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Cause aint nobody got time for Amateur's
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. This is
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is Talking With The Pros. Like, professionals. This is Talking With The Pros with me, Jess Speight. I speak to the professionals in the world of audio to gain an insight into what it takes to become a pro. Talking With The Pros. All right, today we have Matthew Newbold. Hi, Matt.
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How are you doing?
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Good, Jessica. How are you? Good. Thanks for coming to Talking With The Pros. I talked to the professionals in the world of audio. Tell us about yourself, Matt. Tell us your experience in the audio world.
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Well, in the audio world, you know, it's nice to be called a professional. I don't consider myself quite the professional as most audio technicians. I am a musician, and I know a little bit about audio. I've mostly played here in Las Vegas, pretty much every piano bar, piano entertaining venue. If it's opened I played it, actually opened a few. Pete's Stooling Piano Bar when it was here, the Extra Lounge at Planet Hollywood. I got my start originally when I was growing up I went to Bowling Green State University. My major was going to be criminology but that was so boring that I was like what I'm just wasting my time. During as a summer job I was working at a state park and I would listen to the radio in the morning and this DJ would come on and I'd be like, I like this guy, I could do that, that sounds like fun, you know, radio DJ personality in the morning. My second year, I said I'm going to declare my major as communications. My second year, I was all about communications. I worked in a radio station, the college radio station.
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Really?
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Yeah. Wow. And it was like 6 in the morning to 10 and nobody listened. And I'd say, hey, you can call in and request a song and nobody would request a song.
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To this day.
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Yeah. So, I was like, I got homework to do. So I'd put on, I wasn't supposed to, but I'd put on Pink Floyd's, you know, Shine on You Crazy Diamonds, like a 23 minute song. And I'd be like, all right, that's good.
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Oh, yeah.
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You know, so but then I realized, you know, the thing I was also getting into music at the time playing in bands, and I realized that being on the radio, you have to have a certain type of personality that when you say something that's funny, you just have to expect that they're going to laugh where I need that response and that feedback. So on the radio, I was like, I just not, is this funny? I said it. I don't know if it's funny or not. No one's listening. I just thought, you know, I bet it was. I well, it might have probably not. But, you know, so I just decided, you know, I'm going to move to Nashville. I mean, what am I paying this, you know, whatever the college fee was, I felt it was just a, you know, cover charge because it was Bowling Green was like the biggest party school in Ohio and I didn't party at the time.
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That's why nobody was listening at six in the morning, they were still asleep.
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And that's why they gave it to me. They're like, you want to tell your dumb jokes, you can tell them at six in the morning. I did. I moved to Nashville with a couple of friends and it's very, very difficult to work in Nashville as a musician. So we basically just wrote songs. I learned how to write songs. I met a lot of great musicians and great writers and made some contacts. But I was getting nowhere musically and personally I didn't care if I was gonna make it. My idea of making it was not having to wait tables, you know, getting paid to play music. And they told me I sounded too much like Billy Joel. And this is in like the late 90s, early 2000s. Billy Joel was pretty much forgotten at that point in Nashville, but everywhere else across the country, he was like a hit. They said, nah, you sound too much like Billy Joel. I tried to mimic some other singers and that's how I got good at taking requests and trying to sound like Elton John or Bob Seger or whatever. And so I amalgamated all of them together and had my own voice, so they didn't say you sound like Billy Joel anymore. And then I actually, when I moved away from Nashville, that's when I started to actually enjoy country, but when I was there, I hated it. They'd request country songs and I'd say, get out, I don't wanna play that. I met a guy, we were auditioning for a band and I met this guitar player and he had just got off a Disney cruise ship. He gave me the information, cause I was like, a cruise ship? I never thought about that. And so I got the information and I had a demo CD and I called the guy, sent him my info cause they needed a keyboard player for a band. It was a fill-in band. He called me as soon as he got it and said, alright you're hired. Here's a hundred and fifty songs. I want you to learn them tomorrow. Pretty much, because then he was like, two weeks we're leaving. I mean you're leaving in two weeks. You're gonna get paid seven hundred dollars a week. And for me that was like, wow, okay so I'm leaving Nashville. Put my stuff somewhere else where I don't have to pay for for a rent or food or anything, all covered. I mean I knew maybe 12 of these songs in this 150 songs. I was freaking out. How in the heck am I gonna learn all these on the keyboard? And so I for two weeks I was stressed, practiced my tail off and maybe got 50 songs and I was like oh gosh I'm not gonna... because I was used to the musicianship of Nashville. The professionalism that they bring to the table. I get to Merritt Island and I meet the other musicians and I'm like, okay, one of them is this big Elvis who walks around on stilts. He's the lead guy. And then the guitar player is from Canada who doesn't even know chords. And the drummer and the bass player were like top notch, but I was like, nobody knew any of this. I knew more songs than anyone else except for the drummer and the bass player, because they, you know, they were like that type of music. And so I was like, oh my goodness, what I thought I was getting into, you know, this professional band. And I was really, you brought your A game.
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I did. But so, you know,
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so I worked on cruise ships for several years and then that's where I well for eight months And then I met a guy in the dueling piano realm and I always I saw dueling pianos and I was like man That's amazing. I could never be that good. I see those guys and I just amazed and And then I met a couple of the guys and realized well, they were you know, they're they're just like me, they started somewhere. And it's just learning songs. Through doodling pianos, I learned how to deal with audiences, because it's not so much like the music or the style or whatever, it's how do you talk to people? So that's taken me all over the world and on every country, done many shows, and then landed here in Las Vegas. So that's the background but through all that I learned that the most important and any musician in Vegas will tell you this you're only as good as the sound guy makes you and that is such it is so so important some sound guys don't even realize that they in Vegas they'll just flip a switch turn you on and walk out. Some sound guys really put their effort into making you sound good. It's amazing. You could have the best band and a sound guy that just kind of flips a button and you don't sound very good. Or you could have a mediocre band and a sound guy who really dials it in and then you're like, wow, this band's really good. You know? Yeah, that's so true. And also speaking about audio, you also do audiobooks, right? I did. What I did was I had a vocal booth that I had bought back in Seattle to a CD that I had done, a project. And so I had this vocal booth and I've carried it around with me for 15 years. And I was like, what am I going to do with this? I'm not using it. But then the shutdown happened and they said, hey musicians, you're not allowed to play music. You're not allowed to get paid. I said, I've got to do something. And all the dueling piano players at the time, they were doing online dueling pianos. And to me, I was like, why? You miss the live aspect. That's what really makes it. So, you know, hey, come tune in to Facebook and see me play all your favorite songs except horribly bad. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. You're the computer speaker. Yeah, right. So I came up with some other ideas, you know, I wanted to be more creative. And so I did, you know, dueling pianos, except it was just me. Meaning I recorded one half of it, and then I went back and video recorded the other half. And so it looks like there's two me's playing piano. And then I was like, I gotta add, so then I added a third me, and one of them had a wig, and so I was playing the guitar. And so I did an AC-DC, you know, shook me all night long, and all three of it, you know, one on the piano, one on the keyboard drums, and one on the guitar, and I learned that guitar solo on the guitar, and it was just, I mean, you don't have a job.
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That's how you do it.
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That's when I decided I got to do something. I listen to audio books a lot so I thought, you know, I wonder, I bet you I could probably do this. I'll give it a shot. You know, I always don't necessarily think I can do it until I try it. So I set up the vocal booth and I listened to some narrators, some amateur narrators and I thought, well, I mean, this person can do it, you know, they're narrating a book and I mean That's probably not the best way to decide to do something That's not really what I thought I was like, well, okay Well, if they you know, I got the stuff you had the microphones and so I set it up and we're inspired I was I was inspired by sucketude I I was inspired by Succotude. I set up the vocal booth and I recorded. My friend had written a book, so I said, hey, let me do your book, just as a fun project. So it took me quite a bit of hours. Put it on the ACX website, which is like Amazon's audiobook thing. And then I did a bunch of test runs and then I actually landed a few, I did one or two for free and then I started getting $50 an hour, which is, you know, $50 an hour is like really $7 an hour. Because you put in a lot of work, especially when you're just starting. I was still learning, so, you know, I felt like an intern. And then finally, worked my way up to a hundred and twenty five hundred fifty dollars an hour, which is Still, you know, you maybe you're making twenty dollars an hour I'm 25 an hour when it comes down to it because you you record you got to go back and edit and take out all the the things and Yeah, when you're reading a book you want to make sure that you the way that you speak needs to be Accurate to what they're saying in the sentence and if you're reading it the first time, you may not get it, you know. So turned out, I actually used that college experience after all for something.
