Have you ever wondered what an audio podcast editor does with your audio? How do they make everything sound level, cohesive and professional? This week Mickenzie is asking Kyle all about his process. Kyle has been working in professional audio for 15+ years as a Nashville-based music producer turned CEO and Founder of Podcircle.
Kyle and Mickenzie have been working together for 4 years on several podcast projects. In this episode, Mickenzie has some questions for Kyle about his editing process, how to manage unforeseen audio issues, and what tools he uses to create a premium audio podcast. The discussion also touches on balancing DIY efforts with professional editing to produce top-notch podcast content. Let's jump in!
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Chapters
Have you ever wondered what an audio podcast editor does with your audio? How do they make everything sound level, cohesive and professional? This week Mickenzie is asking Kyle all about his process. Kyle has been working in professional audio for 15+ years as a Nashville-based music producer turned CEO and Founder of Podcircle.
Kyle and Mickenzie have been working together for 4 years on several podcast projects. In this episode, Mickenzie has some questions for Kyle about his editing process, how to manage unforeseen audio issues, and what tools he uses to create a premium audio podcast. The discussion also touches on balancing DIY efforts with professional editing to produce top-notch podcast content. Let's jump in!
Disclosure: We only endorse products and services that we’ve personally used or come highly recommended by trusted sources. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Creators & Guests
Host
Kyle Cummings
Kyle Cummings is the CEO and Founder of Podcircle, a podcast production agency who partners with New York Times bestselling authors, Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, influencers and everyone in between to produce high-impact podcasts.
Host
Mickenzie Vought
Mickenzie Vought is an expert podcast content strategist. She is also the Producer and Co-Host of the Living Centered Podcast, a leading emotional wellness podcast.
Editor
Podcircle
Premium podcast services for busy people and organizations. Visit Podcircle.com to learn more.
What is Podcircle Podcast?
Finally there’s a podcast for podcasters. Each week, join hosts Kyle Cummings and Mickenzie Vought as they share the knowledge and expertise they've gained from years of launching, running, and promoting successful podcasts. Whether you're an aspiring podcaster or you've already got hundreds of episodes under your belt, these conversations dive into the topics that matter to every podcaster — from marketing and growing your podcast, to recording equipment and best practices, monetization, cutting-edge tools, hiring help, and much more.
Kyle Cummings:
Welcome to the Podcircle Podcast where we bring practical tips and insights for every podcaster.
Mickenzie Vought:
Whether you're just getting started or you're already a seasoned podcast pro, these conversations dive into all the topics that matter most to you. Alright, guys. Today, you get to be a fly on the wall as I ask Kyle all of my pressing audio editing questions. So a little bit of history, as you may or may not know, I've been working with Kyle for almost 4 years. He actually helped me launch the Living Center podcast for the organization I work for in February of 2021.
Mickenzie Vought:
And in that time, I think Kyle has performed quite a few magic tricks for me to help make my show and later shows, because I now work with him on several different shows, sound the way our listeners have come to expect it to sound quality, concise, the type of thing you actually wanna listen to. So as I was learning, he was with me every step of the way, and he has worked with me to improve our sound quality. At the beginning, I don't think it was as great a sound. But through little tweaks and his guidance and his expertise, it's really become a show I'm proud of. So I've placed complete trust in him as we encourage other podcasters to do, and I outsource my weaknesses.
Mickenzie Vought:
We encourage you to do that on a regular basis. So today, I'm asking him to pull back the curtain and ask questions that I've never really asked. I've just blindly trusted him to do it. So, Kyle, let's start from the very beginning. Are you excited to hear all of my questions?
Kyle Cummings:
I'm really excited to hear them.
Mickenzie Vought:
Okay. Great. So first and foremost, every episode, I send you my files. I send you an intro, I send you individual host and guest tracks, I send you a combined track for you to be able to track. That's how I get my edit and outro, etc.
Mickenzie Vought:
But I also sometimes do something that maybe not a lot of your other clients do. I actually give you a full list of time stamped edits because I'm a little bit of a control freak. So what do you do with that?
