381 – Massively improve your Zoom calls and recordings: Tom interviews Bobby Owsinski

Episode 381 – Bobby Owsinski
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and eighty one of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm here with Bobby Owsinski. I got to tell you folks, I was researching for my last episode, which was 380 on Do-It-Yourself Sound booths and probably going to have to scrap that episode after this guy gets done with me because he is one of the best of the best in the world on sound and audio engineering and all that stuff. And I ran across an hour and 50 minute video of Bobby doing the Nimbus School of Recording and Media in Vancouver. And I'm sitting there thinking like we all do, oh my God, an hour and 50 minutes. I didn't know who he was at the time. I'd tell you what, folks, I was mesmerized. I almost had to pee myself because I didn't want to pause the video to go to the bathroom in the middle of it. It was just mesmerizing. So and when you see somebody that's been there and done that, you see greatness in front of you. I just had to have him on the show. So if you want to learn how to up your game and sound better than 99 percent or even 100 percent of your competitors. Hang in there, folks.

[00:01:35] Let's see here. Hope you got a copy of your automation ebook. We give it away free for people to listen to the show. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Just one of the tips in this book, folks, has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. We actually estimated that a couple of years ago. And it'll help you work really fast and take care of more customers and grab business from competitors or who are too damn slow to get back to people.

[00:02:03] So grab that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're over there, grab a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and we've got video training and a lot of people give you an app and then you try to have to figure it out on your own. Well, we have video training and screen captures so you can take us with you on the road on your cell phone and tablet.

[00:02:27] All right. I know everybody is or not everybody, but most people are really hurting. And this pandemic has got him going crazy. They school one day. There's no school. Yeah, send your kids. No, don't send them. No catch on fire if they come to, you know, just all this craziness going on. Well, for me and my students, it's it's not that way. We've learned how to sell from home legitimately. I've been doing it since the commercial Internet started in 1994. So twenty, almost twenty seven years straight. And my students are not freaking out because we're able to sell our information products around the world. So I formalized this training and the only licensed dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, probably the world. It's IMTCVA.org. I had to go through three years of hell trying to get the license and dealing with all the red tape and everything. But it's a highly in demand skills.

[00:03:26] You know what I hate is kids going to a four year college and then all they learn is how to protest and then they get their MBA and they're competing for jobs at Starbucks. So that doesn't happen when I'm around because the skills that we teach are the same skills I've been living for 26 years and every business on Earth needs them and they're clueless.

[00:03:48] So we got people making money before a couple of months into the school. So. So check it out. It's IMTCVA.org. And a little later I'll tell you how. If you're in my mentor program, you can get a scholarship to the school.

[00:04:02] All right, let's bring on the main event. Bobby Owsinski is a music producer and mixer, blogger, podcast and author and I'm talking author. And I don't know, it might be a little confused because his bio says 24 books, but his website, he said 26 more books. So I think he lost track, kind of like a while back. He did so many of them, but his books have been the staple for many years and recording courses in universities around the world. Bobby, are you ready to screw? The commute?

[00:04:33] Yeah, Tom.

[00:04:35] Oh, man. So great to meet you. I mean, I'm just thrilled to death that I sat through that hour and fifty minutes and you could have probably it seemed to me you could have gone on for one hundred and fifty hours.

[00:04:48] Such as you know. But thanks so much for coming on.

[00:04:51] I'm glad you sat through an hour, hour and 50 minutes because I probably wouldn't.

[00:04:56] Well, yeah, you've heard the stories before and you know, you kind of left us hanging and saying, oh, I could talk about Frank Zappa for another day and you didn't tell us anything. So maybe.

[00:05:07] Give us a Frank Zappa story later, but we'll tell people what you've been doing all your life, I've got so inspirational that you started with nothing and started as a young man and just fight your way to the to the top.

[00:05:21] Well, the condensed version is I started as a musician, but I started in a little. Pottsville, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, which is, you know, not many people there.

[00:05:35] Ten thousand, something like that. And when I started the chances of breaking out and going anywhere were, you know, pretty much next to zero. But that being said, you know, I stuck to it and was a professional musician, a touring musician for the first part of my life.

[00:05:52] And then tell them the ages, though, you started at 13 years old or something, right?

