- Hello, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this video, I'll show you how to make a podcast
that you've recorded sound better.
(energetic upbeat music)
First of all, if you enjoy this video,
make sure to hit like.
And also, subscribe and ding the bell,
so you don't miss another video.
I cover all kinds of audio production
and podcast production tips.
Let's get into Adobe Audition, which is right here.
And I've got a podcast that was recorded in, well,
a very podcast unfriendly room, you could say.
It's not the worst in the world,
but we can definitely improve it with a few simple steps.
Let's have a listen.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone unfamiliar is an episodic form
of internet radio.
There will be- - Okay.
A few things going on here first and foremost.
First we can hear and we can see those breaths
in the waveform view of Adobe Audition.
Exactly where I'm highlighting.
And in fact, you can even see those breaths
without needing to play them back.
They appear right there.
There's also a bit of room echo going on.
- [Female Voice] Cast, which for anyone unfamiliar-
- You can definitely hear the huge space
that is being recorded in there.
And we can reduce that really, really simply
by adding on an effect.
And you can do this either in the waveform view,
which is this view I'm working in now,
or you can go into multi-track view.
And it may be a really good idea
to learn multi-track in Audition.
It's this click box up here.
And then we can call it "Podcast001", like that.
And then we can bring that podcast into track one.
And we can even name it "The host".
And then later on, we can name this track "Music".
And we can name this track "Guest",
if we're gonna have a guest on the show as well.
We can jiggle these about as well, if we like.
So I've just used the hand icon there to pull it up and down
to wherever I'd like it to be.
But that's absolutely fine.
And if we don't want tracks, we can right-click them,
and then we can delete the selected track here.
So delete the selected track.
Or you can use Ctrl, Alt and backspace,
which of course would be command, option and backspace,
if you're on a Mac.
So simple as that.
And now, if I hit Ctrl, or command and backslash,
it makes my screen nice and big, and easy to work in.
So now we can add effects without destroying the waveform.
So if we work in waveform view, we're destroying,
we're changing this audio file.
We have to do many steps to undo and go back.
Whereas, in the multi-track it's all non-destructive.
We can add stuff on and take it away.
And I'm gonna do this in the effects rank, just here.
And the first thing I will do
is go into "Noise reduction restoration",
and I'll add the reverb.
And then we just fade this up from zero to 100%,
and reduce that room echo.
Let's try it.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone-
- Okay, right up at 89% it is really pulling our podcaster
straight into the microphone, getting rid of that echo.
But also, the further you go up with this effect,
the more it degrades the quality of your audio.
So we definitely wanna get a happy medium,
and get it as loud as it needs to be, but not too much.
So let's try again.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone-
- I think around 44% will be absolutely fine
in this instance.
Next, I wanna go on and add a bit of a noise gate,
to make sure none of those breaths are getting through.
And here's a ninja hack to find out
how to set your noise gate.
Double-click to go back into waveform view.
I'm actually gonna click everything by double clicking gain.
Ctrl or command+C, to copy.
And then we'll start a brand new audio file.
So that's file, new audio file, or Ctrl+Shift+N,
or command+Shift+N.
And we'll call this "Duplicate".
Okay, it doesn't have to be your whole podcast
if it's 30 minutes, it can just be 10 seconds.
And all I'm going to do here is, I'm gonna remove the speech
and leave the breaths in, like this.
So, eventually when I've deleted all of the speech
and like I say, it can be a 10, 15 second sample,
30 seconds maximum.
And you'll get something like this left over.
Just breaths, no talking.
When I play it back, you should hear.
(heavy breathing from waveform)
Okay, so there we go.
Just the breaths, no speaking.
The reason I've done it on a duplicated track
and not the original, I don't want to affect the original.
Now I can run something in the window menu
called "Amplitude statistics".
It's here.
Really helps if you actually undock this panel
'cause there's loads to see here.
And then you scan the selection, boom!
Okay, peak amplitude is -16.45.
That's a bit higher than I'd like it to be.
Then I can see around here,
(heavy breathing from waveform)
there's a kind of mouth click there.
So I'm gonna take that out.
Otherwise it's gonna impact my result.
Let's double-click everything and scan again.
And we get okay, -29.64.
That is more reasonable.
Remember, the peak amplitude of just the breasts -29.64.
Back into multi-track with our original speech here.
I'm gonna go ahead and add in
amplitude and compression dynamics.
And, I'm gonna go to default view,
and I'm just simply going to go for the auto gate, okay?
