By now you’re taken all the steps necessary to produce a professional sounding mix. It’s loud, intelligible, free of distortion and nicely balanced. If it was a man it’d look like Brad Pitt from the neck up, King Dong from the waist down, and have the mind of a young Richard Feynman. If it were a woman she’d look like a young Kristen Scott Thomas, have no gag-reflex whatsoever and the conversational ability of Dorothy Parker.
Your podcast is hot.
The final stage in making things perfect is mastering. This is taking all of the tracks you’ve been working with and ‘bouncing them down’ to a stereo file you’ll distribute to listeners.
Mastering a good mix is simple, but here are a few tricks it’s worth knowing which go a long way to making radio sound so punchy and alive.
Compress
Multiband compression is the reason that ads sound louder than TV shows and why podcast radio shows sound louder than shows recorded by amateurs.
Normally compression (which we discussed here) treats all frequency bands the same way. Therefore, if you have a loud bass drum on one track and a vocal on another, each time the drum sounds both the drum and the vocal will be turned down. Normally that’s not what you want. Multiband compressors work like a number of compressors in parallel, with each one looking at a specific frequency band in isolation. In that way, only the frequencies which are loud are turned down, leaving the others unaffected. Putting your mix through a multiband compressor makes tracks sound louder relative to each other and will give your show that ’sheen’ you associate with radio (that Sheen who’s dad’s on the West Wing your probably associate more with hookers.)
If you don’t have a multi-band compressor you can use a regular compressor, just go easy.
Add Reverb
Adding a little reverb to your whole mix works to glue sounds together. Why it works doesn’t matter, I can’t be bothered to explain, and you don’t really care about. It’s just magic. Try it and hear how much it helps.
EQ
EQ’ing the mix is a non-obvious, improvement most podcasters miss. Roll off (i.e. gradually reduce) frequencies above 14 KHz because, unless your podcast is aimed at an audience of bats, there’s very little information up there (music is an exception to this – high frequencies are where the ’sparkle’ is).
Roll off frequencies from about 500Hz down. Most shows have too much bass content which makes them sound ‘muddy’ and means, because small speakers (like headphones and computer/car speakers) are bad as reproducing deep sounds clearly, people will play your show more quietly to avoid distortion.
Excite
An exciter adds high frequency content to a signal based on the information it contains, resulting in sounds that seem clearer and fresher. Many podcasts include tracks which have already been encoded as MP3’s, a process notorious for removing high-frequency information. An exciter can make your MP3’s sound significantly better. If you have a PC you can download free software that includes an exciter here. If you’re on a Mac, like me – sorry, we’re all excited enough already apparently.
Normalize
When you’ve done everything else, normalize your show again. This will return your tracks to maximum volume after that last touch of compression. Feels good doesn’t it. Mmmm…. normalization.
So that’s it. Six installments worth of little tips, that each add 5-10%, and in combination can make your podcasts sound 50-100% better than it does right now. Use them freely and credit me generously – or be on my list of people to sue in few years when I need fast cash. Have fun.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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