How to Avoid Common Audio Mistakes in Your Podcast: Essential Do's and Don'ts, with Max Graham

This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts from anywhere. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, companies like Spotify, and even the New York Times. What's amazing about Riverside is that when you're recording a podcast or a remote interview, the recording quality is independent of Wi-Fi stability, which is huge. Your content is recorded locally, which ensures reliable and uncompressed content quality. It's basically a studio inside your browser, and it is super intuitive and easy to use. Once your recording is done, you'll automatically be able to download separate audio and video tracks and edit your content all with a few clicks. So if you haven't yet, give Riverside a try. Visit Riverside.fm and use my code Grow15, that's GROW15, to start recording studio quality sound and video and get 15% off a membership plan. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Stridland. I am your podcast growth coach. And today on the show, we're going to shed some light on the tiny little mistakes that you're currently making with your podcast's sound quality. You may not realize it, but those mistakes are making your podcast sound unprofessional, and they're making listeners take your show less seriously. But have no fear, because we're also going to share with you how you can correct those mistakes with just a couple of tweaks and hacks. With them, you'll be able to make your podcast sound way more professional. That way your show will make a great first impression, and your new listeners will be more likely to become binging fans. Joining me today to help shed light on these teeny tiny little mistakes is an audio engineer who has been working with sound for more than 30 years. He's a world-renowned DJ and music producer who's toured the world for decades, and now he's the co-founder and lead audio engineer of podcast boutique, which is the podcast post-production agency that I use for Grow the show, and then I recommend for everybody. Today, he's going to step through a checklist of tweaks and tips that he provides to his production clients so that you can maximize your show's professional sound without breaking the bank. Max, you ready to dive in? Yes, definitely. Awesome. Let's do it. All right, Max. So the first thing I want to get into before we talk about the tips, tricks, and techniques is why is this so important? So why should the podcaster who's listening pay any attention to their sound quality? If you are a podcaster that is interested in being in that one percent, these things that we're going to talk about today are all such easy fixes that make some people might not see them as making much of a difference, but they really differentiate the top one percent from the rest of the mess. We have clients come to us that have been doing things incorrectly for years and not realizing it, and just the slightest tweak free easy tweak can bump them up to being instantly more professional. So that's why it's almost painful to see people making those mistakes because they are such easy fixes. You know, like purchasing the wrong mic is one thing, but simply moving the mic out of your breath channel or adding a bit of lighting for your video can raise the level up so much you will look back on previous episodes and be like, what was I thinking? So our goal as a company and you as well has always been to help tweak those things that are easy to deal with, get yourself in the one percent so you can focus on the difficult things like content monetization and growth. Don't worry about these little things, get them fixed, get yourself into that professional one percent right away. So, you know, again, because they're easy to fix, we want to help go through the list and see if we can help people out there make those little tweaks for their own show. You bring up a great point, which is you don't have to do these things like you totally can be somebody who just like records throws it on like doesn't do much. You can do that, but it's so easy to do these things that we're about to talk about that there's no reason not to because it's just going to put your show above the rest and truly like you said, make it sound like the top one percent. Exactly. And if you're listening to grow the show that's clearly your aim is to upgrade your show in every direction from monetization to just the random little things. There was an amazing Reddit post a couple of years ago that asked, have you stopped listening to a podcast and why? And there were hundreds of answers and a lot of them were content shift either like a political shift or something, but there were so many that said that they just couldn't get past the lack of editing or the poor audio quality or you know people leaving gaps in like which slows the pace down which makes it just appear more kind of kind of lazy. So I always point clients to that because it's really eye opening to see how these little things really do affect your audience and your listenership. You know like for us you and I content editing is a big thing. You know cutting your 30 minute show down to 20 minutes instantly gives your audience more time back means that someone with a 25 minute commute is going to hear your whole show and they'll hear your CTA at the end, which is key, but they might miss it if it's 30 minutes. So why are you leaving in that 10 minutes that's unnecessary of like small talk and mistakes and stumbles and all that stuff is so easy to remove that why wouldn't you give your podcast the best chance to succeed. Yeah. So yeah that's that's where we're coming from. So