 at the show, just pre-show live, pre-show. Warm up live. All right, we are now officially live. I'll mute the mics while you give out the Wi-Fi password has been distributed. OK, there's nine people watching. All right. Interesting, as soon as Dave joined the Wi-Fi network, it got better. Let's not question it. I'm not saying a word. Hi, Patricia, Andrea. Of course, Andrea is there. Thank you. Hi, Liam. Oh, I can find all kinds of things for you here. OK. You know, in my style. Mm-hmm. I think that's completely out of my style. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Tonight on. Mwam, mwam, mwam, mwam-mwam-mwam-mwam. Oh, I got one of those right here. To all of you out there, and all ships at sea. All ships at sea. Hold on. Okay, so I've updated the website. Let me say hi to Jeff in the chat. Hello, Jeff in the chat. Hello, Jeff. I was typing in Greek, because I was one letter over on the keyboard. How often does this happen to you? It's happening to everybody. Everything seems to be screwed up. I think there's mushrooms in the water. I don't got only hope. Yeah. I wish. No, everybody's doing ketamine. That's the new thing. No, everyone's doing ketamine. They heard keto and got confused. They did. I mean, Jesus. All about circle K. Yeah. Circle K. Well, don't play it off the street. You know, this'll be a good one for you. It's two pages, but it's your city. Yeah. Your big thing is about getting you to quiet down. I can do that. Right. Okay. I can be very calm. You can be. I can be very calm when I want to. But when you put the microphone in front. I have to talk louder, like I'm on the radio. Exactly. Well, we'll put this down here, because I don't think we need it right now. No, we'll get to it later, a little later. Dan should do his VO with a lavalier mic, and then there is no mic. That might work. Hacking your brain. I have to silence this stupid watch. So I've never silenced this watch before. Does it make noise? Well, Siri will come on every once in a while. Oh, yeah, yeah. How do we do the sounds, or general? Private, or do not disturb. Yeah. If you do it on your phone, it should do it all across the board. I should basically just put it on airplane mode. No, do not disturb, like pull down from the top. Oh, okay. You've got that large foam right there. Thank you, sir. Pull down and then do a pull down from the right and do personal mode or focus mode. Click on focus and do do not disturb. There you go. What's going on in Topanga State Park, Sue? What is it? There's something going on there. Anything exciting? Something wild, wildlife. Coming down here was ridiculous. Really? Almost an hour. You don't come this way often? It was almost an hour. I left Santa, I left Santa, the west side at 1.30 to do an errand, and it was already just crawling at 1.30 in the afternoon going north. And it's weird, like one day, one day there won't be anything, and then another day it's packed. But I think that's because, what I just realized, like a moron, some people go to work Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they might go Tuesday, Thursday. That's why. There's a lot of that, yeah. Okay, it's five o'clock. I think we can start something. Yeah. What do you want to be? How do we do the show? By the seat of your pants. It's like that every other week. That's what I love about it, is that you never know what's going to happen. You know Tim Powers? He was doing an improv thing. Oh, he doesn't have the switch on the screen right now, he has his notes. You should see the laptop precariously perched on top of a Pringles camera. All right, so I don't know how to start. No, I'm going to cue them. Here we go, hands are up, Sue's ready. Okay. All right, here we go, five, four, three cameras over here. Hey, it's time for VoiceOver Body Shop. How's everybody doing out there? And our guest tonight is Dave Walsh, superstar V.O. Coach. How you doing? I'm good, how are you? I'm doing okay. How you doing, George? I'm doing great. All right, I get to have both of you like right here, you know, you're right, you're not far away. I'm so glad you're close by. I'm very close. So I'm going to step guests in the room. Have you had other guests in the room at all? Not that much. A few times this year, that's it. It's much more fun this way. It's much better this way. I like the energy like this. Yeah, especially with this huge audience that we have. Anyway, we're going to talk with Dave and his true tell method and talk a little bit about AI and a bunch of other stuff. If you have any questions, all you got to do is go into the chat room in Facebook Live or YouTube Live, if by some strange reason you're watching on LinkedIn, even though nobody knows it's there, but you can try. Go into the chat room and write your question and Jeff Holman is sitting somewhere writing it all down and you will transfer it all to us. Hey, Ethan Salazar is in LinkedIn. He's in there comment. All right, Ethan. See that? We got him, Ethan. That's right. We got a great hour coming up, so don't go away. It's time for VoiceOver Body Shop right now. VoiceOver Body Shop is brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan's signature products. Source Elements, the folks who bring you Source Connect. VioHeroes.com, become a hero to your clients with award-winning VoiceOver training. VoiceActor.com, your VoiceOver website ready in minutes. VoiceOver Extra, your daily resource for VoiceOver success. And by World Voices, the industry association of freelance voice talent. And now here's your hosts, Dan and George. Hey, I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Woodham. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop, or V-O-B-S. Tuned right in. Our guest tonight is Dave Walsh, and Dave's enjoyed a truly multifaceted career on both sides of the Hollywood glasses, a successful artist, coach, and director, as well as an ex-studio executive. Boy, you've been busy. I'm busy. Yeah, he's also spent the better part of the last decade coaching and cultivating the VoiceOver careers of some of the most established artists in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Yes. Some reason the other parts of the world I have not been to so far. Well, I've been to Chile. It's really cool. I've not been to Chile. I've not been to South America. Yeah. Really, no. I've coached people in Latin America, I've coached people in Europe. I mean, that should be added to this too. Right. And people now in South Korea too. I have clients in Seoul. Yeah. So, am I not? No, it's just a shadow. Swing us over. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. So, I think that the, and again, it's indicative of just kind of the world since the last time I was here, which I think was, we were online probably during the pandemic. And then in studio, it was like 2018 or 2017 or something like that. Unreal. But it's changed, you know, again, so much of the conversation we have now is about how international, how global this is. And the fact that I travel, I sit and I coach clients and I pass the time zones one after another after another every day. And it's pretty incredible how we've got so many, you know, so many clients all over the world, you know, and One Voice UK is doing what it's doing. The other conference is coming up in Africa. Oh, that was on Saturday. That was Saturday. I'm sorry. I was actually on that one. That's right, you were. Yeah. You and Tim were both on that. Yeah, now of course, they were on, Tim and Mark Cashman were on an hour later. And in Cashman as well, yes. Right, so I immediately wrote to them, I said, how can you poops get an extra hour of sleep? I had to be up at 5.15 to be on this so I could address these poops. Was it in Nairobi? It was in Lagos, Nigeria. In Lagos, Nigeria. Okay. It was a lot of fun. Is it international because there's more international business because there's more out of US projects needing American voice? It's a combination. I think what's happened with, particularly some of the managers and some of the agents, voices become so global that it's not just American voices. I think one of the things that I've said this to both Joan Baker and Rudy Gaskins is that one of the things that the Sova Awards did when they, a couple of years ago is they started to bring more global voices to the public and people started to know that there was so much for global voices. I remember there was one year, I think it was right before the pandemic, that there was a huge amount of Eastern Europe and South American actors that won Sova Awards. And it put those countries on the map when it came to voiceover. People didn't even realize where the opportunities were. So even managers, Celia Siegel is one of those managers who reps a lot of international clients. She's tuned in. She really is tuned in. She really, really gets, she gets that part of it. Yeah, so I think that it's not just American voices. Although I have a client in Seoul who, when I started working with her, her voice was what they wanted in Korea was very old school American. They wanted it hard. They wanted it articulated. Everything had to be that. And so when she started working with me, I needed to uncoreanize the voice. So now, but now she's able to, her work has spread out around the world. So it's pretty interesting. Yeah, well, we had WoWokan last weekend in Orlando. We had somebody, we had a couple of people from the UK. Colin McLean was there, wonderful guy. And then I, you know, I took a lift ride back to the airport on Monday morning with Bill Williamson, who lives in Japan. Yeah. So, Are these American expats? Yes. Okay, got it. Well, no, Colin McLean is a brilliant project. Williamson is. Yeah, he's in Japan. He's in Japan. And I was surprised by that as I'm like, you're going, oh, yeah, I'm going back to LA. But then I gotta go to Tokyo. Yeah. Well, you're gonna have a long day. But that's another kind of international. Totally. We have American expats in China and Japan and Australia and Canary Islands and whatever. And Barry Severus, who's my client, the client in Seoul, South Korea, she came to Vio Atlanta from Seoul. She flew from Seoul directly to Atlanta and came to that. It was the first time she'd been. So, yeah. Too big. We had 87 at WoWokan. It was a nice intimate group. Cool. God. That's great, good for you. How was it? Did you enjoy? It was fabulous. We had a great time. It was well planned. Instead of giving out lots of swag, we gave people embroidered sweatshirts. Oh, nice. Very nice. And portfolios and we had a silent disco. And it was. I saw the pictures of that. That was a lot of fun. I saw Emo and Neil at the silent disco. Yeah, yeah. And then we also announced that next year, Amy Snivley has agreed to let us be the torch bearers of FathCon next year. And she's actually going to train us on how to do it. Wow. Awesome. So nice that that's official. Yeah, it's official that that's coming back. That was a very well-loved conference for it. Yep, and there wasn't. About FathCon. No, one person doesn't just kind of lament over it, that it was just so amazing. Except maybe Amy. Maybe Amy. Well, yeah, she's like, I've had enough. Maybe Amy. There's a lot of work. Anyway, let's get into the meat of the matter here. Now, how did your career start and how did you make all these transitions from producer, executive, to voiceover, to coach? Honestly, if I had to kind of paint a trajectory, it just, I don't know how it all just kind of evolved one thing after another. I started years ago as a talent agent assistant, and it was the best opportunity I had to learn the business. And it didn't matter what type of agenting it was, this was literary. Right. So ironically, I got this job in the writer strike of 1988. So they kept me on through the entire strike. But what I learned so much of was about contract writing. I understood I learned the whole relationship between actors and agents. And so, and I understood that when agents would have their weekly meetings, they would, you know, talk about the clients. This one's doing this, this one's not doing that. Why is he painting the side of his house? He's supposed to have the book written. Right. But you started to realize, swear to God, that was an actual conversation. So one of the things I realized was that you really, your agents are talking about you. What you're doing and what you're not doing. And so I started to learn, really quite frankly, how Hollywood worked. And we learned how the town operated, what a deal memo was, how you structure, how you pitch, all that kind of stuff. And then it went into publicity for quite a while. And when it's indicated television, then went to Paramount. And when I was there, I was director of research. So I started to be able to package TV shows. And I understood how to create research presentations and learned how to sell shows domestically and internationally. So you learn that side of the business. And at the same time, I was taking voiceover workshops. I told the story before that I found a book called Word of Mouth by Molly Ann Mullen and Sue Blue at the Samuel French bookstore. And that became my Bible. That became the thing that really gave me inspiration to work in voiceover. And so first agent was in 95 with Abrams Artists and then kind of worked my way up there and really, really soaked in the whole business because I felt like, you know, people like Phil Tanzini. Phil Tanzini's been working in voiceover since he was a kid. I mean, he's worked as a camera actor at CESD for years. And so when people like that, who I've known for so many years, I see these child actors that have been doing this for years. I said, I gotta friggin' catch up to these people. You know, I came from a television production degree. So I immersed myself in coaching. I truly did. And had some of the greatest coaches in the world, Tom Pinto and Nick Omano were my first. I owe an enormous amount of my career to Maurice Tobias. Incredible amounts of my career to Maurice. And agents and managers that were just incredible for me in my career took a little time to take off. But when it finally did, I just had immersed myself in so much of coaching. And I still value that as, you know, obviously for what I do now. But again, as you guys know, some of you know the story or not, but I did have a vocal injury that caused me to really have to stop doing what I did in voiceover and have to learn that I had a disorder called spasmodic dysphonia, which was the name for the strangled voice syndrome. I did so much promo, so much trailer, so much narration. I was speaking from a voice that was down here. So I was pushing my voice into my throat and it was causing my vocal cords to bend. When you do that kind of a thing, the vocal cords are, they have so much space around them, they're circular. And when you compress the voice down, it actually causes them to swell. And I found a way to strangle them. And so I ended up going to the speech pathology department at UCLA and they told me I had a disorder called spasmodic dysphonia. There was no cure. And they said the only cure was putting botox, no cure, but treatment, was to put botox into the vocal cords because they said this was neurological. So when they said it was neurological, they said, your brain is sending involuntary spasms to your vocal cords. Now, I'm the one that's