The Content (is) King with Kenneth Baucum
Welcome to "The Content (is) King," the ultimate podcast for aspiring and established content creators who are passionate about mastering the art of storytelling through photos, videos, and podcasts. Each week, join Kenneth Baucum, a seasoned content creation expert, as he delves into the strategies, tools, and techniques that make content not just compelling but king. With a mix of interviews, case studies, and hands-on advice from leading professionals in the industry, this podcast is your go-to resource for turning your creative ideas into impactful realities. Whether you're looking to sharpen your skills, find inspiration, or understand the latest trends, "The Content (is) King" is here to guide you on your journey to content mastery. Tune in and transform your content into your crown!
The Content (is) King with Kenneth Baucum
Mastering the RODECaster Pro 2: Elevate Your Podcasting Game with Pro Tips
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Could your podcasting game use an upgrade? Discover the RODECaster Pro 2, the ultimate audio production studio for podcasters on the move. We kick things off with a comprehensive tour, diving into its standout features like ultra-low noise, high gain preamps, customizable buttons, and versatile Nutric combo inputs. Explore how the RODECaster Pro 2’s built-in wireless receiver and Apex processing capabilities help you maintain top-notch sound quality, no matter where you're recording.
Explore how bank switching options, on-the-fly voice effects, and MIDI command capabilities make the RODECaster Pro 2 a powerhouse for content creators. The seamless navigation offered by its 5.5-inch touchscreen with haptic feedback and rotary encoder makes it incredibly user-friendly. Learn how easy it is to import and export show settings, and how to fine-tune headphone settings to ensure every recording session is just right, regardless of the studio.
Finally, we delve into the nitty-gritty of sound mixing and processing basics. Understand the critical importance of achieving unity gain and how to use pre-fader and post-fader listening to your advantage. Discover processing options for main outputs and individual mics, and learn about various adjustments like depth, sparkle, and punch. Wrapping up, we break down the concept of ducking and its broader applications, emphasizing the importance of mastering your equipment to produce high-quality audio content consistently. Don’t miss out on these tips and tricks to elevate your podcasting game and ensure professional audio quality wherever you record!
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You're listening to the Content is King with Kenneth Bauckham.
Speaker 2:Good morning, good morning. Good morning. This episode is sponsored by the Root co-working inspiring spaces crafted to make the workday greater for all. We're in the podcast studio over here in the East Village location and they've got an excellent setup here that is not only well treated for great sound but looks fantastic too. We've got great lighting, decor, comfy seating and, of course, my favorite gear from Rode. I encourage you to book a tour or book a conference room, studio or desk today over at therootcoworkingcom.
Speaker 2:And since we're here at the Root and we've got some great gear from Rode, today's episode will be for all those traveling podcasters who are renting studios with Rode gear, and we're going to talk about some of your favorite Rode equipment as well as how to get your show sounding consistent from week to week or from space to space, so that your listeners don't hear the difference as you move around. So today I'm going to have to cut and splice this video a lot. I'm here by myself today, did not bring a full production crew with me, but I'm going to show you around, give you a tour of some of this equipment, this integrated audio production studio by Rode. We're here with all the great Rode equipment. Right, we've got some Rode Pod mics. We've got the Rode PSA1, I believe maybe the OnePlus I'll have to look that up and be sure but some great boom arms here holding the mics up. And then, of course, I'm wearing a pair of my own NTH-100s. The headsets that are here in-house over at the Root Coworking are some Samsons, which are great headsets as well, but I just love wearing my Rode NTH-100s. So got those on All right.
Speaker 2:So I want to give you a quick tour of the Rode Podcaster Studio. So if you give me a second, I'm going to move the camera around and then we'll go check it out, all right? So here we are right back again looking at the Rodecaster Pro 2. I went ahead and turned off the room light so it'd be a little bit easier to see the color and be able to see the display without reflections and things like that. So this RODECaster Pro 2, it is an integrated audio production studio so we can actually set it up to do all kinds of amazing things. It can be as simple as just working with one mic at your desk. It can be a situation where you're actually recording, you know, into your Zoom meetings, into any other software that's just right on your computer. So that's always super cool. Just to give you a quick tour of the top here of course there's the Rode logo.
Speaker 2:We've got a bright red record button running right now, some colored buttons across the top of the board that correspond to all your inputs. You can change and customize these colors as well. You can also change the colors around the headphone volume controls right up here at the top. We also have the knob here that is made for adjusting values that are on screen. I'll show you that here in a little bit. Of course, all the faders down here at the bottom and the sound pads.
Speaker 2:Sound pads are super cool. You can kind of go through your set. I've only got a couple of them programmed in right now my intro and my outro, which I love doing with a green and a red light. It makes it super easy for me. You can see what these pads are assigned to by looking here on the screen. So if you check that out as well, you'll see that you can also see the levels right here on the screen as I am speaking. So you can see that as I bring my volume down or if I push it up, you'll see all of those things adjusting right there on the screen. So I love this Rodecaster Pro 2. It makes me a really happy person.
Speaker 2:It's got revolution preamps, apex processing. But let's actually dig into some of these features a little bit because I want to tell you a little bit more about them. So the ultra-low noise, high gain revolution preamps these are awesome. You always want to do as low noise as possible, so these revolution preamps will help out with that. You can get up to 76 dB of gain on those With very low noise down. I think the specs are actually like 131 below dBV, right. And then high gain preamps. These will rival even the most expensive and high-end boutique designs. So they're clean, they're transparent and they eliminate the need for lifters, boosters or external processing. That doesn't mean that you can't include that. It just means that you don't have to have it because you've got clean preamps getting you right off, right off and going Okay, all right. Right on the back of the unit We've got those four high quality nutric combo inputs.
Speaker 2:You can connect microphones here, instruments, line level devices, and this provides both an XLR option and a quarter inch connection Option in the same connector, and so you can choose those settings and you can add or remove the 48-volt power as needed for those devices that might require it. There's also a built-in wireless receiver directly in the unit as well. That is made for being able to connect your wireless pros, your wireless go-tos or your wireless MEs to this device. So that's always super cool as well. I've done that a few times before. It's actually kind of nice to take that wireless pro 2 and be able to disconnect and reconnect it as needed to be able to use those wireless LOVs or to just have a wireless mic in general.
Speaker 2:The heart of this new setup here so the Rodecaster Pro 2 comes with Apex processing. We can see that handy dandy logo right here on the front. Of course there's a QR code there so you can read more about this device and about all of these settings and things, and that Apex processing has been around for quite a while a 40-year history at the heart of pro audio. It's a proven staple of top artists and bands. You may have heard of some of these folks Paul McCartney, pink Floyd, james Taylor, bruce Springsteen and even Lenny Kravitz and Kanye West and so many more, along with major broadcasts such as the Grammys and the CMAs. So Apex is a wonderful, great set of processing tools that is now included in the Rodecaster Pro 2, so you can have those rich and creamy vocals as well. We already talked a little bit about the smart pads and things over.
Speaker 2:Here You've got the bank switching options so you can go back and forth between all your choices, trigger some of those on-the-fly voice effects like reverb, echo, pitch robot, I mean all kinds of crazy stuff. You can even send MIDI commands to external software and automate automated mixer, activate automated mixer functions like mix-ins and fade-outs and all that other fun, fun stuff. Does this sound exciting? Yet I just love the idea of being able to automate my settings and be able to do whatever I need to do right here on the RODECaster Pro 2. Everything from selecting those inputs to working through the settings and the things like that that I need to be able to move my podcast forward.
Speaker 2:One of the other great things there's actually two separate USB-C connections on the back which you can use for connecting devices and computers and all kinds of fun things to be able to expand your capabilities with this integrated production studio. And so it's compatible with a range of the different Rode USB mics, which allows for an additional mic input. So you know, maybe you've already got four of your Rode casters I'm sorry pod mics plugged into your Rodecaster. You could even take a pod mic USB and plug in as well, which is super cool. Now you got five mics. You can plug in a computer and do multi-track recording of all of this. Of course, you can do that multi-track recording directly in the studio itself as well, so that's very important Directly into that USB storage device or the micro SD card.
