This will no doubt be met with some scoffs, eye rolls, and overall animosity. I’ve listened to plenty of podcasts before, and I have had plenty of conversations before. How hard could it be to just combine speaking and spewing what I know into a microphone? To my chagrin, not nearly as easy as I thought/hoped. I just found out I suck at simply talking. The sniffles, the lip smacks, and heavy breathing I never realized I garnished. I also discovered I might have a lisp. Big thank you to everyone who swept that one under the rug. My thesis? Podcasting is hard.
I’ve garnered a new respect for those word windbags since just attempting to become one myself. I can’t speak more highly about the ‘Blue Yeti Microphone’. If there was a fly in the room, you would have heard the wings beating as clear as a whistle. It even picked up the high school marching band practice from half of a mile away. They’ve still got work to do, but I think they will really have come into their own by the Spring.
Hiccups Along the Way
The first hiccup the diaphragm of life launched into my daring attempt at podcasting was speaking alone. Boy, the mastered schizophrenia one must wield to look around a room and talk to absolutely nobody about how Andrew Schultz is the man on Netflix AND in person. Then with that speaking aloud comes its fair share of ‘likes’, ‘ums’, and a plethora of pauses that would have the listener wondering, “Is it over? Did he just get up and leave?”
The $10.99 bottle of Barefoot Pinot I found my way to the bottom of certainly didn’t make things better. I figured what the hell, this’ll loosen me up and get me chatting. It loosened me up alright. Seconds after my last glass, my shoulder popped further out of its own socket than Gary Busey’s mind from his own brain. I got liquid courage mixed up with a migraine-inducing black out. Beware of those cartoonesque yawns that send your arms nice and high in the air. One of them might just slip out.
The Final Cut
Audacity is an excellent platform to use if you have more than a couple brain cells and scored at least a 25 on your ACT. Needless to say, I struggled. The editing process was rigorous for a measly ten minutes. I went second by second making sure I sounded flawless and angelic. I wanted there to be no distinction between my own voice and James Earl Jones’. Morgan Freeman would be in my DMs pleading on his digitalized knees for voice lessons. “Sure,” I would say. “If you promise to reprise your role as God in my rendition of ‘Greg Almighty’.”
After it was all said and done, I kicked back with a sore shoulder, loose surrounding cartilage, a belly full of cheap wine, and smile much like the one God (Morgan Freeman) had on his face at the end of the seventh day. And guess what!
I’M NOT MAKING IT OUT THE FUCKING HOOD. It’s staying in the drafts. Mom – sorry about those mortgage payments but keep making ’em. Dad, I was wrong – Facebook Marketplace actually IS the right place to find a new car. I realized podcasting is a lot like the game Kan-Jam. Sure, you can play by yourself. You better be reallllll good though.
All that being said, Cangro and I will be getting one done soon. Maybe one day that audio track will feel the warmth of the sun above the deep blue water. Until then, to the Mariana Trench it goes.
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