testing, testing, 123, Hi everyone. I'm Megan. I'm the podcast editor here at clocking in. Super strange today to be working on both sides of this episode. I have the file open, like I usually do to edit. Haylee Gaffin, I am on the microphone, so I'm glad I get to come from behind the scenes today and talk to you all. I'm gonna talk about audio, live recording everything that went down at the mic check retreat. So as Haylee said, what I'm sharing today is a bit about our live panel recording at the retreat, how I set that up to get the best quality audio possible and also to make my life a whole lot easier when it came to editing, I hope to just be able to pass on some of the advice that I gave at the retreat. So hopefully, if you're recording a panel of your own, or you want to just gain some audio knowledge overall to make your podcast even better, hopefully I can share some of that today. So at MIC CHECK retreat, my job was to help Haylee make sure that everything ran smoothly and also offer some audio education. I have over a decade of experience working in live sound in both the classical recording space as well as now editing for Gaffin creative also, I think my personal favorite thing about the retreat is that I got to meet some of my clients. So shout out, Kiana and Bree. I can't believe we finally got to meet in person. That was so cool, very, very bizarre to have people that have been in my ears for so long, for years now, finally getting to meet them, see them in person, pick up on all their mannerisms in person. That was pretty cool at the retreat. In addition to capturing the live panel, I also got to talk on how to record high quality audio for your podcast. I also got to work one on one with each of the attendees and talk over their recording setup, give everybody personalized advice, answer questions they had. That was also a personal highlight for me, because each of the attendees is maybe at a different point in their podcast production journey, and so to be able to talk one on one and say this is what's appropriate for you. You at this time. This is a way you could level up in the future. Here's how we can give your audience the best sounding quality audio right now. That really meant a lot to me. Anyway, let's talk about this live panel. So we were set up in a conference room at the hotel. This was a smaller retreat this time. This was our first time ever doing the MIC CHECK retreat. So we were able to keep it in a small room. We did not need a speaker system for this retreat. Maybe we will in the future, as we level up, as we grow, maybe in a conference setting, you might need a speaker system. In this case, I just needed to take the speakers and get them recorded into my laptop. Let's talk about what was plugged in, where what are my settings? What gear did I use? In this case, each speaker got a sure SM, 58 microphone. If you just stop and picture a microphone right now, you're probably picturing the Shure SM 58 it's one of the most common microphones to see around, especially at live events. They're like industry standard. They're reliable, inexpensive, relatively and they're really sturdy microphones. That's important, since we were traveling with them, we're moving around a hotel, all that kind of stuff. So each speaker had an SM 58 and those microphones were plugged directly into what's called a scarlet Focusrite interface. I highly recommend having an interface if you are recording with more than one microphone. This basically lets me plug the microphones into the interface. It looks like a box you might have seen the Scarlets are always, usually like this reddish box, and each of the microphones is recorded on a separate channel, again, making my life easy when it comes to editing. I love when we're recording on separate channels, I can mess around with each person's voice appropriately however they speak, right? Just gives me a lot more flexibility as an engineer. But every microphone was plugged into the scarlet focus right at a bigger conference, like I said, we might have speakers. So typically, the microphone would run into a soundboard. The soundboard would, I guess, channel off into a speaker system, plus the recording device. But we're in a smaller room, we did not need a speaker system. So the scarlet Focusrite is essentially the device that will take the microphone signal and boost it to a level that our laptop can read something really important that I don't think a lot of people might realize about microphones at first, especially the professional microphones, like like a shirt SM 58 or the SM 7b that you see a lot their natural output level is very low. It requires some kind of device to give it what we call gain. Gain is the additional level that's applied to the microphone level in order for the sound to be heard. Okay, so you need to have gain in order to hear your signal. If you're having problems where maybe somebody's on a call with you, they can't hear you, or you're like, why are my levels so low? Why am I so quiet? You probably need some gain pretty common, the Scarlet has the gain on it. I really recommend the fourth generation Scarlet products if you're looking for that. And this is not affiliate. Maybe we will be in the future. But this is just my personal recommendation. What I've used for