Speaker A: Y’all ready? Be history.

Speaker B: Get started.

Speaker C: Welcome.

Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone, to the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional.

Speaker C: They’re motivated with tech. To the Vo stars George Wittam, founder of Source Elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, Austrian audio making passion heard. Source elements. George the tech. Wittam and robbo and AP’s. International demo. To find out more about us, check thepro audiosuite.com line up.

Speaker B: Learner. Here we go.

Speaker C: Welcome to another Pro audio suite. Don’t forget, if you do want to buy a Tribooth, the code is tripap 200 to get $200 off your purchase. If you’d like to leave a comment, by the way, on your favorite platform, please do so. It’s good for our analytics, and we might drive a bit more traffic, which is always handy. Now, something that may be out as we speak or maybe about to be released, is the new Nexus from Source Elements. You’ve definitely had a look at it, George. I think you’ve had a look at it, Robert. And Robert knows all about it because it’s his baby.

Speaker A: How much do you know, Robert?

: Let’s be honest, I’m clueless. Yeah.

Speaker C: No, that’s me. That’s my Robert.

: I know it all, but really, don’t I’m just like yeah.

Speaker A: Can I just say, before you dive into it, it’s a very sexy beast. Seriously, it’s very clever.

Speaker C: You’ve had a look around the whole thing, haven’t you?

Speaker A: I have. I’ve sort of had a play with it. But, I mean, Robert’s going to explain it the best, so we should leave it to him to run through the list of features.

: I like hearing what kind of mess other people make out of it.

Speaker A: Well, you know, what inspires me the most, and I think is going to be the most useful for our listeners, I think, is simple things like the Dim operation, the fact that it actually just drops your mic level.

: Drops the levels. Yep.

Speaker A: And all that sort of stuff.

: A lot simpler than a Dugan mixer.

Speaker A: The gateway from a studio point of view, from me looking at that gateway, everything’s all in the box. I’ve got video, I’ve got everything there. But, I mean, you should explain it all.

: Yeah. So basically, Nexus started out, oh, God, how many years ago? 2007? I don’t know. But I was like, wouldn’t it be nice if you could route audio, virtual audio interfaces in and out of Pro Tools? And it was like, we made that, and it was kind of a hit. And what it was primarily used for was to interface the client side of a remote voiceover session, or just a remote client side. So think of it as Source Connect was the remote connection for voice talent into an engineer setup, who then also has remote clients. And Nexus was used to empower things like zoom and hangouts. But we all know that all of those have their various issues for instance, one of them is if you’re broadcasting and you’ve got talkback going over zoom, there’s very different goals of the talkback versus the broadcast that you want to have your clients listen to, so the talkback can have echo cancellation on it. And actually that helps because many times your clients don’t have headphones, but your broadcast, you don’t want it to be impeded by the echo cancellation and things like this. So what Nexus is, is it still represents to me that sort of client side connection. But now we’re completing more of it. Instead of saying, oh, just like throw Nexus at Zoom, or throw Nexus at whatever it is that your clients are using Microsoft teams, here’s a gateway for it that does what you need as a professional audio and video person for collaborating with your clients. Instead of trying to pound Zoom into a hole.

Speaker B: Here’s how it was described ten years ago, you sent an email out sourcenexis is an audio application router. Record remote voiceover from Source Connect directly into Final Cut or Media Composer playback itunes to Pro Tools, even patch Pro Tools to and from Nuendo all at the same time. Route any audio application in and out of Pro Tools, even if that application does not have any plugin support.

Speaker A: There you go.

Speaker B: That was December 2013.

: So that’s like a very broad, broad strike explanation. Sort of like it’s round and so it rolls, but this is a wheel for a car. So yeah, the rolling part of it is well, it pretty much is a router that was put in the Daw so that you could route external interfaces in and out and do things like that. And the primary thing that it got used a lot for was those client side connections.

Speaker C: So how would it work for someone like me? What benefit would I get out of Nexus?

Speaker B: So the talent side, what do they say?

: I think the same thing. So just like you’ve got Source Connect and you’re running with studios and engineers and it has that rock solid queued up connection that’s going to pick up every bit. Even if the internet does its thing, as you know, voice talent are being forced to take up much more and more of the burden and you have the situation where, hey, can I get playback? So one of the things that Nexus has is it’s now a suite, by the way. It’s not just the plugin. So there’s the original Nexus IO, which is sort of like just the raw plugin. You have to know what you want to do with it. You have to build your own template for it. Nexus Review is a Nexus plugin that now has several ins and outs going into it and out of it. So it brings your talk back over to the gateway, which is our web meeting room. It gets the gateway back into your connection so that you hear it in your headphones and it plays your playback to the connection and everybody. And it does all that without you having to even think about what the word Mix Minus is or if it even exists. Because it’s done all in one plugin. So what used to need two, three Nexus plugins and a talkback plugin is now Nexus Review. Okay, straight, just drop that plugin on your master fader, your setup is complete.

Speaker C: So when you do playback, it actually mutes everything else. So you don’t get obviously well, it.

: Doesn’T in this iteration, but there’s going to be all kinds of stuff that starts to happen within the suite, within its sort of capabilities. And I think that right now, the first thing you would say is it just makes playback easy. Your question specifically, Andrew, which is like, why would a voice talent want this? It makes playback easy because really, in that sense, you’re just like the engineer at that point. You’re recording stuff and you’re playing it back. That’s kind of like what? So this just makes that setup way less daunting because all you really have to do is and also we’re going to probably come out with that as a standalone app as well. So if you’re using something like Twisted Wave, you can just route Twisted Wave into the Nexus review app and same thing, you don’t have to be on a daw. It doesn’t have to be a plugin, but it does your Mix Minus and your talkback Twisted Wave. Actually, here’s a question about twisted wave. Do you have the option to monitor live through it?

Speaker B: It does have a monitor mode that you can turn on, of course with a little bit of latency, but it does have that capability, right?

: So you might want to do that. And funny enough, if it does create a latency with yourself, there’s a handy mute button so you can mute it and you don’t have to listen to it, but at least your clients can hear you monitoring through Twisted Wave. So there’s little individual situations that might come.

Speaker B: What would be the benefit though? Like if you don’t have to monitor yourself in Twisted Wave, what would be the benefit of turning that on?

: Well, the reason why is that you’re either going to direct your microphone live into Nexus Review, but then if you want playback, you’re going to route your Daw into Nexus Review. And if you call Twisted Wave a Daw, then you want to route Twisted Wave into it.

Speaker B: Okay, so you set the output in your Twisted Wave output setting to the Nexus review plugin input.

: Yes. Not the input of well, in this case it would be the input of the application, not the gotcha gotcha, because in the Daw sense, the input is taken care of. It’s like whatever channel you throw it on, the input is implicit.

Speaker B: Right.

: And then that same ability for all you video editors out there and things like that, the review set up and integrating my talkback with a talkback button if I want all of that is just like done, whatever, I have to set up a template in Pro Tools or I have to have a mixer. All the different things that people do.

Speaker B: To be able to passport vo.

Speaker C: Yes. Nicely sliding there.

Speaker B: Right. So just to get a little bit deeper. So I’m in Twisted Wave. I’m the actor. I’ve recorded myself. I hit stop, I hit play to hear playback. I want to hear the playback and I want it to also send to Nexus. If I set the output of Twisted Wave to Nexus, will I myself on the local side hear the playback also or will it be shunting the audio.

: To you would hear the playback and so there is a fader for you.

Speaker B: Oh, Nexus handles that for you.

: Nexus has a fader with the mute on it that you could mute that if you want.

Speaker B: Nice. So that solves that problem. Beautiful. Right.

Speaker C: The question I’ve got though is it seems that we as voice over people are going to end up sitting in one room with microphones and screens and computers in there with us. So the booth is pretty well fast becoming redundant.

: Well, it might be that radio style booth.

Speaker A: Yeah. Do you just have it in your booth? That’s right, that would be my yes.

Speaker C: What I mean but it’s become like a radio.

Speaker A: I think that’s going to happen anyway. I kind of think that for me, this thing’s sort of ahead of the game because I can see that coming, I really can. The more and more I even had two sessions in the last couple of weeks canceled because the creative guys just jumped online with the voice and did it themselves. They didn’t need an engineer.

: We do see a lot of that. It’s like the phone patch may have gone away, but the direct to client session and where it comes up and it’s really funny because clients don’t really save time when they do this. They think they do, but they don’t. So they say, hey, let’s not book a studio to record the talent. Let’s pay the talent the same amount of money and make them record it and complain at them if it didn’t work out the way we wanted, by the way. So now we have the talent recording everything and inevitably, no one keeps good notes. And even if someone does keep good notes, you don’t know how well the talent is cutting up the files. And it’s very easy if you’ve ever been in a session sometimes to get your take numbering off from what you’re writing down and what’s actually happening in a computer, especially if you as the talent, you’re busy trying to do other things, like read the script and not look at the computer screen. On what file number Twisted Wave is on. And so inevitably, someone has to put humpty Dumpty back together again after the talent has recorded everything. And that’s going to take just as much time as just recording the session with an engineer online who can cut everything up and do it for you. And that way the talent only reads what they need to. They’re not reading a bunch of speculative takes because no one knows if A is going to edit back to take 65 or whatever. You can just hear it. You got it. Great. And it fits because we timed it out.

Speaker A: You just touched exactly on the problem that came from one of these sessions the other day. And this was a well known agency, a global agency, that they did one of these sessions where they just recorded it with whoever it was locally and they were on the phone, but the creative rings me and goes, yeah, kind of. I’m really happy with this. But we did some takes. I asked the talent to do this, but of course, with no labels, no notes, no nothing, I’ve got to go through every single take and go to him. Is it this one? No, that’s not it. What about this? No, that’s not it. No, it’s more like this. Oh, hang on. Okay, well, is it this one? No, it’s not that. It’s like if I was doing the session in Pro Tools, it would be labeled. I’d have a page full of notes as well. This edits to this, blah, blah, blah, and it’s done. But it took, like half an hour to find one take for this guy.

Speaker B: The pennywise found it is pennywise pound foolish.

: But the other problem is that what happens is that they’re all working off of flat bids, right? 1 hour for the talent. They know what their residuals are. They bid these things out. And it’s really hard to get these agencies to necessarily do just, hey, we want to be creative and throw paint on the wall and pay by the hour to throw paint on the wall. Instead, they do I don’t know if you’ve seen that. It’s that thing where the guy says, like, hi, we’d like to do an advert and we want to research sound effects and do all this stuff and try two different music takes and this and that. So 1 hour. And the person in the studio is like, I think it’s going to take longer than that. And then the person at the agency is like, no, we know our stuff. We know exactly what we want. We’re not indecisive at all. We only need 1 hour. And then you’re like, okay, now you’re stuck making a commercial in 1 hour that you know is going to take longer. So even though the agency basically saddles the talent with recording the takes, they never actually face the consequences of their actions because the bid happens. Then they audition, and it’s like they’ve already at that point with the bid, taking out the voice record. We’ll just give you takes.

Speaker C: Yeah. You get what you pay for. And if you don’t pay him, you.

Speaker B: Don’T get much, and you’re going to pay later.

Speaker A: It’s pay now, pay later. Sooner or later, you’re going to pay for it.

: I really think this was that moment when the voiceover industry, they all decided that they were going to try to eat each other’s lunch. And at some point, it became like, my booth doesn’t cost a thing. My setup and knowledge of my booth and what to do through blood and sweat and tears, paying me figured out and literal money that is free too.

Speaker B: Right?

: And all that stuff never should have been free. It should have been, okay, I’m whatever. $400 an hour, and, oh, you want to use my studio even if it’s $50 an hour?

Speaker B: Yeah, there should be a rate attached. I totally agree. As voice actors who wanted to be providing a service and I can name names, but I don’t need to who are very early on in the home studio timeline. Right. Like literally FedExing Dat tapes. Right. They wanted to be a service provider. They wanted to be ahead of the curve and create a business niche for themselves. In the meantime, they were creating a problem for the fact that home studios would eventually become the norm, and nobody was getting compensated for operating a studio and engineering a session.

: It’s like when you have something unique, you charge more for it. So if you’re a voice talent and because you’re available at home, you are available, like, instantaneously, you don’t need to have a limo drive you around La. That’s a perk. And it might be a perk for you, but it’s also a perk for your clients. But it became part of the add in, like, a long time ago. This was in the early 2000s. This was in the days of ISDN that this happened.

Speaker B: It was literally when I got into the business. Yeah. I was just being told, people need this help. And I didn’t know anything about the business model. I didn’t know Jack squad about who got paid what, how, what you didn’t get paid for. I just was there to solve problems. So I had no idea that this was going on till much later.

: Yeah, but here we are. Talent put a lot of time, effort, money, emotion into building their setup and learning this basically some aspect of the craft of audio engineering, essentially. Maybe not the whole thing, but there’s.

