Podcasting has exploded in popularity recently and for many recording engineers, it has meant newer sources of revenue. In this article, Damian Kearns tells how he turned a hobby into a significant source of income and breaks down what steps are critical to making successful, great sounding podcasts.

Living The Loudlife

Back in 2008  my friend, Joe, got it in his head that we ought to do our own podcast.

We had a lot of fun but neither of us had a clue how to really make a “go” of it as an income stream, nor did we aspire to do it as anything more than a hobby. Over the course of 7 years, we made 20 episodes of a series that sounded great and were lots of fun, but few people actually heard.

Five years ago, prospective podcasts clients started calling, emailing and messaging me about working on their projects. Suddenly, our old series, The Loudlife, became my business’s demonstration material and I was queried not just about my recording and editing skills, my production techniques and insight into delivery and show structure were also in demand. 

Podcast work makes up 30% of my business’s total revenue for this calendar year. This vast, nontraditional clientbase is evolving into a core part of my project portfolio. My podcast works for clients have won awards and earned me a reputation as a podcast specialist. 

Based on my experience in front of the mic and behind the board, the aim of this article is to provide an outline for making the most of the podcast medium.

Getting Started Is Easy

Whatever your starting place is for the central idea that drives your podcast creatively, good podcasts need a lot of attention and thought before the show starts. Here’s a list of primary considerations:

• Have a point. Podcasts that are directionless aren’t marketable and the lack of structure means there’s no ‘target’ audience. In other words, not having a point means a total, complete misfire: No targets hit, few or no ears listening. Having talking points written out as a framework prior to recording will keep the conversation going in the right direction so as point number one, a written framework is a must. 

• Rehearse. Whether you’re the star of your own show, the recordist for someone else’s series, or a director of talent, ‘rehearsal’ is vital. Record 3-5 minutes of content and play it back. If it sounds good, you’re in the zone. If not, retool, rethink, and try again until you get it right. 

• Nail down the format. Are you a single host? Co-host? Small group? Large ensemble? Do you have guests? The more people involved, the harder things are to schedule. Really, really ruminate on this until you figure out exactly what number of regular participants is tenable over the long term.

• Gather your pieces. If you’re in need of music, sound effects, commercials or voiceover bits, bring them online as early in the process as possible. A good number of my clients use services like APM Music or Extreme Music for their music choices. I typically cover the SFX end of things myself. The VO can come from a variety of places and I usually like to have it before I start editing. If you’re lucky enough to have a commercial sponsor, the smart play is to read the copy yourself so it fits neatly into your show. If not, ask to keep the commercials or interstitial stuff brief. 

• Decide the periodicity of your podcast. It is absolutely critical that you understand that people will wait for something they like, as long as they know when it’s coming. If you look at how streamers like Netflix or Disney+ release their video content, you’ll note that some shows are immediately available as an entire season, while others are released weekly, in episodic format. There’s an incredible amount of thought behind this and the main driver is of course, maximizing the amount of viewers and hits on the site. 

Periodicity necessitates a solid production schedule. My best podcast clients can tell me exactly what the schedule will look like 4-6 months before production starts and when they want the episodes to come online for the public. 

• Get the word out. Find places on social media or in the real world to tell people about your podcast. Example: One of my clients is a hospital network here in Toronto and on my advice, they placed posters in the common areas of the hospitals to advertise their series. The result of this was instant, sustainable success for their download/streaming projections. After all, their target audience are patients, donors and the peers of the doctors and researchers featured on the show. This low tech approach worked because the audience quite literally shows up inside buildings in which my clients work.

Social media and websites are even better tools for reaching broader audiences than simple terrestrial signage. The key here is to strategically pick sites, groups, pages and social media services where your intended audience hangs out. Become the object of conversation on these platforms. Broadcast your message regularly and try to avoid becoming background noise to larger events. Contests, quizzes, prizes or surprises are great tools for bumping up engagement numbers. 

• Gear Up. Understanding which gear will suit your needs mightn’t be as straightforward as you’d think. Carefully choose the studio, booth, mics, software and consider whether your interface has enough mic preamps and cue sends to get the job done.

If you’re going to be recording remotely for your podcast, that’s a consideration that has to happen upfront and in my opinion, a conferencing host like Zoom or Source Connect NOW or Microsoft Teams has to be a mutual choice amongst your team. 

Recording It Right

For talent, being in the right mood to lay down tracks is the ideal. This means general talking points are written out before the session, scripts are provided where needed as well as mood lighting, comfortable chairs, sit/stand desks, decent mics and possibly even the right libation to help lubricate the linguistics.

