Inside The Recording Studio

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► Tell us about you and your podcast

Jody Whitesides & Chris Hellstrom. We are musicians and producers with years of experience mixing and recording.

Inside The Recording Studio is the name of our podcast. We talk about tips & tricks to help other people interested in getting better at recording and mixing. It's great for beginners to professionals.

Each episode picks a particular topic where Chris & Jody provide real world information about a technique or piece of gear. Often we draw upon years of experience of what has worked for us and others and what hasn't.

Additionally there are times when we're throwing in stories that might be utter nonsense as well. The extra spice that makes us, us and a bit more entertaining.

► Why & how did you start this podcast? 

Jody had been holding on to the domain insidetherecordingstudio.com for a number of years. Initially he wanted to do a show that was a lot like Inside The Actors Studio. Where the host had a guest on and would know everything there is to know about that guest and their career.

Things changed.

Jody had attempted to start the podcast by breaking down the recording of a song from initial writing conception all the way thru the demo process to final recording and mastering. Unfortunately those initial episodes were a tad undercooked. Jody pulled it and let it sit for about a year before he brought Chris on board to retool the idea of the podcast to be about recording gear and techniques.

With the new direction the podcast was born. Chris and Jody had recorded about 8 episodes and were about to launch when the decision to halt and start over happened. Because Chris and Jody live in different cities, there were some technical issues to overcome with the recording of the podcast. Particularly with the audio quality. They worked out a method that works extremely well and has some of the highest production value of pure recorded audio. Which for a podcast about recording, is paramount.

They re-recorded the initial 8 episodes and launched in April of 2020, right after COVID shutdowns hit. With the dumping of the original episodes and the re-recording it took about 2 months to get the first episode out the door and into the world.

Both Chris and Jody listen to multiple podcasts. Some for comparison, some for personal pleasure. They felt they could add to the education of budding and fellow professional producers, mix engineers, and musicians. It's an effort to help people handle their goals for being professional and not waste time when the red-light goes on in the studio.

► How'd you find the time and funding to do this podcast?

Currently Inside The Recording Studio is a once a week release, with an additional video lesson that also releases once a week. Wait, does that make it a twice a week thing?!? To be fair there is a podcast episode and a short video tip that isn't via the podcast feed.

Normally it's about the length of an episode plus about a hour or so. Since ITRS does both the audio and a video version, it takes some time for Chris to upload his audio and video to Jody. Jody then assembles it by lining up the audio. Great thing is, due to the consistent nature of where we record, Jody has audio presets for the clean up, noise removal, and sweetening of the audio. Then the audio gets exported as the final MP3 to the host, plus exported as FCPXML where it then gets assembled to the video outputs. There's some minor assembly in Final Cut Pro for the video version.

The exports go pretty quick, then it's uploaded to the audio host, YouTube, Facebook, and linked to the website. A fairly smooth process at this point. If an episode is 45 minutes, figure about 2 hours and 15 minutes till it's all uploaded and scheduled for release.

Fortunately for Chris and Jody their day jobs consist of recording and producing. Thus it's fairly easy to fit it into their schedule. Also they spend time each week working on music as a production team.

The current costs are about $150 for the year of hosting, and about $150 a month for advertising. As for the editing and production, well, that in the nature of the job so there's no extra cost there. Yes, Chris & Jody currently fund it themselves. The goal is to get the podcast to a fanbase big enough to pay for itself within 18 months.

► What do you gain from podcasting?        

Right now there is no financial gain. We would take sponsorship and while we haven't been actively pursuing it, we will when we start hitting about 2,000 downloads an episode. Hopefully that's a good solid number to have to start pursuing it.

We enjoy the art and science of recording thus it's a labor of love more than anything. Plus we enjoy helping others improve the quality of their recording.

There's a segment that we've been doing where we search out something new that's happened in that week so we can inform our listeners. That helps to keep us on our toes and keep things fresh for us. We're always learning and improving our craft. How boring the world would be if one wasn't learning something new every day.

► How does your podcasting process look like? 

Our respective mics are a C12 (by Telefunken) and an ML-1 (by Slate Digital). We use FaceTime to link up and see each other while recording and chatting. We both use Logic Pro as our recording DAW. iPhones are our means of video recording.

There is a plethora of plugins we use for making sure the audio sounds as good as it can. Including software from Universal Audio, Slate Digital, iZotope, and Oek Sound.

