Hey guys, welcome back to Dan week. I'm gonna be answering some of your questions today. You
left a bunch on Floatplane, so let's get to it. A bunch of people ask who the f*** is Dan Besser?
It is me. I'm that. My title here recently changed. I'm no longer the infrastructure and
technical specialist. Now I am a technical architect, whatever the hell that is. Basically,
as a technical architect, now I'm responsible for designing systems that are kind of more
company-wide. The documentation system and kind of the data management stuff, and that involves
a lot of liaison with every single department and kind of interfacing with everybody's different
workflows to kind of find a system that works for everybody. A lot of process management and kind of
continuous change improvement and working through procedures and things like that that
people should be using. It's very much more like higher level conceptual stuff and then
some implementation as well. Then you tack on other things to that like when show is tacked on
to what my job is and stuff like this and short circuits and everything like that and doing
infrastructure rebuilds and things like that are mostly handled by Sean. So now I'm assisting with
those rather than it being like core duties. Core duties are process improvement and change
management. Logan's Media Hub asks, what got you into music or audio? I'm not entirely sure.
I started classical training and piano when I was quite young and just kind of eventually
accidentally found this neat little program. I think it was called Anvil Studios, which let
me make little doodles and things like that. And I was always doodling on the piano and that kind
of just spurred things along. My dad was a guitar player and hung out with a lot of bands back in
England and I don't know. It just kind of continued from there. Gordon Freeman, well known scientist
and professor asks, what kind of music do you listen to? Most of the stuff that I listen to is
kind of downtempo electronic, although it seems to change constantly. Basically, I'm not necessarily
into one kind of music. I'm always looking for a section in a song that triggers what I call like
the cheesecake brain. You know, your brain loves fat, salt and sugar and cheesecake kind of has
everything. So your brain's just like, blah. And so there's always like one little nugget inside
of a song that I kind of like. I really enjoy metal, but only like the really intense stuff that
kind of has a lot of pig squeals and stuff like that. For example, AXCX. They're pretty stupid
and great, but like them a lot. As for what I use for reference tracks, I kind of have a nice
Spotify playlist that goes through everything. Mostly they're tracks that I've listened to a lot
where they have really weird things in them, or they're varied enough to kind of keep things
interesting. A big one that I keep going back to is The Wheel by Son, which is kind of a nice
varied song. The start kind of is quiet and then it kind of gets more intense after that. I've got
some BTS in there, which is also interesting. You know, like what people would listen to a lot.
Pop Music Austin has better production quality, or at least simpler production than a lot of other
kind of indie artists or smaller bands. So that can kind of give a nice general feel to
what things are going to sound like, but often a good mix can make up for a bad speaker kind of
thing. So there's another one in here called Pink Lemonade by James Bay on extremely high-end
systems, especially if you're using something lossless like Deezer. What that'll actually show
you is that the song wasn't mixed very well on. It's kind of bad. You can really only hear that
it's bad on super high-end systems. I've got a pair of HD 800S's and you can immediately kind of tell
that something's wrong with that song. Another great one to listen to speakers on is I'm Sorry
by Madonna, because for some reason whatever remaster they did, the S in Sorry is extremely
sharp and painful. I have a playlist of reference tracks and perhaps we'll make that public and
then we'll post that. Mad Economist asks, what's your dream speaker setup? I think my dream speaker
setup is actually a nicely treated room. I've already even got a pair of NS10s and I have the
HS8s, also a Yamaha, but my room is bad and you know you put any speakers in there. You've got a
pair like Bluetooth speaker. It's big and it'll probably sound okay, especially if your room is
sort of wide but short. That's bad. You want like a long and thin kind of thing and then you also
have to position your desk properly and you have to make sure the speakers are far enough away from
the wall and you also have to have like reflection things like a scout room. If you had a six foot
room, that's bad, but there's some calculators online that allow you to decide your room and find
your modes and nodes and what frequency they're going to interact in and then kind of place your
desk there. But a lot of the time you don't have a choice. So Nat for Sale asks, what's your paper
game release in the last five years or so? I really enjoyed Bellattro for a while. I enjoyed
Hell Divers 2. BG3 is also fantastic. The new Armored Core that came out a year or so ago. I find
myself, I'll play a game for a little while and then I'll kind of just move on quickly. I wouldn't
necessarily say I'm the biggest like sweaty gamer or anything like that and there's not a lot of
stuff that catches my attention for a long time. The title I kind of keep returning to though is
Thumper which came out in 2016 unfortunately. I think right now I'm global rank like 50 or at
least top 100 which is kind of interesting. It's a really fun kind of rhythm horror game. I really
like rhythm games and that sort of thing but often they can just be a little bit too technical
and not necessarily fun. This is kind of a nice mix of both and it's the only game I've ever played
that I've like I get and that I'm good at and that I can score consistently at. So yeah that's
pretty damn good. Pick it up please. As for game OSTs I think there's a really good YouTube channel
like I think it's called 8-Bit Music Theory and it seems like Nintendo titles often have some of
the best. I think for a lot of titles I'm more into like the fun stuff rather than the atmospheric
stuff. When I'm writing my own OSTs and things like that I'm always trying to make them invisible
in a way but sometimes if the music is like bright and front and center then that can kind of get
onto your brain more and it's just kind of like more casual and cool. I like that sort of thing
and Nintendo games seem to really push for that type of thing where the music is front and center
and really part of everything. A Fishkin04 asks how do you stay on task? For me it's kind of difficult
you know. I've got ADSL, AADHD, I guess you know broadband and it's difficult. It is really
difficult. There's a lot of stuff in my life I have basically blocked every single hour of the
entire week to things and there's maybe a couple hours left that I haven't found placement for.
For me I've tried notebooks, I've tried calendars and things like that and it all just kind of
doesn't work you know to-do list task things apps everything it doesn't work. Google sheets for me
works really well because it's cell-based you can kind of lay things out and reorder them really
easily. The biggest thing that I found was countdown timers. There's a great program that you can get
on Windows called Time Left. It's kind of free and you can have one countdown timer and you can set
up a bunch of automations and stuff like that. For me ADHD one of the big things is time blindness
or at least a malformed perception of time and so there's a lot of mental bandwidth of like
when do I leave? When do I have to do this thing? How long do I have? And so say I'm taking my
lunch break at noon when I look at my clock there I can see exactly that I have 24 minutes left or
like two hours and 40 minutes and 30 seconds which allows me to go okay now I don't have to think
or conceptualize how much time is required to do a task and I can go okay well this is probably
going to take an hour and 15 minutes so yes I can dive right into that. Everything is kind of planned
and it removes a lot of mental bandwidth of time management and knowing how long I have to do
something. If I have to go to bed at 10 p.m. I know that I can play video games for two hours
and then ignore the timer and go to bed at 2 a.m. anyway. Casper Explorer asks,
does Dan play any instruments besides piano? I guess I play accordion which is a type of piano
I guess. I also play the saxophone. Lisa stopped playing that stupid saxophone. It's
alto for me. I guess baritone as well they're both in E flat. Does synth count? Yes, it counts just
for you. And play the computer. Mirawin asks, why did you want to work at LMG? So I had been in the
music industry for about seven years I think before that point and the ceiling is like pretty small.
If you can think about the pool of people who are professional engineers it's pretty small
and it's also pretty incestuous. I think there's maybe like three or four studios here in Vancouver
and generally you have a senior engineer and a junior engineer. So I was acting as a junior
engineer and so what that's like one of eight people. I'm not going to be going to move to work
for a big studio. The guy I trained under had been working as an engineer for longer than I'd
been alive and then okay well you think about the big concert it's like okay who's Beyonce's
engineer at a concert? That's going to be like one person. Where do you go in that kind of space?
I mean I was lucky enough to get into a studio at all. You see all these people coming out of
recording college and stuff like that and they're okay well I want a job now and you know how are
you going to get a job? I actually started there as a camera operator and eventually moved up into
engineering and things like that because I had been doing it forever. I'm mostly self-taught and
I'm still bad and I wish I was better and it's just practice all the time and I don't know
how to get to that next level. It's very difficult. It's kind of like a black art almost very very
strange. We did a lot of live concerts too so live sound mixing
and that whole kind of thing turned into a full production house so that's kind of
I grew from just a camera op to the technical director of like the whole studio. We did
concerts every weekend because our main booth was set up for live orchestra so the main recording
room could seat about a hundred person orchestra. In 2019 pre-pandemic I did 192 concerts which was
a lot and then I also moved into developing our own like online streaming platform. I used a system
called MUX which is on the back of AWS and then we have player integration and VODs and live streams
and all that sort of stuff and then a team of editors including myself who would edit the footage
and kind of get it going during the week and studio maintenance and everything. It was a tiny team
basically just the two of us and we had the head engineer and then myself who did everything else.
If there was a fire then I had to put it out and there was always like
15-20 fires at the same time. I needed to get out of that environment. That's one of the
reasons why I started working at LMG and it's really nice here because if I die in a car accident
the business doesn't fail like someone can do the job and that is kind of nice. I can take vacations
and I can take weekends off and I still do WAN shows so my Fridays are still destroyed but
now I get Saturdays back and having a social life is sort of possible.
I'm going to knock on wood for you dying. Don't die.
I'm going to knock on wood for you dying. You Sammy gets me. I love you man.
Shrishach asks what are your interactions like with Linus and Luke outside of the WAN Show?
I would say it's pretty similar to be perfectly honest. Obviously there's a little bit of heightened
antagonism I think on the WAN Show set but I mean Linus takes that elsewhere outside of the WAN
as well. It's maybe a little bit more friendly and jovial than the WAN Show set. It's kind of
heightened a bit to boost the entertainment thing like I would never really jump in with quips or
digs kind of outside of the WAN Show wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for kind of like
a business working relationship but sort of you know water cooler you know he makes fun of my car
that sort of thing. Luke is less like that but of course on the WAN Show we don't have as much
antagonism kind of fun place to dig at him and he can dig back and it's good. It's like a cathartic
in a way but very similar very very similar. Curse rotted great wood asks what kind of questions
are you allowed to answer on the WAN Show and are there any guidelines and stuff like that.
WAN Show questions are a bit difficult. There's not really been any training on it. You kind of
build up an intuition after doing it for a long while. That's one of the reasons why we initially
wanted just a single host or at least Linus did. Originally the plan was to have four or five
rotating hosts so that we would only lose like one Friday each. Having repeat questions every
single week is very irritating and kind of boring and because we got you know two 300 merch messages
every single week being able to know what those 300 messages were for the last few weeks is really
useful to be able to keep the show interesting. I'm always looking for something that can
spark a discussion so that intuition isn't perfect. Sometimes I think questions that would
be really interesting are actually really boring or Linus won't engage with or Luke won't engage
with. It's just kind of like yep okay next question. Another stuff that I think is a little bit
innocuous and that I would expect a yes from actually sparks of 40 minutes of tangents and
things like that. Some of the stuff that I would kind of archive and not really push through are
maybe anything with a link. Anything that seems overly antagonistic. Obviously I answered a question
about wages ages ago that I thought was pretty innocuous and that caused an entire spark of
controversy as well. So generally anything business related to anything that would be me
speaking for another person. So if somebody asked like what does Sammy think about this?
I would probably respond to that and say like I don't know ask him and then next question right
just kind of like throw it away dumb answer kind of thing. I think the intuition now is basically
don't say anything and that's really sad and it makes me sad because I'd like to have a more
engaging discussion and like respond with heartfelt things or give information about the
business but everybody seems to misconstrue that and it makes it disappointing to be able to engage
with things. How do you think Chewy did when he was doing the merch messages for the charity stream?
I think it was pretty good. I'm trying to train him as a replacement for the Wanshoes. Right now
there's no replacement so I can never take a Friday off. That's dangerous because again
bust factor of one if I get hit by a bus on the way to work right then there's no yeah thanks Sammy
wishing for death. He's so mean right and I think he did okay. There wasn't too many
merch messages during the day stream this may be 20 to 30 maybe 50 something like that
and Chewy would be perfect because he's already the community manager and already knows how to
not start controversy so he can pretty much say whatever he wants and we've worked together a few
times on dealing with the fallout from shit I've said. Fancy Pingo asks what's the most frustrating
thing about running the Wansho? Right now it's been the computer there's been decades of bugs
with that computer a couple streams ago it just hard freezes right before the show right I can't
do anything it takes a stream down I can't trust my equipment and it makes Wansho extremely stressful
the whole time every single time Fridays are not a good day for me I don't it's awful every stream
is like the computer failed again and I built another one and that failed in the same way
we put a 3,900k on a test bench and I ran some Cinebench and benchmarks and things like that
and it was failing after 15 seconds after one second so I gave that to Labs because it didn't
make any sense why this was happening and then we built another system on AMD and I was running
Cinebench, Furmark, MSI, Buster, Prime95, eight chrome tabs full of 8k video and live streaming
simultaneously oh and playing back audio in Reaper and it ran for two hours straight just
humming along and I oh I was also doing some photoshop work too so the computer was a hundred
percent everything 95c perfectly two hours so that's been in service now and it hasn't
failed yet um the stream cart exploded on the last stream we did this Wednesday or last Wednesday I
think it was right before the stream the whole computer exploded so I put the Wansho to computer
in there and then now we're building an identical system out of AMD which is going to be like our
streaming cart and probably combined with an away kit um because we need to figure out how
that works a little bit better it needs to be easier. Dr. Raccoon asks you use Vmix, how long
did it take you to kind of grasp it? Vmix is very similar to any kind of streaming platform it's
very similar to OBS except it's a little bit more advanced it costs money it's about $700
for the 4k one but Vmix has a lot of features that OBS doesn't and it also doesn't require any
plugins it does everything in the box it also has a bunch of advanced things too like web scripting
and integrated tally lights we can turn any phone that we want into a tally light for anything
it's great um one of the things about Vmix is it has four sub mixes so it's like four OBS instances
in one that can all talk to each other that takes a little while to grasp but the same thing can be
applied to OBS in that the way that you lay out your scenes and sources in a very particular way
so that if you make one change in one place it propagates everywhere also some techniques like
sending in a married audio and video mix or just sending in a single pre-mix like I do with Reaper
can simplify workflows as well and make it more stable and you just kind of find these things that
make your life easier eventually so it's a long ongoing process but the whole kind of setup is
I don't know it took a year or so to kind of get it down pat lucky falcor asks what is the part of
the streaming setup that you're most proud of I would definitely say the audio routing system
it simplifies everything it means that I can get set up in like five or ten minutes I don't have
to worry about Linus's mic level Luke and Linus can whisper and everything will kind of be fine
and Linus can also scream into his microphone and there's no clipping and it's all really stable
Mcreed asks where do you get your sense of humor uh trauma just lots and lots and lots of trauma
cheeky prawn asks what was the biggest what the f*** that you've had at LMG why are we doing it this
way it was almost immediately after I started I looked at the ShortCircuit set and I think I asked
Andy like how often do you tear this down and he basically said oh no never it was really interesting
coming from my kind of well oiled production machine at the studio where we could get a live band
live stream setup the whole thing tested all the cables routed in about two hours with two people
nobody hears lazy and they all seem to like working I'm lazy and I don't like working
so the less work that I have to do the better why isn't Daniel ask what is a typical day for you at
LMG that is pretty difficult to pin down I do a lot of random stuff I mean even before this Sammy
I was crawling up around in the ceiling in the in the lab here pulling cables that I ran
when we first started moving in here yesterday I was playing with some of the Q-SYS system
and doing audio routing for the Dante system for smash champs that's coming you know I'm doing tech
support and things like that I'm fixing people's problems it's just all over the place and it's
