Podcast Gear and Setup

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the how to start a podcast series. I'm Craig Hewitt from Castos. In this video, we're going to talk about Gear, everyone's favorite topic. And I am super excited to share the gear that I use and how I think about creating great podcast content and the gear that goes behind it. So gear is definitely the sexy topic. There's this expression, chocolate broccoli, right? And we've covered the broccoli, right? Talking about ideal listener Persona and story and narrative and format. All the foundational elements that you have to have to create a really great podcast. Now we get to have the chocolate and talk about gear. So I'll just talk about what I have around me because I think I have a pretty good setup. The first is microphone. I have a Samsung Q two U, and links will be in the description for everything that I mentioned. Samsung Q two U is a USB mic, plugs right into my computer and is just amazing. It's a very forgiving mic. There are probably slightly better quality mics out there on the market, but for kind of beginners to advanced intermediate podcasters, a microphone like this will do you plenty good and create really great sound while also being super easy to use, doesn't require any additional gear or hardware, and creates really great sound. The next is my background behind me, especially as video podcasting has become more popular. You gotta do video, right? Don't start a podcast today if you're not doing video. And it has to look kind of nice. My office here at home is pretty small, and so this is a really great room for me to record in. Speaking of rooms, the thing you don't want is think about like a conference room in an office building, right? You have glass walls, you have this big table. There's hardwood or tile floors. All of these hard surfaces for sounds to reverberate off of. My office here has built in bookshelves on both sides. I have a carpet on the floor. I have drapes over the windows. And it's just a pretty small room, so it sounds really great in here. So that's what you're going for. But the backdrop here is important, too. You want something really nice looking. And the kind of trinity here, if you will, is a bookshelf, a lamp, and a light. And I have all three of those behind me. I have an accent light that gives some color to. And I think this is a pretty good thing to shoot for. So you can be a little creative, you can be a little artistic, have it defined, kind of who you are. There are some that have neon lights back there. I like those as well. But I'll let you kind of deviate from this as you would like. But this is probably a pretty good starting point. Okay, the next is the camera that I'm using. I'm going to give two different suggestions here. One is any kind of like digital SLR or mirrorless camera, like a Canon M 50 mark. Two, these are really, really great. Super high quality shoot, 4k video. They're amazing. They are a little more technical setup to get connected to your computer to sync with the audio. So if you already have one of these, it's great. I will say I'm not using the Canon camera today. It's sitting right over there on the counter because it's just too much to manage. I'm on Zoom and Google Meets calls all day. I'm recording content like this and for me a really good webcam is a better solution. And for that I'm using the Insta 360 link and it's really great. It has a gimbal arm on it so it can move around. It has some software on the computer so I can adjust like the location and the hue and the saturation and I just really like it. It's just one camera for me to mess with. I don't have to flip back and forth between like a digital SLR or a mirrorless camera and a regular webcam. And the last thing is lighting. Controlling the lighting is probably the biggest thing with video. I have elgato key lights on either side of my desk, kind of right behind my monitor. So they're pointing right at me from slightly different angles, probably about like a 30 degree angle. And this is really great just for kind of illuminating both sides of my face. There's not a whole lot of shadowing and it works pretty well. So that's a brief overview of gear. The one thing I will say is you have to learn how to use the gear correctly. So with video, kind of positioning you as the person at the right point. There's this rule of thirds with video and you want your eyes to be about at the top third and you to be centered in the shot. And with a microphone, you want to be pretty close to the microphone. I'm about this far away from the microphone right now, slightly from the bottom, but the microphone is pointing at my mouth. Really important for kind of the pickup patterns of a modern microphone. That is a very brief explanation of podcast gear. We have more information on our YouTube channel and on our blog. Head to castos.com if you want to learn more about what we do as a podcast hosting platform, and in the next video, we're going to talk through how to create beautiful cover art for your show.

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