Drop the Mic with Mike Brown — How to Podcast and Hack Creativity So You Can Share Messages That Matter

Step up to the mic with Mike Brown in Drop the Mic—your ultimate guide to mastering the art of podcasting and unlocking unstoppable creativity. Whether you're an aspiring podcaster, a seasoned creator, or someone itching to share messages that matter, Mike brings you practical tips, insider hacks, and inspiring conversations with industry pros to help you level up your game. From crafting compelling stories and growing your audience to staying creative when inspiration feels out of reach, this podcast is your one-stop shop for sharing your voice and making a real impact.

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How to Find Music and Art for Your Podcast | The Ember Studios Podcast 05/26/2022

How to Find Music and Art for Your Podcast | The Ember Studios Podcast This is episode #8 of the Ember Studios Podcast, How and Where to Find Music and Art for Your Podcast. >>> <<< I’m Mike Brown and this is the Ember Studios Podcast, the show to help you transform from confused to confident when it comes to launching and maintaining your podcast and other related projects. Finding and choosing music and art for your podcast can be very daunting but it’s not as hard as it seems. In this podcast episode, we aim to answer a few questions. What Is Podcast Cover Art? What Size Should Podcast Artwork Be? We also cover How To Create Podcast Cover Art, How To Make Podcast Artwork, as well as many other topics. In addition to talking about Music and Art for your podcast, I wanted to let you know about my 10-Day Podcast Planning Initiative. This is a two-week online course that will help you zero in on your podcast topic and format. One of the days is actually dedicated to the topic of this episode- Finding Art and Music! It’s currently in production, but you can join the waitlist to be among the first to know when it drops! I’m planning on offering a launch discount, so getting on the waitlist is the best way to guarantee you get the best price. Head to to join! If you want more information, I give a more detailed description in the episode audio. Please feel free to email me at michael@emberstudioscreative.com if there's anything I can help you with. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a 5 star review, so we can keep chatting for a long, long time. Thank you again, and don't wait to share your voice with the world. Bye! **************************************** Resources Mentioned: Get your FREE PDF with the image dimensions and links to useful resources: Canva - Envato Elements: - Upwork - Fiverr - ArtStation - Behance - DeviantArt - Lore - Leitmotif - Be the first to know about my next course - Start Your Show - Find more at - Contact me at michael@emberstudioscreative.com Full Show Notes - /episode/index/show/ec48d4f8-72b6-433f-a499-948a36310b45/id/23227214

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The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield - Identifying and Overcoming Resistance | The Ember Studios Podcast 04/21/2022

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield - Identifying and Overcoming Resistance | The Ember Studios Podcast This is The Ember Studios Podcast #4 with Mike Brown and we go over The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. Grab The War of Art on Amazon and Audible: Start Your Show: www.emberstudioscreative.com/libsyn Find more at - Contact me at Full Show Notes: A.I. Generated Transcription: Hey, it is episode number four of the Ember studios podcast, the war of art by Steven Pressfield, identifying and overcoming resistance. Hey, before we actually get started with this, I just wanted to pop in and say, I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it. I read some stuff online about the book and it is very polarizing. This book is not for everyone, the stuff I didn't like. I just kind of rolled my eyes and moved on some people aren't going to be able to do that. There's just a lot of stuff that either isn't going to jive with you or. Maybe some of this stuff even makes you feel angry. I'm not sure. I tried to extract some of the important stuff while leaving the other stuff behind. There's a lot of religious themes and a lot of shame and guilt in this book. And if you've ever seen me live, you know, that I have an entire section of, one of my presentations dedicated to how shame and guilt are garbage and they don't want. Yeah. So I just wanted to come out ahead and say that, listen to this show, decide if you want to read the book, but I'm going to try my hardest to get the most important stuff into this episode, so that if you're not the kind of person who this book is for that, you could still get the ideas from it without having to sift through all of the stuff that you're really not vibing with. Yeah, that's just my little disclaimer. I'm still gonna release the episode. I still got a lot of help from the book, but I will admit maybe the execution. Isn't great, but it's a self-help book. It's a motivational book. A lot of people in that space, like to make you feel like garbage in order to do what you say you want to do. So that's not me. So I just wanted you guys to know that that if you do pick up the book, I'm not going to do any of those parts of the book. So. Check it out. And, uh, I'll see you in the main episode. All right. So a few years ago I wrote a book on the recommendation of a content creator that I was following called the war of art by Steven Pressfield. I got it on audio book. It is a super quick listen. I'm used to hearing things faster than normal. And so the book is less than two hours on audible. For me. I listen at 1.5 speed, which is not that bad. Once you get your. And I want it to just talk about it a little bit, because I think this book has really shaped the way I think about a lot of things in terms of creation and creativity and inspiration and stuff like that. So before we get started, I do just want to say, I don't agree with every word in the book. There's some stuff that I just don't really buy into. Some of the stuff can be kind of polarizing, but as Graham Cochran says, if you're not offending anyone, you're not saying anything. Graham Cochrane author of how to get paid for what you know, and we to have the recording revolution and the grand Cochran show. Great dude, follow him. But today we're talking about the war of art. You should read this book. You, you should not consider this to be a whole entire compendium of the information in this book. Again, like I said, it's less than two hours. If you listen to 1.5, meaning it's a little under three, if you listen to normally. So you should listen to it. I would find a good price on it. I blew a whole audible credit on it. And when I found out, I mean, great content, great content. But when I found out it was only like three hours long, I was like, could have gotten something bigger for this, but yeah, very important. I don't regret it, but if you can find it for a lower price than an entire audible credit, grab it like that, I'll be including links to the audible and the Amazon version for you in the show notes to check there. If you are interested in picking this up in a. So in this book, Steven Pressfield starts out by talking about the fears we have of becoming an outcast when we succeed. And basically he's just talking about the idea that honestly, the really true idea, that the more you become successful, the more people see your success as an affront to their complacency. They're offended by your success because they're angry. It's not that. They're offended by your success because your success Buck's the norm. Right. So that's just how he kind of frames this entire book. And I think that's a really good framing to have as you're going into