06: The Equipment You'll Need to Start a Podcast

Written By Britany Felix
 
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In this episode, I discuss all the equipment and software I recommend using for your podcast.

Not everything mentioned in this episode is a necessity my any means, but each item will help dramatically with the quality and processes.

The links for everything mentioned in this episode are listed below and, while some of them are affiliate links, I never recommend anything I don't personally use or have thoroughly researched.

Special Note: Because I'm human, I did forget to mention one item while recording this episode. You'll need a program called Audacity for solo recordings. It has been included in the links below and will be discussed further when it's time to record your first item.

UPDATE: As of January 2022, I have been using Riverside.fm (linked in the resources section) ever since. However, I have to be honest and say that I’m becoming increasingly more frustrated with the platform as I and a lot of others have been experiencing issues with this platform as well. When it works as it should, it’s the best. If you’re not comfortable rolling the dice, Zoom will be lower quality but does tend to be more reliable.

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Transcript

Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more.

 

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Welcome to Episode Six of podcasting for coaches.

 

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In this episode, I am going to break down the equipment that you need to start your podcast. And this is going to be your actual recording equipment plus your software plus some other services that you're going to need. And then we're also going to talk about sound treatments for your room that you're going to be recording. So to start the equipment that you will need, I touched on it briefly in Episode Five. But today, I'm going to specifically recommend the ATR 2100 microphone. At the time of this recording, it was on sale for like 60 or 70 bucks, I believe. So it's relatively inexpensive microphone, especially when you compare the sound quality to microphones that are quite a bit more expensive. Now, the reason I recommend this microphone is because it is a dynamic microphone, which means that it's not as sensitive as condenser microphones like a Blue Yeti, which if you have researched microphones, you've probably heard of Blue Yeti, I actually advise everyone to stay away from them. If you already have one. That's okay, I actually have found a fantastic YouTube video that shows the proper way to set up and use your blue Yeti microphone because there is absolutely a wrong way to use it. And I'll have that in the show notes for you so that you can take a look at that. But if you have not already purchased your microphone, I do recommend the ATR 2100. And I will have links to everything that I talked about in this episode in the show notes, which you can find by going to podcasting for coaches.com forward slash blog forward slash 06. I know that is an insane link. But the platform that I use to host my website and have my membership area for my clients doesn't allow me to customize URLs, that's a whole other side tangent. Anyways, with this microphone, you are going to have to sit very close to it within like one to three inches. So I want you to be aware of that before you purchase it. If this is something that's going to be an issue for you, you might need to look at something else. If you talk with your hands a lot if you move around a lot. If you cannot train yourself to sit still and sit right directly in front of this microphone, then it may not work however it is going to absolutely be the most forgiving in terms of background noise and just the overall sound of your voice. It does come with a little tripod mic stand that sits on your desk. So if you want to be hunched over the entire time that you're talking, which I did for a very long time on my first podcast, you can keep that but if you don't want to be hunched over, I recommend getting what sometimes called a boom arm or a scissor arm. Basically, it's this contraption that attaches to your desk and then it suspends your microphone right in front of your face. So this means you can actually have your ATR 2100 just inches from your mouth, but you're still sitting up straight, you're not hunched over you can still sit completely comfortably. So it will make it a lot better experience for you. Also with this microphone, if you are going to purchasing it, you absolutely must get a pop filter that is a little foam ball. That's it's actually on the microphone itself. And what that does is it helps prevent the rush of air that comes from your mouth. Whenever you say words like peas or T's or Ks or anything like that that has a hard sound, those are called plosives. And when you say those, there is a puff of air that rushes right into the microphone and it sounds very painful and unpleasant to listen to. So getting a pop filter or sometimes also called a windscreen basically just that foam ball helps remove that a little bit. It doesn't take care of it completely. So you'll still need to train yourself to try and minimize the air that's coming out of your mouth when you say those words. But that's just something you learn as you go. So the boom arms are actually generally pretty cheap. Those are 20 $30 and the pop filter is like a $3 add on when you buy the microphone. Now for the headphones, if you're going to actually be editing the audio yourself if you're going to take care of you know editing, producing, mixing, doing all of the post production work yourself and you're not going to be outsourcing that which we will talk about in a future episode. By the way. I do recommend actually the headphones that I use. I've been editing podcasts professionally for the past two years. These are the headphones that I love. I have a pretty small head with pretty small ears. And I found that either a headphones are just way too big to sit on my head or be

 

