Share your worst or hackiest recording set-up

It often feels like everyone around you has the best equipment and you’re sitting around with an old laptop or cell phone hoping to record a best seller. The truth is that everyone starts somewhere, and we’ve all had our fair share of mediocre equipment and hacky set-ups.

Share your worst recording set-up! We’d love to see (or hear) all about it.

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FrankKane

My very first course had a pretty janky setup. I used my Android cell phone as a camera, propped up on some books. For a key light, I put a computer monitor near my face with a white, blank document on it and the brightness turned up. My backdrop was the white wall in my office. For screen recording, I used freeware called BandiCam, and for editing, I used the free Windows Movie Maker which doesn't even exist anymore. The only non-janky thing was my microphone because I already owned a Blue Yeti.

But you know, it worked - that course still has a 4.5 rating today. If I could go back in time, I would at least have invested in Camtasia and a webcam, as it would've made production go a lot faster. But even with a budget of nothing, it was possible to get passable A/V quality with the stuff I had lying around anyhow.

GregReverdiau

I'm a totally DIYer, mostly because I like building stuff and I like the challenge of learning new skills, so I built myself a teleprompter out of an old 8.5x11 picture frame. It was designed to display the screen of an iPad but because of the distance, I couldn't read the smaller font. So I figured out how to use the "zoom" function on the iPad (designed for people with vision issues) and I had my image zoomed in enough so I could read it but in most cases, it cut out a portion of the screen lol. I knew the topic enough that I didn't need that portion but it surely made it interesting. I have since upgraded to a bigger (also DIY) teleprompter screen but I don't need to zoom anymore