Speaker 2:I just love how this whole system works together, okay. So, yes, you can call me a Rode fan boy or something, that's fine. I mean, come on, I bring my own headphones, okay. So that's got to tell you something. And then, of course, I've shown you the screen a few times already, but it's a 5.5-inch high-definition touchscreen and get this with haptic feedback, okay. So a little shake-shake to let you know that you've got everything all set the way you want.
Speaker 2:That includes a rotary encoder, which I pointed out toward the beginning, next to those headphone controls. Just helps you be able to easily navigate and control everything right here on the screen. Just helps you be able to easily navigate and control everything right here on the screen. So what I'll do is give you a little bit more of a tour of some of the settings here that are inside the the RODECaster Pro 2. And and yeah, we'll just kind of talk through that a little bit, because what I love is being able to set this thing up to really just work well for my show. Every time I come into record, that I can have the same settings, that I can have all of the sound effects, like everything, the way I want it, no matter whose RODECaster Pro 2 I show up to. I just take care of it. So let me show you that real quick.
Speaker 2:All right, so here we are looking at the screen and I'm going to try and navigate this. I didn't bring a ton of equipment in here to be able to record this screen, so if I need to redo some of these screenshots or things later, we may end up doing that. But here we are. 10 minutes into our podcast. You can see the timer clicking down there in the top left-hand corner, so that's always helpful. Right next to it, the indicator for my storage card. You can see the monitor output. So the main mix is kind of showing there in the top right On the right side, along the right side, all of the sound pad buttons, just like we talked about before, and, of course, my level, along with your other mic levels. They're across the bottom and through the center. You can see sound effects right here. I can fade those up and down and it reflects just right there on the screen. So all of these things that we can see here and make it easy to be able to run your own show.
Speaker 2:So let me show you real quickly. Here's what I did when I came into the studio today. I plugged in my micro SD card in the back, back and immediately. Of course, I'm not going to be able to do it because we're recording right now, but up here, where the record button is, is a spot I'm going to overlay the screenshot on here so you can see it. In the top left-hand corner is a spot for me to be able to import and export my show, so I can go through, uh and just be able to bring my own settings in and in the process of importing that show, it's going to ask you if you want to save the current show. So yes, I do. Um, you know I'm they've been kind enough to let me use the studio today, and so I'm going to make sure that I return the studio back to the condition that it was in when I found it, and I'm going to go ahead and give them that default show settings right back again. Okay, so that's another great way that you can not only bring your own show settings in, but also return a borrowed or a rented studio back to where it was. So I love being able to see all of these things.
Speaker 2:You can also come in and if you watch here, I can go in and look at my settings and I can go through and work with a lot of things. Some of them are not available right now while I'm recording, such as the show that we just looked at through the other button. It's also available here, but I can go in and look at my outputs and I can see hey, what kind of headphones do we have? Here? I'm wearing my Rode NTH-100, so I can choose that, but other people in the room, they may choose to go with the low sensitivity headphones high sensitivity usually needed for earbuds and things like that. Honestly, this is so easy. A firefighter could do it. I'm just kidding. A firefighter told me that joke. It's got the pictures right on here. You cannot miss it. So choose whatever is appropriate for you. You'll see, here there's a warning.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, as you switch between different types of headphones, it says, hey, go ahead and turn these down because we're going to light you up with some amazing sound, and that's just a great way to do that. You see your color chooser right here. That corresponds to the knob. So if I wanted to, I can actually change the color of that green knob to anything else that I would like to have. You can see it there, just going through the colors. I'm actually going to put it back at green. So Rode has some really cool kind of color scheme going on here. So I have made my inputs match my outputs. That way that's all super easy. And then it's kind of continuing on and choosing other custom colors for these other inputs here. Right, so let's go back. So that's headphones.
