ejsvoicecast season 2 episode 13

The speaker shares their experience with encountering a scammer on Fiverr and warns others to be cautious. They also discuss seeking technical support for their voice recordings and mention contacting a well-known person in the industry for feedback. The speaker talks about their accent coaching sessions and their decision to switch from a Southern accent to an Australian accent. They mention watching a program to familiarize themselves with the accent. The speaker mentions a possible research gig and previous experiences with scams on Voices.com. They also discuss improving their profile on the platform and receiving feedback on their YouTube explainer channel. Lastly, they talk about purchasing a capture card to improve the video quality on their channel and upgrading their monitor for better connectivity options. I'm changing who I am. I'm making a new plan. Rearranging my life fast. I won't look back. Hey, welcome to another segment of EJ's voice cast. EJ here. And, as you know, I completed my Fiverr account some time ago. And, you know, I attracted a scammer. I'll never know for sure. I'm pretty sure it was a scammer. Because a family thing came up. I had to drop that particular task and take care of it. And then I came back and revisited. I did a little sleuthing on it. Some of the stuff in there was a little shady. Like the name of the company was spelled two different ways. They contacted me outside of the Fiverr system. So instead of using the internal email system, they just decided to have me hook up with them on Telegram. So I was curious and started following along to see how far this would go and what it entailed. Because of the family thing, I never got to the end of it. But pretty sure it was a scam. Like I said, I won't know for sure. But hey, after a few posts and a little digging around by friends on Voices, definitely a scam. You know, watch out for them on Fiverr. You'll get a lot of them. I'm used to finding, you know, those things in emails and whatnot because of work. They're usually pretty blatant. They did a pretty good job of posting it. Their English was good. So I'm assuming whoever it was may have been out of the U.S. I don't know. Enough on that. So now I'm going to transition to something else, getting technical support. I posted a question with my Facebook group, Our Voices on Demand. And basically the question is. When you do your recordings and you want to find out if your recording is good, terrible, bad, what can be done with it, who do you send it to? Most people say they send it to their friends, let their friends listen to it, their friends come back and say, yeah, it's great, it's wonderful. But your friends and family are going to say that because they want you to succeed. Not always are they going to be critical. So you kind of want somebody within the business to do that. So somebody within the group dropped some information on me. The person they told me to contact is known as Uncle Roy Yockelson. He's he's been in the business for quite some time. I saw him on a YouTube video some time back. That was pretty interesting. I didn't know who he was at the time. I had never heard of him before. Listened to the YouTube video. Most of it was really interesting. He had a lot to say. And then when this person dropped their name and said, yeah, it's pretty much easy to contact him, you go to his website, you set up a meet. And that's what I did. So I have an appointment in like three hours. So I'm getting this out of the way now. Report on that one when it's over. Basically, I just cut a raw file in WAV format. No, no plugins, nothing to it. Didn't clean anything up with like basically 10 seconds of room tone, just not saying anything, just letting it record whatever it records and then doing a 30 second audition. So I wrapped that up and sent it off to him. So we will see in a few hours what happens. So 15 minute meetup doesn't cost anything. If you want to go forward with more help, then you set up appointments and get something going on the cost front. Now, I have an accent coach and I've done three classes so far. The first two were for the southern accent, and now I've switched to Australian accent. The southern accent is way easier for me as I've been exposed to it my entire life. This is a Georgia accent and my family on my mom's side is from Florida. My father's from Alabama. But I picked this one because it's kind of a go to accent for most people. I've been working on it. Hopefully it sounds pretty good. My coach's name is Sammy Grant. And after doing the two sessions of southern accent, she said I was getting it pretty well. And did I want to switch to another accent? I did. I kind of thought about it for a bit. So instead of going with another southern accent, which she agreed with, would be a disservice to me. And instead of going with the standard English accent from our cousins across the pond, I decided to go way out into the Pacific where I'm at because I am around a lot of New Zealanders and Australians and I cannot for the life of me tell the difference in that accent. Well, I can now. And that was only after one class. Pretty good. I picked Australian as I'm not able to tell the difference. And my homework now is to listen to native Australian accents. So I'm going to start watching a program. I think it's called In Between Man. And it's about a fella in Australia who I guess he's kind of sort of a good guy, bad guy, work for the mob or something. And he takes care of business. So now he does it to take care of bullies who are picking on some nice folks. So we'll see how that program goes. I just need to find some episodes and then start listening. I believe it was on Netflix. I'll look it up and see if I can't find it. I have a possible current gig. I've already been attempted for two scams. This one is from Voices Managed Services Team to participate in a job. And this is one of the research types. So it's a research gig. The name of the job was AM2500 TTS Research. They never posted to YouTube. It's never going out in the public. You're not going to get a nationwide viewing of this. This is strictly research. And it's like a one to three hour read of whatever they decide to post. It's a one to three hour read. Hopefully I'll get more info on it. I submitted it, answered their questions. Everything was within the Voices system. Their world. So hopefully this isn't going to be another scam. Hopefully it won't interfere with my time away because I'm going to Las Vegas in a week to Cisco Live. And I'll be back on the 8th of June. So we shall see and keep our fingers crossed. On Voices.com, they provided me with some information on how to get views after I ask them questions about that weird post. It's a very strange post. I joined to reply to this particular job, not the one I just mentioned. It was a different one. I got a hit. Said, hey, we like your voice. We want you to do these things to apply. The link they provided me to contact them basically failed. I'm like, OK, why did this fail? And during that few minutes that I was looking, all of a sudden that job disappeared. No idea what the heck happened. It just dropped from Voices and said this was cancelled by Voices.com. And I reached out to them, got some more information. They said, yeah, we suspect this is a scam. They were trying to get people to go outside of Voices to contact. And so they dropped it. All right. Thank you very much. Voices did a good job of triaging that. But they also noticed that my profile could be set up a lot better than it is. So they gave me some pointers, dropped a file for me and said, hey, follow these. Check these things out. Make sure you're adding more demos. Go in and fix your demos for your tags. So a tag would be me saying I do a southern accent, so I should do a demo showcasing my southern accent. I do radio style reads, so I should do a demo showcasing that. So I have a few more to drop up, drop on there. I've got about four up there now. Can't hurt to put more out there. Now, you know, I have a YouTube explainer channel called EJ the Explainer. So the Discord group that I join is the first place I mentioned my YouTube explainer channel. And one person showed interest, but their project isn't ready yet. Said they'd get in touch with me when it was. That's great. So another person joined. His name is, or her name, Jamie Jo. And I'll put the link to Jamie Jo's YouTube site in the show notes. So Jamie checked out the site and encouraged me to keep going. I also dropped the link to a gamer friend of mine. We're always, we're in the same fire team when we're playing Destiny 2. And he checked it out and gave me the same thing. Said, hey, good content. Keep going with it. So hey, great. And also both subscribed to the channel. That's really good. So now I have, it says three subscribers. I only showed two names associated with, so I'm not sure what's up with that. I'll have to dig into that a bit more. So as I said, I've posted content to that channel and I'm making some additions so I can to my system so I can post more content in and better content. Cause right now it's like 480p and that's terrible video. The audio is fine. The video is kind of yucky. So I want to post at least 1080p. So I purchased a capture card from Elgato. It's the 4KX or 4K10 if you're into Roman numerals to fix this issue. After I started checking out monitors, my current one, eh, not really broken. It's just seven years old. So there are certain things to it that it doesn't provide me that the newer monitors do. One is the number of ports and whatnot on the back. It seems to have a built-in KVM. I like that so I can get rid of the KVM that's sitting behind my desk. It's got a rat nest of cables running around here. It has multiple connections. As I said, two HDMI, one display port and a mini display port. So this should allow me connect my PS5, my gaming PC, my work laptop for when I'm doing work from home and share the screen with my iMac at the same time. Cause when I'm watching movies here, I like using the curve screen to view it. It looks much better than the iMac screen, which is only a 24 inch. Yeah, I made the mistake. I bought the 24 inch. I should have bought the wider screen. I need to make sure that I can connect my keyboard up so that I can connect to the work laptop and the gaming PC without swapping cables around. That's annoying for me. Maybe I have to move to a tinier KVM switch, but it still takes up less footprint and cleans up more of the cables. So back to the capture card, that will allow me to record gameplay, video and audio as long as I hook it up properly. I've tested it out. It records video fine. The way it's set up now, there's no audio that will be fixed. I got a device coming in today along with the new monitor that's supposed to allow me to connect my headset to the controller, to the capture card device. And that's supposed to pass through the audio, at least for me and the chat portion of the audio. Also record whoever I'm gaming with as long as we're in the chat version on PS5 for the game. There is a way to do it via HDMI. I have to work on that a little bit more, and that requires a separate microphone, meaning I got to get, you know, I already have this mic. So they're basically telling me I need another mic to plug into that, which would allow me to handle the audio portion while gaming without the need for that device that hooks my headset into the controller and then into the capture device. So that information I got from Midnight Man off of his site, which I was just Googling around and found it, is a shout out to him. I put his link in the show notes also. So he seems to have pretty good content. He puts YouTube videos out about how to get your streaming game on, how to do the audio visual portion of it. That's very helpful. The takeaways today, I guess the main ones are push forward with your endeavors, whatever it is you want to do, find a community that does what you want to do, join it, reach out, get some help. Don't be in a rush. Take your time. You know, you got hopefully you got time and maybe this is a side gig. If it is, then you have time to plan, strategize, really dig into stuff to find out if it's right for you rather than just jumping on the first thing that comes by. And then you realize, you know, a week or two weeks later, like this isn't working out and then you want to get rid of it and you're frustrated because maybe you wasted time on it or maybe you wasted time and money. So. To the end of this podcast, thank you for listening. Hopefully I get a lot better at this and we'll catch you on the next one. To claim a brand new name. Oh, don't lie to you. I'm a bit nervous that I might screw everything up that I've ever done. But what's the point of living if you ain't having fun? I guess I'll try this, try that, might miss, gotta find what I'm good at. I guess I look here, look there, over where am I scared? Where am I at? I gotta make it in this life. Whatever makes me happy, know I'm doing things right. We've been in the summer on a goose dance right. We'll find a nightclub for the end of the night. Oh, and we all got dreams. We all want things. But what you gon' do for it? How you gon' move for it? What you gon' be? And do you believe we can do anything? But what you gon' do for it? How you gon' move for it? What you gon' be? How you gon' move for it?