What Does an Audio Producer Do, and Why Should You Hire One?

While film and TV production has dozens of defined roles like Producer, Director, DoP, Editor, Gaffer, Grip, and Runner, the division of labour in audio is much fuzzier. An audio producer might be someone who takes care of the entire production process, but that’s not always the case.

A while ago, I was chatting with a producer for a well-known media brand that puts out a lot of audio content, and was surprised to learn they didn’t know how to edit audio. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad producer, but it does go to show that the role can mean very different things to different people.

If you’re looking to launch a podcast or hire a producer, this ambiguity can cause issues. You need to have an idea of what’s involved in the production process, what skills you’ll require to get your project off the ground, and whether a prospective hire can meet your needs.

So, here’s an overview of the production process. It’s rough, but it’ll help you understand what you need to look out for.

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The Stages of Producing a Podcast or Radio Programme

Pre-production

The phase where you prepare your project for recording.

Development

This is really pre-pre-production, in that it happens before production even begins.

If you want to launch a podcast but don’t know the first thing about making them, you’re going to need a producer who can consult on the best format for you, any equipment or facilities you might need to invest in, logistics, production cycles, budgets, overheads, and everything else you should understand before getting started.

Project Management

Whatever the project, it’ll need someone to manage it. For small productions that could just mean finding a producer who can effectively organise their own days, but it might involve hiring and briefing freelancers, organising cross-team production schedules, and making sure everyone and everything is in the right place at the right time.

Research

Strong research: V important.

Before you start making your podcast, booking guests, and asking questions, you need some foundational knowledge of your subject. That might be as simple as finding a guest and doing a little light reading about their expertise, or it might involve delving into academic archives, sourcing and clearing audio you’d like to use, in-depth investigative work, or building relationships with hard-to-access sources and communities.

Treatments

Whether you’re producing a narrative series or a cosy one-on-one interview, you’re likely to need a treatment – a structured plan noting contributors, locations, questions, story beats, and anything else that can be prepared ahead of time.

Things will inevitably change in the course of production, but having the experience and foresight to sketch out a compelling structure before recording begins, and then adapt it as required, is an essential skill for a producer.

Fixing and Talent Management

Secretariat: Famous Horse

Fixing is a producer’s bread and butter. If your episode needs a guest who can speak on a certain topic, your producer will fix it. If you need to arrange flights, book locations, synchronise schedules, or keep talent happy, your producer will fix it. If you need to get a phone number for the former jockey of famous racehorse Secretariat who you’ve heard now lives in remotest rural Canada and the only way to get it is calling every church in the region because you found out while researching that he’s a practising Catholic (true story…), your producer will (probably) fix it. Crucial for all of this, your producer needs to have great people skills.

Recording

This one seems obvious, but there are different kinds of recording, and they can require different skills.

If you want to interview a beluga whale, you will need a producer who can operate a hydrophone.

If it’s a one-on-one studio interview, your producer will need to be skilled in studio management (SM). If it’s a narrative series with lots of location recording, they’ll need good mic-handling and field skills. If you’re doing something more creative or high-end, the sky’s the limit. You might need someone who can operate lavalier mics, underwater hydrophones, binaural ASMR mics, ambisonic full surround mics, or any number of other devices.

They’ll also need to have a well-trained ear. During a recording, any experienced producer will already be editing the material in their head as they listen, and that will determine how they guide the interview.

Interviewing

You won’t always need a producer with interviewing skills, but they can be good to have. Maybe you need to pre-interview guests to help plan your interviews, or you’ve got a busy or expensive presenter who can’t show up to every interview. A presenter with interviewing skills can gather your material and write script around it for the host to record later.

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Post-production:

Everything that happens after your recording.

Editing

Reaper: God’s own DAW.

Editing might be a fairly hands-off process, fixing only major mistakes or cutting irrelevant sections, a total overhaul with a lot of cutting and moving around, or a meticulous clean up with every ‘um,’ ‘ah,’ and unnecessary pause removed. Whatever you want from your edit, you should make sure your producer has the skills to do it quickly and accurately.

You might also need to consider which DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) your producer knows how to use. Pro Tools, Audition, Reaper, Audacity, SaDiE, and Hindenburg are all common options, and you might have a preference depending on your workflow, budget, or other software you’re using. I personally think Reaper is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone should be forced to use it, but I’m equally comfortable with all the major DAWs.

