Speaker 1: The big thing to get across here when striving for great audio in your podcast recordings has to do with the microphone placement and also how far away you are from the microphone. In this video, I'm going to cover what I do for my podcast to get great sounding audio. My name is Javier Mercedes, and I've worked at a professional recording studio for about four years in Atlanta, and then I moved to Austin, Texas, where I was recording a whole bunch of different podcasts, as well as my own podcast, The Passion in Progress Show. So I have many years of experience in doing audio, and hopefully these tips will help you as they have helped me in the past. Now, the specific microphone that I'm using right now is the Shure SM7B. I'll have a link to it down in the description. But this is representative of a type of microphone that a lot of people may have, which is the dynamic cardioid microphone. That's what you see a lot of singers on the stage with. Those are dynamic microphones. And how those work is there's a magnet, there's a wire coil in there, and a diaphragm. And as I talk, my voice creates sound waves or air pressure. And as I talk, it's going to move the wire in that diaphragm in there. And that creates the electrical current that distinguishes the sound waves to send through the wires and then into your computer or into your recording device. But just know that there's a moving coil in the diaphragm in there, and you have to project your voice in order to move that. And that's what creates the sound. So with that in mind, the other part of my description there is it's a cardioid. It's basically like a globe pickup pattern around the microphone in the front. And there's like a sweet spot. So if I were to turn the microphone this way, you're definitely not going to hear it as well, right? Right. But as I talk and get into that sweet spot, it's going to be better. The other big thing, too, is how far away you are from the microphone in that pickup pattern. A good rule of thumb, and speaking of fingers, let's actually use them, is to have at least three or like two fingers in between you and the microphone. Now, when you're recording your podcast, you don't want to move away from this far away from the microphone, and I'll show you why. Because of that cardioid pickup pattern, as you move further away from the microphone, you're going to get more room tone. Notice how you can hear more of the room in the recording as I get further away from the microphone. Now, if you have something like a boom or shotgun microphone, it actually may benefit you to be this far away from the mic. But for most people, if you even have a condenser microphone, it's nice to be right up on the microphone. Now, condensers are a little bit different of a beast, but these concepts may work just as well for you for podcasting. Two fingers, three fingers, sometimes a fist. I mean, if you're animated while you're doing your podcast, for sure, keep that energy. But how close you are to the microphone is detrimental to how good your podcast is going to sound. The next thing I want to bring up is if you notice, you can see most of my mouth right now. I'm not speaking directly into the microphone, and there's a reason for that. Off access, put the mic off access. This is the second tip I want to bring up. The reason why I don't want to speak directly into the microphone is because of this. If you notice, if I speak directly into the microphone, my plosives will then pop the microphone. Anytime I have a like piggy or popping pickles, pickles, pickles, pickles, as opposed to pickles, pickles, pickles, popping pickles, whatever. If you speak a little bit off access to the microphone, you receive all those benefits of getting close to the microphone, but also you're not going to be cumbersome to your listeners by popping the mic every second. The third tip I want to bring up is these headphones. The reason I want to talk about headphones is if you are doing something like a remote podcast and also if you're recording a podcast in person, at least check your mix before you start podcasting through your headphones. The big reason why I say to use headphones for remote records is because if that person on Skype or on Zoom is talking to you through the speakers and that gets into your microphone, then it's going to kind of have this slap back delay and you don't want that. That's going to get real cumbersome on your listeners and they're going to want to tune away and that's not what you want. The next tip I would give for a great sounding podcast is to dampen the sound of the room that you're in. Now, in this room, I have carpeted floors, which is a number one plus. If you can record in a room that has carpeted floors, that's already going to make it sound so much better because it's soaking up some of those reflections. And what I mean by reflections is right now as I talk, I have a computer and a wall right in front of me. My initial sound source is going to hit that microphone because I'm right next to it. But I'm also going to leave reflections that will hit this wall in front of me. It will bounce back, hit that wall. It will hit the wall over here and a wall over there. And then after it bounces off those other places, it's also going to soak that back into the microphone. So those are reflections and you want to cut down on those as much as possible to get to the direct source as much of the direct source and hearing that direct source as much as possible. What's nice is to have a carpet. As you can see, I have a couch in the back and that's also great set dressing, but it also helps with dampening the sound in here because it's a cloth material. Other things that would help are little acoustic panels and other things of that nature. But I do understand that with some podcasts, sometimes you just got to record where you're at. Like if you're trying to interview people on the street or you're at a conference or you're in a conference room, sometimes you're recording people on stages like that's not going to be the most ideal situations. But I mean, it's more about the content at that point. So if you do have the possibility of dampening sound, please do it. Hang blankets and pillows in different places, probably off camera. Do other things to put cloth material in an area and see how it sounds to you. If you clap and then you hear it dampening, then you're doing your job. But if you can't dampen your sound while you're recording, there are some things that you can do in post that will allow you to cut down on some of that reverb sound. And that's with effects like noise reduction. So for me in particular, I'm just going to use the noise reduction software within Premiere Pro and tweak that a little bit. Now, with this microphone, listening to the flat microphone, it would sound like this. But after I've processed it in post, it now sounds like this. And what I'm doing is I'm adding compression and EQ. And a good thing with this whole proximity effect of how close you are to this microphone also brings up the bass. And I think a lot of radio show like that radio show voice comes from the lower frequencies. So if anything, what you want to do is look up the parametric EQ in your editor and then bring up a little bit of the bass and just toy with bringing up a little bit of the highs to to bring in all those consonants that and bring clarity into your mix. With compression, what I use is a multiband compressor. But with any compressor, there's a ratio there of turning up the voice when it's too low and turning down the voice when it's too high. That's what compression does. It compresses the audio signal. I'm not going to get too much into it right now, but just know that in your signal chain, try adding some compression, a parametric EQ, noise reduction. And the last one is a noise gate. And all a noise gate does is turn off the audio signal once the volume coming from the microphone goes beneath a certain threshold. Meaning if I were to stop talking and if you heard silence, it would shut off the audio to that microphone. If you're curious into getting into the specifics of the post-processing that I do for my audio, I did a video on it. I'll put it here on the screen. And let me know what you guys are doing in your podcast to make it sound better. Till next episode. My name's Javier Mercedes. I'm Javier Mercedes X on all the social things if you want to follow my journey. And I hope you guys are out there living a life of abundance. I'll see you guys on the next episode.