let's jump into each one and start with the first one that you alluded to which is microphone. Now they're you talked about the mic placement which we'll get into in a second, but what I'd love to know from you off the bat is the age old question. What mic should I use? So got any opinions there? For me it's pretty simple. It's either a sure a road or an audio technical and you're talking about companies that have been around for decades making microphones. You have new people come along you know like Logitech which is a computer peripherals company that's trying to make mics. You have you know the Blue Yeti and the Snowball these mics made by companies that are less than 10 years old. They have the kind of beats by Dre or vitamin water vibe where it's like 90% marketing 10% quality in the product. So I would always focus on you know the companies that have been around for a while. You use what is the best in class across everyone from Joe Rogan, Jay Shetty, any top tier podcast uses what you use which is the Sure SM7B. Now it's a little out of a lot of people's price range because it is top tier it's a you know three four hundred dollar mic and then you need another two hundred dollars worth of stuff to get it working but they have the cheaper version the MB7. The microphone that I suggest to everyone is the ATR 2100 which is less than 100 bucks. It's half the price of some of these overly marketed poor sounding mics and it is perfect especially for female voices I find with high siblings. It tones that down really nicely. So all of the clients that we have either use the SM7B or the ATR 2100 and like when you see a comedian on stage or a politician speaking you don't see a blue yet. You see a pretty boring looking standard microphone that's the ATR 2100 it sounds perfect you can drop it on its head you can throw it in a bag and it will last forever and it sounds amazing and like I said it's cheaper. So what we see is a lot of people fall into this trap of you know how to start a podcast and they Google it and the blue Yeti comes up because they have the biggest marketing budget. So this gets back to a bigger problem which I think is the first step to starting a podcast is consult a professional consult someone who knows who can help you avoid the pitfalls such as buying an overpriced microphone that you're going to replace in 15 episodes when you realize that it's picking up all this annoying room noise that you don't want just avoiding the general pitfalls of setting up audio setting up lighting learning how to record recording levels you know you and I both know most podcasters hate their first 10 episodes yeah because they didn't consult a professional the sound is all over the place they didn't know what they're doing which is fair it's a kind of complicated you know it's once you learn it it's simple but it's it's a bit daunting so it's fair that they don't know which is why we say consult a professional off the rip you will save money you will avoid pitfalls you'll avoid signing up for services you don't need or you know I have people who've been recording paying for something like you know Riverside or Squadcast to record solo episodes when they have a Mac and quick time is built in and it's free yeah so it's like and it records perfectly on a local recording but because they just don't know and again it's understandable but that's why you should consult someone who knows yeah so as far as the microphone yeah I would always stick with a company that's been around for a while and you will slightly less glamorous looking than the than the blue Yeti or the blue snowball whatever it is but the goal is the end product user who has your voice in their ears for an hour you want it to sound as clean and as soft and as pleasing on the ears possible and the microphone is obviously the most important part of that yeah so there will be undoubtedly some listeners who have a blue Yeti and they're like oh no what do I do so for someone who I mean the first thing would be grab a sure grab an AT but if you can't do that if it's out of someone's budget they have a blue Yeti let's talk a little bit about how they can get the most out of that and how they can you know make their sound better with a blue Yeti first of all you want to jump on YouTube and look up someone who is reviewing the blue Yeti because there's four settings on the back there's a dial with four and one of the settings is to record all around the blue Yeti where it's designed to be put in the middle of four people podcasting which of course we do not recommend at all but it's just kind of a feature that it has but there's also a setting so that it's it's only recording what's directly in front of it and everything around it is lessened and obviously you want that because the Yeti is notorious for picking up air conditioner noise computer fan noise any sort of little mouth clicks or noises in the room and it adds a lot of like hissie kind of vibe to it so you definitely want to make sure that the gain is quite low which you can set right on the back of the Yeti and also you want to turn it to the heart symbol which is that's four symbols and it's like a circle and infinity eight you want to turn it to the heart if you're recording solo so you minimize and mitigate the noise around the blue Yeti so the two things are the levels and that setting if you're using the all around setting guarantee you're adding 30 40% noise that is unnecessary on top of your voice which of course doesn't sound great now a lot of people do think there's a magic button in post-production if there was people wouldn't have five hundred dollar microphones so Rogan wouldn't be recording