Speaker 1: Now it's time for the fun bit and the part of our process where Pro Tools really starts to shine in comparison to other software. In this section I'll show you through how I set up my podcast mixes and give you some tips and tricks on how to get that commercial level quality to help your podcast stand out in the crowd. I'll take you through some tricks on stereo imaging to create space and focus in the mix, how we apply fundamental EQ to add clarity, as well as adding compression and volume riding to give a consistent listening experience. I'll also touch on some additional processes like noise reduction and harmonic distortion to add extra warmth to our digital dialogue. Before we get going I want to share a quick piece of advice for you. Mixing podcasts aren't easy. It's taken time, hours, weeks, years of my life to develop my process and my ears to get used to the nuances involved in working in spoken dialogue, which normally is heard in isolation so we can't hide from anything. I come from a background of working with music artists and bands in the rock and metal genres, so whilst a lot of the principles are the same, I was so used to ways of working in that field that took me a long time to understand the notion that less is more. It's so easy to over complicate a podcast mix with too much EQ, too much noise, too much compression, and so in short even if it feels slightly like it's too much, it is too much. Go back to your mix after a quick coffee, go and listen in another room, put on your headphones, in fact mix in your headphones sometimes. This is where they're listened to, so if it sounds good in the headphones, it sounds good in the speakers. Finally, there's a world of amazing plugins out there. I'll show you some of my go-to plugins in the description and I'm sure you guys have your favorites too, so I'd love to hear what you're using in your mixes and if there's anywhere you think that works really well with mixing. So here's our session, we've edited all of our dialogue, our music is in there, our sound effects and our transitions are in there, and now we're ready to mix. This is an example session that I did recently with two speakers and a nice top and tail mix with some transitions in the middle. So let's open up the mix window. Now before we get into any EQ compression or anything else, I want to have a look at my stereo image. Typically I'm always going to set my dialogue to be center, that way it's nice and clear and stands out from everything else that's in the mix. Here we have our music and because music typically is mixed in stereo, I'll keep that the same, so that's hard left and hard right here. It just helps to give some space to our mix and keep our dialogue nice and clear whilst the music's playing at the same time. So as a quick overview of a typical chain of inputs and processing that I'll use on a dialogue track, I'll go denoise first, gating, use vocal riders to automate the volume, then I'll start using some corrective EQ, add in the de-esser to clean up all the S's, then I'll start compressing and I'll use two compressors, then I'll add in another de-ess and then some creative EQ using Waves API plugins and the Pu-etec. I want to show you guys an example of what the audio sounds like on one of our voices before all of our processing and then after. So let's play here, we're going to mute all of these plugins holding apple as we click on each one and we'll play back. We're going to be speaking about what she brings to the role, what energizes her most about her job, a little bit about her past experience. And then let's add in all of these different plugins. We're going to be speaking about what she brings to the role, what energizes her most about her job, a little bit about her past experience. So I'm going to go into each plugin a little bit more in detail to give you an oversight. Here's the denoise, so what we want to do is find a sample of noise in our audio, tell it to learn it and then find the right level of reduction depending on how noisy our audio is. Then we'll go in and check our levels with the de-esser. So let's play that back. And that's just about right before starting to cut off bits that we don't actually want to cut off. Then we've got vocal rider which is a very cool and handy tool here. Let's play that back. What you can see here is that's the level that we want our audio to hit. The yellow is the peak so anything above that is being reduced and anything below it brought up. Here is our range and then our rider you'll see will move as things are playing. Let's play again. And that's really helpful, that doesn't compress that just changes the overall volume of the audio before we then get into compression. Now before I get into compression as well I also want to go in and clean up any problematic frequencies. So I really love the metric halo channel strip which is really clean and warm sound and that gives us an opportunity to go in and find those frequencies using corrective eq techniques to clean up anything that we don't want to hear. Here we've got a few notches in and around 1k, 3k just to really smooth things out. Bypass this plugin. And you can hear that smoothing things out so here we go again. And then I'll add in a de-esser. I use the Massey de-esser which is really cool so play that back without for example. And you can hear it's not doing a lot here but if we want to increase that for example. We'll increase our reduction and then we can work on our dry and wet mix here. And this is great because we can find the frequency and then work on the reduction and then work out the best dry and wet mix so let's try that for a second. And as you can see we're working around the 3k marker which we were finding some troublesome frequencies there before when we were working with the eq as well so that's just an extra level of tidying up around that range. So a little tip for compression I always find it's best to have two examples of compressors going at the same time with a little bit of gain reduction rather than one with a lot of gain reduction. This way we hear a lot less artifacts so let's hear these bypassed. And you can hear that we still need to ride out that volume using this compression. The way CLA-2A is really great because you can also use their high frequency roll-off which helps with de-essing as well. So again we don't really want more than two to three to four db on this one which is a nice smooth and slow opto compressor. And then we'll also add on a faster attack and a faster release using the R compressor on top of that. And that helps to really smooth things out and warm up the voice as well. And then if we're still having some issues with de-essing let's have a listen. Leadership. Not just people leaders. I'm going to use some creative EQ here just to add in and boost those frequencies that we want to hear. So whether that's a bit more clarity or a little bit more warmth on the low end or we want a bit more air at the really high frequencies. Let's have a listen. I really like the Pu-Tek which is great for boosting the high frequencies which can be really harsh if you use the wrong plug-in or you do it the wrong way but the Pu-Tek is just really nice and subtle even if you're boosting quite a lot. So that's an example of how I would mix one voice. So obviously we have two in this podcast. I'll mix both of those separately which are both going into the very same bus. As you can see on this track I've also added just a safety catch limiter which just helps to ensure that nothing is being clipped digitally just in case we've ramped things up too much. And I'll apply that across each one of the subgroup buses. And then let's play that back at the beginning. And as I'm mixing that I'll play that back and also make sure that we're still hanging around more or less the right loudness level. So I'll

