Help Me Podcast

Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you

launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice

a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks

for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning

intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will a bite sized

tip to help you podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I got a

little bit more of an advanced editing talk for you.

And this may not be for everybody, but I kind of just wanted to

dive into the aspect of EQ

and compression when you're editing your audio. And

this isn't a necessary thing, but EQ and compression are two tools that

you can use to have more, clearer and

better sounding audio. So maybe if you're a beginner

podcaster, maybe this episode isn't for you. Or maybe it is. So

EQ and compression are two of the most common tools

in editing podcast audio that can help you

improve your clarity and your presence of your audio. We're

going to talk about these two tools separately. And let's first talk about

EQ. So EQ is equalization. I'm

sure most of you are familiar with some sort of EQ, whether on

a home stereo or maybe in your car where you can kind

of like turn up the bass or you can turn down the treble or

something like that. That is a form of EQ. And when you're

working with audio and you're in your audio recording program, your

daw, your digital audio workstation. Mine is

Reaper. But if you're in any other of them, they all probably have

some sort of EQ plugin or piece of software

that you can use to edit your recorded

audio. So I will tell you how I use EQ because I think it'll be

the best way to describe how you can use it practically on a podcast.

But I just wanted to talk about it kind of theoretically first.

So EQ, basically all it's doing is it's

turning the volume up and down at certain frequencies.

So think back to your car stereo when you're turning up the bass. All

that's doing is turning up the volume of the lower end

frequencies. So it sounds like there's more bass in the audio

or the radio wherever you're using the EQ. You

can also do this to different frequency bands and using

it on your podcast audio. When you're editing podcasts, you can

pick different frequency ranges that sound good and turn them

up. And then you can listen for bad sounding frequency ranges

and turn them down. That's basically as simple as it can get with

EQ. The idea is that you're adjusting the curve

of the EQ to bring out the good parts of the

vocal recording and just to bring down the bad parts of it. So

things like harshness or thinness. In a

vocal recording, you can use an EQ to kind of

lessen that harshness or lessen that thinness. A lot

of times what I'll do is I'll add an EQ to my vocal or

to my podcast audio. And the first thing that

I do is I grab one band of EQ

and I just turn it up all the way. And then I sweep it through

the different frequency ranges. And usually, at least on the

EQ that I have, there's a visual graphic representation

of the EQ. So you can kind of like see, to the left side

it's low frequencies, to the right side, it's high frequencies. And

you basically just sweep through the different bands.

So, like, I'll turn it all the way up, increasing the volume by maybe ten

DB. And you can hear that specific

frequency when you sweep it through the different frequency ranges.

So when it's in the low end, you hear all the low end voices, and

then you sweep it to the mid range, and then you hear all those mid

ranges, and then you sweep it up into the high end, and that's usually where

that harshness and that fitness comes through. So it'll give you

an idea of which frequency ranges sound like what.

So then what I'll do is I'll take the ranges that I like and

I'll boost those a little bit. Not all the way to the top, that was

just for listening purposes, but I'll boost them a little bit, maybe three

or four DBS, maybe five. And then I'll listen

to the nasally sounding frequencies or the thin

sounding frequencies, and then I'll lower those frequencies

and I'll subtract by four or five DB.

And what this does, when you put it all together is it'll help

the vocal sound better. And a lot of times what I like to do to

see if I'm even making it better at all is to toggle on and

off the entire EQ. Because if you

have the whole thing on and you're listening to it, then you click a button

and it shuts the EQ off. And then you can hear the original sounding

audio track. Sometimes it'll even sound worse

and you made it worse and it's like, all right, well, let me start over.

Or maybe it doesn't need the EQ. Maybe it was fine the way it was.

This is the sort of workflow that I use when I'm putting an EQ on

a track to help improve the sound of the audio. So

I hope that was clear. In describing what an EQ

actually is, you're really just increasing the volume

of good sounding frequencies and then you're lowering the volume of bad

sounding frequencies. So now let's talk about a compression and what

a compressor is. A compressor is I like to think of it

as like an auto leveling, right? So sometimes you're listening to

a podcast recording and somebody's talking really

loud, and then they get really quiet, and then maybe they talk

like this, where the T is really loud and the rest

of it isn't and just the inconsistencies in the

vocals. And really what a compressor does is it helps

you control those dynamics, it helps you control the

highs and then it helps you control the lows. And the way

that I think about compression is it's like an

auto learning. It's like somebody sitting there on the

volume level, right, and turning it up and down quickly.

When the volume gets too loud, they turn it down a little bit and then

when it gets too quiet, they turn it up a little bit. And that's kind

of a simple way to describe what compression is.

There's other sorts of variables that go into it and

how fast you turn it up and how fast you turn it down and things

like that. But I think to get a basic understanding of what compression is, is

it helps to even out and level out the audio

peaks and valleys. So this could be helpful in podcasting

because you want a consistent sound, right? You want your audio

to stay at a consistent level and you don't want it to get super loud

and you don't want it to get super quiet. The whole idea of editing a

podcast that sounds good is it all sounds very consistent

so you can use compression to take out some of

these peaks and valleys. To me, compression is a little

bit more of a tougher tool to learn how to use

because it's a lot more subtle than EQ is.

Finding a sweet spot is kind of

difficult and sometimes, especially as somebody who's new to

editing, you might not even be able to hear the differences of

what a good compression or a bad compression is. And

I say that because I had a very hard time when I first started learning

how to use compression, like even hearing what it was doing.

And this one takes a little bit more practice and a little

bit more training of your ear to hear what you're

listening. You know, I'm not the best user of

compression out there, but I try to take a very minimalistic

approach and you can Google stuff out there like what's

the best compressor settings for a podcast and watch some

YouTube videos out there that tell you how to use it and that sort of

thing. But today I really just wanted to bring to your

attention how you can use compression to help your

audio and to help your podcast sound better. But like I said, it

does take some practice. So make sure you go practice both the EQ and

the compression out there and utilize the tools

to help make your audio sound better. But also keep in mind

that there's going to be a learning curve and you're going to need to

work with these tools a lot in order to get comfortable with them.

And like anything else, the more you use it, the better you'll get

at it. So I think it's good to start and good to

just go in there and mess around with them and to use them as

tools to increase the quality of your audio

recordings. So that's all I have for you today.

Maybe I'll do a video on compression and EQ one of these

days. If anybody's interested, let me know. You can always send me

an email. You can always sign up for the Happy Podcasting newsletter

with a link in the Show Notes and I will see you next

time. We've reached the end of the episode and

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listening and happy Podcasting.