P’s). By getting up close, you can turn down the input volume and reduce ambient noise. If you are not using a limiter (which protects your audio from peaking) your average peak should be around -12db to be safe. You can always increase the volume a little if you peak, but it usually sounds bad and is difficult to fix. On the other hand, if you make your recording too soft, you will mix in too much of what is often referred to as the “noise floor,” the spectrum that all the other sounds inhabit—generally sounds you don’t want.
Recording Location
You also must consider your location. If I’m looking at a new location to record, I will often hang out there for 30 to 60 minutes to hear what kind of ambient sounds occur. People, footsteps, cars, water pipes, and air conditioning can all find their way into your recording if you’re not careful. You can’t get rid of all of them, and the fewer you have the easier it will be to get a clean recording. Room liveliness is also a consideration. Clap or make a clicking sound in a room you are considering. If you hear an echo, your mic will too. If you don’t have a choice of location, consider mics that have a high level of off-axis rejection such as the SM58 and PR 40—they will ignore much of the ambient sound around you. (We record on the show floor at Macworld Conference & Expo with SM58 mics, and the speakers come through clearly.)
Remote Recording
Of course, recording locally is only one option. Oftentimes, you might have one or more people in different parts of the country or different parts of the world. How do you bring them all together? The easiest way to do this is via Skype using Ecamm Network’s $15 Call Recorder. With it, you record yourself and everyone else on Skype to a QuickTime file. We regularly tie together people from around the world using this combination. If, however, you don’t have enough bandwidth to do this effectively, you have two options. You can use a box such as JK Audio’s $270 Inline Patch, which lets you record phone calls directly. Or, you can create what is called a double-ender—essentially everyone recording themselves locally and then uploading the files to you to mix together later. Double-enders tend to produce higher quality audio but are more work and more prone to error—if a person doesn’t properly record himself or upload the file, your podcast is in trouble. In the end, we’ve decided that, with a good connection, Skype can provide acceptable quality. The key is to make sure that the host is local and sounds good.
In general, it is easiest to either record everyone locally or everyone remotely. Mixing and matching is doable but it takes a little more thinking. What you need to do is send the local guests’ output to the remote guests. Simple right? Here’s the rub: if you send the raw output back to Skype, your remote participants will hear themselves. So, how do you send the only the local folks’ output to the Skype folks while ignoring the Skype audio, but only for the remote folks? We call this a mix-minus, which means the mix minus the remotes. To set up a mix-minus, you use the auxiliary out of your mixer—essentially a separate track that you have independent control over. Making changes here won’t affect the final mix. So, you can turn the Skype track down in the auxiliary but leave it at full volume for the main mix. The people on Skype hear everyone in the office but not themselves while you are still recording everyone, everywhere.
Post-Processing
So now you that have your raw mix, the next step is to clean it up. There are many options, but let’s focus on the
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