It’s sounding a bit toppy in the cans man!
If you’ve followed this series so far you will by now have a good mic, running into a decent, probably free, piece of software and you will have used it to lay down some clean, loud audio tracks.
Now you need to compile your audio clips, jingles and drops into a show (make sure you have fart sound effect – they always kill).
Mixing music is hard, because you have to make a load of disperate instruments, recorded at different times, sound like a band playing together. Podcasts are simpler, you can focus on making everything sound clear and distinct. It’s more like radio, a lot easier and less likely to get you laid.
When you’re mixing you can change three things about any track, its tone (via equalization, effects and processors), its position (from left to right between the speakers) and it’s volume.
Tone
Effects and processors are a big topic we can ignore because they’re mostly used to produce artistic effects. If you aren’t interested in trying to recreate ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or ‘Justified’ (for our younger readers) you’ll only need to bother with a couple of effects and processors. All of which can improve perceived sound quality when used correctly.
Don’t think you have to use effects, or that they’ll automatically improve anything. The best recordings are often the simplest. If you’ve done a good job laying down your tracks you won’t need to do much to make them sound great.
(The only effects that are used on pretty much everything are compression and EQ.)
Compression – used more aggressively, compression can improve the ‘tone’ of a voice. More sophisticated compressors have a very real ’sound’ and that’s what makes late-night DJ’s sound so much better than you do when they step up to a mic. You can discover how yours sounds by playing with it. Using compression on vocals means that your podcast won’t jump up and down in volume when you start to scream and shout, or drop off when you whisper. They make balancing your tracks easier.
Chorus – ‘thickens’ sounds to give them weight. Some people use it on vocals but less is always more. If your vocal track(s) sounds thin, a touch of chorus might fix it.
Reverb – this is not echo. Reverb is the ’shimmer’ you get off bathroom tiles as you hot wet body gently hammers into the person you love while the water falls. It can add ‘life’ to a flat sound and can be used to integrate sounds together, making them sound as if they’re all being heard in the same room. If your room has lots of natural reverb you won’t be able to do much by adding more.
EQ – Sounds with lots of information in the same frequency bands can sound muddy (if your podcast has two hosts this might be a problem). To separate them and add clarity gently cut different parts of their audio spectrum using EQ. It’s always better to cut, than boost. Boosting ads noise and distortion, cutting is far kinder to the sound and produces a better result.
Gating – A noise gate automatically mutes any sound on a track which is below a pre-set level. You can use a gate to get rid of unwanted noises during portions of your track which are supposed to be silent. Be careful with noise gates, they can sound very obvious if overused.
Noise removal – Noise removal used to be the kind of thing only organizations like the BBC had access to. Audacity does it for free. Noise removal works by taking a ‘fingerprint’ of your recording during a period which is supposed to be silent, and then mathematically subtracting that fingerprint from an entire recording. It sounds like magic and works incredibly well (used gently). It can make in a room polluted with AC noise, fans and open windows plausible. Noise removal doesn’t work on sounds that aren’t constant (like car horns or your mom asking you what you’re doing in your room).
Normalization – analyses a recorded signal and makes it as loud as possible without distortion, turning the volume up until the loudest part of the track plays back at maximum volume. Use it on every track before you mix them together.
Position
You can use pan controls to place each track in a different position between the speakers. Doing this will create a soundstage, put space between your sounds and make everything sound clearer and less confused. Tips:
- Keep voices in the center (or close to it)
- Don’t move things around. People don’t suddenly jump from one side of the studio to the other.
- Don’t pan things all the way to one speaker. It’s distracting, very 1967, and will make people listening on headphones think they’re broken.
Volume
You’ve already used compression (which is a volume control) to make the level of each track fairly even. Mixing, the way it looks in movies on TV during the ‘cops checking out the musician who they suspect killed his girlfriend’ scene, is all about adjusting the volume of tracks relative to one another.
In a podcast, most tracks can be adjusted once and then left alone, creating a good mix is just about making things clear and audible. If one of your tracks changes volume dramatically during the show you can ‘ride the fader’ and adjust its volume whenever it’s needed.
Because your tracks were recorded loud, with light compression, and then normalized, you can mix like a pro. That means never raising the volume of tracks above the level at which they were recorded. It may be counter-intuitive but it works because amplification adds distortion and noise. It’s why you work so hard on getting the loudest signals recorded to begin with. Want to make a track louder? Lower the volume of all the tracks around it, leaving your chosen track where it is.
Now you’ve mixed your track and it’s sounding good, your final chance to add a little professional sparkle is the final stage in the recording process, and this series, is mastering.
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