The VO Meter… Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. Hi, everyone.
Welcome to episode 11 of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We have a super exciting show coming up. We are basically like kids in a candy store because we are interviewing two of our idols, basically, George Whittam and Dan Lenard, from VOBS, formerly the East West Audio Body Shop. We watch their show every week.
We’re in the chat room contributing. They, I like to say they taught me everything I know, and I’m just so excited to get to that interview.
I am too. George and Dan have been very generous with their time and have agreed to come on our set after being on theirs. Was it two months ago?
Yeah, about that.
Very cool. Yeah, so I hope you guys are interested in a gear-centric episode because that’s what these guys are all about.
Yeah, it got a little geeky, but that’s okay.
Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Len, we’re raising the sophistication of our podcast.
Exactly.
But with that, let’s talk about some current events. Do you have anything exciting that you wanna talk about, Paul?
I do, actually. I mentioned last episode that I had taken on a long title or just finished a long title under a pseudonym, and I went looking for some more work under a said pseudonym, and I just landed a six-book series that’ll be coming out in the next couple of months. I’m working on the first one now.
They’re all about an hour to an hour and a half, short stories in the same genre. So those will be coming out shortly. Again, if you’d like to go check it out, listen to episode 10 with the little Easter egg about how you can find the pseudonym.
Do that, and you can look me up on Audible.
Now I just can’t get that theme song out of my head.
Which one’s that?
He’s the man with the name that you want to touch.
Oh, right, you’re right, right.
But you mustn’t touch.
And then I have another client on Freelancer who is sending me an audio book every two weeks. And I have one of those coming out this week and another one I should be working on starting tomorrow. And then finally I have a client today who has sent me the first of what is supposed to be a 30,000 hour English lesson job.
30,000 hour?
Right, I should explain it’s an ensemble where sort of like the work I’ve been doing with you, actually, there’s several different narrators playing different parts for English language learning for non-English speakers. And I’m doing one of the roles. So I don’t know exactly how many lines it’ll be, but it’s supposed to be 30,000 hours total.
It’s a job out of India. And I’m working on it obviously remotely and did the first job today in a small piece and we’ll see how the rest goes over the next couple of months.
Very cool. I mean, it’s nice to have a giant, gantic gig like that that you can rely on. That’s very cool.
Yeah, unfortunately, I didn’t bill at that rate. So it’s not like it, and there’s no retainer. So it’s not like it’s a guarantee.
So I’m hoping that they’ll keep me on and they’ll like what they hear, but it sort of remains to be seen. I have to make sure I do a good job, which I always do with my clients, but especially this time, because that carried out there with so much extra work.
Very cool, and if they need a young 20 to 40-something-year-old voice, just let me know.
I will let you know for sure. Although I watched the… They have a scratch track with a computerized voice, and I watched the video today, and there’s like seven women characters and me.
So I don’t know what that means.
Lucky man.
So what’s going on with you?
Well, last episode, we were talking about when I went out to Seattle to get some professional headshots made for my new agent, and I finally got those back, and they look awesome. I try not to be too vain about it, but I posted some of my favorites on Facebook, and I got 200 responses that ranged from the hilarious to the downright raunchy.
Yeah, I participated in some of those as well.
What was that?
I participated in some of those comments as well.
That’s right. But I mean, largely they were all positive. It was pretty hilarious.
Yeah, I saw them too. I think they look great.
Well, thank you very much. A lot of my friends were like, you’re a lot handsomer in these than I remember you being. And so, I’m like, really?
I saw you like three weeks ago. And so, I don’t know.
That’s not where they saw you. I mean, I was talking to you offline about how the last time I saw you in person was at VO Atlanta, where you were basically on no sleep and tearing your hair out over the challenge.
Just drenched in sweat and emaciated and like bags under my eyes.
Falling up a stairwell. So, you definitely didn’t look as good as you do when you’re all coiffed and taking headshots.
Well rested and cleaned up.
Yeah. That’s great. Congrats on those.
They really came out great.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
So, Michael Doucet out of Seattle did a really good job on those. Other than that, I’ve just got my monthly e-learning project that I’m working on right now. Just sent some scripts to you this week, actually.
I just finished some huge narration projects that I was working for this lovely German production company. We have a very nice rapport going so far. But this was 31 individual scripts, about half hour each.
Yeah, it was a pretty long project. But the rate was very nice as well. And they were a pleasure to work with.
So, hopefully they will come back for more.
Now, did you do those all at once and then split them up later? Or did you record them all individually?
I usually do it in a couple of sessions. I focus on long form mainly. So I do try to record long stints for an hour or two and then just kind of divide it up later.
If I’m smart, usually I’ll start and stop and record individual files just for archiving purposes. But you can do the same thing in twisted way, just using the markers and the split by markers feature.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. I’ve done similar work in the past where I use that exact feature, put the marker in, split by marker, and it will put them all in the same folder for you with that file name convention that you create. It’s really awesome.
It is very awesome. And Dan Lenard actually has some great tips about getting very specific with how you arrange your markers so it’s like everything has the same amount of opening of room tone and everything is uniform. And it’s very cool.
You should definitely check it out.
Awesome. Well, we will get to our main topic and our interview with Dan and George in just a minute. But first, why don’t you tell us about our VO Meter Stick this week?
So up next, we have the very talented Jack DiGoglia. You might know Jack as the incredibly talented transcripter for the VOBS podcasting episodes. Like he’ll watch these episodes and write very detailed notes and transcriptions, including time codes of interesting things that happen in a given episode.
So as my workloads increased, I can’t watch these episodes as consistently as I used to. So I’m very grateful to Jack for always providing these detailed, just wonderful write-ups of the episode. And if I read them and I really like what it was about, I’ll still go back and watch it.
I don’t care. So thank you, Jack. That is a great volunteer service that you’re offering us.
This is a slightly different VO Meter Stick than we usually do in that Jack has actually sent us a series of bloopers from some of his audiobook recording sessions. So without further ado, take it away Jack with our VO Meter shtick.
Okay, everybody, it’s time for the VO Meter shtick. What did he say? It’s time for the VO…
Oh, never mind. The VO Meter shtick? Oh, got it.
He touched Coulter’s cheek. He touched Cotter’s neck. Judy countered as she paused to push her thick glasses back up her nose.
