- Hey podcast people.
Welcome to the Pod Sound School.
If this is your first time here we help artists,
entrepreneurs and content creators to produce, plan,
and promote successful podcasts.
I'm really excited about today's video,
we are furthering our education in Pro Tools.
We're gonna be getting a lot more advanced,
and we're gonna be going through the process of editing
an entire podcast episode from start to finish,
and I'm gonna show you the basic steps that I go through
to edit one of the Pod Sound Schools episodes.
I have a previous playlist that will get you started
with all of the basic operations in Pro Tools.
It's actually Pro Tools first,
which is the free version of Pro Tools.
You can find that playlist here, definitely check it out.
If you haven't checked that out yet,
you might not wanna jump into this one.
We just recorded this episode into Pro Tools
and I haven't touched it, I haven't done anything yet.
These are the raw tracks.
So we're gonna walk through after recording,
how you can edit your podcast.
This is gonna be very informative.
Make sure you stick around until the end.
This is gonna be a four part video series.
This is the first video of that series.
In this video, the first step we're gonna cover
is normalizing, doing some cross fades,
and just basically cleaning up the tracks.
The next video we're gonna get to chopping up,
and cutting out the bad audio, and then consolidating those,
and cutting out the crap and making it sound better.
And then the third video will be applying effects
to the voices, compression, noise reduction,
things like that, that we would do.
And then finally on the fourth video will be adding music,
sound effects, things like that.
And finally exporting it to an mp3, and we're done.
And before we get to it, don't forget to
hit the subscribe button here, that way
you can stay up to date when we post new videos each week.
And what do you say we get to it.
♪ I, I, didn't mean (coughing), ♪
♪ Oh no (laughing). ♪
- Let's pull open this session here.
I'm in Pro Tools Ultimate but it doesn't matter
what Pro Tools you're using.
Even in Pro Tools First all the functions
are essentially the same.
We talked about these tools here,
we talked about the modes of operation right here.
You should know what the quick keys are for all of those.
I will be saying them as much as I can
as a refresher as we go through this,
because I like to really nail in
those quick keys into our mind into our memory.
Again, if you haven't watched the first playlist yet
with the Pro Tools basic setting up your workspace,
getting familiar with the tools, getting familiar
between the edit and the mix window and all of that,
then you might want to go over and do that right now.
Okay, so you'll notice I have a master fader setup here.
I have Veronica, I have Stephen.
Those tracks are all good to go.
The first thing I like to do
is put a limiter on the stereo buss.
Now you'll remember I select Control + equals
or Command + equals to go over into my mix window.
And that's where I apply the inserts.
And I'm going to go ahead and apply a master fader here.
I like to use this precision limiter.
And that's something I get with the URI plugins
but you could use this compressor limiter right here as well
and put on a limiting setting by going to
factory default and go to hard limiting or gentle limiting.
But I like my I like this limiter here.
Now this is an upgraded plugin
that you would have to pay for.
And then I just go to like a happy medium
or something here a preset that's on there.
I like to put a limiter on the stereo buss
because it kind of just protects against distortion
for the speakers or for the headphones,
whatever I'm listening through.
So it kind of protects the gear.
And it also I am going to apply a limiter on the mix
at the very end to give it that final boost.
So I like to just put it on to begin with.
So that way I can hear how the tracks and the music
and everything react to being limited to begin with.
And that way, it kind of makes the mastering process
a little easier at the end.
So you'll see I have these two tracks here,
Veronica and Stephen.
The first thing I'm going to do is group them together.
In Pro Tools to group you highlight both of them together.
And then you press Control + G or Command + G on a Mac.
And then here I'm just going to name dudes.
You can name it whatever you want.
And now we're grouped together.
This is great if I ever want to ungroup them temporarily
all I have to do is come down here where it says dudes
and deselect that, and what this allows me to do is by using
the tools up here, I'll press f8 to use the grabber tool,
now I can grab and move these around
and they won't lose their relationship together,
they won't slide around in time.
If I didn't have that group selected,
I could accidentally slip them out of each other
as I'm doing edits and cutting and things.
And that would be pretty nasty.
We wouldn't want to do that.
So let's go ahead and keep these grouped.
And we'll start the first process.
So as I mentioned, the first thing
I like to do is to normalize.
Normalizing is kind of a funny word,
it's similar to a compressor in that
it is playing with the dynamic range,
but different than a compressor it doesn't play with
the dynamic range over a period of time,
it does it by generally analyzing the peaks that happen.
And there are tons of normalizing plugins
in every DAW that you can use.
I prefer however, to do a manual normalizing
because I feel like you can be a lot more particular
about things and there's some trouble that happens
with normalizing if you just use the automatic normalizers.
You'll hear it, you almost hear like a gating effect,
or hear a sound that I'm not very fond of.
So because of that I like to do the normalizing manually.
And I can just look here, let's look at Veronica's track,
for example, and I'll start with hers.
And here is where I would want to ungroup these guys,
if I'm just going to be doing normalizing.
And you'll see here, if you look at her audio file,
there's some places where we see some spikes.
Other than that, she's pretty consistent
with her volume levels, which is nice.
So this isn't going to take a lot of normalizing.
But Veronica's, I can tell you right here
what this spike is, it's one of her laughs.
- [Veronica] I wanted to say that (laughs).
- She's very dynamic with her laughter.
And so whenever she laughs, it's this huge spike of energy.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to normalize that,
and Pro Tools has made that very easy for us.
So I would just zoom in, and if you remember the quick key
for zoom, it's Control + bracket, either the bracket
to the right or the bracket to the left,
and it will zoom in according to where your cursor is at.
