Hi everybody and welcome to episode 12 of Inspect. In this week's episode I'm going to be answering my first listener question. It comes from listener Rohit who actually got in touch via Instagram and his question goes, I've listened to a few of your episodes and it's inspired me to give podcasting a go. I'm an amateur magician and I'm planning on interviewing others in the same position who are trying to build their brand.
I could do some help with knowing what equipment I need. I don't have a big budget but here's what I have in mind so far and Rohit has sent me a list of recording equipment that he's found on Amazon. Could you share some tips on equipment and how to get started? Thanks a lot Rohit.
First of all Rohit thanks for getting in touch. It's my first question that I've had from a listener and I definitely welcome more. If you have any questions that you'd like me to attend to answer you can get in touch via the website, inspect.fm. There's a contact page on there which has details on how to get in touch.
But yeah back to the question. So podcasting. Now I'm fairly new to podcasting myself. Obviously I've only been this early episode 12 so this is not necessarily the right way but this is my way and it's a way and there's plenty of ways of doing things.
But the first thing I'd like to tackle is a question of why. Why do you actually want to do podcasting? Is it to learn a new skill? Is it to improve your speaking?
Is it to make money? Is it to build a personal brand? In Rohit's case it sounds like he wants to build his personal brand and obviously get to know other people who are in a similar position to him. But I think the most important question to ask first is why you want to do this because it is time consuming and it does take a lot of commitment and it does take a lot of effort to put an episode together.
And also why podcast? Why not a blog? Why not a YouTube channel? Why not any other form of media where you can get your message out there?
There's obviously a reason why you've chosen to go down the podcast route which is great. But as long as you're clear with why you've chosen to do a podcast that's probably the best place to start. My personal reason was to improve my public speaking. I have an ambition to one day present in front of a crowd at a conference or something like that and also to improve my public speaking skills so that it helps with my great progression.
And also it just gives me an opportunity to speak to other people in the industry that are doing similar things to what I do. So that's my personal reason. And Rohit I'm sure you've got your own reasons and I think it's great that you've actually chosen to be proactive and find an outlet for what you're trying to achieve. So secondly is how do you go about doing it?
Now you mentioned that you're on a low budget and that's absolutely fine. You can pretty much get started for free. You've probably already got all the equipment that you need to get started. All you need is a computer and you need some form of microphone and I would say a decent pair of headphones as well.
In terms of software, all you need is something to record your audio and something where you can edit your audio and that can all be done for free. So if we start with the hardware first, so in terms of hardware like I said you need a computer I use a Mac. So I'll give you my opinion from a Mac point of view but there are obviously alternatives for Windows as well. So yeah you've got your computer.
Next you need something to plug into it, something to record it. So you're going to need some sort of microphone. So something that you should already have which most people probably have is a headset which came with their smartphone. So this is going to be a pair of headphones which has a mic, an inline mic which you can use to record.
Now you've probably used this to do some sort of video call either via Skype or by Google Hangouts or FaceTime and this just proves that you've got the, you've got all the equipment necessary to record your voice via the microphone and hear your voice via the headphones and that's all you need really. It doesn't need to be studio quality at this point. I think the best thing to do is just record your voice, have a listen to it, make sure that you're comfortable talking on a microphone and also that you like the way that your voice sounds because the way that your voice sounds in your head is going to be different to the way it sounds when you're listening back to the recording of your voice and you need to be comfortable with the sound of your voice on a recording. So that's definitely where I would start.
If you are planning on spending some money on some equipment I would recommend that you go for a microphone before anything else because with a better microphone you're likely to get a better recording which means less post-production and less everything and the more time you can save later on the better it will be. I have a USB microphone, it's a blue Yeti and it's around about £120, there's a few different versions, depending on which version you get of it. The one I have is it's a white one and it retails around about £100. I bought it second hand so I got it for about 60 pounds.
There's quite a few of those being sold second hand as well so that's probably a good option. It's a USB microphone so there's no need for an audio interface you just plug it into your computer and you're ready to record. It comes with its own little table stand. You can plug your headphones directly into it so that you can monitor your audio, has a mute switch, has volume controls, it also has four different recording patterns so you can have it in mono, in stereo.