in a professional studio I wish there was a magic button but there isn't yet maybe AI will come up with something soon so you really do have to pay attention to the mic the room and you know the mic technique so let's talk about that one what is mic technique and why does it matter it's basically the relationship between your voice and your breath and the mic and what it's picking up so even the slightest change in where you are can change how your voice sounds and how intimate or how far away you might sound you also have the issue of room reverb this room is not well treated because I don't record podcasts here so you can hear if I move the mic farther away and speak louder my voice is bouncing off the walls and it starts to mix in with my voice and it doesn't sound great so if I get too close it starts to get a little like right it's kind of gross it's like a bit ASMR you can hear gross so those are very slight adjustments that I made but it's a drastic difference so mic technique is key because nobody wants to hear you know popping peas in the mic and nobody wants to hear your mouth noises and also breath is a big deal if if you have the mic directly in front of you and you're drawing your breath in over the mic the mic is picking that up and amplifying it and it does not sound good so all those things I mean if you're listening on speakers in a kitchen while you're cooking that's one thing but if you have air pods in and it's right in your ear it can really be a turn off not only a turn off but distracting from the content so again it gets back to you want to give yourself the absolute best chance to succeed and moving your mic three inches is free and easy and literally upgrades your sound instantly yeah so the good way to think of it and and thankfully now with more people coming into video it makes it easier to picture is that if you're facing a camera you don't want the microphone to be blocking the view so that instantly upgrades your sound because you're moving it to the side so that your face is showing to the camera and the mic still picks it up perfectly but you're not getting the air that your blowing is not hitting the mic and the mic is not picking up this sort of mouth sounds and gross stuff some of it can be removed and editing but again we're not doing ASMR here we just want to do a nice clean voice simple you wanted about a fist distance and on an angle like a 45 degree angle out of your breath channel you do not want to be breathing into the mic or drawing in your breath over the mic so it sounds perfect here I can turn to the mic if I want but you're going to get that sort of chance if I laugh or if I say a popping pee like pizza pronto it doesn't sound right so just make sure it's out of that sorry I'm bumping the mic which is also a cardinal sin but in the effort to explain it it's a it's a necessity so you just want to make sure that your air channel is not pushing towards the mic and the mic is pointing at your mouth but your mouth is not pointing at the mic right so yeah and also you want to isolate it off your desk or be very careful with bumping the desk again because those things are just distracting and unprofessional and even though it doesn't really take away from your content if you're bumping on the desk it takes the focus away from your content you know so it's just again easy fix and can upgrade your show it just a little change just like that little focus on the little things right and it's it's so much cheaper than having to fix it in post-production and having to either spend tons of time trying to fix it or or you know tons of money paying somebody else to fix it when a lot of times they can't even fix it because it's just not possible right it's just so much better and ounce what is it ounce of prevention is worth the pound of cure exactly it all starts with the source recording like I said there's no back magic button to fix everything we can fix up a lot of things but even when you're you think of like Photoshop if you have a slightly blurry photo and you try to bring it into focus with AI it's like it's not perfect it's you can still feel a little bit of weirdness like some fuzziness around the hair it's the same with audio so if we're going to run like reverb removal noise removal it's never going to be as good as recording in a quiet room with no reverb so yeah it all starts with the client with the the host and the guest being in a as good a situation as possible to give yourself the chance to succeed and appeal to your audience as much as possible when you're competing against a million other podcasts now obviously the guest you know the guest is always a role of the dice not every guest has a treated room or a $400 mic and that's totally understandable and I think any podcast audience will understand that but for the host no excuse yeah and when I'll just add to what you're saying you kind of just alluded to it now is that I've had tons of podcasts you say well you know so and so like this creator that I know and that I follow or this person has a huge show and like they clearly don't pay attention to this and the answer to that is like yeah they already have a huge audience like they can kind of get away with it but for us you know the folks that are listening to this show are largely podcasters who are building their audience from scratch and you know when a listener discovers you for the first time you not having a high quality sound is going to be a reason that they don't pay attention like oh this doesn't sound legit and so they'll turn it off and you'll lose a chance yeah on one hand like Tim Ferriss is a good example of that on one hand I do I get angry