 Hey there. It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk number 39. I got it right this time. Even with the sore finger. 39. But I don't know how it is. We keep coming up with stuff to talk about, but it's like, well, something new every week. So we'll do it. And we repeat ourselves sometimes, but that's because there's a lot of things that need to be repeated apparently. It's always an update. We've got some great stuff on microphones and source elements and software and gears. Gear and a little gripe for me. Yes. And your questions. Stay tuned voiceover body shop tech talk coming up right now. They bring it to you now. George Wittem, the engineer to the VO stars of Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional studio studios of the biggest names in VO today. And you, Dan Leonard, the voiceover home studio master, a professional voice talent with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio. And each week they allow you into their world, making the complex simple, debunking the myths of what it takes to create great sounding audio, answering your questions, showing you the latest and greatest in VO tech and having a dandy time doing it. Welcome to voiceover body shop tech talk. Voiceover body shop tech talk is brought to you by voiceover essentials.com, home of Harlin Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone, voice actor websites.com, where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt. VO heroes.com become a hero to your clients with award winning voiceover training, J. Michael Collins demos when quality matters and voiceover extra, your daily resource for VO success. And now live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California. Here are the guys. Well, hi there. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is voiceover body shop. Body shop. I jumped on you there. Tech talk. I'm trying to, trying to jump the gun on these, some of these things. It's tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. You guys just love tech talk. It's like, every week we're here, and thousands of you watch this show, like, okay. If you insist, I guess. Oh, we keep telling them to stop using the forums and the groups for tech support. Maybe they're listening. Yeah, just come in here. We got the answers for you. Ask us. You're going to get the right answer. Which by the way, is why we're here. It says here, plug-a-rama. Plug-a-rama. Plug-a-rama. It's time to talk about what George and I do, which is help you with your home voiceover studio. I mean, do you realize what a unique place a home voiceover studio is? It's not a big studio with guitars hanging on the wall and gold records and windows and, you know, somebody, you know, if you've got somebody- Perceptionists at the front. Yeah. Hi, can I help you? You know, and the engineer's going, ah, okay, you're right. No. It's just you and generally your closet or your booth. And if you don't really know how to set one up, how long we've been doing this? I mean, we've been doing the show for nine years, but you and I have been doing home studio stuff for what, 15 years now? Yeah. I think as long as, almost as long as I've been, as long as I've been in LA since 2004. So it's 15 years and I've been doing this since about the same time. Yeah. And nobody knows as much about home studios as we do. And we don't say that as an egotistical thing. It's just when you work with hundreds and hundreds of people, you see it all. You know what's going to, you know, if someone says, what's this noise? Like, oh, well, you know, we have our, we have our 10,000 hours of mastery at this point. Yeah. That's true. Maybe we should do the master class. Well, we like actually working with people one on one because every voice is different and every room is different. It's a very personalized thing for sure. Absolutely. And so we give you very, very personal service. We ask you the right questions. I don't think other people will like, well, get this microphone and get this, this processor and get this thing. You go into those Facebook forums, you're going to end up spending a lot of money and stuff that you're never going to use, nor understand how to use. We keep it simple. We get you up and we get you running and we make sure that you're always running right, but we also teach you how to do it. So you don't have to bother us that much. I guess that's one way to put it, but I think it's important that you work with professionals who actually know what they're talking about, not people who are experts in one studio their own. And we do it. We're not competitors. We're here. We compliment each other. But if you want to work with George, where do they go? You can just book support. There's even an ability to book emergency booking of time. If you really need help like ASAP, I can get you that help. And sometimes we just need a sound check. That's on there too. Dan has a different flavor of sound check, but the same idea over at his website and that is... I will analyze your audio and talk to anybody that I've done this for. And I'll tell you, I'm very comprehensive about what it is that I listen for certain things and there are certain elements that we grade what your studio is like and how you're using it. And if you perhaps you're not very knowledgeable on these things, we can take the time and consult with you and teach you how to do it right so you can be a voice actor and not an engineer. I mean, there are certain things you have to know how to do, but you don't want to be constantly monitoring your engineering. You want to be constantly monitoring your acting because your voice actors. So check us out. Go to our websites and book time with us because it's better than guessing. A lot of guesswork. Absolutely. We can save you lots of money and hours and hours and hours of mind numbing frustration, which I think is probably more valuable than anything else. Anyway, every week we have George's tech update when he takes a look at all the stuff that's going on in the technical world as far as voiceover is concerned and so that you can understand it. What do you got this week? Well, yeah, so I always like to look at different sources for topics. What I've dealt with over the last couple of weeks, Facebook groups, what are the discussions happening, equipment announcements I've heard about, and just notions that just pop into my head. So this is a total mashup