PDP Portfolio - Record Rewind Podcast

13 September 2024 - Creation of the Podcast

We tried to come up with a name for the podcast, we also drafted a few logos, but they weren't very catchy, Nathan G tried to use AI for the logo, however it produced very "monotone" logos.

Example logo we generated below:

We eventually settled on it being the Record Rewind Podcast, and our friend from the college designed a logo for us on canva.

24 September 2024 - Test Recording

after creating the podcast, we decided to record a sort of "test" episode, this would allow us to see how we did, since it was only the three of us planning, recording and hosting it we wanted to see how we would do without having the pressure of releasing it.

We decided on our setup for the podcast in one of our colleges studios, for microphones we would each use a shure sm7b as these are almost a standard for podcasts as they are a great dynamic mic for speech.

For this test we recorded into pro tools, we used no outboard gear or plugins within pro tools, which is something we ended up changing in future recordings.

after recording we realised that if we wanted it to be a good product that people would listen to we would have to change many things, first issue was that we had not done any research into any topics to talk about, although this could work in some scenarios for podcasts, at the time we were leaning to be a more informative podcast so we needed topics to talk about.

Another issue we saw was that we had failed to do a sound check pre recording, we had issues with the audio peaking at points, as we had not applied any sort of compression or limiting to stop this, we hadn't even done a level check, and one of the microphones would cut out every few seconds.

The final issue with it was how we spoke, as we weren't properly speaking into the microphones on the podcast, and instead turning away from the microphones, meaning the mics weren't picking up our voices clearly.

With all of this realised, we ultimately decided that any episode we record and release must have topics that we research prior to recording, we must use some sort of compression and/or limiting to keep everything we record from being too loud, we also came to the conclusion that our podcast should not be unedited like most podcasts, but instead edited to cut between the different topics that we discuss, similar to a Formula 1 podcast I listen to "Formula for Success".  This allows for more streamlined episodes, cutting out a lot of the mess-ups or boring parts.

20 October 2024 - Creating Social Media Pages

I was the one that created the social media pages, originally, Nathan G had created a Gmail account for our podcast, however he got locked out of it, so I instead created an email for record rewind using outlook.

I then created accounts on TikTok and Instagram, as our target demographic is 18-24 year olds, it was found in 2024 that over a third of TikTok's users were in this age range, and 32% of Instagram's users were in this age range.

13/14 November 2024 - Episode 1 Recording Session

on the 13th, we began with booking a studio in our college, Nathan G did have a contact outside of the college who had a professional podcast studio we could use, however the timing didn't work out with this other studio and we couldn't get a booking.  Since I was in charge of planning for us, I booked the studio, along with two sm7bs, as previously mentioned they are the gold standard dynamic mics for podcasts and are great for speech, Nathan G would bring his own sm7b along with the camera, I also booked some headphones for us to use so we could communicate with each other while checking levels and setting up our preamps and compressors.

Nathan M brought up a bunch of topics for us to talk about:

We were all set to record.

On the 14th we got into the studio at around 4pm, we set up the cameras, tables and mics first.

We set up with two cameras, one of which being Nathan G's phone, however we didn't end up using this as when it came to editing, we struggled to find a use for this second angle and ultimately scrapped it.

Also seen in the below photo, we set up the acoustic on the walls to minimise reflections.

For this recording, we used the Audient Black Series Preamps and Compressors, we did also have FabFilter Pro L on each track just to make sure we didn't ever peak in the DAW.

In the photo below, we patched our signal coming from the live room to the preamps and compressors and then into the SSL desk mic inputs that then went to our DAW, on the preamp, we had the mic gain on all three of our mics set at around 35 dB.

We had the input and output for the compressors set to 0 db as we did not want to directly turn down the levels when coming in or out of the compressor, we had it set to the smooth setting, which does both average (RMS) and peak detection compression, so the RMS circuit applies gentle compression, whereas the peak detection compressor specifically targets the loudest points of a signal, so any time we spoke extremely loud this circuit would begin compressing.  We had it set to a ratio of 6:1.

We checked levels on each individual mic with one of us being in the live room speaking into one mic at a time, after this we had another one of us go in the room to make sure everything was sounding fine when two people were speaking, we also did a quick less than 10 minute recording of all 3 of us speaking, just to do a final check with all three of us.

