 Yeah, you guys can't give in the rundown. All right. Okay. Oh, let me go away. Yeah. Bye. I'm not supposed to be here Where's she doing here still where's my remove? Oh, that's better Yeah, I can't imagine sitting there with the recognition right now. Oh man. Yeah, really. Okay. Yeah, it's it's still 108 out there What's it like at night in the 60s or still in the 70s? Oh, no, no, it doesn't it gets down to about 83-84 really it's not even that he ended up there and it's humid. Oh, it's humid. That's why yeah, yeah I mean, it's dry than it it would cool down. Yeah, but it's not it's not cooling. I mean, but also everything's getting baked Yeah, you know, all the everything everyone all and yeah Poor Ari does not do well in the heat And he's he's some sleeping all day. That's what he does is he sleeps and then he gets up And you know if he has this if he if he eats and he takes his meds, I'm not supposed to be here What? That was random What that's what happens when I open the Facebook. Oh, yeah, don't do that. Well, I have to I'm trying to get the Oh, you get the link chat pin. You know, you have to pin the chat right links. I have to open the Facebook anyway All right, so we are live talking to some folk. Yeah, there's Jeff. Hey Jeff Yeah, we've been we've been gone for a couple of weeks, but yeah while you're waiting we can go through my we can watch look at pictures Oh, okay. There you go pictures of what? That this hate museum or is that with your your is that your apartment that that was the load of stuff I brought back from London. Oh geez Did you bring an extra suitcase? I mean, I had my full-size suitcase and then a carry-on and when I went to actually, you know Put the bag on the belt at British Airways. It gives you an immediate pass fail You know with the weight right and I was two kilograms over Which is like five pounds, you know, and I was like, oh shit I like read reorganize take stuff out of the big suitcase put it in the carry-on suitcase But yeah, that's there's all the stuff I brought back. Luckily tea is very light Yes, and they have a lot of that in England. Yeah. Yeah, my mom's like bring back to our jeeling tea. I'm like, okay, mom I got to grab some water. I'll be right back. Okay. Don't go anywhere. Everybody. I'm just going to get some water Any minute now we'll have more cash any minute now more cash graces with his presence It's like walking into a blast furnace, huh? Anyway, I just came back from London and it was a it was a really amazing experience. I really I Recommended if you have the if you have timed it Sorry, if you have time to travel to Europe Check out London if you've already been to the rest of Europe. I would recommend it. I really enjoyed it I like the street art. I'm a big street art fan Actually more of a street art fan than I thought it was actually that was something that was probably the most fascinating to me I'm getting to see a real-life Banksy and real I thought that was really fascinating Banksy the street artist. Let me see if I can find his his piece. No, that's not it. Sorry That is it that is a street urinal at the Notting Hill Carnival That's a street urinal. They literally stand on the street. Yeah and use that Where's the Banksy here? Oh, here's a piece of art. It's like a 1982 Cadillac Thought that was pretty cool to see to see in the middle of London What else what else what else There is a ridiculous amount of graffiti art there, but where is the Banksy? Oh, this is great. Look at this barbecue boat You can rent a boat and cook a barbecue while you float around in the in the harbor. It's not hilarious the schooner barbecue boat And let me go back. I'll find it. I'll find the Banksy Tips for delivering the guy next door conversational read. Okay. That's a good question for Mark for sure That is a good one. Hey Jeff. Thanks for being here with us on a Proper holiday day, you know what they call a holiday like this in England. They just call it a bank holiday They don't have any name for it. They just call it a bank holiday Here's the Banksy I found no cashman This is a Banksy piece. This is the original when he painted it. That's his photograph of it I found on Google and then this is what it looks like to three years later looks like that and Somebody put plexiglass over to protect it. So I thought that was pretty Pretty cool. Hmm This stuff's very political like social activism from this moment to spare ends and tactics begin Anyway, it was cool. Cool. Well good times Where is Mark I sent him the link. He knows it's supposed to be here at five He's in the same time zone. So it's not that it's not a time. He's just a freaking road. I mean, come on I definitely sent it to him Sent it to him again. We stumbled into the hum the hard rock cafe hotel hard rock hotel, which I didn't realize was the original hard rock hotel was in London I didn't know that and they had Oh Come on George don't blank on the lead singers of King of Queens name right now Freddie Mercury Yeah, they had Freddie Mercury's childhood piano from when you grew up when he was growing up and inside a plexiglass box in the Lobby, I thought that was pretty a pretty cool artifact. Hmm. It's pretty neat Tips for the delivering the guy next door conversational read Yeah, yeah, Jeff had quist, but he's literally almost neck the guy next door. So I Wouldn't want to live next to him, but he is the guy Who you who do you mean Jeff or Mark Mark? Oh He's got a hell of a studio, maybe he'll talk a little bit about his studio that he had designed yeah, we can buy What's a fellow who's passed on? Yeah His name should not be forgotten and yet I'm forgetting his name right now It's been like 10 years since it has that happened, but Mark was it more now If he remembers to be on the show Yeah, yeah, I mean he's he sent me all this stuff and he said he was gonna be here so Anyway, I mean so we may stop we may start a couple minutes late, but we're glad everybody's here You know and George and I can just talk because that seems to be why everybody shows up anyway We can talk we can talk for hours. Yeah, and we have And we have like like hundreds and hundreds of hours, and we still find stuff to talk about It's it's like the never-ending cocktail party or poker game Mm-hmm Yeah, I had to get a new keyboard My type of yeah It's nice because it's got the finger ID on it. Oh, yeah, that's nice. Yeah, and You know it's rechargeable and it's why I always know how to say a one more thing It's like yeah, this one's got the touch ID on it like 120 not a keyboard. Okay. It's five o'clock and he's not here it is You think he's being technologically challenged Not that he's ever been technologically challenged for it's a distinct possibility But Or he just forgot which I doubt he would I mean I've texted him. I've sent him the link twice Hopefully he is okay. Maybe he thinks we're on zoom or something It's I don't know Yeah, I don't know we're gonna get going here kid. So don't don't you worry, you know Our guest will be here. Let me let me try let me try giving him a call. Hold on. It's an old-fashioned phone call Beep-bop-bop beep beep beep Do, it's a tah-tah-tah-tah rah-leh Who's all here we got Grace Jeff Linda high Linda hi Jeff Hello Red Cabin acoustic And hi and my vacation was awesome. Thank you And I'm gonna share a little bit about my trip Audio-related stuff only but I'm gonna share some some things that I found were cool during my trip to London as part of my tech talk later. Unless of course, Mark doesn't come, then you'll be spending the next hour listening to me talk about London, which I'm sure you can talk to us about London. I mean that would be interesting, but okay, come on, Mark. Unless you decided he wanted to come over here and then couldn't remember my address, you know, I don't know. But my phone's not ringing. I mean, he knows. And the thing is, guys, this hardly ever happens. Yet the last show we had, well, George was in England, and we had Scott Parkin booked, and then he broke two ribs surfing. Yeah. Can't make this stuff up. No, we can never, we never make this stuff up on the show. It's whatever we come up with. Anyhow, all right, people are all tuning in here, except for Mark, supposed to be here. Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark. What day is it? It's Monday. Maybe he thought it was next Monday, because it's a holiday. No. Okay, said Labor Day, he knows. Jeff had with headquests that I just emailed him. So did I. He's hearing from the audience. Hey, where are you? Everybody knows Mark. Everybody email him all at once. Okay, three, two, one, go. Message him on Facebook. Yeah, really. I mean, I've occasionally like had a booking where it's been in the books, it's scheduled, it's in there. And I'm just like scrolling Facebook. And then I look up at 10 minutes later, and the client is emailing me like, where are you? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. I was not to make up a good excuse. Nobody wants to say our tomorrow's broadcast. Yeah, you know, and I told him five to six. Yeah, that's what people nothing we could do is we could do tech talk now. We could. And then we're gonna go stuck with this till seven. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, just tell him, well, we'll we'll we'll get you. We'll get you at the six o'clock hour. Right. And should we do that? When we do that, since he clearly forgot what time you was supposed to be here. Or I hope it's that's it. Yeah, I hope it's that simple. Yeah. Let's do that. And then if he does jump on, we'll just let him know what we're what we're doing. That's right. All right, so we're gonna do tech talk here, which is great because we got a lot of people watching. And if you've got a question about home voiceover studios, something George and I know a little bit about, you know, we sort of scratch the surface. So if you throw those in the chat room in Facebook or on YouTube or wherever it is you're watching, Jeff Holman's in there. So all right, are you ready, Sue? She's counting us in down five, four. Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop. And it's tech talk number 86. Yeah, baby. Don't 86 it man. Yeah. Yeah, 86 times we have done tech talk, you know, plus if you throw in the almost 200 episodes before that before we started doing this. Anyway, if you've got a microphone, a few times, right? That's yeah, the few a few times. What's the best microphone for voiceover? Yes. So if you've got a question about your home voiceover studio, throw it in the chat room. Right this time right at this time right now. And George and I will discuss it in the next segment. So are you ready, George? I certainly am. Okay, good. It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk right now. Voice over body shop is brought to you by voice over essentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, the folks who bring you source connect, JMC demos, when quality matters, the heroes.com become a hero to your clients with award winning voiceover training, voice actor websites.com where your voice actor website shouldn't be a pain in the butt voice over extra your daily resource for voiceover success. And by 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 Whitton. And this is voiceover body shop or VO BS. Tech talk, tech talk, an early tech talk. Yeah. So you guys get to see us. Yeah, some people join us for tech talk. Some people join us when we do our guest interview. But the people who've come for the guest interview get to hear tech tech talk now. And they're going to go, This is fabulous. Why don't they do this like every other week? Well, we used to do tech talk, we used to do the tech stuff before the guest, but we decided rather than make a guest wait around for us to finish, we would just have them first. And that's the way it's been quite a few years now. But today, because our guest is deposed. Is that the word? Deposed? No, no, no, that would mean he's he's decomposed in legal six. Yeah, and he's not decomposed either. Whatever the reason deposed means he has been removed from office. Okay, thank you, whether by force or by I like big random words. And just use them proper. Isn't there a word isn't there terminology for the misuse of words? Malaprop. Boom. And you didn't misuse it. So that's you weren't ironic about it. I think that's a Malaprop. A Malaprop. Yeah, that's think that's the word I remember. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Highly technical talk here. But by the way, if you're wondering why why we're talking about tech, it's what George and I do. One of the things that, you know, we try to fill our days with all sorts of fun stuff, whether it's flying down a mountain side on a on a bike, or playing with old radios. But most of the time, we're dealing with you in your home voiceover studios. And we've been doing it for a long time. There's a lot of people out there. Apparently a lot of coaches out there that will tell people, Oh, yeah, yeah, use one of these. But not how to use one of these. And George and I usually end up mopping up afterwards. Because we know how to do this kind of stuff. And it's usually like, Oh, God, what did this person tell you? Well, if you want to get the right information and not be intimidated and get that boulder of technology craziness off your shoulders, you can work with one of us because we're going to give you the right answers. We're going to show you how to do it right. And that's the most important thing when it comes to a home voiceover studio. If you don't have a home voiceover studio, you're not really participating in the freelance voiceover market. And if you're going to have a home voiceover studio, it's got to be good. And if it sounds good, it is good. Right on cue. Gotta love that. Anyway, if you want to work with Mr. Whitman, George the tech, where do they go? You can head right over to George the dot tech. And if that makes your brain hurt, you can also just put in George the tech dot com. That will work too. And all my services are available for booking over there starting with the most popular and most affordable sound check service, which is similar to one that Dan offers. And it's just a matter of you sending in your audio. And I also like to get some photos and a description of what's really going on. And that way I can give you a really clear answer about what I hear in your audio. Very objective. Just how does it sound? How's the noise floor? How's the acoustics in the space? How is your mic technique? All that stuff will cover in a soundcheck. And you can go from there all the way to studio design, whatever you need is available. And over at Dan's place, as I was mentioning, at home voiceover studio dot com. What can you do over there, Dan? Well, now you can find the specimen collection cup much easier because when you go to the page, it's right there. Right where it should be in exactly where it should have been all along. But now it's up top. Yeah. And for $25, I will do a very thorough analysis of your audio. And you know, it's not just what I hear. It's also what I see. There might be some things that you might think are inaudible. But I see them, you know, if you look at a spectrograph, and you see a repeating line at 125 Hertz, it's like air conditioner, ceiling fan, refrigerator, fish tank. Yeah. Yeah, aren't that many of those anymore? Are there? No, no. Yeah, the people keep those somewhere else. But yeah, if there are sounds that you don't realize are there. And I can see them, I can hear them. Although you get down underneath 80 Hertz, you don't hear them. But the engineer on the other end is going to see the needle moving up that direction. And speaker cones going like this. Yeah. So anyway, you've been gone for a little bit. And you were in in Jolly old England. I was I it's my first ever trip to London. I went there with my girlfriend where we met her mother who flew in and her sister who also flew in and it was really an eyeopening experience. I went there with some expectations. I mean, who doesn't have expectations about what London might be like if you've never been right. But I kind of went there with just open eyes and ears and mouth and nose and just smelled and taste and just enjoyed the city in a lot of ways. But I did gather a little bit of content that I thought is well, at least somehow audio related. So I thought I could share a couple of things with you guys. So first of all, let's find the one I want to show you. So this is this is a clip showing and letting you hear as well what the subway train. Well, this isn't a subway. This is called the DLR. So this would we call we would call an elevated train. This is the sound and a view from the train of looking at my actual hotel, my Hilton hotel. So this is check this up. Right there's the hotel. That's loud right there. That's how close the hotel is to tracks. Right. So when we when we checked in and I saw the elevated train right outside our hotel, I was like, Oh, no, because I had this bad flashback of going and checking into the Jack London Inn or whatever it was in Oakland. Long time ago, like 30 years ago with my dad, my mom and the train tracks right outside the hotel. And we were thinking we saw the train tracks and we're thinking, Oh, cool. The trolley is going to go right on by not realizing that no, it's not a trolley. It's freight trains. And they were really frigging loud. Well, in this hotel, you couldn't even hear the train at all. Here's why look at the look at the windows in the hotel. I was saying earlier how this hotel is super quiet. Look at the windows here. Look at this. They have a double pane, heavy, heavy glass, double plain exterior window. And then an interior glass window. And even that interior piece, it rattled a little bit so they could done a little better on the on the weather stripping. But if that was even like a laminated piece of glass, it was really impressive. The effort that was put into the hotel to keep this the noise levels down. Yeah, there's nothing like the sound of a train rambling by when you're trying to sleep. So yeah, I mean, they they didn't mess around. It was I you literally would forget that there was a train outside that close. That that's that's how incredibly quiet it was. I was really impressed. So if you're staying if you're going to London, is a shot actually shows how close the train actually is right above it. There it is. Totally inaudible. You would never. So this is a neighborhood of London called Canary Wharf. And it's an eastern part of London. And it's an old wharf area that was all for loading fish and stuff. And now it's all giant high rise buildings. It's like being in the middle of Wall Street. It's all banks, right? But you're really close to all these different train lines. And you can get around really easily. And that was cool. Other audio related stuff that I enjoyed and witnessed in London. She says the things you were concentrating on. What is the audio situation in London? Of course, I'm obsessed with it, right? This was in the Tate, which is an amazing modern art museum in London, founded by Her Majesty the Queen in 2000. And this was in one corner of one of the exhibits. He walked into this hall and this is what you heard. Is that like all the radios playing at once or? That's all every single radio. I mean, theoretically, anyway, every single radio tuned to some kind of random point. I don't know if it was random or what it was, but it was just idling static of whatever these radios were pulling in. And occasionally, you would hear an actual song, a song, a strong, clear song would just come through at random, which was really, really kind of a trip, actually. I found it hypnotic and also super nostalgic. I mean, how could you not find that nostalgic as you're walking around, you're looking at all these radios that you remember. Either radios you already have, like Dan, you've got a collection. I'm sure some of the radios you have are in this pile. I can recognize a few of them. Although British radios are, you know, there are British manufacturers. And their stuff was just a little bit different. Yeah, yeah. And then I have another clip I won't show it, but it's me walking around the entire tower, showing everything there. But that was just really cool and fascinating. I thought that was very, very interesting. And then on another audio tip from the same museum, this was an art piece that was made by this artist as Waldo Machia, or Machia. And it was essentially a thousand different bird songs that he had recorded. And then as you walk through the exhibit, you're hearing them playing through speakers suspended from the ceiling. And it there he's basically playing back the sound of the birds, as though it was a musical arrangement. And on different walls in the exhibit like this one, he is showing the key, essentially, the plan of how everything is what instrument is what bird, right? And then this is the actual master plan of how all the bird sounds are mapped over what a theoretically would be an organ. So imagine a huge church or theater organ, but all of the instruments are birds. And they're all playing through these these speakers suspended from the ceiling. I don't even know if you can hear them right now. Oh, I would the sound is not on but shoot. There it is. It's not reading right now. You pretty much had to walk under the speaker to hear it clearly. But there are bird sounds coming out of these speakers as it's just really fascinating use of technology, music, bird sounds, all these things combined. It was just it was incredibly fascinating. Yeah, the last audio and video experience that I'll share if I can find the tab here. This was Yeah, I think I think I clicked away from it and then lost it. I got to go down and see the carnival parade that's in Notting Hill, the village of Notting Hill. And the experience of the sound systems that were on the trucks was pretty pretty over the top. I mean, you I could not believe the sheer scale of these sound systems that they were carrying around on the backs of semi trucks pulled through neighborhoods. Like imagine the loudest car stereo you've ever heard that like you're like, okay, that's enough. This is a little obnoxious. Imagine that but that times 100. And that's what these sound systems were like. Here's here's a clip of one as it goes by. Here's the back of it. The business and I would call it. Come on. There it is. Look at that. That's that's one heck of a subwoofer. It was insane. And there was that those trucks over and over just going down the street with a huge crowd of people dancing behind them. So it was a very sonically varied and interesting trip to London. It was really, really fascinating. But I didn't do any work. I didn't bring any microphones. I really was pretty much offline the whole time and it was a joy. It was a joy to be able to do that. I felt really lucky, to be honest, to run a business and be able to just decide that you're not going to work for a while and do that was was a real real treat. And so I've only been doing that since 2003. Good for you. I mean, it's hard to do it. But I man, I loved I really enjoyed it. And if you're going to London and you know you're staying there, I can recommend the the Hilton Canary Wharf for being a really, really quiet hotel. And you could also shut off the air conditioning. There was a fan control on the wall and you could just shut it off and make it really quiet in there. So it was I found that quite impressive. Yeah. Oh, now Mark Cashman joins us. Mark, we're gonna start you with six. Okay. I'm so sorry, guys. Unfortunately, we had a power outage 458. And oh, yeah. And I just got it back. That's the only reason that I was okay, we were we had we were hoping it was for a good reason and not a not a not a sad reason. So that's a good reason. No, no, no, no, no, it was just the heat. I'm surprised that the grid is held up as well as it's held. And then so when it went out, I said, okay, it doesn't surprise me. Fortunately, it was brief. And they got everything back. But it and then it took me a while to reboot everything because everything shut down. So I'm sorry, I'm sorry for the delay. But but thank you so much for for inviting me on your show. And it's been a while. Have you been both? Have we've been great. Can we do our segment at six? Because we started into tech talk. So just absolutely not a problem. Not a problem. So I'll just I'll just hang and I'll come back at six. Okay, perfect. Don't go anywhere. Just stay there. Okay, keep that power on. Yeah, not that he has a choice. Alright, let me get the razor blade out. Place that out. Okay, okay. Okay, so where were we? Oh, we were talked about London. So that that was your trip to London. That was my trip to London. So so because I was off offline and taking a vacation, I didn't really gather a lot of new tech tips and tech news. And I haven't really seen that much. But I'm going on. What have you seen, Dan? Talk to me. Our friends at Centrance. Oh, yes, yes, they have this new thing called the Jasmine. It's not in production yet. But it looked like an improvement over the the mic port pro. Oh, really? Yeah, it's it's a it's a pre a mic preamp. And it has a big VU meter on it, and a limiter and all these things and apparently they're working on it. And they they did all the testing. And now they're ready to start production runs on it. And then it'll be a nice another great little portable unit that that Centrance puts out. Oh, I'm checking I'm checking it out now. It's called the Jasmine. It's a boutique preamp with limiter and headphone amp. So yeah, so this is this is interesting, because what they're doing here is going well, some people just want a preamp. They don't actually they don't actually want the ad converter. So this is what's so fascinating about high end audio gear, right? Sometimes the more expensive stuff does less. Right. Is not interested. So this is a little things better. Right. So this is a $700 unit that does nothing but provide a preamp with a high pass filter and a limiter, which is really obviously handy. But that's what it does. That's it. It's not an interface. It's not a headphone amp. Although it does have a headphone. Oh, no, I take that back. It does have a headphone amp. Yeah. So it's it's a very niche thing. So I'm wondering who would really benefit from this? I guess if you hmm, probably musicians, but it would work for very if you know, it would definitely work for voiceover. Yeah, like it would just be an interesting thing. If you're if you're wanting like a completely super clean, I would imagine it's got no distortion, super, super clean. Oh yeah. Low noise. Their their standards are really, really high. Yeah, yeah, it's gotta be but it's interesting that he built it in the same chassis as like the mixer face. Right. So he's making a line of new products based around that that chassis. So that that's cool. Yeah. And I like that it has the big VU meter on it. Always in the green. Always in the yellow. The red every now and again. Yeah. No, that that's cool. No, I I like that he's iterating and creating new products and we'll have to see if anybody in the voice over world finds it to be, you know, helpful to use something like that and a supplement to their other other preamps and processors and stuff. Right. So maybe he'll send this one. There you go. There we go. Well, we've gotten stuff from Mike and Mike Goodman and Sentrance in the past, you know, we've we've we've tested the mixer face and we found it fantastic. The mic port pro two and three now are both yeah, it's really great. The meter on it and you know, the people in animation and gaming are really liking that one. So that's really cool. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I wanted to throw something out here for the next few minutes. And if people have questions on this, they can of course, you know, they can they can join in on this. I get a lot of questions about resolution settings. You know, we've always you know, up until now, I'm usually with an MP3, we always say, do it at 44 one K at 24 bit. And I'm getting stuff all over the place. Some people do it, you know, it you know, 44 one, it's been the standard for a while. But now a lot of video goes to 48. You're talking about wave files or MP3 files? Either. You know, people are there, they're they're being we're being asked for 48 for 48K. You know, especially by video producers, because that's the standard for video, for just straight audio. I mean, you can get get away with, you know, 16 bit and, you know, and the 40, you know, 44 one. Yeah. But for the most part, the funny thing is, is there's no difference in sound. Now, if someone says they can tell the difference, they're lying. Because between 44 one and 48K 48 sample rate. Yeah. Yeah, you're not going to notice a difference because it's you know, there's a certain frequency range that it covers and it doesn't matter because that's it's it's recording sounds that you can't even hear. Right. He's basically you can tell the sample, this the frequency range of what the sample rate captures by just taking whatever that number is. Right. 