of all that stuff starting off with just one issue that people have often is with USB audio interfaces, namely cable length. You'll notice a lot of times when you buy a Scarlett UI2 or a Steinberg UR12 or fill in the blank USB audio interface, they have one thing in common and that is a very short USB cable. I mean, I haven't seen a USB interface with a cable. That's a really short one. I haven't seen an interface with a cable longer than three feet in a very long time. Way back in the day, the Shure PG42 USB mic was unique that they included like a 15 foot USB cable, which was pretty amazing. That's really not going to be common. And that's because as these USB cables get longer, things get wonkier or less reliable. And also when we try to extend them using repeaters or hubs, things, there's just more points of failure with USB. It just happens. So it's definitely recommended that if you are not going to have your computer in the same room as your mic because it's just too dang noisy, computer fans too loud, whatever, then you're probably not going to want to try to extend the USB cable and run the preamp into the booth. You're probably going to want to have your interface outside the booth next to the computer as close as it can be and use its stock cable. Yes, it's less convenient. Yes, it means that you cannot just reach over and grab the gain knob. But I got to be honest, like once you start doing this regularly as a voice actor, you start, you know your voice, you know the kind of script it is, you're going to find there's probably two or three different settings on your gain on your preamp, where you know where that knob is supposed to be. Because Dan, I know you don't have your preamp in a booth, right? You walk in, you put on your headphones and go, you mean before you walk in there, right? Right. I don't even wear the headphones. I just, everything is set, I know, you know, approximately how loud I'm going to be in a particular read. Right. Set that, hit record, walk around, go into my booth over here and record and record and record until I'm done, until I'm satisfied I've given enough of the right takes. I open the door, I walk out, I hit stop and then I edit from there. I, you know, a lot of people are like, I got to stop it. I got to set the level. You really don't want to be paying attention so much to being an engineer when you're, you know, when you're trying to be a voice actor. So I separate the two places. There's the engineering place and then there's the voiceover place. Yeah, I mean, that's something we can help you with too, like on a session, if you're trying to figure out what are those gain settings, we can help you with that. If you're something you're not confident doing on your own, you know, we can have you record these different styles of reads that you might do, character voices for a video game. Right. And you'll probably find there's at the very most three different gain settings you might use. Many people, maybe only two. And once you learn where those positions are, it's very easy to repeat and you won't have to have it. So bottom line is it's much better to extend your microphone cable than it is your USB cable. My cables properly can be run quite a long distance, 100 plus feet, if you're right, without any real loss of quality and definitely no added noise if it's a good cable. It should be a well shielded microphone cable. The cheap cables tend to be not well shielded. The better ones tend to be well shielded so you won't get noise. But you can run my cables very long distances. And if you have to use headphones, because you're doing Skype source connects type things, headphones are going to be the best way to type source connects type things, headphone extension cables, not a big deal either. So extend the analog stuff, not the USB cables and you'll be much better off. Excellent suggestion. Thank you. Another thing that came up just recently I was helping a client as she happened to have a mic port pro two in her booth. Haven't seen them being used that often because they're still kind of new and a little on the expensive side. But I'll tell you, if you're doing voiceover for, again, games. I think this could be the ultimate interface for game voiceover actors. For the reason that we just got done talking about game, right? The thing about the mic port pro two is it has this cool hidden feature of its sleeve and that is it can record at two different levels at the same time. So you can put it when you engage the limiter mode. It turns on this circuit. And so now let's say you're using Twisted Wave, but this works in any recording software. You can now record a new stereo file. And on channel one will be the original level, whatever the game setting is you're doing. Channel two will be a level minus. I think it's minus 12 db lower than channel one. And there's a limiter as well. So you're pretty much covered in multiple different ways. Unless you egregiously set your gain to way too high. So that you're crushing the input so hard even the limiter can't keep up as long as you've done a relatively good job of setting your gain. You're going to be covered for a read where you might occasionally get too hot and and normally would be clipping the audio. Track two will have your back and that I think that is pretty slick. You can record in 24 bit 96 K. Again, not something that most voice over once, but apparently I'm seeing game audio producers having some really high standards in terms of their sound files that they want. So this device can do that. And I showed I showed this actor how, you know, you might be done a session and go back and go, oh my gosh, I'm clipping here and here and here. But then you look at track two completely clipping free. You can just really just throw away track one and just use track two. Or if you're really into editing, you can comp them together. I don't know if I would do that. I would just stick with the non clipped version. Normalize a little bit if you need to to just bring it back up to minus three or whatever and off you go. But that's just another thing has so many little facets to it, but that's a hidden one that's so underused, I think I really never hear people talk about it and you gain voice over people or doing all your work at home. Like really, really helpful. Really. So also I'm seeing also casting calls where they say we prefer a U87 or a TLM 103. And so