As she paused to push her thick glasses back up on her nose. Her pace failed. Her face paled.
Hiding his hands in his trembling hands. With an amused look in his eyes and a well-modulated tone to his voice that carried a hint of condensation. That carried a hint of condescension.
Emergency medical personnel transported the city to city hospital under heavy escort. Several minutes passed and his version became blurred. Hoffmeyer grabbed a set of cufflinks from his belt.
Hoffmeyer grabbed a set of handcuffs from his belt. She held up her two favorite Barbie dolls. They look like the beach.
They like the beach. The Huey was painted in drab olive. The Huey was painted in olive drab and had seen better days.
Server virtualization is a mythology of dividing the resources of a computer. Server virtualization is a methodology of dividing the resources of a computer. He pulled the hair off her forehead.
He pushed the hair off her forehead. This pre-Columbian artifact is made with such intimacy. This pre-Columbian artifact is made with such intricacy.
He had a preposterous gut that spilled out over his belt. He had a prosperous gut that spilled out over his belt. Nazar al-Bayati supported a heavy brush of a mustache.
Nazar al-Bayati supported a heavy brush of a mustache. They were all chanting among themselves. They were all chatting among themselves.
Flocked wallpaper, brass wall scones, brass wall sconces, her head gently cradling her son’s head, her hand gently cradling her son’s head. You’re looking at images from the side scan solar system. You’re looking at images from the side scan sonar system.
The Sphinx is southwest of the Great Period. The Sphinx is southwest of the Great Pyramid. As lunchtime approached…
As lunchtime approached… Willie’s second tug pulled her through the side of the garage. Willie’s second tug pulled her through the side door of the garage.
By three years of age, a child’s speech skills and vocabulary. By three years of age, a child’s speech skills and vocabulary. Mr. Javier asks them if there were any new words in the book they don’t have on their P-list yet.
Speak freely.
Thank you, Jack, those were hilarious. Something I hadn’t thought of, creating your own personal blooper reel. Good stuff.
So believe it or not, we actually do not have a questionable gear purchase this week. I know our fans are going to clamor for it, but I managed to not buy anything stupid this week.
Pretty much the same for me too. I have some knickknacks and just minor purchases that I have varying levels of satisfaction with, but nothing to bore or like to tell your ears off. So no questionable gear purchase this week, folks.
Sorry.
I was also a little scared that Dan and George would yell at me. So I tried to restrain myself at least this week while we talk to them, and hopefully it’ll go over well.
Well, they might anyways. I don’t know if they like poking fun, but who knows? Maybe they can tell us about some of their questionable gear purchases.
That’d be awesome, yeah.
All right, but speaking of Dan and George, we’re sure that you guys are chomping at the bit to get to hear what they have to say about all things audio. So without further ado, here are Dan and George. All right, we are moving on into our Source Connect Now studio, and I am very excited to have these two upstanding gentlemen.
They have over 200, that’s 275 episodes of their East West Audio Body Shop slash Voice Over Body Shop podcast. They’ve had agents, celebrity voice talent, anyone under the sun that’s related to VO, you name it. We have the home studio master, Dan Lenard, and the audio engineer of the stars, George Whittam.
How are you guys doing?
Fabulous, great to be here, guys.
Yeah, man, it’s really fun to join you. Fun to join you guys here today.
All right, and we are so excited to have you. So we’ve got a lot of questions, and Paul, why don’t you start off with that?
Well, guys, we are big fans, as we talked about in the show, but we may have some people that may not be as familiar with your show and your individual backgrounds. And I thought maybe we could start by just talking a little bit about how you got started and some of the things that brought you to where you are today. And actually, if we talk about backgrounds, we have a lot in common.
George, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but my wife went to Virginia Tech at the same time you did. I think it overlapped by three out of the four years. And my brother-in-law was the exact same year as you were there.
And Dan, I sold insurance for a while, which is something I know you got into and got out of quickly. There’s a lot of commonalities there. And I was wondering if you could just talk about where you started and how you’ve gotten to the point you are now with your businesses and the show.
All right, well, you know, I’ve been in broadcasting. I started like in 1975. Yes, there was human beings on this planet back then.
No one was alive then.
I was in radio and television until about 1992. And then I sold insurance, life health, long-term care, disability insurance, broke a few telephones trying to do all this stuff for all that.
Got your Series 7 in 66?
I did. And then, and I did sell mutual funds and things along those lines and annuities. But I hated it.
So I got out of that. And my mother-in-law, bless her heart, suggested that perhaps I go back to school and teach high school what I really loved, which was social studies. And US history and the Constitution.
And I did. When I was 40 years old, I went back to college, got my teaching degree, and ended up teaching in our public schools for three years and really enjoyed teaching, despised the very ground that administrators and other people, you know, they’re horrible. I mean, there are some wonderful people in education, but…
As an institution, you’re saying.
As an institution, it’s pretty bad.
Not narrowing it down to anybody in particular.
Well, I could narrow it down to a couple of people in particular. We won’t mention any names, and they’re not in Voice Over and they would never know this. I ever said this.
That’s every teacher, by the way.
Yeah, but I tend to think that our educational system was run by a bunch of insane Marxists who really were hell-bent on making sure that this country got completely dumbed down. So when you tell kids, hey, you know, you can be something, they don’t like you telling them that. It’s kind of interesting.
Anyway, education and I obviously split ways around 19, or in 2001, and I found myself at home finishing up my master’s degree and a project that I did got me involved in recording again and doing voiceover again. And I just checked out to see what was going on in voiceover. And voiceover was in 2003, was really just starting to take off as far as an internet business was concerned.
So I had the chance to really get ride the front crest of the wave on that. But because I had experience working in radio studios and recording studios, setting up the proper environment for proper recording was a real simple thing for me and using the right equipment. And people started…
I would list it… Back in the early days of online forums and stuff, I would start to type in things and people started to notice that I was commenting on it and they started writing me questions. And after about a year of spending a long time writing questions or answering questions, the missus said, you know, you really should hang out a shingle.
You can’t take 30 years of experience and just sort of like dole it out for free. And so about 2005, I started becoming the home studio master and been doing it ever since. And it’s always fun to teach people.
Having my master’s degree in education, I apparently am able to relate fairly, what is seemingly complex to make it a little bit more simple. George?
