The Ultimate Voiceover Transformation Guide

BOSSes Anne Ganguzza and George the Tech unveil a powerful collaboration designed to equip voiceover professionals with essential technical prowess. Their discussion highlights the evolution of VO BOSS to include comprehensive tech support, recognizing that pristine audio and a smoothly running studio are fundamental pillars of your voiceover business success. They introduce the new VIP + Tech membership tiers, which offer direct access to George's expertise through monthly meetups, personalized sound checks, and an innovative AI-powered knowledge base, the "George the Tech Bot." By democratizing access to top-tier technical guidance, Anne and George empower voice actors to overcome studio hurdles, optimize their sound, and ultimately elevate their professional presence, ensuring they can confidently navigate the technical landscape of the voiceover industry.

 

00:04 - Anne (Host)

Hey guys, it's Anne from VOBOSS here.

00:06 - George (Guest)

And it's George the Tech. We're excited to tell you about the VOBOSS VIP membership, now with even more benefits.

00:13 - Anne (Host)

So not only do you get access to exclusive workshops and industry insights, but with our VIP plus tech tier, you'll enjoy specialized tech support from none other than George himself. Enjoy specialized tech support from none other than George himself.

00:27 - George (Guest)

You got it. I'll help you tackle all those tricky tech issues so you can focus on what you do best: voice acting. It's tech support tailored for voiceover professionals like you.

00:35 - Anne (Host)

Join us, guys, at VO Boss and let's make your voiceover career soar. Visit VOBOSS.com/VIP-membership to sign up today.

00:46 - Speaker 3 (Announcement)

It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent1 today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO boss. Now2 let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.

01:10 - Anne (Host)

Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I am so excited today to have one of my favorite human beings on the planet here with me, and that is George the Tech, George Whittam. George, thank you so much for being with us today.

01:23 - George (Guest)

Oh, it's great to be here. It must be the East Coast vibes or something, you know. We're from the same sort of corner of the country.

01:30 - Anne (Host)

I think so. I think so. Gosh, bosses, if you are not familiar with George, you should be, number one. I'm so excited to talk to George today because we have come together in a collaborative effort, so to speak, and we're excited to kind of talk about that and talk about how you can boss up your tech and your audio in your studio and in your business. So, for those people that don't know George, gosh, since 2005, George has dedicated, and in George's bio it says that you've dedicated your career to serving the technical needs of voice actors, podcasters, and recording studio owners.

02:08

Guys, actually, George has dedicated probably his life, not just his career. I mean, since I've been in voiceover, George has helped me umpteen billion times, and he has been the audio engineer technician to the stars, to all of my voiceover heroes. And literally, if you've got a tech issue, George can solve it. And so I'm just excited that he's here to talk to us about things that we can do to boss up our studios and boss up our audio. And in 2017, you launched georgethetech.com, which expanded your business like a boss, from just yourself to an entire team of people which can assist anybody with training, studio design, audio processing, stacks—anything you can think about it. You're a '97 graduate from Virginia Tech, woo-hoo, East Coast, with a bachelor's degree in music and audio technology and a minor in communications, and that's pretty darn awesome, because not only are you a geek, but you can talk to people about it.

03:15 - George (Guest)

I can communicate, that's right, that's right.

03:18 - Anne (Host)

And gosh, if you haven't ever heard of... well, it was E-Webs and then it was VOBS, the voiceover body shop, George and Dan Leonard. For 13 years now, I've had a podcast for gosh, going on nine now, but 13 years they ran their podcast and video. Actually, what did we call it back then?

03:39 - George (Guest)

It was a podcast, but it was a vlog, podcast, live stream, live stream. Yeah, it was all of it.

03:45 - Anne (Host)

But all of that amazing content is still on YouTube. And now you are the co-host and producer of the Pro Audio Suite, which is wherever your favorite podcasts are located, right next to VO Boss. So after that long-winded introduction, George, I am so glad to have you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

04:10 - George (Guest)

Absolutely, and believe it or don't, that was definitely the abridged version. There are very, very long-winded versions of that that I've described on many podcasts if you want to hear more about all of the background.

04:24 - Anne (Host)

But yeah, it's just so much.

04:26 - George (Guest)

I mean, yeah, you're my people. Voice actors are my people. I love working with creative talent, and I have found that, through a test that I took not so long ago, that I'm exactly split left and right brain.

