 Hey, it's time for a tech talk number 29 29 and we got lots of cool stuff to cover tonight We've got a little bit of an interface shootout and we've got some questions And we're gonna talk about RMS levels and so you can actually explain that to me George I'll try okay And your tech update so stay tuned we got lots of stuff coming up on tech talk on voiceover body shop From the outer reaches they came Bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your voice over audio and Together from the center of the VO universe. They bring it to you now George Wittem the engineer to the VO stars of Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build set up and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today and you Dan Leonard the voiceover home studio master a Professional voice down with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional-sounding home VO studio And each week they allow you into their world Bringing you talks with the biggest names in the voice of a world today Letting you ask your questions and giving you the latest information to make the most of your voiceover business Welcome to voice over body shop Voice over body shop is brought to you by voice over essentials.com home of Harlan Hogan signature products Source elements remote studio connections for everyone voice actor websites.com where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt VO heroes.com become a hero to your clients with award-winning voice over training JMC demos when quality matters and voiceover extra your daily resource for VO success and now Live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California Here are the guys And Leonard I'm George Wittem and this is voice over body shop or VO B s Tech talk tech talk tech talk People love the tech talk George. This is what they come here to hear You and I talk shop because when you and I talk shop Everybody just people listen. They want to be in our shop It's fun. Yeah, we have a good time here and People learn a lot and we all have a good time together, right? And there's a reason for that because you and I are I mean There's other guys that like yeah, we can get your home studio up and running you and I have been doing this for probably a combined 40 or 50 years Yeah, it's probably about right, you know compared to these other guys like well I know how to do this if you came out of broadcasting like you and I actually did sort of There's a way it's supposed to sound and as we always like to say at the end of the show If it sounds good, it is good, but how do you get it to sound good in the first place? Well, yeah, it's sounding good But through using all this processing and all this stuff and all those other things to make you sound great Or sound broadcast ready or yeah, I cast quality. There's no such thing as broadcast quality kids It's a term from the 60s that referred to analog audio and stuff digital audio is so clean and crisp and Easy to use but people tend to over complicate the stuff and so what George and I try to do is We try to make it simple when we present, you know tech talk every week here but we're available to look at your studio and hear your audio and hear how you're messing up and Because everybody thinks why sound great, you know, I get an audition here and I get a job here and there But what work are you not getting? Because your audio may not be what other people are expecting it to be. Maybe it's over process Maybe it's too loud. Maybe your waveforms are a little tiny things But what George and I can do is we can get you to the point where all you have to do is hit record and Get it right and that requires a little bit of instruction and a little bit of hands-on tweaking with some of your equipment But that's what we do here at the voiceover body shop and George and I do this independently from each other We talk about it every now and again But if they want to work with George if you want to work with George, it's easy to do all you have to do is Go over and visit George the tech George the tech on the web And if you don't like those short domains George the tech comm all of it's all there You can reach out for support You can send a message if you can't seem to find the right service for you because there's so darn many of them Just check out that tech services menu But if you can't figure it out just send us a message and we'll be happy to get back to you And obviously for the foreseeable future that will all be done remotely. Yes And most of what we do is remotely and done virtually anyhow. So it's really not that big a deal So we're very I'm I know Dan is too very very adept at helping you from a distance all around the world hearing studios Can obviously be done from a distance. So we do this a lot. So check it out And you can see Dan's brand of home studio support over at Homevoiceoverstudio.com There it is right there. Uh, yeah, come on over to my site check out some of the things that I do and how I can communicate with you and you can go to my specimen collection comp and dump off some of your audio And let me give it a listen follow the instructions carefully There's a certain way. I want you to record it and uh, I will Listen to it and I will get back to you and I will tell you if your audio is great Or if you know it needs some help somebody I was talking to yesterday. So while I'm I'm not really technically You know have a lot of expertise But you know, I had helped him build his studio and uh, he sends me audio. I'm like Sounds great. You want to upgrade? What are you gonna upgrade to is anybody complaining about your audio? If it ain't broke, don't fix it If we think it sounds good it is good Trust us trust us. I mean, I gotta tell you gotta you do have to trust us I mean I so often get audio that I set up for people or dial in for them or Get their audio and give them feedback and they say it sounds this or it sounds that or this or that And I'll you know, tell them what it sounds like to me and based on again hearing thousands of files every year um And sometimes I get a sometimes I get some pushback saying no it sounds really sibilant or no it sounds I'm like You know it you're probably overly sensitive to your own sibilants Or you probably have extremely bright headphones or whatever trust me. Please Don't worry be so concerned because as I've been telling a lot more people lately. You don't hire you Based on what dad says on this show here So don't be so caught up on how you sound to you, right? Alrighty. Well, it's time for your tech update for this week. Uh, what do you got for us? Well, I just heard a couple weeks ago Um, I don't usually report on like