 Hey, it's Monday night. Yes, it is. And it's a hot one here in Southern, California. Hot, hot, hot, got it. Hot, hot, hot, real hot. Yeah, and we have a hot show tonight because we have a lot of tech stuff to talk about. We've got questions and stuff that people need to know about. Plus, we have an interview with our good friends J. Michael Collins and his engineer, A. J. McKay. A. J. McKay. Yeah, which is a story in itself. How that came about. And we'd love you to have you toss your home voiceover studio questions right here because we got a little extra time tonight. So send them in and we'll answer those questions for you tonight on voiceover body shop coming right up. Two men, twin sons from different mothers with a passion for voiceover recording technology and the desire to make recording easy for voice actors everywhere. Together in one place, George Whidham, the home studio engineer to the stars, a Virginia tech grad with an unmatched knowledge of all the latest gear and technology in voiceover today. Dan Leonard, the home studio master, a voice actor with over 30 years experience in broadcasting and recording and a no holds barred myth-busting attitude for teaching you how easy it is. Together to bring you all the latest technology, today's voiceover superstars and leading the discussion on how to make the most of your voiceover business. This is VoiceOver Body Shop. And now, live from their super secret multimedia studio in Sherman Oaks, California, here are George Whidham and Dan Leonard. Good evening, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop or VOBS. Yay. All right. Well, it is hot and sticky here in Southern California. Yeah, it is. It was 103 at showtime. Yeah. So it was wooden at my temperature here, 109 on the way here through wooden house. Boy oh boy oh boy. So it's another hot week. It's going to be hot all week except I don't get to be here all week. I have to go to Philadelphia where it's only going to be about 95 and 80% humidity. And really humid. That's going to be like the weather we just had. I was in Nashville last week where I saw those several people. Man, that is oppressive. It feels like you're wearing a cement suit everywhere you go. I know. I've been in this dry climate for the last three years. Man, I'm spoiled. It goes above 50% humidity. We start getting really whiny around here. Yeah. And it's been pretty sticky. Anyway, tonight on this very program, we are going to talk about all sorts of home studio stuff. We've got a lot of great questions. Have a taped interview. Well, not tape. It's literally on an SD card. SD carded. Yes. Interview with our good friends, J. Michael Collins and his engineer for their demo production, Ajay McKay. And they talk about their process and, you know, about how they started that business and how you go about getting a demo and why you should and how to use it and all that kind of stuff, cool stuff. So that's very interesting. Well, John Florian is on vacation again this week. Good for John. Yeah. He guy works hard. He's been around this business for a while. So we don't have any news this week. So we're just going to take some time and, you know, for the first couple of segments here, talk about some more home voiceover studio tech. So why don't we start off with what you wanted to talk about? All right. Well, let's take a look here at the notes. Oh, okay. You might be glad that you're prepared for that. All along here. One thing that came up, I try to always think of things that we always try to think of topics that have, you know, been topical or timely. Topic should be topical. Yes. Something we've run into recently. And one of those things is saving files and recording files in the right format. What do you think of as? Yes. Well, I mean, you know, a lot of you folks, maybe this is part of your routine when you start a new recording is, and it depends on the style of software that you're using. Right. And this is where non-destructive versus destructive recording softwares have a very, very big difference. Absolutely. So I'll start with talking about non-destructive. That's Pro Tools, Reaper, things like that. Non-destructive because when you hit record and when you stop, no matter what you save the project as, what format you save it as, it doesn't matter. That file is written and saved as a wave file on the hard drive the second you hit stop. Period. It's there until you go in there and delete it. Or play with it. Or play with it. Right. But you don't, that's the thing with non-destructive with Reaper and with Pro Tools, you're never actually manipulating the original wave file that was recorded is completely separate from whatever you're doing. The advantage of that is if you have a destructive editing recording program like Twisted Wave, Audacity, although Audacity sort of has a file format that it can save. Well yeah, I mean it'll go into a new track every time you, right. Oh yeah, the AUP thing. Right. And then Twisted Wave if you hit record, it doesn't really take out what you've recorded. It just pushes it aside. Right. But. If you save that project as a different file format because your client wants something weird like 8-bit 8 kilohertz mu law for example, well guess what next time you hit record in softwares like Sound Forge, Twisted Wave, it thinks it or it may think that that's the format you want to record in. Now for many, in many cases, that's not true. It's going to default back to the last format you recorded in. As long as you pay really close attention when you hit record what format you're recording in, you should be fine. But what you may run into is if you last saved the project in say 8-bit 8 kilohertz wave format, the next time you do save as, it's probably going to default to those settings. And at that point, if you didn't catch your error, you could have recorded sometimes more than an hour's worth of audio to the wrong format. And now here's something I don't know about Sound Forge. I know this about Twisted Wave. In Twisted Wave, let's say you save it as an MP3 when you're done and you're going, ah, dang it. I wanted to make a wave, right? You're thinking, oh, I've already screwed up the file, the damage is done. Well, in Twisted Wave, it still has the wave file sort of in temporary buffer memory. So you can actually save to MP3, then go back into the file again, just after you've saved it. Do another save as, and you can redeem yourself and save it as wave. There's export in Twisted Wave, too. There is. There's also the ability to export a file. In my experimentation, I found out that if you export a file into a format, the next time you do save as, that same preference is also duplicated. Unfortunately. I had thought maybe it would be really nice if the export thing had its own preference. So if you export to MP3, but you want to save as wave, the two wouldn't get in the way of each other. But, alas, that is not how it works. At least not in Twisted Wave. But just be very careful, and if you do save a file to the wrong format, don't always necessarily panic. You can, if you haven't actually closed the program out or closed the file out, but you've only saved it, you may be able to, you may be able to save it again to the correct format. It just depends on the way that particular software works. But you got to just be very careful about what sample rate and bit rate you're saving to. Most of the time, that's going to be 16-bit, 44.1 kilohertz or 48. Or 24. Right. Or 24. I actually have been really recommending recording and storing in 24-bit nowadays. I have been, too. Just about everybody's interface supports 24-bit now. And, you know, file sizes are what? Roughly 50% larger. Yeah, 50% larger of a small file to start with. Yeah, I mean, we have hard drive space is cheap. It's worth it. If something down the road says everything's 24-bit now, you've got it saved. And it preserves more resolution. It's not a bad thing. Just be very careful what you're recording in and saving as. It's just, it can get you in a lot of trouble. And check your playback. As soon as you're done recording, check playback. And when you save a file, play back that saved file before you close out. So you have that last chance to check and see what you've done. Check your work. So just a little PSA for you folks. PSA? Yeah. Public service announcement? Sort of a tech PSA. Good warning on that one. What else we got? So that's that. Plume. Have you heard of plume? I've seen plumes, but what is plume? If you're looking at expanding your Wi-Fi network, there's a million products, right? There's Wi-Fi repeaters and extenders. Yeah, those are fun. There's all sorts of products. And they have evolved tremendously over the years. One that gets a lot of press and a lot of advertising is Eero, E-E-R-O. But the one that I personally installed for my landlord, so putting it to a real world test, setting it up, getting it to work is plume. Right. And what's cool about plume is you have a master or the gateway plume and then you have a bunch of slave plumes. So it's sort of like a repeater for radio stations? Yeah, it's like creating a mesh radio station repeater network in your house or around your yard. Has it got all over the compound there? Well, you could. You could, theoretically. But the way these things work is you have a master that you plug in with an ethernet cable to your router. Straight forward enough. Then you add more plumes around the home. The idea is that no two plumes should be more than 15 to 20 feet from each other. Right. 