[2020] The Podcast Editing Process That Saves Hours, with Max Graham

How much time does it take you to edit your podcast? Is it maybe an hour, two hours? And what about the time it takes you to make the promo content for social media? You know, the video clip, the audiogram, the quote card, that stuff adds up, right? Many of the podcasters I talk to say that they spend four to six hours a week on editing and content generation alone. And what about those of you who already have that stuff delegated? Let me ask you this. Does your editor know the topic of your show and your voice as well as you do? Do you think that the decisions they make while editing your show make the episode better? Or do they just make it shorter? In my experience, independent podcasters tend to fall into one of those two categories. They're either doing all of the editing themselves and spending hours of precious time on something that isn't growing their show or they've outsourced editing, but there's really no quality control. They've managed to save their own time, but by giving the editing to somebody who isn't them or somebody who can't fully capture their voice, they've lost their ability to make the content of the episode better after the interview is done. How is the editor supposed to know which part of the conversation should stay and which should go, right? Now, when I launched my first podcast, Philly Ho, I was in the former group. I was spending up to 20 hours of my own time, 20 hours, on post-production and content generation, per episode, it was insane. And what's even worse is that my show wasn't growing. I was spending all of this time creating the podcast, but it wasn't getting new listeners. And so with my savings about to run out and not enough money coming in, I stopped and I took a hard look at everything I was doing and what I learned surprised me. I figured out that my show was dying because I was spending too much time editing. So simple fix, right? I found an editor, but then I found myself in the second group. I would record a 90 minute interview, I'd send it over to my new editor, Max, and I'd tell him to edit it down and, you know, leave in the best parks and take out the boring stuff, right? Well, this was a show about Philadelphia and Max lives in Montreal. He doesn't know what parts of the interview would be most interesting to Philadelphia's. So even though I finally bit the bullet and outsourced editing, I found myself in a situation where I was paying Max to edit and then I was going back in and editing again myself. Now I was losing time and money that I didn't have and the show still wasn't growing. Now this was about the time that I almost lost it all and I almost went back to my corporate career as an insurance software developer. But thankfully, I didn't give up and neither did Max, who at the time, was new to podcast post production. And so we put our heads together and we thought could there be a way for me to spend only like 30 minutes after the interview to make all of the content decisions? I would decide which pieces of the interview to cut, which one should stay, which ones get moved around and even which pieces to promote on social media quickly and efficiently. And then Max can come in, he can know exactly how to shape the content in my voice, he can do his job, he can make the show sound great. I would save tons of time and the show would still have insanely high quality. And I'm glad we stuck with it because that's exactly what we were able to accomplish. After two whole years of trial, error and incremental improvement, Max and I have developed a process that allows me to spend almost no time on an episode after an interview while maintaining my voice and top show quality. This process has helped me take Philly Hoop past 100,000 downloads and $100,000 monetized and hot off the press. It's allowed me to take this podcast past $10,000 in revenue in only 30 days. And the best part is that you can do this too. And Max and I are gonna teach you how. This is Grow the Show. The podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your audience and monetize in 90 days. In this episode, I'm gonna teach you exactly how you can spend less time and money editing your podcast while making your content even better than it is now. And to do that, I'm joined by my top editor, Max Graham. And together, we're going to share the tool and the framework that we use to make amazing shows insanely efficiently. So stay tuned to Grow the Show. My name is Max Graham. I'm an artist, musician, DJ and record producer. I've been touring the world as a DJ for the last 20 years. And I also now do post-production and editing for podcasts. You were a little confused there for a second, huh? DJ, it's just the right show. But yes, Max Graham is the top audio engineer for my production company, Q9. He and I started working together in 2018 about half a year after I lodged Philly Ho. Now, at that point, I was only a few months into my podcasting career, but Max, on the other hand, was decades into his music career, which began in the 90s. And I was a top 40 DJ in a nightclub, just playing cheesy top 40 hits. I was living in Ottawa, Canada at the time. And a friend took me to a proper underground party in Montreal. This exposed me to this world where the DJ was appreciated for what they were doing as opposed to the top 40 club where people were just coming to drink, meet people, and the music was always an afterthought. So this changed my whole outlook on music and seeing that sort of vibe and crowd in the room reacting to music. And the tracks being the main focus completely changed me. So I went back to Ottawa. A group of us started