Those of you who run polyglot YouTube channels, what equipment do you recommend?

[PfifltriggPi]

So I decided to start this whole polyglot YouTuber thing because apparently I do not already have enough on my plate. More seriously, there is not, in my opinion, enough good audio in dead languages available, so I decided to make some. (Or perhaps I am actually a narcissist who needs constant validation and who wants to build up a legion of adoring fans to whom I can sell cheep junk later, who knows?)

Anyhow, if I am going to do this with any semblance of professionalism, I need a decent microphone. If anyone here has done either YouTube or something else involving recording one's voice, what sort of microphone would you recommend. I would prefer something not absurdly expensive, as I am far from wealthy, and I cannot imagine that putting recordings of myself reading Latin poetry on YouTube will make me the next Pewdipie. That said, I would like to sound at least tolerable.

If there is anything else I ought to get/do as well, I would be very much obliged for your advice.

[Axon]

You had me at "audio in dead languages." I strongly recommend AZ Foreman if you haven't heard of him yet.

I run a language channel on a Chinese social media app. Sometimes I use my phone and sometimes I also record with my Zoom H4N mic and combine the audio later. Honestly, a phone microphone in a quiet room with a tiny bit of noise reduction/reverb added later sounds really good. Experiment with mic placement and post-processing before being sure that you're going to drop cash on nice equipment.

[PfifltriggPi]

You had me at "audio in dead languages." I strongly recommend AZ Foreman if you haven't heard of him yet.

I run a language channel on a Chinese social media app. Sometimes I use my phone and sometimes I also record with my Zoom H4N mic and combine the audio later. Honestly, a phone microphone in a quiet room with a tiny bit of noise reduction/reverb added later sounds really good. Experiment with mic placement and post-processing before being sure that you're going to drop cash on nice equipment.

I did not know Foreman had a channel : his stuff can be quite good : it is a real shame how much unnecessary politicization tends to work its way into his written work.

More to the point, what application or program do you recommend for recording on a cell phone?

[Xenops]

Along with a good microphone, I would recommend using a studio lighting kit--hearing is great, but presumably you want to be seen as well. You can buy decent ones off Amazon for 50$ or so.

[Axon]

I did not know Foreman had a channel : his stuff can be quite good : it is a real shame how much unnecessary politicization tends to work its way into his written work.

More to the point, what application or program do you recommend for recording on a cell phone?

It's only this forum with the rule about separating language from politics; on someone's personal blog about lots of languages and cultures I would be surprised if they never brought it up.

Since my stuff is based around video, I just take videos with the normal phone camera app. If you find that the standard Voice Recorder/Voice Notes/equivalent is too low-quality for your needs (for example, noticeably lower-quality than just recording a video and using the audio track), I'd search your app store for "pro microphone" and see if any of them let you adjust the bitrate or sampling rate.

Built-in microphones in wired headphones can also be surprisingly high quality. I was pretty shocked that the headphones I got for $2 in Laos gave me similar recording quality to the $250 Zoom H4N! There was obviously a quality difference and the H4N obviously has more features than just recording, but it was not a $248 difference by any means.

If you're still not satisfied with that, the Blue Yeti is the go-to USB microphone for people just getting into home recording as it's cheap, high quality, and adjustable in many ways. Works for shadowing too as you get live headphone monitoring.

[cjareck]

I don't have a polyglot channel but I publish reviews of historical books in Polish. I use my standard cellphone camera (Samsung Galaxy A50) combined with sound recording on Sony ICD-PX 240 which I later join using free software called Openshot.

[rdearman]

I use a Samson Go mic. Cheap and cheerful. It works well and is a condenser microphone with multi-direction.

[Cainntear]

Your question really depends on what exactly you're hoping to do.

Are you going to be talking to the camera? Are you going to be doing a voice-over over images/videos/scrolling text? A mixture?

If you're appearing on-screen, what are you using as your camera -- your phone? Or maybe you're planning to sit at your desk and use the webcam on your computer...?

If that's stuff you haven't decided yet, then consider this: any recent smartphone that isn't a bargain bin model can capture better sound and video than was possible in many TV studios in the 20th century. You already have what you need to start experimenting and find your own preferred style, and where the things you have don't suit those purposes. If you were to buy a good close-up mic now and found that you want to be on camera, but the mic looked awful on-screen and you couldn't get it out of shot without moving it too far away, you'd end up needing to buy a new mic anyway.

Xenops's point about lighting is a good one. Lighting is the one thing your phone alone can't fix. Before I got proper lights, I would use the front room for any videos I made, as it has two big windows on perpendicular walls. That's the only room in the house where I could get natural even lighting. Using artificial lights indoors that weren't designed for video work never did me any good, as the colours of the lights vary too much and the shadow are too harsh.

Lighting advice: good lights are big. The bigger the light (physically, not in terms of power) the more even the lighting will be, and the better the video will look. However, you might not want big lights, because they take up a lot of room.

I've had reasonable results with pocket lights from Amaran and Ulanzi, but this year I bought a budget green screen studio kit with mains-powered studio lights with "softboxes" (a big directed lampshade that helps make the light very even) and the results are phenomenal, but it fills a large room whenever I set it up. The lights in the kit are the type of models you'll end up with if you go down the $50 route as Xenops suggests. The biggest problem with these lights is that they use compact flourescent bulbs, so they're a bit of a nuisance to pack away. I have to disassemble them and put the bulbs back in their boxes to prevent them getting smashed. Large LED panels are the gold standard now, and much smaller and more compact that bulbs with big softboxes and less fragile, but they're considerably more expensive, so you would have to be sure you have a genuine need for it.

Start experimenting with what you already have and see what you think the problems are.