How to Edit a Podcast | Reaper Tutorial

[Music] producing a fantastic sounding podcast is easier than it's ever been these days we are almost spoiled for Choice when it comes to excellent microphones high quality audio interfaces portable audio recorders and even super specialized Hardware units like the rode Road Caster Pro but all of those tools are for recording a podcast and once you have one recorded what do you do with it that is what you are going to learn in this course hi my name is Dave Bode for envato and in this course you are going to learn how to edit a podcast using Reaper this course is going to cover everything from starting with the raw recordings all the way through the final render start you are going to learn how to set up Reaper using a custom config file that optimizes Reaper for podcast editing after that I'm going to give you a super quick tour of the reaper interface and then you're going to jump in and start editing a demo podcast that I recorded you will be able to follow along with me using the same files that I'm using to learn about podcast editing starting with loudness and normalizing your raw recordings and music using loudness tools you will learn how to use some basic Master mix track effects like a limiter and loudness meter using effects that come with Reaper then we will dive deep into processing your dialogue tracks with a denoiser gate compressor and EQ you will learn how to edit music against dialogue use volume automation envelopes to help level out your dialogue use a custom action that will make editing mouth clicks ums and US faster than you ever thought possible and render out your project with metadata finally you will learn how to take your podcast edit and turn it into a template which will make future podcast episodes much faster to edit do you know what also makes podcasts easier and faster to edit using envato elements with envato elements you get access to Millions that's right millions of creative digital assets for one low price I'm talking about stock footage Motion Graphics templates music sound effects photos vector graphics fonts After Effects templates and so much more a single subscription gives you access to everything you need to create great projects see for yourself at elements.invato.com even though this course is aimed at total beginners I will be moving through the lessons fairly quickly this is a learn as you go approach and if you're not keeping up with me in real time don't worry pause the video where you need to in order to catch up following along is definitely the fastest way to learn how to edit a great sounding podcast so follow along as much as you can to get started let's talk about setting up Reaper for the first time coming up next foreign how to install and set up Reaper with a custom configuration file that will get you up and running with podcast editing to get started you can head on over to reaper.fm and there's a download link right at the top and down here you can select your version I'm going to pick Windows 64-bit I'm going to click my download to install this and the only thing that I'm going to do differently from how you are going to install Reaper is I'm going to do a portable install this is something that I mentioned in a previous lesson as one of the cool features of Reaper the reason I'm doing a portable install is because I already have a version of Reaper on my OS drive and I want to start fresh just like you will be doing so I'm going to install this on a portable USB flash drive I've created a few folders here one called Reaper and a few other folders that I'll talk about more in just a minute I'm going to select that it's set to Portable install and I'll just click through this installer and get going and with the magic of editing that just took a few seconds in reality it was about 45 seconds I'm going to click close And then it's going to prompt me and ask me if I want to run Reaper I do so I'm going to click yes the very first time Reaper runs it's going to run a scan on your system to find any VST plugins so that when you run Reaper you have all of your audio effects ready to go now if you don't have any don't worry because in this course I'm only going to use stock effects that come with Reaper next it's going to prompt me and say that I have not selected an audio device do I want to do that now yes I do and then it's going to open up the reaper preferences and this is where I'm going to set up my audio device so that I can listen to Reaper and I can record in Reaper if I need to do so now if you are on a PC it's going to look exactly like this if you're on a Mac it's going to look slightly different there are not as many options you're probably going to choose system audio and that's because on a Mac you set up your inputs and your outputs in the system preferences on Windows if you click this audio system drop down here you have a number of options don't let this scare you there are only two that are going to be relevant if you are using an external audio device so something that plugs in via USB or maybe it's an older device and it's firewire you're going to want to choose seo seo is a higher performance driver control mechanism for those external audio devices and if you have one that's what you want to use if you're not using an external audio device you want to choose this option down here Wasabi and this is perfectly acceptable for editing podcasts so you can choose that and then you can set up your inputs in your outputs now I am using an external audio device so I'm going to choose SEO and then under the driver drop down I'm going to pick my device I have more than one audio device that I have used on this system currently I'm using a Motu M series the M4 then you have options down here for setting up your inputs and your outputs this is pretty self-explanatory if you're not recording you can disable your inputs not sure why you would but you have that option by default I believe Reaper selects the first two inputs in the first two outputs at least every time I've set it up that's what it does even though I have more than two inputs available on this audio device and if you want more than two available for your system you just need to select the last one as the last one in the list and then they'll all be available the same thing goes for the outputs you can see I have four outputs but I'm only using two for playback meaning what I'm actually listening to so outputs one and two work for me down here there are some settings where you can request a specific sample rate and block size I don't change these because in the audio Control software which I can access by clicking this SEO configuration button I already have my device set to 48 kilohertz or 48 000 Hertz which is what I record and play back everything at I also set my buffer size to 256 and that works for me then I'm going to click OK next I have a screen here where Reaper is going to tell me hey Reaper's not free it's a paid product if you use it for more than 60 days you're required to purchase a license and if you do if you like Reaper go ahead and purchase it it's really not that expensive for now I'm going to click still evaluating next I'm going to go back into preferences which you can get to by coming up here to options and then down here to preferences the keyboard shortcut for this is control p and I'm going to come all the way up to the top and then click on General and then click on import configuration I'm going to navigate to where I have this Reaper podcast basic configuration file you can do that there'll be a link in the description for these assets I'm going to open that up it's going to ask me if I really want to import this because it's going to restart Reaper I'm going to click yes I have some options as to what I want to import you can leave all of these checked and then click import it's going to pop up an error and say that it's missing this particular project file don't worry about that click OK and then I'll just click out of this evaluation screen right here I want to jump back into preferences by hitting control p and walk through just a few more things that I think will be handy for you to set up before moving forward one of those is under General and then paths this is an area where you can set up some default locations for things like saves recordings and Peak files so you'll see on my system I have a folder here on my J drive and you're not going to have a folder set up but it's baked into the config file so if you want to set up a default path for all of your saves in Reaper you can just create a folder somewhere and then point Reaper to it you can see I've done the same for the default recording path I've created a folder called Reaper media and then pointed Reaper to it and then right here I'm going to check this checkbox to store all Peak caches in an alternate path and I've created a folder called repeats on my J drive and this folder will store all of the peak files that are created anytime I pull in audio into Reaper so when you import audio into Reaper it creates a peak file which represents the waveform which is the thing that you can see inside of Reaper normally if this is not checked and you haven't set up a folder that Peak file is created and it is stored right next to the original audio file which I think is sometimes annoying because it can kind of clutter up your audio files with all these extra tiny little files so if you create a folder and you put all your repeats in that folder then a couple years from now you can go and clean that out and you can just delete all the old ones to clear up some old space if you wanted to and that doesn't really affect anything because if you open up an old project and Reaper can't find the peak files it'll just recreate new ones and put them back in the folder for you so it's not really a big deal and it kind of cleans up your files on your system a little bit more so these three folders I think are very handy to set up you can name them whatever and put them wherever you like I'm going to jump down to project and show you that I also have set up in this config file and it may be different on your system because again you don't have a j drive but I've created a folder called Reaper backups and I have this set to save to time stamped file in additional directory so what this does is it creates a backup project file and puts it in this folder for me so if something happens to the main Reaper project file that I'm working on I have a backup for me that is usually on another drive on my system just for redundancy this is also the location where you can change your auto save time so I believe autosave is on by default but it's set to every 15 minutes when not recording I'm going to leave it at 15 minutes for now that'll probably work for you as well and that's pretty much it for setting up Reaper with this custom configuration file coming up in the next lesson you're going to get a tour of the reaper interface I'm going to show you how to import audio and oh open up a project template that'll get you up and running for podcast editing so check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to use a project template and import audio into Reaper so if you come up here to file and then down to project template you'll find a project template that was baked into that configuration file called podcast template one and this is nothing really fancy this project template has three tracks in it a host track a co-host track and a music track There's No Effects right now because I want to show you how to set those up from scratch but from here what I can do is import some audio and get it into these tracks so that we can move forward in figuring out how to edit this podcast so to do that I'm going to use the media Explorer built into reaper now you can just import your audio by navigating in Windows Explorer or finder and then just drag those files right into Reaper that works totally fine as well but I think the media Explorer is pretty cool so I want to show it to you so to do that come up here to view and then media Explorer and then you can navigate to where you have downloaded the demo files for this course for me it's on my y Drive in a folder called cleaning with chemistry I'm going to jump into episode number one recorded files and then here are my two dialog tracks Courtney