(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Y'all ready to be history? Get started. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone. To the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional, they're motivated. Thanks to Tribute, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording. And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post, Chicago. Darren Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.
Tech to the VO Stars. George the Tech Whittam from LA. And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Line up, man. Here we go. Tech to the beat. And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite. Thanks to Tribute. Don't forget the code, T-R-I-P -A-P 200. That will get you $200 off your Tribute. And trust me, they're great. And also, Austrian Audio, making passion heard. This week, we're joined by a special guest, a man called Jim Edgar.
If you're into Twisted Wave or in the voiceover community, you would definitely know who Jim is. If you're not, stick around and you'll find out more. Welcome, Jim. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here among the group. So thank you for having me. Appreciate it. It's more of an honor to have you with us, Motley Crue. Finally, some intelligence injected into the show. Very rare. I'll try. I'll try. I'll try to drag it down in some bicycling tangents. We may find some tangents today.
We'll see. Oh, we'll be veering off in various directions. In about three seconds. Three. Yes, I'm guaranteed. I was thinking about making a bike frame with a shotgun microphone to the tubes. Could you put a capsule into a bike frame and turn it into a microphone? That's great. It needs to happen. I'll encourage you to actually dig through the YouTubes and find Frank Zappa playing a bicycle on the Steve Allen show. Always a favorite. A friend of mine sent me that video today. Really?
He texted it to me. He's like, I don't know if you've seen this. Back on the Chain Gang? Ooh, well played. Yes, I'll take that. Might have pre-dated that song. You're such a pretender, Andrew. Seriously. Oh, man. Sorry about that. Yes. It's starting fast, folks. This is like the bike race where everybody blows out ahead of you, hanging on. I'm not going to be able to catch up with these guys.
We haven't even hit the topic that we're going to talk about yet, and we're already veered off in various areas. What are the frequently asked questions that you get, Jim? Is it twisted wave, or is it just general voiceover stuff? A lot of both. I'm teaching quite a few kind of intro recording classes through VoiceOne up here in San Francisco, in the San Francisco Bay Area. We draw people from all over. So there are folks who literally do not know what to plug into what.
So they have gone on to, say, a major international shopping site and seen a microphone for $29, which comes with everything you need to be a voice actor, and they wonder why they sound bad. Includes talent. Includes talent, too, yeah. But no, often, I mean, the common question is always, why does it sound so bad? I mean, that's the first one. And so you have to explain that the human brain is a very good filter for taking out all those little echoes and imperfections that live in our spaces.
Hey, if you hear well enough to make the determination that it sounds bad, you might have the aptitude for a career in voice acting. Or an audio engineer. The first thing to recognize is that it sounds bad. You'd be amazed how many people don't know that it even sounds bad.
Well, I admit, I kind of let them in on the joke in the first class, because I teach them, or I tell them that I'm going to teach them how to listen, which is, I use the example that my wife is an artist and very visually talented, and so I'll go out and paint with her, and she goes, you know, you just have to learn how to see. And it's kind of like I'm telling voice actors the same thing. You just need to learn how to listen to it.
And so that is always the big thing, is that they get this mic, put it in a poorly treated space, and wonder why they're hearing dog barks and people working in the kitchen and other strange sounds that, you know, never would go on a professional podcast or anything like that.
It's interesting you mention visual, because your wife being an artist, because there's a trick with painting, as someone who does paint, if you're doing like a portrait or whatever, if you're copying an image, if you turn it upside down, then it tricks your brain. Absolutely. You can actually do it fine. Is there an audio version of turning it upside down? The big challenge to voice actors, I think, is that we get wrapped up in the performance thing.
And that's kind of where my intersection is, that, you know, I came into this wanting to do voices, wanting to tell stories, and kind of my second class that I took, you know, back in 2007, all these working voice actors started showing up in them, because they suddenly had to come back and learn how to record, because they were going into their agency and doing the auditions in the agency, and that was all getting handled.
And all of a sudden, you know, in the Bay Area up here, the agencies told them they had to record at home. And so nobody had a setup. And all of a sudden, I'm, you know, digging back into my memory from all my hours and years spent kicking around in computer music and recording studios saying, oh, no, this is the way you set this stuff up. Doesn't everybody know this?
