 You're alive This is uh, we're doing tech talk 112 right it is 112 Cool Well, that's just great that it all works It's nice, man. Well, yeah Cuz we've had weeks where it's like well, of course we had Harlan Hogan on a couple weeks ago, and he was using his ear pods Hey As microphone, by the way, not just monitor but as the microphone. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I always find that interesting people who are involved in this industry audio Mm-hmm, like even recording engineers are classics for it They will have the crappiest sound He's they even built microphones on their laptops and stuff I Know my why go through the trouble, you know, yeah, you know, there's a mic on the computer I think there's still misconception that podcasts are just Yeah, second-rate productions. I'm like, yeah, you gotta get to the program because podcasts are now like big-time productions I'm actually teaching a class this week to some college Back east that the course is on podcasting and the students have to have a podcast by the end of the semester So he was interviewing me for this podcast He does and he goes, oh, you know, you'd be really good to talk to my my students about how to do this, right? And I'm like, okay, so I'll give them the three basics and just adjust it a little bit for podcasting Your audio's got to be good because guess what it's a podcast It's only audio. I mean nowadays are adding video, but yeah, that actually kind of worries me that they're at that video it has to be a part of it because people are gonna really Get there I take their eye off the ball When video comes into play because now it's like a whole nother level of distraction to screw around with It's just more of a pain in the ass to do everything Right definitely issue. Yeah, if you've never done it. I mean, we've only been doing it for 12 years and Yeah, only only I mean, we did it very poorly for a number of years. Yeah, but it was so much fun doing it poorly for a number of years Yeah, why people watch they're like, oh, let's see how these guys can screw it up this week. Yeah Okay, so all right, are you gonna be able to play those those those tracks through Robbo? Not easily I Mean you have the mix down you get his load that yeah, I've got the mixes. Can I shoot them to you George? Can I send you the mixes? Yeah, sure Send us an email or put a link in the chat. Whatever is easy. Yeah, we're going to have a A pull out which one people like my better Yeah No Yeah, however is easy for you to I'll show you a Google Drive link just getting it now. All right Still trying to figure out how it was that we got the audio on or we couldn't get the audio working from twisted wave to the You know just you know, I'd yeah stream yard can share audio from the browser itself Like Chrome browser, but it can't share audio from non-browser So I had to do that off from the roadcaster Well, I don't remember what we did on your end. You were using the roadcaster one and you just turned on the You created a loop basically, but it worked as long as we didn't talk, right? Link in the chat there George. I got There's a bunch of files how many of these two I need so well, that's everything that we did so there should be two mixes there should be It should be Dan mix and AP and Robo mix I think yeah, yeah, okay Go and then then there's population mixed compilation those two and then there's all the separate tracks as well That's what all the other tracks are so okay got It's all there Downloading can't download file. Let's find out why Now maybe I'll put the same. Was that you going pro tools then Robert. Sorry. Oh that was George Yeah, so what I'm going to ask you guys is, you know why you started this Aside from the fact that it was desperately needed in a in a humongous mark producers Why are demos important? We'll talk a little bit about your process and then we'll talk about what we did last week and And I've got like a You know, I only had the video file from me from you Andrew So but I've got us synced up for about four minutes of stuff when we were talking doing the the gym beam spot My link I did not No, I did send it to you. It was straight from my Google from my iCloud account All right, so let's see if you guys can hear this When we thought of the future. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I hear it Do you hear it in stereo or mono? When we thought of the future sounds mono-ish Yeah, it must be get let's get folded down on the stream yard. Yeah. Oh wait a minute. We'll even maybe like Let's see audio. Oh, I'll check stereo We imagine yeah, beautiful. Let's do it. Yeah Lovely All right, so we got that I've got those two loaded in tabs of twisted waves so I can just pop them You want all of them hit at standby all the vials. I don't well we might talk about a specific track Jim beam Probably get a mention because for me that's the standout. Yeah, sure me too. Yeah Well, we certainly had the most discussion about that one Yeah, and it was funny big. Well, we should use all this in the show But yeah, it was just interesting that we both came at it from a different angle, right and with me It sounded great both ways so it But it is kind of interesting and that's why I think this kind of this rob-owned myself thing works in that respect because We're both coming in from a different side of the glass right Yeah, and I think I think that was significant because I've worked with you know a bunch of different coaches and directors and stuff like that and doing demos and they all have a different style and but to have I guess I would recommend that you know, you have the the artist really consult with you But yeah, you know that that that made a lot of sense to me because I Knew exactly what it was you were doing and I was able to land Well, if you did at this, you know, maybe cut it a little quieter here. Yeah, you know that sort of thing Yeah, which most people have no idea what it was. We were talking about we were all talking in our own language of All right Yeah, a little more purple a little less green exactly In there somewhere right exactly. Yeah Yeah, it's true. Okay. We're on in about three minutes here. We're gonna watch those sessions, haven't we? What's that? We've all done those sessions There's there's hard like hardly any latency and you guys are on the other side of the freaking planet. It's Pretty amazing I mean we do forget how incredible all this is Yeah, it's not that long ago when you know a long-distance phone call was a big event Yeah, yes, you know, yeah A buck a buck a minute and yeah, yeah used to go and pick up the phone It's long distance quick and everyone's like, oh, yeah Did you have that? That little fad for a while where you could dial in and force a different long-distance company by dialing in the right string of Numbers. Yeah, have you had a dialer? I kind of seem to recall something like that Well, they were advertising on tv. They're like, hey, you know use our long-distance company Not the crappy one your phone company had to start dial 424242333 then dial your phone number. Yeah, it's like yeah sprint line or something like that Yeah, there was a way to force long-distance lines Then we ended up using that with ISDN all the time Yeah, certain IS some long-distance companies just were patched in automatically and just would not pass ISDN called through they were like What the So They were like no always hit two two two two two two something something and then it would Force it to MCI or I don't know whatever I remember I did a ISDN session and stupidly I I dialed in which was my mistake really Did you forget to hang up? No, I did I did hang up. Okay, but it was a quite a long session and When I got the bill basically I worked for nothing Oh my gosh, it was like I couldn't believe that it's like how much for that call It was hundreds of dollars. Yes Yeah, you every minute it's like kitchen kitchen kitchen exactly. All right. It is five o'clock On the place cool clock. Yes And sue is giving us the countdown here. There's a five four three Hey, how's it going out there? It's time for voiceover body shop and tonight we have a very special episode Joining us are Andrew Peters and Darren Robbo Robertson from all the way down under amazingly Say hi guys. You can see they're below us today. Yeah Like a wink I think It's the brady bunch. Yeah. Yes. That's right We're going to talk about uh demos and their uh, their new demo production company and look talk a little bit about What really goes into a good demo? So if you've got a question for them because after listening to this for a bit You're gonna have questions for them and you can throw them. Did they just say? Yeah, what are they talking about? Add more purple add more orange. Yeah, that's sort of that. What's a quokka? What's it gonna be? Uh-oh, well, we'll get back to the victorian english in just a minute in the meantime It's time for voiceover body shop right now So Voiceover body shop is brought to you by voiceover essentials dot com the home of harlin hogan signature products Source elements the folks who bring you source connect Vio heroes dot com become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training voice actor dot com your voice over 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 Well, hello there. I'm dan lennard and i'm george wooden and this is voiceover body shop or vo bs Well in a world god mad we've decided well, let's just keep doing our show and Let's have peace amongst all the voiceover community Boy, that's rough week rough week and you know lots of you know friends relatives people over on the other side of the big ponds Uh, you know all our best wishes go out to them and hopefully we can have peace there shortly Yeah, anyway tonight We are talking with a couple of great guests all the way down from us Because uh, they have a new demo production company and uh, we were working on a new conversational demo For me last week, so we're gonna talk about it. Let me introduce our guest Andrew Peters is one of the top voice actors in southeast asia The united arab emirates australia and new zealand Heard literally by millions of people every day And I think you've actually heard them on a harlan hogan commercial a couple months ago Uh Darren robbo robertson is an audio production specialist with 35 years experience They are both co-hosts along with george and robert marshal the founder of surus connect on the popular and geeky podcast The pro audio suite and together they are co-founders of robbo and ap's international voice demos Let's welcome robbo and andrew to voiceover body shop. Hi guys. Hello, my good guys Which we say good morning, but it's good afternoon. It's it is. Yeah, we know it's good. Hey. Good day. Good. I get I might Yeah, I've got to take you to task first dan because the geeky podcast Yeah, I feel like i'm a long way from geeky. I don't know but that was the point. That's the way george describes it It is a bit geeky. We do it robert. Don't let robert on the show Yeah That's right, yeah keep robert away. Yeah, anyway Uh, you guys have you know, you're both very accomplished at what you've been doing We we've all been as we were discussing last week. We've all been in the business about the same length of time Amazing that even you know, where you guys are my my career sort of paralleled all the stuff you guys were doing Only, you know 10 000 miles away Uh, but uh, you guys have partnered up with uh with this new venture of yours What influenced you guys to to start this venture of you know doing voiceover demos internationally Who wants to go first? Well, we kind of fell into it funnily enough. It was through um our podcast The pro audio suite we um, we teamed up with centrants to give you some background to come up with a the passport vo interface um, and as part of that part of the launcher that we were giving away Uh, some some stuff for people to to pre-order and ap and i sort of went well, what are we going to give away Andrew being a voiceover artist and me being an audio engineer for robert and george. It was a little more obvious So I said to ap well, why don't we make a voiceover demo for someone and he went? Yeah, that's a good idea So um, so me more so mimo sorsaida Won it and we did one for him. We had such a good time doing it and he was so chuffed with the results We sort of looked at each other and went. Hmm. We might be onto something here Chuffed is a good thing Chuffed yes, it was funny because robbo robbo's been making in fact He's made a couple of demos for me in the past and um, I think when we did this the demo for memo memos demo Um, we kind of clicked and went actually there's something unique about what we're doing here because we're coming at this from both sides of the glass And and it also became quite obvious because we Didn't share our edits with each other. So we did them separately and then without listening to either Like me listening to robbo's or he listening to mine Robo then got them all did a mix and then we sent them off as an a and a b to memo and then got him to choose Which one he liked but it was obvious that We were coming at it from a different angle because our edits were quite different Yeah, and I'd sort of at the time I'd just done Matt Calerit's demo for him and um, I sort of enjoyed the experience. It was something that I hadn't really I've done a lot of it, but it's something I'd never really thought of is something that I enjoyed Um, because I enjoyed the creative process more, but it really became a creative process so um it's also different because in australia Demo's usually work you've done and you just do a comp out of the finished jobs Where it's quite obvious in america. It's a different kettle of fish where you know, you actually go in there and Scripts are written for you and you you go from scratch Which we don't do here So that was something interesting for both robin and I to do that for the you know for the first time really I mean that's always been my you know for my days in radio. That's what you did You know even back in the states it was like if you've done a lot of commercials I was a production director and and on air and it's like oh, I love this spot I love this spot and and in chunking them together and uh You know times have changed. I don't I don't quite understand why they have to be produced this way, but Um, but why do you guys think demos are important? It's your business card short and sweet. Yeah, yeah It's uh, it's it's what you lay on the table to say. This is who I am. This is what I do I don't think there's anything more important for a voiceover artist than a good demo. I