You can have it in cardioid mode which basically means that it picks up the sound coming directly from the front of the microphone or you can have it in omnidirectional which means that it will pick up sound from all around. It is a condenser microphone so it's very sensitive, it picks up a lot of background noise so if you are going for a condenser microphone I would recommend that you record in a very quiet area or that you have measures in place just sort of dead in the sound in your room. If you don't have a USB mic and you have a standard mic with a jack on the end, either a normal TRS jack or with an XLR jack, the difference is the type that you have headphones and XLR is the round one with three pins. If you have one of those on your mic then you probably will need to get some sort of mic preamp and basically the purpose of a preamp is a standard sort of dynamic microphone doesn't give out a very loud signal so if you were to plug that directly into a computer you'd have to turn the record level up pretty high and that would mean you pick up a lot of background noise in your room as well which is harder to get out later on.
By having a preamp it would boost that signal before it gets to the computer so you get a much louder and much cleaner sound. A preamp is pretty essential with using a dynamic microphone. You can get separate preamps which are just USB powered or you could get a small mixer which has a preamp built into there so it does are your kind of two options but for now I just recommend getting a USB microphone. There's very little setup you don't need any extra equipment you can just plug it in and off you go.
So now when it comes to recording you need some recording software so I'm going to be talking from mainly a Mac point of view but some of these some of these programs are available on Windows as well. Now firstly you can get some pre-software record audacity which is A-U-D-A-C-I-T-Y. This is available for Mac and for Windows and it allows you to record multiple channels so you can do multiple takes and you can edit the audio you can apply effects and you can export in various different formats as mp3 as a WAV as a AIF. So it's a pretty little piece of software it's completely free and it should be all you need to get started.
If you don't want to try Audacity if you're on a Mac you can also record directly into QuickTime. If you're on Windows you could probably use Windows Media Player to record your voice directly as well but for the sake of downloading a piece of software for free I would recommend trying out Audacity. If you're planning on investing a little bit of money I would recommend trying out Logic. It's a brilliant piece of software which allows you to record multiple inputs all at once you can sequence any background music you've got just got all the editing tools that you never need there's hundreds and hundreds of plugins available to edit your sound however you might want to do it.
But like you said you're on a small budget so definitely start with Audacity it's probably going to be enough to get you going. You also mentioned in your question that you're going to be interviewing others so now you've got the issue of recording two people. Now there's a few ways you can do this it all depends on how you're doing the interview so if you're doing the interviewing person then the easiest way is to just use a single microphone and you can just record the interview in real time passing the mic between you. The only issue with this is that you only have one input source so if there are any issues between maybe the levels or the volume of both of your voices and then you need to edit bits out because both of those voices are going to be on one track it makes it a lot harder to edit so I wouldn't really recommend this.
If you can connect two microphones then you can both have your independent audio being recorded and then when it comes to editing later on you can just line up the two tracks and you can edit bits you can edit them independently as you need to. However it's not always possible to do interviews in person so your more likely scenario is that you're going to be using either a Skype call or a Google Hangouts call to do the interview online. Now again you've got a couple of options here if you're interviewing someone who's also got a microphone and got some ability to record then you can both independently record your own audio and sync it later on. If that's not possible then you can actually record the audio coming from Skype as well so that's the method that I use when I'm doing interviews.
I use a piece of software called Soundflower which is available for the Mac and what that allows you to do is you can split the audio coming from Skype onto a separate channel so that when you record it into logic the Skype audio gets recorded onto one track and my local audio coming from my microphone gets recorded onto another track and then a little bit of EQ work and a little bit of post-processing makes those two tracks sound very similar. Now what I do is I also get the person I'm interviewing to record on their side as well as a backup and then they send me their recording and then I do a sync later on. If your windows and you want to record the Skype call then you can use some software called Pamela. It's available for Windows only.
It's not free it does come with a third day trial but after that you do need to fork out around about 25 euros for it so it's not that expensive either. I haven't tried it myself because I am on a Mac and I've got free option available to me via Soundflower but yeah this is one of the options for Windows. There are quite a few different options out there and you can just try them out and find the one that's right for you. So once you've got all your audio tracks recorded of yourself and your interviewee then it's just a case of aligning those tracks in your audio editor which would in this case be audacity.
