Cut the Fluff, Keep the Gold: How to Edit for Your Audience

David Jackson  
All right, let's be honest. How many times do you feel like your episode sounded like, okay, but you kind of still felt like something was off, maybe the energy or the pacing, or, I don't know, your voice sounded okay coming out of your head, but you're listening back and you're like, Well, today we're gonna go past cutting out the boring bits into editing that actually keeps people listening. We're going to talk about smarter cuts, cleaner sound and a few simple tools that can make your podcast feel instantly more professional without turning you into a full time audio engineer. Hit it ladies, the School of

The SOP Singers  
podcasting with Dave Jackson,

David Jackson  
podcasting since 2005 I am your award winning Hall of Fame podcast coach. Dave Jackson, thinking you so much. I mean that for tuning in, I realize you could be doing other stuff. I greatly appreciate it, and this is where we help you plan, launch and grow your podcast. The website is School of podcasting.com and today was inspired by the show good. Hang with Amy Poehler. Now, Amy just won a Golden Globe, so I was checking out her show, and I've checked out Amy show before. Amy is a comedian from Saturday Night Live, then later, Parks and Rec and other things, and she was interviewing Jennifer Lawrence. And Amy has a cute little thing she does, and so kudos for being creative, and that is, she finds someone who is a very close friend to the person she's going to interview and ask that person, what should I ask the famous person? And there are a couple things that I was just like, Oh man, what a bummer. Number one, this is a video first show. And one of the things I like about Amy is, you know, she kind of introduces the guest who's going to be on what they're going to talk about, and then she does an ad read. And what I love about it, Amy doesn't even pretend to read a teleprompter. She's basically looking at you're watching her read this off a piece of paper. I think that's actually kind of like all right, let's not even try to hide the fact that I'm reading this. Let's just show you that I am reading this. And so what I thought was interesting is, in this case, Jennifer Lawrence's friend knows that the call is coming. And there are a couple things that I'll put a link to the video. Number one, don't put the camera lower than your nose, because it's a great shot right up the old nostrils, and you better have your Phillips nose trimmer, handy, you know. So there's that. And then the fact that at times when she talked, she would tilt her head back, giving you an even better look right up her nose, and the fact that she was using the built in microphone. Now, I realize she's not a podcaster. Why should she have a microphone, because her friend is Jennifer Lawrence, who probably has bazillions of dollars in the bank. And you could go, Hey, Jen, can you loan me 100 bucks so I can go get a decent microphone. But that's not why she's here, but we will clean up her audio a little bit later. But this is one of the things that I see so many times when I talk about people editing interviews, the first thing you have to listen to is, Did they answer the question? And so this is Amy explaining, you know, hey, you're such a good friend. I'm dying to hear what question you think I should ask her, but let's pay attention to her answer.

Speaker 1  
You know her really well. You know, sometimes we ask people to talk well behind our guests back and they've worked with them, or they kind of know that. But you, you know her really, really well. You've known her for a really long time, and you're deep partners in in work, and you're loving friends in life.

David Jackson  
And so Amy's throwing in a lot of background there that we don't need. And now she's finally going to ask the question,

Speaker 1  
what do you think I should ask her today? What do you want to know about, hear about, or what do you think she'd want to talk about, or a story she'd want to tell?

Speaker 2  
Oh, man, I mean, with Jen, it's funny, because she is so, like, transparent in these spaces, like, I don't think that she's somebody who, or there are, like, a ton of subjects that are off limits.

David Jackson  
So she answered the question, but she didn't answer the question. So Amy kind of comes back again with another version of the question.

Speaker 1  
Well, it's okay. This is really helpful, because I've been prepping for the interview, and I don't want to put her in an uncomfortable position ever to ask her something she doesn't want to talk about, but she also feels really well aware of what she feels comfortable talking about. I guess

Speaker 2  
I think she is, and I think she'll also like, tell you, like, I think that she has. I think, like she'll pivot if she needs to.

Speaker 1  
You never have to answer a question if you don't want to answer and it is, and it's a magic trick to not answer it, and people often forget that what question they asked. I mean, this isn't a good thing to tell a guest. Probably, this is probably not a good thing to get but anyway.

David Jackson  
But anyway, getting back to the fact that you still haven't answered my question, and now Amy's gonna kind of dumb it down. She's like, look, this is what I'm looking for.

Speaker 1  
Do you have it doesn't have to be a heavy question. It can be something small, anything that you think we should ask her today.