We have yet to have guests on the podcast, but we are going to in the future once the COVID thing goes away. So far we've been asking various friends in the industry if they'd be willing to be a guest on the show. At this point, no one has said no which is awesome. We're looking forward to getting them on the show when can, cause some are GRAMMY winners, and others have worked with some pretty amazing artists.

Once we start doing those interviews, we will most likely do them in person to make it easier to do the audio/video. If it isn't possible, we will provide a template and request to make sure the guest can do a similar setup to what we're doing so it fits the vibe of the show and keeps the audio quality as top notch as possible. Fortunately for our industry that shouldn't be too hard to accomplish.

So far most of our episodes come from what we wished someone would have pointed out to us when we were learning to produce, record, play, mix music when younger. We are starting to get requests from listeners for subjects to cover and we have already released episodes based on ideas that got submitted to us. We definitely want that to happen more and more.

We tend to have a production meeting where we brainstorm ideas for future episodes. We take notes and write down an outline of the subject matter. We keep that open on the computer screen while recording the podcast. It helps us to stay on target for the episode.

While we're recording, I also have a note taking app to make note of companies that get mentioned, if there's a flub, or when we plan a break to put a future advertisement in the podcast via the time stamp.

► How do you market your show?

You know, that's a good question, how listeners find us. It might be something we should ask in an episode. Tell us how you find us. The unknown reality is, we have spent time getting our podcast listed in as many services as we can (Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, Listen Notes, Stitcher, Deezer, etc). However, we're not sure there's a real means to know exactly how they've found us.

Based on our host we do know that over 50% of our listeners are listening via Apple Podcasts. Which is pretty wild.

We have an email service set up on our website and we're working on building an email list to become more effective in keeping people engaged with us. That's a slow and on going process.

Right now we do spend money on Facebook Ads and are about to start some ads on YouTube as well. Each week we assess how the ad is doing and think out who we should be targeting. We've recently finalized a lot of our website and do plan on pushing it a lot more with our future episodes.

We've also been told by a few listeners that they've posted about our podcast and something we've said on an episode that may have been controversial. Which apparently leads to long threads on forums and quite possibly new listeners. So we appreciate when listeners mention us online.

► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?

Don't get discouraged, but do have a plan for what you want to express in your podcast.

The very first episode we recorded took me (Jody) about a day to get everything dealt with, which as was answered earlier is now down to a few hours including the actual recording of the podcast. I found out real quick that to get our podcast to have a certain high-end audio quality and aesthetic meant I needed to make templates and and presets in order to cut down on production time.

It took a couple of weeks for me to get the assembly down to the time frame that it is now. A majority of the time is actually the exporting of the audio and video as the actual assembly is pretty fast. Due to the audio sweetening and video presets, the vast majority of the time is the computer doing the exports. Even with a Mac Pro, that takes time. I'm sure as computers get ever faster, that export time will get to be less and less.

To my knowledge we didn't read and books on actual podcasting. That probably has more to do with the fact that we're expert audio producers, we're in our element. We did do research on where to host the podcast and did spend some time looking at what other podcasters and YouTubers are doing with their descriptions. That gives us ideas to hopefully help increase our fanbase and future possibilities of affiliate links and/or sponsors. We're still learning that part of the game, so-to-speak.

We'll be over the moon once the podcast is paying for itself and then some. We're not there yet. But the feedback from listeners is overwhelmingly positive. We did have one listener tell us last week that he stopped listening to almost all the other recording/mixing oriented podcasts because they weren't as knowledgable about their subjects and/or their audio didn't sound as good as ours. That's a real vote of confidence for us and it helps us feel like we're on the right path of fulfilling our vision for the podcast.

► Where can we learn more about you & your podcasts?

Our website is insidetherecordingstudio.com. Jody's website is: jodywhitesides.com. Chris' website is: chrishellstrom.com.

The podcast's social media accounts are as follows: facebook.com/insidetherecordingstudio. instagram.com/insidetherecordingstudio. twitter.com/recordinginside.

The email address is: theguys@insidetherecordingstudio.com - but I'd like to make the suggestion that people visit our website and sign up to the email list there.

We don't have a Patreon or a PayPal donation set up. We probably should, but we haven't gotten that far yet. This interview might be the fire that lights up under our ass to do it.