Meet Ralph Scott

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ralph Scott. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ralph below.

Ralph, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

Ask anyone on the Audiobook Narration circuit. Imposter Syndrome ranks in the #1 position of biggest fears in our profession. You can have a week’s worth of beautiful Booth work. You can have 100 to 1000 books to your credit. Ultimately, ‘I.S.’ will come to visit upon you.

Not quite sure what is its precursor. I suspect it’s not unlike the fear that pro ball players encounter and for which they spend thousands of dollars on sports therapists. But whatever the condition’s underpinnings, it’s very real.

As a professional Narrator of fiction and nonfiction book properties, I’ve encounter I.S. multiple times over the years. The feeling is akin to standing out on stage before a full house of a Broadway musical and discovering that you’re entirely naked. Did you forget to visit the Costume Dept. on your way to the stage? Did your pants fall off during the well-rehearsed choreographed dance steps? Are you simply…a fraud? Yeah, it’s like that. And anyone who has experienced it would agree. Ironically, this unpredictable onset condition isn’t paralyzing us before a live audience. Consider: We’re sitting solo in a recording booth for hours each day with no one around save for, on occasion, a Recording Engineer and a Director, at least for the House projects. (Most home-based Narrators do their own engineering and without the benefits of a Director.) So when we look at this pragmatically, we ask ourselves: ‘Who am I afraid of? There’s no one here.’

There must be a dozen recommendations in various Narrator FB groups for how to beat the condition. Not as many postings for what causes it. And taking a few minutes to reflect on all the titles you’ve narrated and even glancing at the framed audiobook covers on the wall outside the booth will not necessarily catapult you out of the crisis.

For me? I embrace it. I treat it like the rest of life. Because every day, we are no fewer than 20 different people. Think about one 12-hour day. You are not the same person sitting before an IRS auditor as you are when you’re speaking to a lost child wandering up and down the sidewalk. The romantic feelings or frustrations you express to your spouse when you wrap up for the day, will be delivered in a very different tone and, potentially, with a very different overall persona, than when you’re speaking with an Author-client by Zoom or smartphone. Sometimes your roles cross over. Which makes sense. Because at the end of the day, like most therapists will tell the client on the couch who is convinced that she/he suffers from an ‘As If’ personality (i.e., you don’t believe you are who you are), ALL of those personas are, in fact, you. And that includes the persona who is momentarily fearful.

And that’s how I deal with it.

I acknowledge that, in addition to the many characters I have to play during any recording session, one of them is ‘Fear Guy’. Only that’s the point: he’s only ONE of them. I don’t give him any more power than any of the others who might include: Nice Guy; Dominant Guy; Submissive Guy; Pragmatic Problem-Solver Guy; Romantic Guy; oh, and the role that I’ve been playing for the better part of six years, with emphasis on the past year: Multicast Producer Guy. Yeah, THAT’s a role. One of the more challenging of my career.

So my advice? When beset by ‘Imposter Syndrome’ (and you will eventually encounter it), do NOT try to ignore it. Own it. And look it squarely in the eyes and acknowledge: “You know, you’re here. But so are all the others. It’s one big party, baby. So rather than stand there and look contemptuous, kindly pass the damn cheese dip.”

Yeah, that’s how I handle it. How you handle will be unique to you. And if what you do works for you? I’d love to hear about it.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

One of the few unpredictable outcomes of two years worth of Covid-based work-from-home mandates was the literal explosion of audiobook sales. In a matter of months, people eager to touch base with some sense of the outside world — even if that world was comprised of middle-earth fantasy characters, voyeuristic romantic trysts, autobios of long deceased but still famous influencers from history, or simply beach reads delivered without the sand, gulls, and sunshine, discovered that audiobooks were a beautiful and easy way to connect. And connect with one’s own soul.

