Are gear woes cramping your podcasting style? Let me guide you through outfitting your studio with only the essentials, ensuring you sidestep the siren song of Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Today's jam-packed episode peels back the curtain on creating a sound space that rivals professional studios, simply by utilizing household items for top-tier sound control. We're talking curtains, pillows, and the principles of diffusion and absorption—it's all about making the most of what you've got. Plus, we've thrown in a teaser for our next adventure into the tools of content creation, setting the stage for you to bring your A-game in podcasting.
Ever pondered the parallels between microphone gain and a photographer's precision? Well, prepare to be enlightened as we dissect the intricacies of microphone gain structure and its monumental impact on your podcast's audio clarity. The secret sauce lies not in the price tag of the equipment, but in mastering the settings from mic to mixing board. We'll be navigating these technical waters together, ensuring your audience enjoys the crispest and cleanest sound when they crank up the volume. So, fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a lesson that promises to transform your podcast from a hidden gem to an auditory treasure.
Are gear woes cramping your podcasting style? Let me guide you through outfitting your studio with only the essentials, ensuring you sidestep the siren song of Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Today's jam-packed episode peels back the curtain on creating a sound space that rivals professional studios, simply by utilizing household items for top-tier sound control. We're talking curtains, pillows, and the principles of diffusion and absorption—it's all about making the most of what you've got. Plus, we've thrown in a teaser for our next adventure into the tools of content creation, setting the stage for you to bring your A-game in podcasting.
Ever pondered the parallels between microphone gain and a photographer's precision? Well, prepare to be enlightened as we dissect the intricacies of microphone gain structure and its monumental impact on your podcast's audio clarity. The secret sauce lies not in the price tag of the equipment, but in mastering the settings from mic to mixing board. We'll be navigating these technical waters together, ensuring your audience enjoys the crispest and cleanest sound when they crank up the volume. So, fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a lesson that promises to transform your podcast from a hidden gem to an auditory treasure.
The content is king with Kenneth Bauckham all right, hello once again, and here we are back in the studio for episode number three, continuing our conversation on the podcast primer how to start your own podcast. This is a talk that I gave just a few weeks ago at one of our local camera stores and had a lot of people ask for another opportunity to learn more and to dive deeper into some of these concepts and principles, and so I want to do that with you. We kind of summarized overall where we're going to be going in episode number one. In episode number two, we dived into the podcasting fundamentals and talked about some of those things for a little bit, and now what I want to do is go ahead and bring you into the gear guide. Okay, are you ready? This is.
Speaker 2:
I'm going to include a couple of jokes in here, so please bear with me. Um, this is one of those things. Um, that's kind of hard to admit. Um, but I do have a medical condition. It's called gas. I have gas people. Um, gear acquisition syndrome is what that stands for. So now you can laugh. There's the punchline. And uh, um, you know, sometimes it's difficult to stop yourself from buying the newest, latest sh. You know, sometimes it's difficult to stop yourself from buying the newest, latest, shiniest beautiful thing, and so what I want to do is help you learn from some of my mistakes and some of my learned behavior along the way and help us both make better choices when it comes to buying gear. Now, specifically with a podcast, there's a couple of things that happen. People often ask me about the environment that they should record in, and then people also will ask about what gear they need to get started, and so we're going to talk about those things today, and really I'm going to bring it down to kind of two main principles, and that's going to lead us into our third talking point, and that third one's going to wrap over into episode number four as well, so we're going to kind of split that content up just a little bit, but I'm hoping that this is useful to you and helpful for you as we learn and grow together. Now I love it. The studio that I'm recording at today is featuring some of my favorite products. You can find the links to these on my website. I will admit that I do earn some commissions from affiliate links on my site, so you know I appreciate any support that you can provide, whether it's hiring me to come out and do some consultation for you, or whether it's simply just buying through the links that I provide you. That way we can keep this show going, bring on some other guests to learn more about other areas of content creation. But of course, here on, the content is king.
