Thursday, July 31, 2014

Fuzz Cast is 3 weeks old!

So it turns out I really enjoy making podcasts even though I'm still not quite sure where it's going. I've been treating it like an audio blog, a way to provide context for recordings (which breathes new life into them and increases my appreciation of them as well), a way to get to know and appreciate people I know by interviewing them, and another way to police myself and make sure that I'm producing content.

As far as content is concerned, a major problem I've had for years was that I would say "I'm working on an album" or "sure, I'll score your film" or "we should really turn that into a fleshed out composition" but I end up doing nothing instead. Making a podcast at least once a week means I need to get off my butt every week and try to come up with material. Even if I'm rehashing old material it is a weekly reminder that I need to press record and talk about music or people or creative projects. Anyway, I think it's working. The part of procrastinating that sucks is when you truly are ready to start working on your project only to realize you need to upgrade your software, clear off your hard drive, buy some microphone adapters at radio shack, or restring a few of your guitars. I've found that by having this podcast I've been maintaining my software and musical instruments more regularly and at any moment I'm ready to hit record and lay down some tracks or a sketch of an idea.

Anyway, I started typing this blog post because I wanted to explain these new generic posts that you will be seeing popping up. I have my podcasting provider set up to post on my behalf every time I release a podcast so that's what's happening. The other thing is, I only figured out that option after the 6th episode which means I'll be re-publishing all of my podcasts out of order so you should be seeing 5 podcast posts coming up later this week.

I also came up with a pretty portable podcast rig for interviews that I'm pretty proud of. I really wanted to use lavalier mics instead of handheld mics or even worse, desktop mics. I just think it seems unnatural for regular people to talk into a microphone. So, I found some cheap but good lavalier mics (corded ones) and I'm using a Zoom H1 which magically provides power to the condenser mics. All I needed was a stereo 3.5mm male to dual mono 3.5mm female audio cable adapter. So now I'll just clip one on me and the other on my guest and hit record. I have the rig here with me at work so I just need to find a guinea pig to help test it out.

Well, that's it for now.
Here's the iTunes link if you are on an Apple device:
Fuzz Cast
Or the libsyn link which is more generic:
http://fuzzcast.libsyn.com/