This is The Ember Studios Podcast #2 with Mike Brown and we go over the specific baseline gear you need to start editing your podcast.
Find more at – www.emberstudioscreative.com/podcast
Contact me at michael@emberstudioscreative.com
A.I. Generated Transcription:
This is Ember Studios, podcast number two. The gear, you need to edit your show.
What’s going on everybody. I hope you’re having a great day. I am fired up right now to work on this show and I hope you are fired up to work on. So today, we’re just going to talk a little bit about the gear. You need to edit your show. So we’re not going to really be talking about microphones and stuff like that.
Cause that’s not really editing, right? That’s that’s tracking, that’s recording and really you could be editing somebody else’s show you don’t need a microphone to edit somebody else’s show. So we’re just of going to break down the gear. You need to edit. A podcast, hardware, software, everything. This episode’s probably going to be kind of on the shorter side, because you really don’t need as much as you might think for real.
Like I could get you editing a show for less than $150. I think probably it’s really not expensive to break into it. Well, of course that’s not including, you know, the computer and stuff, but we’re going to go over the computer. So let’s just break into it to do podcast, audio editing. Your computer really does not need to be anything special.
For example, I’m looking at the minimum system requirements for studio one, which I use, and they’re pretty low, I guess we could say. So the latest version of the operating system, windows 10 is a given right now. I mean, Windows 10 has been out for, I don’t know how many years, but it’s nice and stable.
Whereas noting that it needs to be 64 bit for studio one, it’s not really a good reason as far as I know, to be running a 32 bit operating system right now, unless your computer is literally ancient. So probably. The processor and Intel core I three or an AMD, a 10 processor or better. If your computer has a processor, it’s less than like 10 years old, it’s probably as good as, or better than the recommended processors here.
Minimum four gigabytes of Ram. Again, this is absolute bare minimum. Four gigabytes of Ram I think is the lowest. Amount you can get right now. I don’t think they make Ram sticks with less than two gigabytes of Ram. And so, you know, dual channel memory, it turns out to be four gigs. It says recommended eight gigs or more, again, this is absolute minimum.
Most computers you buy right now, we’re going to have eight gigs of Ram. Maybe a laptop might have four gigs. Eight gigs of Ram is so inexpensive right now at the end of this, I’ll put together like a bare bones windows system and tell you guys what the price is. I guarantee you it’s less than you think for an audio editing PC.
Then it goes on to say, you need an internet connection, which I think is a little obvious just for installation and activation. Even if you just kind of. Install, everything, activate everything and then move it. You’re good to go. Minimum monitor resolution 1366 by 7 68. That’s the lowest resolution monitor.
I think you’ll find anywhere right now. So basically these programs are being. With specs that any functional computer right now is going to meet these specifications. You know, if you’ve got an ancient computer that’s running on like windows XP, maybe it’s not going to work. Probably still has four gigs of Ram, but it might not be a 64 bit operating system.
You know, these specs are very minimal and they’re really functional at that level. This isn’t like video editing where you need so much Ram or gaming where you need like a high graphics card. It’s just, you just need a bare bones. No again, that’s for editing and some light mixing. If you’re thinking you want to rig, that’s going to scale with you and you’re going to do music and maybe you’re going to have like 13 instances of Melodyne on a track or something like that.
Some more intensive stuff is going to require some higher power components, but you’re, I mean, a minimal system is just fine for voiceover editing. If you’re just editing your podcast. So that’s step one. That’s just a machine. To do what you want now, what do you want? You’re going to do audio editing and to do that, you’re going to need to hear what you are doing.
And so there’s pretty much two ways that you can hear. You can either use speakers or headphones. If you’re on a laptop, I’m not going to lie. Your built-in laptop. Speakers are going to be okay. They are going to get the simple job done. If you’re not looking to go all out or any. You’ll be fine. If you’re on a desktop, it’s a little different, you’re going to have to purchase some speakers.