In 2018, my then co-narrator/co-producer, Kendra Murray, and I, fresh out of live and recorded radio theatre, decided it might be time to start looking at audio as more than a hobby. Paying the mortgage and keeping ‘Gandalf,’ the bright white, 65 lb Australian Cattledog/Shepard mix, in shoes was more than sufficient incentive. So we hopped on ACX.com, did some research, and recorded our first audiobook. At the time, though blessed with equipment carried over from our radio theatre troupe, the Petaluma Radio Players (petalumaradioplayers.com), along with 15 pieces of classic, but somewhat decaying dark green 24-inch square ‘Egg Carton’ acoustic wall foam bequeathed to us by one of our recording engineers, we were still very much novices to this division of the recorded spoken realm. But the love was there. Using your voices to create pictures for people we might and likely would never meet was a pretty cool thing. And, we figured, how hard could it be? We’d been doing this since 2015 and 2017, respectively. (The future spouse auditioned in that latter year after seeing this spouse live on stage in the Goldman Ballroom of Hotel Petaluma where the Petaluma Radio Players staged a series of comedic murder mystery one-acts under the title ‘Slay Bells Ring’. An appropriate portfolio for the Christmas month. She responded to an ad in the Playbill: “Do you have a face for radio? Give us a call!”). Turned out, recording audiobooks was a lot harder than we had thought. For starters, we had to abide by the then ground rules established by audiobook purists. Whereas we were accustomed to a Foley Artist downstage left using all manner of hastily assembled devices to produce the ambience of 1930s Pullman locomotives, galloping horses, rattling sabers, and the standard compliment of slamming doors, opening drawers, and footsteps up and down stairs, in audiobooks — traditional audiobooks — sound effects were taboo. We discovered just how taboo when, while recording the first volume in a five-volume modern day female detective series, one of our two black cats — ‘Merlin’ (yeah, another wizard in the family) — strolled into studio and plopped himself down in the corner of our bedroom-conversion studio. We didn’t think anything of it. So when Merlin cried right at the moment that Cincinnati Private Eye, Jane C.K. Monterrey (‘Taking the Plunge’ by author Scott Kramer) was petting her cat ‘Leonard,’ named for the actor who gave us Mr. Spock, we saw a predestined opportunity. We left it in the mix. When the book dropped on Audible a few months later, we were crucified by a critic for “putting sound effects in the book”. One. Freaking. Crying. Cat. And in a 200+ page story. Hardly qualified, in our opinion, as “putting sound FX in the book”. Suddenly, all the hours and hours of work creating C.K (Kendra), her friend Miss G., the African American gay costume shop owner (me), and an entire cacophony of killers, confidants, and denizens of Cincinnati, seemed strangely insignificant, like dust on the street of a crime scene. Only like most overseen signs in life, noticed only until it’s too late, the dust mattered. The clues were there all along. Well, one of them, anyway. And after the interrogation, we pled ‘Guilty’. That same year, indeed, that same month, we had assembled 15 of our radio thespian friends to do a 20-minute multicast audio demo for one of my previous editorial clients. I’d worked on ‘NEEDLES’ by then NorCal author, Jeremiah Treacy, as a Developmental Book Editor, since 2013. Years later, Radio Theatre inspired me to ask him if we could record some scenes from his modern day crime fiction story and put them up on a website to promote the novel. He gave the okay. The plot captured a recently defrocked Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to the A-list who the Feds caught in the act of writing ‘scripts for cocaine for his celebrity clientele. They made him one of those offers you can’t refuse: Either come work for us changing the faces of Russian mobsters loyal to the United States…or contemplate your nips ‘n tucks for the next 25 years in Leavenworth. ‘Doc Martinez’ took the deal. But when he inadvertently killed the wife of a Russian mobster on the operating table while giving her a nose job, he hopped in his vintage Speedster and raced off to the high desert to hide out, trading his Bev. Hills McMansion for a cozy Airstream trailer, intent on living out his retirement in peace. Until members of the corrupt retired Needles PD found out about their newest upstanding community member…and shook down Doc for drugs they could resell on the black market. Between the Feds wondering what became of their protected witness, the Russian mob wanting his head on a bedpan, and the Needles PD looking for a way to supplement their 401-Ks, Doc was more than happy to have a supply of liquid cocaina to infuse his Vodka tonics. The 20-minute demo turned out pretty good, save for the ambience: we recorded on a small open stage next door to a costume shop in Petaluma. The stage, surrounded on two sides by concrete block walls, provided just enough reflection and echo to peg our Demo as a throwback to the early days of radio theatre when all the thespians gathered around one mic and used handheld printed scripts, hoping that the live sound effects (also produced by a Foley guy, and sometimes Foley gal) would cover the page turning and brushes of neckties and string pearls against microphones. Within two years of bedroom studio operations, with