Speaker 2:
Episode number three I want to get into the gear guide. Are you ready? Here we go, All right. So for those of you that are looking online, you're going to see some different graphics and things along the way. For those watching in the podcast, there'll be a link there where you can actually click through to see some of these slides and photos as well, if you'd like to do that. I meant to mention that on the last episode as well, so we'll make sure those links are there and available to you.
Speaker 2:
But let's talk about gear just a little bit, one of the pieces of gear that people maybe think about not as gear but as just kind of their environment. People often think, well, hey, in order to record a podcast, I need to have floor-to-ceiling foam, you know, or I've got to make it look like a professional radio studio. And while, the foam can definitely be a huge help and of course it looks fantastic, especially if you shoot some color across the front of it or something like that. Definitely, you can get some really great appeal that way, but it's actually not required. You don't have to have it everywhere. What you do need to think about when it comes to your sound is simply being able to control it.
Speaker 2:
So the room that I'm in right now there are lots of different edges and surfaces. As a matter of fact, as I look around, I actually don't see any foam at all. What? How are we doing that? How are we doing that? And I probably shouldn't say we. It's not my studio. It's a studio that I'm renting for this particular episode. But you know, there's some curtains hanging, there's some chairs, there's some pillows, things like that, some plants and things that you maybe can see here behind me and maybe to the side of me, you know. So there's definitely a lot of ways for us to control the sound and help absorb some of that rogue sound, but there's actually no foam panels here, and yet we can do a podcast and we can get a great recording out of it. You can listen to it. Here we are. Do you hear people in the next room? Do you hear people upstairs. Do you hear people outside, cars on the highway, just literally like 100 feet away? No, because it's about controlling the sound. It's not about buying all the gear, it's about controlling the sound.
Speaker 2:
So we're going to talk about a couple of things. Let's first talk about acoustic treatment, and I love these images, but I'm going to try to describe these to you as well, forgive me while I set my laptop down here, kind of stretching just a little bit here in front of the camera for you guys. But acoustic treatment, there's kind of two different ways to help control sound in the room. There's diffusion and there's absorption, right. So sometimes you want to change the way a sound reflects and sometimes you want to absorb the sound so that there's no way for it to reflect right, and so that's kind of the difference between those two things. As you think about the hard walls, maybe this one here beside me, as I'm pointing at it on camera here, this hard wall is going to reflect sound right back, but what you'll notice is I'm actually sitting at an angle to it, so it's not ever going to reflect that sound directly right back at me or directly right back into the microphone. That sound directly right back at me or directly right back into the microphone as I'm talking. I'm talking across the room to a camera and there's an angled wall behind it, so my sound as it comes forward is going to bounce a different direction. What we don't want is we don't want sound to come straight back at us. So a really great way that you can help kind of test this. Of course I'm wearing headphones today, which kind of negates the problem a little bit.
Speaker 2:
Let's say you're doing a podcast without headphones, you've got speakers on your computer facing you. What you want to do in order to help acoustically treat that environment is have a friend, take a mirror and hold it up on the wall and basically, without tearing up the paint, slide that mirror all over the wall back and forth, back and and forth, until you, from your position that you're seated whether it's at the microphone or if you're doing a home theater or something like that, it could be your couch or your chairs that you're sitting in Look at that mirror and every single time that you look in the mirror and you see one of your speakers, that's a reflection that you need to control. You want the sound coming at you from the speaker. You don't want it bouncing off the wall and then coming to you. So that's a spot that you now need to control.
Speaker 2:
That's a good spot for foam or a curtain or a pillow, if it's maybe somewhere where it makes sense to have a pillow. Maybe you have some seated risers, like we actually do have over here. There's a couple of places where people can sit on kind of a bench, on a couple of different levels. You can do that, and so you can change that reflection. So that's called diffusion when you change the reflection. That's why you often see the foam panels are kind of in a pyramid shapes or just long kind of triangular oh, I'm sure there's a mathematical term for that. My middle school teachers are going to be mad now after they told me to memorize all this stuff. But that triangular shape, that prismatic shape or pyramid shape, helps just reflect the sound different ways. The other thing that foam does, that curtains may do, that chairs can do, is help absorb the sound, right. So it's not as powerful when it bounces off as it was when it first went in, all right.