that's creating this this, you know, this people are freaking out going, oh my gosh, they're saying I need to have a thousand plus dollar mic to record voice over and you know, all this it's it's creating a panic and I just just recently I just reminded somebody it says prefer. Unfortunately, these studios they don't they really don't know how to quantify the quality of the audio that they're looking for. They just don't know how to do it. They don't have the language for it. It's difficult to describe. It's just very difficult for them. They don't know how to properly quantify it. So they just start. Well, we can probably weed out some of the amateurs by saying you got to have a Neumann U87, you know, something like that. But you guys know that buying one of those mics does not make a studio. Right. I think you probably know that by now. Yeah. I mean, sometimes they'll ask you, do you have a U87? And I'll go, yeah. Yeah. It's sitting on a shelf in the closet. But yeah, I got one. You know, I mean, the thing is, is can they really tell the difference if you're acoustics are right? If your mic technique is right and you've got the level set, right? They're not going to say, well, that's a 416 or that's a, you know, an audio technica 2020. Well, they might tell the difference there. But yeah. Unless the audio is particularly bright and sibilant or high with a really high noise floor like a hiss. They're not going to notice that there's something going on with the mic if you've gotten the rest of that set up. So should you lie? They don't have to see how the sausage is made. Yeah. That's up to you. That's your decision to make. But yeah. I don't think if the quality is good, it's good. Oh, so in terms of for Mac people out there. So we've been talking about maybe for the last since October, don't install Catalina. Well, Catalina is really at the end of its development lifecycle. It is, it is fully baked. I don't think there's going to be another update to it. If there is, I'll be shocked. But it's now a fully mature version of Mac OS. So if you have been waiting and waiting and waiting and asking, when can I install it? Probably now is now a safe time to install it. Still don't do it without doing your due diligence, backing up your computer, making sure you don't have some random plug-in or something that you've been using for years that no longer works. I'm talking about Source Connect Pro 3.7, by the way, which I had and no longer can use because it's 32-bit. Which was really annoying. Make sure that you are up to speed with what you have and make sure it'll work. But Catalina is fully mature. It's fine to install. However, you don't necessarily have to install it. Now you can at least download it. Yeah. Go to the App Store and download Catalina. And then when it prompts you to start installing, close the window. And now you have it ready for when that day comes when you want to install it. Because what's going to happen is Big Sur is coming down the pipeline. It's going to be just in time for Big Sur. Yeah. And so Big Sur will come along and then you won't be able to get Catalina easily because Big Sur is the current OS. So you want to have Catalina already on your hard drive for when it's time that you want to install it. So go ahead and download it anytime. Don't necessarily install it unless you're really ready. But you can have it ready to go. Just a couple of little quick things. The Austrian Audio OC818 microphone. This is some new tech beautifully designed by the same team that developed all the AKG microphones. C414, C2014, Perception 220, all that. They have their own company called Austrian Audio and they developed a mic called the OC818. And I am working on a review video that I've co-produced with Andrew Peters who is my co-host on the Pro Audio Suite. He has that mic because he's a mic junkie. So we did a remote test of the mic and I'll be releasing a video about it but has a very unique trick up its sleeve which you'll have to see the video to know what I'm talking about but it's pretty freaking cool. Cool. And there's also some exciting news for Source Elements. A new version of Source Connect is coming down the pipe. I'm going to be doing alpha test, very early test but there's going to be a mobile version proper mobile version. That's going to be really cool to run on iPhone and iPad. Twisted Wave has a new version coming down the pipe. I know there's a lot of stay-tunes a lot of wait-and-sees announcements but there's some cool things coming soon. And lastly, a little gripe. The Scarlett 2i2 Gen 3 and the Scarlett Solo both they've gone away from physical switches for phantom power like a push button on, off or a slide on, off and now it's a push what do you call it a momentary switch that's a click. And it doesn't remember the state of that setting and so for a lot of folks who do remove their Mac from the studio take their MacBook with them take it to the desk every time they plug it back in the phantom power is off and you have to remember to push that button again. Kind of reminds me of the original Micboard Pro. That was an annoying thing you had to always remember to push that tiny button on the back of the Micboard Pro Orange light would come on Yeah, at least on the Scarlett it is a light on the front it does, it is right where we can see it but still it's a little bit of a gripe I have. Now I thought the Rode AI1 Rode AI1 which happened to have right here on my desk this little cute little guy I want it back I assume this thing would have the same problem No The brilliant engineers at Rode figured out how to make it remember that state so I noticed when I plugged it in just recently you'll see the P48 light is lit there let's put it on camera if I unplug it obviously it goes out plug it back in and it uses a proper USB-C cable does it come on? Is it on? It is It is on so this one remembers the state of the phantom power how about the maples? Cool Focus right, get it together Anyway that's the end of my tech update for this week so Dan you want to talk a little bit about headphones and monitors headphone monitoring versus speaker monitoring Right Which way to go? A lot of people ask me about this because you want to hear your audio is clear as possible when you're playing it back and some people use headphones and some people use monitors clearly headphones are probably cheaper if you live amongst a lot of people