Hey, y’all. I’m Wulfbrand, and I do the stuff with the things that keeps this all on the air and online. Most of my work is behind the scenes, but every page you visit on the site and every episode of the podcast (except episode 14, which Seba did solo since I was out of town) went by me for the finishing touches. You occasionally may hear me on the podcast, especially in Episode 4 (where I was interviewed) and in the forthcoming Tribe episode which I believe will be for Patreon subscribers only once we get that ball rolling.

First off, happy Yule and I’m pleased to announce that we’ve finally launched a store, a donations page, and we’ve got T-SHIRTS!!!!!!!!! The designs were done by Seba’s husband and are just absolutely flat gorgeous. Visit the Store to pick one up today! (The shop had some teething troubles as we brought it up, but it all works now!)

I wanted to talk to y’all a little about our podcasting process currently and what I’m working on for the future. Our “Studio” as of right now was originally a bedroom (and there’s still some of Seba’s youngest’s stuff in a corner) but currently just has a desk, a couple chairs, a file cabinet, a couch, and some bookcases.

On the desk sits an iMac (Seba is a Mac person; I’m more of a PC person, heh), a glass of wine, the microphone on its boom arm, and a pen and pad. On a small side table to the side sits a pair of headphones (for late night recording) and a USB headphone amplifier. And right now, that’s it!

If you’re curious, the mic we’re using right now is a Blue Yeti Pro (we got the Yeticaster bundle so it’s on a boom arm and has a shockmount). For the first episode, we used the Blue Snowball I had lying around and so the quality, while decent, was improved by worlds once we got the new mic in. They’re both USB mics.

Everything right now is recorded in Audacity since it’s (A) free, and (B) easy to learn (ok, it’s got a bit of a learning curve, but I’m learning Avid Pro Tools right now and boy howdy does Audacity seem simple by comparison). Seba’s voice goes directly from her into the mic, the Yeti does the analog-to-digital without a separate box and sends it over USB right into the Mac, which records it.

Then Seba goes back and spends like 4 hours on each episode editing it to her satisfaction (removing clicks and pops, cutting out long pauses, and occasionally re-recording a section that wasn’t up to snuff). After that I come by and splice on the intro and outro, record any special messages, bounce the file down to stereo and put it on a flash drive. Seba lives waaaaaaay out in the country, which has near-infinite benefits, but the Internet speed is not one of them and uploading 45 minutes to an hour of audio over a mobile hotspot not only takes forever, but also uses up the 15GB of data a month Seba has available to do her day job in a right hurry. Instead of stressing Seba’s connection, I run it by my house in the nearest town and upload it from there; I also build the page for the post, punch all the descriptions and show notes Seba sends me into the system so it shows up right in the RSS feed, turn on the Facebook and Twitter Auto-Share, hold my breath…

And hit Publish. (Or Schedule, if I want it to go out the next day instead).

And out it goes, into the world (and your ears and/or eyes).

It’s a good process and gets the job done well, it’s easy enough to manage and the microphone we have has switchable modes so we can swing that boom arm out into the middle of the room and do interviews with it.

But that process has some limitations.

For one thing, Seba’s slow connection makes remote interviewing (over Skype or Mumble or Teamspeak or even Facebook Messenger calls) pretty much impossible. The bootleg workaround we came up with for the short term is to do a regular phone call on speakerphone, but that has some obvious sound quality problems and it’s just not going to be that great. It’s annoyingly easy to tell when something is recorded using a workaround like that — the rooster crow, for example, was recorded on an iPhone at 5 am, and no matter how much noise reduction and smoothing I did the signal-to-noise just isn’t as good as the rest of the podcast on that. Heck, I’m actually considering miking up the dang chicken coop one of these days — but what we’ve got works for now. For a 4 second clip. But for a whole interview? I’m thinking we gotta come up with a better way to do that.

So, I did. I recently moved back across the state line to, as I mentioned, the nearest town to Seba — my family lives here, and it’s closer to university, if another half hour farther from work (I work up in Atlanta and let’s just say my drive gets fun). The house I moved into happens to also be my dad’s, but he’s fixing to move up North sometime in early January — and take a lot of his stuff with him, leaving me to care for the house for the next couple years.

