Podcast Woes
Last year I started a podcast. I didn't have any high hopes when I started. The original premise was that it was just me and a good friend (we'll call him Tony) shooting the shit and talking about video games. I didn't want it to feel too scripted or structured. I just wanted to hang out and talk about video games, and Tony was about the only friend I thought I had enough 'chemistry' to do some sort of show with and lived in the same town. We actually test recorded an episode in December. We had a blast. We rambled on for almost two hours and ended up talking in circles a bit, but we really had a lot of fun. And that was the point.
Then at some point, I had the idea of making it a book club, for video games. This may have been the original idea, but I've slept since then and am unsure of the timeline. The idea was this: We play one game a month, then come back and talk about it. So, that's what we did. The first few episodes were rough. We still didn't really know how all the equipment we'd bought worked with each other; we had microphones, an interface, and my laptop. We could get everything hooked up fine, but we didn't get it all sorted correctly in our software, and the first couple of episodes we accidentally recorded with the onboard mic from the laptop. They sounded like shit. The content was okay on the first, and we felt like it got a little better each time. Of course, when we finally figured out what was wrong with our recordings and started using our nicer mics to record, the production values skyrocketed. I have to smirk at that because the mics we have aren't anything to write home about, but they are much better than a laptop microphone. After 4 or 5 episodes, we missed a month. Tony and I intended to do two episodes the next month to make up for it. We'd already picked and played a game for the month we missed, so we figured we'd record early in the next month, then play another game for about three weeks, and record another episode at the end. Well, we didn't do that. Finding, or maybe making, time to get together and sit down for several hours to record was tough. We did okay for a few more months after that, but we only actually got out six episodes. We have a seventh, but it took me months to get around to editing it. At this point, I'm not sure it's worth releasing. It's now been about nine months since we released an episode. I like the show. I think Tony does too. It was only ever meant to be fun, and the recording is a lot of fun. But the scheduling is a nightmare, and editing podcasts is not really a good time. And I think, for myself at least, some mental health issues kept me from getting that last episode ready. I think our aspirations outgrew our show too. We kept saying to each other, “I think we really have something here.” We didn't think we'd get big overnight, but I think our expectations for how good the show needed to be grew very quickly and made the process more stressful. As if there was less room for error, because it was possible that the show was really great, and could get big. My best friend asks pretty regularly what's going on with the show. He enjoyed listening to the shows and looked forward to a new one every month. He asked if the two of us could record a podcast in a couple of weeks when I visit. He's wanted to be a part of it since the beginning I think. Maybe even a little jealous I didn't ask him. He lives in a different state. I didn't want the added stress of trying to record from multiple locations and splicing two 1 hour long audio clips together and then taking the time to edit them down. We struggled enough, sitting in one room, recording to one computer. There are so many more variables with two recordings. Otherwise, I would have asked him. I don't know what I, or we, are going to do with the show. I'd like to start it back up again, but we are going to have to be way more organized about it. I'm afraid some of the magic is gone now that we've been on hiatus for so long.