Speaker 1: Hi, this is Dr. Scott Watson with a tutorial on how to make a podcast with GarageBand. An audio podcast is kind of like a radio program. Podcasts emerged in the mid-2000s. They kind of became popular for a while, but then seemed to fall out of use, and then more recently they've become a real hip, popular way for well-known people and less well-known people to share something that they're interested in. The template that we'll be using for this tutorial involves a host narrator who's presenting or explaining a topic, three audio clips that help support or describe that topic, and then some optional extras we'll talk about are things like opening and closing theme music and sound effects. We'll handle each of those components separately. So let's get started. All right, what I'm going to recommend is that when you launch GarageBand, you start with an empty project. It really doesn't matter what key you're in or tempo, since we're mostly going to just be talking. You can choose your mic. You could use a built-in microphone for podcasts, and the built-in microphones on Apple laptops are pretty good. You could also use a USB mic, like the Audio-Technica microphone that I'm using right now, or I also love the Blue Snowball USB mic. So there's a lot of good USB mics you could use as well, and they do give you a little bit better sound quality. So anyway, we'll start with this empty project. Go ahead and configure the mic. You can choose, like I said, your mic there. I'm going to turn off the monitoring for right now and say Create. All right, so right now you can see the VU meter popping. My mic is configured, and you do want to do a sound check. I'm not going to cover using a USB mic and doing a sound check, which are super important, but I'm not going to cover them in this tutorial because I have some separate GarageBand tutorials both on using a USB mic and doing a sound check. When you do your sound check, you'll basically be adjusting the trim, otherwise known as the record level down here, and watching the VU meter, you'll hit the record button, do a little testing, testing, one, two, testing, one, two, test, test, test, one, two, just to make sure that you have a strong signal. So I am going to assign a preset, let's say narrator, narration vocal. So this gets the digital signal processing, all the things like reverb and compression and EQ, what somebody thinks is a good combination of those things, and we're just going to use that as a default. And then I'm going to close this area and close the bottom as well. We don't need to have those smart controls open. And now we're ready to record our voiceover narration. A couple things you'll want to do before recording any voice narration include having some idea of what you're going to say. Either you're going to write out a script or at least have an outline. I guarantee, it has been my experience, that it'll save you time to have that outline or script because if you just try to wing it, you're going to end up wasting so much time with doing a second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth take on every line that you want to say, whereas if you have an outline or a script, you'll be able to bang it out first or second try. And as I said, also do a sound check because if you record with a very, very low level, you'll end up having such a soft voice that you have to crank up, and you're also cranking up the noise level, and there's a thing called signal-to-noise ratio that's very important. So you want to get a good signal before you go ahead and record your voiceover narration. When you do record, you can do it all in one take or you can do it in separate takes. If you do it in one continuous take, you can always break it up through editing later. It really doesn't matter. To split up a voice recording region, place the playhead where you want the split, choose split region from the edit menu, and it'll split it right where the playhead is, and then you can drag the newly detached regions wherever you want them in the podcast. Oh, one more thing. If your podcast has more than one host, or if it's an interview, the simplest way to do that is to have both people in the same room using the same mic. There are fairly simple ways to get somebody at a remote location into your podcast using video conferencing software and its record feature, but we're not going to go into that for this simple tutorial. Okay, a second element of our podcast is going to be imported audio. Say for instance that you're telling us about music you find especially compelling. You might want to give us three examples to illustrate that. Or say you're describing a historical time period like music from the Renaissance. You might want to give us three examples of music from that time period, and so on. You get the idea. Let's go ahead and import one of the audio clips in so you can see how that's done. It's quite simple. You either just have it on your desktop or have it in a folder that's handy, and drag and drop it into a blank area of the track window. Now you're going to notice that the audio is sort of a brown color. That tells us that's GarageBand's way of telling us that the audio is imported. This example is quite long, so we don't want to use the whole example. We want to have, say, a 45-second sound clip or maybe just a 15-second sound clip. I'm going to show you a couple ways to do that clipping. Very quickly, you can resize the audio by dragging one end of the region and then dragging the other end of the region until you get right at the area that you want. You're going to have to do some trial and error and listen to it, but say this, for instance, is the area of music that I want. Just by dragging the sides and resizing it, we'll get the amount of time we want. If you want to really confirm the time, go up to the LCD controls and choose Time. Then you'll see seconds up here in the ruler rather than measures and beats. I can see that this starts at around time equals 19 seconds or 20 seconds and it goes to around 40 seconds or 45 seconds, so it's about a 25-second sound clip. I do want to show you another way that you can do it. What if you have this large sound clip and you want to do something like put the playhead here, go to the Edit menu and