 This one has a knob, see? But this, like I just tightened this. I know I'm gonna use this as a screw. Yeah. Go figure. We are live now, but I would let you know. We're live! Yeah, we're live. We're not doing anything yet. We're live, I mean, people will see us if they're tuned in. We are live now, and okay, there we go. That's okay, because I like to talk about my mic. Ah. Yeah, it's cool having the mic dead on frame. In fact, this has become a trend in video casting is to have a proper mic in the proper place. I've noticed this now. It used to be like video, no, no, no, no. No mic in frame. You don't have a mic in frame, it's video. Or they would use lav mics, but now I'm seeing all kinds of shows that have the mic right on frame. Like right, like, and I'm like, that's a good trend actually, because that's how you get a great sounding show. Right. And then a lot of people wanna put it on podcast. Well, if you don't do that, the podcast is gonna sound housey. I mean, you have to make a video show sound like a podcast, otherwise it will never sound like a podcast. You know what I mean? Right. Which is why we do it the way we do it, but then again, we're rolling the sound, yeah. Yeah, we're trend setters, Dan. That's just all there is to it. And believe it or not, we've been doing this 11 and a half years. I know. We sure have. I can't believe it. I can't believe it, Nita. I'm putting the YouTube link up on the site now. Okay. Cool. And thanks for the social bump on your story. I reshared it on mine. That was only on, you only did that on Facebook, right? That wasn't on Instagram. I did it on Instagram, but I didn't tag anyone because I couldn't figure out how to like redo it once I posted it. And I, yeah, I was doing it in the kitchen and it was very confusing. And then I put it on LinkedIn as well. Oh, cool. Yeah, once it posts, there's no editing, there's nothing, it's just, it's done, yeah. So I put it on LinkedIn with the link that you guys had had up before. Okay, great, thank you. Yeah. I will try to share that now before I get the website done first. But once I have that, I will share that. Let's see, all pages. And okay, and let me tell you how we worked the opening of the show. We open, we do a cold open, be all the three of us. And I'll say, say hi, and you can go, hi. And then we go into the intro and we come out of that. Georgia, it'll just be Georgia and me. I wanted to show you some of my pictures from my trip, which I will fly through because if I went through all of them, you would have five minutes in the hour, so. And then when we finish the show, when we finish at, let's see, what time is it there? You're going, it's 10, five to eight there. Okay, when we finish at nine or at about five to nine, once we sign out and go to the break at nine o'clock when we're finished with you, you can leave. Okay, I will do so. Just exit the studio. Okay, how do I exit the studio? Just click out at the top on the tab. Yep, you can close the tab, delete the tab. Yeah. Okay, so I'll hug you now. Thanks for having me. Pretty hugged. Oh no, it's our pleasure. Thank you. I felt bad I didn't get to hug you goodbye, Dan. I know, I had a skedaddle out of there at 3.30 because my flight was at five. I actually left before you. I took Jamie and Jason sightseeing. Ah, how was the Air and Space Museum? It looked like it was cool. It was really amazing. And I like the stuff on display as much as the stuff that they're rehabbing. I like to see the stuff that's kind of being worked on. It was cool. And between what my son knew and what Jamie knew, I learned so much. Yeah, that's a real niche skill is refurbishing old aircraft. But I mean, there's stuff that I recognize like the Enola Gay, but then there's stuff that they both knew about that I knew nothing about. So it was really fun to walk around with them. Yeah, I should have come with you, but there were like four or five people that needed help with stuff. And then Uncle Roy needed help with stuff. They don't need you till you show up and then all of a sudden, boy, they need you. Yeah, it wasn't quite that bad. I've been there several times. Well, okay, I'm glad you're here, George, because I really need your help. Well, and that's what you and I do. I mean, come on. You know, I'm listening to one of the presenters and I can't remember what it was. I think it was Friday night and nobody could hear anything. Literally had to walk all the way around the room and take the speaker and aim it towards everybody. Nobody in the back of the room could hear it. It was kind of muffled. And then, you know, and you know, Roy had left the room and I'm like, go over to the board. It needs a little more high end. And then suddenly, it was clear as a bell back there. You know, it's so interesting. We talk so much about the importance of mic technique. Well, I can't stand still. So having the mic in the stands in a setting like that isn't good for someone like me. And I talk with my hands, which is part of why my reads are conversational. But if you're holding a mic in your hands and you talk with your hands, the stand drops out. And if there's people in the back of the room, it's problematic. So I had to, it's a skill that I have to work on when presenting, of not going like this. Right. With the microphone. Yeah. Oh, I gotta get one other thing. But you do it at home. Your mic is an obstationary spot in your booth? Yes, but I'm not, there's, I'm not pacing back and forth the way I was. Oh, oh, oh, I see. I was really moving. You're not at a lectern. I can only go here. I was really moving in that room, George. It was a lot of fun. I mean, there was, both days I was lucky to have a big group. So I really wanted to like engage and be active, but the flip side of engaging and being active is that, you know, you have to be cognizant of whether you're actually reaching people and they can hear you and the sounds. And when you are alone in your booth, you, you know, you stay within a certain like range. Yeah. That's where a headset mic would be a really good choice. It would be great. That's what the Tony Robbins and Zizziz of the world are going to be using as a headset mic. You know, the mic is always there. They can walk around, talk with their hands and gesture and stuff. And I've been at conferences where we have to pass a mic. So this was better than that. I didn't have to do that, but. Right, right. It's better that you have one good handheld mic that people know how to pass around than to have five mics where somebody has always got the wrong one on or forgets to turn it on or they're at all the different levels or on and on. You know, it's, yeah, it takes a second to pass the mic, but we started doing hybrid meetings at an organization I'm with, it's a bicycle co-op. And it got us a wireless handheld mic system. And it's great because then we literally, it's like the talking stick, right? Nobody can talk until they're holding that mic. That's very cool. Because then everybody on Zoom can't hear them. That's very cool. Yeah, it works. It's a little, you know, I got to pass it around, but it works out really well. Yeah. Well, now we're ready, Dan. Yeah, I am. Where's my special hat? I feel like we should have all had hats today. We should have had like a theme night. I know. Am I about to watch the Eagles game in the background? I'm just kidding. Oh, I was watching the end of the Bills game on my phone at Dulles. God, it was a great ending to the game, but not the way I wanted it, but yeah. I know, I'm not, I'm a fair weather fan, but I'm a Philly guy. I'm from Philly, so. I didn't realize, how did we know that? Where are you from in Philly? Well, okay, I'm a suburban Philly guy. I'm from Puddington Valley. Yeah, I'm from Westchester. I had no idea. Yeah. And you know, my kids are both in college in Pennsylvania now. Oh, cool. One's at Franklin and Marshall, and one's at Elizabeth Town. Oh, great. I feel like it's their DNA pulling them back. Yeah. Yeah, no, I loved it being there, but college, I ended up going to Virginia Tech, strangely, didn't go to school in Pennsylvania. Well, I didn't either, and that's how I ended up leaving the area because I went to school in New York, so. And then that was it, and you marry a New Yorker, and then it's hard to get them to go in that direction. Yeah, that's how it goes. Laura Atkinson in the chat says, Fezzes are cool. So there's one. All right. Dan. Hey, I look good in a Fezz. Damn good. There's one vote. But you've been rocking the Fezz for years, like this way predates your trip. Oh yeah, no, no. This Fezz came from Fezz, but it came from Fezz from another trip from my sister-in-law. So I returned the Fezz to Fezz and then retreated from Fezz with the Fezz from Fezz. Is there a Fezz, Fezz? You know what, Sue would like us to start because she wants to set dinner. Oh, okay, it's now five o'clock, okay. That's really funny. Okay, I'm watching Sue's hands. Okay. Are we ready here? All right. How do we do this show? It's been like a month. All right. You just hold open, you tell us what we're gonna talk about. That's right. Here we go. Five, four, three. Hey, it's time for VoiceOver Body Shop. And tonight, we've got a great guest, as we always do, but we needed some bubbliness and effervescence and we wanna talk about the trends in VoiceOver today. So we have our good friend, Laura Schreiber, who's someone who keeps up with the trends. Hey, Laura, how you doing? Hi, I'm so glad to be here. We're so glad to have you. George, are you ready to roll with this? Let's do it. I'm all oiled up. I got my tea. Let's make this happen. You're all oiled up? All right, it's time for VoiceOver Body Shop, right now. It's time for VoiceOver Body Shop. Brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan's signature products, Source Elements, the makers of Source Connect. VoiceOver Heroes become a hero to your clients with award-winning VoiceOver training. VoiceActorWebsites.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 Whitom. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or V-O-B-S. Well, I'm glad we're all lubed up to get this show on the road here tonight. Buzzing. Oil can. Anyway, why am I wearing a fez? You've seen me wear the fez before, but we've been gone for a while. I mean, it was the last show we did with, well, we did Tech Talk. We had Scott Parkin on like a month ago. Fiveth of a month ago, right. And I was on an 18-day seven-flight odyssey from LA to Florida to Madrid to Marrakech... No, to Casablanca. and a bus tour to Fez, Rabat, Marrakesh, and all these places, and then from Marrakesh to Madrid, to the Canary Islands to visit our good friend Ramesh, our one fan in the Canary Islands, and then to Barcelona had some tapas and flew 13 hours back to LA from Barcelona. 18 days, not one flight was late and our baggage was everywhere. It was like, everybody having trouble. Other people on our trip, they all got, their flights out of Lisbon all got canceled, so. Did you put a flare gun in your bag? I hear that if you have a flare gun in your luggage, they keep extra good care of it. Really? I did not know that. Anyway, I wanted to show you a couple of quick pictures, not a huge amount of stuff. But show us the good ones. Right, all right, so. Which there are many. All right, we'll start with this one. This is Toledo in Spain. I wrote a paper on it in college. So I'm like, okay, we're gonna be in Madrid for a couple of days, gotta go see Toledo. Gun on the train, went to Toledo. This is the Alcazar up there, the old king's palace, which has been rebuilt about five times. So much stuff was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. And then we went to Casablanca. And it's nothing like the movie. Well, sort of. As you can see, it's a big, humongous city, but the biggest thing there is the King Mohammed VI mosque. It just dominates the whole skyline. That is massive, that tower is humongous. That is a big tower, and it's a big mosque. I mean, that's like bigger than Madison Square Garden. It's huge. Wow. And then from there, we were on our way to Fez, and we stopped at this place, a place called Vizubilis, a Roman city from 2,000 years ago. It's been disturbed by a couple of earthquakes and stuff, but look at the floors in this place. It was amazing. And you could literally stand in front of the shop stalls that were, they're right there. You could tell they were shop stalls. It was a bazaar. Yeah, and you could literally hear some, one of the shopkeepers going, hey Octavius, come here, I gotta show you something. It's like. And then we went to Marrakesh. And of course, in the Shook, you tend to buy stuff. So I bought a Moroccan shirt, Marcy bought. Did they Shook you down? No. No, we Shook them down. It's like the Hagel Central. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and of course, so I bought a Moroccan shirt, and Marcy bought a Moroccan dress, which she put on and immediately saw that it was basically transparent. So she had put on some mucus pants under that. And then I found out that according to the waiter in this restaurant where we had this goodbye dinner, this is not a Moroccan fez. It is a Tunisian fez. Oh my God, I bought this fez and fez. Why would a fez from fez in Morocco be a Tunisian fez? And they don't even wear fez in Tunisia, they wear berets. So, you know, our guide said that, baloney. And then we went to the Canary Islands division, Ramesh. Who knew there was a 12,000 foot volcano out in the Atlantic Ocean? But there it is. The whole island is a big, it's like the Maui of the Atlantic. Very similar idea. And look at these rocks. It was like, if you were there at night, you would thought you were on the moon. Just an amazing thing, but Ramesh lives in paradise. He says, come visit me in paradise if you're in the neighborhood. Well, I'm in Morocco. Okay, we're gonna be in the neighborhood. We fly to Tenerife. Beautiful city. If you wanna go somewhere that's unexpectedly fabulous, go to the Canary Islands, it's really cool. So, anyway, I can tell you. I'm glad it all went smoothly and it looks amazing. Added to the bucket list. Right, there was a lot more to it than that, but now I can take off my fez and let Mishka wear it and there we go. It did make a sucking sound as you pulled it off your head and expect it to. Exactly. So, and what did you do while we were gone? You know, I mostly, I was trying to convince my girlfriend to come back from Iran, which sounds weird. I take it you finally succeeded at that. I did, I picked her up on Sunday. She's home safe and sound back from Iran and sleeping right now, which is normal after a 12-hour change of time zone. It's pretty, but, and just stayed active, cycling, doing some adventure riding. Had a really fun Halloween weekend, so much going on. Staying karaoke on the back of a trailer, being pulled by a tandem electric bike. You know, all kinds of wackadoodle stuff and had a good old friend from Portland who's relocating to Southern California. Stay with me a few days and it was a lot of, it was a great time, so. Great. Back to regular life and domestic life and right, cleaning up after myself again. Pfft. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Bachelor hood, yeah, I remember that like 30 years ago. Anyway, we have a great guest tonight and we're gonna introduce her now. This is a young lady who I've known for a while. She is a very successful voice artist and she knows about the trends in the voiceover business. So why don't we welcome to the show, Laura Schreiber, how you doing, babe? I'm so excited to be here with you guys tonight. What a delight, thanks for having me. Oh, it's our pleasure. We've been looking forward to having you on for some time and the time was right. And of course, we got to hang out this weekend at Mavo in Washington and that was, did you have a good time, meet lots of cool people? I had the best time between connecting with old friends like you and meeting new ones. I left feeling so inspired and then I was really tired this morning. That's like me too. You know that feeling of like being so charged and I was like running on adrenaline, driving home. I had a really long drive back and then this morning I kind of crashed and was like, oh my God. I'm inspired to tired. You have been inspired. Yes, yes. You know, and after you've been on a really long trip and you wake up and you start petting the dog and it's like, what is the dog doing with us in Morocco? Where am I? Well, actually that hotel is dog friendly. It turns out and I had this thought of like, do I bring one or both of the dogs next year? And then it was like, no, because I don't want to have to go back to the room to walk my dogs. But there were other dogs there. They were running through the lobby and... And they were cute, but better than the dogs were the people. Oh my God, what a nice group. And I was amazed people from the UK, people from Tokyo, besides all the, like I thought it was impressive that West Coasters were coming. And then when there was a lady from Tokyo in my sessions, oh my God, my mind is blown. Oh, she was from Tokyo. I thought she was a local. No, well, there were two Japanese women who were authentically Japanese, like from Japan, but one flew in from Tokyo for May though. My mind was blown. And she was in both my breakout session and my general session. And I was like, I couldn't believe it. I thought that was so cool because I mean, I've never considered going to Tokyo for a voiceover conference. I don't even know what voiceover conferences they have. They must, it's cool. We know there's a lot of, you know, English X-pats there. Yeah. Teaching English, you know. Yes. That have been doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, let's get into the meat of the matter. If you have a question for Laura, because we're going to talk about the trends in the voiceover business. And I think that's going to create lots of questions on all of your parts. So if you have a question and you're in Facebook or you're on YouTube Live, you can go into the chat rooms in either of those and write your question in. And I know Jeff Holman is back with us. Not sure what movie he's working on today, but apparently not at the moment. So he's taking down the questions in the social chat. So if you have a question, throw it in there and we will get to those in just a little bit. But let's get underway with really what we wanted to talk about. No, I know you're a very successful voice artist, but what's unique about your background that makes you stand out when booking? Because I think most people wonder, how can I stand out and not like a sore thumb? So it's interesting. I actually talked about standing out when booking. Less in my trend session and more in my branding session. That was something we talked about so much and we talked about this concept from Malcolm Gladwell's book of being an outlier, which is actually not about voiceover at all if you've read that book. He talks about everybody from professional hockey players in both the US and Canada studies and research that have been done on them to lawyers in New York City. And he talks about what makes people successful in their field, what makes them stand out. He uses this concept of an outlier and he talks about having superior and unique skill set. And I said, you kind of have to establish yourself as an outlier because there are a lot of people who do what we do and there are a lot of people who do what we do well. So it's not about your voice and voiceover. What makes you do well in voiceover is not your voice. It's your story. It's what you did before today that you bring into the booth with you. So for me personally, I came into voiceover from being a history teacher. I taught middle and upper school history at an all girls school in Manhattan. And I have a unique educational background. I went to Columbia for college and for graduate school. I have an advanced degree in history. I studied modern European history and was specifically interested in social history of France in the 1890s and women's position and status as it changed when the city was modernized. And I'm proficient in other languages. So I have a very different academic background compared to other people in our field. But when you're trying to build your voiceover career, it's how you can connect with clients and show them why you stand out. And that's how you can really make yourself shine because a lot of people might submit a similar read. So what does the client see in you that's different? And for me, it's not just my academic background. That's not what I'm trying to pitch. For me, it's the service that I provide, the relatability, the fact that I have this great booth that George helped me set up, that I can provide excellent audio with a quick turnaround within budget. These are all the things that I try to connect with. Once again, we're talking with Laura Shriver. If you got a question for her, throw it in the chat room. We would be thrilled to hear from you. So why does it matter if you understand the current trends? I'm an old fogey and I'm like this Instagram stuff and I don't follow it all. I mean, I should. Tickety-tock clock? What does that thing call again? Trick-truck. Oh, tick-tock chart for everyone. So why does it matter if you understand all these trends? So trends are super important. So I started my session on commercial trends with a visual. So this is the visual. Can everyone see this? This photo. There you go. Can you see my screen? Okay. So this is a photo from 1990 from my bat mitzvah. So now everyone knows how old I am. But these outfits were the epitome of fashion in 1990. My dress, my hot pink dress was custom ordered from a trunk show. It had a high neck. It had puff sleeves. It had rhinestones everywhere. What you can't see is that there were rosettes on my hip. The point of this image that I want you to have in your mind is that in 1990, this was it. This is what the bat mitzvah dresses were all about. And when you don't know what's on trend when you're submitting an audition, it's like showing up in this dress today. It's like, if I had shown up in this outfit to present at MAVO, that's what it seems like to the ears of the people casting you when you don't understand the trend, whether it's a video production agency or a casting director or your talent agent. If you can't keep up with the trends, what that does to your eyes, that's what it's doing to their ears. So you really have to have a system or a strategy to understand what today's trends are. Absolutely. How can understanding the current trends help you book more work though? So if you have a strategy to follow the trends and to do brand research, then when an audition comes your way and you know how to look at what's going on, A, in the industry as a whole, like with commercials and B, with that brand specifically, is this a shift in their campaign? Are they doing a campaign? Are they doing a one-off? Is this going on social media? Is it going on TV? Is it going on the radio? What market is this spot being placed in? Then when you submit it, it shows an understanding of what they're looking for and also where your voice fits in with the brand. And something else that we touched on in my session that's really important is making sure you understand the specs and what's being asked of you. So for example, if they ask for a voice with gravitas, I never submit. Listen to this voice, no gravitas. If they ask for an African-American female and you're a white female, you should not be submitting. That would not be a trend. So forever you. That'd be a very off trend. But it's highly offensive if you don't meet the specs and you're specifically not in the right category to submit. So for example, if they're doing an LGBTQ plus casting and you're not an LGBTQ plus person, you should not submit. I had referred someone to an agent, a student that I coached and the job was for an African-American female and he was a white male. And this agent had sent the casting out to everyone on their roster, assuming that the people who didn't meet the specs would know not to submit. And this talent, not only submitted, but this is a straight male and he attempted to make his voice sound like a woman's voice. That is not what is being asked of you and you have to understand that. So now I just don't assume anything and I tell everyone. Yeah. Yes, that's pretty much what you do. Do not assume that people have a common sense. Yeah, after a bunch of years in this business, that's actually more the fact than anything else. Okay, nope, I wasn't referring to anyone specific out there who doesn't need casting though. Once again, if you've got a question for Laura Schreiber about trends and branding and stuff like that, throw it in the chat room. Okay, so let's get to the meat of the matter here. What are some of the trends that we should be mindful of when submitting auditions? What's going on today? So there's a lot and when I covered them, I went about it in two ways. A, I made, well, the scripts that we looked at this week and were really fun and I made a packet of like 25 different scripts that were running and I made a montage of commercials that are presently airing on TV. And when I talk about trends, trends tend to shift. Now it depends on if a brand is in the middle of a campaign and a campaign could run for three months, it could run for six months. So you kind of have to do brand research and see how often that brand changes. So for example, Scott Parkin's Tide Spot has been running for quite a while. Tide hasn't changed their spot, but some brands like Audi might change their spot every six months, every three months. So you don't know and you have to see kind of like where that shift is coming. But in terms of what trends we're seeing right now, in this specs, conversational, authentic, a real person, someone who doesn't sound polished or salesy, this is very common right now. There's a lot of they don't want you to sound, they want you to sound real, they don't want you to sound, they want you to sound like the girl next door, the guy next door, they want you to sound relatable. There is actually for both men and women still a call for the announcer read, but it's very specific, not just an automotive in retail, not just in Black Friday spots in brands like Target, Kohl's, Raymore and Flanagan's, you still see those announcer reads, Macy's. That does still happen, but it's not the trend in terms of like every read, they will specifically say we want the announcer read or if it says retail, that's what they're looking for, that's the buzzword. The other thing that is a big trend is celebrity touchstones and they might say they want a Reese Witherspoon, a Sigourney Weaver, Samuel L. Jackson. And the funny thing that I've been noticing in some agent auditions is that they'll ask for some touchstones of people who have passed. So I did go over a big list this weekend of celebrity touchstones that have been asked for in the past three months, and it was quite a long list. And you can make yourself more marketable by putting your sound elikes both on your website and your pay to plays and tagging them. I actually am not skilled at doing celebrity sound elikes, but I have some friends who really work on it and put an effort into it and can do a great job. That is not one of my strengths, but it is something that's highly sought after. Right, and of course, the pandemic had trends within the pandemic, you know, it was very different. I mean, it was like, you know, from hyper to all of a sudden everybody's stuck in their house and it's like, we're all together. Well, and at the beginning of the pandemic, you had that shift where a lot of the commercials that had video footage were all animation, right? Because nobody could get video footage. So the reference that was happening at the beginning of the pandemic, every spot, they wanted to be like the chase spot. They wanted it to be like, your bank could be here or your bank could be here or your bank could be here. And they would have like the bubble of the bank and it was this animated spot. And like, I did old age home spots like that. I did hotel spots like that. I mean, it was like, and they all had this one chase spot for like an 18 month period as the reference. And you were like, oh my God, if one more person asks me for the chase spot. Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that. And it's, and then it slowly shifted back to what you're talking about now. Yes. And then the other thing is like really being able to dissect the conversational read. Like, because they say they want the conversational read. So you're talking about varied pace and intonation, different inflection, keeping it and like not being sing-songy, keeping it natural. But at the same time, your diction being good but not being too over pronounced. So having contractions, even if the script isn't written with contractions, maybe being a little more conversational and saying like, I'm talking to you and not like I'm not being like overly forced with it. So really understanding what it means to be conversational when you've had training. Right. Once again, if you're just joining us, well, you've missed it all already. There's still more to come with Laura Shriver and she is talking to us about trends. What are trends in the voiceover business? So again, if you have a question, throw them in the chat room because I know everybody's like, oh, well, what about this? What about that? So now would be a good time to throw those in there. Okay, so once I know all these trends, once I'm aware of what it is that we're supposed to be doing in our auditions and stuff like that, are you all set? Can you like stop following them? No, because they change. So you kind of every time that you audition, it's your responsibility to do market research. When these auditions come your way, whether it's direct from a client or from an agent or if you're submitting on a pay to play, it's your job to do constant ongoing market research. So for example, I'm on a veil for a spot for a pretty big brand. And before I submitted, I did a lot of market research to see what their other spots were like, what their preferred tone is like, what do they look for when they cast? And I think this is why research to see what their other spots were like, what their preferred tone is like, what's it? Sorry guys, I had some feedback in my ear. Did anybody else hear that? Yeah, we heard it. That was me, that's Facebook auto, that's Facebook auto on muting itself conveniently when I click on it. That's funny. I hope you enjoyed that. So now I like to do more not- Auto on muting itself can only be when I click on it. That's funny. I hope you enjoyed that. So it keeps happening. So now I like to do more not- Auto on muting itself, slap back. Did it stop? Okay, I think I killed it dead. Okay, I'm not hearing it. Sorry about that. That's all I wanna do is pin the comment from Jeff, but that's what happened. Sorry about that. It's okay. So it's your responsibility to do ongoing market research because the more research you do, the more likely you are to book a spot. So I'm not with one of the top five agencies, even though of course like everyone I would love to be, but I'm not with an Atlas or a CESD or a DPN, but I do have wonderful regional representation that's gotten me access to some great work. And I think the reason I've had success booking national spots and booking with brands like Disney, Smirnov, Gap, Dove, brands that we all know and love is because I'm consistent with my strategy and I have follow through and it does work. There's not like, I think it's a combination of hard work and consistency. And if you follow through and you are strategic, it's possible to book a commercial with any of these brands. You just have to stay on top of it. Yeah, what's a good way to stay on top of it? Watch the commercials? Yeah, but I don't just look for commercials on iSpot. I go on their YouTube, I go on their social media and I don't just try to go back one year, I look at like where they were and what they booked last and how many they have running to see like, cause you don't know whether it's gonna be a one off or a campaign and if they're doing a major trend. So for example, look at Chewy. Chewy is a fascinating brand and I've never actually done work for Chewy, but I love Chewy and I order my dog food on Chewy. So I love to work with Chewy. Chewy tends to book multiple spots at a time and they tend to book like these, they don't tend to hire women with my vocal range thus far but maybe they would pivot and they would do that. They tend to book women with a mid range voice and they tend to be very conversational although they have been doing some that are like characters where the voiceover is actually the voice of an animal and they tend to be like kind of flat and subtle in their read and they tend to have like sarcasm and humor and they're really well written scripts. The one consistent thing about all of Chewy's scripts is that they're really well written but they tend not to pick people with my vocal range. They tend to always be like a mid range woman or maybe someone with a little rasp to her voice. It's really interesting. Yeah, usually talking as a dog. Well, they just had one that was talking as a cat which was fascinating but they tend to have several spots running at a time that are all similar. So you can learn a lot about a brand if you research it. Yeah, so speaking of brands, this is sort of jumping a little bit ahead, you know a little off the thing of the trends but why does having a brand matter for voice actors? We've been hearing this for years like you gotta have your brand. Is that strictly for commercial or does that really go across the board? It goes across the board. It doesn't matter if you wanna work in corporate narration or e-learning or IVR or character. When you're a voice actor, you're a small business owner and you want the people who hire you whether it's a law firm who needs a phone message or it's a creative director whose casting is gonna come back to you again and again to have a reason to connect with you. And the reason is your brand and your brand is your story. It's who you are and it's what we started talking about at the beginning. It's why you were different. It's what you bring to the table that makes you stand out from everyone else. It's what do you have? It's why am I different than George? It's why is my skill set different than George's skill set? And it's why is working with me uniquely different than the next gal because I guarantee you that there's 10 gals who can do a read similar to me and have a similar high range voice to me. So why me? And that's what establishing a strong brand has. It gives them a sense of why you. It's the answer to that. Right. Give us an example of like what do you, how do you brand yourself? So for me, my brand is that in terms of like the way I describe my, there's, so there's multiple layers to the brand, right? There's like the way you describe your voice and the way you describe your personality. So what do I want people to think of when they think of my voice? I want them to think young, happy, millennial, conversational. Those are like the main words. When they think of me as a person, I want them to think of like warm, relatable, I'll bend over backwards for them to get them what they need, savvy and helpful. All right. Now, can somebody brand you? I mean, I'm sure there's some people who think kinky things about that. Yeah, just right here, but. So that's so interesting because that was how I started my session. I talked about how when I first started in the industry and Yang Yang Guza was my very first coach. That's actually how I found George. And she was amazing. And I did then and still do look up to her so much. And one of the things that drew me to working with Anne was her brand. And if you've ever met Anne or worked with Anne, you know that she has an incredibly strong brand. And from like, even before I started coaching with her, I was so tense, like, I have to have a brand. I need to get branded. And I thought, like, I need someone to brand me. I just want to pay someone to brand me. I have to be branded. But the problem with that and the flaw in that thinking is that if you think that you can pay someone who's known you for five minutes to brand you, they're gonna miss a lot because no one knows you better than you know you. And no one can tell your story better than you tell your story. And what you're getting hired for. What is it that you're consistently getting hired for? And if you pay someone to brand you as opposed to you writing your story in your words, in your voice, a lot will be missing. And that's why a brand is kind of a fluid thing that needs to change and evolve. And we talked about, and it's really important because I've read multiple books on the subject, but a brand needs to be expandable. So I don't know if you want to touch on this, but there's lots of ways in which a voice actor can talk about how they're a strong brand is a brand that can expand over the years. But in terms of being branded, you can work with a coach to help you develop your brand. But when you develop your brand collateral and your brand collateral are things like your logo, your colors, your business card, your banner, your email signature. And those all help support and help people get a sense of the brand that you're promoting. You need it to be somebody who's actually working on creating your brand and the graphics that help promote your brand and not someone who's imposing their idea of what your brand should be and their vision of your brand. And they're two very different things. Right, and they may have a totally different idea of who you are as opposed to what you think you are. And somebody else might have a totally different idea from that. And I did, I don't know if it was four years in or five years in rebrand and update my brand collateral and I stuck with my colors because they were me, but everything else was not a reflection of where my business was at the moment and where I saw myself and there has to be a marriage between the way you see yourself, the way other people see you and the way you want your clients to perceive you. Those three things have to match. And then all of your correspondence has to be on brand. And when I say that, I don't just mean like your e-signature, I mean like the way you interact with people. So if I wanna be seen as warm and helpful and upbeat and bubbly and I get all bent out of shape with a client, I can't send an angry, outraged email, right? Because that's not on brand. I have to kind of take a moment and get it out of my system and then think about like, how I wanna communicate this because communications are very much a part of your brand. Right, all righty. Well, it's time to take a break. We're talking with Laura Schreiber. If you have a question for it, throw it in the chat room. I know Jeff Holman is sitting back there with baited pen to take all that stuff down and we'll get to those questions in just a minute and we'll be right back with Laura Schreiber here on VoiceOver Body Shop. So don't go away. This is the Latin lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendez. And you're enjoying Dan and George on the VoiceOver Body Shop. Headphones for VoiceOver? Why not get the headphones made for VoiceOver? That's why I use Harlan Hogan's signature series, Voice Optimized Headphones 2.0 from VoiceOverEssentials.com. Harlan's cans are incredibly strong and lightweight at only 8.4 ounces. The combination straight coiled audio cables stretches from five to 10 feet. It comes with two gold plated mini plugs and a studio standard quarter inch screw on adapter and includes the new mini jack on the left headphone for easy cord replacement. The studio monitoring headphones are optimized for voice work. Now even better, the Harlan Hogan Signature Series VoiceOver Headphones 2.0. And for a limited time, when you buy the headphones, you'll also get a free autograph copy of Harlan's bestselling book, V.O. Tales and Techniques of a VoiceOver Actor Second Edition. It's full of stories from the trenches and insights about making the most of your voiceover career. Go on over to VoiceOverEssentials right now and order yours. Hey everybody, it's the time on the show where we talk about source elements, the creators of Source Connect and so many other tools. So I'll tell you a quick story about Source Live. They've done a retooling of this tool called Source Live and what's amazing now is studios can send a mix of the audio and the video that's being used, let's say you're doing commercial and all the clients can see instant playback within like a quarter of a second delay of what is being recorded and played back. So they all can see in here the way it would be if they were just sitting there in the control room at the studio and this is becoming a much bigger part of the way remote productions are being done. This is used in conjunction with Source Connect and Source Connect is the tool that the actor is using that might be you. If you wanna be available to be connected into Source Connect style sessions which are definitely the types of sessions that tend to pay the best because they have the budget to hire studios and the whole kit and caboodle that comes with producing commercial at the highest level, you definitely wanna get set up. Go over to source-elements.com, get yourself a free trial if that's where you feel like starting or I recommend subscribing so that you have support right out of the gate. They have really good support. They will walk you through the whole setup process, port mapping, whatever you need on your network to make it work reliably, it's fantastic. Thank you Source Connect, thank you Source Elements and we'll be right back after this. Hey there, I'm David H. Lawrence the 17th and with my company VioHeroes and my team of coaches and my community of voiceover talent, we guide voiceover 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 wanna do this. I'd really like to help you. Please go to VioHeroes.com slash start. That's VioHeroes.com slash start and you can take our Getting Started and Voiceover 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, VioHeroes.com slash start. That's VioHeroes.com slash start. This is Bill Radner and you're enjoying Voiceover Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, VOBS.tv. And we are back with Laura Schreiber and her William Wegman's dogs. William Wegman. Because you've got a writer. No. Photographer guy. It's not a Weimariner. It's a Silver Lab. It's the recessive of a chocolate lab. So she's all kinds of crazy colors, right? My friend had one of them, yeah. And she's sweet as can be. Super smart. To be in your house, I think she would have to be. So by the way, George, that was really cool. I didn't know that they could send video with the Source Connect. Well, yeah, that's Source Live. You know, that's the thing about Source Elements. They have a lot of different products and Source Live is something that's not really used by talent. It's used by production in the studio, but it's just another way that they can make the sessions run seamlessly for the client. They want to experience it like they're sitting there live. And because they've got the latency down so low, used to be you would hit play on a spot. There could be five to 10 second buffering before the client sees it. So it kind of drags down the playback process. Now it's like about a third of a second latency when they hit play. So the session flows. You know how expensive it is. You've got directors and writers and the clients and the studio engineer and the actor and you want it to be smooth. So anyway. I have, so not to go off topic, but because most of my work, a large percentage of it is commercial work. I have Source Connect sessions every single week. And for me, having Source Connect is essential. I actually do have IPDTL too, just because I had a few clients who didn't have Source Connect. I don't love to use Zoom and I'm happy to use Zoom because some people want to see you and it's nice because you can connect and it's good for relationship building. But if I will use IPDTL before I'll use Zoom if they will. So anyway, but with Source Connect, I love connecting on Source Connect. It's fantastic. And you know how many people can be on these