Piers Bishop

English voiceover

I am an English voiceover specialising in medical voiceovers and other technical and scientific narration. My voice is on videos and teaching systems produced for all the major pharmaceutical brands, and I know the language of medical communication.

This language is often quite tongue-twisting, with long strings of chemical compound names that have to be pronounced accurately while keeping the sense of meaning in the whole sentence and still sounding like a human being.  Technical voiceovers have their challenges for the tongue (e.g. ‘beryllium-copper contact strips’, said quickly) and scientific scripts are often very complex, but in my experience medical language wins for the voice artist who likes a challenge. (See the medical narration page for more on the oddities of drug names).

I have been heard in most corners of British broadcasting, from TV presentation to Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. I aim to sound warm and friendly as well as factual / authoritative – take a listen to the samples page and if my style fits the bill please get in touch.

There are different flavours of English voiceover – I sound BBC / RP / Southern English.

Getting it right

A lot of voiceovers work alone, but even if we have a director on-line there is always a producer in the control room at Read On where I work. This might sound labour intensive, but we find it saves time in the long run, and it certainly produces better recordings. The ability to mark up the script for editing later saves post-production time, and having a producer’s ears on the read keeps the quality consistent – even the most experienced voiceovers can’t always hear when they make mistakes, or start to lose energy.

I am lucky to work from a studio with a very good dry room optimised for speech with clear sight to the producer / engineer’s booth and view to the countryside outside. It also has top-grade recording equipment – Neuman TLM193 microphones, Focusrite ISA, SPL and Clarett pre-amps, Protools and Premiere for editing and Harbeth monitoring. It also has Source-Connect for remote recording, Skype or phone patch for remote direction and a dedicated fibre connection for stable remote work or quick transfer of large files.

Read On is named after the prompt used by production assistants when I used to add live voiceover to trailers on BBC1 TV. Read On produces podcasts, audiobooks and audio for all kinds of educational purposes.