can't think of anything Yeah, well the demo is the is the calling card and But it also has to reflect things you can do not things you would like to do because There is nothing worse for someone like robo or any Production guy or producer engineer Then booking a talent based on their demo and realize they can't actually replicate it in the studio. Yeah, that's that's bad Yeah, I mean that's that's the thing that I've heard a lot too is that you know people it's like They record it and they record it in a studio, you know, they they're not in their own home studio and You know, and it's like oh we hired you but they do it from home and it's like oh crap You know and but you've got to be able to reproduce what you do on a demo You know in a gig um, and I'm sure there are many people that have who don't understand that didn't realize that and uh You know, it's important Which is why George and I are so adamant about people having a really good home studio because everything everything's being done from home studios now and uh, so it's really important to Do a demo with who you are and what you sound like Without too much, uh, you know finagling to it I think there's two things for me that sort of come from that is the the first thing that we talk about a lot and and the three Sort of cornerstones of what we do and and the and the sort of the markers when we're judging What we're writing or what we're working on whether we're on the right track is is we have repeatable So obviously you must be able to repeat your demo demo believable. I've got it as a listener I've got to believe that it's you and you're capable of doing that and the other one is creativity and creativity is Sort of not the creativity. You're probably thinking about the creativity. We're talking about is finding those reads That maybe you didn't know you had Um, and also reflecting What's currently happening in the market? Yeah, in terms of voiceover and what they're choosing and what they're looking for And and that's sort of a big thing and I and that's why I sort of I'm constantly stunned sometimes when you go onto a website For for someone who maybe you work with regularly But the client wants to hear their demo and you're sending them a demo that's four or five years old Yes, and and you know that you know that that person Is capable like, you know, there's plenty of people in Australia I could think of who I wouldn't hesitate in booking But but you listen to that demo and if you didn't know them you would sort of go Yeah, I think we've moved past those sort of reads and I'm not sure that you're the right person for this Yeah um If you're just joining us our guests are Darren Robbo Robertson and Andrew Peters and we're talking about Getting your demos right And you know and seeing what what's the right process for doing that if you have a question for them about demos, uh I have to do is go in the chat room whether you're in facebook live or you're in youtube or if you happen to be watching on linkedin Or watching the smoke signals coming over the top of the hill You can drop them in the chat room and uh, and I know that jeff holman is back there and he will relay those questions to us in a little bit So listen carefully it should raise some questions and you can ask So let's talk quick. Okay. Go for it. Which for you guys was the most difficult part of the process Was it was it the the the content writing or creation because or the script writing? Is that with what was the most challenging? It's funny. We talked about that because um We were talking about that just in general chatter when we were working with dan recording this I'm the script writer And I've never I've never worked as a copywriter, but for 35 years I've had to edit copywriter scripts because clients have demanded that you know I want the phone number twice plus the email address plus the street address plus the opening hours and everything else So you come up with this 45 second script that you then have to make a 30 Um, and so I think I've learned the craft of craft of writing scripts from having to do that um In terms of organizing and script and and the tone of the script and all that sort of stuff and obviously Coming from a radio imaging background as well. I'm writing a lot of promos and sweepers and all that sort of stuff so so, yeah, but it's um It's it's part of the process that I Sort of had the biggest imposter syndrome about I guess because oh, I'm comfortable writing a radio promo I was sort of going. Hmm Should I be writing some commercials, but The feedback so far has been brilliant. Um, you know people like Matt Cowrick and stuff like that have Had some good results. So you sort of go. Okay. Well, maybe I should stop listening to that in in a voice Oh, you have the background like you said, I mean that's that those years of writing those other types of work Means you have writing chops and you have editing chops So you just have to reshape that into the format that we're working with here Yeah, and also like, you know, I'll get scripts sent to me obviously so I'll keep ones that I think Of value and then we'll just rework that script, but the creative's done as well That's kind of handy So let's talk a little bit about your process and then we can show a little bit of video about what we did Last week when we were cutting a demo for me and we did it pretty quick I mean sometimes you will work for a week on uh with somebody who like, okay, we'll do another spot today We'll do another one. We went through that. We were like less than an hour And but it still gave us plenty of time to do the interplay that needed to be done to direct it and get it done so I was pretty impressed with that but Individually, what is your what is your process? I mean Andrew when you're when you're starting to do this What is your thought process when you're working with somebody? Firstly, I will check out that person and just find whatever demos I can find of theirs and just how to listen and Try and find something that I believe is their strength Or something I can hear There's something in their voice that tells me they can go a certain direction And then that sort of that's something I'll work on with that person when we're going through the process of recording That's that's how I go and once we get online and start recording it all becomes kind of obvious which way we're going to go So Robo do you you're the same though, aren't you? Yeah, I'm pretty much the same for me the magic comes with We do a pre demo Let's call it in the interview But it's really just a chance for api and I to catch up and goof around and have a bit of fun But um But but part of the process is is a bunch of legitimate questions that give us an idea of what's in your head and what you want from a demo and the question that that Always sort of interests me the most And and I think leads to some of the results in terms of happiness of people with their demos is Sort of what's a read that you that you think you're good at that you don't get booked for Um, and for me that's a big one because because there's these Sort of unearth talent That doesn't get to that chance to come to the forefront because people can't don't know they can someone can do that read Um, and so when they have the chance to go, well, yeah, sure. I really like, you know, I really like I think we talked about school teacher with you Um, you know, I really like that sort of thing or something like that then you can sort of pluck that out And you can write a script around that and give them the opportunity to put it out there Yeah In amongst work that still is, you know, booked regularly and And and the rest of the demo works around it in terms of being current and and bookable Yeah, well, let's let's take a quick look. It's about four and a half minutes of the interplay We had it's just me and me and andrew and we were talking about a gym beam spot that we were doing Let me just play that and uh, let's see where it's right here. Yeah Will you want your best behavior? I hope so It was We always believed the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong From the places that don't have a name To the bright lights of a world moving at a frantic pace Wherever gym beam is welcome You'll be welcome too To the bright lights of a world moving at a frantic pace Okay, I'm going to take you somewhere else on this one. Um, I want you to get in right into the mic and um Just get really sort of breathy and gravelly and Like I wrote sam shepard Okay, it's not going to take that long But um, so it's something like I was talking about the sam shepard kind of vibe, you know the Sam shepard is he's got it's more of a baritone upper baritone type of voice Not really a dupe voice, but yeah style But you know what I mean, there's that kind of delivery that that sort of Who's the other actor that always does all these ads the mumbling Not Matthew Modine. Anyway, whatever the guy's But it's kind of that in in close mic, you know, I'm at a bar smoky That kind of thing Yeah Here's some Tom waits in the background Okay, exactly Tom waits in the background indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, okay You still rolling here We just wait for a run. I don't know. I think he wants to mute so we don't bleed everywhere. So I just wait for robo Hmm, we always believed in the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong From the places that don't have a name To the bright lights of the world moving at a frantic pace Wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too I reckon we can even go further and bring the projection back and just get really breathy and Into the mic. I just want to get an idea of how that's going to sound. All right Jim beam take five We always believed in the welcoming spirit was The welcoming spirit was as well. I don't know why I keep throwing that away. Okay We always believed that the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong From the places that don't have a name To the bright lights of a world moving at a frantic pace Wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too okay I reckon pull it back in just a bit more and then we'll play with the Last line. I like to come back slow it down and get it really We always believed the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong that kind of thing. Yep Jim beam take Five We always believed the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong From the places that don't have a name To the bright lights of a world moving at a frantic pace Wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too I reckon Just want to do the tag Wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too Okay, wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too The concentration in your face is incredible It's acting Okay But that that was a yeah, it was a great process because The thing that's probably the hardest for most people Doing demos or even just doing a remote session is The a lot of people aren't used to being directed whereas I love being directed. It's Self-direction is so hard And to just give you know a little having what I referred to as a meta person To really listen to what you're saying and Say bring it up take it down, you know that sort of thing. You can't do that in your own head It's I mean some people can't I mean I've I've got a problem that I I have to close my eyes when listening to other people because I get I don't I get too distracted Uh, so something like that where it's just it was totally auditory. I mean because I I mean we could We I can't remember were we looking at each other when we did this? Yeah, um, yeah, we I think we were yeah, yeah, and george, you were right mcconnell. He's yeah Yeah, yeah, I was trying to think of yeah reading the script. Yeah, the thing I find really interesting and I've talked to robo about this too We're trying to find a language. We still haven't worked out a language yet So when we're trying to direct people as you can tell by that bit of footage, you know It's like I'm trying to I know it's in my head But I'm trying to explain what it is that's in my head And trying to come up with something that will click with you and resonate with you. So you go, oh, I know what you mean You mean blah blah blah blah blah That's the trick. I think Direction is the key to the whole process though that andrew and I have come up with and the whole reason Uh, that we're doing this and and and I guess the whole point of difference to us and anyone else Who could do you a demo is that you're getting you're getting two perspectives So you're getting a perspective from a guy who sat in the producers slash directors chair for 35 years Audio engineers desk, you know and all that sort of stuff. And so I have the knowledge that I've learned from working with directives and directors and and and you know Art directors and all that sort of stuff and directing sessions myself Um, and so I sort of know what's in their head But then you get andrew as well who is a voice-over artist and and sort of has the art And the understanding of different styles of reads and different ways of selling a script So you get him from that perspective and you put that together And you've got the the entire sort of gamut of possibilities. Yeah, we're covering the whole room basically Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, once again, we're talking with uh with robo and andrew here about making demos and They're joining us all the way from the land of oz Or I don't think they refer to it as the land. They just refer to it as oz oz And Andrew's the wizard right if you've got a question That used to be my nickname actually If if you've got a question for them throw it in the chat room right now because we'd love to hear from you guys and I think a little bit later. We're going to take a poll on Which which version you guys like most because they get the final say, don't they? They well not necessarily just because they like it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to go with it, but But you know, it's good to have uh, you know some outside opinions of it putting your career on the line by by poll So let's talk a little bit about about what goes into a good demo What is it that what are the the right elements to a demo that you know, you guys want to achieve when You know, you're you're working with somebody. What is it? You want to achieve with them? And and and how do you go about getting what you think they want? I can tell you the first thing that doesn't go into it that we always joke about is putting your id at the front Yeah, good day. Good day. I'm james and