SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Vio boardroom, and I'm excited because I haven't been able to catch up with our next guest in quite a long time. He's a 35-year veteran voice actor. He's a demo producer and engineer who's trained voice actors through Universal Talent since 2006, almost before the Internet. Today he's showing us how a pro demo is created, which mistakes make uh even a polished demo work against you, and how to ensure that your next demo is built around your abilities, your interests, and most importantly, your career goals. Please welcome to the VO boardroom, our next VO board member, the unflappable Terry Daniel.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

How are you, man? I am so honored to be a VO board member. This this sure beats being a church board member. We do have a lot more fun here, I will say. Oh, yeah, yeah, we do. And you said 35 years. I thought you were going to say uh Terry just turned 35, and I was like, oh, I'm what a great compliment. Feels like it, doesn't it? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Mentally Let's start. It's good to have you, Terry. Let's start with this big question. What should a pro-level demo actually do for a voice actor's career?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Well, it's not only if you want to get on, we'll start with talent agencies because it's always a popular topic. It's really the only way to get on a really good roster. Um pay to put there's pay-to-play audition sites that advertise themselves as agencies, but they're not really talent agencies. They just, you know, they want your annual money. So you can get away with kind of putting together, you know, a sloppy demo on your own and signing up for one of their sites. But if you really want to book work and you want to get on with, you know, if you want to do work for the bigger brands and get on some of these bigger agency rosters, you really need a pro demo that consists of about six clips showcasing your range, versatility, and, you know, the the more variety the better because your booking percentage goes up and agents salivate over demos like that. Because if you can do more than one kind of read, you know, they get 10 to 15% commission on what you book. So they're going to bring you onto their roster because you can book a lot more than just that authentic coffee commercial, you know?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

And when you say six clips, you're talking uh by default about a commercial demo, yeah?

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yeah, yeah. Mainly for a commercial. All demos are run a little bit differently. Um agents used to be a little bit more particular on that 60-second demo mark. But I I'm really good friends with a couple of the gals at Atlas, and they don't care if it goes to a minute 20, you know, so every agent's gonna be a little bit different. Um, you know, first second clip needs to be you need to knock that out of the park. Sometimes they won't even get to the third or fourth clip. But when I do demos, I I try to what I do is I put together a longer version of a commercial demo, something that the talent can put on their website. You know, then clients can hear the whole thing and who cares how long it is. But then I'll send them like a 60-second agency version. So that way, you know, they get some attention from some agency rosters. Well, we noticed your demo on your website's a little long. Oh, guess what? I've got a 60-second version. Director's cut. Yes, it is the director's cut. Makes it a lot easier just to give them two, because then, you know, I don't have to go back and do editing once they And it's a good problem to have. I love hearing, hey, this agent loves me, but your demo's too long. We got to cut it back a little bit. So I actually I really like hearing it. That means that the agent really loved the demo and the talent.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

So how do I know I'm a voice actor? I've you know, got a demo. How do I know when it's really when I need to redo my demo or whether I'm just falling in love with something that's brand new and shiny and I want to feed that fixed?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Well, if you got that clip on your demo that talks about the 1994 Audi, that's not a very good sign. Or if you have that Toys R Us clip, probably want to redo that demo. Toys R Us is no longer in business, and the Audi is already on to 2027 for their new model. So whether, even if you're killing it on the demo, you know, you don't want outdated copy on your demo and outdated background music. You know, if you got a lot of synthesizers, you know, some of those early some of that early era music matched like the 80s, you know, you can hear the a lot of keyboards in licensed production music. You know, they've gone to more of like an acoustic guitar thing. They just they sound more updated now, especially the newer stuff.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

So, you know, in 2026, seven, eight, moving forward, it's probably time to take off in these unprecedented times.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Oh man, yeah. Let's let's get away get away from the COVID message. You know, the COVID reads. It was nice. I mean, we all kind of uh took advantage a little bit of that genre for a while while we could. But yeah, we we don't want to we don't want to put those uh that kind of vibe on a commercial demo anymore. Let's move on to something a little more energetic.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Aaron Powell Let's flip the coin for a minute. What do I need to have in place before I do that professional demo?

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Well, if you're brand new, you don't really know what you're good at yet. Um sometimes you're in denial of what you're good at. It's just it's kind of a hot mess inside your head because you you might think you're great at characters and you're not great at characters. You might be somebody who just wants to do straightforward corporate or industrial narration with kind of a medical swing to it, and then suddenly you work with us and you know, three months later you're doing animation because you had a talent, you know, hidden inside you for so long and you didn't release it due to your own insecurities or everybody told you you sucked, or whatever, you just weren't good at a certain kind of thing. When we coach our students, and I know you're like this too, Paul, I like to kind of throw the darts and see where they land, especially when we just don't know what they're good at and what they're not good at. So, you know, we we do the a lot of script performance, tons of different character commercial narration scripts. So getting back to your question, though, always a good idea to get the coaching up front. I mean, any recording studio will take your money. Oh yeah, we got some scripts lying around. Why don't you come in here, give us our hourly fee, and uh we can do a demo. God bless them, they're all really talented audio engineers, but they don't do, you know, they don't know anything about voice acting directing. You know, they might give you a little bit of feedback and think they know a little something about it, but they really don't. They're not it's you need a real voiceover coach to direct that session, and it's good to do, you know, more than a handful of sessions before you do the demo. I mean, if it's something where you had some experience in the past and then you went into another profession for 10, 15 years, you might just need a refresher before your demo. But we talk about all of that with our students before we even get started.

unknown 7:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

You talked about see where the darts land in this idea of I I feel like it's almost a three-legged stool, right? There's what somebody's good at, there's what they have a passion or an interest for, and then there's, you know, kind of what other other people think that they're good at, right? Like that power, passion, and in play sort of idea. How do you balance that as a coach? How do you kind of figure out what this person's really going to excel in?

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Well, just by practicing all kinds of different scripts, and sometimes people can be very stubborn at first of what they want to go into. I mean, who doesn't want to get a video game character role, right? But, you know, I have eight out of ten people email me and say, Oh, I'm great at accents. I can do characters. Um, I hate to break it to you, but you can't. And your accents are not believable. And that's not really what people are hiring for these days anyway. So we try to get, or you know, I get the email, I can do a hundred impressions. You've probably got that email before, I'm sure, Paul. Yep. Um, hey, I I I can do lots of impressions. That's great if you're up on stage and doing some stand-up. But that's not really going to do you. We want you to excel at your own characters. So it's uh interesting when we work with character development, because I I do a lot of character demos as well. Well uh their the talent's homework assignment will be to go and create their own characters. You know, we'll we'll meet and have sessions with them, but then their homework assignment, go, I want you to invent your own characters. And then we'll come back, we'll practice them, we'll write the scripts for them. That's a really good process for character work. We want all the characters to be original. You know, we don't want the old cliche, you know, video game character that's on every demo. Because, you know, video games these days, they're all very authentic characters for people like you and I, or your nephew or niece. I mean, they're real people. It's not always the big superhero or the dark villain or the wizard. Now, granted, I love putting those characters on character demos because they're a lot of fun, but you gotta get those real characters in there as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

What should a uh what should a talent, especially I think a newer talent that maybe is doing their first, second, maybe even third demo, what should they be looking for in a demo producer?

SPEAKER_00 10:00

I think somebody who now it's easy to to to get one or the other, but somebody that has been a voice actor for a long time, and also somebody that has been an audio engineer for a long time, you need to find somebody who can do both of those things. Because if you're just gonna go with an audio engineer, the demo's gonna sound great, but again, you're not really getting that direction from somebody who has experience booking commercials, characters, narrations. If you can find that demo producer that's got experience in both fields, that's really the way to go. And then again, somebody who understands the industry can give you some good tutelage on the marketing end of it. That helps. But that's why I always appreciate what you do, because I just don't think there's enough out there about marketing. There still isn't.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

That's what we try to do uh here here at the VO Pro and certainly at the VO boardroom. Uh let me sort of flip the script. Uh, you know, we talked about we just talked about how a voice actor can vet a demo producer. From your perspective, as a demo producer, what are the responsible questions that you ask or uh that a responsible demo producer should ask of the talent as they're vetting?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Well, honestly, uh if we're if we're talking about just audio quality, then we can talk about the other stuff too. But uh it's always important to get the specs of what they're recording from. If you can't, if you don't sound up to par, we'll book you in a recording studio in your area. I'd rather do it that way. Um But most of the time our our students, you know, they s you know, they s some of them start from scratch, but they do some coaching and then they build up to their recording studio. So audio quality is everything to me. I mean, engineering's really my love language. I love to coach, I love to do all these other things, market whatnot, my own VO work, but really audio engineering is is my love language. So I want to make sure that their audio is A1 before we start putting together a demo. And of course the reads need to be there. If you sound like you're just picking up the script for the first time, that's not gonna work either, and it's not gonna matter how good your audio sounds.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