calls. Sometimes there's six, seven people on a call and I didn't know they could do that. That's really cool. Well, there they go. There's the big endorsement. We didn't even need to do your spot there, Jordan. Yeah, I could have done it. I could have been like, I love Source Connect. So continuing on, and again, if you've got a question, you still got time to get your question in to talk to Laura Schreiber about branding and trends and stuff like that. But one last question for me. What happens if someone else's brand is like your brand? So that's interesting because this happens all the time, right? Look at Coke and Pepsi. There's competition. People imitate each other. But I think the general consensus is that imitation is the biggest form of flattery and it will happen. And yes, you could get your brand copyrighted and people do that. But according to all of the research that I did, and I've been researching this topic for months in preparation for MAVO, the advice is be the best you you could be. When my twins graduated from preschool, they were given a book that had like little fishies all over the cover and it was called There's Only One You. There's only one you. You're the only person who can tell your story your way. You're the only person who can connect with clients the way they do. So for example, my brand is very pink. Diana Birdsell is one of my best friends in voiceover and her brand's very pink. We are in no way copying each other. We just both like pink. There are gonna be other people coming down the line who also like pink. They're allowed to have pink. I don't own pink. There will be lots of gals who like the color. Is what it is. But you have to be confident in who you are and what you're offering. And if you are, and if you know yourself and have a strong sense of self, that's all you can do. There was a quote that I read and I don't remember if it was in Bob Miller's book or if it was in Michael Levine's book that said that Starbucks and BMW are selling more than coffee and cars. So it comes down to when you have a sense of your brand, what are you offering your clients? What service are you providing? And the service as voice actors that we're providing has to go so far beyond voiceover because it's such a competitive industry. And yes, it's a huge industry with lots of opportunity, but it's also highly competitive. And now having training with top coaches and having expensive gear is not enough to be the distinguishing factor. It has to be about so much more. So it comes down to your brand. Once again, Laura Schreiber is our guest and you still have time to get a question or two in there. So why don't you do that right now? But let's start off with the questions from our massive worldwide audience. George, take it away. And I will say also that having a good internet connection is key and you clearly have a good connection. Your picture has been flawless. Oh, I have a gig. Sharp is attack. I have Verizon Fios and I have a gig. Yeah, no, it's flawless. It looks like a local studio feed. Yeah. Maple J from YouTube says, I'm just getting started. I have my demos. But what should be the next marketing step for me? So I'm more of a generalized marketing question here. Well, Maple, I don't know if you have a website or not, but it's really important that you have a website. You don't want to ever send your clients to a place where there are other voice actors. Like you don't want to be sending them to SoundCloud or to YouTube only. You should have your stuff on YouTube or just to a pay to play. You want to have your website as your virtual storefront. So if you have demos, the next step would be a really solid website. Absolutely, I agree. Yeah, I mean, that's part of your branding too, right? So that assumes then you've already worked on our branding before you launched the new website, right? It's all, somebody asked me this question yesterday, in fact, about like if they're doing their website, when do they start their branding? And getting the timing right is essential because it kind of like you have to invest in the website and in yourself. And if you've already spent the money on the demos, it's like, where are you putting them? So it's kind of like getting the timing just right is tricky. And for those of us who have these massive websites when you've been in the business for a long time, you're always working on it. This is the answer. Once you start, it's something that you work on and work on and work on. Yeah, I'm getting very close to having a new website launched that actually is available for everybody. And part of that, getting the new website design from the ground up was the branding. And this is my new branding. It's this color scheme and this font. And that all was established in the beginning of the process. Long before we wire framed and figured out what the site should look like. We had to get the colors and the fonts and the branding of it, right. So that, yeah, that had to happen first, really. Cause I don't know if it was, it'd be much harder to go back and patch it all in later. You want to get that upfront. Yeah. Alrighty, question from Jim McNicholas. Also watching on YouTube. Other than conversational, which we hear constantly, it's conversational read. What is your best tip to book? My best tip is to always give more than one take. So sometimes they will say not to slate. So don't slate unless you're asked to slate. So if you don't know what slating is, it's when you say like, Laura Shriver for stars. Don't do that unless they specifically say to do that. And then give at least two takes, if not three, if you can, but don't say two takes at the front because you're wasting like that two to three seconds. So your first take should be the closest one to the specs. Your second one should be like, it should be like an A, a B and a C. It shouldn't be like an A, an A and an A. Don't give them three takes that are the same. But they want to hear that you have range and versatility because if you're not exactly in the pocket, but they see that you might be able to give them something different and take direction well and they like your voice, it'll give you much more of a chance. So besides conversational, they're typically looking for authentic and relatable. That's very much on trend right now as well. But also just give them versatility, give them something different and give them something that stands out for your second one or second and third, if you can. All right. Excellent. Took you to Grace. You get Grace's question. All right. Grace Newton asks, you have an impressive educational background. What is your acting background and what drew you to voice acting? Oh, okay. So in terms of my acting background, when I decided to go into voiceover, I started working with coaches one genre at a time. So I've worked with coaches from Ann Ganguza, J. Michael Collins, Nancy Wolfson, Eric Romanowski for my imaging. I'm working with Sean Pratt right now for audiobooks in voiceover. If you don't know this already, your coaching never ends. It's like ongoing professional development forever and ever and everybody should be going to conferences all the time and you should be working on your craft daily and always doing something. You should be working on your reading. You should always be doing something. So right now I'm working with Sean and it's amazing. I've worked with so many coaches. So I've worked with, okay, I'm not gonna name them all because there's like a Jillian. I've also taken acting and improv at our local theater, which is the Paper Mill Playhouse, which is like a theater that Broadway shows often go to either before they're on Broadway or when they leave Broadway. So I've had like Broadway actors as my acting and improv coaches, which has been fantastic for me. And what was the rest of the question? And just, yeah, what drew you to voice acting in general? Okay, so my journey was really long to voice over. It started, I don't know how much time we have. So I'll give you the abridged version. We've got 20, at least 10, 15 minutes. Yeah. Okay, so I went to school in New York City and if you haven't spent a lot of time in Manhattan then you might not know that the waiters and waitresses at the restaurants are typically actors and actresses. And my sister also went to college with me as did my husband and his brother, anyway. So when my sister and I are asked questions, we often respond in unison and my voice was even higher when I was young than it is now. So you can imagine what I sounded like as a teenager, right? So people would ask us questions and we would respond and the waiters and waitresses would be like, you should go into voiceover. So in like the mid 90s, I went to this bookstore in Times Square that was like just for theater and I started looking into doing voiceover. And at the time to go into voiceover you had to have a demo that was like on cassette and you had to show up in person to casting calls because there was like hardly any internet when I was in college. So nothing was online yet. And it seemed like being a student at Columbia and being a voice actor were mutually exclusive because I worked really long hours in school. But my husband who I started dating in 1996 would always joke like, well, when you're in voiceover and it was like literally the standing joke. And then years later, I was at Botmitzva in New Jersey and I was sitting next to a woman named Marie Hoffman who she does a lot of things but mostly e-learning and audio books. She was telling me about her voiceover career and I sort of had this and I knew her from the carpaline at school from drop off and I'd stopped working for a time and was at home with my children, I twins that are now in college. And I had this moment of like, if she can do it, I could do it, like what am I waiting for? So I asked her if I could call her and ask her questions. And she was kind enough to say yes. And we literally had a four hour phone conversation which led to like a six month period of research and writing a business plan. And I come from an academic background. So for me, nothing happens without like excessive research and like making charts and like, if this voice actor is doing this now, what are they booking and where will they be? And that was sort of my path to see like, is this really what I want to do? And then I started researching what it was like to make a booth and looking into how you build a studio and who do I want to coach with? And then my husband and I decided that it did make financial sense that like, I was either going to go back to teaching in the city or go into voiceover. So I decided that I was going to go into voiceover and I literally started coaching. And when I started studying voiceover, I did it all day, every day. So when I tell you that I started studying, I was doing it like eight hours a day. So I went into it as if the studying of voiceover was my full-time job. And that's how I got into it. Wow. So, yeah. Yeah, but Grace had a follow up to that. She says, what was your biggest challenge in your first couple of years in your transition from teaching to voice acting? And what was your work around for that? I think that there were a few challenges. So now my biggest support is that I have my people, that I have my tribe. So I'm in an accountability group with Kim Handyside's Durbla trainer, Michelle Blanker, Diana Bird, Saul and Shelley Avelino. Oh, you name dropper. Yeah. And these women are like my closest friends and I talk to them every single day. And when you have your people, life is easier because you can, you know, if you have a great client, you can fell and if you have a horrible client, you can fetch and talks to them about how horrible everything is and they get you through it, right? When you need to negotiate rates, they get you through it. Well, when you start, you don't have that support system. Like I had Marie for one day, but I'm not gonna call Marie every time I have an issue or she'll like never speak to me again. So until you have your tribe and you don't have a tribe right away or most of us don't or I didn't. So the biggest challenge was, you know, trying to figure out how to like balance everything. And I think for a lot of working moms, not just in voiceover, the home life balance is very hard. So I think until I found my people and I will tell you that going to conferences is a great way to find your people and being active in the Facebook and Instagram communities, you actually do make connections. And then when you show up at the conferences and you meet the people that you've been on social media with, they're like really there and they're like real humans and it's a very bonding experience. But you have to find your people. So until you have your people, it's a little hard. You're working alone in a padded phone booth. So this padded phone booth, I had a contractor who had been doing work on my house build and he worked with Uncle Roy who's local to me and with George to like learn the specs and put everything together. And like, so I built the booth from scratch and then I was lucky that I had like my own custom booth that's been great. As I've booked more and more work and had more steady clients, I've upgraded my gear over the years but I didn't start out with such expensive gear that I have now. But it's all about like finding your people and building your network and that's the hardest part. And I think the second thing that's hardest is knowing who to take advice from and who to tune out because not every, like I'm blessed to now say that I've surrounded myself with positive people and with good people but it's hard to know who to filter out and who to listen to at the beginning. So you have to be a little bit careful. Find people who have your back. Right. Yeah, ask for references. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, who are your people? I get to ask your question, George. Okay, good to do. Yeah, please. Yeah, you were talking about auditions and how often are you asked to send auditions which are raw and do you process them anyway? Okay, so this is an interesting thing. First of all, I'm on a lot of rosters where I don't have to audition and work just comes to me. So for example, in the last like 12 weeks I had three national spots running that I didn't audition for. I was just... To talk through demo. Booked. They're like, we have these, are you available on this day? And they were, I did a Disney promo this summer and I didn't audition for it. So now in terms of raw audio, I'm on Pandora's roster and that's all raw. But I will tell you something and George can explain this more in detail. My preamp is a UAD Apollo Mach 2 Thunderbolt which means that it's never actually totally raw, right? Cause it's always processing it. Like right now the audio that you're hearing has and I use them the Manly Vox box. So that means that like as I'm speaking it's being processed somewhat because it has settings that are going through it. So you're not really actually hearing you totally raw. Right, George? Yeah, I mean, it sounds, if there is processing it sounds very transparent. I mean, I can show you what it is. Do you wanna see what I... Not necessary. Well, we could talk about it on Tech Talk next week. Okay. Alrighty. Yeah. Well, it's a matter of, if the client doesn't know you're processing then you're doing it right. Right. And so if they, so, and I will tell you just as an aside what I typically do when I submit work is that I send them two folders. I send them a raw folder and I always save my raw wave files always whether they want it or not in my Dropbox. Right. But I send them the raw and I send them and it's marked edited with EQ and compression. And then I also always send them stuff they don't ask for. Like wilds of the N tag and I'll send them extra versions and that's my like little work around to never having to do pickups. Fabulous. Well, Laura Shriver, it has been wonderful having you with us tonight. We've been looking forward to this for 11 and a half years. Well, I don't know if I've known you that long, but almost. Not quite, but almost. All right. If people want to get in touch with you, where do they go? What's your website? So my website is www.laurashrivervoice.com and my email is laura at volara.com. Alrighty. Thanks for being with us. It has been great. Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to spend time with you guys. I'm hugging you again. All right. All right. All right, George and I'll be right back after these messages. So don't go away. You're still watching VLBS? 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 voiceover 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 voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. 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. Voiceover Extra 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 voice, auditioning, 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. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. Yeah, hi, this is Carlos Ellis Rocky, the voice of Rocco and you're watching Voiceover Body Shop. And we have more to do. We've got Tech Talk coming up in a little bit. If you're watching live, hang out. If you're not watching live, then you're not hearing me say this. Anyway, at this particular moment. So we love your questions for Tech Talk. It'll be Tech Talk number 90 by the way that we're gonna do next week. So it just goes on and on. How we do it, I don't know. Uh, have you got any webinars coming up? Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to keep the webinar pipes open and the next one coming up is Adobe Audition Advanced. And this one is gonna be on November 30th. 30th. But if you wanna double-check, just go to george.tech.com slash webinars. That's where the info is and that's where you can sign up. And you can get a 10% discount. Remember, we have that discount code. I mention it every week. And it's V-O-B-S Fan 10. And you can use that to get a cheaper webinar. Yeah. And we got a clubhouse coming up again with Jody Crangle, I think, in a couple of weeks. You know, they just crawl up on us. Oh, we gotta do our thing this morning. Okay, that's cool. It's kind of become a monthly tradition, but we always have a great time over there. We do. It's a great platform. I know it's kind of created its own little sub committee, not committee, but community. Community, yeah. But it's a passionate one. And it's kind of neat because it's an audio-only format, right? Zero video, just talking. Right. You know, and because we both have a face for radio, that's really important. Anyway, who are our donors of the week? We have Robert Liedem. We have Stephen Chandler. Casey Clack. Jonathan Grant. Tom Pinto. Greg Thomas. A Doctor Voice. Ant-Land Productions. Martha Kahn. 949 Designs. Jonathan Grant. Christopher Apperson. We got him in here again. Christopher Apperson. You know, the guy's so great he gets to be sent twice. Philip Sapir. Fryan Page. Patty Gibbons. Rob Ryder. Shauna Pennington-Baird. Don Griffith. Trey Mosley. Diana Burdsall. And Sandra Miller. Alrighty, we need to thank our amazing sponsors, Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials. Voice Over Extra. Yeah, he's been with us since day one. Voice Over Extra. Source Elements. VoHeroes.com. VoiceActorWebsites.com. And WorldVoices.org, the Industry Association of Freelance Voice Talent. Go join. Thanks to Jeff Hulman. I just renewed. What? Oh, good boy. We now have our whole tech committee back. Jeff Hulman in the chat room. Thanks for doing a great job on that tonight. Sue Merlino. Doing it great from far away. Well, no, she's just up Burbank. All the way across the valley. Yeah, all the way just up Burbank. And of course, Leap Any for being Leap Any. Well, we got Tech Talk coming up, so don't go away. You've got questions for us. Throw them in the chat room. We will be very happy to answer it, but we got some great stuff to talk about. Anyway, that's gonna do it for us this week. Our thanks again to Laura Shriver for joining us. And remember, if it sounds good. It is good. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whittem. And this is Voice Over. Body Shop. Or VOBS. Have a good one. Bye-bye. See, I finished it right on the top of the hour. I know, you were disciplined. You cut it off. You got it right to the, Sue loves you. Big thumbs up. She's doing air hearts. She's going like this, like this. Like she's just, she can't stop. I know. I needed a vacation from it so I could get my timing mojo back. Yeah, you know. And I threw the music in. So just to get her to be quiet there. That was good. No, I like that. She's like, what? What? Anyway, all right, time for some tech talk. We got lots of cool stuff to talk about. Do not go away. If you have a question for us, throw it in the chat room. You got some cool stuff too. What's your discussion item again, Dan? I can't remember what you're gonna... Expensive microphones. Oh, you're expensive microphones. Take that in, you can take it in. Okay. And gauntage. We'll talk about it carefully. Yes, sir. All righty. As I talk into my expensive microphone. How much is that one? 1200 bucks. Oh, well. But I didn't pay for it. Ah, anyway, so, go ahead, Sue. All right, let's roll. Five, four. Hey, it's time for VoiceOver Body Shop. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk, tech talk. All right. And it's number... 991. No, it's 90. Is it 90? Yeah! It's 90. Tech talk number 90. If you can believe it. Let's just shoot them both and get them out of the way. 90 and 91, back to back. No, just kidding. Yeah, no. If you can imagine, there's 90 hours of us just talking like this. Yeah, you guys just eat it up every time. Can somebody do a super cut on YouTube? What's the maximum length of time if you can make a video? I don't know. I know it's kind of limited on Facebook, but who knows? 12. How short do they have to be on tech talk? They can't be a certain length. 15 seconds or more. All right, it's time for tech talk. Let's get out of this and get talking about tech right now. Tech talk. Brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan's signature products. Source Elements, the makers of Source Connect. VoiceOver Heroes become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training. VoiceActorWebsites.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, greetings, everyone, in the voiceover world. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is VoiceOver. Body shop. Or VOBS. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Talking tech. Interesting weekend. I was at Mavo last weekend and met all sorts of people. We had a great time. I like the small conferences. The big ones, eh, you can go to those, but you're gonna feel like a grain of sand on a large beach. And this one, you're more like, you're a pattern in a rug. Was there any tech talking going on? With me, I was the only person talking tech. Uncle Roy was there, but he didn't really, he was just letting- He was in support, right? Yeah, he was support. I got to talk my thing with about 20 people. And, you know, I've been doing these sessions for many, many years. And you and I have done them together, which are always a riot. The first one we did at the voice conference in Anaheim, where my mother was actually there. Yeah, that's right. That was a lot of fun. Sitting right in front row. Yeah, and we've had fun doing them ever since. But I was at this one and people were asking good questions. And that's what we like to hear. So here on Tech Talk, you get to ask the questions and we're here to solve them, because that's what our show is all about. And why are you asking us these questions? Because when it comes to home voiceover studios, that's what George and I do. I mean, it's a niche that nobody understands. And when I mean nobody, I mean, the... The typical acoustical engineers, the major recording studio designers and owners. Right. And there's a lot of voice actors out there who say, well, I use this and I use that. Fine and dandy. Every voice is... I don't even dare to say the booth makers don't know about how to make the booth sound good. Yeah, you know. There was a booth maker at Mavo last weekend, our friend Bear Cave Booths. Oh yeah, Bear Cave Canada. He's making those improvements in the booths and stuff. But sometimes someone will be rehearsing in a booth and you hear them on the outside and it's like, well, they can hear them on the outside. Can you hear them on the inside? That sort of thing. But every voice is different. Every room is different. Every situation is different. And you need ears that know how all this stuff works and how to make it sound right or make it sound what it's supposed to sound like. Whistle. And so if you need help with that, if you're not really knowledgeable on it, and the fact of the matter is, you don't need to be an audio engineer to be a voice actor. If you understand the basics and your studio is set up right, and it gets the approval of those of us in the intense minority of the 500 billion people that live on this planet that actually understand what it's supposed to sound like, you can work with George and I who will make sure that if you're auditioning, if you don't get the job, it's not because of us because you're gonna sound great no matter what you do. So if you wanna work with George, where do they go? They go to... Georgethe.tech, my home on the web for booking services online, getting a sound check really. It's probably one of the most valuable things that Dan and I do, and it's all over there. You can have a studio design done, you can get processing, but sound check is probably where almost everybody will benefit on some level. Absolutely. And you can work with me too. Dan. Yeah, you just come over to homevoiceoverstudio.com. Is it the specimen collection cup? Yeah, and again, it's now at the top of the page so it's really easy to find. For 25 bucks, I will give you a very thorough analysis of your audio. Takes me five seconds, well 10 because you give me five seconds of silence, you start reading and then I immediately know what's going on in your studio. We've been doing this for so long, we know everything that goes on. Nobody else is really concentrated in home studio audio, but George and I have. And I can hear this stuff, I can tell the shape of the room, the size of the room, what you're using for acoustical panels. Are you using acoustical panels? Are you in your living room? Are you in a booth? Are you in a quiet room? All these different things. Are you in a closet with sliding doors? Right, an 18 inch closet or a 22 inch closet. It's like, yeah, all right. Make sure you got lots of clothes in there. But there's lots of ways to make your studio sound professional because you wanna be a professional and sound professional. And we want you to sound professional because if you don't sound good, everybody doesn't sound good. You don't sound good, we don't look good. And that's most important because we know what it's supposed to sound like. So get in touch with us. Also, if you wanna, you know, write to us here at the VoiceOver Body Shop if you've got a question, you can write in any time and when you write in your question, it gets to the head of the queue of the questions that we answer in the second segment of our show. So. That's right. Right, but you can write it in now. Go into the chat room. You got a VoiceOver Body Shop, Home VoiceOver Studio Tech question. Type it out, put it in the chat room. And Jeff Holtman I know is still sitting in there going. I want some questions and we will get those questions in just a little bit. But right now it's time for George's Tech Update. What have you come up with this week? I've got a couple of things. One is just thoughts about microphone choice and I'm seeing more and more dynamic microphones coming out. And a lot of that reason is because just like up until the last couple of years everything was being made for music. Now this new hot market segment is podcasting. Podcasting. Right, so now all the new microphones that are being launched to market tend to be focused on podcasting and therefore they're using dynamic mics and they're using dynamic mics because they are trying to get an audio or aural aesthetic that is more, I would say closer to broadcast or radio. And so that is why dynamics are really, really taking off. Now all that to say that you don't necessarily get a bad sound with a dynamic mic. And there are some surprisingly good sounding cheap dynamic mics out there if you get lucky at Beringer makes a handheld like a, you know, SM58 style mic that's like 30 bucks. It sounds surprisingly good. The thing about dynamic mics are they have pros and cons. They tend to have lower output. They need more gain. And if you add more gain, they tend to get, you tend to get noisier sound because more gain means more hiss. So you gotta be really careful about dynamic mics. The best dynamic mics are as sensitive or nearly as sensitive as a condenser mic and also nearly as expensive or even more expensive than an affordable, good quality condenser mic. So the benefits can quickly be offset by the cost. I was just actually posted something today on the VO Tech Talk Facebook group and it was a sample of a singer singing into a Sennheiser 441. Remember them well for my radio days. It's a really unique looking mic. It kind of looks like a phaser gun or some kind of a weapon from a, you know, an old sci-fi, sci-fi movie. And it sounds amazing, but it's also a very expensive dynamic microphone, right? So yeah, so be careful about choosing dynamics. I mean, there are some lucky finds to be