Luckily, there are people who care enough to give us free tutorials on how to make these tools work for us. The fine folks at Audiotuts + are knee deep in a series of tutorials on mastering, which includes compressors, EQ, limiters, and more. While the site is geared towards musical production, you can learn a lot from the techniques. Remember, if it’s good enough for high end producers, it’s good enough for you.

Mastering Elements Part 1: The Buss Compressor

Mastering Elements Part 2: The Mastering Equalizer

Mastering Elements Part 3: Multi-band Compression (this is one of the main tools used by radio stations in their processing chain to get that hot FM sound)

Mastering Elements Part 4: Stereo Enhancement

Mastering Elements Part 5: Mastering Limiters

Keep in mind that you already have most of the tools mentioned above in the software you already use. And that includes free software like Audacity. They may not be as pretty as some of the ones mentioned, and they may not have every feature, but most of them are there.

They are saying that a part 6 will be coming out soon, so keep your eyes peeled. Audiotuts + is one of my must read sites, and I’ve learned a lot from them.

Take a little time to learn these tools, and your podcast will sound better for it.

But for podcasting, I like the www. It doesn’t mean anything to a URL, but when you say the name of your podcast to your listeners, and you start with ‘www dot’ you are telling them a URL is coming up next. It’s an attention grabber, and while it is clunky to say, and takes more time to say than three little letters and a punctuation mark are supposed to, I think it’s a good thing to do. That time isn’t very useful to you, but it may be very useful to the listener, clicking on an address bar, grabbing a pen, or just setting them up for what they are going to hear.

Amazing how useful three little letters can be when you think about it.

But I stumbled across a post by Colin Marshal listing the things he has learned after 100 episodes of podcasting and interviews.

http://colinmarshall.typepad.com/blog/2010/02/what-i-can-tell-you-about-interviewing-after-conducting-editing-and-broadcasting-100-of-them.html

The danger with any list is that you will focus on the list, rather than implementing the ideas, or even practicing and putting in the hard work to integrate those items into your work. You can read lists forever, but until you do something about it, you won’t get any work done.

Some of Colin’s thoughts seem so simple, they also seem obvious, but that isn’t the point. Reading something and saying “of course” is one thing, but actually implementing them, and integrating them into your work is another. I can’t find a stinker in there, and while it may point to a few shortcomings I have, it’s all about using it.

Read the post, it’s worth your time. If you have any others, please post them. I’d like to know.

I tend to do this when I am talking to my main co-host, Tom. Part of the problem is that we are talking over Skype, and the pauses will seem a little exaggerated, but the other issue is that we each want to get what we want to say on the show, and interruptions mean we may have to leave out a point or two we wanted to get across. We don’t end out sentences well, and I don’t feel it serves my audience well.

Being in a face-to-face setting helps. There is something to be said about facial expressions and slight cues when doing a podcast.

Do you notice yourself doing the same thing?