Scripting

Whether it’s only for the intro and credits that will top and tail your interview, or a fully scripted feature episode, you’re going to want a producer who knows their way around words. If your presenter has time they’ll often rewrite the producer’s skeleton script in their own style before recording, but if you’ve got an especially busy or expensive presenter, you’ll need a producer with strong enough writing skills to adopt different voices and get it more or less right on the first try.

Sound design and Music

It might be just a little music in the introduction, or a highly-produced project with fancy cutting, archive, and effects, but your project is going to involve at least some sound design. What this actually means is debatable, but I’ve set out some of my own thoughts in How to Improve Your Podcast with More Thoughtful Sound Design and “Dynamic Range”: One of the Keys to a Compelling Podcast.

At some point you’ll also have to think about music. Unless you’ve got serious budget or are working with a network that has blanket licensing, it’s unlikely you’re going to be using the Beatles in your soundtrack, and while there are copyright-free music libraries out there, they can be fairly uninspiring and your options might be limited. It’s not super common, but some producers can compose and produce original music for your project.

Here’s a small sample of music I’ve produced in various styles for podcasts and radio:

Legal and editorial compliance

Editorial compliance is often as straightforward as ensuring your podcast fits tonally with your brand, but there’s a more serious side too. When you release a podcast you’re publishing something, and that makes you subject to both defamation and copyright laws, not to mention potentially serious offences like contempt of court. Get this wrong, and you could be liable for civil damages, heavy fines, or even a prison sentence.

A producer will ideally have enough legal knowledge to avoid copyright disputes, and will be able to flag other potential issues that might need attention. If you’re ever in doubt about the legal status of something in your podcast, you should absolutely consult a qualified lawyer.

Mixing and mastering

Don’t hire Joe Pesci to master your audio.

This is the process of blending all your different sounds together so they’re nice to listen to and, crucially, intelligible. If you don’t do this your project will sound rubbish, and yet it’s a skill that most audio producers don’t have.

There’s actually a pretty good reason for that. While recording and editing a project, a producer is going to listen to the audio a lot, and that makes it hard for them to hear it the same way a first-time listener would. Whether it’s a commissioner, executive producer, or engineer, it’s always good to get a second pair of ears on a piece before publishing, and often that’s the person doing your mixing.

That said, your budget might not allow an extra £300+ a day to hire a sound engineer, which is why working with a full-stack producer who can provide mixing and mastering as part of their service can be a good way to go. Just make sure someone other than the producer listens to the piece before it’s published!

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Final Thoughts

Every audio project is different. Yours might not require a producer who can handle all the stages mentioned above, or you might be on a tight delivery schedule that makes splitting tasks between producers, researchers, and engineers a sensible strategy. Whatever the case, you need to know that the producer you hire has the skills you need.

As a full-stack producer with extensive experience in all aspects of pre- and post-production, I can manage your project from beginning to end, or hit the ground running on one aspect of a production as required. For more information on how I can help, or to book a consultation and discuss your podcast idea, get in touch.

Make Your Podcast Sound Better by Listening out for these Five Common Issues

Let’s say you’re a business owner who’s commissioned a podcast, or maybe you’re an executive producer who’s transitioned to audio from print and don’t have direct experience with the format.

Your producer’s just sent you the final version of an episode and, excited, you give it a listen. You think it sounds fine, but as your finger hovers over the ‘Publish’ button, you freeze…

…What if this is bad, and you just can’t hear it?

This sounds like a thing that shouldn’t happen, and it shouldn’t, but mistakes get made, errors get missed, and if yours is the last pair of ears to hear a piece before it goes out into the world, you need to be confident it’s ready.

So, here are five (really kind of embarrassing) issues I’ve heard in professionally produced podcasts. I’m not going to say where. My aim here isn’t to embarrass people, it’s to encourage better audio. But these are all fairly common, and they’re all avoidable.

EDIT: Since first publishing this, I’ve heard another avoidable clanger in a very high-profile podcast, and so you’re getting six – count them – six common issues to look out for…

Five Six issues to listen out for in your audio

1) Poor sound quality

This one’s obvious, but fundamental. It’s no fun struggling to understand what people are saying because the recording quality is poor. And even if you can understand them, if the recording sounds ugly, it’s not going to be an enjoyable experience.

At the end of the day, there’s only so much that can be done in post-production, and it’s always best to begin with well-recorded tape sourced with decent equipment by a producer who knows what they’re doing in the studio and the field.