somebody's passing in the business But this one just popped up and I just thought he was kind of a significant one And in a name that many of you probably don't know someone named tom Kobayashi Not only was he the guy that literally built and ran George lucas's skywalker sound up in marin county Um, he was one of the very earliest users and pioneers of is dn And fiber optic networks for audio so He's one of the reasons that many of us That started in this business 20 or 30 years ago. We're able to do what they do from home So maybe it's pretty timely But just I'll read it just a paragraph or two about this guy He held major management positions at glen glen sound Which was I think here in la and skywalker sound is co-found and it was co-founder Here's a company some of you may know of ed net Um ed net actually is how it was pronounced ed net is one of those companies many people would call When they needed to get is dn and stuff sorted out or ordered the service these guys Have been pioneers in is dn for many many years and I still recommend calling ed net if you really really got to have is dn Um, he passed away on march 3rd at the age of 91 He'd been working for over 20 years at hollywood's glen glen sound where he was vice president president and chief operative operating officer When george lucas approached him in 1985 and asked him to head lucas films then New skywalker sound division his first job was to oversee the construction of the technical building 153 thousand square foot complex housing scoring and dubbing stages sound design Edit suites and other audio post production facilities at locust's skywalker ranch 40 minutes north of san francisco So talk about trial by fire I was proud that I got to design the little two room studio at the sag lab I mean this guy started off with a 153 thousand Square foot place Mind boggling. Yeah, obviously he did a great job because that place is still one of the The absolute go-tos and then ed net initially allowed high quality audio to be sent long distances Over is dn lines, which then also involves evolve to include video and then eventually using fiber optics Now they are part of on-stream media the new san francisco-based company Which is still in operation. So I just thought it was interesting to tie in between That whole world skywalker. Everybody knows about and is dn, right? Well, that sort of leads into your next thing about Somebody was doing something on remote broadcasting today or remote studio work Yeah, actually karen gilfrey who runs the new york city voice over group She thought it'd be a good idea with everybody either already working from home or some people apparently being Forced into working from home on the voice over side She thought it'd be a great idea to have a webinar on how to Better understand all these remote working methodologies for audio phone patches and skype and Source connect and highest in ipd tl and all these things. So she had a webinar today It was concurrent with our show today So we weren't able to tie into it, which I thought might be a fun thing to do But I thought maybe we could take a few minutes to Break down a little bit about these different technologies and you know, what you should probably be aware of these days So dan how often these days in your work? Are you being asked to be directed from your home studio? Does that happen as often as it used to more or less? It it happens Usually when i'm working with a european company Okay, you know if they you know and it's like well, I did one in out of norway a couple months ago And I had to get up at 6 a.m. So they could do it late in the afternoon there Uh, but usually usually it's doing things in europe Here in the states You know people trust my audio. They might give me some direction and you know, and I'll I'll just get it right They don't like it. It's like well, why don't you if they don't quite get what I'm doing? I can say Look, let's get on the phone. Listen to me record it and that usually solves the problem right then in there Uh, I think that the the remote stuff has to do A lot of people are worried about is with these bigger studios and if you're not really doing that stuff Is it something you really need to worry about? Yeah, there's a certain point where likely at this at that point. It's very likely you probably have representation You know, you probably have at least one agent um, and Those are becoming some of the higher budget projects where you're doing bigger ad campaigns And you're being asked to record remotely over source connect or ipd tl Or some even still using isdn So that's kind of a more I would say rarefied air of the voiceover business Um, the majority of folks are going to be directed over a quote-unquote phone patch And that can be phone patch. Yeah, phone patch A phone patch that's the most generic term for any time you're listening to direction over a phone line And that phone line nowadays can mean anything from an old school pots telephone plain old telephone system to a cell phone To a skype phone call or zoom or whatever method you use to make that phone call or receive a call from Somebody else to me It's silly that even a phone is even part of the equation anymore because We've been using audio chat on the internet by a skype and zoom and everything for a long long time But there you're still dealing with clients from time to time They just want to sit at home at their own their sofa. They don't want to think about the tech They just want to make a normal phone call and be in on the session So for that you do want to be prepared to be able to do that And as dan was demonstrating that could simply be a phone. You could just give them your mobile number Put the earbud your bluetooth or your corded earbud in one ear And just take direction that way. They're going to hear you talk when you talk It's a phone. It's literally as the simplest form, but a highly functional version of a phone patch Right and if your studio sounds good to start with Usually most major studio if you're if you're doing something that's going to be going to another studio Yeah, I you know, they might want to use istn or source connect or one of the others To to record on their end But you know, you need to reassure people that your audio is pretty good and they're going to hear it anyway and you know Most of the time this remote stuff is strictly for direction And you know people talk about you are you're mentioning phone patches and phone patches To me remind me of something from mad men from the 60s You know, it was like All right, uh, okay. I play that one back The thing is is that, you know, most of the time