Mastering EQ takes a deft touch, and you can spend hours trying to get a sound just right. You can adjust each voice to make it as clear as you can by going into each frequency band and adjusting as you like. If a voice is way too sibilant, taking out some high-end will knock that down. If someone's really bass-heavy, you can take out some of the low-end with an EQ. With EQ, you can fine-tune the voice you’re working on. Now you've a clean vocal track that doesn't have a huge swinging, dynamic range, and it’s time to sweeten the sound of that voice with a little equalization.
It's as if there was a super-talented engineer in the control room riding the fader (volume) up and down as the voice actor/narrator was talking into the mic, making sure to keep it nice and even, while still allowing for some dynamic range. I recently started using a plugin called Vocal Rider from Waves. Better stated, you can communicate both a shout and a whisper without blowing out eardrums or making it inaudible.) (Aside: Both “quietness” and “loudness” can be communicated in ways other than shouts and whispers. One is quite manual, where you go in and adjust the volume of each and every word or phrase in an attempt to lift and/or lower the volume to make that bit more even compared to the rest of the track. You can exercise that control a couple different ways. But you do want to exercise some control over that range. You don’t want to eliminate dynamic range, of course. Do whatever you can to get rid of as much noise from the vocal tracks as you possibly can, because there's no reason to process noise, right? Step 2: Control the dynamic range.ĭynamic range refers to the difference in volume of the really, really, loud parts of a vocal track and then really, really, soft parts. I also use a magical tool: iZotope’s Voice De-noise. Yes, that probably means a noise removal filter, so hopefully you've a high-end noise removal tool such as the one comes with Hindenburg Journalist Pro. Background noise, lip smacks, iron-lung breathing… Clean as much of that out as you can before you do anything. Step 1: Clean up the noise.Īudio tracks, especially those recorded in less-than-perfect conditions, often have some noise on them.
So I'm gonna speak in general about the goal of each step and then let you do a little exploring on your own to figure out how to achieve it specifically with your toolset. Some of these settings might be called by different names in your DAW. Having said that, keep in mind that every DAW (digital audio workstation) is different, so the plugins I use may not be the plugins you use. These steps are the same steps they follow, so just doing what I tell you will get you closer to their level, and these fellas are at the top of their game. I enlisted the help of four really smart audio engineers to vet my thinking: Marcus DePaula, Tom Kelly, Josh Wade, and Chris Curran. In just a moment I’m going to stop espousing theory and give you the exact audio engineering steps you should follow to make amazing sounding and accessible episodes of your podcast.īut first, I need to thank some people.