this listen or read. Right. So he also uses. Some of the most dramatic language I've ever heard in a nonfiction book. I mean, it's flowery, it's fire and brimstone. The dude wants to get his point across and he's willing to use any words in the English language to do so. So just be prepared for that. It's interesting. So the book in general, Is about something. He calls resistance. Now this is, I call it capital R resistance, which just to me means the idea of the resistance that he's speaking about. It's not generic, it's resistance, the idea, and he calls it the most toxic force on the planet. And he'll go on to define it in a second, but he also says a professional writer knows it's not the writing. That's hard. It's sitting down to write. And what keeps us from sitting down is resistance. So let's break into what resistance really is. The book is separated into parts, but part one starts out with resistance, defining the enemy again, back to that dramatic language. He's not playing around. The beginning of this section talks about, he calls it resistance, his greatest hits, but he's just talking about the types of activities that most commonly elicit resistance. I'm just going to say them out loud for you really quickly. And those are the pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, just artsy stuff. Any creative art, also the launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise for profit or otherwise, any diet or health or regimen, any program of spiritual advancement, any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals by that? I think he means working out and stuff. Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction education in any kind, any act of political, moral, or ethical code. The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others, any acts that entails the commitment of the heart and the taking of any principle to stand in the face of adversity. So those are the things that Steven Pressfield says will usually elicit a response from resistance. He also says resistance is never satisfied and it's nondiscriminatory it's for everyone and no amount of giving. Is enough until you give in completely resistance is infallible. And by that, what he's saying is resistance shows you where you need to go. You don't get resistance when you're thinking about doing the easy thing, the easy thing is almost, always not the best thing for you. He says resistance is universal. It's eternal. It's fueled by fear resistance. However, Only opposes you in one direction. If you have resistance, it's only opposing you in one direction. You can move any number of ways. Resistance is keeping you from moving up. Okay. Lateral moves. Fine. Downgrades. Fine. Resistance wants to stop you from moving up in the. And it recruits allies. Again, those people where you're talking about at the beginning, who see your successes in a front to their complacency, those people are going to make you feel like you are wrong for trying this. One's really hard to get over either. You're going to have to let go of these people, or you're going to have to convince. It's a come along for the ride. And that doesn't mean, you know, bring them in on your business or your podcast or whatever it just means. You're going to need to convince them to just let you do your thing. And they will seek resistance will make you choose between the instant gratification and the longterm improvement. For example, let's talk about diet. You know, when you're dieting, what you're supposed to do and you know, you want the results, but it's hard because the result is far in the future and it's a long term improvement. The cheesecake is instant gratification, right? So you grab that cheesecake. You feel better. You're you're back on the diet tomorrow. You knew the whole time what you wanted to do, how you want it to accomplish it when you want it to accomplish it. But resistance. Got you. Had you eat that cheesecake. So in essence, resistance is just going to get in your way. And then another big thing about resistance is that it ramps it up right before the finish line. The closer you are to finishing something the heavier, the resistance gets. And I know, I know some of you out there have, let's put this in the frame of podcasting. I know some of you have gotten. Gotten everything you needed, you sat down, you recorded an episode, you opened up an account on Libsyn, you uploaded your episode. And when it says release date, you kinda, you kind of freeze and you just leave it in your drafts and be like, ah, I don't know if it's ready yet. Let me sleep. Great. That's resistance giving one last push at the very end, because you are so close because once you upload and distribute that episode, now you've done it and it's easier to do the next one. And it just gets easier and easier, but resistance wants to stop you from doing it in the first place because they don't want it to be. Because resistance doesn't want it to be easier. I'm saying the word resistance a lot. I'm just trying to use the terminology that Steven Pressfield uses in his book at the very end resistance. It's just going to push harder. Now I want to back up zoom out from the book a little bit and just talk about some real life applications of this stuff. So this morning I woke up, I knew I had some podcasts to edit and I opened up my email and. These people were not ready to send me their shows. So they didn't. Now I'm staring down few hours of choice time, I guess you would call it. If we were in fourth grade where I could choose what I'm going to work on. Now I know that I'm going to work on my business, but I don't know what exactly I'm going to do. I have a list of things that I need to accomplish in the next four or five months that I've been chipping away at daily, but I decided, you know what, I'm going to record an episode. That's kind of like a book report on the war. And so I get everything ready. I go to my audible account and I fired up and I'm listening to it. And about halfway through, I'm just thinking maybe I'll do this another time. I don't think I'm going to do this. And I caught myself. I'm like, this is exactly what we're reading about in this book. Right. It's just for no reason, all of a sudden I decided I got to put a pause on this that's resistance. It's creeping in. It's saying no, no, no, this isn't going to be that good. You don't know what you're talking about. But it is. And I do, and I know that, but I let resistance get to me. Here's another one. I have an interview later today. I kind of forgot about it. And then I remembered it by, uh, an email came through and I have an interview with a film company out in Seattle. And I haven't heard from them in a couple of days. And I woke up this morning and when I got that email, I was just like, oh. And when I realized the interview today, You know what I don't, I don't really want to do that. It's going to be too much work. I barely have time as it is. I don't even think I'd like to gig anyway, but this is the gig I sought after. I'm not applying for jobs. I'm not looking for jobs. I'm doing fine. I saw this and I wanted to do this extra. This was something that I sought out and I said, that's the thing I want to be a part of. And I applied. I didn't think I'd even get considered. Next thing I know they're looking for a interview. And I'm trying to cancel it. So what happened resistance happened because I'm afraid of succeeding. I'm afraid of doing well at this interview. And then what's next. I don't know. And resistance loves to take the unknown and turn it into something you don't want listening back. It is actually, you know, I read this book a few years ago and I kind of picked it up, read it, put it down. And I said, yeah, That was all really good. I'm going to try to keep as much in my head as I