the purpose of post-processing spoken word audio in my opinion is not to make your voice sound
different it's not to change the way that your microphone sounds but rather it's to make sure
that your audio is easy to listen to for your audience greetings earthlings and welcome back
to podcastage my name is andrew and today i want to talk to you about how i think you ought to be
approaching post processing your spoken word audio step number one get your audio right before you
hit record i don't know who needs to hear this so i'm going to say it anyway post processing cannot
fix terrible audio will fix it in post should not be in your vocabulary you should be willing and
able to publish your unprocessed audio without getting any kind of complaints to drive home
this point i have some examples here is raw audio of the neumann u87 that i think is recorded well
and i would be happy with and here is what i would classify as poorly recorded audio on the neumann
u87 and here is that same poorly recorded audio that i have tried to post process and salvage
and get something useful out of but in the end the audio going in was so bad that the final
product still is absolute garbage maybe i'm biased because i recorded it but out of those examples
i would 10 times out of 10 pick the unprocessed audio and i think that audio was good enough to
publish it as the final product for my podcast let me know if i'm crazy and you disagree with me but
i think that's the level that your audio needs to be at before you hit record step number two
process with a purpose i know how tempting it is to go out and download all of the channel strips
and all of the presets because then you don't have to think about anything you can just put it
on your audio and it's going to be great right no before you add any plugins to your channel strip
you need to determine how that plugin is going to be solving an issue what this means is before you
add any plugins you need to listen to your audio and identify the issues that exist for example
here i am right on top of the neumann u87ai and the proximity effect is in full effect and the
audio is likely too muddy but now i've applied a little bit of eq which you can see on screen to
hopefully clear up a little bit of that muddiness and make it a little bit more intelligible to boil
it down and make it simple every plug-in in your channel strip needs to serve a purpose
step number three make sure that your audience has a good listening experience
like i said in the intro to this video this is why i think we should be processing our youtube videos
our podcasts our tick tocks are live streams anything that has audio that we're post-processing
should be to this end like the first two steps i have some examples but i need to lead into
them with a question what is post-processing for it's to ensure that if too much background noise
made it into your recording you can get rid of that to remove distractions it's to ensure
that you don't have too many sharp s sounds like sally sells seashells by this seashore
it's also to ensure that you don't have too many plosives please bring pizza pronto no one wants to
hear it it's also to get rid of any unwanted low end rumble you'll also want to use it to decrease
the dynamic range between the quietest parts and the loudest parts my voice cracked while i was
clipping the microphone i don't think anything more embarrassing has ever occurred on this
channel step four don't add the flavor yet i have encountered a lot of people on their audio journey
who are trying to get their post processing right and a lot of them are trying to sound like some
famous broadcaster some radio host some podcast some twitch streamer some youtuber and a lot of
the time they don't end up happy with the results and i think this all goes back to step number one
the audio that they are recording is not good enough the reason that i'm bringing this up is
they are trying to process and add a bunch of compression add a bunch of eq to audio that is
absolute rubbish this is why step number one exists this is why you need to make sure the
audio is as good as it can possibly be before you hit record then you need to clean up the audio and
post if there's anything that needs to be fixed once that is done then go on to adding the flavor
go on to trying to mimic somebody else's sound to get the sound that you really want
but first the most important thing is having great sounding audio before you start messing around
with it yo here i am on my very first amazing sounding podcast i got the background noise
i got the close talk in super duper proximity effect i got the plosives and most importantly
most importantly i got my hat and what kind of sound do i want um uh i want the radio sound so
we are going to compress it we are going to eq it we are going to bask the boost and bass the
treble boost the treble nut bass the treble boost the treble and that is what we are going to get
it's already going to sound terrible just based on that processing
but on top of that the audio going into it i just turned into what's his name not jack black
lewis black it's just terrible going into it okay that's enough of this example this i get
i apologize and there you go that's what a video of me waxing poetic about post-processing looks
and sounds like i know there are going to be plenty of people who disagree with me and there
will be exceptions let me know in the comments down below what those exceptions are for you
and what you disagree with but if you did find this video fun interesting or helpful go ahead
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it really does help me continue to bring you these videos so until next time thank you so much for
watching thank you so much for listening happy post-processing i'll talk to you next week bye