If you want to just use some, you know, again, $10 Amazon speakers. When you’re mixing a podcast, unlike with music, you do mix with your eyes. I rely on meters more than I rely on my ears because there’s all sorts of different stuff with the different frequencies affect things differently. And just because one person sounds louder to me doesn’t mean.
Digitally, they are louder. And so when things get shipped out to the platforms, they do stuff to them and they’re not doing stuff to them based on their ears. They’re doing stuff to them based on the digital sequence that’s sent to them. And so I need to consider that when I’m mixing, I tell people I can mix their show without listening to it as because I’ve done a billion of them, but you don’t need high quality speakers to mix the show.
So you. Really need high quality speakers in order to edit it. However, I will suggest using headphones more than the speakers. I like to have everything right there at my ear, so I can hear every little mouth noise, every little click, every slide, breath, everything. I want to be able to hear it right in my ears so that I know exactly what I’m doing.
You know, if I make a little cut and I don’t hear that the person is in the middle of a breath, then when I put compression on everything, it’s going to just cut right in, in the middle of that breath that I didn’t hear before, because the volume was a lot lower. And so that’s why sometimes you’ll hear like a, like, that kind of sound because somebody cut in the middle of a breath, didn’t do a fade, didn’t do anything.
And just kind of, kind of threw it out there. So that’s why I like headphones again. They do not have to be. You’ve got a pair of apple ear buds. Those are fine. You don’t need crazy fancy headphones for spoken word or anything. You just need to be able to hear everything. And work on it. It’s not much. And there’s two more pieces of hardware.
Now we have an audio interface now for this kind of thing. If you’re straight up just editing and you’re not going to mix it, maybe you’ll send it out to get mixed, or maybe you’re not worried about the mixing. In my opinion, you should be worried about the maximum, but, uh, if you’re not, you don’t really need to get an audio interface because your CPU’s onboard sound processing is going to be okay.
You’re going to be. 40 to 48 K. You’re going to be able to listen back and edit it 48. K. If you’re going to do some stuff that needs some DSP, which is digital signal processing, then you’re going to need to get a little bit of a higher power sound card. So again, this is something to think of. Upfront. I mean, I guess not because you could always upgrade later.
So if you think eventually you’re going to be mixing, or if you plan on mixing the whole time, you’re going to need an audio interface. And again, this doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to have a billion inputs or anything. I bought one with a ton of inputs because I thought, oh, what if I ended up tracking drums?
This was five years ago. I haven’t tracked a single thing that requires more than two. Not once. So I, you know, my main recommendation right now because the PreSonus audio box USB, there’s a whole bunch of different ones, but the audio box USB 96 records in up to 96. K we’ll get into that another time. I think that’s a little much, but yeah, it was a hundred dollars.
So now you’ve got a computer. You’ve got an interface. You already had the headphones. Now you need a keyboard and a mouse. Okay. If you’re on a laptop, you already have the keyboard. I will say, do not use a track pad. Do not use a track pad. You will be miserable. If you’re trying to edit audio with a track pad, there’s so much clicking and dragging and you have to be so precise sometimes that.
The trackpad is going to be too much. Even if you have to buy a $7 mouse on Amazon, which I did, the $7 mouse on Amazon was better for editing than the most expensive track that I could have ever purchased. It’s just better to have a mouse. When we get a little bit more advanced, it’s sometimes better to even have a gaming mouse.
Cause they have all those extra buttons. You can map them out to your macros. And this is all down the line. Once you really have a feel for what you’re doing. So that’s it for the hardware. That’s, that’s what you need. You need a computer, you need some way to hear the sound, whether it’s headphones or speakers, you need an interface.
If you end up mixing and you’re going to be sucking up some resources and you need a mouse. Well, I guess you need a screen too, but I kind of include that in the. So that’s it. Now you have that stuff. You have the hardware, you have the physical things that you need in order to edit your show. What, now you sit down, you’ve installed windows for the first time.