people say can you do a phone patch and I'll like Okay, it's set up go Yeah, I mean if you're doing a difference if you're doing a short form thing you can hold the phone Maybe not the favorite way to do it, but you can you can hold it. Oh, yeah, I mean it works um playback is uh something that is occasionally being asked upon If your studio is set up in such a way that you're able to just simply play back over your monitors speakers from your mic position where it's extremely You know, everything's in one place Literally you hold the phone up and they'll hear it play back Exactly that works. It does not everybody is set up to do that though There are ways to do playbacks over the computer some are easier than others One example that's easy is the the steinberg and the yamaha stuff the ago 3 using loop steinberg You are 12 they have this loopback mode And with that loopback mode engaged you now have a very easy way to play back something To them whether they're on a phone or whether you're connecting to them on skype or zoom doesn't matter As long as you're connected via that audio device, you're good to go. That is very seamless on mac I find that sometimes in windows systems getting the audio drivers sorted out and keeping You know audition from stomping on zoom and all this stuff doesn't always work as Seamlessly as it does on mac. Um, but it is possible to do so At the end of the day don't overthink it too much If they're being if you're being told now to record something from home And we're going to direct you because you just can't physically come into the studio right now Don't freak out Give them your phone number Put in a near piece and do the session. It's really going to fulfill The need for 95 of you. I'm pretty sure. You know, it really is that straightforward. Yeah, I think that there probably will be probably a Not a lot of going into the studio work for at least a month or so now Yeah, which is a shame because it's always fun to go in the studio, but we have to maintain our distance and so uh, you know, it should not be a big deal And if you of course feel like your audio may not be up to snuff or they say it may not be up to snuff That's when you call georgia rye and we get it up to snuff Yeah, I mean likely you've already auditioned for this job. You've recorded in your studio. They know what you sound like They know what your gear sounds like This is just a technicality. They want to hear you during the session and The sound quality over phone batch is a telephone Uh, it doesn't matter. It's not going to sound great. It's going to sound like a phone So don't worry too much about what it's going to sound like to them They're used to it sounding like a telephone Because it is right. I mean we should it's easy to do anything virtually for instance this morning I was going to go work out at the gym and then mayor garr city said all the gyms are closed So I talked to my trainer. I said, okay, we'll just do it in my living room and I'll just we'll use FaceTime and we did And my wife's like you grunt a lot when you work out so I thought she was going to say something else happens a lot when you work out No, no, no, she's she's very proud of me getting getting getting back in shape here. No, that's good for you. I mean, that's that's fantastic Um, yeah, I mean this is a prime time to improvise your Training and coaching and start wanting ways to do it online. Yeah, it's not hard to do anymore. Absolutely Especially one-on-one like that, right? So We were you were talking about A loop back a second ago with the steinberg and the uh and the yamaha Yeah, also one of the things what we were talking about this new thing coming up called the evo 4 from our friends and audience And we wanted to know what it sounded like now you and I are going to do a much wider uh Interface shootout one of these days You know, yes, we are that it's one of these days kind of a situation Yeah, but when we can't get together again, um, John Keeney beat beat us to it He did and because he got an evo 4 and so Uh, he sent me the audio today and I took a few you know a short section and repeated it of three different interfaces the evo 4 a scarlet solo from focus right and an agio 3 And he read the same copy So let's play that and you guys judge for yourselves This is does one sound better than the other So let's listen to that After a natural disaster like the recent tornado, it's easy to lose hope But that's when cities like Nashville show true character after a natural disaster like the recent tornado It's easy to lose hope, but that's when cities like Nashville show true character after a natural disaster like the recent tornado It's easy to lose hope, but that's when cities like Nashville show true character So, um, okay, probably couldn't hear the difference. Could you, I, you know, I could, you know, I listened to that like five or six times this afternoon and I'm like, yeah, it just totally proves our point that, you know, ones and zeros are ones and zeros. These things all just take our analog audio from our fine microphones and turn them into ones and zeros that your computer can understand and turn it into the graphic representation of the waveform of the audio so that we can manipulate it in all those different ways. And really they all do it pretty much the same way. Well, especially when you're in the same price bracket, so to speak, of equipment. So in this case, he's comparing all sub two hundred dollar interfaces, the EVO for the Scarlett Solo and the AG03. So there's likely going to be extremely small or almost zero, sometimes actually zero difference between them because internally, in some cases, they all share the same bits and pieces. Right. So the EVO may be the outlier there because it is an entirely new piece of equipment that's designed from the ground up, supposedly. So, but still it's, it's the new features are really just new features. They're not some kind of new magical high fidelity thing that's going to become glaringly obvious that the audio is improved as you guys can kind of hear. Maybe we can provide a link to that file somewhere on Facebook or something. People can download it and they can analyze the hell out of it for themselves. And right. I mean, you know, over the air here, it's not a good, you know, you're not going to really hear this subtle nuances between them. But yeah, it proves the point. Listening on the monitors in here, it's like, I can't tell the difference. I mean, it's pretty much the same. I think that the issue that you and I deal with when it comes to this type of equipment is not so much how it sounds as much as what is its functionality? How is it that it helps our workflow as voice actors or gives us the ability to do other things like having a loopback feature where we can play something back to a client or, you know, making sure that it has a the right kind of VU meter on it, but essentially they all sound the same. So the real difference is in the utility of the device. Yeah, it is. It's the reliability, you know, how reliable is the device and the drivers? How stable is it? It's the user interface. How easy is it for you to operate and do what you need to do? And then it's other little things like is it portable or is it not portable? Does it have a lot of extra features that you may or may not need or not? And that's what, you know, separates these. Do you mind if you give me like 30 seconds to listen to it locally on my end? Just to hear if I hear anything real quick. Sure. I hear you. I'm going to listen to it on my end. You probably, I don't know. You may actually hear this. Let me see. It's after a natural disaster like the recent tornado. It's easy to lose hope, but that's when cities like Nashville show true character after a natural disaster like the recent tornado. It's easy to lose hope, but that's when cities like Nashville show true character after a natural disaster like the recent tornado. It's easy to lose hope, but that's when cities like Nashville show true character. So do you know which of those is which? Yeah. So are they in the order that they're labeled in the file? Yes, they are. I thought maybe the last one was the Yamaha. The Yamaha is a great interface. It's just a little bit noisier than the other two. It has a little bit more of a hiss, I think. Maybe, maybe. That's been my experience with that piece of gear. I love its functions and its utility, but it's a little bit tad noisy sometimes. That's what I can see in the waveform as well. The MP3 quality is not so hot. I would love to have had in a like a wave, not MP3, because you can hear a little bit of a compression artifacts. But I'll give you, I'll give you the actual original files that he said. So that would be fine. But yeah, it's really, yeah, we're splitting hairs here, folks. Really are. Yeah, I'll move on. Yeah, that's true. If any of you have a question out there, because I know you're all listening intently as we discuss this, throw it in the Facebook or our homepage chat room and Jeff Holman is still out there getting your questions so we can answer them in the next segment of the show. Now, let's talk about RMS. RMS, sorry, I removed it because I was like, what did you do with it? Oh, there's it's back. We got time for that. So what is RMS? What does it mean? It's basically without getting too mathematical about it is basically the average level of the audio for the duration of the track. That's what we're talking about in this particular case. Like when you're recording in twisted wave, you see the peak meter, which has a number at the top telling you how high you went. And at the bottom of the meter, you see an RMS meter number. And the RMS number is the average level over some sort of period of time. What we're mostly concerned over is how what's the average level over the course of the file. So if it's like a two minute long file, what's the average level over the two minutes? And the thing is I brought this up because people sometimes ask me, well, what is how loud should my auditions actually be? Like how what should they what should I be looking for for a level when I send out a file? And I said, I don't know because, you know, there's no standardized setting. There's only one thing in my world that has a standard. And that's really what's been established by ACX for audio books. And they want to range between minus 18 and minus 23 DB average level or RMS. So and that's a pretty wide range. So for everything else, I made this little spreadsheet. I posted it somewhere on Facebook. I think I put on BO pros and maybe one other place. And a few people went in there and put their information in. And the takeaway is that it's minus 20. Pretty much everybody said I pretty much average around minus 20 DB for the majority of what I'm doing. Radio may be a little louder, but the only person that filled that in but a question mark. So they weren't even sure. Radio tends to be just louder content anyway because of the way radio is produced. So maybe minus 15 minus 16 for radio might be acceptable. But at the end of the day, we don't have standards. And based on the small sample of what I've gotten here, if you're hovering in that minus 20 DB file average volume when you're done in your file, you're probably fine. If you're much lower, maybe look at adding a little bit of compression or limiter or both to just bring the average volume up a little bit because at the end of the day, when you when you have that file played back by the casting director or the client, you don't want them to have to constantly turn up the volume. When they get to your file, when the next person's is going to be a lot louder than yours. And that's the whole point of this. We want so that when you send out your auditions, it's going to sound familiar and level to the next person and the person in before before you. You don't want to be like, whoa, like I was at the beginning of the show. Too damn loud. Right. And you don't want to be like way back here when they're having to go I can't hear it and having to turn it up. You don't want to. So somewhere in the middle, about minus 20. So and you can and you can look at a file and you can like press a diagnostic button on some. It'll give you all the statistics on the file. Right. Twisted Wave has analyzed. That's in the file menu and it'll spit out a number that says, well, let's look at the file that I was just playing back. If I go to file analyze. It will pop up and it'll give you a few different values. But the one I'm most concerned about here is average RMS and here on this file, it's minus 18.86. So right now that's you just heard what minus 18.8 DB sounds like. Right. It's a good strong level, but it's not blowing you out of your shoes. Right. So exactly. There you go. Audition has amplitude statistics. The long word for analyze that's in the window menu. Audition Audacity has one called loudness, I think Reaper has something called loudness almost every program now has a way to do this and analyze that audio because you wanted to analyze the whole track together, not just to a point in time where you're recording. Right. Hopefully that helps. Hopefully let us know. Like if you guys are finding something different, definitely give us comments in the comments below our videos and we'll we'll take that into account, see what you guys are getting for your RMS is on your files that you send out. And again, I'm talking about auditions, jobs, totally different story. You're not supposed to be doing anything for big jobs. You're supposed to send it in raw, but auditions is what I'm really concerned about. But amazingly, people still do. They just need to listen to us. All right. Well, we got a bunch of questions from our vast worldwide audience. And if you've got one, again, throw it in the Facebook discussion or in our chat room in our homepage, and we will get to those in just a couple of minutes right after these incredibly important messages. This is Arianna Ratner and you're listening to VoiceOver Body Shop, VOBS.TV. All right, it's time to talk about VoiceOverEssentials.com. 