Speaker 2:
So we want to minimize our background noise. We want to minimize our echoes. Obviously all those things are important. We want to record in a quiet environment like this one and you can use acoustic treatment such as foam panels or blankets or things like that to help. I'm actually going to kind of look around and describe blankets or things like that to help.
Speaker 2:
I'm actually going to kind of look around and describe this room a little bit to you. There's just one studio I record in. There's many others here locally. I'm going to try and actually show them off to you as we go and as we go we'll provide episodes and segments where we can actually advertise those spaces and we'll name them by name for you as well to kind of show off how those are all used. Right. But as I look around the room here, we actually have an open ceiling in this particular space, so the sound that's above me gets an opportunity to bounce around. All kinds of little tiny things. Plus the heating and air conditioning vents are actually kind of a soft foam, soft insulation around them. So we're really doing a good job of absorbing sound in this room. Not a ton of reflections. If I brought in a live band it'd be a whole different story, but for just two or three or four people to sit here and talk, it's really really simple and easy, all right. So that's just a little bit about acoustic treatment. For those of you watching online, you'll see a couple of images here that help to illustrate that, to help to illustrate the mirror principle, which you can actually do yourself as well, maybe with a mirror and a flashlight or something like that, just to help kind of target where you want to do that treatment. All right, and then we'll move on.
Speaker 2:
This is one of my favorite things to talk about with people that have a brand new podcast and even for people that are going to be recording video and want to just have a clean signal, a clean sound for that video. You don signal, clean sound for that video. You don't have to have the most expensive equipment. We could be talking here on some, you know some high-end microphones. You know gold-plated pop filters in front, you know maybe would have the Shure. What is it?
Speaker 2:
The SM7DB, I think, is the newest model now, like a $400, $500 microphone, sometimes more, depending on the situation or the time of year or where you're buying from, and so you don't have to have the most expensive equipment. We're talking here on pod mics. They look fantastic, they sound fantastic in my opinion, but they're actually not that expensive. It's just a $100 microphone and in my, in my world, in my experience, I say that's probably the price point that you want to kind of look for. A hundred dollars or more should almost always be probably always is a great microphone when you're under a hundred dollars, with really just one exception. Um, those microphones have always failed me in one way or another. They either have had disappointing sound or a disappointing amount of control that I can exercise over that sound. So you want to look for a microphone that's got great sensitivity and low self noise. That means it doesn't create its own noise for you. That's often a problem with cheaper microphones.
Speaker 2:
I encourage you to try before you buy and shop local. This is a wonderful thing I love to illustrate while I was actually at the camera store teaching this class. Shop local and there's point to the wall and there's all the microphones hanging right there on the wall from our good friends at Rode. And again, I'm not paid to promote any of these products. I'm only paid, maybe by affiliate links if you choose to buy. So these are my true and honest opinions. Like I kid you not, I'm trying to help you guys grow, just like I'm growing. I want to recommend only the good equipment that I have worked with. That, I know, is fantastic that I've had a chance to actually test and speak into myself. So here we are with the Rode PodMic. I'm wearing a pair of NTH-100 headphones.
Speaker 2:
I encourage you to just go out and look If you're going to spend your money. This is one of my favorite things to share. When you spend your money, I prefer to spend it once. Buy the good stuff the first time, because otherwise you're basically taking the long, slow route. You buy the cheap stuff, you find out what works, what doesn't work and there's like, oh gosh, now I got to go out and buy more things again. You end up maybe buying medium level and it's kind of like okay, well, some of this is iffy and some of it's okay, and now what you've? What you've done is you've spent all this money on the beginning or equipment, the medium level equipment. You could have just bought the high level equipment to start, and I understand cashflow is different from budget, right, you have to have the money to spend the money. I encourage you to make great financial decisions. I am a producer on a show that talks about making great financial decisions. So I encourage you to check that out.
