I've been thinking of starting one about the paranormal. I wouldn't know where to start though. I have a mic from my youtube channel days but I don't know how best to set everything up, how to record/edit, let alone how to check mics for others on said podcast...oh yeah I would also need to find members to be on the podcast.
Any thoughts or suggestions from people who have podcasted or currently podcast?
Hey LeeC. Here's what I've said to a few people who asked me about podcasting. I'm an amateur, but I have learned enough that I think my experience might be useful to someone starting out.
Short version: get a decent mic and a pop filter and download Audacity.
Long version: get a decent mic and a pop filter and download Audacity, then start playing around with the settings. It'll take a while to find your sweet spot in terms of gain, layers of pop filtering and distance between your mouth and the mic. Depending on your level of experience with a mic and with sound editing, it might take *much* longer than you expect. My greatest challenge is the rabbit-in-the-headlights effect I get whenever I try to monologue into a mic. It is a whole different animal than dialoguing with a person. So I end up stuttering and stammering and vapor-locking my way through my delivery, starting each sentence an average of probably three times. Then I spend a long time editing it. I spend around twenty hours making a one-hour show, although I put a tremendous amount of time into research. Your mileage will vary.
Oh, one other major hurdle I had: mouth sounds. Good god, the mouth sounds. Before I started this project, I had no idea how many clicking, popping, smacking, sucking sounds my mouth makes. It sounds like Cthulhu eating live squid. I was super self-conscious about that, and over the following weeks I learned how to mitigate it, but I was still spending a ton of time editing out the pops and clicks. Then one day I struck up a conversation with Rivers Langley, the man who produces one of my favorite podcasts, "The Goods From the Woods". That podcast sounds so good that I wanted advice from him, and he was generous enough to have an extended conversation with me. One thing that came from that is that I started listening to "The Dollop", his favorite podcast, now one of my favorites. But when I first listened to it, I was shocked at the pops and clicks that were audible in that show. Slowly it dawned on me that I had become hypersensitized to those sounds, and that the average person doesn't notice them. I confirmed this by having my wife listen to a few episodes of "The Dollop" without saying anything about the pops. Then I asked both her and my daughter, who had already been listening to it for a while, whether they noticed those sounds, and they each said no. And my wife, as a professional singer, is *highly* sensitive to such sounds! So the point is that you may find that editing takes ten times longer than you expect, but *then* you may find that you don't need to spend as much time editing as you think you do.
