November 2017… Joey McCloud, aka Joey Mack, and podcasting partner JDub often spend 90 minutes commuting to work, Mack in the San Francisco Bay Area and JDub in Oregon. The two friends usually call each other during their commutes to help pass the time, and most often they discuss beer and board games. Eventually, they decided to turn their conversations into a podcast, and the Gaming on Tap Podcast was born.
“The podcast is bite sized,” observes Mack. “Each episode is about 30 minutes in length, about the time it takes to down a nice, delicious beer. To start the show, we crack open a new beer, talk about it, taste it, describe it, and then we move on to a current board game that we’ve been playing recently and casually talk about why we like it. We won’t spend any more time chatting than it takes for us to slowly savor the beer we pour at the beginning of the show.”
When they started the Gaming on Tap Podcast, the team had no experience with audio or podcasting. “We went out and bought some USB mics,” Mack recalls. “We thought that would do the trick. We recorded two episodes, and JDub sent me the audio files. I brought them into Adobe Audition, and right away I knew they were unusable.”
Mack started researching podcasting gear online. “TASCAM kept popping up in search results,” he relates. “I reached out to TASCAM to see what types of products they would recommend, and one if their guys contacted me and educated me on the line of products they have specifically for podcasters. We ended up purchasing the TASCAM MiNiSTUDIO Creator US-42, TM-280 studio condenser microphone, and a pair of TASCAM headphones. We bought two sets of each, so I have a set, and JDub has a set. Now, even though we’re not in the same room when we’re recording, we have a show that sounds like we’re sitting in the same room having a conversation, which is what we wanted all along.”
The MiNiSTUDIO Creator US-42 is an easily affordable solution for podcast production and Internet broadcasting, providing up to 24-bit, 96 kHz, USB 2.0 recording with Windows and Mac computers. It offers two XLR/TRS mic inputs, so you can mic yourself and a guest, and features TASCAM’s professional-caliber HDDA microphone preamps. Built-in buttons and processing enable Mack and JDub to easily add sound effects on-the-fly and apply EQ, compression, and reverb. “I like having knobs and buttons that I can use to make micro adjustments as we’re recording the podcast to make it sound exactly the way I want,” declares Mack. “I like having that kind of control right at my fingertips.”
Between the MiNiSTUDIO Creator and the TM-280 large-diaphragm studio condenser microphone, Mack and JDub’s Gaming on Tap Podcast finally sounds the way they envisioned it. “I’m so happy with the way that our podcast is sounding these days,” enthuses Mack. “It sounds broadcast quality. The TASCAM products make it sound like we actually know what we’re doing.”
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