- Austrian Audio, making passion heard with their high-quality microphones and headphones. Check them out at austrian.audio
- Tri Booth, the ultimate portable vocal booth solution for voice actors. Get $200 off your purchase with the code T-R-I-P-A-P-200. Visit tribooth.com for more information.
- The basics of setting up a professional voiceover studio
- How to improve audio quality using simple tools
- The role of Twisted Wave in streamlining your recording process
- Jim’s advice on choosing the right microphone and gear
- Common mistakes voice actors make with room treatment and how to fix them
00:00:00
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Y'all ready to be history?
00:00:01
Get started.
00:00:01
Welcome.
00:00:02
Hi.
00:00:02
Hi.
00:00:03
Hi.
00:00:03
Hello, everyone.
00:00:05
To the Pro Audio Suite.
00:00:06
These guys are professional, they're motivated.
00:00:08
Thanks to Tribute, the best vocal booth for
00:00:11
home or on the road voice recording.
00:00:13
And Austrian Audio, making passion heard.
00:00:16
Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone
00:00:20
Audio Post, Chicago.
00:00:21
Darren Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.
00:00:24
Tech to the VO Stars.
00:00:26
George the Tech Whittam from LA.
00:00:28
And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home
00:00:31
studio guy.
00:00:32
Line up, man.
00:00:33
Here we go.
00:00:34
Tech to the beat.
00:00:35
And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite.
00:00:38
Thanks to Tribute.
00:00:39
Don't forget the code, T-R-I-P
00:00:41
-A-P 200.
00:00:42
That will get you $200 off your Tribute.
00:00:45
And trust me, they're great.
00:00:47
And also, Austrian Audio, making passion heard.
00:00:50
This week, we're joined by a special guest,
00:00:53
a man called Jim Edgar.
00:00:54
If you're into Twisted Wave or in the
00:00:56
voiceover community, you would definitely know who Jim
00:00:58
is.
00:00:59
If you're not, stick around and you'll find
00:01:01
out more.
00:01:02
Welcome, Jim.
00:01:03
Thank you very much.
00:01:04
It's an honor to be here among the
00:01:05
group.
00:01:06
So thank you for having me.
00:01:07
Appreciate it.
00:01:08
It's more of an honor to have you
00:01:09
with us, Motley Crue.
00:01:13
Finally, some intelligence injected into the show.
00:01:16
Very rare.
00:01:17
I'll try.
00:01:17
I'll try.
00:01:18
I'll try to drag it down in some
00:01:19
bicycling tangents.
00:01:21
We may find some tangents today.
00:01:23
We'll see.
00:01:24
Oh, we'll be veering off in various directions.
00:01:27
In about three seconds.
00:01:28
Three.
00:01:28
Yes, I'm guaranteed.
00:01:30
I was thinking about making a bike frame
00:01:31
with a shotgun microphone to the tubes.
00:01:38
Could you put a capsule into a bike
00:01:40
frame and turn it into a microphone?
00:01:42
That's great.
00:01:43
It needs to happen.
00:01:44
I'll encourage you to actually dig through the
00:01:47
YouTubes and find Frank Zappa playing a bicycle
00:01:49
on the Steve Allen show.
00:01:51
Always a favorite.
00:01:51
A friend of mine sent me that video
00:01:53
today.
00:01:54
Really?
00:01:54
He texted it to me.
00:01:55
He's like, I don't know if you've seen
00:01:56
this.
00:01:57
Back on the Chain Gang?
00:01:58
Ooh, well played.
00:01:59
Yes, I'll take that.
00:02:00
Might have pre-dated that song.
00:02:02
You're such a pretender, Andrew.
00:02:03
Seriously.
00:02:04
Oh, man.
00:02:05
Sorry about that.
00:02:06
Yes.
00:02:07
It's starting fast, folks.
00:02:08
This is like the bike race where everybody
00:02:10
blows out ahead of you, hanging on.
00:02:12
I'm not going to be able to catch
00:02:14
up with these guys.
00:02:14
We haven't even hit the topic that we're
00:02:16
going to talk about yet, and we're already
00:02:17
veered off in various areas.
00:02:19
What are the frequently asked questions that you
00:02:21
get, Jim?
00:02:22
Is it twisted wave, or is it just
00:02:24
general voiceover stuff?
00:02:25
A lot of both.
00:02:27
I'm teaching quite a few kind of intro
00:02:30
recording classes through VoiceOne up here in San
00:02:32
Francisco, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
00:02:34
We draw people from all over.
00:02:37
So there are folks who literally do not
00:02:40
know what to plug into what.
