Why You’re Scaring Away Clients With An Inconsistent Story, And How You Can Clarify Your Brand By Learning To Say No

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 75

six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource to running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris Graham. We'll come back to it.

Another episode of the six figure homes studio podcast. I am finally home from my honeymoon. I have my real microphone, as you heard at the end of the last episode, but now I'm actually recording a full episode with my role microphone. Thank God. Yeah, thank God no more. Sm 58 and I'm here with my beautiful bald cohost to held down the fort while I was on my honeymoon for the last month. Chris Graham. Chris, how are you doing today?

Oh, I'm so good. It was so much harder to keep the podcast, the float, and I thought it was going to be, yeah, you didn't put it on any youtube videos. Well, we can talk about that. That's what took the hit was the youtube. I'm back on the horse. I am releasing them again. I'm going to catch up. I'm still going to have 52 by the time the year is over. I'm just flexing a little bit on the, when I'm releasing those. Okay. Yeah.

You're going to have a double duty it, some weeks are now right to make up.

This is true, but I haven't done any tutorials or stuff yet. And full confession. Okay. So we had Graham Cocker on the podcast on episode 46 and that episode rocked my face off. That dude is smart. And after that episode I reached out to him cause I immediately knew he knew a lot of stuff. I don't know, but I reached out to him. I had been loving the videos he's doing in the Grand Cochran a youtube channel. They're like, you know, business wisdom, philosophy, stuff like that. And I ended up hiring him to be my business coach, which was so fun and so expensive but so worth it. And we just had our final, we did a six month coaching program. We just had our final call about a week and a half ago. And it was really, really good for me. I learned so much from him about making content and about, you know, telling a good story and you know, serving my audience, serving you guys, learned so much that helped the podcast because he is a freaking content machine. He's brilliant at it. He is, he puts out a video every single week nonstop the last four years and now for two youtube channels of video every single week nonstop without missing a beat. I think it's 10 years that he's been doing it.

Yeah, that's right. I under sold him.

So it was really, really, really cool. I'm doing the business coaching thing with him and Mo, you know, we focused on youtube channel building an audience and it's something I'm still working on. You know, I'm still learning a lot. I'm still overcoming a lot of fear issues. I've mentioned that before. Um, making video scares the crap out of me. Making podcasts doesn't scare me at all for some reason. And so it's been really, really good, but also really, really challenging. And one of the things Graham taught me was this idea of having multiple buckets for your content. And that was a real big eye opener for me. And I've really only done one bucket of content for the youtube channel.

Well, can you first explain what he's talking about? Multiple buckets? What do you mean by buckets? This is a potential learning moment, even though this isn't the topic of our episode, but a little quick learning, a little mini learning moment for this episode.

Yeah, this idea of if you have a blog or you have a youtube channel or a podcast, you should have several topics that you cover. So like for me with the Youtube Channel, all I've done so far is like sort of philosophical, inspirational. You can finish your record type of videos. I haven't done any tutorials, I haven't done any interviews. But you come up with these buckets, these different types of content that you make, and then you make each one of them, you fill each bucket with the same or approximately the same amount of videos. And so that was really inspiring to me. But as I've been kind of working through my theory issues on youtube, I haven't really ventured outside of this sort of philosophical, inspirational finish your record bucket. It's a terrible name for a bucket. I should probably come up with a more concise name, but one of the things Graham also talks a lot about it was really inspiring for me is this idea of consistency and how that plays out in the real world. That can play out in releasing a video regularly, or the fact that we release a podcast every Tuesday where they're Bryan's on his honeymoon. Yeah,

seriously. We have not missed a beat and a year and a half now.

Yo Crazy pats on the backs for us. Good job. US patting myself on the back right now. It's amazing. So one of the things that's interesting that Brian and I were talking about just now before we started recording was this idea of consistency in our brand messages as companies. So you're mixing business or your recording studio or you're mastering company or whatever it happens to be. The power of consistency is really significant. And really it's the power of story. Brian and I are both really, really into an idea that this Guy Donald Miller is popularized and that his StoryBrand, that a great brand, that a great company sells a really, really, really good story.

