Hello, upcoming guest! đź‘‹ We're excited to have you on the show.
The Muse podcast puts a focus on audio quality and overall production value. We want you and your ideas to come through bright, bold, and beautiful for our listeners. ✨
For that reason we ask you do a little bit of prep, as follows.
Any pro or semi-pro mic designed for musicians (e.g. vocal mic that a singer in a band might use to record or perform live) OR mic marketed for podcasting is likely to do the job.
Examples: Rode NT, Rode podcaster, Blue Yeti
In the past we've had guests borrow one from a friend, record from a music studio, or dig one out of the closet from their singing days. If you can't seem to find one, let us know and we can locate a loaner for you.
The pros use over-ear headphones plugged into the monitor port on their mic. Feel free to do that, but it's also fine to use AirPods or other standard earbuds or headphones plugged into your computer. Just avoid your mic picking up the conversation by (for example) having the audio come from your computer's speaker.
Pro mics have a fairly small area of sound capture, so you want to be fairly close and—most importantly—hold a steady distance to the mic. This is harder than it sounds, since our habit in normal conversation is to move our heads around a lot when talking.
It's good to find a comfortable distance at the start of recording. Ideal is one hands-breadth away (if you have a pop filter) or two hands-breadths away (with no pop filter). If you’re using a stand mic like the Blue Yeti, you might want to put it on a stack of books under it to bring it close enough.
The Complete Guide to Microphone Technique for Podcasters
Adam will send you a shared document with some bullet points that we might want to talk about. Please add your thoughts, links you think might be relevant, etc.
We won’t necessarily stick to any agenda or cover everything, the document is just fodder to make sure we have plenty to talk about.
We'll send you a link to a Riverside.fm recording room, which you can connect to like Zoom or other videoconference software via your browser. Make sure to click “I’m using headphones” on the opening screen.
Adam will ask you to pronounce your full name (or handle, or both) and affiliation (if any).
We do a couple minutes of chitchat before diving into the topic. For example an interesting hobby you have or something funny that happened in your day recently.