00:02:41
So they have gone on to, say, a
00:02:45
major international shopping site and seen a microphone
00:02:49
for $29, which comes with everything you need
00:02:52
to be a voice actor, and they wonder
00:02:54
why they sound bad.
00:02:55
Includes talent.
00:02:56
Includes talent, too, yeah.
00:02:58
But no, often, I mean, the common question
00:03:04
is always, why does it sound so bad?
00:03:06
I mean, that's the first one.
00:03:07
And so you have to explain that the
00:03:10
human brain is a very good filter for
00:03:13
taking out all those little echoes and imperfections
00:03:15
that live in our spaces.
00:03:17
Hey, if you hear well enough to make
00:03:19
the determination that it sounds bad, you might
00:03:21
have the aptitude for a career in voice
00:03:24
acting.
00:03:25
Or an audio engineer.
00:03:26
The first thing to recognize is that it
00:03:28
sounds bad.
00:03:29
You'd be amazed how many people don't know
00:03:31
that it even sounds bad.
00:03:32
Well, I admit, I kind of let them
00:03:33
in on the joke in the first class,
00:03:35
because I teach them, or I tell them
00:03:36
that I'm going to teach them how to
00:03:37
listen, which is, I use the example that
00:03:40
my wife is an artist and very visually
00:03:42
talented, and so I'll go out and paint
00:03:44
with her, and she goes, you know, you
00:03:45
just have to learn how to see.
00:03:47
And it's kind of like I'm telling voice
00:03:48
actors the same thing.
00:03:49
You just need to learn how to listen
00:03:50
to it.
00:03:52
And so that is always the big thing,
00:03:55
is that they get this mic, put it
00:03:56
in a poorly treated space, and wonder why
00:03:59
they're hearing dog barks and people working in
00:04:02
the kitchen and other strange sounds that, you
00:04:03
know, never would go on a professional podcast
00:04:05
or anything like that.
00:04:06
It's interesting you mention visual, because your wife
00:04:09
being an artist, because there's a trick with
00:04:11
painting, as someone who does paint, if you're
00:04:16
doing like a portrait or whatever, if you're
00:04:19
copying an image, if you turn it upside
00:04:20
down, then it tricks your brain.
00:04:24
Absolutely.
00:04:24
You can actually do it fine.
00:04:26
Is there an audio version of turning it
00:04:28
upside down?
00:04:28
The big challenge to voice actors, I think,
00:04:30
is that we get wrapped up in the
00:04:32
performance thing.
00:04:33
And that's kind of where my intersection is,
00:04:35
that, you know, I came into this wanting
00:04:37
to do voices, wanting to tell stories, and
00:04:40
kind of my second class that I took,
00:04:43
you know, back in 2007, all these working
00:04:46
voice actors started showing up in them, because
00:04:49
they suddenly had to come back and learn
00:04:52
how to record, because they were going into
00:04:54
their agency and doing the auditions in the
00:04:56
agency, and that was all getting handled.
00:04:58
And all of a sudden, you know, in
00:04:59
the Bay Area up here, the agencies told
00:05:01
them they had to record at home.
00:05:03
And so nobody had a setup.
00:05:05
And all of a sudden, I'm, you know,
00:05:07
digging back into my memory from all my
00:05:09
hours and years spent kicking around in computer
00:05:12
music and recording studios saying, oh, no, this
00:05:15
is the way you set this stuff up.
00:05:16
Doesn't everybody know this?
00:05:18
But that's sort of the whole problem is
00:05:20
that nobody was aware of what they were
00:05:22
saying, because they were so focused on the
00:05:26
performance.
00:05:26
And as a voice actor, we have this,
00:05:29
you know, real insecurity that we're not doing
00:05:32
a good enough job, that we're not doing
00:05:34
it right, that when we hear our voice,
00:05:35
we're hearing the flaws in our performance.
00:05:37
And it's really hard to teach people to
00:05:39
listen past that.
00:05:40
And that's sort of the big push that
00:05:41
I make at first is that we need
00:05:42
to kind of, you know, get rid of
00:05:44
our concern about how we're talking in the
00:05:47
moment.
00:05:48
And we need to talk about or we
00:05:50
need to learn to listen beyond that and
00:05:53
listen to the sound of the room and
00:05:54
listen to the other stuff that's going on,
00:05:55
because they just aren't seeing it.
00:05:58
I did a couple of times trying to
00:06:00
turn around backwards on my mic, and that
00:06:03
did not help.
00:06:04
So, you know, that's not something we could
00:06:06
necessarily do, but learning to kind of.
