How I Do a Podcast: Alex Goldman from Hyperfixed

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s almost as easy to create as it is to consume. And that’s why no two people do it the same way. There are a plethora of hardware and software solutions available to potential podcasters, ranging from NPR studios to USB Skype devices (the latter of which has become something of a standard during the pandemic).

We asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows – the equipment and software they use to get their work done. The list so far includes:

This week Alex Goldman shares his setup. A former producer of WNYC’s “On the Media,” Goldman co-founded Reply All with Emmanuel Dzotsi in 2014. The hugely popular Gimlet podcast examined how the internet shapes us – and vice versa. A decade later, Goldman is back with Radiotopia’s Hyperfixed, a “help desk for life’s most intractable problems” that he produces from the comfort of his podcast basement.

Since the start of the pandemic, a lot of podcasting has actually been done remotely, so you’ll need to carve out a small space for it in your house where it’s comfortable. Mine is a small 8×8 room in the basement of my apartment and it’s surprisingly cozy. So when you listen to my new podcast, “Hyperfixed,” full of hope, helpfulness, and adventure, know that it comes from that torture chamber.

I mean, sure, it looks like the cabin in Evil Dead, but all the gear that’s in here makes it nice and warm compared to the rest of the basement, and I like to think it is I have made it my own to a certain extent.

Engineers act like it’s difficult to prepare a room for recording, but really it’s about making sure there isn’t too much open space or hard surface for the sound to bounce off. The more cluttered a room is, the better prepared it is for recording.

That’s why I have this huge Black Sabbath Vol. 4 wall flag. There is a rug behind the flag that I hung on some nails to make the place sound nice and I just wanted something I would enjoy looking at. Because the album is so good. “Changes”? “Snow blind”? Oh my God. There are baffles to the left and right of my desk that minimize the echo, and all the other junk I’ve filled my office with also helps keep the echo down.

I started in public radio, which means I learned audio editing using Pro Tools, a program that remains the industry standard despite being the most expensive, overloaded, and buggy program available to audio editors. Luckily, they recently started offering a license for $10 per month instead of buying a license for $599 like they used to.

My microphone is a Shure SM7B, which has been the public radio standard for 20 years, and is a microphone that you’ll see everywhere if you know its profile. I even recently saw Metallica’s James Hetfield barking into one during a rewatch of “Some Kind of Monster.” As audio interfaces I have a Focusrite 2i2 and a Focusrite 18i8; The former is basically the little brother of the latter. I like the 18i8 because it’s very useful for recording straight from the desktop, but the 2i2 doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall, which just makes it easier to use.

The music for the show was either done by The Mysterious Breakmaster cylinder or myself. I’m a very, very amateur musician, but it’s pretty simple, and I use the Sequential Circuits Prophet 6 synthesizer most often for that. It’s based on an early ’80s synthesizer (called, believe it or not, Prophet 5) that was used by the likes of Gary Numan, The Cars and Soft Cell, and it’s simply impossible to get a bad sound from it generate. When I need a great, fat synth bass or super thick synth leads, I use the Moog Matriarch, a more temperamental, but still really wonderful and versatile synth.

For drum sounds I mostly use standard Ableton drums, but I also have a few samplers and drum machines (the Erica Synths LXR-02 and the SOMA Pulsar-23) that I like to use to make small broken beats. I recorded an album a few years ago under the name Slow Fawns and I have been known to exploit these finished songs for music cues in podcasts.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room, or the rubber glove in the room, so to speak. When I first started renting this apartment, this room was full of a previous tenant’s trash, and I took it all out and set everything up before I noticed the rubber glove on the floor, just to the right of my synthesizer. Now it’s so much a part of the room decor that I hardly notice it anymore.