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They are way too tight. I have been prone to migraines since I was about four years old. So if I'm going to be editing audio for hours on end, I can have something that's going to give me a headache within the first five minutes. So the headphones that I use, they are over the ear, they completely cover your ear. So they're noise cancelling, you're going to want that if you're editing because it's going to eliminate as much of your room noise as possible while you're editing. So you can really focus on the audio itself. So the headphones that I use are the Sony MDR 7506 model, which I don't expect you to remember that, again, the link will be in the show notes. The last time that I checked, they were about $80. I've had mine for about a year and a half now. And I am not gentle with my equipment by any means. So they have been very durable. For me, I do travel with mine, they fold up compactly. And they come with this nice little pouch. So that's been great. You know, I spent six weeks in Southeast Asia last year, and these headphones went with me everywhere, because I have to work well at your level. So I do highly recommend those. If you are not going to be editing your audio if you're going to outsource that portion of it. And you basically just need headphones so that you can, you know, do a quick spot check of your audio or your guests if you're going to be doing interviews, Apple earbuds or the earbuds that came with whatever phone you have are honestly perfectly fine. For that, you're just going to want to make sure that you are hooking the equipment of the proper way so that your recording devices don't detect the microphone on the earbuds. And we'll get into that later when we talk about recording your first few items. So now moving on, we have the software that you're going to want to have. If you're going to be recording interviews, we need you to have Skype, which is free. However, I do want to point out that we do not want you using the Skype desktop app that comes built into most laptops these days, that app actually does not provide access to the settings that we need to have in order to make sure your calls are the best quality they can be. So instead, what I want you to do is download the desktop version of Skype, which again, the link will be in the show notes. And then we can adjust the settings in there such as volume, how many tracks you're going to have whether it adjusts the volume automatically, which is a huge No no. So you'll really have more control over the whole Skype experience if you use the desktop version. Next, we need a Call Recorder to go along with Skype. Now I will mention that I have tested basically every single Call Recorder out there. Once you start digging into podcasting, you're going to hear all of these programs like Pamela zoom, you might even be familiar with, you know, if you do client calls that way, there are other programs called Zen caster ringer tricast, God gasps, there are so many of them out there. And unfortunately, they are just all not that great. Each and every single one of them has a pretty major issue that makes it just not worth the time and the money in my opinion. Again, I have tried just about everything out there. And they have all either had poor quality or they've been unreliable, or they've been both. So going with Skype and really optimizing it for the absolute best quality is going to be your best route. And I will talk about optimizing Skype in a later episode when it's time to actually do some recording. So the call recorders for Skype that I recommend, if you are a Mac user, I recommend ECAM Call Recorder. And at the time of this recording, it's about $40. And it's a one time fee. If you're a PC user, I actually recommend a multo Call Recorder. And if you don't want the video version, which again, I never ever, ever, ever, ever recommend that you do video on a Skype call, it will severely affect the quality of the call. So if you don't want the video version, a multo is actually free. There's just like a little pop up box that comes up about every 10 or 15 minutes that you just need to click to continue recording. If that box annoys you enough, and you want to get rid of it, it's only $30 to buy the full premium version that does include video, which again, I hope you never use on your podcast when you're recording interviews. But it also gets rid of that little pop up box. So next, if you're going to be conducting interviews, we want to make sure that you have a way to schedule those. And if you are already a coach or consultant if you've been working in your business for a little while, I hope to goodness that you have a scheduling system in place for people to schedule consults with you, or discovery calls, whatever you want to call them. If you don't already, I highly recommend acuity scheduling, I'll have a link in the show notes. They do have a free account if you just want to strictly use it for your podcast and scheduling interviews. However, if you want to use it for everything like I did, at one point, I was actually using acuity for two different podcasts and my business all under the same account, I had to tweak a few things because you can't really customize like the colors and some of the text. But if you generalize it a little bit, it can work for multiple purposes. At the time, my account was only $10. But I'm grandfathered in. Now I believe that same account is $15. And that comes with you know the bells and the whistles. So what that will do is that allow you to put a calendar right on your website so you can send any potential guests of your podcast to that page. They can pick from times that you have allotted. And then you can also ask

 

