Last week my mom saw a woman post in a local homeschooler Facebook group about looking for students interested in a free online Spanish class over Zoom that her father would be teaching. Apparently, his tactics of teaching Spanish is extremely effective, and he wants to make a new video course to record and sell for students wanting to learn Spanish. But he needs about 10 students (ages 12-17) to work with to help teach. He's looking for new students that don't know Spanish so that he has a clean slate to work with. Because he's recording the students and using their faces to re-sell in a course, he's offered the class free for those he chooses to be in it. Otherwise, the video-recorded class will cost about $2000. 

My mom suggested I apply to join the class via an email that the lady provided to contact her father. I Emailed him and wrote a short paragraph about myself and why I wanted to learn Spanish. On top of being a handy extra language to use in social settings with Spanish speakers, this would also open a new door for my voice-acting journey as I would be able to offer my voice services in the Spanish language rather than just English. This would be very useful, for example, for a director needing a voice cast for a global audience such as a Disney movie. Disney doesn't just make movies for the American audience, but the whole world like Asia and Europe. They makes tens of translations for each Language, and having a lead actor that can provide the same voice for an American audience and a Mexican audience saves them a lot of time and provides a more authentic performance.

Today was our first lesson. It went for about 1 1/2 hours, and the first 30 minutes was for showing us students what the whole course was gonna be about and how they'd like us to behave during the course. 

About 20 students joined the live Zoom call, but the teacher only wants 12 for the whole course, so he'll be deciding which students will stay and which he'll have to kick out. He also wants us to have decent audio and video quality, which thankfully I can handle very well.

I hope he keeps me in!

Yesterday I was going through my old blog posts from about 5 years ago. At that time I was very active with voice acting on castingcall.club and was about 12 years old. Being that there were very few voice actors under 13 on the platform, I was cast for almost every role I auditioned for.

One of my favorite gigs was for a Youtube channel called "Star Wars Audio Comics." It was a fan Youtube channel of Star Wars that would add voices and sound effects to the visuals of the Star Wars comics. On top of Star Wars being massive in the film industry, it's also very popular as comics. So this channel had the great idea to make Youtube videos out of them with a great audio experience, as well as helping fans access the comics easier via Youtube.

I voiced characters for them for about 5 videos, my main characters being young Boba Fett and young Luke Skywalker. Here's one of the videos I voiced for young Boba:


That voice was a bit challenging since I had to do a New Zealand accent, since his father, Jango Fett, has a new Zealand accent, and Boba Fett is a literal clone of his father.

Here's a voice I did for young Luke Skywalker:

I wrote a few months ago about starting a large editing project of editing an audiobook for one of my podcast clients. I'd never edited an audiobook before it (and keep in mind, this does not include my own voice narration) but since she knew I edited audio she asked if I could edit her audiobook.

On top of editing, I helped her choose the right microphone to record her audiobook with since she wanted to record it with her own voice. I also gave her tips for recording and her voice, like making sure to drink plenty enough water so she doesn't make saliva sounds, or always staying consistent with the audio quality and how far away she is from the microphone. These small things are very important for audio books to meet the "ACX standard". ACX is the gateway from recording your audio book to publishing it to Audible for your listeners to access. The standard requirements are listed:

• contain only one chapter/section per file, with the section header read aloud
• have a running time of no longer than 120 minutes
• have room tone at the beginning and end and be free of extraneous sounds
• measure between -23dB and -18dB RMS and have -3dB peak values and a maximum -60dB noise floor
• be a 192kbps or higher MP3, Constant Bit Rate (CBR) at 44.1 kHz
  

I'm sure some of that stuff didn't make any sense, but it's specific audio quality details that need to be edited and consistent throughout hours of audio.

After a few months once all the recording was finished, I got to work on the editing. It took quite a while, as my editing consisted of mostly editing the pacing and tedious breaths and mouth-click removal in the audio. 

