Hello

I'm Stephen Griffin and I make the Quizbeard Weekly Trivia Podcast.  I say weekly but it's not an exact science - sometimes I'm a bit busy with the kids or work.  Most weeks I aim to get the podcast published on a Friday but, again, kids and work. 

For most of the week, I work at the University of Birmingham but haven't been on campus for well over a year now, which has been a bit strange.  Producing this short podcast has been a welcome dose of work/life balance and kept me nice and busy during quieter times.

Planning for Quizbeard as a podcast began in late 2018, after I'd played a trivia board game over Christmas, and the first episode went live just before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, forcing everyone into their homes for lockdown.  I think I'd released a couple of episodes before this became too widespread and, by sheer dint of fate, loads of people suddenly began hosting  Zoom quiz nights and searching for quizzes online to share with family and friends.

The response to the podcast has been incredibly positive so far and I'd like to thank everyone who has played along, engaged on social media, made a suggestion for a round topic, sent a comment, entered a competition or donated to the coffee fund to keep things up and running.  I appreciate it all :-)

Here I am strawberry-picking, something I've only done once.  This was that time.

Production notes

The Quizbeard podcast itself is hosted by Buzzsprout​ - I'd recommend them highly; if you ever want to produce a podcast easily and affordably, this is a fantastic option with excellent tools and outstanding customer service.

This website is hosted by Weebly, a platform that makes it *incredibly* easy to create and publish a site for any project you're working on without having to necessarily know how to code or learn anything complicated. Which is good.

I record the audio using an ADX Firecast A01 microphone which is, at only £25, pretty good for the money. I'm on my second one as I broke the first and I initially replaced it with a different brand at a similar price - this was a mistake. In fact I only ever used the inferior replacement for one episode and, if you listen to the main audio of Quizbeard #49, you can hear the difference.

All audio is recorded directly to and edited on Garageband iOS on an iPad Pro. This is really all you need to produce a podcast of this size and, again, it's very, very easy.

The Quizbeard theme music and background score were both purchased from Pond5, which has a dazzling array of music, sound effects, video clips and more available to licence.

All podcast art, web graphics, t-shirt & logo design and other bits for social media were created using either the Windows version of Adobe Photoshop (which is still the best) or Procreate 5, again on the iPad.