Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to teach you the most affordable and simplest way to record professional level voices. This is perfect if you want to record your own audio book, if you want to record guided meditations, or if you want to start a podcast. A couple weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have my mom come visit me after not seeing her for a couple years. She has a very youthful and refreshing energy. You would never guess that she's 70 years old. Anyway, when I shared with her a project that I had been up to, and that was creating a music channel on YouTube, and I showed her how easy and accessible it was, her eyes lit up and she just could not believe it. Because for 30 years, she's been wanting to create her own guided meditation recordings and find a way to sell them or distribute them or make a little bit of money on the side from them. Now, 30 years ago, that was to go into a recording studio and make CDs and find a way to distribute them that way. But now, all of the gatekeepers are gone. And now, not only is it much easier and more accessible to produce really professional audio, but it's also more accessible to find an audience. And you may never have millions and millions of followers, but anyone who is brave enough to put themselves out there and start producing content online, there is an audience waiting for them, guaranteed. You just have to get started and be consistent. Okay, with that out of the way, let's get to the reasoner here. I'm going to show you how to record and produce professional quality voices. Hey, hey, welcome to the Pod Sound School. I'm Studio Steve. I'm an audio engineer and an instructor here. I'm really excited for this video. And let me just say, you do not have to be an audio engineer to record and edit and export and produce your own audio. It's actually very simple. And I'm going to break this video up into three parts. The first part, I'm actually just going to talk about what microphone to use, how to set it up, and some basic microphone technique. The second part, I'm going to show you how to record it into your computer and edit it and make it sound better to your liking and how easy that is by introducing you to one of my favorite programs called Descript. And for the third part, I thought I'd throw in a bonus and show you while we're in Descript, how easy it is to export short clips as audiograms, which are basically little videos that have the captions of what you're saying and even a waveform that reacts to what you're saying. Okay, so let's get to the first part and I'm going to teach you all about getting set up with your new microphone. Here we go with this one. Whoa. Okay, now the first part of capturing really good recordings actually happens before the microphone. So this is where you're recording at. And this really has two concerns that we need to think about. The first is noise. And now the most obvious noises I think that we would all avoid would be distractions like traffic or leaving the windows open or having barking dogs, things like that around. But the less obvious noises, things like refrigerators or air units or buzzes and hums, a lot of people actually leave those in their recording because we get used to those noises on a daily basis. So as much as you can, find a place that's free of distractions and free of these kind of noises. The next concern when it comes to your recording environment or your space or your studio is to watch out for and also treat something called reflection or you could call it reverb or echo. Many rooms have a very echoey sound. Think of a bathroom. The problem here is hard surfaces. So tile, wood, laminate flooring, walls, sheetrock, any of that is going to have a very reflective sound to it and you'll sound very reverberated and that's not really the professional sound that we're after. So the solution for that is rugs, curtains, and record in a nice soft environment. And finally, with environment, if you have no place to record free of distractions or free of noises, one place you may consider is your car. Cars are actually designed to keep sound out. So as long as the car is in park and turned off and the temperature outside permits, then you can actually achieve really impressive results recording in a car with a USB microphone and your laptop. So for anyone getting into content creation, regardless of budget, I always recommend to all of our clients and students to use a USB microphone and that's because USB microphones come with an audio interface actually built in, which means you won't need any other type of equipment. All you need is your microphone and the cable it comes with to plug it into your computer. My top two picks for USB microphones are first, the very popular Samsung Q2U, which is popular for a reason because it gets very impressive sound, especially considering that you can pick one of these up for around 60 US dollars. And my second pick is the really cool Shure MV7. This is a much more podcast looking microphone, but it doesn't just look cool. This thing gets really high quality recordings and you can pick one up for around $250. So I consider both of these microphones to be very affordable, especially considering the true professional quality that you can achieve using them. Okay, so once you choose a microphone that's right for your situation and budget, now we can get set up in your recording space. So most people are going to choose to record their audio at a desk. And because of this, there are two different types of mic stands that I would suggest using for your microphone. The first is what you can think of as a desk clamping stand. This is a mic stand that's actually going to clamp onto your desk and it has sort of a bendy spring activated arm that allows you to move the microphone around and swivel it around. The second selection would