915 – Add this to your toolbox: Tom talks Audio Editing

Episode 915 – Audio Editing
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom with episode 915 The Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about audio editing and why I think it is so simple for you to learn, and can save you so much time, effort, and make you sound better than you ever sounded before. And that's what we'll talk about today. And also give you a sample of how I edit this podcast. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 914. That was a big breakthrough in video eye contact so that you can read scripts, but it still looks like you're looking into the camera and we're not using a teleprompter to do it. It's amazing. All right, let's see. Grab a copy of my automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:13] All right. I just figured it out, Just very roughly. This is episode 915 that I have edited each one. And if you hired this out, it'd probably cost you $100 minimum per episode, unless you got some little kid to do it for you. So that's $91,500 I saved from doing this. And that's not I mean, a lot of people say, yeah, Tom, but you're you're time over the years has been worth more than that. Yeah, that's true to a certain extent. But the thing is, is when you turn something totally over to somebody else and don't check it, you get embarrassed. And they didn't do what you wanted to. They didn't cut out what you wanted them to cut out.

[00:02:01] And you know, so you got you have to really check each one because remember this is representing you. And that means lost time. And 900 episodes would be a heck of a lot of lost time. And they never get it right exactly how you want it. So what we're going to do here is examine how I edit a podcast after the recording is done. And of course, I want you to record at good quality and keep the noise level down in your recording area and all that stuff that I've covered in other places. And plus I think I got a whole podcast course I can help you with if you want, but here's the method that I do. You should just make notes of this. And it's the same thing every time for 915 episodes. All right. So the first thing I do is any good audio program has what we call noise reduction. So I just highlight a usually at the beginning where I haven't started talking yet, a blank area of the file. And there's always these little waves. And they're little tiny nibs of stuff. That's the noise in my room. Like like now I got a fan on because it's summer when I'm doing this. And so all I have to do is highlight that blank area and I hit noise reduction, and it takes that little crappy noise out for the entire file. And I hit save and boom! Now I got a super clean file, and I didn't have to be exactly perfect on the room noise.

[00:03:37] All right, so that's the first thing I do. Next thing, I had somebody teach me what settings work for my voice on what we call EQ to make it sound better. Now, I didn't spend like I could spend 400 bucks and have a guy really, really tweak it. A real big shot. But it sounds pretty good. Nobody's ever said, hey, Tom, I can't understand you, all right? It sounds good. There's no noise in the background, but the EQ, it makes me sound a little bit better than maybe I really am. And all I do is hit a button that says okay, EQ, and it takes the whole file and makes me sound better. All right, said. And then I hit save and I'm just going right along. Then I hit another button that called. It's called normalize. And what normalize does is, is takes whatever I've recorded and raises the signal up as high as humanly or not humanly possible, to the point right before it goes distorted. If you go too high, it goes, you know, it gets all distorted, but it raises it up to give the best possible strong signal. They call it the signal to noise ratio because they're still going to be noise on the file, even though I cleaned up, as best I could say. So basically I hit normalize and it raises the signal up for me as best as it possibly can without distorting it.

[00:05:10] And I hit save again. All right. Then I put on the intro music that Mike Stuart created for me years ago. I'm going to talk more about him in a minute. All right. And so I just put the intro music on and then the interim music fades out as I'm fading in talking, you know, so that's that's already pre-programmed ready to go or, uh, I think that that's more on the outro music. So the intro music just goes and then I start talking. All right. So then I just listened to what I said, and I cut out pauses, ums and ahs, lip smacks, any loud breasts, dog barks or something. If something happened in the middle and I had to stop and tell the dog, quit barking and then start over again, it's easy. I mean, you just highlight it, just like word processing. You just highlight it and hit delete and it's gone like it never existed. And the rest of the file backs up to where you where where it messed up. Now when Mike Stewart taught me this 24 years ago, now he's a good old boy from Georgia. He's in Tennessee now, but he's in Georgia. And he said, Tom, if you if you want to be an audio editor, he says, the first thing you got to do is record something, right. And and then he said, he says, and then you cut out what's bad and what's left is good. And that's all I do.

[00:06:51] I go, I'm never adding anything else. I'm. I mean, maybe once in a couple. Times out of 900 episodes. But, uh, I'm cutting out the pauses and the ums and ahs and the lip smacks and the loud breasts and the dog barks and just cutting them out, it's just boom, boom, boom, get rid of it. And then I hit save. Actually, each time I cut something out, I hit save because you don't want to go ten corrections and then your computer locks up and then you don't remember what. You have to start over. So every time I cut something out, I hit save. And then I put on the outro music. And this is where when when I start talking, stop talking. The music has already started to fade up from your very low. And then as soon as I quit talking, it goes badoom boom badoom boom, you know, something like that. So I put it on the outro music and then I hit a button that says mix. So it takes the intro music on one track and the outro music on another track, and all the stuff I was talking about on a track. And if I have a guest, it's just duplicated on another track for them. They're not on the same track as me and we edit it all. Everybody's happy. And so if there's a guest, there's four different files the intro music, the outro music, me talking and them talking. If there's if there's no guest, a lot of my training videos, then there's only three.

[00:08:17] Intro music, outro music. And what I said. And when you hit mix, it mixes them all together into one track. And then I hit save. On a PC you You always save at the highest quality, so you can always make it lower quality, but you save it to highest quality, which on a PC is a dot wave file dot wave. And but the highest quality is also going to be bigger file size. So distribution uh, the while it's sitting there, I go file save as a wave and then I go file save as. And then I just click another box that says mp3. That's the compressed smaller version. It could be ten times smaller file size. And so I got two versions of it, the highest quality and the MP3 version. And then I use a service called Wetransfer to send this up to Larry, who then puts it on Libsyn for distribution. That's our distribution thing. Now I can do it myself. But, you know, Larry's done all 900 episodes and you know, I've got a million other things to do. So what he's doing doesn't affect the what goes out on the audio. I've already decided what goes in, what gets cut out. And if the a guest said something really stupid or is going to get me sued or something, you know, I might cut that out. Or if I said something stupid, I'll cut that out. So that's it. You record something like Mike Stewart says, you cut out what's bad, what's left is good.

[00:09:50] Each one of these things takes just a tiny, tiny bit of training. We happen to use Adobe Audition, but you can use audacity, which is free, and there's a million, uh, videos on how to use it and just learn to do this stuff. And you can have a podcast that has a heck of a lot better chance of making money, because you're not blowing money on simple, simple editing that's going to cost you. You think it saves you time. It doesn't, because you have to triple check what they've done. And if they're not happy with it, you got to send it back and wait and you're delayed and everything. See? So learning this skill has served me well to the tune. I mean, it's well over $1 million over the time because of all the things I've recorded over the years. And I'm just saying the 91,500 is just minimum. You know, some people charge you $200 an episode, $300 an episode. You know, now we're talking a quarter of $1 million or a third of $1 million, you know? So. So so either you have less episodes or you pay through the nose. This gets rid of all of that. You can have as many episodes as you want and doesn't cost you any more. So. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program where we teach you all this stuff at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. Catch you later.