That said, there are some pretty amazing fixes out there now, from AI voice enhancers to iZotope’s Spectral Recovery tool. If your podcast isn’t sounding great, it might be worth discussing options with the producer, but solutions can be expensive and time consuming, and if used poorly they can make issues even worse, so always try to get that initial recording right.

Which brings us to the next issue…

2) Noise Gates

Simply put, a noise gate is a tool that cuts the output of a track when it falls below a certain volume threshold.

What a noise gate does (courtesy of Wikipedia)

In theory, this could be pretty useful for a podcast. You could set the gate to allow a speaker’s voice to pass through, but cut the signal when all it detects is the quieter noise of traffic in the background, or the annoying hum of a fridge.

In practice, though, unless they’re being used very subtly noise gates on voiceovers are awful. Whenever the speaker pauses the track cuts out entirely, which sounds unnatural and distracting.

It’s much better to have a little low-level room sound on a track than the awkward stop-and-start of a badly calibrated gate. If you hear this kind of thing on your podcast, ask the producer or engineer to try another approach like a filter, or duplicating the track with a gate on one version and some lowered background noise on the other.

3) The music is too loud

This is a straightforward one: if the music under a voice is so loud that tuning into the speaker takes effort, lower the music.

That said, go easy on your producer with this one. After listening to a section of speech dozens of times during an edit, it’s likely their memory of what’s been said will kick in automatically to compensate for any words that are obscured by music. This is more or less unavoidable, and one of the reasons it’s always good to have a second pair of ears on a piece.

4) Bad Cuts

If an editor’s cut one of your speakers mid-sentence, you’re probably going to catch it, but there are subtler cutting errors you might want to listen out for. Here are two that really grate:

What a breath looks like in waveform (courtesy of ResearchGate)

Cutting in the middle of a breath is something a lot of listeners might not consciously notice, but even if it’s not too obvious it can make your speaker sound unnaturally hurried, which is stressful to listen to. People tend to pause for a fraction of a second before and after a breath, so listen out for when part of that breath or pause is missing, and make sure to bring it back for a smooth, natural effect.

Badly cut music is something that should never happen, and yet I recently heard an example of this in a very high-profile podcast. When placing music under someone talking, an editor may need to cut or repeat some part of the music so that it’s the right length to fit the speech. When that music has a drum beat, it’s crucial that the rhythm is maintained across the cuts. Skipping a beat in the middle of a piece of music sounds super amateurish, and it’s something you should listen out for.

5) Overcompression

This one’s a bit more subtle, but it’s important.

I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of compression here, but it is a super useful tool. It lets you make your audio louder, clearer, and more uniform.

What over compression looks like as waveform compared to normal compression – gross. (Courtesy of mastering.com)

The problem is when compression is overused. You can spot this when everything in your podcast sounds like it’s happening at the same loudness and intensity – it all feels squashed and flat. That’s a bad thing, because it robs your audio of dynamic range (the importance of which I write about here), and makes it boring to listen to.

The amount of compression is partly a question of taste, but like so many post-processing effects it’s best to use it subtly. If your audio is sounding squashed or flat, or something about it is making your ears feel a bit fuzzy, have a chat with your engineer.

6) Bonus material: Tracks Are out of Sync

For most interviews you’ll be recording with two mics, and that means you’re going to come away with two tracks of audio.

Unless you’re recording speakers in different locations, or isolated booths, some of the sound from each is inevitably going to bleed into the other, which means the two tracks need to be perfectly synchronised in the edit.

What a two-channel interview looks like during an edit

Most of the time, a producer will cut the sections on each track when that speaker isn’t talking – this simplifies the edit and reduces the risk of things going wrong – but what about those fun, dynamic moments when the speakers are talking over each other, laughing, or having a fast back-and-forth?

There’s no catch-all solution here. The editor is just going to have use what they can from the two channels to make things sound as natural as possible, and that’s often going to mean moving tracks around a little. This is where the issue comes in: you don’t want desyncronised artefacts from one channel bleeding into another, laughs cut in awkward places, or strange echoes where two channels have moved out of sync. This never fails to kill what would otherwise be a nice, lively moment in a piece of audio.

If you hear something like this, ask your producer if they can fiddle it into better shape. Sometimes it’s simply not possible and you’ll need to make a decision whether it’s worth keeping with a suboptimal edit, but it’s worth knowing your options.

Final thoughts

I wrote this post to give people without an audio background some tools to identify issues in their content, but you’re still going to need someone to fix them.