Speaker B: Like I mean, tell me this. Would there be a value I know this is off topic, but would there be a value when a talent or an agent invoices that even if the bottom line is identical, that you literally add in a line that’s engineering services, so it literally shows up and they see, oh, we’re paying for this. Would there be some efficacy to this? It’s kind of like restaurants starting to charge a service fee or a kitchen love fee or whatever. There’s been a lot of blowback to this because some people really just raise your prices and other people are like, I like the transparency. So it’s kind of confusing.

: I think that if you want to, you effectively want to raise your price. And the only way you’re going to be able to raise your price is by showing your value. And so in that sense, you almost need to because to the point that it happens on the flip side. So not just our like there’s three layers to it. It used to be that the talent went to the studio and so there’s two studios and there was a lot of meat on the bone for a whole industry. Right? There was an engineer in a studio in La. There was an engineer in a studio in New York. There was a voice talent in La. Yeah, there was five creatives over in New York. It was all happening real time. And At T was like just digging into the pie, too. And now it’s like the first thing that happens is voice talent or the auditions come in and they know must have ISDN or source connect, essentially, and read between the lines. And what’s happening over on the bid side is there’s no money for a remote studio. Only talent with home studio need apply. And George, how many times have you seen talent that have done the Voice Tracks West? Or I know a place that knows what pay out of pocket.

Speaker B: I tell people do it all the time.

: Voice tracks west is I’m like, if.

Speaker B: You don’t do these sessions that often, spending $10,000 on a soundproof booth is a massive waste of money.

: Yeah. And Voice Tracks has got a tight operation. It’s not like decked out in oak panels, like all the big working facility. Boom. It’s like, here’s a room, here’s a setup. You need an engineer to set you up. We don’t have staff to sit there and babysit you the whole time, but what are you going to do? That’s all you need. I don’t know what they charge, but I have a feeling it’s pretty affordable enough.

Speaker B: They do what we call talent friendly rates, right?

: And it’s a great idea. So you get those auditions that are basically like, bring your own studio iOS. And then the next level is like, you know what, we’re not even going to hire an engineer to record it like we just talked about, right?

Speaker B: It’s a weird position. I’ve always felt weird being in the position of enabling, essentially because I’m enabling the talent buyers to charge low rates for engineering or not budget for it. And I’m enabling the talent to meet that need. At the same time, there’s the plus.

: That you have your talent that can go live where they want to. And there’s many talent that would if charging for their studio would be a deterrent to them having the lifestyle that they want. They want all their sessions to be in house. The reason to give it away is not just because they’re trying to get an edge over some other talent, but also because they’re trying to direct their life the way they want it to be. And being called into a freaking city every other day for an hour session and you got to drive 2 hours is crazy. And so it makes sense.

Speaker B: And let’s face it, as a voice actor, you can’t live the lifestyle that you would like to live and be in. Those days are mostly gone. That you can live that lifestyle and have a nice home and have all this space and blah, blah, blah and live in the city, like live in Los Angeles or Lake. Like that’s unbelievably expensive.

: Right. And you don’t have to anymore.

Speaker C: Anyways, getting back to the rate thing, though, there is a way of doing it because on my invoices I show, studio and edit and then whatever the fee is and it’s usually zero zero, but you can actually put in there. Voiceover blah, blah, blah. That rate goes in studio, edit X dollars and then you can give them a discount, which actually is equivalent to the studio rate. That way the client sees that there is a fee involved in that, but you’ve just done them a favor and not charged them for it.

Speaker B: I think that’s very smart. I will invoice people for a $0 item just so they know they’re getting it. The problem with like a flat rate.

: Or just write the real price down and say the discount that you’re getting.

Speaker B: Yeah. I’ll say this is $100 thing, I’m throwing it in at $0. But you need to know that it has a value attached.

Speaker A: Yeah, everything we do has a value attached because it’s our time.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. But it needs to be literally spelled out for them on black and black and white, I think.

Speaker A: Agreed.

Speaker C: But the stupid thing is I was talking to in fact, Robbo and I were talking yesterday about equipment and stuff in the studio and believe that’s the stupid thing. Well, it’s the stupid thing in my case because it’s ridiculous. I mean, I don’t need any of this stuff, really. But I was sitting here the other day, like, adding up how much the dollar value of the stuff I’ve got in here in preamps compressors and microphones is just completely insane.

: It’s ridiculous. It is, yes.

Speaker C: It’s fun though.

: Okay. It is. People putting wings on their back of their Honda Civic.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks.

: I hate to say it, but it’s like we are kind of doing some.

Speaker B: Of that even does that you can buy a Civic with three exhaust type tips coming on the back.

Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah. Get yourself the type r boom. Look out.

: Yeah, but sometimes we’re just like, OOH, that thing’s going to make us faster and improve my zero to 60 time that neve preamp or whatever, and I think that we get caught up. I mean, God knows I’ve spent a lot of money on audio gear.

Speaker C: Oh, you have? You’re worse than me, actually.

: I need, like, the nose spray that breaks the addiction, whatever.

Speaker B: But Robert’s business model is a different one. His service is his studio and his skill with his know. So I feel like a service provider that’s providing that type of a studio service. There’s an expectation of a certain investment in that equipment and keeping it up.

Speaker A: To date and keeping it serviced and.

Speaker C: Keeping it’s funny, though, because I did send a file off to one of the audio production guys in one of the radio networks here because he was looking at buying Austrian audio microphones for their studios, which he did.

Speaker A: Salesmen.

Speaker C: But he said, oh, can you send me something? You got a sample of the eight one eight? And I went, yeah, sure. So I sent him just a cold read, eight one eight through the neve. He just come back going I said, what do you think? He goes, oh, my God, I’m buying one.

Speaker A: Nice.

: It’s so funny. The subtle stuff is really there, but it’s great when either someone is completely doing the same drugs that you’re doing or actually is truly hearing the same thing that you’re hearing. There is this like, wow, that really is better. And at the same time, someone walks in who doesn’t understand much about audio and goes like, what’s the difference?

Speaker B: You really get me. You really see me.

Speaker C: It was really funny. It’s like a guy that both Robbo and I know is also an audio guy. This is years and years and years ago. He got a voice track sent. It was a cold read from a studio in Melbourne. And he called me up and he said, do you know what microphones or what microphone they use down at this studio? And I said, no, I don’t, actually. He said, man, you got to find out. It sounds unbelievable. So I went down there and I was in there doing a job, and before I got in there, I said, what mics are you using, by the way? He goes, oh, what was the session? I told him, it’s like, oh, yeah, we’ve just bought a new U 47, the Telefunkin U 47. When they first reissued the thing, I’m like, okay, so I think they were selling for close to 20,000 Australian dollars at the time. So 15 14,000 us. I’m guessing. Sounded very nice.

Speaker A: You would want to I didn’t know.

Speaker B: They reissued that mic.

Speaker C: Yeah, the telephone U 47.

Speaker B: Yeah. I never knew there was a reissue of that mic.

: Yeah, that thing’s been, like, homages to.

Speaker B: No, I know, but I mean, it’s literally in Neumann. Like, they did just the U 67.

: Like, five years ago. It’s telefunken, but telefunken is not the Telefunkin that Telefunken was, right?

Speaker C: Correct. Yeah.

: Telefunkin is like some company in Connecticut. Telefunk is really a European funky funkin.

Speaker C: It was kind of weird though, because a lot of the Neumans that were re badged for America, so like Frank Sinatra’s U 47 was actually badged, I think, as a Telefunken.

: Right. So they were really U 47s. They were really Neumanns. Right. And then they were rebadged as Telefunken. And then the same thing happens with the AKG C Twelve because Telefunken was an importing company. They would commission things to be made or they would just say, hey, I’ll buy a bunch of those.

Speaker C: And there were tons of companies doing that, particularly in America, where they rebadged microphones under different brands that were made primarily by AKG or Neumann.

: It’s kind of like rebadging Chinese stuff in a way, happens. It’s like happening again. You see the same product and it’s like, oh, they just put a different name on it and called it their amplifier.

Speaker C: So you’re going to white label Nexus and set it off under different brands.

: There’s all kinds of discussions and things that pop up and then sometimes just like fizzle out. But one thing for sure, I think, is that at least on some version of the Gateway, one of the talked about features is to customize it so you can make it like Andrew’s Shopahor.

Speaker A: Well, one thing I wanted to touch on and something that’s not in the demo though, but something you were showing me after we finished recording a couple of weeks ago is the router. Can you tell us about that? Because that’s a game changer, right?

: It’s not going to release on the first. It might actually I don’t know, but right now it’s a little bit behind. It would be one of those things that certainly would take. It would be one of the things that takes longer to get out, but it’s pretty much done. And it’s just a desktop router. So you can set up a lot of this stuff or the rest of the stuff that you want to customize on your desktop routing, for example, if you wanted just to have something that routed. One of the things that happens with Pro Tools in particular is once you close your session, you lose all your routing. So if you’re not putting all your work into one session or working on one thing and you have to open up different files while you have a group of people online and connected, when you close Pro Tools, you lose communication and possibly even different parts of those connections, depending on what platforms are on. They might lose their connections too, because some of those connections go through you. So router gives you the opportunity to be able to set up sort of like a desktop route. Similar in a way, George, to what a lot of people that you have do with the Apollo Mixer.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going. To mention that. Right, exactly. But being on a not you’re now hardware agnostic, you can be on anything.

