Harlan Hogan, Voice Actor, Chicago, Illinois
Some of you reading this were yet to be born when Harlan Hogan started doing voice work. Some of Harlan’s “greatest hits” include Raid (“…kills bugs dead!”), Heinz Catsup (“Good things come to those who wait.”), Life Cereal (“…the cereal even Mikey likes.”), Head & Shoulders (“…because that little itch should be telling you something.”), Michelob Lite (“Who says you can’t have it all?”) and more, including “You deserve a break today,” “When you care enough to send the very best,” and “Hey Culligan Man!” Harlan also has two books out, “VO: Tales & Techniques of a Voice Over Actor” and “The Voice Actor’s Guide to Home Recording.” Harlan’s voiceover career spans over 30 years. He tells us the secret to his longevity and more in this month’s RAP Interview. The RAP Awards Finalists are on this month’s RAP CD, but you can check out Harlan’s demos on his website at www.harlanhogan.com.
JV: I’ll bet you’ve heard this question before: How did you get into the VO business?
Harlan: Yes I have; that’s part of the reason I wrote 6500 words on the subject. I’ve been asked that so many times over the years, and early on it was tougher because you couldn’t even say I do voice-overs because some people would say, “What’s that?” And that would be an hour and a half discussion followed by them saying, “Well, I have a good voice,” followed by me saying, great, fine, no problem. But I lucked into it in many ways, although you look back in your life and see how those dots connected, but at the time you don’t know.
I did a lot of theatre when I was in high school and did my little magic act. When I got into college I needed some money and my roommate knew somebody at a radio station. So he and I both auditioned, and I got it and he didn’t, and amazingly we’re still friends. I started working at the radio station like so many other people, doing the God shift on Sunday morning. It was a great job for college kids because we had the Sox games on at night, and I could sit there and do my homework and play a spot every so often when I actually noticed there was a lot of dead air. From there I thought, I’m going to be in radio. This is what I like. I’m going to do it. And like a lot of other people, I went to a couple of stations and began to get a little disillusioned with the money and the lack of money — lots of trades, no money — and the realization that only a few people will really make any money in the business. Then there’s the traveling and changing stations every six months. I frankly got bored.
So I quit that and got a job for a company called Honeywell. I did my best to be the world’s worst computer salesman. I was horribly frustrated doing that. Then I got a job at an ad agency. J. Walter Thompson at the time was doing executive coaching for TV and speech coaching, and I was pretty good at that. But I was still a lousy salesman, which is what they wanted me to do.
I did that for a while then finally said to myself, this is stupid. I’ve got a degree in theater. I’ve always wanted to be an actor. I like to perform. I’ve got to go do it. So I quit my job and got some head shots together, put together a god-awful voice demo and hit the streets in the late ‘70s. I did fall back on radio though. I knew I would be panicked and wouldn’t have any money and no place to go for a long time. So I worked part-time at a Chicago radio station. I called them up and said, “I haven’t done any radio in about ten years, but when I was in radio, the hardest thing on earth to find was somebody good enough to work on weekends and do fill-in but who didn’t want a full-time job.” The Program Director said, “How soon can you get here?”
So I worked weekends for a while at one of the radio stations in town, which was great because then I could work on my demo and not spend a fortune. And I was lucky; I hit the golden age of voice-over, although of course, I didn’t know that. We only had network commercials mainly. We didn’t have any cable. Chicago was a really good market for packaged goods because we have large agencies here, and they were turning out a lot of everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Hallmark to Raid. And the beauty of the business at the time was if you could get into the club, which was tough, but if you got in, you were kind of part of the club. Agents were not even used, and if you could get out there and get established, people just called you.
This was back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. It was good. There were the jingle singers and the voice-over people, and we were sort of like this group of people who had our own little business going. And the beautiful thing about those days, if you got an account — like I was doing Head & Shoulders — well you didn’t have a spot, you maybe did ten or twelve and they’d run on a network and pay you every time they ran. Those were the good old days.
JV: It's not like that anymore?
