Production and Website Tools

Podcasting starts with a good microphone. TJ feels very strongly that you should use a dynamic mic for podcasting if at all possible. The reason for this is most podcasters don’t have professional and enclosed recording studios to reduce room noise and solid wall echo. Dynamic mics perform much better in these non-professional environments as they tend to pick up less of the undesirable room noise. As such, TJ uses a Rhode Podcaster on a boom arm so he can stand or sit or whatever, and a shock mount. It’s a bit more expensive than many podcasters use, but TJ goes the extra mile for the listeners.

Joe has invested a good deal of money in microphones over the years as well and has finally found what he feels is the right fit for his voice for the right money. He uses a Blue Yeti microphone.

Other hosts on the network use various microphone setups. While TJ and Joe encourage all the hosts to use the best mics available within budget, they are kind souls and don’t discriminate (too much).

Many techniques can be and are used at various times. For multi-guest shows, Zencastr is often used to allow painless multi-end recording. Sometimes Skype in conjunction with Call Recorder is also used.

TJ and Joe both have a background in digital video and audio editing as professionals. It turns out that this can be very helpful in running a podcast network. Who knew?

Logic Pro is most often employed to fine tune and craft shows that are pleasing to the ears. Although, believe it or not, for episodes that require more marking and story-putting-together skills, TJ usually employs Final Cut Pro X which allows sorting and organizing sound clips and media in a much saner manner than Logic.

Joe is a professional designer. As such, he applied his considerable talents to designing a beautiful website so that the shows not only sound good, but they look good too!

TJ is a professional web developer and he painstakingly wrote all the front end code (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) that makes the site look like what you see. The CMS was also custom written by TJ in PHP with a little light help from the Slim Framework.