[00:05:57] Yeah, I was playing in bars way before I was back in the days, and there's a lot of them. So I was playing four nights a week. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When I was in high school. But and then the same thing happened in college. I was touring a lot of times and, you know, paid people to take tests for me and things like that. That shouldn't have happened. But then what happened was so I was in the studio, I was touring and.

[00:06:27] We were on a tour bus and the bass player came on one day and said, I just got a job writing for the music paper. The music paper is or was a weekly music newspaper that came out in the New York City area. And it was the Bible. But for some reason, I thought to myself, you know, if you could do that, so can I. So I sort of put feelers out. And the next thing you know, I was writing for one magazine and then two and then, you know, doesn't and there.

[00:07:00] Were you really writing or paying somebody else to write for you?

[00:07:03] I didn't know I was doing it.

[00:07:07] And I just found my first article the other day. And I have to say it was pretty horrible.

[00:07:12] I was like, thank God for editors, but it eventually led into another career of writing books. And the first one was the Mixing Engineers Handbook, which is still the one that's in all the colleges.

[00:07:31] I wrote it because I wasn't very good at mixing. I was good as a recording engineer. I wasn't good as a mixer. But I happened to know all the best people in the world. So I went to them and I asked them, what do you do? How do you do it? And they told me so I had all these interviews and I realized, you know, this is gold. This is really good stuff. So that became part of the formula of my books where about a third of them have just the interviews.

[00:08:03] It's become something that, again, there are people that know much more than I do. I'm relying on them and they have lots of good stories, too. So I try to include that in all my books. And that became yet another career and then kind of transitioned into a career of doing courses online. And that's kind of where we're at today.

[00:08:24] Yeah, but you've you've played with some of the big boys. I was looking at your bio, The Who, Iron Maiden, The Ramones, Chicago. And you didn't even play all of them?

[00:08:36] No, I didn't play with them. I worked with them.

[00:08:39] But, well, I met played in their arena. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:08:43] Absolutely. You know, besides the massive knowledge that we're going to hopefully you'll give some tips to us as people trying to do the stuff at home. One of the things that really hit me was your persistence and consistency. And you just kept scratching and crawling. And in fact, one story I kind of dug up was you kind of said your first studio job was a disaster and they they replaced you on the final album, right?

[00:09:10] Yeah. This was the first album that I did with my band back from Pottsville. And it was, you know, in the New York City area. We did it in the big New York studio. And I was shocked when the final product came out because I wasn't on very much, I was replaced, but a lot of people that would have crushed them right there. Yeah, well, it didn't help me too much, but I knew kind of when it was going down that, oh, wait a second, this is a lot harder than I ever thought it was. It's a different state of mind, different state of playing. Everything is different on this level. So it was a surprise that probably shouldn't have been. But that gave you the impetus to go to Berklee College of Music. And from there, it also kind of started me in my teaching.

[00:10:05] Direction, because about a year in as a student, they asked me to be a teacher as well, and this is on the recording side because I had a degree in electronics and I had a fair amount of studio experience. So for a little bit I was a student and a teacher, which I have to say does not work.

[00:10:25] So I went through a semester or two of that and then finally just became a teacher there for a little bit.

[00:10:31] Was that the place that you were in the lounge? And they said this is for losers and no.

[00:10:38] Well, sort of.

[00:10:38] I was in the teacher's lounge and somebody came in and very loudly explained everybody, oh, this is a place for losers or has been.

[00:10:50] And I thought, oh, you know what? I don't want to be either of those. So I gave my notice very shortly thereafter. I was gone by in that semester.

[00:11:02] Oh, my goodness. Boy, you certainly been around. But you I remember you talking about you were sleeping.

[00:11:09] You had six hundred bucks to your name. You blew off one place and you went to the big city and slept on a couch somewhere. Right.

[00:11:17] Yeah, for the first couple of months, I didn't know anybody in California, I thought, you know, everybody just about. Well, I know a lot more than than I do than I did then. So one of my students from Berkeley said, you know what? I have a friend that lives out there in Santa Monica. Look him up and you can stay with him for a while. And I was really reluctant to do that.

[00:11:39] But he made all the arrangements for me. He said, look, John is waiting for you, so go and do it. And I did. I met a lot of really good people that are still my friends, dear friends, till this day. And it gave me and I got my feet wet. And really from there, it's the same thing in any business. You know, you start out with a group of people and you there's their success is your success and vice versa. So we all kind of rose through the ranks at the same time. And the ones that stuck it out were the ones that have made a reasonable living today. Not everybody did, though. And, you know, I can understand why life gets in the way sometimes.

