 Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop tech talk number 93. I believe indeed. It is number 90. Look, there it is 93 Motion graphics. Oh, we got lots of cool stuff to talk about tonight because I know George You've been like collecting things all week long talk as long as you'll let me okay You just pull the string. Okay, it's been extended. Okay. I mean stuff like headphones and travel mics and all sorts There's always a new audio interface to talk about and then I'm going to go with What I think you should buy in 2023 you can you can completely ignore every all that crap I mentioned and tell people what they really need to buy. All right It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk. You want to listen because We got lots of cool stuff for you to start off 2023 right now Now Tech talk Brought to you by voiceover essentials.com the home of harlin hogan signature products Source elements the makers of source connect Voiceover heroes become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training Voice actor websites.com where your voice actor website doesn't have to be a pain in the butt voiceover extra your daily resource for voiceover success and world voices the industry association of freelance voice talent And now here's your hosts dan and george Well, hello there. I'm dan leonard and i'm george widdem and this is voiceover body shop or vio b s tech talk Tech talk tech talk tech talk tech talk. There is doing it live in the flesh All right. So anyway, if you've got a question about your home voiceover studio, any piece of technology, maybe some software issue you're having, or you want to ask us, how do you design something like this? Or what's this voiceover stuff all about? Well, why does George hate Apigee? Why does George hate Apigee? Yeah, that's all these questions and more are going to be answered tonight. All right. So if you've got a question, throw it in the chat room. We also have some other people waiting by live who are going to have questions for us, right? All of you shake your heads if you're going to be asking, okay, good. That's what I want to see. So stay tuned for that. We'll get to some of those questions in a little bit. But it's 2023. That's right. Officially, if you're watching this in time shifted mode, it's not 2022 anymore. Hope yours is off to a great start. That's right. Why don't we just get right into your tech update and you can get into it and then I'll have time to refute it all. Sounds good to me. Okay, go for it. Sounds good to me, everybody. Yeah, so what is new? So happy, of course, happy new year, everyone. Lovely to have you back watching the show. My new headphones for 2023, I realized it's kind of a thing now to have a new pair of headphones basically every year. So the ones I got myself for Christmas this year are the one more brand headphones, brand one more right there. These are called the Sonoflows and a little bit more about them. By the way, I'm mentioning headphones that you can't buy because they're currently out of stock. So maybe this isn't very fair of me to talk about headphones you can't actually buy. But anyway, these is them and they are what makes them cool. Anyway, I paid about 80 bucks for these and they are Bluetooth. They are noise canceling and they have exceptionally good noise canceling. They have really, really soft ear cups that really, really soft cushy, pillowy ear cup that you like to see nowadays. And they're double as wired headphones, which if you're going to buy Bluetooth headphones that you want to throw in your bag and have them act double duty as being on the plane headphones and working while you're remote, you want to have a headphone with a wired capability like these do, right? These can be plugged in. Big fan, I've been loving the way they sound. They sound natural. They don't sound overly hyped. But if you do like hyped sound, they have an app that comes with them and so when you're using them on your mobile phone with Bluetooth, you can add bass or treble and kind of pump up the sound to get a little bit more of a hyped sound. So anyway, if you have to, if you have to, I found when they were brand new out of the box, the low end, the bass was a little anemic. It might be needing to be broken in a little bit. That's possible because bass actually is a physical moving diaphragm and they can be a little tight when they're brand new. So I just pumped up the bass using the deep sound preset and that gave me the little extra something I was looking for. So anyway, again, those processing settings only work in Bluetooth. When you're plugged in, they're not going to be doing anything like that to your audio. So don't worry about them filtering what you don't want it to filter. Moving on, I'm going to move into ranta clause mode now. Yes, I know we're it's a little late for that. You know, we know it's 2023, but this is time shifting and what am I going to tell you? Anyway, ranta clause. Why do the audio processing presets that come with many softwares like Adobe Audition Audacity doesn't really have any really to speak of. What else Reaper most of the built-in audio presets stink. They stink. Like if you plug in one of those presets that has anything having to do with voiceover in it, such as an announcer, I think that's one of them or anything voiceover. They are usually terrible. And my theory on that is, is that they are not made by voiceover engineers. They're just made by generic audio engineers that work for the companies that have played around with some stuff and think this stuff sounds kind of cool. And they don't realize that it's overcooked. It's almost always overly bright, overly bassy, overly compressed, what everything is overcooked. And I also think it might be because they think that the people using it won't hear the processing. So they overdo it. Right. And I find I'll mention a microphone later that has built in processing that has the same issue. You turn on the settings and a lot of it is overdone. And you know, so I think there's a long way to go in terms of presets that are actually useful. And I'm hoping that's going to be a change for 2023. But yeah, man, most of the time, the included processing presets are pretty bad. So I would not go with those. If you're looking at anything with the words voiceover in it, they are usually off the mark. It does depend on the platform. I mean, some of them are good. What? Have you found like a preset that's any good? There's a couple in an Adobe audition that I like. Are they in the rack area or they have favorite? Where would you find the best presets? I would find them. Well, they're in both. They're in favorites, because normalizes there. And yeah, because so many people send me stuff in two track got to turn it down to mono. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's in a favorite. But no, when it comes to say compression and things like that. Yeah, I had there's a preset that I like to use. When I use compression. What's it called? Do you remember? Broadcast compression? Is that in the is that in a rack? Or is that in an individual that's an individual preset for which plug in for for compression? Oh, for the compressor tool? Yeah, cool. There you go. You found one that's good. It's well, it's a multi multi-spectrum compressor. Oh, the multi band multi band. Right. Okay, so that's a that's an example of a plug-in that isn't overcooked. No, like over over the top. No, yeah, you throw that on and it's like, okay, you're supposed to sound like you're on the radio. Yeah, that will do it. Cool. There you go. I'm glad you found one that's useful. Yeah. Yeah, because so many of them are just like, what were the one that says voiceover? Don't use that. All right, one to try. There's one to try. That's I mean, also the plugins that come that are the plugins that are multi band like multi band compressor are by far the most complex to actually set up. So if you can find a preset that's actually useful to help you get started and give you an idea where there's 17 different settings should be set, that really, really helps. So thanks for that. Thanks for that tip. Another thing is, we were talking a little bit about microphones and thinking outside the box a little bit and this and this year, I don't want another large diaphragm studio condenser mic. I don't want another shotgun mic to play around with. I want to start playing around with or experimenting with handheld vocal mics, mics that you guys are thinking of it for karaoke or Celine Dionning or stage performance. But I'll tell you, there are some super high quality, handheld vocal microphones that could absolutely double as studio mics. And one of them I would consider checking out, which again, I haven't tried myself, but based on everything I've read, the specs, everything could be an incredibly great choice is the Sennheiser E 965. This looks like your standard handheld vocal mic like an SM 58 or something. It doesn't look at face value like anything special. But inside, there's a lot going on. First of all, it's a one inch diaphragm condenser. It's a dual diaphragm, meaning that it's got multiple patterns. So it has a cardioid mode. And it has a hypercardioid mode, right? And it's switched inside the head basket. So you unthread the microphone head basket. And inside is a little switch and you can choose. I'm probably going to choose hypercardioid in most cases, right? It also is internally shock mounted. So if you do have to worry about vibration, the internal shock mount will help tremendously with that. You don't have to have a big spider suspension for the mic. And lastly, it also has a built in pop screen, right? So that's one more thing you don't have to worry about and deal with internally pop screen, right? So another thing that's cool about that is the pop screen. The mic is tuned for that pop screen, right? So we all know pop screens can sometimes change the sound of the mic. This mic was designed with its own pop screen. So anyway, I'm saying it's worth a check out. It's not a cheap mic. This is a $400 mic. But if you look at what you get in the box, and what you're getting in a handheld mic that's going to handle the tortures of road travel and all that kind of stuff, I'm thinking it looks really compelling. So you'll be hearing more about handheld mics this year, because I've been thinking about it for a long time. Minor rant mode back on, Rana Claus is back, firmware update, firmware update. 1.27 makes the personas revelator IO 24 less stable. Beware, stick with whatever current version you have if you have the revelator IO 24, do not install the updates. Do not use automatic updates on your Mac or your iPad if you're using the iPad to remote control it like I am. I know I'm talking to a 1% of 1% of the audience right now. I just had to say that do not install the update. It sucks. Moving on the road NT USB plus microphone is fine. It sounds perfectly fine. But it's not ultra clean. It's self noise is kind of high like some of the more budget USB mics tend to have a noisy preamp circuit kind of noisy right that noise levels a little bit high. It does have internal DSP that you can turn on or off but is but unfortunately, it is literally on or off. There is no real tune ability. It does have two modes of high pass filter 75 and 150. So that's kind of nice. But everything else is either bright or flat, boomy or flat, overly compressed or flat and then the gate. You know, we think about gates, not great. Anyway, it's an interesting mic. We've been playing with it over on the Pro Audio Suite. Stay tuned for an episode coming soon on Pro Audio Suite about that Mike and you can hear it used in context. Speaking of DSP being kind of too simple, focus right has had the vocaster series out now this year. They have the vocaster one and the vocaster two and they have onboard DSP as well. So again, what is that for? Really, it's intended for podcasting, live streaming, things like this where you want to hype up the sound real time like tonight, we are using a roadcaster mixer, which has built in processing hyping up the sound a bit for our real time production. Right. So the vocaster does have that. The problem was when it came out, same thing as as the road, those settings were one shot deal. They were on or off or maybe they had two levels on or off on low high. Now they're letting you tune all that stuff. You can actually tune how heavy duty the processing actually is. You have a lot more control over it, making it a lot more compelling to me. Now, the tools that are probably useful for voice actor are going to be simple tools such as a high pass filter and maybe a basic very gentle two to one compressor where you want to allow a little bit of control of our dynamic range. That's about it. All the other stuff, the treble boosts and all that other thing. Don't over cook it. Don't over hype it. And really software controls that we have the processing that we can do in our DAW are so much more granular, so much better tuned and things like this. So just be aware of that. You know, they're not all going to work out beautifully. Moving on one more thing on my to do list here. Oh, another new audio interface. The SSL two is something I have been recommending swell of others have been recommending for a really long time because of its simplicity. So along comes the SSL 12 audio interface which throws all that out the window. So if you like the SSL sound and you like the SSL preamps, but you want to have way more complexity in terms of the routing and the mixing and being able to do say multi track production and on and on and on. The SSL 12 is now available. It has four mic preamps, two headphone mixes and a bunch of internal mixing. It basically has a digital on screen version of an actual SSL mixer. So that kind of thing blows your dress up. Go check it out. $500 pretty fair price. And it ain't bad at all. Just remind I'm just going to remind you, you no longer have that beautiful one simple knob for adjusting your monitor mix. When you go to these more complicated systems, they're far more complicated to operate. So keep that in Anyway, there's my rundown of new tech that's come out recently that you might check out for check out in 2023. And Dan, it's time for you to tell us what you actually should consider buying in 2023. Well, alright, so not in deference to our sponsor. You know, I mean, we are not influenced by our sponsors. We are not. There are things that the thing is, is if our sponsors say you need it, yes, you can probably purchase that, but I won't tell you no. Microphones again. This is this is my own Santa Ray. It's a matter of there is no microphone out there that's going to change the way you perform copy. Now, I will qualify that because I'm using this wonderful Mojave that the folks at Mojave lent us. And yeah, it sounds nice compared to my other mic. I can't tell if it's any different. I mean, is it? Maybe it's a little cleaner. But is an engineer on the other end of the road going to Well, maybe not a bad pun. On the other end of the the cord is going to say well, but he's using one of those or he that the best person is using this and therefore I'm going on. It doesn't work that way. Unless of course, you're using a Samson C 101 or something like that. Oh, I think Sue is using one of those actually. But yeah, unless you're using a cheap USB mic, or a really cheap condenser mic and a really lousy interface. If you've got a good interface and a fairly good can studio condenser mic, you're going to sound pretty good. Now, are you going to