Episode 1: Top 5 Tips for Podcast Producers

Noah Teachey (00:00):

Hey, I'm Noah and this is Sounds Good. A How-to podcast offering you a behind the scenes look at all the cool stuff I get to make as an audio producer. This episode is entitled Top Five Editing Tips for Podcast Producers. Depending on where you are in your podcast production journey, you may already know some or all of these techniques. If any of this is new, however, it will be of tremendous value to you in saving time and improving the quality of your product, so probably best not to risk missing out.

(01:01)
This first tip is both labor saving and quality improving, and it is to load your new material into an old project file. Basically, you just open an old project file and add your new audio tracks to the end of it, save it as a new project and get started editing if it gets too cluttered After a while, you can delete the old episodes and move the new episode back to the beginning of the timeline, but I'll usually line up five or six episodes in a project file before I go to all that trouble. What this does is twofold. On the one hand you have all of the assets you use from episode to episode in the editing window ready to duplicate and drag into the new episode. These assets could be transition music, intro and outro music, sound effects, advertisements, really anything held in common from episode to episode.

(02:00)
On the other hand, you have your mixing bus ready to go with your signal chain all set up, so if you are using audio from the same or similar sources as your previous episodes, you won't have to do much in the way of mixing the time. Savings, therefore is in all the duplicated effort you avoid by only having to make minor adjustments from episode to episode rather than having to set everything up all over again with each iteration. There's a production quality component here too in that you'll end up with consistency from episode to episode if you're using the same assets at the same levels and similar values in the same mixing bus with each iteration of the show. Setting up your project from scratch leaves a lot of room for variability, which you don't want, especially if you're hoping your listener will listen to every episode you put out perhaps all in a row.

(02:58)
Even like a binging situation. You might be thinking, isn't this the same as using a template? And you're right. It's essentially the same thing except without the added step of saving a template. Tip number two, mute tracks when the speaker isn't speaking. This won't make as much sense when you're doing a solo show like the one you're listening to right now, but when you're doing a two mic or a three mic show, it's generally a good idea to mute the other speaker's channels when only one speaker is speaking. This is mainly for the purposes of preventing the buildup of noise and ambience. Even if you have great mics and a very quiet signal chain, there will always be a little bit of a noise floor. It might not be perceptible with just one signal, but the more of these signals you stack up on top of each other, the more likely your listener will be to notice it.

(04:00)
Now, if you've got a noisier mic or signal chain or lots and lots of signals, this becomes an essential practice. The same goes for an untreated room. You might not have a problematic noise floor, but if your room has a lot of reflective surfaces and nothing to absorb the sound bouncing around, each mic is going to pick up some version of what is intended for just one mic. When all of these various signals are summed together in your mix, the listener ends up knowing a lot more about your room than you might want them to know. If you just kill the unintended signals by automating the volume down all the way when they're not meant to be in use, then you end up with a single direct signal with none of the stray sound bouncing in. You might be thinking, why not just use a gate plugin to kill any sound below a certain threshold?

(04:58)
And you might be right, that could possibly save a ton of time, but I find it really difficult to dial in a gate that works 100% of the time the way I want it to. Human speech is so dynamic that I find it hard not to end up with breaths that get half cut off or ends of sentences that disappear. That might be a me problem, but I'm the one making the episodes. So there you have it. While I'm doing aside, it might be good to specify that when I'm talking about this particular ambience problem, I'm talking about a multi mic setup with dynamic microphones in a single room, not a remote setup in which people are recording separately with the help of zoom or something. In that case, it's still important to mute unused signals for noise floor purposes, but you obviously don't have to worry about stray ambient getting into another speaker's mic as long as everybody is isolating their mic signal from the zoom audio through the use of headphones.

(06:01)
We should probably talk about techniques for recording remotely in a future episode. Shouldn't do it now because it is a whole other can of worms. Tip number three, get rid of breaths, mouth noises, ums and dead air in the same way that noise floors might not be a big deal one at a time, but can stack up to disastrous effect. The occasional breath, mouth noise or bit of dead air may not be the end of the world, but too many of these will make your podcast episode, episode unlistenable. I personally am spoiled by working with two hosts who are incredible speakers and give me maybe one or two edits per episode. As a result, we can put out two 30 minute episodes per week, and for that I put maybe two hours into the process from start to finish. That said, there are episodes of that show in which a guest comes on with a bad habit or a sinus infection that makes their breathing and mouth noises really hard to listen to, and at that point I've got to listen a little bit more closely and get a little more creative.