Speaker 2  
I mean, gosh, like, maybe because she's in a position of constantly being asked questions, and she is never in charge of what is being asked. Like, maybe it's asking her, like, what would you like to talk more about that you don't feel Whoa. That's a good friend to declare. You know, maybe, maybe she has a big announcement, or just something that she'd like to, like, reflect on.

Speaker 1  
You know what? That's a really good friend. Because what you're basically saying is, just check in with her and see if there's anything else she wants to talk about. Yeah, it's so true. She, like is tired of talking about you know that too. Yeah.

David Jackson  
So her question that we should ask Jen is, Hey, Jen, what do you want to talk about this from the person that knows her the best, and for me, I was like, that even Amy's like, oh yeah, you're a good friend. Well, you're a good friend, but you're a horrible question comer upper with her, holy cow. So I went back and looked from the beginning of that question to the shortest answer. It was almost two minutes, and yet I took that and boiled it down to 18 seconds.

Unknown Speaker  
What do you think I

Speaker 2  
should ask her today? Maybe because she's in a position of constantly being asked questions, and she is never in charge of what is being asked. Like, maybe it's asking her, like, what would you like to talk more about that you don't feel

Unknown Speaker  
Whoa, that's a good friend

Unknown Speaker  
to declare,

David Jackson  
you know. And if I had separate tracks, I could have muted out Amy going, Whoa, that's a good friend and let her finish her answer. So that's an example of, did they answer the question? We got a couple more of these. Yeah. What can really mess things up is when you know the guests really well. And so these next two examples are two friends of mine that I absolutely just love to hang out with. They're good friends. And the first one here is Daniel J Lewis. Now this comes from an old interview. When Daniel had released pod engagement, that's a great tool. He recently launched pod chapters. So if your media host doesn't allow you to put in chapters, you can use pod chapters for that. But in this case, we're talking about pod engagement. And I asked him, what's coming in the future? Nice, what else is coming? Because it's already

Daniel J. Lewis  
pretty handy. Yeah, there are integrations that now?

David Jackson  
So he started to answer the question, and then he took a little tangent

Daniel J. Lewis  
that I've built this myself, which my heart is really in every line of this code, like 10s of 1000s of lines of code that I've written for this my podcast reviews was programmed for me by another guy, and he did great work, and he was really good to work with. But now I did this myself. I've learned how to program since then, and I did this myself. So that means that at the slightest whim, when I get the idea of how to improve something, I can do that myself.

David Jackson  
So Daniel is explaining because he made it. He knows what's going to be coming in the future, but he still hasn't answered that question. And sometimes when somebody gives you information that's not exactly the answer, like this isn't bad information. But sometimes you can summarize this at the end of the interview and summarize what might be a longer answer down to a condensed version. But at this point, Daniel starts to answer the question.

Daniel J. Lewis  
So there are all kinds of things that I am planning.

David Jackson  
So if we go back now and put the question and the answer together, nice, what else is coming?

Daniel J. Lewis  
So there are all kinds of things that I am planning to build into this and tweaking along the way.

David Jackson  
And so one of the reasons I wanted to bring up that these are my friends, are those of the people that you're comfortable with and you're kind of just having a conversation, which is what you want it to sound like, but on the other hand, you don't want to waste people's time. So my next example here is from the lovely, the talented. Don't be fooled by cheap imitations. Katie SOS from the Women's meditation network. And here's the question, like, let's say you're trying to grow your audience. I'm going to do this new strategy, right? How long do you give it before you go and it's not working

Speaker 3  
well, I would love to tell you I'm I, you know, have the spreadsheets of all the tracking and all of that stuff. I it's only been recently that I have started to actually get really serious about that stuff.

David Jackson  
And so she's giving me an answer. But the question was, how long do you leave a test in? And she hasn't really started answering that yet.

Speaker 3  
Some of it, you see right away. I mean, aha.

David Jackson  
And there she is. She starts to answer the question. So when you take out, and really, there's a part of that beginning of that question that I could take out where I'm like. So you're trying to do this, you're trying to do this. And then I asked the question. We don't need the background of my question either. How long do you give it before you go?

Speaker 3  
That's not working. I don't know. It depends on what the strategy is. It depends on who the people are. It depends on what you're seeing. I mean, with some strategies.

