You're The Voice

Back in another life when I ran the Commercial Production (and 'imaging') department at LBC I often received phone calls and letters which said "People have told me I have a good voice and should do voiceovers."  I'm told it still happens today.

The reply to this is usually along the lines of "Are the people telling you this experienced voiceover artists or producers? Because having “a good voice” is very different to being able to voice ads or station idents; there's much more to being a good VO than meets the eye (or should that be ear?)."

The agency Excellent Talent, who have a number of top voices on their books, provides some down-to-earth advice on doing voiceovers: I've Been Told I Have Nice Voice - So Will I Make Money? 

There is a huge difference between people who have a nice voice, read aloud well or whose friends tell them that they ought to do voice-overs - and a professional voice artist. Professionals understand that the smallest alteration in inflection can make the difference between success and failure; they understand why the client or director needs a particular style of read or performance. They appreciate the need to save time and know how to fit a forty second script into thirty seconds without it sounding like a machine gun.
 

Good voices develop a sense of timing in their heads. They can see a written script and tell you exactly how long it will take at an average read. They can sight-read to time without looking at the studio clock. They know how a scriptwriter's mind works, how to get inside a script, and what to bring out, without having to have it spelled out for them. They can lift the words off the page and take ownership of them, even thought they didn’t write them. 

When I inherited Comm Prod at LBC it was towards the end of a very long-running campaign on the station (and  occasionally Capital) for Barrett's Liquormart, a chain of cut-price off-licences.  The ads, produced by my predecessor, had featured owner Freddie Barrett not only voicing his ads but also "singing" (I use the term loosely) the jingle.

This resulted in a spate of other local advertisers wanting to appear in their own commercials and, to make matters worse, LBC's local advertising ratecard at the time even had a section on production which included the line "To help keep costs down it may be possible to voice the commercial yourself."  It was a long, hard, battle to get it removed from subsequent ratecards.

Letting the client voice his/her own commercial might have helped to save money, but the ads usually took much, much longer to record as the client learned the hard way that doing voiceovers is definitely not a doddle.  In many cases I suspected it wasn't being done to save money on production but more to feed the client's ego. At least some of them admitted defeat and they then had salt rubbed into their wounds by watching an experienced VO do it properly; and in a fraction of the time.

Victor Kiam, who liked Remington shavers so much he bought the company, and Sir Freddie Laker reminding passengers "I've got my name on every plane!" - or at least whoever came up with the idea of getting the company bosses to front their TV campaigns - have much to answer for.

I've long felt that having the right voice is at least as important to the success of the campaign as having the right script, production and airtime. Get any of those wrong and your ad campaign is likely to fail; back in the 1990s even using John Cleese as the leading character in their TV commercials couldn't stop Sainsbury's 'Value To Shout About' campaign from dying on its backside.

Since my days in Comm Prod the technology and cost of it has changed much over the years so that it's now become common practice for many VOs to work from their own home studio via an ISDN line rather than travel around the company from one radio station or recording studio to another.

It has also meant that many people with a hacked copy of Cool-Edit Pro and a half-decent microphone  and call themselves a 'production company', regardless of whether they are actually any good at it. In many cases they end up doing both the industry, and themselves, a disservice by creating poor ads that simply convince the advertiser that "radio doesn't work".

As I pointed out at the start, doing voiceovers isn't as easy as it sounds (and I'll  happily admit to being rather rubbish at it myself, by the way) and this video, produced by Jonathan Kydd (who plays both the VO and producer), is perhaps a little too close to the truth when it comes to what can happen during studio sessions: