Editing Podcasts: Cutting, Correcting, Enhancing, Limiting and Adding Music

Done recording your podcast? Then it’s time for the editing phase. If you prefer to keep things vanilla, this won’t take too long, but if you’re looking for a more professional radio-sound complete with jingles and background music, then you’ve got your work cut out for you. Read on for a step-by-step guide!

The Editing Phase

Feel free to skip this part if you’re a one-take-wonder.

This step is about getting all of the recordings in the right order. The best way to do this is using a DAW.
Cut out any noise and bloopers (or don’t if that’s your thing).
Don’t forget to add (cross)fades. This prevents unwanted sounds during any transitions.
In addition to removing any slips of the tongue, you also want to adjust the pace of your podcast. I’m not talking about speeding up or slowing down the audio, but about pauses between words and sentences. The unedited recording most likely includes various unwanted pauses, which can be cut out or shortened for a more streamlined listening experience. Don’t overdo it though. If you go as far as removing any breathing room, your listeners might start to feel anxious. In fact, it can be a good idea to leave in a moment of silence every now and then so the words can really sink in.

Editing Podcasts: Cutting, Correcting, Enhancing, Limiting and Adding Music

The Correcting Phase

While aiming for near-perfect takes is a good thing, don’t worry about it too much. Even professional studios run into issues that need to be fixed. Here’s a list of the most common audio-based issues.

Annoyingly loud ‘S’ sounds. Most DAWs feature a built-in de-esser function. This is a kind of compressor that’s exclusively focussed on the high frequencies and can help rein in sharp sounds with surgical precision, without dulling the overall sound.
Popping ‘P’, ‘B’ and ‘F’ sounds. Plosive consonants are rather tricky to deal with since the devil usually hides in the lowest frequencies here. You can start by eliminating everything below 100 Hz using a high-pass filter. This should take care of the most annoying popping noises. Next time, use a pop filter to avoid this issue altogether!
Too much reverb. Once it’s in there, natural reverb is hard to remove from audio recordings. A gate or expander can offer at least some solace. This tool has an adjustable threshold value. When the input level dips below the set threshold, the sound is automatically turned down until it reaches the threshold again. This makes any reverb die off more quickly, but unfortunately, it also affects any soft-spoken parts and breathing, making recordings sound less natural. Excessive reverb is usually caused by sitting too far away from the microphone and/or poor acoustics. Next time, set up an absorber panel behind yourself and try to maintain a 10-to-20 centimetre gap between your mouth and the microphone.
Background noise. Just as with reverb, it can be hard to get rid of background noise without making the whole thing sound unnatural. Any brief noises can be cut out, while any constant noise can be reduced using a gate or expander.
Noise. Noise comes in various forms which means you have multiple options to deal with it. As with background noise and excessive reverb, you can use a gate or expander, but you can also turn to special denoise plugins. These specially-developed plugins analyse the noise in your recording and accurately filter it out once they know what they’re dealing with.

Editing Podcasts: Cutting, Correcting, Enhancing, Limiting and Adding Music

The Enhancing Phase

After taking care of the most pressing problems, it’s time to optimise the listening experience by enhancing the sound and dynamics of your voice.

You can use an equaliser to purposefully finetune the sound a bit. Want to brighten your voice? Then start out using a high-pass filter to remove the unwanted low frequencies. A little dip between the 150 and 300 Hertz mark can really open up your vocals. You can also use a high-shelf to inject a bit of sparkle. If you feel like you sound a little nasal, then you might want to create a little dip around the 1 kHz mark.
Passionate speeches can lead to large differences in the dynamics, so the difference between the loudest and quietest parts. This can be uncomfortable to listen to. Thankfully, a compressor can limit any extreme differences by making the loudest parts less loud and the quietest parts less quiet. Most compressor plugins feature presets for vocals, which means all you have to do is tweak the threshold until you have about a 3dB gain reduction left. You can learn more about compression here.

Equalisation and compression is by no means a must. If the raw audio sounds good enough, don’t mess with it.

Adding Background Music

Music can do a lot for your podcast, just ask any maker of radio and TV ads. The only thing you need to avoid is music that gets in the way of your voice. Start out using instrumental music only and make sure that you don’t turn up the volume too much. Your voice still needs to come out loud-and-clear. One trick to keep any music from muddying up your voice is using sidechain compression aka ducking. Run a compressor with the external sidechain or key function assigned to the music and select your voice as the sidechain input. If all is well, the volume of the music now drops every time you speak.

Editing Podcasts: Cutting, Correcting, Enhancing, Limiting and Adding Music

Limiting

The final step is using a limiter to boost the overall volume without any clipping (unwanted distortion). Go for a limiter with LUFS metering like the Fabfilter Pro-L 2. Set the max loudness to -1dB and aim for an average loudness between -20 and -16 LUFS integrated. Podcasts that include background music will have a higher average loudness and can easily be lifted to -16 LUFS. Podcasts that only feature speech are best kept a little quieter in order to avoid extreme limiting.

Got any podcast post-production tips? Share them in the comments below!