David Jackson  
And so there you go. Now, what does this do? It keeps the pace moving. I don't really think it's necessary for me to listen to someone think it through, like, gosh, was it Tuesday or Thursday? I don't know. I think, let's see, I had a coffee on Tuesday and then, no, just get to the answer. Now there are times it's not 100% as always with all even heard Katie say it, it depends, but many times for me, I give people a lot of background on why I'm asking a question, I cut that out, and then I listen to their answer, and even if they answer the question, the next question is great. They answered my question, does it deliver value to my audience? So those are some quick examples of how do you edit for content, and it all starts with knowing your audience. Because how do you know what stays and what goes? Because you know your audience, and that's where you want to go. Hang with them, whether that's on a YouTube channel, reading the comments, hanging out. Well, when you can tell me your audience's eye color, you're in the right spot. But the more you can spend in Facebook groups and Reddit and things like that, seeing what they're looking for, that's how you know what to edit. A little later, I'm gonna play with some tools to clean up some bad audio, because we all know not every guest has spent that 80 bucks on a Samson Q to you and their audio sounds like caca, the School of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, we're gonna kind of get slightly nerdy here. This is a little too deep. We do have chapters. You can skip to the next one, and we're going to talk about the different tools. But here's the thing in the too long didn't read, better known as TLDR. Tweak a knob. Does it sound better, good, then keep it if it sounds worse, don't it really comes down to that. But what should you do first? Well, I read about six different articles on this, and it is the ultimate It depends. But what they say, and I'm kind of summarizing these, is try to repair and clean up before you try to, like, shape it so remove bad takes, obviously, mouth clicks, plosives. What's a plosive? That's where here. Let's see if I can just make one. I'm going to take my windscreen off my Rode pod mic, USB, and I will say, directly into the microphone, please bring Pizza Pronto. There you go. Here, all those P's there, and the bees. And we're just we're jarring. Yeah, that's a plosive, and that's why now, with my windscreen on, I am, if this was 12 o'clock, I am now pointing my mouth at 10 o'clock, I'm talking across the microphone. You know, any kind of hum, you know, because you've got bad electricity, anything like that. Cleaning that up first. Then there's, if you want to get totally nerdy, gain staging. Some people call it normalization. And what this does, from what I understand, if the maximum level was minus 12. And it's weird, because we go up to zero was minus 12 and the lowest was minus six. It basically looks at the top and the lowest, and then kind of makes the every not so much everything, but the lowest one go up to minus nine, it splits the difference. And so what this does, why you want to do any kind of leveling of audio, whatever it is first, is this gives all the other things we're going to play with, a nice kind of consistent input. And it also has what they call headroom, which basically means a little room to boost things up. And then there is your EQ. And what a lot of people don't realize is they look at, what can I turn up? In some ways it's better to turn the other thing down. So if I want to make things a little more clear. Accent, my S's and T's. Everybody grabs the treble and cranks it. It might make more sense to take the base and turn it down, usually anything beneath, especially 80 hertz, I guess is what we're talking there is just a rumble. It's stuff you don't even feel, so you'll hear, and this is always confusing. A high pass filter is saying that we're going to cut out the low end. So whatever it is, high pass means just that, if it's high end trouble stuff, you get a pass. If you're not, if you're really bassy, you can you're not. And so it's going to cut out the low end. And so what this does is it keeps, in theory, the useful sound, so you're not trying to compress things that are too bassy or too trebly. There's a thing called a noise gate, and this is always one of those, if needed, because sometimes you don't need it. But what this means is, you know, you've been to the apart the amusement park, you must be this tall to ride the ride. We're saying you need to be this loud to make it to the listeners ears. And so if you have the sound of the dryer in the background, that's only, you know, a foot and a half tall, but when you talk, it's four feet tall. So you can say, Oh, well, the dryer is one and a half feet tall. Let's set the gate for two, meaning my voice is loud enough to get over the two foot wall, but the dryer at one and a half feet and I'm just using feet, just so we can visualize this is not tall enough to get over the two foot wall. Thus the dryer sound won't make it into the audio. However, when you talk, if you have the dryer running in the background, you're going to hear it while you're talking. So that's one of those. We always just want to make things as good as they can before we hit record. So that's something you might do here. Another one is compression. And in a nutshell, a compressor makes the loud things a little softer and the soft things a little louder, but that may make things like breaths, room tone more audible, because that's noise that shouldn't be there, and especially if you use something like all phonic off phonic, I've had people that are somewhat loud breathers. They're a little, maybe a little too close to the microphone, and, you know, and then so it sounds all of a sudden. You're like, Well, Mr. Vader, tell me about your you know, whatever. So that can be bad. A de Esser is, if somebody has a really clear mic. They really boosted the trouble. And it's kind of just it cut. It makes you blink when you hear it. It's so clear a de Esser goes up to the very, very bright settings and just backs them off a bit. And then overall EQ is again. Now that we have everything, we have it compressed. We've removed the noise things like that, a gentle a gentle boost to kind of warm things up, maybe clear things up. That's where you would do this. And then the last thing you want to do is work on your loudness and what you're looking for, the current standards in podcasting is, if you're doing a stereo file, you should be at minus 16 luffs. And we don't really care what that stands for. That's just the way we measure minus 19 luffs if you are mono. Now, I'm a rebel.

