 Hey, it's Monday night. Time for voice over body shop once again, and for some reason you've shown up. Thank you for showing up. Thank you so much for showing up. We have a great show tonight, as we always do, an audiobook narrator and coach. This guy's done a lot of audiobooks. If you want to be coached by someone that does what he coaches, this is one of those guys. Yeah, Sean Allen Pratt will be with us. Also, we have lots of questions tonight. Thanks for sending those questions in. We've got questions. We've got a demonstration of audacity that you guys are going to love. And I'll talk about some new tech stuff and some new tech. All right, coming up on voice over body shop, stay right where you are. We're coming right your way. Two men, twin sons from different mothers with a passion for voice over recording technology and the desire to make recording easy for voice actors everywhere. Together in one place, George Wittem, the home studio engineer to the stars, a Virginia tech grad with an unmatched knowledge of all the latest gear and technology in voice over 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 voice over superstars and leaving the discussion on how to make the most of your voice over business. This is voice over body shop. Voice over body shop is brought to you by voice over essentials.com, home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, makers of source connect, source connect pro and source connect now, VO to go go.com, everything you need to become a successful voice artist, voice over extra, your daily resource for VO success, the VO dojo, take your voice over career all the way. Jay Michael Collins demos when quality matters and by voice actor websites.com where your voice actor website shouldn't be a pain in the butt. And now live from their super secret multimedia studio in Sherman Oats, California, here are George Wittem and Dan Leonard. Hey now, good evening. I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Wittem. And this is voice over body shop or VO BS. Coffee. Yeah, powered by coffee. Yes, of course, I have the left handed mug. You know what? We need to get a right handed mug. So we need to get right handed mugs. We have these people. Yeah, if you want one. Is the store still working? I don't know. It's been a while. If not, we haven't talked about it. Take a white mug and a marker and put voice over body shop on it. I do believe we still do have a cafe press store, folks, if you're interested in having a mug like that. Yes, all right. Cool. And along with other things like shower curtains with their logo on it. So tonight, Sean Allen Pratt's going to be joining us. So we're going to talk about audio books. But this is going to be, I mean, we've had audio book people on before. I mean, we've had Amy Rubinade on and we've had other people who, you know, who really do audio books. This guy's done a lot of titles and he's got a unique way of looking at it because he specializes in nonfiction, which is really cool. He's highly, highly productive. I'd say over 950 titles. Proliferate. And I thought my 40 titles were really big. Anyway, and we've got some tech. Yeah, we'll talk about something that starts with. Oh. I'll tell you about that in a minute. I think you got it. All right. So let's get the show on the road here. It's now time for And now the voice over extra OBS news, the latest and most comprehensive voice over industry news brought to you wrong way. Wrong way. There you go. Success characteristics. Hey, look how lucky that voice VO star is to be in such demand. Well, luck. Well, that's a four letter word with a few definitions. Even if you defined luck as the result of being prepared for opportunities, that alone doesn't fully describe how some voice actors are on top and know how to stay there. In a new article on voice over extra VO pro and coach Paul Strickler says he observes three characteristics and colleagues who are at the top of their game. How many of these characteristics do you have? Number one is something that call that he calls the magnet. The difference between dreamers and achievers is that achievers attract jobs, Paul writes, but people don't become magnets overnight. He cautions, you've got to have an extensive network in place that generates a continuous flow of leads from multiple sources. Number two is the colander. What? Well, a colander sips out the misfits in your career. In other words, don't attempt to be everything or everybody. And number three, the clay. Paul says the clay comes in as what you can mold into any shape depending on your skills or the needs of your clients. Shape your work to fit their needs. Check out this article for more about how to shape your career to success. That's at voiceoverextra.com, your daily resource for voiceover success. And our good buddy Paul Strickler back there in Pennsylvania. Paul, great. Always great to hear. We have to have him on again really soon. Absolutely. We have some great guests coming up over the next couple of months. It's starting to rack up. The year is starting to heat up. We're very excited. We'll be announcing our upcoming guests at the end of the show tonight. Outstanding. All right. So what's going on in tech? Tech, yes. Well, the tech news is heating up too because NAMM show is this week. So all the press releases are coming out. They're dribbling out with all the new tech gear. And one of the things that people have gotten excited about is a product from Universal Audio. I personally have been really into Universal Audio as products for some time now. And they've released a product called the Arrow. So if those that are familiar with the Apollo series, they've always been a little pricey and a little bulky. This is the first product they've made that's really more designed for portable use. And one thing that makes it so great for portable is that it does not need a power supply. It is bus powered. Why is that a big deal? Well, you know, the Scarlet is bus powered and a lot of other things just, when I say bus powered, just plug in the USB and that's it. Well, this one runs on USB as well, but there's a lot more going on under the hood than a usual audio interface. This thing has DSP on board. DSP. Define. Digital signal processing. So basically a digital way to process audio instead of using analog gear. So you don't have to have an Avalon 737 or a Manly Vox pox or whatever magic mojo box you have in your home studio or aspire to have this one can do it virtually inside the box. So this thing sets a new price point for this technology. It's coming in around $499, which is quite reasonable for what this thing can do. But it has some limitations. Well, the main limitation really is the fact that it's USB 3 only. So that means whatever device you use it with, whether it's Windows or Mac, it must have and it does run on Windows or Mac. You must have a USB 3 port. So for the I don't know what's out there in Windows with USB 3 yet. There's a few devices, not that many. In the Apple world, the things with USB 3 are going to be the new iMacs. I think actually the new iMac Pro, I don't think the iMacs have it yet. The Macbook Pro, all USB 3 and I think that's it. No, all in the MacBook, that little baby MacBook. That is a USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3 jack, I should say. But not my three year old air. Right. If you're on a MacBook Air or an older iMac or a Mac mini, it's not going to work with those devices. So it's it's kind of a bleeding edge thing for new Macs. It's for it's for new Macs and really new Windows systems that have USB 3. Now it's a little confusing. I'm calling it USB 3. In the world of Apple, it's actually Thunderbolt 3. They share the same jack. But underneath internally, they're totally different things. So just make sure. I keep saying USB 3. I think it means to be using, I mean to be saying USB C. C. Yeah. Yes. Sorry. C isn't Charlie. USB C is the new standard jack. This phone has it. You're going to see more and more phones with this jack, the USB C jack as the years go on and more products with it. And the reason why it's so great is it's backward compatible with everything. Everything. Okay, cool. It works with HDMI, Ethernet, video in and out, Ethernet, USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire. It's all baked into one port. Wow. So it's pretty cool tech. So I'm pretty excited about that. We'll get to see this thing in at NAM. In person in NAM, we'll probably get to play with a little bit. So that should be cool. Can't wait. There's going to be a lot more tech coming. But you know, we're going to really wait until we get to cover that stuff at NAM before we we share it on the show. We are going to try to do some Facebook live from them. We've got the gear. The really bottom line is will we have the bandwidth? Because there's probably going to be a thousand, maybe 5,000 people that are trying to use Facebook live. Per square section of the convention set. This is a huge, huge show. Huge and it's bigger now. They added an entire new building. Oh Christ. They built a new building. It's called the North Hall. Right. It's two stories and it's 100% all pro audio stuff. Oh, cool. So it's like an AES show tacked on to a NAM show. I mean, it's big. So we've got a huge list of vendors we're going to be covering Thursday and Friday this week. So stay tuned on Facebook live. We'll go live when we can. But a lot of it's going to come up on, be posted on YouTube and we'll feature some of it here on the show as well. Alrighty. Well, we got some tech questions coming up and a demonstration of the new audacity. So stay tuned. We'll be right back here on VoiceOver Body Shop. Don't go away. Having dinner tonight? How about having some VO too? VoiceOver Body Shop. Have some VoiceOver with your dinner tonight on VoiceOver Body Shop, 9 Eastern, 6 Pacific. Stop that. Okay. All right. It's 2018 going to be the year you take your VoiceOver practice to the next level. If not, you can go back to checking your email while this message is airing. And I think there might be some tie left in the back over there in the back of the fridge. But if you're serious about dramatically upping your level of success, I want you to go to a very, very, very special URL. That's a place where you go on the internet. That's VO2GoGo.com forward slash VOBS. Join the hundreds of VO practitioners around the world who have decided to do something positive and invest in themselves for this new year. Learn VoiceOver from the ground up or from where you are and where you want to be. VoiceOver2Go.com forward slash VOBS. Let's make 2018 your year. 