823 – Sound Great Make Money: Tom talks 25 Tips on How to Sound Great

Episode 823 – 25 Audio Tips
[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 823 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to give you 25 tips on how to sound great. See, audio is the only medium where you can learn or be entertained while doing something else. So you really want to sound great. And it's easy to sound great nowadays, and you're competing against other people that are doing the things I'm telling you right now. So you don't want to sound terrible compared to your competitors. And another rule of thumb, people will put up with poor video. Even though I want you to shoot great video, but they will not put up with poor audio. Okay, that's what we're going to talk about today. Episode 822. Hope you didn't miss that. It was morning routines. What you do when you wake up can help or hurt you. Any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number Morning Routines was 822 and today is 823 25 tips, and you'll probably want to share this with your with people on your team and your colleagues. And also listen to it again and make good notes on it because there's loads of little tips here. All right. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com, and grab a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:43] All right. Let's get into it. These aren't in any particular order, but all of them are important. First thing that I'm going to talk about is a quiet recording environment.

[00:01:52] I get samples all the time from people that there's echoes in the room. There's noises. We had one person, I kept hearing a gurgling and I said, what is that noise? And they kind of tuned it out because they live there. They had a fish tank next to their next to their recording thing. Another guy had a or another lady had a grandfather's clock who's going tick, tick, tick in the background. And I'm hearing this, but, you know, so you got to be careful because you tune things out when you live in that environment and echoes if your room has got is real harsh walls and harsh floors and ceilings. Put some wall hangings up, throw some throw rugs around. Those are the kind of things you can do to to improve those echoes. And then I got, if you're if your room is just, you just can't get a good sound out of it. Go to a closet, get yourself a long my cord, go to a closet, open the door, put the mic, stand in front of the closet and talk into the clothing. It's it'll be beautiful sound. Another trick is to take, like a cardboard box. Kind of like the size of a microwave oven. Line it with foam that you can get bedding foam, cut it up, line it up, glue it on the inside. Cut a hole in the side, kind of like the opening to a doghouse.

[00:03:11] Stick your microphone in there and talk into that. It makes beautiful sound. And if you hear me say dead sound, that's beautiful sound. There's no other extra noises, just your beautiful voice. All right, get yourself a microphone stand. Don't touch the mic or hold the microphone. This is not an onstage speech I'm talking about. This is where you're trying to make a high quality recording. So there's desk ones that are, like, only like six inches high. There are scissors booms. That's what I use for the podcast here, where it's clamped to the side of the desk and I can move it all around. And another one is this, you know, the kind of stand up comics use. Now, I don't particularly like them because I like to sit down while I'm talking, and then it's sticking right between your legs, and it's right when you're trying to write notes to yourself or read, you know, it's just right in the middle. So the way to do fix that is get one. But make sure if you're going to use that type of stand, it has a boom. So the the straight up part is the stand. And then a crossbar goes across. And that's called a boom. So it can sit off to the side of you and put the microphone in front of your face. So that's a nice one. You can move around easier than a scissors boom that's clamped to your desk, which you have to unclamp it and move it and clamp it to something else.

[00:04:32] This has a real heavy weight at the bottom, and you can move it around anywhere you want. Now it's talking about standing up though. Yeah. If you think, you know, you know, you're kind of enclosed and you can't project real well, stand up and it opens up your lungs and everything. So. So I'm not against standing up when you're doing it. And then you can use a mic stand without the boom. Now another thing you can do is get a music stand to put your notes on. So this this is like in the orchestra. And guess what? People won't even notice. You know you'll be looking. Over top of them. If you happen to be on video and it can be off to the side and your notes can be right there and nobody will even notice. So a music stand for notes. Now here's another sidebar tip here that's really important. Don't launch into a long recording before you test. I mean, every time you sit down, test it to make sure with a, you know, 10s 15 seconds and play it back to make sure no settings got off. You know what happens to me? This darn computer updates. And then it kicks off certain settings. So I have to be careful that I don't do a long recording. And it messed up because I didn't test it. So test for long recordings or before you do a long recording, learn how to set your gain.

[00:05:52] See, there's usually knobs or clicks somewhere in your computer to set how your your microphone level is. So maybe if you're a quiet person you would turn your gain up a little bit. Maybe with me booming all the time, I turn it down a little bit or whatever it happens to be. But what you don't want to do is have it set real high and then you distort and it sounds really terrible. Or if it's set too low, people can't hear you and they got to turn up their volume like crazy. And that puts a lot of hiss and static on their end. So you want to learn how to set your gain. I don't know on your system how to do it. So you have to ask somebody, hey, or just Google it, how to set the microphone gain on a Dell or a laptop. Not a Dell necessarily, but a PC or a laptop or a mac or whatever you happen to be using. So learn to do that and then learn to look at your recording meters. And maybe you don't even see recording meters. Well, there's usually somewhere you could see recording meters if you turned them on. And we usually it's those it's those green bars that go up or down or left and right. And when it gets up pretty good, it starts to turn yellow. But if it goes too far, it turns red. You want to shoot for.

[00:07:11] We usually shoot for -three decibels DBS. And I know this is I'm not going to go too deep into all that stuff now, but you definitely want to have a good strong signal so that the noise is pushed away and people hear you really clearly. So learn to look at your meters and adjust your gain to get that minus three db. Now good microphones are critical. Now we suggest and things that are different from what I used to suggest, because now I know better. I used to suggest all the time the Yeti mics. Well that's great. And they're really good mics, but they're too sensitive. They're they're called condenser mics. You want to have a dynamic mic. These are generic types of mics. Dynamic is not a brand name, but the dynamic mic is not as sensitive. And you say, well, that's ridiculous. Tom why would I pay money for something not as sensitive? Well, because unless you're in a sound booth in a controlled environment, you want a microphone that doesn't pick up every possible noise on Earth, that then you have to edit out to sound good. So use a dynamic microphone and also don't ignore your cables. So many people have all the expensive computer, expensive microphone, and then they buy some cheap crap cable off of Amazon and they still sound terrible. So get good quality cables. Go to a local music store if you're if you want to get good quality stuff because the musicians know what what they want to sound good, say good cables.