The pacing editing was probably the hardest. I had to use a lot more of my own judgment as to what parts should be faster or slower. For example, in between chapter announcements, I wanted there to be at least 3 seconds of silence. For the actual narration parts, like in a very dramatic emotional moment, I want long spaces to add to the effect. 

After I was finished editing everything, I sent her the files to review.

She was very happy with the results, and soon had a small list of edits she wanted me to fix. Half of the edits were re-records of audio portions because she wasn't happy with how she narrated them, or because she made changes to the book text and therefore had to re-record it. I made the changes and she's now reviewing them!

A few days ago, I made a new "without music" video, this time it was part of a song from the movie franchise: Highschool Musical. I've seen a lot of people make "without music" videos of highschool musical songs, many going very viral. While they do great jobs with the voices and lip syncing making it very funny and entertaining to watch, the sound effects weren't very accurate or well done. 

I didn't want to re-do a song that someone else had already done, so I found a song that no one had edited yet called "the boys are back again", with 2 of the main characters singing and dancing in a junkyard scene. Here's the original:



I've never seen the movies, but I knew that this video would be hilarious and awkward if it was just their voices and sound effects. So, all day last Saturday I edited the first 50 seconds of the song and made this!:



Doing the sound effects was very exhausting and kinda repetetive, since most of it was them dancing around and I had to match each step and scrape of their feet with the sound of shoes on dirt. but I'm very proud of the result! And the best part was definitely doing the voices, which took about 30 minutes and I had fun doing dumb and silly voices for it.

I've considered buying a new computer laptop, a Macbook Pro. But I want to wait until I'm traveling more and will use it at least 5 times a week, as right now I only use my ThinkPad laptop about twice a week. But the ThinkPad isn't very efficient, and I've heard great things about the latest Macbooks for video and audio editing. I'm planning to graduate before easter, and when I do I hope to move out to Alabama for a few months. I'd take my desktop with me, but it'd still be very handy to have a Macbook to use on the road. My brother that I'm visiting wants to take me to his favorite coffee shop, that he brings a laptop to work at, and he suggested I come along as well. I love editing and working at coffee shops, but sometimes the ThinkPad can be very slow. 
I won't buy a new Macbook until I'm actually traveling more, which probably won't be until I graduate in April. I also specifically want one with an M1 or M2 chip, which is a new very powerful computer processor perfect for high-quality editing and rendering.

Tomorrow I'm leaving to see my brother in Nashville, Tennessee, for a Christian conference. There will be a ton of podcasters there as well, so what I'm most excited about is meeting some new possible clients. My brother knows a lot of finance podcasters, so he'll be able to introduce me to his podcast friends. Admittedly, finance podcasters usually pay the most due to their ability to use money from other income sources to fund the podcast. Also, for algorithms, any categories of podcasts related to finances pay the most in ad revenue. A video about gaming on Youtube with 1m views will make about the same as a finance video with just 200k views.

I'm going to be away for about 8 days, and then I'll fly back home with my brother for our other brother's wedding in California. I'll be in Nashville for about 4 days, and then I'm driving with my brother from Nashville to his house in Alabama. I'll also be able to visit his Church and meet his friends there. He even has a favorite coffee shop he goes to every day that I'll go to with him and use my laptop to work there.

It'll be a great way for me to experience almost living on my own without moving out yet. I'm very excited!

Monasticism is isolation from the world to have a deeper spiritual meaning. This doesn't mean it is the belief that all world things are evil, such as giving up eating delicious foods, entertainment, etc - but it's a sacrifice of those things to be closer to God. This is popular with monks.

Some monks live in complete isolation, while others live with a community of other monks. The words differing them are eremitic and cenobitic. Eremitic is the practice of living in complete isolation from people, like a hermit, or like Luke Skywalker in the star wars prequels when he lived in hiding on that island. Cenotibic is the practice of separation from materialism, but living in a community with others practicing the same, such as a monastery.

