We all have our Walls. Yours may not be as scary-dramatic as the Pink Floyd rock opera, but we all smack our nose into one every so often. Sometimes they’re self-made. Sometimes they’re imposed from without. But everybody hits one from time to time. Dave Courvoisier runs down a quick list of five things you can do to get over, under, around or through whatever Wall is in your way, and move on into John Mellencamp territory. (Wall-wise, that is.. The Coug’s dance moves aren’t for everybody.)

Nancy Wolfson of Braintracks Audio shares another free mini-lesson -- and this one’s brimming with that hot girl-on-mic-on-floor action America craves. The topic is getting into “relax” mode for a laid-back read, and it’s hard to argue with the exercise’s impressive results. What we’ve got here is another demonstration of the direct, clear style that’s made The Wolf one of the most in-demand vocal mentors around. Come for the black leather -- stay for the on-target insight. Okay girls…y’all have at it…

Bobcat Goldthwait, who once joked in a radio interview we did with him that his career was “six months away from doing boat shows with David Hasselhoff,” shares a bold and unorthodox perspective on Show Bidness Success. Bob, who’s a much brighter guy than his IMDB rap sheet might suggest, says walking away from the spotlight was the best career decision he ever made. We’re not all in a position to pull a Bobcat, of course, but his perspective is well worth pondering. The money quote:

My point is this—if you want to be happy in showbiz (or any creative field), listen to that voice inside you. Even if it says “F*** it” sometimes. Work with your friends. Avoid chasing fame or money. Just do what you want to do, when and how you want to do it. And if it’s not making you happy, quit. Quit hard, and quit often. Eventually you’ll end up somewhere that you never want to leave.

True story.

Lisa Biggs, our sister from another mister, called the other night to ask us to be part of a video idea she’d just cooked up with her young Voxy Ladies padawan learner Bella. We, as always, were delighted to accept. With a tip of the hat to recent viral video sensation Jake Foushee, here’s what those two goofball kids came up with (Lisa sez YouTube wasn’t cooperating, so click the pic below for a direct link to the version on Vimeo.):



BTW, you can get more info on Bella here. Check in with Lisa here. And the voice of Lisa’s Inner Lafontaine is here.

In an age of tabloid tarts and Autotuned Idols, Ingrid Michaelson is a breath of fresh air. With a little help from Dylan Steinberg and Chris Kuffner, Ingrid demonstrates the power and impact of a well-modulated voice. We know the only thing this has to do with voiceover is the U87/pop filter combo. And as a rule, we don’t even like Rhianna. But we think this is pretty frictkin’ cool.

Good stats on Voice123 take time to rack up. But renewing members have often been surprised to find out their hard-earned positive track record gets reset every time they renew their annual membership. It’s like somebody pushes the Noob button as soon as the check clears. But them days are apparently over.

On the “Voice the Dream” blog, community manager Steven Lowell has shared about a small but significant change in the 123 system. Bottom Line: your stats no longer get reset when you renew. This strikes us as a good, common-sense tweak. 123’s Monkey in the Middle business model may not quite be a Golden Ticket to VO Stardom yet, but we see this as a definite step in the right direction. Like.

He’s been called the most bankable actor in Hollywood history. What’s his secret? Why, he’s got mad skillz of course. Y’all give it up for The Godfather of VO Soul, Mr. Frank Welker…

The new viral sensation of the week is a YouTube clip from Jake Foushee, a 14-year-old voiceover enthusiast from Mebane, North Carolina, who gives it the Full Lafontaine in this simulated movie trailer that’s been lighting up audiences from coast to coast:



No doubt about it -- Jake’s got some great pipes for 14 . It’s a performance that’s especially impressive since he’s delivering the read through a Snowball USB mic. Voice 123 blogger Steven Lowell takes a look at the fastest spreading VO phenom since Ted Williams leaned into that reporter’s car in Columbus, Ohio early last year. The rundown includes this thoughtful top ten on the trajectory of the typical voiceover career:

1. Find your inspiration
2. Impersonate others
3. Dump that and find your own voice
4. Pursue what you want
5. Ignore critics
6. Listen to critics
7. Ignore them again
8. Stick it out until the honeymoon is over
9. See if it is really what you want to do with your life, as a career.
10. Get a 2nd job, if you said yes to #9, which doesn't mean you are giving up.

We’d optimistically put ourselves somewhere around Number 6. But this weekend’s workshop in Atlanta with Marice Tobias should catapult us right to the verge of Number 7…or set us all the way back to Number 4. But we’re loading up plenty of Fraley and Wolfson onto the ol’ iPod for the drive down, so anything could happen.

Paul Strikwerda, who’s not only a top-notch voiceoverist, but one of the smartest guys in the biz, has pulled off a rare trick: a blog post about rates that has something new to say.

