 Hey, it's time for tech talk number 11. That's two. That's right. We got lots of cool stuff to talk about tonight. We got some questions that were written in and you get in your tech update. What do you got for us tonight? Well, you know, there was some new computer that was in here somewhere on the internet. Some fruit named company. We'll talk about that. Also, maybe a few ways to find why the hell is your Mac hard drive filling up so fast. What is going on? Places to look for those files. And also, if you're doing commercials for voice assistants, maybe some ideas to keep those same things from interrupting your spots. All that and more in a few minutes. All right. Felt like an earthquake there. Good very well. Did you get a shake? I've been feeling a shoe head of shake. No, nobody. Well, we're going to shake things up here on tech talk right now. From the outer reaches, they came bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your voice over audio. And together from the center of the VO universe, they bring it to you now. George Wittem, the engineer to the VO stars of Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today and you. Dan Leonard, the voice over home studio master, a professional voice talent with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio. And each week, they allow you into their world, making the complex simple debunking the myths of what it takes to create great sounding audio answering your questions showing you the latest and greatest in VO tech and having a dandy time doing it. Welcome to voice over body shop tech talk voice over body shop tech talk is brought to you by voice over essentials.com home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone voice actor websites.com where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt VO to go go.com everything you need to be a successful voice over artist James Michael Collins demos when quality matters and voice over extra your daily resource for VO success and now live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California. Here are the guys. Hey there I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Wittem and this is voice over body shop or VO BS tech talk. Hey, we didn't even rehearse that. I know finishing each other's sentences. Well time for another tech talk. We got some great stuff tonight. You know how I love to collect radios and microphones and stuff like that. This is one of the bigger ones you've collected. Well, yeah, I used to have this really nice big feta that my brother had. It was going to cost like $250 to ship it back across the country. So I'm like, I'll just find another one. Well, I found one for less than that in Burbank. Get a shot of that, Sue. There it is. It's a 1942 Zenith multi band radio that it and it's in perfect shape. It is the cabinet's in beautiful condition. Yeah, if you turn the center dial there, Sue, and turn on the turn it on, turn it to the right there. Keep going. Oh, it's no, no, the one in front of that one in front of the center. Yeah, see, it lights up. Oh, but it doesn't turn. Turn it off. Otherwise it'll start to smell. You know, it starts to smell. The transformer will start to go. The radios were so much more multidimensional back then. They were. You got smell, the whole thing. Yeah, I know, but I'm learning about tubes and all this stuff that is completely totally irrelevant to what we do today. How long does it take to warm up? About 30 seconds. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're, that's right. Honey, the radio smells. Okay, the show's coming on. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, the people listen to World War II on that thing. Legitimately. Yeah. Edward R. Murrow came out of that radio. Yeah. He was probably, you know, just hiding in there. Kind of interesting. Anyway, lots of cool stuff to talk about tonight. If you've got a question for us about home voiceover studio tech, write it in the chat room. Mike Merlino is sitting there in the chat room and on Facebook live, and he'll be happy to relay those questions to us. But what have you got this week? First, talking about mobile phones and stuff. Well, this one just came up today and made me laugh so hard. This is like real world voice actor kind of stuff. So if you have one of those voice assistants, anything with the A word, you know, the Echo stuff, I'm going to be nice enough not to say the names of these things so that your thing doesn't interrupt the show that you might be listening to on said device. Right. I don't know that one. Yes. But anyway, I was in a studio today where the client actually had a thermometer or temperature thing. It was like one of those Nest things, except it was called an Echo B, and it's an Echo-enabled device. Sure enough, he's doing a radio spot, and a lot of the radio stations now are promoting themselves on these platforms, on the radio.com and that kind of stuff. And so in the ads, they actually, they will actually say A word and S word and G word. They'll actually, you know, because they assume you're not on those devices because you're listening to it on the radio. So they'll actually drop all those names, which are all taboo. You don't say that when you're streaming, but you can say it on the air. So he's saying the name of this thing and listen to the show. And while he's recording the script, his device in the background is responding and starts talking. So his device interrupts the take. And we were both, I mean, it was really funny. I think he left it as an outtake. But basically, if this is happening to you, you probably figured out what to do by now. But in his case, this device is hardwired into the wall. It's not something you can pull the cord on. So you got to go into a menu and mute the microphone. Do that on your phone? I guess it depends on the, on the, if you have it on an app, you can do it on the app. I mean, my phone will be, my phone's been responding to okay, Google for a long time now. Oh, just did. And so like, if you're doing an ad that