Hi all! I was hoping I might get some tips for you all on how to make my 3-mic podcast set-up sound better!
I currently have 2 condenser mics and 1 dynamic mic to share amongst 5 hosts. I am routing them into a Behringer Xenyx 1204USB and then bringing that right into my Mac and recording with Audacity. At the first recording, I couldn’t tell how bad the clipping was (admittedly, I was hitting over -6DB in Audacity, but didn’t realize how bad it would sound). 2 particular hosts ended up having lots of clipping and distortion, which really bummed me out. I think I can make some simple adjustments next time, but knowing these parameters, and aside from asking the hosts to keep an even-temper or for me to ride the levels, how can I:
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Reduce the mess during laughter and over-talking? Even if I bring down the mic levels before we start, when we’re all laughing, it’s a lot of noise. But that’s sometimes an important part of the round-table. Any general technical tricks I can do to keep the distortion to a minimum?
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Manage the sound quality with a host that may have quite a dynamic range? Someone who will be calm and very quiet for one section, then get extremely loud a few minutes later?
Ideally I want to get nice dynamic mics for us all, with some nice stands, but budget and location currently are making that prohibitive in the short-term. Any tips or website recs would be awesome.
Thanks so much!