 Well, hi there. It's time for voiceover Body Shop Tech Talk. And if you've got a question for us, throw it in the Facebook chat room. We've also got Clubhouse with us tonight, finally learning about Clubhouse and and it's working for us, sort of like being on the old Larry King show. Larry King left us last week, so Pittsburgh, you're on the air. Anyway, a lot of fun doing that. So if you have got questions, throw them in there. And George and I are going to talk about the stuff we have learned in the 10 years we have been doing this show, probably more like in the 30 plus years he and I have been doing home voiceover studios. We'll talk about that. Top five things each of us think the thing that we picked up in the last 10 years. It's hard to it's hard to remember. Absolutely. All right, stay tuned. Time for a voiceover Body Shop Tech Talk right now. From the outer reaches, they came bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record or voiceover audio and together from the center of the Vio universe, they bring it to you now. George Wittem, the engineer to the Vio stars of Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional studio studios of the biggest names in Vio today and you Dan Leonard, the voiceover home studio master, a professional voice out with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home Vio 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 Vio 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 Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone, voiceactorwebsites.com, where your Vio website isn't a pain in the butt. Vioheroes.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 Vio 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 Whitton. I'm glad you remembered. And this is voiceover Body Shop or Vio. B. B. S. Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Tech Talk anyway. So, George, you and I had been doing this show for exactly 10 years. You know, the origins of it were, you know, people keep asking us about. Somebody actually reminded us last week, you know, your show sounds like car talk. We're like, yeah, that was the idea. Exactly. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah. I mean, if you think we sound like car talk, that was one of our archetypal shows for how we decided to model this show. We, we wanted to capture that kind of jovial personality, the back and the forth, the back and the forth. And the, and the, and the, and the, and the thing and the that. And we wanted to keep it light and fun, but it's still extremely topical and really helpful. So I, that's how I always thought of car, car talk. I learned a heck of a lot about cars listening to that show in the 20 years up until they stopped the show. So yeah, you know, I think the important thing that people need to really understand about what it is you and I do when it comes to home voiceover studios is especially since, you know, we both listened to car talk. And that's the idea of, you know, aside from teaching people how to do it properly, it has to do with troubleshooting. And if you've got a technical issue, you know, I remember Mr. Soman, my power mechanics teacher in middle school, back when they called it junior high school, explaining how do you troubleshoot a lawnmower and going through the thing? Well, if it hits this, it's that if it's not this, then go on to the next thing, go on to the next thing. When you've worked with so many different units and so many different setups and all those different things over many, many years, generally, when someone says, I got a problem with this, generally, we just were able to jump right into it and say, well, it's that, although it helps if we actually hear it. A lot of times people will post stuff on Facebook and it'll say, I got a hum, or I got a buzz or I got something like that. It's like, well, is it a hum or a buzz? Because there's actually a difference between those two or somewhere in the middle or both. Exactly. God forbid. Oh, that's and it's fun when you say you've got, you know, you got two noise, two sources of noise in the background. You know, one's here and one's there and it's like, well, one what's one, one might be your fridge. The other might be your your neighbor's Harley Davidson. But, you know, those sort of things happen. But if you really want to learn how to do a home voiceover studio, right? Or if you are having a problem with the one you have, like if someone says, you know, you're something wrong with your audio, it's not quite the way it should be. There's really only two places you can go. One is Mr. Wittem over there. Yeah, I'm over. Wait, no, over there and you're over there. And that's why so you can go over to George the dot tech. That's where all my tech stuff is where I can you can book support with me. I have an automated scheduler that works pretty darn well. There are self service items like a sound check. That is if you don't know what to do on my site, which is a common question. You have a lot of things. What should I start? Start with a sound check. At least let's find out how you're sounding to begin with. But there's a lot on there to check out. There's also a lot of free content, some some some tutorial, training material, FAQs, a blog, a lot of stuff I've accumulated over the many years that we've been doing this. But Dan does the same over it is place and that's. Oh, there it is. Home voice over studio dot com. There it is. Yeah. You know, as George was saying, we've been doing this a long time, you know, and we're going to talk about this in a couple of minutes, the fact that. You know, maybe we didn't know everything when we started, but we've seen it all since then. So generally, there's a there's a way to do things, but still every every voice over studio home voice over studio is different because every voice is different. Every room is different, and we want you to get it right. So if you go over home voice over studio dot com, as we were saying, we really do want to hear your audio. I've got my specimen collection cup there. If you scroll down to the bottom of the home page and submit a raw file to me because every time you people, well, you know, I add I've got a manly box box and I got this and I've got, you know, an Avalon preamp along with that. And then I add DBX 286 and then I use RX seven to clean up all that mess I made with the other stuff. And I want to be able to hear the raw sound so we can get it clean up front. And if so, we can get your sound sounding the way it's supposed to sound or what it's supposed to sound like whistle. I've been using that a lot lately. I'm glad to hear that. Indeed. And I always give you credit. Thank you. I appreciate that as well. And I always give you credit when we talk about stuff that like, you know, George, Joey says this, you know, and I think that's the great thing about our partnership with the show is we've had the chance to to really see everything that's happened out there. We've, you know, when we first started the show, I mean, if people go back and look at episode number one, I mean, I was hoping maybe we could show it tonight, but if you go on YouTube, you'll find it Ewebs EP number one, I think. And it's somewhat out of focus. My mustache is a lot darker. I think I actually have a little bit more hair. George has a few more pounds on him. It stopped and started six or seven times, which we re-edited it back together for the YouTube. But 10, 10 years we've been doing this. And the thing is, is we've learned a lot. You know, a lot of people say, well, you know, can you how much can you teach me while I'm standing on one foot? Well, it's not going to happen that way. It takes time to really learn this stuff. And because we've been doing it a while, generally, we're the first place you should go if you want to learn how to do it or if you've got a problem or someone saying you have a problem. You know, we're the guys to go to because we have learned these things. So I challenge George to come up with we're going to come for the each year we've been doing the show, something that we've learned. So each of us have come up with five. So I figure we'll alternate here and I'll let you go first. What what have you learned from the time that suddenly you found your, you know, from going off movie sets when you were doing sound there and the other things you were doing into doing home studios, what have you learned? Probably knew this longer than 10 years, but this just seemed to be appropriate that the a lot of the boosts that you buy come lined with acoustical foam and how often that it is woefully inadequate to tune the sound of the inside of that booth foam just doesn't cut it. In most cases in a voiceover booth, you know, I the very very first voiceover booth I would have ever been inside of and really listened to was probably for Howard Parker 20 some maybe 20 years ago in New York City and honestly didn't know any better, you know, and I don't think any of us did, you know, we just put up a 416 in there and he would talk into it like this and do movie trailers because because he was eating the mic. We'd never really heard the room. We didn't really hear the acoustical issues. So foam is definitely a biggie. If you're going to use foam, it's got to be so thick at least four inches in most cases that you might as well. It just takes up so much space. So anyway, I'm finding that foam is one thing that I've been trying to avoid in most cases whenever possible. Dan, what is the first on your list? First on my list and this is the exact same also acoustics. Yeah, this is so important is number one. And I've always been saying it's like 90% of the quality of your audio and so many people try to cover up that stuff saying, well, I can fix it with this or I can fix it with that. You can fix it by getting it right up front. Acoustics, you know, and acoustics is two different things and people tend to get very confused about this to us. Acoustics is preventing exterior noise from coming in and what it takes to do that, which is basically literally impossible. Yeah, I mean, especially if you live in a noisy neighborhood or you're in the landing path of a major airport or even a small one for that matter. It's very difficult to do, but isolation is very, very important to prevent as much exterior noise as possible. If you can drop the exterior noise by like 10 to 15 dB that may be enough to get you where you need to be. But the other part of acoustics is what we were just talking about and that is internal reflection. And really and the things that I've learned about that is the louder you talk, the more the acoustics of the room come into play. Because when you talk louder suddenly hear the rest of the room. But when you talk in the way you're supposed to when you're doing voiceover from the proper distance from your mic and your levels are set right, which I'll get to a little bit. It should sound like you and nothing else. There shouldn't be any reflection and how you do that. It takes individual tuning for everybody's voice. Everybody's a voice in everybody's space. Exactly. My second one is just about keeping it simple, which you've heard us talk about a million times on the show. I keep hearing and experiencing it over and over with clients of all different stripes and levels of experience and income levels, et cetera, et cetera. The ones that often shock me with how clean their recordings are really low noise levels like below minus 70 almost always they are plugging a condenser mic into an audio interface and that's it. That's it. There's no mixer in the board in the string. There's no or in the chain. There's no outboard preamp, no compressor, no, et cetera, et cetera, no tube, of course, anything. And that is what's getting the cleanest recordings and that is our noises our enemy as sound quality bar goes up and up and I know some people think maybe it's gone down because of home studios, but I argue against that. I think sound quality bar is staying or not going high not going higher things to the video game industry. They're very, very picky about sound quality. We are getting great sounding recordings with simple, simple systems and so don't overthink how much gear you need, don't overspend, talk to us first. Yeah. Then what's next on your list? Well, I was going to comment on that is that, you know, when I first arrived here out in LA and started going into people's houses when we were still allowed to go into people's houses and you and I both do this as we go in there, we start unplugging everything. You know, it's like, you know, and they'd have all this stuff. I found that people were literally 10 years behind when I got here as opposed to what you and I knew about what was going to keep things simple for people and you unplug it and now listen to it. Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, duh. And no offense to all of our radio engineer friends because I've had my own radio background, but a lot of the times those studios were installed or set up by a radio engineer who is trying to get a broadcast sound quality studio out. That's what we're on the air. That's right. It's a very different thing. My third one is Mike placement and I know Dan's going to talk about Mike technique as always. Did we get to talk about that yet, Dan? Did I step on you about the Mike technique? No, we already mentioned. I think no, I didn't. Well, we talked about it a little bit, but that was my number Mike technique. This is dovetailing Mike technique. Mike placement Mike placement. I have found that as Dan said, as you back away from the Mike and you provide when you're further away from the Mike, you have to talk louder when you talk louder and you're further from the Mike. Guess what? The room is much more of a factor and I found that the Mike placement situation in a lot of small spaces is a little bit different from what people are used to in larger spaces. So we've been using the that classic hang 10 thing. There's still a picture on Google from Dan Friedman. If you look online, you'll see this picture of Dan with the Mike. You know, it's that is not a wrong suggestion, but I find that it is not working quite as well in a lot of really small studios, especially with low ceilings. So that is something that I don't even think I quantified really well until a couple of last a couple of years actually. And I found that, you know, you really have to work your Mike placement very carefully when you're in a really small space, the sweet spot that you have to work with is quite a bit smaller. Yeah, yeah, just just a fist. Yeah, I mean, of course, you have a big space about you. Yeah, well, I have a big space out here in the studio. Yeah, because we also do the show out here. These high ceiling, we're doing high ceiling, but it's all acoustically treated. But if you talk louder, you get a little bit of room about the room. So that's an important thing, but it sounds natural. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, exactly. Like if you're doing a video game, you could back away from the mic and it would sound kind of okay because it's that's what they would, you know, I'm hearing actors find out from voiceover directors doing games. They'll say, can you please back away from your Mike? And a lot of times the actor has a shock on my game right at him and they go way back here and they're like, well, like I'm actually only have two feet to move. I can only go about this far away. So it doesn't work. You can't do that. So that's been kind of funny. Let's see what that calls about. I don't know. So I'm going to mute it. Okay, good. Dan, your turn. Yes. My number three is setting levels. I mean, we talk about this every week because nobody seems to understand it. You know, those of us that came out of broadcasting and sat there in front of the board and you know, we had the where's my view. I know it's here somewhere probably got knocked over when we were. Oh, here it is. This guy. Keep it handy for just such an emergency is bug horn like horn one said VU meter. It's the thing about it is that what we use today is the exact same thing. It's just digital. This is different scale. Yeah, right. But you know, it goes up if you don't want to go above zero, but you want to modulate probably and I think this is, you know, after years and years and years of really listening to people's audio and seeing that they do you want to at least consistently modulate to minus nine and peak somewhere between minus six and minus four to make it even easier. On the on the digital VU meter, always in the green, always in the yellow with an occasional flash of red or if you're on audacity, you flash of orange. Yeah, don't freak out if it taps into the red meter once in a while. That red, sometimes people think that red means dead or clipping. No, it's zero. That's clipping. Right. So if you don't go that high, it's not going to be a problem. But setting that and and what you do on your interface is try and find the sweet spot on your interface where that's going to, you know, where you're going to be consistently doing that on the scarlets. They've got that great little halo around the the gain dial that, you know, always keep it in the green and occasionally a little flash of red. It'll be fine. Um, you know, and again, the meters in your software are going to be in there. Learn to use that always in the green, always in the yellow with a little bit of flash of red. That that simplifies it down as long as people consistently do that. Your level should not be an issue. You want to have a nice fat signal going in. You know, that's what engineers want. You know, we had Mark Rao on last week and he was talking about don't do any processing or anything. We'll talk about that in a second. What's your number four? My number four is dealing with proper ventilation, how it requires a large return feed in addition to the air coming in, even in a larger space to maintain temperature. I learned this the hard way on a couple of studios where the ventilation was set up to bring in cool air or bring out, bring in air, but it would stop cooling and there's a reason why that happens. Now, what I didn't realize was that I'm looking in most residences. You only see an inlet in the room. There's only most rooms in a bedroom, for example, you'll see a vent in the ceiling, but there's no return. The cold air usually in like one or two places. Yeah. So how do they do that? And then I figured out, oh, it's because there's a gap underneath all the doors and that's how the air escapes under the door and into the return. Well, when you have a down proof air tight space, that doesn't work that way. And so if you really want efficient cooling or good air circulation, you have to have a return away for the air to get back out. And if you want it to be as quiet as possible, that return should be rather large, bigger than the inlet. So I learned that over the years and have helped to make some better ventilation as a result. Right. Dan, what's your number? Well, yeah. And the intake always needs to be at the floor and the exhaust needs to be near the ceiling. Yeah. Because you want that hot, stale air to go out the top. Yeah. That's an important one to learn because we've seen people build booths where the circulation is completely reversed. Why is it so hot in here? When to use processing is my number four. You know, and as Mark Rao said last week, never. You know, depending on what it is you're doing for auditions, get it right up front because remember most of the time people are listening to your auditions on their iPhone or their iPad or on their laptop or something like that. It's not they're not being always listen to in some big studio with, you know, with 20 and speakers or whatever. So don't over process your audio if at all. Everybody's talking about RX, you know, eight and all these different things that they use. And then I always ask a question. Why? Yeah, you better know why you're using it if you're using it. Exactly. Why do you know how it works and do you know when to use it? And you know when this, do you know when it sounds bad? Yes. That's a good question for a lot of people. Do you know when your your noise reduction tools sound bad? Well, yeah. And usually it becomes pretty obvious. So he's fascinating, though, the people don't hear background noise because it's usually something that's always going on in their place of residence. Yeah, a refrigerator for starters. You know, I don't think you're blind. I call it your blindness. Yeah, I mean, literally what it is is your brain has a mixer console in it. And if it's something gets annoying, it's like I'm putting down that noise. If you're a lucky, let's go that way. Not everybody has that part of their brain. Exactly. What's your number five? Well, I have found that back to this kind of dovetails with mic placement and stuff, but sitting down in a low ceiling booth, which if you have anybody with a prefabricated booth is almost always going to have a pretty low ceiling. It really improves the sound. And likewise, if you can raise the ceiling of your room, which is far less likely than you'll be able to do that, it also improves the sound. So we often worry so much about what's on the sides in front of us, the sides and what how that's treated. And