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Go ahead and ask them some questions. So in this section, you can put things like you know, what's your website address, attach a headshot that you want to use for the episode image. And then you can put some kind of legal statements there saying that you own the rights to the produced media. And I'm going to include those legal statements a little bit later on when it comes time to set all this up. But you're gonna have all of that set right into your Scheduler. And then it will actually email the guest confirmation with whatever you have in that confirmation email. So if you want them to have certain information, like they absolutely must wear headphones, then you can put that right in your confirmation email, and then you can actually set it up so that it sends them a reminder email. And for some of the accounts, you can even set up reminder text. So it's a pretty amazing program. And I absolutely love it, I've been using it for, oh, gosh, maybe two years now, year and a half, somewhere around there, I've lost count at this point. So again, acuity scheduling, to schedule your interviews for your podcast. Next, we want to make sure that you have easy access to all of these files, because audio files are quite large. I do personally use Dropbox, especially if you're going to be working with an editor that you're outsourcing some tasks to having something shared like Dropbox is amazing. Some people choose to use Google Drive, I absolutely despise Google Drive. But that's just a personal preference, it will work as well. And I actually pay $10 for a terabyte of storage on Dropbox each month. And I can tell you that this terabyte of storage, I have all of my client work that I have ever, ever done in this Dropbox. That's a lot of audio files. And I also have all the auto files for the three different podcasts that I have had over the years. And my own personal stuff and a ton of pictures from when we you know, have done some traveling. So a terabyte of storage is an incredible amount for only $10 a month, you will not need any more storage. I actually even with all of that in there am only at about 60% of my storage capacity. So I highly recommend Dropbox, it's super easy to share things back and forth. And if you prefer Google Drive, that will work as well. So another thing that I do want to recommend as far as software goes, is a way to keep track of everything. Especially if you're going to be at the point where you're organized enough to kind of plan ahead for your content. For this podcast here, I have my content planned out like nine months in advance, I know exactly what I'm going to talk about. That doesn't mean that some things may change occasionally, because it probably will, because it's just the way life is. But it is nice to at least have a rough idea to start from. I personally use a program called air table, and I absolutely freaking love it. I use it with all of my clients that will allow me to, and then I use it for my own podcast. And I actually use it to help me keep track of my weekly tasks that I need to complete for my clients. So what it is, is it's an online spreadsheet software system that is like 1000 times better than Excel. So you can attach documents, you can, you know, make comments and tag other people that you've shared the spreadsheet with, you can basically do anything with this thing that you want any kind of data you want to record, you can do that on here, even attaching audio files themselves. So what I use this for, and I'll actually include a screenshot of this exact podcast. So you can see kind of behind the scenes how I have it planned out, I use it to keep track of not only the episodes, I'm going to record the release dates, what I'm going to talk about, but I also keep track of the workflow. So whether I've recorded it, whether I've processed the audio, whether I've sent it to my editor that I outsource the editing for the show to and whether the show notes have been completed. And I also use it for you know the description because my editor writes that and he sends it back to me. So it's kind of my go to for everything about this podcast, and it's all in one location. Some other programs that you could use to help keep track of workflow are things like Asana or Trello. Basecamp is another one that I use with the client. I personally really don't like it, but some people do. Smart sheets is another type of spreadsheet software. So there's a lot of different things that you can use. But again, I recommend every table and it actually is free, so why not use it. So next, we want to talk about some of the other kind of random things that you're going to need to have for your podcast. And that is a hosting service, which is going to be the place where you actually host your audio files that are connected to your RSS feed. So we don't want those stored on your website because that is going to supreme Li slow down your site. It is just going to make it so bogged down and slow because you're storing these incredibly large files, especially if you get to the point where you have you know, a year or twos worth of podcast episodes, that is going to just kill your site. So we want to get those off of your site. I recommend using a hosting service called Lipson. It's hands down the best. I've used blueberry, I've used pod bean, a few different ones with my clients because that's what they use. And even going behind the scenes of these other platforms. I still prefer Lipson and it's still what I use for all of my own podcasts, the plan that I recommend

 