Speaker 2:You also have a monitor output as well. Now. I personally prefer the fixed output level, because if I'm plugging something in over there, I want to hear it all and I don't want it to change. So when this is enabled, the monitor output level is set to the line level and it cannot be adjusted, which is perfect for me. That's exactly how I want it. You can set this monitor up so that, instead of wearing headphones while you record, you could actually just use studio speakers or studio monitors. And when you do that, you're going to want to auto-mute whether it's the monitor output or the Bluetooth output, or both. You're going to want to try and just and I say both.
Speaker 2:I said that incorrectly. As you go through and change these settings here some of them, you know it looks like you actually can do all that, so I was wrong. Ooh, I thought this was a single select, but this is a multi-select, so it's fixed output level and then you can auto-mute either or both the monitor outputs. I choose not to do that, so I apologize for tripping over the settings on this screen, but that's just because this is not something I change a whole lot. Like I said, what I do is I actually use this as a line out, going into either a larger sound system or into my camera recording devices or something like that. So that's one of the reasons why I leave that alone.
Speaker 2:You do have some listen options here as well. Across the bottom of the board are green and red buttons on each and every channel, so green allows you to listen to just this one input if you want to. I actually just pulled myself out of my own headphones by doing that listen for someone else, and then now I can hear the whole show again. I can also See. You should have heard me. Stop right there. I'll go ahead and do it one more time. Okay, there it is, so you can see that this mute button works right here for the headphones.
Speaker 2:Now what's fun is, depending on my show settings, I may be able to still have my voice recorded even though I muted it here. So, depending on what you're doing in your recording, you may find out that you have either more data than you want or less data than you want, so that's important to check as well. I'll see if I can do that with you here in a moment. I know some of these settings are difficult to look at while we're recording, so that may be an issue. But specifically, the green button there is. Do you want to listen to it?
Speaker 2:Pre-fader or after fader? This is something we're going to talk about a lot on this channel as we especially dive into some sound mixing consoles and desks to be able to help people who are in small churches, medium churches, even large churches learn how to run sound better. So those are some upcoming episodes I'm super excited about. But pre-fader listen is what I like. That way I don't have to move the faders or do anything to accidentally make that person live. If I don't want them live, I can pre-fader listen so that when that solo button is engaged, the host will hear the channel at unity, regardless of the fader level.
Speaker 2:So unity gain is another thing we're going to talk about here on the board. One of the things you can see is the size of these stripes and even the length of these stripes. You'll notice there's one right here in the middle that's a whole lot bigger than all the others. That's unity. You always want to bring your mics up to unity gain wherever possible and then adjust other settings to make them the right level. This is something I'm totally blowing it here and giving you a huge preview to upcoming episodes. But what this is this is part of gain structure right. So during rehearsal, bring this up. During sound check, bring this up and go through and do all of your other settings to make the mic sound right. Then during the show, that's when it's okay to leave the other settings alone and instead just come here and make the slight adjustments that you might need to, just based on what's happening with that individual in that moment. Okay, so, anyway, totally distracted.
Speaker 2:Pre-fader listen we're talking about Unity game because of the fader level there. Pre-fader listen we're talking about Unity game because of the fader level there. After fader listen is completely different. Okay, so now the only way that I'm going to hear myself is if the fader is also up while I'm soloed. So that's an important difference. I love pre-fader listen for all kinds of reasons, mostly that I don't have to do anything with the fader. I don't have to actually, you know, accidentally make that person live just to hear if their mic is working. So that's just me as a sound guy making that choice. Okay, headphones listening.
Speaker 2:We looked at monitors a little bit. The only other one we can do on the screen right now while the recording is active, is processing, and over here on processing, I actually have these features turned off right now on the master side. It's possible to do this not only for your main outputs but also for the individual microphones to be able to turn on the Apex processing and all those things. Then there's one other, so there's the master compelling. And then there's the master propeller. There's also an output delay as well that you can add, and this output delay essentially just allows you to match up your video and audio together. So that's just a way to either slow down or speed up your audio relative to your video feed. So that's something we'll tackle at a future date, future episode, at some point, but for right now, just know that these options are here and that you can go check them out by hitting either the buttons at the top or these buttons here. Okay, all right, so those are the output things that we can change right now.
