 Yeah, we make people show up early to troubleshoot all their stuff. So you're you're ready to go. All righty. OK, so here's some of the questions I may just ad lib around some of these because we ask these all these questions all the time, you know, like, you know, a little bit about your background, because I'm always impressed that you were traditionally trained Shakespearean actor, which I think is something that is really, really important for for audio book work. How many books do you do at a time? What's involved in how you produce them? How many books can you hold physically at the same time? One hand and all standing on one foot. How do you book your work? And everyone wants to get an audio books. Why do you think that is? And then I want to get your thoughts. I may jump ahead, depending on how much time we've gone through here about the state of the audio book industry in twenty twenty three and your thoughts on A.I. Sure. Mm hmm. You know, I could if my wife's listening to an audio book, I'm like, is that an A.I. voice? She likes to listen to its speed sped up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Well, once it's sped up too much, you don't know at that point what you're listening to. I I would disagree a little bit only because I have so many friends of mine who are blind. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have heard them. I've heard the sound because it's so high pitched when it gets sped up that I can hear it coming out and it almost sounds like Morse code. They wait, wait, they're pitching it up as well as speeding it up. No, by speeding it up, the pitch it will listen at least to an untrained ear like mine. The way it comes out, it sounds like Morse code. The words are so rapid. However, yeah, yeah, I got lots and dashes. But the emotional investment is still the same. That's interesting. So you can you can hear it and ingest it. You can still hear the emotion or lack thereof. So who knows? Maybe they can. I actually haven't specifically asked one of them. Can you can you tell me for sure whether that's A.I. or not? Yeah, but they probably could. And you're probably right, because they're so tuned. Yeah, they're super tuned to their whole world. Yeah, exactly. They have like it's it's when you lose a sense, the other four are heightened, obviously. It's like so your other four become heightened, you know, super in some way. Yeah, like I saw a video of a guy who has no sight ride a bicycle by echolocation. Oh, Jesus. He was literally making clicking sounds. Oh, my God. Like like doing something like that. And he could navigate by the sound bouncing off of objects and trees. That blows me away. I mean, it wasn't going 30 mile an hour. But I mean, it was riding a bike at a deep, you know, 10, 12 mile. Yeah, it was really impressive. It was really impressive. So I mean, it's amazing what you can do. OK, all righty. I think we're good. Yeah, the website's updated. Let's see. Yeah, we're good there. And the Facebook, I need to post the thing. But we should be ready to go. All right, there's the proverbial. Two minutes. Echo, that's gone. And we're at. To meet that. Now, how do we do this show? We've only been doing it for 12 years. Eventually, we're going to figure out how to get it right. The problem is software changes all the time. The websites change all the time. It's a constant moving target. Oh, that's I like that one. Look at that. Yeah. How many episodes have you done? Well, this is episode of Voice over Body Shop, which we started eight years ago or seven and a half years ago. This is episode number two forty nine. But we've also done ninety nine tech talks. So add those together. And that's how many shows we've done since twenty fifteen. And then we did about three hundred and forty four. Yeah, thank you for Mr. Matt, plus play a plus the U.S., which was in the two hundred and two hundred and thirty range, something like that. We were we were approaching three hundred. So yeah. So we're coming down near a thousand episodes one of these days. So if someone wants to watch them all, they have nothing else to do. You know, I got it again. I do get another pandemic in order to get somebody that much time. But I'm going to shut my mouth because I don't even want to jinx it. OK, I do get the occasional I want to get in a voice over. And I just say, go to V.O.B.S.D. TV and start watching. You got plenty. You got plenty to get caught up. And then I usually never hear from them again. They don't like the show. Or they realize there's a lot of work involved. All right. All right. It is five o'clock. Are we ready? She's counting me in here. OK, I got to remember what to say. OK, three, two. Hey, it's time for Voice Over Body Shop. How's everybody doing out there? Oh, tonight we got a guest and a great guest because believe it or not, this is our 12th anniversary of doing Voice Over Body Shop. You can throw that up there now, Sue. There we go. All right. And because we're celebrating 12 years, we have a very, very special guest. Our good friend, Scott Brick. Say hi, Scott. Hey there, it's good to be back. It's great to see you guys. Great to have you. All right. If you've got a question for Scott about audio books or anything else that he's willing to talk about, I guess, throw it in the Facebook chat or in the YouTube chat. And depending on where you're watching and we will get to that question, too sweet, whatever that means. I think that means right away, afterwards, after our second, you know, during our second segment after we do the first break. Anyway, you ready, George? I'm ready to go. It's Voice Over Body Shop with Scott Brick right now now. It's time for Voice Over Body Shop brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan's signature products, Source Elements, the makers of Source Connect. VoiceOver Heroes become a hero to your clients with award-winning VoiceOver training. VoiceActorWebsites.com, where your Voice Actor website doesn't have to be a pain in the butt. VoiceOver Extra, your daily resource for voiceover success and World Voices, the industry association of freelance voice talent. And now here's your hosts, Dan and George. Well, greetings, everyone. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop where V.O.B.S. All righty, 12 years. This is actually the actual 12th anniversary is March 22. But since it's March 20th, thank you. Thank you very much. We've been doing this show for 12 years now. I mean, literally since since I was in Buffalo when you were in Santa Monica. And it has been quite the journey. And we're just going to keep going here. It's what's like, we don't get bored with this. This is what we do every day. And if we got bored with it, we would go do something else. I was looking in the archives. The last e-wabs East West Audio Body Shop was episode 195 on July 6th, 2015. Yeah. So V.O.B.S. has been happening since 2015. So we've been doing the V.O.B.S. version for a lot longer now than e-wabs, which is kind of mind blowing. Yeah, considering we used to do it every week. That's right, we did do it every week. Now we're doing the flip flop, the interview and the tech talk. And I think it paces out lovely. I hope you guys agree. Fresh, fresh content every week. And speaking of fresh content, we have a great guest tonight. Let me introduce him because we want to have as much time as possible with him. And Scott Brick is an actor, writer and award winning narrator of over 800 audiobooks. Wow, including popular titles such as Washington, A Life, Moneyball, Cloud Atlas, A Princess of Mars, the whole born series by Robert Ludlum and many other high profile authors. He also coaches talent and does many appearances in webinars and DO conferences. One of our favorite people here on the VoiceOver Body Shop. Let's welcome back Scott Brick. Scott, how are you doing? I'm great. I'm much better now that I'm seeing you guys again. So great to be here. All right, we'll take that as a compliment. I did a show for my booth downstairs when it first opened. I want to say it was 2010, something like that. Then I did another show. We were at V.O. Atlanta. It was a live screen on stage. I did another one that came to your playstand. I think it was my fourth time here with you guys. And it's always a pleasure. Oh, wow. Over 12 years. That's once every three years, if my math is cool or something like that. Which is amazing in itself, if you know anything about my math skills. Anyway, yeah, it's always great to have you here. And of course, you wanted to come here this time because you wanted to see the improvements to the bathroom. I wanted to see about the last time that we did this, it was in person. It was before the pandemic and I fell. I am just a man in love with your bathroom, Dan. It's just the way it is. The way that you have decorated that thing. You got an old floor model radio and you hollowed it out and you put a you put a sink into it. I just went there as an old time radio fan and just went, oh, my God. How do I get one of these? How do I make this happen? Well, you know, you can come and use my bathroom any time you want, Scott. So it's can you give me a key? Sure. Yeah, I'd be wonderful. Give him the bathroom door code. Right. Anyway, you are like you are the guy when it comes to audiobook narration, as you can tell. I mean, over 800 titles. I mean, I did like 40 and I thought that was a lot. Tell us a little bit about your background and your training and what brought you to to doing audiobooks? My training is I I mean, when I got into college, I went to UCLA in the theater department, which is really interesting because now I'm back at UCLA teaching in the theater department. They brought me back to teach their grad students, their graduate acting students, audiobook narration, which is crazy. Been doing that for about seven years now. And you know, look, we were talking about our off camera as we were getting set up. I did a lot of Shakespeare in college as well as afterward. I did 10 years on and off with a traveling Shakespeare company. And and I think it's really important for voiceover performers because there's one really valuable tool that you learn when you're doing Shakespeare in Shakespeare. The the text is everything. However, there's punctuation. And as I've always said, Pat Fraley and I agree on this. There are times you have to dishonor the punctuation. And I think when the more you perform Shakespeare, the more you realize that there are going to be times where if you followed the punctuation in the text slavishly, it would not serve the author's intent. If if that was the case, then you would you would you could pronounce this line this way. Who do you think you are anyway? Yeah, you know, the fact of the matter is punctuation doesn't exist. There's no such thing as punctuation in human speech. All there are are pauses and full stops and drifting off as you come to the end of an idea and you just kind of run out of what to say. And, you know, authors since the dawn of time have come up with this system where we try to approximate those pauses and full stops and what have you. And you have to realize at some point in order to get the author's idea across, sometimes you have to dishonor the punctuation. And I think Shakespeare was really certainly helpful for me in learning how to do that. Yeah, did you do any other classical type of theater along along with Shakespeare? Sure, yeah. One of my I think that my favorite experience ever on stage was playing Serena which is certainly a couple of hundred years more recent than than Shakespeare. I think it was written in 1898, but it was set not long after Shakespeare's death. Yeah, 1640, I think. And so, yeah, I did a lot of what I called long hair rolls. And I had the oh, my God, I had the longest, craziest, longest hair. And thank God, none of those photos exist. That would be genuinely embarrassing. There's pre-internet, is that what you were saying? Yes, don't go looking for them, anybody. Don't go looking. So how did you? So you studied theater, but you were saying that you actually had a course in audio book narration. Is this what you've been doing since the starter? Was there, you know, like working at McDonald's in between there? I worked. I worked at a at a at a bank in Beverly Hills for seven years right when I got out of UCLA. I did this while I was doing Shakespeare because the Shakespeare was a was a part-time gig. And and I wasn't able because the Union rules at the time, I wasn't able to get insurance. And as a result of it, and I have diabetes. So I stayed with a desk job, the the bank job for seven years. And I will never forget my my former pastor. He had gotten out of the ministry and he had become a coach, a private coach. Can your own personal Tony Robbins and he I hired him to try to because I wasn't happy where I was and like, what was it doing what I felt like I was born to do. And he he said to me one time after like six or seven or eight or ten weeks of just bitching and moaning about my day job, he he looked at me and there was no smile on his face. There was no sense of of being facetious or anything. He said, do you need permission to quit your job? And I said, what? He said, look, we meet every week and you say the same thing. You say the same thing every week, but you're not. You're not changing anything. You're not making that change. And I'm wondering if you need permission to quit because if you do. I give you mine. You have my permission to quit. Great advice. It really is. It really is. And I have found myself doing that with a lot of voice over people in in whatever genre, flavor of voice over they're they're working in, whether it's Promo or radio or, you know, or audio books. My my say, Suzanne, when she was when I the day I met her, she said, well, I'm I've got to I've got a job that I'm working and and I kind of need to finish that. It'll take me about six months. But then I think I'm going to go full time. And I said, well, why