And I can get this cursor tool by pressing f7.
So I'm going to zoom in here, and I'm just going to grab
these guys that are a little bit bigger spikes,
and I'm going to press Control + E.
Control + E will split wherever the cursor selected at.
If I Control + E here it splits the segment,
but if I have splits the region.
But if I highlight something and press Control + E,
or Command + E on a Mac, then you'll see
that it splits that whole region.
And now right here, you'll see it gives me a little volume,
this is going to manually adjust the gain.
So I'll grab that and pull it down
until it's about like that.
If I wanted to get really nitpicky, I can even
take this spike here, and then I can grab my smart tool,
you can grab the smart tool by pressing this space here,
but I don't want you to do that, remember,
I want you to press f6, f7 and f8 all at the same time.
So grab the smart tool and then
create some cross fades here.
This is great because it's the same audio
that we're cross fading into itself, but it's going to
cross fade the difference in volume so it will create
a nice fade between those volume cuts.
Now a good practice, and I'll solo her track,
is that you always want to listen at first,
especially to these adjustments that you're making.
I've gotten so familiar with just looking at the waveforms
and this normalizing process with so many sessions
that I don't have to listen really anymore.
But you will want to listen so you can get
a good idea of how big you want to
make your cross fades and how it's sounding.
So let's have a listen now to what it sounds like.
- [Veronica] (laughs)
- Sounds basically the same, it wasn't really effected,
except now it's not spiking in the volumes anymore.
- [Veronica] (laughs)
- Notice where that volumes at,
if we look at this master fader here.
And then let's go ahead and undo everything I did before
the normalizing and watch the volume and have a listen here.
- [Veronica] (laughs)
- There we go, it's a lot easier to manage, right.
So we basically just continue to repeat this process
by just eyeballing our session here.
And we can grab it and yank down the volume there.
And you notice I'm on my smart tool here,
which makes it really easy.
I'm bracketing, that's how I'm zooming in and out.
This guy could probably use a little bit of one.
And how nitpicky you want to be here is up to your taste,
We are going to apply compression
on to each one of these vocals later.
And, that will help with this dynamic range.
That will help to reduce the dynamic range.
But you want this to be a lot more manageable.
Normalizing is very, very commonly the first thing that
people will do as part of their podcast editing process.
And so that's why I thought I would show you here
how I manually normalize.
And I am a big believer in taking that extra chunk of time
and doing it right and just normalizing it the right way.
There we go, I have now done studio Steve normalization
of Veronica's tracks, and now what I want to do
is I want to consolidate everything together
so that it's one block again.
Now, I don't know if you remember the quick key
for consolidate a region, but it is Shift + Alt + three,
or Shift + Option + three on a Mac.
But before we consolidate this, let's go ahead
and duplicate this track, in case we need to come back
very quickly if we did something wrong,
or we applied a gain that we didn't like.
It's always a good practice just to duplicate the track.
And that way we have this.
So go ahead and press Shift + Option + three,
or Shift + Alt + three, and watch
it's going to consolidate it.
That's wonderful, now we have just that nice track and
look how much better it looks that we got rid of the spikes.
Now this point, if you still wanted to get a little crazy,
you can see a couple areas where maybe
this spike could still use a little bit of a reduction.
Here's another laughter of her and you can get very nitpicky
here with the normalizing and that'll help a lot.
This is especially a good practice
if you're not using really top of the line compressors.
It's a really good idea to do this normalizing.
And so I went ahead and consolidated it again,
to be a little bit more nitpicky with this.
And now what you'll notice is if I go to this drop down
arrow here, I have access to the track before I consolidated
it, if I ever want to go back and fine tune that.
And then I can go ahead and do
the same thing down here for Stephen's track.
So let's go down to me.
And really, there's just this one spike here
that I think could use this.
Sometimes if you want to, you can do the normalizing
after the next video, sometimes you it's worth it to do
the basic editing and chop out the stuff
that you're not going to put into the episode first,
before doing the normalizing.
And that's because it can save some time.
A lot of times we will end up normalizing a bunch of stuff
that we're just going to cut out anyway.
But in this because we're speaking pretty
non dynamically into our microphones,
there wasn't a lot of normalizing to to be done.
And that's the other thing if you use good microphone
technique and you're staying at the same position of your
microphone the whole time, wherever you have it, and you
keep it nice and close to your mouth, and you don't waver
or move too much with your mouth, then you're going to have
better results and less less editing to do.
So now I'm going to do the drop down menu the same way,
go ahead and duplicate the track.
And then I'm going to Shift + Alt + three,
or Shift + Option + three here
and consolidate my track as well.
And you can see that was pretty easy.
Now we've gone ahead and normalized these.
And then the last thing I would do here for this part
is keeping these grouped now again, is I would just
boost the overall level of these nice and pretty
until they look until they look pretty good.
So I'm going to give Veronica a six DB boost,
maybe I'll do something similar for me.
And look now we have some fatter tracks.
They're looking good and we can
listen to both of them together.
- [Veronica] So just think about him on the other-
- And that's looking pretty good.
Now we've already got some nice loud tracks
that are coming through without compression on them,
but we do have a limiter on them, which is nice.
And that's good for this video.
That showed you how to normalize your tracks.
Take a little break, have a little drink
and let's jump right into the next one.
We're going to start chopping this up.
We're going to start analyzing it.
But I'm going to show you the method the tools
and the quickest way to do it in the next video.
So tune in and again, don't forget
to hit the subscribe button so you can come back and
find these videos easily and also give this video thumbs up.
Let me know any comments that you might have.
All right, let's keep learning some Pro Tools.