Let’s just say you bought this computer just for editing. You installed windows for the first time you’re connected to the internet. What do you need? Really, you just need a few more things. So first we’re going to talk about audacity. Now. I talked about audacity last week and a lot of people I see online are teaching about audacity editing and just in order to bare bones, edit your show, just grab audacity and edit it like this personal.
Audacity is one of the least intuitive programs I’ve ever used. I don’t like it at all. It is very good for certain things, but everything else I’m pulling my hair out and they’re very short hairs. They’re hard to grab onto. So it’s a nightmare, really for me, audacity what I do use audacity for however.
Noise reduction. The noise reduction plugin is really top notch. I’ve used full audio programs that don’t have as robust a noise reduction. Plug-in as audacity has, honestly, it’s a little crazy to me, but audacity nailed it. Nobody else is really doing it. I recommend you get audacity anyway, that way, when you’re recording, you get a little bit of silence and you pull that noise out because nobody wants to hear a bunch of hissing and buzzing and a low hum of your air conditioner.
When they’re listening to your show. Now, obviously a noise reduction. Doesn’t get everything. You’re not going to get a car driving by. Cause that’s not like a consistent sound. It just happens. You know, you live in Chicago or whatever, and the train goes right next to your apartment that sound’s not coming out.
Right. That ambient room noise, the haze, the microphone noise. If you’re using a lifter because you have a dynamic microphone that adds a lot of noise to the signal, pull it right out. So yeah, audacity is, is very good for noise reduction. And for me, that’s where it ends in my workflow. I open up audacity.
I throw the files in there. I pull out the noise and I export them because I’m done. I don’t want to use audacity for anything. Now there’s another step between audacity and the editing that I do that I’m not really going to talk about much here because it’s incredibly expensive and it’s a little more advanced and that’s what I call audio.
Clean-up it’s just like removing plosives and mouth noises and room tone and everything in an automated way. I use a program called isotope. And it’s not cheap. So I’m just going to skip over that right now, because if you’re, if you’re recording episode one of your podcast, please do not buy isotope RX because you don’t even know if you’re going to be doing this show in three weeks, let alone several hundreds of dollars worth of software.
That’s useless if you’re not recording your podcast or doing film work, you know? So don’t worry about that right now. We are going to talk about. But right now, you’re just doing the DIY thing. Don’t worry about the cleanup. The next step is the actual physical editing we’re here. We made it and you are going to need a D a w.
And I’m going to just say doc from now on. Cause that’s how I say it. It’s easier. It’s not so many syllables. DAW stands for digital audio workstation. So your dog is just the program that you use to watch. On the audio now, of course there’s free ones and there’s paid ones. I’m going to talk about that a little bit.
So the first group I’m going to talk about is the pay group. I’m not going to go too in depth because honestly it doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is that you pick one and you learn it because once you learn something, you’re going to be able to do whatever you need to do. Better than someone who keeps switching and having to relearn.
I’ve been using the same program for seven years. So I know it inside and out. So just pick something and learn it, especially if you’re going to pay, oh my gosh. If you’re going to pay for it, just learn it. Don’t, don’t buy a bunch of them. You only need one, really? So here are a few of the paid ones, studio one professional.
This is what I use most of the time. I know I’m contradicting myself by. I just said don’t pay for more than one, but most of the time I use studio one professional. It’s good. You can get it on a subscription. It’s 15 bucks a month. It comes with everything. I really like it. I really liked the smart tool.
I really liked the way it works. There’s also, you’ve heard of it. Pro tools, pro tools, a lot more expensive if I’m being honest, also on a subscription basis, but I think it’s like 30 bucks a month and you just get pro tools. It’s the industry standard. If you walk into a studio, Right now, most likely they’re going to be running pro tools.