00:06:10
No, but I've seen the actors read scripts
00:06:13
backwards.
00:06:14
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:06:15
I don't know, you know.
00:06:16
Yeah.
00:06:16
Well, that shakes us up out of the
00:06:18
performance, because we don't we start I mean,
00:06:20
that's actually a really nice in the booth
00:06:22
hack is to if we're if we're feeling
00:06:24
like I'm locked into this read, just read
00:06:26
all the words individually backwards.
00:06:27
That's that's I got that direction that several
00:06:31
times when I was learning my craft as
00:06:33
well.
00:06:33
But yeah, that's a good one.
00:06:35
I've never heard that before.
00:06:36
That's interesting.
00:06:37
That's the exact thing you're asking about with
00:06:38
the painting almost.
00:06:40
I like reading backwards.
00:06:41
Okay.
00:06:42
But interestingly with sound, though, because there's a
00:06:46
guy here who's who's actually blind, a blind
00:06:49
voice actor called Alistair Lee.
00:06:51
And Alistair has the most incredible hearing.
00:06:55
Like he hears everything.
00:06:56
I mean, I've spoken to him on Source
00:06:59
Connect, and he will hear stuff in the
00:07:01
background.
00:07:01
He goes, Oh, what what are you doing
00:07:03
with that?
00:07:04
It's like, what?
00:07:05
You know, there'll be something I can't even
00:07:06
hear it.
00:07:06
And he's hearing it down the line.
00:07:08
Is that a tip to shut your eyes?
00:07:10
It's one of the first things I have
00:07:12
folks do, you know, and I've heard you
00:07:14
guys talk about this as well.
00:07:16
But, you know, a lot of the classes
00:07:18
that I teach, everybody's in their own space.
00:07:20
And so I make them close their eyes.
00:07:22
I tell them they have to get all
00:07:23
Northern California's in and everything and, you know,
00:07:26
use their other senses.
00:07:28
But if we cut out the visuals, all
00:07:30
of a sudden we're listening to and naming
00:07:32
the sounds.
00:07:32
Robert, I've heard you talk about this, you
00:07:34
know, where you say, Okay, oh, that's the
00:07:35
buzz of my life.
00:07:36
That's the water going through the pipes.
00:07:38
That's the car.
00:07:40
Well, it was a it was a class
00:07:41
in college.
00:07:42
I remember where everyone would have to sit
00:07:44
there and like the first two rounds is
00:07:46
like, Oh, yeah, the train, the cars, this,
00:07:47
that goes around twice.
00:07:49
And all of a sudden people are really
00:07:50
digging because you don't want to be the
00:07:52
last person who can't hear something, especially the
00:07:55
person after you can hear something.
00:07:57
But that's sort of the point is that,
00:07:59
you know, unless something's about to kill and
00:08:01
eat us, our brain tells us it's not
00:08:02
something worth worrying about.
00:08:04
Yeah.
00:08:04
It's interesting.
00:08:05
There's an audio engineering sort of lesson in
00:08:07
there as well is, you know, sometimes you'll
00:08:10
be listening to something and looking at your
00:08:13
editor, whether it be Pro Tools or whatever
00:08:14
and your eyes see an edit coming up.
00:08:18
Yeah.
00:08:18
And you sort of hear and you go,
00:08:19
that sounds okay.
00:08:21
But then you close your eyes and you
00:08:23
listen to it and your brain's not getting
00:08:24
that sort of visual cue.
00:08:26
And all of a sudden you go, shit,
00:08:27
hang on, that doesn't work.
00:08:29
A mate of mine used to teach actually,
00:08:30
he's an audio engineer, English guy.
00:08:33
And when he moved to Australia, he gave
00:08:35
up recording records because he just got sick
00:08:37
of working with musicians who were lazy and
00:08:39
started teaching.
00:08:40
But he used to do tricks because he
00:08:42
grew up on tape, you know, on a
00:08:44
mixing desk to multitrack tape.
00:08:47
So what he does, he gets the kids
00:08:48
on Pro Tools and they all do their
00:08:50
mix and everything.
00:08:50
And then he takes them to the other
00:08:52
studio where they work on tape and a
00:08:53
mixing desk where they've got no screens.
00:08:56
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:08:58
And it's like, okay, I want you to
00:08:59
use the same components and do a mix
00:09:01
blind.
00:09:03
And he said, it's amazing.
00:09:04
The mixes are so different.
00:09:06
And it freaks them out.
00:09:07
Oh, totally.
00:09:08
There was a guy who made a plugin
00:09:09
for Pro Tools and the plugin was called
00:09:11
Listen.