includes the lines, okay, Google, shut up. Your phone's going to start interrupting like crazy. So mute the mic or at least mute the speakers. This may sound really dull, but seriously, it's going to happen to you. It's going to happen during a phone patch or a live source connect session. And it's going to be embarrassing. So make sure it's worth a good laugh, though, too, perhaps not best two times that happened. Maybe not the best thing to have right around your microphone. Yeah, I mean, these things are super cool. But I find mine interrupts me because I named mine echo. And what do I do when I'm consulting about studios? I hear a little bit of echo. Hello, I'm listening to you right now. Here's a sidebar, by the way. And because of privacy, you can actually go into your echo database or your Amazon database for all of your, everything you've ever said and everything you've ever said that it's responded to has been recorded and sitting in their servers. Yes, you can go in there and say, please delete my entire history of recordings that I've ever done on Alexa. So just think about that. Everything you've ever said that Alexa has acknowledged hearing is recorded. Think about that. Interesting stuff. Yeah, my Apple Watch tends to bother me, too. I mean, it'll say something suddenly, you're like in the movies and your wrist starts to buzz. It's getting out of hand. It really is. It's like, gotta turn that off. Turn off notifications on this discussion. It's like, I think what Google Home came out, came out some geek online had a home, a Google Home, a HomePod. That's the Siri speaker and an echo. And he figured out a way to get them to start having this circular conversation. It was, it is hilarious because you'll have to Google that. It's really funny. Anyway, getting the more things that are more maybe a little more helpful. So if you're a Mac user, you're probably annoyed with the hard drive getting full. If you're seriously so. Well, if you're on one of these services that is backing up your stuff, that's gonna happen. But there's other reasons I take it. Yeah, there's the more obvious stuff like, you know, your own production files filling up the drive and all that. But there's some less obvious stuff. So here's three of them I can think of that I often deal with with folks. One of those is iTunes making copies of every single wave in MP3 file you've ever had because you have a habit of double clicking on said MP3 or wave to listen back to your take, which then auto plays in iTunes. And then iTunes makes a copy of that file and puts it in its own database. So now you have a duplicate of every file you've ever played with iTunes a year or two of that later. And you've got about 200 gigs worth of extraneous crap filling up your hard drive. So there's two things to do about that. One, set your auto set your file format, your default opening software. Let me actually look at that on my screen. So when I tell you what to look for, I'm telling you the right thing, right click on any MP3, go to get info that's also command I and where it says open with change that application. So the open with default for MP3s and waves and AFS probably going to be iTunes change it to something else. I recommend quick time. You can make it your twisted wave or your DAW but I recommend just quick time quick time. Then if you double click will open very quickly play the file doesn't make a copy. Right. That's one thing to do. And that's the best thing because you don't want your iTunes to now to get populated with this massive list of untitled audio files. It's very, very annoying. Most of them actually called untitled. Right. Two is in iTunes. If you do still really are an iTunes user and you like the files to open in iTunes, some people do go into your iTunes preferences, click on advanced and make sure that you check a little box in there that tells it to not make a copy. So by default, it makes a copy of the file in its own music database music folder and starts filling up your system drive. So uncheck that box. It can still play the files and everything. It may it'll still add it to the library, but it won't make another duplicate of the darn file. So that's one biggie that waste space. Another one is live photos. So those live photos, aren't they cute on your iPhone? Every time you take a picture, there's a little bit of animation before and after the still photo. That animation is basically a three second long video and you're shooting hundreds and thousands of these three second long videos, which are slowly, but surely filling up your drive space. So I found that this is rather insidious of Apple. I'm really leery of some of their business practices, but I'll digress what one of the things that they do is they make the app on the phone default to that live photo mode by default. So every time you load the app and take a photo, it's waiting to, it will go back to live photo mode. Okay. So there's actually a setting in there, which I had to do on my daughter's iPhone and I had to read it a few times because it was like doublespeak, but you can set it, you can set it so that if you turn off live mode, it will now remain off next time you open the photo app. So the default is every time you take a photo, it goes back to live mode because Apple's thing is everybody wants live photo, right? Everybody wants to fill up their phone three times faster than they think they are, right? No, they don't. And that also holds true to your Mac because those things all get backed up to your Mac and all that. So that's another thing you can do to scrape away lost space. Another big one, which is a little bit harder to find at first are the actual iPhone or any iOS device backups. So if you plug your iPad, iPad, iPhone, whatever physically into your Mac, which a lot of people don't probably even do this anymore. But if you do, iTunes will prompt to do a backup. It's not a bad idea. It's kind of nice to have a backup, especially if you get a new device, makes a little bit easier to transition to