can, but you know, it didn't change my life. Now let's move on. Listening back today. Amazed at how much of this stuff I subconsciously, incorporated into my everyday life. Like so much of what I was listening back is just stuff I do now. And I'm realizing it came right from this book and it helped me reframe the way I think about working, help me reframe the way I think about entrepreneurship and creativity and inspiration. It was just really interesting to me that I could have such a lukewarm memory of something, to be honest and go back and realize it changed my life. So the next section is talking about symptoms of resistance and he breaks them down into a few different kinds. We're going to go over a few. First one is procrastination. Now, if you're anything like me, you heard this word a lot during your public schooling. And I think Steven Pressfield nails it procrastination is just a fear of not being good enough. Right. You're going to finish something and then you're going to look back at it and you get to judge whether it was good or not. And if you can't separate what you do from who you are, that if, what you do is not good, it's you who's that good. Right. And so that leads us to procrastinate. If you never finished, you can't be judged on it. Oh, I'm still working on. And then what happens is you start to procrastinate all the time. And next thing you know, you got 30 things cooking, but you haven't worked on them in 18 months. And everyone's like, so what's, when's that big announcement you tease on Facebook coming. Procrastination is really hard to get past, but you just got to take advantage of a moment of strength and start. Because again, once you start, you're good. You can keep going. Once you start starting. Another symptom of resistance is getting into trouble. He talks about how, for some people it's easier to get in trouble than to actually finish what you're supposed to do. What do I mean by getting into trouble? I mean the extreme, I mean, uh, yeah, I had that interview tomorrow, but I got a DUI last night That's the kind of trouble we're talking about. Yeah, I know. I said I'd have the project to you by Monday morning, but Friday I ended up in the hospital with alcohol points. These things suck, but they're easier than finishing the work that you have been procrastinating on because they're not scary, you know, what's going to happen. It's all a matter of the unknown, right? Another one is self dramatization. I can speak to this one firsthand. If there's a lot of quote, unquote drama, then everyone's so busy being enveloped in the drunk. That they're too tired to break out of that cycle. Self drama. The second, everything starts being normal. Someone picks up the torch and creates more quote unquote drama creates more strife, whatever it is to guarantee everyone in that group, family, whatever you want to call. To guarantee they all have the excuse of being too exhausted because they're just dealing with X, Y, or Z. And when that's done, they can focus on themselves. Right. I'm sure we all know people like this and they find other people like this and they take the load off of each other and they just pass the drama around and nobody gets anything done. And everyone gets to have an interesting day today instead of setting themselves up for financial success or something else down the road. There's also self-medication. Now this is one part where I kind of deviate from Steven Pressfield's beliefs. And again, who am I, but also who is he? My interpretation of this is alcoholism, drug addiction, these kinds of things that help us numb ourselves of the reality of failure, because if you're failing all the time, but you don't feel anything that's easier than succeeding because then you got to you can't, you can't get drunk every night. If you're succeeding or you won't be succeeding for very long. And so self-medication just kind of get it. It gives you a way to. With not necessarily doing what you quote unquote want to do. And at the end of the day, all of these are things that keep us from breaking the trend and breaking away from what we see when we look around. 'cause you'll learn eventually, I guess this is a good time to start it out. But I, I think a lot about, uh, evolutionary advantages because I'm a freaking weirdo. But if you think about evolution being individuals, doing something different from the. Oh, that's not something we got through evolution that flies in the face of evolution. Evolution wants us to be in a group, wants us to stick with that group, protect to that group and never leave that group. Why? Because for millions of years, that's how we stayed safe. That's how we stayed alive long enough to finish the next step in the process. So just remember when you're bucking the system, it's hard because your body is screaming that you're doing the wrong thing. The whole. So you're going to have to get comfortable with that, but you can do it. Resistance can be beaten. Okay. And how do you start? You don't start by going, huh? I'm going to defeat resistance and finish that giant project. I have. No, no, no, no, no. You beat resistance by getting in doing the work. You get in, you finished something small, you move on because 30 small things start to add up pretty fast. But if you're looking at the final product and going well, got to finish that by this date, it's never happening. And that's resistance helping you fail, right. You beat resistance by getting in and you do small stuff every single day. And you might think, well, I'm a creator. What if I'm not in. And that leads us to part two of the book, which is overcoming resistance. And it talks about the amateur versus the professional. I'm going to share a quote with you from Andrea's mom, somebody asked Andreas, do you write on a schedule or do you write when you're inspired? And he said, I write only when inspiration strikes, consequently, it strikes every day at 9:00 AM. Now what's he saying, he's saying I sit down and I write and I get it done every single day. I don't wait around for inspiration to strike. Cause once I've decided I'm writing now it's happening. Words are just going to come out of my pen or my keyboard or whatever. It's about sitting down and starting. And then you're good to go. If you're sitting around waiting for something to pop in your head. You're going to finish maybe two things in your whole life. I don't know if any of you have seen the Beatles documentary on Disney plus called get back. It's very good. It's about the few weeks before their final concerts and they're doing a lot of songwriting. They get in there, they have to write a whole album and they're staring down a date. That they're doing this concert. Now. I know they had to change the date. George, quit the band, whatever, everything, everything worked out in the end, but they were still working on a deadline that they had to meet. That is another way that you can overcome resistance is by meeting deadlines, setting and meeting deadlines. Even if they're manufactured. But they got in there. If you watch this documentary, this was when they were recording the album, let it be, they wrote, get back, let it be. They wrote dig a pony, the long and winding road. They wrote some of their best stuff because they were under pressure under a deadline. I was watching another interview with Paul McCartney and he said, John, and I never had a dry session. We always... /episode/index/show/ec48d4f8-72b6-433f-a499-948a36310b45/id/22838060

How to be More Productive - 10 Productivity Tips for Your Creative Workflow | The Ember Studios Podcast 04/14/2022