Oh, whoa.
Remember, you’re here too. He’s only heard that story about 30, 40 times.
Well, my background is really in music. And then I studied music at Virginia Tech, got a degree in recording and audio engineering and music performance and a minor in communications. I did radio in college, just for the hell of it.
I was on AM and FM and didn’t think much of it. I just thought it was fun. It was an activity.
It was neat to be on the air, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a career in broadcasting at all. I was really focused on recording. That’s what I wanted to do.
At graduation…
Can I pause you for a second? You said a minor in performance. What was your instrument you played?
I have a major in music, and I have a minor in telecommunications.
Oh, sorry.
But my music performance, I played trumpet.
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Oh, I did too.
That’s another commonality. I have a trumpet sitting right outside the whisper room.
My dad’s still an active musician. George A. Whittam in the chat room is still being…
He calls himself Brass Lips sometimes.
Yeah, I was the exact opposite in undergrad. I was a communications major and a music minor.
I love it, man. There was a lot of commonalities.
Funny.
And I just never was big into performance. I hated practicing. That’s probably the big problem.
So I was in engine engineering. I started a recording business in 1997 with my dad called Eldorado Recording Services, which was built into an Eldorado RV. You ever see those tan and brown striped aluminum siding chunker RVs you see in Venice, California along the side of the road?
I used to have one of those with a studio in it. That is awesome. And it was for doing remotes and stuff.
It was a lot of fun, didn’t make any money, burned a lot of money, but my dad was very supportive. He thought it was really cool and fun. Recorded a bunch of stuff, but then decided it was time to move to LA.
Came out in 2004 after three years of doing radio broadcast for the Eagles Radio Network for football. That was where I got the…
E-A-G-L-E-S, Eagle… Eagles!
Yeah, that’s where I got to spend some time in real broadcasting, doing real stuff where actually people were listening and…
Did you work with Meryl Rees?
I did.
I worked with… This is Meryl Rees.
And you’re listening to 94WYSP.
And I worked with that guy for a couple years. For our fans that don’t know, he’s the classic voice of the Eagles for the last like 50 years. He’s amazing.
Yeah, he’s been there a long time. He’s like the Harry… Is it the Harry…
Harry Carrey?
Harry Carrey.
Harry Carrey was the fifth.
The very… The Vin Scully of the…
Yeah, you know, those guys that have been doing this forever, that’s him. Anyway, left that world after three years and came out here, started doing answering ads on Craigslist for film production sound mixing, because I figured that was the way to make a living here. At this point, Voice Over was still not really on the radar.
I had helped with setting up one studio in Philadelphia and just, that was it, you know, it was just me helping out a buddy. Moved out here, did that film production stuff for a while, started getting a referral or two from an agent, actually a manager named Jason Marks, because I had helped out that one voice actor, his name’s Howard Parker. I call him my client zero.
Ground zero.
Yeah, he’s like client zero. He’s the origin of the disease. And he’s still a very successful…
Yeah, very successful voice actor to this day. But, and then he referred me to his manager, his manager started referring me clients. Somewhere along the way, Connection led me to Don LaFontaine, worked with him for a few years.
And then not long after Don passed away, Dan and I met at… Maybe it was around the time or a little bit before. Dan and I met at…
Yeah, we met at…
We met in 2008.
2008. I met Don in 2007.
Yes. Yeah, Dan and I met at Voice 2007.
And then you and I met at 2008.
Correct. Dan helped me out. I was doing my first presentation in front of people live about Voice Over, ever.
And Dan helped me on the fly, dumb it down, so it didn’t glaze everybody’s eyeballs over in the room. And well, we hit it off ever since. I mean, we just stayed friends after that.
So how did that lead into the show itself?
Well, we started doing a few things together online. Remember, we did a webinar, I think, for one of the pay to play services.
Oh, we did.
Yes.
I forgot about that.
Yeah, hey, it was like seven, eight years ago.
So that was the first thing we did together.
Together, and we collaborated on that. And then we did a workshop at the Don LaFontaine Lab. Yes, we did.
Because my mother lives out here in California, and we would come out here a lot, and so I’d come visit George, and we’re like, hey, why don’t we do an all-day workshop? Or was it a two-day workshop?
I think so.
I think it was a two-day workshop. And that was a lot of fun, working with a lot of people that we knew and a few fresh faces. And then how this came about is, originally, we were thinking, yeah, we should probably just do a, everybody is doing podcasting these days.
Maybe we should do a podcast about Voice Over Studios. And then I’m not sure why we decided to do it as a TV show. I think it’s because you thought you could.
We were talking about how we love car talk. That was part of it as well. Remember the car talk show?
I mean, it was the way the report of those guys had, and they made it really funny and fun. And we’re like, we could do that. Maybe people would want to listen to that.
So we wanted to do it live. We knew that. We wanted to do it live.
We didn’t want to have to edit it and post. That was a big… We’re like, if we’re gonna do this and commit to it and do it every week, we can’t have a lot of post time.
So that’s why we did it live. And since we’re doing it live at the time, when did we start, 2000?
March 11th, 2011. March 22nd, 2011.
Man, I’m so glad I have Dan.
Yeah, that’s about all I remember.
He has a memory. But, and I was like, well, we’re gonna do this audio, but then we’re gonna have our webcams. Let’s just have them anyway.
And at the time, Ustream was the only way I knew how to stream it live. So we were like, let’s just turn on our cameras. It was really incidental.
The cameras were really not the focus. It was more about the audio, but the video stuck. And I’m regretting it ever since.
Because it just gets more and more complex.
It’s so complicated.
And then we did it for five years. I was in… Remotely, I was in Buffalo.
George was in Santa Monica. And occasionally we would get together, which was always a lot of fun, especially when we would get at FAFCon or something, and we would have a live audience.
The VO Peeps, we did it at one time?
Twice we did it there, yeah. We did the anniversary show there, and then we were over at the VO Peeps. There’s like 40, 50 people at that.
You guys actually built a booth in Anne’s room.
Oh, yes. That was great. That’s a classic video.
That is classic.
And actually that booth, I think somebody else is using that now.
It will live on.
It lives on, as does the studio suit that it was based around. And then for a number of reasons, my family had to move out here. It had to.