Harlan: Very, very rarely. Even today, if you have a network spot, they’ll run it a few times and buy a lot of wild spots and cable. It’s very diluted and nothing runs for very long. I laugh sometimes because the ad people complain, well it’s not working or the slogan isn’t memorable enough. Well they run it for about five minutes and then somebody changes it; no wonder it’s not memorable.
JV: So the pay these days is pretty much just a set amount for the session and that’s it?
Harlan: Well it depends. If you’re in a large market, more than likely you’re union and the union still has pretty darn good rates. If you’re in other markets you might not be in a union or might not want to be if it doesn’t have a presence there, so it may be that you just get your check and walk away. But we still get residuals; it’s just not like it was. There are a lot of ways an advertiser can spend their money these days. The Super Bowl remains the one really national TV show left that most people watch and see all the commercials. So obviously, with the dilution of advertising dollars, there’s a dilution in the amount of money paid to the performers. But the good news is, there are a lot more venues for voice. Nowadays, to me, it’s more of a volume business. You can have a lot of smaller accounts, but when you add up the aggregate, it can still add up to a darn nice living. It certainly beats working.
JV: You mentioned getting into voiceover at the start of the “golden age” of voiceover. You’re referring to when the big announcer voice began making way for the guy next door, right?Harlan: Yes, and like I said, I was very lucky. When I was coming in and figuring out what this whole thing was about, the guys that were working had these mellifluous, huge, deep voices. I’d just stand there and go, holy smoke! I’m late 20s and sound like the guy that lives next door. The good news was, the paradigm was shifting. The advertisers were going away from the big, deep voice. I remember replacing Danny Dark, of all people, on Raid. The producer said, “Yeah, we talked to SC Johnson and they said, you know Danny is great. He’s been with us a long time, but he’s a ‘70s voice, and you’re an ‘80s voice.”
Unfortunately, of course, that happens to me too. “Oh, yeah, well you’re old school. Now we want something different.” It’s just the way the business will always be. I’d say in the last year or two I’ve seen far more auditions for what they’ll call mature or older voices. For a while there, it seemed like almost every single audition that came in, 35 was as old as they would possibly go. But that seems to have changed. I think the baby boomers and myself have a lot of money to spend, and the advertisers have already started saying, “You know, we need to talk to those people. They have a lot of disposable income.” I was reading an article the other day that the average age of a new car buyer is up by three years; it was 44 and now it’s 47. It makes you kind of wonder why they advertise to 20 year olds.
JV: Well I know I’m getting tired of the guy that sounds like he’s 18 years old selling me stuff.
Harlan: I know. Me too. We had an audition a while back at the agency that just cracked me up. It said, “We’re looking for an older gentleman around 55. Some examples of the voice quality we seek are Charleston Heston and Jason Robards." So to this young copywriter, a guy 55 sounds like he’s 80! It’s okay. You just roll along.
I did a workshop in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. I called it “The Long Haul,” and that’s really what it takes – just staying in the game, plugging away, and rolling with it. You can do it.
JV: So you're doing some teaching and coaching as well?
Harlan: I have always stayed away from actual on-mic kind of coaching and teaching. I don’t really have any desire to do that. There are people that do that very well. I wrote the books thinking that was a good way to kind of give back and pass along some information. What I did enjoy doing was a workshop for working voice-overs, and not necessarily with on-mic time, but dealing with marketing, promotion, computer skills, home recording. This home recording is a big, hot thing now with all the voiceover people, and I’ve been blessed to have come out of radio, because when the home recording thing started to happen a few years ago, I at least felt comfortable doing it. There are a lot of other voice actors that have come out of theater or some place else, and they’re going, “Uhh… XLR? Is that a station in Juarez? What’s an XLR? Phantom power? Wasn’t that an old radio show back in the ‘40s?” They are absolutely flummoxed by this technology. So I’ve enjoyed doing that, working with other professionals saying, “Okay, here’s how to keep the fire going.”
JV: A typical day for you is long, short, just right?