(07:08)
On the one hand, human speech is an important component of podcasting, so we want to preserve as much of its humanness as we can, but listening is also an important part, so we want to be considerate of our listeners' ears and smooth some things over when we can do so without impacting their intent. It's a balancing act, but everybody can win. A very important point I want to make is that a breath often serves a sort of credentialed function, so if you remove it entirely, it makes its absence felt because the rhythm of the speaker's speech changes. I took a jazz improvisation class in college and learned perhaps the most important lesson of my entire musical career from the professor after he listened to one of my solos. For a little background, I'm a violinist. This means I can play nonstop without having to take a breath, whereas wind and brass players and vocalists are all tied to the need to refill their lungs when it comes to producing musical phrases.

(08:16)
My professor told me I was playing one awful run-on sentence. Rather than forming musical phrases, he told me to breathe in my playing even though I could play continuously with my bow to form phrases and to pause in between these phrases. Anyway, all that is to say that breaths are important. Even if we don't want to hear the breath itself instead of cutting it, I'll typically automate the volume of a noisy breath all the way down so that the pause is still there, but you can't hear the breath itself. In the same vein as a noisy breather, sometimes you'll have somebody who makes mouth noises when they speak. Best thing for this is to fix it at the source, of course, by having a glass of water for the person to sip as they're recording. However, if you cannot fix it at the source, you can still keep an eye out in the wave form for sudden transience right before someone speaks.

(09:14)
You can either cut these or automate them down all the way before ramping back up to the person's speaking part. Usually I'll get rid of an entirely. This brings us to tip number four. Use your waveform to make edits on the fly. When I get used to a speaker, I can start to predict an by looking ahead in the waveform. That way I can just let the recording play with my finger hovering over the shortcut to split the audio before and after the, and it can keep playing while I delete the and move the newly ACH chunk of audio back to join and overlap it with the rest of the track. Sometimes I get it wrong, but it's okay because the shortcut for split is not so different from the shortcut for undo dead air is even easier to recognize in the waveform. Of course, it's just a flat line, so I'll do the same thing there as well.

(10:14)
When I get good and in the zone, I move twice as fast just by editing on the fly. It requires a lot of focus, but when you pull it off, it really feels like you're one with the machine. This is real Galaxy brain stuff. Finally, tip number five. This is sort of a big picture idea that applies to how you use all of these other tips, and that is to always be thinking about your listener. In situations where you're working with scarce time or other resources, you have to make choices about how you will use these resources. If you go into these choices with your listener in mind, with a good idea of what they like about your show, about what they will tolerate and won't tolerate, you'll be more likely to make the right choice. For example, taking out ums can be really time consuming, writing good original transition.

(11:14)
Music is also really time consuming. If you can only do one of those things, you should pick the one that will result in the more enjoyable experience For your listener, what will they forgive and what will they not forgive? For my twice weekly show, my listener has gotten used to episodes without any music in the episode, just the intro and outro. They like it when I do add music, but I know that if I'm pressed for time, they will accept unscored episodes. If I start putting out episodes with major errors in my editing though, they will notice that and they won't be happy about it. So what is a treat versus a non-negotiable? What can you provide with just a small marginal cost to your resources versus something that will have to wait until you have a more substantial time surplus? And that about wraps up this episode of Sounds Good. To summarize, those top five tips are, one, load your new audio into an old project to save time and maintain consistency. Two mute channels of speakers not currently speaking. Three, get rid of ums, breaths, mouth noises, and dead air. Four, use the waveform to help you predict edits and make those on the fly. And five, always be thinking about your listener when making choices about how to spend your scarce editing time.

(12:55)
If you found this useful or entertaining, be sure to subscribe wherever you're doing your listening. This episode has a companion video on YouTube, so you could check that out too. That's @NoahTeacheyAudio. That's my Instagram handle as well, and my website is noahteachey.com. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.

Episode 2: Schützenfest Collab

Noah Teachey (00:00):

Hey, I'm Noah and this Sounds Good, A how-to podcast offering you a behind the scenes look at all the cool stuff that I get to make as an audio producer. This episode is entitled Shits and Fest Collab, and it should be a fun one.