then we forget about the ceiling and I'll whisper rooms my punching bag tonight. That's okay. They can handle it there. They're advertising on YouTube. I see their pre-roll ads all the time. They're okay. The ceiling in a whisper room only has like an inch of foam on it and then it's just wood and those are notoriously resonant and booming when you're when you're up near the ceiling. So if you're having that issue, sit down on a stool or get a tall stool, at least at least try to lower yourself at least five, six inches if you can if not more and notice how much better it sounds. Have you found that to be true? I'll do that with people. You know, I'll go in their closet or wherever it is, their booth, whatever they've set up and I will go up and down and I'll say talk standing up fully erect and then sort of squat down and listen to how it changes the sound. How's the sound now? It's a little distant, but very resonant. You know, I always like, you know, you sound like you're in a tube. Are you talking to the right side of the mic? That should be number one. Are you talking to the right side of the mic? Why does it sound so far away? Oh, man. Anyway, but yeah, I find that, yeah, you've got to be able to know where your sweet spot in your booth is. Let's see. My number five. Well, you know, I want to talk a little very quickly about the things that we've learned from doing this show. Ooh, how much more time? We can do the whole show on that. That's a big book right there. Yes, it is. I mean, we've gone through so many different different platforms to do this show. We started with with Telestream. Yeah. I think we started with Ustream, Ustream's online thing. It was just like a website. Right. Then we went to Ustream Pro, which was an application. Right. Then we went to Telestream Wirecast, which was what Ustream Pro actually was built out of. Right. And it was cool, had a lot of nifty tools, but we had so many technical problems, weird problems. So from Wirecast, which was all Mac-based, we took a huge shift and went to Vmix. Vmix. And that runs on. The beast. Windows. It runs on a PC. We had a custom built PC just to run the show, and I will say, because it was custom built for that job very carefully, very carefully picked the components, it's still running beautifully and we suspect it will. But we're not using it now. Are we down? No, because now we're using StreamYard, which is super duper, so I can sit at my desk and do this. Don't have to put up all this stuff. And we are using StreamYard. Yeah. It makes it a lot easier. So anyway, we've got a couple of minutes left in the segment. You had a story you wanted to talk about, you know, aside from the fact that, you know, we've been doing this for 10 years and we can go on and on about that. Yeah. But you have a fun little story about the Don, if you want to. The Don. The Don. Yeah. Yeah, I was stumbling around on LinkedIn. Brent Allen Hagel, who's a very good trailer voiceover producer, had a great story posted on there because he had just recorded a demo for Sky, which is Don's youngest daughter. And is that right? Sky? Yes. Lisi is the older one. Yes. So Sky, and she was getting rich. She was cutting her demo. And I was like, oh, that is so cool. That is so cool here. And just in the conversation, the chat, I typed up a little story. I thought this would be fun to share. Oh, he was saying how he recorded sky through a Manly Cardioid reference, Mike, and a Manly Voxbox preamp. And he said I did that on purpose because that's what her dad recorded on, which I thought was really, really fun. And then I said, you know, at Don Lothentain, he would have loved the Manly Voxbox. I am sure when I first worked in the studio, he didn't have a preamp at all. He had his Manly Cardioid reference or reference Cardioid tube microphone plugged directly. Well, throw a cable in the ceiling and all this sort of stuff into a massive Mackey 32 by eight mixer. You've seen them in venues all the time in bars, you know, for bands, this big thing. And it was picking up RF like crazy RFI interference of buys at night. And when I realized it was from the dimmer panel that in his studio that controls all of the lighting in the house, the entire house had this massive electronic dimmer system, super high tech, especially for when that house was built. I mean way ahead of its time. But the problem was that that thing was right behind the mixing console and we were getting all kinds of crazy buzz. So I was working for a boutique pro audio dealer that sold tube tech brand stuff. I think it's made in Denmark or something. And so I got him a tube tech channel strip and a year or two later I discovered that his Manly Mono Mike preamp, which was like their one channel, very simple Mike preamp that they I believe still make. It was in the gear graveyard, aka his sauna. Yeah, actually, I just I seen the door to the sauna many times. I never looked in there and he said, go check in the sauna. He was looking for his record player one time. And there was the Manly tube preamp was sitting in there. I was like, wait a minute. I took it home, a little bit of research thought, well, might be a bed dead tube. It was I replaced that tube, but we never reinstalled it in the studio because well, the tube tech was working great. So we just kept using it. Now that Mike preamp actually lives in the SAG Foundation, Don LaFontaine voice over lab. It's in the rack. It's in the in the console there. And maybe you can even get to use it if you're in there, but you know, here's the here's the wrap on this whole thing. It's funny how do you not had a tube preamp, which we always tell you guys don't use one. If you hadn't had one that had subsequently had a failed tube and then Don had to figure out what to do. So he sort of patched around it. He wouldn't likely have. I wouldn't have likely been called into a studio in the first place by engineer Stephen Afton. I never would have been asked to come in and fix it and then I would have never met Don and his family. So thanks, Manly. Thanks for making tube equipment and thanks for having something that had to fail so that I had to be called in. It was fate. I guess in the summer. In a sauna. I have to remember to tell that I always we see at the trade shows we see Ivana Manly and all these other vendor owners that they're boozing. I'm sure she would get a kick out of that story. So off the top. All right. Well, we got a ton of questions that have been written in and people on Clubhouse and you want to get to those. So we're going to take a break and we will get to all those fabulous questions that we love to answer right after these messages. Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching voice over body shop. It's great. Let's face it. If you're a voice talent, not everyone in your family or close friends really understands what you need for your home voice over studio. You want a what? Well voiceover essentials dot com has the perfect answer when it comes to birthdays and other gift giving for us voiceover folk new for the first time ever after countless requests. Voice over essentials dot com is thrilled to offer the voice over essentials gift card. You pick the amount you want to give and they take care of the rest. The recipient will receive an email with their digital gift card and gift code to use on anything they offer on voice over essentials dot com. Give them or give yourself the gift of getting exactly what you want like the Harlan Hogan V01 a microphone the Porta Booth Pro or plus Harlan Hogan Signature Series voice over optimized headphones. A lot of what go to voiceover essentials dot com and click on shop and gift cards and choose the amount gift cards now at voiceover essentials dot com. Thanks Harlan. 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. That's our get. We want you to come as you are. Be comfortable. Okay. Maybe not that road comfortable. That's for the customer on our floor please. Nuevo Mexico necesita un cambio la representante Michelle Lujan Grisham a luchado por nuestro estado en la Cámara de representantes watch anywhere anytime on an unlimited number of devices sign in with your Netflix account to watch instantly at Netflix dot com. The ice cream maker is a big risk that can have huge rewards until you forget to turn it on. 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 JMC demos dot com and see a sample of our work. Now let's get back to Dan and George and this week's tech wisdom. Well it's that time of the show where we get to thank our lovely sponsors Source Elements the creators of Source Connect which they created so long ago at least 15 years ago back when ISDN reigned supreme. Well I'm here to tell you ISDN essentially is dead doesn't mean the technology is not in no longer functioning but it is pretty much left production voiceover world because well all the last year during the pandemic everybody went home including the engineers and the producers so they didn't have their fancy ISDN hardware boxes and ISDN line connections because they weren't at home. So Source Connect really stepped in as the era parent and so for that reason you should definitely consider getting at least up and running with it to the point where you're comfortable with it. The beauty of it is you don't necessarily have to buy it out right you can do a subscription or you could even just do a couple of day passed to test it out or use it for that big session but if you want to get going you really want to get a good start and get off on the right foot go to George the dot tech slash SC to get my my little kickstart on how to get it up and running because yes there's quite a few steps involved and you want to get off on the right foot I got a video on there you can get up and running and learn more quickly how to use it but I would recommend you get going on that because it really shows that you're playing on a higher level and just we also want to make sure your studio is ready so let us know send us a sound check and or a specimen cup drop and Dan's specimen cup so we can know for sure that your audio quality is ready for source connect anyway thanks again source elements let's get to those questions yeah hi this is Carlos Ellis Rocky the voice of Rocco and you're watching voiceover body shop and we're back and we're back and we're back all righty well tons of questions here which is what we love because we want to hear from you guys that's what makes the show work let's start with Jeff Holman has a question you wanted to bring up yeah because this was something that came up on our Facebook group and it was a really good question I think that's where it was and so I here we go he said I upgraded to the latest version of twisted wave and now none of my RX 7 effects come up with in the correct window so you couldn't see them they all come up with a basic window with nothing in it so the plug-in window loads and there's no RF RX window in there when I try to use mouse the click the window there's no sensitivity fader there's no controls nothing also I don't see a preview button a compare button option it's just there they're gone I only get a generic window with the options preset merge tail drop and play apply and apply and close that's it what happened how do I get my RX 7 effects to work in twisted wave again what has happened has this happened anybody else now here's where the details get very important I'm running the latest version of system wave twenty five point two on big sir on an M one Mac book air thanks everyone now this would have taken me a while to debug I don't think it would have been in any way obvious to me I would have probably told me to go off to Isotope to get this troubleshooted and there were a lot of comments that were mostly wrong until one fellow popped up with the right one so I wanted to give credit or credit to do it was from Glenn Gutierrez Gutierrez and Glenn says if you want to run plugins that are not optimized for Apple silicon or your M one Mac yet you need to run twisted wave in Rosetta mode I discovered this with ozone which is also by Isotope I had to quit twisted wave I did get info on the app and then when I open get info I see a little checkbox open using Rosetta and that fix the problem and I tried this myself and right on the money because twisted wave is now twenty five point two is now natively for silicon it means it breaks plugins that are made for Intel so you got to watch out for that at least there is a very feasible work around until all those other plug-in companies catch up so that was a that was a golden one well played there one I find people rely so much on these plugins you know it's like this plug-in is great that plug-in is great yeah but what's wrong with your sound that you need a plug-in I mean if I mean if you're doing audiobooks and all those other things clearly you've got to have you know that type of processing but it's very very specific what you need and all these exotic things none of this stuff was designed for voiceover it's all designed for making music you know if you're watching the Grammys last night it's like well that's what you use that for that's what you use that for not for voiceover keep it clean the biggest trouble for people is is once they have a tool like this and it becomes part of their flow and then all of a sudden I have to do a source connect session if they've been leaning on post-processing tools to get the audio to up to spec they're going to be in trouble so they got make sure you're not only relying on that to get the quality where you need to be let's go to clubhouse hey clubhouse Danny what's going on all right we got Shannon O'Brien from San Diego California Shannon you're up oh hello how you guys Dan George thank you so much for all you do Danny thanks for bringing me up just quick questions for source connect does it need to be hardwired through an ethernet cable or is Wi-Fi acceptable it depends I have a analogy for that go for me do you need to wear a seatbelt when you drive a car and yes and I use that I use that analogy because could you drive your car and get from A to B without a seatbelt on of course would you prefer that you had one on at the moment