Harlan: It depends. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. If I did a sign wave drawing, I’m sure there would be ups and downs and the busy days and everything. There’s just no commonality. I’ve never been able to predict anything. There have been mind numbingly busy Christmas seasons, and times when I just sat around thinking, okay, everybody has figured out that I’m not any good at this anymore. It’s really hard to predict.
But what has happened, which is great, is our delivery system now — being able to deliver tracks literally from your home, either MP3 or FTP, and of course I have my ISDN here. I spend so much less time being in the car driving, parking and frankly wasting time. That’s been great. The only thing I miss – and this is one of the reasons I wrote a lot of the stories in the first book — is the camaraderie and the funny things that happen when you get five or six egos in a room behind microphones. Nowadays — and this happens quite a bit even doing dialogue stuff — I’ll be in my WhisperRoom here with the ISDN box, and the woman I’m working for is in New York, and the Verizon guy is out in LA, and the client’s in Dallas. Nobody flies anywhere. We all get along well, we have a good time, we’re done in about ten minutes, but we never go out for coffee.
I can’t tell you the hours I’ve spent for years driving, driving, driving downtown, parking the car — which is now $20/$25 to park – just so you can wait an hour to go in the booth where you get just one shot at it because there are thirty other actors sitting there. I don’t miss that. I really much prefer to do it at home and be able to think about it and send the take that I think is best. I prefer to have coffee with my wife instead of waiting three hours with another actor.
JV: How much of the major VO business is done by mp3 and ftp these days? I mean, is ISDN being used less and less?
Harlan: Well, I don’t think ISDN is a boat anchor yet. I think at some point the voiceover Internet protocol will be worked out and we’ll probably be able to do air quality work right over the Internet, but that’s a ways off yet. Plus, ISDN is pretty well established in broadcast and studios. You can certainly audition without it. But one area where it is absolutely critical is if you’re going to do station imaging and promo kind of work. Then you’ve just got to have an ISDN connection. But I don’t know how many years that will be true.
Most of my narration people, my corporate clients, don’t have ISDN. They just sit at their desk and do a traditional phone patch and I send the files up on the Internet. They download the files along with the bill and we’re done, saving them time and money and saving me time and money. It’s a real win/win thing.
The agents across the country now generally are pretty much all on board because they send the files out as MP3s to the ad agencies. They seem to be quite content, and many agents have just flat out told the performers, “Put in a home studio. We don’t really need to see you in here.” It’s a terrible waste of their time. My wife was an agent for many years. That’s how met. But it’s a terrible waste of their time to be auditioning actors all day. They should be on the phone looking for business, negotiating. So now, basically they move files around. That’s what I was doing this morning. You send your little file off to Georgia, and he puts it together with the other guys auditioning for the announcer, and then MP3s it over to the ad agency who MP3s it over to the end client who says, “Yeah, I like that Jerry guy,” and the phone call is made and the session is set up. I don’t know what percentage is ISDN vs. just using the Internet, but it certainly has made inroads, and of course, it’s a lot less expensive. You don’t have to plunk down $3,500 or $4,000 for an ISDN box.
JV: So you still need that live connection for direction and such. People aren’t saying, “Heck, I know you can do it, just read it, and MP3 to me.”
Harlan: Well I have some of those. I love clients like that. And of course a phone patch is easy enough to do, and you can do that simply and inexpensively. It’s good enough for many people. I like the ISDN mainly because when you’re done, when they say, “Yeah, Harlan that’s it. We’ve got it,” they are taking the responsibility for the recording. They’re hearing air quality and are recording it wherever they happen to be. Whereas, when you record it at home yourself and do a phone patch — and phones are notoriously noisy and sometime words are missed — you then as the performer are also really taking responsibility as the engineer. So it’s just a little more responsibility on you to say, “Okay, I’ve listened to these and they’re air quality. I’m going to send them off to you now.”
And of course if you do station imaging, or news- what they call, “windows,” if you’re doing that sort of thing, you’ve just got to have ISDN because they want to record you at eight o’clock for the 9:30 news. They don’t want to record it any sooner, and they don’t want to wait for an MP3 file to come. They want it right now.