perhaps they don't want the sound of the louder sound of the monitors although they are neighbor or family friendly Exactly especially if you're like I can only record it two in the morning because that's when it's quiet outside if you want to play back sometimes the monitors can be a bit of a problem Now good studio monitors are great if you have the environment to have them in if it's a good acoustically treated room specifically for the monitors a lot of people will work at their desk that's their booth and they've got their monitors there you know as I was saying earlier I like to separate my engineering from my voice acting and edit at my edit suite which is not in my booth and because there are acoustic panels in here and there's not a lot of echo I'm going to get a true representation of what those very powerful studio monitors are giving me which is the whole idea Yeah, you have a good monitoring environment Right And what studio monitors are is they're very powerful speakers but they're not loud speakers they have this what you call near field monitors So if you're at like a 30 degree angle Right, if you're a 3 feet away Yeah, you find it Oh, that sounds darn good but you know they're there specifically for mixing and for really hearing really fine detail to the audio Now, headphones are great because one, you're the only one that can hear them and then you get into this discussion of well what are the best headphones Well as we all know everybody hears differently and everybody sounds different and what sounds good to one person may not sound good to another person So Yeah, it's interesting like different brands have different kind of sound characteristics They do Like I've noticed Sennheiser headphones are a little bit darker Right Like not hyped and bright Right The Audio Technica's a little bit brighter and then the Sony cans everybody likes very bright Right You know And so you have to experiment with headphones and try different ones That's a lot easier to do than probably with studio monitors But they're very very much personal preference for sure Yeah, I remember being in a banjo and porium once because I was looking at I had a pair of K-R-K rocket fives for many years and I wanted to see what other ones sounded like and it then became very very clear to me that the more powerful ones the good Yamaha's and the other ones you could clearly hear the definition between different frequencies and which, you know, some of the lesser expensive ones you know, they sound okay but when you really hear specifically, okay, you know, at 4K I'm hearing this and I'm not hearing that and it's, you know, it works it really allows you to hear very clearly what's there You know, high powered amplifiers mean that they can run it at a very very low amount of distortion When an amplifier is trying to make a speaker get loud if it doesn't have a lot of power behind it you get little bits of distortion that little bit of distortion starts to just muddy the whole thing that you start losing all that definition So, you know, I have a Mackey Well, I have one Mackey HR824 that's a big monitor speaker I have one because the left one the amplifier on the woofer went out And you only have woofer one, so They're 20 year old speakers so that's not that big of a surprise it's getting repaired at Audio Rehab right now but it's a massive speaker with a lot of power Now, if I want to rock out I can rock out They're amazing but at normal listening levels there's incredible detail because the amps are never being close to over driven they have a lot of what we call headroom Right So, yeah, something to look for Unless you're, I mean, a lot of you are really just using it as a secondary playback tool device maybe you need to give your ears a rest from the headphones or it's just something you're going to listen to casually In that case, you don't need something real fancy I might call me crazy but you could even get like a little anchor Bluetooth speaker which has a line input jack on it I've been blown away with how good some of those inexpensive speakers sound with voice how accurate they are and they will do the trick if that's what you just want to have a different playback device that's more reasonably accurate far more accurate than laptop speakers Well, yeah, they'd laptop speakers will not handle any frequencies below like 200 hertz, I think You're not going to get any of the low end on that You're not going to have a clue if you pop the mic Right You're not going to have a clue if there's rumble in the audio if you're using crappy speakers or really, you know, laptop speakers but with really good sealed headphones Oh, yeah, you'll know if you pop the mic and you'll know if there was a rumble in that recording You'll hear it All right, headphones for studio monitors depends on who you are, where you are and how much you want to spend So anyway Okay, we've got a ton of questions from our amazing audience They're flying in Yeah, so let's get to those in just a minute so stay tuned. We'll be right with those after these Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching Voice Over Body Shop It's great 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 voice over 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 Your dynamic voice over career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voice over industry has to offer That place is VoiceOverExtra.com Whether you're just exploring a voice over career or a seasoned veteran you need to reach that next professional level Stay in touch with market 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, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voice over success Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voice over audition It's all here at VoiceOverExtra.com That's VoiceOverXTRA.com This is Anthony Mendez and you're watching VoiceOver Body Shop It's time for Source Elements That spot on the show where we talk about the amazing variety of products for the voice over actor that is wanting to play a bigger game Well actually at this point play the game of voice over because it's almost completely required across a lot of these genres of voice over the creators of Source Connect Source Connect is a very well honed and long time developed and improved and supported tool that allows your studio to connect to other studios around the world It's a standalone application it doesn't