The Making of The Imaginary Bomb

Even by podcast standards, The Imaginary Bomb is not intended to be a slick, perfect production. It's a homemade project and, as such, I leave my share of stutters and clicks in there, although I'm trying to make them fewer and farther between. When episode 2 is posted later today, for example, you'll notice I don't own a filter that screens out popping P's. I'll try to be more careful starting with episode 3.

Part of the reason why the show sounds the way it does is that I don't own a fancy Garage Band system or even a computer that's less than five years old. And I use the type of equipment that I used for 22 years before I left the radio business 10 years ago: Analog stuff!

The main workhorses are a Pioneer RT-707 reel-to-reel tape deck that I bought new in 1977; a Radio Shack SSM-60 stereo sound mixer; and, for the voice processing, a Marantz PMD 740 mixing board and Yamaha EMP100 multi-effect processor that I got off eBay a couple of years ago. Now, folks who know what all those numbers mean know they're pretty cool toys, but this being my first podcast I'm just taking baby steps with this stuff so far.

Once it's all recorded, it's a simple matter to dub the whole shebang onto a CD and convert it to .mp3 on the Dell. In fact, there's probably a simpler way to do all of this, but I'm comfortable doing it this way, so what the hey.