Back to His Roots: George’s One-Case Location VO Rig

George heads out on a time-sensitive PSA to capture wild VO lines at an actor’s house — and rebuilds a lean, one-case kit on the fly. We dig into what made the rig work, why he chose an onboard recorder for redundancy, mic choices (NTG-4 vs NTG-5), and a stack of road-tested tips from our early days hauling DA-88s, DATs and Franken-booms.

What we cover:

• Packing everything into a Pelican 1510 (laptop, interface, mic, stand, boom)

• Primary vs backup: PortCaster with onboard record + laptop DAW

• Why the NTG-4 worked (once the low-cut was off) and when the NTG-5 is nicer

• Quiet-room scouting at talent’s home (carpet, bookshelves, sofa placement)

• Redundancy paranoia that saves the day (and the gig)

• Old-school sync and remote workflows: clapper slates, Boom Recorder, Reaper, DA-88s, DAT, Ramza/Fostex rigs

Gear & software mentioned:
Pelican 1510, Sentrance MicPort Pro, PortCaster, RØDE NTG-4/NTG-5, Grace Lunatec V2, Sony & Tascam DAT, Boom Recorder, Reaper, DA-88, Fostex 9624, Ramza 8-bus.

Sponsors:
TRI-BOOTH — use code TRIPAP200 for $200 off your Tri-Booth.
Austrian Audio — Making Passion Heard.

Credits:
Recorded via Source-Connect. Edited by Andrew Peters. Mixed by Robbo. Tech support from George “The Tech” Whittam. Got an audio issue? JustAskRobbo.com

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
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Welcome.
Hi.
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Hello everyone.
To the Pro Audio Suite.
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With Tech the VO stars.
George Whitten, founder of Source Elements.
Robert Marshall, international audio engineer.
Darren Robbo Robertson, and Global Voice.
Andrew Peters, thanks to Triboo.
Austrian Audio, making passion heard.

(00:20):
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And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite.
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(00:41):
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Now, you've gone back to your roots, George,
doing a job that you haven't done for
many years.
Yeah, well at least one set of roots.
I'm a weird looking tree, dude.
I got roots.
I got roots poking out all over the
place.

(01:01):
But yeah, so a client of mine, Arianna
Ratner, daughter of Bill Ratner.
As you'll see, yeah.
Her husband's a director or DP or something,
and they worked on this PSA, and there
was a rewrite, and so they had to
record a bunch of VO lines, wild lines,
of the lead actor, who does a lot

(01:22):
of it on camera and then a lot
in voiceover.
He's on both.
It's both.
It's sort of like the vein of a
David Attenborough nature show, except it's about the
dangers of e-bikes and the fast high
-speed motorcycles we have now riding on the
bike paths in Santa Monica and Orange County
and Venice.
I mean, these things are doing 40 to

(01:42):
50 miles an hour on walking paths.
Yeah, some of them don't even have pedals,
I think, and then they're starting to blur
the line between a motorcycle, yeah.
Right.
So they hired this great, interesting actor I'd
met, but it's because his life isn't really
been about in front of the camera, more
about writing, named Gavin Scott, and he was
a really interesting fellow.

(02:02):
And if I've said his name wrong, I
apologize, Gavin.
But anyway, the actor was a really interesting
fellow, and he lives really close by, and
I went to his house to record wild
lines, pickup lines, and at first I was
like, I don't do this anymore, and oh,
this is not my rate, and they were
like, oh, yeah, I can't pay you that
technician's rate that you charge, and I was

(02:25):
like, how about we come up with a
rate?
Why not?
Let's do it.
Because I didn't, I wouldn't, it was the
day, you know, if they needed it the
next day, it was time-sensitive, it was
a PSA.
It's nice to have some variety of work,
too.
Yeah, it was cool to actually put, I
literally had to put together a kit.
I threw up a little video on my
Instagram on George the Tech, and you'll see

(02:46):
it if you want to see it, but
I had to build a kit, you know,
it was either that or show up with
like five tote bags of crap, which would
have felt really, really, really unprofessional.
So I had a Pelican 1510, which is
like the classic carry-on-sized Pelican case
with the handle that pops out and the
wheels, and I've had this case forever and

(03:09):
ever, and I just dumped everything out of
it.
I had stuff all over the floor, and
I just started putting pieces in.
So I managed to fit literally everything I
needed into that case, including my MacBook Pro,
audio interface, microphone, mic stand, mic boom, everything
I was able to fit into that case,
which I was kind of proud of.
I thought that was pretty cool.

