GEAR LIST & STUDIO TOUR!
Brendon TEST Burchard walks through his home office, podcasting booth, and studio setup, showing the gear, lighting, and soundproofing he uses to create his personal development content and online courses.
Hey y', all, it's Brendan. And you've been asking me for a really long time to give you a behind the scenes of my office and where I shoot my videos. And frankly, all that has changed recently. So I'm gonna walk you through what I use for gear, what I use for lighting, how I set up my desk, what my studio is like now because after 10 years many of you have noticed we moved to a new studio location. So I just want to do a gear walkthrough, a setup walkthrough and give you all my tools in the links down below that you can welcome to use your own for your own studio and your own setup. And I think you'll see it's pretty simple. And I've been blessed now over, you know, across from YouTube to our Facebook videos or Instagram videos, over 200 million people have watched my personal and professional development videos. So most of those folks on motivation, inspiration, dealing with hard times, achieving our goals faster and none of them have, you know, cats in them or you know, gimmicks or I don't do any, you know, pranks on anybody. It's just teaching personal development from the standpoint of my research on psychology and neuroscience and high performance and as well as my own self experimentation in the world to become a better version of my own self. So I'm just always sharing that with you. And I think because of, you know, the number of books I released, six best selling books are online courses. Thirteen online courses and those 200 million video views and the 10 million people across Facebook. Everyone thinks I must be fancy and have, you know, access to gear or things that others don't. But I'm hoping that by giving you this walkthrough today that you'll see that you could do any of this. That technically there's no barrier in terms of what I'm doing here. It's just a matter of making, making sure I position myself right in the marketplace. I share the right stories, I teach really well. I deliver my products and my goods to everybody with excellence. I care and show compassion. But there's no fancy big setup. So I thought I'd show you what I have figured out after 10 years of doing this. And I hope you can use this list to get your own message out there or build your own brand or own business or do whatever the heck you're trying to do creatively. I hope that this will serve you. I'm going to start with my simple desk set up here in my new home. It's a Very simple home setup that just helps me be really efficient and keep a good mental mindset. You see, it's pretty bright in here. And I'll show you how we achieve that with some very simple tools that are very inexpensive. And then I'll walk you through the gear. I'll walk you through, I do my podcast, I'll walk you through where we're doing our YouTube stuff. And I hope that you'll enjoy this tour. Let's start with my home office. It's pretty super simple. I've got a Mac screen, a MacBook Pro. I've always got my camera on hand. I'm actually shooting this right now with the same Sony RX100. So if you're looking for a great camera, this is the one I'm actually filming with. Literally, as I'm speaking to you, I'm just holding one, I got two in my hand. So this is the one. This is always on my desk. This is always here. This is always here. This is always here. It's a very, very simple setup. This, though, is part of the magic of this office. I don't know if you can see it. This, if I go down here, you can see this is a 2 inch sound wall that absorbs a lot of the sound bounce because obviously I've just got, you know, it's a pretty tall, let's say, building here. Let's see if I can flip this over for you so I can see you. But, you know, this is pretty tall behind me. And I don't put anything on the walls. I keep it pretty flat. But you'll see that that sound wall here really allows the sound to be handled here. Also, I kind of pulled this out from behind the wall so you can see it. I've got up in this corner crack right here, I've got this, us, this LED light. And it's awesome. It's like a. I'll put a link down below, but it allows this whole room to really light up. And there's not much in here other than that. That big sound wall right there that you see. And then there's just my monitor down below. So when I'm doing live casts or doing any webcam stuff from here or from my laptop, you'll see that I've got this sound wall and this LED light up here. And that's all it takes. So this lighting that you're seeing with me right now as it sort of adjusts, you'll see it's just basically that one light up there. It's A LED light that does really great. And then down below, you'll see that I'm trying to get my cord game into play where on the back I've attached with double sided tape stuff to manage all of the cords in here. And hopefully I'm getting better at that over a period of time. Other than that, I think this is a new video. I don't think you've ever seen me on the floor. Then I have a really bright carpet down below. So I've kept a really white, bright, open feeling office