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 watch your VoiceActor 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. Stretching the limits of webcasting technology. VoiceOverBodyShop presents DOORBUILD 2018 Dramatic. Exciting. All right. Well, nothing beats something new. Now, if you're familiar with Audacity, which I'm sure all of you are, it's looked the same and operated the same for as long as I can remember. It's great because it's a free software and a lot of people learn on it. And some people are making a living using Audacity. Absolutely. But finally, finally they have updated it for 2018. Yeah, they really have. You know, after, you know, since it really looked like it was from 24. And the they of who's they, right? And it's everybody. Because it's user community that created it. That's right. It's what do they call that? Not shareware. Open source. Open source. So I mean, if anything new happens in this software, it's because a couple of people or a bunch of people wanted it that way really badly and worked very hard to make it happen. So what's new in Audacity? Well, let's take a look at it. Let's throw it up on DAWView. And here it is. Now, it doesn't look really much the same, but it does. If you look at some of the icons here, those have been updated. It's not the same old icon. There's some face lifting. You know, there's that. You've got the meters have a little bit more detail detail. So you can really. So I mean, if you turn on the the mic to start monitoring, it's a much more accurate VU meter, which is really important to have, you know, make sure that you're setting the right levels and that you're recording properly. It's got the peak hold thing. It does. It still has that. It has all the same stuff that it used to have, but it looks like it's a little bit more user friendly. Yeah. Meaning, hopefully they've updated the manual for it as well. But it's also got this other cool stuff that I love. We're real familiar with Twisted Wave and we like Twisted Wave. Finally, they've taken some functionality from Twisted Wave. I'm sure Thomas didn't share it with them, but now using your fingers, instead of using the Zoom tool, now you can just zoom in and out real easily. Just pinch Zoom. If you're used to that from an iPhone or an iPad, pinching will work just like that here in audacity. And you can move it back and forth like that. But it has something else. Yes. It has something that I, you know, I find really important. And that is a really much better, much improved spectrogram. Oh, nice. Look at that. Look at that. The colors on it are a little bit more distinct on it now. But it has a little bit more functionality. I haven't had a chance to really work with the tools in it. But apparently, it's a lot more functional than the old spectrogram on there. Can you change the scale from whatever this mode is to a less linear one? Let me see. I'm just poking around to see if it can... Cluts in with it here. Well, you know, it's like, good software shouldn't need a manual. You know, you should just be able to click around and figure it out. Right. Well, you and I can do that. But there we go. Yeah. But that's a much better looking spectrogram. Yeah. And but the fact that you can zoom in and zoom out and navigate around. Yeah. Now, there's a great trick that I've always wanted to show people. I was going to just demonstrate this tonight. But since we're showing the new audacity, I figured, well, we'll do it anyway. But anyway, if we go back to the waveform thing here, if you've got a spike or something, you know, you could use, you know, all sorts of different tricks to try and, you know, if you've got a click or something and you want to just get rid of it, you know, and so no one ever knows it's there, you can use maybe you're familiar with this, the pencil tool. This is something in Twisted Wave is missing and hopefully we'll add one of these days. And look how they've improved the waveform in here when you zoom in. There's actually some lines there. So it's not, it's a lot easier to see what's going on. Easier to interpret what you're seeing. Exactly. So if you go to the pencil tool, you can literally take each of these pixels, each one of these little samples down to zero. And if you've got like a plosive or something like that, you can completely control it. You see this little pencil. That's real. That's a really useful tool. That's one that's been around in other softwares. I'm glad Audacity has that as well. Hoping that Thomas takes a play out of the playbook here and adds that to Twisted Wave. But you know, this, this is something that is a real boon to Audacity users for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is a great improvement for Audacity. Way to go guys. All right. Team over there. I know Paul Lysamelli. It might be sounding as the last name wrong. Sorry if I am Paul. He's a developer of Audacity and he's got a Facebook group just for Audacity users. So if you're an Audacity user, you should do a little search on Facebook for Audacity because you'll, you'll find a lot of helpful you information over there. Cool. Alrighty. Well, it's time to answer some of the questions that we get from our humongous worldwide audience. You've sent them in to the guys at VOBS. And if you have a question in the chat room, Antony is running the chat room tonight. Hey, thanks, Anthony. A little under the weather. So we actually had a chance to watch the show tonight. Hey, all right. It's, it's, it's great to have him on. Anyway, let's go to our questions. First one's from Jackie Bales. Okay. Right. I think that's the first one. Yeah. Does the position of a mic make a difference in the pickup of nasal noise? I'll start by saying yes. Yeah. I was wondering if having my mic upside down coming from overhead, which is the way this one is, closer to my nose makes it worse and whether turning it right side up and coming from below would be better. As George knows, my booth is a small four by four and I'm working with a TLM 103 and the acoustic panels you recommended seem to be working much better than the foam. I would imagine I probably recommended ATS acoustics panels or something with rock soul, fire, mineral wool, because those do really, really work quite well compared to foam in most cases. Okay. So nasal noises. Yeah. It's not a matter of the microphone. These microphones have a very wide pickup pattern. I think it's a big problem with shotgun mics. Yeah. Because they're so directional. If it's pointed up, if you angle it up toward the nose a little bit, okay, like this, it might get a little bit nasal sounding, but I don't know. What do you think? You know, I've always thought that some people say talk off axis or something along those lines. My philosophy is always fix it physically. If you've got nasal noise, one of the things you could do is clear your nose. Well, yeah, what kind of nasal noise are we talking about? Talking about a whistle or just sort of a pinched sound or is it a deviated septum? Yeah, it's a nasal thump. There's a lot of different things. The thumping, if it comes out of your mouth and out of your nose, this guy's going to know it. So it's, if you're at the right distance and using the right technique with the mic, it shouldn't be a problem unless you're the one with the problem. And that means clear your nose, do what you can physically to eliminate it, which also means relax and don't breathe through your nose. Right. I mean, you just breathe proper. Breath control is so important. So it really is. And if you're working the mic really, really close as sometimes you have to and a really, if your acoustics are bad, then it's even worse. You know, you have the issues are magnified as you get closer to the mic. So if you are like three inches from the mic and you move the mic up and down your face, yeah, if it's in front of your nose, it will definitely be more nasal sound. Right. And your mustache will rub on it as well. So, well, if it's from, I often don't go from below up. And I think that's because often, if someone exhales through their nose, close, you get a nostril closest. Right. And that's the thumping is kind of comes in that. Yeah. Nostril. A nasal thump. A nasal thump. Yeah. I do it all the time. Sometimes I put the mic low because I'm shooting a video and I breathe out through the nose without thinking and it hits the mic and it pops it. So I don't like it down there. You can avoid it. Yeah. But now you put the spectrogram and audacity and get rid of that. Yeah. But that's a waste of time. I don't want to fix it. No question about it. Now she goes on. She has a question. More is important. Yes. Yes. Also when stacks are produced and stacks are something that George produces for people that will help you with your processing. Processing presets. Right. What defines how many stacks you need? Is it mostly the level of projection like promo, loud versus commercial, softer or what? Should you have a stack for every possible kind of read? And I defer this to you. Okay. Well, yes. You need a stack for every single kind of read. Order them now. No, that would be unfair for me to say that because I sell them. But to be completely honest, I have clients that have up to five or six stacks that they've made. And that's because they do five or six distinctively different styles of reads. They have a lot of range and they do sometimes they're extremely dynamic for animation purposes or games. And other times they are doing an IVR, which just needs to be very loud, even and no treble and basically no bass. Right. So there's, there are some genres that have specific needs, but sometimes people will send me three scripts and say, well, you make me three stacks and they read whether it's a commercial and a narration or an e-learning and they'll read them all pretty much the same, same energy level, same dynamic range, same process. Yes. Then off to the side, well, what do I do with this? Do I make purposely different processing for e-learning versus narration? What really are the differences between the two? Not a whole heck of a lot. I don't think much. And the thing with any processing is that these are not major changes that you're making to your signal. They're tiny corrections for the frequency response of your microphone, the acoustics of your room. They're not like four or five dB changes in certain things. Only if it's a major sibilance issue do I dip that much. Right. Right. And sometimes you just look at the microphone, you know, it might be the, might not, might not be the right microphone or it's an old microphone that's not performing. Super bright, brittle. Right. Exactly. Had