Best Practice for Recording and Producing Podcasts from Home (2021 Edition)
Best practices and tips to get “studio sound” from home.
The days of “excuse how I sound, I’m working from home” are gone. Podcasts, radio, and even TV are now being recorded from home. This doesn’t mean that dedicated studios are by any means redundant, but in-home recordings are now a widely-accepted option, especially when done well.
And whether or not you’re going live to the world or just catching up with friends, bringing recording-quality to your meetings and video calls will most certainly up your game.
Check out the rest of this blog post for best practises and insights around:
- Getting great sound using the right tools and in the right space
- The benefits of giving yourself some space — both within your home and from your house-mates, to improve the quality of your audio and ensure a distraction-free recording session
- How Omny can help you; from getting your levels just right, to creating audiograms that help put a face to the voice, and more
The right tools… in the right shed?
After an initial run on microphones in the early days of the work from home exodus, manufacturers quickly adapted to the increase in demand with professionals and executives at all levels working from home and needing the proper equipment to do so during the pandemic.
For example, in October 2020, Shure announced the launch of its new MV5C Home Office Microphone, which provides optimal audio quality by prioritizing the user’s voice and not the environment.
So, does that mean the days of ugly acoustic foam or intrepid podcasters recording from their closets are behind us? If mics are doing a great job of making users sound professional, does recording location even matter?
The short answer is, yes. When recording a podcast from home, you still want to be thoughtful about where you record in an effort to eliminate echoes and avoid ‘popped P’s’ (record in a carpeted room, employ good mic techniques, etc.). But more important than the sound in your room is keeping out as much noise from the wider world as you can. If you’re under an airport approach path, our condolences.
If we boil down our recommendations to the simplest to set-up, it would be a decent mic and a boom arm (or something similar). The boom arm ensures that the mic can be placed at an angle from your face, so you are speaking across to it as opposed to straight into it — ensuring a clear and crisp sound.
Get some space
Even in a hermetically-sealed, soundproof closet, your family knows you’re there, just behind the door. Like Johnny in The Shining, if they want to come and get you, they will.
Consider going beyond acoustic treatments to adding physical distance. So if possible go beyond acoustic treatment to adding physical distance. A garage, a shed, or an entirely separate structure from your home will allow you to acoustically treat the space while giving you a mental calm that only a lack of proximity to imminent disruption can provide.
If Marc Maron’s garage was good enough to host President Obama, just think what you could do in your own podshed!
Record anyone! Remotely!
What? The President of the United States won’t come to your podcast garage? Ah well, maybe they’ll do a remote recording from the comfort of their own home (read: mansion). They may even be wearing pants.
Remote recording tools have definitely had their moment, and a few options have really shone through. Sorry, we don’t mean you, Zoom.
Our recommendation for hassle-free, high-quality remote recording? Riverside.fm. Audio, separately tracked, in high quality .wav or ready to rock .mp3 formats. Let’s not forget the HD video as well, for those sweet promo clips.
After recording from your delightfully professional home space with your guest in their own ”at-home” situation, you’re ready to create a great sounding podcast!
Be your own audio engineer
Remote recording tools have also pushed forward the field of audio optimization. But we know that most at-home podcasters don’t know their LUFS from their luftballons, and the dirty secret is that most people in the radio industry, outside the audio wizards, don’t either.
But volume normalization and levelling has never been more important. Omny Studio has tools to help. If you’re already mastering your podcast, that’s great, but if you’d like to guarantee high-quality audio before publishing, you can use the built-in loudness normalization for smoothing peaks and troughs, and the auto-leveller feature for ensuring consistent volume across your episode.
Now you see me: a face to the voice.
You might already be using audiograms (a.k.a. social videos — learn more about why social audio is great here) to promote your podcast on social media. If not, then we’ve made it easy to start with Omny Studio’s integration with Headliner — the leading audiogram creation tool, and a free 60 minutes of video creation per month for most accounts.
If you are currently using audiograms, you may be using the combination of audio from your show and images, but, why not an image of the host, or the guest, or both? Your listeners may be feeling distant and disconnected, so this helps make it possible for your listeners to get a sense of who they’re listening to, and engage more than just their aural senses by showing them the faces behind the voices.
Also, don’t forget to add subscribe links to your promotional videos — it’s a great way to get your show into new ears!
Thanks for checking out this blog post today — we hope it is helpful in creating your podcasting happy place! Until next time…
Happy podcasting,
The Omny Studio Team