JV: I’ll guess you have a Zephyr in the home studio.
Harlan: I do. I have a Telos Zephyr, and I’ve had it for five or six years. It’s one of those leaps of faith you make. If I don’t buy this I won’t get any of that work, but I don’t have any of that work because I don’t have one. Interestingly enough, I got it and was in a studio downtown in Chicago and mentioned in passing to the engineer that I had one — not threateningly; you never want to say, “Hey I’ve got a home studio. I’m in competition with you.” That’s not the idea. I simply said, “Say, I’ve got an ISDN box if you ever have an emergency or things come up or whatever.” “Oh, that’s good to know.” Sure enough, two days later, 11 o’clock at night I get a phone call from the guy. “Harlan, can you do something for us real quick ISDN?” I said, “Sure.” And he was honest, he said, “Well, we were going to hire Pete,” – who’s a competitor – “but we can’t call Pete to do this at midnight. He’s got to drive down here and everything… so let’s do it.” So we did it. They had forgotten to do a mandatory recording for McDonald’s, which said, “McDonald's is as an equal opportunity employer.” They had cut that out of about seven or eight radio spots. That gig more than paid for my ISDN box just two days later. That was a good investment.
JV: Your home studio is probably more of a voice actor’s studio — a Zephyr, a computer and a microphone, right?
Harlan: Pretty much. I’ve got a WhisperRoom, which I bought at the old house because I couldn’t find a quiet place. It turned out to be a very good buy because when we moved I hadn’t spent a lot of money building out a whole studio. This thing just packs down and the movers move it over and re-assemble it. It allows me to not be down in the basement or somewhere like that. I’m upstairs and can look out the window when it’s a beautiful day. I’ve got a couple of microphones that I like and a little Mackie board.
JV: Do you do a lot of editing there?
Harlan: I do some. I’ve got some clients who say just send everything, who like to edit. Others I’ll kind of ruffle cut it for them. I’m doing more and more producing now with clients that say, “Listen, can you put the sound effects in and mix the whole thing for us?” “Sure.” And I charge them for that obviously. If it’s just a narration client, and I’m just going to record a straight thing and do it with a phone patch, many times I don’t even charge them extra for the studio because it’s just a great convenience for me and for them. But if there’s a lot of editing going on, then that’s another revenue stream.
As for editing software, I use Cool Edit or Audition as it’s called now. I love it. I have played with most of the programs, and they’re all pretty similar really. I find ProTools difficult to work with and way beyond anything I need. Since Adobe bought Cool Edit, I think they’ve done some really nice enhancements to it. It serves my needs nicely and I know how to use it.
JV: You mentioned a couple of mics. What are your mics of choice?
Harlan: Well on ISDN… in fact, for an all around use it for damn near anything mic, the Sennheiser 416 has become really popular in the voiceover world. I first saw it on the west coast; the promo guys were using it. It has a kind of slightly brittle sound that really cuts, and it seems like on ISDN it just translates better than a lot of softer sounding mics. I saw them on the west coast a lot and then started seeing them here. They have sort of become the de facto mic for a lot of people. They are about 1200 bucks new. They’re on Ebay all the time for five or six. It’s really just a straight ahead good mic, and it’s good for a home studio because it’s a shotgun. With that tiny little pattern you don’t pick up a lot of room noise. The down side is if you are a real animated reader; the animation guys hate these mikes because they can’t move around a lot. I have to agree with them. I think it’s not a good mic for them. But for voice over, the 416 has become so popular you can’t go wrong with it, and you can’t hurt them. They are made for film work and you can pound nails with the thing, I’m sure.
Then if I want something a little warmer, I’ve got one of the Blue Mouse microphones that has a nice soft lovely sound, and it’s pretty. That’s about 90 percent why I bought it; I like how it looks. Then I’ve got a U47 I should sell, but I can’t bring myself to part with it. They’ve become ridiculously expensive and valuable. I probably should sell it because I never use it. And one of the things with home recording is you want to “keep it simple, stupid,” like the old saying goes. You don’t really want to have a lot of stuff to deal with, and while the U47 is a wonderful mic, it will pick up RF and you can end up with the taxi driver in the middle of your take. If you’re playing engineer and performer, no chance of that happening is a real good idea.