sound fabulous? That's up to you. It's simply a matter of is that the right microphone for you? I don't believe there's such a thing. I really don't because the sound you have is the sound you have. Now, do you want to have a good microphone? Yes. But if you have a good microphone, you also have to have George, you need something to tune it. Yeah, yeah, really, really, really quiet, quiet space. Thank you. It'll be well controlled. Right, because the space is everything as far as I'm concerned. Another thing you were saying, like, you know, it's not about the specific microphone. The best voice microphones work well on anyone because they're not accentuating or attenuating much of anything. You know, they're pretty dead to rights, accurate, pleasing, clean. That's what we want, right? I might it doesn't distort. I might that captures you as you are, right? Exactly. That's what we're looking for. A lot of microphones can do this and do it really, really well. If you go on a set, the sound mixer isn't pulling out a different shotgun mic because there's a woman on set, right? They're not picking the mic goes to a 416 and that's right or whatever the new mic is, right? Right. They're going to use the mic that works best for the environment, for the size of the room, for the number of people speaking, they are not picking a mic out because it works better on a female or a male, for example, right? Exactly. So picking mics based on that criteria doesn't always steer you in the right direction. Right. So what else would you might want to buy? Depending on what interface you have? If your interface is kind of tired? How do you know if it's tired? It starts to crackle when you start playing the knobs. You know, perhaps, you know, the software, you know, the firmware in it doesn't keep up with the OS stuff like that. But if you want a new interface, you don't still have to don't don't have to go hog wild and spend $500 on an interface. So much of this has to do with the functionality and the utility of the device. Right. How well does it do what you need it to do, which is capture your voice with proper modulation. That's its job. And without any distortion or anything like that. All of the good interfaces over $150 are going to do just fine. Now, what happens is as you go into some of these other ones, like, like the Apollo twin and some of these other universal things, it's like, Oh, you got all these plugins. Well, you know, we think about all these plugins. So, you know, however, I must say, I really like that AI one from road. You like it because of its just size or its size, simplicity or lack of complexity. You hook it up with an NT one when you're setting up somebody's studio who has never done it before and it's like, okay, hit record and you're going. Yeah. And that's and I think that to me, that's that's that's really I think you need tech that doesn't get in your way. Exactly. Exactly. And that's if you came from radio, okay, you're used to a thousand blinking lights, switches and levers, right? If you came from any kind of other field, if you came from acting, if you came from on stage, whatever, that's all distraction. You're going to have so much heart over time getting a great sounding product. When you have all those things getting in your way, guys, we really want to emphasize that it is not worth the distraction. Right. So please keep it simple. And if you're thinking about not buying something, bounce it off of us. Yeah, we'll help you steer in the right direction before you you split another 150 to $500 or more out of your wallet for that next new thing. Yeah. Also, I would suggest and I suggest this to a lot of people is depending on on your living situation because if you have like, you know, young children or if you can't have, you know, the sound of what you do all over your house, a pair of studio monitors is also a good investment when you know, once you start really bookings to more because they give you back exactly what you recorded, which is why I like studio monitors. And I hardly ever wear headphones. The only reason you would wear headphones is one, you don't have studio monitors and you've got to do some editing or two, you're doing a remote session and you need to be able to hear the director on the other end. And that's when you would wear headphones. But if you're gonna wear headphones, have really good ones, everybody loves those DT, whatever they are, is that you like. The 770. The DT 770. Right. From the bar dynamics. They got the big gray round fluffy ear pads. Everybody loves those. I've seen a lot of people buy those. They've got really popular. Yeah. It's kind of like it's kind of like the SM7B in terms of gear, you know, certain gear like that microphone for podcasting. Like ubiquitous. It's ubiquitous. Yeah. These headphones are almost becoming that kind of level of and you know, I think I think they're great for listening and monitoring, but they're not as good for voice acting. I think because they do kind of muffle the environment so much. Yeah. It's sort of unnerving and a little unnatural feeling, you know. So that would be something you have to experiment with in your studio to see. You know, the thing about the speakers is just like a microphone interacts with this environment and you have to care about your environment or your acoustics for a good sounding mic. Studio monitors are the same thing. So if you do invest in the studio monitors, make sure the space accommodates them. Right. That's an important piece. Yeah. Don't put nice sized five inch driver two way speakers in your voiceover booth, for example, in your little four by six or three by five closet or smaller, they are not going to sound good. Unfortunately, because they are going to the low end, the base is going to be boosted very unnaturally. Right. So you need to watch out for that. So keep that in mind when switching to monitor speakers and talk to us if you have any doubt. Right. Whether what you're recording actually sounds like it's supposed to sound. Cool. Well, we got lots of questions coming up and we have guests who also have questions. So let's get to those right after these important announcements. So don't go away. We'll be right back in voiceover body shop. This is Bill Radner and you're enjoying Voice Over Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem. V O B S dot TV. Well, Merry Christmas and Merry Christmas. We are celebrating Christmas twice. Never seen that before, but then I'm old. Go figure. Maybe we'll get double the gifts, but I kind of don't think so. I do want to thank George Wittem and Dan Leonard and V O B S for being my friends and I'm so pleased to be able to support you guys because you certainly supported me when I started. Some people thought the port of booth was a crazy idea. Some people thought the V O 1 A microphone, a microphone designed for voiceover people was a crazy idea, but you guys didn't. You didn't reviews, honest reviews, supported me and the products and I'm eternally grateful for that. And you do a great service for everybody. So on behalf of voiceover essentials, that's Warren and Terry Lee and Lon and myself. Happy New Year. Well, I'm on camera. That can only mean one thing. You're on. It's time to talk about source elements, source elements, the creators of Source Connect and something you'll probably be hearing a lot more about in the next coming year or this coming year 2023 is probably going to be is my mic up. I'll go. I said turn on my mic. I don't know if it's up. One thing you're probably going to want to watch out for in terms of new technology coming down the pipe is source elements, source Nexus and source Nexus is already around. It's been around for quite a long time, but its functionality to utility is increasing all the