I find necessary to edit my screencast lecture recordings.
Editing, as a fuzzy rule, takes five times the length of the show—and that’s if everything goes well. This is why people who need to dash off show after show are desperate to avoid editing. I have a favorite YouTube channel I’m about to abandon because they started to post unedited trash.
The audiobook publishers call this “distraction.”
What’s a good microphone? That should be pretty simple [cough, cough].
The microphone types in your post are famous for picking up every single nuance and delicate sound. It’s not unusual for a presenter to want to filter most of the nuances out before the final show. See: DeClicker, DeEsser, and DeSibilator, Punch and Go editing.
Most of those sounds go straight in front of your face. So don’t put the microphone there. Oblique placement (B) has two advantages.
It allows you to get louder which many home microphones need, and it’s much less likely to receive P-Popping and other mouth noises.
But that’s not how I did it.
I shot my fake podcast with a head-mounted microphone similar to this.
This was a first-pass engineering test and not to be considered a final in any way. Most of the technical challenges worked out. Denise and I are four time zones apart and she sounds like she’s sitting on the sofa beside me.
Fair warning “gamer headsets” are usually terrible. I have an “affordable” gamer headset I used once and put it in a box in the garage.
Most people want to write a check for a microphone and and go home, but without question the best thing you can do is throw soundproofing around. Nothing says kid recording a podcast faster than echoes of recording in a bathroom or kitchen.
Also see: good at picking up the sound of crickets
If you never actually appear on camera, you might make good use of a Kitchen Table Sound Studio.
If you’re not handy at all, several people make good pre-baked studios. The one I made is a copy of this.
And there was another recent posting I think I wrote down…somewhere.
I do have an actual microphone recommendation. The Shure SM7b is a terrific microphone and paired with a Cloud Lifter volume booster appears on many podcasts. It’s an analog microphone so you need a small sound mixer and digitizer.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/SM7BCloud--shure-sm7b-with-cloudlifter-cl-1
That’s it in front of Joe Rogan.
He is not the poster child for good microphone hygiene. He likes to swallow the microphone and the sound people have all they can do to deal with his mouth noises. But you can see those poking up in podcasts and Youtube postings.
If you do settle on something, run it by us before you write a check and we’ll tell you all about the problems.
I personally think you can do with what you have with revised microphone placement and a few furniture moving pads.
Koz