Rob B is a respected audio engineer and demo producer from England in the UK. He's also one half of BEE along with his lovely wife, Helen. And you may know them from their incredibly successful podcast, The Voice Over Social. I had a chance to sit down with Rob recently and here's how that conversation went. And joining us live from the UK is the man himself, Rob B. Rob, it's great to see you, man. Hello. Hello Paul, thank you very much for having me on. It's fabulous. Yes, it's good to speak to you again. Yep. I met you and your lovely wife, Helen. It's been quite a while now. was at uh One Voice Dallas in 2024. It wasn't And we got on famously until all hours of the morning. uh The jet lag didn't do us any favors. Yeah. So we, uh, you know, we've been, we've been talking about having you on the podcast ever since. So thank you uh for doing this. One of the reasons I'm enamored and intrigued by you guys is a, you're a married couple that works together. I don't know how you survived that. kind of want to dig into that. your business is called BEE, which is of course a play on your last name, but I love how you position what you do for voice actors. and it's so simple. You're the herd side and Helen is the scene side. So you work with audio tech, uh voiceover demo reels, uh and Helen is on the marketing side. She's, know, websites and marketing and what have you. And I think that's a great division of labor. uh Was that intentional or was that just a natural outcropping of your respective skill sets? Definitely the latter. mean, we've both, you know, long careers in doing what we do. I started, well, I trained as an audio engineer back in the late nineties. And my first ever professional gig was as a voiceover production, which I was doing for 10 years before I started kind of doing what I'm doing now. Helen was at university in the late nineties doing graphic design. And she worked around various different agencies and charities and things like that around Manchester for. Well, since 2000, when she graduated and it was 2018 when we actually brought our kind of businesses together. was sole trading since 2012, she since 2014 and it was 2018 when we actually combined forces and formed BEE, which to be honest, initially was basically kind of as more or less a number, a company for our two individual businesses. But Helen has this habit of not letting me do anything fun by myself. And so when she discovered how lovely voiceover people are, she wanted some. So she started working and now works exclusively with voiceovers, working on the websites and branding and all the rest of it. Whereas, you know, previous to that, she was working in marketing agencies and freelancing around Manchester in various different design agency offices. Very good. ah We'll focus today since you do get to do one fun thing by yourself and that is this podcast. So thank you for doing that. ah So in terms of audio tech and demo reels and what have you, we'll focus on that today. One of the biggest questions, and I don't know if I got to ask you this in Dallas or not, but ah I've always been intrigued by the difference between the way that we do things in the US and the way things are done. in the UK. And one example of that is, I think we book much more uh through auditions here in the US than in the UK. A, is that still true? Is it changing? And what do you think the reason for that is? Because my own opinion is, if I can read a financial services spot, I can probably read another spot in a related category, right? I feel like in America, we almost overdo the custom audition. What are your thoughts on that? ah I kind of agree with that. think there is a big difference in the markets in the UK and the US. Certainly if you just look through the One Voice Awards, the number of different demo categories there are in the US. In the UK, you've got male demo, female demo, and that's it. Whereas in the US, you've got all sorts of different automotive, best automotive, best political, best everything, best medical, best... Whatever. Yeah. So I think the American market is a lot more kind of niched that way, whether you would consider it overdone or not, or whether that's just what the market forces are demanding of the voiceover industry. You know, pick your side. So yeah, I think the UK market does work quite a lot now on auditions, particularly for the P2P sites. um But apart from that, the voiceovers are also kind of marketing themselves and getting their own work approaching clients directly, as I'm sure they do in the US as well, maybe to a lesser degree. don't know. But yeah, finding the work themselves and using their half a dozen demos or however many they've got, depending on how many different areas of work they want to get into to pitch for work via their website, via agents, via whoever and recording those custom demos. largely for the P2P sites whenever the need arises for people to be doing that. So in terms of demo reels, uh one of the things that I've always preached to my students, especially early beginners, uh it's real