Microphone choices can make or break your sound. When co-hosting and recording in the same small room in close proximity, I have typically opted for affordable mic/headset units like AKG’s HSC 271. The over-ear, closed headset design of this unit helps minimize crosstalk through its snug fit and easy to maneuver flexible mic boom. These ones do nicely for self-hosted podcasts and require about 5 minutes of setup each time. What you need from a headset mic is the ability to yell or laugh loudly without the mic breaking up. If you end up going with a headset mic, make sure it’s snug and comfortable, the cabling is sturdy and take the time to give it a ‘yell check’ before you buy. 

USB desktop microphones are another option, as are traditional studio mics. The points to consider here are the mic’s pickup or polar pattern to minimize room reverb, whether you need to invest in a decent pop filter or not (to tame those popping plosives) and whether or not it might be handy to have some sort of adjustable boom arm because people do tend to want to move around. 

Multiple traditional mic’s can sound great in a group setting. In 2018, I recorded a podcast episode called BreakUp. We had a host, two lawyers and a judge in there and two producers in the control room with me while we were doing the recording sessions. 

In the booth, I used a U87Ai, a U87 clone by Advanced Audio and a pair of MKH 416’s so the two lawyers could sit closely and face each other without a whole lot of spill into each other's microphone. I time aligned everything during the final mix and turned off any mic that wasn’t in use.

I was originally going to go with headset mics but there was no budget to buy me a fourth pair so I resorted to traditional mics. If I’d actually had four shotgun microphones–tight polar patterned mic’s with excellent rear rejection- my work would have been that much easier. 

BreakUp ended up turning out well enough that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation put it out over traditional FM radio. For the talent, the producers and myself, this was validation of our attention to detail which started with their research, lots of script meetings, technical workflow conversations and the tight integration between Pro Tools and a different DAW called Hindenburg. The producers – journalists - were using this to collect and edit their materials so I installed it on my system as well. The pro version of Hindenburg can import/export AAF which was vital to our collaboration. Check out the features. It’s the best podcasting workstation I’ve come across. Now, it even opens PT and PTX files.

Clean recordings is one thing. Talent being directed or produced is quite another. I spend a lot of time advising people on this side of things and in a nutshell, here’s what my typical direction is:

• Record yourself or your talent for a few minutes and play it back, if everyone’s happy, start rolling. 

• If the talent isn’t animated enough, direct them to push their energy until they start to sound slightly cartoony to themselves. 95% of the time, that’s when a voice hits the sweet spot for the listener. 

• Roll on rehearsals and keep everything. There might be some gold in there that can be mined for later use. This has happened to be the case for me many times. 

• If you start hearing a lot of clicks or mic thumps, back up. You’re too close. Back up a few inches and give it another go or move the headset mic a little farther from your mouth.

• If the talent is too animated, give them more level in their headphones. That’ll calm them down. If the talent isn’t animated enough, they might be hearing themselves too loudly. 

The other major consideration for those of us not using USB microphones is the audio interface. A single person can get away with a single mic input and a single headphone feed. I like a bit of redundancy and a lot of quality in my hardware, I tend to look at interfaces that have multiple mic preamps and at least two headphone/cue sends. I often mention names like Universal Audio, Focusrite and  AVID to hobbyists or novices. If you can spare the money, I really like the Universal Audio interfaces on the entry level of their product range. They also come with great software plugins and can typically aggregate with other UA hardware if you’re looking to upsize later on. 

Remote Control

Remote recordings have proliferated since the start of the pandemic. Many professionals were recording talent this way long before 2020 but it seems now the rest of the world has gotten into the game. 

For the Production Expert podcast, Source-Connect NOW is what’s typically used. It’s free and easy to use. All you need is the latest version of Google Chrome installed on your devices and you’re good to go. I’ve used this service dozens of times. When I want something a little higher quality with a lot more flexibility, I’ll use my Source-Connect Pro software. If you’re having any issue getting audio into and out of your DAW, consider Source-Nexus as a routing option. It has some pretty powerful configurability, which I outlined here some time ago. 

Zoom and  Microsoft Teams have been used on some of my podcast work. Though I find their audio quality questionable at the best of times, one thing these services offer is audio to text transcription. Audio to text transcription is vital to the paper editing process, since a marked up script can be used for editing and often comes complete with timecode numbers and speakers’ names. 

If you aren’t receiving transcripts and need one, try Descript. It’s powerful, quick and intuitive. Descript scans an audio file, asks who is speaking by providing sample snippets of audio, then generates a timecoded script with each speaker properly named. It’ll even filter um’s out of the script or even out of the audio if you want to take it that far. Some people also use the ‘Studio Sound’ feature to ''improve the quality” of their voice recordings. Notice I used quotations around the word “improve”. The results are very subjective.