00:09:12
And if you launched it, it blacked your
00:09:13
screen out.
00:09:14
Yeah.
00:09:15
Awesome.
00:09:16
Awesome.
00:09:16
Look, I used to do a bit of
00:09:18
training back in my radio days of, you
00:09:20
know, the new guys that came through and
00:09:22
especially on Pro Tools when Pro Tools was
00:09:24
becoming a thing, you know, you'd say to
00:09:26
someone, are you sure that's right?
00:09:27
And they'd go, yeah, it looks okay.
00:09:29
Yeah.
00:09:30
And you'd be going, well, yeah, it might
00:09:31
look okay, but are you listening?
00:09:33
You know, that's the thing.
00:09:34
I find that the visual editing is actually
00:09:37
much slower.
00:09:38
So, you know, it's like I'll spend a
00:09:40
lot of my time zoomed out in micro
00:09:44
view or small view, you know, for the
00:09:46
waveforms.
00:09:47
And you're just scrubbing because I think a
00:09:49
scrub is like audio zoom.
00:09:51
And you can move around a lot quicker
00:09:53
than zooming in and out of everything to
00:09:56
find your edits.
00:09:57
You know, it's like you can get right
00:10:00
up to a transient.
00:10:01
There you go.
00:10:01
Yeah, I think the visuals are really distracting.
00:10:03
I mean, that's, I mean, you get people
00:10:06
that in terms of FAQs, that's probably the
00:10:10
second thing is that I see this little
00:10:11
wavy line.
00:10:12
My question is always, do you hear it?
00:10:14
You know, is it really there?
00:10:15
And most of the time it isn't.
00:10:17
And so, absolutely, that we start editing with
00:10:19
our eyes and that's definitely a time suck.
00:10:25
You will start fixing things that just don't
00:10:27
matter.
00:10:27
And, you know, there's a little, I think
00:10:29
there's a little bit of a psychological response
00:10:32
to that.
00:10:32
And it'll take you longer to edit.
00:10:35
Absolutely.
00:10:35
And you also make the absolute clangor mistake
00:10:38
of usually when you're a beginner is inserting
00:10:40
silence.
00:10:41
Yes.
00:10:43
More disturbing, you know.
00:10:45
Because what you hear, and that's what's so
00:10:47
interesting going back to the listening thing, is
00:10:48
that what you hear is the change in
00:10:51
what you hear.
00:10:52
Yeah, we notice differences.
00:10:54
That's the way our brains kind of react
00:10:55
to that stuff.
00:10:56
And so, you know, if you, like in
00:10:59
one of the classes, I play back a
00:11:01
normal room tone and then I play back
00:11:02
a silenced room tone to say, what's the
00:11:04
difference?
00:11:04
Everybody says, well, there's a lot more noise
00:11:05
when they talk.
00:11:06
It's like, no, the noise is exactly the
00:11:08
same.
00:11:09
It's just that you're noticing that difference because,
00:11:11
you know, the minus 50 dB noise floor
00:11:14
is suddenly very apparent when it was minus,
00:11:16
you know, 120 before that.
00:11:17
The bad gate.
00:11:18
Yeah, exactly.
00:11:19
It sounds like a bad gate.
00:11:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:21
So what about with Twisted Wave?
00:11:23
I know you're the Twisted Wave go-to
00:11:25
guy.
00:11:26
Yeah.
00:11:27
Actually, can we call it the goat?
00:11:31
I was going to do a goat imitation,
00:11:33
but it was going to sound like a
00:11:35
sheep and I didn't want it to seem
00:11:37
like it was offensive to anybody in Down
00:11:40
Under.
00:11:41
That's true.
00:11:42
It's getting worse.
00:11:43
Again, I'm pedaling as fast as I can
00:11:45
here today.
00:11:45
Don't fall off, Jim, seriously.
00:11:48
Andrew does not only dad jokes, but granddad
00:11:50
jokes.
00:11:54
That's an impressive resume, I'll tell you that.
00:11:58
My repertoire goes back to 1850.
00:12:01
That's good.
00:12:01
Well, you know, part of the nice thing
00:12:02
about having, you know, been in studios in
00:12:04
the 1800s was that we had to use
00:12:07
them and trust our ears.
00:12:08
I mean, I learned on a compressor that
00:12:10
had, you know, a negative dial and or
00:12:13
a negative needle and a dial.
00:12:15
And it's like, how did you dial that
00:12:16
thing?
00:12:16
How do you make that thing work?
00:12:17
It's like, do you hear it working?