48K and divide it in half. So now 24 is the maximum frequency you can record. Right. 24 kilohertz. Now, I don't know the last time you had your hearing checked. But I fairly recently, I did it on I actually did my hearing test on an app. Oh, there's an app called Mimi. M I M I right that lets you do your own hearing tests similar to the way you would do it an audiologist for hearing aids and stuff. Right. But anyway, you're most of us won't hear anything above 1415 kilohertz anymore. You know, if you're under 20 under 30, you might be able to hear above that. But none of us can really hear that stuff. You know, so going even higher to 48K or 41 48 doesn't does not make any difference. Yeah. I had a hearing test fairly recently, you know, my I have tintedness and it's it was getting bad for a while. And then, you know, the audiologist like your hearing is perfect. It's pretty good for your age. I'm like, don't tell my wife. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, when I did that home test, I hadn't done I hadn't done a proper hearing test in quite a while. I used to get my hearing tested at the Nam music trade show, the house your institute would bring in a big truck, you know, and you'd go inside and add the audiology booths and the whole thing and they print out your report. And it been a long time since I did it. So finding this Mimi app, it was kind of cool. It was, it was a pretty legit. I mean, it played the very quiet tones that got descending league more and more quiet as they played and then it would tell you to let go of the button when you couldn't hear them anymore. And it said I was about 10 to 15 decibels below optimal. But they said that but it said that was normal for my age. So I was glad to see that. Yeah, I had one where it was like progressively people talking louder in the background and you had to pick out the right sentence. And I got that's pretty good. Yeah, that's that's something we're hearing aids help a lot. So so yeah, I mean, I know another reason why recording at sample rate 48k can be helpful is if nowadays we're asked to be doing multiple things at once, right? Right. Not just record but now we want to record and beyond zoom or record and have something else going on. And as I like to say as I've been saying recently describing sample rate and what's called word clock is you want everybody to be dancing to the same music, the same beat. If you've got you know, your DAW is recording a wave file at 44.1 and you're running zoom and zoom wants to be running at 48 kilohertz, you're going to have problems. Clicks and pops. Now the Mac OS seems to somehow on the fly sample rate convert because rarely have I had clicks and pops and glitches and I've never really given it that much thought. So it is definitely Bex practice to make sure everything's the same sample rate. But if you're on Mac, you might be okay and might because it's sample re converting I think. But I know in the windows environment, boy, things just do not. They do not get along well at all. They're not the same. We told you. You gotta really stick with Mac if you're doing you do an audio but you know you got what you got. So yeah, I mean if you're on windows, everything's gotta be on the same sample rate window. I would say 48k across the board is the way to go and it doesn't matter what they ask for. Just record at that sample rate and you can convert it later. Right. Just just sample rate convert before you send the file and not a big deal. In fact, 24 bit, I recommend to record that as well and then if you need to send it in 16 bit again, you can you can save it as 16 bit. Yeah. Well, you know, people have been asking a lot of questions. So we're gonna take a break and we're gonna get into answering all these questions because that's what we really love to do. Not that your trip to London wasn't fascinating and not that 44 for one versus 48k isn't isn't you know, maybe it's a little geeky for some more fascinating. This stuff you guys are gonna dig. So we're gonna take a break. We'll be right back here on For You Silver Body Shop Tech Talk right after these messages. This is the Latin Lover narrator from Jane the Virgin Anthony Mendez and you're enjoying Dan and George on the Voice of Our Body Shop. You know, I used to live in Buffalo, New York but now I'm in sunny Southern California but no matter where you are, when you need equipment strictly for voiceover, there's only one place to go and that's voiceoveressentials.com and right now is the time to get with Harlan Hogan's signature series V01 A voiceover microphone. They also have the fabulous Sentrance Mic Port Pro 2 with Limiter in stock. In fact, it's the only version they sell. Now, a limiter is a must have especially when recording oneself with no engineer to ride game for you. By the way, it's the most amazing limiter they've encountered. It's impossible to detect and it's incredibly quiet and they've upgraded the Fortebooth Pro quick script LED light. Now it has two Goosenecks, all the better to read your script. Go on over to Voiceover Essentials right now to get these great voiceover essential products. Man, that's a great spot, Dan. Kill it. Well, I'm gonna do my live spot because I don't like producing anything and I'm gonna talk about our great friends over at Source Elements. Well, boy, I'll tell you, by now you have heard a lot about Source Elements Company and if you haven't, well, you're new to the show and then welcome. But Source Elements creates software that allows studios to interact and connect and record audio real time in very high quality and that's the primary software made by Source Elements that the voice acting industries have all used for a long time. A lot of the industries anyway that tends to be the bigger production quality, higher budget, commercial, things like that. They use Source Connect and that's because it's a dedicated application that does one job and that is capture the audio, stream it to the other side and bring the audio into their system and it does it extremely reliably. Much more reliably so than anything that could run on a Google Chrome browser because the problem with browser based audio adapts is the browser changes and updates all the time. If you probably have no idea what version of browser you're running because it updates constantly, probably almost every week and so that's a moving target and that creates really hard to describe and very difficult to troubleshoot glitches and that's not happening with Source Connect. It's a dedicated app designed to do that one job and it's supported extremely well by the support team at Source Elements. So if you want to give it a try and you want to understand why it is the tool of choice in pro audio recording remotely, you can do that go over to source-elements.com and get yourself a 15-day free trial and start experimenting and poking around and testing it and if you need help don't worry they've got great support as well as myself at George the Tech and our team here we can give you extra white glove support if you need it. Anyway let's get back to the show right after this. 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 a the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song. It's the end of the road for Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 from BMW. Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish? Hey it's J. Michael Collins. Bet you think I'm going to try and sell you a demo now huh? I think they speak for themselves. But I will give you my email. It's jmichael at jmcvoiceover.com. Now if they will stop waxing this mustache for a minute we'll get back to the show. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying Voiceover Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem. Vobs.tv. Alrighty and we're back and it's time for Tech Talk and your questions lightning round because we got a pile of them here. Nice. All right. We've been storing them up over the holiday. I know. Just on Labor Day. And I'm glad everybody's here on Labor Day. You could be out barbecuing. Of course you don't have to do anything here in Southern California. Just go out in your backyard and hold a couple of hot dogs and they're gonna cook. It's only 106 in my backyard right now. Oh man. Anyway we got a we got we have an actual write-in one. Somebody actually emailed us a question which you can do by writing to us at theguys at vobs.tv. And if you write your question in before we do the show you get to be first in the queue. So Steve Griffin asks he says I'm trying to lower my noise floor in my home studio aren't we all? I'm currently running a noise floor between minus 57 dB and minus 55 dB. I'd like to lower it to at least minus 60 dB. Do you have any suggestions? Well it would help to to hear what what the noises are. My philosophy is everything is physical. Find the source of the noise and turn it off. The thing is is we we were talking about this a little earlier. You don't necessarily hear all the noises in your house. Your brain has tuned them all out. Your refrigerator. Your air conditioning. You know it's not like you're consciously listening for this stuff and when you go in if you go into a booth or you're in in a certain room you really don't hear it but our friend here does. Here's everything and it puts it on your hard drives so it's important to really stop and think and go is something making noise. Close your eyes for a second and listen and your brain will go oh yeah yeah this one yeah okay we're gonna turn on this frequency and then you hear your refrigerator and you hear the air conditioning. Those things really have to be off unless you're in a really sound tight room. Yeah the air conditioning is a big one. Just noise and traffic noise from even a road that could be a mile away. If there's enough of it it'll show up as rumble that little wave the little wave wavy line in your wave in your waveform and a lot of that can be reduced by just using a high-pass filter and all of a sudden you can lower the noise floor the effective noise floor of your recordings several db sometimes 20 db depending on how much noise it is at that low frequency so you might be able to go from minus 57 db to minus 70 but just applying a high-pass filter so without having the audio to analyze it's that's the best we can do for you but you can always get a sound check or use Dan's specimen collection cup and we'll really analyze it closely. Yeah and a high-pass filter is actually a lot simpler than it really helps. Okay you get the one from Marlene Goodman. Yeah this was also from email. How does one learn the setup and operation of the home technology? I'm gonna assume Marlene in this case means home studio technology. Yes that that would be us. You come to the right place watching every episode of of tech talk you know you're gonna learn a heck of a lot watching all of our tech talk episodes Marlene so I can recommend that because that's free. Yeah that's a really good place to start. We've covered a tremendous amount of ground. There's webinars Dan has taught a lot of webinars I am still teaching webinars as well. You can look for webinar content about what you want to learn. There is obviously a lot of YouTube videos which some are good some are not so you know take those with a grain of salt they're not always appropriate for your needs or always accurate so check your source make sure if you're watching YouTube videos make sure you know who it is you're learning from. Right and also important that if you were listening from the top of the show you can work with Mr. Woodham here or you can work with me and go to our websites and we will we will teach you from soup to nuts. Yeah I mean we'll teach you what you need to know like the key thing is we'll teach you what it is that you need to know because that's the thing if you start studying the books there's a few right there on the shelf if you start reading all the books you can get you can start drowning in knowledge and information and learn a lot of stuff you don't need so working with Dan or I one-on-one will give you a concentrated piece of you know helpful information at the pace that you need to learn. You might learn at a different pace than you can handle on a YouTube video you might want to just write things down long hand that's fine you know we'll we'll work with you directly but the key is to to learn what you need and not learn everything because it's a big distraction from being a voice actor to to learn all of audio engineering. Absolutely yeah and you know it's we've been able to break it down into some very simple things and we will you know if you talk to us you know you set up a consultation with us we will we will set you straight and relieve all of your tension about it. Jeff Holman's got an interesting question. Yes have any tips for using the road video mic go to with an iPhone for recording videos? I'll be using it to record on camera self-taped auditions. You mean this guy? Yeah Dan Dan Dan has it and we used it to do the tour of Mojave microphone and it worked great. It worked great. It's it's it's you know it's like a little 416 and you just mounted a teeny weeny shotgun with with the iPhone. You have to have that cord right Dan? You have to have a very special cord that does not come with the mic right which I ordered to in just in case I break this one uh yeah but it plugs right into your phone the phone immediately recognizes it as your uh your mic and then you just use it you know if it's mounted with if the the phone is mounted on a tripod or a selfie stick or something this particular device allows you to also put that on there with it and then you have your phone I can see my phone right here and then you take your phone just strong spring on there and it's a really strong spring on there. Anyway so you get this on a selfie stick and then all of a sudden you've got real professional audio with this and it works great. Yeah for doing self tapes you want to get it probably within three or four feet don't put it too far away from you um you know obviously mic technique the closer the mic is the more better it's going to pick you up the more directly it will pick you up um you still want to make sure that you don't have a super reverberant room you know so if it's an empty room in