ejsvoicecast season 2 episode 14

The speaker talks about their recent trip to Las Vegas for Cisco Live, an annual gathering for network professionals. They discuss attending classes and seminars, experiencing jet lag, and learning about room treatment and audio editing. They mention purchasing a webinar on using Audacity for recording and editing, and implementing the techniques taught, such as using plugins, recording room tone, and using the punch and roll technique. They also mention adjusting settings, practicing an Australian accent, and their progress on explainer videos and gaming recordings. They end by encouraging feedback and subscriptions and providing a link to the webinar. I'm changing who I am, I'm making a new plan, rearranging my life and I'll be fine. Okay, welcome to another episode of the EJ voice cast. I am EJ, glad to have you aboard. And today I'm going to talk about what's been happening. So you know that I've been gone for a little while. It's been a minute since I last posted. And the reason is I went to Las Vegas for a week at Cisco Live. For those unaware of Cisco Live, it's an annual gathering of network nerds, guys and gals who work in the industry, get together every year. And you have classes and seminars and keynotes and all that provided by Cisco, the company which creates software and hardware to operate your network. It's pretty busy. It's the first one I've ever been to. They've been around for like 20 years. This one happened to be in Las Vegas this year. First time I attended one, never been to one before. Quite busy, hectic. And especially since I traveled from Japan to Las Vegas, I was jet lagged a lot. So it took a while to kind of climatize. I didn't exactly climatize. I was actually falling asleep in some of the classes, took a couple of lab courses and whatnot. And that was kind of tough staying awake. So that's where I was. They tend to have three a year. This was Las Vegas. There's going to be one in Australia and there is either has been or is going to be one in Amsterdam. I won't be going to either one of those. My coworker may be going to one, but not me. So before I left, I took a quick class with a person who's known as Uncle Roy, Uncle Roy Yockelson. He does a lot of audio engineering work. And he schooled me on what I needed to pay attention to with my room treatment, recording and editing skills. I purchased one of the pre-recorded webinars that they have for sale. It was like 40 bucks and on a how to use Audacity. And it's been helpful. It's about two hours long. I'm taking it, you know, chunk by chunk instead of trying to dive into it all at once. Learning something. Practice it. Move on to the next section. And pretty informative. Some things that I had started doing while on GarageBand and then when I moved to Audacity, I stopped, which was adding plug-ins. I now revisited the plug-ins, according to Uncle Roy. Yeah, throw a couple in there. De-essers and de-clicker or X-clicker. So I can remove those annoying sounds. Learn to get a good floor noise, which I just learned from the webinar. Get about 10 seconds of room tone, which is just no noise, no moving around. Five to 10 seconds. Let it record. You can also use sections of that elsewhere in your tracks. Should you have some annoying noise rather than using the silence function within Audacity, which does, as he pointed out, change the actual sound of your recording. And it is noticeable. So I'm going to stop doing that and start grabbing sections of room tone to replace unwanted noises, such as a washing machine starting up or a car going by, so I don't have to re-record the entire track. And speaking of re-recording entire tracks, there was something I learned, punch and roll. I've heard of it. Didn't really understand what it was. It was explained. Basically, it means you have a recorded track. You may not like something in that track, like a mouth noise, sneezing, as I said before, washing machine, whatever it is, you find that section, you isolate that track. You re-record that portion on a new track, and you cut and paste it in, replacing unwanted noise. It works. I've used it before, but not in the way that it was explained in the webinar. I will try playing around with that. And speaking of getting technical support, other tidbits in Audacity, shortcuts. I have a couple of shortcuts set up. I actually added some more, suggested by the person doing the webinar. And it looks like they're going to function out pretty well. It did change my functionality of Audacity. So right now, some of the things I'm used to doing weren't really working. I used to be able to grab a section of a track and stretch it out a little longer. I got to figure out how to change that around. I just noticed this before recording this. Well, it'll be, you know, a learning curve here a little bit, but I should be able to figure it out. A lot of this stuff was done so I could use just one button. So now I don't have to go up and click on the icon to zoom in and out. I can just hit Z. It'll zoom in. O, it'll zoom back out. Various other letters I've used to do different things, like L for labeling sections. That'll come in handy and make editing faster, again, once I practice with it for a while. To kind of clean up my tracks. And speaking of cleaning up tracks, based off the webinar, my settings on Audacity, I reset my microphone gain so that my recording should come in at minus six. And recording this right now, it appears I need to readjust that gain because I'm coming in at like minus 12. So I will have to revisit that. And my I'm talking across the mic, not directly into it. That was another suggestion that Uncle Roy gave me. I took off my shield that I had on there. He says you really don't need it doesn't really do anything. And that's where I'm at there. I have added in, as I mentioned before, the plugins and one's a de-esser and one is a de-clicker. The de-esser worked fine. It took out a lot of the sibilance. The de-clicker I'm having to work on to understand how to make that work, because I run it and then play it back and I still hear the click. So obviously I'm doing something incorrect. That will take a little more doing. May have to Google a couple other places or just, you know, ask some questions of the folks in the webinar. So it will take a little bit of time to learn. Not impossible. Just a little bit of time. Accents. Still working on the Australian accent. It's going to take some practice. Mentally, I know, I understand how I'm supposed to form my mouth and how to make the noises. And it's a drop palate and you're talking from the back of your throat. And I hear it come out in certain words, but I don't hear it all the time. So on the accent front, I'm still wrestling with the Australian accent. I understand what I'm supposed to do and I can create an accent, but it's not consistent. So some of my words sound like an American Southern accent and others like that one just there and others sound like an Australian accent. More work is needed and you will probably hear me practicing this in the podcast. I am behind on my explainer video postings. Gosh, this is sounding terrible, isn't it? I'm behind on my explainer video postings. The new D2 season dropped and I've completed the campaign. I got that capture card and I pro link cable to record. I need to revisit this setup because I record gameplay and you can hear my teammates on the recording, but you can't hear me. I think I need to add another mic mixer for the Wave XLR within OBS application. I really would like to try the HDMI method so I don't have to have that capture link table dangling around and getting in the way while I'm gaming. On that note, and to save your ears, I'm going to stop and just close this podcast out. As always, feedback and subscriptions are welcome. Highly encouraged. Links are at the bottom. I added a link to where I got the webinar downloaded from at globalvoiceacademy.com. You don't have to be a member to get them. You can just go in and look at the products they have, purchase them, download them. They'll send you an email after you purchase that has a link with a password to where you can get it. They're on Vimeo. That's where they're posted. Thank you for joining EJ's voice cast, and we'll catch you on the next episode. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Transcribed by https://otter.ai