00:12:19
And nobody has to do that these days.
00:12:21
Well, see, before wax recordings, Jim was recording
00:12:23
on clay, weren't you, Jim?
00:12:24
I was, yeah.
00:12:25
It was kind of like a punch card
00:12:27
system that we had to kind of throw
00:12:29
through.
00:12:29
Recordings in hieroglyphics.
00:12:30
It was the iRock instead of the iPad.
00:12:33
True.
00:12:35
But no, Twisted Wave is kind of one
00:12:37
of those things where, you know, I've heard
00:12:39
you mention it, too, that it just sets
00:12:42
up and works so easily that most people
00:12:44
don't dig under the hood in it.
00:12:45
And so there's a little bit of this
00:12:48
idea that, oh, it's not really going to
00:12:49
work for professional, delivering professional work.
00:12:52
And that's sort of a load.
00:12:54
You know, that's just not right.
00:12:55
There are so many tools that live in
00:12:57
the menus that most people never get to.
00:13:00
I mean, things, you know, as simple as
00:13:01
just a batch processor, things like the detect
00:13:04
silences, which, you know, I do a lot
00:13:07
of work with audiobook narrators who, you know,
00:13:09
are very worried.
00:13:10
It's like, how do I kind of cut
00:13:11
down all those little pauses?
00:13:13
And, you know, my quick answer is take
00:13:15
longer pauses and just use detect silences because
00:13:18
you can have it find anything that's slightly
00:13:21
longer than three quarters of a second.
00:13:22
Pretty similarly to strip silences, I think, Robbo.
00:13:25
Yeah, strip silences.
00:13:26
Yeah.
00:13:27
But you've got, you know, a tremendous tool
00:13:29
that you can kind of drop in.
00:13:31
So it has all the durations and the
00:13:33
delay start and the keep on silencing after
00:13:37
a moment.
00:13:38
Yeah, you can set it to find, you
00:13:40
can actually, there's a slider in it that
00:13:43
has a maximum setting of, I think, two
00:13:45
seconds, but you can overwrite that manually.
00:13:47
So you could have it look for anything
00:13:48
shorter than five seconds, for example.
00:13:50
And so I encourage long form narrators to
00:13:54
take longer pauses because then it's easier to
00:13:57
find them.
00:13:58
And once you trigger that device and you
00:14:00
have to go into the advanced panel on
00:14:02
it.
00:14:02
But once you trigger that device, you can
00:14:04
then drop in exactly the same amount of
00:14:07
silence.
00:14:07
You can do it from, you know, just
00:14:09
from a little bit of room tone that
00:14:11
you've copied and then suck everything down.
00:14:14
So it's a nice, normal narrative pace.
00:14:16
I've always argued that some software developers, or
00:14:19
most software developers, should change that advanced tab
00:14:22
to a more tab.
00:14:23
Because as soon as someone who's beginning sees
00:14:25
the word advanced, they go, oh shit, better
00:14:27
not touch that.
00:14:27
I'm not touching that.
00:14:28
Yeah.
00:14:28
But if it said more, if it just
00:14:29
said something like more or, you know, dive
00:14:33
deeper or whatever, they'd be more inclined to
00:14:35
click on it and go, oh fuck, hang
00:14:36
on, look what I can do here.
00:14:37
Cool stuff to rubble.
00:14:39
Yes.
00:14:39
I think it should be the warning screen
00:14:41
on the internet when you go to a
00:14:42
site.
00:14:42
It's like, ignore or proceed to risky site.
00:14:48
I never go to sites like that, Robert.
00:14:51
I'm concerned that you are.
00:14:52
I'm a little worried about that.
00:14:53
The question Robert can never answer is that
00:14:56
one, are you 18 years or over?
00:14:59
Actually, you see those screens when you go
00:15:01
to your router, to be perfectly honest.
00:15:03
Okay, all right.
00:15:04
I'll believe you.
00:15:05
I'll believe you.
00:15:06
And those sites too.
00:15:08
Easy.
00:15:09
Router or router, I'm not sure.
00:15:12
A router?
00:15:14
A router?
00:15:15
I don't know.
00:15:16
I think the only thing, the only place
00:15:18
that I ever have Twisted Wave kind of
00:15:20
fail, and I love the fact that it
00:15:23
does fail there, is that people want to
00:15:25
do multitrack for some reason.
00:15:27
And most of those are kind of vestigial
00:15:30
approaches that they learned because they started with
00:15:32
Audacity and they had to put all their
00:15:34
pickups on additional tracks and they're not used
00:15:36
to that.