that, that's last week, had a deal with somebody with an old sterling mic. Oh, okay. Yeah. Really sibilant. Anyway, Larson, yes. Let's see here. Darren Schmidt, joining us from Hawaii. It's not Schmidt, huh? No, it's Schmidt. Okay. You know, I thought that, you know, it was... Maybe it is Schmidt. I don't know. It's Schmidt. Anyway, it's been my pleasure to recently discover your fine broadcast as an enthusiastic enthusiast for dialogue and living in the country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My personal online quest has defined a hi-fi audio connect solution for podcasting beyond decent sound and low latency bi-directional calls. If you care to remotely podcast with what I'd call tonal integrity, would seem as important as not having a cymbal crash entirely mute the bass player's groove. Anyway, alas, as I am a cheap bastard, at least you're admitting it, the free route has led me to Source Connect now, which I couldn't get to work without digital artifacts in any consistent manner. Don't know. My signal chain could be very well lacking. However, recently I have had good testing results with Bodoggo Call and Studio Link standalone. I missed the question mark. Where is it? It's in there somewhere, but what would you suggest? Because he's, you know, he's talking about using Source Connect and all these things to do podcasting. Yeah. I mean, and obviously to talk to somebody else if he's interviewing or something like that, there's sure are a lot of choices out there. Yeah, it's fun. It is interesting that you're having varying results between Source Connect now and Bodoggo Call and Studio Link because those technologies all share the same basis. Right. They all work using the same underlying technology. Right. And something called WebRTC. Don't ask me what that means, but it's something that's baked into Google Chrome and some of the other web browsers that allow these tools to function. So if you're having issues with Source Connect now and not with the others, the issue is probably with Source Connect now. And the thing that's important to remember is that Source Connect now is still a free tool that's still a beta and it's ever-evolving because whenever there's a new Chrome update, they have to make a new version of it to work with Chrome. I will say this, try their standalone version. Yes. It's not very well known, but there is a standalone version of Source Connect now. So you have to go to source-elements.com, go log in to your account and go to the download section and you'll actually find an option for Source Connect now. Go grab that and try it out because that bypasses the concern of Chrome doing updates and causing some instability. So if it's funky on Chrome, try their standalone app to see if it works better. It might be worth a try. I've used it. It works fabulous. Yeah, it's really, it's real. I love having it as an app. You just click, boom, it's there, you log in and you're on. Yeah. So Mr. Schmidt out there in Hawaii, try that. All right. Well, you know, George and I do this for a living. We take care of the home voiceover studios out there. And in really talking with a lot of people, there are probably less than two handfuls full of people on the face of God's green earth that actually understand this unique environment that is a home voiceover studio. And nobody has built more of them than you and I. So if you need help with your home voiceover studio, whether it's designing it or updating it, getting stacks for it, you can try calling Mr. Wittem here. Oh, me. Yeah, I'm over at George the tech or George the tech.com. If you like short domains, you can always type in short short domains like George the tech. A lot of people short circuit with that one. George the tech.com. Okay. I'm all my stuff's there. I got drop down menus with different services. We can work live. You can send me your files and I'll send them back. There's a lot of different ways we can work together. Cool. Dan, where do they find you? You can find me at home voiceover studio.com. Don't ask me how I got that great domain name, but did you have to pay someone off for that? Nope. That was just sitting there. Sweet. I missed that one. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I got a few others that I, you know, I learned a lot from Joe Davis by main squatting. Yes, by Tesla dealer.com when it came out. He's, it's like sitting there is in a bank account just waiting for someone to grab that one. Very good. Anyway, our guest is Sean Allen Pratt. He's going to be joining us in just a couple minutes here. We're going to talk about audio books specifically nonfiction, but also some other stuff that he does and coaching technique and stuff about the audio book business that you do not want to miss. So stay tuned. We'll be right back here on voiceover body shot. Are you confused about how to set up and maintain a professional quality voiceover studio? No wonder. The information out there is mostly mythology. This is the best microphone to use. You have to have a preamp. You need a soundproof booth. This software is the best. Your audio must be broadcast quality. Consult with someone who knows the truth. Someone who's been there in the trenches doing voiceover for over 30 years. Someone with unparalleled experience with voiceover studios, who's worked with hundreds of voice actors and designed hundreds of personal studios. He knows how to teach and cares about your success in one of the harshest environments known to voiceover your home. Dan Leonard, the home studio master. Separate myth from fact and get a handle on your personal voiceover studio. Contact the home studio master at homevoiceoverstudio.com. Drop off a specimen of your dry audio for a free analysis. Source dash elements.com. The creators of Source Connect, Source Connect Now, which we just spoke about and a lot of other tools. Some of them really great for voice actors. Some of them more for post-production and some more suited for music production. But if you want to give Source Connect a try because you've got clients who are wanting to direct you live, or even more so direct and record you live from their studio, this is one of the tools you must have in your arsenal these days. It's been around for over 10 years, so chances are the studio you're recording with has it as well. You should probably have it in your toolbox. If you want to give it a try, go to Source-Elements.com. You can get a 15-day free trial of Source Connect Standard, and you don't have to have the little USB iLock thingy or work with without an USB iLock, and you can give it a try right away. Just let them know that we sent you. We'd really, really appreciate it when you sign up if you give them any comments, and we'll be right back with Sean Allen Pratt. Just ... Voiceover Body Shop. Learn the latest in voiceover technology. Learn how to get rid of that. Voiceover Body Shop, 9 Eastern, 6 Pacific on VOBS.US. We're back here at Voiceover Body Shop, and our guest is Sean Pratt. He's been working a working professional actor in theater, film, TV, and voiceovers for over 30 years. He holds a BFA in acting from Santa Fe University, New Mexico. What a wonderful town that is. He's been an audiobook narrator for 22 years, recording over 950 books, if you can believe that. That's a lot of work. At some point, he decided to keep track. I guess. Yeah, God only knows how many he did before that. Anyway, joining us from Oklahoma City is Sean Allen Pratt. Sean, welcome to Voiceover Body Shop. Thanks, George. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. It's great having you on here. Alrighty. Well, you've had a very interesting career so far. Give us a little bit of your background. You've been in theater and film and TV. Tell us how you got into that and how you made that transition, or are you still doing it? I started acting here in Oklahoma City when I was about 10 and in school and then doing local theater in the area. I went off to Santa Fe to get my BFA at 18. By the time I grew graduated from college, I was working professionally in the area. I was doing mainly theater, Shakespeare. I was a classical theater actor for a long time. But also a lot of movies. This is like late 80s. Young Guns, that whole aesthetic in Westerns was happening. Because I had long hair and I knew how to ride a horse, I did a lot of movies that came and shot in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, both domestically and foreign. So I did a lot of Westerns back then. In 90, I moved to New York City to start my theater career and did that for quite a while. I was a member of the Pearl Theater off Broadway doing classics. But in 96, I moved down to Washington, D.C. I had been there in 94, actually, a few years before doing a play at the Shakespeare Theater. And I met an actor, his name was David Hilder, and one day in the green room I asked him, what do you do when you're not working when you have time to kill? And he said, I narrate audiobooks. And I said, what's that about? I had never really heard about it. I mean, I sort of knew about it in the ether, as it were. But I didn't understand what it was. But that time I was mainly just doing regional theater and working in New York. And so he explained it to me over a cup of coffee. And he said, well, if you ever, you know, get down in this area, give me a holler and I'll introduce you to some people. And sure enough, two years later, 96, I moved down there to sort of start my career over in my life. And he made some phone calls for me and introduced me to a gentleman named Grover Gardner, who's a real icon of the audiobook industry. And Grover was gracious enough to work with me and make a demo and shop it around. And right out of the bat, my first two clients were books on tape there in Los Angeles. And then Blackstone Audio up in Oregon. And then finally a group in Albuquerque, New Mexico called Americana Publishing. So between all of those, I almost went full time doing audiobooks right out of the chutes. So, yeah, I go back to the ancient days of recording on ADAT tape and back in the days of early Punch and Roll on VHS tape. On VHS tape. Yes. Punch and Roll on VHS. Punch and Roll on VHS. Yeah, that really dates me down there. Back when they really were books on tape, even though they still sort of refer to them as that. Absolutely. So yeah, so I started recording and just jumped right into it. And it was, you know, it was just when I got into it, it was just going to be one more thing to add to my career as a performer. Because I was still doing theater. I was doing television and film in the area. I was doing some commercial