Pause and Walk Away: Great Podcasting!
Hello, everyone, Ryan here. Some of you have been asking so today I thought I'd post a bit about how we make our show.
As you can see from the above clip ANYONE can make a podcast! All you need is some recording software, time and the hubris to think people will listen to your jabbering.
I'm a bit of a stickler for audio quality, so the first thing Tim and I did when we started recording was invest in some decent mics.
Now the moment you start releasing episodes of your podcast you'll be rolling in those lovely, lovely podcast dollars, but when you're preparing for your first show you'll want to find a mic that is the most bang for yer Woodrow Wilson. Invest a little up front and you can begin to sound as smooth and sexy as Tim and me on our show. One mic that hits that sweet spot of price and sexiness is the Yeti from Blue. It's the superior-sounding USB mic that Tim uses to record (and no, you don't have to be as hairy as him to use a mic called "Yeti"). Highly recommended.
I use a MLX 990, which is a regular vocal recording mic that requires an interface. Unless you have the recording gear to go with it, I recommend finding the nicest USB mic you can afford.
As you probably gathered from the above clip, Tim and I record from separate locations over Skype. If you're podcasting with someone remotely, Skype or Google Hangouts is a necessary evil. Garbled sounding conversations and dropped calls run rampant over voice and video chat, but that is something I absolutely DID NOT want in our show. Yes, we sometimes have bad connections and yes, we get dropped calls, but when we record, we record locally. That means I record my audio on my side of the country and Tim records his audio on his side of the country. I combine the conversation later in post. When starting a call we always count down and clap together so I can line up the spikes in audio between our two tracks.
Tim records in Audacity, a free bit of software that allows him to save a quality .aiff audio file that he sends to me. In Logic Pro I combine our talk and do the rest of the editing. Some podcasts are purely "captured conversations," but we try to contrive a bit of format and storytelling into our show. I spend a good deal of time cutting down the gossipy fat and adding samples and sound effects. In the future, I could do a LENGTHY post about mixing sound effects and vocals together but today I'll spare you. For now I'll just say that I do some crunching, compressing, de-essing, balancing, noise-gating, automating, side-chaining, vocal riding and suck-filtering before the podcast ready to ship. It's not as filthy as it sounds.
There is plenty already out there about hosting your podcast online and submitting to iTunes, so I won't go into too much depth here. All that can get pretty complicated but know there are pay services like Libsyn that can streamline your hosting and make it easy to get your feed into the iTunes Store (as well as Stitcher and other readers). It's the service we use at HC HQ and I highly recommend it.
So that's it! If you have any questions you can contact me at [email protected] and perhaps in the future we can do another post about the production side of making the podcast.
We'll be back next Thursday with another episode. See you on the other side!
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