It is the end part of 2020 and you may well have had a hard time during the pandemic. You may have also lost your job or have been furloughed and are in need of some extra cash. You know because Humans need to drink and eat! Funny that. Well, In this article we explore why you shouldn’t become a voice over. This is not an industry to “get rich quick”. I’ll explain further in the paragraphs below.
You may be thinking that you know what a voice over is. What a voice over does and how a voice over works. You may be thinking that “I have a good voice, all they do is talk into a microphone, anyone could do that.” OR “They charge how much!?!? For just talking!? I’ll do it myself!”. These are very short sighted thoughts straw man I invented. There is actually a lot more to it than meets the ear.
Did you know, for example, that a HUGE percentage of people who enter into the world of voice over never make enough money to sustain a living? Or, never make any money at all? Did you know that it usually takes around FIVE YEARS to actually feel accomplished in voice overs? All the while spending 1000’s of £ and $ to even get going properly? Did you know that a voice over spends about 85-90% of their time NOT recording and doing voice overs? Did you know that rejection sucks and as a voice over you will spend a lot of time being rejected? I hope you have a thick skin. Did you know that you need to be very efficient in direct and in direct marketing, branding, audio production, editing, directing, producing, time management, problem solving, audio technology, audio software, troubleshooting, computers and acoustics? I am probably missing some as well but that is all I can think of at the moment. All of that before talking into a microphone. That’s the next subject. The talking. You may think you have a nice sounding voice or have been told “hey, you should narrate the phone book for a living”. This will feed your ego with a false sense of security. Being a professional voice over means you need coaching. And a lot of it. Even the worlds best voice overs have a voice over coach or mentor. You will not get very far without it. I mean you certainly can go coachless but the bar you have to jump is a lot higher. Let me explain. If you have no coach then certain ‘mistakes’ might not be picked up upon until much, much later. Causing you to lose auditions and therefore money and you may not know the reason you lost the job. They won’t tell you, they have too many auditions to go through. These ‘mistakes’ might be audio quality, bad script interpretations, tonality, pacing, missing the underlining message in the copy etc. The list could go on. A coach will guide you down the right path, correct your mistakes and speed up the learning process. It could be the difference between success and failure.
So, previously I quickly mentioned being rejected. Let’s further explain this. A good “conversation” rate is about 1 in 10. Lets stretch that out. Say you audition for 100 voice over roles. Using the “good” conversation rate, you would have been rejected at least 90 times out of the 100 total roles available. And that’s with the good conversation rate. Full-time voice overs get rejected A LOT. What serious chance do you think a beginner has? I am not being harsh for no reason, I am just trying to set your expectations straight. You will spend the majority of your fledgling time as a VO being rejected. Can you take that? Are you the sort of person who wilts under examination? Are you highly self critical? Do you have good self esteem? Because all of your pillars will be tested for structural integrity. Make sure you come into this with no ego because the industry will spit you out faster than you can say cardioid polar pattern. Which reading this back is actually quite long. Try saying it 5 times quickly. Anyway, this rejection thing can hurt. Be prepared for it.
Let’s now talk about that money you will make. Well, I say “make” in the loosest possible terms. You will 100% lose money. In year 1 at least. And that’s if you are doing it correctly. Remember, first you need coaching, you need decent equipment, you need a recording space that is treated correctly and in this day and age, no matter what old-hat voice overs say, you will need to sign up to a Pay to Play site (P2P). I say that you need to sign up to a P2P site because, as a rookie looking for places to audition and gain experience quickly, this tends to be the easiest place to start. Think of it as an investment in your learning experience. Which all the coaching in the world will not prepare you for and that is the wild-west world of the voice over audition marketplace. This, however unfortunate it is, is the best, fastest and easiest way to find auditions. Of course you could do it the proper way i.e. market yourself and find work with businesses directly. You will need to do that to sustain yourself in the long term. But for outright audition experience? No, better place than P2P sites. Sorry, but it is. This is all in year 1. Year 2 you can expand and leave the P2P pitfall. The amount of money you will lose depends on the equipment and coaching you choose. You could spend anywhere from £20 to £10,000 on a microphone. I would stick with the lesser end. You can get fantastic sounding mics for less than £200 easy. You can also build your own booth if you are handy with a bit of DIY. Expect to pay around £300 for a wooden variety of recording booth (just materials for the actual structure not the acoustic treatment it will need) and around £100 for the plastic pipe variety. Note: do not build it completely square. This will negatively impact your acoustic treatment and you will spend countless hours and ££ fixing the issues. Lots of standing waves. Trust me I know! Mine was built square and I am only now getting it fighting fit after 3 years or so. It is a pain! A triangular shape is actually useful here. If you can. Then come the acoustic treatments. These again vary in price and effectiveness. You can get heavy duty blankets, acoustic tiles, acoustic plasterboard or a Rockwool type substance. A good combination of these will probably suffice. Expect to pay a few hundred ££’s for efficient acoustic treatment. Again you can go extreme and spend 1000’s. Now lets talk audio software. You DAW (digital audio workstation) is essential. You can use free tools for this. You may of heard of a program called audacity. This is actually pretty easy to use and a bonus that it is free. I used it for my first couple of years. I then moved onto Reaper and SoundForge Pro 12 for my go-to software, these cost money. Again you can go extreme and spend many hundreds on pro audio software. This is a long winded attempt to say that starting your voice over career is expensive and there is no real way of getting past that. It will cost you money if you want to be competitive in the market.
Has that dissuaded you yet? Well, it should. This is not a profession where big money is earned without putting in the effort. It also is certainly not a “get rich quick” scheme. You will fail if you approach it as such. Sorry but you will. You need to have a passion for acting, expression and learning the craft. You need to realise that it will not be easy. You will spend countless hours and countless amounts of money (you should probably count the money) on this marathon of a career choice. That is what voice over is. It is a marathon. You are in it for the long haul or not at all.
Thank you for reading this far. If you have read all the way through type “Sausages” down below in the comments. Thank you again.