a new device. Those backups start to accumulate and they're not really obvious where they're located. If you go to the Apple menu about this Mac and then click on storage, it has this little bar showing analysis of everything that's on the drive. The very first part of it will just be this thing that says like other or miscellaneous or something like that. And if that bar is very long, chances are you have a huge number of these backups. So you can actually go into the iTunes application and get rid of some of those backups, but you can also click manage and go in there and find them as well. They actually do, you know, to Apple's credit, they do have a manage function to go in there and help clean up stuff that's wasting space on your machine. Yeah. Google that. No, I mean, you got to go in there manually and like, I want to get rid of this and I get rid of that. Yeah. This thing called reduce clutter. Yeah. It's in the about Mac storage. If you manage and go to review clutter, review files, it sorts all files by size, showing the largest file at the top, making it very easy to find. Oh man, I forgot I had a 1.8 gigabyte file of this video where I forgot to turn off my camera on my hard drive. So this is a good way to clean up a little bit. Yeah. I use those all the time, by the way. At least once a week I go in, it's like, all right, clean this stuff out, back it all up and get it off your hard drive. It's very handy. I mean, I've been doing it sort of the manual way for a long time where you right click on the folder and find her and then tell it to display file folder sizes. It's this pain in the neck thing. This is something that, this is an easy way to find those files. Lastly, Apple announced a new computer. It's called the Mac Pro. Perhaps you've heard it. What a new concept. They have a new Mac Pro and all of the Mac power user geeks were flipping out about it because it's, it kind of goes back to the older Mac Pro roots. It's a more of a tower computer. It has that cheese grater looking. In fact, this thing looks, it really looks like a cheese grater. It's got a handle on top. Yeah. And that's a great thing about it. You needed to handle it, carry it around. The first YouTuber who literally grates cheese with their $6,000 Mac Pro is going to get a lot of hits. I think that's what I'm thinking. But it's, it's a beast. I mean, it starts at $6,000. It is so outside of the realm of what you would need in voiceover. Honestly, if you're thinking about buying the fastest, baddest Mac without going that far, really an iMac loaded iMac for like $2,500 is fine. An iMac Pro for $5,000 is smoking fast and you get a 5K monitor built in. But the Mac Pro is a serious, serious beast and it's really in the domain of folks doing video. Right. Doing video posts, doing, actually, okay, this is kind of cool. Did you watch any of the keynote online? What they talked about is called, it was announced at the Worldwide Developer Conference. Look for the section in there where they demonstrate multi-track recording sessions using Logic Pro. That part's kind of fun. You'll get a kick out of that. The guy's like, first I'll load up a session with 128 virtual instruments. Let's add 128 more. Now let's add a real orchestra with 256 tracks. When the guy's done the demo, he has a Logic session running with 1,000 audio tracks all at the same time. Not necessary in voiceovers, guys. It's just humming along like it's nothing. It is kind of, it is mind-boggling this computer. We actually have a question later on regarding that. Oh, we do. Okay, we do. We're still waiting to find out what a fully loaded Mac Pro costs. How about 1.5 terabytes of memory? Not storage, memory. Yes. You can get 1.5 terabytes of memory in this thing. I cannot wait until it's in the store and you can do a configuration and see what it's going to be. I bet it's going to be a $56,000 Mac Pro or somewhere in the 50s. I cannot wait anyway. And then they also came out with a 6K monitor, $5,000 plus the stand for another 1,000 for a cool 6 grand. That's their new 6K monitor. Anyways, awesome stuff, but folks, really the Mac Mini? That thing is awesome. I love it. The Mac Mini, I call it the Mac Mini Pro because it's that cool dark space gray color. The thing is freaking great. I just set up one for somebody last week. It was just the absolute base model for, is it $699 or $799? $799, yeah. Even then, it's still a smoking machine. And then we just plugged in an external 500 or 1 terabyte SSD for another 200 something dollars. Boom. I mean, this thing is... You got a flat screen or two. Oh, I go to Best Buy. This is in Canada, by the way, where stuff's generally more expensive. 43-inch 4K TV with a Roku build-in, kind of like the one you have at 4K for $329 at Best Buy. That's Canadian dollars, which is $299 and $259 or whatever US. So anyway, that's one heck of a system for about a grand. So do your shop and you can get some great stuff, great deals. Wow, that's really cool. I've loved Macs for years and plug them in and they work. My job is to gripe about things that they do wrong, but it's still the computer I'm going to pick day in, day out. It's still the one OS that lets you not update stuff. Right. Windows, they force you to update the OS. I don't like that at all. I mean, the highest percentage of trouble calls that you and I get. Quest, first question, Mac or PC? Almost always PC. Yeah. Something that's going to driver... Yeah, absolutely. It's always a problem. So that's why we recommend Mac. That's why we recommend Mac. That's right. Well, we recommend a lot of things, but one of the things we recommend is that if you don't know a whole heck about how to build a home voiceover studio, where are you going to go? Well, first off, you come watch this show, which we really appreciate. You're probably going to go to the forums on Google. No, don't go to the forums on Google. I had to do a little intervention the other day. Oh yeah. I felt bad. I was calling somebody out and I was like, you're doing it. Stop doing