How to be More Productive - 10 Productivity Tips for Your Creative Workflow | The Ember Studios Podcast This is The Ember Studios Podcast #3 with Mike Brown and we go over 10 Productivity Tips for your Creative Workflow. Find more at - Contact me at Get your Freebies: A.I. Generated Transcription: Hey, it is episode three of the Ember studios podcast, 10 productivity tips for your creative workflow. All right, thanks for listening. This is the Ember studios podcasts. The show to help you transform from confused to confident when it comes to launching and maintaining your podcast and other related creative projects. As you heard in the beginning today, we're going to be talking about productivity. Now there's a lot of, I don't want to call it misinformation, but just like bad information out there about productivity. And it's like, whoa, wash washer, clothes, and your dishes at the same time, it's more productive now. All that stuff. We're going to be talking about specific tips you can use usually in the home studio or, you know, whatever podcast is set up, you have going on. These will help you there, especially with the editing portion and oh, a little bit in the recording portion. Ah, yes, the people downstairs. So just started vacuuming. This is a great example of pushing through, because I thought about just not recording this and I could go play final fantasy seven remake, like I've been working on, and I would basically just be using this small inconvenience as an excuse, not to do anything. So I'm going to keep going. You might hear some vacuuming going on, but I want to be a good example and record. Even when the conditions aren't perfect, I think is an important thing to learn that you should do anyway. So we got 10 tips coming. I'm just going to start counting through them. Tip number one is organize your files. I can not say enough about organizing your files. Now I did not get too organized until I started editing video. Once I started editing video. All sorts of files. You need to keep organized and be able to reference whenever you want. Once I started doing that, it really made me grab a magnifying glass and look at my audio workflow. And it's so important to organize your files, because if you're sharing files between people, do you want a nice folder structure and a well-named files that nobody's going to have any questions. If they walk up to your system and need to finish a project, for example, you end up in the hospital, you still got to get your. Now, if you're not sharing with other people, that's fine. You, you still should organize your files, not only for your own sake, but, uh, what if your computer crashes? And this has happened to me, my dog basically reset everything disappeared. I needed to start again from nothing. But luckily, since I keep everything in the same place for each of my projects, I spent like three minutes having a fixed everything. And that includes like my macros and my presets and everything. They're all in specific folders as well that I could just link back up and then everything went back to pre-crash, which was super awesome. So yeah. You got to organize your files. It's it takes five seconds, but it'll save you literally hours of sorting through things playing. Oh, is this the file I want? Is that the file? Just organize your files. You'll never have another question. Tip number two is to use templates. This is a little bit of a polarizing one because I've heard a lot of people saying, well, if I use a template, it's going to sound cookie cutter. It's going to sound generic. Everything will sound the same. And that's not really true. What you're going to get out of a template is a faster workflow and consistency in your final sound. So while you might say, it's going to sound cookie cutter, I'm over here saying people are going to know what to expect when they listened to your. So I have a editing and a mixing template for every single show that I do. The mixing tablets are nice. You keep all the assets in the template, you get that all set up. So it's the correct volume and everything. You put all the plug-ins on the correct track. So you don't mess with them. You just put them where they need to go. And that way, when I have to edit a show, I drag in the files and then everything's there. I just get started looking at meters, adjusting compressors, just I just get going. I don't have. At everything one by one, and then you get like the old, do I want this compressor or this compressor? You just, you just get to work. It, it saves probably 10 to 30 minutes a show, which is awesome because that's hours a week that I'm saving by just using. They also keep you in creative mode. Right? So if you have a template, like there was a time where I was making beats every day and instead of opening it up and deciding what instrument do I want to play with today and adding it to the thing, I just had like a few instruments that I usually went for and I had them set up and they were just ready to go. So if I had a song. I could just open up a template, get started recording and lay it down as opposed to opening it up, figuring out what I want, where how to do it, blah, blah, blah, 15, 20 minutes later. I don't even remember what I was going to record in the first place. And it's just, it just keeps you in that creative zone and you don't have to worry about that. Reset. All the clerical stuff, you just get going and it's, it saves you so much time and it's just really convenient. So definitely use templates. Number three is learn your keyboard shortcuts. So almost, I can't think of an example of a popular program that doesn't have a robust keyboard short. System. They probably exist. One of you knows one of them, but most of them have keyboard shortcuts and they're designed to help you move faster. So if you know the keyboard shortcuts to everything, you can fly around this timeline, the screen, you're just jumping all over the place. It's so convenient to just know, oh, well, if I do this, this and this. The same as if I'm sifting through menus and right. Clicking on something. And just knowing that control lead, that's going to export the things that are going to file export as MP3. Just knowing the keyboard shortcuts is a huge help. And a sub tip here is if you can take all the software you use and pick one keyboard scheme and use it for all of the programs that you use that saves even more time because. Now you don't have to think. Well, I mean, pro tools now, so the keyboard shortcut is this, or I'm in premier pro now. So the shortcut is this everything's the same across all the programs, tools. Might've been a poor example because last time I looked you couldn't define your own keyboard shortcuts. Super lame, but yeah, the software I use studio one does you can just make anything, a keyboard shortcuts that you want. Tip number four is create your own macros. Now what this does, a macro is like a set of commands. So whereas a keyboard shortcut will execute one command. A macro will execute several. For example, I have a macro that selects everything in the timeline makes that the length of the export and then starts exporting the file, which is super awesome because that's like four different steps that I've just automated. And I took that macro and I decided to keyboard shortcut, and then I took that keyboard shortcut, and I assigned that to a separate macro. That is just a one button. I hit just a it's M three on my. It has some macro buttons and I hit him three. Boom. My file is printing. I can go grab whatever I need to grab in the other room. It saves, again, this doesn't sound like much but 20, 30 seconds, but over the course of a year, it's a lot of time. We're talking about hours and hours of time. You're getting back or time. You can just decompress a little bit and get yourself back in the zone that you didn't have before when you're sifting through menus. So, yeah, you, you got to create your own macros. I love them and you should try them out. And if you're looking for suggestions, hit