You mentioned uh a couple of times writing scripts. How do you do that in a way for each particular student? Because everybody's at a different, you know, trajectory when they come to you. How do you take all that and go, okay, I need to write scripts that are real and believable for person X?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yes. And what we do is um I try to write scripts uh based on brands that they're really into or brands that they can see themselves voicing, but it really it's about their personality too. I take a lot of their hobbies and interests and I create scripts out of them. Because you want to be recording and reading about stuff that you're really into. Your performance is going to be stronger because of it. And it represents who you are. I mean, if you're not into fishing and hunting, you're probably not gonna have a lot of those clips on your demo, really. Um if you're super into politics, um we might go down the path of doing a political demo. But all of, yeah, all of our scripts are 100% original. They're tailored to our talents' interest, and then we never use them again on another talent. We don't uh we don't recycle them for the next talent that comes along.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

You mentioned that uh audio engineering, that part of the demo is your is your love language. How do you balance that with the goal of the demo, which ostensibly, I would think, would be to showcase the actor and not overpower the performance with the audio.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Right, exactly. And sometimes the quality of the audio gets a little does come I've heard demos where it does compensate for the lack of talent. Commercial demos that sound like these radio imaging demos and they're just huge. I'm like, uh, that's not really what a TV spot sounds like. So um if this uh I I think this answers your question, I really try to make it about the performance and not so much about the producer. You know, I'm not, I don't, I don't build up the commercial demo to it's it's not really about me. I'm like, oh my God, can't you tell what a super audio engineer I am? Listen to what I did to this person's demo. Yes, I want it to sound super pro, and there's a lot of things that I do to it, but in the end, it's going to be all about the talent and not about me, the demo producer. And I think that's where some people go wrong.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

So let's kind of back up for a minute and talk about, uh, especially for the newer folks that may be uh tuning into the VO boardroom and they they're just kind of getting their feet wet. What are the biggest mistakes that people make around the idea of a demo and certainly a pro demo?

SPEAKER_00 15:15

I think trying to save money and do it themselves. I mean, I know it's hard. It's it's not fun paying for coaching and demos. We'd rather pay for the gear. It's so much more fun to spend money on stuff like this. The MK four sixteen mic, you know, but really in the end, you know, it's the skills and the demo that's going to not only book you work, but get you on the talent agency roster. And there's just too many people that fall flat on their face when they buy a USB mic, plug it into their computer, and they try to engineer their own demo. The sound is bad, the reads are bad, the scripts are bad because you know, a lot of times they take from the Edge Studio Library practice script page. We've all been there. I don't care if you're using those scripts for coaching, but they don't belong on anybody's demo. And you know what? Every talent agent in this country knows every single script in the Edge Studio Library script page. You can't you can't get it past, oh, there's that Lego script. You know, we all know the Lego script. We've all practiced it because they do that thing on there where you can send in your read or whatever if they're still even doing that, which is which is great, but we don't want to use those types of scripts on a demo. But the main thing, Paul, is people, you know, they they try to you know they don't want to spend the money, so they try to do the demo themselves, and it's really, really awful. And, you know, sometimes it sounds like a cliche, but many times you do get one chance to make an impression, and you're gonna piss off a lot of agents when you send those self-produced demos, agents that may not give you another chance later on.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Let's talk about the recording session specifically of the demo process. When you're directing a talent in a recording session, specifically for a demo, what are you listening for?

SPEAKER_00 17:06

I am well, here's a we it's kind of two steps. First, we'll do kind of an audio assessment session where we'll check noise floors and all this kind of stuff to make sure there's no crackling or interference or grounding issues in their recording. And we won't even we won't necessarily care about the performances at that point because we're just focused on the sound of their room. And then the second session, if everything goes well and they pass, you know, Terry's white glove test, then we work on the scripts to make sure that those performances sound real and the characters are fun if they're doing a character demo. So there's a lot of there's a lot of important coaching sessions and steps that kind of lead up to it. But what I really like when people are able to record from home, and let's be honest, most of the people we work with are able to work from home. I love it because sometimes I miss stuff in the session so that when I'm a couple days later, when I'm producing the demo, I'm going, oh man, I got I gotta have this person redo this line or redo this paragraph. And it's so easy to do revisions when you don't have to book the studio again just to do a bunch of retakes. And if they're already especially if they're already working from home, we can get those revisions done quickly. I like the back and forth. It's just it's so much quicker. It works, it's smoother for both parties.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