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Yeah, you did. With learning all those skills, when was the moment that you knew that you had a love of audio? You mentioned doing college radio, so you turned on the radio and heard that. Was that the moment? Was it through music and playing the piano?
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When I was a kid, when I was in high school, I had this boom box. I don't know if you remember, well you probably don't, but back in the day we had two tape deck kind of recording things and one of them you could play and one of them you could record. So what I did was I would do skits. I loved Saturday Night Live I want that was my dream was to be on Saturday Night Live So I came up with these skits and and I was a big fan of Weird Al I made these you know these skits where I did all the voices and so I would Record one and then you know then I would go back and I would play that and then record the other one over top of It it was a very crude way of doing multi-track recording, but that was my introduction to actually audio. I still have some of these recordings. Then I would do rap songs, funny rap songs. Once I realized, wow, you can do multi-track recordings. At the time I think they were using tape decks and then it moved on to HD and now it's all computerized, but I don't have time to mess with it anymore you know basic recording but when I when I decided you know man audio is it's just my thing I love doing it love playing music I love listening to music it was it was probably in college when I was on the radio station and I was playing music and change frequencies. And you can make, you record your voice singing a song in the bathroom. And it sounds great, with all the echoes and everything. And then you just add a little boost, a little low end. I'm not real familiar with all the terminology anymore. Move this knob.
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You just add that sparkle.
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Yeah, and that's when I thought,
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man, this is really cool.
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I love it. That's interesting that it was like the radio almost that, hey, but also comedy. You're quite the comedian. That's where you found audio. So what are you doing now in terms of everything that you said? I know you said you were doing audiobooks. Are you still doing that? Are you still doing music?
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Yeah, well, the audio books, I'm working with an author in particular, she's a young adult Christian fantasy writer, and she had trouble finding audio narrators, because, you know, like any other job, people don't really treat it as a job. They don't treat it with respect. You know, everything I do, I treat it with the utmost respect that, you know, this person put a lot of time and effort into this book. So I'm gonna put a lot of time and effort into, you know, narrating it for them and giving it my best. And just, you know, if I say it's gonna be done by whatever, a month, then I have a month Then I have a month to do it. It's just happened now that I'm working full-time at a church. I'm also Doing a couple nights at playing the piano bar and and where I used to work I don't know Can I say where I used to work because I used to be full-time at New York, New York at the dueling piano bar New York, New York, it's request driven but it's the same 50 requests every night. So I just wanted to do something different. I'm doing a solo piano bar where I still take requests, but it's more where I can actually sing the songs rather than scream them. More intimate setting. Yes, more intimate.
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But I might, you know, I still pick up a few nights over there.
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To the audiobook, I'm just really busy with everything and I'd love to get back into it, but the pay, I still gotta work my way up to $400 an hour or Simon Preble, he's like the rock star of audiobooks, he's probably getting $2,000 an hour and takes him an hour to do an hour. Or me, it takes five hours to do one hour I'm still trying to do it, but it's finding the time
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Of course yeah, I mean just like music music doesn't happen You have to prep like you said when you're on the cruise you have to learn these songs And you have to put in the time and with audio and crafting for books or any medium That's going to be intense audio You got to put in some work to make sure that it's the quality that you want it to be and it's what you want them to hear. Of course it's going to take time just like live radio. I mean somebody's there on a DJ you know doing it or they could do recordings in between and then their voice tracked. So what do you think the future of audio is? There's so many things happening now, especially here in Las Vegas with the Sphere, with the Metaverse, immersive technologies. What do you think is going to be going on in the future? And what are some hopes for yourself going forward, being in the world of audio?