promoting events and I started to DJ more underground club music. Then around 2000, I made the jump to making music and I produced something that did pretty well, a track called Airtight. It was picked up by a lot of pretty famous DJs and played regularly like Tiesto and Paul O'Confold. It was dominated for a Juno, which is like a Canadian Grammy. And that launched my career into touring internationally. For the next 20 years, Max would visit over 80 countries and perform up to 120 times in one year. I usually fly out of Montreal on Wednesday or Thursday to the US or Europe. Then I'll play Fridays, Saturday and different cities then fly home Sunday. But in the last four or five years, I've been looking forward to not traveling as much. Two million miles with their Canada alone gets a bit taxing. And in the process of doing more work at home and less traveling, I started doing some freelance podcast work. And as you know, podcasts are exploding. Yeah. There's a huge market out there and good quality really helped separate the shows. So there was definitely a demand. Also, it was a great way for me to stay home but continue to be the tech audio geek that I am and help people sound great. At that same moment in time, I needed help with Philly Ho, badly. So I'll tell you sort of the story from my perspective and I'd be curious, you know, if you remember it the same way, I was about four to six months into Philly Ho at this point, I have not monetized it yet. It was running out of savings, just trying to figure out what to do. And it was like, okay, I'm spending, man, I was spending 14, 16 hours editing each episode. Like a ridiculous amount of time. Which was in some way a point of pride because I was so proud that I took so much time, you know, to be thoughtful about the arc of the episode and everything. But it was just killing me. It just was so much time to put into an episode. So I said, okay, I need, I need some help with this. And so I wanted to upwork because I was familiar with upwork having a software background. And I just posted like need someone to edit a podcast and was kind of stressed out at that point. Just like, I need this quickly and I need to just have it done and whatever. And I don't have a lot of money. But I definitely know I need to invest in this because of how important it is. So I went on upwork and, you know, sub-minute for proposals. I just remember years came back and was like really well written and thoughtful. And I was like, great, there's Max guy, sure. And then we started working together. And at first, I remember that it came back and the vocals were insanely compressed. Yeah, it was. It was like really loud. And I was like, what is going on here? And then you figured out, figured out. And you're like, oh, I think you said something like, oh, I'm compressing this like a dance track or something. And it just simply went over my head. But I was just like, why is this so loud? I think about this all the time. There was one episode of Philly Who early on that I had erased all of the silence between every time a guest spoke. And we were losing the natural background dead air. And so it almost sounded like every time she stopped speaking, the mic was muted and it didn't sound natural. And when you pointed that out, I took a day off, or a couple days off and I went back with fresh ears and listened and I was like, of course, he's right. Like it was just a natural tendency for me and dance music to trim the audio down to just when someone is singing and not leave any background noise. Because of course, you have music playing. So there's no need for the background ambiance and you want to delete any of that. But when there's no music, it actually sounds worse to have that silence. So there was this learning curve from dance music to podcasts. And that came out of communication back and forth between us and me wanting to find your voice versus coming in there and saying, this is how I edit, this is my style. I think this is best. You won't create the best art and arrive at the best final product when you have that type of mentality. At first, things were super clunky. But Max and I would continue to work together every week on Philly Ho. And every week, we got a little bit closer to the state that I was dreaming about, which is where I could record an interview, send it to Max. And he would know exactly what I wanted. And he could just do it and send me back the final episode. So we iterated and we figured out all of the audio engineer stuff, right? The right compression, the level of bass that I like, you know, the sound of Philly Ho. But then, even after we got the sound right, there still was a huge problem. You see, every time I finished an interview, I would take the audio files and send them over to Max. He would go through, do his job as post producer. He would balance the levels, add compression and EQ. He'd remove any distracting ums and ahs, you know, clean it up. And this was great. But the issue was that Philly Ho was a 45 to 60 minute show all said and done. The interviews, though, could be up to two hours long. So I would send the raw interview to Max. He would do his thing and trim the fat. And then he'd send me back an episode that was like an hour and 15 minutes long, which was just way too much. So I would then go in and re-edit the already edited episode to get the content down to about 40 minutes. This was incredibly frustrating because I had already paid Max to edit the episode. And now I had to jump in and spend four to six hours editing it again. I didn't understand why I had to do this. Why couldn't Max just choose the best 45 minutes of the episode, edit it all down, make it