be what you would consider a desktop stand. And this actually just has sort of a heavy platform at the bottom and then just a couple adjustments with its boom arm so that we can move our microphone around on our desk. Either one of these are going to do really great at bringing that microphone up higher so that you can sit in a comfortable position, but also keep the microphone close to your mouth. So let's quickly set up the Samsung Q2U with this desktop stand. All we have to do is sort of swivel the mic clip attachment to the stand itself and clip on the microphone. And then we want to make sure to use this windscreen or little poofy guy, I like to call it, and put that on top of the microphone. And then we plug the small USB cable side into the microphone and the other USB cable will go into our computer. Since I have a newer Mac laptop, I actually had to get this USB to USB-C adapter so that this would plug into my computer properly. And now let's set up this desk clamping stand. As you can see, you just take the clamp portion of the stand and sort of spin it and twist it and tighten it to your desk. And then you just insert the top portion of the bendy boom arm into the clamp you just tightened and it's pretty intuitive this way. Now we can just swivel and spin this Shure MV7 onto the clamp stand and again plug one end to the USB cable into the microphone and the other end of the USB cable into our computer and we're ready to record. Now I always recommend using a pair of nice studio headphones. This is going to help you to really hear all the nuances of your microphone and get even better recordings. USB microphones also have a place to plug in your headphones, just like you see here on the MV7. Okay, now let's talk about how to get the best sound out of the microphones. No matter what microphone you use, whether it's the Samsung Q2U or the Shure MV7, the same principles apply. And here we're really only focused on two things, or as I like to call the two P's. The first P is proximity. That just has to do with how close the microphone is to your mouth. As a good rule of thumb, I like to do the four finger test and that's just four fingers between your mouth and the microphone at all times. You're going to have enough room to kind of move around and be comfortable, but also capture the sweet spot of your voice right there. And now the second P is something called plosives. And as it turns out, the problem is the letter P. If you were to put your hand in front of your mouth like this and pronounce words with P in them, pizza, Peter, pumpkin, you're going to feel little puffs of air that hit your hand. So if you keep your hand at the same distance from your mouth and you turn it this way and you pronounce those same words, Peter, pumpkin, pizza, the puff of air actually passes by your hand. Well, it's the same with the microphone. If you approach your mouth straight on like this and you speak into the microphone like this, you'll get a good sound, but every time you pronounce a word with P in it, it's going to send a little popping noise, a little annoying kind of distortion into your microphone. So the solution for that is to approach your mouth at an angle or they call this angle of approach. And that's really simple. Just bring the microphone into your mouth at an angle or at the side. So have it nice and close proximity and avoid those plosives angle of approach. Oh, okay. So now that you've chosen your microphone, you've learned a little bit about how to get the best sound out of it and you plugged it into your computer. Now you just need to download Descript. Just go to podsoundschool.com slash Descript and you'll be taken to this page here and you can click get started for free. Descript does a really good job of providing tutorials for beginners also in addition to what I'm going to show you. So they make it very easy and provide a lot of support for you to get started. This is what Descript looks like when you open it up. You can see I have a ton of projects because I'm always using Descript. All you need to do here is press new project and it will take you to this and this is what a new project looks like. And from here you can do all sorts of things. You can drag in audio if you have it recorded from somewhere else or you record some audio on your phone. You can drag in video and then what it will do is it will actually transcribe whatever you drag in and give you sort of a Word document that you can edit. So you'll actually be able to edit your audio like you would a Word document. And in addition to that, you can also record directly into Descript. So that's what we're going to do for this illustration. I have a little motivational line that I actually had ChatGPT write for me. If you're brand new to ChatGPT, I'm sure you've heard about it, but we have some great tutorials right here that you can check out. So here we are. I'm just going to press this start recording button right here and now I've given some options. Look, I can actually record my screen if you wanted to do some screen recordings. I can record a camera, but we're going to keep it simple and we're going to keep it to recording audio only. And since I have this Samsung Q2U already plugged into my computer, Descript has recognized that. So I'm actually getting a little live reading of the level here and that level looks really good. So whenever I'm ready to record now, all I have to do is press record and start speaking. So I'm going to press record and speak through this to show you how awesome this really is. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. As Rumi said, you are the entire ocean in a drop. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. As Buddha said, the mind is everything. Believe in yourself and your abilities and you can achieve anything. So go out there, have fun and make the most of every moment. And then as you can see, I press stop and hey, I didn't even screw up except for maybe I had too much space at the beginning or too much space at the end. But look, as I was speaking, it was actually transcribing as I was speaking. And let's say that I did want to get rid of this Rumi quote that I said. I can just kill that by highlighting it like you would a Word document and then just pressing the delete key. And when I do that, watch what happens down here where they're actually displaying a timeline and then watch what happens when I press the delete key. It deletes it from the script, but it also deletes it from the waveform below. So now I can go back to the beginning and if I want to press play, I can just press spacebar. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. And there's all sorts of ways that you can continue to really edit this. If I go back to you've got this again, for example, you notice there's a pretty big space in the middle of there. You see down here, there's these three ellipses that lets me know that there's a space there. And also I want to show you that if you drag your mouse up to this line right here, you see this icon with the two arrows, one on top of each other. You can click, drag and hold and make this portion a little bigger if you need a little more real estate to see what's going on. So these three ellipses here letting me know this is a pause. If I want to shorten the pause, all I have to do is come down here and click on this word. Don't click, hold and drag it to the left to make that pause shorter. And we'll still leave a little pause there, but we can make it a little shorter. Let's check out how that sounds. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold. Pretty cool, right? And we can do the same thing with the beginning here because the beginning was too long. I can either bring my mouse to the very left hand side and I'll get this sort of trim icon. You could call it. Click, drag and hold that and do something like that. Or I could have done the same thing by grabbing you've the word and dragging you over to the left like that. So now I can either put my cursor here and press the spacebar to play. You've got this. Or you might recognize this little icon here because this has been very common for a long time. This means previous marker or going back to the beginning that will actually bring you to the beginning of your paragraph. And then also this is a play button. You can press the play button there. Lastly, I do want you to notice at the end of this paragraph, it tells us that we have a pause of 3.3 seconds. So again, if I bring my mouse all the way to the right hand side, I get this trim icon again. I can click on that, drag it, hold it and bring it to the beginning. And now I've got a nice, concise audio recording. OK, so that is what you would consider basic editing, which is just to kind of chop and You can even copy and paste or to trim things out, to get rid of long pauses and things like that. This is just barely touching the surface of what Descript can do, but I want to keep it really simple for you because it can be and you really don't have to overcomplicate things. So now what we want to do is I want to add some effects to this. I want to beef up my voice so that it sounds even more professional. And how I do that is over here to the right in this right hand side, you'll see this says audio effects and there's a plus button. If I click on the plus button, I'm given all these different options for audio effects. This is really cool. And if you're an audio nerd like me, the dynamics and EQ and creative right here are really going to excite you, but you really won't need to use these. All you're going to need to use is audio repair. And then there's this studio sound and next to it says file. What it means is it's going to apply this studio sound to the entire file. This studio sound effect is amazing. It combines all of these effects. It combines EQ, compression and noise reduction and really brings your recordings up to a professional level as far as post-production effects. So we're going to go ahead and click on that and you'll see it says applying studio sound to Samsung Q2U microphone. And once it's done applying it, it will let us know. And you'll notice down here too, it says enhancing and that's it. It's been enhanced. So now let's go back to the beginning and press spacebar and listen to it with the studio sound on. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. As Buddha said, the mind is everything. Believe in yourself and your abilities and you can achieve anything. Sounds pretty good, right? Now that you're done and you have your project looking the way that you want it to look, there's lots of different ways that you can export your project. You can come up here to the top right corner where it says publish and here you can actually publish the audio by coming over to where it says export and clicking on export. And then here you can export just the audio and you can tell it the quality by clicking on these two little slider adjusters icon here. You can click on that and you can play with the quality and the different settings that you want. Usually the settings that Descript defaults with are just fine. So you can actually export the audio for this if you need the audio for any reason. Also if you click on where it says audio, you have these other options too. You can export the timeline, which is where you can get really complicated and share this with more complicated programs like Pro Tools or Adobe Premiere. So this is great for professionals. You can also export just the transcript and it will share it as like a Microsoft Word docs. But we're going to do for this bonus is actually show you how you can turn this into a video. And Descript has all sorts of really exciting video options now too. They have stock