Interviews are often conducted face-to-face inside a studio or at a said venue, but now because of many reasons such as social distancing and other health protocols, you cannot do real-time meetings conveniently anymore. This is the reason why interviews these days are limited to “livestreams” or conducted using a smartphone via any software such as Skype or Zoom, etc.
Podcasts now are mostly conducted online by using some software or hardware. A technique which is known as mix-minus is popularly used to conduct online live shows. Now if you connect with your guest through Skype and start conducting your performance, there will be so many live video issues such as voice being too high or low, network disconnection, hardware errors, etc.
But mix-minus is a safe method because it allows sending back an audio signal to the remote guest or audience on the podcast during livestreams. The host will deliver his voice on time to all the guests participating in these live podcasts and saves the host from providing a delayed echo.
The mix-minus main concept is that all of the audio tracks from the guest and host must be readily available in the show but the signal sent back to guests does not contain any designated input. The mixer sends back all audio signals but terminates all of the audio coming into the mix.
In getting ready for mix-minus podcasts, all things must be considered beforehand. Here are the things you must take note before setting up a mix-minus setup for podcast production:
Have Your Phone Ready
Your phone must be fully charged and operational. Your Wi-Fi system must be in full speed as well and make sure outer distractions will not affect the live-stream or podcast recording.
Give Your Guest a Briefing
If you start recording your podcast show without introduction and details, your audience might not take any interest and will not know your show’s production details. So introduce your show well by giving your guest a brief tour of your audio or podcast production setup. This briefing will give them an idea on how to act accordingly and help record a smooth episode.
Using an Audio Interface as Mix Minus
If you have four amplifiers going into a mixer, at that point you need to mix it for the most part present and afterwards. It will send one track to your PC or mobile, though if you have a good interface, it will send four ways to your PC or mobile. You can alter everybody’s voice independently and change things there. Also, there used to be what is called latency with all the sound interfaces. Along these lines, when you are recording it, it will require possibly a large portion of a second or something to that effect to playback on your PC or mobile thus it would get genuinely confounding and would be truly difficult to alter live, utilizing an audio interface.
Anyway recently, as PCs have gotten so great and these gadgets have brought so great, the latency is little to the point that it is nearly no perceptible on these things.
Also, you have gadgets and tools and things where you can alter your PC’s sound immediately and get moment results. Thus, it acts much the same as a mixer yet rather than having a board that you change and you have things on your PC that you can change utilizing the product.
So essentially, an audio interface will do all that a mixer does. It will be less overpowering for most podcasters, especially if you are new to sound hardware and you have not utilized the mixer previously.
Use Actual Mixer and Cables
For a proper hardware-based mix-minus, you need a mixer with an auxiliary send feature because this will help decide which channel will be used to send signals. The one to eight tracks will be used for a different type of signals to be sent. Some of them might include the actual recorder voice too, that’s why right cabling and configuration will help you sort out the purpose of mix-minus.
The channel will help you mix the audio and minus its podcast music so guests will only hear the actual show properly.
Summary
For live streams or podcasts, it is necessary to maintain proper and integrated voices to the audience. But due to low-quality audio systems, it cannot be achieved in live and streaming podcasts. So for proper audio recordings, there is a technique that called mix-minus for podcasts. It helps to minus the mixer’s different voice using the mixer to send back track’s signals. You need a proper phone charged, and you need to introduce beforehand to your audience. You can use the audio interface to provide the functionality of mix-minus for podcast. It is helpful if you are new to recording these podcasts. Or you can use an actual mixer with proper cabling to provide the mix-minus podcast feature.