(03:30):
And anyway, I packed along a Sentrance Mic
Port Pro as a backup recorder, but my
primary ended up actually bringing was the Portcaster,
not the Passport.
And the reason was, was I wanted to
have that onboard recorder for this particular use
case because I'm out of practice at doing

(03:50):
this stuff, right?
And the last thing I wanted to have
happen was to botch it, really ruin the
recording, do something wrong, lose a file, God
knows what, you know?
So being able to just hit the little
tiny record button and the little red light
turns on and that's just rolling.
And meanwhile, I'm on my laptop sitting right
next to them, like the director is sitting

(04:11):
between me and the actor, the actor is
sitting on his couch.
We found the quietest room in the house
and it was perfect, plush carpeting, bookshelves.
It was really ideal, you know?
If I may ask, it was a voiceover
gig, right?
Well, yeah.
So it was pick up wild lines for
a voiceover of a PSA where the actor

(04:32):
is also on camera, both.
But, so the actor's on camera and now
you're recording them in a different environment than
the original.
Right, because the film is a cut, it's
cut together between voiceover and on-camera lines.
So now it's on camera, voiceover in a
voiceover booth and off camera in a different

(04:54):
room?
I don't know if they recorded his voiceovers
in a voiceover booth.
I don't know if they recorded them location,
I don't know anything about how they recorded
I'm just curious why you didn't say, hey,
I got a frickin' brick over here, a
voice brick.
Well, that's another part of the equation.
The gentleman had just broken his leg and
was recovering from surgery and he really didn't

(05:16):
want to leave his house.
Gotcha.
If he didn't have to.
So he was doing pretty well, apparently, he
was getting around, you know, he was walking
and he was actually in pretty fair shape.
But that was the parameters, you know, so
they were like, this is the reason why
we want to have someone come to his
house.
It's not a job you're going to get
falling in your lap every day, it's rare,

(05:37):
you know, these kinds of scenarios come up,
but it was fun to do it.
I had my Rode NTG-4, that's what
I ended up bringing, and it worked great.
Once I turned off the low-cut filter,
because it's much too aggressive, it really takes
out too much.
Why not the 5, out of curiosity?
I couldn't find it on the clutch, I
have too many cases of things, I couldn't

(05:59):
find the 5.
I think the 5 sounds noticeably better than
the 4, I do think.
Yeah, I think so.
I even had a 4-16 sitting in
this booth in here, but the 4 was
right above me on my boom over my
desk, I was like, click, just took it
off the ceiling, you know?
And I took the boom that was up
there too and brought that with me.

(06:20):
So I really had to cobble it together,
because I don't have a proper boom arm
anymore for doing location record.
I don't have a C-stand, I don't
have a nice mic studio boom, I don't
have any of that stuff.
So I really cobbled together this kind of
ragtag setup, but really did feel like I
was going back to my roots, because when
I first started production mixing in Hollywood, literally

(06:42):
21 years ago, my boom pole was a
paint pole from the hardware store that I
spray-painted black.
Oh, really?
And then you just like somehow rigged a
mic clip on the end of it?
Yeah.
I rigged like a 5-8s threaded thing
that, you ever seen those metal brackets that
let you add a second mic to a

(07:02):
mic clip for like stereo pair?
I just clamped that onto the end of
the paint pole and boom, now I had
a mic boom, you know?
And the people that were hiring me at
that stage of the game were low-budget
film, really low-budget student, and they didn't
care, they didn't know anything.
They just knew that I was going to
show up with a mic with a boom,
you know?
What was your recorder?

(07:23):
Or were you recording straight into a camera?
In that era?
I will tell you, my very, very first
kit working in the field was a Grace
Audio Designs V...
It was called the...
What the heck was that preamp called?
Geez.
The Lunatec?
The Lunatec.
The Lunatec.
Yeah.
So I had a Lunatec V2 mic pre,

(07:45):
which had the distinction of also being 12
-volt powered, because it was a really popular
field pre for dat heads.
And dat heads were the guys that recorded
all the Grateful Dead shows.
Have you ever seen a picture of a
Dead show?
I know, all the microphones.
Yeah.
There'll be a sea of mics by the
front of the house?
It looks like an oil field from the

(08:07):
20s.
Right.
And so they're all out there recording, you
know, they were probably on nagras, then cassettes,
and then obviously dats.
So they were called dat heads.
And so I had this preamp that my
friend, not my friend, but my cousin, Jake,
had actually hand-assembled at Grace when he
worked there.
So that was my bag mixer, quote-unquote,

(08:29):
just a preamp.
And then I had a Sony dat recorder
that I had bought from a local guy
that...
Like the Walkman-sized dat recorder?
Or the...
It was like a D3 or something like
this, you know?
DT7 or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a miracle it worked.
I had a Tascam DAP-1, that was
like the...
Mm-hmm.

(08:50):
This thing was small.
I mean, this is really consumer-sized.
Yeah, yours was like a Walkman-sized one,
yeah.
It was like that big.
It was really small.
It was unbalanced, yeah.
And all that was like in some bags
that I cobbled.
I mean, it was a cobbled kit.
That Sony dat player wouldn't have had timecode
then.
How did they deal with that?
No, no timecode.
No, you had to spend big money for
timecode dats back in the day.

(09:10):
The only affordable timecode dat was a Fostex.
And that was like a $5,000.
So what did you do to sync?
You'd have to rely on the slate.
It's all slate.
It's all clapper slate.
Yeah, short takes.
Yeah.
Well, and ironically, that's still how they do
it.
Yeah.
Like on the budget end of things, if
there's no timecode, a lot of the stuff

(09:30):
where they're recording with like a Rode wireless
mic and then they're shooting video on like
a Sony camera or something, they still rely
on just the click or the slack, you
know, clapper.
You couldn't scratch on the camera and then
you sync it and when it falls out
of sync, you put a cut and you...
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The cameras all had sound because we're all
using, you know, we're using mini DV cameras,

(09:52):
right?
We're using video cameras.
The Canon was the big mini DV.
Yeah.
The Canon or the Sony.
Panasonic actually has a really popular one at
the time.
So, yeah.
So that's what we were doing for...
That was my little window into productions mixing
for a while.
And I did have these three or so
Rackspace Fostex timecodes.

(10:13):
a cart that I hauled on location with
a giant marine deep cycle battery and a
huge inverter.
I mean, between the three of those, it
weighed like 120 pounds.
I mean, and it was hauling that on
set, you know, dragging it around.
It was a miserable thing to use, but

(10:35):
it worked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I used to do interviews, oh, this would
be 20 years ago now when I was
doing a syndicated radio show.
And I'd go out and do interviews and
I used a Sony minidisc.
That was my interview kit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The minidiscs were really popular in radio because
they, and also for like theatrical production because

(10:55):
unlike CDs, they had instant start.
If you queued a minidisc up and you
hit play, it played immediately.
So you could just boom.
And they were popular for that reason.
Yeah.
Probably because you had less traveling time because
it was so small.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It was fun though, having a laptop there
to record live.
So I could like, you know, mark, log

(11:16):
shots, name files, and just sort of keep
up.
The big app was Boom Recorder was a
really great app on the Mac.
I used Boom Recorder for a while.
Yeah.
I mean, that thing is so stable.
It was amazing.
I'd record- I used Reaper too, actually.
Yeah.
Reaper is extremely stable.
I would, I mean, I'd use Reaper on
the road, like live before I'd use Pro

(11:36):
Tools live.
Yeah.
I record live bands.
One band, they had a Mac-y mixer
with a Firewire port on it and I
was like, oh, that thing records 16 tracks.
Yeah.
I plugged it right into my laptop.
I've done that one too.
Loaded Reaper and recorded right off the board
in 2005 or whatever it was, you know?
But that's where I, that is my roots.

(11:57):
My roots is live recording and remote recording.
It always has been.
It just, I've never had a proper studio
and I've always just made it work, you
know?
And so it was just fun getting to
do it all these years later and deliver
the product.
And then I just got the, I just
got paid.
I just saw the email.
Nice.
That's always the pile.
Nice.
Full circle.
That's the best.

(12:17):
We both started out doing kind of live
stuff.
I used to have my whole studio on
a table.
I don't know if you, did I ever
tell you about this?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You used to slide it into the back
of the station wagon.
Yeah, exactly.
Yep.
It was like, so I'd bring that thing
around.
It was like, cause I got so sick.
On a table?
Was it like kind of bolted down to
a table?
So here's exactly how it went.

