how do i become that one percent that they're going to listen to because you got to figure their casting director is receiving 10 to 20 auditions per agent and there's 10 to 15 agents going to be submitting on this it's a lot of auditions that they have to listen to how do you rise above and those tricks on how you take your pretty good audition and make them shine are what i try to coach people and and what i've written in in um i wrote this book voiceover 101 how to succeed as a voice actor it's on amazon but the things that make it shine are looking at the law just a few of the things i do look at the line that just happened before you speak and it's acting 101 your your fives your where are you what just happened um what's your mood that you're in why are you saying it who are you talking to and then you take your character i can't see it you guys i know she just put me on me all i see is me i want to see you too um but i know you have this so that everybody can see me right there yeah okay so um i felt alone now we're here we're just listening we're focused on you so i look at that okay audition and i ask myself those questions and i say okay if what just happened was somebody just hit me in the head with a cream puff well if the line is hey what are you doing the line then becomes what are you doing so maybe the line says you're angry about it okay so then the line becomes impact and you have to know how to write impact or ugg or oof and it's what are you doing so that line changes based on everything that happened around it well a lot of the auditions today don't have the whole script or the scene you have to kind of figure out what's happening and they'll have five lines that are extracted from a script and you have no idea what's going on so you make it up you create your little backstory and then i do that read the best i can for my take one and if i feel like i have something really different to bring to the game you know just simple and maybe throw on a southern accent or maybe the person drops their oz when they talk so that becomes take two so i try to give them something different than i think everybody else is going to give and then give a complete contrast to it in a take two but i only do a take two in an animation if it's really different because they're only going to listen to you for about seven to ten seconds you know it might be a five minute audition and you have to do the whole thing but your game has to be at the top of that audition and then and then there's more but wait doesn't work you see who's casting this oh i know that casting person or maybe i don't know them quick go friend of on facebook go look on linkedin see what else they're looking at oh this person happened to do this movie let me go watch that movie see what the tone of that movie is what do they like is it an adult swim oh i can curse okay is it preschool oh the pace goes down slows down so there's a lot to consider when you're doing an animated animation audition and i've just given you a few things but there's a lot yeah you gotta you gotta think about it i think there's a lot of people just they go through the motions because they're doing audition after audition after audition make each one special and and really you know consider what it is that you're doing and that you want to stick out uh we got a question from jay v martin one of our fine supporters and good friends uh you want to take that one george sure um jay v says your intense work schedule and quirky characters no doubt make big demands on your voice he says i love lemon water and gretters pistils or maybe it's gretters pistols to keep my voice and vocal cords from burning out what do you swear by how do you keep your voice going um those two things are so good um when i do lemon and water i i'm always thinking oh it's taking all the enamel off my teeth so i have to limit that one plus the citrus tears up my stomach a little add a little honey and make it warm so that helps um certainly the grothers past deals i try not to drink eat sugar sugar substitutes i try to eat just sugar but not a lot of it so the one the grothers that i eat are expensive and sweet you know it's 40 bucks for your thing a grothers past deals but they work fine um i think more than anything it's rest and water and not cold water and you know not abusing it the night before with screaming i i do notice when i have some you know healthy jobs the day before some challenging throat shredding things the day before or a long video game session i feel at the next day so vocal rest and water i don't really think there's any magic cure you can take the pain away there's all kinds of products people are happy to sell you but water's free lemons aren't too expensive i got a whole lot of free yeah i mean if you take the pain away yeah that's that can be really dangerous right because you can see you on damaging your voice and just well i i dull the pain right so you want to pay attention to the pain they say no pain no gain but i don't think that really holds true in vo if it hurts you better stop and that's another thing in animation people immediately get excited and pinched and so when they go into their animation voice it automatically goes here and that's a pinchy thing and they also can go gravelly you know if they think it's an old lady or a monster then they do this thing well you can't do that for four hours so you can't make that a voice so i work with people on how to create that without the damage and the pain that happens with the the throat shredding right that's awesome i love that the lead singer foo fighter is a long time ago he talked about how he had to relearn how to sing because this thing is basically screaming david growl right and he's like i found out i couldn't do that and keep having a career so to learn how to get the same sound without using the same muscles or the same technique yeah you know it's a very interesting thing it reminded me of that yeah you have to relearn a lot of stuff and i give people exercises and i see where they're really weak it's like if i ask them to do the letter o in the sinus above their eyeballs which is and they go oh and they can't get here oh or maybe they can go but they can't go up there and it's a lot of practice to keep everything alive and working it really is like an instrument i mean my daughter is trying to learn clarinet right now and she's only learning the first five notes right right in the middle of the instrument she's still asked to