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
Master Podcasting Equipment for Pro-Quality Sound
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What if investing in high-quality audio gear could revolutionize your podcasting experience? Join us as we reveal the secrets behind the state-of-the-art equipment we use at Root Coworking in East Village, featuring the Rodecaster Pro 2, Rode PodMic, and Rode NTH-100 headphones. We'll break down the differences between dynamic and condenser microphones, like the PodMic and PodMic USB, and guide you on how to choose the right one for your needs. Whether you're into podcasting or live streaming, this episode promises to enhance your audio knowledge and elevate your production quality.
Discover the rugged features of the Rode PodMic, including its robust all-metal construction, end-address design, and cardioid pattern. Learn why the balanced XLR connection is superior to unbalanced quarter-inch cables and get our expert advice on whether to go with XLR or USB connections for various scenarios. Plus, we'll share essential tips on using the Rodecaster for importing and exporting recordings and settings, ensuring you make the most of your gear. Perfect for both beginners and seasoned podcasters, this episode is packed with insights and practical advice to boost your audio game.
Inspiring spaces crafted to make the workday greater for all. Book a tour at TheRootCoworking.com.
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you're listening to. The content is king with kenneth bockham all right, good morning.
Speaker 2:Fun lovers. You're listening to. The content is king. My name is kenneth bockham and thank you so much for joining us here today at the root co co-working over in East Village. This is an amazing new podcast studio space built within their existing co-working space here at the Root, and I'm here today to give you a quick tour of the room, the soundboard, all these other things. Actually, part of that tour has already been done. So if you look at our previous episode, you get the tour of the Rodecaster Pro 2. I encourage you to check that out, learn how to use it. It's an amazing piece of equipment that can do so many different things. And then we're also going to talk about today. We'll talk about the Rode PodMic. I may even talk about my NTH-100s just a little bit, but I think it's all great, great equipment. There's so many different options for high-quality equipment in the audio space. So I encourage you, save your money, buy the right thing and spend your money once, rather than having to rebuy when you buy cheap stuff. I could go on a whole tangent there, so let me stop. I want to read a couple of things here and then we're going to get to talking. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 2:This episode is sponsored by Root Coworking. I'm so grateful to them for allowing me to come in today and get this recording done for you and show off their new space. They've got a great on-air light here, some great decor, soundproofing all the way around the room, great road equipment here that I love. The Root Coworking is inspiring spaces crafted to make the workday greater for all, and we're here in the podcast studio, as I mentioned, with my favorite Rode gear. I encourage you to book a tour or book a conference room, studio or a desk today right here at the Root Coworking at their website, therootcoworkingcom, and I encourage you to take advantage of that. And since we're here, we're going to talk about some of this equipment and really dive into what's going on.
Speaker 2:Now. I brought my own pair of Rode NTH-100s today. They already have headphones here, some Samsons Samsons is a great brand as well, but we're talking about Rode. I wanted to go all the way from the Rode microphone, the Rode PodMic, down the Rode PSA arm to boom arm to hold the mic, our Rodecaster Pro II and, of course, my Rode NTH-100 headphones. If Rode made an SD card, I would probably have the Rode SD card inside here as well, but I wanted to point out of course we're on the Rodecaster 2.
Speaker 2:It's an integrated audio production studio. It does so many great things. You got your independent headphone controls, independent mic controls, bluetooth if you want to take a remote call, you can connect it to USB and do Zoom calls via your computer as well, and, of course, all the sound effects pads here where I have my intro, my outro and some other things going on. Some of the shows that I help people with there's like pages and pages of these sound pads, and for this show I just have the one. But I want to talk today a little bit about the PodMic. Now, there's a couple of versions of this. There's PodMic and then there's PodMic USB, and then I think they actually have two colors now available white and black. So those are both really, really important to know the difference there and to be able to understand.
Speaker 2:The PodMic is a broadcast quality dynamic microphone. Okay, I'm going to pause there. This is some information that's on their website, so I'm going to read a little bit of that to you and then I'm going to explain what it means, all right, so Broadcast Quality, high quality, it's a high quality mic. There are some standards in broadcasting that are very, very important in the broadcasting world. I'm not as well versed in broadcasting specifically, but I do know that Rode is making some great, great equipment.
Speaker 2:This is a dynamic microphone, so not a condenser. It does not require the extra 48 volts of power in order for it to run. That's an assumption I used to think, just based on the looks. It looks like a condenser mic, but it's actually not. It's a dynamic mic. The good news about that is you can use this mic in a lot more places because it doesn't require power. The PodMic USB, of course, does get power over the USB bus just to be able to communicate with all of the chips and things like that inside. Able to communicate with all of the chips and things like that inside, but for just the regular pod mic it does not require power and still gives you these incredible performance in podcasting, live streaming and other speech and vocal applications. I'm actually super excited about taking my pod mic into some other places that people would not normally expect it to be, because it is such a great microphone.
