Month: June 2015

Vocal Warmup Techniques For Audiobook Narrators

You have to warm up your voice. Do not skip it! I warm up for at least 30 minutes on narration days. I start with moving the body: head and shoulder rolls, wrist and arm circles (I gesture a lot with fiction), side bends and reaches that get the rib cage moving. I’ll address breathing exercises in a future blog post, but they are a critical part of the warm up process.

From there, I might move on to lip trills and tongue trills (at the roof of the mouth, then with the tip of the tongue at the teeth, then again with the tongue sticking out). Add humming to those trill drills. Remove your mask by moving every muscle in the face, blow out your cheeks, trace your teeth with your tongue, gargle, lift and stretch the soft palate, strike a lion face (From yoga’s lion pose. I highly recommend starting a yoga practice and learning Alexander Technique; these have been crucial tools of mine for work and play for the past twenty years. Will write about the benefits of both in future posts as well).

After trills and face exercises, I might move through the vowels seamlessly; then again with various inflections (Statement. Question? Adamant question?! Demand!). Then I might move to consonants, listening to projection points for each. To keep the humors going, I like to make up tongue twisters on the fly using names of friends. Here are a few:

Bob bid Bilbo Baggins: Build the badlands!

Quit quick kisses, Costa. Kick quick kiss quips!

Mikhael must murmur misfits. Mantic Matt must murder mold. Meal milk meek meat.

Narrow noodles neurally nauseate Nikki. Nikki needed unique new innumerable noodles.

Punk Patrick probably purposely punctuated pit-pat-polly-pack.

Suzie said she’d surely stay sleeping, slumbering on the sloping slide of somnambulistic sleep.

My tongue twisters change according to need. One of the most important things I do is to find and work on my weaknesses. I copy and paste sentences I stumble over into a list. Here’s one from last week:

Daniel was feeling agitated that the detective kept ignoring his questions.

I practice that list of stumblers to identify transitions that are tricky for me, working those sound transitions into tongue twister exercises or drills until they are no longer a problem. “That the detective” made it into my list of drills for agility, keeping the tip of the tongue forward behind the two front teeth. Some twisters stick around; for years I have used this odd little gem to correct my sibilance issues: The wrists, they twist like cysts in the mist. I’d just needed to move my “s” sounds back a bit – though that little insight took time to master. Ironing out weaknesses is an important exercise for me in maintaining a sharp reading pace during hours of cold reading audiobooks. It would be easier to slow down to read ahead but I personally can’t listen to slow audiobook reads. If I can think thoughts in between a narrator’s words, then the read is too slow.

On to relaxing the throat. I try to keep a very open and relaxed throat during a session (insert joke here). This is very similar to the space in the back of the throat created when singing opera or using ujjayi breath in yoga. It is the “ha” position often described as holding an egg in the back of the mouth or fogging up a mirror. There are words you can drill with to work on the position of an open throat for the sake of practice. I make up my own amusing drills to keep the humors going: THE THICK FAT BAT SHAT DARK DRAB CRAP. HA, HA, HA. Say this five times: THE THICK FAT BAT SHAT DARK DRAB CRAP, HA, HA, HA.

If that doesn’t make you smile then I cannot help you. Try Googling “humorless drills.”

Lastly, I always warm up character voices. Locking in and shifting voices is a strong point of mine and there’s a lot to say about it on another day. I need to get back to work.

Warmly, Lesley Ann Fogle

p.s. I haven’t been on Twitter long and would like to connect with people who might be interested in this topic or have things to say that might help unlock more insights into the voice: @LesleyAnnFogle

And if your name starts with an X or Z, I’ll write you a twister.

Lesley Ann Fogle is a Narrator, Voice Artist, and Audio Designer. Visit her website at www.hearnoevil.us

June 25, 2015
My audiobooks are on the inside cover of Publisher’s Weekly!

It’s Audiobook Month and this is the inside front cover of the June 2015 issue of Publisher’s Weekly.

Publisher’s Weekly inside cover featuring Audio Realms and Samhain Publishing

Three of these are my books! Well, not my books, but I became very close to them during the narration process for Audio Realms. They are the brain children of several of the talented horror writers at Samhain Publishing: Stillwater by Maynard Sims, Doppelgänger by Sean Munger, and Boomtown by Glenn Rolfe. I’ll send out some notes and tweets and spasms as each is released. In the meantime, here are some sneak peek snippets of each:

Stillwater by Maynard Sims, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date July 2015

A modern ghost story.

Life was good for Beth, once. Now a car crash has left her confined to a wheelchair. To help her recuperate and rebuild her life, she’s leased Stillwater, a house with a lake in the countryside. But her dreams of peace and quiet are thwarted when she realizes she’s not alone. A girl who once lived at Stillwater—until she drowned in the lake—has never left, and she does not seem pleased by Beth’s presence. Beth sets out to solve the mystery of Stillwater. But can she find a strength she doesn’t know she possesses as she fights the fury of the dead girl, and tries to establish herself as the true mistress and keeper of the Stillwater house and lake?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/198635129″]
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Doppelgänger by Sean Munger, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date July 2015

The house of madness!