The monks were very distinct in their beliefs with monasticism, as at the time, there was a large movement in the church that believed all materialistic things were evil. In contrast, the monks believed they weren't evil but were sacrificing those pleasures as a way to discipline themselves and devote themselves to God.

Tom Woods talks about a specific instance with St. Anthony of Egypt, who was a Christian who wanted to go into the desert and practice the life of a hermit in complete isolation. He told his friends and fellow Christians not to follow him, but as he goes into the desert about 5000 people follow him

Tom Woods talks about Constantine's ruleship, and after the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine was baptized soon before he died. Some people speculated as to why he was baptized so late, and during those times it was customary to get baptized as late as possible, since they believed once you get baptized, then all the sins before that point were forgiven. 

During Constantine's ruleship, he implemented new laws to protect the Christians. He abolished the crucifixion of Christians, and he made Sunday a holiday.

He also removed gladiator games, which was a game where 2 people, often convicts, would fight to the death for entertainment. Constantine also improved the living conditions for women and slaves, which at the time it was legal to beat women and slaves under your household.

Sacrilege to the Christian faith was also made a crime. Much of society at the time started discouraging other practiced pagan religions.

Tom Woods covers early Christian written sources still kept besides the New Testament.

He starts off with the Didache, also known as the 'Teaching of the 12 apostles". At the time it was highly regarded, and even some people thought it should've been in the new testament, but was only rediscovered in 1873. You can now find all of the documents online to read. The book is about the rules of being a Christian. What to do and what not to do. It emphasizes especially the "golden rule", first love God above all things and treat your neighbor as you would yourself.

After seeing many of Tyler the Creator's music videos, I was very curious on what inspired his style of filming in the videos. After some looking around on the internet, I noticed his music videos look a lot like Wes Anderson style films, but with more "grain" and a vintage look. Youtube suggested a video on "The Wes Anderson Style Explained", and naturally I was curious on what exactly makes it so unique, and personally I LOVE the style of his films.

One of his main special touches is the camera movement and placement. He always has the camera facing "flat", which means that instead of using side angles or any angles that isn't 90 or 180 degrees, he keeps it face forward or exactly to the side. Here's some image examples I made with some of his movie shots:

I've mentioned many times before that Tyler the Creator is one of my favorite music artists. He's extremely creative, and he's constantly changing his styles and has changed a LOT over the past 10-15 years. Some-what recently, he did a small collection of songs for the new "The Grinch" animated movie, as well as 2 main theme tracks that were mainly played at different scenes in the movie. He's an interesting choice to make the music, as pretty much ALL his past music is not family/kid-friendly, and he's been in plenty of controversies, so much respect to the studio of The Grinch movie to see past that.

The Grinch soundtrack by Tyler is personally I think one of his most beautiful pieces of work, and the studio definitely let him have his own freedom in creating it (except of course he had to keep it family-friendly). I really wish he made some of the songs longer, such as "Whoville", the opening song in the collection. Whoville is definitely my favorite song in the collection, it's so warm and "Disney" sounding, the piano, in the beginning, reminds me of the show/comics "Peanuts". It sells the kid feeling perfect, it makes me want to curl up warm by a fire while it's snowing outside. Then at the end, it gets more into the strings/orchestral sounds, which I think was inspired by his previous recent album "Flower Boy" where he used very similar sounds.

Here's the full collection plus the 2 main tracks:

I have a small collection of Vans, my favorite brand of shoes/sneakers, but some of them are pretty dirty and even a bit muddy. I wanted to see them good as new again, so I searched up different ways to clean shoes, but specifically the materials of my vans. Across the shoes the main textures are canvas, suede, and fake leather.

It seemed the best things to use for cleaning the shoes were dish soap, baking soda, or laundry detergent, so I decided to do all three. I mixed them in a small bin with hot water, and then got a hand scrub with bristles and scrubbed down the shoes.