here. And this is just my home office. This is where I do most of my work. So I'd say running, you know, 90% in my life is right here. It's very, very simple. I do rarely sit. As you can see, it's a standing desk. So that keeps me being able to move around and keeps my energy up all day. But this is it. This is simple. I kept it way simple in this room so that the, my ability to focus was important because the bigger the office, less focus I noticed myself having. And with that, I'm going to take you over to where I do my podcasting here at the house and then I'll show you the bigger, fancier studios that you guys might be used to. That we do. Okay. Wow. Good lord, it's bright in here. So, okay, this is where I do my podcasting now. Just set up this booth this last week. I'm really excited about it. Listen, when I'm out here and there's like a hallway behind you, you can hear the sound. It kind of sounds, you know, you might hear an echo or a little hollow sound. But when I come into here now, the sound is very different. And that's because this, this, and this has surrounded me in three angles to be able to do my podcast. These are the same things. These are that sound wall I was telling you about. This is a two inch sound wall. Two inch sound wall. Two inch sound wall. I just had them done in white because I thought it looked cool and it kept it brighter. And up there you can see that same lighting strip again, I'll link down below. It's just an LED four foot lighting strip that creates really great, even beautiful daylight lighting. I've got another ring light behind me that's really blaring you out over there. And I'll show you that gear in a minute. But then you'll see that I've got a basic setup that I literally, you know, I bought this rug at a place nearby for like whatever, 50 bucks I've got these four soft boxes where I keep all of my gear, like camera gear, podcast gear, stuff like that in here. I use a rode podcaster microphone. This microphone literally cost me, I think $200 like six or seven years ago. And I still use the exact same one. I've got a. Obviously another thing for a camera over there and it's not super fancy, I hope you see that. I mean literally this contraption here, I built this at. We have a store here in Portland, Oregon called Storables. It's like, I think nationwide they just call it a container store. And I literally went in there and built it on the spot and then checked out with it here. And let me fix this lighting because I know it's really, really bright for you all. But see I can take it down here and look at this lighting I'm getting right here. This is just with the Sony RX100 and that 14 foot LED light and then that's it. Now I don't usually film and record when I'm doing my podcast in terms of video, but I will probably start doing that. So I've set this little situation. This is it, this is the whole little room here. If I flip around, you'll see, I'll pull out over here a little bit. You see that's just it. It's. Imagine it's just this little thing in the corner of a hallway of my house more or less that I set up LED light up there. Two big, that's one four foot sound wall. So it's eight feet tall, four feet wide. There's the other one, that's two, that's three, that's four. So that's just four eight by four foot sound walls. I know it doesn't sound as good as in here because I'm not in that area. And then in here what I'll start doing is recording with this contraption. Let me lower it for you. And this contraption is better. So this is what I'll be recording it with. It's super simple. It is a Sony. I think this is the A7 that I'll be using. That is, you know, a 10 by 18 or 10 to 18 and it's got a shure microphone on the top. And I like this here. The reason I don't use this when I'm filming like this as much is because I can't flip this out where the RX100 I'm using. I can flip it up and down but that's it. So if you see behind me now, you'll see this light here, right? And I'll just be using that as I stand here and film. So a lot of things I'll be doing on Instagram and Facebook and things like that, I'll just be literally standing here chatting and talking. And then I'll do my podcasting facing the other way over here. And that's the whole setup. Super simple, right? So if you think about it, that thing cost me 200 bucks. It probably get 150 bucks on eBay. Now, this thing I built for, I think $100 or less. These things were like 10 bucks each. And that is what helps me reach millions of people. This little ring light probably cost 200 bucks. This camera was a little bit more expensive. I'll link to the lens and this in the area down below. But that's basically all I'm using these days. I'll make sure. I'm now going to my studio. Okay, on the move now. Walking to my studio where shoot my longer videos, my online courses. And I think one big key to being prolific is making sure wherever you're shooting your videos is nearby where you live. And that's key for me. I just walk a couple blocks and I'm at a fancier studio where I can shoot my online courses. And all that longer format stuff you see for me is huge. Plus, just walking, you know, I get to walk by a couple parks. I get to enjoy the day a little