I drove Ford trucks for years while I was in high school and college. Life and responsibility dictated that I transition into passenger cars that could accommodate a car seat for babies and little kids. A Bronco could have served both purposes. It was a blast working on this voiceover project for Ford as they re-introduce the iconic Bronco with the help of none other than Jay Leno. The segment I voiced is at 6:24.
“Keep An Eye On Your Mind” has become a bit of a mantra for me. For a while I said “try to look at life with your good eye” at the end of Good Eye Podcast episodes. The thinking was that by specifying “good eye”, the potential existed for us all to have a “bad eye”; meaning the mischievous part of our mood>thought>personality that loves to pull us down into bad habits, negative thoughts, resentment… unproductive but completely natural and all-too-common stuff like that. Mindfulness, awareness and meditation are crucial to keeping a level head these days. Always have been really. If we don’t observe our thoughts and our experience within the context of consciousness and even influence those thoughts intentionally, they’ll wreck the place. An unobserved mind is like a house full of little kids. “I’ll just be gone for a second, they’ll be fine” turns into “Oh my God! Turn my back for a second and the couch is on fire and the dog is wearing a dress and painted green!” This video makes some great points about keeping an eye on your mind. I’m currently reading Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book “Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself”. It’s fascinating, but I’ve always loved the whole quantum field/parallel universe/probability thing. Take it as you will. Hopefully you’ll find some value in it.
You can record audio files for each participant on a Zoom call. It’s great for when you want to import each participant’s file into a DAW session and process tracks individually.
Send your vocal track to your music track inside a compressor to allow the vocals and the music to sit in the mix together. It’s like the “pumping” effect used in music when you have a kick drum bringing down the overall music level in order to stand out.
Today’s production tip is for renaming regions in Pro Tools using keyboard shortcuts and what to do if at first the shortcut doesn’t respond. There’s always a reason for little things like this. I recently set up a new computer and all my settings were wiped out, and I’m still finding little gremlins in my workflow. Been there? Thought so.
Mark Winn is a peaceful warrior. He’s a calm, present, wise person who is always ready for anything due to his awareness and his philosophy of “concept over technique” which means you must understand the why before you can master the what. He’s a instructor in the Israeli martial art of krav maga. He’s an author, a motivational speaker, and an entrepreneur. His new book is called “Not A Victim But A Warrior”.
Attention VO peeps, language nerds and anthropology enthusiasts. On this side of the pond we don’t always think about the many accents present in the speaking patterns of folks in Britain as well as Scotland and Ireland. But in this video, Siobhan Thompson gives examples of many of them including some celebrities and where their accent originated. I found this while researching a specific British accent. In VO, you often have to nail a regional dialect to have any shred of authenticity. Videos like this are extremely helpful. Plus, it’s fun and fascinating!
The Northerners, the brother-sister team of Justin Khoury and Ally Khoury, talk about their recently-released self-titled album that they’ve been working on for several years. They play an acoustic tune and we hear a track from the new record.
One reason I love being a voice actor is that you come in contact with so many interesting people and subjects. You get to learn so much about stuff you might not otherwise. Synack is a world leader in cybersecurity. In order to be the best at what they do they send their professional hackers that look for vulnerabilities in their software to hacking competitions around the world. They want only the best on their team. I didn’t even know that was a thing!
The Go Forward Team Ride to benefit the Forward Foundation is this Saturday October 24. The team will ride from Bryan Park in Richmond to Ashland, around Ashland back for a total of 50 miles. If people would rather not do the ride they can still help by doing an activity on their own or with friends and getting sponsorships or donations. Get more info on registration, sponsorships and donations at ForwardFoundation.org.