Ep. 15 - The In-Person Metasode
The missing human connection element
👉 Listen to Metacast: Apple, Spotify, CastBox, Google, YouTube
We recorded this episode when I was visiting Arnab in Vancouver. I flew to Seattle for a few days and I thought why not drive a couple of hours north and record something in-person?
I packed a bunch of gear into my suitcase and flew across the country. I was certain I’d get stopped by TSA but here in Ft. Lauderdale TSA now have new X-Ray machines that look like spaceships. I peeked at the monitors and saw them viewing the contents of my bag (two laptops and a bunch of electronics and wires) in 3D.
It looked cool and they just let me through. Oh, and they never asked to “take any electronic devices larger than a phone out of your bag.” That’s huge. As a next step, hopefully we’ll no longer need to take our shoes off.
This was our first face to face recording and boy did it make a difference! When you record in person, you can feel the energy moving in the room. It’s just a different experience altogether. It’s electric!
Without further ado, enjoy this wonderful sparkle of a human connection!
Key takeaways
In-person recording has a very different dynamic. You feel the natural flow, it’s incredible. There are no interruptions and no weirdness that come with online calls. We started to appreciate our human connection a lot more after doing an in-person recording.
Never put your laptop to your laps when recording. There was a lot of noise coming from Justin’s side in our previous episode. Part of the problem was that he was holding his laptop and the mic on his laps and all his movements made scratchy noises. Our sound engineer Misha fixed it but it was a lot of extra work.
Instagram Reels for your podcast work better with captions. It’s cool to publish a 1 minute reel of you and your guests talking on Instagram as a reel. It works even better if you add automatically generated captions, so that people can also read what you’re saying.
Don’t forget to actually record video for a video podcast [facepalm]. We didn’t check what subscription we had for SquadCast when we started the session. Turns out, we had an audio-only plan, so all of our elaborate video setup (see picture) was for nothing!
Show notes
Podcasts
Gear
Shure MV7 — a dynamic mic with a direct USB interface.
Shure SM58 — an indestructible and fairly cheap cardioid vocal mic that is widely used for live concerts. It’s also good for podcasts. Arnab recorded this episode with an SM58.
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 — a nice-looking and powerful yet inexpensive audio interface for plugging in your XLR mic (or any other music instrument) and getting digitized output into your computer via USB.
Blue Yeti — a great starter mic for podcasters. This is the only Arnab’s episode so far that’s NOT using a Blue Yeti mic :)
Software
Winamp — a wildly popular mp3 player from late 90s-early 2000s, the hero of our previous episode.
SquadCast.fm — a tool for recording audio and video podcasts.
Descript — a tool that can help you edit audio similar to editing text in a word processor. We use it for our editing.
Reaper — a great DAW that only costs $60 for a home or small business license. Also the hero of our previous episode.
Alfred — a productivity app for MacOS.
Books
Masters of Doom by David Kushner
Dog Man by Dav Pilkey
People
Post-production
This episode was produced by Mike Semashko
Get in touch
We’d love to hear from you! Arnab is a Twitter guy and I’m on Instagram. Use the method that works best for you!
Email: hello@metacastpodcast.com (both of us get it)
Arnab’s Twitter: @or9ob
Ilya’s Instagram: @podcasthacks
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Bye for now.