had. Sometimes they can work well, but I would still say if you buy one, don't overinvest in it, use it as a secret weapon or a special case microphone for specific types of reads that you're doing. Dan, have you found an occasion, because I know you've got a mic locker, all kinds of stuff, have you found an occasion or even a reason to pull out a dynamic mic? Once or twice, like if I'm asked to be a radio announcer or something along those lines or something where I'm like a news announcer or sometimes when I'm doing something that is like old, like if they want me to do like a read from the 50s or something along those lines, I might drag that out. Of course, in those situations, I drag out a ribbon mic. So yeah, you really go for it with the ribbon mic. Right, I go for that authentic sound and it works, especially if there's a good engineer on the other end who knows exactly what it is I'm trying to get and that helps a lot. Do you think they're ever gonna make like an active dynamic mic like they do with active ribbon mics? Yeah, it's starting to happen and right now my brain's leaking the brand that's trying to do it right now. But there are a couple, I'm pretty sure that Aston, Aston microphones is doing an active dynamic mic and I've seen that in some studios singing situations as well. Again, haven't seen it or heard of it being used much in voiceover, but there are some coming out that's basically combining a line level, a microphone booster, like a cloud lifter type device, into the interior of the dynamic mic and now you get a hotter, more sensitive dynamic mic. It's just this interesting thing. As you do more things to a dynamic mic, it becomes more condenser like, AKA a lot more sensitive and so it starts picking up more background noise in the room. So it's a catch 22 when you're doing all this stuff. And that's one of the reasons some people like using a dynamic is because their environment is not optimum. Yes, the dynamics tend to be able to focus in tighter on the voice and kind of reject more of the room sound. But of course, if you just fix the room sound then solves all those problems. Yeah, I mean, it's all related because then if you get closer to the mic it sounds like you're kind of doing a podcast or a broadcast and not a natural conversational sound. Now your next thing, I will have to say I avoided asking you about it and just went ahead and did it. So you did it. I was gonna say, I was wondering if you did it. I did it. It came up, I did it. What did you put it on? Which computer? Both. Oh, and both of them. Wow, he went all the way in. I trust them, I know what's going on. Tell them what I'm talking about. Well, Dan's saying he just installed MacOS Ventura which has only been out in a couple of weeks and the word on the street is that it is good. Tim Freedlander, Dan's saying he's got a good experience. Tim Freedlander who has a pretty complex home, production studio facility with the Apollo hardware, Pro Tools, kind of the messiest system that anybody is probably gonna have. He's had a very good luck with Ventura. So I'll say this, I'm still not installing it quite yet but I'm tempted to because my current Mac Mini with Big Sur has some issues clearly. Things are crashy. It's had some weird behavior and it might be time to just do a bigger race and install and maybe go up to Monterey or Ventura. I surmise that Ventura is sort of like an a debugged Monterey. It's probably what it is because it's running pretty smoothly. It's got a fresh coat of paint on it. It's got a couple of new nifty bells and whistles which I don't care about. But if it's more stable than Monterey and it runs even better then it sounds like it's gonna be a winner. So just stay tuned. Ask folks that have similar setups to yours that use the same software and hardware before you take the plunge. And of course as always have a backup plan. Have a backup of your hard drive before upgrading. I would say if you're going from Monterey to Ventura it's probably gonna be a very smooth transition. If you're going from a much older OS or an older computer I don't think I would go to Ventura. It's written to run on the modern silicon M1, M2 Max. I don't think you're gonna have quite a good experience on an Intel machine. Yeah, my only complaint is that it took away my screens and my desktop. Chains of picture. I had a great picture of Iceland. It got rid of it. It's just gone, gone, huh? Well, I'll find it. I'll put it back. It's gotta be there somewhere. But yeah, they tend to do that. They're like, yeah, we have a new OS. Get a new wallpaper. It's like, come on, no, I want my old one. Yeah, exactly. Here's just a little PSA because this came up for one of my clients. When you order an acoustical panel for your door, take an account, the doorknob. You would think that that's like totally logical. We're all laughing here, but I mean, we had the room was all mapped out. We knew the size of the doors, everything. I helped her design the room, the whole thing. And she's like, oh no, we didn't take into account the doorknob. I felt so terrible. So it's a pretty small door. I think the door is only two and a half feet wide. So like a two by four panel wouldn't quite fit on there. So she would need two by two panels, one above and one below the doorknob. But hopefully, dear Erin can go without the panel on the door. We're gonna get it all tuned and listen to see if she needs that additional panel on the door and we'll figure out what to do from there. But hey, it happens. Take a jigsaw and just cut around it. Oh, into the panel itself? Yeah. Oh man, those fabric wrap panels. Those are the downside of the fabric wrap panels. They are definitely not easy to modify. That's the one pro of foam. Very easy to modify. Another thing is I bought myself a little birthday gift and I finally got a stream deck. And I got the teeniest, tiniest little stream deck ever. This is the stream deck zoo. Anything you want, which is, I mean, anything your computer can do, you can trigger specific things. You can have macros, like I have when it says my favorite button is start work. I walk up to my studio, I press start work, launches not Spotify, that'd be start radio show. I hit start work, it launches Zoom. It logs into my Zoom account. It waits about five or six seconds and then it loads the Zoom session because there's a little delay between launching Zoom and loading the thing. You can create a macro to do all that stuff. The thing is macros and scripts and all this stuff have been around forever and ever but it's just the fact that it's got a little button labeled literally the word start work because you can customize the buttons. It's pretty cool. I can also have a dedicated Zoom mute button right here. Mute Zoom. And the thing is it's running a special driver in the background so it knows which app the buttons are for. You know how with keyboard shortcuts you have to have the, whatever the app the shortcuts for it has to be the foreground app. You know what I mean? Like if another app is actually showing as the foreground app, it's right next to the Apple logo when it says then. And it's the wrong app. The keyboard shortcut doesn't work. These are all global or local. You can choose, but it's really cool. And you can map sound effects to the buttons on here and do the same kind of fun stuff you do with the roadcaster right here on the unit. Cool. Yeah, you mean stuff like, you know. Of course, I don't think I have it set up so you can hear it, but it's there. Of course the motor, I wanna demo it. It doesn't work, right? But anyway, it's a gadget. It's a gadget. No doubt about it. But if you like a little customization and you don't like remembering keyboard shortcuts, it's pretty cool. Again, this is a mini one. They have some really big ones with a lot of buttons and every button has a custom image that you can map to the button. Pretty fun little thing. Lastly, just a very quick plug. UADforum.com. If you are a Apollo user, go there and check out my sub-forum called VoiceOver Podcasting and Live Streaming. It's not a super busy room there yet, but it's a laser-focused one on our business and it's been helpful to the folks who have tuned in there. So if that's you, I run that room. I check it out every day and answer questions. Very good. So let's talk pricey microphones. Yeah, let's talk about expensive microphones. I mean, we were sort of talking about it before when you were talking about the dynamic mics. When I was at MAVO, had a long discussion with the guys from the high-end microphones, Sennheiser and Neumann. And of course, I was wearing my Telefunken shirt, which he was quite impressed with. The button down one, the wine-style one? Yeah, the blue and orange one. I love that shirt and I wore it for my thing. But we were talking and of course, if you go to conferences and there's mic manufacturers there and George and I have been to NAB and NAMM, you know, we're all the manufacturers and they're like, hey, listen to this microphone. Now, I had to be honest with the guy. And I'm like, do you think that people are gonna be able to tell the difference in voiceover? And I think this was probably his first voiceover conference, which I think was very beneficial because I was able to say, he came in and he watched my thing on home voiceover studios because I want the manufacturers to understand what is unique to what we do. And you were talking earlier about the dynamic mics and the dynamic mics, right, they're great for singers because they can handle high SPL and you don't have to give them as much gain when you're a singer or you got it on a guitar cabinet, on a cab, as they say. I've been seeing them used now. There's a big trend of live studio sessions that are on YouTube, which are really cool. The band's really playing live. But it's a studio situation and they are almost always putting a dynamic mic in front of the singer because it rejects a little bit of the drum sound and the other sound in the room. Right, exactly. But when people audition mics, and I think we've covered this a lot over the last 11 years. We've covered everything a lot in 11 years. Yeah, that's true. But for all the new viewers out there that are like, how do I choose a microphone? And what's the best microphone for voiceover? When you're auditioning higher end microphones, generally, especially if you're in a convention hall or in a vendors area of a conference, they have them set up generally the exact opposite of the way we tell you to use a microphone, which is upside down, eye level like this, because it's gonna capture you the way you exist and the way other people hear you. But no, they always seem to have them upright. Yeah. And people are like, how do I sound in this microphone? And then I'm like, okay. When you're doing this with voiceover people, are they going to get a true idea of really what it's gonna sound like? And it's got a U87 and a 103 and a 416. You know, all mics that we would say, look, if you got a great studio, you got, you know, you have a half million dollar studio that is totally acoustically sterile and neutral, no sound coming in and there's no reverberation or it's just perfectly tuned. Yeah, you can put a $10,000 telephone and microphone in there. That's what they're for. If you're in your closet, you got air conditioning, the dishwasher, the refrigerator. Plumbing. Your kids. I mean, all these. Snoring dogs. Snoring dogs. We've got highways. We got all these things. It's gonna pick it up. So you don't want the most sensitive mic out there. And that really is, I mean, there's a number of differences between the really high-end mics and the stuff that we generally recommend that is, you know, 150 to maybe $400 tops. I mean, I mean, we will recommend a 416 if we think it's important to have that and you have the environment in which to use it. A 416 will help you in a somewhat nominal market. It was great having this guy in my session though because he was like, well, this is what happens with this with these are mics are for and that's what these mics are for. You know, have a great relationship with this guy. Now he understands, you know, how his microphones fit into our marketplace. Well, he knew enough to have a Sennheiser 416 because it's not outside of voiceover. It's not a known thing that you would use a shotgun mic inside a booth this close. Like that's just not what they were designed for, right? So it's a hack kind of that. We're doing it that way. Right. And then of course, the 416 is incredibly versatile because you can use it, you know, at a distance and it has great pickup and you can use it up close and direct in if you're doing like promo work and things like that. You know, Live Announce. I see the Live Announce of people doing it like this. Right. Like right off the tip of the mic. Right. And it works and it's a great mic for that. And it's a road warrior. It's a big heavy duty mic because it was designed for some guy carrying it on top of a pole and following Tom Cruise around or Julia Roberts or somebody along those lines who all have great voices but from a distance of more like five feet as opposed to maybe the six to 10 inches that we might use with a 416. Yeah. But the fact of the matter is if you're auditioning mics you have to do it in the environment in which you are going to use it. Otherwise you're fooling yourself. And I might also mention there's no mic out there. Whether it's a $10,000 telefunken or something under $150. I won't mention any specific brand names. It's not going to change the way you read copy. It's all about performance. Is there some subtlety? What is the difference in these mics? And we talked about this a bit. I mean, what's really the difference? How would this mic be used as opposed to another mic? And we came down to talking about national public radio. Well, that's the sound that they want. Oh, by the way, my new car, the stereo is even better than listening to NPR. It's like being in the studio with them. Oh, cool, must have HD radio. Oh, it's got a super duper HD radio. But you can tell what kind of a mic they're using. Of course, I know what kind of a mic they use, but you can tell that it's just clean and crisp. And of course it's national public radio whose standards are higher than almost anybody's. Yeah, yeah. And so... What you were saying about the environment that you test the mic in, I was with Rick Wasserman and Trybooth at VO Atlanta last year. Right. And I think Neumann really lucked out because they were a sponsor and we put one of their mics up in the Trybooth. Right. And it obviously gave people a much different and much better impression of what that mic would sound like because we had it in that booth, right? And no, it wasn't soundproof, but the acoustical environment and the positioning of the mic and everything