with him because he obviously has the resources to have a perfect show yeah but he doesn't really care and his his audio isn't great his mic technique isn't great but as you said you're competing in someone who had a New York Times best seller for years like go write the four-hour work week and then you can do whatever you want you know I don't know he's interviewing like major CEOs like the top top people in the world so people will suffer it's a strong word through you know a poor production because the content is there so if you if you're using him as an excuse you better have the cloud and the reputation that he has right or you know you're just shooting yourself in the foot right go go write a book that's a household name first and then you can you know use your AirPods and you're exactly your phone mic so you talked a little bit about recording software and I just want to dive into that a little bit more because you know I use Riverside we talk about Riverside a lot here on the show which is and we're using Riverside right now to record this remote interview because you know I'm in Miami and you're in Montreal I assume yeah but there's a time when you actually don't need to use a recording platform like that can you tell us a little bit about that yeah so if you're recording solo and you have a PC or a Mac there's plenty of free options for recording video and audio at home without having to deal with the internet without having to worry about dropouts or downloading from some website or syncing over the web you know a lot of people use to script for their voiceovers also but you're still kind of dealing with the web but you know it's just there's a lot of other options other than using something like Riverside obviously if you're you know if you're doing an interview it needs to be remote you can also record local in parallel just in case something gets lost but Riverside these days is pretty reliable that you don't have to worry about that so for interviews I would use Riverside or even zoom as long as you have the zoom settings to record each person on a separate channel the video is going to be a little bit low because it's a it's a communication device not a recording device as opposed to Riverside which is really focused on high quality recordings but again consult a professional you know what is the best way to do this what are my options you know there's something called OBS which is open broadcast software which is cross platform PC and Mac and I have two clients who co-host a show every week so they were using you know an online platform and they were getting some dropouts and some issues so instead they downloaded OBS and they record locally on each end perfect video and audio I'm actually using OBS to record this show as a backup for our Riverside conversation so I have a perfect clean recording for both Riverside and OBS and it's free so they love it because now they have two perfect files and then they just combine them in post and again by hiring a professional they send me each video over Google Drive and I just you know sync it up and slap it together in descript and then an Adobe audition and it's perfect and the recordings are pristine and that's free yeah you know so they have a zoom call to communicate you know to actually have the conversation but they're recording on OBS which you can choose your camera you can choose your mic and choose the levels so there are options out there especially if you're doing a solo show or an in-person show where you have your guest in the same room where you don't have to worry about paying a service or having to upgrade to the highest quality with that service on the Mac for example is quick time quick time has been built into the Mac for as long as I can remember probably 15 years or more and he takes two seconds to bring it up your camera records in whatever quality you have and your mic is perfectly pristine and you just save it and then send it to a husband we do the post production but it just makes it so much easier and quicker than you know fussing around with an online remote recording system when you're doing solo so each has a time in a place but the clients that I've showed local recording to are like oh wow this is so much makes so much more sense for my you know 10 minute YouTube short or you know just my solo ramp that I want to have on my next podcast for video and audio so yeah there's options out there it's just you know yeah it's funny I'm sitting here interviewing my post producer and I don't have OBS going and I'm like oh my god he's going to kill me well Riverside is pretty good so yeah and also you and I have great internet connections which is of course a huge deal I have had clients that have not so great Wi-Fi and when they have their guests doesn't have great Wi-Fi sometimes you get a delay with Riverside where you speak and they don't hear you for a second then they'll say something and you won't hear it for two seconds which that three second combined delay I have one client who laughed at something that was completely inappropriate because the laugh was actually for something that was said four seconds before so we had to fix all that in post and that came from you know a bad internet so I would say if you are doing regular podcasting at home 100% hard wire your internet just cut out any of those potential issues with wireless with you know interference in the building you're in and even in perfect condition wireless is still kind of up and down you know just plug in your ethernet cable you can buy a cheap one on amazon run it across the floor it doesn't have to look good as long as the camera doesn't see it and you will