If you plan on doing any talking at all in your podcast a microphone is definitely a must. While you might have some crappy old thing lying around (or perhaps a computer with a microphone of it’s own), you will find that a proper microphone increases the quality drastically. For podcasting, I would say that you basically have two choices: a condenser microphone or a dynamic microphone.
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Ducking is an effect often used by DJs and in all kinds of broadcasting. It’s often achieved by the use of side-chain compression. Side-chaining is when you use the dynamic levels of one source to control the compression of your signal. It’s best described in example, for instance, it’s common to use this for the bass and kick drum. Compressing (thus lowering the levels) the bass when the kick drum enters to have them both fit together.

There are other ways to use side-chaining, but in this post we’re going to explore the above principle, usually called “ducking”. We won’t talk about kick drums and basses however. Ducking can be used to lower the music whenever your voice is present on another track. Recognize that? Used in countless radio shows.
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Yesterday I had to record some spoken word in a rather noisy small room. The noise was mostly from computers and the like. Because of this I picked a dynamic microphone (a Shure SM58) instead of a condenser and thought that if I just pointed it away from the source of the noise it would be all fine. Actually it was. I got a decent signal in, and while I’m sure some very low noise was picked, it didn’t really bother me. What did bother me though, was that the speech came out rather “spitty”. What did I do? I placed a cap right over the mic! You know, one of these typical wooly winter things. Worked great…

Just a quick post to say that the next part on digital file formats is now up on Broadcast Engineering.

Broadcast Engineering has an article on digital file-formats that might be of interest to some.

So you’ve got your microphone hooked up to your computer, it receives sound and you have found the record button. However, when you try to record your voice it just doesn’t sound good. What’s the problem? Today I’m going to discuss some general techniques for recording through a microphone. I’ll follow up this post at a later point with a post on how to process the recording.
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During the coming weeks we will be talking a lot about various effects that we can process our audio with. If we choose to work in an entirely digital environment this will be achieved by using plug-ins. A plug-in (sometimes spelled plugin) is sort of an application that works inside your other application. Like an extension, or an add-on if you will, to your main application. When working with audio, and mixing specifically, plug-ins is a big deal. They let you do things that your application normally won’t. More →