But that's sort of the whole problem is that nobody was aware of what they were saying, because they were so focused on the performance. And as a voice actor, we have this, you know, real insecurity that we're not doing a good enough job, that we're not doing it right, that when we hear our voice, we're hearing the flaws in our performance. And it's really hard to teach people to listen past that.
And that's sort of the big push that I make at first is that we need to kind of, you know, get rid of our concern about how we're talking in the moment. And we need to talk about or we need to learn to listen beyond that and listen to the sound of the room and listen to the other stuff that's going on, because they just aren't seeing it. I did a couple of times trying to turn around backwards on my mic, and that did not help.
So, you know, that's not something we could necessarily do, but learning to kind of. No, but I've seen the actors read scripts backwards. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't know, you know. Yeah. Well, that shakes us up out of the performance, because we don't we start I mean, that's actually a really nice in the booth hack is to if we're if we're feeling like I'm locked into this read, just read all the words individually backwards.
That's that's I got that direction that several times when I was learning my craft as well. But yeah, that's a good one. I've never heard that before. That's interesting. That's the exact thing you're asking about with the painting almost. I like reading backwards. Okay. But interestingly with sound, though, because there's a guy here who's who's actually blind, a blind voice actor called Alistair Lee. And Alistair has the most incredible hearing. Like he hears everything.
I mean, I've spoken to him on Source Connect, and he will hear stuff in the background. He goes, Oh, what what are you doing with that? It's like, what? You know, there'll be something I can't even hear it. And he's hearing it down the line. Is that a tip to shut your eyes? It's one of the first things I have folks do, you know, and I've heard you guys talk about this as well. But, you know, a lot of the classes that I teach, everybody's in their own space. And so I make them close their eyes.
I tell them they have to get all Northern California's in and everything and, you know, use their other senses. But if we cut out the visuals, all of a sudden we're listening to and naming the sounds. Robert, I've heard you talk about this, you know, where you say, Okay, oh, that's the buzz of my life. That's the water going through the pipes. That's the car. Well, it was a it was a class in college.
I remember where everyone would have to sit there and like the first two rounds is like, Oh, yeah, the train, the cars, this, that goes around twice. And all of a sudden people are really digging because you don't want to be the last person who can't hear something, especially the person after you can hear something. But that's sort of the point is that, you know, unless something's about to kill and eat us, our brain tells us it's not something worth worrying about. Yeah. It's interesting.
There's an audio engineering sort of lesson in there as well is, you know, sometimes you'll be listening to something and looking at your editor, whether it be Pro Tools or whatever and your eyes see an edit coming up. Yeah. And you sort of hear and you go, that sounds okay. But then you close your eyes and you listen to it and your brain's not getting that sort of visual cue. And all of a sudden you go, shit, hang on, that doesn't work.
A mate of mine used to teach actually, he's an audio engineer, English guy. And when he moved to Australia, he gave up recording records because he just got sick of working with musicians who were lazy and started teaching. But he used to do tricks because he grew up on tape, you know, on a mixing desk to multitrack tape. So what he does, he gets the kids on Pro Tools and they all do their mix and everything.
And then he takes them to the other studio where they work on tape and a mixing desk where they've got no screens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, okay, I want you to use the same components and do a mix blind. And he said, it's amazing. The mixes are so different. And it freaks them out. Oh, totally. There was a guy who made a plugin for Pro Tools and the plugin was called Listen. And if you launched it, it blacked your screen out. Yeah. Awesome.
Awesome. Look, I used to do a bit of training back in my radio days of, you know, the new guys that came through and especially on Pro Tools when Pro Tools was becoming a thing, you know, you'd say to someone, are you sure that's right? And they'd go, yeah, it looks okay. Yeah. And you'd be going, well, yeah, it might look okay, but are you listening? You know, that's the thing. I find that the visual editing is actually much slower.
So, you know, it's like I'll spend a lot of my time zoomed out in micro view or small view, you know, for the waveforms. And you're just scrubbing because I think a scrub is like audio zoom. And you can move around a lot quicker than zooming in and out of everything to find your edits. You know, it's like you can get right up to a transient. There you go. Yeah, I think the visuals are really distracting.