Speaker A: Because the killer for that, for me, is that is exactly what you’re saying, is that whole thing of, like, you’re halfway through a session and the creative goes, hey, last time we did this, we did blah, blah. Can you go to the old Pro Tools session? And you got to do that whole embarrassing listen, yeah, I can do that, but you’re going to lose me for a second here, guys. Okay, I’ll be back in a minute. And you hear the way you go.

: That whole thing changed the way I work. I have Pro Tool sessions with hundreds and possibly, I don’t know, thousands of spots. Whole years of campaigns, just boom, one after the you do them all on one timeline thing of like, oh yeah, one big ass timeline. Really?

Speaker B: They’re not just clips in the clip viewer?

: No, it’s basically what ProTools lacks is any sort of like have you ever worked in Media Composer?

Speaker B: A little bit.

: Okay, so Media Composer, you can have sessions well, you have a bin. Yeah. Pro Tools user have been wanting folders within their bin for the last 20 years, and they still have yet to get them. Different issue, but even more so, the edit and the mixer in Pro Tools are joined at the hip. But there’s many aspects of your mixer that are not part of your edit. They’re just part of your studio.

Speaker B: Sort of like there’s a utility mixer.

: This is a utility, this is your external. What used to be in a lot of early setups were like people that would have like a Mackie mixer off to the side and then they’d add Pro Tools. And what was going in and out of the Mackie mixer was like microphones and headphone feeds and connection to the tape dock probably back. Um, and so the mixer still had routing capability and some of that’s daunting. And really what you need is just like a couple straight ahead patches and maybe a volume control. And that’s really what Nexus router lets you do. It has an advanced mode where you can just sort of draw whatever you want from A to B and then that way you can even have different setups that you can load and save and close and open up a different setup, or you can make one massive.

Speaker B: Setup forward to it. Because I’m looking forward to being more hardware agnostic and less attached to something like the Apollo in general and kind of endorsing that kind of mentality of being a little bit less attached to that system. So this will be something that’ll be nice to set up for more people who do want that extra level of sophistication absolutely.

: Yeah, it’ll make it like if they have little special things that they need to do, even something like a talkback mic when they’re outside or playback from some other device if they want to plug their phone in or have some other app.

Speaker B: Let me ask you this. This is definitely going down a rabit hole in terms of features, but can you imagine that ever being on a touch screen interface like an iPad or having a controller?

: I could definitely imagine. We’ve already got other levels of control that we’re planning on, which are, I think, pretty exciting.

Speaker B: You guys were talking earlier about things are moving towards the actor having to have really a full production suite in their booth, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: It sucks, though. I mean, people don’t want the day.

: That someone asks an actor to not only record for them, but can you please play back picture while you record? When that happens, then it’s like you’re really throwing a lot at Cipriano.

Speaker B: I mean, he does stuff when he.

: Has to, but some people can do that. It wouldn’t be that hard.

Speaker B: He paid me to set up Pro Tools to do it.

: Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. So it would be lovely for someone who really still wants to have a feeling of I have a mic, I have a headphone, I have my script. But not having to have keyboard, monitor, mouse, that whole rig in there too and just have somewhat innocuous iPad or even if you’re reading off the iPad, you can just do the four finger swipe and switch over to the mix.

: The hardest thing becomes, I still think the iPad is a tough environment. There’s been a lot of actors have been like, can I just do this all on the iPad?

Speaker B: Yeah. No, there’s a bit of a stay in your lane. The iPad has a lane to stay in. To me, it still has no place in a Pro audio production workflow except as a controller or a script reader.

: Yeah, it works well as a controller.

Speaker B: I’ve got my V controller controller and a script reader. That’s what it’s for. To me. It’s not a pro audio. Despite the power of the thing, the hardware, the fact that it’s got Thunderbolt now in the Pro model, iPad Pro, it’s still just not the tool for the job. So use it what it’s for, and that’s what it’s good for. So I would endorse having that in there just to control the Nexus monitoring and the other stuff.

: Do a lot of talent. Really avoid and not want some really.

