Guess what news I got this week? Mr. Bunny thinks I am a part of the 95%, unworthy of inclusion in the club. My audition was rejected due to “boxiness throughout, due to poor acoustical treatment.” I have a pretty long history with audio and sound equipment, but I must admit that boxiness is a new term to me. Guess I will have to find out what that is. According to the message, VoiceBunny has a forum available even to the 95% where you can get some information about an audition, so when I get over the depression of rejection, I will probably get in touch with them and see what it will take to fix things.

I am hoping I now have two things in my possession that will help – if not in reducing boxiness, at least in improving my overall sound. I made enough to self-finance this addiction with some new headphones and an upgraded microphone.

Both of these I settled on after doing some online “research” and advice of various sources, none of which I know personally. Opinions on both of these pieces of hardware exist for and against, strongly and weakly. Isn’t that the way with nearly everything you want to buy online? How can it be the best thing ever with a 5 star rating for one person, and not worth consideration by another? I take the Olympic Ice Skating Judge approach to most of this – throw out the highs and the lows and average the rest. And this is what I ended up with:

Headphones – Sony MDR-7506 Over the Ear, Closed Cup, Studio Live DJ Headphones. So, which one? Studio or Live DJ? A little too much marketing going on there in the item name, but overall a decent set of headphones. My ears are too old and have heard too much to have the sensitivity of many people out there critiquing headphones, so my opinion isn’t going to be one to base your purchases on. This is not going to be my final set, but for now they are adequate. They meet up quality wise with my recording area and microphone, and when I upgrade both of those I will get some more better headphones.

Microphone – I wanted a large diaphragm mic, as I have some low end in my voice and a large diaphragm will exploit that a little better. Neumann has always been my mic of want, as is the case with most bass singers, but as that is still a bit beyond my reach, I went with the ElectroVoice RE20. It was a toss-up between that and the Shure SM7B, and I could have gone either way. As with the headphones, I made the best possible and the most worstest choice possible, depending on who you listen to.

And since I have some new hardware, I decided it is also time to upgrade my DAW. Well,not so much of an upgrade as a new interface. All this time, I have been using Audacity and it has served well enough. As you may recall, I am running on KXStudio, an Ubuntu based Linux distro that comes with a nearly infinite amount of audio/video production software. The reason I chose KXStudio was because it came with Ardour, a real DAW! What Word is to Notepad, Ardour is to Audacity. It’s like ProTools, but it’s open source. It could be considered bloatware for Voice over Work, but it has some features Audacity doesn’t that will make thins mo’ betta. I’ll keep you informed, as always.

In addition to all that, three more Royalty offers:

• A history of Marine Corp warfare philosophy since Vietnam;
• Pack Dynamics, a werewolf book (I think it is fiction);
• And TOR and the Dark Web.

These three fall into my category of interest or possible sufficient sales. The USMC is another military book that I wanted to do, Pack Dynamics is by an interesting author and it might see some movement on Audible, and the TOR book is one of the few I have seen on this topic and it might get some love, too. We’ll see.

One odd offer for pfh was for Zombie Planet, which I believe is a first effort at science fiction by a young male author. I enjoyed being involved in this one so far because the author is so very excited about the book and my performance of it. I hope I can deliver something he likes.

Lots of stuff went on sale this week:

• The Body Keeps the Score summary
• Beat the Praxis
• How to Sell on Amazon
• The Roaring Twenties, my second book for in60Learning
• And a Bitcoin book.

Two of these are RS offers, so we can see how that process works now that something is on sale. I have heard about Promo Codes that are available to Rights Holders for their books, and to Producers for Royalty projects. If I can find out something about that, I may make some available here, so stay tuned!

Categories: Voice over Work