Speaker 2:
If you click through the pod role, you'll see my recommended podcasts, places that I have learned a lot from that have some great information and great content and I hope that you'll find great content here as well. On, the content is king and because I want to give you great content, we're going to get right back into it. So we're talking about microphones, kind of that a hundred dollar guideline, and please do try it before you buy it. Here we are with the pod mic Um. There's actually a couple of versions of this pod mic, so I'm just going to give you a preview of the technical know-how that we share here on this podcast. This pod mic um just has the XLR output, so this is the cheaper version, the $100 version. It is a condenser mic, so it does require some extra power from your sound interface. We're using a Rodecaster Pro 2 to power this microphone today, so there's not a power cord on it. The power is supplied through the microphone cable from the sound console, and we'll talk a whole lot more about the Rodecaster later. That is such a cool device. I'm pointing over there because it's to my left, your right, and we'll talk more about that. But understanding kind of how the microphones work, how sound systems in general work and I don't mean to overcomplicate that too early, but knowing how they work is super, super important. So we're going to dig into that just a tiny bit here.
Speaker 2:
Sometimes when people get excited about a microphone, I'm rambling I did not finish my thought a second ago the Rode PodMic this is the cheaper version. They have a slightly more expensive version, or maybe it's double the price, I forget exactly. It has a USB-C port on the back as well. So if you're just podcasting by yourself, you might choose the other one, because it can kind of work both ways. But if you're going to have guests, you're going to probably want just this one, because it's a whole lot easier for you to get your group together in one place and be able to save a little money along the way, because I'm here to help you save the money too.
Speaker 2:
All right, I finished talking about the microphone. Let's move forward a little bit. One of the things that people have difficulty with is understanding how to run their equipment, and we're going to go into a lot of detail on this later. What I want to do is I want to hit a high note right now. Right, as you plug in your microphone, you need to be aware there's more than one place to change the volume of that microphone, right? So some of this is easy. I'm not trying to talk to you like you're stupid or anything, all right. I'm just trying to share all the knowledge, because there's a lot of different people watching and listening to this podcast at a lot of different levels.
Speaker 2:
Okay, so here we go. Here's some of the differences here. There's a lot of places where you can set the volume. Obviously, you can turn your speakers up or down, or headphones if you're wearing headphones, that's one space. But is that really affecting the microphone? It's actually not. It's just affecting that output level. Your microphone generally has its own volume control. It might be physically on the mic, it might be in your computer or on your recording device, but it's often not just one control. If you start paying attention to all the different ways that you can change the level and change the volume on your microphones, you'll find out. There's actually many, many more places.
Speaker 2:
So, for those following along in the link or watching live online, you're going to see this illustration. It's kind of a technical diagram, but I want to share this for you, right? So microphones connect somewhere to record. There's a lot of different ways this can work, but here's what I want you to think about and this is just as critical as any other equipment choice that you make and this is called gain structure. All right, now this can get super detailed and technical, if I wanted to. For our purposes today, we're gonna stay kind of light on this part.
Speaker 2:
Gain structure is basically just the decision-making process and the end result of that process that says okay, where am I turning the volume up or the gain up or down, as may be appropriate? Where am I turning it up and down so that I get the correct levels and the correct signal through all of my signal path, all the way from the microphone, all the way through to the listener's ears. Now, if you're thinking about your podcast, it doesn't end right here as I'm listening to myself live doing this recording for you. It actually ends on the other side of the internet, in their device or on their computer, or in their earbuds or wherever it may be that they're actually hearing you. So we want to make sure that we set up this gain structure in a way that we have as little noise as possible throughout the process, but we also have enough signal so that when the listener is turning up their speakers or turning up their headphones, they don't have to crank it all the way up to the top, which, by the way, will help them hear a lot of noise. All right, so are you with me so far on that? If you're with me, say yes, I'm not going to be able to hear it, but say it anyway.