tech support by committee. Yeah, really. Do not crowdsource your own studio. I mean, people are like, well, someone so told me to do this and this person said, all right, if you want to ask a question, like, have you tried a new reverb? What reverb plugin or do you want? Kind of like, whatever. But don't say, oh, my microphone sounds echoey. What should I do? This is not come to us, please. Right. You know, and because we know what it's supposed to sound like. Yeah. Whistle. Very good. You know, I was talking to somebody today and they're like, I tried this microphone and this and I can't stand the way it sounds. I'm listening. I'm like, actually, the other one sounds better. You know, what are you listening on? Those sorts of things. If you want to work with us, George and I have separate websites. Our clientele's a little bit different sometimes. Yeah, they do. And we talk about these things. And you know, and when you work with us, you know, with one of us, you're working with like over 40 years of experience in this unique environment that is a home voiceover studio. Nobody else knows about it. You know, we had Lori Allen on earlier. We know her for her little studio. Do we ever. It's like, yeah, squeezing into her closet. It's mighty. It works really well. If you want to work with with George, all you have to do is go to George the tech or George the dot tech, if you like short domains, George the tech.com. Anyways, George the tech, that's where you go. I got a menu on there with different services. If you're really confused, because I have too many options, which happens, don't worry, go to the contact page. And it's a note, I'll direct you where to go on there and what service you need. But you can book by the time or by flat rate services, virtual services, where you send the files and we send you back the things that you need. So there's a lot of different ways I can work with you. Dan also does that over his website, located at homevoiceoverstudio.com where I talk about what you really need to do for your home voiceover studio, which is don't over think it. Just contact me and we'll, we'll talk about it. So find out what your needs are, what your lifestyle is like, how you want to integrate your home voiceover studio into your life and how to do it so you're not disrupting the rest of your family. Unless there's nobody there in which case we can, you know, totally do what we want to do there. But go over to homevoiceoverstudio.com. If you've got audio like this person did today is like, I don't like, what sounds better? You can send me the audio $25. I will do an audio analysis of your home voice over studio audio cup. Yeah, go to the specimen cup, click on that. And I'll be happy to give that a listen and give you the advice that you need unless it's really, really bad. And sometimes it's really bad. And sometimes it's great. Like why are you calling me for it sounds great. But if you don't know what it's supposed to sound like, talk to the people to do with George and I'll be happy to help you out. Hey, man, we got some questions and we got lots of questions. We'll be happy to help you out with those particular questions right after these incredibly important messages. You're watching v obs dot TV. I don't know why it's crazy what they do here. I think I'm going to go somewhere else and have a cheese. Hey, check this out. Voice over essentials.com is giving away free a $19 and 99 cent voiceover as heard on TV baseball cap to their new subscribers of their newsletter free shipping in the contiguous us new subscribers only. You can click on the newsletter menu item at the top of any page at voice over essentials.com to get there. Now this is for new subscribers only. So if you try subscribing and they are in your already on their list, it will let them know and you won't get the info for the free baseball cap. If you are new, however, you will be given a promo code to enter in the shopping cart and a button to put the cap in their shopping cart without leaving the newsletter page. They'll also send out an email with instructions in case you want to do it later. But of course, this is a limited time offer, which may end at any time. Even we don't know when they're going to end it. So to get your cap, go over to voiceover essentials.com right now before they run out and tell them we sent you and go over there and buy all their other stuff as well. Thanks for being our super sponsor there, Harlan. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice to announcer guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? This is Virgin Radio. Well, okay, we're not that innocent. There's jeans for wearing and there's jeans for working. Dickies, because I ain't here to look pretty. She's a champion of progressive values, a leader for California, and a voice for America. It's smart. It's a phone. It's a smartphone. But it's so much more. It's a, the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song. It's the end of the road for Rick. This is your knee, Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 from BMW. Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish? Hey, it's J. Michael Collins. Bet you think I'm going to try and sell you a demo now, huh? I think they speak for themselves. But I will give you my email. It's jmichael at jmcvoiceover.com. Now, if Dan will stop waxing this mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show. This is the point of the show where we get to thank our wonderful sponsors, Source Elements, the creators of Source Connect, and other amazing tools for connecting your studio to other studios around the world. Now, they've got two main flavors, Source Connect Now, which is fun and free. And you can send a link to any of your clients who are used to using old school phone patches and would actually like to hear you in full quality. That was fun. Or you can actually use Source Connect Standard or Pro. Standard is really the one that's designed for voice actors. It is absolutely drop dead reliable and stays