I'm a voice over artist and I love collecting goldfish Yeah, yeah, it's like what on next yeah bite next It's uh, I think the key with the demo is definitely the that first five ten seconds is the the hook If you haven't got them, then you're not going to keep them. So Yeah, so that first spot has got to take that person who's listening on that journey You've got to grab their attention. It's got to be that the first the first track has to be current The first track has to be strong The first track has to show your voice in its best possible light Yeah, and I think that's that to me. That's the key because I've sat in so many casting sessions where They haven't the voice hasn't even got a sentence out and they've already gone to the next track Yeah, they've made up their mind in that amount of time, you know, people go are 60 seconds I've got 60. No, you don't you've got five if you're lucky Yeah Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you don't grab them by the gurgle in the first three to five seconds, it's like gone Yeah, which is why name and and hobbies and all that stuff at the front stumps me people actually do that They do yeah a lot Sadly seems to have there's been a discussion on forums down here in australia for the last About a month. I think it someone dropped it in what you know, should I put a should I do an intro on my demo? It's like it's not 1990 anymore. We're not Delivering comp cds anymore. Yeah, that's right. I think that was we've talked about this I think in the days when you were casting off a cd You probably had its place But but these days you're staring at a file with a name on it anyway. You don't need to do it No Yeah, it's even like even with auditions though You very rarely are asked to slate anymore It's straight into the read Yeah, I've noticed that that and most agencies are all saying that no slates. Thank god Yeah, you know because the slate is really awkward And it doesn't show you in the best light because you I don't I don't know anyone that's comfortable Doing an intro or a slate Because you know, you've got to do this read a certain style Do you do your slate or your intro in a certain style? I don't know Yeah, there's there's no hard and fast rules on that and you know, it's I mean, but as you were saying it's it's changed because we used to do it all the time And now it's like no no slates And uh, why why would you want to do a slate? You know and some coaches will say well just try and do it in the character So it you know, so it goes in a lot of that is kind of old school now Yeah and I think the other thing though that goes into it Making a great demo is is knowing what you want to do with your demo I think understanding that before you even start the process is is getting you a long way to to getting a great demo I mean we talked with you About you know, you had a lot of retail Hard sell stuff you you sort of we talked about how the sort of man next door Sort of thing was something that you could do and do well, but you didn't really get booked for a lot So we talked about that and that's how we came up with the the direction for your demo So, you know, I Spots specific spots aside. I mean, I think that's an important place to start and getting a great demo as well Is understanding what you want to do with it. Do you want to get an agent? Do you want to get booked? You know, there's two different things you could do with a demo there straight away And two different directions to take it Yeah So yeah, I think that's a that's a big starting point as well Yeah, it's funny because demos these days are really Used to find an agent because a lot of the work you see like we just mentioned before is scripts arriving your inbox based on Your age gender whatever As an audition So they haven't heard you before they just want to get an audition from you Right, but if you're looking to get, you know, maybe a step up into a better agent Then make sure you deliver a really good demo because it just may do the trick for you Yeah, once again, if you've got a question for our guests throw it in the chat room and we'll get to that in just a little bit One one of the things that we talked about and once you had we had mixed them all down was The order of the spots in there because I've always been of the opinion Having done many demos You know for me It's important to have contrast of reads That it's you know, if you're gonna catch them real quick and you're you were able to hold their attention Through the first spot, which is never an easy thing to do because they're probably listening to a bunch of different demos It's got a contrast So a spot's gonna end and then a different type of read in there What we did with with this one is I specifically wanted a conversational read Like we were saying it's like, you know, I do a lot of retail stuff a lot more announcer-y type stuff Um, but I wanted to show that I can do the conversational thing that we can talk the way you and I are talking now and And make that happen and then the spots you picked really really worked for that But how do you pick the order? I mean aside from the discussion we had well, what about putting this one here and putting that one there and Well, it was funny because you um when we talked once we finished the spots and we selected which ones we were going to go with and Frankenstein a couple And then it was the discussion of what's the order going to be And we got your order dan, which we we kept And then after you had left the call Robo and I said No We're gonna change that And we both agreed that the the gym beam spot was the hero and that was going to be for the top Um, I think you had gym beam second or third from memory dan. I can't remember. Yeah Yeah, it's just the way I think it's like, okay, where it's where it's the contrast here. Where it's, you know, What's a little more upbeat that one was like gym beam, you know, yeah Can I just tell you dan, please just so you know that uh your demo for gym beam has gone on our demo for voiceover demos That's a good sign Yeah, for some reason I always end up doing a liquor spot on my demos. I'm not exactly sure why Everybody throws those in there It's because when you hear your voice down just something we should know Anyway, we're gonna get into listening to what we finally came up with After a quick break and again if you've got a question Throw it in the chat room because we want to hear from you and your thoughts on on recording a demo and Any other thoughts you have on those and any questions you have for our guests so Put them in there right now In the meantime, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back here on voiceover body shops So do not go away. We'll be right back This is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mendez and you're enjoying dan and george on the voiceover body shop So this week we asked our great sponsor harlan hogan at voiceover essentials dot com What do you want to tell your customers this week? Well harlan said how about a free vo baseball cap with their embroidered vo voice bubble on the front And their voiceover essential slogan as heard on tv on the back It tells everybody what you do voiceover essentials dot com vo baseball caps are 100 cotton chino twill Garment washed unstructured caps manufactured by style master and feature sewn eyelets Pre-curved visor and metal adjustable tri glide buckle with leather adjusting strap and guess what they'll send one to the first 25 viewers who email their voiceover essentials customer service head terry lee at terry dot lee at voiceover essentials dot com To get your voiceover essentials vo baseball cap Offer is only good in the continental u.s All sad for the folks down under anyway Yeah, it's time to talk about source elements the creators of source connect and a tool that we At the pro audio suite used for every single episode it allows robbo To produce our show completely remotely with all of our voices coming directly into pro tools We can hear each other beautifully the quality is extremely high And we also have the amazing ability to keep everything backed up no matter what happens on the internet Via the q manager so at the end of our session And we record sometimes for an hour or more That audio is being automatically backed up and transferred over to robbo's machine from all of our computers in the background It's amazing technology. It sounds great. Um, the audio quality you get over source connect is essentially Indistinguishable from being on the end of a mic cable. It really is that good And it's quite a remarkable tool and now with the new version of source nexus coming out soon It's going to be easier than ever for robbo to bring other sources of audio And other platforms in and out of a production For seamless production when you've got guests in other locations You've got directors. You've got the clients in many cases listening wanting to hear and even sometimes see what's going on And give approval that can all be done with source nexus and source connect tied together It's quite an amazing platform But if you want to get started head over to source dash out dash elements dot com And you can get your 15 day free trial get yourself started and running and learn what source connect Can do for you and your career as you're growing your business into another higher tier Thanks for your support source elements. Let's get on to the q&a right after this Well, hey there, it's david h. Lawrence with vo heroes and wouldn't it be cool If there was a very simple tool drag and drop tool that would guarantee That the audio you need to upload to acx or any other audiobook platform is perfectly set up in terms Of the tech standards the root mean square normalization the peak normalization the noise floor Guess what there is and I want you to have it absolutely free It's called audio cupcake and you can find it at audio cupcake dot com I helped create this software It was built to my specs and my standards for when I do audiobooks And I know it's going to work for you now It's only available for macintosh Because you windows users you have the ability to use other tools that work for you But in this case you edit your final raw wave file for a chapter You drop it onto audio cupcake and out comes the 192k mono mp3 file you can upload immediately That's audio cupcake dot com audio cupcake dot com. I hope you love it This is bill radner and you're enjoying voiceover body shop with dan lennard and george widham v obs dot tv And we're back with robbo and andrew and we're talking about demos. All right. Well, here's what I'd like to do Let's play the two mixes that we did my mix and your mix And then uh, jeff sitting there in the chat room Let's take a vote, you know after we play both of them. Tell us which one you you choose And we won't say which one is which how's that? This gets more and more competitive The process between ap and i just because we haven't really talked about that just quickly is is We both do our own versions of your reads And and then without referring to each other we take the voiceover session And and and do our own edits of each spot And then send them back to you and as you know It then comes to you to go well I prefer a over b because they come unlabeled you don't know who's done what and so ap and i are always like Shit he got more of me this time Oh, i'll be sending rob. Oh, it takes time was i a will be which one So now not only are we gonna do that now we're gonna go. Okay. Let's let's throw the mixes out there Putting on it's on the line. Yeah. All right. Let's put george to work here. Why don't you play the first one there? So this is this is the the final mix down their choice or somebody's choice. I'm not sure who's choice is letter a letter a You've sacrificed plenty to build your business From the moment your feet hit the floor to the moment you turn out the lights It's all you think about from the places that don't have a name To the bright lights of a world moving at a frantic pace Wherever jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too We don't have everything We have your thing Welcome to your walmart When we thought of the future We imagined a car with instant power A car that drives itself A car that just plugs in How far can your investments take you? At standard personal banking we go the extra mile to meet your financial goals from your children's education to your dream retirement John perkins medical Not just for us For all of us Now now remember, you know, we had one piece of music for that and I said no no no We need something like light piano, but positive Yeah, and with a note with some notes on it's right. Yeah, not not chords But just single notes and stuff and you know, these are the types of things I don't think other people would have thought about but having you know having produced things like this. It's like Was I right Ah, look, I think there's credit to this is the thing about audio. It's such a personal thing. Is there a right and a wrong? I don't think there is. I think there's just personal taste and that's all you can go with Yeah, um, I but I think both iterations work Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with either of them. Okay. All right, let's play b We always believe the welcoming spirit was a small town thing Turns out we were wrong Wherever Jim beam is welcome You'll be welcome too When we thought of the future We imagined a car with instant power A car that drives itself A car that just plugs in You've sacrificed plenty to build your business From the moment your feet hit the floor to the moment you turn out the lights It's all you think about how far can your investments take you At standard personal banking we go the extra mile to meet your financial goals From your children's education to your dream retirement We don't have everything We have your thing Welcome to your walmart and that was b. Okay, so now everybody vote Did you like a or b and put it in the chat room and jeff will compelate those got a b already Don't stare at that stuff Money's the checks in the mail But yeah, it was it was definitely fun doing that and uh, You know, I was pretty pretty happy with the you know, either one of those Because it was exactly what I was looking for what's let's have a good conversational read None of those sounded a nonsery or anything like that And we did them so fast now now granted i've been doing this, you know since you know the nixon administration But uh, I have a little bit of experience but other people who are perhaps newer Need to understand that they've got to be conversational like that. We got a bunch of questions