Man! My podcast mixes are so boring! Maybe I could add some effects. Yeah,
that's what I'm talking about! Hey, maybe I could add some music too.
Adding effects and music to your podcast is actually really easy,
and in this short video, I'm going to show you how.
Hey, welcome to the Pod Sound School channel, where we help podcasters make
something big with their podcast. In today's video I'm gonna show you how you can do three
really cool mixing techniques with your podcast. Number one,
we're gonna look at how we can really easily drag and drop music into our podcast episodes.
Number two, we're gonna take a look at how we can add some fun effects to our podcast voices, and
you're really gonna wanna stick around for Number three, where we put number one and number two
together, and I will introduce you to my favorite effect that I use all the time in our Pod Sound
School podcast. For all of these demonstrations, I'm going to be using Reaper. If you haven't heard
of Reaper, Reaper is the best all-around most affordable editing solution for independent
podcasters, and it's my favorite, so that's what I'm going to be using in this video, but all of
the effects that we're going to be looking at; you can achieve the same effects in any of your
digital audio workstations. So let's get right to it, but before we do, don't forget to hit
subscribe so that you can be notified every week when we drop really awesome podcasting videos.
Okay, so number one adding music this should be really easy. We should be able to just
drag and drop music right into our podcast mixes and be done with it. The problem is,
we need to automate or control the volume or turn the volume down over time once our voices
come in and once we start talking, and maybe we want also to adjust the volume of the music
throughout the podcast mix, so let's jump into reaper, and I'll show you how easy it is to do.
Okay, let's find the first of our episode and press play. "Hey, welcome back, everyone,
to Studio Steve's amazing podcast..." So I want to grab some music and put it in before that,
so I would just drag and drop into Reaper here a music selection. I'll make this music
track a little bigger so I can see what's going on, then I can move around my vocal
recording until I get it right where I want it. With the music track, I'll zoom in here
and really fine-tune it get it right where I want it,
"...Hey, welcome back, everyone..." but now we need to turn the volume of the music down
once the voice comes in talking. This is something that you can do in most DAWs. To do it in Reaper,
you just click on this trim icon here, and you select volume under track envelopes,
and we see a clone, almost, of our music track, appears, and now we can automate the volume
from here by creating keyframes. In Reaper, we hold shift and click on the green line, so now
we can control the volume of the music exactly how we want throughout our podcast episodes...
"...Hey welcome back everyone to Studio Steve's amazing podcast, or if this..."
so now I can fine-tune the volume and get it exactly how I want and then when I'm done,
I could just go to the back of the music track here and drag it all the way from
the right to the left. Then I can access this icon in the corner and create a nice fade out,
and now I have very easily added and adjusted the volume of some music for my podcast episode.
Pretty cool, right?! You can automate the volume. You can draw shapes of your volume
however you want with our music tracks, which makes podcast editing even more fun.
Okay, let's move on to number two: adding effects to our podcast voices. This can
be a really fun technique to add ear candy for our listeners, and I like to do this at places
where people emphasize a certain point or maybe say something profound or something outrageous.
You can grab just those few words and add effects like delay or reverb to really add a lot of fun
and uniqueness to your podcast mixes, so let me show you what I'm talking about inside Reaper.
Okay, to add an effect track, we just double click to create a new track,
and we can title this the name of the effect. I will call it to delay,
and I'll reposition the track underneath my Studio Steve track
and make it bigger so I can see it better. Now I'll find the part I want to add the effect to,
"...to Studio Steve's amazing... Studio Steve's amazing podcast... Studio Steve's
amazing podcast." Perfect, so I'd like to add the effect to this part right here, so to do this,
I'll set up a send on my studio steve track. I do that by clicking on this route button. From here,
I can go down to where it says ADD NEW SEND, and I will select that track I just created: delay.