learn how to play the notes in the keys above those and all the keys below those and you know it takes time to learn all those different parts of the instrument fine tuning absolutely uh christ question from chris reburn uh or he says uh debbie how did you start out the basics at the very beginning is is a good place to start oh julie andrews um i was a pre-med at uc la and i uh played guitar all the time in the stairwell i wrote songs i moved to nashville to become a country singer the only thing i got hired for was singing like a baby and um i tell this story every time but i was doing stand-in work for a 12-year-old boy on the set of hey ernaz goes to camp and scottie manville's mama said hey debbie you should do voice work and i'm like what is that i didn't even know and uh so i ended up making a little cassette of some commercials with my on-camera agent because i did elfs and stand-in work and um send it to jinny mixwayne and a bunch of other people in la and jinny said good demo but you need to be back in los angeles to do this so i moved back and she walked me into icm jeff danis that became dpn and i started working right away and that kind of there's a lot more in there that i left out but pretty much that's how it happened i didn't plan it i knew i could i knew my voice was silly because i'd turn around and see people going and i just talk like that normally but and i've been acting my whole life on stage since i've been eight years old doing this and that just for fun i never meant to do it for a living i never meant to do this for a living just when you thought you were out they dragged you back in uh you want to get the question from tony hoover there george uh tony says i've never spent a great deal of time imitating cartoon characters or creating original character voices so is animation a bad career choice for me well that's loaded yeah really um i don't know where your voice falls or what your acting abilities are um um so i i can't answer that question it's it's a whole yeah it's a whole road map and everybody's road map is different and i can't say that you know if you create your own show sign up with sag as a new media show and make yourself the star boom you're starting an animated show so there's lots of ways in um it's hard to answer these individual particular questions on such a broad platform but i don't want to tell anybody they can never do it and i just want to go back to that question that we did before the break you're asking why does certain people rise to the top and is there room for more people yeah there is room for more people and yes i do see new people all the time and i see amazing groups that that bring people into the business you know like tim freelander his group and you guys and you you help people you hand hold them into the business it's it's not cheap it's not easy and it it's a lot of work but i see new people all the time that i'm impressed by so i didn't want to sound so callous you know that the digits closed because it's not well if if you really want it and you know it's your thing then you go for and i mean we're still here me eg tera rob we're still all working so you still have to compete it compete against us so i tell people go on agents websites listen to the demos there that's what you have to be as good as or better no question about it um jim mc nicolas asks debbie do you still have to market yourself or do you have a manager that does that i've never had a manager i do have people that help me in areas that i don't have time for that i haven't learned um so i still have to market myself but i do have people that will help me do certain things um nobody helped i did have someone help me write my book which helps in the marketing i hired a photographer to take my picture and you know had to get on my cartoon characters and have somebody put it all together because i don't do photoshop you know as in anything we uh will gather our team of people to pick up the pieces that we can't do ourselves you know i've never been good at making indian food so i buy that and the same with voiceover i think you gather your team you're being a ceo you have to be a mini you have to be a ceo of your career yes you do and hire the right people all right there's many legs to the stool in a voiceover career and you gotta be you gotta have each one of those legs if you don't have one of them there's somebody who does and you know we're all pretty accessible i can't make anybody famous i can't make anybody a great voice artist i can offer what i have to offer but everybody's journey is different and persistence and hard work come out on top no matter what business you're in absolutely got one more question here another one from jv merton who deserves an extra question tonight he knows uh debbie if you're if you're performing a conversation between two or more of your characters do you prefer to have that conversation in real time or record each character's lines separately if you had that choice and any funny stories about that kind of challenge because i know for a fact my son jacob had to do that and he's like i gotta hear the other lines when i'm you know when i'm auditioning or when i'm when i'm recording it for table reads which are the rehearsals we do before a record i'll jump between characters so we can keep it in real time but for the sake of moving smoothly through the record session i'll generally just take one character all the way through to the end if i need a read-in which as an actor i sometimes want it but i don't always need it i'll ask the director to just read me into that line or if it's already been recorded and that particular artist vamped a lot um improved a lot the engineer will pay play me back what that person did so that i can work off that if we're uh and that that's holds true whether i'm virtual or in in the studio live all right well that thanks so much for joining us tonight it's always a pleasure to talk to you and especially in person which eventually we'll get to do again something uh if people want to uh you know get ahold of your books or want to talk to you about having private coaching or your classes where would they go to find that out and get access to that um and i'm sure susan can type it in there somewhere but it's um uh www.debidaryberry.com and the spelling is you know a little unusual it's this is the spelling debidaryberry.com and um you can contact me at the website um on insta messenger in my facebook uh debidaryberry's world um be sure to