is my host she's my subject matter expert for this demo podcast Joe is her husband and I want to get these imported into my project now before I do it can be handy to just preview these and you can do that right in this media Explorer by selecting on the file and then pressing spacebar to play it welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College so this is a really handy thing for managing and importing your media items as it's called in Reaper because you can preview right down here it shows you the waveform you can navigate around in here and play various sections you can actually make a selection in here by clicking and dragging the left Mouse button and you can import only a section of the audio so you don't have to import this entire clip which is very handy if you are working with very long files like an interview and you just need a couple of sound bites you can navigate to wherever those are preview those with the space bar and play them make sure you're getting what you need to get for your podcast or whatever and then make a selection and then click and drag that right in I'm going to delete those from my project because actually I want to import both of these so I'm just going to select both of them and then drag them right in now because I drag those to track number one and they are two separate audio files Reaper is going to ask me what I want to do with those do I want to put them on separate tracks or a single track I want them on separate tracks so that's what I'm going to click and they've been arranged correctly with Courtney as the host and Joe as the co-host if this wasn't the case you can just click and kind of rearrange things here by just clicking and dragging just like this but but it was right before so I'm just going to undo all of that now in addition to getting the talking portion of my podcast imported I also want to get some music in here and I've downloaded a few music options from envato Elements which I have located in a folder called music so let's check out some of these is a track called Lo-Fi from an artist Nikki n I'm going to press spacebar to play this wow that's pretty loud so one of the other handy things you could do in the media Explorer is adjust the volume of the playback when you are previewing these files you can also adjust a whole bunch of other things here and you have a lot of info over here like the tempo for this track and the sample rate and a bunch of other stuff a lot of stuff for you to explore in this media Explorer but for now I'm just going to turn the volume down and check out this track [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] very cool I like this I want to see what else I have here because I downloaded a few other options that I like as well so this is a track called low-fi by an artist called boom Opera and I'm gonna play the full length version here for a second oh yeah this is nice [Music] cool that works I'll also check out this 60 second version and see if that may be a better fit because I don't think I'm going to need more than 60 seconds for my podcast intro music all right I'm hearing a lot of the same stuff here [Music] very good [Music] cool so I think I'm going to use this for my intro I'll just click and drag this right down here to my music track whoops I accidentally put it on a new track here no problem I'll just click and drag and put it back to the music track and then delete that extra track there I have another option for music this is labeled Vlog Lo-Fi and let's see what I have here I think this is the full version I have this sorted by type and this is the wave file here I use wav files because they are uncompressed and have all the audio detail where MP3s are much much much smaller and may have some audio information that has been kind of thrown away probably you won't be able to notice a difference but because I have the waves that's what I'm going to use oh this is very cool too I like this and I think there's a version I think it's right here yes so it starts with this saxophone hook here with this Lo-Fi EQ sound that's very cool so I think I'm going to use this for my outro music so I'm going to select this and drag this in towards the end and put that also on my music track you could put these two different music files on separate tracks I'm just going to keep it super simple and have all my music on one track but you have options in Reaper to do whatever you want now coming up in the next lesson I'm going to give you a brief tour of all the things you are looking at here in the reaper interface so check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you're going to get a brief tour of the reaper interface let's Dive Right In and talk about what it is you are looking at I'm not going to cover every button switch knob and dial because that would take a really long time and I don't think you really need to know everything to get started with podcast editing so let's talk about this big area in the middle of the screen this is called the arrange view this is where you arrange the media items you can move them forward or back in time you can make simple edits by clicking and dragging the beginning of a media item or the left Edge or the right Edge if you want to trim up the end of this media item if you move your mouse to the top corner of a media item either the top right corner or the top left corner you can do a fade you can do a fade in you can do a fade out if you right click on the fade you have a bunch of options for the shape of this fade which is very cool I'm going to undo that you can also change the default fade curve simply by Alt clicking and dragging on it so you can change it from its default shape which is like this to something more aggressive or you can completely invert that curve just like that which is really handy to do I'm going to get rid of those by clicking and dragging to the right and the left navigating in the arrange view I think is pretty intuitive there are several ways to get around here there are some scroll bars on the side and the bottom but most of the time I use my mouse specifically the middle Mouse button or the scroll wheel so let's say I wanted to zoom in to this section right here what I'm going to do is Click right there to set the cursor and then I will scroll forward on the mouse and it doesn't matter where the mouse is it will zoom in horizontally to wherever the cursor is if I want to zoom in vertically to make my tracks taller I hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse forward if I want to move left right up or down what I usually do is hold shift and then click and drag the middle Mouse button which gives me this little hand tool and it lets me move in any direction I want I'm going to zoom back out the arrange view is divided up with these vertical lines here which are in 10 second increments in other words if you zoom into that section where I just was and you want to get an idea of how long this is all you need to do is reference that against these vertical lines here you can see it's about one and three quarters long so I'm guessing this is going to be about 17 seconds ish long look at that 17 seconds right down there when I click and drag in a blank section of the arrange view it makes a Time selection which was the thing that I just did to check exactly how long this section is you can do that down here you can do that up here in the ruler area which shows you the time currently you're looking at minutes seconds and milliseconds but if you have a much longer project you will see that roll over into hours right there to clear your time selection just hit the escape button and down here it'll show you the information about your time selection the start time the end time and the length of time of your selection or the duration of your selection to the left of the arrange view is the track control panel and there are a bunch of settings for each individual track every track in Reaper is treated exactly the same it doesn't matter if it's a mono stereo or multi-track or midi or video track they all have the same controls you can see for track 1 here we have the track name you can double click to rename it to the left of the track name is the record arm and disarm button recording in Reaper is very easy but it's outside the scope of this course but you can explore that if you want to this is the volume for track number one you can click and drag to change the volume this shows you where the volume for track number one is double click to reset it there's a routing button that's a little bit more advanced than what this course is going to cover but you can click and check that out there's a lot of cool things you can do in Reaper with audio routing something we are going to be talking about is effects this button right here opens up the track effects window because there are no effects on this track Reaper opens up the effects browser you can browse to your effect double click on one to insert it on this track you can click this power button right here to disable the effects for this track click it again to re-enable all of the effects I'm going to delete this effect from this track the trim button opens up all of the Automation and track envelopes you can think about automation as changing a parameter over time and this is something that's pretty common to do in audio especially when it comes to something simple like volume so for example let's say we wanted to change the volume in this host track here what I would do is shift click to insert a couple of points here and then make an adjustment to the volume and now what the volume is going to do when this plays back is it's going to go from zero decibels down to negative 24. it's going to hang out there for a little bit and then come back to zero decibels in Reaper this is called a volume envelope it's a way to automate the volume over time I'm just going to click over here on this little drop down to clear that out because I'm going to be talking more about volume envelopes and other automation coming up in another lesson just to the right of the trim button is this pan control here this allows you to send the audio and track number one more to the right side or the left side I'm going to double click to re-center that because most of the time I set my dialog tracks to be right in the center and that's where it is by default to the right of the track is an audio meter for track number one if I hit the space bar to play back my project see that it might not be the best method of cleaning the oven so I you'll see the audio in all of the tracks anything that has audio you'll see that right here in the audio meters right here is a mute button that is pretty self-explanatory you click that and this track gets muted meaning we can't hear anything coming from track number one the solo button is kind of the opposite it makes it so that track number one is the only track that we can hear above the track control panel there is a toolbar and there are a bunch of useful buttons and controls here I'll be talking more about this in an upcoming lesson I've customized this a little bit from Reaper's default configuration because some of the buttons that come in the default toolbar I don't think are that useful and it's a lot more streamlined for podcast editing on the right side of the interface is the master mix track this is where all the audio in every one of the tracks gets routed to the audio from track 1 2 and 3 gets combined together and that all gets summed up here on the master mix track and the mixtrack has pretty much all the same controls as every other track mute solo routing panning volume and effects we're going to be talking more about the master mix track in just a little bit at the very bottom of the interface are some transport controls that I'm guessing you will be somewhat familiar with if you've ever played back a video in YouTube you've probably seen some of these buttons before and if you Mouse over them you can see what they do and they all have shortcuts some of those are pretty intuitive space bar to play and stop that it might not be the best control space will pause and play that it might not be the best method of and that has a slightly different function because normally in Reaper when you stop playback the cursor goes back to wherever it was before example if I play