VOX Talk #25 - Bob Bergen, Audio File Delivery, Betty in Boca, Adam Fox, Connie Mustang, Ken Strickland

Bob Bergen's Animation Weekend in NYC, How Do You Deliver Digital Audio files?, Voices.com Attacked, Betty in Boca Makes Telemarketers Critique Her Demos, Adam Fox, and Connie Mustang with Ken Strickland Shares a Poem Presented at VOICE 2007.

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Transcript of Vox Talk #25

Matt Williams: Episode 25

Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi! I'm Stephanie Ciccarelli, and you're listening to the 25th episode of the VOX Talk podcast. Today's show features the vocal talents of Betty in Boca, Adam Fox, Connie Mustang and Ken Strickland. Get ready for some fast-paced action and adventure, because here we go.

Matt Williams: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: In educational news, Bob Bergen is presenting his popular Animation Weekend, an intensive, two-day workshop for voice over talents in New York City May 5th through 6th. This is the first time Bob has brought his class to the East coast, so if you've been waiting to study with the current voice of Porky Pig, sign-up now. Spaces are incredibly limited, the last I heard there were 2 left.

To learn more about Bob's workshop, check his website, BobBergen.com

Recently on VOX Daily, dozens of voice talent shared how they deliver digital audio files to their clients! Find out what your peers are doing and what some of them have discovered perhaps a cost-effective solution to ISDN? You'll have to read the post to learn more.

Discover tricks of the trade at blogs.voices.com/voxdaily.

To wrap up, I have some news that literally rocked the entire Voices.com website over the weekend. For those of you who haven't heard, a malicious hacker attacked one of the Voices.com web servers, an undeserved assault which we are still recovering from. On Sunday, I made a quick post about what happened on VOX Daily. We don't know for sure who it was that attacked Voices.com so viciously, but with your help, we can bring the guilty party or parties to justice.

If you have any tips, email them to me at Stephanie@voices.com

Matt Williams: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: Today in The Biz, Betty in Boca shares a humorous story about how she gets pesky telemarketers to do her bidding!

Betty: Hi, this is Betty in Boca. Has this ever happen to you? You're in the booth. You're working on a demo when the phone rings, you have to get it because it could be somebody calling about something new audition for and if you don't get it and let the machine answer, they might go to the next person. You can have that happen, so you answer it and it's a telemarketer.

Well, you know what a telemarketer captive audience. Telemarketers cannot hang up on you, don't ask me how I know. When they call this is what you should do.

"Hello, this is Betty. From what insurance company? Oh, great. I am so glad you called. Hello? Hello? Oh, you don't hear that very often. Well, listen to me a favor I want you to listen to something, what do you think of this? (inaudible 00:03:29). Okay, hang on I want to play you something else, (inaudible 00:03:36). Which deliver did you like better? The first one? Really? Why? Sound like somebody you could relate too, like a real person, great. Listen I assure appreciate your help. Call any time. Thanks. Bye."

See, simple and actually they are audience. They listen to the radio. They listen to the TV and you know they're going to call back, so hey it's great. So, the next the phone rings and it's a telemarketer, try this trick and I want you to e-mail me and tell me how it worked. Bettyinboca@earthlink.net. Send me an e-mail. Let, me know how it went, what you did, Bettyinboca@earthlink.net. I want to hear about it because it works great for me. Phone rings make the best of it, no matter who it is, if it's not somebody calling about an audition, it somebody that can listen to an audition. I got to go.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: If you got a kick out of Betty's segment, send her some feedback via email at her website! You can reach her at bettyinboca.voices.com.

Matt Williams: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: Adam Fox shares some PodMail, including some humble studio beginnings from Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli.

Bob Oakman:You're listening to another Defiant Digital Podcast for Voices.com.
Here's your host, Adam Fox.

Adam Fox: Well, howdy all. Another edition of Tech Talk is upon us, so welcome. Well, I must hit a cord last week with the humble beginning segment because I got the attention of the boss, that's right, the President and CEO of Voices.com, David Ciccarelli has made even his submission to the piece. David sent me a really nice picture of one of his first mobile recording rigs and I quote from this e-mail.

"In response to your call for our humble beginning, I thought I provide this shot. Oh, those where the days recording on location, everything from live brands to city counsel meetings about eight years ago now. Well, before I met Stephanie, I thought you'd enjoyed this simple Pro Tools, Apple power books setup, the microphone was Neumann TLM 103 and I enjoyed a few focus sprite plug-ins."

So, well that's a wonderful thing, thank you David and I tell what I'm going to do with this. I'm now working on the website a little at DefiantDigital.com and I've decided that since I get so much great podmail and different kinds of comments and feedbacks about the podcast. I would put up a little section on my website specifically for the podcast here at Voices.com.

Now, here's a great opportunity, I'm going to let everyone else hear decide what kinds of material should be on this little section of the site. You can reach it at DefiantDigital.com/techtalk.html.

Now, it really is just in the framework stages, I've just put up a couple of template pages there and of course I put David's wonderful picture up there that he'd supplied to us and just a little subsection, I called listener pics and I'm just going to basically put the call out to everyone this week to come up with your own ideas and some things that we might be able to do to make this part of the site, an interactive chalk board, green board, white board, whatever you want to call it for being able to share pictures and stories and all kind of stuff with the community of people here that enjoy the podcast every week and I'm make sure to put plenty of pictures up of some wire rigs and to share a small story with you since David just shared one with us today.

I also when I first stared into doing a lot of live recording on my own, I too was hitting everything that I could find to gain my experience and cut my teeth. One thing in particular, I use to do live recordings at the comedy store in La Jolla down in San Diego where I was born and raised and I tell you, I got a really great opportunity to see and record some wonderful upcoming young stars and got an opportunity to cut my teeth and I tell you the circumstances in some of those places anybody out there who's done recording in this kind of a fashion, live recordings for bands or meetings, anything like that and I'll tell you, you show up with your gear and it's never what you need to do the job.

And what I mean by that is that they generally don't have full professional setup with subouts and all kinds of professional recording gear. Their needs are mostly for PA, for Public Address so that the people that either visiting the meetings or in my case the comedy clubs or live gigs can hear those things. So, you're basically lucky if you get a set of tape out or maybe one or two subouts if the board has been pre-thought like in a lot of music clubs will have at least a couple of subouts, so that they themselves can kick it out to that tape and then I'll tell you, you're unplugging and plugging and doing all kinds of stuff just to try to get that signal into your equipment that you're going to use to make the recording.

I remember in my instances at the comedy store when I would go there and do recording that was I actually climbing up on this tall ladders to get way up on the roof and hang microphones over the crowd so that I could get a better crowd noise because you're generally not going to pick up any crowd noise from the microphone that the performer is using and they certainly don't set the house up that way. So, I was actually crawling up and set microphones, stereo imaging microphones on both sides of the house and I would bring my 24 channel Mac mixture with me that I've had for years and it's a great work course and I would take that with me and be able to use stereo imaging mics on either side of the room.

Then I would cut in to their PA that they had for the evening and I would basically taking over the live mixing duties for the evening as well. So, I could guarantee what kind of signal I was going to be able to get for the recording and most of the time they went to a dot machine, I would bring my DAT and my ADAT with me and most of the time, I didn't even have enough outs to stick it in to an a dot, so I could separate the tracks but and most of the time it was just going live straight to that and I would just do a good mix on the house and hopefully by the second set, I'd have a really good, really good mix to be able to push out to a dot and then from there I could master it on to CD's.

And I tell you those were some great days, I learned so much about sound and being in the trenches as if we're having to really come up with something on the fly and not knowing what kind of gear you're going to have when you get there get and what you're going to have when you get there and what you're going to have available to you and those are precious lessons because they really help you to adopt in a professional environment when you've got all the tools and you've got all the gear that you need, it still gives you a really unique prospective as to how spoil you actually are from time to time.

So, folks I encouraged you to drop by the website at DefiantDigital.com/techtalk.html and check out it's, like I said it's just a framework now, just a bear bone basic framework for what we can put together as a site and I would love to hear a whole bunch to your podmail, your ideas, send me your images. File size it doesn't matter. I've got a high speed machine, so you can send me big file sizes if you want to and you can recently do so at adam@defiantdigital.com, that's the e-mail address to use, adam@defiantdigital.com.

And as always you can hit me here on the Voices.com website at adamfox.voices.com or as we said earlier at DefiantDigital.com.

Well, thanks a bunch people, I really enjoyed doing this podcast this week, I had a ton of really positive feedback and we'll get some more of those pictures and stories up on the website as it develops. Don't forget to jump over there, take a look. See what we can do and let's make this a community project and you know me, I'm all about community, so until then. Bye for now.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: Adam's given you quite the opportunity! Go to DefiantDigital.com/techtalk.html and have your say on how Adam should dress up the place.

Matt Williams: VOX Box, answering your voiceover questions.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: Today in the VOX Box, Connie Mustang with the vocal talents of Ken Strickland, present a poem that was performed on the last day of VOICE 2007. The poem is an ode to VOICE 2007 as well as the people involved. Let's listen.

Connie Mustang: Ode to VOICE 2007. We step out of our cabs and up to the mic. Socks of money? No where to be found. We wrote notes of love, to ourselves. To spread that love around. We learn to spin a Wagner's web. Slick tricks flew into our brains. Learning ABC's, how to negotiate fees and hit Piñatas with Frank (cane). We gained infinite Imo.

Connie Mustang: Oh, no we've been hit. With all the things to reach for our dreams.

Ken Strickland: In a world.

Connie Mustang: Where we can dance with character.

Ken Strickland: (Inaudible 00:12:26) swung.

Connie Mustang: We thank you for all of these things. Ode to VOICE 2007 by Connie Mustang. Additional voices provided by Ken Strickland.

Stephanie Ciccarelli: When I approached Connie in the final moments of the conference that Saturday, they were almost shutting the lights off at that point in the room. She was extremely excited to share this with you. I want to send out a big thank you to Ken Strickland for all his help and lovely additions to Connie's poetry.

And with a last glimpse at VOICE 2007, that wraps up Episode 25 of VOX Talk. You can get a hold of me by e-mail, by dropping a line on the blog or sending in your audio feedback to be played on the air. If you missed some of the links mentioned earlier, catch them all at blogs.voices.com/voxtalk. You can reach me at Stephanie@voices.com. I'm your host Stephanie Ciccarelli. See you all next Thursday.