Did you know that Seattle Coffee Gear has a podcast? Now you do! We’ve been podcasting for a couple of months now and we’re pretty excited about it! We thought we’d give you a look into how we’re podcasting from home while we get vaccinated and ready to return to the studio full time!
Planning
The first step is planning out episodes for the show. Pat (hi!) works with other folks around the SCG team to plan out interesting episodes. We’ve mostly focused on some basic coffee knowledge for newcomers to coffee brewing with our first several episodes. Usually Pat will come up with concepts and reach out to a few different folks around SCG to see who might want to join for the episode. Alternatively, everyone on the team can suggest topics to cover as well!
We try to plan episodes a couple of months in advances so we can make sure we get everything just right. With our first set of episodes we recorded in advance, but now we’re settling in to recording the week before the episode comes out. This is really useful because we can talk about anything new or exciting for SCG as it’s happening!
Recording
Once we have our plan for recording, we make sure that both hosts have the equipment to record. Pat’s got a dedicated setup at home, but we have an additional microphone that we move between other hosts so that they have great audio quality. We record using a video call and local recordings. This way internet latency and quality don’t have any negative effects on the audio you end up hearing. By using a video call we can see each other and read visual cues to make sure that we don’t step on each other’s points too much!
Eventually when we can get back in the studio we’ll be able to use professional microphones and mixing equipment to create even better quality audio. Until then, we’re making it work with these at home recordings! Before we start the episode we do a synchronization clap. We do this using a website that shows a synchronized clock so that we can clap at precisely the same time. We’ll get to why that’s important later in this peek behind the scenes! Once we’re in the episode we chat about new gear and coffee we’re enjoying before jumping into our topics. We also love to read listener emails! You can email us at questions@seattlecoffeegear.com and we might just read your message on the show!
Editing and Posting
Once the recording is complete, each host sends the files to our editor, Ryan. Ryan uses the synchronization clap to line up the audio files so that they get synchronized. Depending on whether or not we had any goofs he might also clean up the audio a bit! He’ll also apply filters and effects to make it all sound a bit better before passing the finished product back to Pat.
The next step is to get the audio file uploaded to our file host. Once that’s done, Pat types up some show notes to give an overview of the episode in your podcast player of choice. Once all that is complete and up the episode goes live! Using a bit of code called an RSS feed, the episode’s information and audio location are disseminated to various podcast players like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. It's from these services that you can give the show a listen! You can find the SCG Podcast on our website here.
And we hope you do listen! We post new episodes every two weeks, and we’re so excited to grow the show. Thanks for reading, and for listening!
