A Podcaster’s Dream: The TASCAM Mixcast 4

welcome to get offset my name is Emily

and I think it’s a perfect time to start

that podcast you’ve been thinking about

for the past 10 years I think it’s a

great time the world needs to hear what

you have to say about the Cinematic

Masterpiece Josie and the Pussycats the

live-action movie

it’s true

I’m not lying well I’m here today

courtesy of Sweet Water they sent me

this mixcast 4 by Tascam to uh

demonstrate for you all it is a really

neat tool and I’ve been using it myself

in my podcast yes there is a podcast

most recently I visited my friends at

recovery FX in Seattle Washington and we

recorded an episode of the podcast

using this because normally I record

remotely via a separate tool I didn’t

have a great way to record on the road

though the Pacific Northwest has a

wealth of great musicians Builders Etc

and I’d love to be able to bring the

podcast to their space and do some

interviews and this is already helping

me do that so I’m going to show you

um I’m gonna have an overhead cam review

that hat and I’ll walk you through all

the software

um in in this piece of hardware

and how it works and how I use it but

there are some things I couldn’t quite

show you on that camera so I’m going to

show you now

you’re going to hear me talk about using

a headset you can use a headset like a

broadcaster Style with this you can plug

it in right there and it will take up

your channel one there are also on the

back here we have three of uh sorry four

of those microphone slash TS cable

inserts so you can do for microphones

for people talking you can record demos

on this with those instrument inputs and

actually have like a nice Hardware mixer

you have your SD card and there it takes

a normal size SD card not a micro you

have

a place to plug in a smartphone though

you will need the dongle adapter to get

the trrs you can switch between that and

another stereo line in audio Source

there’s also Bluetooth there’s an eighth

inch line out there there’s a monitor

out in Stereo USB plug four headphones

that’s the on button

there’s that little lock thing

okay I think it’s Kensington lock I have

never used one let me know in the

comments if they’re any good and what I

think is especially important is since

this thing doesn’t run on batteries it

has to run on this adapter it locks in

so if somebody trips over it

hopefully you’re not going to pull it

out of the back of this

pulling out from the wall is another

story

yeah let’s get into the actual software

and mechanics of using this thing I

switched the other camera

just so you know the way I’m recording

this is uh through my computer so I have

the monitor out actually going into the

stereo ends of my PreSonus 1810c I am

only doing that so that I can show you

some features that just aren’t available

while recording but let’s uh let’s dig

into it

so you can see right off the bat uh my

level and then the the Left Right level

so

obviously I’m the only person plugged

into a microphone but there can be more

audio inputs for example I I have

connected this to my Bluetooth on my

phone so I can play music audio clips or

I could have someone call in through

that so there would probably be a little

bit of latency at a minimum probably

around 32 milliseconds so let’s uh hear

one of my songs

and I can talk over it but you can see

um this is a very bushy painting on the

song and uh you can see that going left

and right and the um

this song is singing I’m gonna shut it

off shut it off so that works it um I

think works pretty seamlessly I’m going

to disconnect from Bluetooth now oh

there we go I think it works really

seamlessly

um the Bluetooth thing the phone I’m not

going to try that because I cannot find

the dongle adapter

um I tested it before and it did work

and then the dongle

disappeared into you ether you know

they’re about that big

so as you can see it comes pre-loaded

with eight onboard effects I think

they’re pretty pretty helpful I’m not

gonna do beat but you have like um

oh my gosh they’re very annoying you

have brass

a little punctuation there

[Applause]

Applause

a drum beat

heartbeat you know very kind of uh

morning radio talk radio kind of things

you can also add your own via that

software that’s really the only thing I

was able to use the software for so I

have our intro and uh the song that we

often Fade Out on so those are things

that I have built into the sound pads

you can have multiple pages of them you

can have a quite quite a lot of pages of

them

um so if you have your own kind of

sounds that you want to add on like a

cat meowing or specific kind of cue you

can do that I recommend doing it once

and then never doing it again

that’s how I roll but you can always add

more uh I again just found the software

not super intuitive

um frankly this might have been an issue

with my cables I had some connection

problems

um but hey ultimately it worked it

probably took about 30 minutes to get

those cues loaded on there but that’s

that’s

not so bad

okay so let’s look at this menu there

are five different

blocks so we’ll just start with this one

this is how you can add effects and

things onto each of these different

inputs obviously I am the only input

right now

um so you can select your microphone

type a condenser is just going to add

that phantom power on there the front

and the rear there’s this little trrs

here and that can be used with a headset

like a broadcast style headset so that’s

what you’re using that’s what you would

select next we have uh let’s go to

effect setting

so this basically enables you to oh

okay

to add like a Reverb and

I I don’t super see a huge use for this

you can if you’re in a very very dry

room and you want it to be Sun Life in

it you would uh generally I find that

it’s not what people are looking for

when they

listen to podcasts is the room sound if

anything I I feel like you’d probably

more want to remove Reverb and outside

sounds and I will show you how to do

that

but yeah you can have a small room

medium large you can make it wetter

ah

and then you can just do a manual one so

you can select a room type this might be

kind of cool if you’re actually using

this to record music

um

but I’m gonna bypass that because I

don’t really like it uh using that

there’s also a voice changer you can use

so yeah I I think this one’s pretty

self-explanatory

foreign

again not something I foresee people

using a lot but it’s kind of a fun thing

to have next we’re going to look in to

processing and I have the noise

suppressor on presently so

let’s talk about it

my room’s a little loud so I I like

using the noise suppressor

it is a double-edged sword I use this

with recovery effects and if you do use

the noise suppressor I highly recommend

taking the time to fine tune it

for your room

make sure the attack release threshold

or what you want them to be same for a

low-cut filter I have a set to 80 and

the the uh The Noise Gate so it doesn’t

always allow for the most natural sound

obviously the best case scenario is that

you are in a room that’s not loud

unfortunately my room is a little on the

loud side so that’s why I’m I’m using

that

you also have a de-esser which again I’m

not using

um

I haven’t felt the need for it I have a

pretty good microphone

the other thing I was going to say about

the noise suppressor is if you use it

make sure everyone can monitor

themselves

um otherwise they might not know how

much they’re going in and out I use this

at recovery effects uh there there was a

little bit of noise so we turned on the

noise suppressor I didn’t fine tune as

much as I should have and people weren’t

able to monitor themselves so if you

were just a little too far away from the

microphone

we couldn’t hear you

um that did get evened out within the

episode and I was able to fix it in post

but that was something that was like a

hard lesson that I learned and I don’t

want you to learn it the same way

because not all experiences are good

Bianca we also have ducking I see the

thing about me and ducking is I prefer

to do it manually because sometimes

people are talking at the same time and

yeah you probably don’t want them to

talk too much over each other but I feel

like ducking is is more valuable if you

have like an audio track or playing some

music in the background you want the

music to dip when people are talking you

don’t really want it to be like people

cross talking and at choosing

the person to make audible so I don’t

really like that setting I’m gonna not

use it

what’s nice to have so those are the uh

effect settings the voice settings you

have those for each of these some of

these will have different ones as you

can see mic 2 does not have the headset

option that’s only for mic one

and USB is just gonna have some voice

settings

smartphone is only going to have some

voice settings

and uh Bluetooth this is actually also

where you go to pair the Bluetooth it

was quite easy to do

um I’ve had bigger problems with fancier

equipment connecting to Bluetooth I’m

really impressed with the Bluetooth

connectivity it just it worked really

really well let’s go to this place

settings

um this is essentially where you would

go to listen back to things so I don’t

have

um many recordings I do have some from

recovery effects so I could play that

back

foreign

just a clap and I’m not going to get too

far into it there’s some Advan there are

some advanced settings uh you can see

Mark there you can Mark specific

sections of your podcast or whatever

you’re recording uh say you want to make

sure you grab a clip from it or maybe

you want to edit that part out uh

someone would just hit Mark and you’d be

able to find it so you can scroll

through marks I don’t believe I had any

yeah because I wasn’t the one Manning

this

you have your sound pads you can change

the colors

you can record to a pad directly that’s

kind of neat

and you can have how it affects the

other things like is it going to mute

all your other inputs

um

is there another thing so uh you you

might want to mute other inputs if it’s

like an intro

um the the beauty of this is that you

really the idea is that you don’t have

to do any post-production

um I still had to with my recovery

effects episode

you know partially because

um of the the ducking that we didn’t

fine-tune enough but also you know I

just wanted a little bit more control my

husband was doing his best Manning the

the faders he was really writing those

faders pretty hard

um but if there is something that you go

in and do later I think it’d be better

just to have all of those tracks

separate and I will show you how to

separate them

right so

that is the sound pad

this is some Hardware settings

um that you can dig into you have some

options here for your audio settings

feedback prevention is interesting I

don’t foresee you needing that unless

you are also

um you unless you also have like

speakers going with the podcast so in

that case you would want feedback

reduction again I just don’t really see

a lot of people needing that but it is a

very good thing to have yeah so those

are a few of the audio settings I’m not

going to go through them all there’s a

manual that’s quite in depth so I’m

going to do just kind of a quick

recording with a few different elements

um and I’m going to show you on Studio

One how to then split those tracks it’s

it’s pretty pretty easy right so I’m

just going to hit record

let’s see

red button there so you can see I’m

recording

um I maybe got some Applause

[Applause]

neat I am going to

uh listen to some of my music maybe this

sad ass song

[Music]

up there 30 seconds

very helpful and of course you hit stop

recording and then ask you if you’re

sure

yes bingo

and you can rename it um

so there you go I’m not going to

go back into okay let’s see that file

red button there so you can see I’m

recording

um I maybe got some Applause

[Applause]

neat I am going to

uh listen to some of my music maybe this

sad ass song

foreign

[Music]

very helpful

cool so I’m going to break here I’m

going to plug this SD card into the

computer grab the audio file and show

you what it looks like once it’s on the

computer

there are some obviously some other

things I did there one thing I did

notice is that when the Bluetooth

started

um and ended it doubled my vocals

obviously it was pulling

some audio from the microphone or the

phone not sure why that’s going to be an

easy fix I suspect so yeah I’m going to

go ahead and like I just said plug this

into the computer and show you what it

looks like on uh in like Studio One or

something all right see you in a sec

okay welcome back

um I’m back to using the microphone

through my

interface or whatever

uh but yeah let’s look over here and

you’ll see

this is all of the folders for the uh

that came from the mixcast SD card

you’ll see I have my sound pad stuff

there

my my other

uh sound effects

but we want to look at the podcast so

this is obviously what I recorded

I wish to drag it in

I was building the preview right now

but if you can tell this is all on one

track and I don’t really want that make

this a little bit more visible

so what I’m going to do is I’m going to

put that file I’m going to remove it

remove the track completely

I’m gonna put somewhere I can find it

quickly so I’m gonna just drop it onto

my desktop

now I’m going to go up here to files

desktop

and I have the podcast zero zero six

so I’m going to split these all to

monophiles

so they’re all now split to Mono files

that was like magic so here’s the

original file down here

I am going to pull them all over and

we’ll take a look at them all together

I also love how it color coded

everything for me so clearly these

weren’t used at all

remove them and these are actually my

main track so I’m going to mute them

so let’s look at everything here

this is a full wide view right here on

the bottom these are the main tracks

this is the like everything combined

that’s my little Stinger that’s the

sound board

this is the Bluetooth and that’s the uh

the file I was having some trouble with

and then here’s my talking so let’s

listen

that’s the

Applause I am going to

uh listen to some of my music has to be

talking sounds pretty good but here’s

where we had the problem

yeah right there so I don’t know why it

did that and it bothers me so I’m going

to just

see a man

and uh

oops delete that

song

a song

this sad ass song

and there that was uh and it’s over here

where you can visually see

let’s solo it like this should not have

been picking up my vocals so I’m going

to break here

I don’t think it did it over here

[Music]

[Applause]

so

so an audio is actually playing

it did not take anything from the mic

but in that interstitial time right

before it started playing and right

after it started playing it recorded

some vocal waves so

easy enough

delete that

and that’s the last song

maybe this sad ass song

[Music]

[Applause]

also what I could have done is turned

the Bluetooth volume down when I was

talking manually obviously I didn’t do

that so I would probably want to do that

in post uh potentially with some

automation just to make it really smooth

you also still have these in stereos so

if you pull up your console view here

you can still

do one left one right

there we go so yeah that was on me uh I

did in fact have a left and right

version of that Bluetooth track I just

did not

use it

so be careful when you’re deleting files

I’m going to delete these as well

go ahead and remove

the parts

where

uh there is double Emily vocals

and uh maybe

take these down uh well obviously hard

pan

hard pan

Focus down the middle maybe drop this

by four

I don’t think the Applause is actually

in stereo

[Applause]

it is

[Applause]

maybe this sad ass song

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

up there 30 seconds and it is

subtracting from the available time yeah

if I were to go back and heavily edit

this I would do some automation or some

some essentially ducking in in uh post

see that’s one what that’s one of the

reasons you would use ducking as I

mentioned before if there is music and

you want to play it but also when you

talk you want the music to go down I

could have used sucking for that it

would have made my post production a lot

easier

um the more you use this the less

post-production you are going to rely on

of that I’m very confident you’re going

to learn more about ducking you’re going

to learn more about monitoring and

um you’re going you’re going to learn

all those little tricks that just make

it a seamless experience and that that

goes for any piece of Hardware or

recording software even the more you use

it maybe even running some drills with

it uh it’s going to make it a more

essential tool in your library right

well uh once again thank you to

Sweetwater for sending me this mixcast

for it’s really great I’m really looking

forward to getting all around the

Pacific Northwest with this bad boy and

hopefully doing some more interview

episodes of the podcast if you haven’t

checked out the podcast

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but as always thanks for watching thanks

for understanding until next time my

name is Emily goodbye