Sometimes we’ve got to live with audio quality issues, in favour of having content. Since the start of the pandemic, one of my podcast clients has had to go from nice sounding 96 kHz, 24 bit studio records to rough sounding Zoom interviews because all the interviewees are doctors, clinicians and researchers and they are too busy and rightly cautious about getting sick. There are times when audio quality will suffer but as long as the content is still there, people will listen. 

Something I'm using to mitigate the ‘Zoom effect’ on that project’s audio is Accentize’s DeRoom Pro. It really can take the bite out of Zoom audio by drying it up a bit. As yet, I can’t find anything that turns Zoom audio into good sounding recordings so I tend to experiment a lot with the tools I’ve got. 

When I’ve had to record sound on the road or at a remote location, I’ve employed my handy H4 or H2n recorders. A trusty compact recorder can capture audio discretely or on location easily and since about 2006, I’ve been using mine to gather 96 kHz, 24 bit audio for a variety of reasons. In fact, these products can be the way to record entire podcast series, since they also have mic inputs and headphone outputs. 

Podcasts can vary wildly in terms of their audio quality. What’s key to success is that everything sounds as professional as possible. By making wise mic or audio streaming choices, we can make the most out of the performances we need to build our shows. 

Assembling The Pieces

I’ll be brief and to the point: Everything you receive should come to you as an uncompressed .wav file, not an mp3. Start with the best sounding materials possible, then when you compress your final mix to mp3 or some other lossy audio format, the materials have only had to go through that reductive process once.

In terms of working order, start with the dialogue assembly first, prior to adding any other pieces, unless you need to add the odd piece of music or effect to work out timings. You should work with a script if possible so that you can edit out what you don’t think works on paper. All of the projects I do for clients include a script for paper editing prior to my work. I receive the script with the audio files and then assemble the show, dogmatically following the script onscreen.

To assemble using a timecoded script, I work backwards in time. This is because when I make an edit near the beginning of my timeline, everything later on can shift forward in time. Assembling in reverse chronology maintains the accuracy of the timecode numbers on the script. Once the assembly is completed, I’ll fine cut from beginning to end,  since I no longer need a timecoded script to tell me what goes where.

Now, On To The Edit

Fine cutting is the process of removing any unwanted audio while ensuring the rhythmic flow of each sentence. 

While I’m fine cutting, I also try to get my noise reduction, EQ, compression and any reverb or delay settings happening so by the time I’m done editing, I’m also premixed and most noise issues are cleaned up. I wrote about my dialogue mixing techniques in this article, so if you’re looking for help figuring out how to mix dialogue, that’s a good place to start. To quickly sum, I like to do as much processing as I can with real-time plugins while I’m working so if there’s anything I can’t fix, hide, swap, audiosuite or deal with any other way, I know precisely what problems have to be fixed offline in iZotope’s RX standalone editor which is where the final stage of my repair work happens. 

Dialogue editing is really best done with few or very short crossfades. Really great edits don’t need crossfades between words at all. If you find yourself crossfading dialogue edits for more than a few milliseconds, you’re likely overlapping audio too much. 

In Pro Tools, I work in what's called ‘Shuffle’ mode. As I cut out um’s, uh’s, so’s, you knows, likes, and other vocal stumbling blocks, the timeline ripples to fill in the areas I cut. Sometimes I need to build back in pauses so what I do is identify ‘fill’, which is just dead air or room tone inside my mic recordings. I’m always listening to rhythmic flow so being able to add time here or there with fill is a great way to keep things sounding natural.

While I’m editing, I often instantiate iZotope’s RX De-plosive plugin and the Mouth De-click plugin (after any real-time noise reduction and before my compressor) to find the most gentle settings I can use to fix everything. If you look at the picture below, I save the settings inside the plugin window and they actually show up in the RX standalone software so when I offline repair my audio, my settings are waiting there for me, named and everything. Just hit the three little white lines with the white dots beside them above the black part of the plugin’s UI and this menu will pop open so you can save a preset that is shared with the RX standalone software. Again, any plosives or mouth clicks that get through my gentle settings will require an offline process with heavier reduction settings applied only where necessary. 

Beyond the dialogue, music and SFX need to be in there to add form and structure. If possible, theme music is a great way to brand your shows and create breaks in the middle to allow segmenting or easy editing.