20 feet supposedly is really pushing it. But as long as you have that distance between plumes, it creates this seamless Wi-Fi mesh throughout your home. You can walk from room to room, upstairs, downstairs. You're on the same Wi-Fi network. Because you've gotten those extenders, right? Where you have the same network name but with EXT at the end. It's not one that's 5G and you're like, there's like four freaking Wi-Fi networks. Which one should I use? Not with this. Once you have this set up, you have one mesh network. There's no 5G, 2.4 gigahertz, blah, blah, blah. It's one thing. And it does its own intelligence to measure the connections to all the other units, changes the channels of these things. And it has its own what they call backhaul, which means that they're communicating with each other on a different radio band from the Wi-Fi. That's the problem with the traditional repeaters. One of those Netgear things you plug in with little antennas, you know? Right. When you're using a repeater like that, half of the bandwidth is eaten up in the backhaul, which is having the round trip between the router and the repeater. You lose half. With the plume system, you don't lose as much. And so you get decent coverage. You can stream whatever you want wherever you want. Yeah. I tested it in my landlord's place. Their router is actually in a separate building. There's like an office, then there's like a 10-foot space between the office and the house. I put the gateway in the office and then one in the bedroom of the house. So the signal hops over here. Then it goes from there to the living room where it hops over there. Okay. And then there's one downstairs in the fitness room. So the signal then hops down there. And it gets, it's going like probably when it's all said and done, at least 50, 60 feet from the original router, from many different walls. That's great. And she has a, what are they called? A peloton exercise bike. Right. This is a super fancy bike where you're watching an instructor and you're in a spin class live. Right, right. So you need to have good streaming, you know? And it works. I tested it at about 25 megabits per second download speed and their actual FiOS is 60. So it's a little less than half the speed of the FiOS itself. But that's still plenty. It's pretty, it's plenty to stream, you know, 1080p, 4K, you know, borderline, but it's pretty, it's pretty impressive technology. And it's cool because it's all self-managed. It has a little app on your phone. Is it totally a brain dead simple thing? If you get, if it works right the first time it is, if not, you need a phone call. But it includes tech support. You can call somebody and talk through it. It's pretty cool. How much? You say how much do you pay? How much are you going to pay for this? How much do you pay? Well, they sell them in packs of three, six, nine. You can buy them. And these little things are cute. They're not much bigger than this thing. They look like little air fresheners you plug into the wall. Or USB blocks. Yeah. And you open the box and there's a whole bunch of them there. And you can get them in different size packages depending on the house. And if you go on the website and say how many bedrooms do you have? Three or four? Well, you need this many. And they have new ones called super plumes, which up the speed of the whole system and the gateway that they just upgraded to. And so this is a really cool technology. So if you're having trouble getting Wi-Fi to the far reaches of your house or just into that one room of the house, these are really a really cool way to go. So not really VO related, but these things are really cool. And you're still wondering how much would you pay? Hey, I just saw a hand out of the corner of my eye going like this. You still haven't told us how much they cost. How much, George? You know what? I didn't Google the price of the things. They're taking out a second mortgage. You can have this extremely expanded Wi-Fi network. It's actually, what's cool about is a lot of other systems you have to buy into at least two or three of these units. And they tend to be about $150, $200 each. Okay. And these systems are about, each plume itself is about 50, 60 bucks. So you can buy to start with two or three of them for about 150 bucks, maybe 200 bucks. And then you just expand as you find holes in your Wi-Fi coverage. I like that. I like that pay as you go kind of thing. It's pretty cool. Yeah. It's nice. The Wi-Fi router's over there. It just picked me up in here. Yeah, you guys have a dedicated one for the studio and then one for the house. They tend to interfere with each other. But they do sometimes interfere. It's true. Which Wi-Fi network am I on? Why can't I see the other? Oh, that's why I'm on the wrong Wi-Fi network. All right. Well, that's enough Wi-Fi geekiness for one night. Wi-Fi. All right. We got lots more coming up along with our interview with J. Michael Collins and AJ McCay in just a few minutes. We've got a few more technical things that you will be fascinated with coming up right after this. I'm boys over body shot. And now we return to those thrilling days of yesteryear and we find our heroes, Sheriff Dan and Marshall George on a dusty stakeout at VoiceOver Gulch. Let's see what drama is about to take place. Those getting started in VoiceOver, and those who are established but want more work, VO2GoGo has got you covered. If you're just getting started in VoiceOver, VO2GoGo's getting started in VoiceOver class is a deep dive into exactly how to do it right. With video lessons taught by David H. Lawrence, the 17th. Downloads, homework, quizzes, and actual on-mic work. And the price is right. Absolutely free. Just go to VO2GoGo.com forward slash... Thank you. Start. And you'll get instant access to the class. That's VO2GoGo.com forward slash start. Now, if you're already a working VO talent and you want more work, then VO2GoGo's pro program is for you. This is the most comprehensive, complete VoiceOver support system in the world with classes, workouts, private coaching, demo production, and more, teaching you the art and commerce and the science of VoiceOver. If that sounds like it was built for you, guess what? It was! And you get instant membership at VO2GoGo.com forward slash pro. That's VO2GoGo.com forward slash pro. Getting started or going pro, go to VO2GoGo.com now. It's everything you need to be a successful VoiceOver talent. As a voice talent, you have to have a website. But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don't look right on mobile devices. They're not built for marketing and SEO. They're expensive. You have limited or no control. And it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what's the best way to get you online in no time? Go to VoiceActorWebsites.com. Like our name implies, VoiceActorWebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control. No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your VoiceOver website going for as little as $700. So if you watch your VoiceActor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to VoiceActorWebsites.com where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you-know-what. And we're back. It's VoiceOver Body Shop. And time for more tech talk. But before we get into that, we need to remind people that if they need help with their home voiceover studio, if you want to learn a lot more, you're starting from scratch. If you're an established pro making billions of dollars because it's been promised to all of you out there that the voiceover world is paved with gold, some of you who happen to be doing that, you still need to have your home voiceover studio. You must in 2018, 2019 and forward. And there's only two guys who have created, curated, fixed, maintained, and tuned to absolute perfection in the world that know how to do it. That's you and me. Right? That's right, man. Okay, good. Your turn to do some hyperbole here. Towardsthetech.com is where you find me on the web. I can be booked for real-time services where we're on the phone or on Zoom or something. Or you can send me in files for what I call more of a virtual engineering self-service kind of thing. And I can design your studio. I can tell you why your mic's buzzing. All that stuff right over there at GeorgeTheTech.com. And Dan is over at homevoiceoverstudio.com. And I offer very similar services. I am a full-time voice actor. I am not the big-time engineer that you are. But I've built a whole bunch of these studios. I look at it from the voice actor's perspective. The real world. The real world. Yes. And so I know a bit or two about what it's supposed to sound like. Right. And whistle. See, now you know what that means. And how do you say that? I want to whistle. Feel free. It can be the bed to this particular thing. And you can send me a file at homevoiceoverstudio.com. All you got to do is click on the specimen collection cop at the bottom of the home page. And I will, for 25 bucks, I will analyze your audio, see if it's right. And occasionally, I talk to you about it. That's right. We will occasionally bounce thing off. If one of us gets stumped, we'll bounce it off the other. We had a cool one last week. That was like, what is that? I was close, wasn't I? You were. You were. That was the Wi-Fi thermometer. Thermometer, yes. And I think that was Simon Vance's studio. Yeah. All of a sudden it went. Every 60 seconds. Every 60 seconds. There was this. Some Bluetooth thing is trying to find its mate. I was close. It was a Wi-Fi thing. It was a Wi-Fi thing. And Simon figured that out on his own amazingly. Well, he's a smart guy. Anyway, we've got a bunch of tech questions for our expertise coming right up here. And we'll start off with Cole Niblett. She says, or he says, I was hoping you could help me understand latency and buffer size a little better. I recently purchased an Audient ID4 and had the option to set the latency and buffer size. I started out selecting a variety of different combinations. And to my ears, I couldn't hear much of any difference. I'm running a PC, Windows 7, and Reaper is my DAW. It is the automatic setting, the best option, or how do you find the right settings for my setup? Tons of thanks in advance. Cole, well, first off, my immediate thought is, who are you listening to? You know, a lot of people, headphones on, headphones off. That has to do with latency. Yeah, that's the monitoring side of it. Yeah, so it's funny that I can't remember the last time this question came up. And here it is. You know, so I'm glad we're covering what seems to me new ground here on this particular topic. But the latency and the buffer are related to each other. The larger the buffer, the longer the latency. Well, what's the latency we're talking about anyway? That's the time it takes for your voice to go into the microphone, get recorded into the computer, and then make its way back through the computer, and then go through the interface to your headphones. That's the latency. Right. So why do we as voice actors have to worry about latency? Well, we basically don't. We don't need to monitor ourselves. So if you really have to monitor yourself, you should not be monitoring what comes out of the DAW. You should be monitoring what comes out of the interface. Right. That's why like the mixer, you're hearing the sound right off the mixer. If you're on a Scarlett 2i2, there's a direct monitor button. When you press that, it's literally an audio feed that goes from your mic into your headphones. Make sure your speakers are off. And your speakers have to be off. Feedback central. So that latency really only is relevant for musicians who are doing overdubbing and doing multi-track recording. So they actually are really concerned about latency. They want to make sure that when they punch in a recording or they play over top something else, that the two fit together without any weird delays. They don't want to have to shift the audio over to line it up later. Right. So they really care about latency. Also, anybody that uses virtual instruments, in other words, hey, you hit a key on a synthesizer, you want to hear that sound come back as fast as possible. You don't want any delay. Right. That's where latency is super critical. So