A Voice Actor Walks into a Pet Store

Non-Traditional Tools of the Trade

I don’t have a dog and am not getting a dog, but yesterday I walked into a pet store and bought myself a dog training clicker. While checking out, I got to surprise the employee with the off-label use for this product.

First, you should know that when remote recording an audiobook with multiple narrators, there are 2 main styles of narration: dual and duet.

Arielle DeLisle, a white woman with short purple curly hair, sits in her recording studio, holding a blue and orange dog clicker device. Behind her is studio equipment, including a microphone, headphones and her monitor, displaying audio waveforms with narration and small areas of overmodulated audio from the dog clicker, indicating insertion points for the editor to work with.
The orange button can be depressed to make a loud click to aid with dog training, or in this off-label usage, to indicate an area in the recording for the editor to insert other characters' wild lines into my character's chapters.

Dual Narration

Dual narration involves alternating chapters told from different characters’ POV. Each chapter or section of a chapter is narrated entirely by one narrator, which includes any characters who also speak within that section.

The narrators need to share character prep and samples so the characters can accurately be reflected by their co-narrator in each other’s narration, as well as pronunciations and other elements important to the storytelling. Each narrator will turn in their own POV’s chapter files and sections of full narration.

Duet Narration

Duet narration gives the listener a different experience, where each narrator follows their character(s) wherever they speak throughout the book. This requires more work on the production end, both prepping the script for multiple narrators, usually through colorful highlighting (seen above), and editing all the individual characters lines into each chapter.

The narrators still need to communicate about pronunciations, accents and other global elements of the book. Each narrator will turn in any chapters told from their characters’ POV, as well as “wild line” chapters, where they have characters who speak in someone else’s chapter. The editor and production team then have the task of audio assembly ahead of them, to piece together the audiobook with lines from multiple narrators working from different home studio environments.

A sample of a waveform from a ProTools recording session is shown, with the audio waveforms in bright blue against a darker blue and black background. The audio has visual disruptions from the loud dog clicker, followed by gaps of silence before the narration continues.
Waveform audio from an audiobook that includes duet-style narration. My character narrates this part of the story, but anywhere that another character who I'm not voicing speaks, I've used a dog clicker to indicate the break as well as a few seconds of room tone before picking up after that character's lines.

This is where the dog clicker comes in. The character recording the narration for the chapter will need to clap, snap or otherwise indicate a break in their narration and then leave a gap in their recording for the editors to see at a glance where audio gets inserted. The crisp, unmistakable visuals that a dog clicker offers are an ideal indicator for where the wild lines belong.

Much to the wide-eyed amusement of the guy at Pet Market, this noisy device is very much at home in a duet narrator’s tool kit, and far more practical than clapping for every wild line in your narration.

I love clever and surprising off-label uses for things, such as this. What other non-traditional tools have you found to be helpful or even necessary in your workflow?