were appropriate. I did a little bit of software magic using Clarity VX to remove the room noise, which was pretty good. And people had an incredibly good impression, but you're not gonna get that in a typical trade show environment. Right. And here's the other thing when you're auditioning a mic. If you're listening on headphones and you're trying to satisfy song grade on this, you're not getting a really good impression of really what that mic sounds like. You really need to have it in the environment in which you're recording and then listen to the playback and get a much better idea because then you can listen and compare them one after another as opposed to, all right, all right, turn the gain up on this one. Let me test this one and see how this sounds different from the other one. You don't need an expensive microphone if you were, I'll qualify this. If you're just starting out, it's not going to make a difference. You can start off with a really good USB mic or a mic that's over $150 to 200. I mean, there's some really good ones out there. You know, we've been recommending the Rode NT, the NT1, the... Audio Technica 2035, still one of my classic favorites. You know, still, I still have my 305. The VO1A, if you got a little bit more. Right. And they're all, they capture you as you exist. And that's all that matters. So that's my take on expensive microphones. So take it for what it's worth, which to me is probably a lot if you've been listening to this show. If you say, if we saved you $500, it's worth $500. Exactly. Alrighty. Well, wrong theme. That's okay. I like it. Let's play it out. All right, I'll see you here. Yeah. Oh, that one. Okay. We're going to take a break and we're going to answer your questions. Get them in the chat room right now here on VoiceOverBodyShop Tech Talk. We'll be right back. This is Ariana Ratner and you're enjoying VoiceOverBodyShop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, VOBS.tv. Headphones for VoiceOver? Why not get the headphones made for VoiceOver? That's why I use Harlan Hogan Signature Series Voice Optimized Headphones 2.0 from VoiceOverEssentials.com. Harlan's cans are incredibly strong and lightweight at only 8.4 ounces. The combination straight coiled audio cable stretches from 5 to 10 feet. It comes with two gold-plated mini plugs and a studio standard quarter-inch screw-on adapter and includes the new mini jack on the left headphone for easy cord replacement. The studio monitoring headphones are optimized for voice work. Now even better, the Harlan Hogan Signature Series VoiceOver Headphones 2.0. And for a limited time, when you buy the headphones, you'll also get a free autograph copy of Harlan's best-selling book, VO, Tales and Techniques of a VoiceOver Actor, second edition. It's full of stories from the trenches and insights about making the most of your VoiceOver career. Go on over to VoiceOverEssentials right now and order yours. Hey, everybody. It's time to talk Source Connect. And that's made by Source Elements, our sponsors for the show. And it's an incredible tool set. I mean, it is really what is the... Really the predominant tool for remote recording of voice talent from their home studios, by commercial studios, and oftentimes for bigger budget commercial jobs around the world. And it's because of the workflow. It's one of the key reasons. There are definitely other softwares and tools and utilities out there that allow connectivity between the talent and the studio in high quality audio. But the workflow is so seamless for the production. That's why they love it. The audio goes right into Pro Tools and can also be immediately replaced with the original raw audio right off your computer all seamlessly. It is really amazing. So you wanna make sure you have a studio ready for it. So if you're not sure about that, definitely get in touch with Dan or I. We will evaluate your audio and let you know where you stand. But if your quality is up to par and you're getting representation and they're saying time for Source Connect, go get it. Don't hesitate and there's great support. They will help you through the process. Just go over to source-elements.com and sign up for a subscription and get yourself rolling. You will not regret it. Thanks Source Elements. We'll be back to answer your questions right after this. Hey there, I'm David H. Lawrence, the 17th and with my company, VioHeroes and my team of coaches and my community of voiceover talent, we guide voiceover 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 wanna do this. I'd really like to help you. Please go to VioHeroes.com slash start. That's VioHeroes.com slash start and you can take our Getting Started and VoiceOver 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, VioHeroes.com slash start. That's VioHeroes.com slash start. Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching VoiceOver Body Shop. It's great. All right, we're back. I've been playing with the button that I voice so the wife's in here and she wants to listen. I can hit that and she can hear the monitors. Oh, that's true. Yeah, yours does the special mute monitor dance. That's right. But we waste time here because we have a pile of questions. George and I love this. It's time for a lightning round. Let's get it in here. I love it. Yes, let's start off with Ann Grist. Go for it. Hey there, Ann. She asked, how do you favor vocal booths from Vocalbooth.com? And she said, Dan, I love your eyes. There is Marcy still in the room. Watch out. She's gone. I wanna be careful because I have not installed or heard a recent model vocal booth, something in the last four or five years. I will just from past experience, I found their booths a little more difficult to assemble than a lot of the other ones. And acoustically, I wasn't happy that they were using foam, I call it foam wallpaper. It was just two inches of egg crate foam glued to the walls, you know? And acoustically just never was great. We all would always have to modify it to make it usable. So that was my take. I do remember though, one of them I set up or heard at least set up, had amazingly good ventilation, like really quiet. Like it had six inch ducts, which nobody does in a portable booth. And it had the best ventilation I'd ever heard at that point. So. Or it didn't hear. Or it didn't hear, yeah. No, I was like, is it on? And I asked the client, she said, yeah, it's on. I was like, wow. So yeah, they're certainly not all bad. It's just that those are the pros and the cons of that particular brand of booth. So yeah, I would, I wanna not judge because again, I haven't heard any very current or installed anything currently to know what they're like these days. Yeah. To me, it's a matter of the technology. When you look at all the booth manufacturers, they're all pretty much the same, except maybe Studio Bricks, which does things very, very differently. Yes. In the way their booths are. Are they all soundproof? If they can reduce your exterior noise by 10 to 12 dB, they may actually do what you need them to do, which is filter out some of that noise that is really hard to eliminate in a home studio. So, you know, it probably do not matter. Fred North asks, hi Fred, how you doing? Have you got any good ideas for isolating my mic boom from my desk? Well, that's not hard. Mine's on my desk. Mine's not. Mine is attached to the wall. I probably just woke up my poor girlfriend. I was shaking my desk and it was banging against the wall. Oh, gosh. Yeah, no, it definitely is better to have it on the wall. There's no doubt if you want to isolate it from your desk noise. Or on the floor. I mean, I generally insist that people use a microphone stand that is floor mounted and isolated completely from the desk. Now, it may not be as critical as it used to be, because most computers now are getting pretty fanless, especially Macs, and they don't have mechanical hard drives. Yeah, they're much, much quieter than it used to be. Much quieter. In which case you can probably get away with a desk mounted arm that's like this one. I have been, yeah, mine's on my desk and between the shock mount here, and I mean, if I was literally doing a line of a script, I would not be touching my desk. Like I wouldn't be typing or anything. So I can't imagine being that big of an issue these days, but yeah, it depends on the situation, Fred. Like what you're trying to accomplish by having your mic, what noise is your mic picking up? I guess I should say. And the only way to know that is to listen and we can then determine, okay, maybe you should mount it to the wall. And they make the brackets to do that, which makes it a lot easier. And that's why I have mine mounted as a wall and not to my desk. I have another distinct reason why I don't mount it to the wall, and that's because I want to be able to do this. You mean this? And this? I want the mic, the monitors, my lights, everything to go up and down at the same time. So that's another reason why I have mine on the arm. So. Okay. Now I'm on your desk. Yeah, yeah. All right. You get Jeff's question. All right, hey, Jeff. I seem to have more mouth noise than the average person. I don't know if you would know that for sure, Jeff. How would you know that? Despite trying to deal with it at the source, what a dynamic mic like an RA20 pick up less mouth noise. I don't know, because you know, like a dynamic mic like an RA20, it has to be pretty close. Yep. And the closer the mic, the better it will pick up the mouth noise. Also the better than, the more the mic is pointing into your mouth, this versus you know, as you get back to the side of the microphone, it picks up less and less of the mouth noise. So it's just mouth noises. Oh, sorry. Don't touch the mic. Mouth noise is a mechanical thing, right? It doesn't matter whether you're yelling or whispering, the sound of mouth noise is the same volume. So it's all relative. To how loud you're performing. So if you're doing louder roles or animation and games, mouth noise is probably absolutely not an issue. If you're doing commercials and things with a darker, quieter delivery, we're using more gain and everything, mouth noise is going to be really prominent. Absolutely. I'm of the opinion of if you got mouth noise, deal with the mouth noise, not with the microphone because there are lots of solutions to it. Including my favorite, which is alcohol, which works great, Jeff. I'll be happy to lend you some and then you can... You do that mix, you do a mix with water. You do a mix with a little spray bottle and 10 spritzes spit it out and mouth noises are gone. That's cool. Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Yeah, it's... And I don't think there's a mic I can, I don't think there's a mic I can recommend for voiceover that will eliminate the mouth noise. If it eliminates the mouth noise, then I wouldn't recommend it for voiceover. Good point. Because it wouldn't be very clear, clean, open sounding mic, it'd be very dull. Yeah, really. Grace Newton's got a great question, which is enough to fill an hour. I mean, you and I have done entire webinars on this subject, but she says, any advice on gear for travel? Like, well, one, either don't travel and don't do what when you're traveling. Is it necessary for my travel rig to be as sophisticated as my booth gear? Like a Scarlet Solo Gen 3 Road NT-1. No, it doesn't need to be that sophisticated. If you're literally doing jobs from the road, maybe. It's gonna be good, yeah. But if you're trying to just get those auditions in, any way you can, kind of like getting in your steps, gotta get in those auditions, then you don't need something as sophisticated or bulky or... Right, that's why the Apigee mic is a great road mic. Apigee mic, or the one that you have the road video mic go to. Oh, you mean... Have you had much of a chance to experiment with that on the road yet? No, well, I mean, we've recorded video with it, and it's really good. It's a $100 mic. You can spend extra $30 bucks for its special lightning cable if you really wanna record into a phone, but it comes with the USB cable, right? No, it's strictly a lightning cable. It's designed to work with an iPhone. But it has different cables that you can plug into it, I think. Yeah, well, it's got a USB-C on one end and the lightning cable, but it's not like a charging cable. There's something different about it and they get proprietary, and that's... MFI, made for iPhone or whatever it is. But yeah, you can plug it into a regular computer or a camera input or whatever, and I've never heard of that being... I've never heard a bad thing come out of that. No, it sounds pretty good. There were some people at MAVO last week that were talking to... A number of people were talking about the MV88, which plugs right into your iPhone. That's one of those little mini stubby ones, right? It's a stereo XY. Right. I mean, if you take your iPhone and just go into your car and just talk to it like this, and they know, and if it's just an audition, you can usually get away with it. I think the obsession with, you know, amazing audio quality on the road, unless you are under contract and you got to get stuff out or you got to do remote sessions on the road, yeah, you got to have good stuff. But that's one half of 1% of everybody doing voiceover. Yeah, that's the MV88, I forgot. It looks like it, it's not a shotgun mic, but I guess people think of it that way because it's round and cute. But you can adjust the direction on it. So it's a nice little mic to have. And like I said, you can be in your car or in a pillow fort or something along those lines, and the audio quality for an audition would be pretty good. And if you're really good and you really understand your environment, you can get away with a one-off something, you know. With an iPhone mic. Yeah, with an iPhone. So, you know, too many people are obsessing about this stuff because they travel a lot. I'd say if you're traveling, you cannot continue a project you were working on in the studio. Like audio books, you can't have a road rig and a home rig, it's just, you can't do it. Or if you're doing any long format narration, you can't do it. I mean, unless you're doing the entire thing while you're on the road, and I can't see doing an entire medical narration from the passenger seat of your car, it gets warm in there after a while. Oh my gosh. And why are you traveling? Why are you on the road? Why is it so important that you gotta do this as opposed to what it is you're on the road for? Right. But that's just me. And I'm sure it won't be boring. That's your own business decision to make. Exactly. You get the next one from JHB. Hey, Jay Horace. Great to see you guys. Where does the Sennheiser MK4, or where does it fit, I guess, into the ranking of mics? How does it fair in your opinion? Since it is made