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And to keep your headphones safe, secure in easy reach and off the floor, just clamp on the all metal VOHH headphone hanger on your microphone or copy stand. The non-slip grooved nylon tip and installed stop rubber backing pads prevent scratching your equipment and your headphones from experiencing, whoops, I've fallen on the studio floor and I can't get up. Get them all now. While supplies last at voiceoveressentials.com, first come, first served. Thanks, Harlan. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice denouncer guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? This is Virgin Radio. Well, okay, we're not that innocent. There's jeans for wearing and there's jeans for working. Dickies, because I ain't here to look pretty. She's a champion of progressive values, a leader for California and a voice for America. It's smart. It's a phone. It's a smart phone, but it's so much more. It's the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song. It's the end of the road for Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 from BMW. Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish? Hey, it's J. Michael Collins. Bet you think I'm going to try and sell you a demo now. I think they speak for themselves, but I will give you my email. It's J. Michael at jmcvoiceover.com. Now if they will stop waxing. Hey, everybody, it's time to talk about source elements. You know who they are. The creators of Source Connect, that tool that you don't have what you don't have it. You should have it. It's that tool that allows you to connect your studio to other studios around the world so they can record you from your booth. It's a tool you should have because even if you're not being asked for it now, you might be asked for it tomorrow or in a month or in a year. You want to have it ready to go and know how to use it. It's really the air apparent to ISDN technology. And it is definitely what the pros are using. You can go ahead and sign up for a 15 day free trial of Source Connect over at SourceElements.com. Get it up and running. Get your iLock account in order. There's a little video on there. I'll teach you how to do it by yours truly. And it'll help you get up and running so you can understand how it all works. Then that day that you get the gig, you can activate the license. It's a no brainer. Give it a try. Thanks for your support Source Elements. And we'll see you right after this break. Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching VoiceOver Body Shop. It's great. And we are back here on Tech Talk, number 29. And ready to answer your questions. And we had one written in this week from Brian Topping, who says, greetings. I recently upgraded from an 06 iMac and Audacity, which actually worked swimmingly. Fabulous. It's a great thing about Macs is they just keep running and running and running until the software just won't do it anymore. My new beautiful iMac is awesome. But alas, no audacity on Catalina for me. I figured I would quickly learn Logic Pro X. But oof, not so fast. Do you recommend any particular resource to learn Logic for VO? I also upgraded from an M box. Yes, mini to an FG duet. I regularly use a Neumann TLM 103 and can't wait to get back into it like before. Any thoughts? Yes, many. Oh boy. Where do I start? Where do we start? Well, first off, Audacity won't work with Catalina. I don't think they've figured out how to get Apple to let them through the gates. Really? You know, Apple's got these incredibly stringent security and privacy settings features on Catalina. And if your application isn't set up and signed correctly to allow those apps to run on the OS, no soup for you. Yeah, well, so, you know, and Audacity is developed by a community of volunteers. Yes. So if you think it's hard for like regular developers to get their act together to make this stuff work, imagine a voluntarily designed piece of software getting approved and updated to run on Catalina. It ain't going to be easy. Don't hold your breath. Right. But I use Catalina and here's Audacity. So and it's working and it works just fine. Although I don't which version 2.3.3. This is version 2.3.3. Indeed it is. Well, they may have done a recent update, really recent, more recent than Brian's test, or you just got lucky or you had the magic handshake. There was some something that you did to get it onto the system. So maybe Brian should give you a call and find out what you did. Yeah, well, so honestly, might be might be where he got it from, too. That's the funny thing about Audacity is you can download it from a bunch of different places. Yeah, some places may not be quite on the up and up. Yeah, that is that is true. Be careful where you download it from. It should come from SourceForge. Yes, that's the host that hosts all their software. So if you can't run after all this, we can't run Audacity. Logic Pro may seem like the logic choice because it's developed by Apple, but it is not the logical choice at all because the learning curve is insane. It's not designed for voiceover. The workflow is not great. I don't recommend it. And, you know, what we're going to recommend. Well, I would think so, Brian, if you watch the show, but maybe you don't. Maybe you're just watching this over the first time, but we're definitely going to recommend to you Twisted Wave. Yeah, if you're a producer and you're doing mixing and producing, Twisted Wave probably isn't the tool for you. Then check out Reaper or Adobe Audition. Adobe Audition. But if you're having, if you're finding Logic Pro difficult and heavy, the others are probably not going to make you much happier. This is, if you're just recording and editing voiceover, just try Twisted Wave. Trust us, it's just so much easier. It is. It's hit record and go. And that's