Clear and engaging story. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's what we wanted to talk about on the podcast today. Brian, tell us what his story and how does it impact us as business owners?

Well, if you talk about the StoryBrand, specifically method, they have a whole framework that they run the businesses through and it's this complex thing that we don't really have time to go through today. And to be honest, I don't remember all the finer points of that, but in the context of recording studios, what is the message that you are trying to convey to your target audience, to your customers, your potential customers, at least? What are you trying to say to them? And what I see across the board, most studios have people in our studio or a student of ours, or just someone that I come across on the Internet. Almost every single one of them does the exact same thing. We do mixing. We do mastering, we have tracking, we do editing, we ramping, we will write your song, we will print the cds, we will send you, we'll do everything.

That's their messaging. And Chris and I were talking about it. I want you to think about this scenario right here. If you have, heaven forbid someone, your family that has cancer and this is something that had a cancer scare a while back. So this is fresh in my mind. But yeah, so if you have a family member who has cancer and you are looking for a specialist to treat that, you want to get the best you can afford the best specialist to treat that specific type of cancer. And you don't want to make any compromises in less money's the issue. But just say you have unlimited money, you are going to go to the absolute best possible person. So say you start researching who the best possible person for this specific type of cancer is. You're going to do your research and you're going to land on someone who has been around for 15 years.

They've treated this everyday of their life. They have every potential education involved with this. They are the forefront of pioneering solutions and ways to solve this sort of cancer cure this cancer or at least put into remission and then you find someone who says, Hey, I can treat you have any sort of cancer. I can also clean your teeth. I also have a great dental practice and I like to trade stocks on the side. I'm a day trader in stock market. Which person do you think has a clear message and which person are you going to go to? Especially when someone that you care about his life is on the line. This is an obvious answer. You're never going to take someone with cancer to a person that has a dental practice in a real estate practice and does stock market and has quote specializes in all types of cancer that does not exist.

So we're using this extreme example here to show you how much a mixed message can impact your ability to actually get a customer. When you are trying to say you do everything in your studio, you do mixing, mastering, editing, revamping, but you'd be everything. That is the same thing. If someone is looking for a specialist who can really craft a song, we can help them take that song to the finish line as a songwriter. There are people that do that every single day nonstop and they have hit after hit after hit. That is the person that people are wanting to hire for that position. If they're looking for someone to mix their track, there are people that mix 10 or 15 songs a day. I know it for a fact. I see this in Nashville. Billy Decker is a great example. People that do this every single day and they are masters at their craft.

Those are the people being hired by the labels and the other artists that you want to work with, but you're not. If someone wants to master a track, they're not going to go to the person that does mixing, mastering, editing, tracking, all of these things. They're going to go to the person that has been doing mastering for the last 10 years nonstop. They're going to go to Chris Graham mastering for this. You cannot compete with Chris Gray mastering when you try to do everything. Does that kind of makes sense as to why messaging is so important when you see people saying, we do all these things, it's not a message, it's going to get you customers. Totally. Well, I love you use the phrase of mixed messaging and we hadn't talked about that when we were planning this episode and I think we should probably run with that. Here's an illustration about mixed and

it's important, so I don't know about the rest of you guys. I freaking love Lord of the rings. I've read all the books four times, all the way through. I've seen the movies a bunch of times. I've seen the director's cuts and all this stuff. I'm just obsessed with it.

Chris, what did I give you for like a Christmas present recently? Oh yeah. I give it to you late.

Who is so sweet? You gave me one of my prized possessions. A 50 year anniversary version of the hobbit covered

gold. It's like gold. Yeah. And it was actually released in the 80s so it's actually like 75 years now. Oh Man.

It's on my shelf at my office. It's one of my prized possessions.