And that gives us an opportunity to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while:

Take a room, maybe this one:

And turn it into a right proper studio.

The everyday episodes of the podcast would still be recorded out at Seba’s place the old way. No reason to change that, right? It’s important to Seba that she be able to record on her schedule at her house and on her land and that absolutely makes sense to me.

But for those interviews, and for making music (another side hobby of mine), and even if I want to run a Dungeons and Dragons session and record it, having a proper studio will make worlds of difference, and will be a hell of a lot of fun to put together.

The room’s going to need some acoustic treatment, obviously; it’s got a high ceiling but it’s also got a lot of windows, which reflect sound better’n a mirror does light. We’re also going to do some of that on Seba’s home studio which will help cut down the background stuff and on the whole make the recordings sound that much better.

The studio will have microphones and a place to sit for everyone present. Everyone will get headphones to hear their own voice and the whole mix, and how much of each they hear will be adjustable. They’ll also be able to hear anybody being interviewed on the remote line. I’m getting the house upgraded to fiber, so network issues won’t be a problem for interviews. Finally (and this is more on the music side) I’ll have the ability to record a 6-7 piece band, including a set of acoustic drums; the ability to add sound effects to podcast episodes (holy CRAP is Pro Tools powerful, but like I said, it’s got a learning curve on it what looks like Cheaha Mountain), and even the ability to stream interviews and such live to Youtube or Twitch or another platform. Maybe actually get some content on our mildly neglected Youtube channel, heh.

Obviously this project won’t be instant, it won’t be cheap, and it won’t all go perfect the first time we try to use it. Most of the hardware I’ll be using will be pre-owned, or retrofitted, or borrowed, or is stuff I got as a gift 3 years ago and never could find a use for. This is one of my personal pet projects so it’s coming out of my personal funds (I had an airline lose my suitcase recently and I’m getting (hopefully) my deposits back from moving, so there’s some seed money right there).

The donations and merch sales are supporting Seba and her family directly and they absolutely need it more than I do. With that said, if anyone has any of this or simillar stuff lying around gathering dust, I’d love to put it to good use on this here project:

Sound treatment: Bass Traps, Acoustic Foam, Diffusers

Microphones: Mics of all kinds, preferably with XLR connector. Good brands include Sennheiser, R0DE, Shure, but seriously, anything that sounds good would be cool.

Rack: 8U rackmount case or freestanding rack

Power Conditioner (I was looking at Furman products)

Headphone Amp: I was looking at the Presonus HP60 and I think that would fit well

Headphones: I need like 6-7 sets of closed back headphones with a 6mm (1/4”) plug. Sennheiser HD280Pro or that Sony one everyone uses would be ideal, but as long as they sound decent and have a 1/4” plug they’ll work.

Cables: XLR cables, Dsub cables, 1/4” extension cables, male-male, male-female, female-female, Thunderbolt. You can never have too many cables. (until you do).

Recording Interface: I currently have an Alesis Multimix 8, which works ok but lacks a lot of features I’ll need to do what I’m trying to do here. I really want an Antelope Audio Zen Studio+, which checks every box, but even pre-owned they’re like $1700, so that’s a huge chunk of my budget right there.

Miscellaneous Hardware: If you’ve got something weird or analog or an old school mixing board or a microphone from the 50s, I’ll gladly put it to good use. (Software is good, but there’s just something about tubes…)

Anyway, if you want to help out with this studio project shoot me an email to wulfbrand@southernfriedwitch.com; I’m also taking suggestions at that email for new merch to offer (we’ve got T-shirts, Wine Glasses, Mugs, and plants from Seba’s very own garden coming, and their sale will benefit Seba’s rescue animals, put food on our tables, keep the website up and running, put more plants in the ground, and help keep podcast episodes and blog posts flowing!). We’re also trying to move to eating more sustainably, so keep an eye out for a Musings post about that in the coming year.

Oh, one last thing:

Wulfbrand’s Tech Corner won’t just be about tech— it’ll also have some of my own takes on the podcast episodes, the Musings, and my own stuff. If there’s a major site update or product update or anything it’ll probably be expounded on in excruciating detail here.

Happy Yule, and Blessed Be, Y’all!