you'll hear people talk about Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt's awesome. We get three milliseconds of latency. It's not relevant for us. It really doesn't matter. As long as your audio is recorded without clicks and pops, dropouts and things, you're good. And probably automatic is fine. All right. So just stick with automatic or whatever the default is unless otherwise directed by your doctor. Right. And Cole, if it's working for you. Yeah. It sounds good. It is good. Exactly right. Paul Stefano, the one that only asks, I have an Apollo twin solo wired through a Belkin Thunderbolt dock. Okay. Very specific. Whenever the monitor goes to sleep and I try to bring it back, the monitor stays black. I have to unplug the Apollo or power cycle it to bring the Mac back up. Sometimes nothing works and I have to reboot. Okay. That one happens. I've seen that one happen. But a lot of people have been talking about how, you know, the Apollo is affecting things. Yeah. I haven't heard of that one, but I can tell you that anytime you're using any kind of a hub thing, a dock hub. Don't use a hub. Docks and hubs are very persnickety. Like they're really, because there's a lot going on. You have a Thunderbolt connection going to a box. Right. And then that box takes that Thunderbolt and converts it to everything else. Right. Ethernet, audio, video, HDL, all these different things. So USB. And it's trying to do the best it can and not cause any issues. But sometimes they cause problems. And this is one of those cases. I haven't used a ton of different Thunderbolt docks. The ones I've had the most success with and still not perfect always, but the most success have been from maxsales.com. That's Otherworld, OWC. Right. Otherworld computing. Right. I think their stuff's pretty dang rock solid. But that's probably what you're dealing with here. You're just dealing with a pesky issue where the dock is getting in the way of things. So try a different dock perhaps. That might be something you might want to try. Because he doesn't have the right entry on his computer. Well, yeah. He's using a Thunderbolt computer that has one Thunderbolt port. Yeah. And you have a Thunderbolt interface and a monitor that also needs to be plugged in. Right. You run out of ports pretty fast. Right. A dock like that becomes important. So the routing traffic on there is sort of like the 405 around Wilshire Boulevard at about 5 o'clock. It can be. I mean Thunderbolt's fast, but the hub has to be able to keep up. Right. He also has a bone conduction headphones. Have you guys tried them for live directions? Seems like a perfect solution to avoid bleed through into the mic on a live session. Have you played with one of those? I haven't. A while ago I mentioned this. I think I have one at home in a drawer somewhere. Right. It's called Aftershox. Right. A-F-T-E-R-S-H-O-K-C-K-Z or something. They have a Z on the end. Right. Yeah. So instead of going over the ear like regular headphones, they go like behind the head and they actually they press like right here on your jaw. Right. Like this. And so they just, they send audio into the jaw. But they also unfortunately radiate sound themselves. Right. They're not totally silent. Right. So if you're playing back something pretty loud, you hear the sound come right out of the, right out of the actual. That's going to be like the phone thing we had last week. Yeah. Don't use the phone. It's almost like an open ear, open ear headphone. They were designed for people to be able to ride, jog, whatever, bike. Right. In traffic, outside safely and still hear everything around them, which is what they're doing. But unfortunately, I think because of that reason, there's too much bleed. They don't really work as well as I would have hoped. All right. And Gerard McGuire. Yes, of course. Yes. If you have a choice of soundproofing a garage or building a booth inside it, what would you recommend and which would be more economical? The garage already is well built and fairly quiet. But it's in LA. Enough said. Well, that was the first thing that I would ask is, boy, can get hot in your garage. Oh, my God. Not the best place. Like an oven. Yeah. You know, depending on which direction the door is facing too. Right. Sure. Facing south. I mean, you could cook eggs in there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Big cookies and stuff. That's true. So he's saying, which would be more economical? Which one? What is it comparing? Garages? Oh, soundproofing or building? Well, building a booth in the garage is way more economical. Yeah. It's way cheaper to build a little 3 by 5 box. A closet. It is to soundproof an entire room. 18 by 20 foot garage. Way cheaper. So that's a no-brainer. Yeah. Building a booth is much cheaper. Then you can, if you build a booth quiet enough, then you can get like a portable air conditioner for 300 bucks. Right. Pipe it in there with through some baffles. Right. And you can keep that little box cool enough to work in all year round. Yeah. You know. I've been seeing those little air conditioners over at Home Depot. Mm-hmm. You know, they have a conduit. You got to run it out a window and stuff. They do. They have to exhaust the heat somewhere. Right. If you're in a garage, the heat's going to exhaust into the garage. The garage, and then it's going to be 400 degrees in there. Right. Right. But be able to make a roast in there. The thing is, it doesn't work as efficiently. Because it's taking in hot air and trying to cool that hot air. Right. Versus if it was inside your house. Right. It's circulating the cool air. So your mileage may vary, but sometimes they work okay. Alrighty. Well, good luck. Yeah. If you got questions for us that you would like repeated on this show and have us take a shot at the answer, you can email us at theguysatvobs.tv and we are happy to answer those questions on this very show just as we demonstrated tonight. Mm-hmm. That's right. Right. So an interview with J. Michael Collins and AJ McK coming up that I recorded yesterday, which has a story to it all its own. And we'll be right back with that right after these important messages. Are you confused about how to set up and maintain a professional quality voiceover studio? No wonder. The information out there is mostly mythology. This is the best microphone to use. You'll have to have a preamp. You need a soundproof booth. This software is the best. Your audio must be broadcast quality. Consult with someone who knows the truth. Someone who's been there in the trenches doing voiceover for over 30 years. Someone with unparalleled experience with voiceover studios, who's worked with hundreds of voice actors and designed hundreds of personal studios. He knows how to teach and cares about your success. In one of the harshest environments known to voiceover. Your home. Dan Leonard, the home studio master. Separate myth from fact and get a handle on your personal voiceover studio. Contact the home studio master at homevoiceoverstudio.com. Drop off a specimen of your dry audio for a free analysis. Hey, everybody. I'm here to tell you about our good friends over at Source. Elements, the creators of Source Connect. Source Connect now. Visdin. All kinds of cool products. Visdin. What the heck is that? You may have heard of this acronym. It's a new acronym. We've been buzzing around for the last few months. If you've got an ISDN codec, it's been sitting around collecting dust. Or it's just been vacuuming money out of your wallet. I was just at a client's home in Nashville area last week. He said his phone bill has passed the $900 a month mark for his AT&T ISDN service. It might be time to consider Visdin, which lets you connect your existing ISDN codec box, be it a Telos, a Zephyr, or whatnot, to the internet. And it's not a bridge. It's not going through some shenanigans. It really is converting ISDN to internet. And in a way, it's actually technically possible to be more reliable than old-fashioned ISDN because Visdin connects up to two internet connections at the same time. So you can have a cable modem and a DSL modem both connected to Visdin. So you have super-duper uptime on your ISDN lines. You'd be amazed at how affordable it is if you've been dealing with ISDN for years. You might want to give it a try. Head over to Source-Elements.com and give it a look and see what it's all about. You might find an economical solution to you, or really the only way to get ISDN in your location for many of you. So go give it a try. And we'll be right back here with this fantastic interview that Dan did with our friends Jay Michael Collins and AJ McKay right after this. All right, we're back. Need to set this up just a little bit. Please do. Seeing as a lot of what we do on this show is cautionary tales. Now, it sounds great. It looks great. But you need to understand, and if any of you have ever produced video, you cannot be the cameraman, the assistant director, the director, the lighting director, the audio director, and the director and the interviewer all in one when you're trying to do an interview with two people. What's that in hair, makeup, and costumes? Oh, I forgot that. Yeah, exactly. There was definitely costuming with this. And a costuming error. Because there's things that happen in this interview that I shot it with three cameras and then one camera. I set it up and everybody's talking, and then suddenly it's like, it's me from here down. Oh, man. So that was unusable. And then, of course, there's audio. And I had it going to different sources. And the source that I ended up using was not the one I selected. But it sounds fine, and it looks great. It's all there, folks. It's all there. Anywhere, everything. AJ McKay was with our good friend Jay Michael Collins on Santa Monica Boulevard. It's big, tall. They were there. They were there. They were doing a workshop. Oh, workshop. And I walk in there. I'm like, hey, I know everybody here. It was great. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, but we sat down and had a conversation about demos and what they do. And here it is. And welcome back to VoiceOver Body Shop. We're overlooking Los Angeles here because our guests have joined us on Santa Monica Boulevard. They've been doing a workshop here today with a bunch of people from the area. And they were kind enough to join us here on the show. And let's welcome to the show Jay Michael Collins and AJ McKay. Hello. How's it going, guys? Good. How's it going? Do you have a good workshop today? Can't complain. Good group. Yeah. Very, very good group. It was fun to watch them ad-lib a little bit. A lot of familiar faces. Tell us something. You've been on our show before from far, far away. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and about your VoiceOver career and stuff. Well, I started, like a lot of people in radio, which I know is taboo these days, but I started when I was a teenager, had my first show. And radio career didn't last very long, but started doing VoiceOver's first sponsors on that station. We needed to make a living. We needed to make a living, exactly, right? Long story short, by the time I was out of college, I was making a little bit of income doing VoiceOver, had the chance to go to law school, decided, I'm going to stick with this and see if it works. And family thought I was nuts, but so far so good. And from there, it was sort of 10 years of the traditional agency-based going and doing live auditions and booking a job or two a week, or sometimes job two a month. You know, slowly building a career. And about 10 years ago or so, I found getting to do it yourself, World of VoiceOver, as the market started to change and got more involved in the community. Got into coaching about seven or eight years ago. And shortly thereafter, started producing demos first for myself and then for others. And I'm not necessarily sure some of the initial offerings are ones that I want publicly listened to. What got you interested in doing demos? You know, I think it was more need and request based than anything else. I was coaching a few talent at that point. And most of my demos at that time were real spots, were actual commercials that I had done. And one of the things that I ran into and some of the talent that I was working with ran into as well was that sometimes the production values on the actual spots were not... Yeah. I love my clients, but not everything that ultimately gets put out there is amazing. And I thought, well, we could do this better ourselves and produce, create copy, create spots that sound like and feel like national work. But maybe the production values are going to be a bit higher. And so that was the inspiration and it just grew from there. What kind of genres of demos do you do? I do everything except for video games, animation and audio books. Those are areas where I don't feel qualified as a voice actor or someone who has spent a lot of time in those fields to work on demos. Everything else I play in as a voice talent and therefore I'm comfortable doing demos with. Yeah. Now AJ, where are you from? You're from Louisville? Louisville, Kentucky. Yeah. So some people say Louisiana. No, no, no, it's not something. No, I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. I started in radio when I was 15. And I, you know, at 43, now I got out in 2010 and, you know, I've been a producer all my life with a mixer and an audio engineer and a sound designer, as well as a voice talent. And, you know, so I've lived in different cities with radio. You've got to move around a little bit. I was very fortunate that I had longevity at every station that I worked for, you know, seven years here, eight years there and so on. That's a career. Yeah, it's a very good radio. It's like, you know, a year or two and a market and you're done. So I was very, you know, I had some, I worked at some really great stations and I've just always been fascinated by manipulation of sound and what you can do with sound and how you can, you know, weave that into voice and sound effects. And, you know, so I'm nerdy that way. Not just that way. Not just that way. Thanks. Yeah. And so you're an engineer, primarily. Yeah. And I'm not afraid to, I don't recommend this for everyone, but I'm primarily self-taught. I'm an idiot savant when it comes to sound design and audio. I mean, I research and it's not like I just, oh, I just woke up and I can do it. I mean, I learn and I find, you know, new techniques and study. I just never had any formal college training or engineering schools, you know. That's why I don't teach courses because I know what to do. I just can't teach you how to do it, you know. You know, it's just something that comes naturally to you. Yeah. It really, I've been very, very fortunate in life that it just, I just picked it up. I can't explain it, but I love every minute of it. Yeah. Yeah. Having been a production director and doing all that same kind of stuff. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. It's fun and it's creative. Yeah. And it's like, well, that didn't work. But it's non-destructive now. But you probably learned like I did with reel-to-reel and the grease pencil and the razor blade. Yeah. I mean, you know, back in the day, back in the day. But yeah, when I first got into the business, it was all reel-to-reel machines. And it was, you know, you're doing concert spots on two track reel. And, you know, a lot of the times, yeah, it was just splicing and, oh, I screwed that up. Let's start again. And now, you know, it's just the, with digital technology, it's just, it's, you can do so many more creative things. Yeah. So, you know, it's a blessing and a curse. Yeah. I think. Because I like the warmness of the tape. You know, the old reel-to-reel tape. I like that warm. But yeah, you can do a whole lot more now. People don't realize that for most of us, our first demo reel was a reel. Yeah. Yeah. I still have it. I got a whole closet full of it. You know, the masking tape holding it to manage the reel is getting a little brittle. Yeah. So, what does AJ do with you then? AJ is the lead engineer on my sound design team. And I've got a few people that work for me. But he's the king. He's the best of the bunch. He's my senior guy. And he, you know, has an ear that. He lives inside my head. You know, it's almost. It's pretty creepy. Yeah. It's going to get to the complex. He really does have a vision for understanding what I'm trying to do with the demo when I write the copy, when I direct the session, and how that is supposed to come together. And you just, he grasps at the moment that he hears the read, the moment that he hears the copy. And I don't, these days I don't have to give you much direction. You go and he does this thing. And then of course I come back and evaluate each individual spot. We may make a few tweaks, but the, the synchronicity I think is what makes us such a good team. Yeah. We have very little dialogue when it comes to, I mean, we don't even write, we send hundreds of people. But it's not, it's, I love the fact that this is the first person that I've found that I can work with. And I had the creative freedom to do what I want to do with it. You know, and sometimes they'll rate me back, you know, I'd go a little too far or whatever. Right. But it's not far enough. Right. It's sort of like directing someone through an audition. Yeah. But it's, you know, I, because I don't work well with somebody saying, well, here, use this bed. I want these effects. This is how, this is how I wanted to say, you know, I like to have that creative freedom. And more times, I'd say nine times out of 10, he's on the same wavelength with me. And so we, it just works. It's one of those things where I can't, I can't explain it. It just, it just works. We're made for each other. We're made for each other. So how'd you guys start working together? And I remember meeting you in Vegas. Yeah. Joe was doing his, showing off his book and you were working with him there. Right. We were in a workshop together. I actually, it was really by fate. I'll tell the story because I'm really proud of it. Jen Henry is the, the person that introduced, you know, I knew of. Jen's kind of like Kevin Bacon, a voiceover. He really is. The center of all things. Jen was working on a demo with, with Jay Michael and, and she said, I, I want AJ to do the mix on it. And he's like, well, I've got, you know, I've got people that I work with. I don't really know AJ's skills. She's like, well, that's who I want to do it. She was, she was very, as Jen, she was very insistent. He sent me, he's like, okay. So he sent me the audio of the takes that he wanted to use. And I think within two days, I, because at that moment I had plenty of free time and I spent. So what happened? And I spent, I literally spent eight hours, you know, both of those days doing that, just banging it out. It was a TN show narration. And he got it back and months later we had talked and I said, when you first got that back, you, you thought it was going to be crap. Didn't you? And he was like, yeah, he's like, I got really nervous when he sent it back to me in two days. But that was kind of the catalyst. And the next one was Susan Bernard. She sent me a solo for her demo and it just kind of snowballed and took off from there. So I guess that I'm very grateful for that relationship. We have, we have, we have a problem here. Oh my gosh. How did you people get in my living room? Oh, hi, Dan. How are you? I forgot I loaned to the living room. Hi everybody. See you later, Joe. There's little what residuals off this now. Yeah, I know. It's a contrast. So, so, so when, how long you've been doing this together? Two or three years now. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the demo creation process. I mean, you've discussed a little bit about how you guys work together, but somebody comes in, they pay for a demo, say your basic commercial demo. How does, how does someone, how do you guys do them? First and foremost, I think the thing that is very important for both of us, and I know for me in particular because my name goes on these, is that we work with people who are, who are ready and who are, and you know, for me, that's, that's, what that means to me is that we can produce a demo for them that will allow them to book market rate work. I'm not a big fan of the argument that you should only do a demo when you're ready to present it to a top five LA agent. Right. So people can book market rate work through other sources, through other agents on their own, through marketing, and maybe they're not quite ready for top level national commercial work, but they're ready to go out and make a living, and they're entitled to have a good demo too if they are at that point. But I'm very careful to work with folks who I believe can actually go out and see return on that investment. I think we've got too many people these days, and it's not even, it's very, it's less the individuals than it is certain organizations that are just having to take money from anybody who's got a credit card, and it's important not to do that. So that's the first thing is are you, are you ready? Are you demo ready? Are you qualified? After that, it should be a bespoke experience that's tailored around the individual talent. So I will listen to whatever they've already, if I've coached them, that's great because I, I know them and I already have an understanding of what they can do and where their strengths are and maybe areas we might want to avoid. But if not, if it's somebody who's come in and just wants me to produce, then I'll have to listen to what they've done, I'll have them send me quite a bit of work, previous demos and get a sense for who they are. And then in consultation with