your house or spartan room it's going to sound pretty reverberant so you might want to throw some blankets on the floor you might want to make sure you have a rug you know do whatever you can exactly to get rid of that echo but it yeah hundred bucks plus like a $30 cable is that what it is $30 for like I wonder how it would do with for remote for doing voiceover somewhere well you did some early tests and the noise floor of the mic was pretty good right it wasn't noisy yeah it had a pretty pleasing sound it's a pretty mind blowingly good mic for yeah for a hundred bucks I mean it's it's with that cable it's a hundred thirty dollars shotgun usb mic exactly pretty amazing not a lot of those around okay uh jeffrey headquests uh from youtube says I have a null spot on my preamp section of my apollo twin remedies buy something else a null spot oh that meaning if as he's turning the dial is he's using the preamp in it something goes and then it jumps off so he's got a dead spot oh that's the neve preamp the game knob as you turn it to about 55 db there's an off position oh if that's the one he's talking about i mean he didn't say what plugin he's using or whatever but i'm assuming if that's what he means there is literally a position on that knob it goes you know 40 45 50 55 off 60 65 70 rupert's dead we can't ask him why he did it that way but there's literally an off position on the game dial right and because the plugins if you're using a neve plugin are modeled over the real after the real exact actual hardware it replicates that same quirky design so maybe that's what it is i don't know put it in your chat in the chat if if i'm completely off base here or if if you are using the neve plugin or something terry because uh yeah that's that's an odd one i don't know why that would happen otherwise yeah a lot of people are you know i've been asking about the apollo twin you know because i i need a limiter well like you know you're you're buying an awful lot just to get a limiter you don't yeah that's a big expense and a big learning curve just to have that the mic port pro with the limiters for 300 bucks is a way better value and there you go way simpler to use yeah all righty you get the next one from red cabin acoustic all right um this one's from youtube what are the best in quotes vo conferences to go to for newbies and those that have some work under their belt i don't know if i can rank them right now they each have their their strengths and weaknesses i don't know what what would be the top one that comes to mind and that it's a no-brainer if there's about that one um oh of course no that no that's absolutely true we haven't had a wovo in a while and we've not had a wovo con and we're doing that wovo con is a it's a conference put on by voice voice over professionals for voice over professionals yeah and it's yeah and we're not for profit by the way i'm president of world voices but uh yeah we're doing this may 4th through 6th in Orlando and it's a very different type of conference great for people who who want to really learn from everybody else and not like just attend all sorts of you know going to uh you know different different talks and stuff like that you get to really participate in and that's one of the reasons that we really like doing it so uh yeah this one would not be targeted to the newbie who's someone that's just getting started a lot of the other conferences are really good at catering to the new voice actor like um vio atlanta and uh uh what's another what's the one in the fall that's voice over that's voice over one kind of like i want to get no voice over topics you know that uh are covered by coaches and things well you and i are going to vio north next weekend yeah we are vio north which is sort of the well it's the conference of canada right yeah for the time being another one do it anymore but yeah this could be the last one is my understanding but so we're going and we're going to have a great time because we get to see all our friends that we haven't seen for years and years that's that's a big reason why these conferences are so popular it's you know a lot of folks go to not necessarily learn a lot they maybe will get a few golden nuggets right but they go for the social aspect you know and that's that's a good reason that is a good reason to go if you have the if it's in your town you don't have to spend a tremendous amount of money to get there and right things like that so we're going to do a few uh mini cons with world voices over the next couple of years and they'll be those will be regional conferences so you can drive there which will be really great that's good so we'll be we'll be talking more about those as well oh and also i'm going to be going to mavo in uh washington in november oh i always forget about that one yeah that's the mid-atlantic conference yeah that's going to be out near delis airport and i'm going to be speaking at that so if you want to learn about home studio stuff or anything that has to do with voice over is that one targeted towards a wide range of skill yeah that's that's a that's a wide-ranging one too so but sort of but sort of a regional one i mean people come from everywhere everywhere don't they yeah exactly so that's good that's a good one to go to cool okay you get let's see here uh and rist yes yes i have a question well that's good it's about a scratching noise that levels out at 143 to 153 db in my i think she means k if it's 143 db yeah that must be in my pause spaces in adobe audition it looks red in the wave file and gets more profound at the outtakes of my cut and paste points weird science freaking me out thanks this sounds like an editing thing this is a matter of when you're editing audio you can't cut right in the middle of a of a of a sound you've got it's got to be at the crossover point and that's the the center line you know where you've got the waveform like this i i i suppose i could show that why don't you talk for a second while i set that up and i'll show people how to what i'm talking about yeah i mean i don't we she might be talking about what dan's describing which is a discontinuity which is where there's two you know when you see your waveform and you zoom way in there they when you make an edit point sometimes the two halves of that where the edit point occurs don't actually meet in the middle like this they actually meet at two different spots when that happens that's called a discontinuity and that makes a click but i'm not sure if that's what quite what she's describing i'm a little bit perplexed she said because she's mentioning a specific i think she means frequency she says no it's in the non-speaking area so she's talking about during the room tone there is something that's in there that happens to be in the 146 kilo or hertz oh well that's something there's some tone or some noise in her inner space that's in that frequency range it's probably in a fan if you can all see this we're talking about this red line in the middle here yeah that's the crossover point if you edit from that point over you will not get a click especially if you go back over to the next crossover to the next crossover point right there and if you do that you'll notice that it's a nice smooth transition even though we were dealing down to the sample level here and i think adobe audition is auto fixing that now isn't it it does isn't it auto that's the whole thing about adobe audition is that yeah one of one of you do those types of things it creates that crossover point anyway so that's oh she's saying the wave goes from negative 43 d i guess db she didn't put the and when you're putting in notes make sure you tell us the units so if you're talking about 43 db versus 43 kilo hertz or frequency but from negative 43 to negative 53 so that's the range in which that sound is hovering okay she means db yeah so there's some tone that's hovering in that decibel range it's probably some of that background noise we were just talking about yeah it must be some kind of room tone or some equipment that's in an adjacent room or a unit or something that's creeping in to your space and that's why you that's and that's why you send us a sample so yeah we have to hear this it takes two seconds for us to go oh and yeah i know what that is it's your refrigerator it's your air conditioning yeah we're rarely totally stumped i mean it can happen if there's something like wrong with the equipment that's where the noises are originating from inside the mic or something like that that's a whole different thing but that's pretty rare that that happens yeah question from grace newton this is a good question says i'm about to hang my cloud using teacup hooks and blankets should there be a space between the ceiling and the blankets how much well it's a matter of you it's it's a sort of a trial and everything wouldn't you say it's like well okay you start it like you know six inches and then you know it takes a couple of people and you lower it and you find out where the sweet spot is for that for hanging that so it's blank it so that means that things gonna hang down i'm assuming it's gonna hang down kind of like a like a curve right because it's suspended from the edges or is it's i don't know how she's exactly hanging it with teacup hooks but if it's just hung from the perimeter it's gonna kind of pillow right right it's gonna build it's gonna billow out in the middle so it's automatically gonna have a gap from the ceiling it's gonna have a gap several inches um that's let's let's take a look yeah you've got some clouds here clouds that are in your in your space yeah these are made out of rigid acoustic uh treatment yeah with a wooden frame right and you can see how i how i hang them there they're all about six to inches to a foot off the ceiling it's a while it's it's it's an arched ceiling so yeah it's it's that's right it's not a flat ceiling so it's a little more complicated here but um yeah it my understanding is that there's a law of diminishing returns if if you leave too much of a gap that isn't beneficial so i've heard somewhere between four and six inches off the ceiling is beneficial that's what i've read somewhere i can't remember where or who and i think it depends on how thick the paneling is and etc so if it's just a blanket i don't know how much of a difference it's gonna really make whether you have a gap there or not because it's not very thick so all righty all right why am i why am i juggling like that you're max head rooming i'm up up up up well i no no no no no no maybe we can clean it up in a break but yeah well we'll we'll get to that in a second or i just switch back to the other camera we're using and then uh yeah that might help camera i think that's a weird that is totally like max head room oh there we are doing another news while you're doing that i'll go into the lisa or linda joce minors question and she says what home studio problems come up the most oh you're hearing them all you're really you are hearing them all the ones you're hearing are a lot of the common ones like noise what is this noise how do i get rid of this noise what why is this noise happening those are a lot of them um it's really a noise related um why do i sound like i'm in a box why do i sound like i'm in a tube tube yeah uh why do i sound like i'm really far away from the microphone um let's see how do you record voiceover how do you edit it you know these are a lot of the common questions yeah i mean yeah that's that i it's like yeah why does it sound i mean how many times have we done this yeah why does it sound like uh why does it sound like i'm so far away because it's a side address mic and it only works on one side yeah exactly you might be talking back to the microphone that that's a very common mistake because these large diaphragm condenser mics are a little less obvious which is the right side to talk into most of them have a clear logo badge or something whereas a mic like this is pretty painfully obvious where to talk into it because it plugs in here and it points this way but anyway yeah those those are some of the most common questions for sure is really about sound in the room what the mic is hearing the acoustics uh issues that are causing a weird sound um and i i really like to um relate sound with light or photography right because people think visually more right i mean it's easier to explain what it looks like to be out of focus you know we all know what out of focus what what is mine it sort of looks like that that so what dan's doing is adjusting the focus ring on his camera he and i both have webcams that allow you to manually focus right unfortunately microphones don't have a focus ring right they don't have a knob that lets you fine tune the focus the only way to adjust it is by properly placing it moving it further and closer tilting it higher and lower you know moving it around your face you know that's how we we focus the microphone right so i like using i like relating sound with with photography or video because i feel like that kind of that that fits and then like light the light you see that lights my hand up that is the acoustics for sound right so the light for a photo is the acoustics for the recording so better acoustics better recording better lighting better video makes total sense to me all right what else we got here um terry briscoe any advice on how i can improve me here i think he's my yeah unless you're just talking like a pirate can you improve me here how do you improve your ear your training yeah practice practice practice practice it's you have to understand george and i have been doing this for so long that we know what it's supposed to sound like whistle um there are things that go wrong we know when things are right because we don't hear anything else but you know how we always talk about signal to noise ratio and stuff like that you know right signal being your voice noise being anything that's not everything else so yeah just try and find where that works best for you and and and listen it's like all right that's not my voice and you have to listen to your fault your recorded files and you'll figure it out and listen to listen to commercials right listen to well produced well recorded audio right now don't expect your dry audio to sound exactly like those because they obviously have some processing but generally commercial voiceover audio is not super duper processed right promos trailers radio production that stuff is highly