I mean, that's, I mean, you get people that in terms of FAQs, that's probably the second thing is that I see this little wavy line. My question is always, do you hear it? You know, is it really there? And most of the time it isn't. And so, absolutely, that we start editing with our eyes and that's definitely a time suck. You will start fixing things that just don't matter. And, you know, there's a little, I think there's a little bit of a psychological response to that.
And it'll take you longer to edit. Absolutely. And you also make the absolute clangor mistake of usually when you're a beginner is inserting silence. Yes. More disturbing, you know. Because what you hear, and that's what's so interesting going back to the listening thing, is that what you hear is the change in what you hear. Yeah, we notice differences. That's the way our brains kind of react to that stuff.
And so, you know, if you, like in one of the classes, I play back a normal room tone and then I play back a silenced room tone to say, what's the difference? Everybody says, well, there's a lot more noise when they talk. It's like, no, the noise is exactly the same. It's just that you're noticing that difference because, you know, the minus 50 dB noise floor is suddenly very apparent when it was minus, you know, 120 before that. The bad gate. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like a bad gate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what about with Twisted Wave? I know you're the Twisted Wave go-to guy. Yeah. Actually, can we call it the goat? I was going to do a goat imitation, but it was going to sound like a sheep and I didn't want it to seem like it was offensive to anybody in Down Under. That's true. It's getting worse. Again, I'm pedaling as fast as I can here today. Don't fall off, Jim, seriously. Andrew does not only dad jokes, but granddad jokes. That's an impressive resume, I'll tell you that.
My repertoire goes back to 1850. That's good. Well, you know, part of the nice thing about having, you know, been in studios in the 1800s was that we had to use them and trust our ears. I mean, I learned on a compressor that had, you know, a negative dial and or a negative needle and a dial. And it's like, how did you dial that thing? How do you make that thing work? It's like, do you hear it working? And nobody has to do that these days.
Well, see, before wax recordings, Jim was recording on clay, weren't you, Jim? I was, yeah. It was kind of like a punch card system that we had to kind of throw through. Recordings in hieroglyphics. It was the iRock instead of the iPad. True. But no, Twisted Wave is kind of one of those things where, you know, I've heard you mention it, too, that it just sets up and works so easily that most people don't dig under the hood in it.
And so there's a little bit of this idea that, oh, it's not really going to work for professional, delivering professional work. And that's sort of a load. You know, that's just not right. There are so many tools that live in the menus that most people never get to. I mean, things, you know, as simple as just a batch processor, things like the detect silences, which, you know, I do a lot of work with audiobook narrators who, you know, are very worried.
It's like, how do I kind of cut down all those little pauses? And, you know, my quick answer is take longer pauses and just use detect silences because you can have it find anything that's slightly longer than three quarters of a second. Pretty similarly to strip silences, I think, Robbo. Yeah, strip silences. Yeah. But you've got, you know, a tremendous tool that you can kind of drop in. So it has all the durations and the delay start and the keep on silencing after a moment.
Yeah, you can set it to find, you can actually, there's a slider in it that has a maximum setting of, I think, two seconds, but you can overwrite that manually. So you could have it look for anything shorter than five seconds, for example. And so I encourage long form narrators to take longer pauses because then it's easier to find them. And once you trigger that device and you have to go into the advanced panel on it.
But once you trigger that device, you can then drop in exactly the same amount of silence. You can do it from, you know, just from a little bit of room tone that you've copied and then suck everything down. So it's a nice, normal narrative pace. I've always argued that some software developers, or most software developers, should change that advanced tab to a more tab. Because as soon as someone who's beginning sees the word advanced, they go, oh shit, better not touch that.
I'm not touching that. Yeah. But if it said more, if it just said something like more or, you know, dive deeper or whatever, they'd be more inclined to click on it and go, oh fuck, hang on, look what I can do here. Cool stuff to rubble. Yes. I think it should be the warning screen on the internet when you go to a site. It's like, ignore or proceed to risky site. I never go to sites like that, Robert. I'm concerned that you are. I'm a little worried about that.
The question Robert can never answer is that one, are you 18 years or over? Actually, you see those screens when you go to your router, to be perfectly honest. Okay, all right. I'll believe you. I'll believe you. And those sites too. Easy. Router or router, I'm not sure. A router? A router? I don't know. I think the only thing, the only place that I ever have Twisted Wave kind of fail, and I love the fact that it does fail there, is that people want to do multitrack for some reason.