Speaker 2:
What I want to do is I want to help you understand these concepts. We're going to dig into them just a little bit deeper over time. What I want you to think about with this gain structure again, there's so many places. You can change it. You can do it live. You can do it's your video, whether it's your podcast, whether you're I don't know a TV producer, I don't know who all is listening to this show today. I am going to know because I want to know my audience. After I've defined my niche. We talked about that a couple episodes back in our podcast fundamentals section, but here at the microphone, here's what I want to get to Turn that gain up as early as possible in the process. That way you're not waiting to the end. The longer you wait, the more likely that you're going to be introducing noise.
Speaker 2:
Photographers know this as well. Think about this from a photography perspective. If you set your camera settings correct while you're taking the photo, then when you get into editing you still have lots of room to mess with things before you add in a ton of noise. But if your picture is dark in the beginning because your settings were not right or you didn't have enough flash or whatever was going on, then when you get into Lightroom or Photoshop later and you start to turn it up, it may not be called gain, it may be called exposure or highlights or shadows or whatever else you're working with, but you'll see that noise creep in. It's like oh, where'd that come from? It came from the sensor, the microphone, the video sensor, whatever it may be the appropriate right, the appropriate equivalent in whatever medium you're developing your content in. You want to turn that up. You want to set your settings correctly as early as possible. Even today I had a peek at these settings, gave a little bit of a test run and made sure that my microphone levels are going to be in a way that I'm going to be able to understand myself. Get to a right level and be able to record this without having to do too much after the fact, because the more I have to change this later, the more you will start to notice the result.
Speaker 2:
All right, so speaking of post-production, let's dive right into that. I've included as part of the gear guide because it's kind of important, right? You're buying all this gear, but now how am I going to get this podcast actually produced and shared? Or maybe it's a video content? Again, I'm trying to talk to all content creators here. We're just doing this first section as kind of a podcast fundamentals.
Speaker 2:
But explore the different recording software options you have. You've got some free ones. You've got some that you can spend money on. I personally, as a photographer and videographer, I already have the Adobe creative suite or, I'm sorry, creative cloud is the correct name for it. Now, um, those of you that have been doing it for a while, you remember Creative Suite as well, both when you bought it, version by version as it was released as well, as they started turning it into a subscription model, and now really a cloud-based subscription model, so you can adjust that volume in several places. You'll be able to see an image in the link and online, if you're watching this on YouTube, that shows you what it looks like inside of Adobe Audition, for example, and you can use Audacity as a free software. But you have all these options to experiment with different recording settings and software options to see what works best for you and for this, for your DAW, your digital audio workstation or workspace. You've got several places even within here that you can adjust the volume as well. There's some gain options on the track. You can also edit the audio file itself to normalize it or get it to a point where it's at a relatively normal volume level. Plus, there's everything we've already done and everything that will be done by the listener in the end. You know, like I said, the speakers and the headphone adjustments as well, right? So there's so many different places to make these changes.
Speaker 2:
I want to go into more detail about editing in the future, but for right now, I'm going to sign off and thank you so much for joining me for yet another episode of the content is king. I know this one was just a little bit shorter. Like I said, we're going to do these deep dives as well, but I definitely want to also start to build up this library of knowledge for you, so you've got something to listen to for a little while as this podcast is released. Okay, so this has been the gear guide on the content is king. We talked a little bit about audio workstations, microphones, gain structure and acoustic treatment. I encourage you to check out the links below, learn a little bit more about these different things and make smart choices, be always learning and help turn your content into your crown with the Content is King. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to the Content is King with Kenneth Bauckham. For subscriber-only premium content and bonus episodes, be sure to click the link in the description to join Now. Go, create and always be learning.