And what this does, is it closes when audio falls below
a level that you set, then opens
when audio goes above that level.
So all the speech should be opening the gate,
then breaths and background noise
should be inside the closed gate.
Remember that magic number? - 29.
Pop it into the threshold box here.
Make sure auto gates is ticked.
Don't worry about any of this just yet.
And let's play it back now.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone unfamiliar,
is an episodic form of internet radio.
- Okay, it's good, but you can hear the gate clipping in
just too much there.
It's just clipping a little too much of the audio.
Leave the attack and release the same.
If you get this problem, push the hold up a bit.
Let's push it up to about 40, maybe 50,
just 50 plus milliseconds.
[Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
- And can you see now what's happening with the gate
when I push the hold up?
It's actually holding open just a split second or so longer,
so that it's not clipping the words.
When I pull it right down...
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
- The lights are very green, red, green, red,
open, close, open, close, very harsh.
And then pushing the hold up again.
Let's put that around 50.
That was quite nice sweet spot.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone unfamiliar,
is an episodic form of internet radio
that will be available on demand.
In which my visitors and subscribers will be able to-
- Excellent!
The gate is working exactly as I'd like it.
Getting rid of all that stuff we don't need.
All the breaths.
If you want a less harsh version of this,
just set it up over here on the expander.
Again, -29, push the ratio up slowly
until you get the desired result.
But I usually stick with the gate,
I find that is quite good.
Now we can just start doing a few edits here
to this little part of the podcast.
- [Female Voice] Episodic form of internet radio.
- Okay, a little stumble over "Internet radio",
"Internet (mimics stuttering) radio".
So- [Female Voice] Radio.
I'm just gonna try chopping this off.
And then what I'll do is, I just hit the delete key there
to delete that "(mimics stuttering) radio" before radio.
And then I'm just gonna grab this by the title bar,
drag it over.
And you'll see this cross-fade starts to come in.
So it does a nice little fade between the end of that word
and the start of "Radio".
Let's listen now.
- [Female Voice] Is an episodic form of internet radio.
- Okay, that's much better.
- [Female Voice] is an episodic form of internet radio.
- And we'll just maybe do a notch more.
- [Female Voice] Is an episodic form of internet radio.
- Perfect! - And then we'll go back
and listen to what it sounded like before.
- [Female Voice] Form of internet radio.
- Internet (mimics stuttering) radio.
And then we've got.
- [Female Voice] Form of internet radio.
- Perfect! Sounding confident,
sounding great, sounding really good.
This is already well compressed.
As you can see the volume of the audio
is at consistent level really, looking here.
So that's pretty good.
What I might go ahead and do then
is add on a little bit of EQ, filtering EQ.
Parametric equalizer is my friend here.
Always set this to default, so you've got a flat line.
Start with high pass filter, and push this up
until it starts to thin out the voice.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you-
- That's thin.
- [Female Voice] To what will be my podcast.
Which for anyone unfamiliar-
- I'm bringing it back in until you hear
the full voice gain.
Just rolling off the low-end frequencies
that don't need to be there.
We might clip this on the high
and we might actually move some of the high end up.
- [Female Voice] I created this trailer to welcome you
to what will be my podcast.
- And we can start to tweak-
- [Female Voice] Which for anyone unfamiliar,
is an episodic form of internet radio
that will be available on demand in which my visitors
and subscribers-
- Okay, that's pretty good.
So, in just a few simple steps,
we've got a nice sounding podcast host.
Multi-track mixed down entire session,
gets you back to where you started.
This now has wonderful gaps where the breaths
or background noise were occurring.
Just in general, everything is sounding better.
It's less room echo going on.
A bit of EQ to improve things.
And we have, very quickly in the matter of a few minutes,
gone from something that looks like this,
with lots of breaths and echo.
You can see it if I pop open spectral frequency.
Look, no silent gaps there.
To something that is actually very nice and clean.
Look at that in spectral frequency,
nice clean gaps in between the speech.
And a nice bit of EQ as well.
And no room echoed, just the way we like it.
Let me know what you're doing to improve the sound
of your podcast, in the comments down below.
And, if you wanna make your podcast sound even better,
I highly recommend you grab my pro podcast presets.
They're available right now,
for you to use on your podcast.
Instantly make it sound great by going to mrc.fm/presets.
That's mrc.fm/presets.
Thank you for watching.
And remember to subscribe for more audio and podcast
production tutorials.
(upbeat energetic music)
♪ Music radio creative ♪
♪ dot com ♪