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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ryan understand what microphone and gear he should use for recording a high quality sounding podcast.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire
- John’s last expert QA
- Logitech ClearChat – Starter microphone, 7/10 sound, great value
- Audiotechinica ATR 2100 – 8.5/10 sound quality, all you need
- Heil PR40 – 9.5 /10 sound quality, go pro
- Presonus Firestudio Mixer – John’s Mixer
- Adobe Creative Cloud – Adobe tools including photoshop and illustrator
- Ecamm Call Recorder – Used to record Skype calls on a MAC
- Pamela Recorder – Record Skype calls on a PC
- Scarlett2i2 – Shane & Jocelyn’s Mixer (to hook up 2 mics)
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas of the ‘Entrepreneur on Fire’ podcast and entrepreneuronfire.com.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: Hey y’all, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Expert Q&A podcast; excited to bring in another expert to answer your questions about online business. We do not have the only way to be successful online. Love to introduce you to other perspectives from different experts in different fields especially when you send us questions that we have no clue of what the answer is. So we’d like to bring people on and let them know. We would love to welcome back today, the one and only, John Lee Dumas. John was on about a month ago and he is back again today to answer another audience question from the Flipped Lifestyle community. John, welcome back man!
JOHN: My friends, I am still on fire.
SHANE: You are always on fire. You’re like the everlasting flame; you know what I’m saying?
JOHN: I love it. The Olympic torch.
SHANE: That’s right, you’re the Olympic torch of online business. All right Jocelyn, what’s our question for John today?
JOCELYN: All right, today’s question is from Ryan and I’m not sure how to say his last name, Belolo, maybe, and this is via Twitter. It says, “Hey guys, do you each use your own microphone for your podcast? What does your setup look like and what is the best microphone and in your opinion, the best way to hook up two microphones to one computer? I can’t figure it out.”
SHANE: And we wanted to bring John on to answer this specific question ‘cause Jocelyn and I have the least knowledge of – we’re barely on the podcast ourselves right now, but John Lee Dumas knows a thing or two about podcasting. So John, how does that work man? What’s your set up look like and how do you get two people talking in the same place?
JOHN: Well, whatever you all the doing, the audio sounds amazing. I give it the thumbs up.
SHANE: There we go.
JOHN: Let me break it down microphone wise. I have three mic recommendations starting at the low, going to a medium and then ending at a high cost. The low cost is the Logitech ClearChat. It’s a 29-dollar headset microphone, USB, plugs into any USB port and you can get it on Amazon. It’ll be free shipping with Prime in two days. 29 dollars. It’ll take your audio from a two, which is what most people do and talk at their computer and let the crappy microphone pick it up to, a seven. So you are actually going from a two to a seven just with 29 dollars. The medium cost is the ATR2100 which is twice the price but still a very affordable, 60 dollars.
SHANE: And that’s what we have; we both are talking on the 2100 right now actually.
JOHN: And you can hear how amazing that sounds ‘cause this is a really great quality mic and to be completely honest, it’s my number one recommended microphone when you combine cost and quality. You just can’t beat it for 60 dollars. It’s the mic that I recommend to everybody within podcaster’s paradise because there’s no reason to go any higher than that until you are way down the road, and monetizing at a high level. There’s just no real reason. That will take you from a seven, which is the Logitech, to an 8.5 which, for what we do with the podcasting world, it’s really as high as you need to be because to go above an 8.5, there’s really – nobody is gonna be able to hear unless they have this incredibly noise-cancelling Bose headphones etcetera. There’s just no point however, I’m a little crazy and I did go to that high-level which is the Heil PR40. It’s a dynamic microphone as all of these are by the way. All three of these are dynamic and I’ll get into that in one second but the Heil PR40 is 327 dollars. It’s a broadcast quality mic. I’m speaking into it right now. It takes you to a 9.8. Again, maybe three people in the world actually notice the difference so it’s just not that big a deal. But you know, I just decided to go high level from day one. That was just my mentality. If I could do it again, I’d be at the ATR2100. Now, I was also asked by Ryan like what’s the setup that we have and I’m assuming he’s asking Kate and I. Kate has the ATR2100 in her office; now, we made over 430,000 dollars last month, believe me, we could afford the Heil PR40 if it was worth it but it’s not. We got Kate the ATR2100 because it is the best microphone cost and quality. That’s my number-one recommendation. So she just has the ATR2100 on a boom arm, which if you go to Amazon, you’ll see like ‘Customers also bought’, you’ll see the boom arm and it just is hanging out there on her desk with a little pop filter and she speaks right into it and it plugs USB into her MacBook Air. Now, myself, I have the Heil PR40 on a boom arm as well, with a shock mount and again, this is something like if you hit the mic by accident, it kind of absorbs some of it. It doesn’t do a great job to be honest and a pop filter as well. Mine plugs into a PreSonus FireStudio mixer ‘cause the Heil PR40 is an XLR, not a USB. So I’m hooking it into my PreSonus FireStudio mixer and then taking a firewire out of that into the Mac computer. Sounds a little confusing, it’s really not, it’s just a couple of chords; one cord running into a mixer, one firewire running into my Mac Pro. And I have all of this broken down at eofire.com/equipments.