split the region and then delete the opening and then put the playhead here, maybe 20 seconds later. Make sure it's selected, go to the Edit region and split the region and then delete what comes later. You still end up having that same kind of sound clip, about a 20-second sound clip. The first way I just resized it, the second way I put splits and splits and then deleted and deleted. It doesn't matter which way you do it. Next we're going to want to automate the volume because we don't want this audio to be really loud at the same point where I'm talking, so I'm going to use a shortcut. Press the letter A on your keyboard and that opens up what GarageBand calls the Automation View. If you click anywhere along this light line, you'll notice that you create what are called control points. If I create two control points, I can automate volume. The first control point maybe is down and then the volume fades in and it stays at the level you want it until you get to another control point and then we're going to fade this down. The attempts I've created at the beginning and the end are fade in and fade out and they correspond with when I stop talking and when I start talking again. Let's go ahead and just click along the ruler here and then hit the play button and you should be able to hear something like a fade in and a fade out theme. The first example I'd like to share is called Terracotta Warriors. All right, so that music faded in a little bit too soon. Let me just zoom in so I can get a little more detail. My goal is to hear the music playing lightly underneath my talking and then really bring it in big. All right, let's try that again. Theme. The first example I'd like to share is called Terracotta Warriors. All right, and then after you listen to that sound clip, you want to bring the volume down while you start talking again, but maybe, for instance, you want the music to continue for a while. Let's have it fade out right here and let's have the volume continue at a low level. I'm going to get out of automation and just actually have the music continue for a while, get back into automation, and then do another control point here, another control point here where we'll fade out. Now, watch what this sounds like. Big music. I wrote it as a commission for the Albemarle County Middle School Honors Band. So the music's continuing under my talking. Terracotta Warriors tells the story of more than 6,000. And then the music fades out. All right, let me zoom out again and just show you that what we just did where we have that music fading in and then fading out seamlessly around the narration, that creates what's called flow, and it's really important for a podcast. And you just repeat this process with the other two sound clips, editing the audio for what you want and then adding automation so you have a nice flow in and out of each sound clip. Now, the term for bringing the automated volume at a low level while the narrator is speaking and then bringing it back up when the narrator is not speaking, that's called ducking. Okay, you'll recall one of the optional extras that's kind of fun to add to your podcast is some theme music. So what we're going to do is we're going to just create some room for the theme music by selecting all of our regions and dragging them to the right. Just to get them out of the way, we'll drop the theme music in there in that space in the beginning. So we'll go ahead and go out to our desktop or to our folder, grab our theme music and drag it into a blank area of the track window. There it is. I am going to grab the track header and move this theme music track right up to where my vocal narration is so that I can see them next to one another. All right. And once again, I'm going to move this narration back so that just after the theme music begins, you know, just a little time to hear the theme music, then we'll bring, we'll turn the volume on the theme music down and you'll be able to hear the narration. So now I'm going to type the letter A or hit this tool up here, right? For automating. I'm going to put a control point right before my narration begins and then bring the music down and it'll play at a low level for a while and then I'll eventually just have it fade out. Looks like like that. OK. Maybe fade out here. And if you want closing theme music, you just repeat the process in reverse at the end. OK. And you'll remember that I also said you could add sound effects, which are basically just very short audio. So let me go out and import, let's say some applause into one of the audio tracks that I've already set up. I'm just using the end of those audio tracks to host some laughter and some applause. And I found these out on the Internet for free. There's places, websites that do have downloadable free sound effects. And I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so we can do something with the timing. So let's say my closing line, I would like to be followed by some laughter. Just pretend it was me telling a joke. So I wanted some laughter right after my last words. And then I wanted the joke is so funny that the audience then starts applauding. Let's hear what that might sound like. I've got Watson saying, thanks for listening. OK. We're almost there. We've recorded our voiceover narration. We've put in three different audio clips. We even put some beginning and ending theme music, a couple sound effects. Say we're all ready. We're happy with the levels and everything. We're all ready to export this podcast. Now we're going to go to the Share menu and say Export Song to Disk. Hopefully you've saved it before, but I like to get rid of all these dates and times and things like that. They're very confusing. So I'm going to go ahead and just put final or my name or something like that. I'm going to save it to my desktop. And as an MP3, that's the low bandwidth version that still sounds great. And it's ready to export now. It's going to be saving it right now. It's mixing it down or bouncing it down to just an MP3 stereo file that I can then upload to my website or blog or upload to my podcast host or wherever it is that your audio is going to be hosted for your podcast. Well I hope this tutorial has been helpful in helping you create your own podcast in GarageBand.