[00:12:27] Well, you learned a hard lesson that I just love.

[00:12:32] It was something about you learn to just take every job you could because a buddy of yours took one for 50 bucks and then his the Australians gave him business forever, something like that.

[00:12:46] Yeah, I think that's a I mean, there's two ways to look at it, only work on what you want and what you you know, and then the other way is, you know, fake it until you make it and take every job that comes. I think the fake it till you make it is better, I didn't quite do that, to be honest with you, but you're referring to someone I had my podcast that someone had called him and said, I need a voiceover and I only have 50 bucks. And he said, well, I'm not doing anything today, so come on over.

[00:13:19] And it turned out that it opened up a huge sector of business for him because he recorded every celebrity that was in the United States that was Australian and for for ABC over there. So it became a huge source of business for him. And a lot of people just blow it off and say, you know, it's not enough money or whatever, but it just goes to show you that you never know.

[00:13:44] Yeah. And I see a lot of that in my professional speaking world where, you know, I go to these events and I'm usually the headliner, but a lot of these other speakers just blow in with their entourage like they're too good for everybody. And, oh, I've got to leave right away by my stuff because I got to catch a plane.

[00:14:02] And and then I take all of the money home because I just you know, I was so impressed with how humble and down to earth you are with everything you've been and done.

[00:14:14] And and people like that. They're sick of the people that are so aloof and think they're better than everybody else, that's for sure. But thank you, Tom.

[00:14:23] But I have to say, it's, you know, a lifetime of hard knocks and humiliation.

[00:14:29] Well, that to you. Yeah, that as some of it that's what makes people great.

[00:14:34] But unfortunately, because of you, this is going to be my last podcast ever, because I read an article in Forbes on predictions for 2001 by some learned guy that I could do that said podcasting is dying.

[00:14:50] That was you. Yeah, maybe I didn't explain that clearly.

[00:14:56] Right now, everybody and their brother is a podcaster. Right?

[00:15:00] Right. On their cell phone with Anchor.FM. No decent sound or anything. Yeah.

[00:15:06] And or, you know, a lot of celebrities or near celebrities that think that, well, maybe I'll do this too. Oh, it's easy, but it's not as you well know, it takes time. It takes effort and you have to really keep at it. So I predict that in the next year or so, we're going to see a lot of those.

[00:15:28] Mm. I don't know how I should describe a lot of those that came in late are going to fall by the wayside because again it's not as lucrative and it's not as as easy excuse me as everybody thinks.

[00:15:45] Yeah. And the difference with me and the people I teach about it is that when people get into it, they think I want to get a sponsor.

[00:15:54] Well, I don't know if you know the numbers or not, but a sponsor for just a plain old podcast pays between 12 and 18 dollars per thousand downloads. It's really hard to get a thousand downloads, first of all, and then per episode and then 12 to 18 bucks. So what I teach people is be your own sponsor. So I have a product range that's, you know, from twenty bucks still in the many thousands for my school and my mentor program stuff. So that's really the way to make it lucrative without being a superstar.

[00:16:27] And so but you you in the article you said maybe one percent of the people will listen to me and do it that way.

[00:16:35] I'm the same way I don't have a sponsor. I've been offered many times. But I did this the same thing for my blogs. There is always a reason behind it. And it was for personal branding. Hmm. I already had a fairly high visibility in the industry, but I wanted to cement that. So first it was the blogs and then it was the podcast and now it's kind of flipped around. At one point in time, I go to a trade show and people to hear read your blog and now it's, hey, I listen to a podcast.

[00:17:09] So that's kind of nice. But again, I've stayed away and instead promote my own products and I do it lightly to it. For me, it's kind of, again, a branding thing.

[00:17:19] And and one of the reasons I got into it is because the listenership has been increasing, because the cars now you can just talk into your dashboard and and it'll start playing podcast.

[00:17:33] And then also the Alexa and Google devices and home in-home devices. You can just say, hey, play screw that commute podcast. And bu I just start, you know, coming out of the speakers.

[00:17:43] So, so there's potential for listenership, but you got to do it right. It's a lot of work there's equipment laying all over the place. You know Bobby, you I think invented the real New York City compression trick. Right, and no, I documented it in the name of it, right, the name of it. Well, I don't want to brag or anything, Bobby, but I invented the real Virginia Beach compression trick.