David Jackson  
I go minus 14. Why? Because I've been walking on a street with traffic, and I can't hear my show. So it's one of those, again, where the minus 14, it's a smaller number, and yet that makes it louder. So I go up a little more for that. Now we're going to talk plugins here in a minute. So if you're like, Wait, how do I do all that stuff? And also, there is a site you can go to to for free, have it tell you How loud is my file. One is loudness dot app. And almost all of these, they're free. So you know you're probably going to have to put in some sort of email address or something of that nature. But for me, I'm sitting here in Hindenburg, and almost everything I do is in the yellow, because that's where I want it. That's a good volume. Occasionally I get a little excited and it's a little too loud. But basically, if it's in the yellow, you're probably pretty close to being loud or loud enough where you need to be. Now the bottom line on all that stuff I just said is, as I said at the beginning, tweak it does it sound better? And what you also want to do is I listen through my computer. Computer speakers, I will record something before I upload it, I listen to it through earbuds, because that's how a lot of you are now going to hear it is through earbuds. And then you ask yourself, Does it sound better or worse? Because so many times we make changes, and I think we're making changes just to make it different, and we're not asking ourselves, are we making it better? Because sometimes you can kind of go crazy, losing your mind over this stuff, and then it's like, okay, so I'm going to use the noise reduction. But does the noise reduction come after the compressor? Or when do I do the EQ switch it around? The thing I love about Hindenburg is I can look at all the things I have turned on and go like I use a thing called the Sheps omni channel. It is a compressor, noise gate, de Esser and EQ all in one, and I can move it before the compressor even that's built into Hindenburg, or just just play. I know it sounds weird. I There are times I work at pod page, and one of the things I tell people all the time, because we make websites for podcasters, is just go play. What does it look like if you do this? Do you like it? Keep it. If you don't, don't, you're not really going to break anything. And the same is goes for your audio. So in a second, we're going to hear some tools that clean up bad audio the school of podcasting.

Unknown Speaker  
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Jackson  
All right, so I made some bad audio that sounds like this. All right, so this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm going to turn up a fan noise. There we go, and I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. And so here is that same thing run through a new service called Audio regen. It is from waves, so it's called Voice regen. It's $5 a month for 300 minutes, all right. So this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go. And I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. So it's a little muffled, but it took out all the noise. Here's all phonic All right. So this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go, and I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. And here's audacities built in noise reduction, all right. So this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go, and I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. And the next one from accent eyes. It's called, it's a plugin called dx, revive Pro. All right, so this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go. And I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. And here is descript studio sound, all right. So this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go. And I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. Next up the free version of Adobe enhance, which is in Adobe podcasts. All right, so this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm going to turn up a fan noise. There we go. And I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now. And so I upgraded, paid the 10 bucks a month to have a little more control over this, where you're able to say how much background you're eliminating. And so I left a little bit of background in because it made my voice a little clearer in Adobe, and it sounded like this. All right. So this is me recording on a Mac laptop. I'm gonna turn up a fan noise. There we go. And I got a little music in the background. So this is some pretty horrible audio right now, and that seemed to be the tricky part was adding noise in the middle of something. And for me, the one that sounded the best was the one that cost the least, which is the new one from waves the voice regen. Now, this doesn't take out any UMS or your no. Knows there's no settings. You upload it, it does it, and then you get what you take. And so if you wanted more clarity, I would think I would go with Adobe, because it's $10 a month, where descript, which would probably be my number two, is who knows a month, because they keep changing their plan, and nobody can figure it out. I am paying 35 ish dollars a month, and of course, that comes with remote recording, not just the studio sound, and that whole thing that descript is, and I will say that when I logged into it today, I haven't been in descript in a while, and I don't recognize it at all. I don't know what they're doing over there, but enjoy the learning curve, because it never ends. So as always, it depends the accent ice plugin, the one I talked about that is $300 and I bought that because I got tired of paying off phonic and these other people, and I had a client that just kept handing me horrendous audio, and so it saved me so much time that it was worth that. But the voice regen for five bucks a month, if all you're getting is bad audio with room noise, and you can clean up the ums and your nose later. You know that one for me for five bucks is a great deal of links to all of these in the show notes. And my apologies, because I realize listening to like an audio test like that, that's real close to falling into cruel and unusual punishment, which, of course, is against the law per the Constitution of the United States. The bottom line of all this stuff is, if you can take the time to have a good mic, have good mic placement, have a decent area to set up that's not surrounded by glass or things like that, the better the recording, the less time you have to spend trying to make something that doesn't sound very good. Sound listenable, and that is my goal. Listenable. Yes, I would love pristine audio, but when it comes to guests and other things, I'm just going for listenable, because, again, it's going to be heard through earbuds in computer speakers and maybe in the car, if you're lucky. Yeah, one of my favorite people is coming back soon with a new podcast, the one and only Eric Kay Johnson. You might know him as the podcast talent coach, and I was digging through these old episodes and such, looking for editing examples, and I found Eric talking about editing