(00:40)
I am in the midst of wrapping up some stems that I'm doing for the rapper HILLE, and I'm going to take this opportunity to walk you through my process for collaborating with another musician who's doing the bulk of the heavy lifting on the production side of things. I have a love-hate relationship with this sort of work because on the one hand, I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to anything musical that's going to have my name on it. But on the other hand, if I only ever worked on things that were mine and mine alone from start to finish, that would severely limit my creative output. So I find myself having to suck it up and play well with others from time to time. This kind of work ends up being a good exercise for me in listening to another producer's work, putting myself in their shoes, thinking about the project in terms of what I would want from a collaborator if I were the mastermind behind the final product, and then serving as that collaborator.

(01:40)
I'll get into the details of precisely how I do that in just a moment, but first, let me tell you the story of how I started making music with Hida. About three weeks after I graduated college, I moved to India to teach strings at the Gandhi Ashram School in Kalimpong, West Bengal. I might get into that in greater detail on another episode, but for now, the important thing is that I introduce you to Luise, who was a German volunteer who was working at the same school. We were approaching the end of my one year visa that I was on to teach music at this school, and I had a job lined up that was going to start in September, but I had three months in which I was not going to be employed, and it's a really bad idea to overstay a visa in India.

(02:30)
It's also a really bad idea to move to the US and not have a job lined up. It is very expensive here just to live. So I was scrambling. I was looking for something that I would be able to do, and fortunately for me, Louisa grew up on a farm in Germany and the potato harvest was approaching, so there was plenty of work to be had there. So Luise's family took me in and gave me some work, and that was how I came to be living in Germany in 2014. In the summer when not only did the German national football team win the World Cup, that was a very exciting thing to be around for, but it was also Schützenfest season. Schützenfest is it translates to Shooter Fest. It's sort of like October Fest, but it's more common in the central and northern parts of the country, and basically these shooting clubs put on big parties that the entire community comes out to partake in.

(03:31)
So that was where I was when I met my friend Martin, who is also known as HILLE, the rapper and producer. So over a couple of beers, I learned from Martin that he was a musician and we agreed that we would get together and play some music at some point. So a couple weeks after Schützenfest ended, I went over to his place. We recorded a little bit, we talked about music. We really hit it off. And then not long after that, I left the country and moved back to the us, but Martin and I stayed in touch, and so when the pandemic hit and I was doing a lot less live performance and a lot more recording and producing and composing, it was perfect timing for us to start sending tracks back and forth. Now, recently, Martin has released some of the things that we worked on together, so I've been able to reverse engineer his process, which allows me to make tracks that are more useful for him and also to save a little bit of time on my end by cutting out the things in my process that Martin doesn't end up using.

(04:42)
So what's my actual task here? In this scenario, I'm not really co-producing with HILLE, and as best if I don't think that I am, he's sending me stuff that's 80%, maybe even 90% finished. All the bones are there. So if I start trying to add new bones, this thing's going to end up with 11 fingers or a random prehensile tail, which in this case would not be cool. Nobody wants that. Since Martin's not really looking for new bones, I can focus on either outlining ideas he has already present in the piece and amplifying those ideas or reinterpreting something that's there in new context. Even this process of amplifying preexisting musical ideas or having a conversation with these ideas that results in a new way of thinking about them doesn't require me personally though. Anybody could pop these sequences of pitch and duration into a halfway decent strings plugin and get something listenable out.

(05:44)
The thing that I'm able to bring to this production that really any strings player would be able to bring is that little sheen of humanity, the minor intonation issues that are almost imperceptible, but you can still tell, especially if you're listening closely, that little bit of humanness, even the most skilled sample library player won't be able to bring out. And for audiences who are used to listening to really sample intensive hip hop, getting more than eight bars out of a violinist is sort of a novel thing. I'm by no means an excellent violinist, but in this case, that can be a bit of a strength because these small intonation issues, these small imperfections, they don't hurt, and if anything, I think they bring a little bit more richness to the production. Anyway, let's get into the process. Martin sent me five pieces to add some violin to.

