The Podcaster's Audio Guide

Jay Cockburn

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000511406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The Podcaster's Audio Guide is a concise introduction to simple sound engineering techniques for podcasters. This digestible guide explains the basics of audio engineering, from equipment, to recording, editing, mixing and publishing. Suitable for beginners from all backgrounds, including students and hobbyists, as well as professional content producers looking to experiment with podcasts, The Podcaster's Audio Guide is the perfect resource with cheat sheets, starting set-ups and a comprehensive jargon buster.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003046578-1

Welcome to podcasting properly

Podcasts are easy to make, right?

Sort of.

It’s easy to record two people chatting about your chosen topic into a phone or laptop, put it on the internet and call it a podcast.

At one point that might have been enough. Plenty of shows are variations on that. Dan Harmon’s Harmontown is essentially a 90-minute, multi-person ramble with a bit of Dungeons and Dragons thrown in.

But like the early DJs coming ashore from Radio Caroline, podcasting has evolved. That scrappy show is competing against the BBC, Spotify, NPR and the New York Times. These are huge institutions with professional studios, sound engineers and teams of producers. They’re making science fiction dramas, daily news shows and true crime epics… and all of these are made with teams of professionals who have made a career out of knowing what to do. Gimlet’s Crimetown feels like watching a high budget TV drama – and with good reason, Crimetown was made by former HBO producers.

We are way past the days of podcasting being just the audio version of a blog. Podcasts are a rapidly growing form of storytelling that is picking up the baton from public radio. Podcasts are proving that interesting stories that are told well and presented effectively are incredibly popular.

The investments being made into podcasts are huge. Spotify is building content creation hubs in New York, Los Angeles, London and Mexico City.

There are a limited number of listening hours in a day and your podcast is competing for them. Listeners aren’t going to be more forgiving just because your show was made by two people in a bedroom. There isn’t much room for a podcast of dodgy quality any more.

If you want loyal listeners, you need to step up your game and get to grips with sound. You have to understand the equipment you’re working with and how to manipulate and shape your recordings into something beautiful and easy to listen to.

Luckily, it’s still pretty easy to make great sounding podcasts. You don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of set design, lighting and cameras. You just need a couple of good microphones, a laptop with software and this book. The barriers to entry are still much lower than film and TV. A bedroom or garage can be co-opted into a podcast studio with a little creativity (and lots of blankets).

So, welcome to this crash course into audio production for podcasts.

By the time you finish reading this guide, you’ll have all the tools you need to turn your ideas into a professional sounding podcast. You’ll understand how to create that sparkling quality you’ve come to expect from shows like 99% Invisible and The Daily.

If you already have a podcast, then you’ll find out how to make it stand shoulder to shoulder with the industry’s heavy hitters.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the different buttons and settings in your software and you just want to know what setting to choose, then this book will feature cheat sheets that you can use as a starting point… By the time you’ve read this book, you’ll be comfortable setting up your software, but these will save you some time if you just want to start making stuff quickly.

We know you’ve got ideas and content covered, and with so many exciting and creative ways to make a podcast this guide isn’t going to tell you what to put in your show. What it will tell you is how to make whatever you do sound like you’ve got a team of producers, sound designers and engineers helping you.

We’re going to start with gear, and even if you already have your kit it is worth reading through the chapter on equipment as it will help you understand what you already have and how to use it best. The goal here isn’t for the book to tell you what to do, it’s for you to understand what you need to do and why you’re doing it.

After that the guide will cover recording techniques, editing tricks and nailing that final mix. Then, we’ll turn that final mix into a master copy and show you how to get it out there onto the internet and in people’s headphones.

There are some technical standards to adhere to which make sure your show sits well alongside the other shows on places like iTunes and Spotify. They can seem daunting but loudness standards are actually super simple, so we’ll tell you how to get your show in line with them.

By the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be able to confidently approach a wide range of situations and show formats and walk away with a great sounding podcast that you can publish proudly.

If you’re looking to get your first foot in the door of making a career out of podcasts, then tape syncs are one of the first freelance gigs a lot of producers will pick up. Follow the exercises, and by the time you finish, you should be ready to pick up those quick and easy jobs which help you make those crucial connections at production companies. Remote recording without ever going into a studio has become much more common too, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, so those essential skills are all part of becoming a pro producer. Remote recording can save on studio costs and is easier logistically, so it’s not going anywhere.

The podcast landscape is richer than ever, the industry is growing and people want to get involved. Let’s get a head start on them.

The stuff you need to know first

The commandments of podcasting

Get your recording right because no amount of editing or noise reduction software can completely fix bad audio.

Brief your guests properly because most people don’t know proper microphone technique. If you are recording remotely, this could mean doing test recordings.

Always over-prepare by bringing too many batteries, testing your microphones and cables and having backup recordings running.

The stages of making a podcast

• Development: creating your concept. This might include doing some market research, crafting a show mission statement or a style guide and show bible.
• Pre-production: planning your recording by booking interviewees, finding locations and choosing your gear.
• Gathering material: recording your audio, whether in a studio or in the field.
• Editing: starting with a content edit, then a technical edit, then a final edit.
• Mixing: balancing all the audio to make sure everything is at the right levels and then processing it to make it sound as good as possible.
• Mastering: creating a master copy of the show, ready to publish.
• Publishing: putting it out there for your adoring fans.

Some basic knowledge you need before we get started

There is going to be some technical language here but don’t worry, you really don’t need to properly understand the physics of it all. This is here because it can be helpful to understand a little of the terminology we’re going to be using. Don’t worry if you don’t get it on the first read. These terms will pop up throughout the book but you can just skip back here if you need.

Frequencies

Sound is a spectrum, just like colour in light. This spectrum is measured in Hertz (Hz) and KiloHertz (kHz). 1kHz is 1,000Hz.

The human ear can, at its best, hear between 20Hz and 20,000Hz, so for making a podcast, or any audio, that range is all you need to worry about. As we age, we naturally lose the ability to hear the upper end of that spectrum, so in reality you don’t need to worry as much about frequencies over about 13kHz.

Unless you’re making podcasts for cats.

We’ll talk in more depth about different parts of the frequency spectrum, but for now you need to know that lower frequencies are associated with bass and higher frequencies are treble.

If that means nothing to you, then picture yourself in a loud venue – maybe a nightclub or a concert. You can hear all of the music because you are right in the heart of the venue. Now, you need the bathroom – what happens to the music as you close the door behind you? It muffles but you can still hear a part of it. The walls and door of the bathroom have removed the higher frequencies, or the treble, leaving just the boomy vibrations of the bass frequencies.

The lower end is the weighty, deep reverberations you can feel. The higher end of the spectrum is the clarity and sparkle.

If you are interested in learning more on this, then here is a little bit more on the physics: sound is created by variations in air pressure, and Hertz refers to “cycles per second”; so if a sound is a pure tone wave of 100Hz, lasting exactly one-tenth of a second, then that variation in pressure has occurred ten times (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 100Hz.

In reality sound is made up of combinations of different air pressure changes at different frequencies. We can use equipment and software called an EQ, or equaliser, to emphasise and de-emphasise certain frequencies and tailor our sound. In fact, all the equipment you use will have subtle effects on how frequencies are represented.

DeciBels

We measure how loud a sound is in deciBels (dB).

There are different forms of deciBel but what you really need to know is that for most software the highest possible volume will be 0dB, with the metre usually reading down to about −60dB, or for total silence, infinity. This is because digital signals are often measured in “deciBels Full Scale” (dBfs).

Generally, you want your signal to be as close to 0dB as you can get while leaving some headroom so that big peaks don’t go over. If your signal goes above 0dBfs then it will clip, or distort. You don’t want this; it sounds bad because by overloading the software you lose important parts of the signal… this is called clipping, more on that later.

Hardware may measure in deciBel volts (dBv), because it is measuring the intensity of an electrical signal. These measurements can go above 0; however, you may still introduce a form of clipping.

dB are logarithmic, meaning that 8dB is not double the loudness of 4dB. Perceived loudness does not increase in a linear fashion.

For podcast production, you don’t need to know about the maths involved, but it’s helpful to remember that an increase of 10dB sounds like the loudness has doubled.

Sample rate

The short version: the higher this is, the better the file’s sound quality. Never work under 44,100Hz (usually written as 44.1kHz).

The long version:

When analogue audio is converted to digital audio, it is turned into a series of samples. Each sample measures the amplitude of a signal at a point in time, so that it can be reconstructed as it plays out. The more samples that are created, the closer to the original analogue signal the digital version gets.

In order to accurately reconstruct a sound wave, it needs to be sampled at least twice per cycle (this is known as Nyquist’s Theorem). Humans can hear up to 20,000Hz, so we need to sample at least 40,000 times a second. That’s why you will see most people working at the standards of 44,100Hz and 48,000Hz.

Bit depth

The short version: a higher bit depth will give you more dynamic range – that’s the difference between louder and quiet. This means you get a better ratio of signal to noise. Never work under 16-bit. Most audio professionals work at 24-bit.

The long version: each sample that is taken of an audio signal when turning it into a digital file contains a certain number of bits. The more bits per sample, the more information can be stored. As each of these samples is measuring amplitude at a point in time, increasing the bit depth allows for a greater variation in amplitudes, therefore a higher dynamic range.

Unwanted noise is often low level, so having a higher bit depth allows that noise to remain low level. If you have a low bit depth, that noise will be brought up to the point that you can easily hear it interfere with your signal.

If you save a mix as an 8-bit WAV file, it will have noticeable hiss. The difference between 8-bit and 16-bit is pretty stark, so make sure you’re working at 16-bit or higher. 24-bit is very common. 32-bit is probably excessiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Equipment
• 3 Recording
• 4 Editing
• 5 Mixing
• 6 Publishing
• 7 Jargon buster
• Index