We really wanted to, but we had a good excuse to come out to California. And now George and I are 20 minutes apart. And…
There’s a no brainer to do it here.
To do it here.
Because Dan has a studio.
Yeah, the studio here is really nice. It’s cool.
Well, you really lucked out on a house too. I mean, I know you guys had a very specific criteria for it, but wow, it’s a gorgeous studio and house. So well done, Dan.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, I mean, they nailed it. Being in LA, your chances of finding a house with a studio are slightly increased.
Well guys, I know you didn’t want to rehash that story, but even though I’ve watched all the episodes, there’s still some great nuggets in there that I didn’t know about and I’ll bet our fans will appreciate. But we would like to move into some of the more juicy questions we had. So Sean, I know you want to start us off with a question you had for the guys.
Well, yeah, I mean, both of you have been working with recording and broadcast technology for decades. What are some of the biggest innovations you’ve seen that still kind of blow your mind?
Innovations that have blow our minds.
Well, I mean, the first…
Dan’s been around longer, so there’s more innovations that he has seen than I have.
There was the advent of magnetic tape.
And then DAT, and then…
Internet.
Yeah, well, yeah, the internet is clearly, that’s the most mind blowing thing.
Absolute game changer, right?
It is, and it’s really what makes the voice over business what it is today. And it’s, that more than anything else is really driving what goes on and how people communicate. And the fact that people are communicating using the internet is what’s driving the voice over business because everything has to be narrated or somebody has to physically talk about something.
It’s created more opportunities and more talent all at the same time.
Yeah, well, opportunities, talent is another question.
Talented parties.
Yeah, it’s a plural talent. Yeah, it’s an actual name of something.
But I don’t know, in terms of like, you’re probably thinking more of technology, I’m assuming, Paul. Is that what you mean?
Gear? That was actually Sean’s question, but…
Oh, yeah. Oh, Sean, sorry. And it could be like, but that was something that I hadn’t considered.
And it actually kind of moves on to my next question. How do you guys, because of the internet, people are allowed to do this from home, how do you feel about the fact that a home studio is pretty much a given necessity now?
We think it’s absolutely freaking fantastic.
From our perspective, it’s people that make a living designing, setting up, troubleshooting, you know, all that stuff, sooth saying.
Yeah, and teaching people how to use it. It’s fabulous for us.
It’s a good thing for us.
Because honestly, well, go ahead.
No, I mean, you can speak to it from a voice actor’s perspective. For me, my entire business is based on the fact that people have to have a home studio. I would not do what I do without it, from a voice actor’s perspective.
Well, from a voice actor’s perspective, it’s tremendously, you know, it gives you a tremendous amount of freedom. It allows you to be, you know, an entrepreneur, you know, that sort of thing. So, but you have to know, it’s one of those important pieces of your voice over business.
You know, you’ve got to be a good business person, understand marketing and bookkeeping. You have to have talent. You’ve got to be a good voice actor because there’s no room for not knowing what you’re doing because, you know, your auditions are going to get round filed when they listen to The Slate.
And it’s important to have a good sounding home studio that you have rapid access to. And not something it’s like, oh, I got to take it down. I got to set it up again, take it down.
You want some, you want a permanent recording space that’s dedicated in your place of residence. And whether it’s an apartment, you know, your home, you know, a motel out on Route 66 somewhere, you’ve got to have that. And you’ve got to know how to use it right.
There’s a few basic things that if you understand, you can succeed at it. But you’ve got to understand what’s behind those basics. And that’s generally what George and I like to teach.
I mean, we physically set things up, but we like teaching people how to use it. Although I don’t know, maybe you don’t teach them as much. So in case something goes wrong, you’re the one they have to call.
I know you guys are far more noble than that. But since we’re on the topic of education, what are some sort of misconceptions that you are always trying to steer, like a new talent away from?
You need a mic preamp. Yeah, you need a TLM 103.
You need a tube mic preamp.
Tubes, yeah, I want to use tubes. Why?
You need a mixer.
Yeah, you need a mixer. You need…
You need a compressor.
Yeah, front-end processing. I got an Apex 286. It’s like, why?
Just the other day, I told someone to unhook their Apex channel from their system.
I do it all the time. Yeah, it happens to me at least once a week. And the thing that we do, and as troubleshooters, and the way you troubleshoot, and I learned this from Mr. Soman, my eighth grade power mechanic shop teacher.
You gotta ask questions and you gotta go in the order of how things work. And maybe we don’t think about that, but troubleshooting is, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?
So most of these questions are very cart before the horse mentality is what you’re saying.
Exactly. A lot of people are getting information off the internet and YouTube. And the factor I like to mention is that, somebody may be an expert in a home studio, their own.
And the fact of the matter is, every room is different, every voice is different. People talk louder, people talk softer, the materials, the room that you’re recording in is different. And there is no one set thing to make something, to make your audio up to a professional standard in that particular room.
And it really has to be done in a customized way.
Well, with that in mind, I know how you guys like to keep it simple. What would you say are the bare minimums somebody needs in order to start a home studio?
I mean, quiet.
What?
I mean, quiet is expensive.
Ultimately.
Yeah, it can be very expensive unless you live in the boonies and you just start it out somewhere really, really quiet. Yeah, if you happen to live in a very quiet area in a quiet home with no animals and children and a very quiet air conditioner, Or furnace, depending on where you are. Whatever it is, then you’re lucky.
You’re like way ahead of the game because noise is the enemy of recording. And it’s, yes, there is software that takes noise out pretty effectively, but still to this day, we really wanna have clean audio and noise is the problem. So if you start out with a place that’s quiet, the rest is gravy because you can get, and I’m gonna say it right now, a USB microphone that will sound really freaking good.
We’ve done USB microphone shootouts and I know that they can sound good. I’m not saying it’s the way to go, but for some people who are really technologically averse, which seems to be everybody. Like we know for a fact that Maurice LaMarche uses an Apogee mic in his walk-in closet, right?
He told us that on the show.
And his car, yes.
And holding in his hands.
Yes, yeah, this is happening.
But he’s Maurice LaMarche, he can get away with that.
Well, I mean, that’s something else to talk about, but I mean, a USB mic or a very affordable Audio-Technica mic, I don’t think there’s a mic from the Audio-Technica line that is bad. Like even the least expensive…
The 2020 can be a little noisy.