from right here to clean it I've seen that and I stop you can see the cursor jumps back to where it was before but if I play to clean it and then I hit control space the cursor will stop wherever it currently is and you can press the stop button to make the cursor land right there now if you don't like any of the shortcuts in Reaper you can change I think every single one of them and to do that you're going to want to come to the actions list the actions list contains every single thing that you can do in Reaper and you can assign a shortcut to anything and there are thousands and thousands of things in this action list you can also combine actions together for a custom action which can be really powerful I'm going to show you a custom action coming up towards the end of this course which is going to make editing your podcast super super fast but if there's anything like play or pause that you want to change you can search for it up in the filter and then adjust the shortcut finally I want to show you the right click menus in Reaper when you right click pretty much anywhere in the reaper interface you get a specific menu for that thing that you right clicked on the solo button an individual track the volume button the lock settings items in the arrange View the ruler pretty much anything and anywhere you right click on you get a specific menu to that thing which is really fantastic for discoverability and figuring out how to do things in Reaper all right I think that's a good place to stop I know I didn't cover everything and I went pretty fast but as you watch the next couple of lessons the things that I talked about in this lesson are gonna start to make more sense as you see them used in a real project now coming up next you're going to learn about loudness and loudness normalization [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn about loudness and loudness normalization loudness is a helpful measurement tool that you can use to balance voices to Output audio that's super consistent and to meet specifications set by distribution platforms but what exactly is loudness well loudness is a way to analyze digital audio similarly to the way that we perceive or experience sound in the real world now that sounds obvious but that isn't how it's always been done and for you when you're thinking about loudness and podcast editing I imagine you're thinking two things number one is your podcast appropriately loud because it could be too loud not loud enough or just right and number two if it's not appropriately loud what do you need to do to get it to be appropriately loud now if you Google search how loud should my podcast be you will find that the general consensus is that podcasts should be at negative 16 lufs with a true peak of negative one now those numbers probably don't mean anything to you but I'm going to show you some tools in Reaper that will allow you to analyze the loudness in real time calculate the loudness so the first thing that I want to show you is what loudness measurements look like and to do that I'm going to make a quick adjustment here to my music because right now it's way too loud so I'm going to pull it down to around negative 17 come back to the beginning of my project here and just play this section here when the talking starts to verify that that's pretty close to the right level [Music] welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo cool now that I've adjusted my music I'm going to click on this button right here show actions list because I created some shortcuts for doing some loudness calculations and I realized that you may not have the same buttons on your keyboard I created my shortcuts using my number pad on the right side of my keyboard and if you're watching this on a smaller laptop you're probably not going to have a number pad so I want to show you the actions list and show you how to change those shortcuts so that you can follow along now the actions list is awesome it represents I think everything that you can do in Reaper and it's like thousands of actions long it can be pretty overwhelming and deserves its own course or lesson but for now just search for loudness here in the filter and you'll see a list of actions that have something to do with calculating loudness and there's a bunch of different ways that you can calculate loudness in your project and you'll see that I have four actions with shortcuts that use the number pad so if you want to follow along and you don't have the number pad just click on one of these actions come down here click the add button and then type in a new shortcut maybe something like control F9 and then click OK if that shortcut whatever you typed in there is already assigned to something Reaper will let you know and you can decide if you want to overwrite it or not I think control function keys will probably be pretty safe but you can set those to whatever you want now that you know how to set those shortcuts let's look at the loudness for this project I'm going to hit control number pad 9 and Reaper is going to analyze the loudness from start to finish via the master track over here in other words this loudness calculation would be exactly the same as if I just rendered my project right now and then analyzed it once it was rendered except this file is not going to go anywhere the master track is where all the tracks in my project get routed to and that's the most important thing when you're talking about loudness so now that that's done you can see a bunch of numbers down here and don't let this feel overwhelming because there are only two values that we need to focus on one is this right here lufsi and the other is true Peak lufs stands for loudness units full scale the term full scale references the highest amplitude a digital audio file can store which is zero decibels and on the meter that would be right up here and that's the reason why at the top of this meter in a lot of audio meters anything above zero decibels is red because in your final render there's no way to store values higher than zero decibels and anything in your project that is processed or calculated above zero decibels just gets chopped off right at zero this is commonly called clipping and clipping does not sound good at least it doesn't sound good in this context so all the audio in your final render lives in the space where zero decibels is at the top and everything else is in this space below there which is why all these loudness calculations here are negative values and like I said before lufs is one of the two numbers here that you need to pay attention to the I stands for integrated and that is the average from start to finish s is short term m is momentary those are not really important I stands for integrated and that means the average of your entire project sometimes this is called program or sometimes it's just listed as lufs for example if you Google how loud should my podcast be you'll find most of them will say something like negative 16 lufs and when it just says lufs it means the average loudness for your entire project which is usually called integrated or it's sometimes referred to as program and that number needs to be negative 16 and currently it's negative 22.3 which is quieter than negative 16. so that's one part of is my project loud enough right now it's not negative 22 I need to make this louder to get it to that podcast level of loudness the other number that you need to pay attention to is true Peak now true Peak is kind of a technical way of calculating the loudest peaks in your project and this value needs to be negative one currently it's positive 0.02 and like I said before we can't store a value above zero decibels and we have a peak above zero decibels so if we're already peaking at above zero and we need to overall make this let's say six decibels louder to get this closer to negative 16 we have a little bit of an issue and this is really the meat of loudness when you're working with raw audio that hasn't been processed in order to get it to that produced podcast sound it's usually a two-step process number one is making it louder and number two is taking the loudest bits and using a tool like a compressor or a limiter to push those back down to appropriate levels now to make this really easy I'm going to show you a streamlined process for doing that because what I just showed you of calculating the loudness of the entire project is Not Practical to do especially when you're working with a project that is much longer because it just takes too long the better way to do it is to use loudness measurement and then use that to just set your media items to the appropriate volume that's called loudness normalization and that's super easy to do so to start I'm going to normalize my dialog tracks I'm going to select both of them here and then I'll use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift n now this is a custom shortcut because the default one was a different version of normalization which is mostly useless this action can do loudness it can do RMS Peak and a whole bunch of other stuff but you want to set this to lufsi and you want to set this to negative 19 if your dialog tracks are mono now you can see that there's only one squiggly waveform here in each one of these media items that means that these are mono which is different than how the music looks here where you can see two squiggly waveforms these are stereophiles the reason you want to set this to negative 19 is because when you take a mono media item or a mono file and you send that to a right and a left Channel you essentially double the amplitude imagine you're listening to my voice right now on a single speaker and then you add another speaker to it it's going to get louder now acoustically it works a little bit differently than it does digitally but that doesn't matter because the thing you need to remember is that in Reaper if we're shooting for negative 16 which we are I'm going to set this to negative 19. and then I'll click OK and you'll see that in one second it set each one of my dialog Clips to where it needs to be and if I were to calculate the loudness of a single track which I can do with the keyboard shortcut control number pad seven you'll see that this number will be exactly negative 16 which is awesome because it doesn't matter where your dialog Clips your talking Clips are recorded week to week if one week you have a guess that's all over the microphone they're close they're far doesn't matter because this loudness normalization tool will compensate for that which means that all of the other processing that you set up with your compressors in your limiters are not going to have to change for every new episode almost all that is going to stay exactly the same because you can adjust your individual Clips to be appropriately loud so it's a powerful tool you can also use loudness normalization to get your music to an appropriate level which is also really useful so I'm going to use the same keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift n and that'll bring up normalized media items and because these are stereo and I want these to be appropriately loud I'm going to set these two negative 16. and because I did that I could also increase my track volume here maybe bring that down to negative 7 which should make the beginning here still sound about right in terms of music to talking balance welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo that still feels pretty good to me and if I do a loudness calculation now which again not practical to do for every podcast but this is just for illustration you're going to see that my average loudness is much better in fact this is pretty much as close as it could get to negative 16 without being well negative 16. in getting it exactly negative 16 should not be your goal because actually you can be plus or minus one if the loudness ended up to be negative 17 for your entire podcast or negative 15 that's totally fine anywhere in that range is good negative 22 where it was before is not good but negative 15.9 is looking really pretty good however I have this to deal with and you see all these red bits in the waveform here that's not great right now I have this number pretty much right where it needs to be but my true Peaks are way too loud and this is going to be problematic because if I play back