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Do your headphones hurt you or help you when you're reading for voiceover? Should you wear them or discard them? Anne gives you the definitive answer.
There's a lot of people who will say, don't ever wear your headphones.
So today I wanna talk to you about headphones.
I wear headphones in my booth, and the reason why is a long time ago, when I had a new booth built in a new house, I had a lot of construction going on around me, a lot of building. For me, there was no other way for me to be able to hear if that noise outside was going to affect my recording unless I had my headphones on, because it would be very either low, uh, frequency, uh, drilling, it might be a truck a mile down the road, but I would not be able to hear that until I actually had my headphones on. The other reason also was that my computer happened to be outside of my booth. So if I press -- I would press record and hop in my booth and not be able to necessarily see at the time, uh, the recording levels. I made sure my lev- els were all good, and I knew my place, where to stand in the booth and where my, uh, where I should be in relation to the mic. So I had that all set up. And so I would press record and go on my booth, and then I had my headphones on.
There's a lot of people who will say, don't ever wear your headphones. It's hard for you to sound conversational if you have your headphones on. It will distract you too much from, uh, sounding any particular way. But the way that I feel about this is that you listen to yourself or don't listen to yourself, whether you have headphones on or not. The headphones just bring it closer to your ears. If you are performing in the booth and you're in the scene, you are in the scene no matter what's happening, right? No matter what's on your ears, if you have something on your ears or something not on your ears. You, you should be performing. Get used to it. Get used to performing only and not listening, because again, remember, listening to yourself takes away from the storyline. It takes away from your participation in the story and in telling the story.
Some people say, let's have one headphone on and one headphone off. Well, the problem with that is that your headphones can bleed back into your microphone, right? So if some people -- I, I need to turn my headphones up a little bit because I'm a little, you know, I need a little bit of help in terms of hearing sometimes. And if I have one headphones off, whatever's coming through, that headphone may come right back into my microphone and bleed into the recording.
One of the reasons you're gonna wanna get good at having them on is if you are ever in a live directed session and you have somebody in your ear directing you. So you're going to have to have them on at that point. And I would think if it's a live directed session, I would want to make sure that I'm proficient at performing with my headphones on, especially if somebody's directing me.
Thanks for reading!
Keep on rocking your business like a #VOBOSS
About Anne:
Anne Ganguzza is a professional voice actor and award-winning director and producer who works with students to develop their voiceover and business skills - including voice over Coaching and Genre-based Demo Production. She specializes in conversational Commercial & Narration styles, including Corporate, eLearning, Technology, and On-Hold Messaging. Located in Orange County, California, Anne offers private coaching and mentoring services to students via ipDTL and Zoom.