I just don't know if people really understood the gravity of your obsession with Lord of the rings. Yeah,

I'm a huge fan and like that book that's like, it's mine for the rest of my life. Period. I was looking at it today actually. And my son has been reading books a lot more lately, so I've been letting him use some of my favorite books from when I was a kid cause I kept most of them. I thought today I was like, I wonder if I'll ever let him read that copy of the hobbit. No, he'll get spaghetti. I was on it, you know like, no, that's for me. It's for me alone.

All right, so go back into your story about the specialists in Lord of the rings.

So in Lord of the Rings, it is a story about specialists. Each person that comes on the journey on this giant quest is on that journey for a reason. There's no one that's like, Yo, this is our guy man. He rules with all the weapons. He's got the bow and arrows, the swords, the axe is he can like talk to animals. He's got a ring that makes some sort of invisible that is miserable as Frodo, but it's like he's hard to see. It's more of a camouflage ring if you will.

That's not a thing and I'm going to go at one level Nerdier with you. For any of you nerds, he used to play world of Warcraft. If you were doing any sort of raid and you had a party together, every single person was a specialist on that party. You had uh, someone with Aoe, someone with dps, someone that's a tank. You have like all these different areas and if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. If you know what that means, then you know what I'm talking about here. These are all specialists roles and we've talked about this in the past as well. In the medical field. Things are going to specialist as well. There is a specialist for every type of cancer. There's a specialist for every single body part. There's a specialist for every little condition that pops up because that's what people want. They want people that are absolute experts at that one little narrow field and the reason for that is something called unexperienced curve. What is an experience curve and experience? Curve is

when you have niched down and you've done one thing again and again and again and again and again. It's not this linear improvement. Linear means like, you know if you put in an hour, you get 1% better. Once you've put in your 10,000 hour, you're going to get 1% better. What happens is you get massively better after you've started to put in thousands and thousands of hours. That's definitely what happened to me with mastering. When I first got into it, I had some taste for it. I had some talent for it, but it wasn't until I was like hundreds and hundreds. No, it wasn't until thousands of songs in where I developed the ability to be decisive and to sit down and immediately know where I wanted to take a song, which then led to getting like an approval on the first master 95% of the time. It took a long time to specialize in it. If I had spread myself thinner, I wouldn't have got the hours necessary to get to the sweet spot on the experience curve where I was suddenly amazing at it. Let me pull that back. I don't want to say I was,

they're still going to be rolled out. Chris, shut the fuck up. You are amazing at it, but think about this y'all. If you try to do everything you're trying to compete against Chris Graham who does this every single day for the last 10 years, it is very, very difficult to compete with someone like Chris and the other amazing mastering engineers in our community who have put 10,000 or more hours into this. It is impossible to compete with that. You cannot compete with that. And so let's also now talk about the other side of things. I've seen this other trap people fall into and that is saying they specialize in something but then sending mixed messages. This is back on the mixed messages topic that we kind of got off of. We've seen a few of this in our community, so we're trying to put a stop to this as soon as possible, but I've also seen this in people outside of this community, so this is a very common thing. They say this, we do mastering,

we're

specialists and mastering. We have all this experience, here's our credits, and then you start looking deeper into it and all the credits they listed, it's a mixed bag. They didn't actually master all those songs or they'll post on the community, here's something I'm mixed today or on Twitter or on Instagram, here's a song I'm mixing right now and now you're sending mixed messages and if you think that your potential clients don't notice those inconsistencies of what you say and what you're doing, that is a really, really fast way to ruin trust with someone before they've ever had a chance to work with you.