upgrade immediately you're recording through Riverside right there okay so we've spoken about the equipment that you use we've spoken about how to use that equipment we've spoken about recording software but let's talk a little bit about how you actually perform in the interview so what do you think that podcasters should consider to make themselves sound more professional while recording i think what the best podcasters do is they understand that it's not you're not live on the radio so you can pause take a breath compose your thought start over and we can just cut all that out so what we recommend and what we see in the best podcasters if if you make a mistake pause back up to the beginning of that sentence then we can edit out the mistake what a lot of people do is a very natural thing when you're in conversation you will kind of stumble and then correct yourself with emphasis so you'll say like i went to the bot i mean i went to the gym so you're kind of over emphasizing gym to signify that you made a mistake and make sure the person hears you but then if we edit out i went to the but it doesn't sound right because suddenly you're like why is this person hugely emphasizing the word gym because you've removed the mistake so that's another thing to keep in mind is just if you do make a mistake just stop start over and say i was going to the gym and like totally naturally so and it's a it's a common mistake and it is hard to develop that habit but that's something the best podcasters do they will pause and start over from the beginning of the sentence rather than speed up and catch up and emphasize the correction to show that they made a mistake because it just is so obvious in post when you remove that original mistake that it just doesn't sound right so also something i just did i swallowed because i'm racing to finish that sentence as an example you can stop swallow have drink of water and then start over and we will cut it out in post no one wants to hear those swallow sounds but i'm kind of doing it intentionally to show you guys so yeah so little things like that agreements sometimes are an issue sometimes we remove like 70% of the host's agreements now it is good to show your guest you're interested in your listening so you do want to agree with them and if you do agree too much we can cut that out but it is something to keep in mind that if you're saying the same kind of mm-hmm every 10 seconds you know if you're if you don't have a post producer that can be kind of distracting and grading to the audience so again it's hard habit to build but once you kind of start to notice it you will only interject when you have an actual sort of reaction to it like oh wow that's crazy you know something like that rather than just mm-hmm mm-hmm every sort of few seconds so most clients will listen back to podcasts and kind of learn from that but it is something to pay attention to that will just make the conversation flow more and you know if you have a post producer we can remove that but these are all just little things you can focus on to improve your overall presentation and performance yeah but i've i mean we're going on five years working together now we believe right wow since i hired some dude named max on upwork to work on my Philly podcast who was editing podcasts in Ableton yeah oh my god but like looking back now like so many of those things that you're mentioning like i haven't even considered it but my point is as a podcaster with time you can slowly like improve your habits on the mic so as you're saying that i'm remembering a day when i did my Phillyhoo interviews where like every two seconds i was like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and back then i didn't record the video and so you could just like highlight all of the yeah yeah yeah yeah on the on mine and just delete it and nobody would have any idea that that was happening but now with video like it would actually kind of look weird like you if you took out the audio so like you kind of have to really work to just what i do is i just kind of like not along and signal physically that i'm listening without the constant uh-huh uh-huh perfect that's also you brought up something really interesting that i haven't mentioned yet but is becoming a big thing now that podcasters are learning the video and the audio process is very different because if you cut out the fillers in the video then it's literally it looks like the CD skipping and it's like jumping around and you see that with some influencers on youtube that do what's called jump cuts where they cut out every breath and they they do multiple takes and then edit it together and it just it's almost jarring and unnerving because you don't have a chance to absorb what they're saying because they've cut out the breath and it immediately jumps to the next sentence so yeah it's it's a little bit weird with video we recommend for video that we leave it as natural as possible if you want to cut out a 10 minute piece for sure we can do that but we don't want to remove fillers well tighten up some gaps maybe but we don't want to remove fillers and stutters because the video does not look good when it looks like it's skipping around all the time and it can be more distracting than actually leaving the distractions in right but then obviously for audio we can dig right in and chop the hell out of it so that it sounds natural but clean it up and knock off you know five six minutes of it be amazed i had a client had a 45 minute podcast and when i delivered it it was 38 minutes and he was like is there something wrong is something missing so we audited it in descript i'm like no everything's perfect