in sync throughout an entire session. If there's ever a dropout, it can automatically replace the dropouts of audio and fill them back in. It can even do a thing where it replaces the entire audio file with an uncompressed AIF file or a WAV file from your computer, which it automatically sends to the other end. It's very powerful stuff. Do you want to give it a try? Go over to Source Elements, that's source-elements.com, and you can send up for a 15-day free trial to give it a test run. So give it a look and be ready to go when that client asks, are you on Source Connect? This is Bill Ratner, and you're enjoying Voice Over Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, vobs.tv. And we are back on Voice Over Body Shop, Tech Talk number 11. I love doing Tech Talk. I mean, people are watching it and listening in droves because we're giving away all this free information. And hopefully it's right. Well, yeah. I mean, we think we know. This is vetted from years and years of everybody else doing it wrong and then us having to figure it out to make it right. We're mopping it up all the time. That's what this is. You know, actually doing a lot of mopping up this week. Yeah. Someone so said this, so someone said I should do that. I see that a lot. Oh, boy. It's like, all right. Someone said, someone said, I was told I should buy this fill-in-the-blank, extremely expensive analog digital converter from the, and we're just like, no, who was that? And I'll say, rhymes with E on R. And I was like, come on, you guys, stop recommending extremely expensive high-end gear for Voice Over Somes Studio. Please stop. Yeah. It's not going to change anything. If anything, it's going to drive you insane. Yeah. We got a bunch of questions tonight. Yeah. People have been writing in. If you've got a question for us, you plenty of time throw it in the chat room right now. If you're watching us live, the guys at vobs.tv or in the Facebook chat room or in our live chat room on our website. First one is from T-Man, whose name is actually Tyler. Oh, it's good to know. Nice to meet you, Tyler. You've seen your name in the chat for a while. Hey, guys, love the show. Currently, I have an Audio Technica ATR875R, this guy. That's actually what that is, AT875R. That's what it is. Going into a UM2, which is a. Is that a Barringer thing? I believe it's a Barringer. I think. And Audacity. Will it improve my audio quality by upgrading to an ID4 made by Audient? Yes. Or the higher end interfaces? Or are the higher end interfaces more for multitrack? And the answer to that is, yes. Yeah. I mean, the 14, you mentioned the ID14. There's also the ID4. Right. The ID4 I would actually recommend. Right. That's sort of the affordable end of the expensive stuff. Right. About 200 bucks. That's sort of like a fancy Scarlett Solo or something. Right. The ID14 is the stereo one for two mics. There's no need whatsoever for a voice actor to have a two mic input interface. Maybe two. I mean, if you like using a Scarlett 2i2. I mean, if you're never going to use two mics at the same time. Unless you're doing content. On your own voice. Unless you're doing an interview show. But if you're doing traditional voice recording, you're going to use one mic at a time. You don't need two channels. But if you really want to go there, if you're a geek, anyone have like a close mic and a far mic or you want to go nuts with it with Reaper and all that? Okay. Two mics, two mic channels, two tracks. Fine. You know, you might take advantage of it then. You don't need it though. Right. But you're not going to need 20 tracks unless you are a musician or mixing the background tracks for some major motion picture or television. If you're a producer. Or if you're a producer, something like that. But if you're just doing dry voice tracks, all of those extra tracks, all that money you're spending on all of that expensive gear is not going to make any difference in the world to the quality of your audio. If you've got a good interface to start with that just has a good preamp in it because the analog to digital converters are all pretty much the same. Yeah. Unless you buy a real cheap one. Yeah. There's the really low end and of course there's the high end and there's this middle sweet spot that seems to be like the Scarlett 2i2 and those things, the Scarlett range, the Steinberg UR series, the UR12. There's that kind of like affordable quality gear range that's in the $100 to $200 range. Don't spend more on that until you've already worn that stuff out or you've earned some serious money and you're ready to invest it back into your studio. Right. Not that having all those channels will make a difference. You don't use that stuff unless you really understand specifically what you're using it for. And if you're not producing stuff, if you're not producing commercials, if you're just providing the dry voice tracks, you really don't need all that stuff. It takes years to master the skills to do that. These guys who are engineers who are getting your end user audio, they know how to play with it and they know what to do with it. They don't want you futzing with it. Yeah. I mean, it's like, well, I want it to sound great on auditions. Now, I mean, you work with people and create stacks, but those just little tiny adjustments are not like something that's going to totally enhance their audio to make them sound like something they're not. Right. Exactly. Moving on to Dwayne DeSalvo. Hey, Dwayne. Hey, Dan and George. I love your show and I've been catching up watching older episodes. Excellent. Recent newcomer to VRBS. That's great. We live in a small two bedroom condo and I'm trying to get as much isolation and non-reflection while doing voiceovers as possible without going to great expense or modifications. Aren't we all? Sounds logical to me. I'm looking at Harlan Hogan's Porta Booth Plus, Porta Booth Pro, comparing those to an acoustic vocal booth from Vocal Booth To Go, which, while more expensive, appears it would give more isolation from