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. So if you send me a, like, a text document, the first thing I'll do is I'll pull that up. You've got some really helpful information in there, like, you've already identified a teaser clip that you want pulled for me to go ahead and identify and pull that and put it at the very beginning of the episode. But even before I do any editing, the very first thing I'm gonna do is just listen through the audio, just kind of spot check, look at the waveforms, which are just visual representations of the audio. Are there any points that seem to be clipping or too loud, distorted, that kind of stuff?
Kyle Cummings:
I'm listening for that, and fixing those sorts of things with the, amazing tools that, audio correction and enhancement tools that I have and our editors have here at Podcircle. I'm listening for background noise and eliminating that or reducing that as much as possible. Mhmm. And then once I've done all of that to each track and everything is it's sounding pretty good and pretty level, I'll then go and grab that teaser clip. So say it's at, you know, the 30 minute to the 31 minute mark.
Kyle Cummings:
Go ahead and grab that and set it to the side, and then Okay. I actually take your edits, and I do them in reverse. So I'll start with so if it's, like, a 30 minute episode, I'll actually start at the very bottom of the list and start making edits in reverse. And the reason I do that is because if I do it the opposite way and start from the beginning, and I make an edit and it changes where things are laid out on the timeline, then all of your other time stamps are they're no longer intact and they're irrelevant. So my rule of thumb that I use and that I teach our editors here is to process the audio first and then edit in reverse, especially if there are edit notes.
Kyle Cummings:
So that's kinda what we do. And then once I have those edits that you have me make, which might be, you know, 5, 10, 15 edits, then I'll go through and listen through the episode from top to bottom and just edit out anything that you might have overlooked or just filler words, like unnecessary overuse of filler words, closing gaps, between, like, man, when you pose a question and someone answers, maybe they, if it's, like, over Riverside, sometimes there can be that lag. So just making the conversation feel as normal as possible through quality editing. After all that's done, I'll take that. I'll find I'll import your, any kind of standard assets, intro music, outro music, any kind of ads, if those are relevant to the episode, place those, and just really assemble the final product, and then send it over to you for review.
Kyle Cummings:
That's usually the process. And, again, you you and I, we we work on audio podcasts only just with the ones that we work on. Podcircle, we also do a handful of video podcasts for our clients as well and, follow a similar pattern for that. But, obviously, there's a visual element as well to the ads. So I guess some additional steps to it, but we'll stay in the audio world for now.
Mickenzie Vought:
More complication. Yeah. And I think for people who aren't kinda sitting in a producer role like I am, where I'm really particular on how to tighten up that interview, and that's something I care a lot about. You have served as a really incredible producer for other people shows and doing just what you were saying going through listening to elements of like, Hey, I think we can shorten up here. Here's a filler word.
Mickenzie Vought:
Here's a weird gap. So you go and intentionally do that with other people that may not provide that level of
Kyle Cummings:
Exactly.
Mickenzie Vought:
Detail that I provide as well. Yes. So I just wanna call that out.
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. And you're one of the few clients that actually sends an edit doc along with it, which is totally fine. It's fine either way for me. But I'll I just wanna say either way, we're gonna listen through the full episode and clean it up and make edits and and make the host and guests sound as good as possible.
Mickenzie Vought:
So like I said, you have performed a couple of what I would consider magic tricks because it's not my day to day. Right? It's not the water I swim in. So I've had a few weird things happen, with host or guest audio over the years. Can I walk you through a few what ifs that people might have?
Mickenzie Vought:
And will you share us how you would fix it?
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. Totally.
Mickenzie Vought:
Okay. So what happens if my track doesn't populate and I have to pull it from an Internet backup? So I've had this happen before, where a guest has some issues with their audio on the front end, and it honestly didn't record their track at all mine recorded. But because we use Riverside hint always use Riverside, we had an Internet backup. So you pulled that.
Mickenzie Vought:
And as a related follow-up, the track there is gonna sound a little bit different than the quality track that I'm using my professional mic and recorded on the high quality Riverside. What do you do?
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. So I I remember a particular instance where you had a guest, and they're they just had a partial high quality recording. So for some reason, it cut off, like, halfway through. Luckily with Riverside, there's always that high quality backup, which is a fail safe that I love and sometimes is necessary to use. So what I would do in that instance is I would take what we have of the high quality files for the guest, import that in, and then also download the Internet backup, which is kind of a Zoom quality recording of, you know, of that same track, and then import that as well, and then kind of line those up and then find where the high quality audio, ends, and then begin the backup audio there.
