In the past few weeks, my friend Chandler and I had the idea to start a podcast discussing politics. Throughout our process, we’ve had a few issues like deleting our recordings on accident or accidentally letting the cat out of the house, but we’re figuring things out. Here are 4 things we’ve learned while trying to start our podcast.

Always backup the recordings

This is one of the first problems that we have experienced. We were starting on our second episode, ready to record, however, we wanted to change the file type. As we were messing around with the recorder the format button was accidentally pressed. Long story short, we lost our first episode and had to redo it; so always… ALWAYS backup your recordings.

Make sure the microphone is on

Another important component is making sure the microphone is on. It sounds pretty obvious but seriously who knew you had to change the settings when you plugged in an external microphone. As a result of my error, Chandler and I didn’t have an audio (which is all a podcast is) for our second attempt of our first episode.

Outlines are your best friend

I’ve heard before that an excessive amount of structure is bad but believe me it helps. It’s just like how you would make a detailed outline for a paper to keep yourself on track and transition smoothly to new talking points. During our first and second attempts at recording our opening episode, we experienced choppiness and rather poor transitions in our introduction, since then we’ve written talking points for everything even the intro. Outlines make a great difference, especially with the right transitions.

Scheduling is hard

Like I said, we have already made two attempts at a first episode (third time’s the charm) and while we try to record weekly, to keep up with current events, sometimes it is just too hectic and busy to record that week. It’s not too big of a deal, but consistency is important! Coordination is key!

Our podcast should, hopefully, be on SoundCloud very soon and we’re excited to be able to talk about politics and share our thoughts, ideas, and opinions, as young adults, with the world.