BEHIND THE SCENES OF JMB

Hey everyone,

Thanks for being on this crazy journey with me for however long you have been. I get a lot of questions about what the setup that isn’t on camera looks like and I haven’t really said much because, well, I’m still figuring things out. But then I had to think about how even though I’m still learning I have definitely learned a lot already and maybe some of this will be helpful to some of you. So here it is. I did no prep or cleanup before taking these shots. This is just how they look.

1. Whenever you see me on camera at the desk looking at you, this is what I’m looking at. Two big lights with octagon boxes at low brightness and a wide angle lens LUMIX 5siix (I might not have remembered the model right) in between. It took a long time to look at this stuff and imagine a person. It’s weird and alienating to talk to a camera but you get better with practice.

2. Closer look at the same camera but I really took this shot so you can see what’s behind it: chaos. I put every single piece of padding or acoustic treatment I could find and lumped it in this corner to kill early reflections for my microphone. This is the exact opposite of what you would expect a studio to look like and I admit this is a manifestation of my Olympian procrastination skill. I’ll sort this out someday, but for now it does the job. I guess that’s what you should take from all this. Don’t care about doing it proper. Just do it.

3. This here is the side camera that shows my keyboard and is what you see whenever I’m playing. It’s the same camera but different lens (I think it’s a 28-74? This is from memory and I don’t know anything about lenses). You can also see in this frame my PC which I built specifically for the channel. It handles all audio recording and streaming duties, so all cameras are connected to the back via HDMI into a el gato motherboard capture card. You can also see the TV that’s way too close to me serving as my monitor and on the tv stand there’s two HD recorders from el gato that allow me to capture in 4k my cameras that can’t reliably record hours long video.

4. I mounted this GoPro I bought years ago and dug up for this purpose on the ceiling. I lucked out because it’s one of the last models they made that had a native mini HDMI port, so that is one of the cables you see being snaked to the nearest wall and down to the HD recorder. The other cable is the power supply. You can also see cardboard covering up a recessed light that’s right above my desk area. It was casting a harsh light directly on me so I had to cover it up. Again, things I had to figure out along the way.

5. This stuff is directly to the left of me and is sort of the brains of my operation. There’s obviously the Tascam 388 that I run my whatever is on my desk through and capture, but to the left of that is an Allen & Heath SQ-5. This thing is a digital mixer and you typically see it in mega churches and stuff like that but I was reading the manual and it suited my needs perfectly. Unlike a patch bay I’m able to create different mixes for different outputs, so I can send a combination of any inputs to any output and vice versa. Very helpful for when I’m changing my routing on the fly. It also handles preliminary treatment for my microphone (preamp, compression, hot, EQ, de-esser, etc.). I’d say it’s overkill for a producer but for my specific needs it’s perfect.