HAVE A PLAN

The worst episodes of my shows have always been those where we didn’t have a plan, especially with regards to topics of discussion. Discussion topics are a great roadmap, but shouldn’t be used to inhibit the organic progression of the discussion taking place.

CONFERENCES

If you’re going to record a conference, only record the actual speaker that is going through the sound system. Take questions that were asked during the presentation and post-produce them in, and ignore questions after the presentation. Otherwise what happens is the podcast listener gets crappy audio, and you’re really annoying/inconveniencing those actually attending the live conference. What about accommodating those who do not want to be recorded?

RECORDING IN A ROOM

Unless you want to sound like you’re in a cathedral, get some furniture and carpet in the room. The more carpet and the more wood, the better.

RECORDING ONLINE

Get the guests to put their animals and children in other rooms, and have the children be supervised. Post-producing this stuff out is a pain. Also, Skype yields very awesome audio, but those on dial-up should call-in instead. Just be mindful that VOIP-to-phone bridges can be up to 2 seconds off-sync, so don’t be insulted if someone interrupts you when you’re on such a setup. Oh yeah, don’t slide microphones.

If someone repeatedly does something annoying, make them do post production. It’s an extremely effective method at getting them to stop .

Live chat that is available to those listening in via a live stream is amazing. It minimizes the number of people speaking, amount of noise that needs to be neutralized and overall keeps a very clean conversation. Just don’t forget to check out the chatroom. Ustream.tv has been an awesome tool for this on the Pagan Centered Podcast, but we’re not “married” to this solution by any means.

RECORDING WHERE THE PODCAST IS THE EVENT

When we did our interfaith podcast, GIG Cast, in Spring of 2006, the event itself was the event, drawing almost 50 people with 10 participants in the show.

Things we learned were:
- Have all the audio stuff set up before anyone arrives (especially useful in knowing what audio equipment you are lacking)
- Expect 4 hours of audio to be condensed into 90 minutes of actual discussion
- Physical distance can be good for opposing panels

Oh yeah, and try to use a mixer rather than a series of splitters. Mixers have gotten very inexpensive over the past few years. Some small mixers can be had for $49 now at Radio Shack.

A tip from Ananta on our old forums:

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If you have a desktop microphone stand, you can isolate it from the sounds of people tapping on the table, sliding papers, and such by setting the stand on top of one of those older-style thick spongy mouse pads.

If you find that you keep blowing into the microphone, or if when you finish a sentence and close your mouth, suddenly you let out the rest of that breath in a blast into the microphone from your nose, then reposition the mic so that it is just above your nose level, aiming the pickup area slightly downward.

Definitely if there are hard, close-in echoes cluttering up your recordings, the walls of the room are too bare. Even temporarily hanging blankets or quilts or some other kind of baffling around the place where you, guests, and microphone are, will help to eliminate them. Some people will go into a closet to take advantage of all the fabric clogging the space, to do their solo recording.

Event recording, you can obtain inexpensive shotgun microphones designed for video shooting, even some stereo ones.

For a group around a table, often a “boundary microphone” (or two if a long table, or if two tables of opposing arguers) will be the best option. Again, some isolation from the tabletop is a good idea.