really what's important. The fact is, these bigger programs that are much more complicated and multitrack and things like that, they don't sound any better. They just have lots more, as we were talking about earlier, functionality, but most of it is functionality that has absolutely nothing to do with you recreating a mono, you know, single track track file. I mean, right. And people keep overthinking this and thinking, well, if I buy really good software, it's going to make me sound great and it's not going to do it. It's going to drive you insane. Yeah, I hate to say it, but that Apigee Duet may end up driving you insane, too, Brian. Got a lot of complaints lately with Apigee stuff on Catalina. So yeah, well, hopefully they'll be able to fix that. The thing is, is I think that people don't understand that as you were mentioning that these big multitrack programs are designed for producing a lot of audio and mixing stuff. And we're not going to be doing any of that. And it's it's just way too much. And it is, you were saying it's not a workflow for voiceover. Voiceover should be practice your copy, get what you want to do, hit record and go. And it's it. And to think that the software is going to make you a better voice actor is simply not going to cut it. I have to agree with that. Um, OK, and other news. And let me figure out how to turn off the bubble pop sound that just seems to wants to just constantly be a thorn in our side here and turn it off. There we go. Back to the chat, Brian Avenue, Brad Avenue. Yeah, sorry, Brad Avenue. Now we should get. I know we should keep things natural, I guess, you know, not process. But if you want to do some light compression, what the settings on the scope should look like. I have no idea what scope you're talking about, Brad. I don't use scopes. I use my ears. I have to admit, I have no idea why you would ever use the scope. But I will tell you this, that settings should be very conservative, like no more than a two to one compression ratio. Anything more than that, it starts to sound compressed. And you don't want to sound compressed. Generally, no, you don't. If you want it to sound natural, you don't want it to sound compressed. So less than two to one. And then the ratio I can't get. I mean, we just saw the ratio of the threshold. I can't possibly tell you that because I have no idea what your input level is. And since input ratio input level and threshold are related, that's harder to predict what that should be set to. But if your software or hardware has a meter showing how much you're compressing, like 4 dB, 8 dB, 10 dB, something like that, definitely no more than 10 minus 10 dB or 10 dB of compression. You know, or less is what you should be doing. But that's general. Yeah, I always say, if you don't know what it does, don't do it. It's compression is one of those things that you should not hear the difference. You know, you might it will prevent it from over modulating or it'll keep things a little more even. But it's not something that you will really perceive. Someone on the other end might perceive it a little bit. Yeah, it's done lightly. It's hard to perceive it about the only thing it really does in any noticeable way is allow the levels to be boosted up slightly higher in the end. And you might notice that your raw audio has bigger little peaks and valleys. And after the compressor, those peaks and valleys are kind of less dramatic. Yeah, but you might see it more than you can hear it. Yeah, but but a better idea, Brad, is to take that audio and send it to Georgia Rye or to both of us, you know, at the show. And let's listen to it and say, what are you doing? You know, I would get this all the time. But like I want to like we were saying earlier, it's like somebody like I want to upgrade. Well, let me hear it. Is anybody complaining if is is there a problem? Are you not getting work? You know, let's listen. Well, it's not because of your audio or it's well, it's because of your audio. Let us listen to it. Let the guys that actually know what it's supposed to sound like listen to and and let's figure that out. You know, yes, we are practicing safe mic tonight. William, we are having our social distance on. I I have my I have the spray here and you can actually hear it there. We are doing a social social distance special. And it might be that way for a little while. Yeah. Yeah. Especially speaking of social distance, Fred North says, with all these people now being forced to work from home, well, is it going to kill our internet bandwidth? Or am I going to have to get off my lawn to the neighbors using all the isn't my bandwidth. Damn it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's it's clearly got to have a big effect on the load on our internet, like if there's this many. But if people are working from home versus working from the office, the majority of those jobs are internet based anyway, right? At some point, that's true. This is true. If they're tech business jobs, you would think a lot of that's internet based. But it's probably more the people that just are literally out of a job and are just at home and have nothing to do, but actually read Facebook posts, Instagram, look at memes and listen to what we should be doing or not doing next. Yeah. The Mrs. is watching way too many cat videos. It's a good morning. I'm here. Oh, this is so cute. I'm trying to listen to the radio or could be worse. Yeah. Yeah. You know, but I that was my first fear is that Facebook's going to crash because if you go on Facebook, because you're look, you're all watching it on Facebook now. It's like, look at all the people that we know that are online. It just goes on and on and on and on. Right. So how do they how do they have a billion people on that site? I it just blows my mind. You wouldn't you wouldn't you can't even fathom how hardcore their server rooms are. Can't even fathom. One of my friends actually is a freelance engineer and he had a brief period of time where he was designing Facebook server cooling systems or something like that. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, that's they're probably overheating right now. As we do incredible amounts of load. I'm actually doing research to answer the next question because Sound Guy wants to know what's the RMS on the J. Michael Collins commercial. Yeah. So I thought I would go and find that commercial, drop it into Twisted Wave and actually see what it actually does say it is. Let me go to spawn. It might it might be a little low because we usually boost it back up when we when we do the recording. But yeah, it might be low. We haven't actually gone through. I don't think an RMS matched all of our commercials in a while. And that's something that would help probably a little bit. We should to keep them the same. Yeah. But yeah, I'm downloading it right now and opening it up in Twisted Wave here. And then I can tell you what that actually is. Yeah. In the meantime, T.D. Morganthaller says, I have used Udemy for a lot of software training. I might find something there. You know, that's great. You know, it you can to me. And this is just me is, you know, you can if you try to read this stuff and go and learn how much you know, here's how you adjust the army. Here's how you use compression. It all comes down to what goes into these two things and what your brain perceives. And that the way to learn it is to do it. You've got to do things and listen to them and hear what things do in order to really learn how to get it right. This is a point I was going to make about logic pro that we were talking about earlier is that these things were designed for guys that have experience in a record and a multitrack recording studio. They're musicians, they're recording engineers. They've spent maybe 10, 15 years learning this. You're not going to learn this by reading some manual. You know, it's years and years of listening and experience. You know, how do I know how to do this stuff? I spent 15 years in radio as a production director. This is what I did. We did multitrack recording. We, you know, unreal to real, which was even more fun. Um, you know, there's, there's a certain you have to understand the theory involved. You've got to understand a number of different things before you can say, well, I'm good at this. Doesn't work that way. Uh, what happens is a lot of people start to use pro tools or logic and they get stuck on it and they learn all the stuff and then they're not willing to shift down to something that's simpler and easier. That's going to make their life a whole lot easier. Have you found that? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so true that we get, we get obsessed over the methods and the tools and it really just starts to degrade your, your, your acting. It's really exactly. Actually, I finally got to open that file and I ran it on twisted wave. It opens up as a stereo file. Yep. And cause it's a commercial that's been mixed. Usually that's done in stereo. But the average RMS. Yeah. Yeah. And the average RMS and I'm going to re-correct. I'm going to correct for peak level so that it matches more like what we do usually, which is minus three as a peak. So once I correct for the peak of minus three, the average RMS is about minus 13. So the commercial is mixed very, very hot. Like the average level is very hot. And that's pretty typical for commercials. And you know, in broadcast, there's actually a level that's mandated by the broadcast industry about how loud those levels can be. And that would definitely be higher, higher than what's typically mandated. But that would be not as high as the way music for tell music for say a CD or what's that CD or for streaming is mastered. That stuff often is as loud as minus 10 DB average. So it's different all over the map. Right. Well, as I keep saying, I was told there would be no math. That's what I'm here for. You know, it's the Virginia Tech grads. It's like, we got to know the math. OK, I got to answer this last one and be prepared to turn my mic down. Have either of you guys used an Apex to 30 good bad 10 years ago? Do not use an Apex to 30. Why not? Whoever recommended that to you is a moron. Not tuned in. They're not tuned in to the current this good last 10 years of voiceover trends. And Apex to 30 or one of the other ones, the panel strips, the panel strips, they were not designed for voiceover. They were designed for a couple of things, one for controlling somebody who's playing a guitar really loud or something like that. But mostly it is for live broadcasting. So say a guy, you know, you've got a reporter out in the field and maybe he's a little bit weak, but they want the signal loud at the station. They'll use an Apex to 30 or a DBX 386 or whatever it is. 36 and 286 and it's it's designed to make the voice louder. But it has to do with broadcasting and people want to sound like they're on the radio only or podcast or podcasting. Now, podcasting is a slightly different thing. You know, and I recorded and produced podcasts and I, you know, and I jack them up, but not initially. Do not record using an Apex to 30 up front. Everything that you need to really boost your signal or to to do all these things is in your software. Because if you run it through a channel strip, it's there forever. You can't correct back. I know that one pretty well, because when it came out, I thought at that time it was a pretty cool product because it had quite an array of features that I thought were useful. Again, this was this was a different time when software tools weren't quite as easy to use and also a time when I didn't quite understand what was the best way to record voice over. And I was recommending gear like that till I started really using that thing in practice. And it was such a nightmare to get good settings that sounded right without turning everything off. It was tube. It was slightly noisy. It had a lot of problems. And so we I rapidly stopped recommending it probably 10 years ago. So, yeah, I think he left the chat room the second you gave him the answer. He's not there anymore. So sorry, Ken, if you're watching this later, perhaps you know how I would react to that. No need to offend or meaning to offend. But it's just, yeah, it's there are some channel strips that have value, but a lot of times they are adding possible distortion, noise, compression, exciting, exciters that had high frequency expand distortion, all sorts of garbage to the audio that can't be removed easily later. And it's just they're just generally a really bad idea. Don't use them. All righty. Well, and on that note, one counting to 10. OK. Trying to get my blood pressure back. Blood pressure is turning back to normal. We'll be right back to wrap things up right after this. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying VoiceOver Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, VOBS.TV. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com, whether you're just exploring a voiceover career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level. Stay in touch with market trends, coaching, products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. 