video, not much. I'm just doing, you know, and I started doing workshops on the business to show business for colleges and universities. So I thought, yeah, sure. If I have time, I'll just do an audiobook. And so I was a carpenter. That's how I got through college. I used to be a house framer. So I built my own studio. My very first one. Yeah. Back in the day, it was on the outside, it was like the TARDIS. It was like four by four. But inside, it was even smaller. I used to refer to it as the Gemini capsule. So I'm a big person, too. I'm six foot four and about 240. And so getting into that thing was like, you know, climbing into this, you know, shutting the door. And did it float too, like the Gemini capsule? I wish. I wish. It felt like it sometimes because I, it didn't have any ventilation. So if I wasn't careful, you know, I'd be reading and suddenly I'd get, I'd start getting dizzy and I couldn't remember. Why can't I say four words in a row? And I realized I hadn't opened the door in a while. So I was reading my own exhalation. Oh my God. Did you figure out how many pages you could read before you'd start to black out or? I actually did. Yeah. I used to have a timer. So about 20 minutes, it would go off and I would open the door and, you know, move the door back and forth really fast to get some fresh air and shut it and start in again. That's a traditional way to do it. See, now I find it fascinating that because we've, I've talked with Scott Brick many times and he too was a Shakespearean actor that that apparently is really good preparation to make you more of an elite type of audiobook narrator. Well, you know, yeah, I do. Well, not only Shakespeare, but I think theater in general. You know, as a coach now, I can tell you that those students I have who come from a performance background and mainly theater, but also film, they have a definite leg up on my other students who come in who don't have that kind of background because, you know, they're used to creating characters. They understand I can direct them, you know, using that director's language that we learn, you know, they know every different craft has its own nomenclature, its own language, just like audio guys. You guys have your own language that you can talk about what your craft was like a shorthand, as it were. And we don't have that kind of background because, you know, they're used to director. You can, you know, you can, you can sort of cut to the chase on the notes you need to give them. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the theater background is important. Absolutely. Now, you specialize in something that when, you know, when I did audio books, and I'll do them again if someone offers me enough to do one, you specialize in nonfiction. And nonfiction is, you know, it's different. It's the only stuff I've ever done. I've never attempted to do lots of different characters and stuff. It was just, you know, biographies, autobiographies, you know, historical narratives, a lot of historical books about America's leaders like Jefferson and Madison and stuff like that. And what's your, what's your fun to do, especially if you're interested in the topic? But why, why do you like nonfiction so much? Well, to back up just a minute, when I started, I was doing fiction like I think most narrators, when you start, you want to, as a performer, you want to, oh, I'll do all the funny voices, you know, I can't pay the rent, but you must pay the rent, that kind of stuff. And I really enjoyed it for several years, but then, because I was still up and coming, I wasn't getting A-list material, so I was getting, you know, this sort of same mystery or the same Western or the same kind of material. It was sort of repetitive to me anyway. And after about two, three years of narrating, I'd been nagging books on tape and Blackstone. I realized, I think a lot of people in voiceover realize, the only way you're going to learn is by doing. So the more time I spent on the microphone, the better. So I was constantly nagging them, just send me anything, I'll narrate anything that nobody else wants, because I knew I needed to learn microphone technique, I needed to learn how to punch and roll and those kinds of things. And so one day, this big box came to me from Books on Tape. And this is the old days, they would mail you the book, books with the VHS and the high quality cassettes that you made dubs on. And you recorded everything and proofed it and everything and you mailed it all back to them so they could start doing the dubs. So this box comes and I open it up, and inside is a five volume history of the state of California. Written by the state librarian, Dr. Kevin Starr, very nice gentleman, thank God they were well written. But each book clocked in at 30 hours, it was 100 for your project. It took me over a year and a half because I recorded it on and off. But the thing was is that because it was so well written, it finally dawned on me what I was sort of missing out of doing audiobooks, which was the intellectual stimulation. Oh, absolutely. You know, so I always tell people I'm really good at a cocktail party. Would you like to know about Bitcoin? I can tell you I've done four books about Bitcoin. Do you want to know about how do they drill for oil in the middle of the ocean? I did three books on the BP oil disaster. So I know that. Now you've read four books on Bitcoin. Do you have any Bitcoin? No. Here's the thing, the underlying concept is valid. Right now it's in the middle of a bubble. So if you buy right now, and also if you know anything about how Wall Street works, I've done about three dozen books on Wall Street, you realize that the only way you're going to make money as an investor in Bitcoin is to buy it at $10 and sell it to somebody else at $11. It's the only way you're going to make money right now anyway, unless you're actually using the Bitcoin to purchase things. So yeah, I mean, I just did a book about mutual funds a few months ago, and I've done so many books about mutual funds and investing. I actually knew everything he was talking about. You know, it is in voiceover. As long as you sound confident about what you're saying, then... What an amazing, I just never really thought about that, the side effect of doing all this fiction and learn tremendous amount of stuff. You have your thumb on what's going on in the world. I'm really good at a cocktail party, I tell people, because I know a little bit about everything. I tell them about the third scotch, and then I'm like, hey, look at the weather. And you'd be great on Jeopardy 2. I find that the best narrators are guys who are really good at trivia because they've been reading all this stuff. Absolutely. So the nonfiction, do you answer your question? What made me interested in nonfiction, first of all, was that it was interesting, so it stimulated me intellectually, but doing those books was really difficult. Now, I know that you and I were talking, Dan, we were talking before the show, that you said you didn't think nonfiction was especially difficult to do, but now that I know what kind of nonfiction you're doing, which is basically memoir and biography, those are actually fairly easy nonfictions to do because they tend to be in third person, right? They tend to be, and it's a straight narrative. I was born as a small child in a law cabinet, then I went to school, and then I made my... It's a very straight narrative, but what happens when you're dealing with a book on various aspects of PTSD, or you're doing a book about the nuances of different kinds of stocks, both foreign and domestic, the nuances of the text can get very difficult and tricky to... Well, let me back up. Ultimately, the way we judge in a good audio book is, is it entertaining, right? Right. And in fiction, that's pretty straightforward because a piece of written fiction is meant to be entertaining as well. And so the author has all these storytelling tools that get passed on to us as performers. There's the plots, the characters, the dialogue, the accents and so on. But in nonfiction, all that goes away. All you have to work with in nonfiction is the writer's voice giving you their intellectual argument in a logical progression to illuminate their truth. You know? And so there's no funny voices, there's no zombies, there's no sex scenes, there's no car chases. And so if you can't make that interesting, sorry. In most narratives, anyway. Yeah, exactly. I've been looking for those nonfiction books for a while. Yeah. I take that back because there are some narratives that are really hard. I did one on 20th century Jewish philosophers. Philosophy. I still don't know what the heck the guy was saying, but that book continues to sell very well. So it was either very well written or marvelously narrated. Take all the credit. If a miracle occurs close to you, you can claim credit. It's the way it should be. If you're just joining us, Sean Allen Pratt, master audiobook narrator and coaches joining us here on Voice Over Body Shop. If you have a question for him, I'm sure they're piling up in our chat room. Antony Getig is in there tonight substituting for Jack Daniel. And he's, he'll relay those questions to us. He's watching the Facebook comments too. Oh, excellent. So he's calling him from Facebook. He's amazing. And from our on website chat. Outstanding. So toss those in there. Now, what's, you know, obviously they're both audiobooks, but what's the connection between nonfiction narration and doing fiction narration? Well, they still have the same essential truth. You're trying to find the writer's voice and put it across and make it ultimately, like I said, the ultimate measure is was the book entertaining, right? And there's also a connection to me is that if you're going to be working in on an audiobooks, generally, you should have the skill level to go back and forth between the two. But they are slightly different in my in my world, I believe that nonfiction is more difficult, because it's more difficult to make entertaining. Okay, right. There's, I tell my students that there's there's sort of four obstacles you run into when you're doing nonfiction. The first obstacle you run into is you have to learn to repurpose the book, because a piece of written nonfiction, a piece of written nonfiction is designed to be educational or informative. But you have to repurpose it. It has to be entertaining first. So if you don't make that book on Jewish philosophy, entertaining first, they're going to turn it off, right, or send it back. The second obstacle you run into is that the most narrators, especially those who come from