A Minute-By-Minute Look At Our Podcast Recording Process

Becky and I record three episodes of The D Brief podcast every Monday evening. We record at the Jacobs Media Strategies office, where I work by day. These episodes are then released on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Over the first year of the podcast, our recording process has evolved. Here's a look at what it currently involves:

During the week: Becky and I line up our guests - hopefully more than a week in advance, as there are three or four guests for each episode:

1. A guest co-host who sits in on the recording of the Tuesday and Wednesday episode
2. A regular rotating call-in guest who contributes a segment to the Wednesday episode
3. An in-studio guest who participates in a longer interview for the Thursday episode

Every other week, we also do a "live-to-tape" interview; I conduct a short on-location interview, then use highlights from that conversation in our Tuesday episode. We will also publish that entire interview in our mobile app as a bonus episode. To keep track of our co-hosts, call-in guests, in-studio guests, and live-to-tape guests, we use a Google spreadsheet.

We also use the instant messaging service Slack as a tool that lets us keep track of local events and news stories that we want to talk about each week. We follow dozens of Detroit arts and entertainment organizations on social media, and when we happen to come across something interesting in our feeds, we copy and paste the link to a Slack channel called "NextEp." This way, when it comes time to write the show, we have a lot of material to draw from.

Mondays:

5:00pm: I'd love to tell you that I do my show prep well in advance, but the truth is, I usually put it off until the last minute, and Becky does the same. Fortunately, we've created show prep sheets that acts a template, and a process that allows us to check dozens of websites in a short period of time to drop the appropriate information into the template. This enables us to write segments that cover music news, on-stage events, food and drink, and more. We've divided the segments up - Becky writes hers each week and I write mine. When she's done with hers, she sends them to me via Slack and I print all of our sheets and put them in the proper order.

6:00pm: I begin setting up the podcast equipment that resides in cases beneath a desk in my office. There is a large empty space just outside my office, and we convert it into a recording studio each week. In addition to the mics, mixer, and other recording gear, we also assemble a giant "The D Brief" backdrop that we use when photographing our guests.

6:30pm: Becky and our intern (currently Marvin Figgins) arrive. Becky and I do a quick pass through the show prep sheets, writing in any last minute adjustments, and then hand them off to Marvin to make multiple copies. Becky settles in, while I upload the live-to-tape interview highlights to my Kindle and put the production elements in the proper order for the show.

7:00pm: Our guest co-host arrives. We bring him or her up to our recording space and chit chat. We explain the concept of the show and the ground rules. Then, we start our "rundown." This involves all of us reviewing the show prep sheets together. While Becky and I have written the outline of the show, we use the rundown to figure out where we're going to use that outline as a jumping off point for more interesting conversation. We're looking for places where any one of the three of us have a strong reaction (positive or negative) to a story, or have a unique perspective to share.

The rundown process of uncovers conversation topics that we might not have come across otherwise. For example, we recently had Dan Merritt, the co-owner of Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, as a guest co-host on our show. As we went through the rundown, we previewed the stories for the evening's show, including the annual lighting of the Detroit Menorah for Hanukah. Dan pointed out that Jews have made significant contributions to comic books over the years, so we scribbled that in the margins of our show prep sheets as a topic of conversation to delve into when we got to this story. By the end of the rundown, we have preplanned several of these potential discussion tangents.

7:45pm: Our call-in guest skypes into the show. This is always the first segment that we record, even though it's not the first segment in the show. In post-production, I move it to a later point in the Wednesday episode.

8:00pm: On a good night, we start recording the Tuesday episode at 8:00. When we first started, we would record the show in "sweeps" of multiple segments, and then pause to get our bearings between each sweep. Becky and I have now gotten good enough that we can usually record the entire Tuesday episode - 7 segments over 35-40 minutes - in one sweep. If there are any major mistakes that I will need to cut out in post-production, I make a quick note in red pen on my show prep sheets. After we finish recording Tuesday's show, we take a quick breather, then roll right into Wednesday's show. Ideally, these shows are each 35 minutes, though we inevitably run a little long. We're working on that.

While we are recording the show, our intern Marvin is using his copy of the show prep sheets to write the episodes' shownotes pages for our Wordpress website. The shownotes are essentially a paragraph summarizing the episode, followed by a list of links to the things that we talk about for listeners who would like to know more.

9:15pm: The in-studio guest for the Thursday episode texts me to let me know that they've arrived and they're at the door, which is locked after hours. We send Marvin to go get them, while we wrap up the Wednesday show. When we're done recording, we snap some quick photos of our co-host in front of the backdrop to use as our episode artwork, then send our co-host on their way.

Now we turn our attention to the in-studio guest. We conduct a pre-interview to get a better understand of what the guest does, and to see if there are any particular areas that we should ask about.

9:45pm: We start recording and spend the next 35 minutes or so talking with the guest. Unless something goes horribly wrong, there is only one thing that I will edit out of this interview; when we get to the end of the interview, we ask our guests for a series of rapid-fire recommendations. For example, we'll ask them to name their favorite Detroit dive bar or to tell us their favorite place to see a concert. Before this benchmark feature begins, I give some tips on what makes for a good answer. Also, we give the guest the option of passing on a recommendation. For example, if we ask somebody what their favorite Michigan beer is and they don't drink, they'll pass and we'll edit that answer out. Aside from these rapid recommendations, I usually don't edit this interview.

10:30pm: We wrap up the recording of the Thursday interview, take some photo of the guest against the backdrop, and pack up our equipment. I eject the SD card from our digital recorder and take it with me, along with my show prep sheets.

11:00pm: I arrive home and post-production begins. I upload the evening's audio files to my computer. Using a program called Reaper, I edit the segments together. I have a pre-loaded template with my audio processing settings, so it's mostly a matter of putting the segments in the proper order, making any edits according to the red notes I've scribbled onto my show prep sheets, and bouncing the audio files down. For better or worse, I do not edit out every "um," "ah," "like," and "y'know." I add the proper ID3 tags to the audio file, upload the photos from my phone and crop them into squares, and upload the audio files to my podcast host. I set the episodes to be released at 2:00 am on their respective days.

Tuesdays: On Tuesday mornings, I will polish up the shownotes page that Marvin created for our Wordpress website, adding the photos and inserting an audio player for the episode. Then publish it. This shownotes page is what we'll share on social media. At 1:00pm, our Mailchimp email marketing account automatically sends out an email campaign that links back to this page (using the RSS-to-email feature) to our email database. I'll also send individual emails to all of our guests with a link to the show and encourage them to share it on social media.

After that, we're on to the next episode! The process makes Mondays long - up to 14 hours in the office when you include my workday - but after a year of refining it, we're now able to publish three episodes a week covering a wide range of topics with multiple guests. There's a lot of moving parts, but over time we've gotten good at consistently knocking things out.

LISTEN: Hear the latest episode of The D Brief podcast.

More Glimpses Behind the Scenes:

1. Connecting with Other Local Podcasters
2. Axing the Weakest Link In Your Podcast
3. What Do Podcasters Do When It's Time for Vacation?
4. Using Recurring Guests in Podcasts
5. The Ideal Length for a Podcast