tempting to get a big fancy polished demo reel, but one that overshoots your actual abilities in the booth doesn't necessarily serve you. So my question for you is, how do you balance those two concerns when you're putting together a demo reel? for a voice actor. Yes, it has to put them in the best light, but you can't overshoot the landing either. Yeah, I mean, I think the best advice ever is never put anything on your reel that you can't replicate any day of the week. I mean, think the best case scenario or worst case scenario, if you like, that, the best example of that is if you have a cold on the day when you are supposed to be recording your demos, you might sound as sexy as hell. But if you don't sound like that normally, then you don't postpone your reel recording if you can. Uh, just because you have to demonstrate what you can do. You have to be completely representative. Uh, and it's, my job as a demo producer to try and make sure that that happens. Um, now if I'm doing a directed session, then that's fairly easy because I've got an hour, maybe two hours to make you do what I want you to do for, for that reel. And if you can't manage it in that kind of time, uh, then you're not going to manage it. So, you know, it may take some directing. It may take, you know, a dozen takes or whatever to get the exact read I want to get out of you. But if you can do it, then you know, you can do it. And then if someone then says to you, like that read you did on your reel, then hopefully it won't take you a dozen takes to get back to that because you can kind of remember the direction that you were given and all the rest of it. So I'd say definitely don't overshoot. You know, be absolutely honest and be absolutely representative because if you're not honest, then it's your own career that you are damaging. Because if you go to voicing sessions and you cannot replicate the read that someone has heard you do apparently, then they're just not going to hire you again. You know, I mean, an example of that is slightly, um, you know, not, not a great example, maybe, but, em when I was a, a jobbing producer, we hired a voiceover who's real. loved, was just a commercial reel for a 32nd ad on local radio. Um, and the reel sounded brilliant. Um, they had a great voice. And, and they, the read that they did on this, this reel was, was absolutely perfect for whatever it was we were advertising. We voiced over ISDN back in those days. And when I got her into the session, she could barely read, you know, and it took, it took, you know, the 15 minute session to get one good take out of her, you know, and it's just like, you know, I could edit that together and make the one good read that I needed. But it was a hell of a lot of work. in that kind of instance, I'm not going to use that voiceover again. If it's going to take me that long to get one read, I'm going to go with someone who can do it in one take and crack on with the rest of my day. Absolutely. um want go back to something you said earlier and that is that uh in the UK, it's pretty much, it's not demo reels aren't done by genre. It's male or female, probably, you know, non-binary if that applies. uh Would you suggest for American talent, if they're going to pursue work in the UK, that they do a more, how shall I say, condensed? demo reel that maybe has a piece of commercial matter, maybe some non-broadcast, maybe a documentary, whatever kind of work they're going for, rather than something that's Uber genre specific. Okay. What I meant, sorry, just to clarify what I said when I said it was just male or female, that is just for the one voice awards. The demos themselves are still by genre. So you won't have as many genres probably as you would do in the States, but you would still have a commercial reel, a corporate reel. Well, then you can then sort of split that down if you are really specializing. So you can have a general corporate reel or you could have a financial reel, a medical reel. whatever else it is that you are really, really wanting to specialize in. So it's still very good advice and still common advice that you would have one reel per genre. So you would end up with, you know, an armful of them and then you can send out the specific ones to whoever you're pitching for work for. But it was just the awards that it's just male or female. Gotcha, missed that, I so apologize. Okay, no worries. In addition to demo reels, you also help voice actors with their own home studio tech. And one of the things I love on your website is you call them, what is it, uh studio tickling tours? uh I love the name. And what I gather from that is you've got a lot of experience actually going around to home studios in the UK. I think that provides a unique perspective. let me ask you, know, having been in a number of home studios over the years, probably a very high number, what are some of the common mistakes that you see voice actors making? I'm not sure about mistakes as such. think the voiceover studio over the last 20 years has simplified massively from what it