There were some mess-ups I realized after the shoes had dried, but overall it worked great! One of the shoes I scrubbed was suede and green, and I should have been more careful scrubbing it since some of the color got removed. It isn't noticeable on the shoe, but the color got in the water, and the blue color that came off and mixed with the water dyed the soles a bit. It's not very noticeable, but compared to other colors I can tell easier. 

I also should've mixed the baking soda in the water more, as after the shoes dried I could see some of it on the shoe. I'm sure I can remove it pretty easily.

After the success of my Tyler the Creator sound design parody, where I recreated one of his music videos but WITHOUT the music. 

This time, I decided I'd do a music video from NF: "When I Grow Up". This one took about twice as long as the previous video I did of Tyler the Creator, totaling to about 15 hours of editing. I got all my sound effects Artlist.io, and edited everything in Adobe Audition. 

Here's what the timeline looked like once I was finished editing it all:

I decided it'd be much easier for me and potential clients that visit my website to have a fill out a form of questions about their podcasts to help understand where they're at and what they need done on their podcast.

Here's the list I made:

• How old is your podcast?
• How many hosts does your podcast have?
• How many guests per episode does your podcast usually have?
• Do you want us to *scrub your podcast episodes? *Remove uh's, um's, mouth clicks, aspirations, repetition, dead space, call interruptions, and fixing of any other little inconvenience during the episode
• Do you want us to *mix and master your podcast? *cue, mix, and overlay music and clips with the main recorded interview file, such as your intro, sponsor segment, or ending theme music
• How long are each of your episodes?
  
• What is your episode release schedule?
• Do you want us to *publish your podcast episodes? *We will make sure your episodes get to outlets for your listeners to listen from, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and more. You may add your own description, titles, or artwork
  

All of these questions help me determine the work it'll take to work for their podcast, and from that, I will understand a better and more fair price point to charge them. The questions are all multiple choice to make the process a little easier (I can't put the choices here since posthaven won't let me).

Someone approached me who is reviving a recorded series of old recorded lectures from many years ago, but wants to clean up the audio quality to make it more bearable to listen to. It was digitized from raw cassette tapes to mp3 files. I prepared him a series of presets for him to use ready for all of the recordings, including dynamics processing and noise remover.

Here's what I sent him:


1: Select 1 second of ONLY white noise (no voice in it, just a sample of what you want removed). Right click the select > Capture Noise Print

2: Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process)...

3: Turn Noise Reduction to the highest level 100%, then apply the effect


4: Favorites > Dynamics Preset (already installed on your computer)

5: Highlight frequency above the voice where the voice isn't there, and delete all the unnecessary white noise. Last recording was done at -9k Hz

I suggest you have the volume peak at -3 DB



When the prep for the episode is done, then it is ready for scrubbing.

As I've blogged about twice before, I was working on a fun edit of a music video by a big music artist named Tyler the Creator. I really liked his music for his song "See You Again" with Kali Uchis, and to get a bit back into sound design I wanted to recreate it without the song and with my own sound effects synced up with whatever was happening on screen to make it seem as if you were watching a real recording with all the regular sounds in it like footsteps and car sounds and dishes being moved. 

I spent about 3 hours to do roughly the first 90 seconds of the music video. I got burnt out pretty quick and didn't have time to finish it all, but I still wanted to upload it to Youtube. When I tried re-uploading the video to Youtube, Youtube told me there was a copyright claim on the content in the video. I thought copyright claims were only for audio, and I obviously didn't keep the song in the music video. Apparently it was the video content, and instead of a usual copyright claim where I can't monetize the video (AKA put ads on the video to make money), which wasn't my plan in the first place, it wouldn't even let me upload the video to the public. This is a very frustrating and terrible rule, as the only reason it exists is to prevent me from stealing the video art and making money off of it, which they can already do by just demonetizing it. Obviously I can't put ads on the video, which wasn't my intent in the first place, I just wanted to show off my creation. 

One of my clients emailed me about an edited episode not being sound leveled enough to his liking, so he asked if I could fix it to make it more level. Usually I level the audio with the Dynamics processing, but I wanted to learn if there was a way to do specifically audio leveling instead of the whole dynamics process.