me up and we can talk out some processes that you do and try to figure out if we can macro them. Tip number five is batch your tasks. And if you've never worked in a retail back room, let me tell you what batching is. Batching is when you have something that has multiple steps. And you have multiple iterations of it. And so instead of doing step a, B, C, D E a, B, C, D E a, B C, D E, you do all the step A's, then you do all the step BS, all the sepsis, you get it. And what this does is it keeps you in the zone again, all back into that flow. So if you're doing step a, you do step a six times in a row instead of doing step a, taking an hour break by doing the other steps, then going back and starting step. Hey, again, you just keep doing it. You get into the zone where you. You're flying around. You feel like a magician and you're just nailing it because you're just, this is what I'm doing right now and you keep doing it. So it's really awesome to batch your tasks. It just makes it so much simpler and more productive. Again, you're saving time. Like, for example, you could batch record your podcast episodes and the time you say there is just microphone setup time, right? You don't have to set up the mic six times for six different podcasts. If you just set it up once and spend the whole day banging stuff out. That's one of my favorite ways to batch tip. Number six is what I like to call the little notebook. And when I'm working, I keep a little notebook on the desk in front of me. It's like one of those. You buy them at Walmart, they're three for a dollar. They're like four inches by two and a half inches. They fit in your pocket. I just keep on open in front of me with a pen next to it. And whenever an idea comes into my head, that isn't what I'm working on. I write it down because I know that if I go do anything about that idea in like a Chrome browser or something, I'm going to get distracted. I'm going to lose a lot of time. So if I put everything in the little note, It gets it out of my brain. So I'm not worried about it. And then when I'm done, I could just look through and see all the stuff I need to do. And you know what good third of the time. I'm crossing stuff out. I'm going to add that. Wasn't that really important now that I've had a second to think about it. So if I just let myself act on every single impulse while I'm working, I'm going to do a lot of stuff that actually doesn't matter. And that's the point. My brain is like, you need to be distracted right now. So here here's that thing on Amazon, you were wondering about the other day. Oh, you just remembered the name. No, write it down a little notebook. Look it up when you're done or don't. So the little notebook has saved me a ton of time. It kind of goes on the idea of a brain dump. I know a lot of people, the first thing they do when they wake up in the mornings, they write down everything that's on their mind. That way it's out there. They can clear their mind and not have to worry about losing anything. This is kind of like that. I don't do that whole process. Maybe I should start, but for now I just do this for when I'm working. Number seven is scheduled. And this might sound obvious, but what I mean is schedule things that you think you're going to do without scheduling. Right? So if you're saying I got to record a podcast, And that's it. You're done. The sentence is over. Yeah. I got to record a podcast. You're never doing it. You're never going to do it. If you say I'm going to record a podcast. Thursday, five 30 kids are at soccer. Everyone's out of the house. It's just me. I got an hour and now. The record and edit this show. That's what I'm going to do. When you write it down on your calendar, the chances of you actually doing that, just skyrocketed because a I'm going to record a podcast on Thursday at five 30 rolls around and oh, suddenly the dishes need doing, or it's been a tough day. Everyone's out of the house finally. And you can get playing that video game. You've been thinking about all day, but if you got the podcast on the schedule uses. You just do it, you might think, oh, maybe I could play this instead. But then in the back of your head, you're like, no, this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now. I'll be so happy when it's finally done. I'm just going to do it. So that's one super big thing for me is scheduling time to do things. Now, since I've left my day job, that's a lot easier. I worked for eight hours during the day. So if it's during the day, it's work time. I don't think of leisure activities that I could do to replace my work time. But if you're, you know, a weekend warrior or just you're podcasting at night, you still have your day job, which is most podcasters scheduling really helps. Now, if you have a partner, this becomes a lot easier, right? Because you have that accountability, but if you're just alone, you're a solo show. You have to schedule you're recording. You're editing. Everything. You might even have to schedule some brainstorm time, because if you only think about your podcast while you're sitting down and record it, you might not have an idea when it comes time. So scheduling it really helps your creativity. It helps your execution. It helps everything in the process. So just throw something in your I Cal or whatever calendar you use on your phone. Set up. Even if you just put it in and forget about it, you're going to get a oh 10 minutes from now. I'm working on the podcast for an hour. Okay. That sounds kind of fun. Let's do that. You know, so it's a very, very powerful way to make sure you get your work done. All right. Tip number eight is a little bit more of a technical tip and that is reach for the stock stuff first. Now, without context, that sentence doesn't make sense. That barely works as a sentence. However, the context is we're talking about digital audio workstations, Daws, and they have plugins and there are auxiliary plug-ins third-party plugins that you can also buy that, you know, according to the third-party manufacturers are better. Some of them are, some of them are not, but you're going to have a collection of different possible plugins that you can use on this project. And when it's time to start mixing your show or recording or editing your show, you're going to look at the list of four EQs that you have and you're going to go, well, which one is right for this? This is not an uncommon problem. It's a problem by design, right? If you look at for accusing you can't figure out the one you need. Well, then what's the solution. The solution is to go out and buy a fifth one that does all the things that those four do. And then you'll always use that one. But then when you, now you have five and you're going to buy the sixth. And once you have six, you're going to buy. The tip here is to just grab whatever plugins do the function that you need that came with your dog. So I have, I don't know, 14 different EQs in my dog. When I'm mixing, I don't, I don't audition them. I don't check which one is perfect for this. I just know I'm going for the PreSonus the stock studio. When he Q it gets the job done every time, even more compressors. I have all sorts of compressors where you can see the numbers where you could, you just have knobs and you're kind of working blindly. Like they were back in the seventies. It just, there's so many options that if you start to look. You're getting lost. You're leaving that flow state and you're never finishing your project. So reach for the stock stuff first just means if you think I need any cue, you grab the stock. EEQ that came with your dog. If that's not then doing the job once you've tried it, you can go on to other. But having one that you go to every time is just easy. And then if it doesn't suit your needs, then you move on, but you