04:37 - Anne (Host)

Oh my gosh, I'm right down the center. That's why we get along, I'm quite sure, because I feel that I'm left and right brain too, 50-50.

04:44 - George (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, so there's this ability to balance those two worlds, and you know, we brand ourselves as performer-friendly techs because we feel we get actors and performers and that we're not here to talk directly to tech engineers. We have helped engineers solve problems, but that's not our main tribe. Our main tribe are creatives, actors, podcasters—well, creators, people that have to deal with technology to do what they do, and we just enjoy working with folks like that. You are our people.

05:18 - Anne (Host)

Well, I like being your people. So, George, let's talk a little bit about your business right now, George the Tech, and what it is that you do. And I mean, obviously you serve the voice acting community, but you also serve anybody that has an audio need or a tech need. Tell us a little bit about your business.

05:38 - George (Guest)

Yeah, George the Tech is framed around supporting voice actors, and now we've added into that tribe. We've brought in the tent to now really include content creators and podcasters, because we've been dealing with more and more podcast-specific studios. But how we do that is in many different ways, from one-on-one consulting time with me, which is really kind of like—I wouldn't say the first place to start, because it's the most expensive to work with me one-on-one, but because it's going to be always the most expensive to work with the CEO—we have a tremendous number of services at much more friendly price points, down to the most popular and, I would say, best value bang for your buck service, which is called a soundcheck. And so soundchecks are where we listen to the audio. Oh, really, me? I'm still hoarding all the soundchecks.

06:29

I don't let anybody else do the soundchecks. I personally listen to every sample that comes in and I give notes. I'll look at your pictures of your studio. I'll even look at a video of how your room is set up. I want to see you at your microphone. I want a selfie of you at the mic so I know exactly what you're doing with your mic, and I evaluate all of that stuff with you. There we go. Selfies! Need a selfie on the mic, it's really important. Selfie on the mic.

06:53

And I don't mean a selfie like cheesing at the camera like this. I mean, I want you to be on mic and I want you to send me a picture of you at the mic in the position you read your scripts. It's so critical, and I'll look at all that. I'll listen to the audio, and I'll even listen to your processed audio if you do that in the production workflow as well. I'll take all of that and give back my notes about how you're doing and what could be improved, and if everything's great, I'll tell you everything's great, and all that under one price. Great, I'll tell you everything is great, and all that under one price. So that is now something that our members that we're going to talk about are going to get access to, among many other things. So we provide sound checks, and then from there we have more technical services like processing presets. So when you're doing an audition and you want that audio to sound a little more polished, it's the perfect nail polish, it's the French tip, it's just the right smoky eyes.

07:48 - Anne (Host)

Now you're talking my language there, George, I love it. Oh my gosh, I must have it now.

07:56 - George (Guest)

It's having just the right touch of all those things for the kind of work that you're doing. That's appropriate for the kind of work you're doing. I like to say you don't want to show up in theater makeup for your first date unless you're dating another theater actor.

08:10

But otherwise, you want to show up appropriately, and so these processing settings are very much custom to your voice. They're not cookie cutter, they're not templates. They become a template you can use, but of those templates to your voice, the sound of your room and your studio, and the style and genre of voiceover that you're actually working. So the kind of processing I'll do in an audiobook is going to be very different from the processing I'm going to do on a commercial. So that's what the processing presets are all about.

08:44 - Anne (Host)

I love that. I'm going to add to your story here. So back in, I'm going to say 2010, maybe it was, maybe it was 2009. George, my father had built me a studio. I had moved to the West Coast and my father had built me a studio, and at the time we didn't really know anything about what was required in building a good sound studio. So we did what we could and it was passable. But I needed to upgrade and I needed it to sound better, and so I found George, and George paid a visit to me back in Irvine, California, and really helped me to level up my studio with a lot of things. And I ended up after your assessment, and we took your advice and we put everything together, literally. I had engineers that were like, they were like, "Oh my God, your studio sound is just amazing," and I had so many compliments on that studio, which basically was my father's studio. But then it was blessed by George and enhanced by George, it was juiced.

09:47 - George (Guest)

It was juiced.

09:48 - Anne (Host)

With, like you did, the French tip. So it's like we added acoustic panels, we added a bunch of things. We had, I remember, the studio clouds, and so all those things made my sound so good that I for years after that would have people complimenting me, asking me if I had like a studio brick studio or—because this was before—asking me if I had like a Studio Bricks studio or because this was before.

