 Hey, it's time for Tech Talk number 21. We do that in Roman numerals. It's going to start looking cool if we do it that way. I know. What is it about Roman numerals? I think it's the, I think it's a Super Bowl. I made that look cool. That's true. Fascinating, you know, and I was in Europe, all the stuff that was from the church was all written in Latin and it was like you could read stuff from a thousand years ago. It was really cool. So neat. All right. Well, it's time for Tech Talk. We've got lots of stuff to talk about. George has, he has filled our coffers with stuff that we can talk about and we'd love your questions here on VoiceOver Body Shop Tech Talk. So throw them in the chat room or on Facebook and we'll answer those a little bit later on. So stay tuned. It's time for Tech Talk right now on VoiceOver Body Shop. From the center of the VO universe, they bring it to you now. George Wittem, the engineer to the VO stars, a Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up, and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today. And you, Dan Leonard, the VoiceOver Home Studio master, a professional voice 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 VoiceOverEssentials.com, home of Harlin Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone, voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt. VOheroes.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. Greetings, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop or VO BS Tech Talk. To work on that a little bit more as well. I'm just trying to have fun with it. You know what I'm saying? Well, if it wasn't fun, we wouldn't do it. No, that's for sure. Simple as that. The one thing, one of the things I miss from Europe, since we got back from Europe last week, coffee. They have these computerized machines in the hotels there that, it says touch me for starters. Oh, okay, bye. Like would they have an Ikea now? Yeah, it's like American coffee, cappuccino, mochicino, you know, latte and all these things on a menu and just press it, grinds the beans, almost like the one I have. My god, you're a cappresso. And you know, and Marcy was like, well, no, I want cappuccino every day. Well, you can get one of those machines. I've seen them in car dealers and like the fancy car dealers in the Netherlands, you know. Yeah, well, now they're like in every major hotel in Europe. Because they're not used to eating breakfast there. It's an American thing. So they've gone all out and it's like this full smorgasbord of everything. Really? And we really were like, you know, bloating ourselves. The first week we were there and then. You learned to pace yourselves because you had another week to go. But the second week it was like, maybe we don't need quite as, I don't have to have the bagel, you know, and the strudel. And, you know. Exactly. Anyway, we're here to talk about voiceover tech, which you guys have demanded. And so we're giving it to you. And so let's start with your tech update of the week. What do we got? Yeah. Well, also, I'm also keeping an eye on the chat room as we go here too. Excellent. Um, just because of mic placement, maybe a look on your screen. So just for ideas. So like, okay, somebody already asked in the chat room, voice geek actually said, are there any deals right now? We, we got a deal from Harlan Hogan. We're going to tell you guys about tonight. If you were watching the show earlier or from last week. Okay. The show that you're seeing tonight is not on Cyber Monday, unless you happen to be watching it live. So here's why you should watch the show live. Because you get to find out about deals that are happening today. And one of those deals is my deal. If you go to georgeothetech.com, I've offered four different things at the top of the page that are at a deep discount. 50% off 50, 50% off 30, 60 and 30 minutes, 60 minute and two hour consultations, 50% off. And also $50 for processing stacks, racks, presets for any software. Some of you know, I charge more for some less than other, less for others, but they're all 50 bucks. So there you go. Boom. Go check it out. If you happen to be watching this live for everybody else. Sorry. Well, I'll see you next year. Okay. There's your deal. Okay. Well, I've gone iPhone. I actually have an iPhone. I got the iPhone 11, not the pro, which my daughter apparently calls the stove. She says, you don't have the stove. I'm like, what's the stove? The iPhone pro has the three back cameras on the back. And to her, I guess her friends, it looks like a stove. From the top it does. It looks like a range. It's like a little, a little tiny frying pans. It's got the two camera one. You know, it's, there's features in the pro that were exciting to me, but not the extra, not worth the extra $300 or so. This one's got 128 gigs of storage. It's just plenty. It has the wide angle lens, which for me was a big deal because I've had the LG G seven Android phone for the last couple of years. And it's predecessor, the V 20 or something. And those both had two cameras with wide lenses. So I was used to having that. So when iPhone finally came out with a phone with wide angle, I was on it. I was on it. And I'm really glad I did it. I was very skeptical. I waited a long time and it was because there were so many little features and tweaks that audition, that audition. Yeah, Adobe, Adobe, let's say every word was a that's not the one I mean. Android had tons of tweakability and features, but that was also its downfall. It was just not as stable and they would put out a new version and the phone would just get progressively worse. iPhones, they'll put out a new version of the OS. It may be a little bit buggy on the first out, you know, the first go around, but it'll get better over time and the phone will run better and they'll fix things and it'll get better. My phone would just get worse and worse. I just got tired of the cycle. I've been doing it for 10 years. So finally, iPhone 11. And I'm very happy with it. I can see why people love it. It's got the key features that I really want to have. But for me, my favorite is this one. So I go into iPhone, I