Speaker 1: You need to make sure, dear authors who choose to read their own things, that you're engaged, that you give a shit about what you're reading, right? That you're passionate about it. Because that's all we care about. We don't care about voices. We just talked about voice a second ago, voice quality. Your voice doesn't sound bad. How many people have you really listened to who you walked away and thought, good Lord, his voice is awful, right? It doesn't really happen, right? But what we remember is, you know, their heart. I always will talk about that, and their passion, right? So if we're talking, and you see I'm actually getting a little amped up with this right now, right? You can hear that passion. This means something to me. This is important to me. And that's what I'm trying to communicate is the passion. And so that's the one thing I will say is that when reading nonfiction for actors or, and for narrators reading it yourself, is you need to care about what you're delivering and deliver it with energy and passion, because if you don't give a shit, who's gonna?

Speaker 2: So most likely they're really passionate because they wrote an entire book on it. You'd hope they're passionate about it, right? But is it sometimes, is it sometimes just not really reflected in the way they read it? I mean, is there a disconnect sometimes between the way they feel about the material?

Speaker 1: There can be. There can be technical issues. I mean, look, you know, you're sitting in, you know, we're sitting in one of our studios and looking in that booth, right? That booth is a soundproof booth. When you close it, it has a thud, like an air conditioning close. And all of a sudden you can hear the blood coursing through your head, right? You have one or maybe two people sitting out here looking at you. And of course we all, as human beings, we all think everybody's judging us all the time. Right? Nobody actually cares about us actually. But, but, you know, so now you've got these people like judging us. Some authors have a difficult time with it, right? It's, it's, I call them civilians, right? You know, condescendingly, right? You know? So the civilian goes in there and they're like, holy moly. And it might be a lot harder to do than you think. Like, you know, our typical session, we do like a six to eight hour recording day. Right?

Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. So yeah. Six to eight hours.

Speaker 1: So yeah. You're like, all right, sit down.

Speaker 2: The voice is gone by then. Like, do they show up on the second day?

Speaker 1: Yeah, it can, it can. It can be a problem. Right? And that's also a talent or a skill that a narrator needs to acquire to be able to do that day after day, you know, for an entire career. But yeah, that can happen, you know, and we'll sometimes be like, you know, around one or two o'clock, be like, dude, you sound bad. We got to come back tomorrow and you got to go home and no drinking tonight. Right? Dries you out. Um, you know, the don't drink too much milk. We get a lot of, you know, a lot of that coming back up and in your, in your instrument, we like to call it, right. You know, all that, you know, all these sorts of things and get a ton of sleep and come in just ready to roll. Cause it's, it's a, um, it takes a lot of concentration to sit and read. And then if you're trying to be engaged and, and, and, and, and passionate. Takes a lot of calories. You end up getting pooped. You get tired.

Speaker 2: And you had some really good advice about, um, emphasis and how some, do you feel like some narrators just know what to emphasize in the sentence and, and how

Speaker 1: did people, yeah, I mean, to me, that's always about passion, right? That's where I always go to first when I'm directing is it's, is it's, if we start thinking about emphasis, we're now thinking about technical and this is not technical cause it's heart.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: How do I feel? Right. How do you feel about what's going on right here? If it's nonfiction, hopefully you're very passionate about it. Like, you know, when, when, uh, advice I give to, to both actors and, uh, and author narrators is to, to, to watch like a, you know, a, uh, a documentary on like the discovery channel or I don't know what, whatever, and it'll be the scientists talking, you know, about, you know, whatever ecology or the cosmos. And you'll hear them and they're like, and then the black hole and it sucks everything. And they're just ready to explode. Right. And it's like, it's so riveting, right? Because they're into it. And so I want to be into it too. And that's why I want to remind everybody is like, look, you know, we want to be, I did a book, an audio book a long time ago with a conductor. Um, and he wrote a book called life on one buttock and that was what that is. Right. Yeah. You know, are we, are we reading this book? Are we really engaged? Are we excited to talk about this? What are we doing here? Right. So, I mean, not everything needs that emphasis. There can be a very cool kind of thing. But to me, emphasis comes from passion and passion is a lot about like teaching what we're talking about. Like you'll hear, you know, I'm emphasizing a lot, right. Certain words, throwing a ton of words away because I'm trying to make a particular point of, well, this is actually a recording tip anyway, is to, is to make sure that if you make a mistake reading the sentence, don't just blunder through it, pretend like you're going to keep it. Right. But then you've got to go back to the beginning of the sentence and start it over again.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: And that'll help you kind of get the whole, but maybe the reason why you stumbled is because it's just clumsy. That'll happen a lot. The reason why an actor or a narrator will stumble is because it's clumsy.

Speaker 2: It's because it's not written well. Yes. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: Because the, the, the wording is clumsy. Right. Maybe there's a better way to say it. Right. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it reads well, but when it's said aloud, it doesn't sound, doesn't sound really all that good.

Speaker 2: Great advice.