RECORDING GUIDE

HOW TO RECORD A PODCAST

So you’ve got your big idea. You’ve planned it all out, have your running order locked down and have a pile of shiny new recording equipment all ready to go. What now? Well, it’s time to start recording. Here, we’ve detailed out the steps you should take to take your ideas from the sketchpad and out of your head, and turn them into cold, hard audio files you can share with the world in our guide to recording your first podcast.

1. Setting The Scene

The first task is to arrange the area that will act as your studio so you have everything you need within arm’s reach. That means setting up your laptop or recording device within eyeline, and then arranging your microphones so they are in front of anyone who will be talking. Hook your mics up to your mixer, and fire up the software you’ll be using to capture the audio.

Now, it’s a case of fine-tuning. Have anybody who will be talking speak in their normal voice; a good trick here is to ease them in by starting a completely unrelated conversation, and covertly using their responses to tweak levels. Some people naturally talk louder than others, so be sure to balance out levels and be mindful of clipping, where the sound is louder than the microphone can handle, as this will result in recordings which are nigh-on unusable.

2. Setting The Software

With your hardware all set up, you’ll need to carry out the same housekeeping within your software. Using Adobe Audition as the example, make sure you have your audio routing set the way your mixer, USB microphones or audio interface require.

In the example above, we’ve set Audition to use our Presonus Studio audio interface, and have inputs one and two receiving signals from two microphones connected to the interface. For monitoring – listening back to our recordings – we have the two outputs set to send the audio to our studio monitors, and our headphones for live monitoring when recording.

Now the audio routing is set up, you can ‘arm’ the individual tracks to record. Recording in most audio software applications is a two-step process; you tell the software which tracks arte receiving the audio by arming them. Look for the little ‘R’ button to choose

which tracks you want to record, then hit the master record button to start the process. Congratulations! You’re now recording…

3. Editing Your Podcast

With your audio hopefully now residing nicely within the software arrangement window, you can start the process of editing. Editing is the process of cleaning, or enhancing, audio using the tools available within the software. If your recording features multiple voices, it’s good practice to either lower the volume – or remove completely – parts where a specific person isn’t talking as this removes any background noise and allows the listener to focus entirely on the subject.

Look for peaks in the wave file too; in the example above the audio clips slightly in the part we highlighted. In Audition, you can lower the volume of parts like this quickly and easily using the Clip Gain function, making it ideal for doctoring plosives or sibilance. Be careful using this too liberally though; the human voice is a dynamic thing and is naturally quieter or louder depending on the context. Attacking your audio file with too broad a brush can make for a harrowing listening experience afterwards…

Now you can start to import the other elements. In the last example, you’ll see we have a short jingle on the second row, and then a music bed on the third row. The music bed has had its levels reduced in the mixer, so it doesn’t compete with the main speech track. Think of this part as musical building blocks; you simply drag the audio files into the arrangement window, and move them where you need them. You can also chop, slice and rearrange here to your heart’s content.

To add a final coat of polish to the sound, we add compression and normalisation. In Audition, this is called Dynamics Processing, and the ‘Classic Soft Knee’ preset does the job we’re after perfectly. Be careful though; overusing compression makes your voice sound like it’s coming from a goldfish bowl. The final step is normalisation, which attempts to level the sound across the whole track. Again, this can prove quite drastic so it’s always worth checking your entire mix once you’ve completed the normalisation.

4. Exporting Your Podcast

So the audio is recorded, arranged and polished, and you’re ready to export. This part is simple enough; first tell the software to create a mixdown of your multitrack session – as seen above – which ‘bounces’ all the individual files into one master file. Then simply hit export in the File menu and you’re good to go.

Congratulations, you now have your very own podcast and are ready to take the world by storm! Good luck!