sound good and send it back to me. Now I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have the thought to move on and find a different editor that could do this. But honestly, Max was really good at the audio engineering part and a really, really good communicator, which is rare in working with anyone. And so we stuck together and bit by bit, we chipped away at how to do this. And eventually we came across a brand new way of thinking about it. So there was one day about three months into working together that I sent Max a bunch of feedback on an edit that he just delivered to me. My goal at that point was to get to the state where I didn't have to jump back in and do further editing on every episode. And so I tried sending Max guidelines on what type of stuff to remove from the interview. I basically said, while you're editing, if you feel like a particular piece of the conversation isn't interesting, just take it out. You don't have to ask my permission. Simple, right? Well, Max didn't feel it was that simple. And so he sent me a text explaining why. Now this was the first time that Max articulated a way of thinking about this that would eventually evolve into our super efficient editing process. This process would become the foundation of Q9. It would unlock my ability to completely remove myself from the production of Philly Ho. And we would use this process to land and please clients like Comcast NBC Universal, I Heart Radio, and Tom Brady's sports media company, Religion of Sports. Siri, play Max Graham's text from November 6th, 2018. Here's Max Graham's text from November 6th, 2018. I think I work in a technical only mindset. It's hard to listen objectively to the content and edit the technical side of the audio at the same time. It almost needs two runs. One to focus on the overall content and one to focus on the little nagging sense and distractions. Definitely want to get to the point where you're not also editing. Anya, we might have to adjust the hours and price. But let's cross that bridge once I get the editing down. This is all great experience for me and trust me, I'm very happy to be working with feedback like this on a podcast that's striving to be this awesome. Would you like to reply? No, we're good. Okay, that's everything. Okay, so you may or may not have been able to follow that. Basically, what Max was saying is that there are two distinct parts to editing a podcast. And while a lot of people try to do both parts at once, it really doesn't work well because each piece requires your brain to be in a different place. Max can explain it better than I can, but basically we call these two stages the content edit and the distraction edit. Those two have to be separate. The content edit is essentially removing large swaths like a paragraph, a question and answer, something that isn't necessarily bringing more to the conversation. Sometimes people can trail off and get off topic and you can record an hour and only publish 30 minutes and make exactly the same point as if you publish the full hour. It's sort of cutting down the conversation to just what you need to make the point that the show is trying to make. Then distraction editing is within that final 30 minutes that you've chosen to use. My job is then to go in and clean up any ums, uhs, mouth clicks, coughs. If someone says, you know, a lot or a stammer's a lot, hopefully there's no dogs barking in the background, for example, anything like that. So anything that could be a distraction or gets in the way of a natural flow. The thing about podcast specifically is that they're quite intimate. Like you're giving someone your full attention for an extended period of time. And they're likely in a device stuck right in your ear. You can't get much closer to the brain. Exactly. And the least you can do is edit out the unattractive mouth clicks and smacks. The sound of people struggling from moisture and all that. It's just, it's a huge turn off. And some people say, oh, I don't care, but some do and you have to account for those listeners. And it's subliminal too. As an example, you might go to a restaurant and even though the food was good, something was off, something with the lighting or the music, you just can't pinpoint it. And it's the same with a podcast. All those little nagging distractions add up to take away from your experience. The thing with distraction editing is I'm not listening to the content when I'm doing the distraction edit because as soon as you get lost in the story, you start to miss some of the distractions, which almost sounds counterintuitive that if you're missing the distraction then they're not really distractions. But they can be to some people and that must be cleaned up to ensure that everyone listening has a great experience. It's just a different mindset to focus on the content and how it flows versus focusing on the distractions. The stammer is the little nagging sounds. It's also constant stopping and starting to remove those which makes feeling out the content flow more difficult. Not to mention sometimes I don't know the topic being discussed such as real estate or finance. Sometimes people get into technical stuff that's just not my expertise. So both of those things need to be kept completely separate but both of them come together to have a very tight content, well-produced, great sounding show. This was a completely new way of thinking for me and admittedly because I had been combining these two stages of editing for so long, I found it really hard to clearly understand the difference between a content edit and a distraction edit. What made it click for me though was when Max said that producing an episode of a