How to Make Your Podcast Sound More Natural, with NPR’s Lauren Migaki

Have you ever noticed that people who don't have podcasts seem to think that podcasting is really easy to do? And their mind, you just bring on a guest, turn on the mic, have a chat, and upload the audio. Simple, right? Obviously, if you're listening to this now, you know that that is very far from the truth. Here at Grow the Show, we like to say that making a podcast is easy, but making a good podcast is really freaking hard. However, there is a reason people who don't know better think that what we do is easy. And that's because the best podcasters in the world, the people who are really, really great at producing and hosting shows, they make their shows sound unbelievably smooth and natural. It sounds just like two people having a conversation, but like a really good, interesting, funny conversation, right? And so if that's all you're here, it sounds like anybody can do that, right? Not so much. In fact, it actually takes a ton of work to make a really great podcast episode sound completely natural and unedited. So that is what we are going to talk about today. Now for this show, Grow the Show, we do work really hard on the episodes that we produce. Catherine and I actually produce this one a couple times until we got it right. And the same thing is true for Philly Ho, the other podcast that we make. Both shows sound pretty natural, but are really, really heavily produced. And both shows have done well, amassing thousands of downloads. But we wanted to know more about how to make a high quality natural sounding episode and how to do it in less time. We here want to get better. We've done well, but we can do better. So we turn to the folks who make the gold standard in amazing natural audio, NPR. And today here on Grow the Show, we are joined by all star NPR producer and host Lauren McGackie. Lauren has been a radio powerhouse for years. She's produced interviews with Oprah, Joni Mitchell and Bob Burnham, among many others. She's been a director of mourning edition and she co-created up first NPR's Daily News Show that you might even listen to every day. And through all this experience producing radio, Lauren knows a thing or two about how to produce high quality natural sounding podcasts as efficiently as possible. And today in about 30 minutes, you will too. This is Grow the Show. The podcast to help you grow your podcast. Today, we explore how we can make our podcast episodes sound amazing, but not over-produced. And how you can make your show have the shimmer and shine of NPR in a fraction of the time. All that with NPR podcast producer and host Lauren McGackie is now on Grow the Show. My name is Lauren McGackie. I'm a senior producer at NPR. I wear a lot of hats. I work for the education desk. I occasionally host life kit podcasts. And I host a podcast for students about how to make a podcast. We love podcasts about podcasting here at Grow the Show. Lauren went to college at Syracuse University, but for most of her time there, podcasting and radio weren't even on her radar. I had changed my major like seven times. I was getting to like the cutoff point where like I couldn't change it anymore. I knew I wanted to do something in communications and journalism. And that was the one that like I felt like I was reasonably good at at the time. Eventually she was convinced to consider radio by one of the biggest voices in podcasting today. My senior year of college, Ira Glass, came to our school to talk about radio journalism and making a podcast and I was just enthralled. I remember he introduced us to all of these characters. He played a lot of audio clips. And he also kind of spoke about how when you start out at something, you're really bad at it. And you can see where you want to be. You have this ideal goal in mind and the stuff that you're making is just crap. And that just really resonated with me as college student who was still figuring out what I was even good at. And so I felt like this is a medium that allows you to try something and improve and get better. And it's still like very accepting through the whole thing. And from there I started listening to NPR and like really just fell in love with it. So although she graduated with a degree in graphic design, Lauren applied for her dream internship at NPR and she got the job. One of my very first assignments was to go through all of the audio of a reporter who was doing a story on young girls who hunt deer. And so it was just hours and hours of listening. She just rolled the whole time on this girl who was sitting in, I think it's like a blind waiting to catch a deer, waiting to cite a deer. And that was a really good like beginning, like learning how to listen to a lot, a lot of tape and pick the very best. It's certainly a slog. I mean, that's, that is the job is just listening constantly. And so it was really fun to both do that and also work with someone who knew what they were doing to build that into a story because sometimes that middle part where something actually gets baked into a story is so ugly and so hard. And so it was really great to get to see that transparently as a young person. What types of things did you learn working with somebody who had been more experienced at the time? Yeah, I mean, she