SHANE: Awesome.
JOHN: You can see all of this stuff that we are talking about; links to Amazon and all that stuff, it’s right there and the last question really here was what’s the best way to hook up two mics to one computer. That’s a really good question, really easy answer; if I was using my setup, I would honestly just be having another XLR that would be hooking into the ‘Channel two’ of my mixer and then running it into my computer. But if I had the ATR2100, almost every computer that was created in the last three or four years has more than one USB port and you can just plug both those into the USB ports and you’re off to the races. We can get a little bit into recording and editing software, because that’s what’s going to pick up these microphones once you plug it into the computer but basically the reality is, I use Adobe Audition. That’s 20 dollars and you get Adobe Creative Cloud; there’s Audacity for free, and Garage Bands, all of these work. If you just want to record Skype calls, Ecamm call recorder or Pamela if you are on a PC. That will be picking up these two mics that you are plugging in and then you’re gonna be able to go from there.
SHANE: Cool.
JOHN: So the last thing I really want to share here at the end is, I did mention a couple of times that these microphones that I recommend are all dynamic. There’s two basic kinds of mics: dynamic and condenser. I love the dynamic because you are supposed to be right up on it, your nose is basically pressing against the pop filter. It picks up just your sound and not really the sound surrounding you. So you don’t have that echoey, tinny sound that you get with some microphones. And those microphones, if you are hearing that, it’s likely because they are a condenser which will be your Blue Yeti, your Blue Snowball, those are great microphones. I actually use personally, a Blue Yeti for my webinars because I can stand back, I can move around, I can show things and the audio quality is really good. But for an audio-only podcast, stick with dynamic; go with the Logitech, ATR2100 or the Heil PR40.
SHANE: And there’s another thing that we just discovered; those mixer boards can be really confusing to people ‘cause they got a lot of knobs on them and we just actually hit up Guitar Center the other day and we were like, ‘Give us the simplest thing you’ve got’ because we wanted to have something for this question and we found a mixer called the Scarlett2i2 and it literally has two knobs and two XLR inputs –
JOHN: Oh wow.
SHANE: – and you can plug it in and you can control your gain and you can listen to it on that mixer board and it’s the simplest way we’ve ever found to just bam, plug two mics in, plug it in and you’re good to go. Hey, I got one question to follow up.
JOHN: Sure.
SHANE: If you and Kate are on a podcast, does she just talk from her room and you Skype her and get it on the three-way, or do you drag her in and plug her into the mixer board?
JOHN: No. So I’ll call our first guest and then I’ll just go down to Kate, she’s waiting on Skype in her back-office and I’ll click ‘Add to call’, she comes in and then both her and my guest are on track two, I’m on track one –
SHANE: Love it.
JOHN: – and the recording goes just like that. So she has total control over everything that she does and there really is one more thing that I definitely do want to mention when it comes to all of this is, I kind of sound like I know what I’m talking about when it comes to audio but I only know what I know, and that’s a pretty narrow vertical. Like when I wanted to have this setup created, I actually went on Craig’s List and posted, you know, ‘AdobeAudition/Audio/Mac expert’ that was like the title and I had a guy, a local guy come over, set up all of my gear and I said, ‘Just show me the knobs that I touch and the knobs that I don’t’. And I literally have not touched my setup since that. I mean, my cleaners come over and I say, ‘Do not clean the mixer ‘cause if you adjust any of those knobs, I have no idea –’
SHANE: My business will burn to the ground. Stop.
JOHN: Yeah, literally. You’ll be fired because I won’t be making any money.
SHANE: Love it.
JOHN: And so, I just wanted to make it clear that like, it sounds like I know what I’m talking about but I only know what I know, which is very limited and it’s really just doing what Shane and Jocelyn said, getting the simple version or, you know, doing what I did, getting somebody local which was 20 bucks an hour and now I have this guy. If anything happens, he can come over and fix things. So, it’s really easy to actually get this set up even though it doesn’t sound so. It’s just taking that step forward.
SHANE: That’s awesome, man. Great answer.
JOCELYN: Absolutely. I know Ryan will be thrilled with that answer. Thank you so much for your insights on that.
JOHN: Yeah, rock on right.
JOCELYN: All right, well, John, that is all the time we have for today’s question but we want to thank our guest and John Lee Dumas for being on the show. Until next time, take action, flip your life.
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JessicaLillis says
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