was. When I first started going around and doing home visits, it was at the back end of the ISDN days. so people had to have a mixing desk because it was, you know, the microphone was going into the mixing desk, which was then being split to the ISDN unit and the interface. And so you had to be able to route around the whole lot. Since the death of ISDN, all you now need really is the microphone, the interface, the computer with obviously other bits as well, like cables and headphones and stuff. so the mistakes on, on that kind of front, don't think, it's, it's not impossible to go wrong with that, but it is, it's, it's harder because the setup is simpler. think one of the biggest problems that voiceovers have is actually finding a good space and treating a good space to record. Because voiceover is quite demanding in terms of it has to be silent around and it has to be kind of well treated and as little kind of reverberation as possible whilst retaining a nice, good, natural tone. That can be incredibly difficult to sort out. You know, we all have busy lives. We all have many, many things that we need to do with every room in our house. And there aren't that many people who have. the opportunity to have a dedicated room in their home, which they can really dedicate to studio. Maybe they can once the kids have left home or whatever, but until at that point, there is always something else that's going to have to happen in in the room where all the studio kit is. finding that space and preparing that space and keeping it quiet. and, you know, there's always kind of compromise involved with getting that space involved really, and sorted because. because of the extra demands on the living space that there will be. know, particularly a lot of my tickling tours have been London based. And as much as we talk about, you know, the housing market being in crisis in the UK, in London, it's 10 times worse. And the number of people I've been to see who are starting out, trying to make a career in voiceovers who are sort of in their 20s, maybe into the 30s, who are still living in a one room bed set. who don't even have the luxury of being able to leave their kit up all the time. So every time they get a job, they've got to then get everything out and set it all up and then do the job and you know, all the rest of it. And so trying to make the best of that kind of situation and try to create them an environment which will work for their voiceover clients. And also is there is, um, kind of consistent enough so that in six months time, a year's time, when they move into a new bed set, they can still retain that same quality of sound in their new place. you know, trying to get all that kind of thing. think that that is the biggest problem that all voiceovers have really, until they're really kind of well established, is actually kind of getting that space sorted. So having done these for several years, ah I'm curious, what's either the weirdest or the strangest or the hardest setup you've ever sort of encountered? Okay. Um, I think, I think the weirdest, um, would probably be going back, um, over a decade, uh, when I first started doing the visits and it was, wasn't long after I'd left my full-time job. So I knew a lot of the people I was visiting because I'd been working with them via ISDN for years. So I walked into a few studios in those days, knowing that their studio sounded perfectly what we wanted. what we needed things to sound like for whatever jobs, corporates, commercials, whatever it was that we were doing. And then walking into where the studio was and just looking at the state of what their room was and thinking, what the hell is going on here? Um, there was, there was one I went to that was, um, in a, you know, a beautiful flat. Uh, and, know, so I just kind of presumed it was going to be a beautiful studio as well. And then walked into this voiceover's bedroom. And there was like a built-in wardrobe with kind of, I've got it in my head. was kind of big mirrored doors. It probably wasn't. but then to voice, they had to kind of crawl inside the wardrobe and it's only about 18 inches deep and then shut the door behind them. And then they had a little shelf kind of just sort of below chest level that the laptop was sitting on. then another shelf here that had the microphone on and it was horrible really. you know, all my. My knowledge of acoustics was telling me this doesn't work, but I knew from my experience of voicing that person that it worked absolutely fine. And then I went to see another client, possibly during the same week, I don't know, and walked into their studio and it just looked like a normal office. And it was just like, well, where's the microphone? And then, so they showed me where the microphone was. It was basically in the fireplace. So when they were voicing, they were stood up and we had to kind of bend down and kind of voice like this, you know, sort of crouched down on the side. Um, and again, I knew from working with them many times on ISDN that it worked absolutely fine. But just