room reflections. What are your thoughts, please, on these products? Many thanks. Okay. I've used them all. You've used them all probably. I used them. So what's your take on that? The take is, is that they're primarily designed for being on the road. And if you watch this show enough and if you're catching up on all the episodes, you know how I feel about doing voiceover on the road because you can't do something on the road that you started at your home studio. No. And so if you're going to use one of these devices, and one of them happens to be our sponsor, not that we want to show favorites, Porta Booth, there's a technique. People tend to talk right into the middle of these things and they sound like you're talking in a tube. Yeah. But if you use it properly, they can both be fantastic. And you don't want the mic too far back into it because then you're capturing more of the cavity around the mic and less of your own voice. You want to talk about the bottom lip or the top lip and essentially the same rules for microphone placement that we always talk about what is proper mic technique apply to one of those devices as well. If you're in a small closet, something like that will work. If indeed you are, you know, if you're in such a small space and something like that, will work for you. But, you know, they're not, to take them as portable, the Porta Booth Pro and the Porta Booth Plus, they're great units, they easily fit into, you know, the overhead bin on a plane. But they can also work in your home studio as well. And the other one is... The one he mentioned was the Vocal Booth 3. I think he means the 3x3. It's actually a completely freestanding thing. Right. With blankets all the way around you. Right. Yeah. If it goes all the way around you, it's going to definitely stop more echo. Right. Used to make the ones with what you called Studio Suit. Right. The more coverage there is around you, yes, it's going to stop more echo. So it's not possible for something so portable, like the Porta Booth, to stop as much reverberation and echo as something that gives you coverage on all sides. Right. It just can't do the same job. Right. But it's still not going to stop noise. It's going to... He's saying isolation from room reflections. They're very different things. Yeah, yeah. It's not going to stop more noise, but it will, when it wraps all the way around, will stop more room reflection. Right. It will damp it down more. Right. Exactly. But people tend to forget that they'll say, well, I put all this soundproofing foam in. Like, no, no, it's not soundproofing foam. It doesn't stop sound from coming. The stuff is incredibly transparent. Up against a wallet will certainly absorb sound and prevent sound from bouncing around. But if you're living next to the L in Chicago, you're going to hear all 75 wheels of that thing going by. 75 wheels. Yeah, I know. I threw out an odd number just to confuse people. It reminds me of a little Steve Martin joke. Okay. Yeah. Do these booths stop exterior noise? Not the best thing. You really want to stop exterior noise. Take that booth and put it out in your car. Right. That's going to probably work best. The Portables Plus does a pretty good job. If you're in a, if you're already in a bedroom or something, Portables Plus works really well if you've got like a drapery or something soft behind you. Now you've got something as a backstop to stop some of the echo that the microphone would normally hear. So that in conjunction with something, some practical solution can be really effective and very cost effective and doesn't take up a lot of space. It's a big step up to that vocal boost. It's a lot more money. So think about if that really is practical for you. Yeah. And the thing is, if you got a closet, everybody's like, people tend to overthink these things so much. Now you work with people who are some of these big stars who are like, you know, they're, they got these golden handcuffs. It's all they do. It's all they do is promo day in and day out. And, you know, and people may come over or they're on camera when they're talking back and forth to the studio. My philosophy is nobody needs to see how the sausage is made. And if you have a closet, a closet full of clothes that you can walk into, it's unbelievable how great that can sound. As a matter of fact, it can sound better than some studio. I'm as evolved and surprised how good a closet with clothes sounds compared to like a brand new out of the box booth that's been spent a lot of money on. Right. And you got to treat them. Right. No, we won't name any names at all. Yeah. And now this last question, well, it's got me. Well, we got two more, two more questions, but Ron Eastwood wrote in and hopefully we had this picture up. It's like, what does he say about this? Just wondering if you have any idea what the noise reduction coefficient might be for a Styrofoam cup. This seems to be an interesting way to combine your desire to recycle with the VO business. How long would it take to collect all those big gulps? I thought you appreciate a laugh. So there it is. Yes. Yes. That is freaking amazing. Now those are plastic cups. Those are Styrofoam. Styrofoam, you know, I mean hard plastic. Yeah. Now cardboard probably would probably work pretty well. So what he's got right there is a huge wall of diffusers. And diabetes too. That represents a lot of hospital bills, a lot of medical bills. But yeah, so that wall is going to scatter sound. Right. That does, I mean, it's not necessarily a bad thing. That could actually be helpful. Right. It's not, you don't want to do the whole room that way. But that would be a big diffusion surface. So sound would hit those cups and then sort of scatter and go in random directions. So if you're listening to the podcast, it's a picture of a bunch of cups stacked on top of each other. Picture like a thousand cups stacked in columns on a wall attached to a wall. That's what we're looking at. That would be interesting to try. But again, who wants that many big