Thought I’d write a post to share my experiences (after recording three episodes so far) using a CQ18T for podcasting in a small home studio.
Setup is as follows for a ‘local music/gigs podcast’ with interviews that my daughter and her friend is hosting:
- Small 4mx4m room, not very well treated (some thick curtains on two of the walls as the ‘backdrop’)
- 4x Shure SM58 mics on boom arms for up to 4x talent, sitting very close together
- Recording multitrack to SD card, post HPF (initially, more below)
After recording the first episode and bringing the audio in to post for editing I found some annoying echo, basically mic bleed across the mics, I didn’t pick this up in testing. I suppose guests can be unpredictable with their movements and voice levels. It took a lot of work to edit the audio tracks essentially ‘ducking’ whoever wasn’t talking at the time, not easy when people are talking at the same time! Hours of editing for a ~30min episode.
I then remembered these things have an AMM (Automatic Mic Mixer) which is typically used for boardrooms/conferences/etc. I thought why not give it a crack for podcasting. I configured it with pretty much the default settings, set my SD multitrack to record post-AMM, but kept EQ and dynamics off (to do those in post). What a difference. If you don’t know AMM will automatically reduce the gain of each mic when they’re not being spoken into, effectively shutting them off. Have recorded one episode with this configuration so far with a good outcome and no post editing of the audio required other than some EQ and dynamics. Massive time saver.
Curious if anyone else is podcasting with the CQs? If so, I’d appreciate your tips, tricks, configuration. At the moment I’m doing my EQ and compression in post, but curious if it’s worth doing inside the mixer or not. The guests on the podcast are usually bands, we do an interview, then I flip to a different ‘scene’ on the mixer which sets us up for recording a song, usually an acoustic set with a couple of DI’s and maybe an e-drum kit. (I don’t use AMM for the song, and will also use EQ and compression).
Shameless plug, if you want to take a look/listen: Amped Up Local or on YouTube
Episode 1 (Retromode) has a song in it.
Always learning!
Cheers!