though So george, why don't you take off with those and let's give those to our wonderful guests here All right first morning while the votes are still coming in over here Fiber jazz says don't know much about what commercial casting directors are looking for in other countries But it helped to work with a coach prior to creating a demo for that market Or other sources of info and did you do any special Studying or training to develop your demo coaching skill or did it just come naturally to you with after many years of your own Do your work so two-parter I say for the latter part of the question. I think it kind of comes naturally through experience You know, I've been doing this for well about the same as you dan. I think we're probably late 70s bloomers. Yeah Um So that that's that part of the question and as far as um Different markets. I think it it's your voice. It's it's what you you know what you do. It's got nothing to do with necessarily what people are looking for Well, it does to a point, but but you're not going to build a demo that's not you To suit somebody else if that makes sense Maybe maybe would help influence the music you might Choose, I don't know. Is that something goes into it? See the music the music is really only there to support What the script is for to give it some sort of reference point? I suppose I mean the whole the the other trick to creating a good demo I guess coming back to an earlier question that Dan threw out there was making sure that the demo is about your voice and not about my production Um, which is why you know any demo that I ever make you will will rarely have a sound effect You know unless it's absolutely necessary. I think memos demo I put a car in there because I wanted to have it make it sound like a tv Spot it was for a I think it was for a car And and for Chevy and and so I sort of I I imagined this tv spot that had like this nice mellow music track underneath but it was Giving the impression that dad was traveling home And so you could hear this car driving throughout and then you can hear dad walk up the steps At the end of the spot and the door opens and you hear a little girl's voice saying daddy Just sort of quietly down in the background But that was just to give the illusion that this was again believable that this could have actually gone to it um So yeah, so keeping it simple and and the music is really only there to support a vibe For whatever it is you're trying to do with the spot. So just keeping it simple is really important I think also What robo does if you probably noticed on on that demo or the two we just listened to The the voice is the hero. So in the mix the voice has got to be the standout part of the demo Yeah, yeah, how many times have I you know played one for my wife and she goes, where's your voice? Which one's you? Nice guitar Oh, yeah, some of them are are heavily overproduced and I was just thrilled with the way you guys did that because it was It was highlighting what I did and that would you know the music like I said just sort of supports it Yeah, the other the other thing I would just in say in terms of answering that question two in terms of experience is 35 here 45 there. That's 80 years of experience. I don't know that you could get much more experience sitting in a classroom So I don't know that you know Studying is the be all on an end all somehow and also we've seen you know As you do just because of time you see things come see things go. I mean you see the change in fashion and We've certainly seen a major change in technology and the expectations that You know are put on us now. So that's the other thing too. Yeah, I mean, you know ap's recording Daily with agencies. I'm still working with clemenches sarches. You know all these Global agencies. So we're sort of at the coal face every day Seeing what's coming next and and what's changing in terms of styles and what they're looking for right Question from someone whose name rhymes with orange. Fred north go figure Do they specialize and do you guys specialize in a certain genre and coaching and coach through it? Are there accent and vernacular differences? Are accents and vernacular differences ever an issue? You know, I mean we've worked with memo memos mexican Yeah, uh Matt cowrie. Well, Matt Carrick's probably a classic example. Yeah, I mean Matt. Matt's an Aussie doing american accent voiceovers and big time You know, so so no, I don't see any of that as a barrier no Alrighty George this one's from craig davis. He says good point on the data material because voices also change And with age and the length of a demo Is it 60s 90s I'm an old radio guy and did exactly what dan explained, but I do realize I have to be updated 60 60 is the targets 70 if you've got some really good stuff that you feel like you have to pack in there But as we said, I mean Even if they get through the first five seconds They've really made up their mind by 20 25 seconds and the rest is Is there if they want it? But I can't remember the last time I played a demo in a casting session all the way through for someone I the only I can say I can tell you exactly the only demo. I've actually listened right Right the way through and funny enough. It was Matt Cowrie And this was years ago when I first came across matt. I don't know how we cross paths, but I listened to one of his demos and it blew me away because he was Doing everything in american accent. I just could not believe it. It was Flawless and I listened all the way through but that's an exception. Not the rule. Let me talk about a freak really Tell it a guy very talented guy Indeed, um, I think there was it's part two might have gotten it was on the next page or the next line Saying what sells better a video demo or audio demo is a video demo needed these days Distracting. Yeah, you just want him to focus on your voice. You don't want him to look at you and go. Oh my god. He's too old He's too young. He's not right. Yeah, he might be gay. She might be this, you know, and that's yeah No offense to anybody out there, but you know, these are the assumptions that people make when they look at you So yeah, well, I think I think you're talking about actual production with video content that goes with the voiceover Okay Yeah, I But then again it's still distracting. Yeah And the other trick that I would throw in there too is much as possible Keep keep your product out of there Like people love to go. Hey, look, you know jim beam cries a lot blah blah blah, but The problem that you have there is all of a sudden It's conflict all of a sudden. Oh, hang on. We're casting for for, you know I don't know having having something. Yeah, he's done car company b. So move on Having said that we did actually include jim beam Yeah, I I don't I don't know that it's necessarily you have to do it on everything But but you know as I would I do a demo where every spot had a brand attached, especially if it was a big brand I I don't know that I would Um for that reason. Yeah, you have to be a little bit careful a bit mindful Yeah, yeah Jeff Holman asks and there's a great question. Do you always put a music bed under the entire demo now? We had there was different cuts of music in there You know, which you know to me is like the most important thing. I remember when I when I was learning to do commercials in a The operations manager said, okay, if you're gonna do commercials, here's our rules two pieces of music with every commercial You know something had to be something, you know, there had to be a contrast in the middle Were you doing that live to tape? uh Yeah, it's like hold the record down. Yeah, that's right. It's the finger Slip slip you we're talking about that the other day. We're talking about doing drop edits on on analog tape You know, would we still have the muscle memory to get it right first time? I don't know that I would Pro Tools makes life too easy. Yeah kids these days get it too easy too easy But it was funny you talk about that like, you know, you're queuing up a record and reading live and mixing as straight to tape You know, that was how I kicked off in the 70s. Yeah, I think we all we've been there done that. Yeah. Yeah. Um music all the way through Mostly mostly if if a cold read is called for sure, but I wouldn't do a 60 second demo cold. No No, okay, George. All right, grace newton says, uh, What is the most important element of a video game demo? You guys done any video game demos? No I haven't I haven't done any. I've heard plenty I think it's Selling your ability to come up with a character that's believable Selling your ability to come out the character full stop Versatility in general, I think would be the biggest thing for video games And and if you're recording it in your own studio Making sure that it's sound quality wise It's as good as it can be as well because you know the last thing a video game editor wants to get is a Bunch of distortion on the pieces where you you have to yell and scream and then You know Three noise reduction plugins on one track because the air conditioning noise and everything else going on the background When you've got to be softly spoken. So yeah, they're the two big things I hear on Gaming demos is is just not understanding What you're doing in terms of the recording And also the other thing is your room if you're screaming in a room and your room is not particularly good You're gonna hear it. Yeah, that's right because the louder you talk The more the can the the acoustics of the room come into play. Sorry. What's that dan? Terry briscoe asks and this sort of plays into that are there instruments that tend to overpower the voice more than others saxophone saxophones the killer Sometimes guitar But saxophone is the one that yeah, in fact, I found a really cool plugin for those geeks out there Just because there's pro audio suite out here just for one second And the name of it's just gone completely out of my head track spacer and and it you you you you put the plugin on your music track And you show it your voice over in this what's called a side chain So the plug-ins working on my music track, but it's listening to the voice over And what it's doing is it's putting an eq eq curve in Around your voice over so effectively it's only ducking those frequencies So if you have it a saxophone for example, and it's smack in the middle of the voice over Well, what track space is doing is saying let's take it down A bit so we can make the voice over the hero Wow One last thing let me let me throw the script now. Andrew. I was looking at your website. There's like 50 demos on there I know How many demos should somebody have Not as many as I've got probably like walking into a hardware store is like how much can I buy today? Or ap in a in a in a studio gear shop like yeah I've probably got probably got equal amounts of microphones as I've got demos unfortunately Which says more about my character than anything else, but look, I don't know it depends what What genres you're looking at working in I would probably make a demo for each of your genres Yeah, all right. What are your strengths lie? I mean if you've got I think for me for me anyway A strong overall one and then and then a couple of other ones that demonstrate your other strengths or other as we talked about before other sort of Strengths that you have that people may not know about that you can use to highlight those as well I don't know that I think maybe 50s overkill maybe five or six but the other thing that we do with our demos we because we Each spot is actually produced. So it's each spot is a you know 15 30 second spot So when we deliver the demo We deliver the comp and then we deliver each spot individually So if someone you know sends you a message saying have you got a spot that where you do a blah blah blah? You go, yeah, and you can send them one of the spots Yeah, okay. Yeah, but we've got just a couple of minutes here. We got to figure out who won It's a easy thing It looks like there's a lot of bees Yeah, it looks like it looks like the bees won Jeff Holman Who won? You got to unmute yourself Turn the microphone on audio engineering one or more The answer is the bees won handily. It's the bees knees. There we go And who's was that? Sorry Dan Well, at least you know for sure. That's right. I'm feeling justified now Yeah, all right So guys guys if they want to get a hold of you and talk to you about getting a really great demo done Where do they go? Demo is the work Alrighty Guys it's been a pleasure having you on the show and it was just a riot last week putting this all together and uh hoot Yeah, that one's going on my website Beautiful On my wovo demo player. Which version though? What's that? Which version? Yeah, I might put both on who knows You never know Is there a blind ab mode where it will play one or two? You know I'll try that like what are the web developers do they um, you know, they test ab test You do a month of one and a month of the other and see what happens. Let's see what I book Anyway guys, thanks so much for being with us tonight. It was just a pleasure. Thank you for having us All right, all right. We'll be right back and uh to say goodbye But re-rack it for tech talk, which you can listen to live and ask your questions too. So don't go away. We'll be right back Hi, this is bill farmer and you are watching voiceover body shop. It's great 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 voiceover extra.