Speaker B: Do avoid it as long as they can. They really despise doing that.

Speaker C: I’m one.

Speaker B: Yeah. It’s because of the distraction. Because this is the right brain, left brain, actor, engineer, conundrum. You can’t do both at the same time. I don’t care who the hell you are, you can’t do them both equally well. One is always suffering at the hands of the other. So the actor that really but what.

: Does an actor need in the booth? Truly? They need to be able to record takes, and they need to be able to play back.

Speaker B: Mean, some people like, I’ll call you out, Bo Weaver, I’ve known you so long. He hits record, he walks into the booth. He records all of his sessions. He walks out of the booth and he sits down and he edits all the sessions. Like done. That’s his workflow. Now. How often is he directed? Very rarely. Record and send. But yeah, that’s what he likes. He likes to have the two separate church and state.

Speaker C: Well, I’m exactly the same. I have the same workflow as Bo because a lot of my stuff is not directed. So I do exactly the same thing. I go in there, record, come back and come out of here and edit and send.

: Yeah, but how many times you go back and forth?

Speaker C: I save each file separately. So if I’m doing like 430 2nd spots for somebody, then I’ll record a couple of takes or two or three takes.

: How do you know you’re in time? Are you timing yourself?

Speaker C: I do a timer first. I will sit there and I’ll time one with the stopwatch first read. So I know ballpark where I’m at. By the time you deep breath, you lose a couple of seconds. So if I’m doing like one, that’s got to be 27 seconds and I come in at 27, then I know I’ve got 2 seconds up my sleeve so I can take more time with it. Once you’ve been doing this for that’s the thing.

: You guys have like atomic clocks built in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a talent and I’m like, can you take half a second off that? And they take half a second off that.

Speaker B: It’s like, wow, bo had an iPad one for years. He may still have it just to run the timer period. He’s like, It’s a great timer. It doesn’t make a click.

: I have an iPad one that I use for my eight faders approach. Yeah. So there’s some minimal amount of control that’s necessary. They at least need a door handle, probably. Do they want a mic mute?

Speaker B: Yeah, I’m sure they would. Most people would like to have that, I would think. Yeah, it’s pretty embarrassing when you got.

Speaker C: A horrible client down the line and mic mute’s. Very handy.

Speaker B: Horrible client or bad cheese.

Speaker C: Yeah.

: How do you find the foot switches.

Speaker C: For I reckon a foot switch would be great.

Speaker A: You need one of those AP. You need a foot switch.

Speaker C: Yes, I need a foot switch. Foot switch is great. I love it. Trouble is, I probably tread on it by accident.

Speaker B: Well, the Whirlwind PPD or whatever, they have a foot switch on off switch.

: The ones that don’t break phantom power so that they don’t pop, they just sort of short out.

Speaker C: And it’s also like I wouldn’t want I mean, the idea is fantastic. I think it’s fun, but I hate too much stuff between the microphone and the preamp.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Well, there’s that one more thing that can go wobbly on you.

Speaker B: Not to go completely off base here again, but I was talking earlier about what I saw podcast movement, and I saw the boss answer to the RODECaster pro because Roland’s had and Roland too. Boss is like their musician wing of Roland or like the guitar pedal.

: I don’t know about that.

Speaker B: Right.

: So they had boss is the guitar wing and Roland and Roland is the keyboard wing, but they’ve crossed areas. Like mainly Roland has made guitar synths and the other view is that Roland is the high end and then Boss is the middle.

Speaker B: Right? So I’m looking at their things and going, okay, here’s another RODECaster. What’s on the back? A foot pedals plug. I was like, Whoa, that’s cool. What can you do with that? He’s like, whatever you want. For the gamers, you can do anything you want. I was like, Well, I can see that being cool because the mixer is outside on your desk and you run a foot pedal in your booth and now you have a way to cut your mic, or it could be a way to hit record and then punch a marker when you click it again. There’s a lot you could do with.

: That, so whatever you want. The foot pedal can send like USB.

Speaker B: Messages, as far as I can tell. I don’t know how flexible it is, but it’s pretty flexible. There’s also air tools or AirTurn I think that’s called AirTurn. And now other companies are getting into it where you can get Bluetooth pedals that go in your booth to control certain functions. So there’s more you can do with foot pedals, which is kind of neat, but if I’m not wearing headphones and I don’t know, my mic is truly off, I would never trust anything wireless.