some of this loud talking stuff right here you're going to hear that it doesn't sound so great and I'll just warn you this is going to be a little bit loud so okay so then what is what is the actual advantage of using it is it is it bubbles that are that are cleaning things right everybody sees all these bubbles form it's a little bit crispy and distorted sounding and that is not good so to deal with that I'm going to show you how to use compressors on individual tracks and a limiter on the master track which will make sure no audio in the project gets above negative one you're going to learn about that coming up next [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn about master track effects so I'm picking up right where I left off in the last lesson I've done some loudness normalization and I showed you a little bit of loudness measurement for the entire project and we're looking really pretty good the average loudness or integrated loudness for the entire project is negative 15.9 which is awesome but our true Peaks are way over what they need to be by about seven decibels which is well it's not awesome what I want to show you is two really simple effects to put on your master track so that if you do nothing else you could render this file right now and you wouldn't have any trouble with true Peak values over negative one so to get started I'm going to click on this effects button right here and I'm going to search for limit and I'm going to double click on re-limit this will add re-limit to the effects from my master track so re-limit is a stock effect that comes with Reaper it doesn't look sexy like a high-end third-party plug-in that you pay money for but it works incredibly well and it sounds excellent and a limiter's job is to not let audio get louder than a certain level in this particular effect it's set by the ceiling so to set this up it's really two settings that you need to change you set the brick wall to negative one and you check the true Peak button and that's it if you now calculate your loudness you will find that you're not going to get a true Peak value that gets higher than negative one now your overall loudness is going to be a little bit lower than where it was before because all of those Peaks that were six decibels above zero are now one decibel below zero and that's going to affect the overall loudness a little bit but that's totally fine if you wanted to make this one decibel louder what you could do is set the threshold down one decibel but we really don't need to do that because I think this is a totally reasonable range to be in and like I said before this sounds really good if you recall before when I played this section of Joe talking right here it was a little crispy sounding right it was a little crunchy you heard some little crackly distortions in there as it clipped above zero and now thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning so even though that sounds loud it's not distorted not like it was before even though you see this red Peak indicator here that does not mean it's distorted it means that in this track there was audio that went up above zero decibels and that's totally fine because the internal processing in Reaper has a massive bit depth I think it's 64-bit float which means it has thousands of decibels of dynamic range the most important thing is when everything gets mixed together at the mix track over here we cannot have values here above zero decibels here it's fine again it does not mean it's distorted it sounds loud which is sometimes hard to distinguish because of how loud it is between that and where it was before but listen to the difference I'll disable this and you can hear where it was before thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week you can hear on those Peaks it sounds a little bit crispy right listen to that again thanks for having me Courtney that sounds distorted now it may not be as obvious to you depending on what device you're listening to this back on but listen to it now I'll reset my meter here with the limiter engaged thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a it's still really loud but not distorted and that's pretty much all you need to do for your master track limiter the other effect that I like to add on my master track is a loudness meter a loudness meter will allow me to get real-time loudness information whenever I play back my project it's not critical and it's not something that I look at constantly to make sure that every second is appropriately loud but it's a handy tool to look at from time to time so to do that I'm going to open up the effects window by clicking right here then I'm going to add an effect by double clicking in a blank spot in the effects window underneath re-limit you can also click the add button down here or right click in a blank spot and choose add effect or there's two keyboard shortcuts or you can come up here to the menu effects add effects in in the filter you can search for loud and then this is the effect that I want to add you can double click this to add it to your master track and if I play back my project welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College me this gives me essentially all the same information as that loudness calculation that you saw in a previous lesson but this is real time and is cumulative meaning if I go back and I change something and I play the same section again this is going to add the previous measurements to my new measurements so it's not quite as accurate but it's still a handy tool and I like to have it in my master track now like I said before the two values that you need to focus on are lufsi and true Peak and currently this is set to Peak and I could show you how to come in here and modify this effect to just show those two things but actually I've set up what's called an effect chain to do all of that for me so let me show you how to set that up I'm going to select and delete both of these effects right click in a blank spot come down to effects chain load effects chain and then you can and then you can select this right here Master podcast basic and what an effects chain is is a group of effects with whatever settings you have stored and so you can see that in re-limit it's set up exactly like I had it set up a second ago but if I click down to the loudness meter you're now only going to see the two most important things lufs and true Peak so if I play this back welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo we're only seeing the most relevant information so I don't need to waste too much time showing you how to go in and customize this effect I've already done it and I've saved an effects chain which is baked into that configuration file and bonus if you look over here on the master track I've set it up so that right here it will integrate part of the UI of each one of those effects into your master track which means at any point in time you can just look over here and see where your loudness is you don't have to open up the effects window and check in from time to time like this it's always right here it also will show you what's happening in re-limit with the gain reduction meter so this is showing you how much it's turning down at any point in time so you can see as it plays back see that's where I find that that wouldn't be effective because if you're mostly making water I think that's very cool again this is not something that you're going to be looking at or staring at or stressing out about making sure that this is maintaining negative 16 this is just another tool so you can keep an eye on your overall loudness which I think is very handy and speaking of effects coming up in the next few lessons you're going to learn how to use effects for dialogue tracks to make them sound fantastic [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to do some quick denoising in Reaper sometimes when you're working with podcast recordings they come back to you and they are a little bit noisy sometimes this can be from environmental noise maybe there was an air conditioner in the background or some kind of Appliance making noise or it could be the recording equipment itself maybe someone is using a sure sm7b and an audio interface with a preamp that is a little bit noisy because the Shure sm7b has a really low output and so you have to turn up the preamp a whole lot and some preamps just get a little bit noisy when they are turned up past well a certain point now this particular recording was done with a sure sm58 and a sure beta 57a I think on Joe's voice here both of those are around 100-ish U.S dollars they are handheld Dynamic vocal microphones so they're not purpose built for broadcast or podcasting like the Shure sm7b and all of the other Dynamic broadcast microphones but they sound fantastic and they work great for this application but the environment that I recorded this demo podcast in was not a studio environment this was recorded in Courtney and Joe's Kitchen in their home and like most kitchens in the world they don't have acoustic treatment and there are appliances in it so there is a very small amount of background noise that I want to show you how to clean up what I'm going to do is solo the host Channel which is Courtney's voice and let's just listen to the first second or two of this so that you can hear the background noise that I'm going to work to clean up that was it now honestly it's not a lot and I probably wouldn't worry about it too much because once I add an audio gate I think most of that is going to be reduced to the point where it doesn't really matter but you may be working with files that are a little bit noisy so let me show you a free and really pretty nice denoising effect that you can use in Reaper so I'm going to click on the effects button right here and I'm going to search for an effect called reefer I just typed fir into the filter here and I'm going to double click on refer to insert it on my host track reefer is an fft processing effect it can do Equalization gating compression convolving and subtraction you don't really have to know what all of that is I'm going to show you a really quick way to do denoising on this so what I want to do is set the mode to subtract and then click this button right here automatically build noise profile and then I want to play only a section that contains noise and nothing else because what this is going to do is build a noise profile and I don't want it to capture things like breath noises or any talking because it's going to basically subtract that from the audio to remove the noise so I just want to play the first one second of this which contains only background noise or mostly only background noise and I think that'll be good enough that's it now it didn't sound like anything because as it was building it was also subtracting so you didn't actually hear it working or you didn't hear anything except me hitting my space bar next I'm just going to uncheck this automatically build noise profile or it will continue to build a noise profile and subtract everything from the audio which would not be good but that's it that's all you have to do now when I play this back all of that noise is gone in the background I'll play a little bit of this so that you can hear what it sounds like when Courtney is actually talking welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College so this was our first attempt at the intro there was a dog that walked through with Courtney and Joe's son anyway we're going to edit that out in an upcoming lesson but you can hear that this technique using this reefer effect of doing a subtractive process for the audio works really well and it's super simple to do let's do the same thing on Joe's track here so I'm just going to solo this up make Joe's track a little taller that's the background noise that I'm going to be getting rid of I'll double click on reefer it's still selected there in the effects browser change this to subtract click automatically build noise profile play it for one second uncheck automatically build noise profile and we're done welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Mustang College that's pretty much it no I think for most denoising applications in Reaper this is where you should start because well reefer works really well and it's free and if you need something