Chapter 6: How To Record Professional Podcasts
Listeners to your podcast are going to judge it on two things:
The quality of the content you provide
The quality of the recording
We are going to assume that you followed our advice on planning your podcast and will create valuable content for your audience. So that leaves the quality of the recording itself. In this chapter we will look at how you can create podcasts like a pro.
Start by Recording properly
If you record your podcast correctly then this will prevent you from spending a lot of time editing it. There is not much fun in fixing a lot of mistakes that you have made in a recording. If there are many errors in your recording it might even be quicker for you to record the whole thing again.
OK it is unlikely that you are going to create recordings without any mistakes in them, especially when you are just starting out. But you can do quite a lot to minimize the number of mistakes in a podcast recording by following these steps:
Choose a Quiet place to Record
You would think that this would be obvious but a lot of people make the mistake of recording their podcasts in a noisy environment. Then they have to spend a great deal of time trying to edit out distracting background sounds (sometimes this is not even possible).
Choose a quiet location for your recording and be sure to close windows and doors. Turn off your phone or at least put it in silent mode. Tell other people in your home that you are going to be recording and not to disturb you unless there is an emergency.
Speak Clearly
We said before that we would always recommend the use of headphones when you are recording your podcasts. If you don’t use any headphones then you won’t know exactly how you are sounding. You may be talking too loudly or too softly.
Use headphones and speak directly into your microphone. If you are reading a script then make sure that you can do this without turning your head away from the microphone. Listen in your headphones and see if you need to make some adjustments to your recording software such as the volume, the cadence, the tone and so on.
Provide each person with their own Microphone
If there are two or more people involved in your podcast then provide each of them with their own microphone. You may think that you can get away with sharing a microphone but the result is not going to be great and you will spend a lot of time editing again.
Placing a single microphone in the middle of two people participating in a podcast recording rarely turns out well. People speak at different volumes and one can easily drown out the other.
Create a Test Recording
It is always a good idea to perform some testing first before you attempt to record your podcast. There are a number of things that can go wrong such as you haven’t plugged in the microphone properly or you have it on mute!
Can you imagine recording a 30 minute podcast only to discover that you hadn’t recorded anything at all? These things happen so do a test first. With your test you can check your recording levels are right, there is no background noise, you have your recording software setup correctly etc.
Professional Editing
You must aim to provide your listener’s with the very best experience with every podcast that you publish. It is very likely that your listener’s will be doing something else when they are listening to your podcast. This means that you need to minimize any distractions.
Your listener’s are going to be annoyed if they have to listen to your heavy breathing, loud noises in the background or anything else that is going to distract them from the value you are providing in your podcast. If you don’t take care of these things then you will end up with bad reviews and listener’s leaving your podcast in droves.
Once you have recorded your podcast you need to listen to it all the way through. You need to know how to make edits in your audio editing suite so learn about this on YouTube or through tutorials on their website.
Perform the necessary edits as you go along. If you cough or sneeze while you are speaking then you definitely want to cut these out. Here is a good tip – you will know when you have made a mistake during recording. So directly after the mistake leave a couple of seconds of silence so that you can perform seamless edits later.
After performing all of the necessary edits, listen to the audio right the way through again. It is possible that you may have missed something. Put yourself in the shoes of a listener and honestly assess whether you have created a great listening experience or not.
Creating your Final Podcast File
When you are happy with all of the editing and the podcast sounds really good then it is time to add your intro and outro music and any other effects that you planned to use. You can add these on different tracks in your audio editor. Make sure that you listen to the whole thing again before you create your final file.
In most audio editors you will then perform a “mix down” where all of the different tracks of your audio are converted into a single track. You can then save this in MP3 format so that it is ready for you to publish to the world.
Before you are ready to upload your file add metadata or your ID3 tags. Here you will provide the necessary information so that your listeners can see important details about your podcast. This will be things like the name of the podcast, the number, the summary and so on.
Adding your ID3 tags in editing applications such as Audacity and Garageband (using iTunes) is really easy and there are a number of videos on YouTube that will show you exactly how to do this.