Yeah, and this is intense. I'm sure a lot of us, this has taken us in the gut right now, but it's something that you have to think about. My brother recently had a cancer scare and it was terrifying, but we ended up hiring a specialist when we went with the specialist. He told my brother, I've been working with your specific type of cancer for 32 years and I've only ever had one person die. That's a feeling of relief right there. Yeah, and it was like fucking hired. You're the guy. Sorry for the cussing, but it's worth it in the saved my brother's life department, so this is a big deal. It was easy for us in an emotional moment to choose him because his story was so consistent. I do this one thing, I've done it for a long time and everyone knows the experience curve story and let me say, we're preaching the set ourselves to, Oh

yeah, like look at myself. I run a recording studio that does mixing and mastering, so I offer multiple services. I'm not a specialist at either of those services. I have a blog. I mean I do real estate. I have now a software company, like I do all these things. I'm a hypocrite if anything with this sort of stuff, but it's still, it's still worth pointing out because there's probably plenty of people that have not hired me because I am spread so thin on all these different things.

Yeah, and it's interesting, like I think it's important to recognize that not all of our advice is for everyone all the time. Anytime someone says, my advice applies to everyone all the time, if it's a podcast, you should unsubscribe to it immediately. If it's a friend, you should unfriend them immediately. You don't think that that's not a thing. There's too many shades of gray, especially in the business world. So the issue I think is when you have mixed messaging, you can do more than one thing, but you should do it on a channel basis. You shouldn't use the channel that you are using to talk about your one skill to talk about any other skills, unless it makes you look more awesome with that one skill and tells a good story to your customers that you can trust me. This is my freaking thing.

Can you give an example where you're talking about as far as the channel thing

for me as an example, every once in awhile I will mix like one of my own songs or you know I did a little bit of goofing around with mixing while you were gone on the podcast but I sure as heck didn't take a picture of myself mixing and push it out there in social media was like, look at me, I'm mixing. That would have been silly because a bunch of people that are on the verge of hiring me that are almost to the spot where they need a mastering engineer would be like, wait, what? Oh and it comes back to this world of Warcraft, this, you know Gimley with the ax, this lord of the rings type of thing where you want somebody on your team who's a specialist. You want somebody that like, hey, when we come up against this specific type of issue, we got this dude or this girl on our team and they are going to crush it, and the type of clients that you want are probably sensitive to that. I think a really good way to kind of

clarify this is think about when you're watching a movie. Let's go back to the Lord of the rings example. Please do. Actually, I'm not going to use a lord of the rings because I, you know more about it than I do. I will screw this up. Oh, don't worry. I'll correct you. Okay. What's the dog's name? Gimme gimme gimme Dorf guy. He is strong, stocky, short, and he's a guy with an ax and if you see him do a move where he's chopping and acts into someone's skull, it's probably not going to surprise you that's coherent with this story. What gets weird is if he pulls two small daggers out and starts doing cartwheels and flips around people and jumping six feet in the air and moving around really quick, like a little Ninja that's not part of his character or his story, it'd be very confusing and you would just be like, what the fuck was that?

It didn't explain it. All of a sudden he's not in character. That would be a very startling part of a movie to happen to see a character mismatch between the story that the movie's trying to tell and then some weird thing that it just, it just pulls you out of the story. So think about that when you're on your website, what story you're trying to tell it to your clients or are you trying to say that you're a mixing or mastering engineer or in my case, and mixing and mastering engineer at Moses two things is I can say like if you have more than two things, you're falling on deaf ears on that third thing I tell people in most cases, even if you're advertising all of these different services, one or two of the services is probably 95% of your income, so just choose those and move on. Or for those of you with no income, there's probably a reason you have no income. It's because you have five or six different services on your website. Just choose one or two and learn everything you can about those one or two things and make sure every single piece of marketing on the Internet, including your website, your social media channels, all the things you post online are all coherent with those one or two things that you're trying to say that you do, what is your studios story? Yeah.

One of the components it's important to keep in mind here too is CTA. CTA means call to action and it's like the most important term you need to understand for website

and we talk about that in depth with episode 69 of the six figure I'm stereo podcast or interview with Joe Gilder.