really weird so following me around for one day would not be an accurate representation of what I
do and thankfully quarterly goals and things like that have been restructured so that my role is now
much more fungible and like malleable to kind of do what the business needs rather than doing task
which would actually be a huge detriment KC be a news as well please show us your home audio setup
I am actually doing a LTT we're doing an upgrade at the end of the month it's not an AMD upgrade
but it's a magnetic cable management upgrade I believe Sammy was first I'm up next which you'll
see my full recording setup there which we have to rip out I currently use a studio console with a
24 track mixer and things like that and that's all gonna go because it sucks I have like this much
room for a mouse and keyboard my mouse pad is actually like taped to a clipboard so that I can
use my mouse yeah it sucks so I want the thing gone and I'm building a custom desk with Sebastian
right now so you'll get to see everything it'll be pretty cool and hopefully uh hopefully it
doesn't look too bad dab jam 1990s what's the most non-tech hobby you have I was doing cross stitch
for a while oh yeah that's kind of fun it's very cathartic and chill I'm doing one called
crippling anxiety right now oh yeah I also like draw and doodle and things like that
I do stippling I've never really been able to transfer that to digital art so I guess
analog art yeah acoustic art phony Tony asked what happened to the fold three do you still daily
drive it where is it what's going on um I tried to daily drive it for a while and it just wasn't
working for me it's a stupid phone and I don't like Samsung phones anyway they're really locked down
and stupid and dumb and I hate them and they're bad so I gave it to my dad he runs it out you
can't say that to a Korean I mean long live Samsung sorry Sammy I'm crying right now no
babe princess asks what is your ideal deck I actually really like the jds Labs one Jake got
one out for a video that we're doing I think like the audiophile fake products or something like that
and that was amazing so I like a deck that is loud transparent cheap and simple if you're talking
more about interfaces and stuff like that like an ad da I don't know whatever's in your budget
literally none of it matters just use your laptop it's totally fine and lastly we have a question
from tour deck here Christmas album remaster when I don't know should I answer this honestly
or should I give a dumb answer the honest answer is if I were to do that it would have to be work
sanctioned I did do a track that was like a Christmas song that I wrote in the style of
the Christmas album and the problem is that there's a little bit of overstep and overlap there
between what the company does and what I would do in my free time so it needs to be company
sanctioned otherwise it's a conflict of interest so maybe never maybe a new Christmas album maybe
some sort of agreement there but I think it probably doesn't need it too much so for 3000 likes
you'll do it for 3000 likes you'll make Luke allow me to do it well for 300 likes we'll ask Luke
we'll ask Luke yeah and he will say uh gotta do a f*** off Dan thanks for tuning in not yet Dan
we actually have a speed run oh speed run okay yeah it's gonna be one minute of the million
bread questions uh oh yeah bread questions oh god favorite type of bread favorite type of bread
sourdough uh if you had to take a if you had to pick a type of bread what would you pick and
why is it sourdough it's sourdough bread yes favorite bread phones uh brioche uh everyone's
asking you a favorite type of bread I want to know what you put in slash on your bread more bread uh
or beef how do you get me to buy a blood plushy plushy oh my god I felt how soft they are you
you can think of me pressed against your cheek uh Dan what would you do a bread taste
tasting as a full pain exclusive dressing the loafs beforehand in wigs slash glasses slash hats
and giving the names before tasting is my recommendation sounds a little horny but that's
up to that's up to you Sammy absolutely what happened to the bread uh it got eaten by rats
should a wanshoe be more or less bread based I think that meme is dead bread then
deep bread and if so how often and what kind bread bread every day and that's all the time we have
I was enjoying that that's that's fine you know what just for you we'll do the last two all right
two more two more two more how hard is it to bring in all that bread Dan oh there's so much cake
well I think they meant money but oh it might have been cake oh I don't know my wallet's fat
just like my uh just like my carb intake what kind of bread have you experienced in life
what kind of bread was your favorite what kind of what are your top favorite bread topics do you
like do you like to toast your bread topics what are your top five bread and topping combinations
I'm not repeating that a yeast infection I don't know
thanks for thanks for tuning in I guess the next one it'll be a desk rant or something
like that I also did one about my car which Linus makes fun of all the time uh yeah I don't
know have a breadty day bye