something went wrong yes that's how it kind of goes when you're using Wi-Fi it may work beautifully in every test that you've done and every time you've talked to your friend is a voice actor with source connect and you chatted and said it's working great and then that big session comes up and then halfway through it starts dropping out like crazy at random because the kid across the street fired up his brand new super mega killer Wi-Fi router that blasts the whole neighborhood too much energy and your Wi-Fi goes crazy so yes it is highly highly recommended in fact I'm pretty sure some productions mandated I think they will actually tell you if you're ready for the session you are hardwired and portmaps which is another thing they recommend as well but they the ethernet connection is really preferable for low stress source connect sessions yeah I was talking with Robert Marshall from source elements couple weeks ago we were set you know resetting the our source connect here knows stuff yeah you know that guy to you know and it helps to know people but you know he's like okay let's do the port forwarding on this he goes are you running into a you know into your into a modem well it's like you know my Wi-Fi motive is there another modem that goes directly to the internet like yeah plug it into that didn't need to do anything suddenly is patched around the router exactly and that and that worked really well the thing is is with the Wi-Fi you've got to open up all these gates to make sure it goes through and that's that's why you need to do that there's a question here from Amanda Brandt that I I I know I can answer she says that can you do ADR for a big production studio in your home studio or just in a determined location studio I'm not sure what they determine the question okay well I know that for a fact because my son Jacob was dumping a movie for HBO the last couple of weeks and you know because of COVID my we didn't want to be going into a studio and they're like well if you have a home studio we can do that oh we just happen to have a home studio here it's nice to say yes yeah and and ran you know this microphone into a scarlet because the the road didn't do very well with what their system was but just a clean line and you know they run the the video on zoom and the direction on zoom and they just record it you can see them stop and go okay we can nudge it over just a little bit you can hear what you can see what's going on but yeah you can you can do it at home if you've got a good sounding home studio they're going to want to check it of course to make sure it's up to their standards so all right back to the club house who we got Danny coast to coast reporting from New York Torian bracket Torian Torian hey Jordan Dan great to officially virtually you both fab you too welcome yeah so I'm wondering because I so when we plug in our mics to our interfaces for our computers you can usually adjust the recording level right on the on your DAW and your computer settings but you can also adjust the gain on your interface your DAW wherever you do that so I was wondering if we could talk about the difference between the two and you know why we even have the option because they seemingly have the same function hmm not a pretty good question yeah go get down yeah well okay so the the game dial here you know say on a 2i 2 is usually right next to the mic where you plug the mic in and you know if you've got a two channel it's going to be you know channel one if you're plugged into channel one we have found that you know on most units if you set it to about three o'clock that's a good place to start you know as you can see have it there at about 75 percent because remember you know most of the stuff was designed for making music and when you're singing you're singing a lot louder and these interfaces and preamps don't have to drive as hard for voice over when we're talking very quietly using our indoor voice you need to drive it a little bit more so generally if you're on a PC you know sometimes I say you know just set the you know the mixer level in the PC to a hundred percent and then adjust the gain from from your interface in say if you're using Audacity you can adjust the level in there but that also adjusts it you know from your from your west as I think is right yes there's some large shenanigans on the windows side because depending what sound driver you're using the windows own sound control panel may affect your recording level and that's kind of the prone kind of audacity I don't like that it lets you override the recording level but I do like that it does show you what the level is it has that slider so if it's out of whack at least at a glance you're going to see it in audacity you'll see if that thing is not all the way to the right so make sure you're doing all of your gain adjustments during the recording from the preamp or from the interface really that's what you want to do yeah okay quick question here that I can answer because it's addressed to me for Dan you with your M1 Mac mini which we are now listening to and watching me on right now did you have to buy or any or add anything to be able to connect things that use USB and HDMI connections I know there's one HDMI on the new Mac mini but no USB ports well there are USB ports there's two us there is two regular USB ports and then there are two Thunderbolt ports what I what what I did is and this this one I think is actually broken but you get a port with a Thunderbolt cable on it that goes into the back and it gives you the ability to plug USB and other USB stuff this has actually three USB connections in it and I actually hope yeah I just bought a new hub that also has an HDMI out on it so now I have to HDMI outputs and more USB outputs so yeah you if unless you're also you're not running a lot of peripherals you don't really need it but because you like I said you got two USB ports and you got two Thunderbolt ports the Thunderbolt ports will carry all sorts of stuff but if you're running a lot of stuff out of there it only has a maximum oh I happen to have the instruction card right here it it will only put out three amps max so you've got to have you know you've got you may have to plug it in to your computer to get extra power and not into into a power supply power supply into a power supply into a wall wart three amps is quite a lot yeah you have to be running a lot of outboard gear to yeah but if you are use you're gonna have to plug it in but they give you the ability to do that well I will chime in real quick and say that I too and running the show tonight on a Mac mini M1 this is really the main voyage of this computer live on a show and as we do we just we just go for it there's this is there is no dry run and there was a few gotchas with some video capture issues like I had to get a different ultra studio recorder called the 3G which uses Thunderbolt 3 I had to what else did I have to do start one or two different programs and just the usual gotchas with the silicon like we found out earlier with twisted wave and plugins there are things are going to run into but it's been working beautifully I have an older very early generation Thunderbolt 3 hub from OWC other world computing and it's a little overkill because it's well it's a little overkill but it does give me four USB ports another Thunderbolt port an HDMI port and I am using well actually I'm using a lot of them I'm using dual HDMI monitors one on the Mac mini and then one plugged into the Thunderbolt and so I'm getting to use two displays and it's working great now if you're a total massive power user and you want to have three or four displays you may have some limitations with the new M1s until the next generation comes out but it's been perfectly fine and put my hand on top it's right in front of me let me put the mic at it shall I it should be dead silent it doesn't make any sound at all in fact I put my hand on it and it's warm so I know it's alive but it's not in any way hot it's really freakishly amazing anyway we talked about that a lot sorry chat room clubhouse actually we got one more in the clubhouse queue from Dustin it looks like Danny and I'm using an M1 MacBook Pro so there we go yeah but I just have a fan however all right yeah all right Dustin Frank from Las Vegas you're up Dustin yeah and I'm on the fence about buying one so George helped me a lot with my first audio book a couple years ago and I've done several since then so I want to thank you for that awesome service I've always made specs never had a problem since using your video so I just wanted to ask I have a 416 to a Scarlett solo to my Mac mini I think it's a 2014 I'd like to use my rig on clubhouse do you think I can connect into my phone is that what you're doing right now oh okay well you do need to get a lightning to TRRS dongle they may have included these with some of the earlier iPhones I don't know maybe they didn't but Apple has always sold one of these things it's just another one of the many Apple dongles Apple the dongle company that our drawers are filled with here we go and this is literally what's being used TRRS so it's it's a mini connector like if you have any older Apple AirPods or not AirPods the actual wired ones the plug has a different kind of connector on it than a normal like headphone connector has a another ring so it's tip ring ring sleeve it's got four little metal rings contacts and that's the so you need a cable that can speak that language and then get one of these little $30 a lightning adapter dongle boob abs plans made by Mofi I think and and then you need to the tricky part with this with the with connecting it to the Scarlett is then you need to figure out another way to patch it into the microphone it's it's it's not straightforward with the Scarlett because you can't create what's called a mix minus with the Scarlett and that is the ability to send audio out to Clubhouse receive the audio from Clubhouse but not have the audio from Clubhouse feed Clubhouse that's a loop and that's a little bit challenging to do with Scarlett but Dan and I and Danny and Dan and me all three of us are using roadcaster pro mixers which had a built-in interface specifically to connect to a mobile device and it works beautifully because it also has the USB I'm sorry the mix minus circuit do you need a $600 mixer to do this no I'm sure there's some ways to hack it with some the right adapters and a little bit of bailing wire and chewing gum and experimentation but this is this is the way we're doing it and it's pain-free so if you're really serious about this you want to start hosting your own Club houses and really make a go of it having something like the roadcaster pro is a pretty wise pretty wise move yeah there's some performance clubs that are fun that would be nice to have some Mike technique ability rather than the old tiktok but put it up to your mouth well you know you could also try is the the centrance there's a zoom mixer that our producer Sue just mentioned the zoom thing it's called the f8 which zoom is it to tell me my ear oh she actually you guys can hear us on the on the Clubhouse can't you and then I have a mic port pro 2 from centrance and this will connect by lightning to your phone but be careful I've heard that not every device that has a lightning adapter will actually talk to Clubhouse so like the l8 got you okay yeah so not auditions yeah not every one of these lightning lightning port devices will talk to Clubhouse this is something you have to experiment with but if you're using the Apple adapter that I described earlier it will work with Clubhouse so have fun and good luck thanks everyone alright on the list what's up next let's see here Polaris 3000 here says on the topic of setup at home does anyone here that would be us have a good example or common traps to avoid for a person setting up their first home studio yes rewind the show and go back 10 things through that yeah on a home studio on a budget again acoustics are number one you can avoid all sorts of problems if you set up in the right place and there's no microphone and there's no digital interface you know on you know over you know under a hundred dollars it's going to change the way you read copy you know I mean people like I got to get this microphone I got to get this great piece of gear it's not going to make you a better voice actor and that's the most important thing with any home studio you got to be good at what you're doing and then have someone professional show you and teach you how to do it exactly right and get it set up right you know following those those three basics that I talked about earlier acoustics my technique and setting proper levels so as long as you've got a clean chain of you know a good mic and an interface and a good computer in the right program there's not a whole lot else to it except that your acoustics have to be really good very true acoustics is like the lighting of audio absolutely you can't expect a great professional looking photograph with crappy lighting and just like that for voiceover you can't expect a great sounding recording without good acoustics yeah I love this last question we got here though from from Benson Blake I'll let you read it and then we can both answer it all right then to ask what's your take on using the Cloudlifter to boost a mic signal should a 416 that's a condenser shotgun mic be plugged directly into the focus right Scarlett with the volume up or boosted with a Cloudlifter signal for a better for a better option for auditions and recording so Dan what's your take on that it doesn't work you don't you don't need something like that because the Cloudlifter is designed really and it was originally designed for ribbon mics to get raised again on dynamic and ribbon mics not active studio condenser mics so what you want to do is if you try to put that in line to a 416 the 416 will not sound anything because there's no phantom power going into it it doesn't pass phantom power no it doesn't do it and therefore you don't need it you know if you had a you know if you're using an SM 58 or something or an R20 yeah those are great for podcasting and maybe if you use those for voiceover