not quit now? Not not in a way to be like provocative. But I'm always, well, why not cut the cord right now? Follow your dreams. And she said she worked for an event management corporation. And the event was the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday with, you know, 20,000 of his closest friends at the Irvine Spectrum. And I was like, oh, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, stay stay in that for six months. That makes all the sense in the world. But afterwards, I'm always, you know, trying to encourage people to to make the leap. Yeah. Once again, we're talking with Scott Brick. Be talking about audio books. And if you've got a question for Scott, again, throw it in the chat room. You know where it is if you're watching on Facebook or if you're watching on YouTube live, we're also on LinkedIn now, too, on the voiceover body shop page on LinkedIn. I'm not exactly sure how it works or if it works. I just clicked go to LinkedIn and so it should be working anyway. So how many books can you do at a time? Because I'm going to assume you either try to one at a time or you've got several projects going at the same time. I don't recommend doing more than I would neither. But no, it's horrible. You know, as you all know, we're we're about to leave for via Atlanta and up until about half an hour ago, I was working on a Tom Clancy book that I'm not going to be able to finish before leaving. I'm going to have to pick it up when we get back. And I know that, you know, in the 10 days because we're going to New York afterwards for the audio awards and such, all the audio book festivities. By the time I get back to my booth, I'm not going to remember what I did with any of these characters. So I'm dropping markers left, right and center. I'm like, oh, God, oh, God. OK, the most I've ever worked on at the same time is for titles at once. And you wouldn't recommend doing that again. That was a special kind of awful. Yeah, I got it done. I'm sure it is. What's involved in producing your books? When you get you get a gig from somewhere, what's your process of what goes into, you know, preparation and recording and then sending it wherever it is it's supposed to go. I have two first steps, one for me and one for somebody who works with me. You have to know how to pronounce everything, whether it's a word, a phrase, a proper name, an acronym, you know, forward operating base in the military. FOB, it's FOB, right. And I always thought it would be called an FOB because calling it a Bob like a like a watch Bob from a hundred years ago. I thought, no, that can't be right. But I called my best friend's brother, Colonel in the military. And I said, dude, I really need your help. I'm working on a I'm working on a really high profile title. And I need to know that they talk about forward operating base. Tillman. It was a book about the life of Pat Tillman, who died by friendly fire. Who's the former NFL player who died tragically in Afghanistan. And I said, I need to know. I said, FOB. And he goes, oh, no, it's Bob. I said, are you sure? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I know. But here's the thing. And I start to explain it. And I feel like I was mansplaining to another guy. Right. And finally, he said, Scott, not to interrupt you, but I am calling you from Bob Tillman, which I got to be honest, was a little in a little humbling. Sure. OK, I'm going to shut the hell up now. You have to do things like that. And so I rely on my researcher, George Weisberg, marvelous guy. If anybody in the audience wants to hire him, please do. He's a freelancer. George. George Weisberg, two S's at Gmail.com. He's wonderful. He's got a whole staff. He can help you. First time I get a manuscript, I send it off to him. As he is working on it, what I do is I look at the text and I have the first thing I have to do is determine who is the protagonist. Most people think that's a really easy decision to make. It's the lead character, but it's not. The protagonist isn't the lead character. The protagonist is the character who changes. Look at Star Trek, right? William Shatner was the type, you know, he was the first name in the credits. He's the captain. But he's not the protagonist. The protagonist is Spock because he's the one who changes. Same thing. The Big Bang Theory. It's not Leonard who Johnny Gisecchi. I know he's the main character in the credits. No, it's Sheldon. Sheldon is the character who changes. So identify where the change occurs and then map it. I do kind of an arc. OK, whatever the issue is, if he is an intolerant human being here, but at the end he is far more tolerant over here. Then every time that issue comes up, I have to raise the stakes each time. So by the time that we get here, it's not a surprise. All right. That's right. And well, and preparation is important for anything you do. But for audio books, I would think that some guys say, well, I just read through it, you know, I can read it cold. And, you know, if you know the author, well, you can sort of get away with that. But, you know, it's I would imagine that you do you read the whole book beforehand? Usually, I mean, I always try to. But there are times where I don't have a chance. Sometimes that's easier if it's a nonfiction book. I mean, please, don't think I'm making light of this. But, you know, if it's about a war, well, I know who won. If it's, you know, if it's about JFK, well, I know what happens at the end of the story. And I can get away with not reading it then as long as I'm prepared, as long as I've paid somebody who prepares me. But also, like even when I'm working on fiction, sometimes if I get a crazy turnaround deadline, hey, desperate, we need this in eight days, I'm not going to be able to do that prep. So I will pay somebody to read it for me and break it down into a very detailed book report, essentially. They break it down chapter by chapter. This is what the main character wants. This is what the main character needs in this scene. Those are two totally different things sometimes. So once again, we're talking with Scott Brick about audio books and reading audio books and narrating audio books. If you've got a question about that, again, you can throw it in the chat room because we have three chat rooms now. This is George. You said somebody actually chimed in from LinkedIn. Me. Oh, you chimed in. I jumped on the LinkedIn and typed into the chat on LinkedIn to see that it works. And it shows up right here in our StreamYard feed. So we see all three chats right here live on the show, which is awesome. No matter where you are, we can get your questions. That's right. So throw them in any one of those chat rooms and we will get to those questions in just a little bit with Scott. How do you book your work? I mean, how do you book book work? Hmm. I've got an X session coming up at VO Atlanta. It's called Book That Book. You know, how do you how do you land the gig? I have agents, of course, but my agents. The amount of work that I get through my agents are maybe a half a dozen books per year. You know, once I've already got a relationship with the publisher, the publisher typically comes straight to me. And I worked all the nuances of that out with my agent so nobody gets upset. I pay them absolutely their due, pay your agents, people. But then I've also got a very active production manager through my website. And when people are interested in having me do their work, this is typically if it's a. Hmm. An independently published author. They'll reach out to Gina, Gina Smith, my production manager. And she will she'll tell me about it. And she's like, OK, here are the broad strokes. It's a book about a guy who, you know, this, this and this. I've got things that I just don't want to talk about. I. You know, there are political issues. I just, you know, they infuriate me. And it's like, I don't want to live with that for a week. And I don't want to deal with the anger that's going to result from this. I've made it very clear we're not going to do any books about child abuse. I just I don't want to cry for an entire week of my life. So she'll give me the broad strokes and say, does it sound interesting at which point I say, sure, let's let's look it up. At which point she sends it to a mutual friend of ours, one of her best friends that I met through Gina. And she used to work at movie studios and she does what's called coverage for somebody who writes a screenplay. You send it into Warner Brothers or Universal or Paramount. Hey, would you would you produce my film? First thing they do is they hire somebody to do coverage for it and tells you what the themes are, tells you what the overall plot is. And then it gives you a spot for a recommendation. And she is so good at her job. She's been doing this for studios for so long that when she comes back to me and says, yeah, I really enjoyed this book. I'll say, great, let's put her on the schedule. How many how many do you have like lined up in a row right now? But, you know, looking ahead over the next couple of months. I filled out my production calendar a week ago. And I think we had 13 titles, which is about, you know, three or four months. Yeah. All right. Well, that explains a number of things. But everyone seems to want to get into audiobooks these days. George and I are working with people a lot of times. It's like, I want to do audiobooks. Why do you think that is? What is it? Is there an attraction to it? Yeah. Well, I think there's I look. Audiobooks are the only. Growing part of publishing, right? You've seen your copy of the L.A. Times dwindle from this size to this size. And, you know, print publishing is. I hope not on its way out, but it's certainly been relegated to a much smaller position. And audiobooks are growing. And I think the reason for that is. It's cultural. It's the fact that we we were read to as children. And I think we miss it. I think that's why we listen to audiobooks so much. I got interviewed by the Wall Street Journal years ago. And and it was I was, you know, you try not to lead the witness. You try not to, you know, try to, you know, lead, you know, for the for the answer that you're looking for as a reporter. They were like, do you think the importance of the growth of audiobooks has something to do with the proliferation of, you know, technology and the fact that we can now listen on our cell phones? Do you think you might have anything to do with that? And I said, no. I said, no. And then I gave them the answer that I just gave you. Oh, my God, you would have thought I'd farted in church. But it's it's it's a fundamental thing in culture, you know, we miss being read to. And I think as such, there is a certainly among voice over people. There is a, I don't know, just an overall. Cultural memory, racial memory, I think is another way that they've referred to it. And look, I work with a lot of people who are retirement age plus and they're trying to rebrand themselves. They're trying to, you know, start there. They want to make their golden years more important than what they were doing in their day job for 40 years. And so many people I know have said to me, I don't need to, to, you know, balance another checkbook. I don't need to do the job I was doing before. Hillary Huber once said to me, I don't need to do another tide commercial, please. I don't take that the wrong way. Feel free to hire me if you want me to do a commercial. But and I don't mean to to judge the people who are doing tide commercials. But as Hillary said to me, at the end of my life, I'm not going to wish I had done one more tide commercial. But I probably will wish I had done one more audio book. Because it's something that you can kind of leave behind you. Absolutely. That's that's a great way to look at that. Again, if you've got a question for Scott Brick about audio books, throw it in there. Here's a topic that I really wanted to get into you with a little bit, because I mean, as you say, you you teach, you coach, you you do a lot of webinars and because I keep seeing your face popping up just about everywhere. Hey, Scott, Brick's going to be here. Scott Brick's annoying, isn't it? And it's no, it's not. It's like, well, I'm glad I'm glad somebody's making a living. Give us your thoughts. And what is the state of the audio book industry in twenty twenty three? Stronger than ever, despite the worries about AI, despite publishing being on a bit of a downturn, not as bad as it was a couple of years ago. The audio book industry is in really good hands. And that's primarily because of all of the many disparate, varying voices that we have. Something we learned after the murder of George Floyd people started paying attention to things like representation and inclusion. And I think audiobooks have never been stronger since then. It's it's it's something I'm proud of. It's something I'm I'm proud of our industry for. It's not like I have anything to do with it. But I remember working with one of my dearest friends, Dan Musselman. He was the producer at Random House for many years and Penguin Random House, of course, after the merger. And he just retired recently and and. I asked him one time why he put so much effort into training newcomers. And he then challenged me. He said, well, you you work with a lot of new narrators. Why do you do it? And I said, I asked you first. And he said, I think our answer is the same. He said, the audiobook industry has been very good to me. It's given me everything I've always wanted in this life. And there will come a time where I'm not going to be in it anymore. And I want to make sure that the people coming up in the industry know how to appreciate that and how to appreciate the industry, how to perform in the industry. He said, it's kind of like when you're when you're doing a Shakespeare show somewhere in in one of the performances, if you're performing Shakespeare, you know that someone adult or child will be seeing their