- Hello, I'm Mike Russell, from musicradiocreative.com. In this video, if you'd like to sound
like a pro on the radio, this video will show you
everything you need to know to get that pro radio voice. (relaxed hip hip music) - As I mentioned at the start, this video will help you get
everything you need in place to get that perfect radio voice. So in this video, we will cover three main areas. Number one: Theory. How to achieve the perfect radio presence before you even go live. Number two: the tools. Everything you need in place to get that perfect radio sound. Number three: Techniques. Post-production techniques
that will make your voice sound a million dollars. So that's a lot to cover. I've called in some backup. James Mulvany is the founder
of online radio platform, radio.co, and he's got over a decade of
experience in broadcasting. James has extensive knowledge
of working at radio stations, from presenting to
program control and more, and that makes him perfect
to cover the theory side, before we even fire up the phantom power and get into microphones
and post production. So let's learn more about the theory side. James, it's over to you. - Hey, cheers. Thanks for that, Mike. Hi, my name is James Mulvany. I'm founder of radio.co, podcast.co, matchmaker.fm and Cue Podcasts. And over the past 15 years, I've worked with tens of thousands of broadcasters and podcasters, helping them launch their radio stations and their broadcasting careers. And there is no formula to becoming the perfect presenter that appeals to absolutely everyone. However, there are five principles that I wanna share with you today, which will really help you
aid your presentation skills and you can implement these really easily to make sure that your show is sounding great every single time. Okay, so the first point is
to really know your audience, know exactly who your audience is. So it doesn't matter if you're presenting perhaps like adult
contemporary music or top 40, or maybe you're on news or talk radio. The way that you're gonna be communicating with your audience will vary, depending on the genre that
your station is targeting. And of course the demographic
of the type of listener you're aiming towards. So for example, perhaps your audience is, I don't know, middle-aged guys, let's call for example, call your ideal listener, Dave. And he spends his
weekends sat in his shed, building and painting bird boxes. You might speak to Dave in
a slightly different way, while he's listening to
the radio in his shed, than you talk to a teenager
who wants to hear Ariana Grande or whatever being played constantly. Who is specifically listening
to your radio station? Too many people go into radio, just thinking, "Well,
everyone's listening." Well, you know, my audience could be anyone, but really that's not true
when you think about it, each radio station or
whatever you're trying to do, whether or not you're
presenting radio or a podcast, or even video like this, will be targeting a
different kind of person. So try and like get to sync with who your listener actually is. Think about what they're gonna be doing while they're listening to you. What sort of things that
they like to hear about, what's going on in their lives, and really tune into that. And that will enable you to
become an effective communicator and a really, really good presenter. So that's tip number one. So tip number two, and this is a really easy one that anyone can start
implementing straight away, is talk directly to the listener. So if you are sat there saying, "Hey, everybody," or "Hi guys," or just making it kind of generic, it can kind of sound a
little bit impersonal. Whereas if you say, "Hey, I hope your day is going great. "What are you up to today?" That kind of thing, speaking directly as if it's just you and you, e.g. the person
sat on the other end, make it personal, make it feel intimate. You're immediately gonna be able to build stronger connections
with your audience and who you're trying to speak to. You're having that engaging
one-on-one conversation over the radio. That's why people still
love listening to radio a hundred years down the line. And that's what makes radio
so incredibly powerful. So, tip number three, get your audience really
involved in your show. This is great fun. And I think this is what makes radio, as a DJ or as a presenter, so much fun compared to other mediums. It is real time and you can reach out to people for their opinions. You can get people engaged
with what your show contains and the output of what
you're talking about. And it might be today's news stories, or it might be a contentious issue, or it could be something that people are really passionate about. Whatever it might be, remind your audience that
they can communicate with you, and you can get them on air either, you know, do a pre-recorded interview with your listeners, or even actually get them on live. Regardless, getting your