(12:39):
I used to, in high school, I was
recording bands on my four track and then
I got an eight track at the end
of high school.
So I was, and I'd go over to
a band's practice place and it'd be the
eight track and all the cables and the
effects boxes and the compressors, and he'd spend
half the day plugging everything back in.
And I got sick of it.
And I drew, I was with a friend

(12:59):
at like McDonald's and I drew this thing.
I'm like, I'm just going to set this
all up.
And I drew a big cartoon single plug,
like one fucking outlet.
That's it.
Yeah.
And he thought I was joking.
And by the end of the summer, what
I did is, it wasn't a door, but
like this frame I built about the size
of a door and I put the Tascam
eight track smack in the middle of it.
It had the mixer in the eight track

(13:20):
and imagine two slanted racks on either side
of it with one rack hovering over the
middle and a TT patch bay on one
side of it.
And I mean, it was DAT recorder, all
the compressors, everything, and, and then a mic
panel on the back of it with a
bunch of multi-cable, you were doing live

(13:40):
to two track then?
No, this is eight track.
Oh, it was eight track.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is eight track.
And then took two people, like three people
to carry this thing.
I mean, I remember one time we're trying
to carry it into a house.
We just dumped the whole thing in the
snow.
Like, I was like, oh, but, but I
mean, you just haul it in there and

(14:00):
you, and you plop it down.
You're like, give me an extension cable and
let's start plugging mics in.
And that's like a one rack space box
and a laptop.
So when I was in college, my friend
had a Tascam eight bus, 24 or 32
channel mixer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The 26.
Maybe.
Yeah.
In a rat, in a road case.
So all, you know, it was a chunky

(14:22):
thing.
Right.
And then he also had the eight track
reel to reel, but I eventually convinced my
professor at Virginia Tech to let me take
two DA88s out of the studio to do
remotes, which still to this day, I can't
believe you let me do that.
This things were like 10 grand a piece
back then.
And I would do remotes, but the things
I had a Ford Taurus.

(14:42):
And the DA88s were the machine to use
because unlike the ADATs, they had 120 minute
record time and the ADATs only had 40
minutes.
Oh, that's right.
I remember changing tapes at a live show.
It was a nightmare.
And anyway, where did that rack, where did
the mixer go?
It went on my roof rack.
So it took three or four of us
to lift that console, not the, yeah, the

(15:04):
console onto the roof rack of my car,
which I would lash to the roof and
then drive to the club, you know, and
then take it all apart, dig, take it
into the club, plug it in, you know,
it was so crazy.
I did a live album with a Ramza
8 bus board and two DA88s.
Oh yeah, those were nice.
And I was like, those were really good
sounding ones.
That was Panasonic's Pro line.

(15:27):
Those things were sleepers.
Actually, that's what Nirvana recorded Bleach on.
No way.
Yeah, those Ramza.
Oh my God, the stories will never end.
We have got so many because it was
so much more interesting than just having a
static location.
You know, and given, if I had the
space time budget, I would have, but we

(15:48):
used the resources we had.
It wasn't going to stop us from recording.
We're just going to make it work.
It was, but also one thing I'll always
say, especially when you recorded live shows, because
like for instance, I still have my rig
now, which is like three, eight channel preamps,
a Fostex 9624 recorder that goes light pipe
out into like a M audio box that

(16:10):
then feeds into a computer.
So you get your redundant record and that's
like, you know, 24, 32 channel set up
depending on how you do it.
But you record a band live and screw
ups, mess ups, and all the energy is
always better than what they end up doing
in the studio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the case of a gospel gig once,
I remember we went back into the studio,

(16:30):
had everybody come back in and do overdubs
or not double overdubs really, but like just
layers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or, or, or fix it or fixing stuff.
Yeah.
I've done live recordings and fix them like,
like overdub the vocal and then the background
of the PA becomes a little bit of
extra reverb for a moment.
Cause it's not quite.
Yeah.
We did all that stuff.

(16:51):
It was fun.
But anyway, yeah.
It just, yeah.
Coming back to the roots was, was a
blast.
And I have to, I think I'll open
myself up to those chance encounters from time
to time instead of being, nah, I don't
do that anymore because it was, it was
fun.
And just having a safety net of a
secondary recorder, I could have done it with
a passport and just, again, plugged it into

(17:11):
my phone and had that be the backup.
But I happen to have the podcast.
Always use what's best.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I don't think I'll ever go back to
my roots.
I could never, ever.
Do that much cocaine ever again?
Probably not either.
I'd be dead, far out, you'd be burying
me.
Just quickly before we go, AP, talking about

(17:32):
cocaine and the old days, did you see
on Facebook there's a photo of the old
console out of SAFM.
They've put it in some museum, something or
somewhere.
And my comment on the post was, if
only that console could talk.
Yeah.
Thank God it can't talk.
That console was always high.
Yeah.
Probably still is, mate.

(17:52):
It would have gone down there.
You need a high pass filter on that
one, that's for sure.
Well, that was fun.
Is it over?
The Pro Audio Suite.
We're thanks to Triboof and Austrian Audio, recorded
using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and
mixed by Robbo.
Got your own audio issues?

(18:13):
Just ask Robbo.com.
We have tech support from George the Tech
Whittam.
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