say, get Google. Let's try it again. Get Google. So Siri is a pain in the neck and Siri is showing how she is a pain in the neck right now. And it's not actually working. But what's supposed to happen is, hey Siri, get Google. Oh, and there it is. So I programmed Siri to get Google for me. So it feels like I'm back on my Android phone. And now I can have Google do the searching, do the stuff that it does so much better than Siri. So if you've never had Google's voice assistant, you can get it on your iPhone. And once you start using it, you're going to realize how superior it is in every way to Siri. The one thing that Siri has on Google is that it's more private. The reason why Google Assistant is so amazing is because it knows so much more about you, especially if you use Gmail. So I'm a Gmail user and it learns a tremendous amount of information. So if you're really big into privacy, you're probably not going to be all about what Google does because it knows so much. But that's why it works so well. Well, that's, but that's what you want. It's the trade off. It's like you want someone who knows you like your spouse. Yes. Google Assistant is really that good, folks. So my buddy Anthony Mendez, who was also a longtime Android stalwart, he was the one that said, I got an iPhone. I love it. And here's what I did to make it work the way I want. And that was a big one, using the shortcuts feature. Have you played around with this thing called shortcuts? Not yet. Yeah, you can go in there and create a button or a voice command or what's called an automation that will make the phone do something. Like when I get in the car and it connects to my Bluetooth, it prompts on the screen. Hey, do you want to send a message to your girlfriend telling her you're in the car now? And I could just hit a button and it says, Hey, Fifi, I'm in the car and drive. I'm heading out. You know, stuff like that. But you wouldn't think about that yourself. Here's the thing. Some of you guys are amazing and you're able to remember to do that kind of stuff every time. My brain just doesn't wire that way. I've got 17 things on my mind. So having that little extra reminder to say, Hey, I'm heading out in the car or hey, I'm on the way. I love stuff like that. Anyway, it's been a great phone so far. The battery life completely destroys the Android phones, including the new Pixel 4. It goes on forever. The Pixel 4 in comparison is like half the battery life. I've seen the reviews and I love that. I love getting into the day having the battery life 50% left on the iPhone. Go to bed. Don't even plug it in. Get up. It still works for half a day and then I'll get around to plugging it in. That is amazing to me for an iPhone. Just don't use Waze. Yeah. That will suck your battery drive. I do use Google Nav but I don't use Wave. Okay. Waze. Anyway, very happy with it. So now I'll be able to answer a lot more iOS centric questions because I'll be testing a lot more. So one of the things I have learned about with iOS is, yes, this is my first phone that does not have the beloved headphone jack. And I didn't realize how spoiled I was because the LG I had had an incredibly good DAC. A DAC. You know what a DAC is? A digital analog converter. It should be an analog to digital converter. Yeah. We have both of them, right? Right. But in the case of the LG phone, it had an incredibly good headphone jack. Plug-in headphones. You could turn on its high-quality DAC, which was not a gimmick and really actually was noticeably better. And you had great sound. Now, all the iPhones in the last three or four generations got did away with that. And they give you, they don't give you. You can go buy a little adapter. Well, they think it comes with that. It actually comes with one of these. It actually does. Maybe I should take the accessories out of my box. And you might actually find an extra. I just pulled the phone out and immediately charged and started using it. Anyway, this little thing, it's more than just a little adapter, right? You're looking at it and go, it's got lightning on one end and the TRRS mini jack on the other. It looks like just that's it. But what's going on in this thing is actually it's digital conversion from the digital lightning to the analog connection on your headphone. So there's actually circuitry inside this little thing. There's circuit board in there and it's doing that conversion all in this little tiny, tiny doodad. Well, anyway, I bought a couple of cheapies on Amazon because they were on sale. And I, you know, flashy, flashy object. They're not all created equal folks. I plugged this one in for the first time this morning. And I was playing with a new app on my phone. It's called Dolby. What's it called? Dolby. It's a recording app. Dolby on. Okay. It's a gimmicky thing. I don't recommend it for any VO. It adds way too much processing, but it's pretty cool. Well, it is Dolby. I hit play and I heard hiss and a wine in my headphones. And I was thinking, boy, this Dolby software stinks. It's supposed to make it nice and nice and clean. Right. Played back some stuff on Spotify. Same exact thing. When you stop playing the audio, the DAC turns off. But for about a second before it, you hear the self noise of the system. And it was noisy. So keep that in mind when you're, if you have to replace them when it comes with the phone and I understand these are not very well made, they fall apart, either buy the actual Apple one or buy an upgraded DAC that has good sound quality that you can plug into your lighting port. If you really care enough and you do use high quality headphones like the Harlan VO on a VO headphones or the Audio Technica is one, get a good DAC or at least use something as good or better than the Apple factory. The doctor, because this thing is noisy and it's junk. I'm sending it back. So there you go. This one is the X002BGE1OD. Don't buy that one. Don't buy that one. Anyway, moving on. For service, I'm still obsessing about the iPhone. I'm using this service called Visible. It's $40 a month. It's unlimited. Its only limitation is that you can't have more than one device hot