their very first Shakespearean production. And you feel this this pressure for a lack of a better word to make sure that you get it right so that they want to do it again. God forbid you're working with somebody who doesn't know what the hell they're doing and they do an audio book that is somebody's first audio book. And that person thinks, no, no more not going to do this. I'm not going to do this again. I'm like, look, I got everything I want in life from audiobooks. Right. What does everybody want? Everybody wants they want love. They want a career. They want a home. Well, you know what my fiance is an audiobook narrator. My career is as an audiobook narrator. I bought my house. I call it the house that books built. And I got all of it because of audiobooks. And I just want to make sure to the extent that I can that I help people so that when it comes their time to narrate books that that they know how to approach it. Yeah. Once again, we're talking with Scott Brick. And if again, you got questions, we got a few questions. We're going to get to in the next half hours. So what you still have time to get those in there quickly. Although I'm sure somebody else is going to ask about this. Your thoughts about how AI is going to impact the voiceover business or the and the audiobook business specifically. Um, I've been asked about this question for at least five years now. And I know George will appreciate this. I always quote Donna Fontaine. Whenever somebody would ask me about AI, I would say what Don said. I think he was being asked, why do you go to so much effort to bring people along in the car with you on your way to the studio every day? Why do you bring in so many newcomers who could potentially wind up taking your jobs? And Don replied, if you're thinking about the competition, your head isn't in the game. And I I firmly believe that. And yet I have had it pointed out to me by others in the industry who don't have my track record and haven't recorded the thousand books. You know, they say, well, it's easy for you to say. So since then, what I've tried to do is and frankly, we're doing a panel on it at Vio Atlanta, how not to get replaced by a computer. Can't wait to show up for that one. Well, that there was an author that I've worked with regularly for 20 years. And he talked about the reason that he chose me and I've been kind of debating, like, should I even play? It was on a podcast, the two of us were on a podcast. And and I was like, oh, this this might be helpful. But I would have it would be basically an author saying nice things about me. And I don't need any help to seem self-centered. You know, I don't want to be playing like a podcast. It says, you know, oh, get a load of him. But the things that the author was talking about, the reason that he chose me are things that I can't do. And so. It's. Frankly, tomorrow night, tomorrow morning. There's going to be an article in the Wall Street Journal. I was interviewed by them about AI, specifically about AI audio books. And I was called early this morning to verify a quote that I had given them to say there's accuracy there. But there's no soul. There's no soul. And there's something called the uncanny valley. Yep. And for those of you who are not aware of it, please look it up. It basically means that gap between, you know, what AI can do and what we need it to do. And in between, there's just no bridging that gap. No question about it. I think I think listeners. It's why I've always in terms of my teaching, I always encourage performers to strive for authenticity rather than accuracy. And I'll I'll define my terms. Accuracy to me is OK. You have to do a Hungarian accent. You go out and you put in a Merrill Streep-like amount of work to to learn the Hungarian accent. That is accuracy. But if instead you gave them a hint of that and you strive for. Authenticity, the emotional authenticity of the scene. That's something I mean, AI can learn and train itself over and over and over and over, but they cannot feel. So that's what I always strive for. Go for authenticity rather than accuracy, because I think the human ear can hear in authenticity a mile away. Very good. All right. Again, you got a question for Scott Brick. Throw it in one of the chat rooms, depending on where you're watching. We've got a lot more to talk about with him because he knows more about the audiobook business and just about anybody because he does more than anybody. Anyway, we'll be right back after these important messages. So do not go away. Voice of her body shop will be right back. This is the Latin lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendes. And you're enjoying Dan and George on the voice of her body shop. Have you noticed the specific demands of clients regarding our home studio studios? Are they at a professional level to record for broadcast? And what does that mean? To me, it means it doesn't sound bad. I've seen several now demanding cardioid condenser microphones. Some are great and cheap ones not so great. So how do you choose? It's like standing in the checkout line at the supermarket deciding which candy or mince you want to buy. So which is right for you? Make it easy on yourself and get the Harlan Hogan Signature Series V01A, the first and only mic designed for voiceover performers. Buy a voiceover performer. The V01A faithfully captures deep tones without sounding bassy and has a silky smooth top end that's never harsh. A perfect sound palette for both male and female voiceover performers. Order yours by Mayday and you'll get an ABS strap free to protect your mic from oops, go to voiceover essentials dot com, where you'll see all their great products made just for us voiceover people. Hey, everybody, it's time to now continue with our sponsorship roundabout or roundup is probably the right way to put it by thanking source elements, the creators of Source Connect and Source Live. I would say now they're two top tools in the toolbox for remote audio production. And the tools work seamlessly together at the production side. And they can also be helpful on the acting side, too. Mainly Source Connect is the one that most of you will interact with because it's the way the big studios like to record voice actors live remotely. It gives them incredibly good, consistent quality. It gives them perfect audio sync. So if you're having to record to a pre-recorded track, maybe you're doing looping or ADR or matching, you know, lip flaps, dubbing, whatever it is, it allows for all that to happen and be absolutely perfectly in sync every single time with great sound quality. And it allows that audio to stream straight into the producer's system, whether they're on Pro Tools or Logic or New Endo, whatever system they're using, your audio flows right in. If you want to be one of those actors who has that in their toolbox and is available to be booked on those kind of projects, maybe you've got an agent, maybe you're seeing it on auditions, get ready, get prepared. Go to Source-Elements.com and sign up for a 15-day free trial and start experimenting, learning and getting the training. They've got it over there. And if you need an extra bit of helping hand, we do it at George the Tech as well. Thanks Source Elements. Let's get on with the show with more sponsors and our guest, Scott Brick, right after this. So when you hear the word accents, right, you see a piece of copy with it or there's an audition that says accents required or maybe an audio book you want to take a stab at, what happens in your head? Do you get like, oh, I don't do accents. I'm going to pass on that one. What if you said instead, OK, let's do this. Let's figure this out and I can show you how because I was shown how. My accent coach is Jim Johnson. He's giving away free lessons this week. On the accent class and how to build accents from scratch. So just go to voheroes.com slash accents and get these free lessons. They're all this week. Next week we'll do a Facebook live. We'll open registration for the accents class. There'll be an early, early action bonus, but go to voheroes.com slash accents now and learn from my accent coach. That's voheroes.com slash accents. This is Bill Radner and you're enjoying voice over body shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, vobs.tv. And we are back with Scott Brick and we got lots of questions here from our humongous worldwide audience that is just chomping at the bit to ask questions. Can I ask you a question? Sure, you go for it. My question is, can I choose one of the questions? Because during during our commercial break, I went looking through the chat list and there's a question I would love to answer if I may. OK, go for it. Yeah, do you want to answer a specific one first to get started? Go for it. Specific one said what was the biggest thing you took away working with Morgan Freeman? I got hired to do a screenwriting gig with Morgan Freeman 20 years, 25 years ago. The biggest takeaway I got wasn't about screenwriting, although I learned a lot. The biggest takeaway I got was about voice. I'm sitting in a room with the Morgan Freeman. And and of course, you know, he's got the he's got the whole grandfather glasses going like he'll look down and then he's got that, you know, the the glasses down at the end of his nose. I'm like, hey, Morgan, can I ask you a question? And he goes, which scared the shit out of me? I'm just oh, my God. Oh, geez, you know. But I said, may I ask you a question? I said, what is what do you think is your greatest strength as an actor? And he spoke about his voice. But what he said what he said was my gravitas. He says, you can hear it in my voice. I got a voice that sounds really well lived in a lot of miles on it. And I went, yes, gravitas, there's no faking that. My God, if I could fake authenticity, I would have it made. But but I was like, OK, that's your greatest strength. And just, you know, as he's about to go back to reading my script, I said, follow up. What's your greatest weakness? And he give me the grandfather glasses again. And he said, my gravitas. He said, sometimes you use it. Sometimes you use it and you rely on it. And I realized that was the thing. Look, we've all known guys like, you know, live announcing, you got Dave Fanoi, right? You've got in audiobooks, you look at a guy like Stefan Riddnicki. These guys have got voices that sound like God is gargling with boulders and broken glass, right? They've got an incredible weapon. And yet, if that's all they're doing, it's a failed experience. They've both told me the same thing. They've both told me independently. I have never once booked a job because of my voice. I booked a job because I know how to tell a story with my voice. And when Morgan Freeman said that, I've got I got a refrigerator on my I got I got a magnet on my refrigerator. It says I wish my life was narrated by Morgan Freeman. But to hear him say that and to be so self-aware that that is both your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. I've I just I want to have a class every week where I can share that with with with newcomers. Don't rely on it too heavily. Great piece of that's a great story. If Morgan Freeman was narrating my life, it would be a lot more interesting. So it'd be a lot funnier for me. Certainly. Well, the first question in the queue, because it was written into the guys at VOBS.TV because they wanted to be in the front of the queue, it's from Craig Roberts. George, you get it. Yeah, he says, hello, Scott, back in the day long, long ago, when the world was holy, monochrome and high-fi sound was a thing. I was a pretty successful VO actor and narrator. I strayed into broadcast journalism and for some decades, but returned to freelance voice work about a year and a half ago, primarily in audiobooks. I'm just finishing my 21st project. But all all but all but six have been in this self-publishing realm. The other half dozen were first small, a small specialty publisher. So my question is, how does one break into the major publishing world? And how is self-promotion and marketing to the majors done these days? And what's the secret? Great, great question. When you were at the point in your career, when you're not making as much money, when you're working on projects that are independently published and produced, you have to be forward thinking. I always I always say to people, I'm playing the long game, right? Or when I'm feeling a bit more cynical, I say, I'm playing the long con. By that, I mean, I have always known what kind of books I want her to do. And when people come into the industry, sometimes they will be offered a job that they might not ordinarily want to work on. I worked with a woman once who's gifted British actress. She needed to make money. And she came to me for a business consult and I said, well, what is it? You know, what are you looking for? What do you want to do? And she said, I want to and of course in her plummy English accent, she said, I want to be the person that all of the publishers call when they need to redo, do another version of Jane Austen. And I thought, OK, great. And so we finished our meeting and I went, I looked her up before our next meeting. And when I typed her name into Audible, she had done about 20 books to maybe bring it back around to where you are in your career. But she had taken the low hanging fruit. She had done a lot of erotica and didn't realize that she should use a pseudonym. And the very first title that came up under her name was. Bend me over. I'm not here. I'm not here to poke fun at her. She she took a job, she got paid for it all good. I will admit that there was a part of me that goes, oh, I know all the people at Audible and I just looked this up. Oh, they're going to see my search history. But nevertheless, the fact of the matter is she took the low hanging fruit. And I had to tell her a very uncomfortable truth that, you know, if Simon and Schuster or Harper or Penguin Random