00:15:38
Back when I kind of first started recording,
00:15:40
I was using something called Amadeus Pro, which
00:15:42
is a very Twisted Wave-like multitrack recording
00:15:45
software.
00:15:47
And it took me a little bit to
00:15:49
start to start thinking, it's like, oh, I
00:15:50
can just insert right in the track and
00:15:52
I can insert and not overwrite things.
00:15:54
It actually pushes everything along downstream.
00:15:57
The two-track-to-edit thing is a
00:16:00
common thing.
00:16:02
When you're editing music, a lot of engineers
00:16:04
will take two tracks to edit.
00:16:06
And a good music cutdown, you just need
00:16:08
one track.
00:16:09
You shouldn't need two separate tracks to go
00:16:11
fading between the two.
00:16:13
Yeah, nobody who is just delivering a vocal,
00:16:16
a voice track, not even a vocal track,
00:16:18
because we're not talking about singing.
00:16:19
I mean, you don't need more than one
00:16:21
track, absolutely don't.
00:16:23
It's kind of weird.
00:16:24
I mean, it can't happen physically, so why
00:16:27
would you want to make something happen that
00:16:30
can't happen?
00:16:31
It'll sound like an edit.
00:16:32
How is Twisted Wave with the fades compared
00:16:35
to something like Pro Tools?
00:16:37
I was going to mention that.
00:16:39
That's what Twisted Wave is cool, right?
00:16:41
It has that zero-crossing setting.
00:16:44
Yeah, it has a toggle-able edit at
00:16:50
zero points.
00:16:51
So that, again, is one thing, not to
00:16:53
pick mercilessly on Audacity, but you have to
00:16:56
do that little extra trick to make sure
00:16:59
that it's actually editing at the zero-cross.
00:17:02
Where with Twisted Wave, you can turn that
00:17:04
off if you don't need it, which is
00:17:06
maybe one time out of a hundred where
00:17:09
you can't quite get it to land where
00:17:10
you need it to.
00:17:11
But for the most part, that just keeps
00:17:13
people from having those annoying clicks from edits.
00:17:16
When it does the zero-cross, does it
00:17:18
also consider the direction it's going?
00:17:20
Or will it bounce zero right back up
00:17:23
to positive?
00:17:24
No, it'll find zero-cross from both sides.
00:17:26
Okay, so it has the trajectory.
00:17:28
It does.
00:17:29
And that's sort of the simplest way to
00:17:30
use it, but you can also...
00:17:32
There's actually an overlap function in Twisted Wave
00:17:35
which lets you draw a curve if you
00:17:37
want to do something like that.
00:17:39
And you can actually...
00:17:41
I kind of don't use it because the
00:17:42
native one works well enough that it's not
00:17:45
really a problem.
00:17:46
But with that, if you really want to,
00:17:49
you can actually draw an exponential curve to
00:17:51
get a fade between an edit point if
00:17:54
you want to.
00:17:54
Will it non-destructively edit, truly?
00:17:57
Or is it like you only get a
00:17:58
couple undos?
00:18:00
You get a...
00:18:02
I always call it the bowtie.
00:18:04
So whenever you do a delete, there's a
00:18:05
little right arrow, left arrow that looks like
00:18:07
a fancy bowtie that appears at the top
00:18:09
of the screen.
00:18:10
And you can actually drag that all the
00:18:12
way back or drag that all the way
00:18:13
forward and do some fine-tuning of that
00:18:16
edit.
00:18:17
But once you go to the next one,
00:18:19
you lose the option to do that, so
00:18:21
that it goes away by the second one.
00:18:22
So it's semi-destructive?
00:18:25
I hate to make strong points, but I
00:18:28
really think the destructive versus non-destructive is
00:18:31
a bit oversold.
00:18:34
That there's an undo.
00:18:35
If you screw up, start backing up.
00:18:37
One of the nice things that Thomas did
00:18:39
recently is that he added a history window.
00:18:43
And I have that toggled on almost all
00:18:45
the time now, where you can easily jump
00:18:47
back anywhere in the process with an open
00:18:49
file just by clicking on it.
00:18:51
And it goes right back to that state.
00:18:52
I mostly use it to make sure that
00:18:55
when I'm about to send an audition off,
00:18:57
it's like, wait a minute, did I do
00:18:58
the high-pass filter?
00:18:59
Did I do the mouthy click?
00:19:00
And it's like, OK, it's right there in
00:19:01
the list.
00:19:01
I don't have to undo, redo just to
00:19:03
do that.
