Michael Geoghegan
A Climber At The Peak of PodcastingBy Randy Alberts
"This book saved my podcast!"
- Amazon.com reader review of Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide To Podcasting
by Michael W. Geoghegan & Dan Klass
The nascent art of podcasting was born less than two years ago, yet Michael Geoghegan has already achieved senior expert author and producer status in the field. Not bad for a non-tech entrepreneur who, until 24 months ago, had never moused a virtual EQ knob, held a microphone, or interviewed anyone other than his potential employees. The ascending ride has been, ever since, an inspiring dream come true.
No story better defines the sheer thrill of the podcast than Michael's own. One afternoon Geoghegan (pronounced "go-hay-gan") was a very successful owner of insurance marketing firms in Newport Beach, California, then almost literally the next day he sold those and was shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow podcast visionaries Adam Curry, Dave Slusher, and a small band of 'casting pioneers at a Stanford conference. From that day forward Michael turned his passion — talking about movies — into an expanding business reality.
"I'm truly a native podcaster," he says. "I had never built a website or edited audio until podcasting came along though I built a fancy home theater in my basement and have always been an audiophile. I've been addicted to movies my entire life; that's what got me started reviewing movies and, ultimately, into podcasting."
Leading New Media Up The Peak
How's this for starters: one of Michael's first live interviews was with Michael Eisner. The imagineering Disney company, one of podcasting's earliest corporate adopters, asked Geoghegan to hit the ground running at the park in 2005 with his portable digital recorder and a mic for the launch of Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration. It went so well that Willnick Productions, Inc. — Geoghegan's podcast consulting and production company — now creates each month The Official Disneyland Resort Podcast.
"For a week I interviewed people and recorded events at Disneyland," Michael recalls. "I'd come home each night, open up Peak and SoundSoap Pro and start editing the shows for podcast. I was up until four in the morning then back at the park by 7:30 to do it all over again. It was exhilarating."
Early this year Disney asked him back again to cover the park's new Monsters, Inc., launch. He liked that gig, but the sidebar was his personal icing on the cake. After interviewing the park's climbing team — and making a few lay-ups on their half-court basketball hoop inside the mountain — Michael quite symbolically reached the pinnacle of podcasting: the peak of The Matterhorn.
"I climbed 14 flights of stairs with one of the team, we took a little ladder up, popped the hatch and — wow! We were standing on top looking out over all of Disneyland. I instinctively turned my mic and recorder on and finished the interview. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thrill."
Geoghegan's first podcast audio production tools were free software programs that often crashed — all it took was his losing a couple of shows to hard drive dives for him to get more serious about podcasting: using Peak. He had briefly used a version of Peak included with Apple's Final Cut Pro that he'd once used to create a simple training video for his insurance offices, but by this time Willnick Productions was midstream in building a $30,000 production studio — a serious pro venture not witnessed by the podcast world until then — and Michael needed an equally serious piece of audio software to match.
Geoghegan & Peak
"I've found Peak 5 to be an extremely powerful tool," says Michael. "It has changed the way I think about how I'm editing audio and is now the only program I use for editing and mastering podcasts. And, with the Pro XT 5 plugins suite, it's just amazing the effect Peak has had on the quality of our podcasts. I especially like the sample rate conversion engine, which is terrific, but the biggest thing now with Peak — besides SoundSoap Pro — is the RMS normalization."
Geoghegan says most every serious podcast producer has been talking a long time — long in podcasting terms, that is — about two of his favorite Peak features.
"Until now we had to use third party plugins or even entirely different applications in order to achieve the proper RMS normalization we've been needing. But now that's built in to Peak. For those of us investing heavily into podcasting, you have no idea just how important an addition that is for us. That's a big time-saving home run."
And how about SoundSoap Pro? How important is it to the world of podcasting?
"Very important," he adds. "The recording environments at Disneyland, for instance, are extremely varied. There have been some just horrible recording situations where we've had to simply do the best we could with the situation. We covered an event last summer that included a LeAnne Rimes song and an important speech by Bob Iger. We were using a new portable digital recorder the operator wasn't yet familiar with, and consequently he recorded the levels way too low. The hiss and noise floor were just unbearable when we brought the levels up enough to even hear what was being said, but that was what we were left with."
What happened?
"SoundSoap Pro was able to scrub all that noise out. I can say, if it wasn't for SoundSoap, that we wouldn't have been able to upload the entire show. SoundSoap Pro came to our rescue."
Michael and his Willnick producers also publish the wildly successful weekly GrapeRadio podcast. The show's mantra says it all: "Where an enthusiasm for wine gets personal." They like SoundSoap Pro's automatic mode though also favor dialing things in themselves with the manual controls found under the Broadband tab. They're clearly each passionate about wine, though no one on the team considers themselves on the same audio achievement level as their fellow BIAS users they see interviewed on the site — yet.
"Those people are lifelong audio experts," says Geoghegan. "But interestingly, with Peak and SoundSoap Pro, I feel like I have the ability to yield similar audio results. In some cases I can get those results without having to put all those years they have into perfecting their engineering crafts. BIAS deserves big credit, too, for writing manuals that are easy for podcasters to understand in order to achieve those results. Most other audio software manuals I've tried to read assume the user knows a lot about engineering to begin with, which is certainly not the case for all the new podcasters out there with no prior audio experience."
Michael W. Geoghegan — his book Podcasting Solutions with Dan Klass now in its second printing at Apress/Friends of ED — remarks that the podcasting market has "the growth curve of a hockey stick," and he's right. For novice interviewers and top-notch audio professionals alike curious about the deep end of the podcasting pool, he has this advice:
"Find that real passion point of yours and do a podcast about it."