years now for my own personal projects and professional as well. So the fourth generation Scarlet I like because it has a greater range of gain, which means that I won't necessarily have to push the device as hard in order to get it to appropriate levels. The third generation of Scarlett, and I'm sure the ones before it as well, just have a lower capacity for gain, so you might have to potentially even turn it up all the way to get to the levels that you need. Fourth generation Scarlett gives you a little bit more room. So just so that I don't lose you here, I'm getting into the audio, nerdy, techy part you need gain to bring the mic level up so that the input is at a normal recording level. If the gains too low, and I have to bring the level up in post production, typically, that's when you hear more of the room or even a fuzziness to the recording. It could even be like electrical buzz. If the gains too high, that would result in clipping or distortion, which maybe is cool when we're getting into music, but is not what we want for podcasting. We've all heard a little bit of that distorted kind of thing. If you're looking at your audio, this looks like just a block of audio, rather than up and down waves that we're really going for. So if your your audio is too high, your gain is too high, that's when you see that almost flat looking waveform in whatever you're editing in all that being said, you gotta get your gain levels right before you start recording at a live panel or even in your own podcast recording. If you're adjusting gain as you go along, that means that the out. Is going to change over time, meaning that if your gains changing over time, your listener might have to be adjusting their volume as they're listening to your podcast. We don't want that. It's important to note that gain is different than volume. Gain is the amount of amplification you're giving a signal to get it to recording level, volume is just how high or how low you're listening back to that signal. So adjusting your headphone volume while you record isn't going to do anything to the final recording, but adjusting your gain as you go is going to give you up and down levels throughout your recording. So once you've set your gain, I want you to stay there volume, you can do whatever you want, whatever you need with it's important, especially at a live panel, to do some kind of MIC CHECK in order to get the gain levels right before the panel starts. So to do this at the mic check retreat, I asked everyone to just tell me about their favorite podcast to listen to, and as they answered this, I adjusted the game knob for each speaker so that for each individual person, maybe there's someone who talks quieter, someone who talks louder. Again, they're in individual channels in the scarlet so I could adjust for each person, get their levels to a point where they're not so quiet I can't hear them, but they're also not so loud that they're blowing out the microphone, distorting that kind of thing on your Scarlet focus, right? If you have one of those, you're looking for the little light around the knob to turn yellow every so often, but not hit the red. Another example is on my laptop I'm editing in logic, which is essentially the professional version of GarageBand. And I'm looking for my levels to sit mostly between negative three and negative six. Decibels. Zero is where they clip, where you get that distorted sound. You might even get a pop, anything like that. I'm not looking for it to be like negative 15, negative 20, because, again, that's too low in the recording that I'm doing right now, the peak that I've hit since I started recording is negative 1.9 which means I set my levels correctly. Because I've gotten loud a couple times while recording here, but I haven't ever hit zero. I've given myself enough headroom so that if I do need to get loud, if I get excited over something, I have the space to do it. But I'm also not so low that I'm sitting way at the bottom of the meter. That's reading right right now, for the most part, I'm hitting yellow. Maybe at the start of my sentences. It looks like I'm coming in a little bit stronger and then trailing off. So again, I'm not hitting red at all, but I'm consistently hitting yellow. That's ideally what I'm looking for when it comes to gain, when it comes to setting my levels. So let's listen to this happening at the mic check retreat. I'm gonna throw in the audio here from the live panel, completely unedited, so you can hear as each speaker is telling me about their favorite podcast, I'm adjusting their levels, and I'm ideally getting to a point where everything that I'm reading is saying, okay, they're hitting the yellow. They're not so quiet. They're not in the red, anything like that. I think you can especially hear it on breeze. Answer, if I'm remembering correctly, you can kind of hear me go shroom with the gain and turn it up. That's my turning it up sound effect. If you're wearing good headphones right now, or you're listening in your car, or even on good speakers, you're probably gonna hear some of the air conditioning in the room, which you'll hear later. I actually took out in post production. So again, this is completely unedited. This is just what it sounded like right before the panel started. Let's listen. Yes.