Erik K. Johnson  
should you go in and take out questions that flopped? I would spend more time doing that than I would cleaning up the ums and the UHS and the lip smacking and everything. If you ask a question and it doesn't go where you intended it to go, it doesn't give you a great answer. If it wastes your listeners time, then go take that question and answer out completely. I would spend more time doing that because it's going to make your interview stronger than spending time taking out the stammers, because that's not going to make your interview stronger. That's just going to make your audio a little cleaner.

David Jackson  
Amen brother Eric and I'll put a link out to his stuff in the show notes. Just go to school of podcasting.com/ 1023 but when it comes to editing, the key ingredient is not the software. What? Yeah, it's not the software. How do you know what to cut is based on your audience. The more you know your audience, the better you can edit. I always like to take podcasting out of podcasting, and I always compare it to, in some cases, a meal. If I know I've got a vegetarian coming, I'm not serving meatloaf. So the more you know your audience, the better the content, and the less time you spend on editing. I remember once I interviewed somebody about storytelling, and they were from the video side, but I wanted to talk to them about storytelling, and I told him, I said, Look, if you start talking about F stops and lenses, that's going to end up on the editing room floor, and he's like, Okay, I got it, but that was kind of his jam. And he started talking about cameras and lenses. And you know what? You never heard it. Why? Because back in whatever 2010 11, we weren't really interested that much in cameras and lenses. Today, maybe I saw the guys from Thinkific, and they had a link to the lens they were using, and it was $2,000 for the lens, not just the camera, just the lens. And those guys are doing IT pro, but that's why, yeah, holy cow. Speaking of them, I'm gonna put a link to their episode. Yeah, because they talk about how, and I guess this isn't new, but they talk about two channels that were making $30,000 a month from YouTube, income, like from YouTube, and they got demonetized. And so the video was talking about how it's kind of funny. YouTube, apparently, is using AI to find AI. And the interesting thing was, in this one example, it wasn't really AI, and so they talk about what you can do to not be demonetized. Now, they didn't lose their channel completely, although I know people that have done that, they just were like, Yeah, you know how you're making this money from YouTube. Not anymore, so that'll be in the show notes again. School of podcasting.com/ 1022 next week, I'm looking forward speaking of editing this episode, because I talked to this guest for probably close to two hours, because she's just that interesting. It's Jana Marie from the big lash energy, and I had her do humble brag theater.

Speaker 4  
Yes, I won eight signal awards. I've been nominated for one ambi and I was nominated for two Podcast Awards as best female host and best storyteller, most inspirational podcast, the one that I'm the most proud of is I won gold for Best Writing in the comedy category, and I actually beat Barack Obama's speech writer.

David Jackson  
And the interesting thing is, it's a solo show, and you'll find out some unique ways that she's using to grow her audience and her unique attitude in the fact that, at least right now, she's not trying to make money.

Stewey Griffin
I was making radio shows for fun. What?

David Jackson  
What? What can you do? Wait? Is that allowed? Wow, never miss an episode. Go to school of podcasting.com/follow. And that, of course, is the page that is automatically made because I am now using pod page Hooray for the School of podcasting website. For more information, check out tripod page.com and when you're ready to start plan grow, or if you want to monetize your podcast, go over to school of podcasting.com click on the Join Now button and get access to our courses, our coaching and our amazing community. And it comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do. Can't wait to see what we do together until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is dismissed.

The SOP Band 
If you like the show, please share it with a friend. If you like the show, pretty, pretty. Share it with a friend right

David Jackson  
now. Audio regen, what's the name of it? Survey says, Where did it go? This is now a blooper. Voice regen. There we go. Voice regen, links in the show notes. School of podcasting.com/ 1000 and now I don't know what the number is, great, wonderful, and it's 1023 phenomenal show prep. Just check your show notes. Yeah.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai