On his voiceover blog, my friend Greg Houser recently provided you with a straightforward walk through the question of whether or not you should have ISDN in your home studio.
Risk analysis and the voiceover professional
Tools
The lessons are everywhere, if we’ll just look for them
My friend Jeffrey Kafer blogged the other day about a lesson he brought to his voiceover work from his previous occupation as a tester in the gaming industry.
What Jeffrey has done is one of the key methods of making progress in any field: Find a related industry. Identify how they solve problems. Apply the parallel methodology to your own business. Even if my business is my voiceover work? Yep. Read what Jeff did. Think about your own life experiences. What kinds of parallels can you find?
Eating your Gmail cake and having it too
My friend Anthony Mendez has crafted a brilliant set of tutorials about how to set up Google Apps. Why would you want to do that? Because you can continue to use your own email from your website, but use Google Mail’s powerful spam filter.
Now, it actually gets better because in addition to powering your own site’s email through the Google Mail system, you also get access to a calendar you can share, Google documents and a host of other utilities and applications. I’ve been using Google Apps in my business for some time now and I highly recommend you start, too.
Once you’ve signed up, keep digging. You’ll be amazed at that you can do.
Acoustic Treatment questions?
Firewire audio interface anyone?
With thanks to my friend Eddie Eagle for posting the link on the VO-BB, you’ll find a handy chart comparing 69 different firewire audio interfaces on Tweakheadz site.
Microphone Useage techniques – shotgun edition
As a follow-up to his excellent article on Voice Over Xtra about microphone technique in general, today Juan Carlos Bagnell (better known as Some Audio Guy) offers his thoughts on How Close Can I Get to a Shotgun Mic without Blasting? Good stuff, Juan. Thank you.
Microphone technique tips from an audio engineer
Juan Carlos Bagnell, better knows as Some Audio Guy, offers a bunch of excellent suggestions about how to use your microphone most effectively on Voice Over Xtra. Note, swallowing is not a recommended approach!
A bit of voiceover hilarity
Onion Radio News has this bit of hilarity that touches the voiceover world as published on their site on Sunday, March 15, 2009.
My thanks to my friend Steve Knight for passing along the link to me.
How to record voiceovers at home or on the road
The Harlan Hogan and Jeffrey P. Fisher free teleseminar on How to record voiceovers at home or on the road is now open for registration. You can see many of the questions they’ll be answering on the registration page. By the way, not only is the teleseminar free, so is the MP3 recording of it. When is it? Oh yeah, you probably want to know that too, don’t you?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 3:00 PM Eastern / 12:00 Noon Pacific.
My thanks to Dan O’Day for the email alert this morning about this event.
How are microphones made?
With thanks to my friend and mentor Philip Banks for posting the link to this video on the VO-BB, here’s a look inside a microphone factory.
Fascinating.
Ever need to record while you’re traveling?
Lance Blair offers some helpful ideas for how to pull the best audio performance from your laptop. My thanks to Bill Pryce for linking to this article, thus leading me to it.
A mobile studio video
My friend Todd Ellis has posted a video about how he turned a really “live” hotel room into a pretty decent studio on the road.
mobile studio from todd ellis on Vimeo.
Very nice work, Todd. Thanks for inspiring those of us who have to travel and voice in all kinds of less than ideal locations.
You do back-up, right?
Kara Edwards’ recent blog post prompts me to ask this question because sooner or later something is going to happen that means, if we don’t, we’ll wish we did have a back-up of something. (How’s that for a vague and unfocused sentence?)
For example, my son Eric’s laptop crashed a few weeks ago. Thankfully, nothing of consequence was on the hard drive that died. And replacing the drive, re-installing the operating system, the applications and so forth hasn’t been too hard; but it serves as a reminder that backing-up isn’t just a good idea … it’s a requirement.
Kara mentions that she’s using external hard drives for back-up. That’s a good idea. I go a couple of steps farther. I have an external drive for the initial round of back-ups. I then back-up to optical media (data DVDs) and I have another RAID drive attached to my network at home that holds back-ups of all critical files as well.
Microphones galore
Matt McGlynn just introduced himself to me through a comment to a post from a few weeks ago about microphones, which led me to this fabulous site called RecordingHacks.com and specifically to this page with oodles of microphones that Matt got to check out at NAMM 2009.
A really cool tool for your home studio
With thanks to my friend Dan Nachtrab for sending me the link to this interesting little video, click through to see the Primacoustic Flexibooth, a collapsible, wall-mount vocal booth that opens up when needed, folds out of the way when unused and doubles as a wall acoustic treatment.
A tool for your eLearning work
My friend Liz de Nesnera has written a review of Word-2-Wav on her blog. Word-2-Wav is a recording application that can cut large eLearning projects down to size. Since I do a lot of eLearning work, I think I may just have to give this software a long, hard look. Thank you for the review, Liz.
Curious about Neumann microphones?
George Whittam continues his tour of microphones on display on Winter NAMM with a look at Neumann microphones.
Good stuff, George. Thank you.
Curious about MXL microphones?
George Whittam provides a video and audio tour MXL microphones as they are on display at Winter NAMM.
Too bad about the video going out part way through, but an interesting tour none-the-less.
Free audio software from Sony
Audacity is a very capable audio editor, probably the best known of the open source, free applications. It has a strong benefit of being cross-platform, so you can use it on Windows, Mac and Linux workstations. But I received an email this morning from Sony announcing that they’ve just released ACID Xpress 7 as a free application to anyone who signs up for their ACIDplanet.com site, which is also free. The one fly in the ointment is that ACID, like all of Sony’s audio software applications, is Win OS only.
Sony ACID is a software program most often thought of for music production, taking various musical elements and loops and combining them into a fresh mix. What a lot of people don’t realize is that ACID works prefectly well as an audio editor. It’s more similar in style to the way Sony VEGAS handles audio editing than Sound Forge, but there are strong similarities across the Sony line.
ACID Xpress 7 will handle up to 10 tracks of audio and even comes with unlimited MP3 encodes, something you don’t get (build-in) with Audacity.
A podcast on recording software
Dan Lenard and George Whittam have done an excellent podcast on recording software that’s well worth your 13 minutes and 48 seconds to listen. (The link to the podcast is at the top of the article on the page linked.) My thanks to George for posting the link to the podcast on the VO-BB.