wanted to be really playful with the audio. So, you know, she wanted sound to kind of come out all over the place really creatively and like almost whimsically. And so I think what that kind of taught me early is like, it doesn't have to be this like, here's the news, like official voice from God type announcement. It can be like, oh, and here's a pop of sound here and really I think someone once taught me sound is a fact. And so so much of the sound that she was putting in there is stuff that allowed us to set the scene without ever saying anything, right? And so you're saving all this time of like explaining what this girl is doing because you're illustrating it with the audio. It turns out, Ira Glass was right, developing her skills and becoming comfortable with this new form of media takes a lot of time and patience. I feel like when you are starting out in a new field and especially when you're a young person, you lack so much confidence in the product that you can deliver. I think I turned a corner around the two year mark, right? I had just spent, you know, 40 hours a week working the overnight shift, working on these interviews and pieces and putting together, you know, stories from reporters who just knew how to tell them so well. That finally I feel like something clicked. Then after that I felt like the learning was rapid, right? And you know, you start to get more responsibilities. I got sent out on assignment, I got sent to Crimea and to Israel and all these places and learned how to build like super sound rich stories and then being on deadline because they worked for morning edition like every night taught me to work fast. So I don't think I've ever stopped learning. But I think that it becomes a little easier once you kind of do your time in the ditches there a little bit. And feel confident in yourself that you're going to get there, right? Oh my gosh. I mean, there's moments where you're just like, this is always going to sound terribly. And I don't know how to tell this story and you get an edit back and you're just like so defeated because you're like, why couldn't I see that the story should be told a totally different way, you know? Lauren started your career at NPR as a producer as someone who makes audio stories happen behind the scenes. It wasn't while before she actually had her voice appear on the radio. When that finally happened, she was worried about how she might sound. But she'd be nervous to uptight, which she sound natural. These are probably questions you had about yourself when recording yourself for the first time, right? Well, luckily for Lauren early on in her time recording narration, she had the opportunity to cover something that really didn't fit the standard NPR reporter vibe. I did a story about the puppy bull that, you know, the animal planet thing that happened during the Super Bowl. I had someone tell me something really smart, which was just like, this isn't a serious thing. You can make jokes. You can kind of have some sarcasm in your voice. And I went to track that to narrate it with a friend that I both felt confident and front of, but I trusted their judgment. And she really like helped me nail the like conversational tone of it, right? Because you don't want to sound self serious in a piece about the puppy bull. I think I still take those lessons from her, which are like, pretend your moms in the room or hold the phone up to your ear and pretend that you're just telling this to someone. Lauren spent more time getting experience as a producer and a narrator. Eventually, she started to develop a new show herself. You might have heard of it. The show is called Up First, and it's a quick 10 to 15 minute news program that gets published every morning. There were a couple iterations in the creation of Up First. One was about a year before, before anyone was dreaming about daily news podcasts. We just made a pilot myself and our former host of Morning Edition, David Green. And we just, we wanted to hear how it would sound. We tried to have like a more conversational take on it than you would normally hear on like an NPR show. That didn't really end up going anywhere, but I think it kind of got the juices flowing. And so about a year later, when the network came to us and said we want to make this, we spent about three months piloting. Three months might feel like a short amount of time for a lot of us, but for a newsroom that's used to turning over stories every day, it can seem like an eternity. Plus, as I'm sure most of you know, starting a new podcast is hard, even for radio professionals. We knew generally our structure. We knew we had 10 minutes to do it, which is unlike most podcasts. Yeah. We knew we needed to pack in the top news headlines of the day. And we had to have two hosts because I think that there was an idea that because there's so many hosts of Morning Edition, we needed to keep the voices in their, varied. It was a hard piloting process just because one day we would try super, super conversational. And it would be like, we would just be having chatter about nothing. And we've all listened to that podcast, right? We were like, oh my gosh, get to the point. Right. But then also, I think it's hard to course correct and find that sweet spot of like, you want to be a human, you want to