I simply searched "how to level audio Audition" on Youtube, and quickly found a tutorial video for the speech volume leveler tool in Adobe Audition. The video was just a few minutes long and I followed along with the tutor easily, and quickly learned how to use the tool. Once I customized it to how I wanted, I saved it as a preset to use for the future. It did the job perfectly for my client, and now I can use it every time for all the future episodes I edit for him.

If you already have your first episode recorded and are ready to publish it to the world, follow this video using BuzzSprout to get started:

My brother Gideon recommended me "Buzzsprout", which is a podcast hosting service where you distribute and publish podcasts to listening platforms like Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, etc.

I created a Buzzsprout account to try to upload my own podcast, as the next step I want to take in my business is to offer podcast publishing as a service, this way I'm closer to taking care of everything for a podcaster.

I learned how to use Buzzsprout pretty easily, and learned about RSS feeds, which is a link that has your podcast info encoded, and what you give to listening platforms such as Spotify. I created a test podcast for a client and listed it on Spotify and Stitcher, but I had to wait a bit for both platforms to approve the podcast. Spotify accepted it pretty fast, but I'm still waiting on Stitcher to approve.

I was able to upload an mp3 file really fast, as well as artwork for the episode and artwork for the whole podcast (like a logo), and a description. Sometimes podcasts will have a whole blog post, show notes, description of a guest, or links to sources they mention during the interview for their listener.

Another great feature with Buzzsprout is that I can have multiple podcasts under 1 account, and save all the presets and artwork for the episodes. In the future I'd like to be publishing for tons of podcasts, so Buzzsprout can help me manage so many.

I've gotten a lot into hip hop music, and I noticed some of my favorite artists will get pieces of songs to put in their own songs, and mix it into their "beat". Usually it's a small clip of an already made song, just a few seconds, and then they loop it and add their own instruments with it to make it sound more hip hop.

Here's an example where Tyler the Creator, a famous hip hop artist, uses a sample from an old song from 1971 in "Get Down" by Monterey.

Here's the original sampled song, "Get Down" by Monterey: 

Here's Tyler the Creator's song "Boredom" where he uses the drums in "Get Down" at 1:11:

Some people see this as stealing music, but all art is inspired by art before it. Technically everything in any music has been "stolen" since people use pieces of music to structure their own, whether it be through lyrics or beats or chords. 
Tyler the Creator and Kanye West are my favorite artists to use samples in their music. 

Kanye West samples "My Song" by Labi Siffre in Kanye's song "I Wonder":

"My Song": 

"I Wonder": 


I love how Kanye and Tyler use samples to really give their songs life, especially with old vintage songs as they tend to do. It also really helps to build their own style and aesthetic but made modern.

The past few weeks I've been really impressed by some art I've seen of people painting sneakers of cool specific designs and patterns. I especially love ones that I've seen where they paint a comic on shoes. They usually have bright colors with a fun cartoon comic, like this one with Snoopy:


I thought it'd be really cool to have a pair of shoes with a picture of a Calvin and Hobbes (maybe favorite comic series) comic on them. I looked online to see if anyone has made any with Calvin and Hobbes on them, and there were a few although they were very expensive. 

Since I'm not willing to spend over $100 for a pair of shoes right now, I decided to see how easy it is to paint shoes myself. 

I then binged a ton of Youtube tutorials for how to paint custom sneakers, and decided I want to try. I then found an old pair of used shoes that fit me and ordered a specific branded paint set, Angelus, with 12 different colors as well as some sealers and brushes. I don't think I'll try to paint Calvin and Hobbes on the shoes yet first try, since I'm sure I'd mess it up because of how detailed they are, but maybe I'll do a pattern with a cool icon on the front or something like that.