them, we'll start scripting. And I think one of the things that's very important to me as a demo producer, and I think really is essential to a great demo, is to have copy that's custom written for the talent, not boilerplate scripts, not stuff that's, you know. So you need to know the talent. You need to know the talent, yeah. And so we'll get into scripting with talent feedback. I'll ask them to give me a list of companies and brands that they like and any that they really dislike and things that they are passionate about for or against and I'll incorporate that into the copywriting process, submit it to the talent to review and to prove and we might go through a round or two of revisions on that. Once we're happy with the copy, we set a demo day. I tend to remote direct most of them, although from time to time I was in Lotus in New York last week directing One Life, from time to time if I'm here I'll do that, but most of them we do via Zoom and the talent will come in on mic from their studio. I'll direct them through the session. Whenever I do a demo session it's time unlimited. So tend to block two hours or so. Most talent don't need a whole lot more than that but we're not going to put a cap on it, you know. It's going to be one of those. We're going to stay there and get the reads the way we are both happy with until both the talent and myself say, yeah, we've got it, we're thrilled. And once we've gone through the session I'll do initial cut-downs on the session and come up with the tastes that I think are the winners. Then AJ comes in and, you know, I might have a few marching orders for AJ. Sometimes I'm like, hey, you see the copy, we're on the same page, we're sympathetic, go do your thing. And then AJ begins as part of the process, which you can speak to a little bit more. Yeah, I just, you know, I think the thing for me is that when you have good copy when it tells a really good story, it makes life easier for me because I get a mental picture in my head of how, you know, what needs to happen where with sound effects, with, you know, with the music and the imagery, you know. So it's just, it really, you know, we all have our strengths and weaknesses in the business and for me, you know, like I write copy, I wrote copy for years in radio. It wasn't a super strong thing for me. So when I get beautiful copy and great takes to work with, it makes life so much easier for me. I mean, these things, I can get them together fairly quickly, you know. And then AJ gets the produced cuts back to me, usually in a full form. All review. And if revisions are necessary, we'll go through until we're happy with the final product. It's usually in order swap. Yeah, it's usually in order swap and maybe a bit here or there or something, but, you know, AJ's, like he said, I'll forget the other part. There have been times where we've really just, you know, the stars have aligned and we've done, we've sent, you know, our version out. And it literally gets signed off on without any revision. And that's always a beautiful thing when you, you know, because I'm just, you know, we're very passionate about putting out quality. And one of the things that's important to me too is that, you know, when I'm working with the talent, whenever they get their demo back, I'm going to keep working on that until they're happy. You know, not every one we present to a talent and they say, okay, that's perfect from the start. There may be something that they don't like in their read. There may be something that, you know, production element they want changed or it just didn't come out the way that they thought on one particular spot. We'll keep working on that until they're completely, and I think, right, AJ, that's what this sometimes is, because we'll keep working on it until they're completely happy. And I think that the other thing that's really important is I always put out there that if, if you're not happy at the end of the day, you get your money back. No questions asked, because this is something that you're going to take out there and put out to the world and you should love it. And if you don't, I haven't done my job. AJ's probably done his, it's much better. No, I feel the same way. It's like, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, you know, I want them to be happy with the result, and if you're not, well, then let's fix it until we get it right. It's all about super serving, you know, the end users. Right. Well, if you're just joining us, our J. Michael Collins from JMC demos and his engineer, AJ McKay, and we're talking about how you do demos. So this is a fascinating subject. We're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be right back here on Voice Over Body Shop. So don't go away. An all new American crime story tonight on FX. This week only. It's pasta fest at Olive Garden. Hard rate, crime, blood pressure, perfect. I grew up with the classics, and now with StubHub, I can get authentic tickets to the best shows. The all new Chevy Cruze from $16,995. Fee inspired, then get the beauty that's uniquely yours at Sephora. This week at Home Depot, it's our garden fest sale with up to 30% off all garden tools, sod and seeds. Hi, it's J. Michael Collins and these are just a few examples of the first class demos my team and I are producing. If you'd like to have something similar, visit JMCvoiceOver.com and click on the demo production tab to find out more. All right, it's time to talk about our great friend, Harlan Hogan. Who's Harlan Hogan? Harlan Hogan's a guy that's been in broadcasting and Voice Over since the beginning of time. Since he knows those sorts of things, he has the best equipment out there and he has created the website VoiceOverEssentials.com. Now VoiceOverEssentials.com is a great site because it has everything you could possibly need for your home voiceover studio. And he features a number of really great signature series products like the VO1A microphone that I am speaking into right now that you can't actually see, but it's actually there. And also a number of other great products including the Harlan Hogan signature series headphones. There they are, right there. These are great headphones. Okay, back to me. There we go. They're great headphones because they're first off, they're made of aluminum. They have a twist-of-flex headband. And they're totally isolating. And they also have memory foam pads. But here's the real thing about the Harlan Hogan signature series headphones. They are made for VoiceOver. They are optimized for VoiceOver because they had an incredibly flat response. You're not going to get a lot of excess bass. It's not going to color the sound at all. It's going to be the sound of your voice as your voice exists, which is really the most important thing when you're listening to your playback of your audio or if you're one of those guys that has to listen to the sound of their own voice while they're talking, they do that. But, of course, you can always rotate it off and make sure that one ear is off so you can actually hear the environment in which you are speaking. You can get these over at VoiceOverEssentials.com. All you got to do is go right down to the bottom of our homepage that you're probably watching the show on and click on the icon of Harlan Hogan talking into his porta booth pro, the big one. And to click on that, it'll take you right to VoiceOverEssentials.com and where you can purchase everything he has there. So go over there, check out the headphones. I highly recommend them. We use them here on our show and you should use them in your booth. Thanks, Harlan, for being our sponsor for seven and a half years. We're looking for another seven and a half more. So take care. This is the Latin Lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendez. And you're enjoying Dan and George on VoiceOver Body Shop. You know, there's a little bit more to this interview. I mean, because, you know, there's an issue that came up last week with J. Michael and a well-known Canadian pay-to-play site. We talk about that briefly and some other things that go on. So if you want to hear some really cool stuff, stick around because he's going to talk about how to use your demo properly and a couple of other things. So roll part two. And we're back here on VoiceOver Body Shop. J. Michael Collins and A. J. McKair are guests and thanks for joining us. So we're talking about demos. How long does this process take to do a demo? Typically speaking, if we're just talking about from the moment that script writing begins until we actually have it delivered, talent's usually going to get in for a demo session maybe two or three weeks after they get their script, sometimes sooner than that. And then we usually look at about a four-week turnaround to get it back to them. Okay. And usually what's the cost on something like that? Depends on the genre of demo. When we get into broadcast demos, so commercial, TV narration, promo, et cetera, the amount of work involved with that and the production work involved with that, pulling SOTs, pulling production elements, it's substantially more intensive than on, for instance, the e-learning demo or the corporate narration demo. So at the low end, we're at $1,800 for some of the corporate stuff all the way up to $2,100. It's a pretty small range, but broadcast is going to be a little bit more. Yeah. So like you said, it really depends. If we're mixing a promo demo, that's obviously going to take, because it's so detailed and you just really have to fine-tune those things and they really have to sound a certain way. E-learning, corporate narration, you have a little bit more flexibility. It's not as production intensive. So those tend to come back fairly quickly. It's just, you know, when you do a promo demo, it says SOT's written around a particular episode and you've got to go and isolate them and it's work. Yeah. Yeah. But it's fun. Well, it's fun. Well, this is a fun business. Speaking of the business, let's talk a little bit about the voiceover business and demos. How important are demos to people? I'm sure we have a lot of new people that are tuning in and if we're clicking in or however you describe it on the internet these days. And they're like, what kind of a demo do I need and how should I use this demo once I have it? Well, they're critical and they're critical because there are, they're really sort of four broad ways that you bring to work in this business. It's a classic agency-based route. If you're going to get agency representation at whatever level, you're talking about getting in the door with an organization that has some of the best talent in the world. And who is presenting their roster to high-end ad agencies, to national-level buyers, to Fortune 50 brands. You have to represent their brand and your demo has to be to a level of quality that says I can compete on a national level. I can