The Podcast Journey

 

Sounds and Equipment

And the podcast journey moves forward. I’ve settled on some equipment and placed an order. I decided I wanted to go with a Moano AME2A board. As far as I know, that is one of the newest that Moano have produced. It should come with a fairly good microphone, so I’ll at least get an improvement to the sound of my voice. And it also comes with 11 customizable sound buttons. At first, I was confused about how to program in sound effects to those buttons, but after watching a few things on YouTube, I think I’ve figured out how it’s going to work. It seems you can learn pretty much anything you want from YouTube.

My podcasting equipment won’t arrive until this Friday, but for now I’ve been looking up sound effects online, and there are a LOT of them! I should be able to find any kind of laughter, or applause, or even boos that I want to download to the customizable buttons. I can find cartoon sounds, character voices, storms, and all kinds of other things! I’m getting really excited about this now!

The one thing I’m not sure about is the Moano board runs on battery power so I’ll have to charge it up before using it. Now it would be much more convenient if I could just plug the board into my PC and start using it, but in a way I understand why they made things the way they did. The board won’t have to be powered by my PC and take anything away from the PC’s power supply (Not that it would take that much power). And once charged, it says the battery should work for around 8 hours. But still, it just seemed odd to have to charge the board. On the good side, if I want to settle down somewhere quiet to program sound effects to the customizable buttons using just an iPad, or even my cell phone, the battery power should make that really easy.

So now the real work starts. I will have to settle on what eleven sound effects, or character lines I want to add to the board and come up with some content. What to do, what to do? Should I start talking about writing? I am a writer, after all. But the podcast will be about “rambling”, so no matter what the subject starts out to be, I can always move on to something else if the mood strikes me. The key to all of this is to make it entertaining, I think. No one wants to listen to someone just ramble on. So in a way, I’m going to have to figure out what direction to lead the “rambling”. I’d like to take things in a comedic direction for this podcast. I did that with the past blogs I’ve written, and they always seemed to entertain people. Now I just need to do it with my voice. My first podcast was about friends, where “Vegas Ramblings” first started, and how I kind of moved on to podcasting. Maybe my second podcast should be about Las Vegas? That is a VERY wide-open topic! I could “ramble” all kinds of places from there!

I’ve had a thought about doing a podcast about video games I don’t want to play. A lot of people do podcasts about games they love, and that’s a valid topic, but how about games that really turn me off? “Lown Mowing Simulator” is an actual video game. Who is buying that? Are you really so bored you need to simulate mowing grass? GET OFF THE DAMNED COUCH! That does seem like a valid topic for me to “ramble” about. I can shout about how lazy some people are. That might entertain, or maybe it will offend some people? If you aren’t offending some people, you aren’t doing comedy correctly.

For now, I’m on hold. Once my podcasting equipment gets here, I can move forward and add more to this blog. I’ll hopefully get things figured out this weekend and maybe even get something recorded and then I can post a link to the podcast in the next blog post. If you’re reading this, you’ll have to at least give it a quick listen and let me know what you think. If you’re trying out some podcasting yourself, I’d love to listen to your podcast, so send me a link! It’s always helpful, and fun, to listen to what someone else is trying!

Until next time, podcast on…!

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