Mobile Podcast Recording Setup

Many of the recent episodes on Rebuild have been recorded on-the-go, meaning I’m face to face with the guest in a remote location, rather than doing online with Skype.

Gears

A photo posted by @typester on

tl;dr - here’s the list of the gears I use.

I have an extra XLR capsule for ZOOM h5 called EXH-6, in case I need 3-4 people on the show.

Tips

The benefits of recording offline are basically the opposite of problems with remote recording, namely:

  • You don’t need to think about the (poor) microphone setup of the guests
  • No time-zone sync issues
  • No Skype related network issues

The disadvantages are:

  • You need to physically meet them in person
  • You have to carry around the microphones and a mixer, which could be very heavy
  • You have to find a room with a good sound isolation. Lots of office meeting rooms in Japan have glass walls, which makes it a terrible environment
  • You and guests have to train a bit so that you won’t cross talk or interject too much

Japanese speakers tend to interject a bit too much during a regular conversation (called Ai-zuchi), and if you record a show with the other person in the same room, you cannot isolate individual tracks in the post, as much as you can with the remote recording with Double Ender.

I still try to isolate the tracks as much as possible with Logix Pro X’s “Split Silences” to minimize the echo and interjection. But it would be much easier if there’s no echo or crosstalk in the source to begin with.

Setup

Initially I was using ZOOM H5 as a USB interface for Logic X running on my MacBook Pro. It works pretty well, except sometimes it spins the fan of my laptop, and Logic X dropping the frame due to the high latency.

So I switched to recording directly on ZOOM H5 into its SD card storage. Nowadays SD cards are cheap, about $9 for 32GB, which can record 30 hours with 2 mono tracks.

I plug UCA202 to the line-out of Zoom H5, and connect it to the MacBook’s USB port, to stream live audio via Skype. This requires a bit of more explanation, but the basic setup can be found on my blog as well as Six Colors.

The guest and I both bring in our favorite earbuds or a headphone, and plug them to the monitor output of ZOOM and UCS202, so that we can monitor our voices. It is very important to monitor our voices especially with the offline recording.

If you or the guest sways away from the microphone while speaking (which happens a lot), you wouldn’t notice that without monitoring. And you’ll swear and regret later in the post production when you need to apply a strong limiter or compressor to reduce the dynamic range. Monitor your own voice, always.

Summary

If your show has a fixed list of co-hosts or recurring guests, spending money to have a stable Skype recording environment with double-ender makes the recording easy and flexible.

But if your show is more of an interview style, and you want to interview lots of people at a meetup or conferences, portable recorders such as Zoom and a few dynamic microphones are a good investment.

May. 28 2015
#rebuildfm