don't think ahead of time about all that stuff. So that's really awesome in my opinion, to just keep you in the creative space. And of course there are things that you're doing. Plugins, they're not going to do, or there's going to be features that they don't have, or even just interfaces that aren't as intuitive as a third party plugin, but you got to start with the stock stuff first. And then once you get into a flow, then you can figure stuff out, but you don't want to be auditioning for EQs and seven compressors on a vocal track because it doesn't matter. All you got to do is do the EEQ. You're not looking for all this tonal stuff that musicians want on a compressors, and you're not, you just need to make sure it's listable. And yeah, just keep it simple. Tip number nine is kind of in the same realm is tip number eight and tip number nine is approach each task with a purpose. And what I mean is I've been there, right? You look at your show and you go, okay, well, I think I'm supposed to eat Q it, so I throw any cue on it. And then I go looking around, what am I supposed to take out? And I pump everything to the top and I fish around for ugly stuff. And then I start. And this is wrong, right? This is the equivalent of a carpenter going well. I got a box of nails and a hammer might as well start hammering some stuff. I don't know why the carpenter in my little impression there was Southern. I don't know, but that's the same thing as having a sauce. So you have to use the saw, even if you're not doing anything that needs us all. So figure out why you're doing everything before you do it. If you're listening and everything sounds fine. Maybe you don't need any cute if you're listening and nothing's peaking, the vocal sounds pretty and everything. Maybe you don't need a compressor. You need to know the purpose of the task before you start to execute on the task. Otherwise, what you're going to do is you're going to have a thing that sounds high, an empty and weird because you're not letting the track tell you what it needs. You're telling the track what you want it to need, essentially. And so you just have to listen. Figure out what you want. And this is hard at first. Okay. This is, this is not an easy skill. I've been at this for years. I still can't hear everything the first time I ain't got to listen to things a few times. It also depends on the room you're in and the headphones you're using some, stuff's going to jump out, but it's going to save you a ton of time. If you let the track, tell you what it needs, because you're not going to do anything that Trek doesn't need. Right. So that's just a huge productivity thing. Wait for the truck to tell. Wait until something raises his hand and says, you have to deal with me because this is a problem until something does that. You're good. Don't just start messing with stuff because you're supposed to, and that brings me to productivity. Tip number 10. It's probably the most obvious one, but it's throw your phone across the room. If I have my phone next to me, I'm going to check it. What if it's on silent mode now I'm going to check it. Well, what if it's on do not disturb? No, I'm going to check it. What if I turn the power off? My phone takes about three seconds to turn on. So I'm going to check it. I need my phone across the room where I can't touch it because I'm going to check it. I still struggle with the willpower of not grabbing my phone with every thought that comes into my head or every time. The fact that we have texts coming in all the time makes us feel like everything's urgent. If I got a text while I'm recording, almost certainly it can wait 45 minutes until I'm done. You ever check your phone? And you're like, oh, this is urgent. I got to check this. And it's like, Hey, at three o'clock, can you grab some chicken at the store? Like, oh, I could have waited. It's 9:00 AM. Yeah, I can do that. Okay. And now you're on your phone. You're checking Instagram. And let me just check tic-tac for a second. Just put your phone across the room. If someone needs you that badly, you'll get a call. You'll... /episode/index/show/ec48d4f8-72b6-433f-a499-948a36310b45/id/22779758

How to Edit a Podcast: What Gear do you need? | The Ember Studios Podcast 04/07/2022

How to Edit a Podcast: What Gear do you need? | The Ember Studios Podcast This is The Ember Studios Podcast #2 with Mike Brown and we go over the specific baseline gear you need to start editing your podcast. Find more at - Contact me at A.I. Generated Transcription: This is Ember Studios, podcast number two. The gear, you need to edit your show. What's going on everybody. I hope you're having a great day. I am fired up right now to work on this show and I hope you are fired up to work on. So today, we're just going to talk a little bit about the gear. You need to edit your show. So we're not going to really be talking about microphones and stuff like that. Cause that's not really editing, right? That's that's tracking, that's recording and really you could be editing somebody else's show you don't need a microphone to edit somebody else's show. So we're just of going to break down the gear. You need to edit. A podcast, hardware, software, everything. This episode's probably going to be kind of on the shorter side, because you really don't need as much as you might think for real. Like I could get you editing a show for less than $150. I think probably it's really not expensive to break into it. Well, of course that's not including, you know, the computer and stuff, but we're going to go over the computer. So let's just break into it to do podcast, audio editing. Your computer really does not need to be anything special. For example, I'm looking at the minimum system requirements for studio one, which I use, and they're pretty low, I guess we could say. So the latest version of the operating system, windows 10 is a given right now. I mean, Windows 10 has been out for, I don't know how many years, but it's nice and stable. Whereas noting that it needs to be 64 bit for studio one, it's not really a good reason as far as I know, to be running a 32 bit operating system right now, unless your computer is literally ancient. So probably. The processor and Intel core I three or an AMD, a 10 processor or better. If your computer has a processor, it's less than like 10 years old, it's probably as good as, or better than the recommended processors here. Minimum four gigabytes of Ram. Again, this is absolute bare minimum. Four gigabytes of Ram I think is the lowest. Amount you can get right now. I don't think they make Ram sticks with less than two gigabytes of Ram. And so, you know, dual channel memory, it turns out to be four gigs. It says recommended eight gigs or more, again, this is absolute minimum. Most computers you buy right now, we're going to have eight gigs of Ram. Maybe a laptop might have four gigs. Eight gigs of Ram is so inexpensive right now at the end of this, I'll put together like a bare bones windows system and tell you guys what the price is. I guarantee you it's less than you think for an audio editing PC. Then it goes on to say, you need an internet connection, which I think is a little obvious just for installation and activation. Even if you just kind of. Install, everything, activate everything and then move it. You're good to go. Minimum monitor resolution 1366 by 7 68. That's the lowest resolution monitor. I think you'll find anywhere right now. So basically these programs are being. With specs that any functional computer right now is going to meet these specifications. You know, if you've got an ancient computer that's running on like windows XP, maybe it's not going to work. Probably still has four gigs of Ram, but it might not be a 64 bit operating system. You know, these specs are very minimal and