And most of those are kind of vestigial approaches that they learned because they started with Audacity and they had to put all their pickups on additional tracks and they're not used to that. Back when I kind of first started recording, I was using something called Amadeus Pro, which is a very Twisted Wave-like multitrack recording software. And it took me a little bit to start to start thinking, it's like, oh, I can just insert right in the track and I can insert and not overwrite things.
It actually pushes everything along downstream. The two-track-to-edit thing is a common thing. When you're editing music, a lot of engineers will take two tracks to edit. And a good music cutdown, you just need one track. You shouldn't need two separate tracks to go fading between the two. Yeah, nobody who is just delivering a vocal, a voice track, not even a vocal track, because we're not talking about singing. I mean, you don't need more than one track, absolutely don't. It's kind of weird.
I mean, it can't happen physically, so why would you want to make something happen that can't happen? It'll sound like an edit. How is Twisted Wave with the fades compared to something like Pro Tools? I was going to mention that. That's what Twisted Wave is cool, right? It has that zero-crossing setting. Yeah, it has a toggle-able edit at zero points.
So that, again, is one thing, not to pick mercilessly on Audacity, but you have to do that little extra trick to make sure that it's actually editing at the zero-cross. Where with Twisted Wave, you can turn that off if you don't need it, which is maybe one time out of a hundred where you can't quite get it to land where you need it to. But for the most part, that just keeps people from having those annoying clicks from edits.
When it does the zero-cross, does it also consider the direction it's going? Or will it bounce zero right back up to positive? No, it'll find zero-cross from both sides. Okay, so it has the trajectory. It does. And that's sort of the simplest way to use it, but you can also... There's actually an overlap function in Twisted Wave which lets you draw a curve if you want to do something like that.
And you can actually... I kind of don't use it because the native one works well enough that it's not really a problem. But with that, if you really want to, you can actually draw an exponential curve to get a fade between an edit point if you want to. Will it non-destructively edit, truly? Or is it like you only get a couple undos? You get a... I always call it the bowtie.
So whenever you do a delete, there's a little right arrow, left arrow that looks like a fancy bowtie that appears at the top of the screen. And you can actually drag that all the way back or drag that all the way forward and do some fine-tuning of that edit. But once you go to the next one, you lose the option to do that, so that it goes away by the second one. So it's semi-destructive? I hate to make strong points, but I really think the destructive versus non-destructive is a bit oversold.
That there's an undo. If you screw up, start backing up. One of the nice things that Thomas did recently is that he added a history window. And I have that toggled on almost all the time now, where you can easily jump back anywhere in the process with an open file just by clicking on it. And it goes right back to that state. I mostly use it to make sure that when I'm about to send an audition off, it's like, wait a minute, did I do the high-pass filter? Did I do the mouthy click?
And it's like, OK, it's right there in the list. I don't have to undo, redo just to do that. I think Bias Peak did it where once you open the file on any edit you did, it was all soft. And then once you saved it, then you were flattened again. Again, I sort of went deep nerding on Twisted Wave a couple of times. But you can actually undo Twisted Wave past the point that you save.
And so, for example, I demonstrate in class where I highlight the whole thing, I hit delete, I hit save, and it's an empty file all of a sudden. But you can actually keep undoing back to the point where you opened the file, as long as you haven't closed it. I think I've gone, I got bored and passed about 60 or 70 undos. But it'll go way, way, way past any point of saving. Which is kind of, again, I wouldn't say that it's non-destructive, but it gives you a lot of guardrails.
It's really tough to kind of lose everything. It's also really good at recovering from a crash. Yeah, I would agree. When you go through that edit history, like say I'd made an edit, and then I've done 10 other things, and then I've gone, oh, shit, hang on, I want those last 10 edits, but that 11th one, I just want to undo that. So your levels of undo, is it just undoing that one that I'm clicking on, or is that undoing the whole lot? If you're doing a straight undo, it's sequential.