[00:18:12] That is, you get on the guitar center before they go bankrupt and you get one of the kids there to come and set everything up. And I did that two and a half years ago. I've never touched one of the dials on the mixing board.

[00:18:27] So what's the trick? You sound pretty good, so don't do it. But I'm not going to touch anything.

[00:18:32] I don't let anybody near the place.

[00:18:34] So take pictures just in case. Yeah, I have. Yeah.

[00:18:38] So so a lot of the people, Bobby, in my crowd were professional speakers and all of the all the speeches dried up and now they're flailing around at home and sounding like crap.

[00:18:50] They're used to being on stage with a sound man and thousand people in the audience and now they're sitting in front of a Zoom screen, cross-eyed with backlighting and and noise all over the place.

[00:19:03] And so what kind of that whole speech and by the way, I'll put the link to that in the show notes or anything, anything you'd like me to put in these donuts.

[00:19:12] But what are some tips that they can do to improve? You know, and it won't take much to improve from what they're doing that day that.

[00:19:20] Yeah, I would say the primary thing is a good environment. And that's the first thing. That means quiet. That means not in your kitchen or bathroom because there's a lot of reflections going on. It sounds terrible. And refrigerators and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. If, if anything, you know, a nice closet. If you can't think of anything else, you know, closet, it's usually quiet and there's no reflections and it will make you sound really good. So that's the first thing.

[00:19:47] The second thing would be get a reasonable microphone because it doesn't cost so much anymore and you know, just a USB microphone for 50 bucks. And you're way ahead of everybody else at that point because it will sound much better. And then there would be a number three. It's how to set that up and where to place it, because I've seen people with the USB microphones that place, it's so far away from them that they're getting mostly room anyway and kind of defeats the purpose noise. Yeah, yeah. You have to get a close close enough to you. So it actually works for you now the way I do it. I have a very professional set up, I have to say, but there's some easy tricks that you can think of that will give you the correct spacing and you use your hand. So an open hand, if I'm an open hand away, that would be. And at the most it would be to open hands, a way that would pretty much give you a reasonable. Direct sound without too much reflections. So just remember an open hand, put your hand, put it up to your lips, or put your thumb up to your lips and weird little finger hits. There you go. That's a good distance. And most two open hands.

[00:21:11] All right. So I'm doing it right now, and my open hand is just touching my pop screen, which is about an inch away from the microphone head. So that just a shade over a hand.

[00:21:24] Now, if you wouldn't want to go another way, in fact, you can use your fist. And right now, I'm one fist away from my microphone.

[00:21:33] Here he is, and I sure to be right.

[00:21:37] Yes, one of the things that. I don't I don't think people understand as well is, you know, placement of the microphone is a big deal. But it doesn't have to be directly on your mouth if you look at all of those old Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. Photos from the 50s and 60s when they're in the studio recording, the microphone is always up at their eyes and it's pointing down at their lips. And that way there's no pops, right? So one way you could do it, and this is the way I have it now, I have the microphone at a 45 degree angle, so it's not in front of my face. And it still sounds pretty good, but yet it's picking everything up and there's no pops like.

[00:22:27] Right, because the air is not hitting directly on it. Right. When you say pop or something like that. Yep. Now, with that microphone, that's a 400 dollar microphone, right?

[00:22:38] So does the wind screen on that get away from using a pop screen or is it have an internal pop screen or what?

[00:22:46] It does, but pop screens are overrated. And in many ways, they're they're not what you think they are the reason why they were invented. It was to keep the the spirit away from them. I'm serious.

[00:23:06] I know I never thought of that, but it makes sense.

[00:23:10] Well, especially on very sensitive condenser microphones, sometimes that can make, you know, when you get a lot of moisture on on the capsule, it will make it shut down. So that was a way to keep that from happening more.

[00:23:27] And getting rid of pops is more positional than it is using a screen. The screen will will help a little, but only a little. If it was going to help enough, what would happen is there wouldn't be enough sound coming out the other side for you to hear it.

[00:23:44] So, you know, just like that.

[00:23:47] See, folks, this is why you bring in people who have been there and done that. You know, we all spend our 20, 30 bucks on one of these things and we could throw it away or use it to flip pancakes. Maybe another thing.

[00:23:59] Another thing that you you said that really surprised me is how little the floor had to do with fixing up your sound.