about 50 novels and nonfiction books to our credit, another loud explosion hit audio. Audible had recently invested $5 million into ‘Audible Originals,’ paving the way for new writers to see their work brought to the stage by 10, 15, sometimes 25 professional voice artists on the same stage. Then Spotify one-upped them by a magnitude of 5000 or more when the company invested half a billion (with a ‘B’) into the acquisition of two companies in the podcast space. The writing was no longer on the script. It was on the wall for all to see: the Players saw Audio as the future of entertainment. Came as no surprise to us, really. Our live-on-stage radio plays always opened with the house lights dropping and the large round dial of a 1940s Zenith cabinet radio lighting up as the beautiful vintage device suddenly played a chain of clips from the Golden Age of Radio. The bombing of Pearl Harbor; the homerun that cinched the ‘House that Babe Built,’ the invasion of New Jersey by Martians always culminated in our own announcer stating, “And now, the Petaluma Radio Players present…” It wasn’t lost on us that the shape of a smartphone emulated the shape of a cabinet radio. So the inherent attraction of aural drama when families gathered around the 1930s Philco right after dinner was now available in the palms of Millennials and Gen-Xers provided that somebody was creating the content. That’s where we came in. By 2023, with a few more multicast demos in the can (along with a lot more Solo, Duet, and Dual-narration audiobooks), we decided to move our operations into full-on multicast scripted entertainment. Our big break came from overseas. The Page Turner Awards, a UK-based online literary awards ceremony, reached out to us and asked if we would consider serving as one of the prizes for one of their lucky winners. Of course we said yes. But after Tom Joyce, author of the international spy thriller, ‘The Missing Peace,’ (bit.ly/THEMISSINGPEACE or bit.ly/THEMISSINGPEACE-Novel) won in multiple categories and we more intensely examined his book, it became clear that what we had encountered was the Tom Clancy of this era. His novel was so thoroughly researched, like a hybrid fiction-nonfiction project, there were literally Footnotes on every other page. (A year later over lunch in Petaluma, we asked Tom and his wife to level with us. “Okay, you have top level clearance, right? I mean, how to do you know all this stuff that appears in your novel?” He wasn’t only the new Tom Clancy; he’d clearly studied that other renowned author’s comebacks: “Nah, I just did my research.”) Shortly after winning at The Page Turner Awards, given the heavy volume of characters in the novel — just north of 50 who boasted accents from around the world — we asked Tom if we could convert the project into a ‘Multicast’ opportunity. He agreed. And we put it out for audition. Within two weeks, the Google Drive account we set up for the project was flooded with audio files. With the Author making the final call, and subsequent to multiple callbacks, we selected 22 actors, across more than six time zones, to play 53 characters. There but for the grace of God and Zoom, what we recorded would not have been possible. Getting everyone to the same studio would have been cost prohibitive, even if they flew Coach and used up a portion of their Frequent Flyer miles. Instead, we poured over the manuscript and generated a wall-sized, color-coded Production Calendar that, in its rainbow display, looked more like the large screen Off-track Sports Books in Vegas. Each color represented a different scene populated by multiple characters and voiced by multiple actors. Took about three weeks to get all the RAW audio in the can. At this writing, the project is still in Post. But many of the actors we worked with would soon be auditioning, at our request, for other multicast projects. Within eight months we sat back and realized we’d created a whole new company. Squeaky Cheese Productions, the duet-led entity that was almost felled by a cat’s meow, was soon becoming a player in how to deliver Multicast projects for a fraction of the cost of the Big Guys and Gals. (Sorry; how we do it is proprietary. But our thespians love it. And we love them.) Now, every week, we are approached by Indy Authors who want high-level multicast production value, with or without full Soundscape (Sound FX and interstitial music) and, for the first time, can afford the price tag. And, no, we NEVER use A.I. Hence why we also launched the RealHumanVoice.org campaign. A soundbyte labeling system that assures the listener that s/he is hearing nothing but real human voices. Thank you, Merlin, for being the first to speak up for sound effects. Maybe the ‘Purists’ could take a page from the Purina set. – rs

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Be okay with acknowledging what you don’t know. Be okay with asking those who do.

And then: Be consistent. In. Everything. You. Do.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

Our success is based on collaboration. Have you got a good idea? Drop us an email. We don’t always say ‘Yes,’ but we’ll at least give you an audience. E: info(at)squeakycheeseproductions.com

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.squeakycheeseproductions.com
• Instagram: SQUEAKYCHEESEVO
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/squeakycheeseproductions
• Twitter: SQUEAKYCHEESEVO

Image Credits

Ralph Scott image by Joe Taylor, cpyr 2023. All rights reserved.