Yeah, it's huge. What I have found as I've been coaching people on how to build businesses that gives them the freedom that they want is that there's often inconsistency in their story with their cts. It's one of the biggest like red flags of like, well yeah, at the top of your page you're asking people to fill out the contact form. In the middle of your page, you're asking people to send you a song for a free sample and at the bottom of your page you're asking for people to call you when you've got this messaging mismatch. What did we say before messaging this match messaging mismatch. We got to keep our messaging straight here, Brian, and we want to switch it up in an episode and look like hypocrites. When we got this messaging myths mismatch so she could just say it is awful when this happens, it affects your conversion rate.

This is the other really important term you have to understand in a website when you go on a website and the story isn't consistent, there's this nasty little voice in the back of your head that says, danger, danger, danger, will Robinson, and we don't want to buy from websites like that. That is the way consumers function. This has been proven scientifically millions and millions of times by big time, bad asses who sell lots of stuff on their websites. You want to have a consistent story because customers want to hear a consistent story when they're evaluating buying from you

and they want that consistent call to action that is associated with that story. If you offer a mastering services, don't have a call to action that is not congruent with that story.

And here's the thing. This advice applies the most to people who are just starting out. If you're in a position where you're like, ah, I don't have any customers and your messaging is mismatched, you're story is unclear and inconsistent. You should probably start by clarifying that. If you're in a position, and this is sort of where I'm at, we offer mixing service as well on my website, but I've got a team of mix engineers that do it, not me. So the messaging is still consistent. No, Chris only masters. His does mixing if you need it, but the idea there is I'm in a different spot with my business. I'm large and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with all of the pressures that come from that as opposed to trying to get to the spot where I have a consistent living. I've been making a full fulltime living as a mastering engineer for over a decade, so I'm in a position where my problems are going to be different than they were nine years ago.

If nine years ago, my website, Chris Graham, mastering.com offered all the different services and I hadn't repeatedly five and six times a day. It has a certain chapter in my life said, no, I can not mix this too. I only do mastering. If I hadn't done that, then I wouldn't have a clear brand in the mind of people that want to hire me. I know this seems like we're nitpicking that we're going like full nerd on you guys, but it's really important. Telling a consistent story from start to finish makes a huge impact on whether people will even bother to reach out in the first place. You want people to come to your website and say, do I want to hire this person for this thing? Yes or no? Not do I want to hire this person for thing a thing, be thing c thing, d or all of the above.

So I think one really good way to really drive this home is to leave you all as an example here. This is honestly one of my favorite websites when it comes to music producer or any recording studio. This is from our communities. Actually one of our guests on episode 68 where he talked about using Instagram marketing to build a recurring income as a music producer. If you go to mark dash [inaudible] dot com Mark Dash e c k e r t.com the link will be in the show notes. He has like a very, very clear story. You may not agree with it, he cusses in his stuff, but he has a very clear message of what type of person he is trying to appeal to and he does a great job of appealing to that type of person. And once he captures that lead all of the messaging up unto the point where he has a sales call with you or discovery call and he books you as a client and then works with you every single step of the way is a very singular coherent story. He's working with a very specific niche and he is a specialist in his specific niche. If you wanted a good example, go to his website, check it out, and you'll kind of get some ideas. I don't want you to copy what he does. That's not the way to do it, but just take inspiration of what he is doing and look at your own site and notice how bad you were discovered. When I'm looking at my own website, it is trash compared to what he's built for himself.

I would tend to agree with my own website. Here's the thing about Mark's website that's amazing. One, it's a super clear story and two, it's a super unique story. What if I came to you guys and I was like, yeah, you got to read my new book. It's about this little really short guy that finds a ring that makes them invisible and then he makes like some friends with like an Elf and like a dwarf and like the you're going to be like, ah Nah Bruh. I'm just gonna like go like read the Lord of the rings and watch those movies instead. I'm not interested in your story. If you want a great story, you have to be the only one telling it or the first person to tell it. Who the hell is telling the story? Like Marcus, that one guy that tried to steal his website, but other than that guy, for those of you who are too lazy to go to this website, I'm just going to read his headline.