House wants to do a new version of Jane Austen, they're not going to hire the women who did bend me over. So what you have to do is as you are doing these low paying gigs, maybe it's a it's a revenue share, you have to choose books that are the kind of books you want to be doing. Because even if they don't sell, what you do is you make sure that there is a really good sample. Indicative of your best skills. You put that up on your website and you send it out to everybody and you let them know I did this book recently. And I think it's more indicative of of my skill level than the last sample that I sent you. You always lead with the work that you want to be doing. Hillary Huber, I mentioned her before, Hillary Huber had a wonderful saying. She said the industry opens up the door. The industry lays out the welcome mat in a different place for everybody. Your job is the moment the welcome mat gets laid out, walk through the door. And once you're in the door, go left, go right, go straight, go diagonally, whatever, go towards where you want to be. Lead with what you want. And that's typically how you if you can do that with the jobs where you're cutting your teeth, getting your sea legs under you. If you can do that on those when you send a sample to publishers, they'll go, and they will think of you for that kind of job in that particular genre. Great answer. Jeff Holman asks, last time I saw you, maybe this is a little personal, but last time I saw you mentioned that you were having gastrointestinal issues that made it difficult to record. Sometimes are you doing better? He also has issues with the stomach making noises sometimes. How do you deal with that? Lesson. Yes, I did. I had this I had this bizarre syndrome. Nobody could figure out for two years. It's called gastroparesis. And your stomach just basically forgets how to do its work. I gained 40 pounds in all of this. I know that we deal with a sedentary lifestyle, but still it was like my stomach just wasn't doing its job and I've had a couple of very encouraging meetings recently and I am not dealing with the stomach issues or the stomach upset. I won't go into the details, but I am not dealing with it as much as I was two years ago. I appreciate you asking and I am grateful every day that don't want to jinx it. But it's been for the last month, it's been in my rearview mirror. So good, good to hear. George, good to hear. Yeah, Larry on YouTube with a question. Are audiobook narrations ever live recordings? And if so, do you have any advice for when an actor is struggling with a performance and needs to take a short break so they can reset during a remote recording session? Yeah, if you need to reset, you can handle it a couple of different ways. And by live, you know, I don't know if he, you know, live means a few things. Does that mean literally live streaming like a performance like we are at this moment, or does he mean live recording with a studio who's listening to him while performing, you know, right? If that's the case, then it's being done like an old time radio show, right? And there's nothing really that you can do. But if if you if it's not going to be coming out for weeks or months after you do your work, my first recommendation is to lie and tell your your engineer, your producer, your director. Hey, give me a minute. Sorry, I've got whatever it is. I got my doctor calling on the phone. I got I have to run to the restroom for give me. And then when you come back, come up with an excuse to start over. But it's important that you do this early on. Now, I have done the opposite. I recorded an entire book by Brad Meltzer. Brad Meltzer is a thriller writer, and I had never read any of his work. It was his third book. It was called The First Council, and they flew me to New York to record it 20 years ago, and I had to do this new to me recording technique called the Punch and Roll, which I'm assuming a lot of people in the audience know what I'm talking about. But it's essentially editing on the fly. I had never done it before. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. And I was so conscious of you know, taking a deep breath, like, are they going to have to edit that out? Am I going to are they are they going to have to stop recording and then punch in from my breath so like, OK, OK, all right. Well, I'm listening to the three seconds of playback. I'll take my breath. And then when they're recording, I just I just go into it with that. I had no idea I was concentrating so much on the technical side of things. Yeah, I lost track of. Well, the authenticity to go back to I was I was striving for accuracy rather than authenticity to go back to my earlier metaphor. And the opening of this book was unique because it was it was a first person narrative and it was very funny. And it was and at times poignant. And it basically ran along the lines of I'm afraid of spiders. I'm afraid of snakes. I'm afraid of the evil clown that lives under my bed and only comes out at night. I'm afraid of disappointing my father. I'm afraid of the cancer that killed my mother. On and on. There was even I'm afraid of the cultural significance of Barbie dolls, you know, it was all over the place. It was an entire page. And that's how long ago it was. It was an actual eight and a half by eleven printed out page. And at the end of this long run on sentence, which was a whole page, a whole paragraph, it said, but I'm not afraid of power. Which is why I work in the White House. And isn't that a marvelous setup? It's poignant, it's funny, and it's it challenges you like, oh, shit. Are we going to go now? So I to get back to the question, I recorded that entire book. And it was nagging at me all week long that that first day I was worried too much about the technical aspect of things. So what I did, and again, you don't have this option if you're doing it live in front of a studio audience, but because this was going to be edited, I told our producer or director, I said, hey, and he's getting up and he's walking out of the booth. He's like, OK, nice working with you. And I said, hey, no, hang on, hang on. I need to rerecord the first page. And he says to me, no, you don't. I say, yes, I do. He goes, no, you don't. You got it right. And I said, you can die right. I got I got the words correct. I got them in the right order. I pronounced them correctly, but I didn't understand the character. I need to rerecord that opening page. And I swear to God, he gave me this big, long, drawn out. Fine, yeah, it's like somebody wouldn't want to go down for lunch. Right, yeah. And because look, it was Friday night, you know, Friday late afternoon. And he wanted to go home and I get it. But I worry about all the other narrators that he worked with over the years because I was brand new, but I wasn't going to take shit from anybody. I don't do that now, but I was the same back then at the beginning of my career. I'm like, screw yourself. I need to do this. OK, this is going to be the best way to do this project. Years go by and that author, Brad Meltzer, we were at an event. It was about 10 years ago and somebody asked him. He was up on stage speaking and they said, how did you choose your audiobook narrator? He said, I wanted to find somebody who got me. He said, I had two books, two different narrators. I wasn't really impressed with either one of them because it just didn't sound like they understood me, but that one book that I did, the first council, I knew that that opening page was a challenge unlike any other. And I knew that if they got it, whoever it was, they hired to do it. If they if they could get through that page, then they got me. And that is the only reason that it's 20 years later and I've done 20 books by Brad Meltzer, he would have fired me like he did the first two. If I had not gone back and said and made a fuss and said, I need to redo this. Even if it was only at the very beginning, just so that people's first impression, the first time they hear my voice working with the author's words, that it's so that would be my advice. Again, very long answer to a very short question. That would be my advice, make sure that you are happy with it. And if you need to redo something, redo it. We're not wasting tape anymore. Yeah, there's no tape. Anyway, Scott, thanks so much for for joining us again. We've been wanting to have you on for some time. And the pandemic just gets in the way of everything. But now we're getting back out. If people want to get ahold of you for some of your training, where would they write or where would they communicate with you? Scott, Rick, Dotcom, Scott, Rick, Dotnet. If you go to my website in the upper left hand corner, the little box that you click, there's I think there's one for coaching and there's one for events. Like if I'm doing classes or something like that. It's it's typically those buttons have all the information for whatever you need. Very good. Alrighty, thanks for being here, Scott. Really appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Just make sure to send me that that key because I might need your bathroom in another hour and a half or so. OK, well, if you're driving by, just you know where I am. See you in a few days. I can't wait to see you in Atlanta. Absolutely forward to it. Alrighty, George and I will be right back to wrap things up into a nice tight little ball right after this and get set up for tech talk to bicycle. You're still watching VLBS. While avoiding scams and other pitfalls, VoiceOver Extra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders. When you join the online sessions, bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, home studio set up in equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for VoiceOver success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports. It's all here at VoiceOver Extra dot com. That's VoiceOver XTRA dot com. In these modern times, every business needs a website. When you need a website for your voice acting business, there's only one place to go. Like the name says, VoiceActorWebsites.com. Their experience in this niche webmaster market gives them the ability to quickly and easily get you from concept to live online in a much shorter time. When you contact VoiceActorWebsites.com, their team of experts and designers really get to know you and what your needs are. They work with you to highlight what you do. Then they create an easily navigable website for your potential clients to get the big picture of who you are and how your voice is the one for them. Plus VoiceActorWebsites.com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your VoiceOver career flourish. Don't try it yourself. Go with the pros. VoiceActorWebsites.com, where your VIA website shouldn't be a pain in the, you know what? We are the World Voices Organization, also known as Wovo. We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent. VoiceOver is a complex entrepreneurial business. Wovo is there to promote the professional nature of voice work to the public, to those already established in their voiceover practice and to those who want to pursue voiceover as a career. Membership benefits include a supportive and creative community, a profile and demos on voiceover.biz, our searchable directory of vetted professional voice talent, our exclusive demo player for your personal website, our mentoring program, business resources and our video library, our annual WovoCon conference, a fun and educational weekend with other members with a chance to learn and network webinars and great speakers and weekly social chats with other members around the world. If your world is voiceover, make Wovo part of it. World Voices Organization, we speak for those who speak for a living. Yeah, hi, this is Carlos Ellis-Rocky, the voice of Rocko, and you're watching VoiceOver Body Shop. I think it's always great when we run into Scott Brick, whether it's in a restaurant or on the street or at a conference, always, always great to run into him because he's got all the right answers. Anyway, next week on this very show that you are watching right now, we'll be doing Tech Talk number 99, believe it or not. Right. And if you've got a question, a tech question for us, now would be a super duper time to throw it in one of our chat rooms, whether you are in Facebook or in YouTube Live or LinkedIn. Well, that's right, LinkedIn is now happening. That's right. So and then we've got some other great guests coming up. And we maybe we may record a segment in Atlanta, too, because there'll be lots of great people there. Let's see here, we need to thank our donors of the week, by the way, like Grace Newton. Robert Liedem. Steven Chandler. Gracie Clack. Casey Clack, even Casey Clack pulling a trump there. Jonathan Grant. Oh, man. Thomas Pinto. Greg Thomas. A doctor voice. Ant Land Productions. Martha Kahn. 949 Designs. Christopher Apperson. Sarah Borges. Phillip Sapir. Brian Page. Patty Gibbons. Rob Rader. Shauna Pennington-Baird. Don Griffith. Trey Mosley. Diana Birdsall. And Sandra Mannweiler. I need to thank our sponsors to Harlan Hogan's voiceover essentials. Voiceover Extra. Source Elements. VoHeroes.com. VoiceActor.com. And WorldVoices.org. The Industry Association of Freelands Voice Down. Yes, I'm president. Yeah, you don't have to worry about that. I need to thank Jeff Holman for doing a great job in the chat room tonight. Lots of great questions, folks. And of course, of course, Sue Merlino, our amazing director, who gets it all done and makes it all look like an actual TV show. And before we go, I just want to remind you, we have a coupon code at George The Tech that expires at the end of March. It's it's our biggest coupon we do. Twenty percent off everything on the website. So to get that, it's GTT2, numeral two, point P-O-I-N-T-O-H. GT2 2.0 gives you 20 percent off and that expires March 31st. And there's three more spots left at VO Atlanta from my X session on Thursday at noon, if you want to get into my mic to mp3 training from start to finish. Three hours of 12 people. Pretty intimate group. Three hours of George Wood. I'm going to have to poke my head in there when I when I arrive. Anyway, well, that's going to do it for us this week. And thanks again to Scott Brick for joining us and giving us his wisdom on audiobooks. We're going to re-rack it now for tech talk because you're here live. You can stick around and you can ask your tech questions, which I think is really cool. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you know, this is not an easy business. Voice over, audiobooks, all this stuff. There's so much to know. But George and I have really come cut it down to this. If it sounds good, it is good. I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Woodham. And this is Voice Over Body Shop or VO B.S. See you next week later. Thanks, Scott. I just wanted to say thank you guys. That's all I'm going to get back to the studio. All right, that's a great hour. We really appreciate it. Of course, no, it's always a pleasure. I will I will look forward to seeing you in person. Yes, safe travels. I'm in three years. Yeah, really. All right, take care. Bye-bye. All righty, some class act that man. He is definitely one of those guys. Yeah, sure is. All righty. So a little bit of tech talky stuff here. The stuff that you want that voodoo that you do. And I do so well. Voodoo that you do, yeah. What a rant about an ad I see on on YouTube. It's the first ad if you type in Scott Briggs Voice Over Body Shop. You know, it's the first ad at the top of the ad. And it's an ad for one of those voice over coaching companies. Yeah. And it's a large diaphragm side address condenser mic pointing towards somebody's mouth from the end. You mean like that? Yeah. And the double whammy, no mic cable. It's just, you know, it's stock photography. It's the same thing. It's just every time I see that I shake my head. Come on, guys, make an effort. OK, all right, all right. OK, we got lots of tech. Again, you got a question for us through it in the chat room. OK, are we ready to sue? All right, here we go. Checked out four, three. Hey, it's time for Voice Over Body Shop. Tech talk. And it's tech talk. We're almost at 100. Number 99 99 episode when we first started doing this and where we split it off and started doing just tech talk. That was it seems like it was yesterday, but apparently it was like 105 plus years ago. Yeah, it was a long time ago. Yeah, no, it's a great time. What a great run. Yeah. If you've got a question for us about your home voice over studio problem, piece of equipment, question about technique or how to do something, throw it in the chat room right now. Should you upgrade? Do you really need to upgrade? Do you really need to do that? Well, we'll see. Anyway, that's coming up. Are you ready, George? I'm ready to go. Let's go. It's time for Tech Talk with Voice Over Body Shop right now. Voice Over Heroes become a hero to your clients with award winning voice over training voice actor websites dot com where your voice actor website doesn't have to be a pain in the butt voice over extra your daily resource for voice over success and world voices, the industry association of freelance voice talent. And now here's your hosts, Dan and George. Hey there, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is Voice Over Body Shop or V.O. B.S. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Can you get Jeff on just to get him to say that? I know. It was fun when we were in the studio together. It was great to have him there with us. Yeah, we'll get back into the studio again pretty soon. Yeah, like next week. Anyway, we're going to see all these people at V.O. Atlanta and we'll have already been there. So we'll see who comes home. It was great. It was fabulous. Yes, we had a great time. Yeah, anyway, again, if you've got a question about your home voice over studio, now would be a great time to throw it into the chat room, because that's what George and I love to digest is your questions and your problems. Because we take your problems and take them elsewhere, hopefully to the right place. But, you know, at least not where you are right now. You know, I was thinking about this the other day. You know, we're always helping people with their home voice over studios. And the questions and the comments that we get from people, it just reveals how little good information there is out there. A lot of misinformation. Somebody is like, you know, they were a voice actor for a year and they're like, I use this microphone, you should too. Well, what gives them the, you know, the authority to do that? And or one of my favorites. I'm using a DBX 286 a why I'm using an RE 20. Why? Who told you to do that? There is just so long with you in radio. Yeah, that's what I always ask. And what station did you steal that from? Anyway, so you want to get the right answers. You want to be able to make sure that when you're starting your home voice over studio or improving it or upgrading it or you're moving and you want to get it right, you need to talk to the two guys that have more experience at this than anybody. Some guys are, yeah, they're audio engineers. Yeah, they give you what they do. And the fact of the matter is, is if you've never done it, you're not going to take the 20 years to learn what it was that they're telling you you should do. Instead, how about two guys that actually know how to explain it? We make the complex simple, which, by the way, is the definition of genius. Is that true? Take that as a compliment, you know, all right. If you want to work with us, if you want to learn from the guys that actually know what it takes to make your audio sound the way it's supposed to, you can work with us. And if you want to work with George, who has more services than one can count and he's trying to shove them all into one website, where do they go? They go to GeorgeD.Tech. Yes, we have a lot of services because we've broken it down by software. So we've got a growing panel of experts, including Dan, that can be booked on our website and they're all broken down by expertise. So when you're looking at a service on how to get up and running with Adobe Audition, you're only going to see technicians and, you know, tech coaches who know that software very well and you're going to see their availability so you can immediately pick the right people, pick them on the time that works for you and instantly book it right through the website. We've spent a month getting it tuned up and running on the new platform. It's been quite a journey. We're still fine tuning things. It's kind of like a car that's not quite warmed up yet, but it's you can feel the power coming on and we're really excited. So that's GeorgeD.Tech. The site is shockful of information and resources. So thank you. And Dan, your website, you beat me to it. You got your new website up a few months before mine and you're over at. I'm over at HomeVoiceoverStudio.com. That's right. That's what it says. Yeah. And I've got, you know, I don't I don't do a lot of the kind of stuff that George does. I primarily teach and consult. And a lot of people who are beginners like, what do I do? All right, let's look at what you need to do. And and then we go from there. There's no one size fits all answer to a HomeVoiceoverStudio. Every room is different. Every voice is different. And and how to do it right really depends on you because I look at your lifestyle. How does where we're going to set you up affect everything else you do? And because it's a HomeVoiceoverStudio. So if you want to work with me, go on over to HomeVoiceoverStudio.com. If you've got your studio set up and you want to get an idea of how good your audio is or how bad it would be amazed at the stuff I hear, you can go over to the HomeVoiceoverStudio.com and click on the specimen collection cup and read the instructions and submit it to your audio to me for twenty five dollars. I will give you a very thorough analysis of what is going on with your audio and and how to correct it. Or if it's really bad, you know, if anybody who's worked with me knows, I will ask a lot of questions and figure out what is going on with your stuff and then we fix it and then you don't have to worry about your technology. You just hit record and be a voice actor, which is what I want you to do. Anyway, enough of that, even though we like promoting what we do, because that's what we do. It's time for George's tech update when when he talks about all this new crap that's coming out and has so much to do with voiceover. And, you know, if you're a gearhead, yeah, but there's lots of different things going on out there and George keeps track of it. So what do you got this week? Yes. Well, the first thing out of the gate is the thing I can't talk about, which makes me crazy. Don't talk about it. I can't talk about it. But by the time this airs, I maybe I can talk about it. It's complicated. But while hopefully at VO Atlanta, I'm going to be able to announce a new audio interface product that I've helped co-design and I'm really excited. This is something I've wanted to see come to light for over 10 years. So it's it's exciting, but I can't I can't say exactly what it is and who's making it until we ink the contract, which is going to happen any day now. We have it in the inbox. Just it's the problem with a group of people designing something. Everything takes four times longer. But we're going to be able to announce it at VO Atlanta. And by the time you see this, it'll probably be public. But anyway, I don't know. OK, moving on. Next up, I think that I maybe have mentioned this. Dan, did I already talk about the Road NT one fifth generation? What about it briefly last week? You know, I and people are asking me about this. Yeah, well, it's got it's got a lot of a lot of buzz for a good reason. First of all, it's it's two hundred and fifty dollars. So it's it's twenty dollars cheaper than the fourth generation Road NT one. What that does not have a built-in 32 bit float ad converter, right? So it's a real head scratcher that it's actually less expensive. I don't even understand it. How are they ever going to sell another NT one fourth generation? I have no idea. But the fifth generation's out. I'll tell you this about Road. They do a really good job, I think, of explaining their products with their videos on their site or on their YouTube channel. Check out the Road YouTube channel. Watch the videos that where they explain 32 bit float recording with the NT one. And it was it was a great demonstration. It kind of bends your brain when you're recording engineers like us. And you know that clipping is bad, right? You cannot record audio where the waveform goes beyond zero in the conventional sense, right? This product breaks that convention. And now with with the Road NT one, when you use the USB interface, there is no more needing to set gain. So that means sometimes the levels are going to be low. Sometimes the levels are going to be extremely high. Like literally clipping, like wave right off the edge of the screen, right? And you're just going to think this route, this audio is ruined. But because of this 32 bit float technology, trust me, go to the website, read, I am not going to bore you, not even going to dream of boring you with the details about 32 bit float recording. But check out the website and watch their videos explaining how this technology works and what actually happens is if the waveform goes above zero, you can take the entire clip and just normalize it. And that's it. No more clipping, no more distortion. The audio is just corrected at the levels that you optimal levels. And it's done. So needless to say, 32 bit floats get a lot more buzz lately in this microphone. Definitely has put it in the limelight because of its affordable price point. It's built in. Yes, you will plug into a pro audio interface, which I think is the way most of you still will want to use it. But this secondary functionality of being a USB interface with 32 bit float is kind of interesting. And if we all learn how to kind of work with it and use it, you might find it to be the ultimate mic for recording video games and animation because no longer do you have to worry about clipping at all. So this is a really interesting new tech. And we're just we have to figure out how to work it into our production workflow and see if it's really the way to go. I'm still a little skeptical, but with those videos I've seen from road, I'm starting to become a little more convinced. I can't wait to try it myself. I think I'm going to buy one and give it a shot. It's at that price point where it's it's something you could just say, you know, I'm just going to buy one because at 250 that's a pretty reasonable price. And it's also, you know, it's still a what they consider the world's quietest studio condenser mic. That's a tall order. It's very close to a couple others, but at 4 dB self-noise, it is an incredibly quiet mic. It's a very clean and accurate mic. And cheese, it's very hard to find to really fault with that mic. So even if you're never going to us to use us, use the USB to have that in the mic as a secret weapon or backup or throw it in your bag, plug it in when you travel. Is it is a compelling thing? It's really interesting. Yeah. Yamaha has had the AG-03 and the AG-06 mixer audio interface gadgets for a really long time. I remember seeing them at Nama maybe 10 years ago. And I was really impressed. Well, they've since released the Mark II versions and they're just all the better now. I set up one for a client last week and it impressed me. It was clean, no noise, etc. Well, they've they've decided to take that same form factor of the AG-03 and the 06 and grow it up a bit to the AG-08. And what makes the AG-08 interesting? I don't know. I think it's kind of less about the hardware and more about the sound drivers. And again, I haven't seen it