by a company that makes higher end mics, how does it compare with like a Sennheiser 416? So he's talking about the Sennheiser MK4. I look at that MK4 as sort of like a junior or affordable TLM 103. I don't think they're dramatically different from each other sound wise. They have similar specs. They have a lot of similarities. I don't think Neumann would like that comparison very much, but... Well, it's a Sennheiser. Yeah, they're made by the same parent company, and I think they have a lot of similarities. But yeah, so it's a very good mic. Nothing wrong with it at all. Very straightforward. It's sort of like a Rode NT1. No bells and whistles, no frels. Just a good sounding condenser mic. So yeah, that's where you're at. Did we test it at once? We did a mic shoot out several years ago. That famous mic shoot out we did in your studio many years ago, that was one of them in the comparison. It didn't really shine or stand out. It had a very flat response, as I recall. Did it? It wasn't boosted on the low end. It wasn't boosted on the high end. It wasn't hyped up and shiny and crispy. Which is fine, because if you've got a nice flat sounding mic, it gives an engineer, or if you know how to manipulate and enhance the audio from a very flat mic, you can do whatever you want with it. But an engineer on the other end is gonna like it even more because he can do anything he wants with it. That's right. And you don't necessarily wanna do that, especially if you don't know what it is you're doing with it. So I think that's pretty important. I think there's a lot of people who are really relying on lots of sophisticated technology and it's not really necessary. But the MK4, you know, I mean, how much does that retail? What is it, like 450, something like that? I think it's a $400 mic, something like that. Great, I know people who've used it, they book work with it. But then again, it's not the mic that books work. It's what goes on between your ears, down to your lungs, and out your mouth. It's as simple as that. As long as the mic is bad, or is not bad, and it's interfering, or it is distracting the listener from your performance, any mic is probably fine. As long as it's a studio condenser mic over $150. It's just my little disclaimer there at the bottom. Yeah, I think blue came out with a $99 studio condenser recently, I don't know if I've heard it yet, but it could be pretty good, I don't know. Moving on. Jim McNicholas, you got this one. Have you heard the CAD Tryon 7000 ribbon mic? I know Dan likes some ribbons, but that's a new ribbon. I just use one of the sessions, it handled my low end great, he says. Ribbon mics are known to handle low end, and mid range, and the whole spectrum beautifully, like very, very accurately. The new ones do. The old ones, they are very nuanced, and they hum. Yeah, they're sensitive to RFI or MFI or whatever. All sorts of stuff. When there's nowhere, it might be your screen, it could be your computer, I don't know, I mean I've got a great collection of ribbon mics here. I haven't used them much lately, it's like, I need to play, I'm going to grab a ribbon mic. Let me see what I can do with this, and. It's a very different animal. But the CAD Tryon 7000, it has a ball top to it. It's not what I would call one of those really sophisticated ribbon mics, like what's his name that makes the ribbon mics, well, Shep's, or what's the other brand that, well, or Bang & Olufsen, or one of those other mics. Royer, god, we're Royer over here. Oh, yes. Mike, you know, the Royer mics, which are excellent, and they ain't cheap, but they're very good. There's the CAD Tryon. This is definitely, this would definitely fall into the budget ribbon mic category. I don't know if there's too many great budget ribbon mics. I can't say for sure, but hey, if it worked on your voice and you liked the recording and you got paid to record on that mic. Go for it. Can't be that bad. Right. Like I said, I will also drag out my ribbon mic if I have to do like, December 7th, 1941, I will drag it out for that, but. Yeah, an old, old ribbon mic. Often Mike and I has to do that, exactly. So two, what are you using, George? Well, this is an Austrian Audio OC818. It falls into the expensive mic category because it's over $1,000. It's a multi-pattern mic. It's got a lot of customization. It's got four different high-pass filter settings. And it obviously sounds good. I'm using processing because I'm doing a live radio show, what we call the OBS, but if I turn it all off, that is the raw sound right off the mic. Now, absolutely no processing at all. Sounds great. Doesn't really need much. Doesn't really need it. It really doesn't. For me, it's like a lift in the shoe, the processing. You know, it just makes me feel a little more confident, but at the end of the day, don't really need it with the right mic in a good acoustically tuned room. This one definitely, it's fantastic. I really, really love it. And I'll be very straight when I tell you this, I didn't buy this mic. I would never have bought a $1,200 mic for what I do. It was a- And how did you obtain that? They are a sponsor of the Pro Audio Suite podcast. Okay. So that's how I have that mic. So grain of salt, disclaimer made, but it's, well, that's what it sounds like. It sounds pretty good. And it's saying it makes you sound great. Well, it makes you sound like you, because you already- Makes you sound like you. I hope I sound good. No, you don't sound like me. You sound like you. Yeah. And you have a mic at your end that you need to put up soon. You're still using that your home built mic, but you have a Mojave mic. I think I used that last, on our last show. Oh, the MA-50? Yeah, no, maybe not. No, all right, it's sitting in a box here. All right. Next week I will use that. Next show, promise. Put it up on your stand. We want to hear it. Right. With your voice. I played with it. I did some auditions with it. I actually did a something, my voice that was heard in Times Square with that. So the big event in Times Square, and I got to announce for that. And I used that mic for that. So I did go to put it to good use, and they loved it. So it's obviously a good mic. I will promise to bring it on the show next week. Whoever I guess it's going to be. All right, last question here. That's there. I'm although I'm sure we could talk about a billion other things. Jeanette Robbins asks, the Mac Air M2. Does Apple run Cyber Monday sales? I was advised to only buy a Mac directly from Apple because of future service and possible upgrade needs. So I was wondering if Apple offers Cyber Monday sales. I've never heard of them do that. Have you? I don't think they do, but here's the dis... Well, here's the clarification. It doesn't matter where you buy the Apple product from. If it is within warranty period, the warranty is stuck to the hardware, right? So they don't care who owns it. It's 100% transferable. So you could buy it from any vendor. Best buy. I heard there's a pretty decent discount at Micro Center. I think you have to show up in person. So if you don't have a Micro Center in your neighborhood, forget it. But yeah, there's very few real true discounts available, but check apple.com. Check apple.com refurbished department. It's at the very bottom of the website. Look for clearance and refurbished. And you can probably save 10 to 15% maybe more. And it's gonna be fully certified with a full one year warranty and not a bad idea. It's actually my preferred way to save money on an Apple product is just buying it refurbished. It's never let me down. For example, now we were talking, I was at Mavo last weekend and I have my, I brought my projector with me. They're like, you know, they're like, if you can bring your own projector, that would be great. And the projectors they had were the hotel's projectors. So means they were gonna, they were okay. If you've ever seen the projector I have, it's got like 10,000 lumens or something like that. It would, you know, blind you in a hundred paces. So I brought my own. There's only one problem with my projector. It only takes a VGA input. Oh yeah, yeah, mine too, mine too. Fortunately, the old VOBS 2014 MacBook Pro has a DVI input or output on it. Then I have a DVI to VGA. And you had the adapter. And I had the adapter and I use that. And of course everything worked. So I actually took two computers with me to Washington. My air and the old MacBook Pro. That workhorse just, just keeps on going. I thought the battery was dead on it. Nope, it's still kicking and it still works. And it's a big, hot, heavy beast, but it still runs great. Yeah, it did make my suitcase a little top heavy, but that's okay, you know, and that's the way I like it. But you can have a 2014 Mac. You don't have to have a brand new 2022 Mac if you want to go Mac. I would actually, and George is right. You can get a refurbished one, getting used one, they're a lot cheaper. And, and that's, you know, if you have a graphic you're going to show us, a refurbished Mac. Here is a, this is one I would get if you're on a real budget. Here's a 20, here's a M1 or 850. 850 bucks for an M1 Mac mini. Do you need an M2 Mac mini? No, you don't. Do you want to have the newest and greatest of everything? Fine. Of course. But you don't, you don't need it. You don't need it. I've used both. My friend had an M2 that was just visiting the M1. My computer did everything his did. You know, maybe slightly slower, but that would be a hard, you'd be hard pressed to know. And again, this is the apple.com slash shop slash refurbished page on their site. It's not something they feature, but it's at the bottom of the website. And you can browse their stuff here and you can see there's some decent prices and some deals. You're not going to save big, big money, but apples don't need big discounts. That's, that's why they're almost never on sale. Right. Plug it in and it works. And that's the most important thing. Again, there were a lot of people with PCs in my thing this weekend. And of course, 99% of problems it does this, it does that, I'm having a problem. Mac or PC, almost always PC. Go back, you'll never go back. It's, you know. For audio, it is an absolute no brainer. Absolutely. Alrighty. Well, thanks for all your questions, guys. That was, that was great. And because it makes George and I talk about what we like to talk about, which is your questions. We'll, we'll have more questions next week and another great guest next week, but we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back. And then we will say goodbye for now, but stay tuned. We'll be right back on voiceover body shop. Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching voiceover body shop. It's great. 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 voiceover career flourish. 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It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. Before time began, there was VOBS.tv, watch or else. Nice, nice ad. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, that was Jim, Mr. Keeney did that one for... John Keeney, yeah. No, fantastic, great production. Yeah, next week on this very show, I forgot Johnny Heller will be joining us. Oh, right on. Yeah, I had a great time with him this weekend too. He's a super guy, but he'll be joining us on the 28th and we'll be with us all week on that particular show and then we'll have Tech Talk number 91. And then I think a couple of other people said they're gonna be on the show. I couldn't, I forget that Johnny was gonna be on. Cool, cool. Anyway, who are our donors this week? We have Robert Liedem. Stephen Chandler. Casey Clack. Jonathan Grant. Thomas Pinto. Shelley Avellino. Greg Thomas. A Doctor Voice. Antland Productions. Martha Kahn. 949 Designs. That's Lee Penny, yeah. Christopher Epperson. Sarah Borges. Phillip Sapir. Brian Page. Patty Gibbons. Rob Ryder. Shauna Pennington-Baird. Don Griffith. Trey Mosley. Diana Birdsall. And Sandra Mann Miller. Well, thanks guys for your donations and because it helps us maintain the technical magnificence that the show is. And in more ways than one. So if- Keep two around too. Oh well, that's part of the reason. It's really important. It is, that's what I meant. Anyway, you can donate to the show by going over our website, vobs.tv. And right in there, you will have a button that says donate. And we'll be happy to take your donation and show your appreciation for all the free information we keep giving you week after week after week after week. Hey, if you need your home studio service or you don't know what you're doing with your home studio and you want experts to help you out, you can go over to my website, which is homevoiceoverstudio.com and all my services are there. And you can also talk to George. And if he's not there, generally I get called anyway. Especially on weekends. Yeah, that's right. We have an on-demand hotline for tech support if you're in a real bind. You can call that number. And for a fee, obviously, you can be patched through to a series of technicians we have. Dan is on that list. So you might end up with Dan. And- You can do that. Absolutely, of course. I shouldn't- I mean, that sounds lousy. You might end up with Dan. No, Dan might pick up your phone and walk you through your tech issue. But if you just want regular scheduled support or sound checks, go to george.tech. Go to george.tech slash webinars. If you want to check out my next webinar that's coming up on Adobe Audition, the advanced course, November 30th. Get a VOBS fan 10 coupon code, put that in and get 10% off. And check out my Ask Me Anything on Clubhouse November 29th at 3 p.m. That's open for anybody, just me asking answering questions, kind of like what I do here on this show. Yeah, which we love doing. We need to thank our amazing sponsors who've been with us for a long time because they know we're talking to the right people. Like Harlan Hogan's VoiceOver Essentials. VoiceOver, Extra. Source Elements. VioHeroes.com. Voice Actor, websites. And. And. World-voices.org. World-voices.org. The industry association of home voiceover studio actors, voice actors. We are freelance voice actors. It's our industry association. Time for a brain fart. Anyway, thanks to Jeff Holman for doing a fabulous job in the chat room tonight. Sue Merlino for getting it done and giving us funny looks that you can't see. And Lee Penny just for being Lee Penny. Happy Thanksgiving. No, that's not till next week. Yeah, but it is next week. Oh, but we'll have a show next week. I can't even keep track. All right, let me look at the calendar. Is it ever too early to wish you a happy Thanksgiving? Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Whittem. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or V-O-B-S. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Have a good one.