VO Vocabulary

Just as in any business there are terms and phrases that come up in the everyday operations and recording sessions.  Here’s a list of some of the more common words and phrases I’ve heard over the years in numerous recording sessions from clients  and producers:

A/B/C – this is the common practice of having the talent do three takes of a line, phrase or entire read so the client has choices.

ALT – there are times when the client has two versions of the same line so they will ask talent to do both and the second is the alternative or alt line.

CTA –  stands for Call To Action – the part of the commercial that tells the listener to call or check out a website or enter a contest, that kind of thing.

Energy – refers to just that, the amount of energy to use on the read.  This can refer to whole read or there may be a need to change energy during a read.

Frankenstein It – this refers to taking part of one read and editing it together with part of a second or third read.

Hero –  remember A/B/C?  Well this gets back to those reads and the Hero is the one the client likes and will keep

Playback – during a recording session the client will often ask the producer to playback different takes to see if they have a Hero

Take – that is the phrase used for each version of the read that a talent will do.  Take 1, take 2…pretty self explanatory.

Wilds – quite often the talent is asked to do a “wild” which is a version of the line without direction, just their their idea of how the line should be read.

Again, these are just some of the things you’ll hear during a recording session, hope this helps a little bit. 

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