The received wisdom in the voice trade is that posting a rate card on your website is a bad idea that will brand you as a Noob, or worse, cause you to leave money on the table. Paul was once in that camp himself -- but has recently changed his mind. When the Dutch Master speaks, we listen. We’re still not fully convinced, but this is a post with some very worthwhile points to ponder. Highly recommended.

We’re still managing to avoid the siren song of the Audiobooks portion of the VO business, but we’re nonetheless looking forward to Part 2 of VO Buzz Weekly’s interview with long-form maestro Scott Brick. Scott gave good guest last week, and delivers the goods again in the second installment.

That’s VOBW co-host Stacy J in the pic, by the way. If you’ve forgotten what Scott looks like, there’s a headshot a couple of items down the page in our plug for last week. Not to get all Don Draper on ya, but we think Chuck D’s co-host sets the page off much more nicely, thank you very much.

This one’s actually a couple of weeks old, but we just saw it, and Easter weekend seems like a good time for a lesson in the virtue of kindness. Voxy Ladies co-founder Lisa Biggs shares a personal story about a recent Left Coast acquaintance who decided to buck the ruthless nut-cutter trend in El Lay and make The Golden Rule her byword in business as well as life.

Yipes. We can’t believe we just used the phrase “ruthless nut-cutter” in a post involving both Easter and Lisa Biggs. Kinda spoiled the moment there, didn’t we? Anyway, it’s a good story, even if we didn’t do such a hot job of setting it up. Happy Easter. Seacrest out.

So your Whisper Room still leaks in occasional noise from the outside world? Wish you could make it even more soundproof? Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis has a room that holds the Guinness World Record for world’s quietest space.

No moving blankets or Auralex squares here: Orfield’s soundproof space has 3.3-foot thick fiberglass acoustic wedges over walls made of insulated steel and a full foot of concrete. Orfield’s founder says the longest anyone’s been able to stay in the room without losing their marbles is 45 minutes:

“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”

Planning to challenge the record? Bring along a chair. “How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”

So be careful what you wish for. Even quiet has it limits.

Chuck D and Stacey J at VO Buzz Weekly sit down for the first installment of a two-part chat with audiobook virtuoso Scott Brick. Audiobooks aren’t really our “thing,” but Scott’s so good he’s always worth listening to. Plus, we never need an excuse to spend a few minutes with Stacey J, who’s not only a polished co-host, but even better looking in person than she is onscreen. True story.

We’re not big on April Fools prankage, but classic Star Trek crew member and current pop-culture phenom George Takei got off a good one on Facebook today. The once-and-future Mr. Sulu posted an item to his News Feed about closing a deal to appear in a new JJ Abrams Trek movie as the captain of the USS Excelsior -- a believable scenario, since it references a role he’s actually played in a previous Trekflick. We were all “good for him” until we got to the part about Gilbert Gottfried as a wily Ferengi and Lisa Lampinelli as a Bajoran security officer. Normally, we can spot a gag item a mile away, but that one had us fished-in till the end. Well played, sir.

Veteran VO Bruce Miles is the latest subject of Peter O’Connell’s 5 Questions series. Bruce delivers our pick for Nugget o’ Knowledge of the week -- a bon mot that’s so spot-on, it might have come straight from one of Nancy Wolfson’s recent online promo videos:

“Don’t fall in love with your voice; fall in love with the copy. Make the words and ideas special and the rest will follow.”

Egg-zackly. Hat tip to Mr. M for sharing, and to Mr. O for what’s turned out to be a nice series with good content from an interesting group of voice talents. Collect ‘em all.

Being unabashed fans of the original Star Wars trilogy, we were delighted to see Dave Thier’s Forbes piece “Five Lessons in Freelancing From Han Solo.”

Harrison Ford’s “stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy looking nerf herder” has duly earned a place in movie history as the ultimate independent contractor, and while Thier’s observations may strike some as a bit “fluffy” for the pages of Forbes, inspiration is where you find it. If the freelance piece is up your alley, you might also enjoy Matthew Herper’s “Five Career Lessons From Han Solo.” Who knew Forbes could be so…awesome?

The More Perfect Union is about to become a reality. The membership of America’s primary entertainment guilds, SAG and AFTRA, have voted decisively to merge into a single unified body, to be known henceforth as SAG/AFTRA. The low-grossing George Clooney political thriller of the same name is currently experiencing a sales boomlet on Amazon. Congratulations, you two -- we knew you’d end up together. Now, when are we gonna get some grandchildren to bounce on our knee?

Unnouncer Doug Turkel’s brilliant VoiceOver Talent Manifesto has generated quite the buzz in the VO village recently. We’ve been meaning to mention it, so we just did. It’s a nice piece that’s sort of a modern-day Desiderata for folks in the Talky Biz, and you should totally get a copy to hang in your Whisper Room or master bedroom closet or wherever you do your VO thang. Like.

Okay, so it wasn’t dinner, it was lunch -- but that would have spoiled the movie reference in the headline.