different then you may want to look at a third-party denoising effect something from acon digital or maybe izotope both of those companies make fantastic products that do cost money but they're very good at what they do however I think in probably 95 percent of the cases you can get excellent sounding results results that are so good that you can't hear that it's doing any denoising for free and that's awesome so that's reefer that's some basic denoising and coming up next you're going to learn how to use an audio gate in Reaper which will help reduce background noise even more [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to use an audio gate in Reaper an audio gate is an effect that will help you to reduce unwanted noise below a certain threshold sometimes this is called a noise gate and its job is really simple it opens and it closes when the signal is above a certain threshold it allows the audio to pass through completely unaffected and when the signal Falls below that threshold it closes and completely cuts the audio in other words it mutes it so you can't hear anything and this can be a very useful tool to cut down on background noise for example if I solo up Courtney's track here and you listen to the last phrase that she says thanks for joining me I think last week we were having a conversation you can hear Joe's voice in Courtney's track now at these particular levels it's not a big deal because the signal to noise ratio in other words the signal of Courtney talking relative to Joe talking is quite a bit higher and that's good however the next effect that I want to use which I'm going to talk about in the next lesson is an audio compressor an audio compressor is going to compress the dynamic range and I'm going to set it up such that it takes all these Peaks and pushes them down and then I'm going to turn everything else back up so that we have a really strong sound from Courtney's track and when I turn everything else back up it's also going to turn up all this background stuff which I don't want so that's what I want to do with the audio gate I want to take the background audio in other words Joe talking breath noises mouth noises and I want to turn that down almost all the way not all the way because if I completely cut it out it can sound a little bit glitchy but I'm going to show you how to do that right now so I'm going to click on the effects button here and because I have an effect inserted it's not going to bring up the effects browser but to add an effect I'll click on the add button right here and I'm going to search for gate there are a few options that I have available this is a third party effect that you are not going to have but I'm going to pick regate because it's free and it works really well so like I said before a Gate's job is to open when the audio is above a certain threshold and close when it's below a certain threshold so a really quick way to set up a gate is to play the audio that you know that you want to cut out in other words this part where Joe is talking I know I want to remove that so I'm going to play this with the host track soloed and I'm going to turn up the threshold here until it starts to cut out Joe talking right right around negative 24 I'm cutting out pretty much everything that Joe is saying which is fine because we have all that on Joe's track it's not like we don't want to hear it I just don't want to hear it in Courtney's microphone now if you look at some phrases like this you'll see at the end of this thing that Courtney says it's about at the same level as when Joe starts talking which means that if I play back this section thanks for joining me it's going to start to chatter and cut out right here when Courtney's talking and that's not great so there are a few ways that we can tweak the gate to make that a lot better the first thing is adjusting this control down here called the hysteresis because right now the gate is opening and closing at the same point negative 24. but adjusting this hysteresis will separate the opening portion of the gate from the close portion of the gate in other words we can get the gate to open at negative 24 but we can get it to close lower than that if all of that sounds like hot nonsense just follow along I'm going to set the hysteresis to negative six decibels which means the gate will open at negative 24 and close at negative 30. which should get most of this phrase completely in the clear meaning it's going to come through the gate thanks for joining me that's not bad thanks for joining me I think most of that is in there additionally I can add a little bit of hold time maybe 75 milliseconds which will force the gate to stay open once the audio Falls below the threshold it gives you just a little bit more wiggle room at the end of phrases and I can also increase the release time maybe up to I don't know 150 milliseconds what that will do is increase the time it takes from the gate to go from the open state to the closed state which is kind of a fade out time if you will now 150 milliseconds is pretty fast because a thousand milliseconds is one second so this is happening pretty fast but making the release a little bit longer will smooth out the closing of the gate and it'll make it sound less chattery foreign let's see how that sounds on this phrase right here thanks for joining me good that sounds pretty nice unfortunately there's no way to get this audio gate to work perfectly a hundred percent of the time there are other settings that you can tweak like the low pass and the high pass in the RMS size which will completely Crush out anything that Joe says however those settings will also make it less reliable for the ends of phrases like this which are about at the same level there's not a great way to make it do both but that's okay because on the whole this is making a really positive effect and when you hear it in context you won't hear this kind of chattery sound like if I play this back against Joe's track thanks for joining me thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh because the loud spots in Courtney's track are also the loud spots in Joe's track you'll never hear it open up on these little high spots here so it's totally fine so I'm gonna play this intro section where only Courtney is talking I'll solo Courtney's track so that you can hear what the gate is doing and I think what you'll see is that on some of these breath sounds like this the gate is going to close which is going to be very nice it's also going to cut out a few of the mouth clicks and other little background noises in between the phrases check it out welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Westland College on today's episode we are answering the question vinegar and baking soda magic or myth with me as always is my co-host Joe fantuzo Joe thanks for joining me so I think on the whole that's doing a pretty good job now there's a few more settings that would be good to tweak one of those is pre-open what this will do is it will move the open window if you will ahead of the cursor or the playhead so that it will get the gate to open before the audio actually Rises up above the threshold this will help to ensure that the beginning of every word is being caught so if we add like seven milliseconds of pre-open that's going to move the open forward in time by seven milliseconds so instead of opening right here it's actually going to open like right here which is going to catch the very beginning of this word which is going to sound a little bit better now I also like to increase the attack time which is kind of the fade up time if you will to maybe something like five milliseconds and that will make the beginning of all of the words when the gate opens sound a little bit smoother welcome to the cleaning with chemistry today's episode if you find that these particular settings still sound too chattery what you can do is increase the pre-open time a little bit more and maybe increase the attack time a little bit more and that will hopefully smooth out the opening phase of the gate so that it's not sounding so chattery which can sometimes happen now a few of these clicks are still popping through like this assistant and if you want to try and get it to not do that you can adjust this setting down here which is the RMS size so by increasing this just a little bit what you're doing is you're telling the gate that the audio needs to remain above the threshold for three milliseconds on average in order to trigger the gate to open which will reduce some of these little clicky sounds a little bit assistant you can hear that just with a three millisecond RMS size assistant professor it's completely cutting out this mouth noise right here where if I set this to zero assistant it opens on this mouth click so be careful with the RMS size because increasing it just a little bit can affect how it opens up on certain sounds and it may not work all the time but if you're trying to crush those out that's the setting that you want to adjust and very small values should work so maybe even two milliseconds might get that to be out assistant professor yeah that works could be even one millisecond you want to set this as low as possible assistant professor I think that's working right there assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College on today's episode we are answering the question vinegar and baking soda magic or myth with me did you see what happened right here let me play it again we're myth with me as always this background noise right here there's two mouth clicks and a breath completely gone which is fantastic check out what happens when I take the gate out or myth with me as all or myth with me or myth with it's a lot cleaner with the gate engaged now all of that said I don't like to run a gate completely open and completely closed because I think that even though it's doing a great job it still sounds maybe a little bit too harsh it can still sound a little bit chattery so one thing that can help a little bit is to reduce the dry wet blend there's a knob right here which controls how much of the affected sound versus how much of the unaffected sound goes through this effect in other words by default all of the effects are set to a hundred percent wet meaning you are listening to the effect a hundred percent but by setting it to something like 90 it's going to introduce 10 of the unaffected sound into the mix and this can help reduce some of that chattering especially in the off mic stuff when Joe is talking check it out conversation uh we are married we have an oven that needs some so you can still hear it but it is really really low we're talking like negative 50. so it's it's in there but it's not much and the great part about this is we can pretty much copy this effect right over to Joe's track so I just copied it from the host track and pasted it on the co-host track and the settings should be pretty close because their background noise levels are about the same so this gate should more or less work about the same on Joe's track let's check it out so would there be would there be a benefit to me mixing other chemicals or Cleaning Solutions with baking soda and vinegar so you may not have caught it I heard one thing there when he says chemicals I don't think the gate is catching the very beginning of that c check it out mixing other chemicals or cleanings now it could be the way that he said it it sounded a little bit more breathy but let's see if I take the rmsis down to zero if that sounds a little bit tighter mixing other chemicals or clean I think it does so like I said before the RMS size can work to cut out some of those background clicks but it's really sensitive even at one millisecond It's not catching this very small k sound that's there let me play the before and after one more time other chemicals are clean and then this is one millisecond other chemicals or clean you can hear it's making that k sound sound a little bit too soft so what I would probably do is sacrifice the mouth noises and take those out manually if I really needed to so I'm going to move the RMS size back down to zero on both tracks and that's pretty much it like I said before the gate takes a little bit of fiddling but with those settings with the pre-open the attack the hold the release and the hysteresis if you set those pretty close to