listeners involved in your show and getting them involved in the story and creating your show
around their stories as well as your own, can be really, really powerful. And as a presenter, you are the conduit between
your listener's stories and the listener who is
also tuning into your show. As weird as that sounds, it's very much powerful, cos people wanna know what
other people are doing and people are interested
in other people's stories. And radio is a fantastic
medium for storytelling. Okay, so my fourth tip, is be confident in what you're saying, and also prepare for every
single show that you do. It's always useful to
consider writing a script when it comes to radio. And I don't mean necessarily
doing something word for word, but having an outline for each show, or having a key list of bullet points of things that you think
are important to mention, perhaps you're coming out of a song and you're gonna go into a link. What do you wanna talk
about during the link? It could be that you are talking about something that's happened that day. It might be cross-promotion, you're talking about someone else's show on the radio station or
something that happened on the breakfast show
earlier that morning. Make sure you've got this
stuff down in front of you. So when you go into that link, you feel confident, and you feel like you can
easily talk about the points that are relevant for your show. And by the way, I've recorded
a video all about this. I'll put a link above, called "How to Write an Effective Script "Specifically for Radio." And I've also got a template
that you could download, for free over on my website, at jamesm.com/scripts. I'll put a link below james m.com/scripts. You can download them for free. I'd go and check them out. Basically it will give you
a script that you can follow when it comes to presenting great radio. And finally, don't change your voice and be yourself. This is something that so many people, feel like for some reason, when they first come into radio, they have to sound a certain way, but your voice as it currently is, and the way you speak to people day to day is absolutely fine. You know, gone are the days when, you know, like from back in the eighties, where people felt like they had
to be like this big cool DJ, and have this big booming voice, or kind of appear a certain way. I don't think there's any harm in kind of elevating
your normal personality. You know, no one wants to listen to someone who's boring on air. Sure, you need to share your enthusiasm, that needs to come across when you're speaking down the microphone, but don't think that you
need to change your voice, you need to make it deeper or higher, or you need to speak at 110 miles an hour. Radio, these days, is about personality and it's just about being yourself. So don't feel like you need
to act or change yourself to be a confident presenter, and enjoy it, enjoy what you're doing
and have fun with it. So those are my top five tips
to becoming a great presenter. If you follow these tips, you'll be well on your way to excelling when it comes to your
radio show or your podcast. I've been James from radio.co, thanks very much for watching
and back to you, Mike. - Thanks so much, James. Now let's move on to gear. And in reality, this can be as simple or
as complex as you'd like. For instance, in my studio, I'm using the AKG C1414 XLII microphone. And that's running through a Soundcraft Signature 12 MTK mixing desk, which I absolutely love. I've got a rack full of analog gear, including a DBX 215S, which is used to EQ my streams. Also, the DBX 166XS, which adds some overall compression. I've got two DBX 286S units
to process my microphones. I've also got a headphone preamp from Beringer, and a Furman power conditioner as well, to add noise-free power
to all of my analog units. But you don't have to
spend thousands of dollars. The humble USB microphone
will suffice as well. There are some really
good options out there. My favorite is the Beyerdynamic Fox. Finally onto technique, and some tips that will add some extra zip or zing to your audio, and we'll be using the free
audio editor, Audacity, which can be downloaded online. Okay, so I'm fired up into Audacity, and I've set up my Beyerdynamic
Fox USB microphone, with absolutely no
processing on it whatsoever to record a radio voiceover. This is 99.9 MRC.FM. So let's play that back. This is 99.9 MRC.FM. Okay. Not sending too bad, but we can definitely do
some stuff to improve it. So you can hear a before
and after comparison, I'm actually gonna select the whole track by double clicking it, hit command or control C on my keyboard, and then place the cursor further on and command or control
V to make an exact copy. So now I'll work on the second copy. Then we'll compare what we've
