Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will a bite sized tip to help you podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I got a little bit more of an advanced editing talk for you.
And this may not be for everybody, but I kind of just wanted to dive into the aspect of EQ and compression when you're editing your audio. And this isn't a necessary thing, but EQ and compression are two tools that you can use to have more, clearer and better sounding audio. So maybe if you're a beginner podcaster, maybe this episode isn't for you. Or maybe it is. So EQ and compression are two of the most common tools in editing podcast audio that can help you
improve your clarity and your presence of your audio. We're going to talk about these two tools separately. And let's first talk about EQ. So EQ is equalization. I'm sure most of you are familiar with some sort of EQ, whether on a home stereo or maybe in your car where you can kind of like turn up the bass or you can turn down the treble or something like that. That is a form of EQ. And when you're working with audio and you're in your audio recording program, your
daw, your digital audio workstation. Mine is Reaper. But if you're in any other of them, they all probably have some sort of EQ plugin or piece of software that you can use to edit your recorded audio. So I will tell you how I use EQ because I think it'll be the best way to describe how you can use it practically on a podcast. But I just wanted to talk about it kind of theoretically first. So EQ, basically all it's doing is it's turning the volume up and down at certain frequencies.
So think back to your car stereo when you're turning up the bass. All that's doing is turning up the volume of the lower end frequencies. So it sounds like there's more bass in the audio or the radio wherever you're using the EQ. You can also do this to different frequency bands and using it on your podcast audio. When you're editing podcasts, you can pick different frequency ranges that sound good and turn them up. And then you can listen for bad sounding frequency ranges
and turn them down. That's basically as simple as it can get with EQ. The idea is that you're adjusting the curve of the EQ to bring out the good parts of the vocal recording and just to bring down the bad parts of it. So things like harshness or thinness. In a vocal recording, you can use an EQ to kind of lessen that harshness or lessen that thinness. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll add an EQ to my vocal or to my podcast audio. And the first thing that I do is I grab one band of EQ
and I just turn it up all the way. And then I sweep it through the different frequency ranges. And usually, at least on the EQ that I have, there's a visual graphic representation of the EQ. So you can kind of like see, to the left side it's low frequencies, to the right side, it's high frequencies. And you basically just sweep through the different bands. So, like, I'll turn it all the way up, increasing the volume by maybe ten
DB. And you can hear that specific frequency when you sweep it through the different frequency ranges. So when it's in the low end, you hear all the low end voices, and then you sweep it to the mid range, and then you hear all those mid ranges, and then you sweep it up into the high end, and that's usually where that harshness and that fitness comes through. So it'll give you an idea of which frequency ranges sound like what. So then what I'll do is I'll take the ranges that I like and
I'll boost those a little bit. Not all the way to the top, that was just for listening purposes, but I'll boost them a little bit, maybe three or four DBS, maybe five. And then I'll listen to the nasally sounding frequencies or the thin sounding frequencies, and then I'll lower those frequencies and I'll subtract by four or five DB. And what this does, when you put it all together is it'll help
the vocal sound better. And a lot of times what I like to do to see if I'm even making it better at all is to toggle on and off the entire EQ. Because if you have the whole thing on and you're listening to it, then you click a button and it shuts the EQ off. And then you can hear the original sounding audio track. Sometimes it'll even sound worse and you made it worse and it's like, all right, well, let me start over. Or maybe it doesn't need the EQ. Maybe it was fine the way it was.
This is the sort of workflow that I use when I'm putting an EQ on a track to help improve the sound of the audio. So I hope that was clear. In describing what an EQ actually is, you're really just increasing the volume of good sounding frequencies and then you're lowering the volume of bad sounding frequencies. So now let's talk about a compression and what a compressor is. A compressor is I like to think of it
as like an auto leveling, right? So sometimes you're listening to a podcast recording and somebody's talking really loud, and then they get really quiet, and then maybe they talk like this, where the T is really loud and the rest of it isn't and just the inconsistencies in the vocals. And really what a compressor does is it helps you control those dynamics, it helps you control the highs and then it helps you control the lows. And the way that I think about compression is it's like an
auto learning. It's like somebody sitting there on the volume level, right, and turning it up and down quickly. When the volume gets too loud, they turn it down a little bit and then when it gets too quiet, they turn it up a little bit. And that's kind of a simple way to describe what compression is. There's other sorts of variables that go into it and how fast you turn it up and how fast you turn it down and things
like that. But I think to get a basic understanding of what compression is, is it helps to even out and level out the audio peaks and valleys. So this could be helpful in podcasting because you want a consistent sound, right? You want your audio to stay at a consistent level and you don't want it to get super loud and you don't want it to get super quiet. The whole idea of editing a podcast that sounds good is it all sounds very consistent so you can use compression to take out some of
these peaks and valleys. To me, compression is a little bit more of a tougher tool to learn how to use because it's a lot more subtle than EQ is. Finding a sweet spot is kind of difficult and sometimes, especially as somebody who's new to editing, you might not even be able to hear the differences of what a good compression or a bad compression is. And I say that because I had a very hard time when I first started learning how to use compression, like even hearing what it was doing.
And this one takes a little bit more practice and a little bit more training of your ear to hear what you're listening. You know, I'm not the best user of compression out there, but I try to take a very minimalistic approach and you can Google stuff out there like what's the best compressor settings for a podcast and watch some YouTube videos out there that tell you how to use it and that sort of
thing. But today I really just wanted to bring to your attention how you can use compression to help your audio and to help your podcast sound better. But like I said, it does take some practice. So make sure you go practice both the EQ and the compression out there and utilize the tools to help make your audio sound better. But also keep in mind that there's going to be a learning curve and you're going to need to work with these tools a lot in order to get comfortable with them.
And like anything else, the more you use it, the better you'll get at it. So I think it's good to start and good to just go in there and mess around with them and to use them as tools to increase the quality of your audio recordings. So that's all I have for you today. Maybe I'll do a video on compression and EQ one of these days. If anybody's interested, let me know. You can always send me
an email. You can always sign up for the Happy Podcasting newsletter with a link in the Show Notes and I will see you next time. We've reached the end of the episode and if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something from it, you might be interested in my weekly newsletter that I send out every Monday morning, full of podcasting tips, tricks and news. So if you like this show, you might like this newsletter. To
sign up, just go to the Show Notes and click the link. Thanks for listening and happy Podcasting.