(Upbeat Music)
Trent
Welcome back to the Snow Homey Ship Podcast Playground. It's your place to learn about podcasting, how to do podcasts and give it a shot ultimately when you are ready for it.
(Upbeat Music)
Trent
So last time we were talking all about the gear that we're gonna get. What gear should you get? Now that we have all that gear, let's talk about how do we actually set this up? How do we make this sound good, work right and everything and I'm realizing now there can be so much to this so I won't hopefully hit everything and I wanna make sure you feel successful and ready to go set this up. So first off, before you even try and connect anything, get anything out of the boxes, let's pick where are we going to do this? I think that's something people overlook a lot. They're just like, oh yeah, I have this awesome living room or I have this awesome space and it ends up being near their kitchen which is nothing but hard surfaces and won't absorb any sounds and it sounds like you're in a cave having a conversation. I've seen this so many times on Zoom when people are calling in for things that it's just does not sound the way you want it to, right? Or if you want that reverb, you wanna be able to add that later.
So when you're picking a spot of where you're recording this, I'm gonna say some of the very obvious places not to do this, a parking garage, a canyon, a cave you found inside of a mountain, an all-courts or marble living room or entryway, next to a construction site. I'd seem obvious not to do it there, but I just wanna cover my bases. You really do wanna find some place where it's a little more quieter, things like that. So let's talk about some places that are actually really good to record. One place that people don't think about is actually a library-esque airspace. I don't know if you've been in a library recently, but the books actually help deaden and disperse sound. So if you have a wall of books or someplace in your house that has a lot of books or structures like that, not an even surface, but really dispersed things sticking out, different heights of things, that's a great place to do it. So if you have your own little library, own little place where you have a wall lined with books, it will actually be a great place to do it. If you're doing a solo podcast and you are most worried about getting good sound quality and you're not really interviewing or talking with anyone, your closet is going to be a great place to do it because all your clothes just eat up all that sound. You're not gonna get any echo. It will actually help deaden around anything else that's happening outside. So that's really great space to do it as well. And if you haven't guessed over it and you're like, we wanna do in the living room where there's sofas, that's a great option to just make sure you have rugs underneath, there's curtains, there's something, right? If you're just doing it, anything that has bare concrete or bare drywall walls, you're gonna get a lot of reverb, a lot of sound, it's gonna actually make your life harder in post. So find someplace where you can kind of snap and you don't really hear anything happening. Silly, maybe a little cliche, and it will give you a kind of a good indicator.
So again, you're looking for something that has a lot of things on the wall, fabrics specifically. You don't want anything hard. You want drapes, curtains, things that will absorb that sound, disperse it, books, anything that has a lot of clothing or cloth is also great. And then if you do end up setting up in a place like a kitchen, that just ends up being best because you wanna sit around the table or you're in an office that maybe doesn't have much yet in it or doesn't have all of those other criteria, hang up some blankets, just like pin them to the wall or put them on a ladder or something like that will actually help that in the sound a lot. And again, if you're just getting started, this is probably sounding very, very extreme, but it's little things like that that can make a difference as you want to start making it sound really, really good. So where you're going to do it is a great thing to consider before you set anything up because then you're not trying to have to disconnect and move everything around, right? Find your place, where you're gonna go. And now that we're in that place, let's talk about how do we actually put this set together. So I'm gonna describe things to look out like how to actually connect all these things, what the system looks like the best that I can. And I'm assuming you have some sort of mixer recorder just so that kind of covers everything. If you have an audio interface only or directly plug into your computer, it'll be a lot simpler. So I'm gonna take kind of the hardest challenge.
So first off, you have your microphone, get that out of the box. And also any of your stands, make sure you get those out first so that you have something to attach your microphone to. You can have stands that sit on the ground on table tops, attach the table tops, all different things. But get those set out, make sure it's secure and make sure it's kind of going to stay stable. Some of these microphones can get kind of heavy compared to a normal microphone you'd see at like a concert. So you wanna make sure it's very stable, it's balanced and set up properly so that it's not going to tip over while you're recording or just moving around. Once you have that set up, get your microphone out, attach it, there should be 5.8 side that screws on. Sometimes the microphone stands won't have that direct thing, but a lot of them will come with little couplers or little inserts that you can put in to help make it to the right size to screw it on. So the stands will likely have those adapters if they need them so that your microphone can go on. So just pay attention if you're like, like this threading on the stand can literally just slide in without having to twist or screw anything on. Look for that little adapter piece that will make it so that those two things can fit together. From there, we're gonna run our XLR cable. So again, three pin, you have a male side and a female side to it, that's just what they call it. One side will have, if you look in the end of it, will have pins sticking out and there won't be like any other buttons or anything else with it. And that will be the one that actually goes into your recorder. The other end of it, you'll see, will have probably a little clicky thing on it. And then if you look at the very end of it, it will have little holes. Those will go into your microphone that has three pins coming out and it'll click right in there. When you hear that satisfying click, and it's just good to make sure that's a good connection because if you have bad connections, other weird things can happen. So you plug that into your microphone.