long enough to dig in and really understand exactly the way the sound drivers actually work. But if I was to dare share my screen, which, of course, because the browser tab is on the wrong browser, I can't share it easily. Let's see if I can fix that real quick. I'm going to put this browser tab over on this browser. Boom. And then I'm going to go back here and share that tab. There we go. So here's the AG-08. So it kind of looks like an AG-06 or three, just with a lot more stuff going on. More buttons, more everything. Hopefully you're seeing that. Yeah, we are. Yeah, excellent. So, yeah, it's an it's a interface that's still fascinating. And I think this is an interesting choice from Yamaha. It still only has two microphone inputs. So what they've done here is where if you're looking at the Roadcaster Pro, which has four mic inputs, the Tascam competitor has four mic inputs. The Zoom has four mic inputs. They decided to say, look, the vast majority of people producing podcasts are not doing them in person, right? Maybe they're lucky enough to have one co-host. But mostly, mostly it's done remotely. And so what they've done is baked in a lot of capability for having multiple streams of audio coming in remotely. So it's got multiple USB, I'm assuming sound drivers or channels. This is the part I'm not clear about. I have been throughout the show in the last show reading this website, trying to wrap my brain around the audio routing portion. It is not entirely clear to me yet exactly how it breaks all these channels down and experiences so they don't create all these circular loops. I don't know yet. But if it does it the way I'm thinking in my head, they did it. It could be killer tool, but we'll have to see. It's pretty expensive at six hundred and thirty bucks. Well, I don't know what this extra eight thirty one price is. It's the made up full price, I guess. But it's pretty pricey compared to what the Roadcaster Pro 2 does that Dan has or actually Dan has the one, but the two has even more capabilities. But here's the thing. What I like about it is that it doesn't it's what I like about is what it doesn't have. It doesn't have an LCD screen. I'm trying to make that one size. It doesn't have an LCD screen, right? So that means it doesn't have a tiny little menu and a million touchscreen buttons and lots and lots of things to get lost in underneath the hood. It's all physically on the face of the unit. And I am really big into hardware that gives you that kind of access to all of its features right on the face of the unit. And that's why it's kind of expensive for what it is. It's more expensive to have a lot of buttons and switches and buttons that light up and all this kind of stuff. Then it is to just have a single touchscreen. So anyway, that's the AG08. If you're interested in getting into more of an interview, podcast or live stream scenario and you like the Yamaha stuff, I do. This is something you guys might check into and take a look at. Moving on. Audio Technica, one of my favorite audio, one of my favorite headphones for studio use, the ATHM series. They have the M50 that's kind of like their that's their like, you know, this is our Magnum Opus headphone for studio use, right? I think they maybe have one above that with like leather and some other, you know, really high upscale features. But the ATHM 50 is definitely a what do you call it, a benchmark headphone? It's just extremely, extremely popular. Well, what they've done was they've added a headset microphone boom to it. And not only does it have a boom microphone on the headset, it's I understand the actual same capsule from an AT 2020. So now you've got a really good sounding great studio grade pair of headphones with a entry level studio microphone built right into the headset, which I think is really impressive. Do you think it has the same electronics as the the AT 2020? I don't know. I saw I saw a reviewer who claimed that it's the same capsule as the AT 2020. I didn't see that on the website. So that's some kind of proprietary knowledge. I can't verify that for myself. But that means you've got a decent quality condenser capsule on a headset mic. And I think now that's going to allow a headphone mic to become more useful. I would say for sure, audio books or really long form stuff where you want to be able to physically move around and have a little bit more comfort in your in your work without having to be in a microphone sweet spot all the time. The mic's already already in the right spot. So I'm really curious about it at two hundred dollars. It's a pretty reasonable, you know, the headphones without the mic are one hundred and forty, one hundred and fifty, I think. So it's pretty fair. And they also have a USB version. And frankly, for me, that's probably the one I would get because I'll use it with my laptop whenever I'm doing zoom sessions and everything else. So it's very compelling and it's the ATH M 50 X S T S. Oof, what a mouthful. But check that out. It's got XLR and it's got quarter inch XLR for your mic and quarter inch for your headphones. Very interesting little product. SSL has a driver now for the SSL to used to just be plug and play. Now, there always was a driver for Windows, but on the Mac side plug and play, but now there actually is a driver you can install for the SSL to which adds a loop back. But unfortunately, that loop back is not the kind of loop back that we need in voiceover for playing back a take. This loop back is really meant to be a way to record two additional tracks of audio coming back to your computer. So it'd be perfect for somebody who's a voiceover actor and wants to dabble in some podcasting because now you can record the return from Zoom or Riverside or Source Connect or whatever the remote end is on. And it will record it on two additional tracks in your DAW. So if you're using Adobe Audition multi-track, you can have your mics on one and two and your guests come up on tracks three and four and that can help in production, getting a better mix and all that. And that is just built in now. It's just a feature that you can add at any time by upgrading the driver. And that's cool. I like this trend of hardware companies adding a feature just by giving you an update. Now, I get really nervous about firmware updates. I'll be very honest. When things go wrong with your equipment, I've got one right here on my shelf. When things went wrong with my equipment, that drove me absolutely bonkers on more than one occasion. It was because of firmware updates on this little guy. And that's why it's sitting here on the shelf because it pissed me off after after a couple of times, put it in the time out and I'm back on my Apollo. Which certainly isn't immune to firmware updates, but I've never had it create completely unreliable performance. So anyway, firmware makes me nervous. So if you're going to try a firmware update, make sure you know how to roll back if you don't like it and never do it in the middle of a critical critical production time. OK, lastly, from Audio Technica. Also, I mentioned this to Sue because she was looking for a good little mic headphone, not headphones, but speakers to use just like as a utility speaker, not for mixing records, just a little thing. They have the ATSP 65 XBT speaker. Now, it looks a lot like many of the other USB portable speakers. It doesn't look all that special, right? But it's an Audio Technica. So I would think that it has a pretty decent, natural, realistic audio reproduction. But important to most of us, it has an actual line input jack. It's not just Bluetooth. So you can plug that directly into your studio rig and use it as a convenient way to do just a quick edit without headphones or do that punch and roll style recording also, you know, without headphones. So it could be a good little companion for those in a small cramped booth type space. All right, that's it for tech update. Dan, right? Well, that was a lot of stuff. Greens, I know I came in saying I don't know what I'm going to talk about. Sure enough, there's always something to talk about. Always something. Yes. So here's something I want to talk about. I think I'm going to start calling this segment Dan's basic basics. Sure. Because it's, you know, generally I'm going to talk about stuff that is it should be blatantly obvious to you, but because there's so much misinformation out there and in everybody's got their own way of doing things. I figured, let me at least give you my take. My years of experience and on technique and doing voiceover and recording and fixing other people's stuff. You can trust me. I hope. Anyway, let's talk about pop screens. You know, they make great fly swatters, except, you know, the the arm on it can be a little flimsy and stuff. You see so many pictures of voice actors. You know, and if indeed they are voice actors, because a lot of them, if you type in like looking for pictures of voice actors, they're all singers. They're all got headphones. There's a and they're working the mic really tight like that. That's great if you're a singer and you're trying to be like, you know, maybe not like Adele, who tends to really belt out stuff. Say someone like Billy Eilish, who talks like that or sings like that. Yeah, I may be old, but I still like Billy Eilish. So anyway, pop screen. What is it for? Generally, when people ask me, my standard answer is it's to prevent Celine Dion from spitting on a $10,000 microphone. They make them. And the fact of the matter is, again, like most equipment that we use in voice over, it's not designed for voiceover. It's designed for making music because voice actors have to be you have to sound like you're at an actual distance from somebody when they're doing music, whether it's rap or pop or, you know, whatever, when they've got singers working in a recording studio, they may be working the mic really close and they want to have something that's going to protect the mic and perhaps prevent plosives. But as you can see this thing, Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers. It sort of helps. I'm of the opinion. And I've I've been roundly criticized by numbers of people for this, but they're wrong, including my agent who wrote in in Facebook a couple of years ago, is there's some idiot out there saying, you don't need a pop screen and went into all of this stuff. You know, maybe it'll help that hitting that. And and I'm like, my agent is saying this about me. And so I immediately texted him and I said, what are you talking about? Why would you go out there and say, I'm telling people something stupid like that? And he's like, no, no, I wasn't talking about you. It's somebody else. If I was talking about you, I would have said some walrus-faced doofus was saying this. So he may have been talking about me and he didn't want to insult me. But there look, there's lots of different techniques to how you use a microphone. You'll notice that I don't use a pop screen. You'll notice that, well, George has one on there, but it's more for decoration, I think, than anything else. Spitcar is a spitcar. It's a spitcar, OK, because that's an expensive microphone. Those are our own webs. That's right. We had those made a few years ago and they were great for. They were for a specific microphone, but the Apigee mic. It's right. The Apigee mic, right, which is a plosive magnet. It is. It is not a very forgiving microphone, for sure. Anyway. To me, it's all about mic placement. I can go Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers on, you know, in perpetuity. And I will not get a plosive. Nobody complains about plosives. I, you know, I my recordings have no plosives on them. And I don't use a pop screen. Why do I have it set like this? We've talked about about mic technique many, many times. And but if you have it, the the mic upside down like this, why people say I got to do it up right at right side of this. Again, it gives you free view of your copy. You can move your arms and you have the mic at the top of your periphery, your upper periphery, and you can talk and not think about being on a microphone. Whereas this guy reminds you that you're on a microphone and is very distracting and reminds you that you're a voice actor and you have to talk a little bit louder, which isn't even true. Psychologically, I say take your pop screen and again, use it as a fly swatter. And you know, how many people do we know that have made them out of pantyhose? Yeah, that was your hand. The fact of the matter is unless you're really producing music and you're like doing some heavy vocalizations and stuff like that, you really don't need a pop screen. I think one one reason you might as if like if you're using a 416 for doing promo work, which very few of you are doing, you might want to have one on the end there. And then there's those phone things. Everybody's like putting phone things on their microphone thinking, oh, it's a windscreen, it'll stop. It's called a windscreen for a very specific reason. And that is for using it outside when there's wind, you know, because you'll get otherwise. So there's no such thing as a pop screen. It is something to protect your microphone. Now, you can all write into me and say you're full of baloney. But guess what? The proof is in the the placement and the proof is in the placement. Your thoughts, Mr. Wittem. Yeah, no, the proof is in the placement. It is really all about my placement. Yeah, there's no doubt some mics are really, really plosive sensitive. Others are not as much. It's interesting. I'll I'll preach the same thing to my clients all the time with a KTL103 or whatever, and some of them still manage to pop it. I don't really know how I'm not physically there with them usually. I don't know if they move their head a lot. I don't know if they have a tendency to lean up towards their mic. But whatever it is, some people still catch the occasional plosive, as was happening with me with this this Oc818. So for