How to start a podcast at home

The single biggest improvement to a home recording is choosing the right room. Small, soft and full of stuff beats large, bare and echoey every time.

Good choices: a bedroom, a walk-in closet, a home office with a rug and curtains. Poor choices: a kitchen, a bathroom, an empty spare room, anywhere with hard floors and bare walls.

Clap once and listen. If you hear a ring after the clap, the room will be audible in your recording. If the clap dies straight away, you have found your studio.

You do not need acoustic foam. Soft furnishings do most of the job: a rug on the floor, curtains drawn, a duvet or blanket hung behind or in front of you, cushions on hard surfaces near the microphone.

The surface behind you matters less than the surface in front of you, because that is where your voice bounces back into the microphone. A bookshelf full of books or a hanging blanket opposite your desk makes a real difference.

Some people record under a duvet or in a closet full of clothes for the first few episodes. It looks silly and sounds excellent.

• A dynamic USB microphone, which picks up less of the room than a condenser
• Wired headphones, so you hear what is actually being recorded
• A stand or boom arm that keeps the microphone 10 to 15 centimetres from your mouth
• A laptop or computer, or a phone if that is what you have

Turn off fans, air conditioning and fridges near the room if you can, and silence phone notifications. The full equipment guide is what equipment do you need to start a podcast.

Early morning and late evening are usually the quietest times at home. Tell the household when you are recording, and close windows facing the street.

Do a 30-second test recording every time and listen back on headphones. You will catch a buzzing fridge or a laptop fan before it ruins a 20-minute take.

If a noise interrupts a sentence, pause, wait for it to pass, and repeat the sentence. It is quicker to cut a repeated sentence than to rescue one with a dog barking through it.

Even a well-chosen room leaves some echo and background hiss. Enhancement software can remove much of that after the fact, which is why a home recording can sound close to a studio one.

Hilite cleans up echo, background noise and uneven levels in one pass, then lets you edit by transcript so you can remove the restarts and interruptions.

Once the episode is edited, you need a host that creates an RSS feed and sends it to Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other apps. You submit the feed once and every new episode follows.

See how to publish a podcast on Spotify for the steps.