podcast is kind of like building a house. The content edit is more like you're the architect. You're gonna decide where things go. You're gonna decide the style and feel of the show or the house in this analogy. And then I'm the builder. I'm gonna go in based on your plans and make it shine, build it from the ground up, paint it, put the moldings up. But I don't in that process decide where the walls go or what the feel of the house is gonna be or which way it's gonna face for sunlight in the morning. That's the content edit, that's the architect. That's the voice of the show essentially. You or a host is gonna listen to it and say this stuff doesn't make sense based on what I wanna say and this stuff is ace. Let's move that to the middle, let's move that later in the episode. Then you're gonna hand that over to me and I'm gonna build that house based on those plans and make it rock solid and look great. You can be a skilled architect and a skilled builder, but you definitely can't do both of those things at the same time. Sometimes I'll have a client say, well, can you look for a quote to extract or can you do the show notes while you're editing the distractions? And I'm like, I'm not listening to the content and learning about it and then really understanding the topic to figure out what is a good paragraph to extract for social media quote. Because if I do that, then I'm missing the distractions. So it's exactly what you said. It's two completely different mindsets. I'm focusing on the frequencies of the voice, the bass, the levels, all that. I'm not also learning about our new way to buy and sell houses in real estate, to have enough knowledge to know what is a great quote to take out that will make sense to the audience. For example, I'm not the expert in the show's content, the host or if they're lucky enough to have an associate producer who knows their content. I'm just focusing on the audio and I can't do both properly. So what Max and I did that completely transformed our ability to make good episodes, great episodes and make them quickly and efficiently is to separate the content edit from the distraction edit. They're two separate phases. Now, this sounds great, right? But how do you actually do this? How do you actually implement this in a way that's efficient, make sense, and makes for a great episode? Well, when we first started trying to separate these two phases, we weren't very efficient and it was insanely tedious. We would upload it to a transcript side and you guys would literally highlight the parts to be removed in yellow then I would go through, listen to it, match those timestamps with the audio, remove those sentences and paragraphs and not only did it add an hour to the editing process but it also added time and back and forth as I would have to sync up all the conversation. Upload it to that site, wait a day or two for you guys to mark it up. And then if you wanted to make changes to that markup, you couldn't do that because I had already edited on the timestamps on the transcripts no longer match. Right, and if we wanted to make any content changes, we had a mixed note spreadsheet where we would have to type in, like, okay, take this piece that ends in this word and that piece that ends in that word and then move it here. It was still hectic. But it's all we could, it's what we did. It just became a house of cards of timestamps and different sections. And you could say, well, actually don't edit that part but do edit the other six. And I'm like, but now none of the timestamps match the six other timestamps are off and it just got more and more messy. The funny thing is that we are talking as if this was like 20 years ago and this was like literally earlier in 2020 that we were still doing this. I can't believe it was only a year ago. But not anymore, not anymore. Because today I am happy to report that it is much easier than that. And you are not gonna have to deal with a timestamp house of cards. This is because of a tool that we discovered and started using earlier this year. Now, full disclosure, this is gonna start to sound a little bit like an infomercial because Max and I are so passionate about this tool. But it's not, neither Max nor I get any compensation for sharing how much we love this product. Still, this software has made us so much faster. It's made it so much cheaper and it has made our podcast episodes so much better. That software is called Descript. What it's done that's gotten me so excited and impressed so many clients is that it's bridged a gap between the host having the idea of what they want their content to sound like and getting to that final product they have in their mind. And now they don't have to build a spreadsheet. They don't have to worry about how to communicate that to an editor. The editor doesn't have to worry about well, I don't really understand these notes and it avoids the pitfalls that end up wasting so much time and headache. You know, you and I are pretty techy and we know what we're doing with this kind of stuff and it was still tedious. So for anyone that's not inclined a little on has the time, forget it. Yeah. And to Descript where I describe it as like it's iTunes married with Google Sheets or Microsoft Word. So you basically record your podcast, upload the audio to Descript and it will transcribe it. And then the magic happens because you can select a sentence or paragraph in the text, delete it and it's deleted from the audio at the same time. Oh yeah. So before you even talk to your editor, you can go through and delete parts of the conversation you don't want and move it around literally by cutting and pasting text, which all of us know how to do. Of course, from working in Microsoft Word or Google Sheets or writing an email even. So you can say, all right, I like the first 20 minutes, I'm gonna delete 10 minutes in the middle and I'm gonna keep 10 minutes at the end. So you just highlight the text with your mouse, copy and paste it to a new composition which is dead easy and the audio follows as it's attached to the text you just pasted. So once you've copied and pasted it, you click play and you can hear your new show construction without ever calling an editor. I'm putting myself out of a job here, but the actual beauty of it is now it makes it so much easier for me to understand exactly what you want in the house I'm gonna build for you or with the content of your show, which is the real voice and heart of the show itself created by the host. And this can be done by the host, minutes after recording while the content is still fresh. No spreadsheets, no making notes or having to highlight stuff and then hope someone else gets it on the other end. You can literally just highlight it, delete it and then the audio has gone instantly. It's streamlined the process, but it's also given power to hosts who might be daunted by making notes and trying to express what they want. It's put that power right in their hand, right on their computer to easily create the show that they want, to streamline, cut down the junk, cut the fat off the edges and trim it down to exactly the voice that they wanna have in mere minutes. To take it to the next level, what this also does is makes it way easier to identify and export amazing quotes and excerpts that you can share on social media. You can take that quote that you love, you can highlight the text, copy and paste it to a new composition and have that quote in audio that you can then use on your LinkedIn, your Facebook page, you know, with an audiogram, with a little graphic, whatever you want. Or just by itself and throw it on Instagram. And the cool part, Descript will actually make the audiogram for you. All of the audiograms on my Instagram promoting this show are made with Descript. But just the ability to edit the content of a show and hear what that edit sounds like in real time without having to involve an audio engineer or become an audio engineer yourself, that could be the advantage that takes your podcast from okay to amazing. It is now given a podcaster who may have been too afraid to communicate what they want or didn't even know how to approach it. And people who didn't want to spend 16 hours, you're crazy by the way. You know, 16 hours editing and the learning curve of, you know, work stations, forget it. Now, this is the most important piece of all. Our editing framework combined with Descript does do all the things we've mentioned so far. It makes it better faster cheaper to work with a team. It makes it better faster cheaper to create promo content and it makes it better faster cheaper to just make a great podcast. But the biggest impact that this will have on your show is that this will get you more listeners because all of the time that you're currently spending on editing content generation and the back and forth of it all, if you have a team, all of that time and money will be freed up so that you can focus on what actually matters. Getting more listeners and monetizing. I think it was Oprah who said something along the lines of don't do the things that aren't moving your life or business forward. Five percent of the things you do are actually moving you forward, the rest outsource it. So Descript is that bridge between outsourcing it. But also, you know, even if you're gonna outsource the post-production, it gives you the first half of the show, the content that you can do yourself on the fly. So you're doing the five percent that makes your show shine content-wise creating that compelling story without anything unnecessary and easily preparing the episode for the outsource part with the post-production. You can go back and listen to your version and ideas over and over. You don't have to deal with an editor. You don't have to deal with the post-producer who might not be available. You can make a thousand changes to it to your heart's content without costing you any money or time. We're going back and forth with the editor. So it gives you the power to record it to our conversation and turn it into four podcasts right there, you know, without doing anything. Listen back as much as you want, make the changes you want. It's pretty incredible. It's a game changer for sure. So for this podcast, Grow the Show, which is only on episode five, that's the process. After interviewing Max, he loaded the audio into Descript and I did all the content editing and the script writing right there. It took me about two hours, but that's because I do a lot of writing. Then I told Max it was ready. He exported the episode from Descript directly into Adobe Audition, which is where he did the distraction edit and the post-production. That took him a little over an hour and we're done. Since Grow the Show is only on episode five, I'm still heavily involved here in the content edit because we're still establishing the voice of the show and it doesn't make sense for me to outsource that quite yet. Philly, who, on the other hand, is on episode 72. That process is much more mature and that process outsources the content edit to a third person. So it looks like this. First, I record an interview with an amazing Philadelphia. That interview then goes to my associate producer Catherine who fires up Descript. There in one session, she completes the content edit, writes my voiceovers, identifies and exports all of the social media grabs and