highly processed so it's not a really good one to compare against but listening to good well produced high budget television commercials the voiceovers are very very well recorded and you'll notice you'll start noticing something common between them about how they sound and why they sound that way so that's probably part of that that part of that ear training and it's just repetition and it's time it takes years before you just naturally understand what good sound audio sounds like all right well speaking of time we're out of it for this hour anyway we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to re-rack it to talk with Mark Cashman so don't go anywhere we've got lots of great stuff to talk about here on voiceover body shop and if you got a question for Mark you can throw it in there now that'll help too anyway we're going to take a break i'm going to figure out what's going on with my camera and we'll be right back here on voiceover body shop so don't go away you're still watching v obs hello v obs viewer listener aficionado fanatic i'm david h laurance the 17th i'm the same as you i love this show and i'm glad you're watching last week we opened and closed registration with one week that's the only week it's open for the vio heroes pro training curriculum if you want to build a uh spectacular successful and practical and satisfying voiceover uh career i'm here to help you with that and one of the big questions we got was that's a pretty hefty price tag do you have a payment plan and i'm happy to tell you that i created one for those of you who looked at the price of the incredible value that you were getting but the price was a little outside your budget how do we do this so we have an option of a three or a four month plan all you have to do is go to vio heroes dot com slash go that's vio heroes dot com slash go and you'll get all the details if you want to jump in but you didn't have all the money all at once we can give you a payment plan check it out at vio heroes dot com slash go and i'll see you inside the program like the name says voice actor websites dot 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 voice actor websites dot 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 voice actor websites dot com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish don't try it yourself go with the pros voice actor websites dot com where vio website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what yeah hi this is carlos ellis rocky the voice of rocko and you're watching voice over body shop you are and guess what we're going to start warming up for for mark cashman here in just a minute let me just my focus just a little bit here focus rings you can adjust the focus on that we have these cameras we've got we've been trying a lot of different cameras over the years but i like these ones that you can manually once you get it focused right it stays there and you don't have to mess with it and all right where were we okay that's right well we have to first off we have to talk about people who donate to the show which we really appreciate by the way our donors of the week are robert leadham oh i'm looking at the i'm looking at the wrong donors sorry about that that's okay moving down to steven chandler kasey clack jonathan grant tom pinto shelly abuelino greg thomas a doctor voice ant land productions martha conne 949 designs hey lee pennie and jonathan grant uh christopher epperson sarah borges philip supier brine page patty gibbons rob rider shayna pennington baird don griffith tray moseley tray's been with us for years a tray diana birdsall and sandra man willer all righty uh hey remember home voice over studio dot com if you want to work with me it's easy enough just go over there and you'll see all the things we do or if you want to work with george go over to just head over to george the dot tech all right let's see we need to thank our amazing sponsors with whom this show would not actually happen uh like harlan i know harlan hogan's voice over essentials a voice over extra source elements vo heroes dot com voice actor websites dot com jmc demos and world voices dot org the industry association of freelance voice talent all right thanks to jeff holman for great job in the chat room because questions make this whole thing work really well uh sumer lino sweating her tuchas off because her air conditioning isn't working no oh yeah our director and lee pennie for just being lee pennie all right we're gonna re-rack it and we're gonna talk with mark cashman so don't go away we'll be right back but anyway have a great week we'll see you next time on voice over body shop i'm dan lennard i'm george widdon and this is voice over body shop or vo bs all right so now we can do this hey hey guys how are you doing you're having so much fun you know you start you you already have i know i know we're gonna do tips more tips and uh voice over tips but you gave a great voice over tip george and dan both of you when you were talking about mic placement uh one i post a voice over tip every single day 365 days a year and and after i did it i come up with a whole bunch of more i may do another whole year but one of the mean my more recent tips was what you just said proper placement prevents plosives that's right and we're going to explain exactly how to do that anyway all right so are we ready to roll here yeah all right let's uh we'll do our cold open and uh we'll be ready to roll we're gonna count down here from suit five four three hey it's time for voice over body shop how's everybody doing out there this week our guest tonight is mark cashman hey mark how are you doing guys we're doing great we're gonna talk about your 10 at least 10 tips to better your voice over career and your performance yeah all right yeah 10 tips 10 tips uh you know when dan when you asked me the other day to to do this i i just grabbed the first 10 um or well we'll go let me find who aren't familiar with uh with my tips i post a voice over tip every day one a day on linkedin facebook twitter and instagram and i post one every single day for 365 days in the entire year so all right are you guys ready for this can you take 10 tips and if you got a question throw it in the chat room we'll get to that as well time for voice over body shop yeah yeah well what you do is was uh do a tip and then we just discuss right but we gotta do the intro to the show first right okay okay right now okay voice over body shop is brought to you by voice over essentials dot com the home of harlan hogan signature products source elements the folks who bring you source connect jmc demos when quality matters the oh heroes dot com become a hero to your clients with award-winning voice over training voice actor websites dot com where your voice actor website shouldn't be a pain in the butt voice over extra your daily resource for voice over success and by world voices the industry association of freelance voice talent and now here's your hosts dan and george well hello there i'm dan lennard and i'm george wittem and this is voice over body shop or vo bs all right well mark cashman's gonna join us and uh we're gonna have a great time if again if you have a question for our guest throw it in the chat room i know jeff holman is sitting in there writing it down typing it yet as with his little stenographer thing and we're gonna get all those questions right to us in just a little bit but we got 10 tips we want to cover with with mark but let me introduce our guest mark cashman is an award-winning radio and tv commercial producer as well as a working voice actor i've seen him work uh and as voice president of cashman commercials he's won over 150 advertising awards and is a veteran voice actor with experience in radio tv commercials film dubbing animated series video games and over 200 audiobooks i didn't take a breath at the beginning of that and he authored one of the best-selling books on voice actor vo tips tricks tools and techniques to start and sustain your voice over career let's welcome back to our show our good friend mark cashman mark welcome back thank you gentlemen and i do use that term loosely yeah we would but anyway so you we were we were talking about the fact that you have these 10 tips and i have 365 well we're gonna talk about that yeah yeah okay one one for every day of the week yeah 52 weeks of the year every day of the year yeah every day of the year every day of the week every day of the year absolutely but do you have 366 during a leap year yes absolutely i did 366 absolutely i was in uh 21 way back in 2020 that was a leap year so which tip did you have to leave out for the next year you know it wasn't i i didn't have to leave oh you know that's that's that's a good question so it's what tip did i add that's on 366 and i can't remember um the hardest the hardest thing of coming up with 365 different tips was to make sure i wasn't duplicating and that's not easy that is not easy you know not easy at all i had a couple of editors to go back and and couple of people said oh yeah you kind of said this something absolutely editors i had help okay all right so let's start off here let's start off all right number one don't yes don't race through the first sentence in any well-written copy and by the way not all that is uh the first sentence usually sets up the whole rest of the story explain again the first sentence in any well-written story sets up the whole rest of the story so if you race through the first sentence the listener is going to say what what what what was that saying what what did you say what what don't race through the first sentence of any story you tell whether it's a commercial narration audio book i don't care what it is don't race through the first sentence it just so what do people do that though you know it's like there's a hurry to finish up maybe they're in a hurry or they don't think they're going to get done but still the bottom line no matter what kind of story you're telling don't race through the first sentence when does a voice actor have to be really worried about speed so like you know commercial what the only time is when they're doing a commercial commercials are the only part of voice acting that's timed to the second fives 10s 15s 30s 45 60s and every variation thereof you're timed to the second because advertisers buy time on the air that's the only part of voice work that's timed everything else is not so no going in if you don't mind the pressure the added pressure of timing in addition to everything else you got to do if you don't mind that commercials are for you do you recommend a having a visible timer an actual counting timer on screen or anything like while you're reading that's crazy no because that's artificial it's it's kind of like watching your waveform as you're recording which is just a little bit mind boggling so unless you have this perfect synthesis of left brain and right brain which most people don't have that said that said no what you do is and first of all if you're in a directed session the other people at the other end they're going to have the stopwatch uh-huh you have to prepare you just have to get your timing down before you have to know what 30 seconds is what 30 seconds feels like and you just have to i call it getting in touch with your inner stopwatch time yourself time yourself practice time yourself practice feeling what 15 feels like 30 feels like 60 feels like after a while you'll get it you'll you'll get in touch with that inner stopwatch and so when you do a take and they say okay george uh you that came out to 56 we we need we need you to be out of 59 and a half you say oh okay okay got it and then you do another and then dan it does take and they say a good take dan but that came out to 67 you're gonna shave off eight seconds off that next read how about shaving off seven seconds of copy well that's the other thing too is it can you tell them to do that spots are overwritten but we'll get into that another time but the bottom line for for tip number one don't race through the first sentence just don't because it sets up the whole rest of the story um okay that said number two george you want to take number two have you got the list or is dan have absolutely i have it on the screen right here i just have to scroll up to it there we go um the next one is reformat commercial copy make each sentence flush left easier to read plus you don't have to deal with big paragraphs or line breaks it's why god invented word processing it's because so what you do is when you get any kind of a script that's in a justified graph a block of what i call a cluster fuck of text in a box yeah when you get that i want you to take your word processor and i want you to reformat the copy so that one every line is flush left every line starts a new thought and you also make sure that that font is minimally 14 point font here's a little trick here's another little tip that i may even put down here the larger the font the less mistakes you make hmm that's a tip you can take to the bank the larger the font the less mistakes you make because the larger the font the easier it is for your brain to read and the less mistakes you make just think of the very first sentence you ever read when we were in kindergarten see dick run it was in 20 point times new roman it was monstrous it was huge that's how he learned to read the larger the font the less mistakes you make and of course the larger the font the less mistakes you make when you're getting older and your eyes are getting worse so it tends to be a problem it's like absolutely like just stretching out on the ipad there and making it a little bigger now here's the reason i want you to do every line flush left because when you do that what happens at the end of the day at the end of the story you have a lot of white space white space on your page our brains love white space it allows us to pick out all the black symbols on that page and really understand them well with white space our brains love it i can get that's a again that's proven over and over again if you flip through a magazine and you just flip through pages just randomly your eyes will linger on two things one faces because we're hardwired for faces and two white space the more open a thing is our brains go oh thank you so the more open your script is your brain will navigate through that copy so much more easily in particular if you're anywhere on the dyslexic spectrum if you have any problems