time. Stay tuned in 2023 to see what source Nexus is going to offer the studio not only for the production side, but for the actor side and how it makes running audio between things in and out of their studio in and out of their software so much easier than it was before. So that's a really cool tool coming. So stay tuned for more about source Nexus, but the one we all been using to do those big flashy jobs that use recording studios as source connect. And if you want to start using it head on over there source dash elements dot com and get that 15 day free trial so you can start experimenting with it and learning how to use it. Heck, you can even get certified if you want to, which just shows that you have a very high level of understanding of how the thing actually works in your home studio. Anyway, let's get back to your questions here right after this commercial. Thanks source elements. Hey there, I'm David H. Lawrence the 17th and with my company, VO heroes and my team of coaches and my community of voice over talent. We guide voice over actors along their journey. And you may be watching VOBS here and not nearly as far along as many of the other people who are watching. You may not even have started yet. And we actually specialize in helping you do just that. So if you're watching all the stuff going on here on VOBS and going, I have no idea what they're talking about. I don't know. But I really want to do this. I'd really like to help you. Please go to VO heroes dot com slash start. That's VO heroes dot com slash start. And you can take our getting started in voice over class, which tells you everything you need to get started as a voice talent. And I'd love to hold your hand along the way and help you with that journey. Again, VO heroes dot com slash start. That's VO heroes dot com slash start. This is Arianna Ratner and you're enjoying voice over body shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem VOBS dot TV. And we are back. Hey, now you know, you know, that's your favorite way of like testing a mic. Like, hey, I don't know where that came from. It's a Howard Stern thing. But I don't remember how it came in. We have to remind you what it is that George and I do, which is help you with your home voice over studios, which is a very wide ranging array of stuff. I mean, because there's so many things you have to worry about, mics, acoustics, you know, the soundproofing, your interface, how to use that software. We get a lot of questions about some. Yeah, because they keep making more of it. That's right. And they never stop. And it keeps getting more sophisticated. And the fact of the matter is it shouldn't be sophisticated. So, you know, but we're here to help. And if you'd like to work with us, because we're the ones that actually know how to do all this stuff, because we've been doing it a long time. And the more we do it, the better we've gotten at it. So everybody else is five years behind us. They're OK. They're good. They'll figure it out. I'm insulting a couple of people who are in the waiting room right now. But that's that's OK. If you want to work with us, there's a couple places you can go. One, you can talk to George the tech at George the dot tech. Yeah, that's the website. I'm not going to say anything about the new one because it's still not ready. But the new website. But when it is ready, boy, I'm so excited. Anyway, the new the current website, you can book our services over there. There's a whole menu of things from starting off with a sound check, which is really where you need to start it. I don't know what I should do next is my studio sounding with a way to post the sound sound check. That's where to start. I will give you my two cents about what I'm hearing and tell you how it can be improved. And if it doesn't need any improvement, I'll tell you that too. So that's that George the dot tech you can book on site. You can book remotes. Any kind of support you need is all in one place. Dan, he does a lot of the same stuff over his own home on the web. And that is home voiceover studio dot com. Right. Go on over there because I've got my specimen collection cup there and you can send me a sample of your audio. Just make sure it's raw, no processing, no editing, all that kind of stuff. I get it because I have to preface that because people like I want to show you all the processing I do. I'm like, don't do that. I know as soon as we hear that, we're going to tell you can you send us the other clip we actually asked for without all the process? We want to hear the basic sound of what's going on in your home studio without all the manipulation and stuff because chances we find that when people try to do that, they mess it up and they make it sound a lot worse. They may think it sounds better to them. But then again, you don't hire you. So I will instruct you on how to make sure that it's sounding right. You taught to me I keep finding that when I when I work with people, it ends up talking a lot more about the voice over industry and the resources that you have out there and how to be a better voice actor because I'll get your studio up and running the way it's supposed to quickly and that's the efficiency of time. Exactly. It's a very efficient way of spending your time. So check us both out because we actually know what we're doing as opposed to a lot of stuff you'll read on Facebook and LinkedIn and all these other places where people like, yeah, I use one of these. Fabulous. You go on and keep using. Anyway, we got a bunch of questions. We do. And because Jeff Holman is with us tonight and he's actually taking these questions. Plus we have some people who are joining us on camera because they're not shy and they want to talk to us about some of their questions. But let's start off with Patricia Andrea. Quick question. I use twisted wave now, but want to start fiddling with video and Vio. Fiddling with the video and Vio. Which program do you recommend to start for video? Well, I mean, the question is what kind of video? Well, yeah, I don't mean what what what are you watching? We're talking content, right? Not content. But I mean, are you doing editing to picture? Are you dubbing your voice to pre-recorded video? What kind of because was crystal because twisted wave has added video in it does, but its primary functionality is just for editing, right? So if you want to take a long video that you want to cut down into a one and a half minute tick tock, for example, or an Instagram. Yes, you can do that in twist away. So now if you load a video in a twist away and you make all those edits, you're making an edit in the video. They're just simple jump cuts, right? But that's a great improvement. You can shrink down the length of a video very, very quickly now in twisted wave. It's built right in. Right. But if your job is in is to dub, let's say overdub or add voice to an existing video, Adobe Audition, Adobe Audition is designed for that. Absolutely from the ground up. Yep. Yep. Yep. I know Pro Tools is the gold standard, but you don't need to go to Pro Tools to be doing that stuff. Reaper you can use as well. Much deeper learning curve than twisted wave. Dramatically so. I think Adobe Audition is the kind of the Goldilocks application for that kind of stuff. All righty. Yeah. So you could bring your video clip into twisted wave, then use your audio processing stuff to take out like some lip smacks or whatever and then export it right out of there. Yes, you could. Yeah, there's another use case for it. So if you've got a decently, maybe do you do those? What do you call those self tapes? Self tapes, all my auditions are self tapes and occasionally I have heard a little lip smack in there and I'm like, damn, I wish I could bring that into twisted wave and you can. You