[00:08:49] Now here's a trick I learned from a guy named Freddie Ravel. He is a musician, so he was at one of my seminars one time. It was a small seminar for I was doing a fundraiser for somebody, and there was a hum in the system on the microphone and the sound system, and I'm like, pull my hair out trying to find out where how to fix it. And Freddie said, here, here, use this. It was one of those little rubber, three prong, two, two prong adapters. And I put it in the, the, the laptop or I forget what we plugged it into. I think the little speaker system we had and the hum went away. So I keep them with me in my laptop just in case that happens again. Usually we have a big sound crew, you know, at the big events, but if I ever did a little event, you can believe I have one of those in my laptop case. Another thing, I'll bet you have one of these and don't even know it called a ferrite choke. And like, what is that? Well, if you look at some of your cables, there's a little cylinder attached to like like the cable that's called a ferrite choke. And its job is to catch extraneous signals to get in to your recording, to get into that cable. So that's called a ferrite choke. But if you don't have them on there, you can buy the chokes by themselves.

[00:10:12] They're dirt cheap and they just snap on to your cables. And that helps reduce noise in your system. So it's called a ferrite ferrite choke. And then pay attention to the distance from your microphone and keep it consistent. Unless, like you've undoubtedly seen on TV, when a singer is belting out a really loud note, they back away from the microphone. Their handheld microphone usually see. So just this kind of stuff that we do, you want to keep a consistent distance, so you're not driving your editor crazy, and people that are listening aren't going. Here we go. Here, here I'm my normal distance. And now here I'm this distance. And now here I'm this distance. So if people would be driven crazy and they'd turn it off because it would drive them nuts and they'd have to turn the volume up and down. So practice being consistent with the distance from your microphone and practice different distances. Try a distance and then listen to it and say, oh man, I could do better than that. Get a little bit, go an inch closer and then find out what's the best distance for you and your microphone. And then do it consistently. Force yourself to do it consistently. Now another thing about distance is a lot of people are shooting on cell phones and tablets, and I'm all for that. They're shooting TV shows on on these now. But if you get six feet away with your camera on a tripod now, you just open the audio up to every bird that flies in the, in the universe, right? Or every dog that barks in the neighborhood.

[00:11:53] So you need to get a wireless microphone that will work with your cell phone, and you're looking at 150 to 200 and some dollars for this. But again, you will sound really bad. And, you know, it could mean the difference between getting hired and not hired. If you send somebody something that sounds terrible. So get a wireless microphone. All right. Another thing is called a pop filter. It's one of those big round things you usually see. Usually it's a big round thing. The cheap ones are. And it's got like like a women's hosiery material in there. And it takes your breath and spreads it out instead of letting it hit the microphone real hard. Because when you get those pops like. Up. That's terrible. You know, you can you'll you'll hear that on. So I went around and said to something with a P. In fact, if you hold your hand up in front of your face and say the word p or say the letter p, you can feel the air hit your hand. Well, that's like a sledge hammer hitting a good microphone. All right. So so the pop screen helps spread out that that breath so it doesn't hit real hard on the microphone. That's called a pop filter. All right. Now if you're live streaming make sure you got a good internet connection.

[00:13:06] One of my students drives me crazy. I told her, you know, you got to get a hard wire all the way to your modem whenever you're recording. And she said, well, I don't really like it. It doesn't look nice. Or I'm like, oh, my car. That's a tail wagging the dog. Put it away when you're not recording. But the thing is, is you need a really good connection to live stream or your audio is going to sound terrible and your video is going to be, you know, staccato and you'll look like a fool. You're better off not doing it at all. So hard wire whenever you're live streaming and you'll have a lot better luck. Work on your enunciation. Remember, your your voice has to go through this microphone, through this wire, into this computer, get edited and compressed and sent out back into my podcast distribution thing. I don't know if you hear a noise in the background. The rescue dog here, I'm talking about good audio. The rescue dogs chomping on a bone over there. That's all right. She's had a hard life. So work on your enunciation. Work on audible breaths, inaudible breaths. I had the worst trouble the first couple of years of doing my podcast, because in between words and sentences, I would breathe like. And then I had to edit them all out. It took forever. So I started working on it. I'm not perfect at it, but you can practice speaking without the breath being audible.

[00:14:37] You try it, use your diaphragm, all that stuff and ums and ahs, your nose, your habits and you know all these things that people do. Record yourself and listen to them and record where you don't stop. Record where you have to keep going just as if it was a live thing, and then go back and listen to it and you'll see what you really sounded like. And then you can start working on them a little at a time. You can't fix them all at once. You you might concentrate on your nose and then you might concentrate on ums and ahs, and then you might concentrate on audible breaths. And I still work on it to this day, because I get so fired up about what I'm talking about. You know, that I, you know, I forget that I'm supposed to be paying attention to that enunciation. All right, well, anyway, you'll sound great, and your recordings can be around the world. You can get on audible, you can transfer your books to audible Derek Decker and has a great course on that. I've promoted. And there's just all great things can come from being able to record good audio. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. Make sure you check out that mentor program, because I got enormous amounts of stuff that is going to save you money and make you money into the future. Catch you later.