I've been really interested in video editing in general, and I decided to search "Premiere Pro" on Youtube to see if any interesting videos about the software comes up. About the 5th video recommended to me was a tutorial on doing subtitles, which was something I was already interested in learning how to do. I watched the video and the guy teaching the tutorial went into the text settings in Premiere Pro. He added a black outline around the white text, as well as some background blur to help separate the text from the background footage. Then he showed how to line the text exactly in the middle. 

Then he added one more detail that I didn't expect. He pointed out that sometimes you'll notice in other Youtube videos, when the Youtuber has pop-up subtitles, they almost look like they pop in, with a sort of small animation. He showed how to do it quickly using keyframes. It took about 3 keyframes to make it have a little "pop" animation, but it made an impressive improvement! 

I went on a call with the Youtuber I edit for and he wanted to show me something that he liked in editing. He showed me a video someone else edited for him. He said while he didn't think that editor did the best out of all the editors he's worked with, he did like the way the editor smoothly zoomed in on parts of clips, rather than just a straight cut to a cropped version of a clip. At the time I didn't know how to do that (I didn't tell him that though), but I told him I'd try to implement that into his future videos. 

Before starting on his next video, I looked up tutorials on Youtube on how to do smooth linear zooms in Premiere Pro. One of the most annoying things in this process is fast-forwarding through unnecessarily long videos to the parts that are actually important, instead of sponsor segments and the Youtuber begging you to subscribe to his channel and like his video. I finally found a quick tutorial that was 3 minutes long and got straight to the point. I quickly learned the way the guy in the video taught how to do nice-looking linear zooms, and how to do it fast and easy. Then for the next video I edited, I sprinkled in the zoom edits I learned. Once I sent it to the Youtuber I edit for, he said I did a great job and copied the other editor's zooms just right. 

I'm very grateful for being able to learn these simple yet important tools and tricks so easily through Youtube and Premiere Pro, and I expect I'll be learning much more about video editing in the near future.

This post is continuing my previous post.

After editing the first video for the Youtuber, I sent it to him and the next day he reviewed it. He was really impressed and said I captured his editing style perfect! I've already been watching him for at least 8 months, so I was familiar with the content he makes and the type of editing style he likes. Then we went on a call after that and he showed me some few parts that he changed in the video I edited for him. He also gave me some notes for any of his future videos, such as censoring curse words, getting a 10 second clip teaser for the beginning to get the audience interested, the video must be at least 8 minutes long as that's the minimum required time for Youtube videos to make ad revenue, and cut out any parts where he doesn't add much commentary to whatever he's reviewing. 

We agreed on a fair price per video I edit, and I'll be editing for him daily! This is going to be a good way to learn Premiere Pro, the video software I use to edit, and consistently edit videos fast. 

There's a commentary Youtuber I've been watching for at least 8 months. I like listening to his videos whenever I'm doing handy work around on the house since I can still understand it without watching it. Recently he posted saying that he was looking for editor for his videos. He's been a youtuber for over 2 years but has always been editing his own videos. Now he wants some more time to focus on his content, so he was looking for an editor that could specially copy his style of editing. I DM'd him and showed him some past videos I've edited, and told him I've been watching him for over 8 months, so I know the style of editing that he likes and what sort of content he makes. 

He responded back and gave me a test video to edit as well as a little payment for my time. If he likes it, I get to be his permanent editor! I'd probably be editing for him daily.

I've been really curious about my brother's 3D printer and how it works. He hasn't been using it much lately, so I asked him if I could use it and learn about it on my own time. He agreed to let me use it for free as long as I pay for the filament, which is the plastic that the machine uses to melt and form into the model/object.

The model of the 3D printer is a Creality Ender 3, and takes size 1.75mm filament. The first things I want to print are stands for my speakers to put on my desk, that way they're pointing a bit higher and I can hear them better. 

Right now I'm setting up Ultimaker, which is a software that will connect my computer to the 3D printer, then I can upload any 3D model to print. I can find the 3D models from a website called Yeggi, with thousands of free community uploaded 3D models specifically for 3D printing.