looking at that, it's just like, well, first of all, acoustically, it's not going to work. And second of all, if you're kind of crouching down and leaning over to your side and all the rest of it, goodness knows what that's doing to your diaphragm. Uh, and, know, goodness knows what I was doing to performance. So, you know, we, sorted that out, shall we say. Um, but yeah, there's yes, I have seen all sorts of strange setups and things like that. Um, and I kind of learned along the way that as much as your knowledge of acoustics will tell you this will work, this won't No, uh, acoustics, even to people who have massive acoustic. qualifications and degrees and PhDs and all the rest of it, there's always that element of witchcraft with acoustics. And so for someone like, like me who doesn't have actually any acoustic qualifications at all, maybe I shouldn't admit that on a podcast. Um, that, you know, but I've learned that what should work and what does work can sometimes be entirely kind of different things. so hopefully, hopefully, uh, I've kind of got to a point where I won't I'll do my best not to prejudge a sound of a studio. So when I walk into a studio and there's all sorts of alarm bells going off in the back of my head, I'll keep, I'll keep a poker face on and I'll say, well, let's have a listen and see the results that you're getting. And then we work from the results rather than from, you know, what should work and what maybe does or doesn't work or what have you. of an evidence-based approach. Yeah, I hope so. But having said that, I mean, just because something works for one genre of work, doesn't mean it's going to work across the board. So for example, if it is a corporate read you're doing, it's a very kind of controlled, not monotonous read, but it's all on one level. You know, it's, you know, a really kind of tight waveform if you're kind of looking at looking at in your, in your editor or what have you. Whereas if you kind of contrast that with an audio book or a game or an audio drama or something like that. The dynamic range on that is going to be much, much wider. And if you are doing lots of kind of shouting and screaming, then you know, you're putting a lot more energy into the, into the atmosphere. Uh, and therefore you are likely to get more sort of reflections and reverberations than you would do if you're just doing that kind of straight, normal, boring corporate read. Uh, what have you seen in terms of changes in home studios specifically since the pandemic? mean, uh, you know, we got a lot of new people into the business, uh, in a very short amount of time. personally feel like anecdotally, a lot of those people have sort of filtered back out the door. Uh, some have not, some have stuck. Uh, but everybody went from, uh, especially in places like London, New York, Los Angeles. Everybody went from the, I'm going to go into the studio to do this job to, I'm going to do this either as a self-directed session or a live directed session at home via Source Connect or IPDTL or whatever. What are the changes that you've seen on the macro and maybe even on the micro? Basically what you just said, think in the, um, certainly around London, uh, during the pandemic, uh, lot of the London agencies, uh, had told their clients that they didn't need a studio at home. Um, and so they didn't have one and then the pandemic hit and I was getting phone calls from London agencies saying, can you help our people, blah, blah. So I did, uh, over that time set up quite a lot or help set up, obviously I was doing it all remotely, uh, help set up quite a few studios. And in those days, they were very much. wherever they can be. kind of what I was saying earlier about, you know, in the chimney breast or in a cupboard or that kind of thing, you know, they're kind of behind the sofa with a duvet over the top and all sorts of things like this. did set up somebody. Uh, think it was quite a famous teleatrist in the UK. Actually, I can't tell. I remember, but she was basically, she had some crawl space. Um, she's kind of in an attic apartment and she had some crawl space in kind of an attic store roomy bit. So she'd kind of. laid duvets out on that, which I think was more for comfort than acoustics. And she would be doing all her voiceovers laying down, which, you know, doesn't do you diaphragm any harm, but it's about the only space that she had, which, you know, where she could kind of leave her kit set up and stuff like that. yeah, I think, I said earlier, because the studio is much, simpler than it was. uh Yeah. You don't necessarily see anything all that strange apart from the places where things are set up these days. mean, the only things you really see are people who've kind of got their information on how to set up off a dodgy website somewhere. so they're there with a massively sub par microphone or whatever. And you just have to kind of guide people to better equipment or professional quality equipment rather than completely set them up and start from scratch again. So let's go through that exercise