JV: Do you wear headphones when you’re doing voice over?
Harlan: Yes and no. Usually I do. I think you’re asking the question of whether or not they interfere with your performance, and I have to agree that they can. It depends. If I’m in a studio downtown, you almost have to have them just to hear the producer. I’ve always been in favor of just one ear, and I frequently ask the engineer to turn it way down. I just want to hear them. There’s that terrible danger of, “Wow, don’t I sound good!” At home I pretty much have to use it because I have to hear somebody directing me. But I’m not a big fan of two cans on. Suddenly it’s really hard not to start talking to yourself, and of course the whole idea of voiceover is that you’re not talking to yourself, you’re talking to a person. And that’s hard when you’re in broadcasting. Just the name itself, broadcasting, you’re talking to a big, huge group of people, like giving a speech. But voiceover work 99 percent of the time is far more intimate. It’s hard sometimes to try to connect with some invisible person, but that’s very key.
JV: So your books tell us all your tricks and everything you know, right?
Harlan: Well all but the few tricks I’m going to keep back and sell for big money next week. There aren’t that many tricks. I think the biggest trick — and this is kind of what we were discovering as a group of twelve in the workshop – is that the time spent in front of the microphone is so minuscule and such a tiny part of doing this for a living. It’s the business of the business that’s important. It’s sticking stamps on post cards like I was doing yesterday. I said to my wife, “God, this is a glamorous career.” And she said, “Oh yeah!” Then we laughed and I said, “This is the biggest secret; the work of voiceover work is getting the work.” And I can’t say that mantra too often – it’s getting the work. Doing the work is fun. Doing the work is actually easy. It ought to be easy if you’re good at it. But getting the work is the long hall. It really is a business. People who manage to do it for long periods of time have recognized it’s a business. You keep your contacts going and talk to your clients and look for new revenue streams and promote and deal with agents and deal with the IRS and all those things. Performing is fine, but it’s a tiny portion of it. To me that’s the biggest secret. It is no secret at all except I think a lot of people are in denial – “Well, yeah, but I don’t have to really become a good businessperson because I’ve got a lot of spots on the air.” Well, that’ll end too.
And a lot of times, doing the business of the business is not high cost. It’s just paying attention to the clients you have. Maybe you have a client that’s an avid golfer, and you read an article in a journal about something. You send it over — you know, personal.
I’ve got a chain of seafood restaurants called Captain D's. They’re in about 26 states, although they don’t happen to be in Illinois where I am. They moved a session for me because I was going on a motorcycle trip – one of my other passions. So they gave me a ration of stuff on the ISDN patch. “Yeah, we had to move this because you’re going on vacation.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I’m on vacation. I’m in North Carolina and I see a Captain D’s restaurant. I did a U-turn, zoomed back, and parked my motorcycle in front of the flounder sale sign. I’m all hot and sweaty and take out my digital camera. I took a shot of myself in front of the restaurant on the bike and then emailed it to my client saying, “Yes, but even on vacation Mr. Hogan is dedicated to furthering the fame of Captain D’s,” or something to that affect. They thought that was absolutely fantastic, funny. They sent it on to the client; the client thought it was amazing. Shortly thereafter I noticed that my scripts went from saying “announcer” to saying “Harlan.” So what have I done? I’ve established a name, even with the end client — who is the one that really counts — with a no-cost promotion. It’s about just kind of keeping your head in it. If you’re head’s in the business, you’ll just keep looking for things. And obviously, you can buy advertising. You can do ads, you can do PR, and you can have advertising specialties to give away. I’ve given away stopwatches over the years and mouse pads and other things related to the business that keep your name top of mind.
JV: Has your voiceover style changed over the years?
Harlan: Yeah, I’ve aged over the years. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Not as much as one might think, but styles change just as they did when I was coming in. One of the big deep voice guys, a wonderful talent, said to me, “Well kid,” — he had done Dragnet and all the old radio shows, I mean a very talented guy — he said, “You do something I can’t do. You just sound like a guy next door. I can’t do that.”