If you hear any of these, have a chat with your producer or engineer about ways you might improve the quality of what you’re putting out there. If you need any other help, or someone who can tell you whether your audio is measuring up and how to make it better, get in touch.

How to Improve your Podcast with More Thoughtful Sound Design

I’ve heard a fair few definitions of what sound design actually means in podcasting, but a lot of people now use it to describe the simple act of putting music under speech.

This is… fine.

Putting a little music under a speaker can set the tone and be evocative, but calling this sound design feels like a very grandiose way of describing the least interesting possible version of a thing.

In order to do good sound design you are going to have to think of yourself as Lydia Tár. I’m afraid there is no other way.

I want to talk about what podcast sound design can be, and I think that boils down to musicality.

Music employs elements like texture, timbre, rhythm, tempo, melody, and harmony to engage a listener and create an effect, and a lot of these concepts apply to sound design too.

So, here are some things to think about that should bring more musicality to your sound design, and make your audio more interesting.

(Be warned, in the ‘Humour and Irony’ section there are sexual references some people might not want to read. I.e. this blog acknowledges the existence of [slightly unusual] sex).

Pay Attention to Rhythm and Tempo

As Maya Angelou said in a 1973 interview with Intellectual Digest, “Everything in the universe has rhythm,” and your podcast is no exception.

Actual footage of me interviewing Sesame Street’s Sonia Manzano. Probably the only time I’ve been starstruck.

The music you’re using will obviously have rhythm, but so will your guests’ speech, your archive and sound effects, and the way you fit them all together. If you pay attention while editing, you can often hear when a speaker or sound is hitting the beat – it just feels right – and when I’m sound designing I’ll often tap out the rhythm on my desk to make sure I’m nailing it.

I paid a lot of attention to rhythm in this sequence from Behind the Scenes on Sesame Street, a feature I produced and presented for the BBC World Service (and probably the highlight of my career – I’m a HUGE Sesame Street fan):

Listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds.

Here you’ve got the fantastic Sonia Manzano telling us about the show’s conception over a gospel rendition of the Alphabet Song by Patti LaBelle. So, yes, I have put some speech over some music here, but notice how the speakers’ cadences complement the music’s rhythm, how it speeds up and slows down to give shape to the story being told. It’s a subtle thing, but paying attention to rhythm and tempo can make your pieces more deliberate and effective.

Of course, you can also create interesting effects by upsetting the rhythm. Check out this extract from Akenfield Now, which I produced for Archive on 4 (presented by the brilliant Anna Davies – who was just 18 at the time!) Notice how one rhythm builds up only to be deliberately broken by a different one.

Listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds.

Play with Pitch and Harmony

We perceive every sound we hear as having a pitch. When you put two or more of those pitches together, that’s harmony, and it’s something that can have a real impact on your sound design.

I made Dostoevsky and the Russian Soul, a documentary for BBC Radio 4, during the darkest days of the pandemic. That meant relying a lot on music, sound effects, and voice actors, and I tried to make things more interesting by paying extra attention to pitch and harmony, especially in this section about Dostoevsky’s story The Peasant Marey.

Listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds.

One technique I used was retuning the sounds of brawling men at the start of the section so that, when it swooshes into the music, the pitches complement each other. The two pieces of music that follow, both by Rachmaninov, are in the same key, and along with the high-pitched chirruping of insects in the background, they contrast nicely with the low-pitched crunching of hooves, the actor playing Dostoyevsky, and of course the brilliant, bassy voice of Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who presented the show.

Think About Melody, Structure, and Dynamics

It’s a bit strange to talk about “melody” when not discussing music, but I mean this in the most basic sense: a sequence of sounds. And when you’re putting the various elements of your piece together – speech, archive, actuality, effects, music – this is exactly what you’re making: a sequence of sounds, a melody.

The true message of Jaws.

Melodies are about change. You have one sound followed by another, then another, and the differences between them create an effect. I wrote about this at length in another post: Dynamic Range: One of the keys to a compelling podcast.

Of course, there are some melodies that work well with very little change in them (Like the two-note theme from Jaws, the chorus of Taylor Swifts Out of the Woods, or Antônio Carlos Jobim’s One Note Samba), and occasionally you might want to do something similar in your sound design, but it’s always good to have a strong idea why you’re doing it.

Use Interesting and Relevant Texture and Timbre

If you were composing for an orchestra, you might create an effect or bring out a theme by giving some parts to the string section and others to the brass, and you can think in the same way about sound design.