After about an hour long setting up and checking levels we recorded for almost 2 hours, and took around an hour to take all of our stuff down.

we put up some posts on social media to tease the recording, it got some interactions.

5 December 2024 - Editing Finished

This was the day the podcast was edited.

Nathan M was placed in charge of editing processes, he spent most of the day editing it.

I helped edit around the first 10 minutes but the rest was entirely Nathan Ms work.

Nathan M ran into a lot of issues exporting, to the point he had to change between computers multiple times just to export the video, it even ended up bricking one of the PCs at the college somehow, this is why there was almost a month gap between recording and release, as Nathan M didn't have editing software at home so he was stuck to editing on college days, and he ran into the previously mentioned issues.

below can be found a photo Nathan G posted to the podcast Instagram page teasing the first episode.

7 December 2024 - Release day

This was the day the podcast was uploaded to spotify, Nathan G was in charge of this, I created a photo on canva to tease it prior to its release, below can be found that photo as well as the initial interactions on spotify.

Overall we had an ok number of interactions after a few days.

13 December 2024 - Linktree Account

I created a linktree account so that people who wanted to access our podcast on different platforms could do so easily.

17 December 2024 - Releasing Shortform Content

Nathan G uploaded used an AI tool that took our 48 minute podcast and edited it into shortform videos that we could put onto social media. Nathan G uploaded them to Instagram, I uploaded them onto tiktok.

These platforms were chosen as they are quite popular with our target demographic of 18-24 year olds.

I was the one to release the short videos onto TikTok, I added hashtags to the posts related to the topics we spoke about

The podcast did see some spikes in Spotify interactions after the social media posts, the first spike shown in the graph below is when we released, the second is when we released the shortform content.

Our social media pages and posts at the time had gained decent amounts of attention and interactions, our Instagram page has gained around 2000 views within a few days of uploading the videos, the tiktok page has averaged at around 700 views per video.

9 April 2025 - Planning Second Episode

All three of us were pretty busy working on other things after recording the first episode, I was very busy on working on my other artefacts, however we eventually found time for a second episode.

I booked a studio about a week in advance, I booked a different studio in the college as me and Nathan G had recorded a separate podcast outside of this project for someone else in this studio and the setup was much quicker and overall it went very well aside from his camera turning off at one point during the recording.

We booked two sm7bs again, along with an Eletrovoice re20, as this dynamic mic is often seen on podcasts and is well renowned for its natural sound, we booked it just in case of any emergencies with the other microphones not working, we didn't do this previously in our first recording and although we didn't run into any issues the first time with microphone, we decided to get it just incase. Nathan G would again bring his own sm7b and camera.

We had also decided to change the format of what we spoke about on the podcast slightly for this episode, as after the first episode, we spoke to some friends who listened to it, and they made some suggestions, we were going to make it a bit less "formulaic" to make it less about talking about recent new in music, and more about things we really wanted to speak on, although we still would talk about current goings on in music, we weren't going to discuss things we didn't want to just for the fact that they were big topics at the time.

We also wanted to tie in our own experiences in the industry of sound production a bit more, as we did it in our first episode a bit, and got some good feedback on it.

16 April 2025 - Recording Second Episode

We were all in the studio for around 10 am, we took a bit longer to set up than the last episode as we did in fact have an issue with one of the microphones, as the microphone did not have the correct screw thread to be able to screw onto any of the microphone stands we had, so we swapped it out for the EV re20.

For this recording, we did not make use of any preamps, but instead made use the distressor outboard compressors in the studio, we set the compressor to  Opto mode, we set the ratio at around 5:1, with the attack set to around 2 and the release set around 2 as well, we only had access to two compressors in the studio, but Nathan G has access to the distressor plugin at home, so he took note of the settings used to recreate it at home on the uncompressed channel, the two sm7bs were the mics we compressed, I had a limiter in place within the pro tools session on each channel to keep all audio below 0db. we then spent a long time checking levels the same way we did in the first episode, first one person speaks into each mic one at a time, then two people speaking to eachother in the live room as if they are on the podcast, and then the test recording.

after about an hour and a half, we recorded for almost 2 hours, we then took everything down in under an hour.

We took some photos to post on our Instagram story to tease this episode.

This episode is currently still in the editing process.

To head to my next artefact click the button below.

Artefact 2