: So what about the preamp? I mean, the preamp should be in the booth or not, because even if you wanted to be really theoretical about it, your best signal would be by running the shortest mic line and getting it up to the preamp right line.

Speaker B: If you’re running, then sending it 20 foot runs, that’s different, it’s negligible.

: But having the preamp in the booth to be able to set it is a different thing, right? Isn’t that necessary?

Speaker B: Yes and no. I mean, some people do. I’d say most people that have a booth that don’t have the equipment in the booth don’t have the preamp in the booth, but it’s less convenient.

: And so they’re just recording conservatively and going like, I’ll just hit minus twelve, I got plenty of bits, I put.

Speaker B: Plenty of Avalon 737s in booth. And I just told people, like, this thing’s a radiator, so it’s going to get nice and toasty in here. If you really need to have this in here, I get it, but be my last choice. What, to put in the booth?

Speaker C: Well, that’s what I’m thinking. The more gear I was going to say about that exactly that most people’s home studio booths are quite small, and you start piling gear in there, it’s going to be like a furnace.

Speaker B: Yeah. Gets hot in there quick. So the less the better. Even modern computer monitors are pretty low power, but they still make heat. They still radiate heat. Everything makes heat. So the less in there, the better. Yeah. It’s going to be interesting when the passport Vo comes out, how people choose to use it. Whether they’re going to have it in booth or outside of the booth, you can go either place. And the thing you’re going to miss out on it not being in booth is that mic switch. Mic mute. That’s why I think the majority are going to use it in the booth. So what we’ll be testing I think so, too, how far we can run it on USB to the computer. So we’ll be doing some testing around that whole workflow as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, I can see the value in having the Passport Vo in the booth for sure. Maybe you’re doing a zoom session or whatever. You can use that second interface to run either your phone or iPad or whatever, that you can run the zoom session.

Speaker B: That’s where I could see it being really useful, having the iPad in the booth for phone patch, zoom, blah, blah, blah, communications.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And having that run into it and just that would be a really easy way to facilitate those sessions. Boy.

: Well, in a way, you can have it. Sorry, you can cut all that out.

Speaker B: We’re really off topic now.

Speaker C: This was about Nexus and I don’t know where the hell we’ve gone.

Speaker A: Oh, man, we’ve gone all over the place, let me tell you. This is tangent.

Speaker C: I’m just waiting to see the Mad.

Speaker A: Hatter pop out from behind the door somewhere. Editing nightmare. That is the Pro audio suite.

Speaker B: Yeah. Wrap this one up.

: I’ll bring it together. What comes out first, the passport or Nexus?

Speaker B: Nexus.

Speaker C: Nexus.

Speaker A: Nexus.

: Probably.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Well, we’ll see, because these are both but we don’t know. Neither of them want to divulge a release date until it’s certain because people don’t. We’ve all learned that produced product to under Promise Over Deliver is really the best policy.

: You can’t give a product a C section.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: What we can promise about the passport, though, is that when it does come out, it’s going to be killer.

Speaker B: It’s going to be killer. We’re going to make sure of it, because by the time anybody receives one in the mailbox, we have already hammered on it and proven without a shadow of a doubt that it will do what we said it’s going to do. When you get one, it’s going to be fully tested and vetted before that.

: Yeah, I’m excited because I think you see all these USB interfaces coming out constantly and no one has one that does these.

Speaker B: They’re all playing out of a different playbook. Like, I got into a whole conversation on Facebook about this one person’s. POV is clearly the future is firmware, software, everything. And I said, I don’t think it’s that clear. I said, Because we’re developing the exact opposite. And his response was, I think that’s not a good idea. And my response was, I think it’s a very good idea because look at all the products that have come and gone and what products you can still plug into your Mac or your PC that still work 15 years later. And the Micport Pro First Gen is one of those products. You just plug it in and it works. So that’s the philosophy. We’re just carrying that forward.

Speaker A: My old trusty two rack sitting here right next to me. How old is that now? Jesus.

Speaker C: 15 years.

Speaker A: Have to be something like that. Still keeps going.

: A two, not even an three two rack.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah. Wow.

: I have some ones in my garage.

Speaker A: No, I don’t need the double o one.

Speaker C: What are they doing in the garage?

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Why are you using them, Robert?

Speaker B: Unlike you, he’s using his ramps to hold up his Porsche 920.

Speaker C: The Pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robo Got your own audio issues? Just askrobo.com tech support from George, the tech Wittam. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, end, suggest a topic, or just say good day. Drop us a note at our website proaudiosuite.com