[00:24:11] Well, it's very easy to go too far when it comes to dampening your acoustics.

[00:24:21] I'm not going to say soundproofing because there are two different things that's different. Yeah, but what can happen is you can make your room two dead. One of the ways to get around that and you'll find most professional studios are like this is they'll have a parquet floor, they have a wooden floor, at least partially. And the reason why it gives you spatial cues we're used to hearing. Audio bounce off the floor. And when that's taken away, it can be a little disconcerting as well as just a little too dead, so I would never go.

[00:24:58] One thing I tell everybody, look, if you're in a carpeted room, don't rip it up.

[00:25:02] You know, it should be OK, but you just don't need as much acoustic dampening as you might think you need. You need enough. But usually what there is is we call it a reflection free zone. Mm hmm. And what that means is especially if you're listening on speakers. Wherever the speaker would reflect off a wall, that's where you needed to be soft, so you need some dappling material there that includes both sides of you as well as on top. So it's something that we call cloud. So but if you do that, you find that you've instantly helped your sound. The other thing would be behind you, if you're really close to a back wall, then you have to treat it. If it's not treated already and usually we just have just a normal painted wall or something behind us, there's going to be lots of reflections. So it's not so bad if you're six feet away. But if it's, you know, right behind you, then you have to treat it. One way that's really simple and easy is to put a bookcase behind you. And you don't have to fill it up with books, just some books and then other items. And that way you get to acoustic properties going for you, one is absorption and the other is what we call diffusion. So the sound is actually bouncing off the whatever is in your bookcase and it's kind of playing and all sorts of different directions rather than bouncing right back into the microphone.

[00:26:42] So that's a very simple way of helping your room out and it might be already set up somewhere for somebody, they just have to set set their recording with that at their back.

[00:26:55] Yeah. And you said one of the best studios you were ever in had a massive bookcase, right.

[00:27:01] Oh, yeah. Throughout the street from me, actually, and it must have been 20 feet high, wow.

[00:27:12] Yeah, it was a very large room and a very large bookcase. Now a lot of the spaces didn't actually have books in them. As you would expect. There would be spaces for musical instruments. Which worked perfectly. A storage space, basically, but it's a very impressive thing to walk in and see that you talked about them, you know, for placement of some of this stuff, not the bookcase behind you.

[00:27:40] But you talked about the mirror trick. What's that?

[00:27:43] Well, know a lot of this stuff doesn't apply if you're doing everything just on headphones. This is we're talking about listening environment where you're primarily concerned with what's coming back over a pair of monitor speakers.

[00:27:59] Oh, OK. So if you're using headsets, that wipes out a lot of those problems.

[00:28:04] Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't much matter. What you're trying to do is just make the room quiet enough that you don't have any of those reflections. Like, for instance, you sound really good.

[00:28:15] You don't have any reflections, I have like a fireplace behind me and Mantle, which is stuff all the, you know, random stuff all over, you know, is pictures.

[00:28:26] I mean, there's something there. I can hear it. It's a very slight reflection, but it's not it's not loud. It's not bad at all. And I can only hear it because I know what to listen for.

[00:28:37] Yeah, exactly, yeah, I knew that you would be able to pick up the finest nuances of all, but you sound like the best ever and 380 episodes I've ever had of coming through, even through Zoom and all that stuff.

[00:28:52] So is there anything specific you're doing besides having a good microphone and a good recording environment? You processing your at all, it's a high.

[00:29:03] A high end signal path, I have to say, so we're going through a couple thousand dollars worth of gear and ironically, I'm just about to change it all out for something brand new and up the game even more, which probably I'll be the only one that could tell.

[00:29:22] When you get to that last few percent, it cost more and that it's harder to make those things.

[00:29:29] All I got here is again, I don't touch anything, but I got a Debix compressor limiter noise gate and going into one for that the mike's going into fantham power into the DB X thing. It was only 150 bucks then into a focus. Right 4I4 for what they call that thing that goes into the computer interface. Somewhere this mixing board is hooked into the in here.

[00:30:00] But again, I don't touch anything. How is all there is to it.

[00:30:04] But I went up my microphone and then when I finish off this sound booth, you know, I want to really make nice audio books, make my books into audio.

[00:30:13] So I got to figure figure this stuff out.