Do it in Mark's voice too. That'll help. I can't even remotely mimic Mark's voice and I would offend a lot of people if I tried it says, quote, all I give a shit about is producing and developing indie pop artists. That's his title. That is a very clear story. I love that. So I've got a couple of thoughts on this one. You got to have a cohesive story too. You got to have a unique story, but let's talk about why people don't have a cohesive story. Brian, what's the driver behind offering all this extra stuff? If we know that we know that we know that we know that it doesn't work, it's not the solution to build a long term successful business. Well, everyone I've talked to, they offer all these services because they don't want to miss out on something. Bingo. They're not willing to turn work down.

Fomo, Fomo, fear of missing out. That's it for you old people. And I'm preaching to myself as well here, but when you've got fomo and you're like, well, but somebody that needs that might come on my website. When you do that, the person that really needs what you kick ass at, what you were put on this earth to do is, I don't know if he's taking this seriously, is what they're thinking and they're going to be like, ah, I don't know. One time I went to a restaurant that had Italian food and Chinese food. Oh, it's the same thing. When I see a restaurant. We specialize in Chinese, Italian, Greek, Mediterranean, and we also do fried chicken. Hell No, no, you don't. Peace. I'm out. I'm out. So at your wedding, uh, I think this is like the day before your wedding. No, it was the day of your wedding.

My wife and I were down in Nashville and we went on a date and this is going to be so hipstery. We took a yoga class together and then we visited a small village made of shipping containers that had a Vegan restaurant at it. Yeah, Avo. Oh my gosh, it's so good. And one of the shipping containers had been made into a giant musical instrument. I've played with that. It's awesome. Yeah. So here's the thing for the type of person that Avo is trying to get to come there, the fact that the restaurant is made out of shipping containers and that there's a giant musical instrument, shipping container is really on brand for them. That's a cohesive story because anyone that's like veganism, yeah, that's good is all it's going to be like wow. Shipping container homes. This is great. There's a consistent story there. And at a Vegan restaurant, you can't get any meat or any animal products. So if they're like, we're a Vegan restaurant, uh, but we've got hot dogs and shit too. So if you want them, it doesn't work. You know, if you want them, you can come here. We'll get them them. We got him. So bring the kids. But we're Vegan. I promise we're freaking though. We're Regan. It doesn't work.

And by the way, here's all those headline on their website. Quote locally sourced 100% plant based, kosher certified.

They're leaning all the way in, man.

Yeah. They know what they are and they know what their target market is.

So I think one of the big things that we need to come to grips with as business owners is the Fomo that we're so afraid that we might miss out on an opportunity, and I've talked about this before in the podcast. One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Ford, and I'm going to totally butcher this, but one of the things he talks about, he says, the thing that creates poverty is people do not have the strength to walk past a small pile of money to get to a larger pile of money.

That's probably one of her most quoted quotes on this podcast because it, it holds true. Just so we clarify with the singular messaging thing, the specialization thing, niching down. We've talked about all this stuff before, but this is not just advice that we have for you. Every single business consultant would say the exact same advice for pretty much any sort of business. Yeah. All of them. There are two types of businesses in the world now. There are those that try to do everything and those are usually the ones with one star on Yelp. Does you use are the ones that have no customers and then there's the ones that say, hey, we do this one thing amazingly well. We might have a couple of other little things that we do, but we're known for this one thing come to us if you want this. Those are the ones that are excelling right now.

Yeah, and I think some people would push back and say, well, but there's all these clients that want all singing, all dancing, audio engineers that do other things. Yeah, there are,

those are the bands that are also trying to appeal to everyone and we'll pill to no one and we'll never make it. Ooh, did I? Does that mean I don't care?