follow me on tiktok it's at debidaryberry at insta is at debidaryberry twitter is at debidaryberry i usually try to get back with everybody who has a question if you want to book with me you can do that from the website um just so you know it doesn't have the rate on there but i'm i'm not cheap um but i want people really serious and you know there is time in my schedule to help people so reach out uh get my book on amazon i just lower the price and put it on sale for everybody uh i lowered it from 1995 to 1495 and you can get it through amazon wow well thanks for being with us and i look forward to seeing you again in person no so good to see both of you um i miss you good to see you all right debidaryberry okay we'll be right back in georgia now wrap things up right after these messages don't go away yeah hi this is carlo zellers rocky the voice of roco and you're watching voiceover body shop in these modern times every business needs a website when you need a website for your voice acting business there's only one place to go like the name says voice actor websites.com their experience in this niche webmaster market gives them the ability to quickly and easily get you from concept to live online in a much shorter time when you contact voice actor websites.com their team of experts and designers really get to know you and what your needs are they work with you to highlight what you do then they create an easily navigable website for your potential clients to get the big picture of who you are and how your voice is the one for them plus voice actor websites.com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish don't try it yourself go with the bros voiceactor websites.com where your via website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what well it's that time of the show where we get to talk about our sponsor source elements and they're the creators of source connect and a whole slew of other tools that are used for bringing in voices sharing audio between studios remote recording sessions and collaborating on jobs and voice work and music and post everything you could everything that you could do remotely they have tools for making that possible and hopefully making it easier to the one that most voice actors should have in their toolbox if they are really starting to gun for the big jobs the things that agents typically will send you out on commercials and some of the television stuff that goes to television things that are produced in hollywood etc you really probably want to have source connect at the ready what you want to do is just go get a demo at the very least get a demo of it go to source elements calm and you can get your 15 day trial once you set up your iLock account and have it ready to go and that way once you have it running and you've learned how to operate it and get it all set up you can tell your agent hey i'm ready to go just let me know and i can activate my license and be ready to rock and roll you can have a license that's a buyout license so you own it forever or you can do a subscription so go check it out go to source dash elements calm and get your source connect license running so you can tell your agents and your clients i'm ready to take on those big gigs that's it's time to do it all right we'll be right back to wrap up the show right after this yep this is v obs proven anybody can have a show these days and we're back here at voiceover body shop always a pleasure to have debbie on here next time we'll we'll get her to play again we had that great backyard concert last time and that was that was a lot of fun um next week on this very program you will see tech talk number 50 yeah baby the big five oh we got lots of stuff to talk about with that so if you're watching live stay tuned for that the you know if you're not then watch it next week it'll be on facebook and just about everywhere um who are our donors of the week and there are quite a few of them yeah a lot of great familiar names some of them i may still butcher even after reading them 50 times trey moseley thomas pinto shelly avalino shawn daily hey shawn uh mr george widham my dad brian page rob raider patty gibbons stephanie southerland diana birdsall antlion productions i'll go right shana painton baird martha kahn steven chandler don griffith and diane merit yeah so those names a lot of them are familiar because we read them almost every single week because they are subscribers they they did the donate now button on our website v obs dot tv and they chose to just instead of sending one payment they subscribed and sent us a little bit each month and you don't have to send much and we'll keep reading your name and just our way of saying thanks for being a little part of how we keep our show running absolutely and we got to add jv martin in there one came in a little later today thanks jv yeah big help that we really appreciate it uh hey you know you can join our mailing list too we have a mailing list and how do they get on the mailing list you go to our website v o b s dot tv and it says join our mailing list gee no easier than that and from there you'll get you'll you'll see what's going on in our show every week which is uh well is a help it's like well how can i plan my week because i have to plan it around voiceover body shop what do they have this week oh okay very important you gotta you know make sure you get your priority straight uh we need to thank our sponsors as well uh harlan hogan's voiceover essentials voiceover extra source elements vio heroes dot com voice actor websites dot com and jmc demos uh thanks again to jeff holman for holding together in the chat room tonight our amazing technical director sweating it out from somewhere else but getting it done summarily no uh without we could not do this show and of course lee penny for being lee penny well that's gonna do it for uh this week at voiceover body shop we really appreciate you listening and uh george and i love doing this show we love hearing from you right to us at the guys at v o b s dot tv especially if a question for us a technical question uh people have been sending in like i got a problem with my audio and it's like well we really need to hear it which is something we could talk about on tech talk um so tune in every week we're right here and but we've come to the conclusion when it comes to your home voiceover studio if it sounds good it is good i'm dan lennard and i'm george wittem and this is voiceover body shop or vio b see you next time