Rodecaster Pro - Smart Buy or Waste of Money?

far too long I've had to deal with audio that just had a lot of noise in it now the reason was because the microphone that I was using the rode procaster just required a lot of gain I was using the scarlett solos my audio interface and it just didn't produce a real clean gain so when I got into the market for another audio interface I kept coming back to this the road caster Pro it cost more than the other audio interfaces I was looking at but I think after watching this video you'll understand why I made this purchase the broadcaster Pro is a great-looking piece of equipment it's pretty simple to unbox and get hooked up and you can get recording almost instantly just like with any purchase you never know rather the purchase is gonna be worth it until you actually make the purchase and start trying it out there's very few places where you can just go and try equipment like this out to see if it's something you're gonna like or rather you think it's worth the money so in this video I'm gonna tell you everything I know about the road caster Pro so far and rather or not I think it was a smart buy or a waste of money [Music] five years ago I knew nothing about microphones nothing at all I like you know the microphone on my phone was about as much as the microphone I had any experience with and then it all changed I got into YouTube and I started doing little mini advertisements for my day job construction company and I started doing a YouTube video for my cook my barbecue channel and microphones then came into play you know the microphones on the camera mm-hmm the microphones that you put on top of the camera like a shotgun mic like this one I started learning the hard way all about microphones when I got into podcasting and if you haven't checked out my podcast go check out sharp focus on iTunes Google stitcher it's it's all most of your your podcast platforms it's also at my website Mike Willi calm go check the podcast out it has a lot to do with photography on it but it mainly centers around the inspiration or the life style of photographer and things that we go through so go check sharp focus out guys I'd really appreciate your support now what I learned when I got into podcasting was the interface is everything I have always fought some noise issues when I was doing voiceovers prior to getting into podcasting now when you get into podcasting audio is everything if well if you're doing a video podcast on YouTube it might be a little bit different but audio is still very important but when you're on like iTunes or something like that and you have no video associated with the podcast audio is everything so it's vital that you have great sounding audio I think we've all probably heard some podcast you know where you can tell they're like talking into their cell phone or they're in a huge room it's just there's not a lot of thought that has went into quality audio or maybe the budgets not there or whatever but you know it's just a lot harder to stay engaged with a podcast or an audio session of whatever when the audio is not the best quality so I was looking for a way to get rid of the noise in my microphone and I was using the rogue procaster microphone it's a great microphone and what I did is I ended up going ahead and trying to upgrade the microphone to the shure sm7b thinking maybe that would get rid of the noise because I seen the shure sm7b everywhere I mean it is a very popular microphone it's on the Joe Rogan show and a lot of other you know podcast shows it's a really popular microphone I wanted to know why when I got the shure sm7b plugged it into the same interface that i had which was the the focusrite scarlett solo I still had noise but it wasn't as bad but it was still there and I could tell that by doing a dead air test you know just letting the microphone record the room without talking or making sure there's any other sounds and then you can really hear that noise and what I found was like I said the shure sm7b still had it a little bit of it and it was it was enough that it just I wasn't happy so I knew then it had to be the audio interface and I learned that both of those microphones are very gain hungry they want an audio interface that can give them lots of gain and I put a cloud lifter in front of the focusrite scarlett solo and it helped but it still wasn't perfect so I decided to start looking into a new audio interface and you can spend anywhere from a hundred dollars to thousands of dollars on audio interfaces depending on what your objectives are so this is my current set up and I really like the way that Dee shure sm7b looks it just it's a fantastic presentation I just look sleek it looks modern it looks it's just it's very nice you know I like it a lot and it performs well it performs really well especially after I put it together with the road caster Pro the broadcaster Pro has been an absolute wonderful wonderful piece of equipment I've had it now for about mmm a month and I've been using it heavily so I use it for podcast episodes I use it for doing voiceovers kind of like this video it gets the job done all the time let me walk you through some of the features that I find are the best on this road caster Pro and it starts with the back back is pretty simple it has four areas where you can plug in four different microphones or XLR s one of the things I like the most is it has a plug here that you can use for your cell phone so you can directly plug your cell phone into the road caster Pro as long as you have the right cable and I happen to have the right cable for an iPhone you would need a cable that does the three-and-a-half - the Lightning port but once you get that then you can take phone calls and do you know all kinds of stuff anything you want to do over your phone you can do then together with the broadcaster Pro there's a USB which you connect the computer to and then of course the power so very simple alright so let's go over some of these settings