a general video background or even doing lots of fiction, they if you say to them, hey, we want you to narrate some nonfiction for us. What they hear is, hey, we want you to do some nonacting for us. You know, it's just a book about PTSD. It's just a book about Bitcoin, right? There's no acting. But that's wrong. There is acting involved. It's very basic. The simple the idea is very simple. You know, who are you? Who is the specific audience you're narrating to? And where would you be with that audience? So that the text on the page is actually the transcript of what you said to them, like a TED Talk. Okay, think of it like a TED Talk. If I was teaching a class on Bitcoin. So I put myself just like you do in commercial copy, you know, if I'm going to sell lawnmowers, you know, you talk to your neighbor Bill because that's a specific person. You're out there on the lawn talking to him about that thing. Well, if you're going to do a book about Bitcoin, then where kind of context would you be? Who would be your audience in that room? So that's, so there is acting. The third problem you have is you just have fewer storytelling tools. Like I said, you don't have funny voices or, you know, a plot with a killer chasing the good guys. But then the last one, and I'm sure you've experienced this, Dan, is stamina. Because, you know, once again, it's just you. And that's, I think that's one of the biggest things that I found with my colleagues who come from a commercial VO background, who do commercials and video games and animation, they have the talent. But what I tell them is you better have the temperament to do an audiobook. Can you sit all by yourself in a studio with nobody helping? I mean, if you're in LA, New York and you do a book, more than likely you'll come into a studio somewhere with a director. But I don't. It's just me here in my studio. So do you have the stamina, the mental and vocal stamina to stay focused on the material hour after hour after hour? And not a lot of them do. Yep. No, it takes a certain kind of person to do it. Yes, it does. Which is why I haven't really done any in a long time. I got busy doing a lot of other things, but, but, oh, and it wasn't Jewish philosophy. It was Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. You know, like, you know, Max Weber and guys that I still, again, I had no idea what on earth they were talking, talks and loops and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, Sean Allen Pratt is our guest. Now, you are a coach and people say you're a great coach. So one of the reasons we wanted to have you on, but you approach coaching in a slightly different way. Tell us about that. There's no matter what the topic, if you're looking for a coach, whatever the discipline is, there's, basically, there's two kinds of coaches. There's a tactical coach and there's strategic coaching. So let me give you an example. A tactical coach and voiceover would be someone you would hire to go in the studio and they would direct you on your demo, right? You get instant feedback like a director. And so what you're paying for is their years of experience as a performer and director. So it's an instant kind of thing. So you just bring the copy in and they work with you. A strategic coach has a curriculum. So I'm a strategic coach. I feel like nonfiction is very dense. There's a lot of ideas that I teach that are just mine that I bring to the table. And you can't do that in a back and forth session. So it's like taking a class where the students are required to do homework outside of class, they bring it in for me to listen to before I meet them, along with other things because I deal with marketing and advertising and networking. But then our session is more of a conversation. And we talk about the difficulties of doing that particular idea. And sometimes I'll work one-on-one with them. But mainly in my day-to-day work as a coach, I do strategic coaching. Although I say that, I'm just getting ready to start working, doing tactical coaching with opencoaches.com so people can hire me for one-off sessions if they have something very specific they want to work on. I mean, I can do both, but my preferred method is having a longer time to get to know the students. I'm very paternal with my students. I think of them all as my kids, even though some of them are old enough to be my parents. It seems to me all the people getting into audiobooks these days is people who are very literate, enjoy reading books and want to share with them how they enjoy a book with everybody else. And that's really cool. But there are a lot of them out there, which is, and it's growing every day. Now, George, I'm sure you want to ask him a couple of questions about how he records his audiobooks. Yeah, I heard a rumor that you're doing your audiobook recording using a headset. Now, I don't know if you meant headphones or a headset, microphone. Yeah, not only headphones. I use my Sony's. But there's still a contentious issue there. But go ahead. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I have, listen, I understand once again, it's a difference, I think, fundamentally between say commercial VO actors who do, you know, who go into a studio and they're playing what they do and the engineers there who makes the adjustments to their performance. But when I learned how to narrate back in the days of tape, I was my own engineer from the first day. So I had that little, you know, remote control shuttle in the booth with me. And I had to listen for plosives and fricatives. Was there a thump on the mic? Did the airplane go over? And because you're, because of tape, you had to learn punch and roll editing. And so that's just the way I learned it. And so I prefer it that way. You know, it's what I know how to do. Now, on the occasions when I've gone into studios to record things with an engineer and a director, which has been very, very rare. Usually it's a commercial VO situation. Then I don't wear headphones. I actually just do the performance. So, but when I'm just by myself, I like it or not, I have to wear all four hats at once. I'm the narrator, the engineer, the director and the producer. So maybe you change them all very rapidly. Yes. Well, you're thinking that way, you know, you're thinking, you know, as they you're going along as the narrator performing and then you hit it. Okay, so let's say I hit a small illustration. Now as the director, I have to go, well, wait a minute, do I want to describe that thing? Or do I just want to notate it as the director to give it to the publisher to say, on these following pages, you need to make a companion download PDF. So now as the narrator, I can just say, as you can see from table 3.6, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then if I'm doing that, or if I describe it, then I have to create new language to describe the thing I'm looking at. You know, when you're doing, if you've ever, you know, self-help is a huge category in nonfiction. Well, those self-help books have a lot of those self-assessments in them. So you'll see a self-assessment on the page and I look at it and it's small. It's easy enough. And I decide as the director that I think the listener would enjoy being able to participate in this right now. So out of the blue, I just go, let's take out a piece of paper in a pen and do the, you know, how lousy is your diet at home and at work self-survey. So draw a line from, you know, you describe the charts, you explain how it's going to work and you walk them through the entire exercise. You break the fourth wall as it were. But that's a direct moral decision. So you have those issues too. Yeah. All right. Our guest is Sean Ellen Pratt. We're talking about audiobooks and how he approaches it and how he approaches coaching. Again, if you've got a question for him, throw it in the chat room and we will relay that question to him in our next segment. In the meantime, we're going to take a little break and we'll be right back with Sean Ellen Pratt here on Voice Over Body Shop. Skittles taste a rainbow. She has fought for those who don't have a voice. The National Zoo. Do I sound semi-intelligent? Instagram. Download it and start embarrassing your teenagers today. Resolve spot and stain because the dog's gonna drag his butt on the carpet. He just is $400 million. That's what the mayor wants you to pay for a new basketball stadium. Chickens were made to be fried. Sorry, buddy. KFC. Engage the droid army with this Lego Star Wars Republic fighter tank. What? You've never seen a girl kill a troll? Game stop. Hey, I'm the cat meme guy. Come on, you know you love cat memes. Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. What's your thing? Hi, it's J. Michael Collins and these are just a few examples of the first class demos that Kim and I are producing. If you'd like to have something similar, visit jmcvoiceover.com and click on the demo production tab to find out more. You know, there's a shortage of mic port pros out there. That little guy that you can plug into your mic and it's like a little tiny interface that plugs into any mic, makes it a USB mic. Only it's really good, but there aren't many of them out there for a number of reasons. You know, and there are a lot of online liars out there claiming to have stock when they don't. After you place your order, they inform you that one, they have no more in stock and don't know when they will or two, we expect more units in a few weeks. Yeah. All right. So either way, you're going to be, you've tied up your money in this and you don't have one. VoiceoverEssentials.com. Harlan Hogan and the great people over at VoiceOverEssentials.com has 40. Each finger represents 10. 