[music]You are listening to Digital Podcaster.My name is Dylan Schmidt, your host.I've said that like 100 plus times now.I don't know how else to introduce this podcast.Today, on this little episode here,do a lot of mini episodes lately,I want to talk with you about soundproofing your room,recording space. Many of us record virtually. We do interviews on things like Riverside or Zoom.I speak with more people that do virtual interviews than do in-person interviews. And so I thought it would be good since I'm also, if you listen to the last episode, just recently moved into a new office space here or a new house, my office space in my house, and I'm getting it set up for a recording podcast and making content. And I thought it might be helpful to walk through how I'm approaching making my space sound better because it's something a lot of people think about and then maybe don't know how to approach. It can be confusing like all things podcasting. You can go down the rabbit hole. So we'll kind of go down the rabbit hole today and hopefully by the end of it you feel confident that your space will sound the best. So coming into my office I'm going to describe what it is like in here. We have hardwood floors. I have two windows, well four windows total but two of the walls are windows. I have a ceiling fan. I have a closet that has a mirror on the closet doors like they're two rolling doors. That's it. It's just a blank space.What you would notice about this space if you walked in and you clapped is it has a really high kind of hollow sound because the room is not super big. It's not like the sound travels for very far but if we were to just picture the sound for a minute the sound is just bouncing off all of of the different walls, right?It's just pinging around.If we were to visually look at the sound waves happening,which we can't see, but we can hear it.And so the sound is not ideal for recording a podcast because it'll sound like exactly like what we're in,which is a empty box.So how do we fix that?Most people are familiar with different like soundproofing type things that you put on the walls.You see in recording studios, there's like foam on the walls.There's all sorts of different things.And we can even get into a little bit about soundproofing, sound treatment.There's differences in that as well.When we look at this space, we don't necessarily need to worry so much about noise, probably leaving the room.It's not like we're bringing in a four piece band in here and there's going to be drums and we need to contain the sound of this room, we're more concerned about the sound in the room itself.And then we also want to be mindful of not letting a bunch of external noise in.So if the neighbor's dog barks, it's not a big deal for in the middle of recording and we get thrown off and all that, which, you know, we can only control external circumstances so much.We have a lot more control over what's inside the room.And I think that's the best place to start for most podcasters is look at inside your room.What are the different variables you can control around the noise?So for this office, I was looking, I'm like, okay, first things first.I want to make it look good.I want it to sound good, but I am equally as invested in it looking good for video content as I do want it to sound good.I kind of value those the same.So I have to make a little bit of sacrifices on the sound because, you know, I'm not going to be recording in my closet.I'm doing video content.I want the backdrop to look good.If you're watching this on video, you would see there's a orange couch behind me and you see just this black spot.That's my dog.Wednesday Adams.You know, she's helping with the noise right now.Uh, probably also making noise.Cause I hear her snoring.I'm not sure if you can hear that now she stopped snoring as she gets quiet.Um, so yeah, I want it to like look and sound good.So what I did and thinking this through is I need stuff.I can't control the noise with no objects in the room and objects help us dampen the noise.If you've ever seen a show or an episode of the show hoarders,they just got so much stuff.It's sad because it's a huge problem and it's like life threatening, but.Just go to the extreme with me for a minute.You look at an episode of hoarders and you see all this stuff in there.If you were to like record a podcast episode in there, it's similar in a way to like a closet because the sound dies pretty quick, it doesn't have much to bounce off of because there's so many objects.So it's, it's not peeing back and forth off the walls.This is a simple way to look at it.That's an extreme examples.If you had a bunch of stuff in your office, the sound is not going to travel as much.Now, what people will do and the mistake they make is they'll go into an office space like this, and then they'll go on Amazon and they'll buy some like soundproof foam that is targeted towards podcasters.And then they'll put that on the wall and they'll call it a day.And they're like, well, I got the soundproof.But that's not that much.Like the soundproof is usually not that thick.And if you're not covering your whole wall with it, it's not doing much, like you're not going to see that much of a difference.So my thought was I just want objects in here.So I just started putting the things that I normally would put in my office.I put my desk, I put all my computer stuff.I have some books and then I started designing it.So I'm like, I want a couch.I want to love seat in my office.I got a cool vintage record player.I need a spot for my books and some other electronics, like other microphones that I have.So I needed like a shelf for that.So I got that and I started putting up my lights and then I got a rug and all of these things are contributing to a better sounding office.So I could have gone the foam route where I just put up some like foam, but the difference between hanging up like a bunch of vinyl records that I really like versus thin foam from Amazon or something is not super significant.If I was to do a blind hearing test, you wouldn't really be able to hear the difference between the two.And a big part of that is also because of the microphone I'm using.I'm using a dynamic microphone.This is a Shure SM7B.Some other examples of dynamic microphones are the Samson Q2U or the Shure MV7 or the Rode PodMic, just to name a few.The Shure SM58, the Shure SM57.These are examples of dynamic microphones, which to put it simply, it doesn't pick up a lot of noise once you move further away from the microphone.You got to be a little bit closer to the microphone for it to really pick you up.And so that's where my mindset is around.It is like filling the office with stuff and I want it to look good.And then from there, dialing in things of what I have my microphone plugged into.And that is the audio processing part.Currently right now I have my Shure SM7B plugged into a Rodecaster from the company Rode.It's a Rodecaster Duo which just recently came out.And on there, there is actually just a Shure SM7B setting.It's nothing crazy.They have multiple processing kind of presets you can choose on there.They have a neutral, there's a podcast studio one, and a broadcast one.Right now you are hearing the broadcast one.If I was to change it over, this is like what the podcast studio one sounds like.This is what the neutral preset sounds like.I'm enjoying the broadcast one.I think it sounds good.This audio processing does quite a bit actually.So there's a compressor, so it keeps my voice, if I drift away from the microphone, it keeps things even a bit.There is a noise gate and then it's also making my voice just sound a little better, really like a little polish, if you will, on it.It didn't take an engineer degree to figure out how to make that because again, I'm just using the preset, but I could go in there and tweak it more.Probably could just been busy moving.So there's a lot of fine tuning you can do to it, but at its core, really just using one of the presets on there.Now there's other things out there that you can use and tweak and things like that.If you've listened and heard me in the past, talk about the Focusrite Vocaster.There's the Vocaster one, there's the Vocaster two.of those, they're very similar.Just one has two microphone inputs.The other has one microphone input, but you plug your microphone into that.And then that goes into your computer via USB, plug your microphone in via XLR.And then USB from the vocaster to your computer.When you have that plugged into your computer, you can download,it's called the vocaster hub.And then you can change the settings in there to fine tune, similar to what I was just saying here.But they also have presets built into the Vocaster hub that you can use and that will help block out certain external noises.I know people will want to record in unique spaces and I think that's great.I enjoy recording my podcast sometimes away from the desk.It just feels because I'm always at the desk working and so just not being at the desk and then recording a podcast just puts me in a, in a different creative spot.But for the most part, I just record here because I have everything plugged in.It's easy for me to turn on the camera and go.For interviews, it can't be beat for myself because it's just simply the easiest setup I can do here.As far as I've got everything dialed in, everything's right here.Take all this into consideration and then when you go into,you know, your kitchen or your living room, the noise is going to bounce around more.And that's important to know and think about where you're recording.Now, having outside noise isn't always a bad thing.Recording in, say, somewhere like your kitchen where there's going to be noise bouncing around,That's not ideal because that's not adding anything to what you're saying,unless you're talking about kitchens and it's really painting the, you know, a scene for the kitchens because it sounds like what a kitchen should sound like.But the other side of things, if you're recording, say outside at like a park,for example, and there's birds and maybe there's some light ambient noise.I think that can be an addition to the podcast.If you also address the fact like, Hey, I'm recording this in the park.I think that's something that would help the podcast not detract from it.And so I would encourage you to lean into certain ambient noises when it would enhance the listening experience, not when it would detract.So take all those things into consideration to give your listeners the best listening experience that you can give them.All right.I hope this helped.I hope you feel like you're walking away with knowing way more than what you came into, even though at its very core, I understand it's a very basic fill up the room with objects and that will help dampen the noise.The more objects the better books things like that basically any objects. Yes, you know books will help Detract the noise better than like metal objects, but it's okay metal objects are better than no objects, you know So don't worry too much about the quality of objects just objects will help and that's all I got for you today I will catch you in the next episode. I hope you're doing great. Talk to you soon