retroAM

Upgrading the Studio, Getting Ready to Kill God, and Other Things

Added 2020-04-15 15:19:33 +0000 UTC

Hey everyone,

Hope you're hanging in there and staying well.

Monthly billing is resuming as normal on 5/1. If you're out of work or in a situation where you need to penny pinch, please reach out and we'll try to work something out temporarily.

Recording Progress. In terms of recording, we're are in the home stretch. We've recorded everything up until the final chapter, First and Last, which took 50 episodes. At times, it seemed like this podcast would wrap up at 40, but the depth of the plot structure and the thematic elements that require a ton of extrapolation left us with a ton to discuss.

During this final stretch, we'll cover the optional stuff, the final dungeon, the final battle, and the epilogue. This might take a few episodes, which would bring the season total to 52-54. Anyway, if you're interested in hearing these sessions recorded live, please join us on Discord.

Bonus Content. Finishing the game will complete our re-experience of Xenogears, so that'll help us free us up to work on some more in-depth content for bonus episodes. It's been fun to do some of the in-depth stuff we've done so far, but we were a bit hamstrung by the fact we hadn't gotten through and discussed the game yet. We plan to continue to record Xenogears bonus content until the season is over.

Speaking of, we're going to start working on our next bonus episode, covering the Xenogears Comic Anthology. We plan to talk through each chapter, discuss how it could fit into the canon, and see where the conversation goes from there. Check it out if you've never read it!

The Next Miniseries. We are approaching our goal of $200 per month. This means we're going to give ourselves the go-ahead to make a miniseries on Terranigma. If we're being honest, we were going to do this anyway, but now we're really, really going to it. Production of this will begin after we finish the Perfect Works miniseries. Miniseries episodes will be available for $5 and up patrons.

Season 2. Voting is almost closed! On 5/4, we'll crunch the numbers and add the weighted totals to the poll and announce the Season 2 game. We are super excited to start thinking ahead and it's going to be a thrill no matter what wins.

Equipment Update. I once read a reddit thread where someone gave a piece of advice that I really take seriously: "no matter how good your content is, if you are annoying to listen to, people won't listen." I can't tell you how many podcasts I've dropped because of incessant background noise, inconsistent audio, etc. I think we got a pretty good sound from an early point, but we wanted to make it so it would be less time consuming to edit and process.

So, thanks to you, we've pretty much completed the setup we didn't know we needed when we thought this whole thing up. Because we're risk-adverse nerds, we just bought some USB Mics (Blue Yeti) and figured it out from there. Turns out, Blue Yetis pick up EVERYTHING. We wanted to produce a better sound with less time spent on editing out mouth noises and slurps, so here's the route we took with updates:

We have the luxury of a quiet room, so we stuck with condenser mics, but went the XLR / audio interface route in lieu of USB so we could get a multitrack recording setup. This allows us to process each voice individually and gate out most of the chair squeaks, nose whistles, and slurps. The studio arms are terrific for saving space, reducing table noises, and maintaining a consistent distance from our respective faces. Also, Eric doesn't have to transport a mic to my house every time we record.

We started putting this setup together sometime in late January, so you won't hear the results for a little bit on the weekly show, but if you listen live on Discord, then you've probably heard us talking about it.

Take care and hang in here!

-Chris wrote this, but Eric probably agrees with everything I said