can't. So it's an add on. So it's the first time he's really offered an additional feature that cost extra. I think it's a $50 add on fee, but you'll see a video option on the top menu bar now and you can then demo it for a while and try it out. But yeah, that's a cool idea to be able to just pull something in and do the audio fix. Yeah. And now when you save it, the fix is saved to the video, you know, before he did need more suffix, sophisticated software to do that. So very cool. Thank you. That's Jeff Holman. Our very own Jeff Holman. Sorry, he's not on camera. I forgot to turn the camera towards Jeff. Right. I will next. But he is there. All right. Hey, let's go there. There he is. There he is. There he is. All right. Let's go to somebody who's actually got their camera. So let's go to Grand Rapids, Michigan. You're on the air. Hey, how's it going? Good. What's your question? You guys do RMS normalization, like New Gin, LM, correct? Is that a thing that you would recommend in a process to people who are on cheaper audio interfaces and recording systems to to meet these kind of requirements? What requirements specifically? Yeah, like let's say they need a they want the audio at minus 18 RMS with the, you know, a true peak of minus three, you know, using New Gin, LM, correct? You can just do that instantly. Oh, yeah. So minus 18 RMS for, I guess that'd be something for an audio book. Is that would that be an example of what would have that kind of a spec? Yeah, you know, audio books have those specs. Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, if they if it automates the process for you and makes it easy and doesn't make it sound crappy, then it would be a yes in my book. Like Adobe edition has match match loudness. So it lets you set an exact peak that you want to achieve as well as an average volume. So that's the kind of thing you're talking about. So whether that's done in a standalone plug in, if it's whether it's done as a function of the DAW, like in again, Adobe auditions match loudness. There's also RX. In Twisted Wave, in Twisted Wave, they have RMS normalization. I would say it's not as accurate as the Nugin products. Well, the thing about normalization is normalization, it cannot fix a dynamic range problem, right? You can't normalize to minus 18 and peaks of minus three at the same time. You have to pick one, right? And that's just it. I think with with Nugin, I think you can do exactly that. Right. Well, they're calling it normalization, but that's not the right term. That's more compression. Yeah, that means it's actually incorporating compression and dynamics controls as well. So while they might call it normalizing, it kind of co-opted the studio term normalization to apply to to imply that it means something that it doesn't actually mean really. You can only normalize to one thing. You can either normalize it to a peak or you can normalize it to an average. But if you're normalizing to both, then it is doing some dynamics tweaking, which is really useful. Like it's a huge time saver. For me and my own workflow, especially with this run and gun type of pernavo, send it off. Like I have found that the LM correct is is saving a lot of workflows. That's awesome. Is it done real time or after you're done? Like in post, you just hit a button and it does it. It's like you hit a button. It's like a app on your desktop and you just take your files after and then load it right into LL. Oh, oh, well, got you. It's kind of like a drag and drop tool. We're just my it's the last thing I usually do when before I send something off. OK, cool. Yeah, man. I haven't used that one before. It sounds like level. We're going to say level later or a cake or audio cupcake. There's a couple. It's not cheap. It's like six hundred dollars. Oh, is it worth it for that? That's that's the question. I think it is. I think it is in this run and gun type of deliverables. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, if it fits your workflow and your budget, go for it. There's there's just much less expensive tools that can do the the same thing, including like I was saying twisted wave twisted waves, RMS normalization is really they're the only guys really doing it. Well, yeah, like, like I was saying earlier, there's match loudness in Adobe Audition, which does it beautifully. And also, Isotope RX Editor has a level control as well. Works exactly the same way. You set the peak, you set the average and it does the rest for you. So I think it's based on the crest factor with the Isotope. Yeah, I'm not sure the technicality behind whether it's using crest factor or what, but the end result seems to work really, really well. I don't use it all on its own. I use it with a conjunction with a lot of other plugins before I use that to make sure that sounds great. So I don't take something that sounds mediocre and then make something mediocre sound much louder. That always sounds worse, but that's the tricky part. But thanks for the new tip. One more question with noise floor. What's the lowest do you think when you're doing deliverables that you should be like nothing below 100? Well, you know, if it's below 100, it's silence. Yeah, once you get past my 60, it's not it's not an issue. I tend to find that we have a standard of minus 60 for noise floor. Any engineer is going to take that and think that's fabulous because if it's something they need to clean up, it gives them enough headroom and enough room to to do things seamlessly. So I would, you know, if you're going to if you're trying to get like a zero noise floor, it's not necessary. And I'm sure some of the expert other experts we have on right now will probably either agree with us or go, you know, you guys are full of baloney. It's well, are you producing or are you voice acting in this context, George? Well, let's say it's like meditation. I feel like with meditation kind of videos that you need that total silence. Well, that's that's a very specific genre in which you're talking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's that's the point. It is very genre specific. Certain things they may like a very quiet or are completely absent noise floor. Other things they may want a normal or sort of what we call a room tone, like an audio book production, they want a consistent room tone. They don't want a very, very low noise floor or right, ACX would fail you if you're going to get out. Yeah, exactly. The hundred is kind of they're cut off with ACX. Yeah, which is arbitrary. You know, once it's below, say minus 80 or something, you cannot hear whether there's noise there or not because that noise is so quiet. It's below the monitoring of your own setup, the self noise of your headphone amp, the self noise of your speakers, then room tone of your room, all that stuff, right? You're not going to hear that, that really low noise. Thank you, man. We love good questions. Mike Cunningham, you have a question. Yeah. Go for it. So I have been running into an issue while I'm doing some live, live ADR stuff where occasionally, maybe once or twice a session, they'll tell me they're getting like an electrical impulse interference on their end. Kind of like just a static electrical sound that'll come through. Audio is clear all the time regardless until that happens. It lasts about a second, goes away. I've only ever heard it one time. I never hear it in my monitor. I've heard it one time while I was recording something here, but it's super infrequent and I've not been able to kind of pinpoint it. I've replaced every cable I have. I've replaced the dock that I'm using on the MacBook. I've moved all of the power cables and stuff away from every microphone cable. You know, to the best of my ability, this is not the most spacious of spaces. I'm wondering if it