But as we just talked about, styles do change. Young and bright and happy was the style in the ‘80s, and then you started to see more of the flat readings, and then the young guy with an attitude was big for a while. I think you need to pay attention to what’s going on, but don’t get trapped into trying to imitate what’s hot because by the time you get the imitation down, it won’t be hot anymore. I have a friend in Chicago who really got into doing what was the hot sound for a while, and he made some money doing the really hot sound, but it trapped him to this day because people don’t really realize how flexible and good the guy is. They only think of him for that one read that now is very passé.
One thing you do need to do is just watch TV — even though that can be tough — and see a lot of movies, because the people that you work for, their shorthand is celebrity. Their shorthand is, “I want Donald Sutherland.” Well they don’t want Donald Sutherland; they can’t afford Donald Sutherland. But we know what Donald Sutherland’s read is like, and it’s actually pretty good direction. They frequently will say, well I want Joey from Friends or I want so and so from some TV show that frankly I might not normally watch, but it’s critical that you can say, “Oh yeah, I know what that sounds like.” You find that in auditions more than other descriptions. They frequently refer to celebrities. So it’s pretty important to see most of the movies and watch the hot TV shows so you know, so you have some clue. When they say, “I want David Hyde Pierce,” you really need to know what David Hyde Pierce sounds like.
JV: What about those who just can’t get rid of that radio voice, is there any hope for them in the land of VO?
Harlan: I have worked with people and met people who can’t lose it. It doesn’t mean there isn’t work. There are a lot of different styles that work. There are people that do hard sell and they do it so well. But a guy like me finds that just very, very difficult to do. It’s not me. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not making a living too.
JV: You’re most recent book is The Voice Actor’s Guide to Home Recording. Tell us a little about this book.
Harlan: In the first book I had a chapter called “Studio of Your Own,” and as I was writing it I realized, wow, this needs more amplification and clarification. At that time I was still kind of an early adapter to having a home studio, and agents out of town were kind of willing to send you something. For a while my New York agent would do auditions on the ISDN box. Now they just let me MP3 it to them. But they were starting to realize, as we were, that you could work more than just your own little immediate market. In the old days you really couldn’t because you’d have to fly. I flew out to New York one time and did a Ford audition, which was a biggie, and got the very excited phone call from my agent at 5:30 that evening as I was touching down at O’Hare field in Chicago. He’s saying, “Harlan, you’re on the call back! You’re on at 11 o’clock tomorrow.” Well, shit! So you get on a plane and fly back, which I did by the way, but I didn’t get it.
So, it was almost impossible to branch out. But the Internet was opening up, and when I wrote that chapter I thought, you know, we may have to do more. So I teamed up with an engineer. His name is Jeffrey Fisher, and Jeffrey is a wonderful audio engineer and even better writer. There are not many of those guys around. He’s got about fourteen books. We get along great, we write well together, and we kept it very non-technical. We look at everything out there like modern recording and all these things. The average voice actor who wants to do voice work has very little computer skills usually, and no recording skills. I mean, they absolutely have no idea what this is about, and don’t realize it’s actually really simple to do and fun. So we realized we needed to do a specific book, the Voice Actors Guide to Home Recording. It’s specifically for voice actors. We keep it very, very simple. We do explain a few of the more arcane things like compression and EQ, but that’s under the heading: “Caution, the following information is not necessary and will not make you popular at parties.” We had a lot of fun with it. Believe it or not, it’s a “how to” book, but we had a lot of fun doing it.
We should be getting a box of the books today. They’re coming out at the perfect time because across the country, from William Morris in Los Angeles on down, they have told their performers, “Get a home studio. Don’t come in. Send your stuff in.” So that’s the new paradigm, and the home studio is just a necessity. Of course it’s also a great convenience. If you happen to be on a motorcycle trip, or happen to be on location somewhere or on vacation, you don’t have to miss the audition. If you have a laptop and a microphone and an A to D converter, you’re in business.