and the first thing I want to show you is the volume controls so if you start at the bottom of each channel and each channel that you have that you're using you can control the volume individually with a volume slider you can probably hear my voice going down on this volume slider right here you hear the difference you can also solo a channel so if you just want that channel to be the one recording you hit your solo button and that will get rid of all the other channels and you have a mute button so that's very nice you can you know do multiple volume adjustments at the same time you can bring down channel one bring up your you know your why your Bluetooth or your USB or even over here on your sound effects which I'll show you a little more in a second let's talk about the the volume levels here on the LCD screen and what's so nice about this is you have all your volume levels right in front of you the whole time you can monitor each channel individually so if you hear the one channel is higher or lower than the others you can adjust that with the volume slider so I really like that the first thing that you want to do when you get the road caster Pro and you power it up is you want to go into your settings and you're gonna go ahead and pick the channel that you want to set up a microphone on and for me it was channel 1 so I select channel 1 and I go to microphone this is where you select what type of microphone you have and you can see roads different microphones here that they have but you can also either pick a dynamic or a condenser mic i'm using the shure sm7b which is i diy'd a dynamic mic so i have that selected over here is your levels and so your levels tell you where your volume is falling on that microphone on that channel and you can see it kind of wants you to be right between those green bars the one on the top and the one on the bottom and when you're in that area you have a pretty good and a level when it comes to your audio if you're if you're behind the green bars like if you're over here and it's just barely getting to the green bars then you increase your level here until you get the volume in the middle of those bars or close to it same thing if you were too loud you would decrease the level and that would bring your audio down you can also apply phantom power as needed and now you go into some voice settings so this is I think where this row caster Pro really shines in my opinion you can go into tone and pick the tone of the voice you know of the sound of the voice that you want to have so I have a deep tone selected and you can hear the difference now with a medium tone selected you should hear just a little bit different you know to a sound on the voice and then a high audio or a high pitch or you know a high tone for that channel on each channel you can do you know its own specific settings so I like deep so I'm gonna stay with that and now you can go to strength strength is just a little more enhancement on your voice and I picked a medium strength and you can see the difference here with a soft strength that's what this sounds like so now we'll go to a strong strength voice and that's what this sounds like so you have to play with that a little bit do some recording some monitoring seeing what sounds best with your voice I like the medium so that's what we're gonna stick with and so you back out of there and you can go to advanced the danced is probably one of my favorite parts of this row caster Pro down here at the bottom you have processing that turns everything on or off so right now everything is off I turned all of the the processing for my voice on this microphone off I can turn it back on by clicking that now I have come the film that I like you can hear the difference in my voice I'm sure as I'm changing those but I like all of them on I think they all do an excellent job I've spent hours and hours and hours trying to learn how to edit vocals for voice servers podcasts and you know doing all these things in Adobe Audition and I've come pretty good at it but this makes it so easy with the toggle of a button I now have a compressor and you can hear the difference in that just just a toggle of that button and in Adobe Audition you can put the effect on the voice but then you have to adjust the settings to get it where you want it and if you're not an audio engineer or sound engineer it could be very tricky and I'm not so it's been tricky for me to learn this makes it so simple and here you can hear the de-esser so Sally sells seashells on the seashore and that does a good job with getting rid of the asses Sally sells seashells on the seashore you can hear the difference there and ducking here's ducking with the effect on and then we'll turn it back off and you can hear that difference high-pass filters are great one I use that on Adobe Audition and here you can hear the difference there with the high-pass filter on and now with the high-pass filter off noise gate is vital to having great audio and I'm not gonna get into the specifics of what each one does I'll let you look those up but you know play with them till you get the the button selected the effects selected that you want to make your voice sound the way that you want it to down at the bottom here the affix advanced processing it has the exciter and this just kind of adds a little bit of a nice pitch a nice effect to your voice you can hear it with it on and now again with it off and the big bottom is just that it's going to give you some nice deep bass tones and so you can hear that and my voice is kind of suited for that so I like to keep that and back with it off again and so here again no effects and now with all the effects and this is how I keep it and so that's what you do you go through each channel and you set it up for you know whatever effects you want to have on each channel and it makes it really nice so you can really really really tailor in each person on each channel or each device to get that perfect audio now here you