Harlan Hogan is a well-known voice actor and a published author of many books about building and recording from a home studio. A must-read for any home-based talent is his book The Voice Actor’s Guide to Recording at Home …and On the Road.
Hogan is a pioneer of the idea of the “portability” of recording and has recorded voice-over projects in hotel rooms across the world (and even in an occasional quiet, parked car). He has even gone so far as to design and market his own “Harlan Hogan Porta Booth,” a collapsible mesh cube fitted with pre-cut pieces of acoustical foam; beautifully lightweight, portable, and a welcome alternative to maniacally building an ersatz fort out of hotel pillows and sheets. He even confessed in a podcast to accumulating Do Not Disturb hangtags from every hotel he’s stayed in and festooning all the doorknobs of nearby rooms with them to keep the cleaning staff and their whirring vacuums out of his recordings, much to the chagrin of fellow hotel guests who were left wondering why their rooms were never cleaned.
I, too, decided to give hotel room recording a try once last summer during a brief few days off in Vegas—granted, a city not known for its peace or serenity, and likely the very worst locale in which to try out the idea of remote recording. I had purchased the Snowball Microphone, made by Blue Microphones and thought to be one of the most durable, portable and best podcasting microphones, and installed my usual sound editing programs on my laptop. I was all set. Then, the thought dawned on me as the elevator ascended to my room at the Bellagio that I had booked a fountain-facing room. Who would book at the Bellagio and not request a fountain room?
Possibly someone who hopes to record sound.
Oh well, I’ll just time my “takes” carefully to coincide with the 14.5 minutes when Andrea Bocelli is not belting out arias during the fountain display.
I carefully crafted a fort between the twin beds that would have made Harlan proud. It featured high-backed chairs with sheets suspended between them and the facing bed acting as good baffling for the mic, which was balanced on several phone books.
Just when I had a couple of fairly good test takes in the can and was feeling pretty masterful about the process, the plaintive tones of Bocelli launching into his famous aria from Don Giovanni interrupted everything.
Patiently, feeling a little ridiculous camped out my tiny fort, I waited for my next opportunity, and when the cacophony of the fountains right under my window died down, I tried to fill the next 14.5 minutes with as many clean takes as possible.
That was, until the loud debate between the guests in the room next to mine started up. Something about someone wanting to sleep the hangover off, and the other loudly insisting that they hit the outlet mall.
I submitted the experimental takes to a couple of clients who were willing to act as guinea pigs, and the verdict wasn’t favorable. Any deviation from my usual equipment—be that a change of microphone, the sound processing ability of my laptop, and the uncontrollable variables of my surroundings—all amounted to an inconsistency in my sound files.
Actually, in retrospect, the atmospheric conditions were the least of my worries. I think a voice artist’s choice of and preference for a mic is pivotal to keeping her sound matchable to previous work, something that’s paramount to my work in telephony.
Mr. Hogan has expressed the reason behind his passion for recording remotely: He actually can’t relax on vacation knowing that an agent has requested an audition from him; he finds it hard to unwind with the knowledge that a client is under the gun with a deadline and needs his help to record. In short, he relaxes more knowing that the most urgent matters and lucrative opportunities are dealt with.
I applaud that level of service, and I try my best to also be as available as possible as I can to my clients and especially sensitive to those with crushing deadlines. But do you know what I discovered? My clients are extremely accommodating and understanding when I need to leave town. I stay in contact with everyone. I have lugged that albatross of a laptop through practically every major airport in North America. They know I will record for them, in that never-changing, familiar, consistent environment of my studio, as soon as I get back. The world doesn’t come to an end, I don’t think I’ve lost a single client by delaying a recording until I return, and I feel better avoiding the pressure of attempting to return the same high-quality files I know I can crank out at home. Yes, the workload of those first couple of days back is crushing, but I also derive a sense of comfort knowing there’s lots to do when I’m back.
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Allison Smith is a professional telephone voice, having voiced platforms for Sprint, Verizon, Qwest, Cingular, Bell Canada, Vonage, Twitterfone, Hawaiian Telcom, and the Asterisk Open-Source PBX. Her Web site is www.theivrvoice.com.
