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I think I sound okay. Do I sound okay? You sound good. Five by five. Sound good? Five out of five. Except that one time I had a viral infection and people ignored it. Yeah. Except my mom. But uh no, I I have gear, it’s in front of me. It’s always impressive when I get on video calls and they they’re looking at a boom stand and all this all this Falderall, big pair of headphones. But overall, I I bought barely enough gear that I’m going to sound good. And I just looked at some experts and I went on the website um it’s for jungle enthusiasts. It’s called Amazon dot com and uh bought a bunch of stuff. And that’s about it. I then I moved. I bought a house and my office is about it has like ten foot ceilings. which is very tall ceilings. So I bought some foam tiles to put in the room. And that’s it. End of things that I have done for this podcast. I deliberately took the room that was closer to the back of the house so you don’t hear street noise. Shut the door so you don’t hear my refrigerator. Hired editors so I don’t sound like a charlatan. I don’t know what else to say as far as what the gear is, right? Like you have to get a microphone that has a narrow pickup pattern. Microphones are either good for like a room, like Recording an orchestra, like many things at once coming from many different point sources? Or they have very narrow pickup patterns, which are good for vocals, and you would see it like a rock show or something like that, like somebody singing directly into the microphone. And I have a microphone that’s like an extreme version of one of those. So when you get to like the side of the microphone, I’m going to turn my head to the side and you’re going to hear me speaking like this, right? Hopefully. And I again, I’m just as close to the microphone. But hopefully, you hear that I’m quite a bit quieter. So that’s kind of like the natural pickup of it. So if my dog comes in and starts, you know, snarfing his butt during the middle of my podcast. You mercifully do not have to hear that, even though I do.

Yeah, I so I tried doing a podcast like God a long time ago, and I thought it would be punk to do like something lo-fi by going on getting like a crappy mic USB microphone on my crappy laptop in a crappy space and just having a conversation. And you’ll find that like guests will be willing and that it’ll be like a nice vibe. And then you turn off the podcast and it’s a feral disaster. And I realize the people they care a lot about audio quality. They seem to like a podcast really lives or dies based on the audio quality. Contrast with my mailing list. It’s in Georgia. A crappy font that sucks, like, and no one seems to care. The typography is horrible because it has to be cross-device, and no one seems to care. But I don’t think that’s the case for podcasting. I think you actually have to come correct. And it’s not hard. It just takes a little bit of money to actually buy the gear. and it’s a one time thing, and there’s probably dozens of failed podcasters on eBay putting up their gear so you can get it on the cheap.

Yeah, you want, just broadly, a USB preamp for a microphone and an XLR supercardioid microphone. That costs around $100 to $200. And the interface doesn’t really quite matter. You just need to make sure it’s not going to have any hum. And that’s it. I have some cables. I have a boom stand so that I can talk and be on a a camera all day. This is my fifth meeting of the day, right? It’s the last thing I’m doing today. And that’s it. And I have a pair of nice headphones, but honestly, they’re the same pair of headphones I used to DJ with in college. Like, they’re just a crappy pair of $50 Sony headphones. They’re studio monitors. And they’re closed ears. So I uh Don’t have to hear like background noise or anything like that. So there’s nothing but me and the microphone in front of me, and I’m just going. And it works out really, really well. I don’t think you have to overthink this. Like, again, the all in for this, the nice option is about five hundo. If you’re a consultant, that’s a round off error. If you want to start, get a crappy USB microphone off of eBay. Everyone seems to like the blue snowball, but it’s very omnidirectional, so you need to be very careful about your room noise. And they always seem to mount it so it’s low on the table. So let’s talk about why good microphone technique is important when I am talking, my lips are just barely touching the windscreen on my microphone. I’m directly in front of it, and that way I’m able to have a lower volume on the microphone, so that picks up less background noise. The thing that you need to be sweating in that situation is making sure that your face does not move away from the microphone. Because when you’re talking, it’s going to sound like I’m about to go. I’m going to move slightly away from the microphone. I’m going to, you know, move around, do my normal gesticulation. I’m going to have my normal thing. It sounds like garbage, right? I come in and out, right? So, you have to hold your head still and make sure that you’re focusing on the sweet spot of the microphone that’s directly in front of you. And you end up sounding a lot better. I hope that I sound better than I just did.