Sound effects can be simple or complex, depending on the scope of the podcast. In my own series, I used SFX for comedic effect or to create pivot points. In the Odyssey Theatre’s The Other Path, Foley and sound effects were as thick and full as any TV show I’ve worked on and took days to design. Voiceover can be a much simpler mechanism to create structure since all it requires is a good script and a decent performance. 

As with any production, it’s the interplay of elements that creates a successful balance. The great thing about this medium is that, unless you’re working with video, the structure can be very interpretive.

The Mix

Podcast mixing is all about levels and headphone monitoring. While I usually edit and mix everything through my studio monitors so I can hear those lower octaves in the human hearing range, my final pass entails a listen on headphones. I’ve an old pair of Apple earbuds I plug into my system to listen through sometimes but more often I use a nicer set of headphones. It’s important to hear what the end user will hear so if you’re working on podcasts, you’d better listen through headphones at least once. I also bounce a copy of my mix and Dropbox it to my iPhone so I can hear it on mobile phone speakers as well. This ensures utmost dialogue intelligibility which we all know is a hot topic of conversation these days. 

Having multiple monitoring options is the best way to judge a mix so between your studio monitors, your headphones, your phone, your computer’s speakers, and maybe even your TV speakers, it’s good to spend a little time hearing your balance in different contexts. I’m always stunned when I get to my iMac’s speakers, that there are certain words that fall off a little too much so I bring them back up a little. Time spent worrying about how a mix translates is time well spent. 

Since my room is calibrated for me to work to -24 LKFS for TV mixing, in the case of typical podcast work, I turn down my monitor fader in my DAW by 8 dB so that -16 is comfortable to listen to through all of my speakers. 

-16 dB LKFS/LUFS is my typical dialnorm target for podcast mixes going to Apple Music, with a -2 true peak limiter engaged. Adjust your speaker volume so you can mix to this or any other desired target comfortably. 

A true peak limiter is vital because compression from .wav to mp3 can introduce intersample peaks that are marginally louder than the original peaks so I like to give myself headroom by peak limiting a dB or so below the maximum any delivery spec demands. YouTube will accept AAC-encoded audio up to -14 LUFS but with a -9 true peak limit, according to many websites, so find the delivery specs for your target sites and work to them. Following my logic, you can see that if I was mixing for YouTube at -14 LUFS and knew for sure -9 was the target true peak, I’d have a peak limiter engaged at -10 true peak. Interestingly, a level check I did on Metallica’s new Lux AEterna video came out as -14 LKFS with a -5 true peak so it’s quite possible the true peak guidance materials out there are wholly inaccurate. It’s more likely someone on the internet has confused short term loudness with true peak levels and this misinformation has proliferated. 

As an example of how to judge podcast target levels, Plugin Alliance offers a cool measurement tool well worth looking into. Check out ADPTR Audio’s Streamliner. 

Streamliner’s codec auditioning is really quite something. I’m a fan of hearing what damage will be done through audio codec compression schemes. Think your mix is a little bright? It might not be once you audition it through Streamliner first. Also, target dialnorms and true peak can be judged accurately by using this plugin. With software like this, it’s simple enough to figure out exactly where you’re at and how to get where you need to be for your desired streaming platforms. You can either strap this plugin onto the end of your mastering chain, on a track containing your printed stereo mix, or by using it as an audiosuite plugin on your printed stereo mix. 

Time To Go Live!

Once everything is properly recorded, edited, mixed/mastered for delivery, it’s time to get it out there. I used Podomatic in concert with Wordpress for years and was happy enough with the results but these days names like Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor, Podbean, SoundCloud and many others will do the job nicely. Just make sure whatever hosting service you use targets platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube or Tidal. My advice here is to read up, ask around, and if clients are involved in your podcast, engage them in this process. I’ll go back to what I said earlier and that is: Figure out who your target audience is. Once you know that, you’ll have some idea which platforms to choose for hosting your work.   

Whichever host you use, make sure they provide you with analytics so you can see how many hits your podcast is getting, where they come from and when they’re happening. This can really help you refine your approach to content creation, as it will become very clear which episodes are most popular.

It’s A Wrap

I’ve been working on podcasts for half of my career. I didn’t know it in 2008 but learning how to prep, perform, produce, edit, mix, publish my episodes to a host website, operate a web page and work out which platforms I wanted to engage were to become bankable skills by the 2020’s.

Even though our podcast series was produced for our personal amusement, toying around in this medium for years led to podcast work becoming a healthy swath of my current freelance workload. I did not foresee this.

When I proposed my concept for this article to Julian Rodgers, he suggested doing a podcast on podcasting. So to end this article, here’s a link to our Production Expert podcast episode on podcasting. Enjoy!