they're really functional at that level. This isn't like video editing where you need so much Ram or gaming where you need like a high graphics card. It's just, you just need a bare bones. No again, that's for editing and some light mixing. If you're thinking you want to rig, that's going to scale with you and you're going to do music and maybe you're going to have like 13 instances of Melodyne on a track or something like that. Some more intensive stuff is going to require some higher power components, but you're, I mean, a minimal system is just fine for voiceover editing. If you're just editing your podcast. So that's step one. That's just a machine. To do what you want now, what do you want? You're going to do audio editing and to do that, you're going to need to hear what you are doing. And so there's pretty much two ways that you can hear. You can either use speakers or headphones. If you're on a laptop, I'm not going to lie. Your built-in laptop. Speakers are going to be okay. They are going to get the simple job done. If you're not looking to go all out or any. You'll be fine. If you're on a desktop, it's a little different, you're going to have to purchase some speakers. If you want to just use some, you know, again, $10 Amazon speakers. When you're mixing a podcast, unlike with music, you do mix with your eyes. I rely on meters more than I rely on my ears because there's all sorts of different stuff with the different frequencies affect things differently. And just because one person sounds louder to me doesn't mean. Digitally, they are louder. And so when things get shipped out to the platforms, they do stuff to them and they're not doing stuff to them based on their ears. They're doing stuff to them based on the digital sequence that's sent to them. And so I need to consider that when I'm mixing, I tell people I can mix their show without listening to it as because I've done a billion of them, but you don't need high quality speakers to mix the show. So you. Really need high quality speakers in order to edit it. However, I will suggest using headphones more than the speakers. I like to have everything right there at my ear, so I can hear every little mouth noise, every little click, every slide, breath, everything. I want to be able to hear it right in my ears so that I know exactly what I'm doing. You know, if I make a little cut and I don't hear that the person is in the middle of a breath, then when I put compression on everything, it's going to just cut right in, in the middle of that breath that I didn't hear before, because the volume was a lot lower. And so that's why sometimes you'll hear like a, like, that kind of sound because somebody cut in the middle of a breath, didn't do a fade, didn't do anything. And just kind of, kind of threw it out there. So that's why I like headphones again. They do not have to be. You've got a pair of apple ear buds. Those are fine. You don't need crazy fancy headphones for spoken word or anything. You just need to be able to hear everything. And work on it. It's not much. And there's two more pieces of hardware. Now we have an audio interface now for this kind of thing. If you're straight up just editing and you're not going to mix it, maybe you'll send it out to get mixed, or maybe you're not worried about the mixing. In my opinion, you should be worried about the maximum, but, uh, if you're not, you don't really need to get an audio interface because your CPU's onboard sound processing is going to be okay. You're going to be. 40 to 48 K. You're going to be able to listen back and edit it 48. K. If you're going to do some stuff that needs some DSP, which is digital signal processing, then you're going to need to get a little bit of a higher power sound card. So again, this is something to think of. Upfront. I mean, I guess not because you could always upgrade later. So if you think eventually you're going to be mixing, or if you plan on mixing the whole time, you're going to need an audio interface. And again, this doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to have a billion inputs or anything. I bought one with a ton of inputs because I thought, oh, what if I ended up tracking drums? This was five years ago. I haven't tracked a single thing that requires more than two. Not once. So I, you know, my main recommendation right now because the PreSonus audio box USB, there's a whole bunch of different ones, but the audio box USB 96 records in up to 96. K we'll get into that another time. I think that's a little much, but yeah, it was a hundred dollars. So now you've got a computer. You've got an interface. You already had the headphones. Now you need a keyboard and a mouse. Okay. If you're on a laptop, you already have the keyboard. I will say, do not use a track pad. Do not use a track pad. You will be miserable. If you're trying to edit audio with a track pad, there's so much clicking and dragging and you have to be so precise sometimes that. The trackpad is going to be too much. Even if you have to buy a $7 mouse on Amazon, which I did, the $7 mouse on Amazon was better for editing than the most expensive track that I could have ever purchased. It's just better to have a mouse. When we get a little bit more advanced, it's sometimes better to even have a gaming mouse. Cause they have all those extra buttons. You can map them out to your macros. And this is all down the line. Once you really have a feel for what you're doing. So that's it for the hardware. That's, that's what you need. You need a computer, you need some way to hear the sound, whether it's headphones or speakers, you need an interface. If you end up mixing and you're going to be sucking up some resources and you need a mouse. Well, I guess you need a screen too, but I kind of include that in the. So that's it. Now you have that stuff. You have the hardware, you have the physical things that you need in order to edit your show. What, now you sit down, you've installed windows for the first time. Let's just say you bought this computer just for editing. You installed windows for the first time you're connected to the internet. What do you need? Really, you just need a few more things. So first we're going to talk about audacity. Now. I talked about audacity last week and a lot of people I see online are teaching about audacity editing and just in order to bare bones, edit your show, just grab audacity and edit it like this personal. Audacity is one of the least intuitive programs I've ever used. I don't like it at all. It is very good for certain things, but everything else I'm pulling my hair out and they're very short hairs. They're hard to grab onto. So it's a nightmare, really for me, audacity what I do use audacity for however. Noise reduction. The noise reduction plugin is really top notch. I've used full audio programs that don't have as robust a noise reduction. Plug-in as audacity has, honestly, it's a little crazy to me, but audacity nailed it. Nobody else is really doing it. I recommend you get audacity anyway, that way, when you're recording, you get a little bit of silence and you pull that noise out because nobody wants to hear a bunch of hissing and buzzing and a low hum of your air conditioner. When they're listening to your show. Now, obviously a noise reduction. Doesn't get everything. You're not going to get a car driving by. Cause that's not like a consistent sound. It just happens. You know, you live in Chicago or whatever, and the train goes right next to your apartment that sound's not coming out. Right. That ambient room noise, the haze, the microphone noise. If you're using a lifter because you have a dynamic microphone that adds a lot of noise to the signal, pull it right out. So yeah, audacity is, is very good for noise reduction. And for me, that's where it ends in my workflow. I