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 Voiceover extra has hundreds of articles free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed Learn from the most respected talents coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions Bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, 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 voiceover extra.com. That's voiceover Xtra.com Well, it's my turn to talk about Voiceactor.com. That's right voiceactor.com. What do they do there? They make it easy for you to have your voice actor website Like that you can do it In in 20 minutes, uh, you know, just go in there. You don't have to have a lot of technical knowledge It's not like using html or this coding or that coding It's templates and you go in and you pick a template you like you can Change the colors you can change the template you can put things where you want to put them and It's all up to you. It's not up to some webmaster who's going to charge you 25 bucks for every comma you change or anything like that It's Free to start actually Uh, you can go in there create an account find a template that you like set it up put the colors you want the pictures you want and of course most importantly your demos and You'll be online And if you want to have a really your own url because it goes through voiceactor.com You have your own url. It's 20 a month and You have all sorts of opportunities to make what you want and change what you want in your demo So go over to point put it up there again. So voiceactor.com. That's voiceactor.com To get your website up right now We are the world voices organization Also known as wobo. We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent voiceover is a complex entrepreneurial business Wobo 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 wobo 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 wobo 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 rocko and you're watching voiceover body shop God it was great talking to working with those guys. It was so much fun You know now you see why i've been enjoying doing a show with them now five years running Absolutely Alrighty well next week on this very show. It'll be tech talk number 112 All right, it just goes on and on we keep coming up with stuff uh, if You want to work with one of us to help you with your home voiceover studio? You can go to george the dot tech Slash v obs for discounts and services. Yeah, that's right. So that's a what kind of a discount. Do you get for that? Uh, currently it's a 10 off That could change as the holidays come so stay tuned but for now 10 off when you use v obs fan 10 Alrighty and uh, we have to mention. I am db Dot me for jeff holman too, but also but you can go to my website, which is home voiceover studio dot com If you want to work with me on this kind of stuff We need to thank our donors of the week, which are greg cooper Grace newton christopher apperson robert ledum steven chandler kasey clack jonathan grant Thomas pinto greg thomas a doctor voice ant land productions martha conne 949 designs sarah borges phillips apyr ryan page rob rider Shawna pennington baird don griffith tray moseley diana birdsall maria mackas And sandra man willard. Hey join our mailing list. All you have to do is go to our website and it says You'll sign up for our mailing list and you'll be on there We need to thank our sponsors. Of course harlan hogan's voiceover essentials voiceover extra source elements bio heroes dot com voice actor dot com and world voices dot org the industry association freelance voice talent, please join today Uh, we have of course, thank jeff holman for doing a great job in the chat room and being the official vote counter Even though, you know, I didn't win that one. Uh, but You didn't damn enough jack. I apparently not. Yeah, uh, sumer lino for getting it all done on the switchboard tonight making sure that this has been technically Magnificent and of course lee pennie for just being lee pennie Hey, we're gonna re-rock it and set it for tech talk if you're still out there and listening or watching live Perfect opportunity for you to ask a question in our chat room. So george and I can attack it and give you the right answer to it Anyway, that's gonna do it for us this week. Thanks for watching Uh, this is not an easy business It's you got to get everything right. You got to be a good actor. You got to have the right business plan But your audio is important, but we've come to the conclusion that if it sounds good It is good. I'm dan Leonard and i'm george widdum and this is voiceover body shot or vo B s have a great week everybody. Stay tuned for tech talk Bye It's a shame because my parents flight from chicago to philly Is exactly during this block of time while we're doing our show They can watch the replay. I know but they love watching it. I said they they watch it live the week We do the pre-tape show and they watch it at the same time. They Right before jeopardy. Yeah Yeah, nothing funnier than them showing up at my door and i'm not remembering who they were but uh When you were yeah, i'm sorry to see you good good good to see you guys this time. It was a pretty pretty short visit Yeah, uh, but it was nice. So yeah, andrew robbo. Thanks for hanging out with us You guys can hang out watch the next segment if you want It's up to you or go go be with your families. Whatever you want to do. Yeah Yeah, it's the middle of the afternoon down there. Yeah, anyway for uh We got tech talk coming up here and uh, so if you got a question throw it in the chat room Are we ready sue to roll on with uh with tech talk? She gives us the thumbs up Let's roll it so I can have dinner three two Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop tech talk tech talk tech talk Tech talk tech talk tech talk tech talk tech talk over 112 I know there's 112 sitting up there somewhere. Just there we go. Just so in case you look at it and it's like, okay We can always do a new show because apple always has to release a new operating system to break everything There's always something to talk about. Yeah, there's another two years of stuff right there Anyway, if you've got a question for us throw it in the chat room Whether you're in facebook live or you're watching on youtube or if you're watching on linkedin Now's the perfect time if you've got a question about your home voiceover studio Some piece of equipment a problem you're having a thought or two about Having a home voiceover studio throw it in the chat room right now. We'll get to it So let's get ready. It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk right now Voice over body shop tech talk is brought to you by voiceover essentials.com the home of harlin hogan signature products Source elements the folks who bring you source connect Vio heroes.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 Well, hello there. I'm dan lennard as it's and i'm george wittem as it says And this is voiceover tech body shop Or vio v s v s tech talk tech talk tech talk tech talk tech talk Tech talk lots to talk about tech and uh, we've got lots of cool stuff But but before we get into that we have to remind you of something and that is that this is what george and i do now I've seen a lot of stories and articles and people putting stuff in on on facebook and linkedin and different discussion groups They seem to be parroting everything that you and i have been talking about for the past Well 12 years doing this show but before that before we even started doing this. Well, i mean that's I'm glad i i would love to see people parroting what we're Talking about on this show because we've spent a long time making sure we're giving out the right info so right It's a it's a good thing Um, but you know maybe getting it right from the source is probably a better more reliable way to go It makes sense to me Uh, and this is what george and i do we help you with your home voiceover studio Talk about a niche market But you know, we help with podcasters too and stuff like that, but voiceover is our primary focus And how you get to sound the way you're supposed to sound or what i like to say what it's supposed to sound like which is so So uh, if you'd like to work with me all you got to do is go over to There it is. Oh home voiceover studio dot com And uh, you'll be able to find uh, what it is that i do and how i do it and my specimen collection cup Which is seems to be continuously flowing over with with all sorts of interesting samples And it's always fun to respond to people and tell them what their audio is like And if you want to work with george who has A staff of thousands, uh, at least it seems that way now you got a lot of people working with you You've got lots of backup Over at we do at over at george the dot tech Yeah, i'm getting better at delegating things to other folks. Uh as uh as i'm realizing i'm not the biggest expert in everything tech There are people who are specialists And we have them all working with us, which is wonderful So we've got the best talent in the tech world of voiceover and beyond Available for you at george the dot tech performer friendly techs And dan Yeah, what you doing over there home? Studio home voiceover studio. I already told people about it. Oh, okay. You weren't paying attention. I was I was multitasking I was reading my notes for the next segment Okay, well since you're now totally up to date on what you were going to talk about it's time for george's weekly tech update What do we got this week? Oh boy. Well, first of all, we get it right out of the way apple sonoma is out. Don't install it What? yet Every year. It's the same thing. Um, if you are jonesing to make it jonesing to make an upgrade Let's say you're on big sir Or you're on uh modere This might be a good time to go to ventura. That's fine Um, I would recommend that before I I click on the very tempting upgrade button That's in your in your update window. Must push. Must push it so tempting, isn't it? Yeah, just don't do it quite yet. We haven't had chances to test it out I did hear that thomas at twisted wave did release an update patch to make sure he can support it and he has That's still not a good reason quite yet to just jump onto that And every year when the new os comes out, that means old computers become Unsupported or obsolete. I don't know the word. I think it's unsupported is what apple calls them So it turns out that folks on 2015 max It doesn't mean your computer will stop working It just means that your computer will not be able to get all the security updates And it won't be able to update to certain things like certain web browsers That are required to do certain things on the internet and unfortunately, that's the way tech goes Things do become outmoded after a while. So that 2015. Well, what do you do with a 2015 mac that still runs perfectly? Well, it could be as it could be like a server. It could be like a data server You could use it to keep, you know, a lot of videos online to view the network. Yeah You know, there's a lot you could do with it. You could give it to a school who needs a computer for teaching video editing Um, it doesn't need to be used for web browsing. So there are things you could do But that is what happens now this next thing on a noise floor This is something that we talk about all the time and usually when we get a week of audio from somebody It's like what's the noise floor and there's so many different answers to How do you measure it? What is it? Yeah, so talk to us about this came up This got inspired from a specific facebook post and the post wasn't about hey, how do I measure noise floor? The post was what is a good noise floor? And I will never answer that question with a straight up number because It ain't that straight up. It's not that simple and well, here's why George the tech It's time that I did this it was time to do this 10 years ago. I'm finally doing it And this is a little video explaining what I believe and based on my compadres in this business believe Is the appropriate and accurate way to measure noise floor, right? How loud is the noise in your recording? During the room tone of your files So there's a couple reasons why this is not a straightforward answer, right? First of all, we're measuring dynamic range. We're not measuring Just How loud the noise is right? I could take the file you see on the screen right now I could set the peak level of this file to minus 20 And when I check the noise floor by hitting play By the way, the number you want to look at is an rms level not peak level for noise I can get an rms of minus 85 Wow, that's fantastic, right But that's not telling the whole story because the peak of the audio file is still well below zero db So to really accurately measure this we have to first correct for those level variations And adjust our peak level by just simply normalizing the audio file to zero db Okay, now we've By the way, that's a little bit of the debated topic as to what to calibrate the peak level to I've heard some say do minus three But I think to be as honest as possible zero is the maximum level you can have so that's why I said Normalize to zero by the way, that's normalized to zero peak somebody saw the video Normalized to zero db rms and wondered why it sounded kind of complete garbage Peak is what we're setting it to done is we've taken the peak level in this file Set it to its maximum level is zero And then if we measure the noise floor in this sample We'll get a more honest answer Minus 65 minus 66 rms. Okay Now if the meters in your DAW don't show rms levels only peak You might need to use a different method now in twisted wave. We have file analyze Okay, now what animal the same thing featured is in adobe audition and it's called What do they call it analyze? No, it's not called analyze What's the adobe audition? Equivalent of the stand. Let's see. Let me go back in here. You look that up while I play this Analyze does is really really useful. First of all, obviously it gives us a peak telling us zero db was the peak It gives us the loudness units full scale and by the way, this is integrated Which means it's measuring it over the average of the entire length of audio file It's giving us the average rms power, which is what is used by the audiobook industry To determine the correct levels for delivering files And it's giving us another useful number the minimum rms power Which essentially is giving us the average level of the quietest portions of this audio Which in this case is about minus 69 db Again a good number Now how long is that window? aka the rms window Well right now that's two two thousand milliseconds or two seconds So over the course of two seconds of audio at any time That's the average That you're getting at the minimum Which is a pretty fair and honest way to measure a noise floor Does that mean at some other point in the file the noise floor doesn't go higher than that? It does it means somewhere else in this file. There may be an increase in noise floor So another issue with measuring noise floor is how big is the window of time? And this is something nobody ever asks or tells you to do When measuring your noise floor, right? I can pick a one millisecond moment in time Where my studio is incredibly quiet and give you an amazingly low number But that's not really a real world number, right? So an rms window of two seconds, I'd say a pretty fair way to go Longer is more fair, but honestly most systems don't let you measure longer than two full seconds. Okay Now next is the fact that there's two different levels in this audio file. You'll notice there's a lower level And there's a higher level So in the higher level, there's a higher energy level being projected into the mic and a lower level There's a more of a conversational volume level