with dyslexia or anything related to that the larger the font the more white space the easier it is to read every line flush left guaranteed it's guaranteed you just break up that block break up that brick break up that justified graph of copy into something that's manageable easily digestible let your brain let it be just be easy on your brain right yeah if it's a pdf you can just select you can usually select the text yeah and copy and paste it into your absolutely absolutely takes a little bit longer but the prep is worth it because your performance will be so much better yeah you know or as my wife says get trifocals which i finally relented to do and now everything perfectly remember the first time i hadn't done voiceover for a long time about about 22 years ago and stepped up to a podium to read some stuff for a demo and i'm like what that that's what i knew i needed glasses that's anyway all right number three number three don't read when the copy is short you can memorize a short line without reading you'll sound authentic and conversational so for example starts thursday yeah of course that's it have you ever seen an actor go on stage in a play holding a script no have you ever seen an actor in a movie go on camera holding a script no they're all off book that's what actors do actors get off book actors memorize their lines because that is part of their job now you might say well mark memorizing vo copy that's kind of an oxymoron isn't it i mean come on but the thing is why are actors on stage and on camera so believable because they're not so whenever you have the opportunity to not read take advantage you in most voice work you don't have the opportunity to not read in most voice work the copy is so dense that taking your eyes off the page good luck finding your way back but commercial copy is one of the few areas where you can get your eyes off the page and you don't have to read there are only two other areas where you have that ability animation where you're doing all these different sides and different lines like hey bobby give me that ball you don't need to read that and video games as well where you have individual lines single lines where you can look at the line and then say the line without reading and that's the thing with with most commercial copy 30 seconds of copy it's only gotten you know maybe 20 25 seconds of i mean 30 second spots only got 20 to 25 seconds of words and they're all short short phrases do you really need to read them starts thursday do you need to read that that's an announcement i'm talking about just any other thing right so whenever you have the opportunity to get off the page get off the page because it answers the age old question how do you sound like you're not reading don't memorize yeah don't read so could you possibly just like read the line several times as you're recording it and that way you're you're not only are you memorizing it but you're going back and you you're saying it several different ways that way all i'm saying is look at the first line of tip number three what's it say don't read when the copy is short do you need to read that now now you can look at me and say don't read when the copy is short don't read when the copy is short right don't read when the copy is short again you don't need to read that line you've now memorized that line your short term memory is intact sort of exactly i always say look unless you've got mild cognitive impairment or you just drank a half a bottle of jack daniel's or you just took a huge bong rip you can remember don't read when the copy is short i'm sorry but you again there are many instances in commercial copy when you just don't need to read stop reading and be an actor your voice actor be an actor acting number four before ad lib a short backstory before you perform commercial copy it helps you frame the story and warms you up before you dive in of course absolutely i always make a distinction between voice over and voice acting voice over is 2.9 percent apr financing for 60 months on all vehicles in stock there's no acting involved in that your voice actor if an actor does understand who they are and where they are and who they're talking to that's what all believable acting is all is is is all about it has been about from the very beginning so you need to know who you are where you are and who you're talking to you need to know why you're saying what you're saying you need to give yourself a reason to say what you're saying and that reason isn't i'm a voice actor behind a microphone doing an audition to send it to my agent that's off the table that's that's that's just artificial you have to be an actor an actor understands who they are where they are and who they're talking to the definition of acting if you boil down to its essence is what stella adler and sanford meisner said it's behaving truthfully in an imaginary situation acting is all about yes so therefore we have to understand that when we are telling a story we are actors and we have to figure out who we are in that story where we are and who we're talking to once you can understand those three questions you understand the story and you have every right to tell it but if you don't understand those three questions you don't understand the story and you have no right to tell it so you can like imagine i'm somebody that's going to be talking to this class about this and so so have you ever been in class before and you know that sort of thing that's exactly right all right that's exactly right understand who you are where you are and who you're talking to what was your pre-life why are you saying what you're saying frame the story and then you can tell anything to anyone anywhere anytime all righty if you're just joining us we're with mark cashman and we're going over tips simple tips to just better your career and better your performance style and all the things that go with it if you have a question for mark you can throw it in the chat room of wherever it is you're watching whether you're watching it on facebook live whether you're watching it on youtube whether it's just sort of snowing down outside your house and you're hearing little bits and pieces through the ether write a question down and put it in the chat room and jeff holman will get that to us number five another on our top 10 this week uh who is it your me george your turn my turn okay number five take a few minutes to warm up your voice stretch your facial muscles or your facial muscles do tongue twisters sing to oxygen eight and hydrate all the things you just did not do before you started before i started saying that exactly no i'm kidding i'm all warmed up we've been doing this show for another yeah but then this is just the this is the most practical thing again you want to see it before you go running you're going to stretch before you go to the workout you're going to stretch before you do anything uh that where you're in a performance mode you're going to stretch and your facial muscles are are definitely one of them and um and that's an adjunct corollary to this is just is also the opposite um when you after you've done your performance and you're in front of your computer your monitor and you're doing your editing and stuff like that get up every 20 minutes and get your eyes off the screen off the screen off the screen and get up also and start walking around and get and start sitting because you're sitting to death so those three things warm up before you perform but after you perform just keep in mind don't be in front of that monitor for more than 20 minutes at a time get up and get your give your eyes a rest and break and get up and give your hips a break and your back a break and everything else like that okay it's all physical things to do before and after your performance to keep just to keep mindful yeah what's what's your favorite warm-up exercise mark the nbc announcer test um and anybody can find the nbc announcer test by going online just write in the nbc announcer test and it was one duck two to swan three that it has four four squawking geese yeah no no no that's that's another song but um but the nbc announcer test was a test that they gave announcers back in the in the 40s in the 50s to see if they were good enough to be announcers for a national nbc tv the nbc announcer test i see george is checking it out right now and george what do they give you there this is a test that they gave all announcers who wanted to apply to be announcers on nbc and um and then after and then of course all the other stations all the other um stations that did the same test and so george what does it say what's what's the copy say one hen two ducks three squawking geese four limerick oysters five corpulent porpoises six pairs of don alverzo's tweezers seven thousand macedonians in full battle battle array eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of egypt nine apathetic sympathetic diabetic old man on roller skates with a marked propensity toward prastic procrastination and sloth and lastly ten lyrical spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who all stall around the corner of the quo and the quay of the quivery all at the same time now now so those are the 10 things that they go but the thing is you have to do one then one two then one two three then one two three four then one two three four five then one two three four five six and and and so so that's basically what you have to do if you could pass that test and you could articulate every single word they said okay that's the baseline now read this and then they give you news you know ap ap wire things and all sorts of stuff that they that they had there but the nbc announcer test was the baseline for any if you couldn't get through that you're out you're not even being considered nbc announcer test great great warm-up and um and then of course there's another unbelievable one that'll completely blow your mind it's called the chaos the chaos chaos and it is an exercise that the nightmare exercise in english and all the different english words that you weren't even sure you knew if you could get through that you can get through anything already chaos so that said so let's see we think uh so number six number six i think that's george george your turn mark your copy and pencil not pen and keep the mark simple so you can navigate through the text easily and consistently and of course this has been updated uh because that was written in the 21st and 20th century and now we have the 21st century so we have tablets with styluses we have entire monitors that you can write on um and of course a lot of people are very very adept at editing on the fly with let's say google doc or something like that so it's whatever is most convenient for you whatever is whatever format that you can mark your copy easily and quickly that's the key that's the key you have to be able to mark your copy your mark the marks on your copy are navigational marks always mark i always like and marks the navigational marks on copy to buoys in the water when we're doing we're driving a motorboat when you're driving a motorboat you add these buoys in the water that tell you where you can drive the boat that's safe to drive the boat if you go outside the buoys what's going to happen you're going to run the boat aground same thing with marking on your copy you ignore the marks on your copy you run the performance the story aground so you mark your copy to remind you and the marks are very very simple extraordinarily simple they need to tell you just two basic basic things and all the rest are frills two basic things are emphasis and timing emphasis in that you have to make sure that you emphasize the correct words in the story that you're telling you have to understand what the subject is and obviously emphasize that points you're trying to make you emphasize things so emphasis is extraordinarily important and all you need is a simple underline to underline the word you want to emphasize very very simple you're going to take that same shape line which is now horizontal and you're going to turn it this way diagonal and that's going to tell you where to take a beat you need to take a beat you got to find places to take a beat i always joke that i never met an actor who didn't like to take a dramatic beat but you always have to want to try to find a beat you always want to give the listener a rest if you don't find to take a beat the listen you're just going to be talking on and on and on and on and on do you know that there's a 12-step program for people who talk incessantly there is i know a bunch of people who should take that take a damn breath already it's a 12-step program it's called on and on and on thank you so that said you got to mark your copy to remind you where to take where to where to stress where to emphasize and where to take a beat everything else is extra it's embellishment it's your hieroglyphics however you want to do it you want to remind yourself to to lift a particular word and you'll put an arrow you want to send out another word you'll put a downward arrow you'll make your own hieroglyphics but your marks are really really extraordinarily important because your marks keep you consistent from take to take to take and if you are inconsistent from take to take to take the listen the director is going to tear what little hair they have left out of their head all right all right so mark your copy mark mark mark your copy by the way if you say my name three times fast i'll you'll sound like a hairlip dog not that was my dog all the time yeah um yeah i was doing it last night with mishka i'm like she was like what god only knows what i was saying to her anyway number seven number seven i think that's yours dan it is your smile is the promise of a good experience when people hear you smile they think they'll enjoy it too absolutely every advertiser the smart advertisers leave the listener want to leave the listener their goal is to leave the listener with what they call a positive emotional response a positive emotional response so when you're smiling you're telling the listener you had a good experience with it they will assume that they will too but if they don't hear a smile they will assume that you didn't have a good experience with it and they probably won't either so that's why i say your smile is the promise of a good experience when you're smiling about talking about the benefits of a product or service when you're smiling their listener is basically saying oh maybe i'll have a good experience with this too all right and if you don't have a smile they'll think that way too all right number eight mr witham yeah every spot is an invitation to try a specific product or service always invite folks in particularly on the tagline at the end absolutely particularly on at the tagline on the tagline at the end so every single time at particularly on that tag you're always saying to the listener come on in you like it here good to see you come on in you're always welcoming you're always inviting them in that is the that's what's underneath everything you say everything you say you're inviting them to try the product inviting them to listen inviting them to see inviting them in and it's gotta be sincere it has to be sincere as they say in hollywood always be sincere even if you don't mean it thank you what's what's a good way to sound sincere what's what's a good technique for that be sincere yeah even if you're not sincere you know fred alan also said if you took all the sincerity in hollywood and you jammed it into a fleas navel you'd still have enough room for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart thank you that said now again how do you sound sincere be sincere i'm sorry but but but but that's i i know it sounds very facile but it's it's just that simple be sincere don't sound phony all righty and and and and uh penny abshar had a wonderful wonderful tip the classic the most classic tip in the world in voice work and everybody's heard it tell me don't sell me absolutely just tell me just tell me that's all you gotta do and be sincere number nine number nine i think that's gorgeous number nine no it's mine actually oh you're older oh that's right that's right we're going yeah right this is a great one because i i actually do this one uh ask three story related questions to understand what you're talking about who am i where am i and see who am i talking to and then i usually add when am i talking to them and that sort of thing does it really matter when i can't you know maybe it's the middle of the night it might be the middle of the night but is that normally is that nor is that does that normally happen no it doesn't most of when unless it's very story specific when is is just one thing you don't have to worry about but who where and what yes absolutely and you can always find out what you're talking about if you just find the subject i always remind my students the formal subject of any story is the name of the product the name of the company that's the formal subject find the subject once you find the subject then you can tell the story you know what exactly what it is you're talking about if the spots for colonial life but they talk about employee benefits then the subject is employee benefits know what you're talking about and you'll be able to understand and tell the story but again actors on stage and on camera they have a process where they're in rehearsal for their play or their movie and it's a process that they call that's called discovery they discover everything about their character that they're portraying they discover why their character says says what they say what their their character's relationship is to the other characters in the story the story arc the character goes through from the beginning of the play to the end of the play or film they understand they've discovered everything about their character they understand why they're saying what they're saying voice actors think that they don't have to go do that do that process you do if you call yourself an actor you have to do discovery absolutely once again we're with mark cashman if you have a question for mark throw it in the chat room jeff holman's there he's writing them all down getting him to us and we'll be able to ask him that mark yes right uh and george you have number 10 you do a lot of copies sings find the music the key in the cadence in copy and you'll hit all the right notes that's right find the music in copy i find that a lot of my super successful students are musical they learned they were singing in the choir they were singing in the car they were they played piano they learned how to play guitar they were musical now does that mean that you have to be musical to be successful in this business no but you still have to have a god damn good ear and you have to at least be well i guess not tone deaf right so bottom line is if you are musical you have an advantage in this business if you're not musical and then you're going to be doing more what i call left brain stuff you're going to be doing more directional knowledge as opposed to um musical knowledge that you that you can apply but if you're musical everything in music is in copy with one exception everything in music keys sharps flats whole notes half notes quarter notes dotted notes rests pianissimo forte legato staccato everything in music is in copy with one exception and that is time signature we do not talk in a steady beat we talk in a cadence we talk in an ebb and a flow we get fast we get slow we stutter we stammer we do all sorts of things but we don't talk in a rhythm but everything else in music is in copy and if you're musical find it find the keys find the notes find the cadence if you're not musical listen remember what you guys were talking about with the q and a before how do i develop my ear listen listen listen listen to people you admire listen to people you respect listen to people you look up to and say oh my god if i could be one fraction as good as this person i'd be happy listen be inspired listen and listen to the music because some of the most amazing voice actors you you hear and say wow micro perfect example everyone involves micro dirty jobs micro beautiful voice beautiful baritone everyone says wow what an amazing narrator he was an opera singer he was an opera singer before he got into narration that's what i'm saying if you're a singer if you're musical you're going to be able to do you're going to have you have a leg up you have an advantage over those who are non absolutely we're with mar cashman we're going to take a quick break we're going to get to your questions you can still throw them in the chat rooms so throw them in there right now so stay tuned we'll be right back and we'll talk a little bit more about good performance technique with mar cashman here in voiceover body shop don't go away this is ariana rattner and you're enjoying voiceover body shop with dan lennard and george widham v obs dot tv well hello there i bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice announcer guy on your new orientation training for snapchat were you this is virgin radio well okay we're not that innocent there's genes for wearing and there's genes for working dickies because i ain't here to look pretty she's a champion of progressive values a leader for california and a voice for america it's smart it's a phone it's a smartphone but it's so much more it's a the files are ready don't forget to pick up the eggs what time is hockey practice check out this song it's the end of the road for rent when hope is lost the i8 from bmw who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish hey it's j michael collins bet you think i'm gonna try and sell you a demo now uh i think they speak for themselves but i will give you my email it's j michael at jmc voiceover dot com now if dan will stop waxing this mustache for a minute we'll get back to the show you know i used to live in buffalo new york but now i'm in sunny southern california but no matter where you are when you need equipment strictly for voiceover there's only one place to go and that's voiceover essentials dot com and right now is the time to get with harlin hogan's signature series v o one a voiceover microphone they also have the fabulous sentrance mic port pro 2 with limiter in stock in fact it's the only version they sell now a limiter is a must have especially when recording oneself with no engineer to ride game for you by the way it's the most amazing limiter they've encountered it's impossible to detect and it's incredibly quiet and they've upgraded the porta booth pro quick script led light now it has two goose necks all the better to read your script go on over to voiceover essentials right now to get these great voiceover essential products well hey there hero it's david h laurence the 17th and it's time yes it's time in fact it's limited time this week is the only week throughout the entire year that my huge vo heroes pro training program is available the whole rest of the year it's not so if you want in if you want me to help you create a satisfying and profitable and successful voiceover practice i can't wait to help you the bonuses are amazing you get equipment you get training if you're here to figure out how to do better at your current voiceover practice or build a brand new one i'd love to help you all you have to do is go to vo heroes dot com slash go that's vo heroes dot com slash go do so before the end of the week and i will see you inside the program hi this is bill farmer and you are watching voiceover body shop it's great welcome back we're talking with mark cashman author of vo tips tricks tools and techniques to start and sustain your voiceover career and great book i mean i've been reading this one for since you first wrote it because i got to read the galleys for it so that's right you did because you you were you were kind enough to to give me a really nice testimonial and i'm actually i'm working on the sequel i i took a sabbatical this this summer and just so i could start to try to finish this book by the end of the year and um the the title for the second book i'm going to give it to you now nobody this is the this is a first this is an exclusive you have to sign an nda or anything no not at all vobs but the uh the title of my second book is v hyphen omg explanation i like that yeah so that's the that's the second book hopefully it'll um i'll finish it by the end of the year and it'll be out next year and um and then i'll also be doing the audiobooks of both my books so uh so 2023 is going to be a real banner here i've been working hard at it and and so i'll be debuting a lot of things next year excellent all righty well you're ready for some questions from our vast worldwide audience that is tuned in tonight oh yes i'll start with jeffrey headquist he says uh jeff tips for delivering the hey the guy next door conversational read yeah um you know what's funny is is that a lot of writers want the guy next door conversational read and the copy is not guy next door conversational copy unfortunately so that is a matter of just really working with a great acting coach who's going to be able to show you how to throw away a lot of copy uh when we first got into this uh we were constantly taught to billboard this and billboard that and stuff like that and and highlight part of the benefit and that and and all these copy points that they were doing but a lot of it now is thrown away and when i say thrown away it's it's just not again again not overly stressed or emphasized and there's a lot of upspeak and a lot of copy it depends upon again who's doing it so overall how do you get the conversational guy next door read you listen and rehearse and listen and rehearse and listen and rehearse and work with a great great acting coach an acting coach who's going to be able to give you and help you get to be competitive with current reads that are on the air now guys who have beautiful deep resonant voices like jeff and i jeff is a colleague and jeff and i've known each other a long time and i've worked with jeff and uh he's on air and just beautiful beautiful speaking voice a lot of the people in our business have to learn how to just relax and not sound as announcer as they used to yep it's not easy it's not i'm not saying it's easy yeah especially if you were an announcer george you get the questions one question from brad avenue you get number one he says hey guys here are a handful of questions from mark one the first based on your 25 years as voice talent and producer yet what observations do you have about clients and producers you are working with both the good and the you know it's interesting i've been doing this for over 44 years and i can literally count on one hand the number of assholes i've met in the industry and worked with literally even maybe even less than one hand virtually virtually everybody i work with in the business is smart got a great sense of humor super creative and easy to work with why because they have a career and they want to continue working so they want to make sure that they are easy to work with and that they're not assholes so the great thing about our business is is that you see we don't work for a boss we don't have somebody dangling a paycheck over our heads every single week and we can't tell the boss screw you but we're freelance talent and if anybody disrespects us or anybody acts like an ass always fuck you i don't want to work with you that's it and you just drop them as a as a client so the bottom line is we get to pick and choose who the people who we want to work with we want to work with smart creative people who are respectful and organized a professional and and aren't wasting our time and are going to pay us what we're worth that's the people we want to work with the other people who don't want to do that we cut them out of our lives we don't work with them is that kind of answer your question yeah that answers that one okay um what was the other ones there are a couple of others yeah brad's second question the gva a rate has a great rate god do you spend time explaining business basics to clients i.e broadcast tv digital radio project versus lower non-pro i mean when i talk to people i mean i give them a whole lecture like you know there's there's this tradition and judyism it's like if someone wants to convert a rabbi has to say three times are you sure you want to do this it's like a vampire inviting you in that's said that said um uh rates um look there are after rates there are gvaa rates which a lot of people use for a lot of non-union uh rates which which are terrific so it's always i'm i'm glad that there are union rates because that sets a minimum here's what i want people to remember voice actors to remember when they're putting a quote together and they're giving a client a price as to how much it's going to cost they're