00:19:04
I think Bias Peak did it where once
00:19:06
you open the file on any edit you
00:19:08
did, it was all soft.
00:19:10
And then once you saved it, then you
00:19:12
were flattened again.
00:19:14
Again, I sort of went deep nerding on
00:19:16
Twisted Wave a couple of times.
00:19:17
But you can actually undo Twisted Wave past
00:19:20
the point that you save.
00:19:22
And so, for example, I demonstrate in class
00:19:26
where I highlight the whole thing, I hit
00:19:27
delete, I hit save, and it's an empty
00:19:31
file all of a sudden.
00:19:31
But you can actually keep undoing back to
00:19:35
the point where you opened the file, as
00:19:36
long as you haven't closed it.
00:19:38
I think I've gone, I got bored and
00:19:40
passed about 60 or 70 undos.
00:19:42
But it'll go way, way, way past any
00:19:45
point of saving.
00:19:47
Which is kind of, again, I wouldn't say
00:19:51
that it's non-destructive, but it gives you
00:19:53
a lot of guardrails.
00:19:54
It's really tough to kind of lose everything.
00:19:56
It's also really good at recovering from a
00:19:58
crash.
00:19:59
Yeah, I would agree.
00:20:00
When you go through that edit history, like
00:20:02
say I'd made an edit, and then I've
00:20:05
done 10 other things, and then I've gone,
00:20:08
oh, shit, hang on, I want those last
00:20:11
10 edits, but that 11th one, I just
00:20:13
want to undo that.
00:20:14
So your levels of undo, is it just
00:20:16
undoing that one that I'm clicking on, or
00:20:18
is that undoing the whole lot?
00:20:20
If you're doing a straight undo, it's sequential.
00:20:23
So it backs up everything that you did.
00:20:25
So if you did 10 edits and 11
00:20:26
was an oops, then you would go back
00:20:28
to 10 by hitting undo.
00:20:30
In the new history window that has appeared
00:20:33
with the 30 point, was it 30?
00:20:36
Whichever version he brought out goes kind of
00:20:38
post that survey.
00:20:40
Yeah, 30.
00:20:41
30, yeah.
00:20:41
When he brought that out, that one you
00:20:43
can jump around to any point.
00:20:45
See, that's powerful for me.
00:20:47
But if you jump back 10 edits, 10
00:20:53
edits in the history, the nine that you
00:20:56
did after that point are undone also.
00:20:59
Correct, yeah.
00:21:00
Oh, really?
00:21:01
Yeah, it goes to whatever state you choose.
00:21:04
But it's still linear through the undos.
00:21:07
If you jump back to 10, you lose
00:21:09
all the ones between.
00:21:11
Well, you don't lose anything because you can
00:21:12
always jump back.
00:21:14
But you have to redo them.
00:21:15
It undoes everything between step 20 and step
00:21:18
10.
00:21:19
If there's 15 minutes of work between undo
00:21:21
11 and undo 1, and you go back
00:21:24
to 11, you've got that 15 minutes of
00:21:26
work to redo.
00:21:27
Some systems, it's funny.
00:21:28
That would be time travel.
00:21:29
If you mess up something in the time
00:21:32
-space continuum, you can't go back.
00:21:35
Well, you can in Pro Tools.
00:21:37
You just go back and you go.
00:21:38
You can.
00:21:39
In Pro Tools, you go back and you
00:21:40
go, well, there's the cut there.
00:21:42
I just slide my audio back, and I've
00:21:44
undone that.
00:21:45
You know what I mean?
00:21:46
But I think Pro Tools also has nonlinear
00:21:48
undo.
00:21:49
So as long as one thing's not hinged
00:21:51
on the other, it will undo that and
00:21:53
not undo everything that you did.
00:21:54
But what happens when it is hinged on
00:21:57
the other?
00:21:57
It undoes the stuff that it has to.
00:21:58
Yeah, I have to believe that as Thomas
00:22:02
continues to evolve that tool, that would be
00:22:04
feedback that might be actionable.
00:22:10
Right now, it's basically a pretty simple list,
00:22:12
and I think it's really patterned after what's
00:22:14
been available in Adobe Audition, that they've always
00:22:16
had that history window.
00:22:18
And Rx has that as well.
00:22:19
You have the little history window down there.
00:22:21
You can do the same thing.
00:22:23
But yeah, this is just a nice, easy,
00:22:25
quick application for it that hopefully, since he
00:22:29
makes a living at it...
00:22:31
What's that?
00:22:32
Didn't he also add video, I think?
00:22:34
Yeah, video's been in for a while.
