Creating a Magic: the Gathering podcast is a great and very simple way to get into the world of content creation. It’s also a fun way to collaborate with your Magic friends. Put these two things together and there’s no need to wonder why there are so many new Magic podcasts these days. The bar to entry is as low as a microphone and an hour of free time.
Perhaps this article should be titled, “So, you’ve decided to make a Magic podcast” because that might be as appropriate. Let’s go with the idea that you want to make a podcast or recently started making one. Congratulations! As TJ often says, you have to make something, even if it’s bad, before you can make something good. Now let’s look at some easy ways to make it better.
Don’t Record with your Game Microphone - Sound quality is extremely important to a podcast because it’s the first thing to impact new listeners. Can they hear what you’re saying? Do you sound like you’re mumbling into a paper bag in the back of a warehouse? The first step is to put down that headset and get an actual microphone. No, you don’t have to drop a ton of money on it. As I typed this I checked eBay and you can get a used Yeti for $30, which is a great place to start. I’ve listened to so many podcasts (once) where I couldn’t tell the hosts apart because of poor recordings, and I never went back. Don’t be that podcast.
Speak Like You Know You’re on a Podcast - If you know it can be edited out later, take every advantage you can of this while recording. That means if you flarbed trying to say something and sounded incoherent, just take a pause and say it again. Your stupid editor can fix it in post! If you tend to be energetic (TJ), try and stay at a uniform distance from your microphone (TJ). This keeps the levels consistent throughout your recording to save you balancing work later. If you look at a screen during your recording, try and put your microphone in front of it. Turning your head to the side to look at something causes you to talk in that direction and can cause gain issues. Also, don’t chew on your pop filter if you have one (TJ).
Record your Tracks Separately - It’s very tempting if you have multiple hosts to have everyone meet up on Discord or Skype and have one person record the conversation. This is fine for beginners, but if you want to really punch up the quality of your podcast, you need to record your audio tracks separately. For each episode of Ponder, Jamie, TJ, and myself (plus any guests) each record our tracks individually, and then we put them back together into one show. The advantages of doing this really shows off when you get to editing. Here are just a few things that you can do with multiple tracks that you can’t do with just one:
Upping or lowering the volume on one person’s voice compared to everyone else
Edit out people talking over each other and leave in the primary speaker
Remove background noise from anyone not speaking at the time
Perform noise reduction to cancel out white noise and hums
Edit your Tracks - Just because you have an hour of dialogue doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be shared with the world. Once you’ve got all the audio tracks from your hosts, put them all together in an editor. We typically use Audacity because it’s free and pretty good, but you can go fancier if you want. Expect to spend about three times as long editing as you have material, so that’s 90 minutes of editing for a 30 minute episode. Editing can be as meticulous as you want it to be. I perform noise reductions and background sound removal. I edit out random sounds like coughs, sniffles, furniture shuffling, and pet distractions (Jamie). You can even remove all those words we use when our brains are stalled, like “uh”, “um”, and “like” as much as you care to. I generally remove most of these unless it obviously interrupts the flow of the speakers cadence.
Next up is dead air. There’s no need to leave any more than two seconds of no one speaking in an episode. Get rid of it. If you’re a humorous podcast, you can also edit out the delay between someone saying something funny and the other listeners reacting, which is usually longer due to recording delay and makes it seem like the listeners don’t get it. Cutting this gap down between joke and laughs makes the speaker’s joke “hit” better.Have a Story - When TJ and I asked Jamie to join us on Ponder, we wanted to go over the actual theme of the podcast. What were we? Were we a news podcast? Did we want to have a guest every episode and move into being an interview podcast? Were we a podcast that focuses on a specific niche of Magic, like Commander or Limited? Who did we want to listen to us, and why should they?
TJ recommended a book for us to use as a guide: Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller. It breaks these questions down into sections and workable exercises that lets you come up with the answers on your own. We used this to focus on what our show was about, who we thought would want to listen to it, why they would listen to it, and what they would get out it. If you want proof of our execution of it, it’s right on the front page of this website.
So there you go. These are some pretty simple things that will help you make your podcast better. If you want to go even further with looking at what you can do in terms of editing, I recommend going back and listening to Sam Tang’s Kitchen Table Magic podcast. Sam has extremely high standards for everything he produces and it has set a goal that we constantly strive to equal. Sam’s also pretty open to giving advice, so you can always reach out to him yourself. He’s been wonderful enough to offer advice to us in the past. And in the same regard, you can always reach out to us with questions or comments about your own.
Happy Casting!
Melvin
**** BONUS SECTION ****
Just a few other things:
Don’t use copyrighted music! You might wake up one day with all your episodes removed.
Network! Talk to other people that make podcasts. Listen to their shows.
Advertise! Make a Twitter account for your podcast. It’s free and is a great way to reach others.
Distribute based on your budget. Some places charge for hosting, so figure out how to get the most audience for your buck. Libsyn’s minimum account is a great place to start.