Speaker 2:It's got a wide dynamic range or wide frequency range that it can pick up from 20 Hertz all the way up to 20 kilohertz. For those of you sound nerds out there, like, that's pretty much the spectrum, like that's. I want all of my equipment my sound console, my microphones, my headphones to all be able to cover that range so that, no matter what it is that I'm recording or that I'm monitoring, I'm listening to that, we'll be able to pick that up and process that data and that information. There's other frequency ranges that can be important to you for different reasons. That's what's important to me. I love the 20 to 20, 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz, 20 to 20 K. That just is a great all-around setup. You'll notice, as you do purchase sound equipment, that sometimes it's not that full range, and that's okay. There are specialized microphones, specialized speakers, specialized headphones, specialized processing equipment. That all maybe has their own range, and for good reason, and that's okay. So I'm not downing everything else, but I just wanted to let you know about that.
Speaker 2:This mic offers a rich and full-bodied sound. Let me demonstrate to you real quick. We talked about this some on our previous episode. There's some presets that you can use here with the microphone, but then you can also just turn off processing and just hear the mic by itself all right. So right now, this is the Rode Pod mic and I'm using the Podcast Studio preset that's automatically built into the Rodecaster Pro 2.
Speaker 2:Here it is Sounds great, right, I sound like I'm here in a studio. I've got a little bit of that rich, creamy voice going on. I can also adjust it over to a broadcast sound and you can maybe hear a little bit of that difference. I'm sorry. I encourage you to try and listen and tune your ear to hear some of these differences. All right, let's jump back over to podcast studio so you can hear podcast studio and how I'm talking here. I'm trying to keep the same sentence going and talk all the way through it. As I switch back over to broadcast, you'll hear that there's just a little bit more depth, a little bit more sparkle in Rhodes' words, a little bit more punch built in there as we go over to that broadcast setting.
Speaker 2:Now let me back all of that out, or almost all the way out. Let's go to a neutral sound. So here we are. It's still the pod mic. There are still some processing things going on here, but we've really backed a lot of that out. Again, these are presets. You can also customize all these settings individually. So while I leave it in neutral, let me come over here and just turn off the processing, so now you can hear just a raw mic like this is the pod mic, with nothing else. It's still a great sound, isn't it? I love the sound of it. It may even sound better for my voice. Right, I record myself and I think I sound a certain way. You guys probably hear me differently. If you have a favorite out of any of these settings that you know the way that you think my voice sounds best, send me a message. So this is no processing at all. This is a neutral setup. Right here we have the podcast studio setup and then, of course, the broadcast setup. Okay, so let me know what your favorite is. I'm going to switch back over to podcast studio because I think that's going to be the best, just based on my experience with the system so far, and we'll see where that goes.
Speaker 2:The microphone I'm going to show you some closeups. I'm going to have to cut this video together a little bit, but I'm gonna show you some closeups. I own one of these microphones as well. It's super, super cool the way it works and it has an internal pop filter that helps minimize the plosives. So you can hear me kind of doing that on purpose right now. Right, these plosives I added some extra clicks in there for fun, you know, just in case anyone from Africa is watching and needed a translation of what a plosive is. Africa is watching and needed a translation of what a plosive is. But plosives, those are those consonants and sounds that come from our mouth that they're a little bit more explosive. Right, that's the root of the word, right? So plosives, the pops, things like that, sometimes T's and S's, you know, can all kind of qualify as that.
Speaker 2:Right, it also has an internal shock mount. So as I'm, you know, touching the stand, you're not hearing a ton of that noise. Inside the mic. You can still hear some, but like I can tap on the desk and you're going to hear the sound maybe through the microphone, but you're not going to hear it rumble through the stand and that's definitely something that can be super annoying on different microphone systems. If you can hear the desk noise or the mouse clicking and all that kind of stuff through the stand, that's horrible. So this is really nice. It's got the internal shock mount for reducing those vibrations and then it's got the swing mount.
Speaker 2:I'm actually going to—let me borrow another one here for a second. Can you see me swing this around? This is the Rode PSA1 or maybe the PSA1 Plus, I forget which here. That is actually a boom arm from Rode, but specifically the swing mount. What we're talking about is this motion right here so you can adjust this microphone to whatever angle makes the most sense for you. You can tighten it down with the knobs on either side. This one also has some tightening that you can do on the PSA arm itself. So, anyway, all of these are just tools to be able to help your sound be a little bit better.
Speaker 2:Oh, and I think I might have unclipped this mic wire, so I need to fix that, or maybe it was already loose. I'll check on that after the recording. I don't need to do that while you're here, but I will take care of that because I love, as we're being allowed, to use this space at the Root Coworking in East Village over in Tulsa. I want to make sure that I put everything back the way I found it. We talked in a previous episode about how to get your show on and off of this Rodecaster, the recordings and everything going to the micro SD and off of this Rodecaster, the recordings and everything going to the micro SD. But even the settings that we have on our microphones can be used in conjunction with a saved show that you can import and export and all that kind of stuff. So I'm going to make sure I check this before I go, make sure that you know I put everything back the way I found it, because that's what you do when you're borrowing other people's spaces or you're renting other spaces Like, take care of them.