sound relatable, you want to sound warm and inviting, even if we're telling you about wildfires and war and terrible things. And so, you know, basically every day we would set the clock on how much time we had to make this. We would record it, cut it in a couple hours and then send it to a bunch of people to listen to. And eventually, I mean, you occasionally hear them break format, but we knew that when we were starting out, we had to establish a really strict set of rules because you can have a freeform podcast once you've established the rules, but I don't think you actually get to break that format until you've established yourself and your listener knows you really well. So, they tried a bunch of different formats and created a ton of pilot episodes. It was a lot of bad pilots. And I think when I look back at them, they were meandery, they didn't have a directive, they didn't have a promise to the listener, and we would send them to people, and it's actually it's a vulnerable thing when you send your audio out to someone and trust them to give you kind feedback that is helpful. And you had to figure out what was going to sound best, but giving ourselves that amount of time to just keep playing with it, I think was the saving grace of it. Yeah, how did you know when it was ready? I mean, we set a deadline. I mean, it's not saying this Lauren Michaels quote that like the show doesn't go on because it's ready, it goes on because it's Saturday night. You know that is precisely, you have to have something. Now, you might be thinking, this is not how I started my own show. Did I do it wrong? Do I need to start again from scratch? Lauren and I are here to tell you to fear not. Like a lot of other things, there isn't one right way to launch a show. Even NPR doesn't always use the same strategy. I also, in my time at morning edition, briefly did a stint at pop culture happy hour, which is like a much more chatty podcast about pop culture, obviously. And their origin story is completely different. They basically just started recording episodes and quietly releasing them. This is back before you would do like a big splashy like, hey, we're launching something new and they just sort of put them out into the world and slowly decided what their format was. They essentially did it in public, their piloting process. But it started with like this very Lucy Goosey thing and then they realized they needed to have individual segments where they talked about, you know, a movie and album. And by the time it became a bigger thing, they had found their footing. It takes time to find a show's voice. That's why we say find our voice, not decide our voice or choose our voice. Anyway, eventually Lauren would move on from up first and move to another part of NPR. I work on the education desk and a big part of that is that we're often putting stories out into the world, but some of the voices that we hear the least frequently are students voices. And so we wanted to give students an opportunity to kind of tell us what was going on in their worlds. So we started this podcast contest of which there are many, but ours is called the Student Podcast Challenge. And after the first year of it, we realized that we needed to teach people how to do it. Because I think it's really intimidating to launch a podcast, especially when you're in fifth grade, perhaps. So we started putting out episodes that are very digestible about just like, how do you even get started? This is what we are all here to find out. So Lauren has worn a lot of hats over the years. And while she's worked in a lot of different capacities at NPR, pulling good audio, producing shows, reporting, and even developing shows, there is one lesson that she always remembers regardless of what she's doing. I never forget the listener when I'm making something right because that's the whole point of doing it. It's decided out into the world and how people enjoy it. Listener first, we say this every episode because it always deserves repeating. But beyond that, we are going to talk about a part of podcast production that can separate good shows from great shows. And that is how to make your episode sound authentic and natural, sort of like you're just chatting with a friend, even though you are putting tons of time and effort into your show. It's sort of like how really amazing dancers make their moves seem effortless, even though there are years of training behind those performances. It takes immense effort to seem effortless. And when it comes to podcasting, sounding natural might be more important than you realize. Having an authentic sounding podcast is the difference between sounding like this, like you're reading a book report out loud for class, and you might be a little tense or nervous, and sounding like this, confident, relaxed, and not overrehearsed. The irony of this whole thing is that it can take a lot of work to produce a show that sounds like you didn't put a ton of work in. So let's dive into how to do that now. I know you probably aren't going to be making really complex, highly, highly produced audio documentaries, much like the talented folks at NPR do. You don't have to, that's not required, but I do think that you'll agree that when I say we can certainly benefit from adopting some of the practices