there was just that many filler words wow and stutters and stumbles and distractions that we actually cut seven minutes you know i mean that's crazy it was 20% so much time a 45 minute podcast is it yeah something like that yeah it's pretty crazy so i want to emphasize that that you said there which is that when you have a professional do the audio editing those filler words and and pauses and standards and stuff can be removed but what's key is that it makes the audio still sound natural just earlier today i was listening to this is a classic example of what we just mentioned earlier with like huge podcasts just like getting away with stuff that like i wouldn't recommend for somebody just building an audience from scratch i was listening to Tim Ferriss's interview on the Dak Shepherd podcast just a couple hours ago right and what always drives me nuts about Dak Shepherd's podcast which incredible show like not say anything but always drives me nuts is how they edit it they edit the audio really tight like they remove filler words and everything to the point where it's like super jumpy yeah and it's the only podcast that i can't listen to on like one point anything speed like i have to listen to it on one because it's so like it's super jumpy which you can get away with on video even with an interview you can kind of get away with like the youtube jump cuts yeah but my point is that you know if you're editing your audio and you're taking things out you really want to make for audio only make it sound as natural as you can because that's the place where truly when it sounds unnatural it can be pretty jarring would you agree yeah that's absolutely our priority is you know if an um you know an us rolled into another word and you chop it in the middle and it literally sounds like someone unplugged the mic we're going to leave that on in there we're really conscious of one sounding natural and two the gaps being proper i will shorten gaps to keep the pace up to keep the interest and keep it snappy but if someone says something emotional or they end a point with something strong you need to give us couple seconds for it to sink in and absorb like wow that's crazy what's coming next you know if they immediately jump to the next sentence then you lose the impact of what was just said and you know it doesn't it just doesn't work and i get it with these you know five minute tutorials on youtube you know they they want to beat the algorithm and keep the attention of you know 16-year-old gamers up as much as possible who might turn turn it off if there's a two-second gap but if you have like an adult podcast you need to leave those gaps in because that gives people a chance to absorb what was being said you know so we're really conscious of is this a point that needs to be we have the gaps slightly extended before the next sentence starts or can we shorten it and i would say about 75% of the time i'm shortening shortening shortening to keep the pace up keep it snappy and then the other 25% of the time i'm saying like okay this is a really beautiful point they just made you know or something emotional or they're telling a really you know a deep story then you want to leave a little bit more room for sort of impact you know it's just yeah it's just like you you know you watch movies or you know you see a well-produced movie it's like those gaps between the editing from the car chase is all frantic but then it might have a beautiful slow scene where someone just died or something you know i remember in the wire when one of the best characters died they kept the camera on the body on the ground not to be too morbid luckily it was only an actor but you can one of the greatest shows of all time i will say that but it was such i'm getting the chills but it was you know it was almost at the end of the show five seasons in and it was such a poignant moment that the camera stayed just on him and you could hear the police sirens in the background and no movement for so long because you as the viewer needed the time to absorb what you just saw and they knew that this was such a favorite character that if it was just like oh bang you fell on the ground and then you cut to some other scene it would have completely lost the chance to have a poignant moment and i mean i have a podcast about hospice care which has a lot of emotional moments i have a nursing podcast as a client you know so they're constantly talking about things that are quite heavy and quite emotional and interviewing people that have amazing stories so those pauses are critical and the thing about something like descript which we both love and use all the time you can push one button fill a removal and one button gap removal but that does not take into account at all what the content needs to be presented in the right way so that's why there's really only is one option which is using a proper post producer but if you do do it yourself and descript leave those gaps in focus on the gaps that are necessary for the most sort of emotional impact and shorten the gaps that don't but yeah i've listened to those types of shows that you're talking about also and it's to disservice to the audience because you're like yeah you almost want to rewind and catch it again and then you're like this is just annoying i'm gonna move on yeah you know it just takes you out of the flow because you know listening to a podcast is one of the few you know ways of consuming content that we have these days where you actually can kind of sit back and let the silence do the work a little bit and let a moment breathe which is awesome and and you know we don't get that in too many other places these days