in this body. And I'm going, wait a minute, what do you mean it's involuntary spasms? And I knew that there was something off of the diagnosis. So I opted out of the botox and I found a doctor in West LA who was the only doctor in the entire world that didn't treat this with botox. His belief, and it's the belief I still hold, is that we all have a vocal identity. Parents, husbands, partners, business owners, whatever you are, and you walk through life with that particular identity, you will chameleonize your voice to fit that particular moray or that particular part of your life. He said, your problem is that you spent so much time making a voice. I was classically trained as an actor, but then I put a voice on top of it to add more for trailer, for promo, whatever else. And it worked until it didn't work anymore. So I had to go back to school to learn how to speak. And as I did, I started working with people all over the world. They all came to LA because he was the only doctor that didn't use botox. So we had, pardon me, we had executives from Johannesburg, we had singers from Tokyo, we had entrepreneurs from Oslo. They came from everywhere. And I looked at this and I said, wait a minute, he's not an actor, she's not an actor, and they all have the same thing I have. So this isn't an acting problem. This is a global communications problem. It's a cultural problem. It's a cultural thing. And it actually crossed, this is, I'm glad you brought that up because it crossed cultures. It wasn't an American thing because of a certain masculinity, femininity thing. It was part of that, but that's how men and women, it was believed, you know, wanna sound more feminine, act more masculine, whatever it is. And so what I started to do was, to be honest with you guys, I thought I thought it was over. I really did because I could not trust my voice anymore. I couldn't come in and sit with you guys. I couldn't go, I couldn't tell my agents. I had people saying to me, don't tell your agents your career is over if you say anything. So I didn't. And I started to coach actors just to kind of make some extra money after having had this incredibly successful career. But what I started to do was to get actors to not, pardon me, speak inauthentically, that they were understanding what the hell they were talking about and it started to shift the careers. They started to book and book and book and people would say to me, this is so easy. How have I been killing myself all this time? So I realized it was more of an effortless thing for them. And so over time, the program came, it just came, I didn't, at the time I was coaching, and I haven't really said this to you guys ever, I didn't tell anyone that I was coaching that I had a vocal problem. No one knew the reason I was coaching. I didn't know if people thought, well, Dave's washed up, Dave couldn't work anymore. But these things go through your head. Yeah, that will, if they're already caught. Exactly. Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome. People that do, do, those that don't teach and I'm going, great, this is how people are gonna think. And eventually, I will say this publicly, Celia Siegel, speaking of, we went to have lunch after that's voiceover in 2015 and we sat at lunch and she said to me, I told her the story, nobody knew the story at that point. And she said, Dave, that's the thing that makes you you. I want that guy, not because you're better than anybody else, but because that's what you have to offer. Right, her thing is branding and really. It is. And she actually gave me permission to be able to step forward and say, look, I'm damaged like everybody else, but now we use it in a different way. Right. So the true tell, which is the name of the program that it became over the last eight years since I actually named it something, it's really caught on and I've been so appreciative of the people that have used it, people that continue to use it because it really is about getting you to speak from your authentic self, your 100% authentic self. And that to me over time really became my purpose. That became the thing that I really, I mean, even since I had last time I talked to you guys, I mean, I'm even framing it differently. The way I feel about it, you know? So it's, I've been very lucky in that respect. Well, the pandemic allowed people to think about it. Oh. All right, what am I gonna do today? Oh my God. And of course you were doing almost everything virtually by then too. I was already doing it, so I didn't really, I didn't move from my house. I literally was in the same place. I'd had sessions with you because I was setting things up in my house and we were doing things virtually. He couldn't travel, you couldn't travel, nobody could go anywhere. And so people learned how to put together their home studios. You two know only too well. But it really changed, not for me personally, but it changed the whole industry around us and how, I mean, the first agency to close, there was an agency to close, Paradigm closed its voiceover department the day after the Utah Jazz tested positive. That's when the whole nation went insane. That was on Thursday, on Friday, Paradigm closed its doors to voiceover. They closed the entire voiceover department one day. And I remember all of us going, who's next? Because that was because Paradigm had really, a lot of their money was based in their live, their live event department. That was a huge part of Paradigm's bottom line. And when that went away, they shored up like in five seconds. It was crazy how that happened. Really? So yeah, but I mean, again, like you said, the whole pandemic really brought home the whole idea of the home studio. It brought the whole idea, as I said to actors, you're gonna have to self-direct. Enough with this being- More self-sufficient. Totally. More versatile. Yup. We freaked a lot of people out. Yeah. And George and I experienced that first day and whole day after day. People that did like a certain thing. Yup. Especially here in Hollywood. I do this one thing, I could book three times a year for this voice. Now I'm a student. What do I do? Yeah. Yeah, I had some of those clients. Yeah. I mean, you know, Bob Bergen has been very vocal about the fact that he needed to, you know, upgrade his studio to broadcast quality. And now he doesn't want to go to, you know, now he loves being at home. Yeah. And it was never part of his world, you know? So it was, you know, it wasn't as much of a part of his world, but yeah, it was crazy how it changed. Yeah, just dealing with people like, I don't know how to do any of this. We had to calm them down and say, okay, look, we're going to make it super duper simple for you. And which is what George and I do. I can't imagine how you guys, you know, the deluge of people that just must have been knocking on the door saying, help me. I don't know what I'm doing. Well, as Mark Cashman described it, we were busier than the one-legged guy in an ass-kicking contest. So, 2021, for whatever reason, that was the real peak. That was it. Yeah. I think it was, there was a delay. You had the initial people going, I got to get my act together. Yeah. Then you had like six to eight months later, Taylor in the 2020, beginning of 2021, people were like, oh, this isn't going away. Is it? Yeah, we're still here. All right, I got to do this now. Totally. And things really picked up. But then there was no equipment available. Yeah. Because they couldn't keep up with, I mean, you know, they couldn't keep up with the demand. Right. Yeah, we got creative. Yeah. We really did. I can imagine. I like being creative. You guys were, you guys really, really were the savers of this industry. Because, you know, you and Tim Tippets and Tim Friedlander, and you know, they're in Jordan Reynolds. I mean, you guys all, I mean, really saved us. Collectively. So collectively, as a group, you really did. Honestly, honestly, honestly. Totally. Yeah. So you're coaching all these different people and all these different lands across the globe. Yep. What are some of the kind of problems that many voice talent need to overcome? What are some of the most common problems? Because we have a lot of people who are just starting out out there and we can perhaps help them avoid these problems before they start. But what do you see? Well, here's the thing. Now, after we've just, I've just praised these gentlemen. I am going to say one thing. I think that people are putting studios together too fast. If you're new, okay, if you're new to this, I think the whole thing is I've got an entire studio put together. I'm ready to go. No, you're not. And I say to people, I would rather you invest and I want you to invest in these guys, but I want you to invest in your career first. You need to invest in your coaching, your talent, your storytelling. I could not believe when I saw the polar opposite advice just on YouTube the other day. I'm like, first of all, who are you? Secondly, I literally put like in the comments little, you know, motor cons. I had a horse. No, I had a cart and then I had a horse. That was my comment. That's awesome. I love it. It was like that. You have this all wrong. I've used that icon in a number of presentations. Like, you're not ready yet. You're not ready, no. But I think that it means it's important. But should they have a practice mic? Absolutely, you should absolutely have a practice mic. You should definitely, and definitely start practicing on editing, using editing software, learning how to do those things. Your mic doesn't have to be broadcast quality when you're starting, but also you don't want to spend a lot of money on a practice mic. It's like learning photography, you know? You don't need to go buy a $10,000 camera to learn how to take a photo. No, not at all. You have to learn how to, you know, frame an image. You have to learn how to just do the basics. Totally. That's where you start. One correction though, we no longer call it broadcast quality. That's a term from the 60s. What it means is it doesn't sound bad. That's about it. We don't have a slick acronym for that. That's true because- Actually, we have one. It's whistle. Whistle, what it's supposed to sound like. What it's supposed to sound like. Sound like whistle. Yeah, we know what whistle is, and whistle is why you hire us to make sure that what you give them is whistle. So whistle takes a place of- There we go. Broadcast quality. Right. I think though what's crazy is people have auditioned for things and booked jobs on mics, literally taking their mics into cars. They're, you know- Or they're phoning to their closet. David Kay had a picture one time. I have it somewhere. He took a picture of him in the bathroom at LAX doing a session. I remember this and he actually put the picture somewhere. David, if you ever here, watch this. I'll nag him about it. I think there's a picture somewhere. In fact, I should email him and ask him where it is. I see him almost every month, so. Yeah. I'll ask him about it. Yeah, and then we'll go, I didn't do that. But yeah, I mean I think that spending the time really on your read, spending time on understanding who you are as a talent, you know, what you do, coming in, you know, when you're talking to somebody like Celia, you're talking to somebody about branding, your agents, if you have agents, or even on your pay to plays. In your own marketing, your own marketing has become such a huge part of this business where getting your website, SEO optimized, getting a CRM program, talking to people like Ann Ganguza and Mark Scott about how to create a marketing program. And it's a huge part of this. Right. And people are just, you know, they need to really get an understanding of who they are first. Again, they're true tells, understanding who they are as an actor, you know? Yeah. Yeah, if you're just joining us, our guest is Dave Walsh. Hello. He's very eloquent at all this. If you have a question about how he coaches or some suggestions about how to help your delivery, put them in the chat room in Facebook, Facebook Live or YouTube Live. And we will get to those questions in just a little bit. So make sure you do that. Yep. AI. I mean, you and I have talked about this a little bit. I wish I had spiked my water before I came here. Holy crap. I mean, people are, some people are in a, the sky is falling panic. And then you have people who are like, ah, it's a nothing burger. And, but it seems that the- It's summer in the middle. Yes. Yeah. I mean, what are your thoughts about this new technology that some are embracing and other are screaming and running down the hall with? Well, first of all, it's scary as hell. I mean, it's brilliant in and of itself as a technology. But for our business, as we've all talked about, it's scary as hell because of what the possibilities are, what it's already done to a certain part of the business. The thing that I will say is, I think people need to spend, I'm gonna go back to the S word again to storytelling, that I think personally, this industry is about to experience a shift because there's gonna be a tipping point because so many people are either in it or wanna get in voiceover, that the business is not gonna be able to sustain. It just can't. Too many people. The number of people, it's eventually going to create some form of a tip where the people that remain are the ones that are the storytellers because AI is going to start from the bottom and take businesses like telephony and start moving its way up. Our ability as actors, I say to actors all the time, slow the tide and what Nava is doing right now with the mission statement and the pledge that they put out last week and what that board is really doing, Karen Guilfrey and Tim and the whole board and what people are doing really to really turn the tides on this are huge. However, technology is technology and it finds its way but the truth is the people that will survive and I'm gonna call it a nuclear winter, a VO nuclear winter. You wanna be a cockroach. You wanna be a cockroach or voiceover. You wanna be able to still be the storyteller to survive it. That the business itself can't sustain the number of people. People are saying to me, I wanna be with an LA or New York agent. I get it. But how many slots do you think they have? I'm not saying that to dissuade anybody from being a part of this business but you need to be realistic about it. They're still humans casting people. It's not AIs casting humans. No. It's humans casting humans. They want human aspects of emotion. There's no computer that can make the thousands of decisions that I have to make looking at a phrase or a line of copy where I'm gonna go up, where I'm gonna go, I'm gonna cry, I'm gonna do this. It can't do it. Yet. Well, but even if it could do it, someone would have to sit there and program it and direct the computer to do all those things and can they do all of those things faster than the actual actor can perform with real human emotion? I don't think so. No, I think, you know. They're gonna figure that out after over time they're gonna figure out that yeah, we can get a convincing human speech. We can make it sound like anybody we want but it's still the uncanny valley. It's still not gonna sound human. It's gonna sound like a facsimile. There's, but there is, you know, even there's something now where they're talking about when you get spam calls, if you pick up the phone that what they're doing is recording your voice on the other end and using that voice to then go to use it with AI and be able to, you know, the whole thing about hunting down, I'm caught in Guatemala and I can't get out, I've been kidnapped. You know, all that kind of thing. But when it comes to this particular business, I think, again, it's the people that are the consummate storytellers. Now, when you're talking, like you said, the nuance of a story, you know, are you? The nuance and the reaction. Yeah, yeah. Like how you can immediately react to direction, make a change, make an adjustment. That's, that's, on top of the storytelling. Right. On top of the acting. That just, just the mechanics of that. Yeah. And the computer's gonna be able to do it. It's gonna be fast. But I think telephony, I think telephony has already started being attacked, not attacked by it, it's kind of a strong word, but it is. Telephony is the first level where it's going to, where it's gonna really get, it's gonna penetrate. I mean, it just, it only makes sense, you know? But again, I think that I want people to absolutely fight for this. I think people absolutely should be active and proactive. But at the same time, please focus on story. Please focus on your craft. Because it's the only way you're gonna slow the tide. Right. Because it won't be able to figure it out as fast as you can, to your point, George. It won't be able to figure things out as fast as you will. Right. So yeah. Okay, well, we're talking with Dave Walsh. Again, if you have a question, throw it in the chat room right now so we can get to it in the next segment. And we also might have a little fun with what we always do. Fun with words. Fun with words. And he'll direct me through some copy and so you can see. Just wait. Okay. We'll be right back at Voice Over Body Shop. So don't go away. This is the Latin lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendes. And you're enjoying Dan and George on the Voice Over Body Shop. As voice actors, we need to hear the clear, transparent and honest sound of our voices. 