run in Chrome and soon it will become available on more platforms other than Mac and Windows but for now it's a Mac or Windows program and it talks to the audio interface you already have it can be a completely run standalone it doesn't have to be a plug-in although it has that capability so if you do want to use it in conjunction with some processing that you do use on your audio let's say you have a high pass filter plug-in that you use it can be set up with a little bit of skill to be run as a plug-in so if you have Reaper or Adobe Audition or Pro Tools or Logic or Studio One there's a few more I'm sure you can set up Source Connect as a plug-in within those platforms and so that whatever processing you're doing on the audio to deal with rumble or a little of an EQ issue that can be passed through into Source Connect so that's a really clever way to just do a little very subtle adjustment to your audio before it goes to that studio so check it out get a 15-day free trial go to Source-Elements.com get yourself set up if you want a little extra hand-holding head to GeorgeTheTech.com slash SC where I've got some training videos and very long tutorial video on getting Source Connect standard up and running and get yourself be ready so that you can take on those projects when they come because they're gonna come if you're working in voiceover they are more popular than ever with COVID-19 anyway thanks again Source Elements we appreciate it and we'll be back here to answer a ton of questions right after this voiceover journey so I've been subscribing and clicking on lots of VO related things that have come up in my computer something called Speechalo has come up I'm thinking well this can't be good what are your views on this this can't be good this can't be good Speechalo is one of those things there's a lot of companies that are trying to perfect AI voiceover one company stole all our voices they're like synthesizing them into these these AI things you know I listen to them and they did this better ad on Facebook a couple weeks ago they had some seed money and did a massive ad buy it's popping up everywhere yeah it's like oh it's much cheaper than voiceover because it's so expensive because we're good at it I think is the point but we were talking about this earlier that phrase the uncanny valley yeah you can tell it's not a real voice you know unless people just like total no emotion in the voices that they hear which is just fine I guess yeah I mean maybe like a 10 second speech bite of something could sound pretty realistic but any extended listening of something you're going to start hearing all kinds of telltale signs that this is not a human yeah you know it's I'm sure it's going to be used by small businesses and people with no budget or you know for doing things that voiceover normally would be um take a very long time because it's extremely mundane material maybe there's going to be people using it but the thing is people that care are going to hire real voice actors there's going to be always a demand for real voices um so I wouldn't be too concerned about it yeah I really wouldn't be I mean really look at the gaming industry I mean they they evolved into stopping you know not using the secretary and the sales manager to you know to record the voices for games and hiring very good professional actors why because they're very good professional actors and they bring the humanity to that particular game um and that and I they they keep saying oh it's getting better it's getting better I'm like I don't think so how do you program in a motion or just a slight you know change in tone you know I mean an algorithm to do that it's you know eventually they will but probably not in my lifetime I hope it's going to be a while Jeff our very own chat room moderator Jeff Holman again classy guy didn't put his question first but second can you give an example of a 10 foot extension for the USB cable that would not lose quality going from my Scarlett to my MacBook Pro it shouldn't be a problem it's not a quality thing Jeff it's a reliability thing sound quality will not vary but connection quality or reliability of connection can dramatically vary and that is that's really the problem and I know I can't I mean honestly the whole point of what I was saying earlier is I can't recommend a specific 10 foot extension USB that will work without problems I can't that's that's the issue I've and I trust trust me I've tried it and you know it'll maybe work today it might work tomorrow but six months later my audio my client's going I'm getting clack clack crackles and pops in my audio and it's crackling when I play back and that first thing I always think of it's got to be that USB cable that janky thing we hooked up that extension that active extender repeater blah blah blah adapter thing above Bob and chances are and whenever you get tech support from the company that makes the device always they ask you what USB cable you're using are you using the cable we included in the box you're no no I'm using the oh well okay we'll put the original cable back in and disconnect everything else and I'll tell us how it works yeah really I used to run a 15 foot USB cable in my my old studio back in Buffalo yeah they had for printers and stuff I never had a problem with it you know yeah I didn't run my audio through there was simply it was for a webcam and for right you know and a monitor I think and it was an hdm along hdmi run you know it worked you know it's when you start putting a lot of adapters in the way it's like okay I got a five footer and I got a five footer and keep playing them together yeah I think that a good idea I think the maximum spec length for usb cable is like 15 feet something like that so if you find a 15 foot usb cable that has the right connections on both ends you know usb a for the computer usb micro or whatever it is on the other side you may have good luck with that right but everything else all the other variations and adapters and repeaters and blah blah blah it's just no guarantee just way more to go wrong yeah this next yeah this next question this is this is a great question because sure it comes to the definition of how people badly define things sure Michael Alexander's asks any suggestions other than acoustic panels to lower room noise in my closet currently my noise floor is about minus 48 to minus 57 dB again a confusion