Podcasting at first might seem really daunting, but it's actually super easy. My name is Daniel. In 2020, I was a winner of the New York Times Podcast Contest, and now I'm trying to help teachers and students bring podcasting into their own classrooms.
Equipment-wise, there's not a lot of, you know, fancy materials that you have to get started with a podcast, and anyone can pretty much just jump right in. I think... A smartphone with any voice memo app or any app that allows you to record MP3 files or a computer with Audacity or GarageBand or pretty much any free app that allows you to record audio are perfect examples of how simple the equipment are to jump into podcasting.
To get a clear recording, I think first you had to do is you had to remove yourself from any distracting sounds or noises around you. And so what I do is I go up to my room. with my computer, with my phone, or whatever I'm recording with.
And so I sit at my desk and what I do is I actually build a pillow fort. And so what that allows me to do is it allows my voice to not have any echoes if it were to bounce off like a hard wall or a hard surface of any kind. And so I build a small pillow fort and I keep my microphone, whether that be in my phone or in my computer or either an external microphone. What I do is I keep that around six inches away from my mouth. And that allows for really clear and crisp audio that you would ultimately put into a podcast.
So when you have a podcast, sometimes you want a guest to add their opinion or add their expertise to your podcast episode. And so when you conduct an interview, I'd recommend to use a phone for the call. And if you're talking face to face, you can record it as if you're just having a conversation and have the voice memo app open.
Or also, if you were to call the other person. On the other end, you can also ask your guests to record their audio through a local source, whether that be their phone or their computer. And at the end of the interview, you can ask the guests to send their audio files to you so that that way you have the most crisp and clean audio. After you've recorded all of your audio files and your interviews or whatever you want to have in your podcast, you want to be able to have these mp3 files on hand and you want to edit them into a podcast in the end.
And so for editing podcasts, there are so many free options out there. So I usually use Anchor if I were to record on my phone and want to edit on my phone. Or I also use Audacity or GarageBand, which are both free options if I were to edit on a laptop.
So when you're editing, I think that it's important to make note of how many layers of audio you have. So usually I have my first layer of audio being my voice and being my narration. My second layer of audio being a guest or anyone who I have on my podcast.
And my third layer of audio being any sound effects that I want to include in my podcast and enhances the message of my podcast. So when you listen to a podcast, more often than not, it's not just purely voices. There's a lot of sound effects, whether that be music or simple like knocks on the door or something like that.
And so, for example, when I listen to a crime podcast. There's usually a suspenseful mysterious piano sound effect that the narrator adds in to set up his scene that he's describing and so there's a lot of overlay in between the sound effects and the subtle music and your voices and all these sound effects add to the development of your podcast and its message. So you can record these sound effects locally whether that be just knocking on a hard surface to mimic the sounds of knocking on a door or you can also choose these sound effects from an online library.
But when you're choosing sound effects online, I think the first thing you have to make sure is that these sound effects are royalty free and that you can repurpose them in your way so that you don't get into trouble later down the road. After you're done editing your podcast, you probably want to publish it for the whole world to hear. And so through your editing software, you can compile all your tracks into one single audio file, which is your podcast. And once you're ready, I'd head to SoundCloud.com where you have a spot to upload that audio file.
And then after that, you'll get a link where you can just pretty much share with anyone in the world.