how I set those up here you should have a really good starting place for this audio gate all right coming up in the next lesson you're going to learn how to do some audio compression which is really going to smooth out the Dynamics in both of these talking tracks check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to use an audio compressor in Reaper an audio compressor is one of my favorite effects to use because it really does a great job of smoothing out the Dynamics in whatever audio you throw at it and there are quite a bit of variances in this particular phrase I'll just solo up Courtney's channel so you can hear what this sounds like tend to think can do motorized can take care of different cleaning of different grease stains and things like that but I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together you technically have sodium bicarbonate and you have acetic acid that you're bringing you can hear that there's quite a bit of Dynamics that's happening in there now you're not hearing the whole dynamic range because the limiter on the master track is helping us out a little bit you can see that we're getting peaks of plus 6.4 which would be problematic if I wasn't using this limiter but even with the limiter this is still sounding a little bit I don't know peaky I guess it's not as smooth as it could be in a compressor will smooth that out a ton so let's get to it I'm going to click on the effects button here and I will go down and add an effect and I'll search for an effect called 1175. if I just type 11 in the filter here it shows right up here and I'll double click to insert this below the gate the compressor works based on a threshold anything above the threshold that I set gets compressed and anything below the threshold doesn't get compressed so the easiest way to set this up is to just play back the audio that you want compressed and turn down the threshold until you see the compressor well compressing let's give it a shot sure well vinegar and baking soda tend to think deodorize can take care of different cleaning of different grease stains and things like that but I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together you technically have so that's it it's really not more complicated than that especially with this effect so this effect the 1175 compressor is a digital version or a digital emulation or digital copy of probably one of the most famous Studio compressors of all time the universal audio 1176 the 1176 is a fantastic compressor it's been used on possibly hundreds of thousands of recordings throughout history if you've ever heard music in your life you've almost certainly heard the 1176 and using this digital version is pretty simple by just adjusting the threshold and leaving everything else at their default settings you can get really good sounding compression super fast now I would recommend that if you did the loudness normalization like you learned about in a previous lesson where you took your dialogue tracks and you normalize those to negative 19 lufsi a threshold of negative I would say eight or seven maybe six somewhere in that range should be adequate enough to smooth out whatever you throw at it and all of these other settings at their default or most of these other settings at their default should be pretty good and you don't have to mess with them but I'll go through them really quick so that you know what they are the ratio controls how much compression is being applied it's kind of a difference between the input and the output for the threshold in other words if the audio comes in four decibels above the threshold after the compressor it leaves at one decibel above the threshold in other words before and after there's a difference of four to one now if you click the drop down here there are other ratios available eight to one twelve to one twenty to one and some other values here including all all is a setting that on the original Hardware compressor you could get by mashing in all of the ratio buttons at the same time but I think four to one will work for dialogue tracks the gain control controls how much gain is being applied after the compressor it's usually good to turn the audio back up because after you've reduced the dynamic range it's likely going to be too quiet in other words if you turn all the Peaks down you're going to want to hear everything a little bit louder so I'm going to adjust that in a second but before I do I'm going to go over these two controls right here the attack and the release both of these controls affect how fast the compressor reacts the attack time affects how fast the compressor turns down the gain once the audio goes past the threshold so when the audio goes up above the threshold it takes 20 microseconds for the gain change to happen 20 microseconds is super super fast it's 20 millionths of a second it's fast enough that it will pretty much catch any spiky bit of audio that you can throw at it especially when you're talking about a dialogue track release controls the time that it takes for the compressor to release the gain reduction so if you look at what the compressor is doing when it's actually compressing you'll see that there is some activity down here in this meter which is the gain reduction meter vinegar and baking soda people tend to think can deodorize if the compressor turns down the audio by let's say six decibels and then the audio Falls below the threshold it takes about 250 milliseconds for the compressor to turn back up the volume now I said about 250 milliseconds because this compressor has what's called a program dependent release meaning it's going to be a variable release depending on the signal going into the compressor it could be a little bit slower than 250 milliseconds it could be a little bit faster we don't really have to know exactly what it's doing we only have to know how it sounds and I think it sounds fine so I would leave these two settings at their default values of 20 and 250 I think it it's probably fine if anything if you adjusted anything I think you could probably tighten up the release time so that it reacted a little bit faster but you know I wouldn't fuss with it too much and like I said before because the compressor is turning things down what I want to do is increase the level back up by turning up the gain you technically have sodium bicarbonate and you have acetic acid that you're bringing together and you're forming sodium acetate which is assault so I'm seeing the gain reduction meter Dance all over the place I would start at something like maybe three decibels because even though it's going down to nine if I turn that up to nine I think it's going to be way too loud in fact let's just see I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together yeah that's just too loud but let's see what a more reasonable value sounds like something like three decibels I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together you technically have sodium bicarbonate and you have acetic acid that you're bringing together and you're forming sodium acetate which is a salt and you're forming water we all are familiar with water and carbon dioxide right so there's your gas right there that you're forming I think that sounds fine anywhere between three and maybe 2.5 decibels should work fine and the great thing is because we normalized Joe's track in the same way I can just copy this compressor and paste it to Joe's track and it should sound great let's check it out thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously where we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I was going to use baking soda and vinegar to clean it I've seen so let's hear what this so let's hear what this sounds like without that compressor on Joe's track thanks for having me Courtney uh less last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I was going to use baking soda and vinegar to clean it I've seen that that is the way to go and one more time with the compressor engaged thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously where we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning to me with the compressor sounds a lot smoother and a lot more consistent without the compressor it doesn't sound bad because the limiter on the master track is doing a great job of Smashing down those Peaks that would otherwise sound clippy and distorted so that's working great but the compressor in addition to the limiter is kind of sharing the load if you will in addition it's also turning up some of the quieter bits to help match it to the louder sections now this is not the only thing that you need to do to level out your talking tracks or I should say it's not the only thing that you can do because you can see that the section that I just played compared to some of these other little phrases in sections where Joe is talking is pretty loud it's not as loud as this section where the waveform is much much more dense and it's definitely Louder Than This section right here playing with the vinegar and the in the the metal like why does it why does it work so well on copper and it might not work so well on something else is it is it a mechanical thing or is it an actual chemical reaction but they really don't sound too dissimilar in amplitude which I think is great so that's pretty much it for compression the 1175 compressor in Reaper I think is fantastic and as you just heard it can really really help to smooth out the Dynamics of your dialogue tracks now coming up next you're going to learn how to use an EQ to make it sound even better [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to do some simple corrective EQ for dialogue so I'm picking up right where I left off in the last lesson I have my denoising with reverse setup I have my audio gate dialed in my compressor set to do a great job leveling out the Dynamics for both of my dialogue tracks here for Courtney and Joe now what I want to do is apply a little bit of corrective EQ now corrective EQ makes it sound like there's something inherently wrong with the recordings and there's not these recordings I think without EQ sound okay but with EQ I can make them sound a little bit better so to get started I'm going to solo the host Channel this is Courtney's track here I'll click on the effects window to bring up the effects and I'll click add and I'm going to search for EQ you can see that I have a bunch of options most of these come with Reaper I have a few third-party eqs here but I'm going to choose a stock effect called re-eq right here at the top I'll double click to insert that into the host track here and this is re EQ it is fantastic even though it does not look nearly as cool as some third-party eqs and it looks rather basic with its four bands here but actually re-eq is is incredibly flexible because you can add as many bands as you want or as your computer can handle now I would not recommend adding 50 bands of EQ I couldn't think of any situation in which that was appropriate but I just wanted to show you that you could if you really felt that you needed to most of the time I only use four maybe five bands of EQ to do what I need to do to start I'm going to come to band number one and I'm going to set the type from low shelf to high pass a high pass filter will allow high frequencies to pass through and it will attenuate low frequencies sometimes this is called a low cut filter and what I want to do is set this below the fundamental frequency of Courtney's voice which is just a technical term to mean the lowest sound that Courtney makes with her voice and you can actually see that right here in the frequency analyzer if I play back this track sure well vinegar and baking soda people tend to think can deodorize can take care of different cleaning of different grease stains and things like that but so you can see there's kind of a bumpy shape right here around 200 Hertz that's going to be the lowest fundamental frequency in Courtney's voice which means anything below I would say 150 Hertz we can get rid of which will clean up any low Rumble that may be being captured by Courtney's microphone it's stuff that we don't need and I think in general it's a good practice to apply a high pass or a low cut filter same thing to anything that does not need low frequency sounds and dialogue does not so I'm going to just click and drag