between the concept of sound treatment and sound proofing they are two totally different things yeah what we're trying to achieve in our booths is isolation preventing sound from coming from the outside and making its way into the booth and into your microphone and then you've got actual acoustic treatment where you are preventing the reflection of your voice from happening and that's really what acoustical panels are for there you know the rock soul or fiberglass or something like that that absorbs the sound but they they're like tissue paper as far as sound going through them you know so low frequencies especially low frequency you know you'll see it on a spectrum boy there's something really rumbling down there or it's my dog snoring and the only way you can prevent exterior noise is with mass with a heavy wall or a decoupled construction wall and that's expensive and that's why it's important to find the most isolated closet you can I'll tell you the most common noise issue is rumble for sure right that low frequency stuff and it's the most difficult to stop acoustically or with soundproofing because it's usually a fridge yeah really low low stuff like the ospreys hovering nearby helicopters but but those are the easiest to remove electronically with a high pass filter so I want to know you know those numbers mean something but we're not knowing what not knowing the frequency content of that noise makes it a lot harder for us to tell you what needs to be done to fix it because sound treatment and proofing also has to do with frequency content low low mid mid high and that kind of thing you know use different ways to deal with all that problem so not an easy answer as you can tell yeah but if you want to soundproof it you got to have heavy walls heavy walls, heavy glass, heavy doors airtight seals yes all of the above but acoustic panels aren't going to do anything for you maybe a little bit but probably a little bit you get the next one oh yeah I just saw this today Petria Bershard in the Twisted Wave Facebook group said asked about she'd seen something about producers wanting a backup of your audio during the recording and then that created a discussion as to whether she was talking about real time backup which I think that's what she thought the question was regarding so how can you do a real time backup of the audio data while you're actually recording and then that spurred another discussion where they were talking about well actually what they probably were talking about is recording a backup audio of a source connect type session where the studio is recording and then they ask you to record a backup and that's two different things that's easy when they're recording you on source connect or IPDTL or anything like that you hit record on your software you're covered that's a backup but backing up your own audio in real time literally having it in two places at once is not quite as simple definitely not there's a couple different ways think about it there's mirrored hard drives or what's called a raid mirror where there's literally two discs or I guess now solid state drives that are both storing the data in real time so if one of those two were to go kaplui the other one would still have the audio intact that's one way of doing a backup and that's more technical and low complicated another way is to literally record in two devices at once so you could have your scarlet recording to your computer and you could have a zoom recorder not zoom conferencing but zoom brand or task am they have $100 or less recorders that you can plug in with a line cable and have audio come out of your scarlet outputs and have that record as well so I've recommended that to a number of people that are just tired of having a random glitch screw up a chapter of a book or something and this is another way that it's a totally different signal chain or a data chain it's the same signal chain but the audio data is stored in its own device separate from the computer that is to me the probably the most thorough backup I can think of because it is literally a different device if the computer was going to crash or whatever or have total audio meltdown that thing is still recording audio through an analog input so couple ways to handle that but there you have it Tom Machin wants you to answer this next question okay this one's for me okay this is a geek question I use various DAWs off and on for various jobs and lately I'm finding strange glitches for recognizing batch functions and both Mac and PC linked to keyboard shortcuts they'll act as if the key combos I haven't that haven't been sent so this issue is across operating systems machines and DAWs I don't have any viruses and I've rebooted and when I reboot it solves the issue only thing I can think of is I've worn out the keyboards your thoughts maybe it's time to have a seance when in due reboot yeah well you said rebooting fixes it I don't know how often you have to reboot every five minutes every five days every five weeks you know rebooting every day is a completely acceptable solution to a lot of things so I recommend shutting down and starting your machine fresh really every day if you record a lot and it's your business but man I you know I don't I haven't heard of this issue particularly and I have really no other magic wisdom so I won't waste any more time I don't know now Jeff has an interesting question here it says when I record room tone I get a much higher level when I'm in the booth even when I hold my breath like 10 dB difference what's going on there that one I think that sounds like an on-site inspection sort of thing that's fascinating well you have a road you have a road NT1A I think Jeff I think and we already know you have a high noise you have a high rumble level in your booth you have a lot of rumble in the audio I've seen your waveform so that's fascinating I have never heard I have never seen anybody have you ever seen that before Dan? no I'm I don't have an answer I'm theorizing here that perhaps the fact that Jeff gets in his booth and is taking up you know airspace big part of the space yeah maybe it's not absorbing the sound it's allowing it to amplify amplify it somehow he's become this one super herodine circuit well because I would think if you're in there it would actually absorb some of the energy you would think but not amplify it well maybe Jeff's different maybe he's from another