spot off the phone. So typically you can probably have your whole family on your phone on vacation. Who does that? It's rare. Like this one, you can't do that. That's the only limitation though. And supposedly it's limited to five megabits a second. But my tests show that it's really full speed. So they must have turned that off. And it's running on Verizon. And it's pay as you go. So $40 a month, pay as you go. Verizon Network, which definitely is the best one. Take it from somebody who's used now every one of them. I left Project Phi. Lousy. I hated dropping phone calls on the 10 freeway driving the Santa Monica. Inexcusable. So now this has been a really good one. Cool thing. If you have a party of four, they call it a Visible party. You can each get a discount on your service. So if you have four people in your party, you each pay $25 a month. Flat rate, unlimited phone calling and data and internet and hot spot. It's incredible. Really good deal. So if you want to party with me, hit me up. I'll add you to the party. And don't worry, you all pay your own bill. It's not like one of us is paying and then you have to Venmo each other and stuff. No, it's not how it works. It's pretty cool. What else? Just a little heads up. The Apollo stuff. I talk about a lot because so many people are wanting to buy these things. They're getting recommended now to folks getting started with their own home studios for the first time. Not going to name who's doing this, but they know who they are. These things are way too sophisticated, way too complicated, and just way more than you need to get started with your home home, with a home studio. The sound quality of them, of course, is great. The feature set is great, but here's the deal. There has been a known issue with the newer series of these Apollo twins that Mark two in the USB. And the thing is about this problem is they haven't really properly addressed it yet. People are sending them in getting replacements or getting them repaired, getting it back. And the new problem, the same problem comes up again. Right. So it literally is a bad component in the design of the unit. Right. And these are the people from Universal Audio, which is a great company. They make great stuff. Yep. But they've made, because these became so popular, perhaps... Some bad spec or bad part got specced in there and got into the batch. And that must have been a big batch. It's been a real issue. So if you're having trouble with your Apollo and you're getting this weird soft whooshing sound behind your audio, then you're probably having the same problem. There's a Facebook group called Universal Audio Apollo. I started it maybe a couple of years ago and Drew, a guy from UA is in there and he'll take your information. He'll get your service ticket information. He's creating a file about this because, again, they haven't really recalled them. They're just sort of fixing them one by one. But just a little red flag for you guys out there having that trouble. Me and Tim Tippets, he was really also instrumental in getting people to find the right kind of help for this thing. So a little just general watch your backs thing that happens this time of the year. I found special in the last couple years and I've been a victim of this to some degree. The amount of fraud going on at this time of year is unbelievable. Everybody's online looking for stuff. Everybody's online. They're looking for deals. They want to get their families the best thing they can, but the thing they can't afford. Then there's those Instagram ads that are so well targeted and Facebook because they'd both use the same system. They're so damn good because trust me, I'm seeing these ads and I am tempted to click on them all the time. But you got to be aware. Some of these ads, if they're not taking you to the actual manufacturer of that thing, the brand of who makes it, do not use these ads to buy things. It's either a knockoff or it's a... They're knockoffs are just purely vaporware products that don't really exist or do what they say that they're going to do. I've seen all kinds of scooters, electric scooters, drones. And now this year, I saw this triple screen thing that hooks onto your laptop and provides two more screens that slides out to the side. Really cool gadget, 69 bucks. I'm telling you, I've looked at these things, I've priced what they would cost. They would be easily survived to 10 times that to get something that does what this does. Got to be really careful. If you click on those ads and it's clicking you, taking you to some random Shopify website, I have one linked here. I'm not going to read the whole domain, but dreamflea.myshopify.com run away because they set up the shop, they sell you some crap, they'll tell you, they'll tell you, they're shipping from China, so give us a month. By the time you get that thing and realize it's not what you wanted, or something totally different, you go to the website to get a return. Got it. Site's gone. Boom. So trust me, stay away from these resources. Now you've got a new item that you and Rick Wasserman have put together. Yeah. The tri-boot. Tell us about it. Yeah, I won't go into that detail because I'd love to do a proper demo sometime and bring Rick in, but Rick saw a need for himself. He saw that there was a need for a truly portable product that would then feel like a booth. It wasn't something you had to sit down at, or it wasn't something you had to stick on a stand. Something you could stand inside of. And for Rick, that was important to him. He wanted to feel like his booth at home. He works in a whisper room at home. So he came up with his own idea, and we'll go into it more when we have Rick on some time, and he'll tell you about the impetus of this design and everything. But we created this thing. I mean, it was his brainchild, his design. He basically just came to me for, how's this going to work? How can we make it sound good? And so on and so forth. And in the end, I think we came up with something pretty cool. I just tease it tonight and let you know it is available. It's at tryboothtry-booth.com. You can get, actually, I don't know if there's a dash in it. It's just trybooth. Sorry, trybooth.com. And you can give it a try on the website. You can get a demo if you're in the right areas. We have one sitting at my parents' house now in Pennsylvania. You're going to send people over to your parents' house? Well, actually, we had Paul Strikwurta and Paul Stefano both test it. Paul picked it up from Paul Strikwurta. They were close enough that he could try to over pick it up. So we've got one on the East Coast, and of course we have them for demo on the West Coast. And for some of you that don't want to cobble something together and want something that's a step beyond what else is out there right now that you can still travel with, this could be something for you. So stay tuned. We'll bring one in one of these nights and we'll do a proper demo. You can take a look at it. That's a lot of stuff. I'm so glad you're on the iPhone. You're bragging always about, oh, I'm an Android guy. I'm like, then suddenly, oh, you've come to the dark side. I had enough. I had enough. I couldn't deal. Honestly, the battery life was the biggie. I was always carrying around a big, fat battery to get through the whole day. And I was like, I'm just tired of this. Yeah. And the iPhone, they nailed that battery life thing. They really got it right. Some say it's because Johnny, I've left the company so that I could finally make one thick enough to have a proper battery. That was the conspiracy theory. But loving the iPhone 11 is a good deal. Yeah. Once again, if you've got any home voiceover studio questions for us, throw it in the chat room. We'll get to them in just a couple of minutes. I wanted to talk a little bit about interfaces. Now, we were just talking about the Apollo twin. And people are always like, what interface should I buy? To keep things simple, which is what we're always about. I mean, we've always been recommending things like, you know, the focus right to I2 or solo or something like that. You don't need an awful lot. What does an interface do? It does two things. One, it's a preamp, which everybody says, well, you need a preamp. If people are going out and buying these incredibly expensive preamps that are more expensive than everything else in their chain, and it really doesn't do a whole lot. Sometimes even more than the computer. Most definitely. It's not going to change the way you read copy. Some people say, well, it makes my voice sound fuller. But if your voice isn't full to start with, why create fake news with your voice? And say, well, is it going to fake it? Or is it you want it to record the way you actually sound? It's not our job to sound that way. But there are some interfaces that have really good preamps in them, but they're not like two preamps that do all that, you know, warm up your voice and cause a little bit of harmonic distortion or emulations and plug-ins and all that kind of stuff. You don't need any of that stuff unless you are a commercial producer. And if you're just starting out in voiceover and haven't had 20 years experience as a commercial producer, you don't need that stuff. It's going to get you in trouble worse. Oh, absolutely. That's actually the worst problem. But there are some good manufacturers that make really good interfaces, you know, or what we call digital interfaces that also have a preamp. They all have preamps in them. Most of them do. They pretty much all do at this point. Yeah. And the ones that are there are pretty good. I just got myself an ID 14 this week. Audience. Yes. Great unit. I'm still futzing with it and learning what it does. It's got a lot of cool little features in it. It's kind of like a Scarlett 2i2. Like it has two mic inputs. Right. But just overall upgraded looking, physically upgraded looking device. It's got a really nice interface physically to it. Right. And supposedly better preamps and converters as well. I will let you know. Yeah. But really, if you buy anything, now there's some manufacturers, they're all getting better. There's no question about it. They've all, a lot of companies have upped their game because things have become cheaper to produce. But the quality is there. Don't go out of your way to get a really expensive preamp interface because it's not going to change the way you read copy. It just isn't. And I don't understand why people go nuts with it. Well, it's got all these plugins or it's got this. It's got these features. Unless you're recording music, it really doesn't make a difference. You don't buy cheap, but you buy something that is probably a hundred bucks or more. You know, 150 bucks might be all you ever need. I'll tell you. I mean, I've been recommending the Steinberg UR12. I have yet to see one of those really fail somebody. I think one of my clients got one. He bought two of them on my instruction. I was like, hey, they're so inexpensive, get two. So you have a spare. And I think he may have had trouble with one of them. So it was actually kind of really helpful that he had two. But that's the first time I've heard of anybody having any trouble with it. It's so simple to use. I love that it has a single push button for the monitoring. So if you really want to wear headphones, you just press a button. And I like that it has a clean preamp. You don't have to install any drivers at all. Plug it in and it works on Windows or Mac. I do recommend the Windows driver. They do have a driver for it. And that's an ASIO driver, which will make it more stable and not subject to having the levels mucked around with by the Windows system. But, you know, I had somebody who had the Apollo. Then she bought the after she had problems with the Apollo on her Windows system. Windows and Apollo still not a good mix. Then she went to the RME Babyface, similarly priced thing, even more complicated and confounding to use than the Apollo. And after all that, she was so frustrated. I said, just trust me on this. I know it sounds too cheap, but just try the Steinberg UR12. She plugged it in. She sent me some audio and it was crystal clean. It was so pristine. And she's like, this is so easy. I can't believe how easy this is to use. I'm like, yes, it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be hard. Keep it simple. But I think maybe we'll do a shootout with a bunch of different interfaces. It's something I've been wanting to do forever. And then you'll hear, they all sound the same. Between us, we have a stack of probably this many, honestly, of different interfaces, different prices, and all that. We'll do a shootout. I haven't done one at home because I don't have a quiet enough. I don't have a real proper quiet studio. Bring it over here to my magnificent studio. Yeah, we could do a somewhat quiet. This thing is a recording studio. Well, it's way quieter than MySpace. That's for sure. Yeah, there are bird sounds and the sounds of rushing streams and stuff like that. Anyway, we're going to get to your questions right after these important announcements. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying Voice of Her Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, vobs.tv. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice denouncer guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? This is Virgin Radio. Well, okay, we're not that innocent. There's jeans for wearing and there's jeans for working. Dickies, because I ain't here to look pretty. She's a champion of progressive values. A leader for California and a voice for America. It's smart. It's a phone. It's a smart phone. But it's so much more. It's the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song. It's the end of the road for Rick. This is your name, Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 from BMW. Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish? Hey, it's J. Michael Collins. Bet you think I'm going to try and sell you a demo now, huh? I think they speak for themselves. But I will give you my email. It's jmichaelatjmcoysover.com. Now, if Dan will stop waxing his mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show. Hey, it's the holiday season. You hear it in the supermarkets. You hear it everywhere. And you can't wait for the holiday season to be over. But since it is and you're out there shopping and you want to get the best stuff for the voice actor in your life or just you, the best place to go is voiceoveressentials.com because it's got everything you need. Anything you could possibly need to be a voice actor, Harlan Hogan at Voice Over Essentials probably has it. And if he doesn't, you probably don't need it. To quote Prairie Home Companion. Anyway, he's got the stuff that you need, especially the signature series products that he has, such as the Harlan Hogan VO1A microphone. It's designed for voiceover. And he's got them there at voiceoveressentials.com. The Harlan Hogan Signature Series headphones designed specifically for voiceover. A very flat response, very comfortable. And George will now show them off. There they are. The Harlan Hogan Signature Series headphones. Very comfortable. They have the thing, the headphone actually unplugged instead of rips out when you tend to walk away with your headphones on. Great to have. Also, a lot of other things, books, things that will help you with your voiceover practice. Go over to voiceoveressentials.com. Best way to get there is to go here on our website. If you're watching, click on the little icon of Harlan Hogan talking into his porta booth. And it'll take you right there. And let him know that you're watching our show and that you like his stuff because we tell you about it and we believe in it. So go over there, voiceoveressentials.com. Deplace to get your voiceover equipment. Thanks, Harlan. This is the time of the show where we get to talk about one of our wonderful sponsors, Source Elements. Those are the creators of Source Connect. That is a software that voice acting pros are being demanded to have in their home studios by the commercial studios of the world. How do I know this? Well, I've set up software for everybody on every platform and in every scenario you can imagine. And this is the one that people are being requested to get. It's a standalone application. It doesn't run on a Google Chrome browser. So you have a lot more stability involved. And this software has been tried and true, tested, improved the whole nine for well over 10 years now. So if you really want to be establishing a business and voiceover that works with the top studios in the world, top agents, that kind of thing, make sure you have Source Connect locked and loaded in your studio. Absolutely important. Go get a 15 day free trial at source-elements.com. 15 day free trial. You don't need an iLock little USB dongley thing to get set up with Source Connect standard right away. So go give it a try and tell them we sent you. We'll be right back right after this. Before time began, there was VLBS.TV, watch or else. And we're back. Yeah, we were talking about headphones before. You were talking about some Sennheisers. I remember the Sennheisers from the radio stations that just were foam. Oh yeah, just a yellow pad on your ears? Yeah, and always fun when you would come in to do your shift and find makeup on them. Yeah, those things, foam ear pads for like communal workspaces, not a good idea at all. In fact, I saw somebody post today on Facebook saying, guys, bring your own headphones to the studios you work at because sometimes they are disgusting. Yeah, really? Bring your own headphones. I think that's a really good idea actually. Yeah, they should just have squawk boxes in most studios now. What do you need headphones for? Yeah, I mean any proper studio should be able to just have a talk back switch. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's get to the questions from our audience because that's why we're here, although we love talking about all the other stuff. Well, I saw this first one, Dan. I guarantee you're probably better at answering this one. So I'll ask it. Okay, okay. This is from Vince Falcon. He says, I'm a California resident. Dan is now after, what are you on now? Four and a half years. More than four and a half years, yeah. What is the most optimal way to set up the business side of voiceover? I want to venture into voiceover, but I have little to no experience running any type of business. So is an LLC better than a corporation or vice versa? I'm not planning to join a union for the foreseeable future, maybe after I've established myself. Well, I'd say that Mr. Falcon's way overthinking all of this. Yeah, you're definitely like seven steps ahead of where you should be starting. It's okay to plan ahead and to understand all those steps, but if you really want to understand the physical structure of how to set up your business and stuff like that, one book you should probably get is from our good friend, Rob Sigmund-Panglia, who is a lawyer and a voice actor and a producer and a floor wax. And he is a business owner and he runs several businesses and he's written a book called Voiceover Legal, or is it VO Legal? But you can get his voice over. Yeah, let me check that. Well, we'll double check on that. He talks about how to structure your business and whether you should be in LLC and those sorts of things. You have to establish yourself in business before you do all those things. See if you're going to actually do it, because do you want to go through the expense of setting up a corporation or an LLC or one of those things? And then you're like, eh, maybe I want to do voice over. It's voice over legal. Three words. Voice over legal. Yeah, I can tell you, I mean, again, anytime we will never tell you stuff that a CPA would tell you, or legally a lawyer should tell you. But I will tell you that my CPA has kept me from becoming an LLC in California year after year after year. She keeps telling me like you need to make a considerable amount of money, revenue, not revenue, but taxable income and take home to make that step to an LLC worthwhile. So don't jump right off into doing that. There's no real good reason to make that investment in time and investment in costs. It costs like $800 to start a company or corporation in California. Right. And when you are ready, you'll know it. Yeah. I think this is probably the best way. Yeah, it might be a little while, so take your time. Unless you're like a serial, like you said, you've never owned a business. Right. If you're a serial entrepreneur, you understand the reasons for doing it. You have the history of doing it, the experience. But starting out, don't go there. You get that book. Definitely worth taking a good look at that one. Yeah. Voice Geek asks, as you mentioned, Harlan Hogan's Cyber Monday sale last week. Any other deals that those of us in voiceovers want to get in on before midnight? Well, if you're watching the show live, you heard my plug earlier for George the Tech. I have some on there on georgethetech.com. But if you're watching this a week later, sorry, too late. That's why I got to watch the show live, folks. Yeah, we'd like to get you on. But I did notice that, you know, I got a lot of email, you know, from Sweetwater and Guitar Center and all those, but they're all plug-in companies. Yeah. Isotope, Waves, all of them are going to have deals. Sound effect company. And everybody's giving it away. Why did you just give it away in the first place? A lot of these companies, especially the plug-ins, those things go on sale several times a year. I've noticed they go on at least two or three times a year. Right. Software is much, much easier for companies to discount for kind of obvious reasons. You know, it's software. Right. They make it once and then they sell it 10,000 times. Right. So it's a lot easier for them to discount that. Hardware, not as easy to discount. You know, there's some real upfront costs in making these things. So I haven't seen anything that's blown my, you know, blown my mind in terms of deals. But I feel like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's not the big deal it used to be. Even though this year they said on Black Friday we had the most purchases ever. Right. And most of them were online, by the way. Right. But these deals come up to you throughout the year. If you're savvy, you listen to the show and you just subscribe to some of the newsletters and this product vendors that you like the most, be it Isotope or whatever. And just get on the mailing list. You'll see these deals come up more than once a year. They're not one-time-only deals. Right. And then they pile up in your inbox. And it's like, I think I need to go through, delete a pile of stuff, you know. And it's like, everything from these guys. Nothing to rule is like these Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all this stuff. For a lot of the consumer stuff, what they're doing is they're heavily discounting the crud that they need to get rid of. Right. It's stuff that wasn't, it's kind of low spec gear. It's that brand, but it's the cheap one. And I'm even hearing that there's some gear that's even made specifically for Black Friday. So they make it at the lowest possible price point so that big stores can have that door buster sale. Right. And you buy that TV, that 60-inch TV for $199. And it lasted two weeks. Yeah, it lasted a couple of years or two, and maybe if you're lucky. So don't, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Just be really careful, buy or beware, as I said earlier, about what you see online for those deals. Yeah. Now, Voicecake has another question. Great. That we may have the same answer or similar answers to. He says, any thoughts, caveats, an Isotope RX-7 standard? Because it's always on sale as far as, you know, from what I've seen the last couple of months. It's on sale now. It'll be on sale, you know, next year. Yeah. Now, Isotope is, it's for cleaning up audio. Yep. It's great at it. It's got all these bells and whistles. Lots. But here's the thing. It has a rather significant learning curve. You have to know what things are supposed to sound like. Right? Right. Yes. Especially using tools like that. Yeah. I mean, unless your audio is really crappy and you're trying to clean it up, it's not really designed for voiceover. I mean, none of this stuff was designed for voiceover. It was all designed for recording and producing music