Speaker 2:Now what I want to do is show you, just real quickly, a little bit about the individual microphone. So when I poke this colored button, I now have the settings for that microphone brought right up here on the screen. Rode has been so kind as to put a boatload of presets directly into the screen for me, so I can actually just scroll back and forth on here and choose all kinds of different microphones that Rode offers, or I can just take the easy way out and choose that it's, you know, line or instrument, or dynamic mic, or condenser mic. We'll talk about what the differences are between all these different types of mics in a different episode, but for right now I'm talking on a pod mic. So I click on pod mic and it brings up some default settings. The default settings for me were not quite exactly what I wanted, so I did go ahead and turn up the level a little bit. You can see I'm bouncing into the yellow zone here just a little bit, and that's okay. Being in the yellow just a little is not too bad. If you get into the red and stay there, that's a bad thing. So basically, I put my fader to unity gain and then come over here to level and set that to where I want it, so that my voice is the right volume for this device in this room.
Speaker 2:Now, the pod mic is actually a dynamic microphone, so it does not require any extra power. There are some condenser mics that do require extra power. We'll talk about why at another time. But this P48 is phantom power. You know, I don't know if the P for them stands for phantom or stands for power, it doesn't really matter, p48 just reminds you. Hey, this is the way I can provide some extra power to my mic so that it can operate properly, and it's just an on-off button that I'm going to leave alone for right now.
Speaker 2:Then, over to the right, you can see we have some options here. This is actually what the screen looks like by default. I was actually clicked into it just a little bit too far. So there's some default presets here for processing so you can look at these and you can touch them and adjust them. So I'm going to do that real quick for you. Live here. If I want to change the depth or take away some of the depth, you can kind of hear what that's doing to my voice A little bit of sparkle. I'm going to be honest with you. I forget exactly what this means in the road world, but there it is. And then some punch. Some people like a little bit more punch, some people like a little bit less punch. Sometimes it adds a little bit of grit and things like that to the process and to the way it works.
Speaker 2:For you, what I'm going to do instead, I want to put these back to a preset. I can actually come in here and I can click on Podcast Studio and it will light up these things in the amount that that preset is set to. I can also switch it over to broadcast, and now you can hear that difference as well. And sure enough, look at the difference there in the depth, the sparkle and the punch. There's a lot more on there for that broadcast preset. And then there's also neutral. Here we go, there we are over at the neutral side, and you can see how much it brought that all out.
Speaker 2:So if I want to just have a regular, old, boring neutral voice sorry guys, here it is you can also turn this processing on and off. There it is no processing at all. This is me, just raw audio coming into the system. Turn that processing back on, make me sound a little bit better. I'm going to go back over to podcast studio and then here we go. This might be too much at one time, but I'm going to do it anyway. Are you ready?
Speaker 2:I told you earlier you can wirelessly connect your Rode Wireless Go's to this unit, and what I have done is created a preset for that as well. I'm not going to turn it on while I have my pod mic plugged in, because it's going to sound really weird. But essentially I've got that live sound. Wireless Go is just what I named it, because for a little bit I was trying to use this mixer as a live sound mixer for super, super small events, which, by the way, you can absolutely do. It's not what it's made for. It is a really fun, easy way to add sound effects to your live events if you need to, or to bring in something via Bluetooth, or add a phone call into the PA system or whatever you need.
Speaker 2:Again, it's an integrated production studio, so it does pretty much anything you want. It's super, super cool from that perspective. But anyway, you have all these settings and and honestly, okay, sorry, this light behind me, I'm going to have to fix it a little bit here because it's doing weird things. Let's see if I can get it to just go on and stay on. Sorry, the on-air light here in the studio has the ability to have some attention grabbing features and be fun, and sometimes it just kind of switches modes on us just a little bit, which is totally cool. I wonder, can you change color on it? I'm going to have to play with this thing some more because it's super cool, the on-air light behind me, but anyway, I'm distracted.