in the display here and set this to I don't know about maybe 90-ish Hertz because of this curvy shape here it's not quite as aggressive as you'll find on other eqs but if you adjust the bandwidth control which you can do with this slider or you can do with your mouse right here in the display we can kind of flatten this out just a little bit so that's the high pass done I'll play this back but you're not going to hear any difference in the audio sure well vinegar and baking soda people tend to think can deodorize and the reason you're not going to hear any difference is because there wasn't a significant amount of super low frequency information in Courtney's track to begin with but this is a good practice to do so I'm going to do it and show you how to do it too next I'm going to take band number two and I'm going to do a simple technique of boosting sweeping and cutting the idea here is to help identify some frequencies that may sound better if they were reduced I'm going to try and make them a little bit more clear by boosting them up so I'm going to push this up by maybe six or eight decibels sweep this around between maybe I don't know 800 and 100 Hertz and listen for any area of frequencies any band of frequencies that I think sound a little bit annoying or a little bit harsh and then what I'm going to do is pull them down just a little bit now I think this bandwidth or this shape here is a little bit too wide so I'm just going to scroll with my mouse to make this a little bit narrower this is the center frequency here which is currently set to 151 and with the mouse you can change What's called the bandwidth which is the amount above and below the center frequency that we are affecting with this EQ if you go too narrow everything's going to sound terrible meaning that no matter where you put this it's going to sound annoying and harsh so it's better and it sounds a little bit more subtle to use a little bit of a wider shape maybe something like this sure well vinegar and baking soda people tend to think can deodorize can take care of different cleaning of different grease stains and things like that but I feel that when so to me maybe around 266 was sounding just a little bit I don't know tubby boxy it sounded like it could be reduced a little bit so I'm going to bring it down by just a couple of decibels I'm going to do the same thing with band number three here and I'm going to Target these frequencies in this range right here between I don't know five kilohertz and 500 or 200 basically I don't need to go below band number two because I already checked that range so let's check it out sure well vinegar and baking soda people tend to think can deodorize can take care of different cleaning of different grease stains and things like that but I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together you technically have essentially I'm just listening for areas that I think sound a little bit too harsh and pull them down a little bit finally I'm going to take this last band here and push this up to see if adding some ultra high frequencies sounds better now currently this last band is set to a high shelf now normally a high Shelf looks like this where it's got this gradual increase and then it kind of tapers off but the default shape looks more like a giant ramp I prefer to set this more like this where it's a little bit curvier and then kind of flattens off and I'm going to be aiming for somewhere in the 8 to 10 kilohertz region to see if that sounds better with a little bit of a boost up here I feel that when you have vinegar and baking soda and you're mixing that together you technically have sodium um bicarbonate and you have acetic acid that you're bringing together and you're forming sodium acetate which is the salt I think that sounds nice but keep in mind that I am monitoring what I'm listening to right now with headphones and these headphones have not been corrected with any kind of plug-in and I know from experience and also the frequency response of various measurements that have been done on these headphones that they are not nearly as good as my studio monitors so this really should be done listening to studio monitors ideally that have some kind of corrective EQ applied to them to make their frequency response extremely flat mine are but I can't use those and record with my microphone without the risk of feedback so that's not what I'm doing right now so I think this is close but keep in mind I am listening to this with headphones which is not normally how I do this so I'm going to do the same thing with Joe's track as well but I'm going to do it a lot faster how I normally would do it without explaining exactly what I'm doing so I'm just going to play a section here in fact what I'll do is I will just Loop this section by making a Time selection and then pressing r on the keyboard to enable repeat thanks for having me Courtney thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously where we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I was going to use baking soda and vinegar to clean it I've seen that that is the way to go and you were telling me that it might not be the best method of cleaning the oven so um I ended up I'm hard-headed I decided I was going to do it anyways and improve the internet right and uh and and you were explaining to me that there may be better methods so why do people think that baking soda and vinegar are the best form of cleaning and uh and why may it not be okay that was a super quick EQ I think it's generally in the ballpark I may revisit this later and make some tweaks but I think that's great now normally I don't think that all dialogue tracks need to be boosted up in the top end but I think in this particular case it sounds just a little bit sweeter because of the microphones that were used and they had a windscreen on them that's going to attenuate a little bit of those really high frequencies and I think it sounds a little bit nicer to put those back it's also helpful to see if your eq'ing is effective by just taking the EQ on and off by enabling and disabling it here in the effects window just like this hey Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and and I think the effect of this EQ is also pretty subtle I could probably bring this down just a touch more but I think it sounds better with it on with it off I'm hearing a little bit too much energy in this I don't know 200 and 140 Hertz region so that lets me know that the corrections that I've made are in the realm of reality you know you might think it sounds great to add a band down here for Joe's voice because he's got it's not a super low voice but maybe you want to accentuate some of those low frequencies for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I was going to use baking soda and vinegar you know depending on your playback Hardware you could think oh that sounds really good but then you take it off and you realize thanks for having me Courtney uh oh my gosh thanks for having me Courtney that was way overdone so it's good to come back to reality every once in a while I'm going to delete that because that was ridiculous although maybe maybe a little bit of boost here which you can do just with the bandwidth control of number one would sound nice for Joe thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I would cool I think that sounds good now coming up next you're going to learn about grouping media items [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn about grouping media items one of the things that I think is really important to keep in mind when you are editing a podcast is to keep your dialogue tracks in sync for example these two dialog tracks were recorded in the same location at the same time and right now they are perfectly in sync and they're in sync because they are snapped together if I were to try and move Courtney's track what you'll see is that as I move it forward or backwards and get close to Joe's track at some point it snaps right to Joe's track and that lets me know that the beginning of each one of these media items is perfectly aligned but if I am adjusting things and I inadvertently grab Joe's track and just slide it one way or another now my tracks aren't aligned and that could be problematic because if I play this back right here you may hear some funky stuff going on in the background welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo now the effect is actually pretty subtle because I'm using an audio gate but if I disable these effects like this I think you'll hear what I'm talking about a little bit more clearly welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantas assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College it sounds like there's another person in the studio who's just chattering away on the phone in the background that's actually not what's happening that's Courtney talking but Courtney talking from the future or the past because these two dialogue media items here are no longer aligned so the thing that I wanted to go over with you in this lesson is grouping so if I pull Courtney back towards Joe's track here it will snap this is a control by the way that you can enable or disable with this button the keyboard shortcut is alt s you can also right click on this to change a bunch of settings for example if you feel like the snap is not aggressive enough you could change the snap distance to something like 20 and now when you try and move your media items you will see that they will jump from farther away 20 pixels rather than 4 pixels I'm going to set it back to four because that's what I'm used to but you may want to change that however the best way to make sure that your dialogue media items don't get out of sync is to group them together this is something that I usually do when I first start editing so to do that it is super easy right now they are snapped together I'll just verify that yep they look good I'm going to select both of them and press G on the keyboard and now you'll see that there's a little indicator right here this little chain icon or link icon and that means that these are now grouped together when your media items are grouped together you can move them together you can edit them together you can fade them together and it makes working with them a lot easier for example if I just select Courtney's media item and drag it to change its timing you'll see that Joe's media item underneath it which is now grouped comes right along if I make a split to Courtney's media item right here they get split together because they are grouped if I make an edit like this those edits are in sync with each other the same goes for doing Fades if I do anything to Joe's media item the corresponding grouped media item comes right along now once they are split these two are no longer grouped to these other two that all works in a really intuitive way this is going to make editing for Content a lot easier because everything's going to stay in perfect alignment when you are kind of editing out the ums and the US and all of that jazz so grouping is super simple to do again you just select your media items and you press G on the keyboard and that will group them together if you want to ungroup them it's the U key on the keyboard you can also get to these settings by selecting both of your media items right clicking and then coming down to group and you can group them or you can remove items from group or select all items in group so that's grouping it's pretty simple and you should definitely group all of your dialogue tracks together so that they don't get out of sync all right coming up next you're going to learn how to mix the music against the dialogue [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to mix the music against the dialogue with volume automation so I'm going to go back to the beginning of this project by pressing W on the keyboard I'll play back my music and just get a sense of where I want the talking to start [Music] welcome to the cleaning with chemistry okay it it did come in here but actually I feel like it should come in somewhere in this neighborhood and so what I'm going to do is play the beginning and then I'm just going to stop the playhead or the cursor where I think the intro should come in let's see here somewhere in this neighborhood I think would be good and I'll