It’s okay, it’s not the…
You go up to the 2035, and I’ve been recommending that to people.
The non-USB ones. Right, yes. The USB stuff can be a little noisy.
Non-USB, you can start with a 20 or a 2035, I love. That’s one I really like to recommend. In fact, I made a custom package with B&H that has a 2035 and the interface is a Steinberg UR12, which is like 80 bucks.
And that’s a really clean starter setup that works beautifully well. And then a good, decent pair of headphones.
And like we were talking about before, a lot of people, they want to reach for the industry standards like the 103s and stuff like that, but that setup’s already past $1,000. You just listed off a $200 setup that sounds perfectly professional.
Right. In the right environment.
Right, in the right environment. Yes, yes, exactly. So that can be as inexpensive or as expensive as you make it.
Right, well, I’m of the belief, and I repeat this a trillion times a week, is that 95% of the quality of your audio is dependent on the acoustical signature of the room that you recorded. Absolutely. And it’s not the microphone.
And another 20%, we’re gonna have 130% when we’re done with this, but another 20% is the mic technique, placement and technique.
Right. And those are the factors that really affect audio. And when you say words like industry standard, my immediate reaction is, what industry are you talking about?
Yeah, and if you’re talking, I think people have a big misconception, especially if they are experienced talent but haven’t recorded on their own before, they think that they have to have a nice room with a couch and guitars hanging on the wall and windows and a couple of fabulous babes hanging out or whatever it is that goes on in a recording studio.
Yeah, those commercial studios are there to impress the client and really wow them and make them feel good about spending $300 an hour for studio time. And your home studio is designed to do one job really well and that is make you sound really clean, accurate, and well, as Dan says, like you, sound like you.
And I think people get, they have a misconception about what it is that they’re trying to do. And the fact of the matter is, is nobody needs to see how the sausage is made. They only hear it.
That’s right. I love the sausage making analogy. It’s one of my favorites.
It makes complete sense.
And is there a point guys where having what’s so called an industry standard is actually a bad idea? Because my personal situation, you may have heard the last episode, I got a TLM 103 in here with me and it was a mess because it was way too sensitive and did not work at all for my space.
Right.
Right.
When you’re using a mic like that, that was designed for being used in a studio environment, you know, really high end productions. It is extremely sensitive and it has a pretty wide pickup pattern. So you have to have a good room, very low noise to get a good sound out of that mic in most cases.
The other air quotes again in his true standard mic is the Sennheiser 416. But that became an industry standard because of the use of it in promo by Ernie Anderson in the 70s. And that mic just sort of stuck around because of his use of that mic in the 70s.
And it was just became the Hollywood promo mic and trailer mic.
It just has some interesting mic technique that’s involved to make it sound good. And you have to be extremely on mic. You can’t get sloppy with mic placement and get off to the side and it sounds really bad really quick.
So those are two mics that have arguably become industry standards, at least in the promo trailer commercial world. But it doesn’t require those kind of mics to get good voice over recordings.
It’s not in the least. And it’s not the mic. There’s no microphone out there that enhances your performance.
There’s nothing that’s going to… You’re going to turn on the mic and suddenly you sound like Jon Hamm. It’s just not that you can’t read like or sound like Jon Hamm, yet people believe that.
Because they watch YouTube and then it’s like, well, this is the best mic for voice… There’s no such thing as the best or… From my point of view and probably from George’s, there is the worst and then there’s everything else.
There’s a lot of bad mics, which we don’t need to get into the bad mics, but there are definitely a number of bad ones that just don’t work. I’m going to name one, because it’s been a punching bag for years. The Blue Snowball.
Oh, the Snowball.
It’s a pretty bad USB mic. But let’s also have some context. It’s also one of the first.
Right.
I don’t know if it’s the first. I think the Samson…
The CO1U was the first….
is maybe the first. They’re both rather lousy, but they’re also over 10 years old, I think, now, in terms of when they were designed.
I had one in 2006.
Yeah.
And people are still buying them for some reason.
Because they’re sold at like Apple stores.
And Best Buy and… Yeah, for nothing. Yeah.
You know what’s fantastic, and you guys heard it, is that that Blue Raspberry, as far as the USB mic goes?
There’s an example of evolution of technology, right? The Snowball, old technology, noisy, no proper gain control. The Blue Raspberry is an evolution of an evolution of USB mics.
They’ve had many, many mics in between those two. Yeah. And the Raspberry is like…
Again, I haven’t tried them. We haven’t gotten one yet to try, but I know you have, Paul.
So Blue is listening, which please send this one.
Send this one over. We’ll give it the rundown.
I’ll take another.
It’s a great mic. It’s a really surprisingly good mic, if you know how to use it.
Yeah. In fact, last week, I had a directed session where I used it because I was messing around with my gear and wasn’t set up with the interface. So I used the Blue Raspberry that was sitting right there in the booth and the client loved it and it’s on the web right now.
There you go.
Go for it.
If the mic is low noise and it’s reasonably accurate, you’re good. Put it in a good booth or a good acoustical space, put it in the right spot and talk.
Yep.
You’re good. There we go. That’s it.
Good night, everybody. Can we sell that last sentence for $9.99?
Sean, you had some questions about industry events, didn’t you?
Oh, yeah. So I was just curious because I know you guys love going to NAMM and NAB and other conferences with lots of new innovative audio tech. Is there anything that’s coming out this year that you’re really excited about?
Well, it’s expensive stuff, and whether it’s relevant to Voice Over or not… I mean, to geeks like us, especially George, he loves going to that stuff because it’s cool and it’s fun and it’s at a very professional level. And if somebody’s at a professional level, that kind of gear is kind of cool.
Well, I’m going to name one thing that if it wasn’t so dang expensive, I would tell everybody to go out and buy this thing, and I’ll back that up with an actual review of the product when I get one because, again, I don’t like to cold, like just write out and out, say, buy this thing until I’ve really used it.
Can I guess what it is, George?
Go.
Ahead. Is it the MixPre, the sound devices?
We were very impressed by that.
That’s not what I was going to say, actually. It’s really awesome. The thing that was the most innovative to me and the most amazing was the Yellowtech, it’s called the PUC Mike Lea.
