Editing, on request

Before I touch anything I play the whole session from start to finish at normal speed, headphones on, hands in my lap. No waveform on the screen, no meters, no notes. It is the only time I will ever hear your episode the way a listener will, and if I start fixing things on the first pass I stop hearing the conversation and start hearing problems.

I am listening for the shape of it: where it warms up, where somebody suddenly becomes interesting, the joke that lands four minutes after it was set up. Afterwards I write down timestamps from memory, and the moments I can still remember are the ones that matter. For an hour of raw audio this takes an hour. I have tried to shorten it, and the edits got worse, so I stopped trying.

Every voice arrives on its own track, which is the whole reason we record that way. I treat each one on its own: a gentle filter to take out the low rumble from the street and the desk, a little compression so the quiet guest and the loud host sit comfortably in the same room, and a careful look at the moments when somebody leans back and laughs.

I do not push everyone to sound the same. A deep voice should stay deep and a bright one should stay bright; my job is to make them easy to listen to side by side, not to iron them flat. If a guest joined on the remote link they get a little more attention here, because a laptop microphone in a spare bedroom needs help that the room microphones never do.

Noise reduction is the tool most people overuse, and you can always hear it: voices go metallic and faintly underwater, and the end of every word gets swallowed. Our rooms are quiet, so recordings made here usually need very little.

For audio recorded elsewhere I take a print of the room from a moment of silence, then pull the noise down only as far as it will go before the voice itself starts to change. That is nearly always less than people expect. A faint, steady hum under a clear voice is fine; listeners stop hearing it within a minute. A voice that sounds wrong, they hear the whole way through. Where a single noise intrudes, a car horn or a cup set down hard, I deal with that moment on its own rather than processing the whole track to catch it.

This is the part of a Full edit that takes the time, and the part I enjoy most. I cut the false starts, the sentence that went nowhere, the long pause while someone checks their notes, the um that arrives in a cluster of four. I do not cut every um, because a conversation without any sounds rehearsed. And I do not cut the laughs, even the ones that go on a little long, because the laugh is usually why somebody keeps listening.

When I cut inside a sentence I cut on a breath or a hard consonant so the join cannot be heard, and I listen to every join twice. If a segment works better somewhere else, I move it. If something was said that you might not want broadcast, I note the timestamp and ask, rather than deciding for you.

Your intro and outro go on every edit. On a Full edit I also bring a quiet bed of music under the transitions, between segments and under a sponsor read if you have one. The bed rises as the voice finishes, sits low for as long as it is needed and is gone before the next voice starts, so nobody is ever talking over a melody.

I use the music you supply and nothing else. If you do not have any, I will tell you honestly that a show can work perfectly well without it, and many good ones do.

Last, I measure the finished episode and bring it to -16 LUFS for stereo, or -19 LUFS for mono, with the peaks kept safely under the ceiling so nothing crackles on a cheap pair of earbuds. That is roughly where podcast players expect a show to sit, which means a listener switching from another programme to yours never has to reach for the volume. If you deliver somewhere with a different target, tell me and I will master to that instead.

Then I listen to the first five minutes, the last five, and three places in the middle, once on the studio monitors and once on a pair of ordinary earbuds, because that is how most people will hear it. Only then does it go back to you.