40 mic port pros sitting over in their warehouse and they would like you to have one. As of right now. As of right now. And so feel it and they're ready to ship and he does his shipping free. Very nice. Absolutely. So even the manufacturer, our good friends at Sentrin's aren't manufacturing them at the moment, but they're going to keep, keep manufacturing them, but all their money's tied up in mixer face. We'll be finding a little bit more about that. We will. We'll be talking to Michael Goodman about that when we talk to the Sentrin's people in NAMM this week. But if you need a mic port pro and everybody should have one. Anyway, just, just it's a good being your arsenal. It should be. It's a great backup. There's only 40 left. If you want one and you want one now, like most of you millennials do, all you have to do is go over to voiceoveressentials.com and look under mic port pro order yours before the other 39 people jump on it and get it first. Anyway, voiceoveressentials.com where you can get everything you need for your home voiceover studio. Thanks Harlan for being with us for almost seven years. We must be doing something right. We'll be right back. EOBS. Proving anybody can have a show these days. Wow. This is VOBS. You're listening to VOBS. Minus four. We had minus four DB. We're at minus four. Hey, we're back. We are. All right. And Sean Allen Pratt is our guest and we're talking about audiobooks and narrating and nonfiction and all sorts of cool stuff. But we wanted to ask you, what are you using to record with? Tell us what's going on in your studio. I just switched over last year to Studio One Artist. I have a Mac Mini. Okay. I used for years. After around 2000, I finally went digital and at the time, the only system and the person I was working with knew was Pro Tools. So the Pro Tools on my PC. And I always joke that buying Pro Tools was like purchasing a Maserati and running it like a Ugo because it had way too many features. Oh yeah. I'm just recording my voice. That's it. And so it was always a little persnickety, a little temperamental on the interface. But I kept it for a long time and then recently I just got fed up with it. And I said, you know, everybody was, you know, I looked around at the Twisted Wave, Hindenburg even. But I said, you know, Studio One seems pretty cool. And I played around with it. But I'll be honest, I'm not a tech head. There's a reason, you know, I take my card and my mechanic to work on it. I know my limitations. So after I gathered enough information, I said, okay, I'll do Studio One and talked with Dan Barnes and his apostle is at where Joe Brookhouse. And so Joe came in and worked with me and set it up, got my stack the way I wanted it. It made me a template so I can record the way I like. And so I'm off and running and I love it. I haven't had a single issue with it. Studio One is a personas product. That's right. That's right. That's their answer to Pro Tools. And I know Dan Barnes. Is it Don? Sorry. I'm sorry. Don Barnes. I think it's Don. He's a, he's a total guru with Studio One. He's a guy I've talked to for that software. I'm, I'm still a total fledgling with it. I have dabbled with a little bit, but I don't have the experience. Yeah. Well, like I said, you know, it's funny, some of my students come from a technical background with computers or they've been right, you know, they, they've been dabbling around with software and so on. And they want to try to figure it all out themselves. And I say, look, cut to the chase, you're only going to be using, you know, of all the features you have, you're probably going to be using only 25% of them. So just learn those 25%. You're not recording Sergeant Pepper. You're just recording your voice and just mastering it. You know, don't go further than necessarily you need to. Because if you go off the deep end on this stuff, then you're, you know, then you won't get back, you won't get to the point of using the software. You're just recording your voice. And so I set it up for Punch and Roll. I have a little baby bottle, Mike. And I'm like I said, my Mac Mini with my external hard drive. And it's a very simple setup. You know, as I tell my students all the time, even as a coach, I say, if I don't have an answer for you, a technical, an answer to a technical question, I'll immediately refer you to someone who does because I'm not going to pretend that I know how to use this software in depth. You know, I'm totally out of my field when it comes to that. But I know enough of it to do the necessary things I need to do to make my simple kinds of voiceover. Because in our world, when you're working for the major publishers, they just want the raw wave file. They just want the raw audio. They don't want you to touch it. No effects, nothing. So by the time I finish recording chapter seven, because my ratio when I narrate is about two to one, right, two hours of work for one hour finished audio. That's good. Pretty good. Yeah. And then it goes right off to the proofer in house there at say random house there in LA or whatever, they proof it, they come back with fixes. I do the fixes wild in one track, send it in their engineer drops it in, and it's off and running. Now, of course, when you're starting out, you don't have that you're doing all of it yourself. But even then, once you get your it's all pre once you get your presets and everything where it needs to be, and that's why you need an engineer, someone who actually knows how to use the software understands the microphone and so on into the space like George and Dan. That's your plug, by the way. And then they can, you know, then they will fix that thing for you. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't think in a million years of trying to do it myself. And I tell my students the same thing. Don't go to somebody who knows what they're doing. So my system is very simple. And my booth actually is not a booth per se. This is a very quiet corner in the house. What you're seeing here is the my microphone boom. And I actually narrate into the corner of the room. I've got all this sound proofing here. And what you can see is I have this really heavy curtain that shuts off the space. So it's not it's not it's a sort of a soft, yeah, a, you know, like a pie wedge sort of. And that is that's quiet enough for what I need to do for my for my audio and probably just lively enough. Just not super dead. Someone's going to ask just because you didn't say what is your interface? What do you plug your mic into? Oh, it's a I knew you're going to ask me that question. I just got a new one. It's an it's an it's an Apigee. What Apigee do at or do one one or Apigee one. They make great preamps. That's a really nice unit. And once again, here's the other thing when I was actually putting the whole system together, this new system, I spoke with an engineer for a colleague of mine, Charles Lipper from Washington DC. I've known him for a long time. I said, Charles, just give me the grocery list and I'll go buy it. And so he knew what I needed. He knew what I wanted to do. He didn't he knew it didn't need to necessarily expand in a lot of different ways because I'm not going to do video editing or multi tracking. And he said, get this, this, this and this. And I'm like, okay. And he he knew all those systems. So he could put it all together very simply for me. You know, I'm not trying to become a production house. I'm just trying to work with me. And so I you know, I've been extremely pleased with how everything is interfaced. And with Studio one. And and my clients did too. So I did a test recording. And then I sent it off to Tantor and Blackstone and books on tape and all the different people. And I said, here it is. And what they do in house, of course, is they keep notes. So when they do their final mastering, they know what to settle that for all the different narrators. So it all comes out more or less with their sound once they do the compression and equalization. All right, ready for some questions from our vast audience. Alrighty, Paul, Paul Stefano asks, how do you recommend aspiring or newer narrators slow down their performance? That's a good one. Let's see. Well, when I was a theater actor, a young theater actor that we were taught this, if you ran over the text without really, you just said the text without taking the time to really take it in. The phrase we used was, you're not sucking all the juice out of the fruit, you're not using the text for its full dramatic value. And nine times out of 10 people who go too fast, they're just skating over the words and they're not really taking them in, they're not using the value of the word itself. Like the word particularly in and of itself is a particular word and you can't skate over it. And in the act of slowing down, you highlight that word for the listener. So it really becomes a matter of actually, on one level, you're taking the text in, that's a purely mechanical thing, that's a skill set. But then as a performer, you have to say, oh, that word, it colors the rest of this phrase. And so that begins to influence the tempo at which you take the rest of the sentence. So it's a moment by moment thing. Paul happens to be a student of mine. I hope you've got your homework finished, Paul. And Paul is a very fast narrator. He's very precise. And so he's, and as we've worked together, what he's done is he's learned to see the value of the words themselves and pull more dramatic value out of the text. Now, you wouldn't think that, of course, thinking, well, it's e-learning or it's nonfiction. But there's a lot of drama in that if it's done correctly. So it's more a matter of, and also sometimes, if you have multi-syllabic words, a lot of people want to skate over those things. The famous one, which really isn't a word, is anti-disestablishmentarianism. People want to skate over words that are multi-syllabic or difficult, thinking, if I say it quickly, no one will really catch it. And there's an old, you know what I'm talking about. Well, there's an old chestnut in the theater that says, if you can't hide it, you have to highlight it. And so what that means in the theater would be if I was directing a play in a basement somewhere and there's a big concrete column on the set in the space, I can't hide it, meaning I can't make the audience pretend it's not there nor the actors. So I have to highlight it. That's why I turned it into a tree or a phone booth or a bookcase. The same things happens when we come into big multi-syllabic words or phrases that are unique. You can't skate through them. You have to slow down. And in the act of slowing down, you highlight that phrase or word. And ironically, nine times out of 10, that's the word or phrase that was meant to be emphasized in the sentence anyway. I love it. It's like jazz. I have a music background. And in jazz, when you play a wrong note, sometimes a blue note, you don't just, oh, I just made a mistake. Nobody will notice it. You play that note and you hit on that note and you hit it and you hit it and go, yeah, that's right. I hit that wrong note. You hit it. That's like jazz. JB Martin voiced over. JB says, Anthony, I'd like to, like Sean, I'm reading the narrative. I'd like Sean to address nonfiction, audiobook narration. I know that the big money is in novels, but I don't read or enjoy novels. I like nonfiction, factual stuff, be it politics or history and such. So can a decent living be made in nonfiction given the pay versus how much work is involved in being an audiobook narrator? I mean, you're very efficient