It’s a weird name. It’s made in Germany.
Is it like a mounting system, right?
No, no, not at all. The PUC is an acronym for something. I don’t know what it stands for, but it’s an audio interface.
But what makes it stand alone that I’m aware of is it has the most amazing automatic gain controlling system I’ve ever seen. Normally AGC or auto gain is horrible. It’s not good.
If you’ve ever used a cheesy… Well, actually almost any video camera where the audio goes up and down and the noise gets hissy and then it goes down, you know what I’m talking about about. But this thing intelligently adjusts the gain control on the fly without pumping up and down the background noise.
It’s absolutely amazing technology. Unfortunately it comes at a cost. It’s about, I think, 900 bucks.
There’s judgment after all.
It’s no joke. It’s the standard of college. If they ever decide to license the technology to somebody else, maybe someday in the future they’ll do that and it becomes a $200 unit, it would be just a killer device.
It is really amazing. It will de-stress the voice actor’s job of recording themselves tremendously. You literally set it to auto and that’s it.
You do not have to ever set gain after that. It’s really amazing.
So that’d be extremely useful if you’re doing very different energy reads or styles of reads, like an animation versus an audiobook.
Animation, video games, that sort of thing.
It would be awesome for video games.
Yeah, because usually what you have to do with video games, if you know you’re going to be doing a lot of loud stuff, and I have, the script calls for scream or you’ve got to do something very loud. You’re shouting to somebody across the street. Usually what you’ll do is once you learn good mic technique, you can back off the mic or you can hit like a 10 dB or 20 dB pad on your interface and some mics actually have a 20 dB or 10 dB pad on them.
But that’s something you have to do and you’ve got to plan ahead.
It’s engineering gymnastics. You have to constantly switch your brain from actor to engineer back and forth. It’s a lot to think about.
So you end up setting it… Yeah, well, you end up setting the game something, you end up having to set the game really low. So then it doesn’t clip when you’re yelling.
But then when you’re doing, so get over here, I’m going to rip your brains out. Lines something like that. It’s way down to like minus 30 or something.
And so it’s in the noise. So it’s difficult recording that stuff well. And this is going to make it, the technology like that’s going to make it easier.
But it’s just a little inaccessible. And it’s actually hard to get. It’s only carried by a couple of companies in the US.
It’s very, it’s hard to get. So I’m going to get one and test it out. But the Sound Devices Mix Pre-3, really cool in terms of its feature set, what it can do.
And again, another, you don’t want to test out in the real world, but that thing was really sweet.
Very cool. Well, since you, like, you really get the sense that you guys, you don’t want, like, you understand that everyone has a unique budget and you really kind of, like, you don’t encourage anyone to spend more money than necessary. I’m curious what sort of are your favorite recommendations at both like sort of a budget mind and an aspiration-minded equipment.
It can be mics or interfaces or both.
Well, you know, I mean, we already mentioned that, you know, we both like to tell people, look, you know, an Audio Technica 2035 and, you know, maybe, you know, the… Was it the…
Steinberg UR.
The Steinberg UR thing.
You have some others you like too, right?
Well, I like the Scarlett 2i2.
Still do to this day.
Still do to this day.
Version 2, I hear, is much improved too.
Much improved, I gotta go get one. A Yamaha, if, you know, for people who maybe be doing podcasting, a Yamaha AGO3 or AGO6, which George recommended to me, and I immediately ran over to Banjo Emporium and bought one.
Yeah, we both use those as well.
Yeah, and that’s my at-desk interface, because where I do webinars and stuff like that. It’s important to be able to play audio from your computer into the sound mix that you’re doing.
Back over to GoToMeeting or whatever it is you’re using.
Right, GoToMeeting or Zoom or whatever. And-
For what it does, I haven’t found anything as affordable or easy to use. It’s pretty incredible, actually.
Yeah, and for doing remote sessions, I mean, it’s great. If you’re doing it, you do it by Skype or Zoom or something.
I sent Rick Wasserman to Colorado with an AGO3 and some moving blankets and some PVC pipe. I mean, literally. He has a PVC pipe booth with some blankets, an AGO3 and his trusty Sennheiser 416, and he’s doing his Mad Men.
Well, that show’s not on the air, but whatever AMC thinks… He’s doing all of his AMC stuff from a house in Creed, Colorado, where he’s there for the summer doing Repertory Theater. Wow.
It works.
He was on the show a couple weeks ago when I wasn’t here, but I was on an airplane getting little tidbits of what’s going on on the show, and then he said… It’s my dog walked in and he goes, Tinky.
Even my wife laughed at that one.
He has an awesome voice.
He does. He really does.
Yeah. That’s the entry-level stuff. We mentioned to Mike that there’s the Harlan Hogan VO1A, which we’re using today.
We’re talking into that very, Mike, as we speak to you.
If you want to step up one level from the AT 2035, this is a little more expensive, but a beautiful sounding, really nice sounding microphone.
And Harlan designed it specifically for a voiceover. People don’t realize that most of the equipment that we use was never designed for voiceover. It was designed for recording music.
And it has a workflow. A lot of the software that people use has a workflow for recording music. Oh yeah.
Pro tools. Yeah, pro tools, which we could have an hour long discussion about. And I’ll just recuse myself from that discussion.
Well, I want to start another discussion because you do have some talent who, they start with pro tools and then they fight learning anything else. What do you think is the reasoning for that?
Because once you learn a system, and especially pro tools, which was exceedingly difficult to learn, I mean, there’s a learning curve on there.
It’s designed to be like an old school, multi-track-based studio with walk sends and everything else.
Right, with as many channels as you have. And I went to school to learn how to use a recording studio like that. And there are people who go to college to do it.
And it’s not a skill you learn overnight, and it’s not a skill you learn in a month. It’s a skill you learn over many, many years because there are so many little tidbits to Pro Tools and some of these other multi-channel DAWs.
It’s got a tremendous amount of tools that once you’ve learned to use them and you’ve kind of put them in your muscle memory, it’s very, very hard to abandon those skills or adapt those skills to something else.
Unless you really hate doing all the things that you have to do in Pro Tools.
I mean, if it’s all you know and it’s all you’ve ever used, and you’re good at it, and it’s reliable, and it gets the job done, why change it? But I have changed a lot of clients from Pro Tools. Pro Tools has gotten a lot more reliable over the years.