Cable management is important because you don't want people tripping over it. So try and run your cables behind things or out of the way of walkways because you don't want people tripping over it and pulling your gear down, or more importantly, someone tripping on it and then falling and hurting themselves either, or you doing that. So keep your cords out of the way, make sure they stay nice. And then when you go to your mixer recorder, you're gonna get the one, again, you look at the end, you're gonna see three pins coming out. And on the back, or maybe on the top, you're gonna see all these kinds of connection points. They're gonna be like black little circles, and they're gonna have three holes, spots available in them. Or some of them might look like a little weird oblong triangle circles. Don't know what I'm talking about when you see it. You wanna go and plug that in. So if you have two microphones, you wanna put it in probably the one and two spots, or if you have one just in the one spot, make sure you know which one you put it in because that changes how you set some other stuff up sometimes and you just need to know which channel is which. So make sure it's easier when you go to look at the files and you're like, why is there nothing in two, three, four, why is there nothing in one or two? It's because you plugged it into four. So just being aware of where that is and knowing what that means will be important. Sweet, so now you're all hooked up, and now we're gonna turn it on. You're gonna turn on that mixer. And if you have all these little sliders, and I call them sliders, and they look like little rectangles that can only go one direction, up or down. And when I say up or down, I mean, it's like up towards some sort of screen or up near where the connections are happening and then down the opposite way. If you move all of them down, you're not gonna hear anything when you turn things on. But if you turn up the blighter that your microphone's plugged into, as well as most of them will have a main or a master, and you'll have to slide that one up too. Not all of them do, but some of them will. You turn that one up, then you should start hearing things.
If you haven't plugged in your headphones yet, you won't hear anything. There will be a spot somewhere on your mixer to plug in your headphones. The only thing is you might need some sort of adapter, because a lot of these will use what is called a quarter inch jack. So it's like a long, longer thing that puts in. And usually it looks very similar to like a guitar hookup. So sometimes you need a little adapter if you have headphones that only have a 3.5 millimeter output, but you can find those pretty cheap online too. Plug those in, and then you can start hearing what's going on. And just start slowly turning things up, tapping on the microphone, speaking into it, and you'll maybe hear something, maybe not. The other thing that comes with these microphones and why this can be trickier using this system is gives you more flexibility. What can also be trickier is you have to worry about something called gain. So gain is actually what is happening with the microphone. So for like the L8, you will actually have a little knob above your sliders that says gain on it. And that one you can play with up or down and right will make it go louder, left goes quieter. And basically this gets very technical. So in trying to avoid being super, super technical, what you wanna do is you wanna set your slider to zero. There should be some sort of line. If it doesn't say directly zero, should be some sort of line that's near the top, but not the whole way at the top. Leave your slider there and then slowly turn your gain to the right until it sounds good to you. So that'll be one way that you can do it. Also, if you keep doing that and you feel like you turned it all the way up, also make sure your headphone jack is turned up a little bit and then restart that process. Cause there's so many different ways that you can actually end up hearing things incorrectly because you have things, everything turned up too loud and then the actual recording is very quiet or vice versa. Everything can be very quiet and then recording is way too loud. So get that set up. And then once you can start hearing yourself and it sounds pleasant, yay, you're there. That's one of the biggest things, right? There'll be record buttons. I recommend looking at some of the manuals for these. I know very old school, but if it doesn't come with one, you can find them online. And it's very helpful to just understand, hey, how do I do this? And a lot of them, cause they're PDFs now, you can do a quick search of like, how do I start recording or record to make sure you get that set up properly? Cause everything's a little bit different and I don't want to confuse anyone. So make sure you figure out how to record and make sure that the microphone is sounding pleasant.
And again, if something's not sounding right, just play around with it. And that's why we're calling this a playground in a lot of ways, right? When it comes to podcasts, you need to play around with the podcast. We want you to play around and try things. The same thing goes with this gear. You really want to try it out and test it before you ever get into it, right? Like play around, mess with this. Like, hey, what happens if I have this all the way up and this thing all the way down? Oh, I can't hear anything. What if I vice for flipping around? That's way too loud. What if I go somewhere in the middle? Oh, that sounds great.
Whatever it is, just play around with your systems and get to know them before you actually need them. Because that's also when you're like, all right, we're going to hit record. I have a guest coming. I've never used this before. That's when you get frustrated, you don't learn it. You say it doesn't work. Everyone's just not happy. So make sure you test your systems ahead of time. Play around with it. Record a silly intro. Record you making silly sounds with it. But just make sure you understand how the system works. Maybe you find a few problems so that you know how to troubleshoot it as well. But that's the big thing. So that'll be going again. That's for a mixer recorder that has sliders on it. If you just have the audio interface, you literally plug those in. And then you have kind of volume controls of gain controls really for those different inputs. And then you can see it on your computer. And then on your computer, you can use Audacity or Reaper or one of those to set it up. And again, I'm going to say, look at the manuals, go find some of the online tutorials of how to set up that interface. Because those are very tool specific of what settings you need to change, how you set that up so your microphones are going in there properly.
So I know I kind of brushed through a lot of the complicated stuff. And the important part is understand your system, play with that system, get the stuff in that you need ahead of time before you're actually doing your first recording with a guest or anyone so that you know, hey, I know how this works. I know how this operates. I feel comfortable with making changes and making it sound how I want. So yeah, was a very quick summary of setting up the hardware things, the more specifics of how you adjust things, how you get things to sound the way you want. That's where you get to be on the playground. You start to really get having fun and playing around to seeing what happens. Some of them come with prebuilt sound effects so you can have fun with that and just play, have fun. Don't forget that part of this when it comes to building the podcast. And this is where you first really get to do that. You've been so serious talking about all of these different things up to this point. And this is where you can really start playing around the technology, seeing what it sounds like and what you want to put out there. So now that you're all set up, we'll start talking more about editing and all of the other fun stuff that's coming up soon. Until then, get that gear, have fun with it, play around. Very few things you can do to break it unless you're throwing it or literally tossing it across the room, which again, you shouldn't need to. But any other, the knobs, anything that you press or rotate on those, you won't affect them. Play, have fun, see what it does and find it so it sounds how you want. Take that time and play. Until next time, don't forget to have some fun.
(Upbeat Music)