Well, it, it's, there's a lot of truth to that. And the idea that there are bands that want people that do it all, but are those the bands that you want to work with or are they just a cash play for you? Are you selling out by offering all the services just so that you can get some crappy customers when you should be going for some better customers. Food for thought. Avo Vegan food for thought. I love what you just said, Brian, about this idea that this isn't like us with an idea preaching at you guys and trying to convince you of something. This is what every business book that's ever been written says, this is what every business coach on earth says. What every business consultant says. It's what every branding firm and marketing firm and conversion optimization, you name it. All of the people, literally all of them believe this and preach it incessantly.

I mean it's a non negotiable in business learning and business acumen. It's this idea of consistent branding, clear messaging, not having a mixed message, not confusing your clients, but just letting them know like this is a safe place. We're really good at this. We're going to take care of you. I know like our cancer illustration might seem heavy handed might seem kind of intense of like, well of course you would for cancer, but I'm just trying to record some rock and roll music. You got an understand that people are really emotional when they're making music. Man, I use an illustration on the phone with a client today and I was telling them about Instagram models and how intense it would be to be an Instagram model. It's this idea of I am going to let people take pictures of me and I'm going to try to like be skinny and sexy and I'm gonna put it out there and just hope that everyone thinks I'm pretty hope that people think I'm good looking and hope that no one's like, whoa, dude, lay off the candy bars or something like that.

It's intense. It's emotionally vulnerable to put a picture of yourself out there where you're trying to look sexy. Right? When you put a song out, you are saying to the world, hey everyone, what do you think of my soul? It's so much more intense. It's not just, hey, how do you think? I look at 25 it's for the rest of time. Will people look at this and think, wow, he was such an old soul. He just, he had a special type of wisdom and he made me cry when I listened to that song. It's so freaking emotionally intense and your ideal customer is emotional about their music. They've got a lot of fear and courage issues, hoping that they don't get rejected by putting something that personal out. It's so much more personal than the bikini shot or the speedo shot on Instagram. You and we have to keep that in mind. Our customers are emotional and if we send them a mixed message, they'll run for the hills. It may not be as life or death as choosing the right cancer specialist, but when it comes to music, people take it extremely seriously and they're not going to hire someone who puts up red flags by having mixed messaging or is trying to appeal to everyone. Because again, I say this, this is,

this is Mike. Whoa, did I use all the time? If you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to. No one. I didn't actually come up with that quote, but I love that quote and I say it all the time. All right guys, it's time for a new section called mail time. This is where we occasionally come on the podcast and talk about stuff that people have mailed us this week. Chris, what do we have in store?

We have from Triton audio, the fet head. Brian's been using the fat head on the podcast since the beginning. I just jumped on the train. We've been getting a lot of stuff in the mail from people and it's been pretty cool. We get microphones and all kinds of stuff like that, but the fet had jumps out at us is something really fantastic. It's like a little preamp do Hickey, the plug in the back of a large diaphragm dynamic mic, like an Arri 20 then I'm using right now for an sm seven B and it just makes the mic louder and the noise for significantly. I'm going to use a fat head for the rest of my life. As a podcaster. I freaking can't believe how much better my Mike sounds. You probably don't notice. Yeah, you do. You guys are audio engineer's. You totally noticed.

I can't believe we've reached this point. Chris. We've, we've officially sold out. I know to a gear slow. This is like a gear slot alert. I know on the six figure homes to your podcast and we're slutting out for free gear.

Well, we probably should do that more because I'm going to make fun of you right now. Since the beginning of the podcast, Brian has been using $12 headphones that he bought it. Freaking Walgreens.

When are we going to court? There's not even a brand on these headphones. They don't even have a brand. Yeah, that's how, that's how off brand they are. Shinzen audio corporation. Yeah.

If you guys want to get your your headphones on our podcast and you sell some fancy ones, please by all means send them to us. Brian

do literally, these are my favorite headphones and they're low. They're like $12 frequencies.

Bonds from 400 hertz to four kilohertz. Blockchains in audio, Coverity, Shawn. Yeah.