Kyle Cummings:
And sometimes I'll use that. I'll put that on the same track if they sound pretty similar. The the real downside of having to use the Internet backup is that if there is a hiccup with an Internet connection or anything like that, it's gonna glitch and lag kind of like a Zoom call will. So that is why I'm also gonna use that high quality file for as long as I can in the conversation, and then just kinda stitch those together. In most cases, only a really keen listening ear is gonna be able to tell the difference, to be honest with you, but a really high quality editor and a practiced editor is gonna make that sound as seamless as possible.
Mickenzie Vought:
Yeah. And I think in that situation, we ended up placing an ad right where the quality audio ended and the Internet backup started.
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. We just broke up the conversation, so it wasn't a stark difference. And honestly, I don't think any anyone would have noticed the difference.
Mickenzie Vought:
Alright. And so my last question, because I had so many, we're gonna break this up into 2 parts. So I have done this as well. I accidentally recorded myself and my in person guest on the same track, and they're way louder. What do you do in that situation?
Kyle Cummings:
Yeah. So if you have multiple people in the same track, one person is loud, one person is quiet, and you're just kinda stuck with that single file. There's a plug in called Vocal Rider. It's by a company called Waves, which produces a lot of audio plug ins. And that will it'll kind of identify the peaks and the troughs, like the low parts and the loud parts, and it'll help just kinda level them out.
Kyle Cummings:
Before I do that, I'm gonna do some other just audio processing and enhancing to help, reduce any kind of background noise that's also gonna get louder as that's as that quiet mic gets boosted up. So just things like that on the front end to help, but then really leaning on that vocal rider plug in. And then what we're always gonna use is a lot of EQ and or if necessary EQ, a good bit of it, but also compression, which helps also just glue everything together. Makes the really loud parts quieter, the quieter parts louder, and then just kinda gives a more consistent product.
Mickenzie Vought:
So for those DIYers or someone who's saying, I don't wanna be a DIYer, how many plug ins do you use on a typical interview?
Kyle Cummings:
My what I'm gonna call my signal chain, has a Yeah. Has probably 4 plug ins on it. It's got an EQ, a compressor, a noise gate, a de esser, and then all of the tracks together feed to another track, like a master track that has a limiter on it. And then I also at the very beginning, I mentioned processing the audio and cleaning things up, kind of the the more Yeah. Reparative restorative type work.
Kyle Cummings:
That's a whole other, plugin suite that I use called Isotope RX, which is really, really incredible. So, there's a lot that goes into it, and I never want to come down on freelancers or whatever, but a lot of folks are are leaning on AI tools that do an okay job, but they're just not they're not gonna get the kind of quality that a really quality audio editor, particularly someone who's been doing this for a decade and a half, is gonna give you really that attention to detail.
Mickenzie Vought:
Yes. I think the number one thing I said when I took over the podcast and tried to launch it in 2021 was I'm fine to do a lot of the content and the producing and the scheduling and the ideating and the marketing. I'm not touching the editing. That's not something I wanted to learn. And I'm so glad I outsource my weaknesses because the more I get to know you and the expertise that you bring, it's like, I don't need that.
Mickenzie Vought:
So I can't speak highly enough of you at Podcircle and your skill set and your editor skill set. So I'm done bragging now. It's just made my life so much easier.
Kyle Cummings:
Well, believe it or not, there's people that actually like this stuff. And they like, I like this shirt. And that's not everyone. And that's that's good. No.
Kyle Cummings:
That's a good thing. Because the stuff that you do is not in my wheelhouse. It's it's not in my skill set type thing, and I'm I'm very happy to let, you do kind of the front end stuff so I can work on some of the the back end post production things.
Mickenzie Vought:
Totally. But if you're like me and this is not your bag, but you do wanna produce a quality podcast, I really encourage you to reach out to Kyle and his team at kyle@podcircle.com. Because I know all I have to do is send you my files and I will get back a super quality well produced podcast.
Kyle Cummings:
So We love doing it. Thanks for the questions.
Mickenzie Vought:
Yeah. We'll see you next week when I bring more questions.