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Hey everybody, this is the time of the show where we thank our wonderful sponsor Source Elements, the creators of Source Connect and many other technologies that allow studios to collaborate real time with talent and their clients all around the world. And the tool that most voice actors want to look at in their career, if they're stepping it up and really, let's say for example, you're trying to get an agent. What are the things that agents are gonna look for in your home studio and being ready to do the big jobs, especially those commercials, they're gonna look to see if you have Source Connect. It's a tool that is considered to be the industry standard for a lot of how the voiceover business operates in this modern age. We recommend you guys get familiar with it. So head over to Source-Elements.com, get yourself a free 15 day trial over there and get yourself started. If you need help, they have a lot of training and we also at George the Tech can help you out with the more advanced technical setup in your home studio. Anyway, let's go onto the next part of the show and listen to this next sponsor so we can get back to Dave right after this. Hey, do you know this guy? He's Michael Kostrov, an actor you've seen on lots of shows like The Wire, Billions, The Blacklist, Law and Order SVU, Molly's Game, Lim Mizzrab and The Producers. I took his audition psych 101 class a few years back and it was the best acting class I ever took. He's now releasing his latest video course, Audition Myths, Tough Truths and Logic, a three video series where he debunks actor's most common misunderstandings and misinformation about the audition process. Here's what Michael has to say about this series. If there's one tool that has been most helpful in working through my fears, insecurities, anxieties and self-criticism about auditioning, it's my good friend Logic. Once I've disproved an illogical thought, all that mental noise gets tamped down. You can now get lifetime access to this series for just $195 on nearly 50% savings. Registration is open now, but closes Friday night at 9 p.m. Pacific. Here's the link, auditionpsych101.com forward slash join. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying Voice Over Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Widdem, VOBS.tv. And we're back here at Voice Over Body Shop. Thanks for being with us tonight. Or if you're watching this later this week, sorry. What's up? Sorry. It's good to watch the show live, which is why I'm glad to see there's so many people watching the show live because they can ask questions of you. Otherwise, they're like, I'd like to ask them this, but oh, it's not live. And then that makes them sorry and sad. So that's okay. We don't want people sorry and sad at all. That's right. So what do we got in questions, George? All right. Does anybody care? Yeah, of course we do. Yeah, we definitely got some questions up here. Awesome. Let me jump into that. So first one I see in the list from Grace. Grace Newton. Hi, Grace. Hi, Grace. She's a wonderful regular on the show. Aside from good acting chops, what is an important skill set to develop for video game Voice Over? That looks like the question. Yeah. Besides acting, I think definitely if you can, couple of things. One is definitely improv. If you've never taken improv, which I know is a form of acting itself, but improv, especially for every area of Voice Over, particularly commercial, I think it really helps you to loosen up. Especially if you're gonna be going into something like motion capture. If you happen to be doing a video game that includes MO, MC, excuse me, that you need to have that flexibility in that physical aspect of being free of doing that. With regards to motion capture itself is learning motion capture. I think that's another part of this which has become a massive part of video games that when we started doing video games, when I started doing video games, motion capture was not part of it at all. We didn't do that. But now it's become almost a given as part of, you've seen so many talent that have posted on Insta and on TikTok, et cetera, from their motion capture sessions, from their motion capture workshops. So get into, if you can, Grace, get into both of those areas. And if you're not in LA or New York, there are plenty of workshops, obviously you can take particularly for improv to really kind of expand those chops. Yeah, good question. It's very physical. It's very physical. It's incredibly physical. It is, definitely. But again, because of the pandemic, we go back to what we were talking about. Places like Second City, places like the Groundlings, places like Ups, Uppright Citizens Brigade. There are a lot of places that started to create, their online presence in improv. And a lot of their classes, you never were able to do these kinds of things if you didn't live in LA or New York. So now you have that ability. And it's a real bonus. It's a real bonus. Yeah, Max Goldberg asks. Hey, Max. Yeah, given your busy coaching schedule, do you ever do any voiceover work still? I do, actually. I actually, I don't do a lot of it. I had an audition today, as a matter of fact, before I came here. I don't, I really find, Max, that because I went back to acting after I rehabbed my voice. And even when I was coaching, you know, so much. But I then really realized that my purpose was really helping people to overcome whatever their insecurities were, whatever their authenticity issues were. And so that became my focus. So I will audition, pardon me, every once in a while. But for me, the core of the work is really helping people like you. That's really what I focus on. Yeah. Cool. Let's talk about TrueTel for just a couple of minutes here. Before we do that, there's a quick plug about TrueTel. There it is. Yeah, this is from Beatrice Ryan. She says, grateful to Dave after the 2021 remote VO Atlanta X session he led on TrueTel, he gave me additional tools to get out of my head and get real. So thank you. That's awesome. And I actually remember you in that workshop too. I do remember that. Thank you for that. And I'm really glad that, you know, that's to go back to Max's question. That's the reason for things like that. That's why I really do it every day. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate it. So now I've worked with you and I understand what it is. Yeah. You know, I created my arsenal of... Essence words? Well, no, the people I know. The people you know. Yeah. The personal of acquaintances. There you go. Yeah. Which I refer to whenever I'm like, all right, I don't know what this stuff is about, but I know somebody who does. So really, what that imitate them, but how would they say? How would they say that? Yeah. Right. Well, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Explain it a little bit more in our detail. Those of you that don't know what the program is, the name of the program is the TrueTel as I said and the definition of the TrueTel is your 100% authentic opinion about every single thing you talk about in this world. It is your authenticity of how you see it. Right. So we know how it feels if you guys are gonna have a conversation with somebody, there's an effortlessness, even if it's a conversation that's, I don't know, heated, but you'd still feel authentic, you would feel that the conversation is focused. You're not scattered unless you had a really tough day and we know how that happens when people are talking. But normally we all know, we understand why we're having a conversation with somebody. First and foremost, we understand what we're talking about. Then we understand the person we're talking to and the big one is why. Why am I having this conversation with this person in the first place? Other than the fact that I have a script in front of me and I have to book a job and I say to actors all the time, that's not a good reason. So the actors that will go into a studio or they'll go into their home studio and you'll read a piece of copy, if you don't understand what it is you're reading and understanding who you're talking to and why, you know that feeling of, especially when you're really, you're kind of discombobled in a conversation, you're meant to be prepared, that pull in your stomach, that gurgling. Yeah, you're about to open your mouth and you're not really sure. You're not really sure. That's called being out of true tell. That's called not speaking authentically. The problem that actors have is they go, well, I gotta do it anyway. So I push, I push through the inauthenticity and it feels like, pardon me, shit. It feels like it's not real. That's what we're going for here. There isn't, this program isn't about playing nice, nice. It's not about your voice is beautiful, therefore you should be able to tell a good story. Absolutely not. In fact, your voice is so sensitive that it's gonna rat you out so fast when you're not connected. I don't know, you may have someone that actually would say to you, are you listening to me, are we, are you here? Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. You know, that kind of thing. When you're like that, you're not in true tell. And so the whole principle of the program goes back to everyday communication, how it feels when you're connected and how it feels when you're not. That's the foundation of it. I mean, there's many a time when you'll do an audition and it's like, this was written for me. I can understand it and I can feel very, very confident and then there'll be something talking about something I know nothing about. Which is very few things, by the way. Cultural literacy is really important. That's really important in the voiceover business. And when you can, you pull out your list. And we're gonna talk about what that is. So what Dan's referring to is when we worked together we talked about who are the people in your world that can tell the story you're about to tell if you can't tell it. So that's when you bring out your characters and I say to actors all the time, this is how on-camera and stage actors create subtext for the characters they create. So the actor then lives inside of the character and it isn't about imitating a voice. It's about living inside of the skin basically of that character. And that character could be somebody you know. It could be somebody you know professionally or personally. It could be an actor. It could be a character from a film. It could be a sports star. It could be anybody that you think would be appropriate to tell the story. And you speak through that person. The big challenge is the vulnerability of an actor actually living, like a voice actor living inside of the skin of an actor, of a character. Video games and animation, that's where everybody loves it because it's play. But people time and time again will say to me my biggest problem is when I see A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E-R. And now sir, for those of you that are small. The word announcer, that's the word that literally sets people into orbit. They're like, I have no idea why I'm here. If I were a character in a video game, I know why I'm there, I've got characters. But if I'm the voice of Chipotle, I don't have a clue why I'm doing it. So that's what the key to this is. It's really about zeroing in on that specificity. Big time. And it works and by doing that, you feel a lot more comfortable as you're reading the copy. That's it. It is all about the effortlessness of the story. It really is. We got a question from Ethan Salazar. Go for it. Mike too, it was very before him. Hey Ethan. We'll get there. Want me to read that one? Yeah. Ethan says, hey first, thanks Dave for such highlights on voice risks. You're welcome. Also, I wanna get into real video business. I want both knowledge and tools, but haven't made it into the real biz. Okay. How should I get or look up for an agent? So he's, it's the question of how do I get through it. Yeah, where's your visual George? The horse, the cart, you gotta get them in the right order. So Dave, where does he need to go first before the agent part comes to play? So the fact that you were saying that you weren't, Ethan, you weren't, you really weren't in the biz yet. It really depends on what you determine that to be. When you say in the biz, do you mean auditioning at all? Do you mean auditioning on a pay to play, auditioning because you've gotten the work yourself? If you're doing any of those things, you are in the biz. That you are in the craft itself. And so part of that to move your way up is to continue to coach to, and again, it really is, and believe me, I know that this is a business where all of us that are coaches, yes, I know there's a monetary exchange for this type of work. It isn't about trying to build up the business, my business at any higher. It is a reality of the arts. It doesn't matter whether it's music, whether it's camera, whether it's voiceover, whether it's whatever. It's like sports. It doesn't matter what industry where craft is involved. It is not the kind of business where you can come in and expect to just fly through it and get in it quickly because there are so many other people, Ethan, who have been in this for a long time. What I will say to you, which is a great educational tool, is go to the websites of agencies such as Atlas, CESD, DPN, SBV, KMR. There's, I mean, there's so many others, obviously, but these agencies, Buckwald in New York, A3, these agencies are the tops in the business, and I know there were plenty of my other friends we've left out, so I apologize. But there are, these are the people who are at the top echelon of the business. Those are the people who are your chief competitors. So I think for a lot of people to get kind of the sobering reality of how it is, go to those websites, listen to the demos that are there, listen to the competition. That will give you inspiration. I swear, it's not meant to dissuade you or to deflate you, it's meant to inspire you that these people are doing what they do because they are the best, right? So yeah, but keep at it, Ethan. Don't ever, don't feel like you're not in it. Just don't rush yourself for the agent. The agent will come in time. Yeah, if you're making money, they're gonna come find you. Yeah, exactly. Just make sure that they can find you. That's the other thing. If you're making money, make sure you have a website, make sure you have a way for them to find you. That's Kate. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, question from Mike Cunningham. What is the best way to understand who you are without cutting yourself off at the knees? Like limiting yourself. Interesting question. How to find out who you are without cutting yourself off at the knees. You know, and yeah, if you're so, I guess if, you know, you're trying to be somebody else. Yeah. And how can you still be you? Oh, got it, got it. Okay, so the big, that's a really, Mike, that's a really good question. I think when you're being another character and this is where actors play, this goes back to vulnerability that I talked about a couple of minutes ago, that when you step into a character, it's, I use the word all the time, immersive, okay? Which means that you are living in the values and the morals of the character. The vulnerability I talked about a couple of minutes ago is letting go of, and this goes back to sound. This is why I started doing what I do. It is absolutely none of your business how you sound. Because we hear our voices one 1,000th of a second faster than anybody else. So I'm hearing my voice, if I'm talking to George and Dan, I can hear my voice one 1,000th of a second faster. I think my voice sounds slightly different than they hear it. Right. Because the bones. It's physiological. It's always passing through the jaw and all that stuff. Totally. The bones in your face, it vibrates differently. So when you're performing, it's when you're trying to kind of lean. It's not that you're doing this really, but you're leaning out. It sounds like you're leaning out the window to listen to your voice. Like you're trying to lean even with you. If you have cans on, get rid of them. Thank you. You're leaning out the window to hear your voice. You can't rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time. Some people are brilliant, they can. But when you're trying to tell the story and listen to yourself at the same time, that's when you compromise. Actually, Mike, you compromise the story by trying to be yourself and the character. You have to let go of you and let the character take over. And the big word is trust. Trusting that the voice will turn itself exactly where it needs to go to tell the story, because it does that all day, every day. It's all of a sudden, when you step in front of this thing and you suddenly become so insecure that all of a sudden, it's like your voice is gonna fail you. Which it really is not. And it's the trusting, believe me when I tell you, I have to losing your voice and thinking that it's literally gone to crap and only to come back from that. I really try to strongly encourage people that have any kind of vocal problem to seek help for that. But people that are insecure about their own voice, one woman said to me, I hate the sound of my voice. You're in the wrong business. Well, yeah. But then I was also in a workshop recently and this great voice actor, J.P. Carlyak, has a group called Queer Vox. He and another great talent in one of my clients, Lindsay Rousseau, they're at the head of this organization. And when I asked people in that group what they thought of their voices, the first person said revolutionary. So the difference between the woman that didn't love her voice and the person that said their voice was revolutionary, hell yeah. So that's the kind of thing that you want to get inspiration for. Your voice is always gonna be changing because your life is always gonna be changing. That makes sense. It does. Yeah, good question. We got a little bit of time. Let's run through a script here and show everybody how this system works. Okay, so I've prepared a script for Mr. Leonard. If you so choose to accept. This script is for you. It's a 15 second spot. Don't worry about the time. So this is for a product called Krylon, which is a rust protector. Here's a plug. Okay, so we're gonna give Dan a little bit of time to look at it. And this is what everybody else should do. When you look at the script, now this script intentionally does not have specs on it. It doesn't have any direction. So Dan has absolutely no idea who he's supposed to be, what he's supposed to say, how he's supposed to sound. Okay? So I'm just gonna give you that. Okay. So you've got, you do your thing. Yeah. As someone who uses this product, though it makes it a lot easier. Okay. Okay, let me stop for a second. Okay. When people say that to me, they go, this will be easier. And the problem with that is what? I'm not like everybody else and there's, you know. Well, the other thing was, since when the hell does it have to be hard for you to book a job? Right. If it's gonna help you if you use the product, I say hell yeah. Right. But it's also knowing who am I telling this to and convincing them of such thing. So. Remember it's not a convincing. Right. It's having the conversation. Right. But we also wanna go back to, we talked earlier about the why. Why are you telling the story at all? Right. Other than the fact that I just handed you a script. Okay. All right, well let me read through it once and let's see. Okay. Okay. All right. Why does Krylon's new rust protector dry in only eight minutes and not two hours like the leading rust competitor? Because a lot can happen in two hours. For performance, you don't have to wait for. Choose Krylon. Okay. First of all, how did it feel? Fairly comfortable. Okay. I mean, there are, for one just running through it and just saying it, it's, you know, it's like, okay, this is how I would say it. But who else, you know, might do it differently or how would I do it differently and how would I try to connect with somebody who doesn't understand why Krylon is such a great product? Well, let me ask you a question. Before we even go there, what does the copy actually mean? That it makes, there's a lot going on in your life so I have to worry about paint drying. Mm-hmm. So this prevents you from doing that. Right. Now the question is, what's your true tell about, now true tell again is your 100% authentic opinion about everything you're talking about. Do you agree with that? Yeah, for the most part. Okay. So when you say something like, yeah, for the most part, do you think that the creative director of the agency or the company's gonna wanna pay you a session fee plus 10? If you think, and you say, yeah, well, all right. So your true tell about it is it's okay. Like it's true, but who cares? Right. So that's your attitude going into it versus everything in advertising is a good thing. Everything is that. So the question is, you have a couple of choices when you're telling the story. I'm giving you kind of this, some extra, this is gift with purchase. In addition to telling the story as you, you also can tell the story to the camera. Right. Or somebody else, but because you use Krylon, we're not gonna have you tell the story as another character. Why waste good, you know, Leonard time? We got some Leonard skin in the game. We don't want you to go to somebody else. Right. So if you're gonna tell the story to camera, you've obviously got your own kind of side, part of the house set up for tools and everything else. Right. All right, so if you're gonna tell that story, we know there's a hell of a lot you got going on in two hours, right? Right. All right. So we're gonna put the story in your backyard or we're gonna put it wherever, where do you usually normally store the Krylon? Right behind this curtain. So right behind this curtain is where it is. So it's a story. You tell it to camera and you're the on-camera spokesperson now. Oh, okay, all right. Now tell the story. Why does Krylon's new Rust Protector dry in only eight minutes and not two hours like the leading Rust competitor? Because a lot can happen in two hours. For performance you don't have to wait for. Choose Krylon. Yes. Yes, nice. Yes, so the camera, the camera becomes such a great part of this because you put anybody in front of the camera, us, anybody else and the red light goes on. All of a sudden every single thing they say suddenly gets elevated in value. Everything just sits up. So the shift in that read, we heard it in sound, right? I didn't say to you, make sure you say the leading Rust competitor. This time it actually, you found the nuggets of where to hit the words. Versus, well, I've been taught in voiceover 101 that I'm supposed to hit the words and do what I do with the product. You naturally find the intonations because the reality of the relationship you have to the product is real. Does that make sense? It makes total sense, it's true. And it's a matter and true. So that's it. And two takes, if you decide to do it to camera because you couldn't think of anybody to tell it to, camera always works beautifully because it just all of a sudden it's, it just all of a sudden sits up and has more impact. How did it feel? Well, great. Yeah. And that's, and again, that's the goal of every audition for it to feel great. That is all that matters. Thank God we hit a camera. Good job on that. Thank you. Dave Walsh everybody. I really appreciate that. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Always fun to have you here. Have we talked our way all the way out of this? Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. All right. We'll be right back and wrap things up in a nice tight little ball and get ready for Tech Talk right after this. You're still watching VOBS? 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All right. About 10 years ago, good friend of mine said, I wanna do something for the voiceover business. Maybe you know his name, Joe Davis. Everybody knows Joe Davis. More people know him than know me. It's amazing, the guy's amazing. But as a webmaster, he wanted to find something that could help the voiceover world. And I said, make a templated website so people can get their website up quickly, not in six months and pay a fortune to a webmaster to do it. Well, he started voiceactorwebsites.com which now employs like 30 people. So, and I apologize to him every day about that. But finally, the technology came around where you could create a website yourself easily using a lot of different templates. And you can customize them. You can change the wording in them. You can put whatever graphics you want in it. But it gives you a real easy basic platform to create your voiceover website. And you can start for free. I mean, how many places can you do that? And there are some other plans, $20 a month to maintain your site. But it's easy to change things. Update your demos, update your bio. Maybe you don't like a picture of yourself in there. You can take that off. And you can do it really, really fast. And George and I tried it out. We got our kids online in no time. Go over to voiceactor.com. That's voiceactor.com and check it out and get your website up really quick right now. We are the World Voices Organization. Also known as WOVO. We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent. Voiceover is a complex entrepreneurial business. WOVO is there to promote the professional nature of voice work to the public, to those already established in their voiceover practice. And to those who want to pursue voiceover as a career. Membership benefits include a supportive and creative community. A profile and demos on voiceover.biz, our searchable directory of vetted professional voice talent. Our exclusive demo player for your personal website. Our mentoring program, business resources and our video library. Our annual WOVO.con conference, a fun and educational weekend with other members with the chance to learn and network. Webinars and great speakers and weekly social chats with other members around the world. If your world is voiceover, make WOVO part of it. World Voices Organization. We speak for those who speak for a living. Yeah, hi, this is Carlos Ellis Rocky, the voice of Rocco and you're watching Voiceover Body Shop. All right, we're back. Getting ready for Tech Talk, which is, oh yeah, always a lot of fun. But we have lots of people. Thank Dave Walsh for starters. What a great hour with him. Dave was amazing. Yeah, always a crowd pleaser. That's right. Also, remember that George and I do the voiceover home studio thing, so we'll tell you more about that in a little bit. But we do have to think our donors of the week. We certainly do. All right, let's see how good my vision is from here. I think I can blow it up real good. Okay, there you are, that helps. Okay, so Grace Newton. Robert Liedem. Steven Chandler. Casey Clack. Jonathan Grant. Thomas Pinto. Greg Thomas. Dr. Voice. Ant Land Productions. I was wearing his t-shirt earlier today. Martha Kahn. 949 Designs. Christopher Apperson. Sarah Borges. Philip Sapir. Brian Page, great actor. Patty Gibbons. Rob Ryder. Shona Pennington-Bear. Don Griffith. Trey Mosley, another great actor. Yeah, and Diana Birdsall. And Sandra Manweller. Yes. All right. Well, all right, we need to thank our fantastic sponsors who have been with us for millennia. Long time. That's right. Like Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials. Voice Over Extra. Sorus Elements. VioHeroes.com. VoiceActor.com. And WorldVoices.org, the Industry Association of Freelance Voice Talent. Yes, I am the president, not only a client. We need to thank Jeff Holman in the chat room doing a fabulous job tonight. And Sumer Lino at home, sitting there going. The shot. They're in their pods. That shot. The shot. They're in their safety pods. That's right. All right. Who are we have coming on next time? Next time. We're gonna take off Memorial Day. Memorial Day. But next week, we have Tech Talk, number. 103. 103. Which we're going to do right now, so don't go anywhere. Don't go no way. If you're watching us live, so you can ask your questions and be totally fascinated by what we do. But in three weeks, we have Debra when coming on. Hey, all right. All right. And she's like, I haven't been on your show 12 years. We're close friends. About dang time. Okay, all right, we'll put you in after Memorial Day. Anyway, this is a very difficult business as Dave was alluding to. But from George's and my point of view, if it sounds good. It is good. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or VOBS. See you in a bit. See ya. Stream counter. And it's your, yeah. You have at least 50% more of the usual audience. Wow. People really want to come and ask questions. Well, I'm glad they do, because I did, I plugged it today. I saw that. You kind of do that. And thank you for that too, yeah. And I sent an email out to my poll list too. That really helps. Yeah, it really helps. Okay. Well, you're welcome to hang or split. Now's the decision time. How long you guys are on for? Another hour. We're gonna do our tech talk. I want to vote, because I have a plan at seven. Sounds good. I'm gonna make some calls in the car. Sounds good. All right, boys. Great to see you, man. Thank you so much. It's awesome, as always. Appreciate it. Watch your step. Watch your step. Thank you guys. Take a bottle of water if you need one. What was mine? Is that me? That's down on the floor. That's me. Okay, I'm out. All right. Thanks, Dave. Bye, Dave. Be well. I will. Okay. Okay, so. We're ready soon. We're just gonna stick with that camera and keep it simple. Yeah. And Jeff's getting everybody's tech questions. And we're gonna unpin that one. And tech questions. And there we go. And we go to the rundown. And I think we're ready to go. All right. I've got my show in town. I got a couple of little news stories. Nothing that. I have a rant. Really have two rants. Don't go on too long. I have an unboxing and a rant. Okay. The levels are not quite, it's a little crunchy. Just give me a second. Okay. I think what I need to do is. Don't go anywhere. If you got any questions, by the way, we're gonna start up in a second. But if you got any questions, throw them in the chat room. And Jeff Holman, star of stage and screen, will be taking that down and. That sounds better. Okay, good. Let me back this down a little bit. One, two, two, two, two, two. There we go. The sound is always much better when we're in the studio. One, two, three, four. Yeah, it's just getting the mix between the XR12 and the road caster. But now we got it. Okay. Get my table. Yeah. You're sitting there playing with it. It looks like you're playing a dulcimer. It's, or a lap steel, a pedal steel. All right. All right, let's roll here. All right, look for Sue. There she has four. Three, two. Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop. Tech talk number 103. They keep making tech. We keep talking about it. I know. And ranting. And yeah, and we got a couple of rants tonight. So make sure you're here for that. It's getting rantier. Yeah, but as long as it doesn't get rancid, that's the most important. Yeah, no spoiling. If you have a question, throw it in the chat room. And that way we can answer that question. So we want to hear from you. You got problems with your home studio, question about some equipment or a technique with software or something like that. We're the guys to talk to. So stay tuned. Time for voiceover body shop tech talk right now. Voiceover body shop tech talk is brought to you by voiceover essentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, the folks who bring you source connect, the heroes.com become a hero to your clients with award winning voiceover training, voice actor.com, your voiceover website ready in minutes, voiceover extra, your daily resource for voiceover success, and by World Voices, the industry association of freelance voice talent. And now here's your hosts, Dan and George. There. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is voiceover body shop or VOBS. Tech talk, tech talk, tech talk, tech talk. Alrighty, well, we got lots of stuff to talk about tonight, but we always lead off with this because, believe it or not, the reason this show exists. And we've been on the internet for 12 years, which boggles our minds every time we think about it. And somehow we keep coming up with stuff to talk about. Wait, there was internet 12 years ago? There was internet 12 years ago. Well, we were dialing up modems back then. Almost. Yes, there may be a few people like that. But when it comes to home voiceover studios, there's really only two guys that really know what they're doing. There are other guys that are engineers. They understand what it's supposed to sound like. Whizzle. How you get there varies because every voice is different. Every room is different. Every budget is different. That's for darn sure. And so our job as voice actors and voiceover engineers is to make sure that you sound your best. And if you don't understand how it all works, we explain it to you. Believe it or not, I have a master's degree in education. And I have a high school, part-time teaching gig, teaching kids science. Not the same. We're at the Franklin Institute? Yes. Oh, amazing how I would pick that one out of my ear. Not a degree, but teaching is always, both is important to both of us. Right, teaching is a lot of fun, especially when somebody actually wants to learn what you're telling them and explaining to them. I got to do it to a bunch of people in Lagos, Nigeria last weekend. How cool is that? At a big voice conference, voiceover 4.0 in Nigeria. And it was a lot of fun and totally unscripted and go through the routine. This is what you need to do for a home studio. So if you need help with your home studio, and the point is, is that we've been doing this for 12 years, the initial idea with this and still maintained as that is shameless promotion of what George and I do. Because if you didn't do this, you wouldn't even know we were there. Wouldn't like, but anyway, if you would like to work with one of us and help you with your home studio and teach you how to do it right, or something with software, or if you've got a technical issue, my mic sounds like crap. Why is that? Mm-hmm, or my phone isn't on vibrate, though it's supposed to be. All right, well, you'll get back to them. Anyway, if you need help with that, you can work with either one of us. And if you want to work with George, you go over to GeorgeThe.tech. There it is, right? And we have an ever-expanding team. Huge website. Of techs. If you go to GeorgeThe.tech, we have updated the banner to show you that we are more than just George. We are a team. And we've got folks that are specialists in a wide, wide range of softwares, technologies, techniques, and a new thing we're working on soon is having what I call virtual on-demand engineers so that you'll be able to, if you've got to get something edited, and you're like, oh my God, I can't get that done. And still audition for this really important gig and take the kids home from school. Sometimes something's got to give. Sometimes you need a virtual engineer to help you edit. This is something we're adding to our roster of services. Stay tuned, we're working out the details, but I'm really excited to be able to start offering these types of services. And we have some of the best people you know, people you know are working with GeorgeThe.tech. We've, Dan's on the team. We've added, we just added Jim Edgar, believe it or not. He wants to work with us now. It's just, we have the greatest team of folks over there. So head over to GeorgeThe.tech. And Dan, he's helping you out with your home studios too, over his place on the web. And that's homevoiceoverstudio.com. Really easy to remember, especially if you want to have a home voiceover studio. And what my thing there is my specimen collection cup. Yeah, some people say, that's really silly. Well, that was the idea, it gets your attention. And what you can do is you can drop off a specimen of your audio. So I can give it a listen, give it a very, very thorough analysis and see if it sounds great. I'm gonna go, it sounds great. Maybe your levels are a little off. Maybe there's a little bit of acoustical issues with that. Maybe you're too close to the microphone. Maybe you're too far away from the microphone. Maybe you're talking into the wrong side of the microphone. You know, that sort of thing. That's what that sounds like by the way. That is what it sounds like. So check us out at georgethe.tech or homevoiceoverstudio.com and get your audio sounding what it's supposed to sound like. Whistle. All right. Well, let's get into the real meat of the matter here. And that is starting with George's tech update. And why is this, why does he have this thing on his lap? It looks like he's playing a dulcimer. I have an unboxing. Okay. He's gonna do an unboxing course. Yes, I have an unboxing. Yeah. Did I bring my unboxing knife? No, I did not bring my unboxing knife. So do you have a knife or a scissor or anything? It's out in the new shed. All right. Well, I will use the hammer. The hammer of this hammer. Over the years of going to trade shows like the Nam Music Trade Show, I've made a lot of vendor contacts. And one of the longest standing, longest history of vendor contacts that I have gotten to know is a fellow named Chris Courier. Super nice guy. And Dan's met Chris as well. Chris has worked his way up in the ranks at Sennheiser, which owns Neumann by the way. And anyway, we've known him a really long time. Well, out of the blue, he contacted me a couple months ago. He said, would you like to try our new streaming podcasting microphone? And I said, yes, of course. And here it is. This is the profile USB streaming set. So this is the model that comes with a nice boom arm for the table, which I think is a huge deal. I mean, there's the blue Yeti's and all these other USB mics, the Rode NT USB. But most of them come with a little tiny desktop tripod. This comes with a proper boom arm, which I think if you really are gonna be serious about your beginning voiceover mic, it needs to be in the right place, right? Now I consider a USB mic to be a beginner mic. I mean, yes, you can get pro audio out of a USB mic. Little trouble with the hammer there. I don't wanna destroy the box too bad. It worked though. But the trick to getting good audio is not all about the mic. It's a lot about the acoustics and it's especially about the placement, right? Absolutely. So what's great about this thing is really honestly, the mic, obviously we know is the mic's gonna be good at Sennheiser. But this is the arm any good, is the boom any good, right? Let's take a look at this thing. What's the resistance? Oh, and is it adjustable? Probably. It feels pretty sturdy, stout. But the mic's not all that heavy. There's a knuckle here. Okay, that knuckle goes totally vertical. It's got a pretty long reach. It's got like a preset tension on these, right? They're not adjustable. They're preset, okay. You're only gonna use this mic with it and that's probably... Probably, but it is a standard 5.8 or 3.8 thread. So this could work rather than mics. And it has a cable channel in it so it could run other kind of mic cables too, right? Okay, and then it has a nice beefy, stable, sturdy looking tabletop clamp. This looks really nice. It's got a really nice machined fit to it. There's no slop and wobble. Nothing less from the Germans who make that stuff. You would not, and that is what you're getting. This is, so already I'm impressed, right? We haven't even looked at it. I like stuff like this. This is the stuff that makes a difference, right? I know I'm burying the lead. I'm opening everything except the mic first. In this box, a nice, pretty long USB cable. USB-C to USB-C? It goes to USB-C, so it's gonna be a radio rock and all your modern laptops. Looks to be a pretty, let me see. Six, oh, 10 to 12 foot long USB cable. Wow. Pretty impressive. That can be useful. And finally, the thing that we're actually here for is the microphone, how it comes. There it is. So this is an interesting design because the microphone has a mount on the base and it has an integrated tilting mechanism. So if this was standing directly on a desk stand, you can tilt it toward you up off the desk. So I think the basic version without the arm has like a little desktop stand. So interesting design, having it tilt, right? Looking at the back, we have our USB-C connector, a headphone jack. So if you're doing podcasting or Zoom calls, it's built in there. And then on the front is the three controls I always look for on a USB mic. What do we got? Dane, headphone monitor level or volume. Is it a mix? And a headphone monitor mix between microphone and computer. Playback. These are the basic things I expect to see these days on a USB mic. I know the roads and I know others. I'm annoyed when they don't include an actual gain knob on the mic. Cause then you have to go into the software. And a lot of times they have the software that goes with it. Yeah, you have to use their software in the case of like the road, right? So this puts all those controls on the face of the unit itself. And bonus, which is really, really helpful. If you're doing anything live, it has a mic cut or mic mute button. Cough button. Yeah, cough button or cut the mic mute button right here. That is fantastic. So I have never plugged this thing in before. I just want to plug it in just to see what lights up on it. If it's assuming it has some kind of lights on it. Let's see what happens when we plug it in. Three, two, one. Ooh, it does have a light. Okay. It's got some lights. Is that a meter on there though? So it's got a gain, it's got a light ring around the mic gain knob, but it's not a meter. It doesn't change intensity as you speak. Okay. And then it's got the mic mute button. Oh, that's nice. So when the mic mute is on, it lights up in a bright red. So you know that mic is off. You don't want to be embarrassed by being heard when the mic is on by mistake. So what's the takeaway? Obviously we're not going to do a real audio test with it today. There's no real practical way to do that because it's USB. So I will be doing that at some point on the George the Tech YouTube channel. Stay tuned for that. But it's a good feeling, Mike. It feels like it's not plastic-y, junk-y feeling. It feels substantial. The knobs all feel the knobs and the buttons. Everything feels like a little extra attention to detail with the drag. Yeah, the knobs have a nice drag to them. There's nice and it just feels of quality, which is, you know, if Sennheiser's gonna have a mic with their name on it, at whatever price point. And I think this is around 200 US with the arm. Don't quote me on that. You know, it has to be up to par no matter what the prices that they're selling it for. That's why I was amazed when they sent me a USB mic. I never thought they were gonna make a mic that was in this sort of affordable. I wonder what kind of a capsule it has in it. Yeah, that we don't know. Obviously it's definitely got an internal pop filtering going on, cause you can not see inside there. Right. So we'll have to find out more. I'm guessing, cause of the price point of the mic, and it's probably like a small to medium capsule, but it doesn't say anywhere very obvious and I don't want to make this draw all in forever. But anyway, when I get a mic to unbox or get anything to unbox, it's fun to be able to do it. So I figured, what the, hey. There are people making millions of dollars doing unboxing videos. You ever seen that guy unbox