So it backs up everything that you did. So if you did 10 edits and 11 was an oops, then you would go back to 10 by hitting undo. In the new history window that has appeared with the 30 point, was it 30? Whichever version he brought out goes kind of post that survey. Yeah, 30. 30, yeah. When he brought that out, that one you can jump around to any point. See, that's powerful for me. But if you jump back 10 edits, 10 edits in the history, the nine that you did after that point are undone also.
Correct, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, it goes to whatever state you choose. But it's still linear through the undos. If you jump back to 10, you lose all the ones between. Well, you don't lose anything because you can always jump back. But you have to redo them. It undoes everything between step 20 and step 10. If there's 15 minutes of work between undo 11 and undo 1, and you go back to 11, you've got that 15 minutes of work to redo. Some systems, it's funny. That would be time travel.
If you mess up something in the time -space continuum, you can't go back. Well, you can in Pro Tools. You just go back and you go. You can. In Pro Tools, you go back and you go, well, there's the cut there. I just slide my audio back, and I've undone that. You know what I mean? But I think Pro Tools also has nonlinear undo. So as long as one thing's not hinged on the other, it will undo that and not undo everything that you did. But what happens when it is hinged on the other?
It undoes the stuff that it has to. Yeah, I have to believe that as Thomas continues to evolve that tool, that would be feedback that might be actionable. Right now, it's basically a pretty simple list, and I think it's really patterned after what's been available in Adobe Audition, that they've always had that history window. And Rx has that as well. You have the little history window down there. You can do the same thing.
But yeah, this is just a nice, easy, quick application for it that hopefully, since he makes a living at it... What's that? Didn't he also add video, I think? Yeah, video's been in for a while. He added a speech recognition and a video component that you can add to it. Up here in the Bay Area, we've got a lot of on-camera folks who use it just to do their on-camera auditions.
So they can do a quick edit if they stumble a line without opening Final Cut or whatever it is, or QuickTime or something. It's funny, the other one that can edit video is Reaper. And it can do titles and all kinds of stuff, actually, funny enough. But I said the other week when we were talking about Twisted Wave, there's so much in there that I would never go anywhere near it. I mean, I just use the basic stuff. That's all I need.
So I was always interested in that survey that Thomas did, and the things that people asked for, it's kind of like, oh, really? What would you want to use that for? What's the craziest one someone asked for, Andrew? Multitrack. Yeah, Multitrack was, that made me cry. Oh, that made me sad. It's like, no, do you go do something? No, I think the interesting thing in that survey was how many people asked for stuff that's in there. Yeah. I mean, that was, I was like, don't you go to that menu?
Do you not go around the menus? But most people don't. I mean, you know, again, it gets back to, you know, I mean, we clearly have, you know, a technical interest and we like that stuff, so we dig around under the hood. But most people, it's like, I just need to get an MP3 out. And, you know, that's okay. I mean, there's such a variety of people that find their way into this business that, you know, I mean, I think there's a couple different approaches.
I mean, this gets to sort of a larger topic, but there are folks who want to keep it all behind the curtain. There are people who, and, you know, it's like, just push these buttons and everything is going to come out okay, which is not the same thing that George creates with a stack that, you know, we're using very specific tools for very specific effects and they're very visible.
And so, you know, if it's like, I'm going to do my audio book audition, I'm going to use my George audio book stack and have it come out exactly how it should. But fortunately, stuff breaks usually on Sunday nights and people end up calling us, you know, or very, very panicked that they have to be able to solve those problems. I mean, you know, with the Vespa, when you have a problem, you look at it and you can recognize parts in the engine. You know, it's like, okay, I can fix that.
That's what mechanics are for. I was going to say, that's kind of where I am with cars. It's like, well, there's an engine in there, shoot. That's all I know. If the engine was gone, I could at least, you know, diagnose the problem. But of course, these days you open the bonnet and it's just a piece of plastic. You don't even know where the engine is. That's true.
And on that note, it's time to shut the bonnet or the hood on this episode and we'll be back with part two next week as we're joined once again by Jim Edgar. Have a fine time, won't you? Well, that was fun. Is it over? It's over to me. The Pro Audio Suite. With thanks to Tribooth. And Austrian Audio. Recorded using Source Connect. Edited by Andrew Peters. And mixed by Vudu Radio Imaging. With tech support from George the Tech Whittam.
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