[00:30:16] Well, I have to say, having done a fair amount of voiceovers myself and knowing a lot of professional voiceover artists that have their own facilities now, just about all of them. Mm hmm. One thing I know is that when you're making a booth, usually the quieter it is, the more absorption, the better. And this is kind of just the opposite of what we're looking for in a playback environment, playback environment.

[00:30:46] We don't want it 100 percent dead and with little reflection is OK.

[00:30:52] And they're talking about what this podcast environment is called a playback environment.

[00:30:58] Well, a playback environment would be you have monitors, speakers, and you're listening back to audio. You're you're mixing it. You're you're manipulating it. So that would be the playback environment. And the equivalent would be for someone that owns a high end stereo, be their playback environment. They say sound, you know, reasonably dead.

[00:31:21] You don't want it to be two dead. But on the other hand, you don't want any reflections either. So you can hear the music or.

[00:31:28] All right, so am I on the right path, building this frame in this, I got a four by five frame I just built and I'm waiting for these acoustic.

[00:31:39] What do you call them, packing, moving blankets coming in there? They're like nine pounds each to wrap this thing up with.

[00:31:50] Well, that'll work. There's lots of different ways to do it because there's lots of materials that are available that work. What it is, is how well they work at certain frequencies. So you have acoustic form. Everybody's seen the egg. Great stuff that doesn't really work the way you expect. It's good at high frequencies, but not at low frequencies. So that's critical in some cases. In other cases it's not. So if you're doing voiceovers, for instance, or you're doing audio books that may not be as critical, like packing blankets or acoustic blankets, we'll probably give you, let's say, a wider bandwidth of what is going to attenuate. So, yeah, that should work, OK. Again, there's lots of different ways to do it.

[00:32:41] Yeah, well, I mean, I heard you say a couple of times even the best of the best people experiment.

[00:32:48] You just have to try something and see what happens, right?

[00:32:51] Yeah, I'm not a studio designer. I know how to make home studios work. I've done a lot for mostly for myself, but for other people, too. But that being said. I know a lot of the best designers and there the technology is so far advanced now that they can pretty much hear what a room will sound like before it's even built, believe it or not. Wow. That being said, it still requires some experimentation when it's finally built because there are things that you can't foresee that happen. And, for instance, the material is changed.

[00:33:34] Maybe the way it's installed is changed slightly or you have what normally happens is there's a construction person that isn't used to working in a certain way. The studios are required, for instance, and they install something improperly. So that means that you still have to fine tune things. You can take a while.

[00:33:57] Yeah, well, that's I mean, for me, I'm a constant learner, so I'm getting a kick out of, you know, learning all these things. And I mean, I had this microphone for 300 episodes that had these switches on it. And I never knew what they were for. But it was one was a high pass filter.

[00:34:15] And now the other one was, I think, a it was like a minus 20 DB controllers.

[00:34:23] Yeah, yeah. Well, I can tell you what those are just in case anybody else has the same problem when six minus 10 or minus 20 DB. What that's four is really loud sources. So for instance, if you're screaming into the microphone then you might want to use that so it doesn't overload anything downstream, doesn't overload your mixer or your computer interface or anything like that. That's what that's for us just to knock the level down if something's really loud. Now, if you're podcasting, that doesn't apply. So, OK, so leave it off. Yeah, the high pass filter is useful, though, and what that will do is it will cut out all the low frequencies. It usually says what the what the frequency is, the cut off frequency. It might be 60 hertz, it might be 80, it might be 120. But it's useful because it might cut things out like truck traffic. That you might not be aware of and yet is kind of mugging up the audio. It might cut things out that, again, low frequency things that you're just not even aware of or it happens so often that you don't think about and that will clean up your audio. So that's useful and it won't change the sound of your voice because it's too low, right?

[00:35:44] Yeah. Yeah. So so you're saying that would be a good thing to leave on in a home environment? Yes. Awesome. Yeah.

[00:35:53] Ok, well I'm going to go back those 300 start over and we can do that after the fact, Tom.

[00:36:02] Digital Audio Workstation. I use Adobe audition. Only like one millionth of what it can do is what I can do.

[00:36:16] Did you ever in your path ever run across a guy named Mike Stewart?

[00:36:21] Maybe there's a lot of Mike Stewart.

[00:36:24] Okay, so. So he has a gold record for PAC Man Fever, OK?

[00:36:31] He he's a friend of mine. He's got me started in this like 20 years ago editing. And he's an old Georgia boy.