If your subject is technology, for example, the obvious choice would be to use sharp, metallic-sounding music. That’s what I did in Automation Nation, a three-part series about automation and the future of work I made for the BBC World Service. Four Tet’s Parallel Jalebi was a strong choice for the theme music because it’s got a rhythmic, robotic feel, but even better because later it introduces a beautifully sampled female vocal. These two sides—artificial and human—nicely sum the themes of the story.

But music isn’t everything. You can also select sound effects, archive and actuality that complement the texture you’re creating. In fact, there’s little I like more than a nice, grainy recording to give a sense of another era, like in this sequence from the third episode of Automation Nation. I love the texture of the archive from a 1944 informational film about Youngstown Ohio, which I interweaved with interviews and music while paying special attention to the rhythm of the various clips.

Listen to the full episode (and series) on BBC Sounds.

Have Fun with Quoting, Humour, and Irony

This is where things get really fun…

You’ll want to be sparing with how much you use them, but there are often opportunties to be playful and creative with your sound designs. Here a couple of things I like to bring to mine when I hear the chance:

Quoting (one for the nerds)

Sexy Bill Gates, never letting me have any fun.

If you’re a jazz fan you might already be familiar with the concept of quoting, where a player borrows part of the melody from another tune during a solo. Take this 1948 recording of Charlie Parker playing White Christmas, for instance, where he quotes Jingle Bells as part of his solo. A good quote is an immensely satisfying thing – a little knowing nod to your audience to let them know how smart they are – and you can do it in your sound design too.

I tried using a quote recently in a piece for the Guardian’s Today in Focus. It was a moment in a story about cyber security where the hero meets a major setback, and I sampled the classic Windows XP error sound in the music. For knowing listeners, this would have been a fun little addition, but sadly I ended up having to take it out because I was afraid Microsoft might sue me.

Humour and Irony

I’ve written a lot here about when you might use sound design that fits with your project’s theme, but what if you didn’t do that? What kind of effects could you create by making choices for ironic or comic effect?

lol…

For Kink!, a six-part series I produced for Audible about… well… Kink, we set up a hotline where people could tell us about their various proclivities.

After a week or so we got a call from a woman in New York who has a fetish for receiving oral sex while on her period. Then, amazingly, we heard from a man in London who loves to give it! I know… it’s like this century’s Sleepless in Seattle.

Now, some people might not like the idea of this, but it’s also undeniably quite nice: Two strangers, thousands of miles apart, serendipitously calling in to the same show with the same fetish. So, I decided to play up that contrast by using the most tropey, romantic music I could find find. Take a listen:

Listen to the full episode (and series) on Audible.

The engineer for the project and I both loved this, but the editor didn’t get the joke (The note, I think, was “Why is there Black Beauty music under this!?”). Thankfully, after convincing him to share it with some colleagues for a second opinion, we got to keep it in. The result, I think, is at once funny, sweet, and… well… pretty nasty. What’s not to like?

There all kinds of ways you can break the rules to create fresh effects in your sound design, but you need to make it clear that you’re being intentional. If you don’t, you might end up with one of the issues from this post: Make Your Podcast Sound Better by Listening out for these Four Common Issues.

Final Thoughts

I wrote this because I’d love to hear more creativity and musicality in the podcasts I listen to, and hopefully this can serve as inspiration for producers looking to do something a bit more interesting in their work.

More actual footage of me working hard to make you a really good podcast. :)

Sound design for podcasts doesn’t just have to be about dropping some music under a voiceover. There are a tonne of fun ways to make things sound more interesting, engaging, or just plain weird, and I encourage you to try them.

If you’re a business looking to commission a podcast, hire a producer, or get help making your sound design more interesting, you can also get in touch.

“Dynamic Range”: One of the Keys to a Compelling Podcast

I love In Our Time on BBC Radio 4. It’s an institution: A panel of academic experts discussing their niches while Melvin Bragg sasses them? Delightful.

But if you asked me to tell you something I’ve learned from an episode, I honestly don’t think I could. Why? Because the show has zero dynamic range.

Melvin Bragg: Sassy Man

What is dynamic range, and why does it matter to podcasting?

The human brain uses a tonne of energy – around 20% of the body’s overall consumption – and that means it looks for efficiencies where it can. If your brain thinks everything’s ticking along smoothly without any new events it needs to be vigilant to (hungry approaching tigers, etc.) it’ll conserve energy by going into autopilot, and that means it stops paying attention.