Then while I recommend studio one professional. I can’t in good faith. Say you shouldn’t use ProTools because if you ever think you’re going to leverage these skills into a new step in your journey. If you’re going to turn into music, if you’re going to turn to video sound design or something pro tools, you’re going to need to know it.
So I can’t in good faith. Tell you not to use ProTools, but I will say I still recommend studio one. There’s also logic. If you have a Mac logic is like 200 bucks. It’s a perfectly fine program. I don’t know what the editing is like at all. Cause I don’t use a Mac, but tons of pros use it. And the editing functions I’m sure are fine.
I will say it’s just for Mac users, PCs. It’s not out on PC and it probably never will be. So I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t sweat logic. There’s a ton of them. You got reason Ableton, Cubase, FL studio. Garage band Harrison mix bus between studio. All of these are just Dawes that you can use. And because you’re just doing basic editing, it’s not, it doesn’t matter which one you pick.
So just pick one that’s. If you’re going to buy one, pick one in this, the right price and pick one that you think you’re going to stick with because you don’t want to jump around. It’s just cost too much. There are free ones. Personally, if this is what you’re doing, you’re just doing podcasts editing for now.
I’d go with a free one. Why are you going to spend a ton of money when you can get everything you need from the free version of something? And so there’s studio one prime, which is just a stripped down free version of studio one. It’s got all the editing features and that’s it. That’s all you need. You can edit and export and mix very basically inside studio, one prime for free.
There’s also pro tools first. It’s a stripped down free version of pro tools. I don’t know exactly how stripped down it is, but I’m almost positive. It has a lot of the same editing features. And again, you’re not trying to recreate the sound of a dragon breathing fire in New York city. You’re just trying to cut out a breath between a few words.
Pro tools versus fine. There’s also Reaper. Reaper’s a fully featured program. That’s just free. There’s a trial. You can use it infinitely. You just refresh the trial. When you’re done, the developers have come out and said, that’s fine. You know, if you’re making a ton of money, you should buy a license. Um, it’s like 60 bucks, but if you’re just DIY in your own show, get Reaper, do it for free.
No reason. Not to. We are in a time where the tools hardly matter, because your message is what’s important. Right? And so you just got to get the bare minimum truly to put out a good podcast, the bare minimum, just spend a little bit of time working on it. Cause I know if you’re making a podcast, that’s already about something you love.
So it’s a labor. You’re not making any money. It’s a labor of love. So you’re going to take it and you’re going to work on it, make it sound the way you want it to sound with the basic editing tools that these things have, because that’s all you need. I’m getting very fired up right now. I didn’t think I would be, but we live in an amazing time for podcasting, for audio in general, but podcasting, because anyone can do it.
Anyone can do it for almost no money. The last thing is kind of hardly editing, but it’s just something that I think is important. Let’s say hypothetically, you’re editing for someone. You’re going to need a file sharing platform, media, fire, Dropbox, Google drive, any anything personally, I prefer Dropbox.
It’s very easy to send and receive large files and to collaborate Google drive. A lot of people use I’ve found it’s it’s a lot clunkier when it comes to large files. Like if I’m downloading the media for, you know, an hour long interview, they included the video for some reason. And it’s like a gig.
Google drive doesn’t handle that so well, I’m not really sure why, but it breaks the downloads up and puts them into multiple files. And I feel like their bandwidth isn’t great. I get slower. Download speeds on them. So Dropbox, I just have my Dropbox sync to my computer. So when somebody throws something in a folder, it just sinks.
They just tell me they put it there. And then I look and it’s already on my computer. So I really liked Dropbox for that reason, but that was just kind of an extra thing for now. That’s just, that’s kind of step one. One in terms of the stuff you need to edit. So you now know what you need. I bet you have most of it already if you’re planning on making a podcast, so, awesome.
Good on you. And if you didn’t, I hope this helped. And if you need anything else, email me at Michael at Ember studios, creative.com. Thanks for listening to the Emory studios podcast by.
