How We Record Podcast Episodes

With Sam in Chicago and me (Steve) in the San Francisco Bay area, we use Skype to connect for our podcast episode recordings.

Sam uses a Rode Podcaster USB mic on his end. Since I do the recording, I need a fancier setup on my end.

My microphone is a Heil PR-40 and it’s connected to a mixer.

After reading a recommendation from a podcaster named Dan Blank, who had done a lot of research, I decided on the Allen & Heath ZED-10 mixer. It’s got a relatively small footprint, an all-important USB connector and it’s built like a Sherman tank.

I’ve tried several different configurations with the ZED-10, but after some trial and error, I settled on the one described in the following video:

By recording Sam’s voice and my voice to separate channels on the Zoom H4n digital recorder, it’s easy to get the voices to more or less the same level in Adobe Audition, which is what I use to produce the audio.

With separate channels, I can also apply different effects to Sam’s voice than to mine, since our voices are very different. Plus, if one of us coughs, sneezes, sniffs or snorts, it’s a lot easier to remove these types of extraneous sounds when the tracks are completely separate.

This video shows how sound clips are inserted into the mix: