A Twitter follower, Joey Keeran (@joeykeeran) posted on Twitter last week a photo of his DIY audio dampening setup to file reports for his team/radio station. It’s an ingenious solution as hotel rooms can be very echoey and judging by the background in his picture there seems to be a lot of hardwood and other types of surfaces that would bounce audio waves.
When I’m on the road and have to record in hotel rooms, I don’t often use this type of setup. My headset microphone is close enough to my mouth and setup well enough so that it doesn’t pick up too much echo around me. However it doesn’t look like Joey is using a headset microphone in this case, so his solution of using pillows to absorb the sound waves his voice makes is ingenious to avoid an echo, or reverb, coming back into the microphone.
Joey’s photo got me thinking about other solutions to recording things like podcasts where you don’t want to really take the room with you. YouTube channel, Indy Mogul, which is unfortunately now defunct posted a fantastic video a while back on DIY sound dampening. The channel focuses on movie creation and complimenting techniques, but a lot can be ported over to sportscasting in this manner.
Do you have an interesting setup on the road? Got a sure-fire technique that helps you get the job done in less than ideal circumstances? Let us know in the comments below, on Twitter (@sportscastlife) or via email (sportscasterlife@gmail.com)