Okay. Well, that’s fine. I’m my biggest critic and I notice a difference. And if you have on really nice headphones or in-ear headphones or something like that, or you’re our podcast editor, you almost certainly notice a difference. And I think that matters as far as turning out a good product. And honestly, if it’s a matter of like don’t move your head for thirty minutes, we’ve got this That’s fine. This is not a hard ask. It’s a weird thing that does not come naturally to people, but like neither does running a consultancy, and you’ve been doing a lot of unnatural things for a minute. So hop to

Yeah, I mean, I could easily blow another five or six grand on just a microphone and a preamp for this. I could blow probably half a grand on cables that are materially identical to these cables, but they make me feel okay. And if you want to stroke your ego, go for it. But like, it becomes very much a game of inches after about $500. And even then, like you’re doing really, really well for yourself, and you’re going to sound like a serious put-together consultant. If you’re recording video, there are two things that have helped me out. And this is sort of like if you’re doing screencasts, but it’s worth mentioning. I’m backlit in this room. Like my ceiling light is behind me. the outdoor windows behind me. So I need to be frontlit. And if you don’t have the luxury of having a window directly in front of your face, you’re going to need an LED panel. You put this on a tripod, you attach it to a switch, you turn it on when you’re recording, you turn it off when you’re being a computer hacker, end of thing. The second thing that I have, I have a twenty seven inch iMac, and I found that the white balance and focus on my default camera settings It does not look good. And so I tried thinking, like, well, do I get like a DSLR and just aim it at my face? And I know some people do that. That seems crazy to me. And I found an app called eyeglasses underscore or lowercase i, then capital G. all one word, like it’s an iPod. That allows you it gives you all of the levers and settings that you need on your camera. Focus and white balance and zoom and stuff like that, so people can see my face a little bit closer up. It allows me to set the monitor a little bit further back, which is good for my eyesight. That’s a tiny gear thing that I found to be really, really helpful. Overall, you want the camera to be about forehead height. If it’s any lower, it’s going to look like the person is looking up at like a god of some kind, and you’re not that. And if you’re too high up, it’s just gonna it’s gonna feel distant and weird. So you need to make sure that it’s like you’re having an actual conversation. And I think that’s it for video. I don’t care about Anything beyond that?

All right. Fair enough. Yeah. Computers. What other audio recording tips? Shut the door. Disconnect your doorbell if you remember. I have like one of them portable doorbells, and unless I’m like expecting a FedEx package, God help us. I usually disconnect the doorbell. Make sure that your computer’s fan is far away from your microphone and hopefully pointed in the opposite direction. If you want a big level up move, buy some foam tiles and treat your room.

It is very much trial and error, actually. It’s weird. Basically, you start by well, I’m talking at the wall, right? So if I’m talking at the wall, it’s likely that sound waves are going to bounce back off the wall and into my microphone. So that’s the first place you should be going, is the wall that’s directly in front of you. So right now I’m looking at a wall full of foam tiles. Another thing, if there are um this matters if you have a beautiful and inspiring baritone like I do. There are What are called base traps that you put in the corners of a room. And there’s all eight corners, like they’re the vertices of a cube you have to think about. and they’re fucking expensive and horrible, and um but they suck up all the bass frequencies. The goal is to make it kind of as flat as possible. So it just sounds like a normal Room. Well, it sounds like a voice that’s next to you, and you don’t hear the rest of the room. You don’t hear reverb. You want to deaden as much reverb as humanly possible. So, what I would recommend is Cover the wall in front of you with foam tiles. If that doesn’t sufficiently deaden the reverb, cover the walls next to you with foam tiles and the wall behind you. If that doesn’t deaden the reverb, congratulations, you’re going to sistine chapel this and go to the ceiling. If you’re dealing with a lot of bass issues, like a lot of and you have to listen very carefully on nice studio monitors. Then you install base traps in your room, which are basically like foam tiles that go in the corners and cost five times as much. And you can shuffle things around at will. You want to make sure that those tiles are pointing in different directions. So like it’s a checkerboard, one is horizontal, one vertical, so that it’s like Vanta black. It takes in the sound and the sound bounces around inside of these little fins. And it doesn’t give it a chance to escape. I think that’s the answer. I’m sure some audio engineer wants to murder me for how ham-fisted of an answer that was, but I don’t care.

One last thing I’m going to say about video. What is behind you matters. People will comment on it. People will judge you on it. If you have a wall of acoustic tiles behind you, that actually kind of looks badass. If you have like a giant feral disaster behind you, that doesn’t look so badass. I had a client call, or a prospective client call, I never hired them, but it was with somebody who was very obviously in his grandmother’s living room. He did not decorate this room. It was not a good look. Make sure that you look good. Make sure that you’re in a room that can’t be judged harshly. That’s it. And then go forth and podcast and don’t overthink it and don’t spend $6,000 even if you’re busy and important because that’s just sad.