Compressors used to look like this.
This series, which is about improving the sound quality of your podcast, has finally reached the recording stage. If you’ve been waiting patiently while I’ve talked about gear – this is where it gets cheap and practical. Stop bitching.
Most podcasters pretend they’re DJ’s when they’re recording their shows. They’re not (unless they’re middle-aged, fat and pissed off they can’t get a paying gig on TV).
DJ’s produce their shows live, playing music, jingles and special effects (known as ‘drops’) when they need them. That’s why producing a radio show requires a lot of gear, some coordination and a producer (payola and self-loathing help too.)
Podcasters don’t have to work live but many choose to because people, erroneously, compare podcasting to radio broadcasting. In the absence of easy to use software which replicates a radio studio, trying to get a perfect live take makes everything harder than it should be. Without someone to produce the show, it’s almost impossible to get a decent result plus, as you need to run all your effects live and in real-time, using one old PC for everything becomes impossible.
Software that makes ‘live’ podcasting (more) simple is coming, but it’s coming like Bob Dole – in a slow dribble. Even when it arrives, you’ll need hardware with enough power to do everything you need it to on the fly.
Until then, and for anyone who wants more control, has little to no radio experience, and can afford to spend some more time putting their show together, recording podcasts in sections is the way to go.
It involves recording each audio element, loading them into a multi-track audio tool (like Audacity), applying effects and then mixing the result down to a stereo MP3.
The first part of that process, recording your audio, is known as ‘tracking’. I know a lot of you will think that it’s called recording but, technically, recording is what we call the process of tracking, mixing and mastering a piece of audio.
If you call tracking recording in a professional environment you’ll almost certainly get punched in the teeth.
When you’re tracking you’re trying to get the cleanest, loudest signal from your mic to your hard drive. You want it clean so it can be heard. You want it loud because, the louder the signal, the less noise will be apparent when it’s played back at normal levels.
Here’s how to get the best signal possible:
1. Watch the input meters on your recording software while playing a sample of the audio you’re recording. Adjust the distance between the microphone and the sound source until things are loud and undistorted.
Adjust the volume of your mic input until the signal strength meter’s are just touching the red zone (or the -3db mark if you have db markings).
2. Use a compressor. Analogue recording has a couple of real advantages over digital. One of them is that when a signal gets too loud, and distortion occurs, it sound nice. Digital distortion sounds worse than John Ashcroft acapella, but you can stop it from occurring by using a compressor as a signal limiter.
Simply speaking, a compressor is an automatic volume control which turns down the volume on an input signal when it reaches a certain level. You can specify when the compressor starts to turn down the volume, and how quickly it turns down the volume when it’s working.
When a signal’s been compressed, the differences between the loudest and quietest parts of the signal are reduced. This makes the quiet parts of your signal (including the noise) seem louder.
If you set your compressor to turn down the volume radically, just before your signal is about to distort, you can prevent it from ever reaching the point where it’s distorting. That’s known as ‘limiting’ and as digital distortion sounds so horrible, it’s smart to put your mic through a compressor while you’re tracking.
3. Don’t add other effects. Anything you add to your signal while tracking you’ll be unable to remove. If you want to use echo, reverb or any other ‘artistic’ effects apply them later. That way, if you make a mistake you can undo it and try again.
For tracking that’s it. Get the loudest, un-distorted signal you can into your computer and leave all the processing and effects work for when you’re mixing things down.
In the next installment we’ll take a look at mixing (and in celebration of that I’ll write it while drinking a cocktail).
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