VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[colinsz1]

I don't know whether this is a rookie question or not, but I've always wondered why are professional recording studios so expensive much when it's known that a much much cheaper home studio can produce just as good sound? Is there something that much better about the big recoding studios?

[Philip Banks]

In a home studio is a VO able to lay and mix up to 96 tracks in Dolby Atmos, preview HD, 4k or 3D images, host 5 execs from an ad agency catering to their every need, do an ensemble VO piece with 7 VO people working together?

I have a box with a mic and ways of people recording me or recording myself. The stuff I have is too much for an over compressed sh*t local radio ad but it is enough for a movie trailer played in a cinema with speakers the size of a London double decker bus.

Not a daft question, like most of us, you don't know what you don't know and there's nothing wrong with that.

Most VO home studios are cheap yet still manage to price themselves out of the market

[vkuehn]

A few people did have home studios "back in the day" but the home studio as we know it was not available in the past. If you have ever sat in the tube-equipment filled room of a small radio station in August in the rice country of Eastern Arkansas, you know why we didn't all run home and build our own studio back then.

When your market is national advertising agencies you often need the palatial studio to host the "committee" of people involved in the talent-selection and creative process.

Our traditions in the voice market developed before there was a market for book narration, e-learning, corporate instruction videos and computerized telephone answering decision trees.

Before there was an Internet, how did a voice talent working from home in North Carolina or Nebraska or the mountains of Colorado deliver auditions and product to the market place?

Real estate agents, insurance sales people, and other lines of business will tell you that not everyone is cut out to work from a one-person office, either at home or in a rented commercial building. Some of us need "community" when we work. I would suggest to you that some really great voice talent working from home studios today.... would not be doing that function today if they had not worked and nurtured in the 'community' that exists in the big commercial studio back when they were beginning.

And then there is geography and zoning. My daughter began her architecture career in NYC. I saw first-hand some of the challenges of even a minor "remodel" in The City. Lots of luck trying to affordably do the kind of minor construction in The City that I do routinely here in the south end of Appalachia. (My 15 year old truck can practically drive itself down to Lowes and Home Depot. )

If you are doing radio commercials, then the sound of 'a very small room' lets you fit in with all the other recorded voice on radio. Most of it was done in a small room. When you look at the variety of markets for voice today, some of them may hunger for the sound that only a larger room can support.

[Bish]

"Professional Recording Studios" need to cater for all eventualities... that may be a large number of people in front of or behind the glass. They have to have an armoury of different tools to produce what is needed from multiple and diverse sources... they also have a whole bunch of hardware (compressors, exciters, gates, whathaveyou) that is possibly legacy equipment, but still in demand by clients and the engineers/producers themselves (not everyone uses software plug-ins). There will also be admin offices, reception, staff, rent and all those other good things that need paying for. It's a business with a lot of overhead. This equates to "expensive"... or, to be more accurate... "relatively expensive".

Usually, a home studio is a one-trick pony. It's there to record one person (you) and the tools needed are specific to the job. Unless you're a gear-head, one good mic*, one good preamp*, and a well-treated space for you to work in. The rent is usually covered by your overall housing cost, the administration is you, even the kitchen and bathroom are part of the existing (i.e. free) environment. Remember, even 1,000 sq.ft. in a major metropolitan center can be a considerable cost.

And don't forget that it's not just about the sound. It's often about the creative process and human interaction. If you are self-directing or the client wants a remote-directed session, then a well tuned home studio is ideal... but there's nothing like being in-studio with an engineer and producer/director... and some clients won't work any other way.

* OK, "one" is an oversimplification, but you see what I mean.
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
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[Scott Pollak]

I think it's a very good question and one that I haven't really seen come up on v/o forums much, if at all.

I wonder, though, how most professional studios keep their doors open anymore. I have a friend who has owned his own studio in Atlanta for 30 or so years, and I KNOW he's struggling to stay in business. In the 90's, if you were a voice talent, you went into such studios to do your work. And quite often, even just to AUDITION. But all that work has gone away for the big studios and let's face it, even recording musical groups is declining for most of them as many groups record in their own 'studio' in their basement or garage. I'm afraid the professional studio may be heading down the path of the drive-in movie theater. And yes, there are still a handful of drive-ins left, as there will always be a handful of professional studios around, but they are getting scarcer. I would imagine the only ones making real money are in major production hubs like L.A. and NY where a lot of animation and similar types of recording is going on.
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Scott R. Pollak
Clients include Pandora, NPR Atlanta, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Humana, Publix, UPS, AT&T, HP, Xerox and more.

www.voicebyscott.com

[georgethetech]

It is refreshing to see a new question once in a while, even if it is O.T.
Remember that commercial studios need to look impressive to help justify the billing rate, as well. The vast majority of the legacy gear in the racks are unused "rack fillers", with plugins taking over.
I'm concerned that some major studios have my photo on a dart board in the back, since my M.O. has been enabling the VO to record from home professionally for the last 10 years or so. I know that movement has hurt commercial recording studio business. Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit, but the thought has crossed my mind.
I for one am very glad I didn't start my own studio back in Philadelphia and was coerced to stay mobile and head out to Los Angeles. I would have likely been in very big trouble. Who the hell can survive billing at $25/hr? At least that's the prevailing rate in the music world. Whereas running an ISDN equipped studio in LA is a far more profitable venture.
And once Source Element's latest wave of tools goes fully online, the ability to have talent(s), engineer(s), and client(s) in different cities easily will make the big rooms even less important.
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[Eddie Eagle]

Most pro studios cater to music and albums and tv. The equipment and costs are easily justified when recording a band that makes hit records.

[vkuehn]

[Lee Gordon]

To be fair, the majority of home studios are little more than the equivalent of the tiny booth with the microphone in it at the big studio that you go into to record your VO. And while many of us are capable of recording the voice(s), and mixing in the music and SFX, many are not. Presumably, the studios with the fancy gear also have some highly skilled folks twiddling the dials. The client isn't paying for the stuff; the client is paying for the expertise.
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Lee Gordon, O.A.V.
Voice President of the United States
www.leegordonproductions.com
Twitter: @LeeGordonVoice

[Philip Banks]

My most recent "you have to be there" session took place at the studio responsible for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOnyz3UcEXE

It features the voices of Dame Helen Mirren, Kate Winslett, Rupert Graves and Martin Freeman who never once mentioned P2P, the fact that the mic/pre combination was not right for their voices, they didn't blog about networking the guy in the car park and at no point was the session stopped because the guy who rents the condo across the street was thinking noisily about using his leaf blower