therapy? Yeah, yeah. His studio is like this humongous room with LED lighting on the ceiling that stretches the entire length. We're missing it somewhere along the line. Oh my God, yeah, I know. What do we do wrong? Yeah, it's got a little pictogram, looks like an IKEA, looks like an IKEA manual. What do you expect coming from Europe, you know? Cause they have to cover a lot of languages and it's got a QR code for additional documentation, online manual, et cetera, et cetera. But clearly it's plug and play and it's obvious to me that they don't, and I think this is good, they're going to don't have a console proprietary control panel away. They're going to plug it in. It's all hardware. Oh, it's all hardware. And I think that's a plus, a plus, I really do. And this leads me into a rant, not a rant, just to sort of a little food for thought thing. You're on. On the way here, a VIP client of mine I've been working with for a really long time, texts me and says, I have a 911. And every time I see that, I'm like, huh, it gives me, it gives me hives. I give him a call and he's like, I'm out, I'm not at home, I'm using my travel kit and I can't get this thing to work, right? What do you got? Oh, I have the, you know, the Audient Evo 4, don't you remember it? You know, how many studios we work on, right? Oh yeah, the Evo 4, the one that you use once or twice a year when you go on a trip. Yeah, that one. I'm instantly remembered why I do not recommend audio interfaces or any, even USB mics, any gadgets that require an understanding and a memorization of how certain buttons work. You know what I mean? Well, okay, well, remember to get that mic to work, you have to turn on phantom power. Do you remember how to turn on the phantom power? Well, remember you have to press the number one, then you have to press the phantom power button. Now, if you don't do this, if this thing's in your home studio, you're gonna do this every single day. It's gonna be repetition, whatever. You put something like this in a road kit that you use sporadically, maybe once or twice a year and the mic doesn't work, it's not gonna be obvious, right? So I really, really don't like using gear that requires a memorization or the reading of a manual just to get it to start functioning, like turning on phantom power. Or wait a minute, I can't hear anything. How do I get my headphones on? Well, you have to remember to push that button that looks like a wifi symbol, but it's actually your headphone level. Press that, then turn the, I mean, that is not what you want in a portable kit. If you want something at the very basic, something like this with knobs that do one job, each is what you're looking at. The mic port pro is always something I love because it had one mic knob for gain, one knob for headphones, no menus, no proprietary software, easy to remember. The new version of the mic port pro, the new three, it's good, but it still has that battery in it. You still have to make sure that battery is charged. So the new hotness is definitely gonna be the passport VO. And I just want to let you guys know it's still available. I'm gonna get my plug in now. It's still available. There's like 19 of them left in the 100 unit batch that we're getting made. And even though we didn't hit our $100 unit goal, Mike Goodman from Sentron said, let's do it. Let's do this thing. So that thing is official now. It looks like I'm gonna have to do it. We're all gonna have to buy one. That's gonna happen. But the design philosophy behind that thing was one knob per function, one knob or one switch per function, no menus, nothing to have to remember. Everything is clearly labeled. Everything is straightforward. And that I think is what's really critical for a travel kit. The very last thing before we talk about booths, I added the word soundproof. Is that what we're talking about soundproof? Yeah, pretty much. Or just in general, yeah. It's just a little micro rant or maybe another reminder about Chrome. Chrome, the web browser, if you're doing anything multimedia or even not multimedia, just day-to-day stuff, like click this button to upload a file. Those things tend to stop working in Chrome after a while. Devices seem to mysteriously stop working. Audio things don't seem to work correctly. Chrome seems to be needing to be restarted just as often, probably actually arguably more often than your actual operating system. I find that I'm needing to restart Chrome to get things to work more than ever. I don't know what's going on. I don't know why this is. But think of it this way. The Chrome web browser is really an operating system. Inside an operating system. Exactly. It's another layer of an operating system. And if you're like me and you do run a lot of your business on the web, then you have a lot of things open. You have a lot of tabs open. And so it comes up every single day. Even just getting our show on the air today, restart Chrome. I think that's going to fix it. Fixed the problem. My audio device isn't working. My Evo4, the audio signal isn't reaching IPDTL. That's running on Chrome, right? Let's restart Chrome. Oh, it's working now. As I usually say, when in-dute reboot. When in-dute reboot Chrome. If you're using anything on Chrome. Anyway, that's it for the tech talk part for me. But let's talk a little bit about booths. Yeah, I usually base my basic basics on the stuff that I've dealt with this week. Because there's always something new. Somebody comes up. Someone writes to me and says, should I get a new booth? And they send me a picture of like, okay, it looks like a basic acoustical booth. And they send me some audio. And I'm like, sounds fine. You know, acoustically, it sounds pretty good. Yeah, you got a little bit of a noise floor, but you're, you know, in a house. You know, and so this person's like, well, should we invest in a big booth? My daughter is doing this. And we wanna make sure that we're prepared for the future. What I usually tell people is, don't overthink this. And do you need a booth? If you are in a very noisy place. If you are like in the flight path of LaGuardia, or LAX, or O'Hare, or DFW, one of those places where- On Broadway. Yeah, yeah. If you happen to live, you know, in Midtown Manhattan and leave your window open. Yeah, you might need something like that. But then again, you live where you choose to live. So, but what are you looking for in a soundproof booth? And we have looked at a bunch of them. I mean, yeah, and there's a few more manufacturers. Some have come, some have gone. Thinking that perhaps they can do it. And what I have found is, depending on what your noise floor is, which is why I have my specimen collection cup so I can hear exactly what's going on. And I say, give me five seconds of open mic silence. Read some copy the way you normally would. And then 10 seconds of open mic silence so I can hear your voice juxtaposed to your background. As we like to say, your signal to noise ratio, or signal being your voice, noise being anything that's not your voice. And that can be everything. So we wanna mitigate the amount of exterior noise. So the best way to do it is with a booth. And we know lots of manufacturers and we know the quality of these booths. The one thing that people don't realize is that all of these things were never really designed for voiceover. They were designed for musicians to practice their violin or their oboe or their saxophone or slide drum bone around other people and not disturb them. So there's soundproof going out and soundproof going in. So should you get a booth or not? Number of factors, one, what's your budget? You can spend up to $10, $15,000. Oh, yes, you can. I saw somebody who bought a double wide in downtown Los Angeles in a big apartment building. And it was like, it wasn't a room in a room, it was like another apartment inside his apartment. Big loft type of apartment. You can spend an awful lot of money on these. The question is investment versus return on investment. How, the only reason you'd need something like that is if you're doing a lot of remote sessions. If, you know, you're a busy working voice actor and you are doing a lot of stuff, you know, via source connect or something and you've gotta have it quiet. I call it quiet on demand. Quiet on demand. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So what do you do? Do you buy a booth or not? Look at your budget. Really get your sound analyzed in your space so we know what you're working with. And we can determine, okay, you don't need to spend the fortune, what you need to need to do. And we've sort of discovered this over working with a lot of people, you know, people playing basketball next door or there's a construction site or something like that. If you could reduce the exterior noise by about 10 dB, if it's just incidental noise from the house or the apartment building and it's literally impossible. No matter what you buy, no matter what you do to eliminate outside noise. Yeah, or all of it, all of the noise. Yeah, yeah. But if you can keep it at a low frequency under the frequency you're going to waste, that's good. So if you- 10 decibels is 50%. That's right. 10 decibel reduction is half the noise. Right. So if you have a moderately good booth, that's really all you need. So don't go hog wild on this, but first let's analyze your space. Let's look at your situation, how much work are you doing remotely and how much, you know, audiobook people probably need it because they need to have a consistent noise floor and stuff like that. But don't, you know, like should I buy a booth? It's not a question you just need to ask yourself. It's someone you need to ask someone like George or I to really listen to your room to see how much noise reduction you need physically. Yeah, the microphone is going to hear what it hears. Your ears are going to hear probably something different. Right. So how that mic hears you and what noise is the mic hears is really what is the most important. Exactly. You know, like you never hear your refrigerator until you're sitting in your kitchen and go, does the refrigerator make a noise? You know, it's always making a noise. You just don't notice it. You know, it's so funny, our refrigerator makes an odd noise. It goes. Something like that, right? And we're used to it, right? Right. Well, we have two friends stay over at the place as guests, right? They're like, what the hell is that? They're staying in the living room and they're like, your refrigerator sounds like a, sounds like a moaning animal. And I'm just like, oh my gosh, you're not. Yeah, you're right. It absolutely does. But you tune, we tune it out. That's right. So you need that objective set of ears. Right. Send it in. Go to our websites. We both have ways that we can listen to your audio and determine if indeed you need to make a booth or do you just need to be in a quieter place? If you're in one closet and you have an exterior wall, go to a closet that has no exterior walls and it will insulate it from a lot more stuff. Anyway, yeah. I'm going to cause, I'm going to. I'm going to cause total chaos. Uh-oh. I'm going to turn on this one. This is not a good idea. I wasn't able to select the correct microphone beforehand. So I don't know. I just plugged in the mic. I don't know if I can choose the mic. One, two. Actually, maybe that's going to work now. One more try. Sue, do you hear a double? Do you hear two signals now? One, two, three, four, five. Five, four, three, two, one. I got to be out of the stream. There we go. Well, now it seems like a really good time to take a break. Just take a break. I'm on the mic now. I hear myself echoing back, so I know it's working. Now we know this mic works. And now you know what it sounds like. And, okay, we can get back to business. Once again, if you've got a question for us, now would be a really good time to put it in the chat room, whether you're in Facebook Live or on YouTube Live. We'd love to hear from you. You've probably got a lot of questions after all the rambling we've just done. So get into it and start writing your question. Yes, but we know we're not if we've been doing it this long. Anyway, we'll be right back after these messages in VoiceOver Body Shop, so do not go away. This is Ariana Ratner, and you're enjoying VoiceOver Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Whittem, vobs.tv. As voice actors, we need to hear the clear, transparent and honest sound of our voices. Harlan Hogan Signature Series voice-optimized headphones 2.0 provide both that accurate, transparent sound with enhanced mid-range audio. 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Oh, hey, it's time to thank our sponsors, Source Elements, the creators of Source Connect, Source Nexus, and a whole slew of helpful tools for engineers and producers that record talent, musicians, voice actors, all around the world. The tool that you guys need, if you're wanting to be ready to get the big gigs, the ones that the agents tend to be the ones that are getting you as actors, they're gonna very likely be expecting you to have Source Connect. Now, here's the secret, and they don't want me to tell you this. You don't have to buy it yet. What you wanna do is go to Source-Elements.com, get your account set up, get your iLock account set up, go through the process of getting everything online, get your 15-day demo, and have it at the ready so you know how it operates, you know that you've got a studio that sounds good enough for Source Connect, and you have all the tools in place. Then, when you do have a session that you need to do, if you're very well-versed in how it works, and you've practiced, you'll be ready to go, and you'll be able to activate your license when you're ready to start. And that can be a subscription. You don't have to buy a license fully upfront. So, this is a great way to get going and not spend a penny. But if you do need extended help, they're there for you. If you sign up for a subscription, we can also provide help at george.tech if you need it. But Source Connect is the tool for pros to connect to other pros for the big voice-over gigs out there. Anyway, thanks, Source Elements. We're gonna get on to the rest of the show, but right after this break. Hey, do you know this guy? He's Michael Kostrov, an actor you've seen on lots of shows, like The Wire, Billions, The Blacklist, Law & Order SVU, Molly's Game, Les Miserables, and The Producers. I took his audition psych 101 class a few years back, and it was the best acting class I ever took. He's now releasing his latest video course, Audition Myths, Tough Truths, and Logic, a three-video series where he debunks actor's most common misunderstandings and misinformation about the audition process. Here's what Michael has to say about this series. If there's one tool that has been most helpful in working through my fears, insecurities, anxieties, and self-criticism about auditioning, it's my good friend, Logic. Once I've disproved an illogical thought, all that mental noise gets tamped down. You can now get lifetime access to this series for just $195 on nearly 50% savings. Registration is open now, but closes Friday night at 9 p.m. Pacific. Here's the link, AuditionPsych101.com forward slash join. Hi, this is Bill Farmer, and you are watching VoiceOver Body Shop. It's great. All right, we're back. But we're on a single shot because George was not paying attention. No, it looks like we're on the right shot. There we go. Sue went to the wide shot just in case. Way to go, Sue. She's on the ball. Anyway, it's time to answer your questions. And again, you still have time if you want to throw it in the chat room. Let's start with the first one here from Justin Ramos. Alrighty. You want to read that one? Oh, sure. It says, I have a question for Tech Talk. Well, gosh darn it, you've come to the right place since we're here. What is the simplest digital audio workstation or DAW, as we like to call it, for Android phones? Or should I just bite the bullet and get an iPad? I have an iRig pre-HD interface and want to audition on the go. I also just wanted to give a shout out to the guys for leaving up EWabs episodes. EWabs 166 is how I discovered the iRig interface. Zurich and Dr. Calhra. Oh, that's the one I did down in Miami, I guess. They were both on. I was probably in Miami at the time. That was more than eight years ago. How cool was that? Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Saw Doug over the weekend. That was great stuff. Oh, that's good. Been a long time. I haven't had an Android phone in a long time. I was an Android user up until the iPhone 11 came out and that's when I jumped to the Apple world. Think about what the reuse case of this is. Is this a first setup? Is this a travel setup? Is this a supplement to what you have at home? It kind of depends. If this is like a first, my first VO studio situation, absolutely I would get like a used iPad. Even a brand new iPad, whatever the current iteration is, is around $300. So it's pretty reasonable. You can get a couple year old one for less money. If you really do want an iPad device or a touchscreen device, I would highly recommend going iPad. Now, I don't know of anything as simple as Twisted Wave and Twisted Wave does not, there's not a version of Twisted Wave yet for Android. There's only one for iOS and Mac and Windows. And it works great. But iOS, but it does work great, right? And it's very easy to use. I think there's a WavePad for iOS and Android. Don't quote me on that. But if you want to look for an app called WavePad, they might have an Android version. But I can't ask for that. That's about the ACH as I recall. NCH? ACH. No, I think it's NCH. Whatever. Yeah, WavePad. WavePad, just type in WavePad, you'll find it. I think they have an Android version. But if you're giving us the choice, well, should I get an iPad? I would get, I would go with the iPad. Plus you get way better battery life. You know, a new iPad, the battery's gonna last for days. Yeah, we just bought a new iPad for my son and he's very happy with it. Yeah, it's a good product. It really is. Yeah, so I hope that works out for you. Let us know what you decide to do and how it works out for you. Watching eWabs episodes, they're all still there. There's some actual useful content from WavePad. More than just for a good laugh. Just don't watch episode number one. Well, actually go back and watch episode two. If you want a laugh. All right, let's, from Jeff here, go for it. Hey, Jeff, our very own Jeff Holman says, I've got my shag rug picked out for my van. I mean, for my on-camera audition space to reduce the boominess of the hardwood floors of his room. Would a carpet pad help out the cause as well? And should I look for a particular material for the carpet pad or a certain thickness? Seems to be overthinking it just a little bit. The details. Jeff is all about the details. Hey, who's on HBO? You or me or Jeff? Good point. Sorry. Boom, Jeff. So, I would say the carpet pad won't make a big difference. What it'll make a difference for is comfort. Right, you can audition barefoot. Exactly. It will be a lot nicer standing on that rug on a carpet pad. What thickness you need, go with the thickest that feels weird, comfortable to you. If you go too thick, it feels weird, right? It feels squishy and, I don't know, strange. But I mean, if it was me, and I'm not needing to literally do a tap dance on camera for an audition, I would wanna have a comfortable thing to stand on. I'd like to see that, though. Yeah, and if my feet aren't in frame because you're doing on-camera auditions and I'm not gonna worry about what's on the floor, I want it to be as comfortable as possible. Probably don't wanna be wearing shoes if I don't have to. I would go with a nice thick carpet pad and a nice plush rug, but I don't know if one carpet pad over another will. Unless he's auditioning for a Nike commercial or something, in which case, carpet might not be the best thing to have there. Or a basketball commercial. Right, exactly. Maybe, well, you're tall enough, but I'm guessing you're not doing a basketball act. Anyway, so let us know how that works out, Jeff. I know you've been slowly putting together your ultimate on-camera audition space, so looking forward to seeing how it comes out when it's all done. Okay, Patricia, Andrea on YouTube. Maybe this was from a former conversation we had, but Cinco Mike D2, have you had a chance to try it more? Well, I haven't tried it personally at all, but I've definitely heard the mic a lot of times. I have, too. People send it in samples all the time. When you think of that mic, what do you think of? It sounds like a mic. It sounds fine, right? Right. I always think of it as sounding like fine. Right. It's not a 416 like this one. It doesn't sound like a 416. Right. It looks like a 416, but it definitely doesn't sound like one. It's a very, if I recall, a flat sounding mic, right? Now, when we say flat, what the heck are we talking about? It's really kind of how much it boosts T's and K's and the articulation in your voice. Right. The amount of sounds. Or over-emphasizes the low end or de-emphasizes the low end. Right, right. What we call coloration. Yeah. And the D2, from what I can, what I'm gleaned is it has very little color and it's very honest. It's very flat. Which is fine. It's not a bad thing. You know, I think it's not a bad choice. I would want to try it in context with maybe a large diaphragm condenser, like a Rode NT1 or an Audio-Tetnica 2035 or something like that, a Vanguard V4. Or this Mojave MV5. Well, yeah, the Mojave M, is it the M50? 50. I think it's a 50? Yeah. For $500 range. How does it sound? Sounds great. From the two 2035 Audio-Tetnica to this, that's kind of the range you want to look at spending. No more than $500, honestly. Unless you're buying a 416 or something like that. But this probably is not your first mic, right? This is more of an aspirational mic, honestly. There are a lot of great sounding mics that sound right up where this one does for a lot less money. The D2 does not sound like this. But what a D2 does because it's shotgun mic is it will not pick up as much sort of house noise, random outside. Not quite as hyper-cardioid as this one. Maybe slightly wider, but it's not bad. I mean, for the money, you know what? I prefer the Audio-Tetnica AT875R. I just pulled it out of my box of mics the other day and did a little video with it. I keep forgetting how damn good that mic sounds. It's well, it's designed to be a video mic like that. Yeah. I've used it on podcasts. $175. It works great. I like the sound of that mic better than the Cinco. Honestly, if I had the two side by side, I would probably go with the 875R from Audio-Tetnica. All right. All right, from Bill Hepburn. Now, this is being an interesting one because last week, Dan and George, that would be you and me, brought up the Y Reaper for voiceover and when it's not the most intuitive and wondered why not just twisted wave. Well, here's my two cents. Everybody's got an opinion. And when it comes to Reaper, clearly there is many schools of thought. I'm pretty new to the VO business, but I chose Reaper because I wanted something more than audacity. The price was right at 60 bucks. I didn't have to pay a subscription. I had three months free trial, which is nice. And like at Booth Junkie, we don't mention a whole lot except when he's on the show, had great videos on how to simplify it for VO. I figured as the first DAW that made it a good choice. These were my decision criteria and it might be different strokes for different folks. Well, the thing is twisted wave has free trial. Audition has a free trial. Audacity is free. Some other ones are free, OSEN Audio. I mean, there's a lot of different packages out there. He's clearly reacting to some rant I did about Reaper. No, I think, maybe you had a rant. I had the rant two weeks ago about Reaper. I'm like, why are you using Reaper? Everybody's saying, I'm using Reaper. Why? We just had a two part class that I was taught by Steve Cunningham who knows Reaper really well. And I watched those two four hours of content and I was like, wow. Your head is full. My eyes were almost like, this is a lot. So the way I look at Reaper is it's like, you made stuff with Legos. Yeah, I tried. Twisted wave is like a die cast metal car. You pull out of the box, you play with it. It looks beautiful, it's shiny, it's made well, and it works. It does what it's designed to do. Reaper is a box, the box of Legos that has a picture of a spaceship on it. You can't try to build a spaceship. It has 12 out of four. It has 12 friggin' pieces. Okay, that's Reaper. You know, different strokes for different folks. Like either one will get you down the road, one will take a tremendous amount of time and preparation, and maybe that's for you, part of the fun. For many actors, that is not part of the fun. They don't want to have fun, they just want to hit record and record their voice. They will break out in hives when they see the amount of prep. Now, I mean, Reaper can work with no prep, but it will never feel as efficient and easy to use as Twisted Wave without doing the necessary steps to change its configuration, customize it, and give it the tool sets, the buttons, and all the keyboard shortcuts necessary to make it work as efficiently as Twisted Wave. So yeah, that's fine. Use what works for you, but believe me, we work with actors day in, day out, and actors on the whole do not want to learn and go through the learning curve to learn. Reaper, whether it would benefit them in the long term or not, so yeah. All right. Patricia Andrea says, I have a former autometry booth. I sent a video to Dan, got it for 500 bucks. I remember that. Wow, what a deal. Added home theater curtains inside. I did the Specimen Cup and Dan said it sounds great because it does. Well, those things are built at a different, they're on a different level from all the Isobooth brands that we talk about, the Studio Bricks, Whisper Room, Vocabooth, they are built like, well, industrial. Right, and the thing is, if you can get one for 500 bucks, and find a way to get it into your house. Yeah, and get it into the house. These are booths that are made for audiologists for doing ear tests. I did an ear test last year. I'm over, too. Yeah, and they said, oh, your hearing's fine. I'm like, don't tell my wife. Anyway, but yeah, anytime you can get a hold of one of those booths, like from some institution that's getting rid of a bunch of them, they're very heavy, and the thing is that they don't need a whole lot of acoustical treatment in them. I found that fact, it's like- They're integrated into the design, generally. They have like a metal mesh grid, and then behind that is probably like a rock wool or some kind of an insulation. So they are amazing. For granite, because it's really heavy. You get the one from Tony Hoover here. Okay. I've heard good things about the Shure PGA, 181 mic, but the self-noise is rather high. Someone suggested using downward expansion to reduce it. What the heck is downward expansion anyway? Well, first of all, don't buy the wrong mic and then use plugins to fix it, okay? So if the mic is already too noisy, why aren't you looking at the other 200 mics that aren't? There are many, many, many microphones that don't require a downward expander to be usable, okay? So that's your first clue. It may not be the right choice. That being said, what's a downward expander? It's like jumbo shrimp. Now, downward expander is a processing tool. We call it a dynamics tool that as the volume of the sound going into the mic or into the recording, as it drops below a certain point, we call it a threshold, then the level drops off on a ramp, like a slope. That's what an expander is. And you can adjust the slope. You can adjust the slope. And where the threshold is. Exactly. So if you set that threshold too high, it's gonna start cutting off like the F in football. You'll get football. You'll get football. Because the F sound is too weak and it doesn't go above the threshold and you get football. I think that's what they play in Luxembourg, is with ball. With ball. With ball. You get with ball. Exactly. Now, if you set the threshold too low, then it doesn't do its job and you still get noise. And it'll fade in and like. Yeah, and sometimes with breaths it goes, the breaths have these weird little, it's difficult to get these things to work smoothly and sound really good. It's what we call a noise gate. Yeah. And sometimes they end up sounding like a noise gate. And a noise gate is even worse because that actually just shuts the audio off completely, which you don't want. So that's what an expander is. And it's part of dynamics processors, like compressors and limiters. It's in that same umbrella of audio processing tools. All right. Jumped away from the questions here. Oh yeah, so did I. Sorry about that. So from J. Horace Black. Hey, Jay. J. Horace Black. Jay, nice to hear from you. Currently have a 2012 Mac Mini SSD HD 16 gigabytes of RAM. I did five years ago and went to the next one. Yeah. And then went to the next one after that. Yeah. Me too. Needing to update my hardware, a new Mac Mini or 32 gigabyte memory MBP. Oh, MacBook Pro. Could I get away with the MacBook Pro, 14 inch and docking station? Of course. Yeah. I'm in cybersecurity program, so I need 32 gigabytes of RAM to run virtual windows for class. I could just get Mac Studio to however, 14 megabyte MacBook Pro could serve both needs. And right now with my discounts, I can get an M2 MacBook Pro, 32 gigabyte memory for 1850. And do that. Question answer, Jay. Yeah. 1850 dollars for a MacBook Pro with 32 gigs of memory. If you stole it, yeah, I would get that. Yeah. Cause that will do everything. That's gonna do everything the Mac Mini will do. That's gonna pretty much do everything as Mac Studio will do. Right. Yeah. That's a no brainer. I think that's the thing that people don't understand about Macs. The operating system is an operating system. And whether you're using a Mac Mini or a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air or a Mac Studio, which takes up half your room, it's still the same operating system. It's a matter of processing power. If you're just doing voiceover, you don't need that much stuff. But as Jay is saying, well, I also use it in security. He's using it for two different jobs. Right. So will it work for the other thing? Most likely, will it work for voiceover? Heck yeah. No problem. Even the most basic, basic Mac Mini for 599 bucks will be beautiful for a voiceover setup. Right. You'll have no problem. It's