As far as the Fed had thing, no, we haven't sold out because they send us free gear. We use the term loosely. They set you free. Shit, I didn't get anything. I've got some for you. I bought one with my own money before we started the podcast because my microphone is such a gain heavy Mike. This is true. When I plugged this

that head into my Ari 20 this is going to blow your guys' mind. We didn't get free stuff from universal audio but we've been using their APP.

Wouldn't mind free stuff from universal audio

but I've been using the Apollo to record the podcast as Brian, but I wasn't using a preamp emulation on the Apollo. I was just using the straight pre cause I thought that my mic sounded a little too noisy when I use the preamp emulation and when I put the head in it was like, oh my gosh, this sounds so much better. So now I'm using the

SSL unison. Pre emulated do Hakey and

I had so much fun last week testing, I felt guilty. Your little gear slight inner child came out to play. Oh yeah. My gears let inner child. That doesn't sound right.

That doesn't sound right. But anyway, we should probably cut that out. But

yeah, so it was really fun. Like I'm so much happier with how much easier it is to record because there's not like this in the background.

Well, honestly, like back in the day when I actually still recorded bands would have been nice to have it on vocalists cause I could only use my sm seven B when I was doing loud vocals are loud screaming. It'd been nice to have for other stuff.

Yeah. So last week speaking to the fat head, I used two of them. The guy that shares an office with me, his name is Andy Jay Pizza. He has a podcast called the creative pep talk that sort of successful. What's that like? I Dunno know, they're like four times bigger than we are. Well more. Why we're more than that. He's got 4 million downloads and his catch line is we help you build a thriving creative career. And I was on his last episode on two to six just interviewing him about listener questions. Um, he's had and Andy had been working through how to record his podcast and make it sound better. I've been trying to help him. Road was kind enough to send us a pair of pro casters, which are like a large diaphragm sorta sm seven B tech thing and we were plugging it into Andy's zoom, h five n another care side.

Oh my gosh. What's happening. And uh, it's tough cause it's just h five n doesn't have a great pre so it's really noisy. That's all. My audio was so shitty during the honey. Yeah, they're a great device but the priests aren't amazing. But when you plug a fat head into the zoom it is magical. Honestly. It's interesting I think for our audience to hear because now that you've got like the fet had the cloud booster lifter thingy, you've got these different boosters out there in the marketplace. My favorite definitely is the fat heads because it's just, it extended your microphone, you just plug it right into your freaking Mc cable and boom, you got 27 extra decibels of gain. All the sudden there's a shift in our industry where it's less important to have this unbelievable preamp because one of the reasons you'd want an unbelievable preamp was to have a lot of clean gain and now like clean gains, like 90 bucks, not a big deal.

It's pretty inexpensive. And even for something like a zoom, like a little tiny portable recorder man, the audio quality that we got out of that thing was just ridiculously better than the zoom by itself. We just pimped a bunch of a bunch of gears. Yeah. If you have gear and you want to send it to us, drop us an email and if we think it's cool and our audience might like it, we'll talk about it. Maybe. Maybe because here's the deal and it anyone listening to this far into this episode, thanks for sticking around. I'm like this weird weird human that has absolutely zero gear lust as you can tell by my headphones selection, $12 headphones from probably Walgreens. I just don't give a shit. I'm exactly the same. I'm just kidding. Alright. So like I'm the most harsh person when it comes to gear stuff.

So there'll be a constant battle of like Chris trying to get stuff to talk about on this podcast and d being like, no shame, shame. Speaking of which game of Thrones comes back this weekend, I'm stoked for that, but what's amazing later? Well, the Fairhead I think is a good segue for us to sort of begin this segment because it has no on switches. It has no buttons, it has no knobs. You literally plug a mic cable into it and then you plug it into a Mike Yam and everything sounds better. It's so minimalist. It's true. It's the least slutty piece of gear that you could possibly own. So cool. Anyways, guys, check out the fat heads. They're amazing. They gave us some for free and we really like them now. I have a great week. We'll be back next Tuesday. So yeah.