planet we don't know Jeff's definitely different Jeff we love you man we're gonna have to see that one that is a very odd phenomenon we got two bizarre questions in a row three now well we got I got a notice here from our friend Pecholo de Leon Gonzalez in the Philippines haven't seen him in many many years but he says hello he's a busy guy he's in the Philippines from Karate Voices and Tom asks how do you disinfect your studio booth and mics I'm the only one in there I'm the only one in here so yeah I guess in the context of a commercial studio full educational facility which I know Thomas works in educational facility right that's a tough one I would have everybody have their own headphones even if they're $20 headphones doesn't matter as long as they got their own that's a big one that would be a big one for me I would not want to share headphones at all microphones don't spray them with anything use alcohol prep pad maybe and wipe off the grill on the outside of the microphone even the pop screw or the anything that somebody would touch just wipe wipe them off with alcohol 70% alcohol are better um you know I thought about those foggers you know those things they use on the airlines yeah Ray Obi apparently has one of these things I've seen it um maybe if you have a pretty big facility with a lot of equipment and more people are in there I don't know anything about the fogger technology I don't but it'd be something to research because if you got to disinfect a large area commercial studio and a lot of stuff and you don't want a lot of moisture I don't know if that fogger is bad for equipment I don't know the voodoo behind how that thing works but um maybe get one of those molecule air purifying systems that you know can eliminate down to the molecular level viruses and pathogens and stuff that's probably a good idea people your voice actors would thank you if you had an incredibly good air quality yeah so that might be good yeah but I mean on a microphone like this where it's all just a metal screen you know just a wipe will work on that you know I wouldn't spray anything that would go like through the grid or anything yeah nobody should be making no actor should be making contact with the microphone period right again I think he might be I really because I know he works in a university that's a different story he's got students people using the equipment sharing right yeah I would use um I would wipe things down with alcohol wipes yeah uh Jim Edgar says is there a Neumann TULM 190 which has the best of both models I'm not exactly sure what that means T well that's a TLM and there's the TLM 190 and the U87 right so the TLM is transformous the U87 has a transformer right if it sounds good it is good I don't know dude I have no idea you guys are like really trying to chump the stumps they really are but hey that's what we're here for you know they're regulars they get to do that there's a TLM 170 170 that's kind of a very un unpopular mic because it's expensive it's like right between the 103 and the U87 and I've heard it and it sounds it does sound great it's like a less harsh bright 103 smoother very nice sounding microphone I like the few times I've heard a 170 I like it a lot so I don't know if that would be fulfilling what you're asking but don't know that's a good question yeah really iPads iPads where do we stand up iPads for VO recording this year I don't think we've covered it yet or this quarter my problem with iPad is not the iPad in fact the iPad pros are badass computers like specs wise everywhere they're just amazing my problem is the iOS sucks for audio recording because it has no audio preference settings that you can specifically choose the input you're using right and so there's no guarantee what input it's using in any one second I know when you start just a wave you can plug in an Apogee mic and then it will prompt it will clearly do something to acknowledge it's using the Apogee mic you'll see it on the waveform it's like BOOM you'll get a spike as the mic powers on and you'll see that it's using it but that to me is the major problem of using iOS for critical work is I don't know when it's using what mic that tries me crazy why do I sound so far away because you're not using the mic so until they get their act together with iOS 14 or 15 or whatever the heck it is and do that properly I'm not going to recommend it just not not for critical professional work so one final question here Tom Machen who happens to ask a lot of questions hey we got you back Tom that's right purely subjective question we love the subjective questions when this virus thing is over how are professional home studios going to be viewed how will it change from the way it is now I think how are they viewed well I mean what does he mean by that well clearly from from the specs that I keep seeing and several agents are sending out these these edicts from the casting directors that they're working for you've got to have this and you've got because clearly they're hearing stuff that they don't like right or they don't understand what it takes to have a good home studio they haven't worked with us that that's right perhaps they should work with thousands of voice actors so we know at this point there's thousands of voice actors with proper home studios right so but hire them you know who are the ones so yeah I mean I don't know that's a weird question I know dealing with when I do pro audio suite we've got two Aussies on that one right and in Australia until recently home voiceover studios were considered categorically subpar they were not respected at all and Andrew that hosts the show with us he's always been highly very picky about his audio he's got a well-designed studio and all this but it that's outside the norm in Australia and so there I can see that could be a big deal but home studios have been professional home studios have been around here in the US for a really long time now right so and I don't know how that view will change I don't think it's going to change at all and I just think that the productions that could be done in person in studios are going to return because people are want to be in they want to work in person right they really do want to do it yeah not everything I'm sure there's going to be some things that they're going to realize actually works out better or more efficient or saves money or something I think that's