not just buying you they're not just buying your voice and your talent and your performance they're buying three things they're buying your voice talent slash performance that's one thing they're buying your studio time which you put together your entire studio and all the equipment inside of it they're renting that that's the second thing they're buying and the third thing they're buying is you as a producer director and editor they're buying your editing time your producing time your production time talent studio production they're buying three things so when you give them a quote you itemize the three things let them know they're buying three things rather than one all righty you get number three there hooray in preparation lifts slash edit slash versions question mark do you have a strategy for educating those clients and forgetting them to consider consulting the gvaa when setting up a voice budget yeah that's that that's a boy when you that's really getting into the weeds in terms of negotiations and that's something that you need to get straightened out ahead of time before you even get into the studio and that's why sometimes it's always good to have an agent because your agent can take care of that all that stuff is technically what your agent's supposed to do is negotiate on your behalf if you have to negotiate on your own behalf you better be armed and ready to answer any questions and justify everything there and make it as clear as possible if it's too complicated sometimes it's just worth it just just walk away sometimes um uh dealing with people who are uh difficult to work with sometimes it's just better to say you know what it's not worth my time all this stuff going back and forth with the case maybe if it is worth your time you got to figure out a way to make it clear and simple and stick to your guns absolutely grace newton has a great question here uh mark i remember you have specific thoughts on not punching the word and will you share that with us and and and she continues this is i see a lot of copy where a sentence begins with a conjunction like yeah but always always always how would you approach that i see no i i see the word but and i immediately change it to the word and oh no but and it's not a button a but it's not an ant but no a but a but is an exception a but is a transition a but is a you're telling a story da da da da da but and that's a transition point so don't confuse ants and buts but here is what you do with ants okay and is not an important word and is a preposition this this this and this so and a sub and is going to be placed in two places in a sentence inside of a sentence which is a bridge this this this and this and it becomes an ampersand or an n or an a n you don't hear the and and when and starts a sentence you use and as a springboard and this and that and those and them and these not and those and those and these and them and this it's a springboard inside of a sentence it's a bridge the beginning of a sentence it's a springboard the exception if the writer decides and asks you to hit the and whether either with italics bold underline or caps my pet peeve that said if the writer makes and important you hit the and if the writer doesn't make and important you don't hit the and because and is not important and most conjunctions and prepositions are not important and to but of with so from i mean it goes on and on and on not so but that said it's not important and is not an important word unless the writer makes it important yeah and a lot of times people just you know when we're talking we just throw and away and you rarely hear the d on the end of and that's exactly what i'm saying yeah and when you do say an and don't hit the d i rarely do i'm like like sometimes i gotta add the d in which is sometimes fun fun fun thing to walk and they'll be people who say can you please articulate the word and okay fine all right all right not a question from debobo george uh he says hi everyone mark are you the voice of menards no somebody else asked me that a couple of months ago and it's um it's my doppelganger and and and it's interesting as scientists have been comparing doppelgangers and seeing that they actually have some similar dna even though they're not related how do you like that well that's true all right ivan sherry asks mark would you please address how voicing auditions differs from voicing bookings uh huh well they really shouldn't should they no because well here's the thing okay you do your audition when you do your audition if you are picked that's what i call demo love they fell in love with the demo they fell in love with your audition and all you have to do is reprise what you did in the audition that's what they're expecting that's why they picked you so it's the easiest thing in the world to do the directed session because they picked you based on the audition no pressure nothing unless the night before the session they say hey dan uh we've had big changes in the copy and just a whole different set of directions on the story gone in another direction um uh we still want you but uh but uh can you come on uh you know maybe a half an hour early so we can discuss all right that's rare that's rare most of the time 99 of the time you do an audition they pick you you're going to reprise what you did in the audition and they're going to be so happy yeah or even better they use your audition that's the best and still pay you for an audition that's right they do you do an audition and they say hey no need to do a directed session we're going to use what you did on the audition yay fine great just make sure you spell my name right on the check Linda Joyce Minor uh let's see here uh and she says I've been in your classes when doing commercials talk to a person or to a group she says in quotes hardly any copy is ever written talking one-on-one hardly any copy in the world is written well enough to be considered realistically talking to one person the overwhelming majority of all commercial copy you are talking to a group of people you're talking to a large audience of people and you're just explaining everything about your product and service it's that simple it's that simple anybody who says to you just pretend like you're talking to one person i'm sorry they don't know what they're talking about the overwhelming majority of all commercial copy can be framed as presentational you're presenting in front of a group always always got to keep that in mind you're not talking to one person you're hardly ever talking to one person once in a blue moon once in a blood red moon will you ever have copy that you could realistically say yeah i could see talk telling this to one person because any other copy you'd say to one person they'd look at you like you're off your meds and some of this are uh j or is black has the last question is black how are you doing oh hey mark dan in george uh you mentioned having a welcome or try this mindset what's the general approach for the announcer of radio tv spots approach for fast tags other than saying that boy there's a lot here other than saying them clearly and quickly is there a general approach for legal fast tags i've been getting a few auditions for these lately in these specs real guy with great legal skills no pressure just be cool calm collected and glide through with a brisk upbeat matter of fact vitality talk to what they said yeah that's all you have to do is just do what they asked you to do and then you'll be fine i you know no there's no you know other other than uh than post and and doing a little uh you know little you know time compression for a legal tag um you're just gonna go as quickly as you can possibly go and and and hope you don't go over there's live announce live that anybody who's on on the air is these people it's funny this snobs in our business say oh you're from radio you don't oh you'll never make any voiceover that's bullshit everybody who's on on the air knows more and they're pinky than most voice actors know in their whole body about articulation and projection and timing and and and understanding what this you're talking about and and page everything they understand everything and on top of it they're in live live in front of millions of people millions of people well no yes we don't have that kind of pressure when we're doing stuff we have e-learning stuff we're in our little studios live announcers people are on the air they they are they they are killing it man they're doing so many millions of they're multitasking beyond that microphone so no there's no trick for speaking a legal tag faster other than practicing and just again the nbc announcer test if you can get through the nbc announcer test really really quickly it's like saying giggity you know the seth mcfarlane can say giggity ten times in a row ten times in a row flawlessly you have that kind of vocal control you can get through a legal tag quickly all righty mark cashman author of vo thanks for being with us if people want to get a hold of you i know if people want where's your website let's see sue where's his website it should be right there somewhere there it is commercials dot com there it is right there and and mark at cashman commercials dot com marc is my email address people can contact me anytime i'm around like a donut and um what else what else what else uh again i'm planning on having my book out next year so anticipate that i can um you guys how many years now have you been 11 and a half 11 and a half years it is right now it is such a well oiled machine it's scary but it is so entertaining you guys put together so much stuff and so in such a short amount of time and you give everybody a reason to keep on contributing which is great thanks mark we appreciate good work congratulations congratulations and thank you i'm honored to be on your show anytime and we're always honored to have you all ready we'll be right back and wrap things up into nice tight little ball right after take care guys and thanks for your questions before time began there was vobs dot tv watch or else 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 voice actor websites dot 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 voice actor websites dot 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 voice actor websites dot com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish don't try it yourself go with the pros voice actor websites dot com where your via website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what it's that time of the show where we talk about source elements the creators of source connect which is a tool for pros the one to record voice actors all around the world that can't be in the studio and of course that's been a big part of life the last couple of years not being able to be physically in the studio the beauty of this technology now is that a lot of the work that could have only been done by actors locally in the city or where the studio is can now be cast and and be performed by actors any place and that's a huge plop huge pro of having tools that are this well respected this reliable and sound this good you know the fact that now voice actors can do the kind of work that traditionally had to be cast and and done in this in the local city can now be done remotely and that's source connect enables that if you want to get into using source connect if you want to be familiar with it you want to start playing around with it head over to source dash elements dot com and sign up get your account started get the 15 day free trial watch the tutorials absorb all the learning content there and get started so that you understand how it works and you'll be ready when that next job comes along that says must have source connect thanks for listening thanks for sponsoring us and we'll be back to wrap up right after this this is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mendez and you're enjoying dan and george on the voiceover body shop all righty well that was a rush hour of voiceover tips it's always a fire hose with mark yeah fires of knowledge absolutely uh let's see here next week on this very show we'll have tech talk number 86 which is an hour of just amazing stuff all the stuff that we know make sure you tune in for that we'll have that out next week the promo i'm not sure which one i'm going to use but we'll see you've got a webinar coming up for twisted wave tomorrow yeah it's tomorrow if you do miss it don't worry it's all always recorded and available for pay video on demand that you can catch later but either way whether you watch it live and show up tomorrow at 3 p.m. pacific time that's september 6th or if you missed it and you want to catch it and reruns they're always going to be at the same place george the.tech slash webinars and that one's going to be on audiobook narrating using twisted wave excellent twist wave great for long format narration great program for that we need to thank our donors of the week of which there are many many like 949 designs jonathan grant kasey clack christopher apperson sarah borges philips appear tom pinto shelly abaleno brian page patty gibbons rob writer greg thomas a doctor voice ant land productions shanna pennington baird martha con don griffith tray moseley diana birdsall and saundra man miller all righty uh thanks to our sponsors harlan hogan's voice over essentials voice over extra source elements vio heroes dot com voice actor websites dot com jmc demos and world voices dot org the industry association of freelance voice talent uh thanks to jeff holman lots of questions tonight we love it we love it when people are tuning in when we do it live and give us those live you know in real time questions uh so thanks to jeff for doing all that great work there uh sumer lino hopefully things are a little cooler where she is our technical director uh let's say it's down oh it's down to 100 here in my backyard so it's cooling off just a little bit thanks sue for a great job tonight and of course lee penny just for being lee penny well you know the voice over business ain't easy but we're here to help you at your home studio and bringing you the people that can give you all the great tips in making sure you are the best you can be as a voice actor uh in the meantime it really comes down to this if you're if it sounds good it is good i'm dan Leonard and i'm george wittem and this is voice over body shot or vo b s have a great week everybody we'll see you next time stay cool