might just be my interface. I'm running a Mo2M2 and if you think maybe the interface, what should I replace it with? You know, it could be, it could be a lot of different things, but generally if it's crackles and stuff like that, it's not cables unless you're moving your microphone. Once something stationary, it's not going to be an issue. Can an interface scope start to go bad? Sometimes the dials and stuff like that will wear out if you're using those a whole lot or don't use it much, very much at all and keep it at the same level and then you twist it, you know, who knows what could get on there. But generally something like that is probably something, it may be something external, like your actual electrical system in your house, in which case I would say get a, you know, a line filter. OK. You know, which might solve the problem. Yeah, power conditioner, you know, the the cheap ones under under one hundred dollars are pretty much useless. The ones that actually seem to work, you know, there seems to be a price threshold of around two hundred bucks where they start to really actually have proper power filtration and power regulation and things like that. So, you know, your mileage may vary. Always buy it with the return policy in mind because you never know if they're actually going to help. Or a lot of people throwing out their entertainment systems tend to throw out their monster cable power conditioners. And those work just fine. That's a good point. You know, so you pick one up for twenty five bucks as opposed to one hundred and seven or five or something like that. Yeah, you got to make sure it has power filtration. A lot of them have, you know, lots of buzzwords, but if they don't have an actual line conditioning power filtration, they're not going to probably help. But those are the worst issues when they're so infrequent and so random. Yeah, it'll happen maybe once or twice over the course of two hours, three hours or something like that. And you know, like I said, everything sounds fine or at least to me, it sounds fine. I don't know, I'm going to have Uncle Roy tell me how terrible everything is in a couple of weeks. But yeah, I've been trying to lock it down for a while. And you know, like I said, every single little piece of everything that I could change out, even though I bought a brand new Mojave cable from them just to try and rule that out, too. It's not the cable. I don't think so. Now when it's super random, now when it's super random, it sounds like RFI, some pulse of radio interference from something either in the building or outside the building that's just sneaking in to the electrical signal somewhere along the way. So, you know, at the end of the day, if it's if it's so frequent that it slows down production, that's one thing. If it's so infrequent that you can very quickly remove it with autoheal or some other tool or something like that, then it may not be worth the time and expensive. Yeah, usually it's enough that it like I have to rerecord that line. I mean, it's not a huge deal, but I'm wondering if it's, you know, if I don't happen to catch it and submit it, that's going to be an issue, too, you know. Yeah, well, that's right. Listen to your stuff carefully before you send it out. Yeah, yeah. It's really important. Hey, Mike, thanks for joining us today. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. All right. Should we go to the chat room now? We've got a few from the chat room. We've got a couple. Yeah, we've got one from Brendan McCoy, who's on YouTube says, which new interface with onboard DSP would be on your Christmas wish list? Epigee Boom or the Lewitt Connect 6 or something else entirely? Love your show, guys. Thanks, Brendan. Well, which ones have onboard DSP? Well, we know the Yamaha, the AGO3 and the AGO6. Yeah, that's kind of the OG, right? And I'm glad you mentioned that one. I forgot all about that one. Yeah. But they have a new addition of the AGO03 series. I can't remember if it's called that just a Mark II or the II or whatever. But they have a new addition, which supposedly has cleaner preamps and it's got some basic processing built in, which is really cool. And it's going to be front end processing. It will be front end processing. You know, the thing is, I like that it has a single on and off button that will turn that feature on and off. It's very obvious whether you're using it or not because it has a button that lights up when you press it, right? And that I kind of like. And you can just simply dial that processing in and do one job and that could just be a high pass filter, right? You can dial in exactly the frequency you want, have that turned on and that's all it does. Or if you are doing podcast production, more compression, more of everything to based on what you're actually doing. So that's a great option. I mentioned the vocaster two by focus, right? That has DSP with more controls now. Thankfully, they made it more flexible. The Kinect 6, we're I'm actually even talking our buddy Jim Edgar, who was here earlier tonight. He isn't. He isn't a process of kind of putting it through the mill right now. He is. There he is right there. Jim. Tell us about it. He said I'm not ready to share a lot, but I know he's testing it. Yeah, the thing that's popped up with it is that the drivers on Mac OS are very limited. And so that would be sort of OK. But one of the problems that I've run into, I was playing with it in a Zoom session and I wanted to play some background sound and realized that I had no way to mute a secondary source going through it, even though I had the mix or the channel all the way turned down and it was taken out of the main feeds. There's an A and B mix that I should be able to put it in and out of. This is getting super nerdy, super fast. I apologize. But what you would think is that you'd be able to cut off a secondary source and you cannot. Everything gets pushed out and you have no control over what's going out to an app on Mac OS. So, for example, you and I use the the revelator a lot and you've got, you know, essentially three in and out pairs going to anything. You've got the mix A mix B and the regular one. You don't have any control over kind of the regular one. Everything gets pushed into it. So if you're feeding up to a phone, it's good because you can select certain outputs. But if you're feeding using it more as we would in VO, you're going to run into strange things being included with your signal. And that will be exciting, depending on when it happens. But I'll have I should have a video out the next week or so. I've got some some samples of what I just poorly described verbally. So hopefully I'll let you know when that's out. It's over at Ask Jim VO, right? Just ask Jim VO dot studio. Just ask just the cool kids got all the dot tech URLs. So you. The one that confuses people endlessly. Yes, yes. Yeah, we look forward to hearing about that. Thanks for thanks for taking the bullet on that and keeping me from buying it and doing all that. I really one of the many services we offer, you know, I'm happy to be happy to do that. Thanks for that, Jim. Be well. All right. Let's go to another question here because this is an interesting from from Grace Newton. She says, I accepted the opportunity to host a podcast. Great. Lots of fun. I have a producer, sponsors and guests lined up. Well, that's that's all hard stuff right there. My next step is choosing a hosting provider. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and are there some top ones you recommend? Well, we're with pod pod bean, which boy made it super simple. I mean, I've had other people that have they wanted to start a podcast and I'm like, well, where do you go? Well, let's just set you up an account on pod bean, you know, because you're not going to start off with a hundred thousand, you know, listeners. Yeah, the starter is free, right? Yeah, it's started. Yeah, and and as the show starts to pick up steam, you buy a better plan on or or you upgrade to their pro plan or something and then you have all sorts of stuff you can use. Yeah. The key is the tool set they give you for promoting the show, the fact that they help you syndicate it. Right. So when you when you do the show on pod bean, they're going to put it everywhere. Like, it's going to be on Spotify if you choose, right? Right. It doesn't have to go on Spotify, but you can choose to put it on Spotify. This is a topic I could talk about for a long time because the thing about once your podcast ends up in an aggregator or a place that is a rebroadcaster of your show. Really, the big the big one is Spotify, right? That's the right. That's the big dog, right? Once that podcast ends up in Spotify and your listeners are listening to you on Spotify, your pod bean console, which tells you your metrics, how many people are listening, how many, how many episodes have they downloaded, et cetera, will not know who the listeners are or how many have listened when they're on Spotify because they're now behind this invisible barrier that is Spotify, right? Sorry, buddy. So that's that's the problem with Spotify. So the pro is it gets more listeners. The cons are you won't know who they are or where they're listening from really. They won't be adding to your listener pool that you can use to help monetize the show. So the pod bean is an excellent excellent. It's been around forever. We've been using it since pretty much the very, very beginning. I think literally the very beginning, right? So it stood the test of time, which I think means a lot. And I wouldn't use any provider that says completely free service. The reason why it's completely free, the free ones and Sue. Oh, I'm glad Sue came on because she knows a lot about podcasting. The reason the truly free ones are free are because the company is making ad dollars. They're making money on the back of your show, right? Instead of you. So keep that in mind. Sue, you know so much about this. Another really good one that I've used is Lipson. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have a really good back and also. But make sure you register your RSS with Charitable. So that will give you some insight every week. That one. Are we are we doing that, Sue? Are we doing? Are we using Charitable? You guys are not. We should be. Yeah. So Grace, if you want to chat with me offline about this, I know, I know, like, way too much of a task that I can't just like say all right now. But I sort of. Tell her how to get a hold of you. Yeah. Tell us everyone. Yeah, I'll put up. Cool. But just, yeah, I have a list of things where you want to register your RSS feed and where you can just kind of do it's going out wherever you're going. Lipson does a really good job with that. It's a little more pricey. But Podbean, I have one that does really well on that. I get enough info, but Lipson. Cool. And I'll read it. Thanks, Sue. That's our director. Gerard, I think, has one thing. He's he's kind of giving us little cute gestures of sadness because he's not on the show right now. But now here he is. Well, hi, guys. Yeah, I've stayed with it the whole time. Moved from eating my dinner to my couch with my dog. Now I'm in my new studio. Lovely, man. Yeah. How's it going in there? How's it sound? You're in. I should put my headphones on. Yes, well, and I'm listening on a little earpiece. Let me take a listen. Yeah. Well, how does it sound? Does it sound OK? This is new. I'm back in Silver Lake, by the way. I've moved from full time in Sedona to full time in Silver Lake. But I've still got the Sedona house, George, and you're still invited. Oh, my gosh. Thank you for reminding me. Did you forget about that? Yeah. I forgot about that, which shame on me. OK. But so so tell us about what you're using in this home studio. OK. Yeah, well, I've just tried a new setup. And I was and I asked that question is why do you hate Apogee? Because I've been using the Apogee Do It 2, which is a very nice piece. You know, it's very nice. But you guys, whenever you talk about, you know, interfaces, Apogee hardly ever comes up, except when you did the test when you had the Apogee 1, which outperformed everything else. You did. But you seem to dislike Apogee 2. And I don't know why. Or Apogee 4 most. And the new Apogee Boom stinks too. I agree. Well, you know, Apogee airs on the side of perfectionism when it comes to sound quality, right? And that's not a bad thing, right? The sound quality in general, until the boom came out, was excellent from their products. If you want to know what I'm talking about, type into Google or YouTube, type in Julian Krause, Apogee Boom. And just watch that, OK? I don't need to get into it, right? But the problem I've had with Apogee products is even though they were developed from the ground up to be native running on Mac OS, they seem to have support issues that come up when Mac decides to update systems, right? And there's this instability that comes along with it that kind of doesn't really seem to jive or make a lot of sense. Some have also... The old thing, the Maestro controller was fine. I mean, you could use it. They've got a new one now with the new OS, which is a pain in the butt. I mean, it's far more complicated, but very good for music studio. But for me, it's a lot too complicated. So just to cut the story short a little bit, you can tell me why you don't like it. I think it's probably got something to do with the dongle. But what I've done now is that I've got a very nice golden age pre-73 going into a Focusrite One. And bypassing the Focusrite One pre-amp and now just going straight into the interface. Yeah, that works. I mean, you said you're using... Which interface are you using? Focusrite. The Focusrite Solar One. Scarlett. Oh, Scarlett, the red one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, in that case, what you're doing is you're going through the pre-amp of the Scarlett, but just attenuating the input until you're turning it all the way down. Turning it off, basically. You're plugging into the TRRS connection or the tip ring sleeve connection, right, on the store. No, I think that's where I might have made a mistake. I've actually put a mic cable into the input on the golden age pre. But I believe I should be using a TRS cable instead. Well, it doesn't matter that much with the Scarlett because either way, it's still going through the pre-amp circuit. You're just turning the gain all the way down to attenuate or pad the input gain as low as possible. Right. And that, it's fine. As long as you don't hear the noise from the Scarlett pre-amp itself on the signal. In other words, hiss. No, I don't hear any hiss. And the golden age pre is sort of a Neve clone. That's a 73 clone. Exactly. And when I use the 416, it seems to take the harshness of the SS of the 416, but at the moment I'm using the Neumann. Right, exactly, yeah. So when your couple of 416 with a Neve derived pre-amp, it's a pretty good combination because it does calm it down versus like the SSL 4K button, which is on the SSL 2, which does the opposite. It boosts it way up and adds more trouble, which is not what you want. So anyway, but yeah, the reason is Apogee support and instability, their weird proprietary dongle breakout cable thing. All those things. I've had it replaced about three times, yeah. Yeah, that's the stuff that's made them kind of an irritating for my users and why I've had a little trouble with them. I was hoping to boom because it got rid of the dongle thing was going to be an improvement. We'll see if they can revamp it and get it