briefly, right? Let's say I'm brand new. uh I'm trying to identify a space in my home in which I can record and that I can treat well. Ideally, if you could just dream it up, Rob. What am I going to be looking for in my home? Is that a whole spare bedroom? Can it be tiny? Like, what are the guard rails? What are the things that I'm looking for when I'm trying to identify a space? Well, from an ideal point of view, an entire room uh would be best. And the reasons for that are, think, first of all, it's more comfortable to work in an entire room than cramping yourself in a cupboard or, you know, cupboard under the stairs or whatever. So giving yourself space and comfort, because that will affect your read. You know, if you are more comfortable physically and kind of psychologically, then you're just going to do a better job of the read. also a bigger space, small spaces have weird acoustic properties. And so if you have a bigger space, I mean, it may be kind of more expensive to treat a bigger space because you need more material. But if you are working in a small space, there's more kind of tuning and tweaking of the treatment that you have to do to obtain as neutral a tone as possible. So a bigger space is in a lot of ways, it's more desirable. So if you can have an entire room, which at least it may not be dedicated to your studio, but you have use of it, then that's fine. So, I mean, I've worked with voiceovers who do use like when their kids are very small in the child's nursery, that's where their studio is. Obviously they don't voice during nap time. But even when the kid goes to school, you know, you still then got all day when you can be working in that room. you know, things like that kind of, you know, as I said earlier, just kind of compromising a little bit on, some of those things. doesn't need to be an entire room dedicated to voiceover, but if you have the entire room, then that's brilliant. I totally appreciate that for most people, most people, that's not going to be possible. So finding. Um, whatever space you can and the bigger space, the better for reasons already mentioned, um, where. Ideally you're not going to be disturbed, um, where you are in a, an already quiet place because acoustic treatment can be relatively cheap. Soundproofing isn't. So if you have some serious amounts of soundproofing to do to kind of stop any noise ingress coming from outside, then. Um, you know, that's, that's going to bump your costs up quite a lot. So if you can find a space that is already quiet, you're going to save yourself a lot of money. and you know, the mistake on that, the mistake a lot of people do make is by thinking, uh, you know, an outbuilding or an attic. Um, these places are not built with soundproofing already in the fabric of the buildings. And so you may not be disturbed. You may be able to leave your equipment out all the time, but the chances are, um, you will hear the rain on the roof. And if you are in a shed outside, you may be able to hear the pigeons walking along the top and cooing at each other and all that kind of stuff. it takes some thinking about and thinking kind of around the potential problems as well as you can understand them. If you're kind of really kind of thinking outside the box like that and trying to find a space that is going to infringe on people as little as possible. I tell people all the time, uh a home recording space does not have to be Instagram ready. It just, to your point earlier, has to sound good. My booth is behind me. It is a converted John. oh And it's still functional, by the way, which is great for audiobooks. ah But again, if you can get your space evaluated by a professional engineer, someone like Rob, Some you know, doesn't matter what continent they're on if they can listen to your space they can give you honest uh and and informational educational feedback that you can actually apply so I always recommend that if you're new to this and look I've been doing audio for 35 years. I still don't my ears are not acoustically tuned enough like an engineer's are ah And so, you know, if you think, know, audio you may or may not, but you don't have the years of an engineer. So I always recommend that people do this. Rob, this has been great fun. It's really been a pleasure to have you on. We've been trying to do this for well over a year. uh We, Helen is still on the list. So we was, we still want to have Helen on. We'll work to get that done, but I can't thank you enough for spending time with our audience today. What you guys are doing both in the UK and for folks in the States ah is I think. The way you guys split it up is brilliant. Again, it's BEE. Is that a dot com or is dot com? UK. It's got hyphens in, so it's the letter B hyphen, the word double hyphen, the letter E dot co dot UK. So B double E dot co dot UK. Well, if you're listening to this or watching the podcast, don't worry. We'll put the link in the description and show notes so you can get in touch with Rob and Helen and Rob B. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.