being sent into the mic So which really is the correct noise floor? Well If you're doing high energy performances Then the noise floor would be be accurate to measure the noise floor during this selection here So it's the volume of the voice with the noise floor afterward But what about up until that point here? The first half of the file Remember that normalizing part? Well, yes, exactly. What if we normalized this so this section of audio is a peak of zero And we do another analysis on this selection Now what do we get? Now we get a minimum rms power noise floor level Of minus nearly 60 db, right? I'm hearing reports of the audio on the playback is bad. Is it unintelligible or just really bad? It's just a little choppy that's all. Oh, it's choppy Ah fascinating more choppy. Yeah, no, it's yeah, but But when we when we release this we'll put this full video back in there So no one will see any of it because went in. Yeah. Yeah, I had no idea that was choppy Can't tell on this side. It sounds great So yeah, I don't want to keep playing a video that sounds choppy But the kind of the takeaway of this whole thing really is that Audio quality or noise floor Is a little bit more nuanced. There's more to it than meets the eye And another thing I didn't get to address is that Noise isn't noise. It's a noise. You can have a meter that shows minus 60 rms That where the noise is actually very prominent because it could be a buzz A hum a whistle, but that's still meters below minus 60 and be quite audible And vice versa. You can have a metering that looks at minor. It's at minus 40 and Looks pretty awful on the waveform because it's full of rumbling stuff But still to the ear sounds pretty good sounds pretty clean, right? So it's not as straightforward as as you would like it to be So when somebody throws these numbers around just take it with a grain of salt Remember that there is more to it than than what you might think um a couple more things that we can Jump on before we get to the rest of the show. I wanted to mention that There's there's a little This just came up as well USB audio interfaces with loop back There are a lot of them now and there's more coming every day including the new scarlet 2i 2 the gen 4 has loop back The thing is there's not loop back isn't loop back just like room tone isn't room tone. It depends Loop back. There's really kind two kinds. There's one kind that is playing back the playback To a separate set of channels, which they might call virtual channels That's great if you're producing a podcast or producing something where you want to record the return to separate tracks, okay Where that's not so useful is for voiceovers who want to do playback If that playback is on a separate set of channels Chances are the software you're using for your meeting isn't going to hear that audio because it's on separate channels Now interestingly zoom now lets you choose multiple channels So zoom would probably actually work. You could say use channel one my mic and channel three the playback, right? That's a workaround, but not every program is going to do that probably not google meet Probably not what's the other microsoft teams, you know things like this, right? So keep that in mind loop back is different the ones that have the right kind of loop back are the steinberg ur 12 The yamaha ag 0 3 and ag 0 6 those actually provide the kind of loop back that you want Actually, the roadcaster pro does as well and the coming in someday in the near future Or longer future the passport vo from sentrance also will have the right kind the wrong kind of loop back is in the 2i 2 the evo 3 The ssl 2 unfortunately because they're for different purposes um another quick thing When you're sending out this is a ps a when you're sending out audio to another producer or an engineer to finish a project for you Let's say it's an audio book something really long form It's really really really important to make sure the audio you're providing Is good enough to work with what do i mean by that? You might record with the same mic the same booth everything's the same same same same you know how it sounds what can change your own voice If you if it's allergy season and your own allergy meds and you know that that's messing with the sound of your voice And if you don't know you should know that Probably is um absolutely make sure that those files are checked and listened to if you don't trust yourself by somebody else at least Before you go and record an entire book You know 8 7 12 30 hours Do not record an entire book at once and send the files off record chapter by chapter Make sure someone's checking those files. I'll tell you not everything can be fixed in post There are certain things that just Cannot be reliably fixed in post so don't be stuck in that position. We had a good time with that this week You hear that amongst our our crowd and it's like well, should we do this? My thought was if it's throughout the entire thing You know if you can fix it and post fine Otherwise, it was a great rehearsal And try to try it again, but it was a pretty prominent nasal squeak in there Squeaky nasally thing. Yeah, yeah, we don't normally hear that stuff because when we're talking to other people They don't hear it either. It's just because you're close conversation. Yeah Yeah, the mic when it's very close up. It's pointing into the nasal passage and now it's picking up Coming out of your Yeah, it's coming out of your nose. It's picking up all sorts of stuff coming out of your face I like to say it's all of it. It's the sounds coming out of your face Right. It's not just coming out of your mouth. It's coming out all over the place Last one real quick because I want to get to Dan's thing Watch out for those ill-informed client requests. This was a good one. I saw today I have a project requesting raw wave files recorded at bit rate 192 kilobits per second What the person who posted this said I do not however see a way to choose A kilobits per second for wave format I am only given the option of kilobits per second when I save it as nmp3. That's correct, right bit rate refers to How much data are you fitting into a certain amount of time kilobits per second? That's bit rate bit depth which when we talk about 16 bit 24 bit is a whole different animal Probably what they maybe wanted is they conflated some other numbers. Maybe they want 192 kilobit No, they want maybe they want 192 kilohertz Sample rate wave Which would be ridiculous for a voice over. I mean Absolutely hard driving two seconds. It's just like it's four times the file size and absolutely no improvement in fidelity whatsoever, so it's You're gonna have to you're gonna have to punt on that one if they don't know how to answer that question But beware bit rate is for mp3's bit depth 16 bit 24 24 bit Is for wave files. All right, Dan. Yeah, sometimes you wonder, you know, where people pick up information from I mean there's voice actors get stuff from everywhere and we hear on the telephone remember exactly exactly Everybody you know once that guy says well, it's this and you need source connect and the next guy's well, you need nurse kadoodle I'm not exactly sure where that came from but Yeah, I got my no sninehouser microphone. What do you think your sninehouser? Yeah, um It's amazing how people want to show you how incredibly intelligent they are by throwing out lingo Interminology as opposed to what it is. They're trying to say So be careful with that All right in in my basic basics and it's sort of going back to what george was talking about with with loopback and stuff like that There are a lot of different interfaces out there you know and We generally try to recommend stuff that we think that somebody's going to be able to use properly Uh Now george we've officially sort of stopped recommending the apollo twin for a number of reasons because People buy it because they hear oh, I can do all this stuff with it And yeah that that's no door stop, isn't it? Um I mean a lot of people still have a studio built around it, but it I don't recommend it for most folks Yeah, I mean curve is ridiculous. It causes confusion It's not worth it for most people Right the the idea being that what that what that particular unit does is it allows your You know your computer to become a whole workstation with lots of different tracks and Adjusting things on the front end as you're recording and then you know on the way back out The thing is is 99 of the stuff that that thing does has nothing to do with voiceover So we don't recommend people use something that is more sophisticated Than you're capable of learning you shouldn't have to spend a lot of time On a learning curve for something that isn't really all that necessary Uh now there are other audio engineers saying well, this is what I use So you should use it too because it's going to sound great if you use what I use which Unfortunately is simply not true The more stuff you have or as my brother used to say the more stuff you have on a sailboat The more stuff that can go wrong Uh and the same goes true with with an Apollo twin, but you know when you're looking at Buying it an interface you don't have to go hog wild. What does it have to do? It takes the analog sound that your microphone is sending to it and it turns it into the ones and zeros That your computer understands. What's the difference between models? I think most of it has to do with the quality of the preamp inside the interface For example, what are they doing? Oh, it's over right here Somebody gave me this this week Uh because they said it doesn't work. Well, I plugged it right in and it just came back to life. No problem So chances are they weren't using it right? This is all you really need if it's got a good preamp Most of the analog to digital converters in these things are all pretty good where you run into problems With an interface as if you buy a cheap one. It's like buying a cheap usb microphone It doesn't have a good preamp And you have to you need a because voiceover is a very conversational thing Uh, you know where we're just talking at the level that we talk to other people over a cup of coffee or something Preferably not in a noisy coffee shop. Perhaps in your in your kitchen Uh While while a studio condenser mic is very sensitive You still have to have a lot of gain now. We're seeing with a lot of the manufacturers They've all added a little bit more gain in some of their later Uh, their later models like the the fifth generation Uh focus rights and some of the other ones audience makes a really nice interface and yamaha and uh Uh, what's the other one is taking away game. They're all adding more. They're adding gain, which is a good thing Here's the thing about gain though and why you need to think about it when Most of this stuff again is not designed for doing voiceover. It's designed for making music And music is inherently louder than the conversational tone of our voice unless you're you know, uh What's her name the uh the singer of the who's What oh, oh the opposite of Adele. Yeah, the opposite of Adele Oh, oh, um, um, sorry, we can't remember her name right now. Yeah It'll come to me in the middle of the night. I'll have to edit it in but You all know who I'm talking about great artist and her brother. Uh, anyway When you're singing or you're playing a loud instrument You don't need a lot of gain because the mic's gonna pick it up Because you're singing So you don't have to give that much gain if you're Billie Eilish. Thank you. Billie Eich. Thank you so much Sorry, Billy. Yeah, I know she watches the show and I feel I felt crushed I it was in there somewhere I'm taking memory supplements. It's getting better. But you know, uh anywhere. Where are we talking? Oh, we were talking about, uh Gain is all is gain everything gain gain is everything with one of these things because the digital the the analog to digital converters in these I'll do the same thing and they one doesn't necessarily do it better than another one But again, if you've got a good preamp and the ones that we usually recommend the focus rights audience Uh, yamaha steinberg um Not necessarily barringer because barringer is uh is an interesting one Um, part of the other stuff is sometimes considered to be a good one for the money Yeah, um, but you know for the most part it's um It's not a crap shoot if you buy something like I always say about a microphone over 150 to 200 dollars That's going to be the case with uh with your particular interface, uh, oh also in the ssl2 from uh, You know from that particular manufacturer people like that one too What do you think on that before we go to break ssl is a great. I mean The problem with most of this gear is it's still designed for different use cases from voiceover So like you said the loopback functions are used for producing They're used for doing like multi-track production where you're recording playback from the computer Or an interviewer for a podcast etc. That's not what we need Um, and so there there's things added in that seem helpful than they aren't They add features we don't need They add user interfaces that are Complexing to use Complexing Yeah, too too complex to use too complex to use too complex Like or or things that seem simple because they have a single knob But actually are more difficult to use because they have only a single knob, right? So Yeah, we're really picky about what we like because we just have seen what people have trouble with and We want you to have a user experience. That's reliable and easy, right? So Don't go hog wild on an interface because of all the stuff it does Because most of the stuff that it does has very little to do with what you do Let it do its job To me everything is physical, you know, I mean there's going to be you know different ideas about it and To me it's like if you got a quiet room that's not reverberant you use your microphone right using proper mic technique you'll notice there's never a plosive on this show because And I have no pop screen because and you hear me like I'm in the same room with you Use your mic right and set your levels right which is now becoming a whole nother deal with some other technologies coming along That's all you're required to do And you don't want we don't talk to other people Through all these filters and all these plugins and all these things that we use there are purposes for them and You know reducing potentially some noise and stuff like that like if you have a really bad nasal squirting sound in there Hopefully you can get it out But you want to keep it as clean as possible So you want to have a nice interface that has a nice preamp in it But that's all you have to worry about you don't want stuff with a lot of extra stuff in there So don't don't listen to all these forums saying ah, this is what I use just because somebody uses it doesn't mean you have to All right Well, we're gonna take a quick break here and we'll be right back with all of your questions Which you can still put into the chat room and we will answer those questions when we come back So don't go away voice over body shop continues after this This is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mandas and you're enjoying dan and george on the voice of our body shop So this week we asked our great sponsor harlan hogan at voiceover essentials dot com What do you want to tell your customers this week? Well harlan said how about a free vo baseball cap with their embroidered vo voice bubble on the front And their voice over essential slogan as heard on tv on the back It tells everybody what you do voice over essentials dot com vo baseball caps are 100 cotton chino twill Garment washed unstructured caps manufactured by style master and feature sewn eyelets Pre-curved visor and metal adjustable tri glide buckle with leather adjusting strap and guess what they'll send one to the first 25 viewers who email their voice over essentials customer service head terry lee at terry dot lee at voiceover essentials dot com To get your voice over essentials vo baseball cap Offer is only good in the continental u.s Well, let's talk about source elements the creators of source connect the software that voice actors use to be recorded remotely by the biggest best productions In the voice over world, which is totally true If you want to get online with that and start learning how to use it head over to source dash elements dot com And get your account set up. We definitely recommend starting off and you can start with a demo But here's the deal if you start with a subscription Then you're going to get the full support that they can provide to you They have a very high degree of support. It's an award-winning support that they provide Actually, they won an award for it this year and for a good reason And you will get that support if you're a paying subscriber Another reason to be a subscriber versus a buying a one-time shot license Is it just happened to one of my clients? He lost his eye lock Well because he was on a subscription They were able to transfer that subscription over to the new eye lock It was no loss of license because it's a subscription. So that's another strong argument against the one time buy license Um, but anyway, that's source connect Recommend it check it out learn it love it and start making some money with it We hope you do and we'll be back with more questions right after this Well, hey there, it's david h. Lawrence with vo heroes and wouldn't it be cool If there was a very simple tool drag and drop tool that would guarantee That the audio you need to upload to acx or any other audiobook platform is perfectly set up in terms Of the tech standards the root mean square normalization the peak normalization the noise floor Guess what there is and I want you to have it absolutely free It's called audio cupcake and you can find it at audio cupcake.com I helped create this software It was built to my specs and my standards for when I do audiobooks and I know it's going to work for you Now it's only available for macintosh Because you windows users you have the ability to use other tools that work for you But in this case you edit your final raw wave file for a chapter You drop it onto audio cupcake and outcomes the 192k mono mp3 file you can upload immediately That's audio cupcake dot com audio cupcake dot com I hope you love it This is bill radner and you're enjoying voiceover body shop with dan lennard and george widham v obs dot tv All right. Well, we got some great questions and looking through some of these questions They all seem to be geared towards me for some reason. I'm not exactly sure. It's usually your night. It's my night Okay, well, let's get into them. Uh, you get the first one here. All right, this one's from Mo jalal. I'll go with mahalo I think that's a better way to say that Mahalo is filled with some zeros and characters opinions on sitting versus Standing voiceover delivery. Well, if you guys watched the first half of the show of the last few months Did you notice that I sat for the first and then stood for the second? I don't know if you did but if you did if you did I did because you tell I'm going to think I'm going to stand up for the rest of the show I've been doing it to the last couple of shows I do the I do the interview segment that we do the first week Seated and when I come in when we do the tech talk, I've been standing And I'm wondering if you guys have noticed any difference in my energy level My delivery or anything else. I'm curious with that, but dan, uh, what are your opinions as an actual voiceover actor? You know, I it's it's changed over the years because now I'm old Uh, so sitting is is is always a preferable thing to me I don't buy a lot of this stuff about, you know, you know standing and diaphragm support I can see where that is really important If you're doing gaming if you're doing, uh, promo stuff where you really have to belt it out and stuff like that but for the most part Look, I'm sitting here and and this is how I talk to people and This is the way my voice sounds whether I'm standing up or not and I being conversational means relaxed standing Generally tends to make people talk a little bit louder because they're concentrating on Projecting and that's what they're doing when they're standing Uh, and if you if you're doing an audiobook or something like that It's you're gonna be you're gonna be very tired at the end. So it takes energy to stand up Save your energy to me. It's like sit You know or lean Just don't use a lot of the energy in your body to stand up straight and there's a halfway point Between sitting and saying that's leaning. You can have a leaning stool. You can just have a tall bar stool and just Uh, you know put part of your weight on it. That's a good halfway point Yep, you know, but if you have to see it's got to be a comfortable seat My x chair here. Yeah, that that is a nice chair. Um, he had a part two We won't get into a lot of detail in this because you know, it's an extremely personal choice and uh Neither of us use both So the question is pros and cons of using logic pro versus adobe audition I will give my two cents logic doesn't have a great editing mode I don't like the editing mode and logic at all. Whereas the waveform editing mode in adobe audition Works the way it's supposed to work like it works the way I want it to work That would be a really big difference in between the two for me Um, but that would be about if logic is cheap because you buy it once and you own it for life But there's so many things in logic that are not logical for a voiceover So I just don't I just don't find I don't know. I just never never feels right for me. Never felt right Yeah, the thing about logic is is that it's it's the big brother to garage band Which is designed for exactly what it's called for garage bands It's music production. Yeah, it's it's a it's a multitrack program Editing in it is is very very complicated and not as accurate as what you can do in in adobe audition Which I use every day Logic doesn't have a spectrogram in a spectrogram. Yeah, it's uh The logic is made is really designed for making music Audition was really designed for doing voiceover and adding voiceover to video Right, so the workflow is there and it actually has several different workflows in it I mean if you go into adobe audition, you've got uh, you know edit audio to video radio production There you know, and there's a there's a oh, yeah, there's a lot of mixing spaces for simple editing You've got all of these different tools to work to create the right workflow for you Yeah, that's that's why I like adobe audition. It was really along with twisted wave It was really designed to do what we do as voice actors. So If you want to be a geek about it, if you're like, oh, I want to have all this stuff Fine and dandy most of it has very little to do with voiceovers. We were saying earlier Justin Ramos has a question for me. He says, uh, how do you define signature sound? Is it the timber of your voice or just the way you read copy or something else? Thanks What is your signature sound your signature sound? From what I've learned over the many years I've been doing this is the one you get booked for So that's your signature sound Uh, there are certain styles of copy that you know only certain people can do Um You know if I said what's my signature sound? I'm like, well, it depends on what I'm doing You know if I'm doing if I'm doing a long format narration There's my voice for doing that if I'm doing a commercial it's going to be a little bit different and If you've got some range You know, what is a signature sound? I think it's something that you don't have to concentrate on or think about It's once you've been working for a while And what are you getting hired for you can use that as your signature sound and the thing that you highlight In your demo But I think it's it's one of those pieces of terminology that you know some agents or some other people throw out there to say Okay Signature sound discuss it doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, there's something specific they're talking about But I think that's strictly for commercial type reads where there's a You know a much smaller country of people doing it as opposed to all of the other Genres of work that that are out there. So I wouldn't worry about that too much I think there's a signature sound occasionally with production You maybe you've been using the same mic for many years and you did use a processing Chain on your voice. So now that's kind of your voice is married to it And if you were to take that away, then you would sound more muffled and Raw or something something that didn't sell you as well so Sometimes you get married to your signature sound and you and you're required to have Extra gadgets and things that you didn't normally have to have there. I go popping the mic So yeah, watch out for getting hooked to a signature sound. Sometimes it can be in a bit of an albatross Yeah, I mean sometimes, you know, you'll you'll you'll book a gig and the client will say Well, I like the way you did this on your demo. Can you do that? You know anything that's on your demo is a signature sound to you and what they want and a lot of times They'll say good like the third cut on your demo like I'll get out to go back and listen to the third cut like Oh, oh, okay that read right now. So that's and that's why in a demo and last week we had Robbo and Andrew on we were talking about demos You know, you it's got to be Contrasting you've got to have slightly different styles to the read In order for people to say what you can do this. I don't know about that But you clearly can do it in this type of copy or this type of spot. So, yeah, absolutely. You're welcome. Justin. No problem. Yeah Keith Copeland This is regarding to the by the demo we did earlier showing Noice for how do you do this in audacity? Well, I guess what there actually is a tool that is very similar to those tools It's actually called the most bizarre name of all acx check That is the closest thing um in analyze in the analyze menu of audacity. You'll find acx check Um, let's see if what kind of a disaster I can create by trying to show you this Let's go here Now this is a great audio sample showing you The wrong way to set your levels that's that's the actual level of the audio that was sent to me So let's take a look. Let's go to analyze acx check Boom. Oh, see. Yeah, it doesn't show that because it's it's a window over top the windows So you don't get to see it because technology. Yay Um, let's see if we can try that one other different way. Let's go to present Share screen I guess I have to do entire screen. Hey Well, sometimes that works Well, let's move things around so you don't have to see the entire production Screen on my computer. Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's do this Let's do that Ingo bango and let's go to analyze acx check There we go That looks familiar. So it's going to tell you things like passes acx. You don't care about any of that all you care about is um certain values like peak level Look at the peak level of this file. It's minus 34.5. Not saying it's dramatically low. No, you're not seeing that now I'm seeing it. So do you see it? Yes or no? What in the blazes it's showing it on my screen in in the in the share window stopping sharing entire screen Take three Now do you see it? It's not showing up in the in the box there It beats me dude. This is why we're going to go to a different production software At some point in the near future Because this stuff drives me crazy. But anyway acx check will show you a window looks a lot like those analyze tools And oh, that's right. Adobe audition. It's called amplitude statistics In twisted wave, it's called analyze in audacity. It's called acx check and that's going to give you A very similar readout. It's going to show you minimum noise or minimum volume in the file at your noise floor It's going to show you peak. It's going to show you average volume, right? So try acx check If you don't have it in your version audacity, it's probably an old version Or you didn't install the acx check free plugin that you can get from audacity's website Moving on. All right Next question is from fiberjazz Does source connect just allow remote site the remote site to hear what i'm recording and give direction And then send the files or does the other studio actually do the recording or can it work the other way? Dan what brand of chair are you using? I got an x chair. Uh, it seems to be really quiet when you move. Isn't that something? Uh Anyway a source connect you're the expert on source connect and then we'll go back to the other thing now Uh, this works kind of And send the files So source connect is Got one main job and that is to connect your audio from your studio to the other studio So they hear you in real time Like you guys are hearing us tonight in real time that are watching us live except source connect maintains the sound quality at a very high standard It allows for higher bit rates. So it can do higher resolution audio It will also replace dropouts in the audio That other systems cannot do it does it automatically. So there is no Automatic recording and