and strategies that Lauren and her colleagues employ to make really, really, really compelling natural audio. So let's jump in. Now, when we're talking about making compelling podcast episodes, you might think that we would start with how to ask good questions or how to write good voiceovers, right? Wrong. We actually have to start a little earlier than that and begin by asking ourselves whether the actual person or people appearing on our episode are interesting. You want someone who is a character, not just a talking head or like monotone. You want someone who is laughing, who's sarcastic, who's choking up. You want like the human range of emotion because podcasts are so human. And it's the thing that you can't get from, you know, reading something. You get like this range of people's voices. And I think when someone hears that and they're connecting with it, they're thinking like I can relate to this person because they're being so human. This is not only true for your guests if you have an interview show, but also true for yourself as the host. You got to be interesting and so does your guest. I think the very first thing you do is before you even get into the interview as you do a little research on that person. You're not only researching who they are or what they've done, but also whether they can actually carry a conversation. If you're not sure, search their name in your favorite podcast app and see if they've been on other podcasts before. If so, tune in and see if they can hold your attention. If they're boring or monotonous, inauthentic sounding, you probably shouldn't have them on your show. But if they're interesting, then you move further in your research and start determining what questions to ask them. But as Lauren has learned, you don't want to get too married to the questions you come up with. You would write down questions as we all do because our brains can only hold so much information. But then you want to leave room to spread out in those, within those questions. So one of the things I do is just listen to a lot of interviewers, so I like and respect. There was one podcast. I think it was about an art heist and they interviewed the security guard who was there the night of this heist. He was talking about how he was panicking. He thought he was going to die. He mentioned that I started playing music in my head. She very easily could have continued on and been like, and then what happened. But inside she was like, what song? And it led to this haunting piece of music that this man was imagining before he might be killed. And I think it's like moments like that where you have to follow your curiosity, you have to leave room in your questions. You still want to hit the who, what, where wins. But the more detail you can ask the better. Why is it important to not ask yes or no questions? I think there's probably a place for yes or no questions, but mostly there's not. I think that you want to, first of all, just have open-ended questions so that your guests will say more than yes or no. But also I think when you're putting things into a yes or no category, you're almost imposing a worldview, right? It's like, oh, did you feel panicked? Well, now you're implying that that person should have felt panicked versus just allowing them to say how they actually felt without any hints at what you think it might have been. I also think this is where confidence comes into it, right? Because the thing I do is I will ask a question, but then I just won't stop talking. I like the question, keep going. And then you're just like, no, that's where writing it down, I think helps where you're like, I'm not going to say any more than this thing. I'm not going to do a two-part question. I'm not going to ramble after. There's also I think a lot to be said about allowing silence. Because I do the same thing where I ask a question and then it's I want to give them time to think or just ask the question. Yes. And that silence is so uncomfortable, right? But it's so important. I mean, I grew up in the Midwest. I generally find that I'm trying to fill silences and try to make people feel comfortable. And that is the wrong instinct to have, right? And I very often on assignment have my reporters like put a hand on me to be like, don't talk here. You know, like, don't fill this silence. Let it sit there. Let the question breathe. By letting your questions breathe and making sure they're open-ended, you'll be conducting a more interesting interview because you'll be able to really explore the mind of the other person rather than pigeonholing their answers to whatever's in your mind. You'll be able to have a more natural free flowing conversation this way. After the interview is done, it's time to edit. As you edit, you'll want to highlight the best parts of the interview and make sure they're heavily featured so that you can really make them shine. But the question is, how do you know which parts of the interview are the best parts? So when I'm thinking about putting together good tape from an interview, I rely actually a lot on advice from someone that I interviewed. She was a scientist who specializes in memory. And her name is Pooja Agrawal and she basically said that the things that we're going to remember from a lecture, from a podcast, from a