Sounding INCREDIBLE on ZERO budget

Eric Beels 0:01
Want your audio to sound like this, instead of distant and echoey like this, let's get into it. You're listening to Practical Podcast Tips. My name is Eric Beels. And today, I'm going to cover tip number 16. Sounding incredible on zero budget, there's some super simple techniques to get amazing audio from your microphone, let's get into it. So a lot of you may not have the budget to buy a good microphone for your podcast, maybe you're just getting started, you don't have the budgets to really invest in good equipment for your podcast. Sometimes you may have guests on your show that aren't using good microphones. And so you might sound incredible, but your guests they don't know necessarily what they're doing. So what do you do on that? How do you help them get better audio without having to tell them like, Hey, you got to go out and buy this, you know, 100 $200 microphone or whatever it is, maybe you're also in a bad environment, you know, maybe there's nothing you can do about that, that is just going to, you know, got traffic, nearby construction, whatever it might be, what do you do with that to get good audio, I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So in this entire episode, you might notice that I sound a little bit different from before, that's because I'm actually not using the same microphone that I normally do, I am recording in the same environment that I normally do. But I'm using my iPhone, actually. And so this entire episode, all the audio I'm using strictly from my iPhone. And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to kind of keep talking in this and I'm going to move my phone around to kind of show you just the positioning and how I position my phone, how that makes a huge difference in audio quality. Now, most people's phones, they tend to sound something kind of like this, right? So you'll notice that this sounds quite a bit different suddenly. Now, I didn't make any edit there anything. This was simply me moving my phone and changing my position. I'm in the same room, same environments, I'm simply holding my phone how a lot of people tend to do especially if they're doing like a podcast or if they're talking like over zoom, right? A lot of people do podcasts over zoom because they're they're talking to someone. Well, one of the problems with that is it gets the phone really far away, and which is what I'm doing right now. Now when I move the phone closer, suddenly, this sounds like a completely different microphone, right. And that's because I am facing my couch and I am speaking into the couch with the phone close to the couch. Now the room that I'm in, I'm in a sunroom okay, this this thing has hard walls. This is a absolutely horrendous environment to record in. And that's one of the reasons I actually really love recording in this room, it gives me the opportunity to bust the myth that you need a soundproof good environment to record in. And to make matters worse, there's literally there's construction, let's see about like 150 feet away, there's some big condos going up in my neighborhood directly across the street from me and there's beeping, there's hammering, there's all kinds of stuff, there's some planes going overhead, there's so much noise going on, it's crazy. And you might be able to hear that a little bit because my phone actually does do some automatic processing that happens to help eliminate that and we normally do this on the other microphones that I record in on the other episodes, we normally do this mainly in this episode, the phone is going to do most of that automatically, it's typically not as good so you might be able to hear a little bit, but this episode will sound pretty freakin good. And a lot of you I think are more than happy and especially if you can get this kind of quality for free just by changing how you do things.

Eric Beels 4:04
I think you'll be stoked on being able to do that with just your phone. Now one thing to keep in mind I am using an iPhone 12 Pro. So depending on the phone you have, you know the microphone may not be as good depends on the phone, you might have you have an older iPhone or like an older Android or whatever, you know, I don't know you might not get the same quality of this phone does have good quality but a lot of people do have iPhones and iPhones typically had pretty good microphones in them for a while now, but this is something certainly to test and try out simply on just changing your technique. Now one thing to keep in mind and I'm just going to give a warning right here if you're wearing headphones I'll try to make sure to tone this volume point down a little bit as well because I don't want to bust your eardrums. So this is kind of a bit of a plosive warning is to make sure it's really important to speak past your microphone, okay. And the reason that's so important is you get what are called plosives otherwise, and you're phone will be super susceptible to that if you speak directly into it. So I'm going to go ahead and speak directly into my microphone now and you'll kind of hear what that sounds like. So right now I'm speaking directly into my microphone. Now, you'll probably hear a lot of like plosives, that's the the microphones kind of gets all distorted, because I'm speaking on the breath from my mouth is distorting the microphone. And that's not something that you want. So you don't want to speak directly into the microphone, a really good way to do this and that speak directly pass the microphone, so you hold it about one or two inches below your mouth. And so that way your breast speaks past it. And that gives you the best balance. If you don't have a windscreen if you have a windscreen you should be okay, you should be able to speak directly into it, you might get a little bit better audio quality out of that car, I don't think you need windscreens very often, especially if you're on zero budgets and just want to talk directly into your microphone, this is a fantastic way to do that. And so like right now, there's, there's a plane going overhead and whatnot is just kind of crazy how it sound there is and whatnot. But you know, with the right tools and the right technique, and get really good audio out of just the stuff you probably already have. And you know, I get tired of kind of hearing audio guys and stuff like that, that are like oh, you got to have a good soundproof room, you got to get a, you know, this really expensive microphone to get good audio, no, those things help. There's nothing wrong with doing those things. But it's not necessary. You don't need those things, you know, go at your own pace on your own budget. And don't let expensive equipment be your limiting factor. You know if that's holding you back from starting your own podcast, hopefully no one's intimidating you or anything on like upping the quality of your ear. But I have seen some audio guys, you know, do things like that. It's just not good. And so that's what I try to be I try to be a good audio engineer. And well be practical. You know, that's one of the reasons I started this podcast is to help podcasters out with these techniques and show how to just get better audio on zero budget. So I hope this episode helps you out. Remember, just hold your phone just below your mouse about two inches and you can sound like this instead of all echoey and distance like this. That's it for today. I'll see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, feel free to leave us a review. I'd love to hear how it helped. Also, if you know somebody else that could benefit from it. Go ahead and share it with them. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

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