As of lately, it’s far less problematic than it used to be. Now every time I launch it, it just tends to work, and I have little issues now.
It tends to work?
Yeah, it does work. It does work very reliably now. Pro Tools 12 does.
But it was a real pain in the neck for a really long time. So we were all looking for stuff like Twisted Wave that demystified recording and editing tremendously.
Well, yeah, and I’m actually really grateful for when I decided to get involved with Voice Over because the equipment was far more accessible, and it’s easier to use than ever, and it was right around the time that Twisted Wave was released, and it’s my favorite DAW, easily. It’s just so easy to use.
Yeah, I mean, it has a reduced feature set, clearly. I mean, certainly a lot less features in Pro Tools and Adobe Audition.
But it has everything you need.
It really does have everything you need. I mean, Audition…
And I think it’s a lot more powerful than people realize. Like, you actually take the time to figure out all the features. I know Jack DiGoli has got a wonderful webinar on all the things you can do with it, as do you guys.
Yeah, we both teach it.
Yeah, I mean, I needed it yesterday. I did a very long narration that was about an hour long that had to be cut into 135 different slides.
Twisted wave is perfect.
It’s fabulous. You mark it, you can cut and paste the gaps.
Split by markers.
Split by markers. That’s process. What used to take three hours now takes, it took me an hour to record it, an hour and a half to edit it into that format and go split by markers.
Whoosh! Out the door, my client is thrilled as he can possibly be.
Massive, massive time saver.
Yeah.
We’re big on time saving stuff. I mean, to me, audio quality always is important, right? But next to that, it’s reliability and then how much time is it gonna save you?
You’re not getting paid by the hour, folks, to be voice, to be engineers. You have to be fast.
One of those things that I see a lot is people will send me audio and they’ll send me their chain and they’ll say, well, I record on this and then I transfer to that and then I transfer to this. So I’m like, and you’re doing this, why?
A lot of hoop jumping.
Because it’s efficient.
But if it is, I mean, there occasionally is an argument for using multiple programs and multiple systems that I’ve seen convincing, but most of the time, it’s an unnecessarily number of steps.
Right.
It slows you down.
Circling back to gear one more time, I don’t know if you’ve listened to the show, I think George has-
Paul, are you gear obsessed?
Yeah, that’s where we’re going.
With the questionable purchase of the wing?
Yeah. So have you guys had any questionable gear purchases of your own that you regretted either immediately or after using for a few weeks in your own studios?
That’s a hard question. I mean, George is an engineer and he buys gear, and he plays with it and stuff like that.
Well, I know you guys have to try a lot for your clients too, to test it out and stuff like that.
Things that I’ve, maybe the things that I’ve recommended and regretted later. I recommended WaveLab by Steinberg to one of my clients. And I recommended it to her.
She’s on Windows. And at the time, I thought it was the best simple recording solution. And I used White WaveLab extensively a long time ago.
But then when I have to now teach it to somebody and troubleshoot it, remotely years later, I realized bad choice. It’s great software, it really is, but it’s just in many ways mind-numbingly frustrating. It’s just, it’s very German.
And it’s very… And it’s just overly… It’s basically Twisted Wave took the WaveLab thing and made it Mac friendly and way less complicated to use, and then puts all the right tools in the right places.
WaveLab doesn’t, it’s a little harder to use. So that’s one thing I’m kind of regret recommending.
Yeah, of course, Ocean Audio came out, which is really cool, but that’s not something we would ever regret, because that’s a really cool little program. It’s free. It’s free, which is why we also like it.
It’s free.
Audacity has its back.
Gear wise, I do a lot of research, and I do a lot of testing. I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I used to recommend a DBX 286, which I know you have now, Paul, you’ve been playing with.
Actually, I tore it out, based on…
Oh, you tore it out again.
You finally sold me.
Didn’t it go in and out, then in, again and then out again?
Like the who? The old you now?
Yes, it did, actually.
It’s not a bad piece of… I mean, I used to recommend it pretty widely, but I’ve kind of moved away from that one. Man, I can tell you about video streaming equipment that I don’t recommend anymore.
And that’s a whole nother deal.
I won’t go down that route.
That’s been our current curse.
Well, it appears you guys are just efficient. You’re just too efficient and I’m clearly diseased. So we’ll just leave it at that.
We can’t help you with gas, Gear Acquisition Syndrome. We really can’t help you. If you won’t listen to us, what are we gonna do?
I always listen to you. It just takes several weeks.
I mean, gear is gear. And again, as George said, does it make you more efficient as opposed to, does it change who you are? Does it change you from voice actor A to John Krasinski?
John Krasinski. It’s not gonna do that. It’s got nothing to do with it.
And people are just lost on that. So there’s never been a piece that I’ve regretted having. There’s stupid stuff I bought because it was like cute, but I never intended to use it for Voice Over.
But I know you’ve, because I remember you had a lot of the Apogee stuff too, like the one in the, did you have the duet too?
I never had a duet. I’d like the Apogee mic. I still have mine.
I use it when I’m on the road, if I record on the road.
I know you have very firm opinions about doing it on vacation.
Yeah. And yeah, I’m on vacation. I don’t want to do Voice Over.
I mean, if you can do an audition on your iPhone in your car, who cares? But you’re not going to be able to produce, add to something that you did in your own home studio somewhere else. It can’t be done.
You’re not going to be able to match the ambiance. Even if you’re as good at it as I am, it’s really hard.
I call it the black diamond level of voiceover recording. Trying to do it from a hotel remotely or something. It’s much harder.
Yeah, you can’t do it.
I guess another piece of gear that comes to mind when you mention Apogee, I did use to recommend the Apogee One a lot.
Yeah, that got kind of quirky.
But I found it to be quirky and I didn’t like the little proprietary cable it has, the dongle thing. And then their drivers started to get unstable sometimes and that drove people crazy. It just got too flaky.
And I stopped recommending that thing because of it.
Interesting to note though, but one point about this is that when I was at Voice 2010, I think, and I met the president of Apogee and I had a One and I really liked it. I was running it through the Eureka without the compressor and he was just using that as an interface. And as a preamp.
And he’s like, you know, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the preamp inside the One, go naked. And I’m like, excuse me?