i don't actually listen to a ton of podcasts i've gone through phases where i do and i'm you know going to the gym stuff but one that i listened to religiously which i think is absolutely best in class is sam harris and sam touches on very serious topics all the time he also has you know hour long solo shows but his level of production you know one i've heard him say that you know apologize for not being able to air an interview because the quality wasn't good enough which is crazy i've never heard a show do that yeah but for the most part like his recording is perfect his pacing is perfect and if you if you listen to sam harris versus someone like you know Tim Ferris and sam just has those pauses that make so much sense because you he really is focused on you absorbing the information that he's giving you he's not using it to self aggrandize himself and just like hey how about podcaster here's what i'm gonna talk about you're all gonna listen he focuses on like that connection with the audience and having the pause at the right time that really counts and it just makes all the difference and it doesn't seem like it does it's probably even subliminal partly but those things those tiny things make such a difference in the listener experience so that's a show i listen to pretty much all the time because i love how it's produced i love how it's presented so he has my loyalty because he focuses on those things yeah again like podcaster listening you don't have to do it that big like you know you don't have to make it completely perfect like have cinematic moments with like all like perfect silences but again if you can just make a couple tweaks here and there just to improve your levels it really really does go a long way to your point max even subliminally right the listener may not even realize it but they they still feel it i'm so curious so i know there are a lot of listeners agree the show who have post producers who have editors who have help with their show i'm so curious that i actually don't know what you're gonna answer to this oh yeah and also a lot of your clients listen to this podcast so yeah so what is something that you wish your clients did more or less of and the purpose of that question is to just make the life of the podcaster make the symbiotic relationship between the podcaster and the post producer better easier so what's something that podcasters should consider doing more or less when working with their post producers naming their files correctly oh no oh that's gonna be right at me i know we get we get so many discreet shares and it's usually just named like the guest name yeah so i'm like what show is this so i always have to i was renamed them with like the initials of the show and then the episode number no it's that's something we're happy to do for the clients and you know clients are busy and our job is to take the stress and time off their plate so they can name it how they want but yeah it's just one of those little things if i could snap my fingers and change it i was so funny but overall i would say the biggest times i've been frustrated with our clients is when they don't come to me first with a question about how to do something we are very accessible and we try to make sure that we're always available to our clients and i plead with them i'm like if you're gonna suddenly leave your house and go do a live recording in a cafe let me know and i will tell you how to do it best you know or if you can only do it a certain way i'll tell you the best way to do it to get the best result so that we can then fix it up the best way possible you know how to client is like well it was really noisy so i ran noise reduction in description for you and it's like that something that you know once you've embedded that you know a cheaper version of a noise reduction plugin it ruins our chance to actually use our high-end plugins to do the same job in a better way so our goal is always to save our clients the most time so we say don't remove any mistakes don't fix anything up leave it all to us so we'll do it in a quarter of the time and we'll do it five times better because we have the experience so yeah you know and yeah that's like if you hired a it's like if you hired a private chef and you went and bought the stakes and you're like i took the liberty of freezing reasoning up for you and the chef would be like no no exactly they'd be watching the season also they could do it themselves exactly and the thing is it bothers me because you're paying us to save you time but you're trying to save me time and in turn yeah making more work for me which i don't mind about the more work but i feel bad that like you're paying us to do this don't do it just leave it so i think that's my and that gets back to the first thing i said which is consultant professional so when i have a client that comes to me and says like okay i did this and it took me three hours but i prepared it for you and i'm like if you had come to me first we could have done it in a way that would have taken you 30 minutes and saved time on our end so then my goal is strictly to save the client time and stress and energy so that they can focus on content growth whatever they can only do and what they can't only do we will do so that's i think my biggest thing and i would say that to any podcaster is before you go and spend eight hours on a sunny Sunday while your kids are playing outside and you're inside editing something learning how to use confusing software not knowing the right method you know basically making a mess of it which we've all done you know i've done that with things i don't know how to do well and don't have 20 years experience