[00:36:38] And he and he says he says Tom, if you want to be an editor, first thing you gotta do is record something.

[00:36:50] He says. He says, then you cut out what's bad and what's left is good with this whole thing.

[00:36:59] I said, well, that's that's simplifying it for me.

[00:37:03] Yeah, you can't get much simpler, but it's a perfect explanation.

[00:37:07] Exactly.

[00:37:09] So what what if your your training in books would be good for my crowd?

[00:37:13] People that are working at home want to improve their audio so that they sound better than their competitors. What what kind of things do you have that might I know you help a lot of professionals out, but none of us are that level.

[00:37:26] Yeah, I don't know that I actually have anything, to be honest.

[00:37:29] What's the one book that you have about the studio builders that that advanced?

[00:37:36] It could be helpful. Yes, it's a studio builder's handbook. Again, it's looking at a lot of different concepts, but it is taking you from from nothing, from, you know, nothing, which is where we are now. So it could be very helpful. But most of of what I teach is at a higher level, to be honest. Right. Right. It's slightly beyond it's at the neophyte audio level for musicians, for instance, anybody who wants to be a producer who already knows a good bit of this but wants to refine their knowledge. So that's kind of the neesham in it.

[00:38:21] I mean, I did see you doing some just nuts and bolts stuff with how to make sound panels and stuff.

[00:38:29] What was some of the materials that you were saying that go into the sound panels and do you have that as training that people can buy or is that just like a YouTube thing?

[00:38:41] It's YouTube thing, but it's also part of the studio builder's handbook. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's multiple ways to do this, but Rockwool is one of the easiest ways.

[00:38:53] And.

[00:38:55] You know, the reason why Rockwool is good is because unlike fiberglass compressed fiberglass, which is what was used forever and in all sorts of studios, and this was used as an absorption material that's kind of toxic and it's not fun to work with.

[00:39:13] Yeah, it's itchy.

[00:39:14] And many people want to breathe that stuff in. Right. Right. But none of that applies to Rockwool, which is actually SP1 Rock, and it's also cheaper. And the acoustic properties are slightly better now. It's not as easy to get. Well, actually, compressed fiberglass isn't that easy to get either.

[00:39:36] But it's now you can start to go close and you can find it. It's made by a company called Wraxall, you will and usually comes in four by eight sheets, so you'll find that the all of the panels that you'll make, the acoustic panels are in that standard frame. So make a frame for it can either sit on top of the frame or within a frame. All of that's within me in that book, the studio below, beautiful, beautiful.

[00:40:07] You know, we do have some some of our professional speakers are musicians that use their music and then turn it, you know, because I got a I don't know the music business, but it's much easier to be a speaker and get work than a musician, I think, to get work, because there's just every company on Earth, you know, is having meetings all day long and stuff.

[00:40:30] So so a lot of the musicians, I mean, we got a guy that's been the Carnegie Hall three times and but he makes most of his money speaking and then playing the guitar while he speaks. Yeah, I'm sure you'd have some stuff for them.

[00:40:44] So anyway, how do they how do they get a hold of your stuff? How do they find out where all these books are? You saw them yourself or Amazon or what? No, they're all available on Amazon.

[00:40:55] Or. Well, colleges wouldn't apply, I mean, there's five or six different distributors, but Amazon is the easiest hour. You can just go to BobbyOwsinski.com and everything is there are links to the podcast linked to the links to the blogs, links to my Forbes blog, links to the books, excerpts from the books, all that stuff. It links to my courses. So it's a good place to start.

[00:41:30] That's beautiful. Beautiful. So you have all this in the show notes for everybody, because like I said, when you run into somebody like this that's been there and done that, it's time to open your ears and eyes and pay attention, because I said he's really been around.

[00:41:45] So thanks so much, Bobby, for agreeing to come on the really, really appreciate. You've been very inspiring to me and I know everybody else.

[00:41:55] I'm going to make them watch that Nimbus thing, too, because that's that was just tremendous.

[00:42:00] Thanks so much, Tom. I appreciate it. Thanks for reaching out.

[00:42:03] Oh, it's my pleasure. So everybody, check this out.

[00:42:06] This was episode 381. You'll probably want to listen to it again at screwthecommute.com/381.

[00:42:16] Wow. Best sounding interview I ever had, that's for sure. And most interesting. Thanks so much, Bobby. And we'll catch everybody on the next episode. See ya later.

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