probably a lot of line is that it's you know a lot of producers are going to say we're spending $500 on a recording studio this guy can do it for you know far less and that worries me well yeah I mean that's an issue because you know that's when people start undercutting you were talking earlier about you know shouldn't we be charging engineering fees for you know our studio work for working in a home studio if they're asking us to do fairly sophisticated stuff yeah I and that's a very very much an individual choice and some portions of the business it's considered absolutely a necessity that you have a really good studio and that the audio be delivered ready for ready for air so to speak and in other cases that's not considered the norm whatsoever and rarely if I'm rarely here voice actors saying that oh I have a studio fee and I have an acting fee but I see it mentioned from time to time I mean it's unfortunate we've started a precedent and voice over that you know the audio production that you're doing as a voice actor is thrown in and so it's going to be difficult to unbake that cake if you've been throwing it in for 25 years but you should at least at the very least as Dan said to me earlier he built it into his rate so he knows that he feels he's being fairly compensated you know so that's good but it's still not communicating that they're actually paying for engineering I think if I was a voice actor and I'm not but if I was I would really like to have an invoice that has my voice production time or my voice time and my engineering time even if it's only 25 bucks an hour still to see that it's something that they're paying for will maybe help make sure that that is not a whole part of the industry that just disappears the jobs of engineering you know disappear wow boy you get lots of questions and the time flies like that we've already passed the top of the hour time to wrap this up we're going to take a break and we'll wrap this up right after this thanks for all your questions guys thanks you're watching VOBS.TV I don't know why it's crazy what they do here I think I'm going to go somewhere else and have a cheese sandwich well hello there I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voiced announcer guy on your new orientation training for snapchat were you? stick around you don't want to miss this R1039 at target we want you to come as you are be comfortable okay maybe not bathrobe comfortable pants for the customer on aisle 4 please New Mexico needs a change the representative Michelle Lujan Grisham is our representative watch anywhere anytime on an unlimited number of devices sign in with your netflix account to watch instantly at netflix.com the ice cream maker is a big risk that can have huge reward until you forget to turn it on well that's it guys time is up hey it's JMC thanks for watching the voiceover body shop if you're demo ready or looking to get there check out JMCDemos.com and see a sample of our work now let's get back to Dan and George and this week's tech wisdom thinking that you need to get in gear and start your own voiceover career this is the course you should start with you'll learn about the vocal skills you need the storytelling skills you need the equipment you need the business skills you need and the mindset you need to have all in one single comprehensive online course taught by VO heroes David H. Lawrence the 17th this course won the backstage readers choice award four years in a row and again there's no charge it's absolutely free want to take it? of course you do getting started in VO.com that's getting started in VO.com hey you know it's not often we get to hang out in the voiceover body shop office home of the voiceover body shop broadcast museum and time wasting hobby museum anyway we're here to talk about Harlan Hogan and voiceover essentials right now the Harlan Hogan voice optimized headphones together with the wonderful LED full color voiceover recording sign are on special right now at 20 bucks off no promo cord required just put both items in your voiceover essential shopping card the headphones they're specially designed for voiceover with a nice flat response that allows you to hear you as you exist and the LED voiceover recording sign is the perfect way to keep everyone around you quiet until you ply your craft that's 20 bucks off when you buy both no promo code required just put both items in your voiceover essential shopping card go over to voiceover essentials right now and see all the great stuff they have thanks Harlan this is Ariana Ratner and you're listening to voiceover body shop VOBS.TV and we're back to say goodbye next week on this very show we have only Elaine Clark who I'm sure will have some very interesting views on the voiceover industry and on training and she's a great coach and just a wonderful lady so and brilliant a brilliant lady who are our donors this week we've got familiar names like Shauna Pennington Baird Martha Kahn Lee Penny Rob Ryder Michael Kennedy Valerie Burgess Mike Gordon and Michael Kearns we really appreciate you guys helping us out yeah hey show us your booths eventually this will all end and we'll be George and I will be back in the studio and we'll be able to like be in your studio and I've been getting a few and we're saving them up and when we get to that we'll start having people's booths in here but send them to this send them to us in landscape not portrait yes for whatever reason you guys do it we need to thank our wonderful sponsors too you take the first one let's change Paul and Hogan's voiceover essentials voiceover extra source elements voheroes.com voice actors websites.com and JMC demos alright thanks guys for your help thanks to Jeff Holman doing a kick butt job in the chat room tonight lots of great questions Sumer Lino for getting it done and pick getting in her car and driving over here and doing it and getting it done and pressing those buttons and all those great things she does and Lee Penny for just simply being well this is not an easy business but we're here to help you out with all the tech stuff that you guys need to know comes talk to with us you know visit us at our websites watch our show but it really comes down to one thing if it sounds good it is good alright I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George and this is voiceover body shop or VOBS have a great week everybody we'll see you next time