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Is $20 a month. However, when you first start up, because you're going to be going through this launch process, and it may take you a month or two or maybe more, I recommend actually signing up with the $5 per month plan because you're not actually going to be uploading and storing any audio files for a little while. Once you start releasing episodes, then you're going to want to switch to the $20 per month plan because it's going to provide plenty of storage, and is going to give you some advanced stats so that you can really see what's happening with your podcast and where your listeners are coming from. Next, you're going to need a way to tag your audio files with metadata. iTunes actually requires metadata. And do you want to have it anyways, because that's where the information comes from, whenever your listeners download the file to their device to listen offline. So if it's in the podcast app that they're using, and that provides offline listening, there's still going to be all the data there. However, if they download the actual mp3 file and play it in another player, whatever their audio player is on their phone, or their tablet, or even their desktop, it's not going to have any information if you don't put that in the metadata. So the metadata is the actual data that's attached to that file. It's the title, the artwork, the artist, as they call it. So whenever you play a music file on your phone, all of that information that it's displaying comes from the metadata, the song title, the artists name, the album, artwork, copyright, notice lyrics, all of those things are in the metadata. So you're going to need a way to add that to your file. I personally prefer to use a program called ID three editor. It's a one time $15 fee, I have actually transferred this from multiple computers because they've crashed or I've just upgraded. And all I have to do is ask them for a new like code a new key, and they give me one. So I've even been able to put this on multiple computers. And I've only paid $15 one time, you could absolutely abuse that. But obviously, I don't recommend that you do that, because that's just really crappy to do. So this is a super easy program. And it actually lets you save the data. So you don't have to fill in every single field every single time. Now, if you prefer to go the free route, Apple actually has a way for you to add metadata to an audio file inside the desktop version of iTunes. I absolutely hated it when I started off doing this for myself, because I didn't know any better. And that's what I used. And it just was a pain. It's not exactly setup user friendly, you got to go through a lot of steps, you got to deal with being in iTunes, which sometimes runs a little bit slowly. So I recommend getting away from that. But if you are on a shoestring budget to start with, you absolutely can do that. And we'll talk about how to do that a little bit later, when it comes time to process your first audio file. And lastly, I want to talk about sound treatments. So depending on where you are recording, you may need to treat that room, aka make it a little bit better so that the sound is not terrible. If you're recording in a space that has a lot of hard surfaces, hard floors, high ceilings, nothing on the walls, a lot of windows that is going to bounce sound around like crazy, you're going to have a very echoey sound, your voice is gonna sound really hollow, it's gonna sound very distant, it's gonna sound like you're talking in a cave, basically. And that's the exact opposite of what we want. We want your voices down very rich and warm and inviting and like you're right there in the person's ear. So the first thing that we want to do is cover up the hard surfaces. If you have hard floors, we want to put a rug down. If you have nothing on the walls, we want to hang some blankets up. Or you can do mattress foam toppers that you can buy at Walmart or pretty much any kind of superstore. And you can put those on the walls and that's going to absorb sound. So well. If you prefer something that looks a little bit better than mattress and blankets and towels hanging on your walls, you can actually get some acoustic sound panels, those are going to be quite a bit more expensive. But they are an option if you prefer something that looks a little bit better if you're going to leave it up all the time, and also helps if you put a towel down on your desk. If you do have Windows or mirrors, we want to make sure that the blinds are shut or the curtains are shut or there's a towel hanging over the mirror. Because the glass is going to bounce sound around even more than empty walls. Another thing that you can do if you have a particularly echoey room, after you treat the hard surfaces, you can also get what's called a mini sound booth or you can make one. So this is basically a box that your microphone sits inside of and it's lined with foam as well. So that's going to kind of help control your sound a little bit, it's going to keep it from going all over the room it's going to be contained in this box mostly. And then the foam inside that box is going to absorb the sound. I will have a link to a premade one in the show notes. But I'm also going to include some links to some DIY options because honestly, you can just go get a tub and some mattress for home from Walmart or Home Depot or Lowe's and make one of your own for like 20 bucks. And this is something that you can easily put away in a closet when you're finished recording. So it's not something that necessarily has to look pretty. Now if you're going to have a boom arm for your microphone, you're going to need to do

 

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take that into consideration whenever you're getting a mini sound booth, because it's going to need to be tall enough to surround your microphone whenever it is, you know, suspended in front of your face. And it can't be a fully enclosed box, or else the arm itself will actually prevent it from sitting inside. So just a couple of things to consider whenever you are looking at these many sound with options if you need it. Always, always, always do a test recording first, before spending a whole bunch of time or money treating your room. I actually record in a second bedroom, which we use for storage. So while there's nothing on the walls, there is a lot of stuff in this room, we have all of our Christmas decorations and a ton of camping equipment. And my husband's pretty outdoorsy so he has you know a bunch of backpacks and just all kinds of stuff for hiking and mountain biking. And we have some decor that we still haven't hung up. So there's just a bunch of random stuff in this room. And all of that's going to absorb the sound. And I also make sure that I shut my blinds whenever I record. So I actually don't have this room really treated because all of the random junk in it treats it for me. So that wraps up basically every piece of equipment and software that you are going to need to get your podcast started. Some of these things are optional. Of course, like the advanced headphones if you're not going to be editing it yourself, the items for the room treatment you may not need at all depending on what you have, and some of the software like acuity or air table or things that you absolutely don't need to start but I do highly recommend that they will make things easier. One last reminder that everything I mentioned today will be in the show notes for this episode at podcasting for coaches forward slash blog forward slash 06. Or you can just go to podcasting for coaches comm and click the header that says podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I will see you back here next week, where we're going to dive more into determining the topic of your podcast. So what exactly are you actually going to talk about? Have a fantastic week.

 

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And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business, head on over to podcasting for coaches.com where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly, thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you back here for the next episode.

 
Britany Felix
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07: Determining the Topic of Your Podcast
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05: The Cost of Starting and Maintaining a Podcast for Your Coaching or Consulting Business