I'm not a big fan of those but no you can't use a Cloudlifter on a 416 and why would you want to 416 has great output and with any reasonable you know interface like a 2i2 or an AGO 3 from Yamaha or you know the audience or the there's so many good ones out there what's the Cloudlifter for it's for one when you're using a ribbon mic oh oh yeah the lip mic maybe one of these two is clean here I will patch it in and we'll actually listen to myself talking if you want to see and hear these being used at least see them being used I'm not totally convinced you're hearing them yeah is on the show Ted Lasso oh really I started watching that last night it's a great show and whenever they go to a football match in in England the announcers are on these just kind of fun to watch for us radio geeks yeah that's a ribbon mic and they have very very low output and they really need the the boost of the Cloudlifter so what's why if I ever use this mic the Cloudlifters living in case with it all righty ten years we had been doing this show and I think you know if we do it another ten I'll be seventy four years old but I'll still know what I'm talking about we'll have USB ports USB seven ports wired into our brains by that time it's true yes plug in anyway thanks for all your questions guys and thanks for being there on Clubhouse and watching the show every week we're going to take another quick break here and we will wrap things up and start the next ten years right after this this is the Latin Lover narrator from Jane the Virgin Anthony Mendez you're enjoying Dan and George on the voiceover body shop hey there it's David H. Lawrence the 17th with VO heroes and you may be watching voiceover body shop the OBS because you're interested in becoming a voice talent and you looked around the Internet you found that this was a great place to come and you're absolutely right but you don't have any of the knowledge yet as to how to get started and I'd like to help you with that I've got a free course online you can take it anytime you want it's called getting started in voiceover and it walks you through the equipment you need the business side of things the actual categories of voiceover work that you likely be pursuing and also the mindset that you need to have when you're getting started and moving into being successful at doing voiceover for a career so if you're an actor or you're not an actor you want to side grade from another business you want to learn about voiceover go to VO heroes dot com slash start that's VO heroes dot com slash start with the VO heroes getting started in voiceover class and I'll see you there in these modern times every business needs a website when you need a website for your voice acting business there's only one place to go like the name says voice actor websites dot com their experience in this niche webmaster market gives them the ability to quickly and easily get you from concept to live online in a much shorter time when you contact voice actor websites dot com their team of experts and designers really get to know you and what your needs are they work with you to highlight what you do then they create an easily navigable website for your potential clients to get the big picture of who you are and how your voice is the one for them plus voice actor websites dot com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish don't try it yourself go with the pros voice actor websites dot com or your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what yep this is VO BS proven anybody can have a show these days already yes anyone can have a show these days thanks to technology like stream yard and clubhouse but it doesn't mean everybody should make sure you have a good make sure you have a point of view and you know what the hell you're talking about exactly exactly all right well let's see here there was something about an Apollo user survey yeah so you know we've had this ongoing rant I guess you'd call it your rant in Facebook there's a Facebook group called Universal Audio Apollo for VO and we've been reporting we've had a lot of reports of folks with technical issues with their Apollo's and I just thought it was one particular model and founding out now there are more of you out there not just one with the one twin model twin mark two if you want to kind of if you're frustrated by this and you want to be kind of like heard about this we're trying to gather a survey of of many of you and I want to build a build a nice database here and bring it all together to Universal Audio's higher ups hopefully getting their attention and realize that this is not just user error or just random technical issues it is actually a manufacturing problem that needs to be sorted out with some sort of a recall so anyway if you want to be part of this the easiest place to find it is it's on Google Forms as I put it a link to it on georgev.tech slash Apollo dash UAD so if you go to that page georgev.tech slash Apollo dash UAD you'll see a link to this form and please fill it out even sending in your audio sample of whatever noise your equipment is making that it shouldn't be and we'll add you to this if you want to call it a class it's not really a class action but we just wanted to get this information together to deliver it on mass Alrighty next week on this show we'll I'm going to come up with something you know we're we're going to be off for Passover so we're going to I'll find a really good replay that perhaps a lot of you didn't see from last year or earlier this year and then on April 5th we have television producer Kevin Gershan and he works with a lot of the top voice over talent here in LA and I bet he has a lot of great stories about that who are our donors this week our donors we've got quite a few a couple new names that we haven't read that often Noreen Reardon Eddie Faria Eddie Faria with all caps Graham Spicer Michael Michael Michelle that's my problem Michelle Blanker Christopher Epperson Sarah Borges and Ant-Lan Productions thank you everyone for your donations all right again if you need help with your home studio you can go to georgev.tech or and you can head over and visit dan at home voiceover studio dot com Alrighty we need to thank our amazing sponsors tonight of course Harlan Hogan's voice over essentials voice over extra source elements vioheroes.com voiceactor websites.com and J.M.C. demos thanks to Jeff Holman in the chat room tonight doing a great job Danny Burnside working with us in clubhouse tonight thank you very much Danny that was great thanks Danny made it sound like a real radio show and of course our amazing technical director Sue Molino for keeping it nice and tight and making it easy for me to edit it later tonight and of course Lee Penny simply for being Lee Penny well you know it's not an easy business you don't be intimidated by the technology but it really comes down to this if it sounds good it is good I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Wynnum and this is voice over Body Shop or V.O. B. S. Tech Talk Tech Talk Tech Talk Tech Talk see you next time guys have a good good night