Speaker 2: open up the Ulean loudness meter here. As you can see we're averaging around the minus 16

Speaker 1: dB LUFS level at the moment which is great for when we come to mastering our final piece and I'll get into that a little bit later too. A few final tips on mixing. So there's two ways of approaching this mix and sometimes it just depends on what equipment you have or what you're used to. As you can see I've got a bit of automation here on my volume on the music track. So when people aren't talking it comes up and just at the end of the intro when it goes into the main content it also comes up and rides back down as well. But what's quite cool if we know that we're going to have to be a little bit more hands-on, Pro Tools offers an option for automation where we can ride the faders and that'll write that automation. So for example if I know that I want to ride the automation on my dialogue channel I set the mode to write. And you can also go into the edit window and set the automation mode writer here as well. As we're playing it back I'm going to start playing with the fader and you'll see the automation be written onto the track as we move the fader.

Speaker 2: Let's take a look. It was the start of a great career and every couple of years I ended up doing something different at Bose. I worked in different product divisions, worked with different channels,

Speaker 1: I worked with different geographies. As you can see that was really excessive but it was just to show you the point that actually writes exactly our movement here into the track. And then it automatically changes that back to latch. But if we know that we don't want to make any more changes we then just change that back to read and then no more changes will be written to the track. And you can see it play back exactly the same changes. Bose. It was the start of a great career

Speaker 2: and every couple of years I ended up doing something different. Now let's just undo that.

Speaker 1: This is really helpful if we're mixing music against dialogue or just working with more sub faders. So let's say for example I want to ride the music track and I'll set that to right.

Speaker 2: I'll open up the track. Here we are. We'll play it from here. Bringing the power of play to more girls and through that teaching more girls skills like not only creativity and imagination but resilience and problem solving. And it's really helpful if we know that we get different parts

Speaker 1: of the music where it's more dynamic or louder or quieter and we want to ride out and level things out a little bit more rather than having to write them in every single time. Now we'll take a look at the master bus in our next step.