10:07 - George (Guest)

Some fancy brand name.

10:08 - Anne (Host)

Yeah, this was actually before those were even a thing.

10:12

And not only did you help me with my physical studio, but you helped me with stacks, and I remember I think I wrote you a testimonial back in the day, like you saved me like 50% of my editing time just by those stacks that you created for me, because I was able to take those and process my audio that I was sending to my clients and literally half of my work was done for me already, like a little bit of EQ, some compression, getting rid of some of the breaths, and that was back in 2010.

10:41

And so literally, George, I still have—like, I have a new studio and I got one more set from you, but literally I used those for years. I was in the same studio, had the same mic, and honestly, like they just worked amazingly well for years. And so they're very, very valuable, those sound checks and the stacks that you created and any sort of help. And it amazed me because, even though you came to see me in Irvine, when I then moved and then created a new studio, you could do everything remotely. I mean, what you can do remotely is really wonderful, like you can listen to somebody's audio and then you can make recommendations based on that. And you said you want selfies of "where's your mic, what does your studio look like," and so, based upon all that, you can actually just do consulting from remote.

11:28

You don't have to actually be on site, although you could be if it was local, right? And I guess, if the client wanted you to just come and do a full-scale like build of studios... yeah, once in a while we do that.

11:39 - George (Guest)

Yeah, once in a while it happens.

11:40 - Anne (Host)

So I mean, I firsthand have had George for the longest time helping me with my audio, and also back in the day, and this goes into what we're going to be collaborating with. When I started VOPeeps, bosses, I don't know if you've heard of VOPeeps—hopefully you have—but I've run VOPeeps since 2010. And in 2010, I created a networking group that was physical, like people came to my house.

12:03 - George (Guest)

Can you imagine?

12:04 - Anne (Host)

Yeah, people came to my house for meetups, for meetups, and ultimately first it was just a bunch of voiceover actors and, you know, it was a get-together and we kind of like—we either had a little potluck and then it turned into something a little more extravagant where my husband would start making food and kind of catered it for us, and ultimately it was like-minded people getting together. And then I decided that I wanted to branch out and make it even bigger, and so I started inviting all my heroes, all my VO heroes, and I would interview them in my living room. I would interview mine in the living room, and ultimately people would come to the house and it would be a really cool local networking meetup.

12:44 - George (Guest)

I remember helping to figure out some of the tech and stuff to make that work. It was quite an adventure.

12:50 - Anne (Host)

I started streaming back in...

12:52

I want to say 2010 for sure, when streaming technology was just beginning, and I had had some experience working in technology from my previous job, and so I first started streaming those meetups live on the internet from my laptop computer on my coffee table with a blue snowball microphone and a little, I think it was a Logitech webcam. But the cool thing was is that I now went from a local meetup to a global meetup. And then, as we grew and I did these gosh, once a month for almost six years, and as we grew, I said, "Who's the person that can help me to really make this stand out and have great audio and stream my networking meetups over the internet?" Well, who better than George? So I hired George to come stream my meetups on the internet and take care of all the video recording and the audio. And it was great because you came with all your equipment and I had equipment. You helped set it up, and gosh, we had a good time, didn't we? We did.

14:00 - George (Guest)

We did. It was such great memories.

14:02 - Anne (Host)

Yeah, they grew and grew, and so that's pretty much my VO peeps. I have lots of great memories of it being physically in my house, and I think in 2017—was it 2016 or 2017—was when, finally, once a month, it became a lot because they grew. I had up to 55 people in my home that my husband was making themed meals. It was packed.

14:23 - George (Guest)

It was sold out all the time. Themed drinks.

14:25 - Anne (Host)

We started selling tickets to it, and gosh, we would definitely stream it live. We would have Zoom. We would have people working out via Zoom, and so we would actually have them piped in, piped in. We have Zoom piped in to my TV.

14:40 - George (Guest)

It was sophisticated, it really was back in the day. I mean, you know, it was the closest to like having hybrid training where you've got people in the room and you've got people online, all at the same time. Yeah, it was very, very ahead of its time.

14:53 - Anne (Host)

All across the globe. And so George was that tech geek that was there to like, put it together and help me. And I'd be like, "I want to do this." And George would be like, "Okay, let's—we can do this, we can do this." And so if you guys need outside of just audio—I mean George, the tech, right—any kind of tech, and I know bosses, as