and you do, would you say about a book a week? Yeah, I do 50 books a year, which is insane. I don't. Yeah, just a tad. So let me unpack that. There's a lot going on in that question. So first of all, let's talk about voiceover relative to the different genres. So first of all, within the via world, audiobooks are sort of the low end of the pay scale. And also on the sexier scale, because it's much cooler to have to do radio games and animation and radio and TV spots. And that's faster work. You walk in your studio or whatever and you're in and out in 15, 30 minutes an hour or whatever. And you get paid commensurately much higher for your time than you do in audiobooks. So there is that. Well, once again, I think a smart VO person would just want to be working every day no matter what they're doing, depending on what scale of work they're, you know, what it pays. But the idea is you're always in the booth behind the mic. Then it comes to audiobooks itself. I always say that nonfiction audiobooks are the ugly redheaded stepchild of audiobooks. You know, we only constitute about 25% of the industry, maybe 30%. And it's just pretty sizable, but it's not necessarily as sexy as doing a murder mystery or a Jason Bourne action thriller or young adult, whatever, or piece of erotica or whatever. But here's the thing, if you can do nonfiction really well, there is a ton of work out there. Because once again, it constitutes 25% to 30% of the industry. And unfortunately, a good chunk of that stuff that gets recorded is not very interesting because of all those obstacles I discussed in the previous segment we had. So if you can learn to become an on point kind of narrator in nonfiction, yes, there is a lot of work out there. And then, of course, that leads into other things like e-learning and corporate read, which you can take the same basic principles and apply to that stuff. And that those kinds of reads can pay you a lot of money for your time. Absolutely. John Oak asks, how do you select your outsourced needs for editors and mastering? Or do you do it all yourself? Because I work with the major publishers, that's all done in-house. But that being said, when I do a book privately, and I do about 10 books a year privately, I get contacted by authors via Twitter or Facebook, or they go to my websites, and they just ask me, and they're almost always nonfiction authors. In that case, I hire, I usually, I'll work with a production house, say Paul Falley over at Common Mode in New Jersey, or John Marshall Media in New York City. And then in a pinch, I also have my own proofers that I throw work to and also my own engineers that'll do the mastering for me. So I think if you're going to be doing a lot of outs, and I also tell my students, initially, they should learn to do all those jobs. That's just part of the paying your dues and just being knowledgeable about the industry. But the first place, the first place that you should always spend money in audiobooks to outsource work, isn't a proofer, a good proofer. People like Derek McClain, who's starting his own proofing company. He offers really good services for a proofing because, and I'll tell you why, if you grew up pronouncing E-P-I-T-O-M-E as epitome, and you proof your own material, then you're going to go, yeah, it was epitome, as opposed to epitome, right? You need a fresh set of ears on that book. Nobody knows, you just need that extra, you know, that new person to come in and listen. You can learn to do your own mastering, but then, if you start booking a lot of work, then it's about a workflow issue. It makes more sense to hire that out and charge the client for it. And then you can just reach out to different engineers or hire a company like CommonMode or John Marshall to do all of that on your end. They just send you a bill and you just pass it on to the client. I haven't heard the letters, ACX, muttered yet. So, is it somewhere you find yourself in from time to time? I don't do, yeah. I mean, I was around when ACX was getting set up. I was with them. I've been with SAG after for a long, long time, and they invited me in as a consultant committee when it was being done. Gosh, this is what, 10 years ago, I guess, maybe? Sounds about right. Yeah, five, seven years ago. Audio creative exchange is a wonderful place for beginning narrators to look for work. And like it or not, from most VO talent, you're going to be looking there initially because it is a different kind of voiceover. The major publishers, the major audiobook publishers, unless you have a really solid reputation behind you, someone like Dan, who's got decades of experience, they're not going to be interested in you working with you until you've done a certain number of books just to get them under your belt. They've learned the hard way that someone who's used to doing 30-second radio spots will not have the stamina and focus to do a 10-hour book. They just won't, because oftentimes they'll be booking you into a studio in New York or LA if you're local. Well, you've got to do that 10-hour book in three, four days. Do you have the vocal stamina to talk for five to eight hours a day until it's done and maintain that performance? So ACX is a great place to start. I tell the analogy I use, it's like for theater actors, it's like doing summer stock theater. You're going to go work your butt off. You're not going to really make any money initially, but you need the experience and the credits on your resume. But you can grow out of that. But here's the thing. I have students who will book work privately with an author for a per finished hour rate. And I say go through ACX because it's owned by Amazon, which owns Audible. And they act as the honest broker. Because if you're not in the union, that way you can make sure the author won't stiff you for your money. Because if you agree to the contract they've signed, until the author pays you, that book doesn't go over for sale. Or they make sure that the royalty share agreement you have gets split evenly. So they act as an honest broker. And I think that's a really big advantage of working with ACX initially when you're starting out. Alrighty. JV Martin asks, in a session, do you read from a hard copy? And if not, from a tablet or even a big TV screen or what? Or are you a paper guy? Well, back in the old days, there was stone tablets. But then I've moved on with the old days we had the book, of course, right? And you strap it down. But no, I use my iPad. I just have the PDF on there and I just flick it up as I go. So in my studio, the iPad's on a there's a video I've made on my YouTube channel about setting up your your booth ergonomically. Plug, plug. What's your YouTube channel? Just look up Sean Pratt on YouTube and you'll find me. It's called Inside the Narrators Booth. It's a really simple video. Cool. You know, it's the thing, a lot of narrators, when you're working on copy, they put the copy low. So they're doing this. Now they're closing off their voice box. So I have two shelves. One shelf I use for my keyboard and my mouse, then a higher one, which is actually this one behind me here. And on top of that sits a book stand and the iPad sits there. So when I'm narrating at full height, I'm looking right into the center of the iPad. And then if I swivel to my left, I have my flat screen, which shows me my waveform, my program. And then, you know, to my right, I have my little phone on my really cool little phone stand. So I can see everything I need to look at is all on iLevel. So it keeps my chin up, which helps with posture and breathing and phrasing. So, so I use my iPad. But every, it's funny. This year, last year, I actually got a book, a real book, a real physical book to work on. And I hadn't had one of those in years. It was very strange, very strange. For a 10 hour book that you're going to be working on, how much time is spent preparing? Are you a cold reader, or do you pre-read the book? If it's a piece of fiction, and I only do maybe five or six pieces of fiction a year, you always read fiction before you do it. Always. So it's a lot more work. A lot more time. Yes, it is. But you know what? If you don't know what who the mystery voice in Chapter 4 was when it finds out in Chapter 20, you guess what? You get to go back and rerecord all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a famous, you know, there's many famous story. There's a famous story about a narrator who, he just put up a murder mystery on this piece. It was a first person detective, right? And the detective, it's all in his voice. And he narrates the entire book and he gets to the last chapter. And you know, it's the case of the missing cell phone or something. And he said, okay. And so I solved the case of the missing cell phone. And to celebrate, I decided it was high time that I went back and saw my folks in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I was born and raised. And so, yeah. So guess what he got to do on Monday morning? Record the entire book again. So you always read fiction. Now for new, new, new narrators, you should read every book you work on. Because the volume, you're not going to have the same volume. What I do is I actually have a method I used to prep a book. I call it my three step method. And I use it very quickly to get a handle, a biographical information method, the author, the topic, I look at it as a director, what kind of research do I need to do? I look at it from a performer standpoint. But I think you will know you'll appreciate this, having been in VO for so long. I have a friend, Jerry Dale McFadden, who's a piano player. He plays for the band called the Mavericks. And Jerry's been playing for 35 years. We've known each other since we were kids. And if you put a piece of music cold in front of Jerry, he'll know everything he needs to know about the piece of music in eight bars. He'll start, he'll start playing. Oh, it's the KSC. It's cut time. Oh, this is jazz. It's ragtime. It's Scott Joplin. He's off and running. And he knows everything that's about to happen where the break is for the bridge, when it goes to the minor key, when it does a modulate. And if you do enough work in fiction or nonfiction, after a while, you learn how to hear what kind of music that book is very quickly, because you've done that book many times before. And that happens. You know, it's like a murder mystery series. Think about that. If you're reading Agatha Christie, there's a certain formula to that. There's a certain tone, a certain tempo. Well, if you're doing a book about investing in Wall Street using how to make money, there's a certain tone to that. The