That’s why, no matter how much you want to learn about the Hanseatic Language, the Irish Rebellion of 1798, or the Great Stink, after a few minutes of academics explaining them to Melvin Bragg: Sass Machine in the same voices, volumes, and pitches, like it or not you’re going to stop listening.

Mixing up the dynamic range – the timbre, volume, and pace of your piece – is vital to making audio with impact, because that’s what keeps your audience engaged.

How can you keep people listening to your podcast?

There’s no hard and fast rule to working with dynamic range, and you should always follow your own tastes, but I find the sweet spot for holding an audience’s attention (or mine at least) is a little under two minutes.

This means that roughly every two minutes, you want something to change. It could be the person speaking, the energy in their voice, the music, sound effects, archive, or something else, but you can’t just keep alternating between the same two things. When the brain starts to sense a repeating pattern, it’s going to assume it doesn’t need to listen anymore.

This is basically about musicality, which is central to interesting sound design and something I’m going to write about in a future blog. A lot of music is about establishing patterns and interrupting them – theme and variation – and the same is true for speech-based audio.

So, in terms of sound (because content and narrative are something else I’m going to write about in future posts):

Dynamic Range + Variety = Compelling Audio

What does strong dynamic range sound like?

To illustrate strong dynamic range that keeps an audience engaged, I’m going to pick apart the intro I made for an episode of the Guardian’s award-winning Today in Focus podcast.

(Listen to the full episode here)

Now, this clip is just over 2 minutes in itself, but being the introduction to an episode it needs to be especially arresting. There’s some kind of dynamic variation every 5 to 10 seconds here, which would be exhausting to listen to for a full 30 minutes, but might be appropriate for a hard-hitting intro, or a climactic sequence somewhere in your piece.

Here’s a rough breakdown of what’s happening:

• 0” – 8” Presenter Nosheen Iqbal is speaking without anything underneath. We’re around a 2/10 here.

• 8” – 48” Around 40 seconds of alternating speech and archive, changing every 5 to 10 seconds, over some droning music. A solid 5/10

• 48” – 1’08” Sooner or later that’s going to get boring. Your brain’s going to figure out the pattern and start switching off. So we change up the dynamic a little. A (thematically appropriate) clock starts beeping, and the droning music starts to rise up in the mix, some other sound effects come into play. Pushing up to maybe 8/10 here!

• 1’08” – 1’20 But careful! The ear’s only going to tune in to that kind of dense noise for so long. So after a brief climax the dynamic comes down again: a single note repeated on the piano, then Nosheen with nothing underneath her. Notice how there’s still some residual tension from the previous section. 3/10.

• 1’20” – 1’36” Now we’re mixing up the dynamic with some music again, but notice that this isn’t too full on. It’s got rhythm, but no beat. 6/10.

• 1’36” – 2’06” Now we take it up a notch, introduce a beat and return to our pattern, alternating between Nosheen and fairly urgent-sounding archive. 8.5/10

• 2’06” – 2’11” There’s a lot going on now and we’re nearly at the end, so just to give one last boost to Nosheen’s last line – the all-important title – we’re going to switch up the dynamic one last time, taking the music down a notch. 7/10 here, but not for long…

• 2’11 – 2’16 … after a few seconds, we crank everything back up for the final line, which is all the more emphatic for following a moment of relative calm. 9/10

Now see how these (very scientific) scores out of ten look plotted on a (very accurate) graph, and you get an idea what’s going on… It’s all a bit “Kurt Vonnegut explaining story structure,” right? You’re creating a dramatic arc with sound!

So there you have it: speech, archive, music, and effects all brought together with dynamic range and variety in mind. The result: An intro that holds your attention, compels you to listen to what’s being said, and ultimately makes you want to stick around and hear the rest of the episode.

Again, you don’t want to sustain this kind of pitch and pace for a whole piece, but the same principles slowed down some will keep listeners tuned in.

How can you improve the dynamic range in your episodes?

Dynamic range doesn’t necessarily mean you need to pack your podcast with music, archive and sound effects. Many speech-only podcasts are brilliant, but they often rely on gifted presenters and great guests with plenty of chemistry to keep the dynamics varied and the energy up.

You can have a go at improving the dynamic range of your episodes yourself using some of the ideas above, but there’s no substitute for the trained ear and technical experience of a producer who can really make your audio sing (ahem).

Want help making sure your audience tunes into everything you’ve got to say? Get in touch.