Speaker 2:People. Man, I don't know why I have to tell that to people sometimes, but this mic offers a rich, full-bodied sound. I hope that you can hear that in here. It is all metal construction. That's actually something you can't say about a whole lot of microphones, but you know you're getting into pro-level stuff. Whenever it has that all metal construction, it just feels right. It feels firm and whole and complete and I could use all kinds of words to describe it. It'll start sounding weird if I go too far. But stainless steel, mesh grill as well. So all-metal construction all the way around this microphone, protecting the elements inside and also allowing it to just look great and perform great. It's kind of heavy duty and rugged because it's all metal, so that makes it really easy to use and take care of. It's got a two-year warranty. I should have pulled warranty information for all of these things right, because Rode does a great job with warranties being able to provide replacements. I actually had a pair of headphones that broke. They stopped working properly. Those were replaced very, very easily. All I had to do was wait on the shipping. But it's broadcast grade.
Speaker 2:Here's something else. We're going to talk about this with microphones. This microphone, in spite of looking like a condenser, it's not. It's a dynamic, but it also is an end address microphone, instead of being a side address microphone, like many of the condensers are. So some people, they might be tempted. I'm going to use this other one as an example. They might be tempted to maybe hang it down like this and try to talk into the side Like welcome to Radio City, and you can do that. It won't sound quite right because it's an end address microphone. It's designed for you to talk right into the end of it and be able to communicate that way.
Speaker 2:It is a cardioid pattern, though, so instead of being omnidirectional, it's hearing all the way around us. It is a cardioid pattern, so it is directional. It's picking up from just this way. As I turn this microphone around to demonstrate, you can hear how my sound is different. In fact, it's even starting to reject me as I turn around. I've got all the other mics in the studio are turned off. You can see my faders are down here but as I go and try to talk to other sides, it's actually going to reject me a little bit and allow other noises in the room to be ignored, which is exactly what we want from a great, high-quality microphone. It provides great room rejection as well, and there's some stats here.
Speaker 2:I don't know if these are necessarily as important for you. One thing to note as you are buying equipment for your podcast, for your live sound applications, for your recordings, whatever it may be, is the connection types. Connection types are super, super important. This XLR cable is a balanced XLR and we'll talk more about some of these definitions at a future time. But essentially, the XLR is a professional grade connection and there's other professional grade connections too. Professional grade connection and there's other professional grade connections too.
Speaker 2:Quarter inch is a great connection. The difference between quarter inch and XLR is the quarter inch is unbalanced and the XLR is balanced and this means a lot of different things that I'll go into detail later. The most important to me is simply how much noise the cable might pick up. Over a longer cable run An unbalanced line, that's just a quarter-inch line. The longer that cable is, the more likely you are to start to pick up RF interference or even electromagnetic interference from other devices nearby, whereas this balanced line is going to do a much better job of being shielded and rejecting those other noises and things. So that's important to me.
Speaker 2:The Rode PodMic has both a USB and an XLR, so the USB connection actually can just connect straight to your computer. You don't need the XLR connection in that case for the PodMic USB version or PodMic Pro maybe and what else was I going to say about that? So all of these things are really really important to knowing about your connection so that you get the right thing in the right place. You can create, you can sorry, you can plug in inputs into your Rodecaster Pro 2 that are either XLR or quarter inch. I encourage you, please stay away from microphones that have just a quarter inch out. For the most part those microphones to me have proven to be not as great of quality, not as great of a sound. There may be some good ones out there. If you have one that you think you love that is only a quarter inch out, send me the make and model. I'd love to look at it and check that out. All right, so it is starting to get just a little bit warm here in the studio.
Speaker 2:I'm getting excited about all the different things that are coming on this show.
Speaker 2:I'm going to tease those just a little bit for you. I'm going to be doing some walkthroughs of some church sound setups here in the coming weeks and months. We're going to talk through a whole lot of different things on the Yamaha DM7 sound console. We're going to talk through some things on the Behringer X32, which is a very affordable option for small venues, churches, places like that, and we're going to talk about some other consoles. In between as well, I've got a Yamaha TF1 that I bring to my events that I love using, and we'll talk about the differences between analog and digital mixing consoles, all the different features that they offer and the ways that they can work and help you in your live sound environment. So that's what's coming up next on the Content is King. We're going to talk about a whole lot of things all things live, sound, microphones, headphones, speakers, the whole nine yards. It's going to be tons of fun. Thank you so much for joining us here, and I hope that you have a great rest of your day.
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.
