I Have a Confession…

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When we started The Podcasting Store, we wanted to get quality gear in the hands of podcasters and remote teachers and give them the knowledge to use it. And we have done that, but we have yet to do one fundamental thing: Create our own podcast!

Until now the creative bolt of lightning had not yet struck me with an idea worthy of making a podcast. Yes, I have been informally making one off shows and, of course, recording videos, but when I think of the podcasts I follow they all have a core theme and explore it in depth over the course of many episodes.

A while ago I posed a question to the local school music teachers: what kind of content can we create that would be useful to you and your students? Out of that came a fantastic idea: and exploration of the careers in music that do not involve performing (hat tip to Russ Massey for the idea!). As someone who has had many non-performing music jobs, the topic is both exciting and relevant.

So with the idea in place now I had to figure out how exactly to make it happen. Being a guest-based podcast, I would need to find someone who had the qualifications and willingness to be my first guest. Who better than Cindy Haraway, the person who founded my store, Boomer Music Company? She agreed and we set a time for her to come to the store to record.

With the hard part out of the way, I wrote up some questions to use as a guide for the conversation. I did not want it to come across as an interrogation or feel like we were checking boxes on what I was asking, but rather I used them as a guide to keep the conversation flowing and let it go wherever it took us. This was highly effective and I could not be happier with the results.

As for the gear used to record it, that setup was as follows:

This setup is super streamlined and portable while still recording high quality sound. I recorded it to an internal SD card (rather than directly into Audacity) because the P4 records each track separately. This is useful if you need to rebalance the volume of one person or edit out something from just one microphone.

But no podcast is complete without some music! Peter Knudson was gracious enough (again) to record some drum beats for me which I edited to fit with the intro and outro I recorded. And since almost every podcast has a sponsor of some kind, I recorded an ad spot for Boomer Music and The Podcasting store, combined them woth another drum beat, and inserted it into the podcast. All of this was done in Audacity, which is a free piece of software.

Now to the problem of publishing it. I could do with this like I have been for my video content and just put it on YouTube or the store websites, But I think this idea deserves the chance to find a wider audience quicker. I turned to my buddy (and veteran podcaster) Vincent Ferrari for his advice and he without hesitation suggested hosting through Anchor, a free hosting service.

I just finished setting up my Anchor account and uploading my first podcast episode! Anchor was super easy and intuitive to set up. I was even able to create cover art and integrate that into the episode. The first episode is scheduled to publish Tuesday, June 1 and the podcast is titled Beyond the Stage. I am still developing these skills by doing it, so there will be bumps along the way. But this is how we learn!

This is the first step of an exciting journey. We know how to record great content. I hope you will join me as we (finally) start a podcast and learn the ins and outs of everything that happens after.