and producing multi-track things like podcasts, although podcasts is a brand new thing to these companies. They're like, wow, podcasting. Here's a market we didn't think about. So you're going to sell stuff to you. A lot more people podcasting than doing voiceover. So you're going to start seeing a lot more products for podcasting. Isotope is one of the companies I've noticed that does seem to to start to pay attention to the voiceover user. Right. They actually do now have a plugin of their Denoiser that's called Voice Denoiser. Right. So they're trying to, they're starting to pay attention to what people are asking for and eating, which is nice. Most of the other companies, definitely, I would say, heavily music-centric. Right. I'll tell you, if you have Adobe Audition, you've got probably 80, 90% of what is an Isotope already baked in there. Yeah. Like, I've found so few reasons to buy any plugins when you have Adobe Audition. I see people all the time, I don't want to pay the $20 or $22 a month for, like, but it's got so much built into it. The spectrum, the spectral view, spectrum view. The spectrograph. Spectrograph view. Start with that editing method. It's, it's insane what that includes. Right. And the thing is, if you need to do a Denoiser, here's what you do. You close the door. The idea of a home voiceover studio is not to make you sound great. It is to make you sound like you in the environment in which you exist. So you create a good environment in which to record, because the acoustics, and we don't, we only say this every week, the acoustics are the most important part of your home voiceover studio. Absolutely. And if you've got outside noises, and you've got, you know, electrical noises, you get rid of those physically. Don't rely on the technology to help you out. And everybody's like, because they read stuff in Facebook or in some of the online forums, like, oh, this works great, or that works great. They work great, but it's a lot easier to not have those problems in the first place. And saves, you know, it's like poop in, poop out. The thing about the noise removal stuff is the people that have the worst noise issues, these noise removal tools are the most, they draw the most attention to the problem. Right. The worst the noise is, the harder it is for that tool to remove it. So the people that buy those tools, sometimes by them thinking it's going to fix some really atrocious noise issues. Heater running in the background, air conditioning, whatever, just always running. And, you know, when you, the worst of the problem is, the more the tool will cause you trouble because it can't deal with the more severe noises. They do really good with the more subtle issues. And here's the thing, like most of these subtle issues, we have so many other ways to deal with it, as Dan said. So before you buy these things, get the demo, test them out. Play with it. Send the audio to us. Let us listen to what you're doing, help give you feedback whether what you're doing is actually helping or hurting before you make too much of an investment in these tools. Yeah, I mean, it's, there's a lot of stuff out there. The more, we've been doing this show, it'll be nine years in March, if you can believe that. Yeah. And we, the more, the more we talk about this stuff and the more we, the more experience we have in working with people. And we had already had a lot of experience, but we've had a lot more in the last nine years. You and I have really come to the inclusion to keep it totally simple. And, you know, there are people that do need some higher end equipment because they're doing stuff live and they're constantly high speed turnaround. Right. And it requires a certain particular sound. But for everything else, it's BS with all lot most people are saying about, you know, you need this equipment, you need that. You need, you need this kind of a microphone because it's going to make you sound great. Well, if you don't already sound great as a voice actor, there's no microphones going to change that. Yeah. You can't buy a mic that makes you sound more bass heavy or less nasal or things like that. The mics just don't, the mics are pretty accurate. They're going to hear you as you are. And not even a really expensive mic. Right. You know, and most of the ones that we can use are like less than $300. Oh yeah. It might be the only mic you ever need. We're using two $300 or round there microphones due to the show we have for years. What can we say? Sound great. They sound great. And that's, that's the most important thing. Do we have any other questions that have been phoned into our, Let me take a look before we say good night. Some comments. Okay. Thomas Machin says, their denoiser function was built by Isotope. What's an audition? He says was made by Isotope. That's why it's so good. Okay. Remix is amazing. As far as I know, there's nothing out there like remix. Is there remix is something again, not for voiceover, but for producers that want to take an audio track and then subtract things from the mix or rebalance the mix of audio. Almost no relevance to you guys's voiceover, but it is something that audition can do. And now Isotope has as well. But that's it. I think that's it for the questions. Let me check the Facebook one more time. Nope. I think we can wrap it up. All right. Well, we'll be right back and wrap things up right after this. Voiceover career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level. Stay in touch with market trends, coaching, products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. Voiceover Extra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, casting, home studio setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceover X-T-R-A dot com. David H. Lawrence, the 17th and the coaching team at voheroes.com want to know. As we head into the new year, they're planning new courses and new training and they want to find out what you need most. And it's easy to let him know. Just drop him an email at david at voheroes.com and let him know what you'd like to know. Is it tech oriented? Is it about auditioning? Is it about booking more work, finding an agent, podcasting, audiobooks, performance questions? Whatever that one thing is that keeps you up at night that makes you scratch your head or that you've always wanted to know about success and vo, email David and ask. The email address again is david at voheroes.com. That's david at voheroes.com. They 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 voice over website going for as little as $700. So if you watch your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what. The voice of our body shop. Can I hear Knives out? It's really good. As a voice talent. No, that's not what we want to see. It's a clue Agatha Christie who done it. Oh, okay. All right. Hey, we're back. Who knew? We were talking about movies. Yeah. Seeing that I heard Knives out is good. I'm going to go see that. I'm going to go see it. Okay. I don't want to see Ford versus Ferrari too. I want to see that too. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, next week, I think Jack Daniel will be joining us. I hope so. We'll find out. He's a guy that started coming out to LA, then moved to LA, then he came and helped us out on the show for a while. And wouldn't you know it after some time? He just got too busy to help us. Heard him on Jimmy Kimmel the other night. He's doing great. It was really cool. He's truly a success story. And it'll be fun to share his story. And we'd like to know who you'd like to have his guest on the show. Yeah, please do. Let us know. He was a suggestion from one of our friends. Right. So we would love to have more suggestions for you guys. No, I actually have to talk to him, say, you want to do it on the show. Well, I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, we haven't invited him yet. Here we are. Now he has to come on. His friends are all going to say, Hey, I heard you're going to be on. Really? Yeah. He didn't even ask me yet. I know. Who are our donors of the week? Oh boy, we got a big batch. Patty Gibbons, Michael Kearns, Brian Roush, Antland Productions, Michelle Blanker, Sarah Borges, Philip Sapir, Trey Mosley, Tom Pinto, Stephanie Sutherland, George A. Wittem, my dad, Shanna Pennington-Baird, Don Griffith, Joseph Harrison, and Harlow Rodriguez. The last one is a new name to me. Yeah. Everyone else, we know them all. We've been donating for a long time. Yeah. Or as Les Nessman would say, Harlow Rodriguez. Rod-Rack, Rod-Rick-Waze. Yes. Thank you, Harlow. We appreciate it. Hey, show us your booths, like this one, from Rob Ridder's rule. Can't remember his name, but isn't it a gorgeous studio? It is a beautiful one. Yes, wouldn't we all like it? Quite an impressive spread there. Yes. Send them in, Landscape, High Resolution Images, and we'll throw them on the show. 1080p at least, for your pictures. Right, and just to the guys at VOBS.TV. Yes. Also, we'd love to have you in our studio. We do, we've got lots of space. Yeah, as you can see, Sue will now, there's the audience cam. Yeah, it's kind of blank. We'd like to have more people in here. We do, and if you're a tech person and you like tech, you love the studio because it's like a museum. All kinds of antique radios and microphones, it's a cool place. Come in and hang out with us. Yeah, absolutely. We need to thank our sponsors as well, because without them, well, we just wouldn't have any sponsors. Like, you mean we would still do this show? We'd still do the show. Well, don't tell them that. We'd shoot darn well. Anyway, Harlan Hogan's voiceover essentials. Voiceover extra. Source elements. vo-heroes.com. Voice actor websites.com. And J. Michael Collins' demos. And of course, the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for the Betterment of Live and recorded webcasting. Sue Marlino, who you saw earlier, our wonderful TD who comes in here after a month off and just picks it up like that. Picks it right up again. Well, how do I do this? How do I add the box in? She'll figure it out. She figured it out immediately. All right. And of course, Lee Penny for simply being Lee Penny. And by the way. Yes. Hire Sue Marlino. What is your email address? Sue. Oh, Marlino Susan C at gmail.com. Marlino Susan C at gmail.com. Hire her. She's available. She's great. She's an incredibly good, fast learner, very flexible, reliable, and pleasant to be around. Hire her if you're in LA. Yeah. Get her in your podcast, production studio, video casting studio. Get her in. She's fantastic. Just not every other Monday night. Right. She's not available every other Monday night. Otherwise, she's awesome. Right. Let's see here. Well, that's going to do it for us. You know, getting good quality audio for your voice over is not that hard. But you got to let guys like us listen to it. We haven't plugged ourselves tonight. Oh, you're right. I plugged my promo, but we didn't plug our actual what the heck we do. That's right. We hope you have home studios. Yes, that's what we do. If you haven't figured out about it now, that's what we do. If they want to work with you, they go to GeorgeD.Tech is the website. There's menus of services and on-demand and self-service services and sound check and all kinds of stuff. And if you just get overwhelmed with options, just contact us and we'll help steering the right direction. Dan also provides services via the web over at homevoiceoverstudio.com or it's actually that way. Yeah, homevoiceoverstudio.com. Check it out. See what the kind of services I offer and consultations, but listening to your audio to hear how it sounds and if it sucks or if it's really good. And I will be honest with you. We will be. Lately, I've been getting a batch of really good audio. Yeah, you know what I mean? Almost every time. What's your problem? You're good. They're like, really? That's right. Like, yes, you're good. But the bottom line is, is we know what it's supposed to sound like because if it sounds good to us, it is good. I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Whittom. And this is voiceover. Body shop. Or VOBS. Tech talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. We'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. Toodle-loop.