bit. And I barely ever drive. Barely ever. I don't even own a car. My wife owns a car. But I try not to drive and just walk everywhere. It's part of my lifestyle goals. And so I hope you enjoy this new studio. I'll get over there. Okay. So at the studio now, which I'm excited to show you, I say to you this. Beware. It's going to be a little bit of a mess because we're under construction right now. I'm having new stuff put in, as you'll see. So it's a little bit of a mess. But I also. Man, I love this place. And before I show it to you, I want to say this. Please remember that when I began, I started with like a flip video camera that was like 90 bucks or something like that. So what looks like a fancy studio. And my ideal setup now, 10 years later, is very different than when I started. So for those who are just saying, oh, yeah, you have fancy gear or whatever, now I'm like, come on, just get in the game. You could probably do almost everything with your own Phone now. So this is the new studio that we're having built out now that our courses and our books have taken off the way they have. And this is going to be. Oh, I didn't set the alarm. Do you hear that? It's going off right now. Yeah. Remember to turn off alarm when you enter a place. Okay. So with that, back to the place I'm building out. I hope you guys are gonna dig this because we've been working super hard on this, and it's just now getting done. This is going to be the new studio in here, and I hope you dig it. We just got these floors installed, which is like this cool engineered wood that kind of looks like oak. And then we've got this wall that was put in yesterday, which I'm super stoked about, actually. This is the first time I have ever. Let's back away from the crazy light. This is the first time right here I've ever stood in front of our new wall. So I'm checking it out. Forgive me not looking at you right now. I'm looking up there, if you can tell. But I'm pretty excited to see how this turns out. It's super blazing bright in here right now, but you can see this will be. I'll be shooting a lot up against this. Let's see if I can get this light to autocorrect here. It's a little blown out, but this is. I'm shooting, by the way, on the Sony RX100. It's probably because this huge white wall there, that'll help. So I'll have this white wall behind me, but I'll also have this here. And so with the new floors, look at this gorgeous window back over here. So obviously this is not going to adjust. Sony, Sony. Sony. But you get the idea. But here's the other thing that I really dork out about. I hope you guys check this out as we're building up. Look at this. You see these little globes in the background back there? We're having that all painted white. You can see there's more windows over here and over here. This is all being painted right now. But this is a huge studio space compared to what I was working on before. And it's got a ton of different angles that I can shoot. You know, anything. I can play with these things over here. I can go over here. I can go over here. And I'm sure this video is not doing it quite justice for how large this space is. I'm stoked, too, because this is going to be my green room back here, which I've never had a green room ever before. Like a real official green room. So I'm pretty stoked about that. You know, basically have a ton of shirts back there and a full change of clothes. And this is important thing for me. I wouldn't have all this if I was just doing like, you know, social media videos. But as you all know, I do full scale production for our online courses. So I've got 13 online courses, counting two other courses I did with the Oprah Winfrey Network that are super highly produced and just require a little bit more. But basically at the end of the day, I always tell people it's really just me standing there with the flip chart teaching stuff or with a TV teach and stuff. So I think this is, you know, if you're just starting out, totally overkill. But I just want to give you guys the tour. And now I'll go over to what is going to be the second studio. Okay, so that is the first one. There's another little alarm I hope I don't set off. And same thing. This all are in construction to finish this month, which I'm stoked. And this is some general office area that is definitely a work in progress right now. As you can see, we've got all this construction stuff on paper. I'll do the big reveal later for you all so you can see what it looks like. But if you saw a video or a live cast from me recently, it was filmed right here in this simple little space that you could see is basically just a kitchen setup in this office here. And I've got, you know, two light sand boxes, two soft, soft, soft boxes and two other ones over here. And I was there. The live cast setup was over here. And with that, what I want to do is I'm going to cut. So this is basically the setup. So I'm obviously on my Sony RX100 right now, but let me flash over to you right now to show you what that live cast looked like when it was fully produced. Remember I said you won't do it if your brain can't see it. Step through. Well, here's specifically what I do to make sure I don't procrastinate. So I want you to socialize your agenda with other people, clear weekly outputs. I want you to find your exacting workout schedules. Delegate seven days in advance, increase intensity during your workouts. You can see that was a pretty different look than I'm shooting right here with you. So let me show you what we did that with. Because I get asked to that all the time. What we use for our, you know, more courses or live kind of things that we do. This is the Canon C1 hundreds with a lens on it that is pretty dang sweet. And I'll link to this down below. It's 24 to 105 millimeter lens, you know, with a typical sort of Sennheiser setup for our sound. Oh, it's not on here. Oh yeah, it is right here for the sound mic pack that I use. Again, I'll link to this. All this stuff down below. This is more of an expensive thing and we didn't use this for probably several years. We had like some JVCs or something janky, honestly back in the day. But we have used this for my Oprah Winfrey network courses for 10 or 12 of our online courses. It's a workhorse. It's a beast. We've also used it for more documentary style footage and that has been fantastic. So I highly recommend that product to you all. And by the way, I'm not sponsored for saying any of this. This is just what I've been using over the years. It really helped. This is pretty sweet. Look at the size of this door. So this is how small I am. That's how big that door is. And what's in here is obviously, you can see it's also under construction. This is going to be where I do almost all of my YouTube videos going forward. This is a. Basically we call this the library room because behind me that's all basically sets of my books and products and programs over the years that will be behind here. And then what's gonna happen is I'll be coming over here. And this right here, I'm framing this pretty much for the first time as you've been under construction. This is going to be. If we got a table in here, I'm trying to show you all this. This would be about right there how I'll have this set up. It'll be right here. And I'll do a lot of my YouTube stuff from here on out. Vlogging, talking to you just like this. I know it's a little stiff because I'm trying to hold up the camera precisely where I'm going to have that. It's hard to see that window in the background because it's so bright right now. And I'm gonna have over here. Remember those lights at my, at my house I showed you. I'm gonna put a panel of those up here and what's cool about those lights is they're literally like, I don't know, I'll link down below. I think they're like 20 or 30 bucks and they're beautiful so I'll have them just posted right up here. They plug into a regular socket, so I'll just do an extension cord down the walls and I'm also gonna put here, here, and then here, that same exact sound walls I told you about. Alright y', all, I hope you enjoyed that first vlog here of the year and that first behind the scenes tour I've ever done. I'll try to do a bunch more of these this year, so post down below any comments or requests of other things I missed that you would love to know about how I do what I do. Also, please make sure you hit the thumbs up button. Make sure you share this video and if you'd like any of the gear, click down below in the description for all that, make sure you tune into my new podcast as well the Brendon show and the new recently released podcast High Performance Habits in the business category. I'm doing a lot of recording, a lot of vlogging and a lot of podcasting for you this year, which is the reason I've expanded all of this. Like I said, it used to be just me at home and now there's a lot more production because we're doing a lot more for you all. I hope in some way this has been helpful for you. Check out the links down below and please make sure you hit the subscribe button to my channel because I'll be doing a ton of vlogs like this. Post your questions down below, share this video and I'll see you next week. Thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe to my new podcast, the Brendon Show. It's available on itunes and Stitcher and wherever else you get your podcasts. And it's the exclusive place where I share my thoughts about life, about current events, about what I'm going through, about my advice for you, and as you seek to live an even more extraordinary life. It's called the Brendon show and it's available anywhere you get your podcasts. So make sure you subscribe. And if you're ready to take your life to a whole new level, make sure you grab my book High Performance How Extraordinary People Become that way. It's available on Amazon right now and when you order your copy, you're really supporting my channel and the message. And you're also getting a book that will reveal to you 20 years of my research into what is it that helps people go to a new level of success in their life? What does it really take? What habits are proven to help you reach long term success in your career, your health, your personal life, your relationships? It's called high performance habits. How extraordinary people become that way. It's available on Amazon right now. 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