It's an angle I hadn't thought of, and that makes a lot of sense. Um So I uh let's say I am a newer talent and I get my first demo back, and I'm listening to it for the first, second, maybe even tenth time. How do I know if it's any damn good?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Well, if you're getting rejected by every talent, first of all, we'll talk about the rejection of agents first if we can. If you're getting rejected from an agent, it doesn't mean you suck, usually. Um sometimes it does, but a lot of times they have a voice that sounds like yours, and they just can't really you're not marketable because somebody else sounds like Paul Schmidt or Terry Daniel. So I always tell my talents, I'm like, you know what, it's not the it's not Armageddon because you get turned away from an agent. Because, you know, you can also get clients on your own. 80% of my annual income is by working by way of direct clients. My agency billing has become, you know, my vacation money. You know, my mortgage money is working with clients direct, right? Um but I will usually I try really, really hard, maybe harder than I used to ten years ago, to not even deliver the demo back to the talent until I know it's great. But that's not always gonna mean that some agent in New York is gonna think it's great. But you know, we revisions come with the price of the demo. We can always redo it or make adjustments here and there. You know, if you're playing it for a hundred agents and all 100 agents think it's awful, well then I have to look in the mirror on that one. That means we either didn't prepare the talent enough, or maybe I rushed through the production, and I don't rush through anything because Paul, as you know, it takes me forever to get back to somebody. Um and it takes a long time, honestly, it takes a while to get your demo back. So I'm not the demo producer that's gonna, you know, turn it around in 24 hours. You know, I work on like one if I have a really open week, I'll try to work on like one clip a day, you know, one script. So, and then then I get really meticulous when it comes to mastering, and it's really it's very painful on my end because that's where I really become the perfectionist, because I'm always listening for stuff, and I'm like, well, you know what, that that take with that little bit of music, that sound effect, you know, it's not ducking under the vocal enough. You know, that reverb is awful. It's taking over the entire project and bleeding into the next clip. You know, there's always stuff like that that can go wrong. And and I learned a lot of this when I started music mixing as well for bands and musicians, which of course I that's another part of my love language. So I get my demo back.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yes. How do I what the hell, Terry, do I actually do with the thing to make sure that it produces for my business, that I'm getting auditions, that I'm getting opportunities?

SPEAKER_00 21:31

You know what? You know why that's a great question? It's a great question all by itself, but it's even a better question because these people that are getting really good demos out there, why the hell don't they know what to do with it? That that would be my question. Did they just go to a demo producer that doesn't know what to do with the demo? It's always very bewildering. Um there's a lot of training companies that do just a fantastic job, and this isn't like a rub on anybody, but I get at least one email every couple of days from somebody who actually has a really good demo and they have no idea what to do next. So I don't know why they're not again, I think we talked about this at the beginning, or maybe before we started recording. I just don't think people are spending enough time on marketing in a lot of these coaching programs like you. I mean, that's what you excel at, Paul. Um, but there's not enough of it out there because we're getting emails from people that that have spent a lot of money, a lot of money, more than what I charge for a demo. And it's exceptional, but they have no idea what the hell to do now. They don't know where to send it, how to send it. They don't know how to go after a client direct. They have no idea what to do next. And that's to me, that's just kind of sad. And it's no fault of their own. Nobody told them what to do.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

It's always fun chatting with you. Um I I appreciate your generosity towards our audience. You've actually got uh uh an well, uh kind of a freebie uh on how to break down scripts for our audience.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Yeah, it's it's kind of a step-by-step script breakdown PDF uh with lots of exercises on it. You know, how to how to look at the script, interpret the script, and then there's some examples on how many different ways you can perform it and still be right. Um, a lot of really good, I talk about lead-ins, which is always something I learned way back in the theater days of my life in the 90s.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Terry Daniel, yes, demo producer extraordinaire, coach extraordinaire UVT coaching. Where can they find UVT online, Terry?

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Uh, you can just go to uvtcoaching.com. There's a lot of helpful information, uvtcoaching.com.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Fantastic. Terry Daniel, it is always a pleasure, man. Thanks so much for dropping by the VO boardroom.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Thank you. And I'll be rooting for your Baltimore Ravens only if you root for my Fairweather, Minnesota Vikings, where we're, of course, we're gonna underachieve, but nobody wants to hear about that right now, Paul. We'll we'll talk about that behind the curtain. I will try to keep it purple teams only.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Purple rain, Terry. Purple rain.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Yes, purple rain, exactly. Paul, thanks again so much for it. Always a pleasure, man.