(06:42)
As I said, the pieces are mostly done, so I don't need to build huge structures on top of them. Just sprinkle in a little bit of ear candy here and there. First, I've got to have a listen and take a few notes. I need to know the tempo, which Martin sent, and the key, which I can figure out by plucking out some scale fragments as I listen when it comes to the lyrical content ish heist. So really, I just try and get the vibe of the music to determine what is appropriate to play. It's fairly obvious for the most part. That said, if I'm getting myself into trouble here by, I don't know what Martin's writing, so please let me know in the comments if I need to be a little more careful. Next, I've got to set each piece up in the DAW with the correct tempo so that logic doesn't do anything weird, and give me a track that won't lock in with the grid in Martin's original file.

(07:42)
And at this point, I'm ready to either play around a bit and see what comes out or I might find I need to warm up with some scales and some Etudes just so that I don't embarrass myself. If I am ready though, I can start recording and see what happens. There was a time in my life in which I would agonize over sketching out ideas. In musical notation. I would spend hours in middle school putting together notation that I could bring to school to have my school orchestra perform. By and large, I don't do much composing with notation at this point unless I'm getting it from MIDI data that I've exported from the DAW just because my composition is pretty improvisatory and based on bringing things together in the moment, copying and pasting and moving things around as a means of orchestrating and arranging, I find it to be a bit more tactile, sort of like playing with Legos instead of drawing maybe.

(08:42)
I don't know if that's a good comparison, but all of this is to say that I'm improvising these parts and maybe keeping a few things from take to take as I hear ideas that I like, but I'm not really writing anything out. As I've already said, my playing at the moment is not that great. I'm hoping to change this over the coming months as I rebuild a regular practice habit. But for now, it's okay because these tracks are not about virtuo playing. They are about putting something purpose-built and human into a piece of music that would otherwise be a little bit modular and really sample heavy. That said, the thing that makes these tracks extra useful for Martin is that they have, they're not eight bar samples, but they do have a certain modularity to them because I'm playing over music that is otherwise modular.

(09:38)
So Martin has a lot of freedom with these tracks. He can move them all over the place. They'll be locked to the grid. They'll be of the same chord progression. They'll be in the right key. He can soak them in reverb and put them sort of at the margins of the audience's attention, or he can bring them out, he can chop 'em up, layer them on top of each other, lots and lots of possibility with this type of thing that I'm sending him. When I sent my first batch of ideas his way, he responded that he was going to rewrite some of the lyrics, and so in that way we're kind of having something of a conversation. We're not co-producers, but we are engaging in a musical dialogue. Keeping all of that in mind, and this is what I picked up by listening to the final products, I think of what I send him as stems.

(10:29)
I sort of see my ideas through to their logical conclusion, or at least to my interpretation of their logical conclusion, but I try to give Martin the most wieldy material I can give him more specifically, I'll send a few violin tracks in harmony with one another. I will pan them, I'll compress them, I'll treat them with reverb to my taste, but I'll also send them with the effects bypassed. If I'm recording with a few different mic positions, I'll send all the mic positions as separate tracks in addition to sending them mixed to my taste. Even as I say this, I'm having to sort of suppress the producer ego, the part of me that wouldn't want to let just anybody see under the hood of this engine I've built from scratch. But really it's because I haven't seen all that many engines. So I don't know if mine is any good, and I'm afraid that if people can see under the hood of an otherwise functional car, they might be able to connect the dots and realize I'm something of a hack.

(11:35)
Really, this is a great exercise for this very reason I'm sharing some of my work, warts and all, though just a little of it with someone I can trust. So I guess if there's a moral to the story, it's this, that music is a social endeavor and it's easy to forget that when we're off in our own studios working on our own stuff separately. But it's good to reach out and connect with others to work together on projects for a number of reasons, whether it's because each opportunity to improvise is a workout for my improvisation muscles, or because someone else's need for violin tracks is a far better motivator for me at least to practice than my own level of playing my violin in the midst of late stage capitalism and the constant need to trade my time and labor for whatever is going to do the best job of paying my bills within some bounds. Of course, I'm getting a lot out of working with Hilla and I'm looking forward to sharing the final product with you when it comes out.

(12:49)
We have reached the end of this episode, so it's now time for me to ask If you have enjoyed this or found it useful, please give it a subscribe, a like a comment, a five star rating, whatever the case may be, whether you are watching on YouTube at @NoahTeacheyAudio or listening on your podcast streaming platform of choice to Sounds Good. All of that stuff is really appreciated. It lets me know that you're enjoying the stuff that I should make more of this stuff. So be sure to make your voice heard in that capacity. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. My name's Noah. See you next time.