Transplanted from her native Sweden to the drawing rooms and gas-lit parlors of Gilded Age New York, Anine Atherton will want for nothing in the lavish row house her rich new husband bought for her. But Anine’s house doesn’t seem to like people. The caretaker hangs himself in the entryway. The maid drops dead her first day on the job. Anine herself is becoming anxious and terrified, and not just because of the ghostly laughter she hears in the middle of the night. Her gentle, charming husband is slowly turning into a domineering brute. And whatever shadowy entity lives in her house, it can read Anine’s mind and use her darkest secrets against her. The last woman to live in the house went insane. Will Anine be next in line?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/207513345″]
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Boomtown by Glenn Rolfe, Samhain Publishing, Audio Realms Publishing, Narrated by Lesley Ann Fogle, Audiobook Release Date June 2015

Terror from below!

In the summer of 1979, Eckert, Wisconsin, was the sight of the most unique UFO encounter in history. A young couple observed a saucer-like aircraft hovering over Hollers Hill. A blue beam blasted down from the center of the craft into the hill and caused the ground to rumble for miles.

Now, thirty years later, Eckert is experiencing nightly rumbles that stir up wild rumors and garner outside attention. The earthly tremors are being blamed on everything from earthquakes to underground earth dwellers. Two pre-teens discover a pipe out behind Packard’s Flea Market uprooted by the “booms” and come into contact with the powerful ooze bubbling from within. What begins as curiosity will end in an afternoon of unbridled terror for the entire town.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/209861194″]

June 11, 2015
New Website!

Welcome to my new website! Special thanks to the talented Aaron Yeagle of Author Platform Guru for his, well, guru skills. And thanks to Constantine Hondroulis for his management skills.

Highlights this week include wearing scrubs for a medical training shoot, eyeing the finish line on my current audiobook, and making it through week three of the plank challenge.

The medical training videos were shot here in Columbus on multiple Red cameras by owner/operators Lance Meaux and Chris Hagan (DP). They both do beautiful work and are a lot of fun on the set. Worked with Chris Carson (AC, PA) for the first time and was very impressed by how he made himself indispensable on the set and did so with relaxed ease. I was field mixer, using the Sound Devices 664 mixer/recorder: great sounding pres, ample routing options, and an internal recorder that can be set to record polyphonic WAV files to CF and SD cards. I love that option because for 50 camera takes, each involving 6 channels (5 lavs and a backup boom), you have 50 WAV files that each contain 6 tracks when imported into ProTools or Final Cut. You don’t have to handle 300 tracks. The editor can solo say the boom track as scratch, make the other 5 tracks inactive, and group/lock those 6 tracks per take for the edit. Then your post engineer knows everything there is to work with when they get the OMF back. I’ll blog about using all of the tracks to cut the best final audio when we get to the post-production stage of that project. This is where you want a post audio engineer with experienced ears as you can’t just set up an EQ on a channel and expect that to be the right filter on a moving target. I’m sure this process sounds obvious to my audio engineer friends, but I think video folk will get something out of it. To my voice talent friends, the producer hooked me UP on that shoot and I will also be narrating the medical training videos!

I am two chapters away from finishing the narration for Windwood Farm (Taryn’s Camera, Book 1) by Rebecca Howard-Patrick. The series focuses on Taryn Magill, an artist/photographer who uses her oil-painting skills and her degrees in Art and Historical Preservation to create portraits of grand buildings as they would have been when they were created, long before they fell into disrepair. Further, Taryn uses determination and her burgeoning psychic abilities along with her camera’s burgeoning ability to develop actual pictures of the past to solve the mysteries behind the paranormal encounters she experiences while on the job. I love this book. It ties into many things I value: historic preservation, the paranormal, the American gothic vibe. My first engineering experiences in my teens involved gathering EVP recordings…this was in the late 80s, pre-internet, before I could discover what the masses knew about EVP. Ok, and I love historic houses. My husband and I painstakingly restored our Craftsman-style house to life in Columbus’ first, historic neighborhood. We geek out on the researching the history and treat our house like family. In other words, I love the subject; and when I looked over the script for Windwood Farm and read about Taryn’s connection and even conversation with these grand old inanimate objects, I was hooked. Taryn herself gets so immersed in her work that she can come off as aloof and she has a healthy sense of sarcasm to boot.

Finally, the plank challenge. See this?

Rug burn. I’ve been taking my yoga and core classes through the plank challenge for the past few weeks. This week we got up to the five 35 second sets of walking planks which I’ve also seen called alternating hand planks…the ones where you go back and forth from a high pushup to a forearm plank. I feel like I could pop on a crazy German guard bra right now and it would feel comforting. Everything from my neck to lower rib cage hurts; the pain goes away for a second then picks back up from belly button to hip joint. The stuff below that feels great and so does my head. I don’t know about Week 4 because it involves Spiderman kookery. I’m also the only one that got rug burn.

June 8, 2015