doing it's natural right so just outsource it hire someone or even ask someone and you know with our circle community like i am more than happy to take half an hour with a member of gts ecosystem that is not a client of ours i've done it on numerous occasions where they might have a problem with the audio i'm like send it to me i'll run it through our processing i'll show them how they can make it better you know with one client recently it's like we we came to the agreement that it should probably be re-recordings it's a really bad recording but this wasn't a client of ours it was a client of yours yeah that message just on circle so i'm more happy to free of charge help someone else get better than i am to sit back and say hey they're not a client of ours they're they're on their own like i just want everybody to sound good and everybody to save as much time and stress and energy as they can right i'm focused on the right thing so i think that's it consult a professional before you go a mile in the wrong direction and you will save money you'll save time and you'll save your own frustration which is probably the biggest thing right and just to emphasize like consult like yeah do we recommend hiring a professional hell yeah but the very least consult one right exactly just even a little bit of guidance to really take your share to the next level it can be i mean we do it you and i do a free coaching call for audio production yeah so you know we do that weekly with gts sorry every other week on Wednesday so you know if you're a member of the gts ecosystem then jump on that call if you have a problem with the script or you're wondering what any q is or you're wondering why your room sounds funny like you know all those things they had a client last week who came on who was wondering why she had room echo and a lot of people call it echo but it's actually reverb which is that sense of space in the room and your voice bouncing back and she was talking to me from you know a glass desk with a glass wall and i'm like hmm glass is the absolute worst because your voice just bounces perfectly back off that right into the microphone yeah the thing is when you speak your voice is going out in all directions then it's bouncing back and it's causing like an accumulation of your voice bouncing back which is why recording studios are never square they don't have right angles they don't have glass they're always padded on the walls so that's another thing if you can't afford to treat your room they call it treating where you put things up on the walls and stuff what most people will do is you know move to the bedroom or move to a room with books or carpets or plants or non-right angles and not a lot of glass you want to stay away from hard surfaces right angles and anything that can help bring up that reverb and again it's trial and error you want to try a couple of rooms in your house try a couple of different corners in the same room and listen back to the reverb in the room and see you know how you can mitigate that so you don't have to spend you know $500 treating a room just move to a room that has some carpets book cases because again it's not a flat surface it's all over the place yeah maybe if you have a basement with brick or rock that's always perfect because this sound is just dissipated all over the place when you have a flat surface it all meets back in the middle right on top of your microphone so yeah that's another small tip awesome but back this has been chock full of little tips and tricks which I'm not usually a tips and tricks guy but really right now like these can make all the difference in making your show sound super professional so yeah any last tips or tricks or do you think uh you think the listener is good to go I think that's it I mean just you know focus on having a quiet room get a good microphone you don't need to spend more than a hundred bucks I think the ATR 2100 is like $80 in the US and it is absolutely my favorite mic especially if you have a female voice with high siblings so mic room during lots of water don't be afraid to pause we have paused and started over a few times in this episode but you won't see it because we're good at editing yeah so just that you know just focus on those little things keep the mic out of your breath channels probably the biggest one as far as mic usage and just trial and error you know don't be afraid to consult someone yeah so this is awesome thank you so much if the listener wants to find out any more information about getting in touch with you or even maybe working with you guys what is the best thing for them to do just go to podcast boutique.com there is another website called the podcast boutique.com that's not us but if you go to podcast boutique.com you will see uh trusted by girl the show thank you Kevin and there you can either email me at info or max at podcast boutique.com or click the information link we have client testimonials we have a page for all our video and graphics assets that we make the reels and the shorts and show notes etc and on there you can book a call with one of us just to explore what your needs are you know no cost no commitment and just jump on a zoom call with us and we can talk about your show and even give you some direct tips that fit you and then after that if you choose to work with us to save yourself hours a week and upgrade your podcast we will be there podcast boutique.com we will put the link in the show notes i've been working with max for the better part of five years and continue you know here's to another five years man so thank you so much for happening on and uh yeah appreciate it son thanks for having me