Speaker 2:Let's get back to the show here so you can do this with all your mics, I can go through and I can adjust all of these microphones and make them sound however I want to. You can see here that in my show that I have loaded on the board, which is completely different from how the studio is set up in my show, I actually have a spot here for condenser mics, so I might want to hang some mics overhead to provide a backup recording or a different tone or a different sound for some reason, and I can always do that here. Or, of course, I've got my first two inputs set up for pod mics ready to rock and roll, all right, so you can switch between them here. You can also go between your inputs right up here as well, all the way through them to include setting up your routing for your USB inputs, for example, and even your USB inputs. You can have that neutral podcast excuse me, podcast studio or broadcast sound, all of these things super, super easy to be able to set up and use. And then, as I mentioned before, you've got smart pads that you can use. I've got my content as king intro, outro. I can actually fade us out.
Speaker 2:I can do some ducking. Ducking is a super cool feature that we will find and talk about on some larger sound consoles. But for here, just understand that ducking is exactly what you do, like if you're about to hit your head on something that's up high and man, I don't understand why this thing is flashing so much. I just want it to stay on the light behind me. So I may have to stop doing this little screen share so I can turn the room lights back on and be less distracting. But anyway, smart pads, super fun.
Speaker 2:Ducking is basically just a way to allow your mic number one to be over and above everything else. They can duck. The bridge is low. They're going to hit their head on the door, whatever it is. However, you want to picture that. That's what the word means, that ducking. So if I poke that duck button, it's going to bring everything else down and allow that to happen. In fact, why don't I just show you that, just real fast. I'm not going to move the fader. I'm not going to move the fader, I'm just going to kick off that intro and then I'm going to go ahead and duck it. So now, every time I talk, it's going to bring that music down. Do you hear how it's doing that?
Speaker 1:It's automatically bringing the music.
Speaker 2:It's bringing the music down every time I start talking there. All right, I'm going to go ahead and stop the music, stop the duck. You can see what happened here. The lights light up, and these lights light up indicating kind of what's going on on your screen as you're playing. It's also going to show you that timer there as it plays as well. It's going to just swipe around like a pie chart. All right, so there's the Rodecaster Pro 2. Do you like it? So far?
Speaker 2:I think it's a super fun tool to be able to use, not just for podcasting, but, like I said, I've used it a little bit in live sound applications. It can be used for so many different things, and so I encourage you, when you buy new equipment, learn how it works, dig in and learn all of the little details. And I know you're looking at this and you're like, hey, but you missed a detail earlier. You didn't even know that that setting worked the way it did. I was like, well, you know? Hey, everybody is always learning, which is, by the way, the title of another one of my podcasts, but that's a whole other story. I encourage you to always be trying to figure out how your equipment works. Learn more about it, get used to it and and just enjoy your time.
Speaker 2:Whether you're a live sound engineer, a podcaster, a photographer, a video creator, the content is the king, right, it's the most important thing is we're trying to share our message and help people understand. Whatever it is that we're trying to sell, that we're trying to share, that we're trying to you know, to get people to do our calls to action. Right, the content is the king. We've got to do a great job with the content. Whether we're recording podcasts or doing live sound, it's important that that audio quality be great. So that's one of the areas I'm going to focus on in these next few episodes. We're going to talk a whole lot about audio and different sound consoles and things that you may be using for live events or for church settings or houses of worship all this kind of stuff and anyway, it's going to be exciting. I think you're going to have a lot of fun and I'm excited to see where this podcast goes over time. So it's not just a podcast about podcasting. We're going to talk about all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:Please go into the description. There's a link there. If you're on your mobile device, listening to me is going to be the easiest way. I know this works on my MacBook as well, but click the link there where you can actually send us a text message. If you're on your MacBook it'll actually just pull up and probably do like an iMessage style, but send us a message. Let us know what it is that you want to see or hear or talk about on this show. It is a one-way message, so you send it to me and I can't reply other than through this show. You can also give me a call or an email if you've got my contact information, or you can find it there on my website over at kennethbockhamcom. But certainly I'd be happy to talk to you more about all things technical and nerdy and content creation right. So turn your content into your masterpiece. Be always learning. I encourage you to have a great day and look forward to talking to you next time. Have a good one.
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.