gulps? Oh my gosh. I don't know. Yeah, that cracks me up. I think that's amazing. Okay. We got two more questions here. Schmuckl has asked a question. Hey Schmuckl. Yeah. He says, the blue snowball is the closest thing to a studio mic I've had. Well, far, far from having a studio mic. Yeah, a little ways to go. Yeah. What starter mics would you recommend for starting out in voiceovers? Okay. So the blue snowball is a USB mic. It's really like kind of like the OG original USB mic. And as a result, it's been improved upon dramatically since it came out. And it's multi-pattern too. So you can use it. Yeah. It has like two switch, a switch, but it has no gain control. Right. No, it's noisy. It is noisy. It's kind of hissy. It's not very sensitive. Starter VO mics. Okay. Well, if it's going to be a USB mic, I used to recommend them a lot. I'm not so big on recommending them anymore because now you can get such good mics in the price ballpark of a USB mic, including the interface. Including. So it's like, I can't, because the USB mics I used to recommend are at least 200 to 250 dollars. Right. But you can get, let's say for example, an Audio Technica 2035. Right. For a hundred and fifty bucks. I wouldn't go for the 20s. Yeah, I wouldn't go for the 20s. 20 is definitely a notable drop in quality. It's a little noisier, right? But the 2035 definitely is a winner for 150. And then the interface to go with it for a hundred bucks, Scarlett Solo, Steinberg, UR 12, as low as $80. I've seen that thing. Right. You're in the price ballpark of a USB mic now. Right. And it's super quality gear. And it's rock solid. It's quiet. And then that takes that issue out of your, your audio chain. And it makes, as I like to say, always do everything you can physically to get your recording space right. And if you get that right and you've got this, this type of an audio system that's not expensive and you got a good mic and you use it right, you're going to sound golden. You can get great results in your closet. If you set everything up right, proper mic technique, proper acoustics, and setting your levels properly, yeah, probably going to be fine. So we got one more to slip in here. One more here from Voices by Jacques. Guys, you are so generous to help us with amazing show. I have a Sennheiser S4. I'm trying to remember what the S4 is. Me too. Personas 96 audio box and Audacity. Okay, fine. With proper room treatment, our plugins are additional software helpful and necessary. Excellent question. Which we talk about this a lot. We talk about this a lot. It's not the technology that's going to make you sound great. As your number one of your first guys, Don LaFontaine, what makes him sound, what made him sound so great? Don LaFontaine. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't the equipment. It was, I mean, you set it up, you maintained it, you made sure it worked. Yeah. You know, but for the most part, I mean, he had all sorts of stuff, apparently, but he sounded great on the matter of what it was. Yeah. But it's not the software. So, so proper room treatment, as we've all said, is super important. If you get that room treated correctly, the one thing in the list here that we're, we got a question, I think Mike might be asking you again. If you could, Mike, would you ask Jacques again what he means by the Sennheiser S4? Because I don't know that Mike. I'm sure he's referring to a Mike, but I'm not sure which one it is. So we'll see. But anyway, assuming it's a Sennheiser Mike, they don't make any junk, period, at any price point. So if you got a Sennheiser Mike, the person is 96, it might be a Mike, could be a Mark 4. If you've got the personas, audio box and audacity and proper room treatment, you've got a voiceover studio, you're, you're ready to rock. Now plugins, what they're going to do is help make little adjustments. Let's say that Mike with you is a little slightly sibilant. Then a little tweak to an equalizer setting in your software could smooth it out that response. So it's not a sibilant. If it's, if your room's kind of boomy and muddy, then rolling off the low end, a high-pass filter is really, really helpful. Again, can be done in software. If you've got a rumble, like say a refrigerator, something that's under 80 hertz. If you're in an apartment building. Yeah. From the whole HVAC system in the building. All those things, these things are all software, software helped. Now every plugin we're mentioning are basic things that all come with your basic softwares, audacity, twisted wave, audition, what are some of the other really popular ones? There's any of them will have these tools built in. Reaper, they all have these tools built in. Pro Tools, Logic, Studio One. By the way, if you're on a personas, you've probably got Studio One. There's only one guy I know that really, really knows how to make that thing dance. His name is Don Barnes. He's the guy. If you really, really insist on using Studio One, I don't, I really don't recommend it. But if you want to learn it, he's the guy. But anyway, otherwise, no, don't need anything special. The plugins that are included are going to be fine. And if you want to know what they do and why you should use them, hire one of us. We'll load your software in, we'll listen to your audio and see if there's anything that can be done in software that would actually make it better. Right. But it's rare that it makes the big difference. Do what you can physically to make your recording space work for you. That's going to make your job easier. And of course, perhaps you won't have to work with us. But we at least got to hear what's going on there. Alrighty. Well, great questions. People are enlightened. We're having a great time and we'll be right back after this. Minus, are we at minus 4 dB? We're at minus 4 dB on VLBS. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voiceover 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. Voiceoverextra 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, casting, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. As a voice talent, you have to have a website but what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don't look right on mobile devices. They're not built for marketing and SEO. They're expensive, you have limited or no control and it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what's the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com. Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control. No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voiceover website going for as little as $700. So if you watch your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what. So you've thought deeply about it. You've discussed it with friends and family and you've decided that it is your future. Audio book narration. And the doors to that future swung wide open for you this morning. Registration for the upcoming ACX Masterclass is now open. And there's a happy twist. Register right now and David and Dan will pay the first $300 of your tuition. No strings attached. That offer is only good through Tuesday night at 9 p.m. Pacific time. So you have to act right now. If building an amazing audio book narration career is what you dream of or if your current audio book narration career isn't all you want it to be, this is your shot. Go to acxmasterclass.com to register for the 2019 ACX Masterclass. That's acxmasterclass.com. Class begins this coming Monday. The $300 tuition payment special offers only good for the next day or so. Take that step. Walk through those doors and register for this amazing four week class. Visit acxmasterclass.com. That's acxmasterclass.com. Hey guys, this is Tom, also known as the boys of SpongeBob SquarePants. I love doing tech talk. Me too. You guys, you know, great questions and we're happy to help you out with it. Next week, if you're watching this next week, I'm in Alaska. I'm looking at glaciers and bears eating salmon. I like to get, and you guys are eating some salmon. Oh, oh, that's, I mean, that's a requirement. So I'm looking forward to that. But you know, you're watching tech talk number 11 next week. Hey, tell us, write to us. Tell us what you want to see. Is there a show, one of our interviews or a tech talk that you haven't seen that you really want to see or when you want to see again? Maybe you miss some stuff. Write to us at the guys at vobs.tv and tell us what you want to see, especially for future shows. When we come back in July and give you all sorts of cool stuff, but we're going to take a couple of actual weeks off, but there will be content here that you want to see. That's right. All right. Who house? Our donors of the week. We got donors. Thank you so much. We got lots and lots of donors like Christy Burns, Don Griffith, Dwayne DeSalvo who asked a question tonight, Martha Kahn. Antland Productions, who's Uncle Roy. Uncle Roy. Diana Birdsall, Patty Gibbons, Brian Page, and Pilar Uribe. Thank you so much. They must have clicked that donation button on the web page on vobs.tv. And many of them I think actually did a subscription. So they're sending a little bit of money every month. And some of them did fairly large donations. We appreciate that so much. We really appreciate it. It keeps the technical quality of the show magnificent. It looks like a TV show now. Oh, let's see here. Hey, show us your booths. Like this one, Andrew Peters booth, which we had last week. Look at this thing. This is just fabulous. Now this is an example of overkill. Okay. Well, I know Andrew really well and I know he likes overkill. But this is an example of what to work toward. He's been in the business a long time. So he's earned it. And it's a point where having a space that you're really proud of and you feel really good in is worth the investment. Absolutely. So, you know, something to work toward. Yeah. But awesome studio, Andrew. Yeah. But send us a picture of your home studio. Yeah. But in landscape. Please landscape. Not portrait. Not portrait. Yeah. Drives me nuts when people... That means hold your phone like this when you take the picture and not like this. That's what that means. Is that what that means? I always wondered. Hey, once again, if you want us to help you with your home studio, aside from watching this magnificent program every week, if you want to work with George, where do you go? GeorgeTheTech.com is where you'll find me. And Dan's over there at... Home voiceoverstudio.com. Look forward to hearing from you there. Go over, check us out. We're fabulous. Um, also we're live alternate Mondays. Just not the next few Mondays. But if you want to be in the audience, write to us at the guys at vobs.tv and say, when you'd like to be here, if you happen to be in the greater Los Angeles area. Keep getting greater and greater. But if you're going to be around on a certain day, let us know and if we're going to do a live show, we'd be happy to have you here. Also, we need to thank our sponsor. Let's do that right now. A great bunch of people. Like, you do Harlan Hogan first. Harlan Hogan's voiceover essential. Voiceover extra. Source elements. vo2gogo.com. Voice actor websites.com. And J. Michael Collins demos. Thank you guys for all your help and support as we continue to produce the show. Also the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for the betterment of live webcasting. Mike Merlino on chatroom duty who was able to do a fabulous job tonight. Wearing the strawberries and his mom. So who's there? Who's our technical director? You know, they have no reason. If there's no actually correlation to the fact that he's here, that she's here. We heard them both separate. We've answered both their ads on Craigslist. That's right. Exactly. And of course, Lee Penny for being Lee Penny. Well, that's going to do it for us this week on Tech Talk number 11. Look, we're here to help you out. Tune in every week and we're going to try and do our best. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is Voiceover. Body shop. Or VOBS. Have a great week, everybody. Bye now.