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Well, yeah, the future is, you know, the fact that everything is opened up to where now somebody can get a system, run a podcast for like $200, $250, you get a microphone, you sit in your closet or whatever. There's a lot of people that are doing it, but there's training, vocal training. It's like you can't just get up and sing unless you're like, you know Really really good and you've never had training and you just there it is or get up and play piano Or get up and entertain people it takes a lot of there's a lot behind it. So I think right now You know in the audio world, there's a it's being flooded But eventually it's going to rise. A lot of people that are doing it that really shouldn't be doing it. Listen to some of the podcasts, you'll get a lot of ahs and ums and things and pauses. Yeah, we call those filler words. Yeah, and if you haven't been trained, if you're pausing, you're thinking, you want to move away from that. And so I think what's going to happen is the audio world is going to, the cream is going to rise to the top. But right now it's just flooded because this is where we are. Everybody has a, everybody has a phone so they can be a videographer and they put it on YouTube. But you're seeing the YouTube videos that are really going somewhere. I mean, besides the person falling on their face or someone getting beat up and like, hey I'll pull out my phone and videotape that. Like the real channels, like one of my favorite channels is called the Y-Files. And this guy, I mean talk about professionalism. It's like he deals with the supernatural and almost debunking it, which I love. But it's so well done. And it's, you know, that's the stuff that's rising to the top. I've watched his channel go from like 800,000 subscribers to 2.7 million subscribers in less than six months. And it's because he's put in so much work and effort and, you know, same with, uh, with podcasts, you know, people are starting to recognize that this person is really good, and so we're gonna subscribe to them. We want more content.
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Right, yeah.
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But then with the metaverse, and I don't know how popular that's gonna get. The sphere, I don't know, are they gonna do broadcast from the sphere and put you on top of the ball?
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Yeah, maybe they're gonna project things like on the dome. Yeah. I don't know. Then why pay? Who knows? Yeah, so there's so many things going on. And just like you mentioned with audio and podcasting, it's just now everything's getting so intermingled with not only it just being people want that video aspect and wanting to see, you know, that live recording or that podcast in real time or be able to watch it on video as well as hearing it and just being able to be mobile and I think passive but also a form of like sitting down and enjoying like on YouTube and also being different ways to connecting. Did you have any additional things that you wanted to share with us that we may not know what it might take to be in the world of audio? The world of audio, there's a lot
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of aspects to that world. If someone wanted to get into the world of audio, if you're gonna do it, you know, don't do it without the least bit of training. You can watch YouTube videos on how to enunciate, what words to enunciate. I mean, I'm not great at it, but when I speak to an audience, when I'm live, I don't mumble, I don't go, hey, everybody having a good time today? That might be how I speak to my kids or something, but when I'm speaking to people, it has to be different. You know, I slow it down, I over-enunciate, almost to the point where it's like I'm speaking to children, because you know, these drunk people pretty much are budget children. But they want to be entertained and they want to, you know, with all the other noises and things. And so, you know, you have to get the message across. Yeah, and when somebody comes to the world of audio, you have to learn how to speak, you know, know, learn what a vocal fry is, you know, and when to use it. Because I hear a lot of people using vocal fry a lot. And, you know, they don't realize that sometimes it doesn't sound good. You don't want to use it in a certain... Anyways, those little tricks that you could learn from just taking a course or, you know, if you're going to go to school for it I thought you know when I was in college I was like what do I need to go to school for this I could just if I wanted to be a radio personality I could just do it well not really you know unless you're famous and then you take this step into the audio world but even then it's because you have a recognizable voice not because you know you worked on it. So if you're famous and you want to do it, do whatever you want. But if your goal is to be in the audio world, get some training, go to school, at least watch some videos.
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Please, just go on YouTube. Search it up. Well, I appreciate all that you've shared with us, everything that you've talked about today. Definitely, I also believe in educating and training and taking the time to hone in your craft, especially if you want to do this long term and build up an audience. We all have to start from somewhere. I'm just so happy to get a chance to hear your journey in the audio world. So thank you again, Matt, for coming out. Really appreciate you.
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Absolutely, Jessica, and thank you for having me. And I enjoy listening to your show. You're awesome.
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Oh, thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. And hey, maybe we'll have you on again, or we'll see you live.
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Yeah, you can have me on again, and we'll discuss wrestling.
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Oh, okay. Old school. So that's our new podcast. There you go. All right, Matt, I'll see you later.
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All right. Bye.
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I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if you missed any of today's episode, you can find us anywhere. Podcasts are available like Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Talking with the Pros with me. Just be I love you and I'll catch you in the next one. Just be I love you and I'll catch you in the next one.
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Bye.
Transcribed with Cockatoo