video that comes with it that you can use. So I could actually find stock video and throw like some nice nature video behind this. And there's all sorts of things you can do right here in Descript. But we're just going to keep it simple with a very text only sort of audiogram. And how we'll do that is we'll come up here to this icon at the top and you'll notice when you hover over it, it says templates. It has the four squares. We'll click on that. Now we have all these templates. And under my templates, you have a gallery, you have titles, this is for video editing. If you go down to where it says audiograms, here's some audiogram templates. And I like this first one right here because it's a portrait, which means vertical, which means this could go on TikTok, this could go on YouTube Shorts, which I think is really great for a YouTube channel. It can also go on Instagram Reels, which are all very popular right now. All you have to do is click on this and drag it over the section that you want to apply this video to. So I'm just going to click on it and drag it and drop it on top of my section here. And now it's actually turned this into a video. And much like I was able to drag my icon over this line here to get these two arrows, I can do that over here to the right as well to get these two arrows going left and right. And that allows me to resize my video panel, you can call it. And now let's watch this video that it's generated for us just by pressing the spacebar. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. How cool, right? Now you can take this even a step further again with other options Descript has. You'll notice here there's an icon that says media, and this is where you can start playing around with and getting familiar with the media that Descript has available for you to use. And one of the options it has is music. So I could actually grab some music, look at this Born Again instrumental, and I could download it for the import. And now here the music is now in my timeline. You'll also notice that it put this little music icon where the music came in. So I could grab that and move it to the beginning like that. And now let's listen to this with some music added to it. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. As Buddha said, the mind is everything. Believe in yourself and your abilities and you can achieve anything. Okay, now the music is a little loud. So if I were to click on the music track, now I can actually adjust the parameters of the music by clicking on it. So I could click on the music and turn the audio down quite a bit. And now listen. Buddha said, the mind is everything. Believe in yourself and your abilities and you can achieve anything. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. Let go of what no longer serves you and focus on what matters. And now also, if I click on the video portion over here and I can click on this, now I can adjust the parameters of this actual video and I can change the colors to maybe colors I like more or I could change the style of font. I could change it to any color I want by clicking on this little circle here where you can move and adjust the fill color and notice how when I do that, it changes the color of the text just how I want it. So maybe I want to like more of a dark blue instead of a black. And then instead of this pink color, that's actually under here where it says live text, which means text that's moving around live. So instead of this pink color, I could click here and change this color to let's say a yellow or a green. Maybe you have brand colors that you've selected for your channel that you want to keep using and you can actually just type in the hex code of your brand color. Now if you haven't chosen brand colors yet and you need to kind of learn what, how to do that and how to build a brand kit. I also have a very helpful video for beginners here that you can check out and add to your playlist. Don't get overwhelmed. So now if I come up to the publish button, now I have a video in my timeline, a video in my project that I'll be publishing, not just audio. So when I click on publish and then I come over to where it says export again, now I have different options. Now it's giving me the option to actually export this as a video. It's saying export the current composition. It's asking for the resolution, 720p is fine. You can also go up to 1080p and all the way up to 4k, but we don't need the highest quality for this type of animation. We'll leave the quality at medium. That way we have a nice small file and let's go ahead and say export and I'll put it on my desktop and we'll call it test for YouTube family and we'll say save. And now it's exporting the video. You can watch the progress. Look how fast that's happening. And now I can actually say I'll go here to my finder and from my desktop, we'll see it. It's right here. YouTube family. And now here's a file that you can share this file with your phone. You've got this. Don't let fear or doubts hold you back. And once it's on your phone, you can post it to Instagram reels. You can post it to YouTube shorts and you can post the same video to TikTok as well. So how cool was all of this? I hope you found it super helpful and I know that this can seem overwhelming, but don't worry. We've got you covered. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel. Also, if you want to learn more about working with us directly inside of one of our coaching programs that we periodically launch throughout the year, you can go to pod sound school.com and until next time, I've curated a list of all of my favorite videos on our channel. Perfect for beginning content creators. Go through this playlist and watch all of these videos. Take some notes and you'll be up and running so fast. You won't even believe how quickly you're going to become a professional content creator.