What's Been Goin On with Pete Gustin

From Fox News to big moves, we caught up with our “can’t stop won’t stop” friend Pete Gustin…who by the way, nails Blue Steel. I mean come on! It must be hard being that ridiculously good looking.

1) What have you been up to lately (new projects, life happenings, etc)?

Well it’s been a busy year. In July 2016 I sold my house in the suburbs of Boston and built a brand new house and a brand new studio right by the beach in North County San Diego. 8 months later, I landed the largest single VO job I could ever imagine getting in becoming the new voice of the Fox News Channel along with Fox News Radio and all of their affiliated network properties. The opportunity came out of the blue but actually landing the job was A LOT of work. I’ve added six new stations to my roster in the last year including major markets like Boston and Denver and also became the Creative Director in Charge of Music Imaging for TuneIn. I’d been the voice of TuneIn for the past 3 years but took on the added responsibility of running their imaging near the end of 2016. My work in the land of movie trailers has also been going great as I was able to be a part of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean campaign over the summer of 2017. Along with all that WORK, I’ve decided to try and have some FUN out here in San Diego as well. Some may know and others may not, but I am legally blind suffering from a degenerative eyesight disorder called Stargadt’s disease. The disease made it impossible for me to “read” copy and so I developed my ear prompter system. It also made it impossible for me to partake in any of the sports my friends in Boston were playing like basketball, golf, tennis and all that good stuff that involves….you know….seeing. Since I’m right around the corner from the Pacific out here though, I walked into a surf shop in late October 2016 and grabbed a surf board thinking “hey…the ocean is pretty damn HUGE. I can probably see that, right?”. I started with an 8 foot foam board and just a few months later was riding with some pros down in La Jolla on my 6’ 2” Channel Island Pod Mod. It’s super exciting for me to be able to get out of the studio and do something really physical. True I might end up getting eaten by a shark someday….but at least I’ll never get hit in the face with a return volley of a tennis ball. The latter is SO MUCH more embarrassing and “blind guy eaten by shark while surfing off coast of San Diego” is a pretty cool headline.

2) You’ve had an outstanding career already. What are some goals you have professionally?

I started in radio and always wanted to be the voice of as many radio stations as would have me. Every time a station makes the choice to use me as their voice I get all kinds of excited just as if it was the very first time. There are just so many people doing VO’s these days, the fact that a station can decide on just one of them…and it ends up being me…..is a huge honor and I absolutely love that feeling. I want to experience it as often as I can. I also had a pie in the sky dream of becoming the voice of a TV Network and never would have dreamed I’d land that job as the voice of the most watched cable network in America in Fox News. Now, I’m looking to do even more in TV promos and especially trailers. The trailer pool is an extremely small and extremely elite pool of talent and I’m both super excited and very honored to be competing with them for those coveted jobs. Going forward, I’d like to land more and more of them.

3) Any new gear or upgrades?

Most of my gear is still the same, but I made a HUGE upgrade to my studio. I built this San Diego house from scratch and so I was able to build a really awesome studio inside of it. I hired a company called Sound Proof San Diego to build me a booth from the studs up. The walls are air gapped, packed with max weight vinyl and all that other good stuff that makes a booth bomb proof. All my “gear” is outside the booth and anything inside runs completely silently. I close this door….and I’m in an amazingly silent little cocoon where the only thing I have to worry about and focus on is my performance. I love it.

4) How has new technology changed the way you work?

If this were maybe just 15 years ago, I don’t even think I’d be able to be in this business. The text to speech technology I use to “read” copy has literally given me the ability to work in my dream job. without little robot voices reading copy into my ear buds, I’d never be able to “read” copy and would just have to get a WHOLE LOT better at surfing so I could get sponsored and do that professionally.

5) What advice can you give to aspiring voiceover artists trying to get into the biz?

Two things. First is – be patient. Second is – use your own voice. Starting a VO career takes just a second. Buy a mic. Buy a computer. Boom….your career has begun. Getting people to pay you to speak into that mic and send it to them via that computer could take years. Honestly, I started trying to get into VO’s when I was just 18 years old. It was a decade later before I was making any sort of money doing it and another five years after that before I was able to actually begin supporting myself with VO work. It takes time…and patience. As for using your own voice, that’s another one that took me a LONG time to learn. While it can help to listen to some of the more popular voices out there, what you don’t want to do it try to copy them. think about it, if someone wanted a voice that sounded like them….they’d just hire them…not you doing a copy of them. have confidence in your own unique sound. Don’t’ force anything. Do what comes naturally to you. Be super confident about it and focus on your read. read that last sentence very carefully. FOCUS ON YOUR READ. do not focus on the timber of your voice or the pitch and tone of it. just let your voice do its own natural thing and you…..you focus on reading that copy and trying to convey the message the writer wants you to convey.