sending back of files. In fact, if you're being recorded on source connect, you don't have to Um to playback anything because there's somebody else who's doing that. That's the job of the engineer Who's running the source connect session? That's one of the beauties of being directed in sorry in a source connect session You don't have to be the engineer You just get to be the actor somebody else is dealing with playback and shuffling files around comping together takes You know all this stuff. That's their job. They're getting paid to be the engineer So that's that's one reason why source connect sessions And have a higher budget because they can afford and pay have have, you know, a proper production team Um, and it also means that you as the actor just get to be actor What a treat just just talk, you know, I mean, it's great It's source connect is super you just turn it on, you know Once it's all registered and all the the passwords are memorized and stuff You just go in there and you know two weeks ago I was working with uh with robo and andrew and we did it by source connect They were in australia And demo just came out sup sounding super because I just talked which is cool now back to my chair Uh once once upon a time mark cashman showed me his chair in his studio Which essentially converted into a shea's lounge So he could close the door and make it look like he was working when in reality. He's just lying back So I wanted something similar and incredibly comfortable My back's not the greatest so At that time of year My birthday is in late december. My wife's birthday is early december and our anniversary is right after thanksgiving It's a really tough time of the year for gift giving So You know, we don't like to guess. I mean, I don't mind guessing but you know, it's like Our earrings this that the other thing My wife says, what do you want? I said, I would like a really good chair. Oh, look x chair. This is a really nice chair And as you can hear it makes no noise. It's really comfortable. It's really adjustable And it's not cheap So if you want a good chair, you're gonna have to spend for it Alrighty ellen conqueran asks Gain, do you mean the gain on my interface doesn't have to be turned up all the way before the lights starting Start turning orange and red Well, okay, we've said this one a million times Here's the key to using The vu meter especially on a focus right um because it's got that great halo meter around it Always in the green always in the yellow Getting into the orange may be flashing into the red Once in a while, that's that's the way we we gauge The right levels if it's into the orange, it's loud enough if it's just in the green It's not loud enough if you're in the green and the yellow That suffices just fine Uh, so but that may require you turning the gain up a significant amount To get it to that and the thing is is it has to be Those levels whether you're talking softly or you're talking loud So you want to have a setting for both your Conversational voice and then a lower setting for when you're talking a little bit louder Excellent. Yeah Keith Copeland another question. So is the Apollo twin overkill Kind of a similar thing to the pro tools as being overkill as far as voiceover is concerned bingo And my favorite is the voice actor who insists on using pro tools And the Apollo twin Well, there's sort of built for each other There's so much overlapping of functionality when you have an Apollo and you have pro tools because of the ability to have auxiliary sands and different mixes and Real-time processing and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it gets crazy. But yeah, I would say it's very much a kin It's also a kin in terms of like needing to be compatible, right? You can do an upgrade to your system and all of a sudden things just don't work at all And then what do you do in water? Right, so um pro tools is very sensitive At least it always had been very sensitive to the version of os you're running Um and the Apollo twin maybe a little bit less or so And in fact, actually I've got these are original Apollo twins. I have two of them in the desk here all both from clients These are these still work. Um, they're eight 10 10 years old. Maybe they still work But um, that's because they do keep them updated with software and drivers and firmware And I haven't seen any of their stuff go obsolete yet, which is pretty amazing Um, but uh, yes, it's always a problem. You got to be on the same versions You got to be up to date or not up to date and stay versions back to make sure that things still keep working It's uh, all that mess. That's other reasons why we We really don't recommend Adding that complexity to your studio unless you have a really darn good reason to do it, right? I generally The way I generally refer to when people ask me, what should I have this? What about I need to have all the sophisticated stuff You don't need the control room for a nuclear reactor To run a hamster running in a wheel Oh, yeah, here's another one. Okay. Everybody's got an opinion, right? There's some very good producers out there I had a producer somebody that I know not This was not not without my knowledge Go to one of my client studios Go into a studio Solly had the certain preamp and said, you know, it sounds great and go in there and mess with all the knobs on this preamp Oh He thought it sounded great, right? My client after the guy left not to be rude was like This did not sound great Sounded awful. So just one person's opinion on settings. No matter how big shot they are and own a studio and Produce and all the stuff still doesn't mean they know what the heck they're doing In your studio with your voice and your mic and your gear Don't let anybody touch your stuff. Yeah every voice is different every room is different And it's nobody else's business as long as it sounds good coming out. That's all that matters Somebody yeah, if you're booking Don't worry about it. You know Well, that was a bunch of good questions tonight makes for for an easy show. Thanks producers. Yes Thank you very much for for adding to all that Anyway, if you've got a question for us, you can write to us at any time at the guys at v obs dot tv and that will You know if if you write a question to us, it gets first in the queue You don't have to like, you know wait, you know If you're watching the show and you have a question you put it in the chat room Yeah, we'll get to it if you write to us It goes first in the queue because one will look at we get to read and go Hmm, how can we answer this? You might even give a little pre-thought. We might even do a video about it. You never know. Yeah, never know So let's let's go that way Anyway, thank you for all your questions We got a few things to talk about after the break. So don't go away. We'll be right back With some important stuff. So, uh, here's some more important stuff This is ariana rattner and you're enjoying voiceover body shop with dan lennard and george wittem v obs dot tv 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 voiceover extra dot 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 Voiceover extra has hundreds of articles free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed Learn from the most respected talents coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions Bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books auditioning 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 voiceover extra dot com. That's voiceover x t r a dot com You know one things for sure you have to have a website if you're a voice actor It's your business card along with your demos and stuff like that So if you have to have a website which you absolutely have to do and you don't have one yet Here's a real easy way to get yourself up and online Like that and that is to go to voice actor dot com voice actor dot com It's a subsidiary of voice actor websites dot com But they've made it even easier by having a website that is full of templates And the great thing about templates is they're just templates. They're like, okay. I can use all right this background Oh, wait, I can change the background. I can change the color scheme of this sort of this template I can put in all my information. It says, okay. What's your name? What's your contact information? It has a way to put your demos in there And you get it up and you get it up and running and on the internet Starting off for free So you can get at least get the idea of what your website should look like And then for $20 a month you get your own URL and That's what you put on your business card. Hey, you want to listen to my demos? Here's my website or if somebody calls you and says like can I hear your demos? Just go to my website and there they are. What should you have in your in your website? Of course, perhaps your name not necessarily your picture unless you have a you don't have a voice for radio Uh and your demos and your contact information. That's all you need But you want to have a pleasant background to it and all that stuff and it's easy to navigate That's the most important thing. So go over to voiceactor.com and get your website up and running like that 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 Hi, this is bill farmer and you are watching voiceover body shop. It's great Take two. Alrighty Thanks for joining us tonight next week on this very show. We've got this guy dr. Dialect PJ Olchan will be joining us. He is a great coach We're going to talk about accents and the stuff that he teaches and Then in two weeks. We've got another great Another great guy coming on it is Jeff It is Jeff Howell Who is hey right on he is a great promo director and coach and he's we're going to talk about promo So we got lots of people coming up over before as as we roll downhill to the end of 2023 And the season where my wife and I have to keep getting each other gifts. Um, anyway So make sure you're on for that, uh, and you're going to hear some great stuff from them Uh, we have to of course plug what we do Uh, if you want to work with me about your home studio, you go over to home voiceover studio.com And have a riot just looking at that site with the specimen collection cup and all that And if you want to work with george, you go over to George the tech and if you like deals go to george the dot tech slash V obs and there are discounts on there right now discount code is V obs Is it get 10? I don't know if you go to the landing page, you'll you'll see the discount code Yeah, there it is fans 10 Gets you 10 off any of the webinars content. We have a webinar coming up By the time you guys see this it would be tomorrow Um, I think on universal audio apollo the thing that we were just telling you don't get well I can't get y'all to stop buying these things sometimes So i'm gonna teach you how to get the most out of it. I'm doing an advanced adobe I'm doing an advanced course on universal audio apollo Trying to get it to do anything voiceover people need it to do That's coming up and you can stop at george the dot tech slash webinars And join in if you if you are one of those people that have invested and learned and want to know how to use it better All right, you got some stuff the other stuff piling up there too, don't you? There's a few booths. I'm I'm in charge of getting rid of for some companies Um, and if you're interested, I've got two studio bricks pro booths pretty big ones And one vocal booth calm diamond platinum series. That's the I think it's the five carrot model Um, if you were interested reach out. I haven't been putting these things on facebook and it drives me nuts I get a bunch of terrible fake ad fake offers to buy them and Just i'll put them up somewhere in the next week or two But for now just email me george at george the dot tech if you're interested in the Booths that are all for sale. These are all in the los angeles area So you'll be in charge of disassembling loading them out and driving them or having them move to your location And then putting them together which is putting back together which is like working with lego Hmm Alrighty, who are our donors of the week? We've got greg cooper greg newt grace newton. Sorry, grace. Yeah, thank you greg Uh christopher apperson Robert leadham steven chandler kasey clack jonathan grant thomas pinto greg thomas A doctor voice antland productions martha conne nine four nine designs sarah borges phillips appear frying page robert writer shawna pennington bairdon griffith trey mosley diana birdsall maria makas and sandra manwheeler, you know, you can donate to the show and help us maintain the magnificent technological Perfection that the show is every week and every dollar helps make it even better never never ever We'll figure that one out sooner or later. Uh, just go to our home page, uh at bobs.tv and you click on there. There's all sorts of things you can click on but You know, you can donate to the show and you can also subscribe to our newsletter So you can know exactly who's gonna be on what's coming out. That's right Uh, I need to thank our sponsors like harlan hogan's voiceover essentials voiceover extra source elements bioheros.com voice actor.com and worldvoices.org the industry association Of free lads voice talent joined today because we got lots of cool stuff about to happen there Our thanks to uh, our wonderful staff jeff holman Put up his imdb because that's part of how he gets paid to do this Slash jeff holman with two f's and one l and one m and one n that's right and put them in your next production And great work in the chat room tonight, especially taking votes and stuff like that last week Also Sumer lino for being our director and making it all happen from Wherever it is that she is at any one particular time But she can do it from wherever she is at any particular time and of course lee pennie for being lee pennie Well, that's gonna do it for us this week. Thanks for your questions. Thanks for watching. Um, you know Again Voiceover is a very difficult business. It's a lot of people out there who say they're voice actors Uh, but i've heard their audio and maybe they can act but their audio is not very good It's a lot of moving parts. It is. Yeah, you gotta gotta do everything right, but in the meantime We've just come to the conclusion if it sounds good. It is good I'm dan Leonard and i'm george widdum and this is voiceover body shop or vo B s tech talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk Great Anyway, have a great week everybody. We'll see you next time here on voiceover body shop Pj old jan next week. So we'll have a great time. Hey take care