Now, this Studio Steve track is being sent to the delay track, so now, on the delay track,
I need to add a delay effect I do that by clicking on the effects button right here, searching for
a delay effect choosing one that sounds fun and clicking: add. "Studio Steve's amazing podcast..."
And perfect, I have a delay that I love for my voice now; the problem, though, is I don't want
the delay track to be playing throughout my entire podcast episode; that would be insane.
I just wanted to come in at this selection and then drop out afterward, so just like I did with
the volume automation with my music, I can also automate the send volume on my studio steve track.
I do that by clicking on this trim button. Now at the bottom, I can select TRACK 2 DELAY SEND. When
I click on that, I get a similar clone, and now I can automate the volume to send to my
delay track only when I want it to. I do this by holding the shift button to create some keyframes
and then just drawing in the exact volume shape I want for my send.
Cool now, let's have a listen to what that sounds like.
"Hey, welcome back everyone to Studio Steve's amazing podcast, or if this is your first time
tuning into the show, this podcast is all about podcasting..." that's really fun, isn't it?
And you can get so creative with it. There are so many different effects: delay
reverb, modulation, I even like to use pitch shifters, but now let's move on to number three,
which is my favorite transition effect I use in all of our pod sound school podcasts,
and with podcasts, I edit for clients, and that is to reintroduce music to the podcast episode.
It can seem really jarring and weird and even nerve-wracking to just suddenly bring music
back into our podcast episodes, but there are lots of places we can do it.
Also, it's a really good idea to take short pauses every so often in a long
podcast episode to give the listeners a chance to sort of pay attention again.
So what I like to do is I like to combine number one and number two to make fun transitional pieces
throughout a podcast episode.
Let's take a look at what I'm talking about:
Now that we have this delay track set up and also the automation send set up, we can bring
it in and out wherever we want throughout the episode. So this can be a really fun way to add
effects when you want to bring music back in and create some nice ear candy for your listeners.
So let's start by finding a place I want to bring the delay back in, "...so why don't
we just jump right into it, okay number one: stay in the sweet spot..." perfect we'll do
'stay in the sweet spot,' and I'll just repeat the same process I did with my first send and now
let's have a listen to what that sounds like. "...Okay, number one, stay in the sweet spot
when I'm talking about this..." that's great, now let's drag another song in, and we can bring
a song in with this delay effect and see what that sounds like and since I already have a music
track set up, I can just drag a new song onto the same track. Then I, conveniently, also have this
volume automation set up for whatever music I add throughout the episode. So I'll go to the FINDER,
find the music I want to drag in, drag it exactly where I want it to come in, give it a little fade
in, and then I'll readjust these track sizes so that I can see what's going on here. I already
can see that the volume is low from where I had it previously. I'm going to want the volume of this
music track to start a lot louder, so let's add a couple of keyframes here and turn the volume of
the music up, and now let's have a listen to what that sounds like. "...Stay in the sweet spot..."
Perfect, now I can drag my voice a little closer to where that music came in,
add a couple more keyframes and really dial in another volume automation
and turn the volume down once my voice comes in, and let's listen to that.
"...Stay in the sweet spot..." We can fine-tune and make adjustments while we're listening,
and there we go when I'm talking about this sweet spot, I'm talking about that perfect
distance in that perfect position away from and in front of your microphone...
"And there you have it, Podski. I hope that that really got your creative juices flowing,
and you're excited to hop into your own podcast mixes and start adding music and sound effects.
Don't be afraid to get creative and take chances and be wacky and weird even
it can really add a lot of fun to the whole process and if you got really excited by
seeing how easy and fun Reaper is to use. You want to learn more about reaper you want to get
really good at podcast editing, I put together an online podcasting course specific to podcasters,
and it's called REAPER 4 PODCASTERS. You can find out more information by going to the link
right here where you're watching this video, and you can also go to podsoundschool.com/r4p.
And before you go, two things don't forget to subscribe to our channel. Happy casting, amigos!