really all you need. It's just for you power users like Jay, you're gonna need some more complicated, more capable, not complicated, but more capable systems. Right. You and I both use, well, we're both an M1, the M1 chip. M1 Mac Mini, yeah. You know, is it worth it to go to the M2 chip? I don't know. Apparently from what I hear, the performance is maybe 30% more. But faster or... That's like to me, that's it going from a Tesla to a Tesla model dual motor. Like you can get that cheap one, it goes only zero to 60, it only goes zero to 60 in seven seconds. Oh, I wanna go from zero to 60 in five seconds. Oh, you're gonna, like how frigging fast do you need to go? Right. Especially if you're recording starts Thursday. I don't know. Come on, you can do that. I know, I know. All right, John O'Rourke, your turn. What have we used to physically isolate an air conditioner compressor? How about maybe springs? It's more of a low rumble and I'm dealing with more than just motor noise. Turning it off is not always an option. Yeah, we know. We live in the valley like Dan does. Turning it off is not an option. There's an air conditioner in here. Maybe perhaps it's time for a new air conditioner. My compressor was really loud. So I went out and I called somebody and it died, the compressor died. I mean, it was probably 15 years old. And I ordered a new one, got one that was not expensive. The guy came out and installed it that day. Sue, go to the wide camera for a second and I'm gonna point the camera at our new, at our air conditioner. So here we go, I'm gonna swing this around. Is it gonna reach that far? I think you're going the wrong way. Oh geez, it goes pretty slow too. I don't know if it's gonna go this far, but let's find out. No, it does 360 and then go up. Then you can see my antique radio collection and then go up and then over a little bit more. I think I'm at the end of its little neck. Oh, there it is, it's in the corner of the front. All right, now Sue goes up a little more. I think Sue went back to the shot. There we go. Yeah, she's still there. There it is. So my Bose speaker and all the other garbage. See that thing on the wall there, that white box that's on the wall right there? Yeah, we're at the edge of the, that's as far as I can go. That's the air conditioner in this room. It's running right now and it is really quiet. You can't hear it. That's called a mini-split duckless air conditioner. Fabulous. This is the way to go in a studio. And when these are running on low or quiet mode, you can actually record in the same room as the air conditioner, it's incredible. I know that's probably not what you're asking because you may not want to spend $3,000 to get one of these right now. Spend $3,000 for this. And which was that put in, installed and everything? It was 27. No, it's not bad. No, it's not bad. Well, you have to look at where your noise is coming from. Sue, you can come back to that, whatever, good, cool. You have to look at where your noise is actually coming from in your system, but there's a very good chance that your noise is coming from more than just the motor, like you said. So the condenser unit, that makes noise. The blower unit, that makes noise. And then the air physically traveling through the ducts also make noise. And that tends to be what makes the rumbling, the low frequency rumble, rumble, rumble. So putting things on springs will not help that. Cause that's just the air traveling down your ductwork. The only way you're gonna stop that is to reduce the speed of the air flow or and or increasing the volume or the size of your ducts. So the air isn't going as fast. Right. Those are the two things that are gonna fix that rumble. Yeah, brand new air conditioner. Yeah, it's gonna be quite a process too. The ductless systems are just so quiet. You know, the higher-pressed ones are silent. Ridiculously quiet. The Mitsubishi is really crazy quiet. And you can get up to four zones. So you can get one condenser outside and that can run up to four different zones. And it's way more efficient, energy-wise. Wait, wait, wait. I think he's asking, how can I, what filters can I use to not do that? And maybe not do that. No, I mean, I can set up processing that will get rid of that noise for you if that's what you wanna do. You know, hit me up. We have a processing preset service that's called Audio Processing Presets. I can probably come up with a filter that will reduce it or eliminate it completely. If that's what you wanna do on a budget, that's fine too. Let us know. Alrighty. We got through them all. Wow. And gave good answers. Whether they were the right answers, at least they sounded good. It's the most important thing. Anyway, if you have a question for us, and perhaps we're out of time for getting more questions in here, though, all you gotta do is write to us at, you ready, Sue? The guys at vobs.tv. And that will get you first in the queue. So if you have a problem during the week or you suddenly it's like, what about this? What about that? Well, it's top of mind. Yeah. Send an email. Send an email to the guys at vobs.tv and you will be first in the queue, as they say in Europe. And in Canada, interestingly enough. And probably in Mexico only. I think it's a different word. I've picked it up now. I like to say it. Okay. That's why I used it. And we're happy to answer those questions. And of course, that's why we're here. George and I are professional home studio consultants and engineers. And it's what we do. It's what we've been doing for a long time. Other people are like, yeah, I've been doing this a while. I'm real old school. I learned from the analog radio days how to do this stuff and progressed into digital. So it was like, okay. And I mean, you were an analog too. We've obsessed about this stuff for a long time. Yeah. And the other thing is, is that we've been working with so many people and so many studios. When we first started out doing this, we were like, okay, we know what we're doing. Take 1,000 studios later. And chances are we've learned something. Yeah, we've heard prop. We've heard every single scenario at this point and every type of noise at this point. That's right. So, well, that's gonna do it for this segment of the program. We'll be right back after these important messages to tell you a little bit about what's coming up. So don't go away. We'll be right back here on VoiceOver Body Shop. Tech talk. This is the Latin lover narrator from Jane the Virgin, Anthony Mendez. And you're enjoying Den and George on the VoiceOver Body Shop. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. There's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voiceover career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level, stay in touch with market trends, coaching products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. VoiceOverextra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions, bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, 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. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. All right, let's take a slightly different angle on this. If you wanna qualify as a professional in the voiceover business, especially from world voices of which I am president, we have very specific parameters that qualify you as a professional. Certain amount of paid jobs and a certain amount of time. But one of the most important things is you have to have a web footprint. What does that mean? It means you gotta have a website. If you're a voice actor, if you don't have a website, they're never gonna find you. Dave Walsh was telling us last week, you gotta have a website so people can find you. What do you need on your website? You need your name, your demos, and how to contact you. If you wanna have some fancy website to show people how artistic you are or something like that, go for it. It's gonna take a long time to do that. So what's an easier way? New website from voiceactorwebsites.com. It's called voiceactor.com where they have templated websites. So you go in there, you can start for free and get yourself online really fast. And in about half an hour, 45 minutes, you can choose from a number of templates and the Joe Davis who runs this company says we got new templates. They're fabulous. You can customize the templates. Put your picture where you want, put your demos where you want, put your bio where you want. Not that anybody really is gonna read your bio. It's like, okay, where is this person from? More importantly, what does this person sound like and how much contrast do they do in their reads and stuff like that? It's templated websites from voiceactorwebsites.com. I gotta get used to that. Voiceactor.com. And start for free and then be as little as $20 a month to have a great website that you have complete control over. Go to voiceactor.com. We are the World Voices Organization. Also known as WOVO. We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent. VoiceOver is a complex entrepreneurial business. WOVO is there to promote the professional nature of voice work to the public, to those already established in their voiceover practice and to those who want to pursue voiceover as a career. Membership benefits include a supportive and creative community, a profile and demos on voiceover.biz Our searchable directory of vetted professional voice talent. Our exclusive demo player for your personal website. Our mentoring program. Business resources and our video library. Our annual WOVO.con conference. A fun and educational weekend with other members with the chance to learn and network. Webinars and great speakers and weekly social chats with other members around the world. If your world is voiceover. Make WOVO part of it. World Voices Organization. We speak for those who speak for a living. This is Bill Ratner and you're enjoying VoiceOver Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem. VOBS.tv. Yeah, and we're enjoying it too. We always do. It's more fun in the studio. It really is. You know, I mean, it's a lot more fun. It's more comfortable. It's more challenging because we have a lot more stuff to set up. Multiple cameras, a bunch of mics, you know. So there's more to do, but it's still fun. We still love setting up the studio because it's what we do. That's right. And we've been doing it a long time and we do it better than everybody else. They can't even compare. Boy, I'm really egotistical tonight. I'm not sure what's going on. You're in a tear. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. So anyway, next week on this very show, you'll still be watching this because we're taking Memorial Day off. Hard to get a guest in here for Memorial Day. Yeah, and I'm traveling to Pennsylvania. By the time you see this, I'm already in Pennsylvania, spending a couple of weeks with my parents and my daughter, Elijah, is flying up from Georgia. We spent a week with us over Memorial weekend, so that's gonna be really, really nice. And I'll be recovering from neck surgery. So. Oh man, we hope it goes smoothly. I have no doubt. We've got the best doctors. This guy's great. We're in great. So Cali, yeah. Although there was the cardiologist I went to last week who said, all right, who's doing the surgery? And I told him where he was and he goes, oh, he got his license back. Not a good thing for a cardiologist to say. Maybe it's like, let me see if this guy has a heart attack. Gee. He was just yanking my chain. Anyway, in three weeks, well, two weeks, because this is next week, our good friend Debra Irwin, personally, is gonna come on and talk about all sorts of stuff. Sounds good. Yeah, and so I'm looking forward to that. And then in the coming weeks, we've got a great improv teacher. Tim Powers is gonna join us. Oh, really, okay. And someone from the UK, hopefully. Okay. But we may have to, that might be a little tough because it's gonna be very early in the morning. Time shifting might be required. It may. It might have to pre-tape that. Maybe. Because I had a fun time talking to him at WovoCon a couple of weeks ago. All right, we'll figure that one out. All right, well, first off, we need to thank the people who donate to us. And you can donate to us too. Just go to our website and there's a little button that says, donate now. I think it still works. Money still keeps coming in. All right, then. I think it's for all these people that forgot how to unsubscribe. Okay, well, we gotta thank guys like Robert Liedem, Steven Chandler, Casey Clack, Jonathan Grant, Tom Pinto, Shelley Avellino, Greg Thomas, A Doctor Voice, Antland Productions, Martha Kahn, 949 Designs, Christopher Epperson, Sarah Borges, Philip Sapir, Brian Page, Petty Gibbons, Rob Ryder, Shauna Pennington-Baird, Don Griffith, Trey Mosley, Diana Birdsall, and Sandra Mann-Willard. Thank you guys for helping us out, making the show technically perfect, which it was tonight. Boom, drop the bottle. No, don't do that. And you hear those names all the time because, well, they subscribe. You can subscribe for like as little as a buck or if there was something that was particularly amazing or just a great guest and just want to give us a little thank you, you can make a one-time donation to the show. Thank you, we appreciate that. And remember that George and I, Home Studios is what we do. It's our bag. Right, so you can go over to homevoiceoverstudio.com if you want to work with me, or over to George's Place of Business, which is? GeorgeThe.tech, which is really a team of people, not just about me anymore. And as a fan of the show, you can always get 10% off, whether we're doing webinars, one-on-ones, anything, just put in VOBS fan 10 for 10% off. Outstanding, we need to thank our sponsors like Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials. Voice Over Extra. Source Elements. VOheroes.com. VoiceActor.com. And WorldVoices.org. Voices.org. World-Voices.org. The Industry Association of Freelance. Voice Talent. So go on over and join, and next year you can go to Wovocon, which was fabulous this year. We just had a great time. I'll go next year, I promise. Not a thousand people, more like a hundred. Under a hundred, yeah. Maybe 120, but you get to see all your friends and make new friends. More one-on-one time. Right, you'll make friends for a lifetime when you go to these things, that's pretty important. Of course, Jeff Holman. Kick and butt in the chat room tonight. Thanks, Jeff. While starring on TV and movies and all that other stuff. Hollywood Holman. Yeah, that's what he calls himself. Thanks to Jeff for doing that. And, Sumer Lino, sitting there in her house going, doop, doop, doop. Thank you. Thank you, Sue. We really appreciate it. She didn't have to deal with any of our BS tonight. That's right. Just had to listen to it, that's right. And of course, Lee Penny simply for being. Lee Penny. Well, kids, this isn't an easy business. You got competition, you've got. Tech. Tech, you've gotta have talent. But it's most important, at least to George and I, that, you know, your audio is right. But we've discovered that really, if it sounds good. It is good. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Woodham. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or V-O-B-S. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. See you after Memorial Day, guys. Have a good week.