How to record a podcast at home, audio or video, and when a studio makes sense

What do I need to record a podcast at home?

Much less than you've been told, especially at the start. For your first episode you need a quiet room, a decent microphone, a pair of headphones and some recording software. If you want it to be seen, add a camera or phone, a tripod and a light. Very respectable shows get recorded with just that.

The better question is which of these will show the most. After years of editing podcasts, we have a clear answer. A viewer forgives an ordinary image, but doesn't forgive bad sound. Two or three minutes of echoey voices or fridge hum and they're gone. So if you have to choose where to put your money and time, put them into the sound first.

And before you buy anything, decide on the format: how long it runs, how many people talk, whether it will be watched or only heard. Recording alone calls for very different gear from a chat with two guests in the living room. In types of podcast we explain the formats that exist, and what you need to produce a podcast has the full list of what's needed beyond the recording itself: the idea, the editing and the publishing.

If you're only trying it out, start with what you've already got at home and record three episodes before you spend anything. That's when you'll really know whether you enjoy doing it and what's actually missing.

How to set up the room so it sounds good

The room matters more than the microphone. An expensive microphone in an empty room with bare walls sounds worse than a modest one in a bedroom full of clothes, for a simple reason: sound bounces off hard surfaces and comes back into the microphone as echo.

Pick the room with the most soft things in it: rugs, curtains, a sofa, shelves full of books, an open wardrobe with clothes. Avoid empty rooms, bathrooms and the kitchen, and stay away from windows onto the street. Before you record, turn off whatever makes noise without you noticing: the fridge if it's nearby, the air conditioning, the computer fan, phone notifications. And warn anyone you live with.

A quick test: clap your hands in the middle of the room. If you hear a metallic tail, there are too many hard surfaces. You can fix that cheaply with thick blankets hung on the walls or behind the person speaking. It's basically what studios do, although it looks a lot less pretty.

Also make a one-minute test recording and listen to it on headphones before you start. It sounds silly, but it's what saves the most episodes. If something's off, you fix it in a moment. If you discover it after an hour of conversation, there's no fixing it, however good your editor is. AI improves ordinary audio a great deal, but it doesn't work miracles on very bad sound. If you want more detail, how to get good audio for video and podcasts goes into it.

Microphone, camera and light: the basics for video

The microphone has to be close: about a hand's width from the mouth and slightly to the side so bursts of air don't hit it. Many shows use dynamic microphones because they mainly pick up what's right in front of them and less of the room, which is a big help at home. If there are several people, each one gets a microphone and a separate track, so you can fix one person without touching the other.

A camera or a phone will do for the picture, as long as it's fixed and steady. Put it on a tripod, vertical or horizontal depending on where you'll publish, with the lens at eye level. Record at the best quality the device allows, check there's free storage and plug it into the mains. And turn on airplane mode, because a phone call will cut your recording at the best possible moment.

Light is what changes the picture most for the least money. The best and cheapest option is to sit facing a window, never with your back to it. If you record at night or the daylight keeps changing, a soft light in front and slightly to one side does nearly all the work. And behind you, a tidy background with some depth and a lamp switched on. It gives a much greater sense of care than a white wall.

If several of you are recording, one wide camera and one for each person give you a lot to play with in the edit. With two cameras you can already cut between one person and the other, which is a good starting point.

Can you record a podcast on a phone or with remote guests?

Yes to both. A modern phone shoots very good video, and one of the searches that comes up right beside this one is exactly how to make a podcast on your phone. What it doesn't do well is pick up sound from a distance, so it needs an external microphone, either a lavalier or one that plugs into the phone. With that and a tripod you've got a valid setup to start with, or for shooting the clips you then upload to social.

If your guest isn't in the same room, there are tools built for it, such as Riverside or Zencastr, to name two. Their advantage is that they record audio and video on each person's computer and upload them afterwards, so an internet dropout doesn't ruin the recording. A normal video call, on the other hand, is recorded compressed and complete with all the connection glitches. We explain the full method in how to record a podcast remotely.

We know what that approach can do, because some of the shows we edit reach us like that, recorded far away from us. And here's a recommendation we give everyone: put headphones on your guest, even if they can't be bothered. They stop the sound from their speaker going back into the microphone, and that small thing saves a lot of trouble in the edit.

The mistakes we see most when editing home-recorded podcasts

We edit all kinds of shows, and these mistakes come up again and again.

Recording everyone on one track. If someone coughs over another person, there's no way of cleaning it up. With one track per person, it takes a minute to fix.

Not leaving ten seconds of silence at the start. That silence gives the editor a sample of the room's noise, so it can be removed better. And a clap to camera at the beginning makes it easier to sync video and sound.

Trusting a single recording. If you can, also record a backup, for example on your phone. You only have to lose the material from a guest who took months to book once to find out how much it's worth.

Turning up to record unprepared. Half of what gets cut in the edit is people searching for what to say. A good podcast script, even one of five questions, changes the result more than anything you can buy.

And expecting to fix everything later. The thing we say most often is that editing can improve good material but can't save bad material. Ten minutes of testing before you record are worth more than five hours of editing afterwards.

Finally, some encouragement: your first episode will sound worse than your tenth, and that's normal. Plenty of good shows started in a bedroom with a blanket on the wall.

When it's worth leaving home and going to a studio

Recording at home is a very good option for trying things out, for a solo show or for anyone publishing on a tight margin. It falls short in several cases: when you have guests you want to look after, when the podcast represents your company, when you want several cameras with a finish you can't tell apart from a big show, or when each recording costs you half a day of setting up and taking down.

That's where our studio in Viladecans comes in, about twenty minutes from Barcelona and very close to the airport, with three sets already in place. You arrive, sit down and record. And when it's over, we also handle the editing, intros, thumbnails and clips. It's the same way of working Albert Murillo applies with Aladetres, whose channel went, with his team, from around 100,000 to more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube.

There's also a middle ground: you keep recording at home and we take care of everything that comes after. Or we tell you how to set your space up properly so you can keep recording yourself.

If you're torn between one and the other, tell us. Book a free diagnosis: you show us a recording or your idea over a video call and we tell you what you could change at home without spending anything, and whether the studio is worth it for you. Everything we do with a show is on our video podcast production page.

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