conversation are things that are tinged with emotion because that's how we relate as humans. And the other thing is that you're going to remember things more quickly right after you've just had that conversation. And so if you want to kind of seal it in your brain, the best thing you can do is after you leave this interview right down the top five things that you remember from it, those are going to be the things that stand out, those are going to be the moments that make your interview great, I think. The magic spark is in those highlights. And it doesn't have to be a hard and fast rule, but like I try to do it right after the interview, but sometimes it's like I'm going to call my mom and tell her about it or I'm going to record this voice memo or you know. Okay, so now you have a great interview. You've determined the best or the most interesting parts of that interview. Now it's time to construct your episode. And as it turns out, there is one emotion that is almost guaranteed to hook a listener. That emotion is surprise. The thing that makes us intrigued and wanting to listen more is when you know it's not going to turn out the way you think it is, right? Or maybe it does, but in a way that's like unexpected, like the the point of it all is sort of to challenge your assumptions. I mean, I think we listen to each other because we're looking to to have a different perspective on the world, right? And so any way that you can disrupt what you think is going to happen and surprise the listener in a in a storytelling way, I think is really important. The other thing that I think is important to keep in mind. My boss always says that every story should make you smile or make you feel something and make you think. Apart from thinking about how to surprise her listener, Lauren thinks about how her episode flows and how it sounds to the listener when she's constructing a story. One of the things I think about when I'm writing a radio piece or writing a podcast piece is a sense of rhythm, right? Like it's almost like you're constructing a song and you need different kinds of texture. And so, you know, people aren't going to want to hear one person drone on for too long. And so we try to interrupt big chunks of audio. And so all it is is like, if you want a monologue for a minute, that's fine, but that should be a part of the rhythm of this like song you're creating. And then you should think also about like adding, you know, texture in other ways, whether that's audio clips or music or different voices. You just want to make sure everything is like hitting a similar beat. Yeah. And why is that? Does it just make it easier to consume? Yeah, I think people, you know, we're programmed to notice patterns, right? And so if we have predictable patterns, we can kind of get immersed in the story, get lost in the story rather than being like, man, this guy's been talking for a really long time and I'm bored and oh, now I'm zoning out, you know, if you keep it like a regular rhythm, you're keeping someone on task almost and helping them pay more attention. As Lauren mentioned, voiceovers are a great way to enhance a story's rhythm. But the tricky part is you can't just pay attention to how adding a voiceover affects the rhythm of your story. You also have to think about the rhythm of the voiceover itself. When you are saying things out loud, you're going to run out of breath. So there's not a lot of room for commas in your sentences. So someone once taught me that like when you write a script, just like cut in half every single sentence, I make it a new sentence. I also find that that helps me when I'm looking at a script and reading it out loud to kind of slow down and emphasize the right things. And just like with your guest, you need to make sure your voiceovers aren't boring. I do think that asking another person to listen and say like at what point did you zone out or at what point did this bore you. The one thing that I have noticed though is that with those kinds of things, people will be much more forgiving if you are giving an insight or a detail that doesn't seem generic. You're not describing someone as like she was nice, she was pretty, she was kind. You're saying like she had the kind of voice that like made you think about sunrise or whatever, like maybe not quite so poetic, but like you want to get into this like specificity that makes the listener feel like they're there and that they met this person, right? I usually say that facts go in voiceovers and emotion comes from your characters. That doesn't have to be a hard and fast rule, but generally you're not actually looking for like the physicist to explain his process because you can probably dumb it down and simplify it as like the narrator, but what you want is like that moment of Eureka. And if you really want your voiceovers to pop, you should work really hard to not work really hard. If you're at a funny part in your script smile, you know, or like come out of it with a laugh and like our point is like trying to sound more human, so just allow yourself to be yourself as a huge part of it. Right, which is so funny that that's the hardest part because it's what we naturally do all day, but as soon as we start observing it and thinking about it, it all goes out the window. Overthinking is