me, this little very, very unobtrusive pop screen was was helpful catching those, but I would never use this as a substitute for my placement ever. It is just I look at it as a spit guard, just like the Celine Dion thing Dan said. It's just a spit guard to catch something flying out of my mouth and not hitting my $1,200 microphone capsule. And that's the way I look at it. You don't want anything that's obscuring the mic, making it larger. God forbid, a big round foam ball that makes the mic the size of a soccer ball. Now you have to work that mic instead. What a nightmare. Really, you want you want something unobtrusive and doesn't get in your way and pop screens get in the way most of the time. Yep, absolutely. Alrighty, we got a ton of questions tonight and you have no idea how happy that makes us because it makes the next half hour even easier. Anyway, we're going to get to all your questions and there's tons of them. Again, if you want to throw one in there, please do in one of the chat rooms because we are on Facebook Live. We are on YouTube Live and now we're on LinkedIn Live. And I know somebody's watching because somebody on LinkedIn sent us a question or a comment or something like that. We're everywhere. So stay tuned. We'll be right back with your questions here on VoiceOver Body Shop. Tech Talk. Don't go away. This is Arianna Ratner and you're enjoying VoiceOver Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, V-O-B-S dot TV. Have you noticed the specific demands of clients regarding our home V-O studios? Are they at a professional level to record for broadcast? And what does that mean? To me, it means it doesn't sound bad. I've seen several now demanding cardioid condenser microphones. Some are great and cheap ones not so great. So how do you choose? It's like standing in the checkout line at the supermarket deciding which candy or mince you want to buy. So which is right for you? Make it easy on yourself and get the Harlan Hogan Signature Series V-O-1A, the first and only mic designed for voiceover performers by a voiceover performer. The V-O-1A faithfully captures deep tones without sounding bassy and has a silky smooth top end that's never harsh. A perfect sound palette for both male and female voiceover performers. Order yours by Mayday and you'll get an ABS strap free to protect your mic from oops, go to VoiceOverEssentials.com where you'll see all their great products made just for us voiceover people. Hey, everybody, now's the time when we get to thank source elements because they support our show still years and years later. We thank them because of the consistency and the success of their main product Source Connect, which has been set up in studios now. I don't see the first time I set up Source Connect. I think it was for some voice actor promo folks who wanted to back up or wait to extend their studio when they were out of town, but still wanted to connect to ISDN. So my friend Steve made this thing go to an ISDN to Source Connect Bridge. I think that was 2006. The rest is history. Source Connect has been consistently used for a very, very, very long time. And that consistency and track record has made it a tool of choice for producers around the world. Yeah, it's not free. It is not free, but here's the deal. The reason it's not free is because of the support and servers and the technology behind it that make it work as well as it does. It's not just about creating a clever product, a magic box or a very free or inexpensive software, it needs support. And that's what they give you. Source Elements support is fantastic. Really, really is. They know their products and they know a lot of the things that you're using to so they can answer some basic studio questions as well if you're really stuck. So get set up at Source-Elements.com. You can get a 15 day free trial. You can even just get a two day license for that occasional gig. It's really not as unaffordable as you might think. Thanks so much. We appreciate their support. Let's get on to those questions right after this. Right. So I've taught thousands of people how to be successful at voiceover. And before I start teaching them, I always ask them, what is it about voiceover that makes you frightened or keeps you up at night or stops you from doing it? What are your concerns about voiceover? And more often than not, what I hear is accents and dialects. I'm not good at them. I don't know how to do them. I don't know how to build one from scratch. I don't know whether what I'm doing is good enough for professional VO work. I get it. I absolutely get it. And I don't teach accents and dialects. And I've never found a class that I could recommend to people that was really fantastic until now. When I saw Jim Johnson teach a sample lesson from the accents class, which he and Dan O'Day have put together, I was just blown away. Amazing. It's it's creating a toolkit that lets you build any accent you want from scratch, and they're great. Like I do pretty well with accents and dialects. I'm going to take this class. I'm not just going to recommend it. I'm going to be in the class as a student, right? And I'm not getting it for free. I got it ponied up just like everybody else. You want to take the class with me? I'd love to have you. And I've arranged for a discount if you act fast. So go to the URL you see on the screen, voheroes.com slash accents and register for the class. Do so before Tuesday night. You'll get the three hundred dollar discount. If you mention my name in the comments box on step three. So when you get to step three, there's a comments box to say, hey, I love David. I want to take the class with David. I want to sit next to David in the class, whatever. Mention my name. You get a three hundred dollar discount if you act before Tuesday night. And I'll be right there in the class with you. I can't wait to see you succeed at accents and dialects. Voheroes.com slash accents. And I'll see you in class. Hi, this is Bill Farmer, and you are watching Voiceover Body Shop. It's great. Yes, we are back with Voiceover Body Shop. Tech talk, the stuff you guys love to hear about. Now, so at Voiceover Atlanta, we, you know, people are always coming up to us and asking all sorts of questions and I use this and I use that. And we generally come up with the right answer because the answer is something that is something that we've probably dealt with before. But we got a lot of questions tonight. Some of them are kind of left over from last week with with Scott Brick and well, we'll start off with Patricia Andrea. She says, I want to give audiobooks another try. I would love to know how how Scott organizes his files. Organizing files is not a big deal. I mean, it's just number of them and keep them in the folder with that particular project. And then she's asked, what format are there? Are there any presets that you recommend? She uses an Apollo solo and Twisted Wave but planning to switch to Adobe Audition. Good idea for audiobooks. Twisted Wave is great for audiobooks because it doesn't take up a lot of resources of your computer. So you can go on and on to do a half hour chapter or 45 minute chapter in an audiobook and it doesn't affect the computer. Of course, computers now have so much memory and and are so fast. They can they can generally handle just about anything. Adobe Audition is again, to me, it's the standard for what you would want to use for audiobooks or any voiceover recording, it's got the only workflow, I think, for for voiceover. And so use it that way. And, you know, somebody told me that I don't want to pay the 20 bucks a month. I'm like, then use audacity if you're going to be cheap. You know, it's it's worth it. It's totally worth it to have something like Adobe Audition. But, you know, yeah, I mean, I teach workflows for recording audiobooks from soup to nuts on Adobe Audition and Twisted Wave. And those are the two main ones, audacity. Yeah, that one too. And yeah, you can use either. Twisted Wave works fine. It is all about file organization. It's about storing all of your raw takes in one folder. Your pickups in another folder. Your edited comps or your final edits in another folder. You know, you just put things in folders, state organized as you go. And you'll always have redundancy because you've saved copies of your files as you go along. What people like about some more sophisticated DAWs, digital audio workstations, is their non-destructive editing. Right. So what they're doing is they're always keeping a copy of literally everything you record, no matter what you do. It's always stored and it's fine. The thing is, there's more file and data management that's required with those because it makes a lot more files. It fills up your hard drive faster. And there's a more steeper learning curve to learning how to work with these non-linear, non-linear editors, non-destructive editors, I guess I should say. And so there's a pros and cons to everything. But I think Twisted Wave is still quite viable for audiobooks and I know a lot of folks that do use it for that. In terms of processing presets, that's something I do, like I set up processing presets specifically for whatever you're doing. So if you're doing an audiobook and if you need to do the mastering side of things, check that out at georgev.tech. I have a whole thing about audiobook mastering and I will set it up on whatever platform you're using, depending on your DAW. In terms of the Apollo Solo, the processing I would use for an audiobook is literally just a high pass filter. That's it. I wouldn't use any processing at all. I would set the gain so that you're not even close to clipping. Record a 24 bit wave file. And you're good to go. You don't need any special settings on the Apollo Solo itself. Good. And that's the thing that the Apollo was for is it gives you all those plugins. So that's why people buy it, because I mean, it's I mean, it's made by by universal audio when there's they make great stuff. It's it's reliable. It's complicated. It looks the thing about is it looks unassuming, right? Friend little box with a knob and a few buttons. Yeah, it drives people crazy getting to learn how to operate the thing. It's got a very complex software audio interface, a software interface that goes with it. It's you know, if you use it for nothing more than basic audio recording and playing back in your headphones, you pay too much. Yes, Scarlett, Scarlett will do that. Fine, you know, for a quarter of the price. So just make sure when you're buying one, make sure you understand why you're buying it and then get some help to get it optimized for your use case. Otherwise, again, it is definitely a big waste of money. Yeah, I mean, it's you're having great equipment is is worthless if you don't know how to use it. And having it doesn't make you sound better. It's knowing how it makes you sound better and what you do with it. So every time someone says, yeah, you got to use this great piece of equipment. Think about it and go, is this something that is going to change the way I read copy and it's not if you've got your setup right. You can be using a microphone that is not five hundred dollars or an interface that's eight hundred dollars or six hundred dollars. You can go a lot less and it will sound the same. Believe it or don't. OK, well, carrying on here, Christine Dunford asks, George, can you give us your opinion of waves clarity plug in? Thanks. I don't use any of this stuff. Yeah, waves clarity is for when you're recording in crappy environments. So you've got noise that you can't stop today because you're just extremely unlucky that your deadline is today. And this is also when your neighbor is putting in a new sewer system or a pool or a pool. And there's machinery and jackhammers and or you're traveling and you're trying to pull off something that you normally shouldn't or shouldn't be able to do because you're in an urban environment, you're in a city and you can hear car horns. Well, waves clarity is probably the best, arguably, the best audio processing tool at removing that kind of noise. You know, it can do the kind of noise removal that nothing else can do at this point pretty much across the board because it can remove those random sounds and do it almost perfectly, like eerily good at doing that. And it's because it's using a neural network, which is a sort of a form loosely of AI technology. And so, yeah, it's pretty good. If you want to learn a lot more about it, I've got numerous classes about waves plugins, including the clarity plugin that you can learn a lot more about it and see a demo over at george d.tech slash webinars. Check out the stuff about waves. I have a lot of content about waves plugins. But the clarity plugin, it's pretty impressive, especially if it's still twenty nine or thirty nine bucks. It's kind of a no brainer if you know you're going to have to deal with situations where the noise is going to be really, really killing a gig. You know, it's like I got no choice. I don't have another friend's studio I can go to on a short notice. I'm traveling and if I don't get this job in, the client's going to bail and I'm in Italy and I have to record in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, who knows? That's that's what this tool is for. I would not make it part of my every day processing. It's a special sort of secret weapon. Yeah, you know, if you live in a noisy place, you know, otherwise, try and isolate yourself as best you can. This is this is an interesting one. George, could you demonstrate? I might be better at demonstrating this. How do you twisted wave to edit a video clip? Well, that I haven't done specifically how to cut and paste room tone over a click or a pop sound in the video. Please. Well, I didn't get a chance to prep, so I don't have a video. Well, I'm sure I could pull one up. But maybe if you want to go to the next question and I could prep for this while the next question is being dealt with and then maybe I could pull off demo demoing it. OK, well, Gloria Mason Martin asks, or as she says, I've been in my studio since 1999 with Owens Corning 703 on the walls, hopefully covered up a shirt, KSM 32, a wonderful microphone and an interface with sound forge since the beginning of time. In other words, she's a PC person. I'm now getting ready to move and what are some things to watch for in a new space and keeping the KSM 32? That's not too tough. Look for a place with a walk in closet, not an 18 inch sliding door closet. Those are by far the best things to have. One, because you can close the door behind you and actually move. And two, especially if it's an interior closet that doesn't have an outside wall. That gives you insulation from all the outside noise. It doesn't stop all the noise from inside the house, but it can help a little bit. And the KSM 32 is just a great microphone. It's going to hear a lot of stuff. But if you isolate yourself really well, that does a whole lot to improve your sound on the back end. So look for a place with a deep closet. I've been working with some people that have had some great closets to work with, and we've had fantastic results with that and using stuff that you wouldn't think of. You know, it's like, I don't want to spend a whole lot of money. Do you have any duvet covers? Do you have any heavy curtains? And we've used them and it sounds just as good as any one of the studios. If you do it right. Heavy, massive. Yes, yes. You know, go to Goodwill. They probably got some old drapes sitting there. They may smell a little weird, but that's for breeze. Yeah, watch out for the smell, but you know. OK, you're going to help Jeff Holman now with this question about using video in twisted way. You got that set? Yeah, I think I have a way to do this now. I'm going to. I'm going to share a window and chances are it's only going to show that the main twisted wave window and not the video window. Yeah, you guys don't see the video window. I knew that was going to happen. Maybe I can try sharing it one different way. See, there's a video. This is a video right now. That's what I have open on my screen. It's a video, but it looks in twisted wave just like a regular audio file because, you know, what I'm doing here is let's see, can I do a window? I can't do a selection of a window. I have to do the entire screen, which is a massive screen. OK, fine, I'll do it. I'll do it anyway. Entire screen. There we go. And then I'll just make this bigger. Oh, there you go. That works. There's the video window right there, right? So I've taken an M4V file. That's just what I literally the first video that came up. And it looks like this. So the video file is floating right over the audio file when I hit play. You're going to you may not hear it because I don't think I have a routing set up yet, but if I did, you would hear the audio. Let's see. There it is. There they are right down there blowing. And I can't hear a thing. That's a client of mine boasting about his how soundproof his studio is, which is always, you know, it's always a good feeling when you get someone telling you how good the studio sounds that you designed. So OK, so this is this is not the greatest example. But what he was asking was how do you do the room tone paste technique in a video? Well, it's it's the exact same technique as if it was just an audio file. Just that there happens to be a video attached to the audio, right? So if you want to replace something with room tone, let's say you want to remove that door sound, right? And so you want to select this piece of room tone over here, copy it. You want to select the room you want to select the thing you want to magic erase, right, the door sound and you want to use special paste. Just make sure special paste options are correct. Should be on replace, check all the boxes and make sure attenuation is all the way down. And now when you hit command Y, it will replace the length of the thing you don't want with the thing that you do want, which is that piece of room tone, right? So which doesn't interfere with the sync of the video. It doesn't screw up the sync of the video exactly. And in here. Now, he's breathing in that room tone. You can hear him go. So that would be bad room tone. You would not want to paste a breathing room tone over and over, but you get the idea. That's all it is. Once you have a clean room tone sample copied, command Y will let you paste over and like there's a little click sound there. I'll just magic erase that with one tone. Right, it's just it's just gone. So that that is that's how you would do it. So it's just special paste just with the video. Now when I go to save this file, save as it's just going to save it in the same file format that the original was in. I can convert it if I need to, but I don't necessarily have to. And I don't have to mess with any codec settings. Just save, give it a new file name and move on. That's it. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's other ways you can do that as well. I mean, in editing the, you know, in twisted wave, but that's that's an interesting feature to have that, you know, in Adobe Audition, you can throw in a video window and you can completely sync things up. That it's it's really fabulous. Yeah, you get the next one from Max Goldberg. All right. What, Mike, is George running into the Apollo and is there any key or processing on the signal? It sounds nice and full. Well, thank you, George is nice and full. Yeah, yeah. Well, I had a nice big Neuruse lunch today. So yeah, that helps. Yep, I am processing and you know why? Because I'm doing a live show and I want to sound as good as I can. So what am I doing exactly? Well, this is an Austrian audio OC 818 multi pattern large diaphragm condenser mic. It's running in hypercardioid. So that gives it a little bit more of a richer, fuller sound. I don't quite have the pipes of Dan, so, you know, getting all the help I can get. And then I'm going through API vision channel strip, right? That's a plug in that has a compressor, a high pass filter, an expander and an EQ, right? So I'm running through all of that. If I turn it all off, then I sound like this, right? This is with zero processing whatsoever. Oh, a whole lot different. And then if I turn off the LA2A, which is also kind of like a lift in the shoes, turn that off. Now that's off. So now that is truly flat now. So that is Mike Apollo preamp directly into the system completely. That is all it is. The thing that sounds funny in my headphones is I think when I'm using that processing, it changes the way I sound in my headphones in a dramatic way. And I don't know if that's from phasing or what it is, right? So when I turn off all that stuff, I sound a lot different to me. But I may not sound that different to you guys. You sound like you, which, by the way, is what you're supposed to sound. I'm like, right, exactly. Because we don't talk to people through all that processing. And if they're trying to capture you naturally as you exist, you don't use all those things. I mean, I like it because it does let me be a little lazy. I can get loud and never clip, but doesn't distort. I can speak more softly and it will bring up the quieter stuff. It allows me to be a little more lazy on the performance side because I have so much processing in there to level things out. I'm also using the expander to hide the fact that I'm not in a very quiet room with aircraft and vehicles and other crap from my neighborhood and my building. So I'm doing everything I can to clean up the audio. And that's that's the magic sauce that I'm using. Alrighty, we got time for one more question because it's the last question. It's here in regards from Ed Moskowitz in regards to the 32 float discussion. We're talking 32 bit, I imagine. In film and TV post and production, it has been debated for quite a while. With manufacturers like sound devices, having the option, many of its studios, the option, many of its studios were perhaps that has changed now, not capable of dealing with the 32 bit float. So the question is, what is he talking about? I think most of you are quite quiet. So the question is are more for your questions, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Are more studios now ready to utilize tracks recorded in 32 bit in production at this stage of the game, a lot of filed recording of effects are done in 32 bit. Your opinion. 32 bit is yeah, well, you take part of this and I'll. Well, I mean, we don't, Dan and I don't produce, right? We're not doing the actual production a little bit here and there. Yeah. Yeah, but we're not like in a production workflow for TV film, right? So we don't know what is needed at that stage of the game. But yeah, it is all about workflow. And if it doesn't fit into their workflow, they're not going to use it. When will they adapt to using 32 bit float? I have no idea. I mean, you're deliverable. The file that you're going to send to the client ain't going to be 32 bit float, right? It's purely a capture and process format. It is not a deliverable format. You're going to send out a 16 bit 48 K or 44 one wave, maybe a 24 bit wave for some of the more picky producers like the video game companies, and that's that's it for the foreseeable future. That's all I got to say about that. I don't know. I don't know anybody who has 32 bit float audio in their production workflow yet, so don't know yet. Edward, that is a good question. Yeah, so we'll find out. Alrighty, well, that does it for questions this week, a lot of good ones. And we really appreciate it. You know, you can get to the front of the queue if you actually if you have a question during the week and you like maybe you can't make the show when we do it live every other week and you want to ask us a question. You can write to us, you know, like typing on your computer and type us an email to the guys at vobs.tv. And if you write it in, I put it first in the queue for questions and tech talk next week. Can I make a correction real quick because Jeff caught something and I didn't catch it because I was I was focusing on the audio, right? So that whole special pace thing I was doing, right? In Twisted Wave. Well, Jeff was paying attention. He noticed that what happens is when you do that special pace, whatever room tone is that you copy and then you paste it later, the video goes with it. So now you are pasting in that clip of video over and over and over again, which is no bueno. Don't do that. So so that's a that it's very good questions, very relevant. And it's as far as I can tell, not yet possible to do that exact technique with video. That's that's a great question, Jeff. I I hadn't even tried it until we did it right here on the show. I wasn't watching the video, so I didn't see it. Thanks for thanks for noticing that. And it's a good question for Thomas. Yeah, absolutely. Send him an email and say, here's a workflow I use and I'd like to be able to resolve this, how can I do it? And he's he loves to make his tools better. And this is not a free tool, by the way, the video function is not free. It's a it's a forty or fifty dollar upgrade to twist a wave. So he would be especially open to hearing, I would say, some feedback on that. Whereas if you're in a multi track system like Adobe Audition multi track with video, that would not be the case. It's actually a lot easier to audition. Yeah, it would not be the case. So that that is a good point to that's one of the things where you're going to be feeling a little limited with twisted wave for editing video. Absolutely. Alrighty, well, that's all the questions we have. But we have a little bit more to talk about when we come back on VoiceOver Body Shop, Tech Talk, so don't go way quite yet. This is the Latin Lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendes. 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If your world is voice over, make Wobo part of it. World Voices Organization. We speak for those who speak for a living. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying Voice Over Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, V-O-B-S dot TV. All righty. I want to quickly close the loop on that last thing for it one more time because in our chat, amazing chat room, Jim McNicholas pointed out that to turn off the, you have to uncheck the video edits, follow audio edits function in the video menu of Twisted Wave. If you uncheck that, now you can cut away your audio, copy, paste, mix, paste, and it will not cut the video as well. So thank you, Jim, for mentioning that. All right. Next week on this very show, which will be April 3rd, we will be live. And of course, you can watch the replay all week. We have another great guest. I got a couple of people lined up and you're going to be thrilled. And of course, we were at VO Atlanta last week. So we asked a whole bunch of people. 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Voice over extra, source elements, the heroes dot com voice actor dot com and world voices dot org, the Industry Association of freelance voice talent. Join and join us at Wovel con down in Orlando in May, because we're going to have a great time down there. Jeff Holman, thank you for doing a fantastic job in the in the chat room tonight, because we had lots of great questions and Sumer Lino, who's thank you. There and she gets it done and we really appreciate it. And of course, Lea Penny, just for being Lea Penny, they come visit us for crying out loud. Anyway, that's going to do it for us this week. You know, voice over technology and audio can be kind of tricky. You've got to know what you're doing. But it really comes down to the bottom line. And that is if it sounds good, it is good. I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Woodham. And this is voice over body shop or V.O. B.S. Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton Tecton See you next week, everybody. Have a good one.