done and hear the differences. The very first thing I'm
gonna recommend you do, is EQ Voiceover. That way you can get
rid of any frequencies that shouldn't be there and add on some that should be there, like the high end to make it sound crisp and punchy and nice. So let's do that. Into the effect menu in Audacity, and we're looking for filter Curve EQ. It's a really easy effect to use. You'll want to start off by flattening it and then drawing on your shapes. Now this frequencies all
the way from the base, all the way through the mid, all the way up to the high end. And the first thing I'm gonna do, is do a simple base roll off, and I'll put in a dot here and a dot here, and fade down the base. Let's preview. This is 99.9. Now you'll notice if I move this way up and I go too far up, it's going to thin out the voice a bit. This is 99.9. And in some instances when
you're doing radio imaging, that could be quite handy
to get that kind of sound. But for me, I wanna keep the fullness, and definitely the base in my voice, so I'm gonna roll off just around, just above a hundred hertz, and maybe even slightly below. So that's how your base
roll off should be. It's called a high pass filter by the way. And then just about 4,000 hertz, we're gonna start to add on some high end. Let's try that and preview it. This is 99.9. And of course the more high end, if I really turn that
up so you can hear it, This is 99... Now, of course, that's too much. We're introducing way amount
of sibilants and distortion, so I'll pull it back down to about here. This is 99.9. And now already, just with
those two effects in the EQ, we've rolled off base. So any plosives, any pops,
any rumbles, any booms, have gone, and the crispness and clarity
of the voice increase, just using that simple technique inside the filter curve EQ effect. Click okay, and we'll listen to before... this is 99.9... ...and after, ...this is 99.9. Crisp and clear. Now we can see that, well, there are some peaks in the audio and there's some quieter bits. We'd like to kind of be the same volume all the way through, nice and loud, punchy. If it's a radio voiceover, if it is a voiceover for radio imaging, we're gonna want it to sound really good. So again, selecting the whole audio here, just this bit, not the original sound, and we'll go into effects again and we'll set up a compressor right here. Now, the way you set up a compressor is you choose a threshold. So that's any audio that goes above the level you set will be compressed. Turned down as it were. So usually I recommend -20 DB
as a good starting place here. You can move this around, but obviously the higher you make this, the less the compressor will work, - 20 is generally good. You can leave the noise
floor exactly as it is. Now, ratio usually is around two to one, and this is good for podcast
and things like that. When we're working in radio, we might go three to one, or even if we're going
for hard radio imaging, we might go five to one. So a radio presenter's voice would probably be a three to one ratio, and five to one is good for imaging. This is just how much
the audio is compressed when it goes above the threshold. And, finally, attack and release. We wanna be as quick as possible. Why? Because as soon as the compressor detects any audio going above the threshold, you want it to compress
as soon as possible. You don't want it to be
hanging around or waiting as you may be if you are working with a drum track, for instance, or a music track for voiceover. Attack and release should
be as fast as possible. And then finally you got
the makeup game to zero DB. This is an excellent,
excellent feature in Audacity. Because of compression. it will actually turn
your overall audio down. So what ticking this does, which is default, by the way, it makes it louder and
up to a maximum of 0 DB. So when I click, "Okay", watch the wave form, see how
it's nicely flattened out. And now we've got this radio voiceover. This is 99.9 mrc.fm, and the original, this is 99.9 mrc.fm. And after one more time, this is 99.9 mrc.fm. Crisp and clear with
just a couple of effects, the EQ and compressor do the trick. So there you have it, how you can achieve
the perfect radio voice distilled down to just three steps. I really hope you enjoyed this video. And if you'd like tips on improving your radio presenting skills, equipment reviews, and all
the latest gear in radio, you can check out James's YouTube channel and there'll be a link
down in the description. Finally, James and the team at radio.co, have put together a
bunch of helpful goodies that will help you up your radio game. And if you'd like to download those, again, the link is down below. Make sure you like this video. And also if you wanna see
more videos like this, subscribe to my channel and ding the bell. So you never miss another
audio video from me. (energetic rock music)