Editing out any mistakes any coughing you'll probably notice that there's no coughing in this podcast but I've got a very dry throat at the moment so I have been actually coughing a lot but that's the magic of editing and take out any other background noises that you don't want in there and then to get your audio sounding nice you're going to need to apply some compression and some EQing but basically what compression does is it evens out the volume across your audio so if you have maybe a sudden shout or something loud that's in the background compression will just tame those loud sounds and stop your audio from clipping. It also just sort of boosts the volume of your audio as well so if you have got recording where the volume is a little bit low generally a little bit of compression may will make it sound a lot tighter and then by applying some EQ which equalizer you can basically just make it sound a bit more professional get rid of any sort of bassy hum in the background or any sort of high pitch noises and just make it sound generally a bit more rounded and the way it's intended to and basically once you've got your audio sounding the way you like it and you've done all your editing maybe added some theme music any sound effects or make it your own do whatever you want with it and once you're happy with that you just need to save that and then the next step is going to be publishing that. So when it comes to actually publishing a podcast it all boils down to one thing which is your RSS feed and RSS feed is simply a just publishing format which has all the details of your podcast or of your news feed wherever you're publishing so you'll have the title of your the length the date it was published any notes that go along with it any artwork that goes along with it for a podcast specifically it tells you if it's got any explicit language in it as well so there's all sorts of things that you can put into your RSS feed and in order to create an RSS feed you first need to publish your your actual audio somewhere. Now the easiest place to do this is probably going to be soundplowed it's completely free to start with I think with the free account you can have up to three hours of audio so if your episodes are going to be around about 10 to 15 minutes long you should be alright for quite a while before you need to stop paying if you're publishing sort of episodes around an hour then obviously once you hit two or three others you're going to be at your limit before you need to start paying and then it's around about 70 pounds 75 pounds for the year so again it's not it's not bank breaking but it's a good way to start for free now the beauty with soundplowed is not only do they host your audio for free they also create the RSS feed for you and all you then need to do is take that RSS feed and publish it to iTunes or to wherever you're going to be publishing your podcast so soundplowed have a page on their website which has all the instructions of how to do this if you're looking to show notes I'll put a link to that page also the beauty of it is that soundplowed have their own audio player which you can then embed onto your own website or other websites on Facebook and Twitter and so it's very easy to share your audio from soundcloud as well so it's probably a really good place to start if you do want to invest a little bit then you could try out a service called Libsyn or there's one called fireside FM and there's another one called Podbean now all of these are sort of podcast hosting platforms they do try to feed off around about 12 dollars a month as a starting package but what you get for this is you get your audio hosted you get your RSS feed for iTunes they automatically connect your iTunes and they also give you analytics so you get some data about how many people are listening how many people are subscribing and so on you can get some of the data from soundcloud but I've found that it's maybe a little bit limited compared to what else is on the market now I actually don't use any of these services I've rolled out my own I host my audio on Amazon S3 and my RSS feed comes directly from the website which is inspect.fm which I've just built and hosted myself if you also wanted to go down this route you could use Amazon S3 to host your audio which is very cheap and then you can build your own website using something like WordPress or Squarespace and you can get your RSS feed like that but if you haven't got any experience in building for the web then I would recommend just thinking with soundcloud you get everything for free and you get some stats and you should be covered for a little while while you're getting yourself off the ground just on the free platform and the next thing is once you've got your RSS feed is you need to submit that to iTunes so you need to go to a website called podcast connect and a link to that is in the show notes sign in with an Apple ID if you don't have one you need to sign up for an Apple ID and then submit your RSS feed and Apple would then validate your feed and as long as it's got that errors and it meets all the guidelines you have a podcast live on iTunes and it's as simple as that if you wanted to publish your podcast to other services like Stitcher or Overcast or Pocketcast and it's just the case of submitting your same RSS feed to those services and they all have ways of submitting as well and zalp with some links in the show notes or how to submit to these various services and that's pretty much it you should now have a podcast live on iTunes and a few other platforms as well if you choose the only thing left to do now is you're marketing so get your podcast link push it out to Twitter push it out to Facebook and let people know and obviously let me know as well so I can have a listen as soon as you've got this done all right so hopefully that's given you enough information and thank you for your question if there is anything else that you'd like some clarification on feel free to get in touch and I'll be happy to help you out along the way and if anyone else has any questions that they'd like me to answer or get anything else that they'd like to discuss do get in touch like rohith you can get in touch via Twitter at Inspector Fem on Instagram which is at inspect underscore FM someone's actually taken Inspector Fem on Instagram but they're not using it so if that's you can have it please or you can get in touch via the website which is inspect dot FM and you can find all the show notes for this episode and all the past episodes on the website and links to all the ways that you can subscribe so I'd recommend that you subscribe in iTunes leave us a rating leave us a review it really helps other people discover the show and obviously it'll make me feel good as well so I really appreciate you doing that also if you'd like to talk about this episode or any of the previous ones you could do so in the inspect slack team just head over to inspect dot FM for slash slack and then you'll find all the information on how to get an invite into the team I'll be there and you can ask questions hopefully you can build up a bit of community around this podcast and get some conversations going and discuss some future future episodes as well so yeah once again go to inspect dot FM for slash slack to find out details about the slack team and yeah open that just like to say thank you for listening and thank you once again to write first question and I will catch you guys in the next episode