By Shawn Leonhardt for 30 Day Singer – the best place to learn how to sing.
Many singers and vocalists would love to hear their voice in an advertisement or jingle. With all the streaming and social media platforms available there is plenty of potential for finding voice over gigs that want you to help with a catchy jingle.
In this article
- You Need the Right Equipment
- Mics and Soundproofing
- DAWS
- Record and Polish
- Getting Ideas and Being Creative
- Fine Tune Your Demos
- Find the Work
- Where to Find Clients for Jingles
- Find What Jingle the Client Needs
But first, you must know how to produce the tune. In this article, we will go over the basics of how to make an ad jingle for a classic commercial or modern voice over job.
You Need the Right Equipment
Many years ago, you would need to have the budget to rent studio time in a major metropolitan area if you wanted to record any songs or jingles. Now you can literally use laptops and smartphones to record and master finished pieces. Obviously, a higher budget home studio is going to give you the best quality, but we all start somewhere, so make do with what you have.
Mics and Soundproofing
The sound you put into a recording will reflect the final product, if you have a bad mic and a room with echo, very few clients will want your jingle. Buy the best microphones and cables you can afford and dedicate the best sounding location for studio space. If you use smaller devices to record on, you can find better areas that are quieter or even have better reverb.
No matter if you’re a great singer or are only just starting singing lessons, if you do not send your voice signal through decent gear it will only make it worse. Besides mic research you can even investigate building little homemade soundproof booths, sometimes they work ok, other times they deaden the sound. Just as you practice your vocal skills you must hone your recording abilities to make a proper jingle.
DAWS
A Digital Audio Workstation like Audacity, Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton, Garageband, and many more allows you to record your voice and music. It is as if you are sitting at a mixing console in an actual analog studio, these DAWS let you compose entire songs. They also provide you with drum rhythms, chord progressions, bass lines, and more elements of songs that are readily available and can be legally shared.
It is essential to familiarize yourself with whatever DAW you choose, the more you know the better you can make a song. Billie Eilish mixed and mastered her songs in Logic Pro, and many other modern artists are making ads and full songs in bedroom studios. The technology to do all of this is incredible and affordable, it just takes time to learn.
Record and Polish
Getting Ideas and Being Creative
Even if you are only composing an ad or jingle that is just voice, it helps to start with music. Use a drum machine app (like the ones in DAW’s), or a similar looping device to riff over and vocalize ideas to get started. It also helps to have different instruments in your studio, you will find famous theme and jingle writers like Mark Mothersbaugh have tons of instruments.
Creativity thrives in new environments, so always challenge yourself musically., Try different genres, tunings, and sounds because you never know when one may be the perfect hook for a vocal. So do a couple of vocal warm ups, be sure to record any ideas you have and build on the good ones, then turn them into basic demos that you can play later and review.
Fine Tune Your Demos
As you make these demos, keep the best takes and start to polish them within the DAW or with extra mixing and mastering software. If you have a high budget you can even buy hardware to really give your jingles a solid master. It is also possible to hire out these services, but you will find singing for jingles is not always lucrative, so the more you can do the better.
Besides mixing features for your voice or music, also make sure to polish the tune with any fading, volume adjustments, intros, outros, etc. You may find even as a singer you will have to create music beds for some ads, so practice completing a song. Don’t make the mistake of walking away from a project for too long. Sometimes a couple of days break helps with a fresh perspective but generally, songs must be finished in a timely manner or they will languish.
Find the Work
Where to Find Clients for Jingles
This one is the first step in the world of jingle writing, but we can’t look for work until we know we have the right equipment and recording knowledge. Finding work as a songwriter or singer is not easy, it requires a lot of searching online on freelance sites like Voices, voiceover pages, and other creative agencies. There is no secret, it just takes a lot of time to seek out clients who require your voice.
The one rule to avoid when looking for work is never to do anything for free. Providing a quick sample of your singing or jingle is ok, but do not agree to make a song in hopes that it will be picked up. If a client doesn’t want to respect you as a musician and pay you, they certainly will not do it after you work for free. Approach your clients with great samples, quirky ideas, and confidence in your ability and you will find people who need jingles.
Find What Jingle the Client Needs
Once you have found a project it is best to try different genres, styles, and singing methods. If the client gives you a brief, make sure to follow it and make appropriate samples, but also make a few unique ideas like adding some vocal fry or singing the entire jingle in your falsetto range. Sometimes you happen upon a vocal hook that may be more suited than they realized. Plus the more variety you can provide, the more professional you appear.
If you learn to produce your own music then you will not have to spend money on musical beds and can charge more. Clients like it when you can provide voice, singing, and music for their ads. After they have chosen a sample you then refine it and master it according to the audio standards they require. On other occasions, the client may provide the music, to which you simply load it into your DAW and work on vocal ideas.
It is not an easy process to make your own ad jingle, however, it is the most accessible it has ever been in the history of music. You can have a high budget and go all out on equipment or stick to the bare minimum of what sounds good.
Either way, if you approach your clients with recording skills, creative ideas, and a great vocal range and singing voice, you will be on your way to producing your own advertisements and jingles.
Looking for some voice over jingle jobs? Search Voices today!
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