We just returned from a week in Los Angeles, where we turned our very short list of LA connections into an improvised VO fantasy camp. Among the highlights were a quick pow-wow with Bill “Voice of Goofy” Farmer, a great evening at the VO Summit at SAG where we said hi to Joe Cipriano, Paul Pape, Scott Rummell, and Randy Thomas, a delightful breakfast with our old pal and recent LA transplant Lisa Biggs, and a wonderful extended lunch with animation slugger Rob Paulsen.

Rob is one of our all-time favorite voiceover people -- in fact, he’s one of our favorite people in general. He’s got what we think of as the Total Package: a killer voice actor with a contagious enthusiasm for The Biz, and a real love for the other amazing performers he works with on an almost daily basis. Chuck & Stacy of VO Buzz Weekly have just posted Part 2 of their chat with Rob, a fun gabfest with a guy who’s at the top of his game and lovin’ every minute of it. Highly recommended.

Wow -- six days in LA and we’ve already started name-dropping. Beg pardon, y’all. We now return to our anonymous daily slog, already in progress.

The pop-culture satirists at The Onion offer up a VO-related item starring actor and VO Donald Sutherland. The Donald, who’s appearing in the long-awaited Hunger Games movie, allegedly stood on his head to nail a VO for Toyota. And when we say “stood on his head,” we mean literally. And when we say “literally,” we mean literally.

This is a fun bit -- until word gets out that somebody actually did it for a Super Bowl ad. Then we’ll all have to sign up for clinics and webinars to learn how to do it too.

Makes us dizzy just thinking about it.

Raven haired voice princess Mercedes Rose offers an important reminder to voiceoverists worldwide: VO means never having to say you’re sorry. Acting is about making choices and being real -- and occasional mistakes along the way are a natural and universally recognized part of the process. This idea was mentioned during a weekend VO workshop we attended, and having just seen Ms. Rose’s post a couple of days before, we took it as, y’know, a sign or something. Anyway, the point is a good one: if you frack the client’s car in the parking lot on the way to the session, then by all means apologize. But once you’re in the booth, as George Costanza used to say, “Stuff your sorrys in a sack,mister!”

VO Buzz Weekly visits the nerve center of Joe Cipriano’s worldwide voice empire in Part 2 of Chuck & Stacy’s chat with one of the all-around best guys in the biz. The VOBW camera crew takes a peek inside Joe’s poolside backyard VO headquarters, which looks like exactly the kind of Fun Fort we’d build if not for those buzzkills at the local zoning board. Some guys have all the luck.

Jane Ingalls shares some insight at VoiceOverExtra about the time-honored “leap of faith” as a way to move forward. Moving out of the ol’ comfort zone is often the ticket to real career breakthroughs. The money quote:

When your next challenge looks like a good fit, don't be afraid to say "yes" even when you don't have all the pieces in place. 

Or as the old saying goes, “do at least one thing every day that scares the crap out of you.” We’ve personally found this to be useful advice -- and surprisingly often. Well said, Jane. Thanks for sharing.

Rats -- we used up our one allotted ‘Down Under” reference in the headline! Anyway, Part 2 of the Australian contribution to the “Sh*t People Say” craze is out -- and we likey, by crikey. (Too big a stretch? Sorry.) In today’s voice market, we suspect a lot of VOs can relate to the “Is it quiet, or is it just me” montage at the beginning. We’re a bit worried about the blonde who’s switched from hip-hop to Death Metal for her in-car warmup, but that’s the way of the world right now, eh? Thanks to RKM Voices for a much-needed chuckle. Good on ya, mates.

Our longtime VO bud and Voxy Ladies co-founder Lisa Biggs -- shown here hugging up to animation king Rob Paulsen -- will be joining the Robster and several other top-notch voiceoverists for a pair of cartoon voice panels at WonderCon in Anaheim, California the weekend of March 16 and 17. The panelists include two other members of the Voxy crew, Katy Leigh and Alicyn Packard, along with original SNL cast member Larraine Newman, Bill “Voice of Goofy” Farmer, and other tempting taste treats. More info here.

VO Buzz Weekly’s Chuck D and Stacy J spend their latest episode chatting with the legendary Joe Cipriano, one of our favorite VO people in the world. The Cip talks about his journey from radio guy to the top of the Promo heap, and waxes eloquently on the influence of Don Lafontaine, the most beloved guy in voiceover history. There’s a lot of background on the DLF Voice Over Lab at SAG, which is hosting a series of seminars over the next few weeks featuring some of the Best in the Biz. We’re visiting LA the week of the Marketing, Demos & Representation panel on March 20, and plan to make that scene like Lorne Greene. (That’s a thing, right?) .

As enjoyable as Part 1 of the CipChat was, we’re even more eager to see Part 2 next week -- in which Joe takes the VO Buzzers on a tour of his secret backyard VO fort. Don’t miss “Inside the Clubhouse” -- on the next VO Buzz Weekly!