So he was one of the first guys that really said to you, plug your mic into this thing.
Right, just plug…
And listen.
Right, just plug the mic in.
I won’t argue with that. The Apogee preamps and converters are stellar. Like they really are a gold standard.
You know, no doubt about it.
And so my belief is that you don’t need any front-end processing, just a good preamp interface and your microphone. And that should be the extent of your chain. And every time we pull people away from front-end processing or a channel strip, like an Apex, it just makes such a dramatic difference in their audio.
And usually it’s like, God, it sounds better.
And there’s sanity.
Yeah.
It sounds different. But like you were saying, I know you’re always like, get the gear that makes you sound like you. Not that makes you sound better or your best self.
Like we want accuracy, not flattery.
Right. That’s who they’re hiring you for you. What is unique about you?
Not, you know, does your booth sound better than this guy’s booth? And the booths don’t sound good. Booths just exist to make you sound like you.
If that makes any sense.
No, it makes perfect sense to me anyway.
Drop the mic.
Yeah.
Don’t drop the mic.
Nevermind.
All right, so thanks again, George and Dan for being here with us today. Before you leave, how can people get ahold of you if they want to use your services?
Well, they can, you know, my website is homevoiceoverstudio.com and I’ve got a contact button there that you can, you know, email me directly. But I also have the Specimen Collection Cup. And it’s actually, you go to the page, it’s like, son of a gun, it’s the Specimen Collection Cup.
If you want to send me some raw audio, five seconds of open mic silence, read something and give me 10 seconds of silence, open mic, so I can hear how you’re addressing the mic, hear the acoustics in the room, hear how much background noise you have. And if I think it sounds great, I will tell you so, and I do on occasion.
Refrigerators running?
Oh, refrigerators?
It’s like, I now know the difference between what a refrigerator in the next room sounds like in a ceiling fan or an air conditioner. It’s amazing the noises that dribble into people’s homes. And if you look at it on a spectrograph, you can generally tell what it is, whether it’s electronic or whether it’s something mechanical.
But you can send me a specimen if I think you need some help. Then we can set up a consultation and we’ll get your booth sounding the way it should.
And I am available through my parent company, which is Edge Studio. There’s a website, edgestudiotechnology.com, and I provide services like Dan’s. I kind of go a little nuts with the options, so I have a lot of different flat rate services and different ways you can work with us.
One-on-ones, do the webinar thing as well. You can send in a sound check as well for me, a similar process, and you can have me make a processing template for Twisted Wave, which you should really only use for auditions, if at all, unless the client asks otherwise. And a whole bunch of different ways to work with me.
I also get to design studios from time to time, and right now I’m actually in the middle of seven different studio build-out projects in different stages. A couple here in LA, a couple elsewhere. And that’s actually where I’m going.
Immediately after we hang up the source connect is running over to Burbank to check out a studio that’s been under work since… Oh man, I think it’s been a year. Yeah, a year.
So, I mean, George and I are literally competitors.
Yeah, but we’re not.
I mean, we…
It doesn’t sound like it.
We are and we aren’t.
We are and we aren’t. I mean, we consult with each other. Nobody knows more about home studios on God’s green earth than the two of us.
And we don’t say that from an egotistical point of view. We just know this is… We’ve been doing this longer than anybody else and we understand the environment.
We have different styles. We have different personalities and we have different, you know, just backgrounds and people tend to gravitate to one or the other. Sometimes people bounce back and forth.
Yeah, that’s happened a few times.
Like both of us have.
Well, George said this. Well, Dan said that.
What the heck is he talking about?
You’re killing me, Smalls.
Dan said it was okay. Well, again, guys. Drop the mic.
Yeah, really. Again.
And they’re out of mics.
It’s been so awesome to have you guys on. I can’t believe you agreed to it. Not sure what you were thinking, but we really appreciate it.
And hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk again soon.
Well, we know we will. We love you guys. You guys have been devoted fans of ours and it’s just been a lot of fun to see you guys put together a show and kind of follow in our footsteps in a little way.
It’s been a lot of fun to see it. I do listen to you guys pretty regularly in my podcast, Blair.
Yeah, George is a podcast addict.
I’m in the car a lot, so I do listen to a lot.
Well, PAS is a lot more affordable than GAS, so…
Podcast Acquisition Center, very nice, exactly.
It’s been our pleasure, guys.
Thank you guys so much. I know you have to get out of here for some other appointments, but I know Paul and I have benefited a great deal from your podcast, and…
Tell me everything I know. I’m fond of saying…
Except for trying out gear you don’t need. Well…
We can’t help you with that.
Yeah, if you’ve got the budget to do it, and you enjoy doing it, do it.
Is this your hobby? If it’s fun… Yes, it’s fun.
It’s for the…
It’s for the fans.
It’s for the fans.
It’s for the fans.
There you go, Paul. Is that what it says on your tax, on your schedule C?
I paced it to the window of the Whisperer.
For the fans. Again, yeah. It’s perspective.
If you’re buying the gear because it’s fun to you and it doesn’t stress you out, it’s actually fun trying to go for it, right? Have fun.
Go out and play. I mean, and that’s something that I tell people when I work with them and I teach them some of the initial things that they need to do with software. It’s like, here are the basics.
Go out and play.
Once you know the rules, then you’re allowed to break the rules.
Break the rules. Absolutely.
All right. Wow. Thanks again to Dan and George for that awesome interview.
Once again, you can check them out at vobs.tv or you can go to their Facebook page at VOBS and request to become a member.
Yes. Thanks once again to George and Dan. Like I said, it was a dream come true.
They are my VO idols and I’m so glad we were able to get them on the show.
Well that’s going to wrap us up for this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
We hope that you’ll stay tuned because we’ve got some great content coming up. We’ll be interviewing a very successful voice talent and coach, Paul Stracquerda.
And another future episode, we have Terry Daniel coming on. A voice over coach and voice over talent out of Minneapolis. That should be fun.
Excellent. I can’t wait for those guys. I’ve studied with both of them and they’re incredible talents and I’m sure they have a lot of great strategies and tips for our listeners.
So join us next time for episode 12.
That’s it for this episode. Have a great day everybody.
Bye everybody.
Thanks for listening to The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. To follow along, please visit www.vometer.com.