0613 – How ‘Control Room Characters’ May Shape Your Voice

2022.09.05 - 0613 – How ‘Control Room Characters’ May Shape Your Voice

The Control Room (AKA: ‘gallery’, ‘production area’, ‘ops’ [operations area], or simply ‘studio’!)

While you are alone in the studio, other people will be in the area just outside, where the recording actually happens.

There could be several people in here, even eight or ten people in an agency studio situation. Maybe a creative director, a creative writer or two, clients, an account manager, a rep from the marketing department, an engineer or two, maybe the scriptwriter. Someone else because “it sounds like fun”, a trainee perhaps. There should be someone who is in control of the recording and co-ordinates feedback to give you, so you are not party to lots of different ‘direction suggestions’ from everyone. Imagine the mayhem if they all pitch in with their thoughts: too many people telling you too many things.

Keep a note of who you are introduced to, their name and position. Then you can talk to them by name, and is more friendly and builds a relationship (“So, Brian, is that the kind of tone you had in mind…?”)

Lots of suggestions from several stakeholders can be quite a challenge to cope with. To be clear, it shouldn’t be a problem with the requests changing over the course of the recording (“Can you try it a bit slower now, please?” or “I know we said we wanted that line ‘thrown away’ but can we just try it, with more of a punch?”) as they explore options and you become a sounding board for their ideas. But what you don’t want is constant disagreement between various people… of what they want right now.

Set some polite parameters at the start “So I think we’ve put aside an hour for this haven’t we? Do you think that’s OK…?” . I wouldn’t refuse to utter a single word when the 60 minutes is up, but be careful your goodwill (“just one more take…”) or voice are not taken advantage of. If there’s going to be another 20- or 30-minutes work and you can fit it in, that’s probably fine (on the same or higher rate), but you should be able to take a 15minute voice-break first. Think that might come over as a bit ‘precious’? Then “So I think we’ve put aside an hour for this haven’t we? Do you think that’s OK…? I can stay for a bit longer if you need me to, but with all this water, I’ll probably need a bathroom break at about X o’clock…” 

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