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 and ciders when you join the online sessions, bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, casting, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. As a voice talent, you have to have a website. But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don't look right on mobile devices. They're not built for marketing and SEO. They're expensive. You have limited or no control. And it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what's the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com. Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control. No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voiceover website going for as little as $700. So if you want your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what. So, levelator. It did a great job of RMS normalization for audiobook content and podcast episodes. But it's orphaned software, which means no one's developing it anymore. And now it doesn't work with the latest Macs and Catalina Mac OS. So you're stuck, right? Well, not anymore. Behold the gooey goodness of audio cupcake. Visit audiocupcake.com and download the free audio cupcake app for Macintosh. Audio cupcake does exactly what levelator did so well for so long. It applies RMS normalization to your audio and it preps your work for ACX. And it does it so well with Mac OS, including Catalina. Just like with levelator, you drag and drop your audio file onto the audio cupcake window and out pops an RMS normalized file. But audio cupcake goes even further. Unlock the premium features of audio cupcake. And what pops out? Audio that is both RMS and peak normalized and converted to a 192K mono MP3 file ready for uploading to ACX or your podcast platform. That's delicious audio goodness. Audio cupcake is available free at audiocupcake.com. That's audiocupcake.com. Audio cupcake, a beautiful, simple way to master your audio narration and podcasts. You're watching vobs.tv. I don't know why it's crazy what they do here. I think I'm gonna go somewhere else and have a cheese sandwich. You know what? We're live. A cheese sandwich sounds pretty good right about now. It does, doesn't it? Good thing I have a lot of cheese in the fridge. I was gonna say, are you well stocked? Pretty well stocked, pretty well stocked. Should be good for at least a week or two. See we went to Target yesterday. There was toilet paper and eggs there. So people in Los Angeles have gone crazy with this stuff. What's going on in the rest of the country? By the time people are hearing this though, who knows what's gonna be going up? Yeah, it'll be a week from now and then everything will be different. Yeah, or much worse, who knows? Of course my thought is is that as voice actors, we're all sequestered away in our booths. If this wipes out humanity, voice actors will rule the world. It's kind of true. Yes, and I'm not telling you where my studio is. Wipe out the humanity, but leave the voice actors behind please. You know, with the entire population of the earth. Hey, how are you? I'm fine, how are you doing? Anyway, who are our donors of the week? Oh man, okay, Sarah Borges, Mike Gordon, Stephanie Sutherland, Shauna Pennington-Baird, Harlow Rodriguez, Michael Kearns, Christy Burns, Brian Roche, Uncle Roy Ockelson of Ant-Land Productions, Michelle Blanker, and Rob Rader, who's the name I learned last week. That's right. Yeah, these are all folks that names that you may have heard before because almost all of them are subscribers so that means they click the donate button on vobs.tv and decided to send us a little bit of money on a recurring basis on PayPal. But you can do, or not, you can just do it one time. If there's a particularly amazing guest or you walk away with a nugget of gold from the show then leave us a little tip there, or not. It's up to you, but it's there if you want to support. We appreciate it. It makes us technically sound every week, which is very important, yes. Hey, show us your booths. This is Henry Howard's microphone collection. Oh, man. He's got a few there, obviously. You know what, if I was a voice actor full-time, I would, and had a few years in this business, I would probably have a collection coming out, like that myself. Yeah, I mean, you got a 414 and a U87, a couple of Hyal. Hyal PR 40, I think a PR 30, a EV 320, maybe in the middle, possibly. Right, it looks like centers are 416 maybe. Yeah, for sure. And then there's a, one of the end is a road. Road, road NT1A. We don't want microphones. The one next to the road NT1A though, I don't know it. I'm not sure what that shotgun might be. There's another one there. It might be an A75R. Who knows? Could be, it could be a road. Yeah. Good collection, very impressive. Yeah, guess what? It doesn't matter. Don't use those ones in the middle, those dynamic mics are not so hot. They're not gonna be great for voiceover. But most of the other ones are great. So anyway, if you've got a picture of your studio in landscape, not portrait, send it to us. And then you can be the background on our show. And you can send them to the guys at vobs.tv. Alrighty. Well, we need to thank our incredible sponsors. You can go first, George. We got Harlan Hogan's voiceover essentials. Voiceover extra. Source elements. VOheroes.com. Voice Hector websites.com. And JMC demos. Also the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for the Betterment of Live and Recorded Webcasting. And Sumer Lino, a fantastic job running the show tonight. Jeff Holman in the chat room. And of course, Lee Penny, who was actually watching tonight for being Lee Penny. Well, that's good. Did we plug ourselves? I can't remember. We did. At the top of the show. It's good. It's been that long? It has. I forgot. It's time to go. Yes. You've taken another hour, but as always, George, it is a pleasure talking tech with you because you and I talk the same language. Yeah. We've learned a lot from each other over the last nine years of doing this show. Or some version of this show. Really? It is really nine years we've been doing it anyway. Well, look, this is not an easy business. Your audio has to sound good. But, you know, if you listen to our show, you're going to get it right eventually. But if it sounds good, it probably is good. That's right. So tune into us every week here on VoiceOver Body Shop. We've got another great guest coming up next week. So stay tuned, stay healthy, wash your hands, don't touch your face, stay in your booth. Already. I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Whidham. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or VO, BS, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk. Have a great week, everybody. Bye, everybody. Stay safe.