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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