yeah, very, very problematic here. I mean in recent years, we've also introduced some like vocal warmups with people. And one of my favorites is they ask you to read the things in different voices, so like Minnie Mouse or like your Eure or you just do like three or four of them. And really I don't think it's about how it sounds, but it's about loosening yourself up to sound like yourself. So, you know, you're very serious script about, you know, whatever, but do it in a Minnie Mouse voice, you know. Fantastic. I find that that really like, it gets me out of my head and helps me just focus on sounding normal. You want to find your voice. And that means both your actual voice, your hosting voice, like you want to sound warm and approachable, but you also want to find the voice of how you write and like how you work with people you interview. I think that you can always tell when someone doesn't want to be there. You can always tell when someone doesn't believe in the thing they're saying or when they're kind of phoning it in and just like reading from a piece of paper. I feel like people's BS meter is very strong and they will turn that off the moment they sense that you're just reading or sounding kind of drone like. So, I think the most important thing is that you be present and you be interested in the thing because if you aren't, then no one is and no one's going to get past the front door because you have to make it welcoming at least to start to start out. Apart from honing your inner Minnie Mouse, there are other ways to ensure that your voiceovers sound smooth and natural. I kind of have a routine that I go through with people when I'm coaching them on their voiceovers. First thing I would do is I don't know if everyone has printers at home, but if you print your script, you want to underline the words that you mean to emphasize, right? This prevents that like weird newscasty cadence where you're, you know, you sound like a robot. If you underline those words, you know that you need to like make sure you have emphasis there. The other thing is when you're script writing, sometimes you are writing it in a writing way, but not a talky way. And so sometimes even just saying the sentence that you want to convey out loud, those are the words you should be using in your script. So if you're saying them out loud and it doesn't feel right, maybe that has to do with the writing that you want to switch up. And so you want to kind of give it a once over, you want to talk out loud as you're writing this, you're underlining your words. And then when you go to actually lay down the audio, some people will suggest like doing warm ups, like various vocal exercises. And so anything you can do to make it feel like more like a regular conversation, even if it's like pulling up a picture of your grandma and imagining you're telling it to her. Sometimes it even means having someone in the studio with you or your closet with you to be conversational. And then if you can really, you should enlist a friend to say, hey, you sound really weird here. And so it sounds to me correctly from wrong that you're kind of putting yourself in your listeners shoes. Is that where this comes from? Yeah, I mean, I'm always thinking about like if I play this for my mom or my brother or whoever, like, are they going to like this part? You know, if I'm telling them about it and they're getting bored at a certain part, then like then you know, you've got to like trim or you've got to edit it a little bit differently. So I think when you're first starting to make a show, you're asking for everything, right? You're asking for does the structure work? Does the writing work? Do I sound okay? Does the tape sound okay? Yeah. I think if you've established your structure, you can kind of do away with some of those questions, but it's, am I telling the story in the right order? Very often I am not. And I think someone who has what we call fresh ears is going to rearrange it for you in a more logical way. And so I always know I'm off course when I'm on the phone telling my mom about an interview, but the things that I'm telling her about don't make it into the final cut. I know I've lost my way because really the things that you are including in your interview are the moments of humanity. It's the pop of emotion. It's it's still content. You're still getting data and things from it, but you want it to be memorable. It's kind of funny how in order to be memorable, we need to be normal. And yet when doing this work, it's really hard to be normal, right? Well maybe that's the hard part. We can hardly tell if we are sounding normal. So if you would like to know whether your podcast is doing the trick, whether it's sounding natural while still packing a punch, I invite you to share it with us in the Grow the Show Facebook group. That's where you'll find over 1,000 other growth minded podcasters and where you can get direct feedback on the stuff you just learned so you can improve in time for next week's episode. I will see you there. The link is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was written and produced by me and Catherine Nails with post-production by Jeremy Bishop and a very, very special thanks to Lauren Megaki. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. See you next time.