can see you can adjust the volumes for the headphones for each channel and you have a master volume adjustment the sound effect buttons which are controlled by this slider and this solo button are as such and you can program them you can program these very easily through the app that you download onto your computer my podcast intro my podcast altro and then the other sound effects I have not done anything with these and you can get more than one page so that it can do different things but the app literally allows you to drag the sound that you want onto the button change the color and it's just very very simple to do as you can see here you can click sound and that will tell you as well what those buttons are labeled as what color you have them and you have multiple pages here's the blank like I said I haven't done anything with them except for my intro in my outro for my podcast load from rode and what it does is it allows you to program those buttons so you click the button you can change the name change the color kind of change the style and if you want to add any sounds from your computer here you can see you can transfer sound to your computer or here you can transfer a sound to your rode procaster so it gives you a lot of options here and like I said I've just started to get into this but I can tell you the intro and the outro or the finish for me have been a really really wonderful setup a wonderful experience to be able to work with this the record button allows you to record your audio directly into an SD card that makes it incredibly user-friendly and that everything about this is you know user-friendly and just performs but that feature would this record onto an SD card allows you to take your podcasts on the go if I mean all you need is 120 volts to power this thing and you know you can even record in the desert if you hook it to a small generator you need a microphone and your rode caster Pro and you can go so you can go anywhere you want to record as long as you have that power supply so that makes it very very nice and very flexible and you know when you're when you're in content creation rather it's podcast videos or whatever flexibility is huge some other pros and I really like about the road caster Pro is it allows your creativity to just kind of blossom and you know you can just get started simply within a half an hour to start recording but you can also grow into this because of the capabilities another feature that's really important to highlight is the clean game it gives you a wonderfully clean gain and that's everything because nobody wants to hear that hum or that hiss when they're listening to your audio I will tell you that I have a cloud lifter that plugs the microphone plugs into the cloud lifter and then a cloud lifter to the road caster Pro and the reason for that is it just helps make sure we have a really clean gain the shure sm7b is a gain hungry monster and as long as you give it the game that it needs it is an amazing microphone but it got to be careful with gain not all gain is created equal so I'm gain it's really noisy and some gain is very clean it has a very clean game it's very simple to operate I love how simple it is and I think it's uh it's you know anybody could use it you don't have to have hardly any technologies to get this set up and going and like I said you can grow into it as you learn and being able to record in multiple tracks which is which is a newer feature I think there was an update that allows you to do that it I don't think it did that in a very beginning but it does now and that's really awesome there is one con and it's not to be picky because I think the layout is beautiful I love the colors I love the operation of it I love the the general bill the design the angle you know it's a really nice setup however there's a lot of extra space in here like we could convince this into about half the size so that it's not such a monster on your desktop because a lot of people they're going to be using this art podcasting and they're not podcasting every day but when we do podcast it'd be nice not to have such a bulky item so if I were to give rode any type of suggestion that's what it would be shrink the size of this but I think you nailed it all most other parts of this in fact I don't have another you know negative thing to say about it the size is my only critique the touchscreen is it works perfectly a lot of touchscreens on tech objects like this are very fluky this one's great it works really really well I really appreciate you sticking around for the whole video guys I want to go ahead and plug my podcast one more time it is sharp focus and it can be found on iTunes Google stitcher any of your podcast platforms as well as on my website Mike will EECOM go check the podcast out subscribe support me over there out on that platform I have a feeling if you have any kind of passion for cameras photography you know and videography you'll enjoy the podcast it's gonna you're gonna be able to relate to it a lot thanks again for joining me for this whole video please leave it a like down below if you enjoyed it you have any questions ask those in the comments share the video with your family and friends and share it on Facebook put it out there guys help me reach more people I'll greatly appreciate it and be indebted to you I can't wait to talk to you on the next video make sure you have an awesome week

Channel: Sharp Focus

Views: 27,833

Keywords: rodecaster pro, rodecaster pro review, rodecaster pro setup, podcast equipment, rode caster pro, rodecaster review, audio interface, rodecaster pro tutorial, rodecaster pro podcast, rodecaster pro video podcast, rodecaster pro sound pads, podcasting equipment, podcasting gear, rødecaster pro, podcasting setup, best podcast mixer, best podcasting setup, rodecaster pro mixer, rodecaster pro unboxing, podcast setup, rode rodecaster pro review, voice over, recording

Id: jF_kXQ3PeEI

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020