writes the episode title and show notes all in one shot, all in one headspace. After that, she lets me know that the episode's ready. I hop in, I give the episode a quick listen through in Descript, I record my voiceovers and then it goes to Max. Now, not only is this process insanely efficient, but all three of us, Catherine, Max and I, are playing completely to our strengths. Catherine is a professional writer and storyteller with a degree in journalism. She handles the content and doesn't have to worry about EQ or compression. Max is a 25-year touring DJ and music producer who's legendary in the electronic music scene. He handles the post-production, makes it sound amazing and doesn't have to make content decisions. And I am this random dude who's good at talking to people and so all I should be doing is interviewing an amazing Philadelphia and leaving the rest of it to people who are better at it than I am. Now, if you're someone just starting out or if you can't afford to outsource, totally fine, you can do the whole kit and caboodle in Descript. It is a fully functional digital audio workstation and it allows you to do the content edit, distraction edit and post-production all in one place. But if you want your audience to grow and if you want to monetize, you are gonna need to get editing and content generation off of your plate. And so I encourage you to think about doing that now and when you do that, don't be intimidated by it because remember this, when you bring on somebody to help you with post-production or editing, success is all about communication. That is the one thing that's allowed Max and me to get past our awkward newbie phases and to create the insanely efficient and effective processes that we shared with you today. Don't be afraid to be honest and open about exactly what you're looking for and clear with feedback. There's nothing worse than someone coming back to me saying, yeah, I felt it had too much base, but I was afraid to say something, that's mortifying to me because I don't ever want you to feel like you can't be honest about something you won't change. And if they say, well, you know, I thought it had too much base, but you're the expert. It's like, I'm the expert in manipulating what you want. I'm not the expert in telling you what you should have for your show. I'm happy to explain why I think something the way it is, but ultimately it's your show and voice. For example, I can say, well, we need to reduce that frequency for AirPods because they boost the high end and it will sound harsh. So we need to reduce that and that comes from communication, but you just need to be open and clear about what you want and develop a relationship with them where you can together find the best balance to present the voice that the host wants or that the brand wants. And that's what you and I did. And I think the one thing I've learned in the years of doing shows is they are all different. There's no single set way, you know, to produce a show. There's basics like balancing the volume, of course, but you know, some people want a lot of editing, some people don't want it. Some people want a very natural voice. Some people want more spacing and pauses to let a point sink in. Some people want faster cuts. So it's a quicker pace, you know, you just have to communicate. I think it's also key for the post producer or editor to be as open and receptive to feedback and help clients with the terminology. So hosts can understand how to convey what they want. I love when a client comes to me and says, I don't really know how to explain this, but here's what I'm hearing or here's what I want, different, but I don't know how to explain it. I would much rather that than them say to me, well, I didn't know what to say to you so I just shut my mouth. That's the worst. And then they're not happy. You're not happy. It's not the best product. Exactly. Yeah. So my challenge to you this week is to see how you can make your editing and content generation process more efficient. Think about how you can separate your content edit from your distraction edit so that your brain can focus in one headspace at a time. And check out the scripts to see if it could change the game for you as much as it has for me. Now, I'll admit, it is pretty impossible to demonstrate the full power of scripts on a podcast. We tried, but if you want to see how I use Descript to edit and generate promo content, you can do so right now on the brand new Grow the Show YouTube channel. The link to that tutorial is right in the show notes. On top of that, if you are interested in working with Max to edit and post-produce your show, you can head to growthe.show forward slash Max to fill out an editing application. The link to that is in the show notes. Finally, if you would like direct support from me in growing and monetizing your show, be sure to join us in the free Grow the Show Facebook group. This week, over there, we're talking about other ways that we can use Descript to streamline our show. And we're also talking about how you can get a podcast listened that come from your website to count on the Apple Podcast charts. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. If you felt that this episode brought to you any value at all and helped you to get one step closer to growing and monetize your podcast, please do rate and review if you are in Apple Podcasts. As you well know, it really does help support and grow this show. This episode was created, edited, produced by and about Max Graham and me. Huge thanks to Max for working on both sides of the mic for this one. For Q9 and Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidlin. See you next time.