open up audacity. I throw the files in there. I pull out the noise and I export them because I'm done. I don't want to use audacity for anything. Now there's another step between audacity and the editing that I do that I'm not really going to talk about much here because it's incredibly expensive and it's a little more advanced and that's what I call audio. Clean-up it's just like removing plosives and mouth noises and room tone and everything in an automated way. I use a program called isotope. And it's not cheap. So I'm just going to skip over that right now, because if you're, if you're recording episode one of your podcast, please do not buy isotope RX because you don't even know if you're going to be doing this show in three weeks, let alone several hundreds of dollars worth of software. That's useless if you're not recording your podcast or doing film work, you know? So don't worry about that right now. We are going to talk about. But right now, you're just doing the DIY thing. Don't worry about the cleanup. The next step is the actual physical editing we're here. We made it and you are going to need a D a w. And I'm going to just say doc from now on. Cause that's how I say it. It's easier. It's not so many syllables. DAW stands for digital audio workstation. So your dog is just the program that you use to watch. On the audio now, of course there's free ones and there's paid ones. I'm going to talk about that a little bit. So the first group I'm going to talk about is the pay group. I'm not going to go too in depth because honestly it doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that you pick one and you learn it because once you learn something, you're going to be able to do whatever you need to do. Better than someone who keeps switching and having to relearn. I've been using the same program for seven years. So I know it inside and out. So just pick something and learn it, especially if you're going to pay, oh my gosh. If you're going to pay for it, just learn it. Don't, don't buy a bunch of them. You only need one, really? So here are a few of the paid ones, studio one professional. This is what I use most of the time. I know I'm contradicting myself by. I just said don't pay for more than one, but most of the time I use studio one professional. It's good. You can get it on a subscription. It's 15 bucks a month. It comes with everything. I really like it. I really liked the smart tool. I really liked the way it works. There's also, you've heard of it. Pro tools, pro tools, a lot more expensive if I'm being honest, also on a subscription basis, but I think it's like 30 bucks a month and you just get pro tools. It's the industry standard. If you walk into a studio, Right now, most likely they're going to be running pro tools. Then while I recommend studio one professional. I can't in good faith. Say you shouldn't use ProTools because if you ever think you're going to leverage these skills into a new step in your journey. If you're going to turn into music, if you're going to turn to video sound design or something pro tools, you're going to need to know it. So I can't in good faith. Tell you not to use ProTools, but I will say I still recommend studio one. There's also logic. If you have a Mac logic is like 200 bucks. It's a perfectly fine program. I don't know what the editing is like at all. Cause I don't use a Mac, but tons of pros use it. And the editing functions I'm sure are fine. I will say it's just for Mac users, PCs. It's not out on PC and it probably never will be. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't sweat logic. There's a ton of them. You got reason Ableton, Cubase, FL studio. Garage band Harrison mix bus between studio. All of these are just Dawes that you can use. And because you're just doing basic editing, it's not, it doesn't matter which one you pick. So just pick one that's. If you're going to buy one, pick one in this, the right price and pick one that you think you're going to stick with because you don't want to jump around. It's just cost too much. There are free ones. Personally, if this is what you're doing, you're just doing podcasts editing for now. I'd go with a free one. Why are you going to spend a ton of money when you can get everything you need from the free version of something? And so there's studio one prime, which is just a stripped down free version of studio one. It's got all the editing features and that's it. That's all you need. You can edit and export and mix very basically inside studio, one prime for free. There's also pro tools first. It's a stripped down free version of pro tools. I don't know exactly how stripped down it is, but I'm almost positive. It has a lot of the same editing features. And again, you're not trying to recreate the sound of a dragon breathing fire in New York city. You're just trying to cut out a breath between a few words. Pro tools versus fine. There's also Reaper. Reaper's a fully featured program. That's just free. There's a trial. You can use it infinitely. You just refresh the trial. When you're done, the developers have come out and said, that's fine. You know, if you're making a ton of money, you should buy a license. Um, it's like 60 bucks, but if you're just DIY in your own show, get Reaper, do it for free. No reason. Not to. We are in a time where the tools hardly matter, because your message is what's important. Right? And so you just got to get the bare minimum truly to put out a good podcast, the bare minimum, just spend a little bit of time working on it. Cause I know if you're making a podcast, that's already about something you love. So it's a labor. You're not making any money. It's a labor of love. So you're going to take it and you're going to work on it, make it sound the way you want it to sound with the basic editing tools that these things have, because that's all you need. I'm getting very fired up right now. I didn't think I would be, but we live in an amazing time for podcasting, for audio in general, but podcasting, because anyone can do it. Anyone can do it for almost no money. The last thing is kind of hardly editing, but it's just something that I think is important. Let's say hypothetically, you're editing for someone. You're going to need a file sharing platform, media, fire, Dropbox, Google drive, any anything personally, I prefer Dropbox. It's very easy to send and receive large files and to collaborate Google drive. A lot of people use I've found it's it's a lot clunkier when it comes to large files. Like if I'm downloading the media for, you know, an hour long interview, they included the video for some reason. And it's like a gig. Google drive doesn't handle that so well, I'm not really sure why, but it breaks the downloads up and puts them into multiple files. And I feel like their bandwidth isn't great. I get slower. Download speeds on them. So Dropbox, I just have my Dropbox sync to my computer. So when somebody throws something in a folder, it just sinks. They just tell me they put it there. And then I look and it's already on my computer. So I really liked Dropbox for that reason, but that was just kind of an extra thing for now. That's just, that's kind of step one. One in terms of the stuff you need to edit. So you now know what you need. I bet you have most of it already if you're planning on making a podcast, so, awesome. Good on you. And if you didn't, I hope this helped. And if you need anything else, email me at Michael at Ember studios, creative.com. Thanks for listening to the Emory studios podcast by. /episode/index/show/ec48d4f8-72b6-433f-a499-948a36310b45/id/22640624

The Ember Studios Podcast | Trailer 03/31/2022

Drop the Mic with Mike Brown — How to Podcast and Hack Creativity So You Can Share Messages That Matter

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