BRX Pro Tip: 5 Tips for Getting Your Tech Right
Stone Payton: And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, tech is more and more a part of our business, probably most people’s businesses. What are some thoughts on steps we can take to make sure to the degree possible that we’re getting the tech right?
Lee Kantor: Yeah. This tip is really for those folks that are doing podcast interviews for the first time or they’ve been doing some and they’re not been happy with the audio result of doing it. So these are the tech you need in order to do a podcast interview or if you’re interviewing somebody on your end if you want to make sure the quality is right.
Lee Kantor: The first thing is I would invest in a professional microphone. There’s lots of different ones. You can Google “best podcast microphones.” But we use directional microphones here that are plugged into a mixing board. That’s what we do to get the sound that we get.
Lee Kantor: Another thing is, if you’re doing an interview, please find a quiet room. You don’t want to be in a place where kids are screaming in the background. Dogs are barking, you know, the landscapers going. Find a spot in your house or wherever you are that’s quiet and away from other people.
Lee Kantor: Another one, another tip that’s important is on your, whatever device you’re using to do the interview, turn off all the notifications. So, you know, when somebody’s calling you on the phone and it’s beeping in, guess what? We’re all hearing that. Or if you’re on your computer and you know these apps are notifying you that you got an email or something, that’s all happening and being recorded so get rid of all the notifications on your device. And also close all the other apps that might be using bandwidth on your device. That’s another thing that happens from time to time. Somebody will have a tab open and they’re on the computer and then it’s just doing something that’s taking a lot of bandwidth and it’s affecting the quality of the voice and the interview.
Lee Kantor: So if you do those things, you’ll find that you’re going to have a better, better result at the end of the day, when it comes to the quality of the audio that you are recording.
Stone Payton: So, two related notes that are products of scar tissue from having done this almost 20 years, one is if you can do it, build in some type of redundancy, right? Get two things doing something because you don’t want to call that guest telling you didn’t get it recorded. And in your recording, if you’re going to air, air on the recording volume being low because you can amp up the volume in post-production. It is very difficult to get distortion if you’ve got too much power. It’s very difficult to get that out of the end product, definitely.
Lee Kantor: Yeah. That’s an important consideration. Especially if you are the interviewer, you definitely want to have redundancy and you want to record at the lowest acceptable volume so that you can make adjustments if you need to. If it’s too high, then there’s not much you can do.