clean, but anyway, that's why. They need to buy the bullet and get something that's inbuilt, I think, rather than using dongles, it's a silly thing. Right, that's what the Apogee boom is. There's no more breakout cable, right? So those things break. That's because you're constantly moving. But my little silver leg thing, I've read Dunnerdall now. I've got a very big closet here and I've built these nice fiberglass, what are they in there? They have these baffles. The baffles, I put them all around here and put the blankets. It doesn't sound echoey at all. No, it sounds good. No, I think it's very flat. I don't know whether it's too flat, though, that's all. But I've got the door open at the moment. Of course, the dog's out there. But you're pretty far from the mic and it still sounds pretty flat considering you're here. If I get a bit closer to the mic, you'll get an idea. It's sort of, you know, I'm so close now to the PLM 103. Yeah, okay. Good, glad to hear it. All right, okay. All right. Good to me. Good to me. All right. All right, well. It's the time of the day. It's past that time of the day, as it is. But we appreciate all your questions tonight and, you know, if you've got a question for us, you can always throw it in the chat room during the show, but we like getting them. If you write to. The guys. The guys at vlbs.tv. And that way you'll have priority. If you write your question in, your question goes to the front of the line. It's gonna be the first ones we read at the top of the show. Right. So, but you have to watch the show in order to get the answer. So that's the important thing is if you can write a question in, if you've got a problem like during the week, send us an email and we will include that question on the show. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna clean things up here at our party and we'll be right back. So do not go away just yet. This is the Latin lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendez. And you're enjoying Dan and George on the voice of her body show. In these modern times, every business needs a website. When you need a website for your voice acting business, there's only one place to go. Like the name says, voiceactorwebsites.com. Their experience in this niche webmaster market gives them the ability to quickly and easily get you from concept to live online in a much shorter time. When you contact voiceactorwebsites.com, their team of experts and designers really get to know you and what your needs are. They work with you to highlight what you do. Then they create an easily navigable website for your potential clients to get the big picture of who you are and how your voice is the one for them. Plus voiceactorwebsites.com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish. Don't try it yourself. Go with the pros. Voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the, you know what? Your dynamic voice over career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. There's one place where you can explore everything the voice over industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voice over career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level, stay in touch with market trends, coaching products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. Voice overextra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voice over success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. You're still watching VOBS? All right, let's make 2023 a great year. Ah, yes, less stress. I don't know how we personally do that but we'll figure out something. So anyway. This was fun, thank you everybody that joined in. Braved the liveness of the show, brought your questions in. We really, really appreciate it. The show thrives on your interaction. That's why we're here. We're here to serve you. So anyway, let's see here. What do we gotta do? Well, we have to tell you who's gonna be on next week. Kelly Mojinski's gonna be here from the voice caster over on Burbank Boulevard. Any time we get people that are industry pros or casting people is huge. She knows her stuff and that's gonna be really important for you to be here for that or catch the replay. And then on January 23rd, Jason Lanier White will be with us. A cool dude and a bunch of other people who are Scott Brick said he would be joining us again. Awesome. Ran into him over the weekend. Oh, cool. And we're trying to get ahold of Maurice Lamarce. Please send us your regular actual email address. He's probably trapped in his closet and his boxers. That's right. That's an old joke from a long time ago. Go just type in E-wabs and his name. You'll find that, yeah. Okay, our donors of the week. We have many, many of them, like Robert Liedem, Stephen Chandler, Casey Clack, Jonathan Grant, Thomas Pinto, Shelley Avellino, Greg Thomas, Dr. Voice, Antland Productions, Huggler Roy, Martha Kahn, 949 Designs, It's Lee. Christopher Epperson, Sarah Borges, Philip Sapir, Brian Page, Patty Gibbons, Rob Ryder, Shawna Pennington-Baird, Don Griffith, J. Mosley, Diana Birdsall, Hey, Diana. And Sandra Manwiller. Manwiller. Alrighty. Thank you. You know, guys, this is not an easy business, but George and I are here to help. If you need help with your studio and you would like to talk to me because I'm just a lot of fun to talk to. Anyway, go over to homevoiceoverstudio.com. You can book time there with me. And, you know, or Troubleshoot or any one of those things. And along with my, what's it called? My specimen collection company. Yes, it is. It's still called that. It still is. And it still works. It still is. And George- It still uses audio. Nothing else, folks. Right. And you've got stuff coming up and you're over at... I'm over at georgev.tech. And I am dipping my toe into, yes, that's right, TikTok. I do have a TikTok now. Guess what? George the tech. And I try to post, I'm trying to do it every day and it happening, but two or three days a week. I'll get a quick tech tip video in over there. And the good news is being that a TikTok is we keep it short over TikTok. So less than a minute and a half to get a tech tip in. So then we have the webinar coming up. By the time you see this episode, that webinar will be coming up very soon. January 5th with that. When is this episode actually airing, Dan? This episode will begin airing on New Year's Day. Okay, so this one, yeah. So be later in the week. So by the time you see this, you'll have one, you'll have a few days to prepare. Head over to georgev.tech slash webinar to sign up for the next level production and VO recording techniques for 2023 webinar. We appreciate you having you over there. Alrighty. We need to thank our sponsors, Harlan Hogan's VoiceOver Essentials. VoiceOver Extra. Source Elements. VOHeroes.com. VoiceActorWebSites.com. And WorldVoices.org. The Industry Association of Freelance Voice Talent. This is the year you gotta join. We got WoboCon coming up this year. So you guys wanna come down to Orlando and hang out with us there. That's right, come up in May. All right. Well guys, happy new year because this is on New Year's Day that you're probably watching this for the first time or like January 2nd or something. Let's make 2023 a great year in the voiceover business. Make sure you got all your stuff right. Got all the right equipment. Coaching. You're not stopping to learn. You're not stopping your learning at all. You're just always doing it and moving forward. And that's what we wanna see from you in 2023. But the bottom line is if you got your studio together, if it sounds good. It is good. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Widow. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or VO. B.S. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Have a good year, everybody. See you next week. Later.