compete with the very best in the business. And so in order to attract their attention to get that representation, getting referrals are great, but if you're cold submitting, your demos have to be not just good. They've got to be elite because in today's industry, you know, and you guys know that I always talk about how I think it's a myth that we're oversaturated with competition in this business, but in certain markets, there is a lot of competition and even in the broader VO world, everybody right now has, you know, everybody who's competitive has good demos. You know, it's great that they're sitting there profiling us, but there are a dozen producers out there. You can go to Chuck, you can go to Nancy Wolfson, you can go to Mark Grau, you can go to Uncle Roy, you can go to Aunt Gangusa. You're going to get good production, okay, at the end of the day. Your demo needs to rise above whoever it is who may be interested in the same roster spot that you are and you have to, it just has to be at another level. So whoever you go to, what's important is that every read sounds like it could be a traditional spot. That, you know, we're talking to you before thinking about commercial demo here, or if it's e-learning that the content's really relevant and specific to what the market's looking for and that if you are one of a stack of 20 demos, you're the one that the buyer, the casting director, the agent goes, that one, that's the one that we're looking for. Right. And it's got to like, it's got to grab them by the nose in, you know, the first five seconds or so. What's the real secret to getting a demo, to get it to be, to nail somebody right away? For me, I think it's the content. I think it's, and I think that's one of the things that we work hard to do, and I know I work hard to do as a copywriter, is to create a copy that is on the bleeding edge, that's relevant, that's what the market's looking for, and that's what's, it's popping, it's interesting, it's edgy. Sometimes maybe I push the boundaries a little too far, okay? But you never, but I, you know, I always say, I want to appeal to people who are going to be casting for the next 30 years, not necessarily the people who have been casting for the last 30 years. Right. And I want to stay on top of trends and look at what, you know, marketing is done these days, advertising is done to the 18 to 30 year old demographic, and young people today, they're edgy, they're no taboos, they're no lines, the senses of humor are right on that, that cutting edge, and I want to match that with the content of the demo. So I think that that's the most important thing now is, do you have a read that, I always use a line that's going to make the listeners pick coffee out of there, that's on the demo that's going to make them go, and want to take it out in the reception and play it for everybody. Right, right. Well, and you have to, I mean, I mix the way that I mix, I mix for what I call, I mix for air, I mix for broadcast, and I think, you know, everyone has a different algorithm or a different way they do it. I mix how, I mix those things to sound like spots that actually could run on air. You know, some people, you know, they keep the beds really low in the mix with really featured voice. I just do it differently because I think that, you know, they want to get a sense of, you know, and it's smoking mirrors, it's subliminal, but they want to get a sense of how you're going to sound on a broadcast spot, on a real spot. And so that's how I try to mix. Right. Have you spoken to agents about what it is they're looking for? Yes. What are some of the things they tell you? You know, it's not right now the feedback that I've gotten from some of the real big agencies is the anthemic read. You know, warmer, rhythmic, not so much inflection. The spot that says, you know, we're the company that does this and we do this and we do that and it's about him and it's about her. You know, it's meant to evoke something deep within you that says this is a good organization that's doing something for society. Sometimes it's even true. The anthemic read is really popular. Again, edgy humor, if it's the timing's perfect and whatever the joke is, is really on point. That's hot right now also. And of course, the regular guy conversational read continues to be strong. Yeah. And there's more work out there than there used to be and it's growing every day. What are you seeing out there in the marketplace? Well, there's more work out there than there is quality talent to do it. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I mean that in an encouraging way. You know, that's what I talked about before, I'm frustrated with talent. Well, there are a lot of people trying to do this. There are only so many people who can do this job well. And if you're one of them, I mean, the work is exploding today. Yes, commercial rates are under pressure more than they ever have been. Demographics are changing. Media consumption habits are changing. And that's creating a lot of pressure on broadcast work. But out in that big non-broadcast narration space of explainer and e-learning and corporate, it's exploding. And the rates are not going down. They're steady. They're strong. You know, work that's different than what we used to do. Work that's self-marketed. Work that comes in through a well-sealed website. You know, and yes, even work off of the more ethical pay-to-play sites. You know, it's such a success. It's such a success. But at the end of the day, there are more opportunities in this business today than there ever have been before. Is it harder to make a million dollars a year? Yeah, it is. Okay. And that's not going to change. But the amount, the number of people who are kind of in what I call like the upper middle class of voiceover, it's more than it's ever been and that's going to continue to grow. Yeah. You got your thoughts on how to change? Yeah. I mean, I, but he says he's got it. I mean, he really has his finger on the polls more so than I do. But yeah, I think that, you know, it's, I mean, I just, I'll look at what you said. It really is. That being, you know, sought out that, you know, I don't think that people realize, you know, the range of genres that you can really, you know, dive into and make really good money. I mean, I don't do corporate and you know, I don't work in those genres. I study them because I do, I mix those demos and I want to make sure that I'm on point with what they're looking for. But, you know, the money is, the rates are staggering. It's, I mean, I need to, yeah, I need to pick it up. I need to, I need to investigate that more. Yeah. Oh, it's huge. I've been, you know, I've been doing it for 15 years and it's, you know, it's only grown and it's, it can be fun work. It can be, you know, it can, it can drive you nuts a little bit. It's fun when the check clears. You don't have to have patience. Yeah, that's the most important thing. That's really important. When do you know that somebody's not ready? What are some of the things that, that sort of key you off? Well, you don't have to mention it. No, and I won't, but I think, I think it's a judgment call, but I think the, look, I'm, I'm sort of privileged in that I sit on a lot of different sides of this business. I hire two or three times a week for my own clients. Okay. I've got a lot of long-term clients who come in and say, Jake Michael, we want a younger voice. You know, whatever it might be, that happens, you guys might be there already, but they come in and they want me to help cast for them. And, if I, if you approach me to do your demo, and I listen to your stuff and my immediate reaction is I wouldn't hire this person, then I'm going to recommend that you get some coaching and that's not always going to be with me. Okay. You know, they're, depending on where you are, if it's a, if it's a project, I'm probably going to ask you to go to somebody else first. But, you know, I think talent need to be honest with themselves too. You have to have a realistic expectation in this line of work. And, I mean, if you haven't gotten it in, you know, the first couple of years, then, you know, maybe this isn't your line of work. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the idea that you need to study this for five years before you're ready to go out and work or make a demo. If it takes you five years to get there, there's lots of people we talk to or like, I've been studying this for five years and it's like, and you haven't gotten it. Yeah, I don't actually have any work or anything like that. It's, you know, it's something you really have to look at. But then again, people generally think they're a little better than they might actually be. Yeah. And that's a tough pill to swallow that, you know, there's a reason I'm not a brain surgeon. Yeah. Well, you know, I have one or two instances where I have on up giving somebody their money back and it's often been a case of an expectation that the demo producer is going to make you sound a little bit better than the skill levels there. You know, and that's not what we do. We work with what we've got, you know, and it's our job to take what we've got and make it sound as marketable and as viable as possible. And it's also our job to draw the line and say, no, I'm not going to take if you're not ready, but we're not going to make you, you know, I can make you better as a coach, but if I've never coached you and you come in, you're going to be who you are. And it doesn't matter what demo producer you go to, your skill level is going to be what comes through on the demo. So be sure you're ready. If they're a good demo producer and you're not ready, they will tell you. They will tell you and we won't take your money. You know, the names that you hear every day among the best demo producers, we're not going to have trouble paying our mortgage if we don't work with you, you know, and we don't need to exploit people. We don't need to cash every check. You know, we want to do good work and we want to help you grow your career. And that's the way people would hope you would think about that. Aside from the awards that you've won, because if you watch this show at all, you see them holding those awards all the time. When do we get the new spot, by the way? We're working on a new UBS spot. A little busy. That's a good thing. But what are some of the successes you've had? You know, I don't necessarily mention any names, but people who have really booked some good work because, I mean, obviously, because they're good. Right. But they had one of your demos that demonstrated their promise. Well, we got one in the room over there, Julia Grace is talking about looking over a transatlantic demo. That's my favorite thing. We talked about that a little bit at lunch today. When he gets an email, because usually I hear about successes through them, he gets an