author has a certain style. No matter who the author is, they have a certain approach. Self-help books tend to be up and positive, right? That's why they're self-help books. So you know that. And then, of course, over time, you learn, the publishers learn your style. And so you're also again and again getting books that are sort of in your own voice, as it were. So I can hear an author's voice very, very quickly with just reading the preface, the intro, and the forward. And I'm off and running. I know exactly what's going to happen. I love all the music analogies, because when you see a professional orchestra sit down and play a score, which I've gotten to do one time personally in my life at Warner Brothers' scoring stage, they pretty much say, read it. I mean, they say, like, I know this composer. We know this genre. We pretty much, you're not going to catch us too off guard. I mean, that's what comes with incredible amounts of experience. Yeah, absolutely. And so you, I'm sure both of you have experienced that when you're doing VO, there's a certain tone to a political spot, right? There's a certain tone or style to selling high tech stuff or stuff for medicine. Well, the same thing goes in audio books. You just hear it very quickly. And it's hard to describe, but it's one of those things you get after doing 20 years of narration. I found that, and I discovered this after doing a few books, after a while, you sort of take on the personality of the writer. You totally tune into who this person is, what their syntax is, and you can almost predict what's going to be said next. Yes. Yes. I mean, I do a little biographical research on the author just to find out who they are. But ultimately, you go, you know, oftentimes you'll find a writer, if you look them up on YouTube or the website, and they might be really wooden. But their writing is very dynamic. Well, you always go with what's on the page. Right. Okay. And then if you use the concept I teach is this TED Talk idea. That's a shorthand. The idea is who are you, who is the audience? So when I narrate an audio book, unlike in commercial VO, I don't narrate to one person. I narrate to the audience the book was intended for. So let's use the Bitcoin example. So in my mind, I'm doing a TED Talk about Bitcoin. So everybody in that audience is a receptive audience that wants to know about Bitcoin. Now, that might be different from an audience for what I'm doing a book for Christian audio about the nuances of the New Testament versus the Old Testament. Maybe these are young theologians that I'm doing a workshop with. And so the size of the audience might change. But it's when I, the reason I do that is my attitude, my approach as a performer and as a coach is the text on the page is actually the transcript of what I said live. And that's what I'm, you know, in the words, if we took this episode and transcribed it, then performed it again. The idea is that if you do it right, it should sound like the lines you're actually saying. All right. Well, there's still a few more questions. And I'm sure people would love to talk to you and get the chance to get them answered. Where can they get a hold of you? And especially if they would like to have you coach them, which gosh, I would, I would relish the opportunity to do that. They can find me on Sean Pratt Presents.com. They can find me on Facebook at Sean Pratt Presents. They can find me on Twitter at SP Presents. And of course, in any of those platforms, you can send me a direct message or an email. And my email address is Sean Pratt at Comcast.net. All right. Sean, thank you so much for being on the show tonight. That's font of knowledge. And I'm sure with the fountain continues to flow. Is that a nice way of saying I wouldn't shut up? No, it was like we're, people were absorbing it. And we knew the audience was very engaged in what you had to say. So we really appreciate you coming with us tonight. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. You're great. You're great. We just went to a commercial by a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level. Stay in touch with market trends. You can tell I sort of like what I do. Products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. Voiceoverextra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, casting, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. Very interesting discussion and again they can reach you at one more time. Get that plug in there. Okay, so online at www.SeanPratPresents.com you can send me a direct email at www.SeanPratAtComcast.net You can find me on Facebook, Sean Presents or on Twitter, SP Presents. If you happen to be in Los Angeles this weekend, I'm going to be a panelist at Scott Brick and Johnny Heller's big audiobook extravaganza they're doing. You can find more about that on Facebook or on their respective websites. If you have any in Texas in February, I'm coming to Dallas and Austin to do some workshops there. If you go to my website on a regular basis, you can also see where I'll be teaching next around the country. All right, wonderful. Thank you. All right, thank you. You know, Johnny Heller and Scott Brick, you can't get better than that, except me to this guy. All right, thanks for being with us, Sean. Thank you. Alrighty, next week on this very show, we will have Tom Deere, who everybody knows is a real expert on voiceover business marketing. So make sure you're here for that. On February 5th, the return of the one and only Debbie Dairyberry will be here. She's bringing the flesh in the flesh and I think she's bringing her band with her. And the flesh. Yeah. And that's going to be fun. February 12th, somebody we've wanted to meet and work with and talk to Tim Tippets, who's also one of that handful of people that understand home studios. He knows his stuff. He is. And also, on February 26th, Roger Rose and Carlos Alasquea. How do you pronounce that? I was Rocky. I was Rocky. I think that's how you say it. Who works in animation. So a great lineup of people coming up over the next month or so. Carlos Reno911. If you ever watched that show, one of the cast of Reno, freaking hilarious show. Alrighty. Well, we got lots of people to thank for this show. You know, thanks to our donors of the week first, like Oh, Andrew Kaufman, Jorge and Fante, Eric Aragoni, who is just insane giving us money every single week. Thank you, Eric. We really appreciate it. We've got donations from Shelly Avellino. Thank you, Shelly. It's a great seeing her name each month come up. Thomas Pinto. Tom Pinto, man. Donate. You know what? Donate to the show even just a buck so we can just say your name every time. It's fun. Tremaine Mosley. What else? We got more. We got more. We got more. That's the bottom of this list. Wait a minute. There's one more from before last week. Yeah, I saw his name already. Just said Tremaine. And Philip Sapir. Philip Sapir. Absolutely. Once again, if you need help with your home studio, you can get rid of, you can get hold of this guy at. You can get rid of. Is that what you're going to do? No, I just ate with totally a, totally a Freudian slip. That was funny. George at George. You can email me at george at georgeofthetech.com and you can find my plethora of services at georgeofthetech.com. Yeah. And you can find me at homevoiceoverstudio.com or email me at dan at danlennard.com with no, oh, separates me from the rest of the Lennards. Sure. Show logs. They're out there. Jack of the Lea. When the show gets posted on YouTube, you'll see the show notes with that. It'll take you right there. Time indexed and everything. Absolutely. We also have a podcast. Yeah, this version of this show can be listened to. If it's difficult for you to find the time to watch it, grab it on Stitcher or iTunes, just type in VOBS into any podcasting app and you should be able to find it. All right. And we do the show live because we're lazy. We don't want to have to edit it. But it's more fun and more spontaneous that way. And what makes it spontaneous is the fact that we love having an audience here. And we actually do have an audience here tonight. Yay. Get a shout of the audience there. There she is. Hi. Petra Bouchard joining us tonight. Taking care of them. She must live in the neighborhood. She just keeps walking in here. And if you like to be here to see the show, if you happen to be in the Greater Los Angeles area, all you have to do is write to us at theguysatVOBS.tv. Tell us what night you can be here. And we'll make sure that you're up to snuff. We'll pull a chair out for you. Exactly. Also, the survey. The survey is very important. If you want to influence the show in some way, like suggesting guests or letting us know that we go on too long or that we do too much of this and not enough of that, you really need to fill out the survey. We really appreciate the input. And do let us know if any of the sponsors that we have on the show, you're taking advantage of because they'd sure like to know. So please fill it out when you have a chance. It's right there. I believe at the top of the page, somewhere up there. There's somewhere. Alrighty. And speaking of our sponsors, we need to thank them like Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials, Voice Over Extra, Source Elements, B.O. Tagogo, VoiceActorWebsites.com, and J. Michael Collins' demos for providing an uninterrupted live stream and bandwidth. All right. Well, we need to thank Marcie for letting us be out here in the garage. She's a little under the weather tonight, so she didn't even show her face here tonight. But also, Jack Daniel, when he's here, Anthony Geddock doing a bang-up job in the chat room tonight. We really appreciate it, Anthony. And our wonderful new floor producer, director, and switch pusher, Sue Merlino, doing a great job over there for us. And... Keeping it sane. Oh, yeah. Catherine Curden, our producer, booking all these great guests, which we've got a great queue of them right now. We certainly do. And Jack Tagoglia for the show notes, and Lee Penny simply for being Lee Penny. Well, that's going to do it for us this week here on VoiceOver Body Shop. We so appreciate you joining us every week and supporting our show and telling us what you want to have on the show. And we appreciate you coming out here every Monday night. And we know it's a hard business, but study hard, keep doing what you do, and success can be yours if you are totally dedicated and passionate about being a voice actor. That's going to do it for us. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whittem. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop, or VOBS.