Behind the Scenes at The Pen Addict 200

This weekend, I traveled to Atlanta to help produce Episode 200 of The Pen Addict podcast, live in front of an audience at The Atlanta Pen Show.

Obviously, the setup for this was more complicated than what we normally use to record a show like this, so I thought it would be fun to share how we did it.

Here’s a timelapse of everyone helping set the room up, courtesy of Doug Beal:

Here’s the tech we used to record the audio and stream it on the site:

The hosts spoke into Shure BETA 58A microphones. The 58 is a solid vocal mic, and one that’s easy to use and setup. We ran a 4th mic for a live Q&A session that followed the main show.

We ran these mics into a Zoom H6 portable recorder. Instead of running on the 4 AAs the Zoom will accept, we opted to run it off the optional external power supply. The Zoom recorded each microphone directly to a .wav file on an SD card. The Zoom was sitting on the table in front of Myke so he could monitor levels using the built-in display and adjust them if needed.

Zoom H6

(A little bit of Gaffer tape kept everything in place.)

To stream the show — and record a back up in QuickTime — I ran from the Line Out on the recorder to my MacBook Pro via a USBPre2. This is part of my normal recording setup, and while expensive, is an incredibly powerful and flexible piece of gear.

USBPre2

Once I had signal at the Mac, streaming was as easy as telling Nicecast to use the USBPre2 as its source and boom we were live.

I like the challenges presented by producing a live podcast. The tech requirements are different, as is the environment. The Pen Addict community is amazing, and it’s always fun to do something new and exciting with them.