Tom Hazzard walks through setting up your first podcast microphone, starting with the Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB. Bad audio kills listeners faster than anything else, so he covers what the mic's USB and XLR connections do, how to use the headphone jack, and the critical step most people skip: actually telling your computer and recording app to use the new mic instead of the built-in one.
Even if you are not very techie, you all need to have a little bit of tech understanding of how you're going to use your equipment to make the best possible experience and sound experience for your listeners, but sound for your podcast. And you know, the bottom line about your sound quality is that if you have sound quality that is off, has some odd background noise, you have a dog barking in the background, or you have a lot of echo or any kind of static or noise, electronic noise, people don't like that, and eventually they will stop listening. So we have been telling you from the beginning of this program that you need to go and purchase some equipment if you don't have it already. The most important piece of that equipment being your microphone. So we're going to talk about how to connect it to your computer and then.
How you adjust the settings, how you make sure you're actually using it. Because this has actually happened to me in the past, even not for this program, but for this program learning how to use Google Hangout, I would go and I use my microphone, you can see here, and we have it connected to a mixing board. We've got a pretty advanced setup because we're co hosts and because we wanted a very high quality of audio. And we ended up doing Google Hangout. And we're both talking into our microphones and usually, you know, Tracy across the desk for me and using our camera that, you know, you've seen that split between two of us. And usually.
We would expect actually that Tracy's talking to her microphone, I'm talking into mine. And it all worked well. It turns out the way when we first started doing Google Hangouts, the way that our sound system was plugged into the computer, it wasn't even utilizing the sound coming from our microphones. It was using the sound, just the ambient mic from my computer right here that I'm using to do this broadcast. And so the audience could hear me. Okay, because I'm talking right here, here into the laptop right in front of it. But Tracy across the table from me, sounded like she was way across the room, even though she was like this, talking into her mic. It was. We could have recorded that locally, but it wasn't going out over the Internet to Google. So the point is, there are some settings that are very important for you to know about in order to make sure that even though you have the right equipment, that it's actually being used. So let's get to it. So I'm sure those of you that did not already have a microphone.
Probably went and purchased the one we recommended. And you know, we practice what we preach. This is the Audio Technica. Now, excuse my little.
Sort of on air graphic square here. You see like all the TV stations on TV use something like this. I just made our own for identity. You don't need. Obviously that's not important. It's just the microphone. But it's the audio Technica, the.
ATR21 100 USB microphone. So really most of you will probably just be using this plugged into your computer. And that's what I'm going to talk about first. And I'll touch a little bit on some advanced possibilities toward the end. But most of you are going to use this microphone or a microphone like it. And you can see I like this microphone because on the bottom you can see has the. That's the mini USB port. And then you can see these three pins. That's called an XLR port. So what I really like about this microphone, you can start out using this mic with USB on your computer. Excuse me. And you start using a USB on your computer. And then later if you upgrade your sound system, you want to do a higher quality of audio where you'd use a mixing board perhaps, or there are a number of reasons why you might want to do that. Then you would connect it to this XLR port.
Which is a higher quality audio connection. And then it has, I think a little volume adjuster there and I don't really use that. And there's even a little, a little headphone jack on the bottom of it which you know, you could use to listen on if you wanted. But generally I think it's best using headphones to have them connected to your computer so you hear all the sounds, not just the sound coming out of this. This would be more if you just want feedback if you were singing or something. You want to make sure you're on pitch, hearing your own voice. You might have a headset plugged into the mic. It's convenient. Nice thing to have, but we're probably not going to use it in podcasting. So this is a standard mini USB to regular USB connector cord. And it comes with this microphone. So what you would do is obviously just plug in this end and then it comes with a cheap little stand. I mean, what I like about this stand, it's convenient in that it is small and it's compact.
We actually have four of these microphones. Okay. We have one on each side of the desk. Tracy and I have. It's connected to our boom mount, which allows us to Swing it away easily and swing it back.
But it comes with these. So we have two more of these that we take on the road. Like when we do trade shows, we conduct interviews in the field. Sometimes for our podcast, we'll actually take our microphones with us. And then these are very convenient for, you know, have as a travel stand, but for using every day. It's very lightweight. I found it kind of topples over. And you know, if you're going to podcast a lot, I would recommend you use something a little more robust. Perhaps if you want to mount it to a tabletop or desk surface, get a boom mount. We have referral to those on our site. And then we also there are some other stand mounts that are heavier that don't topple over. So easy, more steady. If you don't want to have a big, you know, boom spring loaded thing here, you can just use a normal mic stand on the, on a desktop and there's a few others you can look at. So. All right, so when you. This is a really important thing. The.
Other major piece of equipment you're going to use is your computer. Okay. And you need to use your computer. A computer is a wonderful tool because it does so many things right, but it also only does exactly what you tell it to do. And we found out the hard way, even just plugging in your microphone to the USB port on your computer does not always.
Mean that when you're. You're speaking and recording that that software or even your operating system is actually using that microphone.