email from a client that he's been working with, and they say, I just wanted to thank you. I booked a national spot off of my demo, and it's something that I helped put together and work on. That gives me such a great feeling, because I love seeing people succeed, and I love having a small part in helping them achieve their dreams. That's cheesy, I know, but it's true. That's how I feel. That's why I love doing this so much, because... That's what the value is. The words and stuff like that are great, but at the end of the day, it really is, are we seeing results? I think, lately, the political demos, we've been doing a lot of political demos this season, and I'm getting an email a week from Dallas, and I just booked this campaign, this candidate, to say, you know, it's like, wow, you know, it's actually turning right into spots off of the political stuff, but it's really rewarding when that happens. Yeah, of course, if the checks are coming in, it rubles. Yeah, I think you have a problem. That's the whole history, you know, you might think twice about doing those political demos. So, in conclusion here, tell us a little bit more where they can go, if they're interested in, you know, talking to you because I'm sure it starts with the consultation process. Where do they go? Well, first thing, if you want to see the work that we're doing and hear the work that we're doing, visit the demo production page on my website, jmcvoiceover.com slash demo-production and we've got, I don't know, but almost probably close to 100 samples up there right now, some of the demos we've done in the past year or two and have a listen and see if you think that the work that we do is a good fit for you. Not every demo producer isn't the right fit for everybody out there and, you know, you want to work well personality-wise and you also need to sort of buy into the sound and the feel of it. So, if what we're doing is what kind of tugs at you and says, this is great work, then get in touch with me, email us the best way, jmichaelatjmcvoiceover.com I tend to reply pretty quickly and we'll see if it's a good fit and I won't blow smoke at you. If it's not right, I'll tell you why. If maybe the genre that you're looking to do isn't the best fit, we'll talk about why, but if you're a good candidate, we'll make you a darn good demo. Absolutely. Yeah. You move around a lot. You can't tell. You live a pretty exciting life. Here we have this great view of downtown Los Angeles here, but you get around. I mean, you're in New York, you're in Luxembourg, you're out here every now and again. Off to Normandy soon? Yeah, off to Normandy this August. What takes you to all these places? Various work-related things, typically. I mean, it's nice when it's pleasure travel, but in this instance of the workshop tour, started in New York and we're here and doing, well, doing VOBS, of course, is huge. It's a big part of this. That's why we're here. That's why we're here. I've had a lot of sessions over the past week with clients who want to be in particular studios. I have another one in Boston on Monday. Normandy, of course, is the Euro VO retreat, which that'll be number three. Is that sold out? That is sold out. Yeah. Sorry. But we'll be announcing number four after voice arts in November. So keep your eyes open. What goes on in some of these cruises and trips that you're doing? There are a lot of togas involved. That sounds like a part of it. I stay in my room all those days. It's a learning experience that I think is a little bit different than anything else that's out there in the industry because we bring in some of the very, very best presenters and experts in their particular fields. This next one, we've got Dave Finnoi teaching video games. Joe Cipriano just came in. He's going to be teaching promos. We've got Melissa Disney doing live announcing commercials. Dave Walsh doing commercials. Jeffrey Humberger is coming to talk about agency representation. I'll be doing radio imaging. And you'll be doing radio imaging. I'm doing even radio recording. Cut it off. You know, Cliff Selman's coming for automotive. Yeah. Oh, right. And it's limited to 12 people. And we keep them small. We keep them intimate. We've got a lot of spouses coming to this one. So it's going to be a little bit bigger than the last couple. But 12 attendees max, which means that, you know, in Ireland, we had sessions where there were three people. Right now. And you were three people on one top out of this world presenter for two and a half hours in a block. And you're just, you're getting an intensive, personalized experience. Plus, there's just a, the cool factor and the fun factor of hanging out in these groups. We have this Chateau and Normandy that Marie Antoinette's brother used to live in. And, you know, and it's, it's enormous. It's got an indoor pool. We've got, you know, a caterer coming all week with fine French food. And it's, it's just going to be a, a week of comfort, leisure, and learning. And I think that what I like to do in this business, I kind of feel like, I want to play the Willy Wonka role a little bit. I think that sometimes we get so focused on the negative and we get so focused on the rate server or in this situation or, you know, whatever else somebody's trying to take advantage of somebody, whatever it might be. I want people to realize that this industry is still pretty badass. And you can achieve success in this business. You can have fun in this business. You can have a nice lifestyle. You can play. And I want to bring experiences to folks that just kind of elevate the conversation in the field of what we do. And, you know, I hope I get there soon. I think the great thing about these retreats because I've gone to every one of them since Barcelona and the thing that you just literally spend a week with top players in the game, you're able to just have coffee in the morning or have lunch in the afternoon or go to the beach or take a walk and really get to know these people and pick their brains. And I love the fact that after everyone goes home you have built lasting friendships and brotherhood, sisterhoods that are going to last forever. Well, these retreats have become families. Yeah. It's really remarkable. It's very, everyone's protective of each other. Everyone lifts each other up when they're struggling. So it's just, it's fascinating to watch. Yeah. And I can see that when I came in working with this group you were doing a workshop with today here in LA. One final question if you can talk about it was this new story earlier this week. And dad, what did you do? Thank you. Thank you. That you announced that you are taking legal action against our friends up in Canada. What's that all about? Can you talk about it? I'll just kind of leave you with the same thing that I said to John Florian when he asked her comment on that, which is that they have used my likeness and violated my right of publicity by using my name, my voice, and my image without my permission and in fact in direct violation of an order to cease doing so. And they did, they took the video down, though, didn't they? Well, they did after they were sued. So, you know, at the end of the day I think it's important that even those who would purport to be the biggest players in the business and large corporations and anybody else involved in you know, and taking money from talent that they realize that they have to follow the law. I love it. And that's what this is about. They've violated my rights. They committed civil violations of the Lanham Act among other federal law. And I'm protecting those rights when you, you know, with some of the scrutiny that has fallen upon that organization over the years, the implication of a false association threatens my brand. And when you threaten my brand, you threaten my son, and you threaten my ability to provide a living for them. And I won't stand for that. That's what this is about. Very good. Well gentlemen, J. Michael, great to see you. AJ, always a pleasure. Always a pleasure, my friend. Alrighty. One more time, where can they get a hold of you? J. Michael at jmcvoiceover.com or go to jmcvoiceover.com. Check out the demos and and they just want to say this guy. He'll screen all my stuff. This guy's amazing. That's a matter to call you a friend. You're my bestie. You're my boy blue. You're my blue. Well, this was fun. All right. We'll take care. We'll see you again real soon. Take care, guys. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voiceover career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level, stay in touch with voiceover trends, coaching, products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. Voiceoverextra has hundreds of articles free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions bringing you the most current information on topics like audiobooks, auditioning, casting, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, plus sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceover x-t-r-a.com. And we're back. What was a fascinating interview? That's work, man. Thank you. Doing all that solo. That's no joke. No, it was no joke. If I was there, I wouldn't have let you use three cameras. If I did all by yourself, mom blows my mind. Yeah. Well, one of them turned out to be totally two-camera. No, it's just like if you have an extra camera, you cover yourself. It was an old iPhone, actually. Well, you know, which had it worked, it would have looked great. As it was. It would have been nice to have them here in the studio, but J. Michael and A.J. had to fly back east. They tight-skinned you out. Yes. So I'm like, we'll show up, went out to dinner at a very interesting Beverly Hills restaurant afterwards where they had really good tapas. Oh, nice. The Andreas something or other. Cool. Great place. Anyway, we've got a few more tech questions we want to cover. Before we say good night. If you asked a question, here comes your answer. All right. First one. Hi there, guys. Watching the livestream right now. Hopefully, there still are. Quick question for you. I recorded my room. Could you be a little more specific? I got to get rid of the sound coming from my window. I live in a rural area and there are crickets and little bugs that make sounds all the time. That's a very thin window. I think the translations I record in my room means I live with my folks. I record in my room. What do you recommend for blocking out high frequencies? I'm running a $100, $200 budget since I'm barely starting out. Thank you so much. Cool. Well, blocking a window is to keep that sound out. Not all that tough. Yeah, high frequencies aren't the harder ones. It's the low frequencies. Crickets don't go at low frequency. Right. So if you've got cricket sounds leaking in through your windows, that probably means you have really poor weather stripping. Right. Your windows are not really well