Chris Solo – PES 098

My guest is myself. hehe

I cover many topics that can help your podcast production, and a quick fyi that the next semester of PES starts Sep.18 and early-bird pricing is available for the rest of July.

Here are the things I cover in this episode:

• NIGHTMARE SESSION segment: Lately, I’ve faced more of the usual – guests connecting in non-optimal ways, having bad mic technique, computers running lots of programs, etc.
• NEXT PURCHASE segment: Mine may be the Sennheiser MKH416 shotgun microphone when it comes on sale again 😉 And btw I just bought another Scheps Omni channel plugin for my old production machine.
• Mixing INTO your mastering multiband compressor.
• A recent email from Allan Tépper: “Sadly, Forecast (Podcast MP3 encoder with chapters) downsamples our 48 kHz master to 44.1 kHz 🙁 Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Fortunately, Hindenburg Journalist Pro respects 48 kHz when encoding MP3, as do Fission, RX6 and even iTunes. Hindenburg Journalist Pro also has built in chapter creation with graphics.”
• Recently observed: Removing everything below 30-40 Hz DOES NOT affect the overall LUFS level of the audio. I remove those frequencies in RX6, usually 30 Hz and below, because those frequencies are barely audible and not very relevant to the human voice.
• My new fave: Waves CLA-76 plugin – Bluey mode (as opposed to Blacky). Does a really great job of bringing a voice closer and more in your face in a very transparent way.
• My response to a listener commenting that he doesn’t use that much compression because less compression sounds more natural. “Yes, less compression sounds more natural, or course, but real-world listening environments are not dead quiet, and so compression makes the audio more intelligible in those noisy environments. If you listened to a pop music radio station in a very quiet environment you would not like it, but the compression and limiting that the station uses helps the audio be more audible over the road noise, etc.”
• Idea to play around with: For folks with bad mic technique, in addition to processing their main track, send their signal to a separate track and use a multiband compressor on it. Crush the signal, and then mix in a bit of that crushed signal with the original. You probably want to heavily gate it first, too. I’ll be doing this on one of my upcoming streams, if you’d like to tune in.

I hope that my thoughts and suggestions help you produce better sounding podcasts in less time 🙂

Sound great!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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