00:22:35
He added a speech recognition and a video
00:22:38
component that you can add to it.
00:22:41
Up here in the Bay Area, we've got
00:22:41
a lot of on-camera folks who use
00:22:44
it just to do their on-camera auditions.
00:22:45
So they can do a quick edit if
00:22:47
they stumble a line without opening Final Cut
00:22:50
or whatever it is, or QuickTime or something.
00:22:51
It's funny, the other one that can edit
00:22:53
video is Reaper.
00:22:55
And it can do titles and all kinds
00:22:58
of stuff, actually, funny enough.
00:23:00
But I said the other week when we
00:23:02
were talking about Twisted Wave, there's so much
00:23:04
in there that I would never go anywhere
00:23:06
near it.
00:23:08
I mean, I just use the basic stuff.
00:23:10
That's all I need.
00:23:11
So I was always interested in that survey
00:23:12
that Thomas did, and the things that people
00:23:16
asked for, it's kind of like, oh, really?
00:23:19
What would you want to use that for?
00:23:21
What's the craziest one someone asked for, Andrew?
00:23:24
Multitrack.
00:23:24
Yeah, Multitrack was, that made me cry.
00:23:28
Oh, that made me sad.
00:23:31
It's like, no, do you go do something?
00:23:33
No, I think the interesting thing in that
00:23:35
survey was how many people asked for stuff
00:23:36
that's in there.
00:23:38
Yeah.
00:23:38
I mean, that was, I was like, don't
00:23:41
you go to that menu?
00:23:43
Do you not go around the menus?
00:23:45
But most people don't.
00:23:46
I mean, you know, again, it gets back
00:23:48
to, you know, I mean, we clearly have,
00:23:51
you know, a technical interest and we like
00:23:53
that stuff, so we dig around under the
00:23:55
hood.
00:23:56
But most people, it's like, I just need
00:23:58
to get an MP3 out.
00:23:59
And, you know, that's okay.
00:24:01
I mean, there's such a variety of people
00:24:03
that find their way into this business that,
00:24:06
you know, I mean, I think there's a
00:24:08
couple different approaches.
00:24:09
I mean, this gets to sort of a
00:24:10
larger topic, but there are folks who want
00:24:12
to keep it all behind the curtain.
00:24:14
There are people who, and, you know, it's
00:24:15
like, just push these buttons and everything is
00:24:17
going to come out okay, which is not
00:24:19
the same thing that George creates with a
00:24:23
stack that, you know, we're using very specific
00:24:26
tools for very specific effects and they're very
00:24:29
visible.
00:24:30
And so, you know, if it's like, I'm
00:24:31
going to do my audio book audition, I'm
00:24:33
going to use my George audio book stack
00:24:35
and have it come out exactly how it
00:24:36
should.
00:24:39
But fortunately, stuff breaks usually on Sunday nights
00:24:42
and people end up calling us, you know,
00:24:46
or very, very panicked that they have to
00:24:48
be able to solve those problems.
00:24:49
I mean, you know, with the Vespa, when
00:24:53
you have a problem, you look at it
00:24:54
and you can recognize parts in the engine.
00:24:56
You know, it's like, okay, I can fix
00:24:57
that.
00:24:58
That's what mechanics are for.
00:24:59
I was going to say, that's kind of
00:25:01
where I am with cars.
00:25:01
It's like, well, there's an engine in there,
00:25:03
shoot.
00:25:03
That's all I know.
00:25:04
If the engine was gone, I could at
00:25:05
least, you know, diagnose the problem.
00:25:07
But of course, these days you open the
00:25:08
bonnet and it's just a piece of plastic.
00:25:10
You don't even know where the engine is.
00:25:11
That's true.
00:25:11
And on that note, it's time to shut
00:25:13
the bonnet or the hood on this episode
00:25:15
and we'll be back with part two next
00:25:18
week as we're joined once again by Jim
00:25:20
Edgar.
00:25:21
Have a fine time, won't you?
00:25:23
Well, that was fun.
00:25:24
Is it over?
00:25:25
It's over to me.
00:25:26
The Pro Audio Suite.
00:25:27
With thanks to Tribooth.
00:25:29
And Austrian Audio.
00:25:30
Recorded using Source Connect.
00:25:32
Edited by Andrew Peters.
00:25:34
And mixed by Vudu Radio Imaging.
00:25:36
With tech support from George the Tech Whittam.
00:25:38
Don't forget to subscribe to the show and
00:25:40
join in the conversation on our Facebook group.
00:25:42
To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or
00:25:44
just say g'day.
00:25:45
Drop us a note at our website.