insulated and sealed. They're probably all window single pane windows. It could be, or they just have bad seals on them. So the first thing you do is weatherstrip the heck out of your windows. Right. Go to a hardware store saying I need stuff to weatherstrip my windows. Start there so they're sealed off. Right. And then you've got the big guns, which is buying some drywall and some weatherstripping and then making a plug for your window. That fits perfectly. It fits into that frame. Not that easy to do, but it can be done. It's not, you know, it's not expensive to do the DIY thing you can do that will stop a lot of sound and make it very dark. Interesting, you know, the crickets are a higher frequency. Crickets are about a moderate frequency, not high frequency. Not dog whistle frequency. Exactly. Fascinating. We have one of those Dyson fans in the house. Yeah. Which really keep things cool. Yeah. It's right at the frequency of the human voice. So if it's on, it's like sound cancellation. Whoa. You know, with people's voices. Sure. Can't hear the TV. Can't hear each other talking. If you're trying to drown out an annoying outside neighbor or something like that. It works great for that. Dyson and it drowns them out. Right. And if we want to talk to each other, what? Huh? Sounds fantastic. Like any couple needs more problems with communication. I'll have to demonstrate for you. You're right. Son of a gun. Brennan Gensmer asks, are there any really viable options for USB microphones on the market? Well, certainly. Yeah. I mean, we haven't talked about them for a while. We did do a USB mic shoot out at WovoCon a couple years ago, which all those mics are totally viable. If you do a search on YouTube for a USB mic shoot out. We'll probably do it again at WovoCon this year in November. There's many viable options. It's really a matter of finding ones made by reliable, good companies that make good microphones. Recognizable brands that they're primary thing is microphones. Right. Audio Technica 2020 USB. Dyson. Dyson. Okay. They sometimes are a little bit noisy. Right. They have a little bit higher noise floor hiss. Right. Than maybe you'd like. Right. I had good luck with the Shure PG-42 USB. I think they stopped making it though. The Mk5 from Sennheiser. Now we're talking. Which has an epigee. Mk4 digital. Mk4 digital. Right. That one's the real deal. Because now you have a Sennheiser Mk4 which is an amazingly good microphone to begin with. Right. Added with a mic. And in the AD conversion and all that that's designed by an epigee. Yeah. So it's a heck of a good combination. So, you know, it's only downside is that it has no headphone monitoring and we talked about that earlier in the show. Most of the time you don't need it. Right. If you're trying to get a really high quality signal straight into the computer, it's about one of the best USB mics that I know I think does have a headphone jack if you need that. Yeah. If you're podcasting or something. Yeah. So there are some really good alternatives to USB mics that you can actually use. You know, for podcasting you can get away with it, with a Yeti, you know, which is actually great for two you know, for two-sided interviews and stuff like that. It has a great pattern. There's also the audio tentika AT, hand-held voice mic or like a vocal mic. Right. But it's USB and XLR. Right. It's dynamic which is good for, you know, close-up use and it's like 60 bucks. A lot of podcasters use that. Yeah. Including the takeout. Yes. Which is a show on CBSN that's on television. Right. And that's what they use. Right. So the quality's got to be okay. It's pretty decent. Yeah. So we'll actually start talking a little bit about that one. It's the total democratization of, you know... Casting. Or... No. It's the democratization of self-indulgent behavior, I think. Yeah, or knowledge-sharing. Knowledge-sharing? I have something to share with you. If you're going to do a podcast, you've got to have something to say. You don't do it just because you can. The point of view and some experience to back it up helps. Yeah. Well, I'm going to be... Lots of... This is bigger than voiceover convention. Podcasting is like a four-to-one search over voiceover. If my parents are watching, I just... We just found out about this like two weeks ago. Yeah. It's in Philly. Right. And my parents, who live near Philly, are flying here tomorrow. It was like the absolute worst possible time. I'll bring you back a steak hoagie. Thank you. No, wait, you're a vegetarian. A vegan steak hoagie. Vegan steak hoagie. Saitan. Progressive vegan stuff going on there. It's a very progressive city. It is. William Penn only knew. Anyway, we have lots of great stuff going on over the next couple weeks on the show. We have next week, Chris Edgerly will be with us. He does a lot of gaming voices, some big-time gaming voices. And we're going to talk about gaming, which is the biggest thing there is in Hollywood right now. August 6th on Zoom, Jamie Muffet, who has his own V.O. School podcast that I was on last week. I'm seeing a theme now with podcasters. I'm telling you. Voice actor, podcasters. Great opportunity for voice actors in getting involved in podcasting. What I see is... You're bringing brand, right? Well, not only that, I think in the future what we're going to see is some podcasting networks that are going to curate really good content. And when you have a network of curated content, you're going to have big-time advertisers. You need voice actors. That's not the future. That's now. But it's only going to keep growing. Yeah. August 13th, the one and only in-studio, Bob Bergen. The Bob Bergen will be here. Awesome. And we're going to talk about the union and other issues. August 20th, Paul Paypar, good buddy, who's a great guy. And then August 27th, Catherine Horan, who is a casting and coaching director. So she's a casting director and a coach and all that kind of stuff. Very cool. Good stuff to have. So we've got lots of great stuff going on here at Voiceover Body Shop. Who are our donors of the week? Actually, one of them I got to see in person last week at in Nashville at the TVOE meetup on Tuesday. And that was Tracy Reynolds. Tracy. Very cool to meet that man. Nice. You hadn't met Tracy before? No, I don't believe I have. And if I have Tracy, I apologize. She's not someone you forget. He was very nice. He was fantastic. And he's a radio engineer. Right. Really good. Andrew Kaufman, one of our regular donors of the show. We really appreciate it. Scrolling, scrolling. Eric Aragoni. Eric. Man. Thank you, Eric. I've been saying that name for a long time. Like five or six years. Brian Page. It's so weird how PayPal formats these emails differently sometimes. Amanda Fellows. George Wittem, which is my dad. George Wittem. Senior. That's right. George. The original George Wittem. And then going down the list here, there's a few more that are kind of buried below. We've got one that came in from... Hey, where'd you go? Where'd you go? Thomas Pinto. Yep. Thomas Pinto. He's donating to his stuff. Shelley Avellino. And those are the fresh ones since... Oh, Tremaine. Mosley. Sorry, Trey. Trey. All right. So much appreciated. Yeah. So again, if you need help with your home studio and you want to talk to George, you go to... GeorgeTheTech.com. And if you want to talk to me, you go to HomevoiceoverStudio.com and we will help you out. Show logs. I think Dan Sutton is still running the show logs this week because Jack de Gaulle is off running around the continent somewhere. Aw, thanks, Dan. Thanks, Dan. We really appreciate that. Very nice. And you can get those here on our website and certainly when we post the YouTube video, that'll be there. And on YouTube, they're time indexed. So if you see something interesting, click the time. It'll take you right to it. Right there. We're here every Monday night, almost every Monday night, live if you want to be here. Email us to let us know you can be here at theguysvobs.tv and we'll give you the secret handshake to get into the clubhouse. Hey, and show us your booths. Now, whose booth was this tonight? This is... That one was... Oh, that one is Mike McCall's studio. That's not just a booth. That's a whole studio. It's a 12-by-10 room. The whole room is the studio. That's kind of a dream space to aspire to, as far as I'm concerned. I have that much room. And I like it, too, because the desk, which you can't really tell from this, the desk is in the center. It is in the center of the room. Dead center. You can walk all around it and everything comes up through the floor. So it's really... That's the way it should be. Absolutely. All right. We need to thank our sponsors like Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials and the Voice Over Extra. Source Elements. Vio to gogo. VoiceActorWebsites.com and J. Michael Collins' demos. And thank him for being a guest on our show. Oh, by the way, if you're watching this live and you want to hear the podcast version, there's a new way to get podcasts. There is? A new old way. An old new way. Right. Google podcasts. You can actually take your phone and say, OK, Google. Yeah. Listen to our four-body shop podcast. Hey, you can't beat that. We'll bring it up. You don't have to have an app. You don't have to... We'd like you to subscribe. You don't have to. You can just go to your phone and ask it to play for you. Play that. I like that. And it can do that. Yeah. We also need to give a shout-out back to J. Michael because for giving away a free demo that Wendy Shapiro happened to win at the Imaging House Launch Party on Friday, that was a huge gift and very, very classy. Very cool. Because J. Michael is a classy guy. All right. All right. We need to thank... Well, of course, we need to thank the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for better webcasting. Who else do we have to thank here? Katherine Curran, of course, who has that big queue of guests. A huge queue. A huge queue. Jack Daniel for chat room duty tonight. That's right. And of course, our technical director, floor director, chief bottle washer, and everything else that goes on around here. Sue Merlino for doing a great job tonight. And Jack DeGolia for the show notes, along with Dan Sutton, who is working on it now. And Lee Penny simply for being Lee Penny. Well, we know this ain't an easy business, kids, but we're here every week to give you as much help as we can from the technical end, from the business side, from the performance side. Join us every Monday night here on VoiceOver Body Shop, or watch us on YouTube, or listen to the podcast, or watch us on Facebook, or come and watch the show live and experience what it's all about. Tell a friend. That's right. I'm Dan Leonard. This is VoiceOver Body Shop, or VOBS. Have a great week, everybody. We'll see you next Monday night. And remember, if it sounds good, it is good.