just scrub this back to about here this is where the musical phrase kind of repeats and this is where I want the intro to start so I'm just going to press stop here I pause that by the way with control space and I'm going to press M on the keyboard to drop in a marker you can see that right here I'm going to double click on my marker and name It intro and now I have a nice marker in my project so that I can align my intro in every single podcast so to do that now that my dialog items are grouped I'm just going to trim up the beginning and then drag that over and it'll snap right on that marker so let's listen to how it sounds now welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College okay actually what I want to show you before I mix this music is there's a little bit of a false start here with this podcast it happens no problem I'm gonna quickly edit this by soloing just my dialogue or probably easier I could just mute my music and I'm going to select this media item here I'll split it with the S key and then I'm just going to trim all this middle section which is just a little bit of awkward conversation while we're figuring out how to restart and then there's another intro but actually I think I can stitch the first part of the intro together with the second take of the intro because I like the energy here let me just play this back so that you can hear it too welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College and today so I think what I can do is edit right to here where she says College because if you listen to the first take of the intro at Roberts Wesson College there's a dog park right at the end of when she says college but right around here College I think I can just split this and I'll delete this section right here and I'll find where that same spot is over here I think it's right about here in college I can see that because I can see this little shape right here which is that hard C vowel in college and I'll split this right here select both these items and delete them and I think I can pull this right over here and it should be pretty seamless I don't know let's check it out straight at Robert oyan College wow it's like it never even happened chemistry at Roberts Wesson College all right that's good I'm gonna come back to editing for content in an upcoming lesson but for now I'm going to go back to mixing my music now that I have my intro sorted out the music sounds like it's at a pretty good level if I play it from where it is right here welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College it might be a touch loud but what I want to do in the intro is actually make the music a little bit louder so what I'm going to do is Select my music track here and press V on the keyboard to bring up volume Automation and then I'm going to use shift and then click to insert a couple of points here in this volume envelope you can see if I hover over the volume envelope it's currently set to negative 7.3 and what I want to do is bring the music up to maybe zero decibels in the beginning so the music is nice and loud at the beginning of this podcast but then comes down right around the intro and I'll pull it down to I don't know negative 10 or so somewhere in this neighborhood by the way when you are adjusting envelope points and you want to pull this horizontally it's actually not easy to do it's quite easy to move this up or down but let's say you get the point set at exactly the right spot maybe negative 10.1 or whatever if you want to move it horizontally without moving it up or down what you need to do is click and hold and then use the keyboard modifiers control and shift and when you do that it will lock it to the horizontal so that you cannot move it vertically I find that really really useful to do all right let's hear what the intro sounds like now [Music] welcome to the cleaning with chemistry pack so that might be just a skosh too loud in the beginning and maybe I want to pull it down a little bit more like that let's try it one more time [Music] welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College on today's episode we are answering the question I'm going to move this up just a touch more at Roberts Wesleyan College on today's episode we are answering the question vinegar and baking soda magic or myth with me as always is my co-host Joe fantuzo Joe thanks for joining me thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously where we are married we have an oven that needs okay so when Joe starts talking I think I can start to pull the music down and how I like to do this is not with a volume envelope I just like to fade the music out like this because I think it's easier to adjust week to week if I want to make the music a little bit longer I can do it right here and I don't have to mess around with these points so that's what I'm going to do I'm just going to fade the music out with this fade out just like you saw me do a second ago and I'll probably change the shape to something more like this so it starts out pretty fast and then kind of tapers down over a longer period of time something like this let's see how that sounds oh thanks for joining me thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we are married we have an oven that needs some cleaning and I was going to use baking soda and vinegar to clean it I've seen that that is the way to go and you were telling me that it might not be cool I think that Fade Out is perhaps a little bit too long so let me just adjust that just a little bit I think this will work better thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we have an oven that needs cool I think that's fine I don't need to listen to the whole fade out because I feel like that's more or less good enough now I'm going to come to the end of the podcast and I'm going to adjust the outro music right around here is when Joe kind of does the clothes I think it's right here let's listen to that I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did um I appreciate all of your Insight and uh and your um expertise on it uh what are we going to talk about next week next week we're gonna so I think when Joe starts the close here I'm gonna bring in my outro music just like this and because I left my envelope at a good level where the talking was in the intro I don't really have to adjust it when the outro music starts in other words it sounds good with this talking right here at this level toad we are answering the question which means that because I did the volume normalization of my music it should also be at a pretty good level when I'm bringing in my outro music let's see if that's the case I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did um I appreciate all of your Insight and uh in your um expertise on it uh what are we going to talk about next week next week we're gonna I think that's pretty good the level is more or less in the zone where I want it to be I think I'm going to edit my music though right to here and then bring it up because the beat I think kicks in right here and I want that to come in just as Courtney's talking I think that'll have a nice feel for it let's see if that's the case I'll talk about next week so I want that to land maybe right here so Joe says what are we talking about next week and talk about next week next week we're going to continue talking about this type the thing but we're going to talk more about combining household chemicals to find out specifically which ones are safe and which ones are potentially lethal so don't miss what's coming up next week remember to leave a review in your podcast app And subscribe for more clean chemistry content thanks for listening thanks cool so right at the very end I'm going to bring this back up to maybe zero decibels I might pull this down like just one decibel more and I think maybe I will edit this over like this to come in right when Joe starts talking but I'm going to fade it up just a little bit let's see if that works I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did um I appreciate all of your Insight and uh and your um expertise on it I think that's pretty good now there's one other thing that I like to do when I am mixing music against dialogue and that is to adjust the EQ of the music just a little bit now this isn't something that you always need to do but depending on the music that you are using for your podcast it something that could be helpful so the idea here is that some frequencies in music can conflict with something called Speech intelligibility there's a group of frequencies between maybe two kilohertz and six kilohertz that is where we make a lot of the consonant sounds which is what makes speech intelligible by removing some of those frequencies we can get a little bit more clarity in the dialogue when the music is underneath so what I usually do is something like this I will insert an EQ just like you saw me do I'll remove all the other bands except for one band and I will pull down some frequencies around five kilohertz just like this and let's see what that sounds like when the talking comes in for the intro welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host it's pretty subtle if I solo up just the music it's doing a little bit it's I'll make it a little bit more aggressive so that you can hear uh this is probably too much but you'll definitely be able to hear this engaged now [Music] so I probably wouldn't go that aggressive but maybe up to six decibels would be good this will be subtle but I think it'll be enough to just clear just a little bit of space for that dialogue to sit in but I don't want this EQ to be on all of the time for example I don't really need it on in the intro of this podcast so what I'm going to do is use automation to make that EQ change at the exact same time as this volume change which is super simple to do I'm going to click on this trim button here and you can see all these options that I have for automation for this track and I'm just going to click on the gain for band number one and then I will shift-click to set a point here and another one here they don't have to align perfectly with the volume automation but if we get it close I think that's fine and then I'll just push it back up to zero at the beginning so this is doing no EQ in the beginning and then right here that EQ is going to kind of move down and get out of the way of the talking let's see if we can hear that at all welcome to the cleaning with chemistry podcast I'm your host Courtney fantuzzo assistant professor of chemistry at Roberts Wesleyan College on today's episode cool I think that sounds fine and I'm going to do the reverse in the outro music so at the very end here the gain is already down I'm just going to add two points by shift clicking two times and push this back up to zero to kind of reset the EQ at the very end of this podcast just like this that was good [Music] really [Music] I'm also going to fade down my music right here as well and probably use a similar curve by Alt dragging on this curve shape right here so the music comes up but then starts to fade down a little bit let's see how that sounds good really good [Music] so that's pretty much it for mixing music against dialogue you're probably going to have to tweak your music a little bit differently than what I did here but this should get you in the ballpark coming up next you're going to learn about Ripple editing which will make dialogue edits super fast check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to use Ripple editing so in a previous lesson you saw me do some real basic editing of the dialogue I split my media items I did a little trim and then I dragged these two media items over to the left it looks something like this split edit and then move this is a totally fine way to do edits however it is slightly problematic because if you look at what's happening at the end of the podcast watch what happens when I undo that move that I did at the very end there the music didn't move along with my dialogue media items you see that which is going to mean that if I had my music set at the exact right spot and I need to go back at some point and edit out something in the middle now my music is not in the right spot and in general this is just not the fastest way to edit something like this instead I'm going to show you how to use Ripple editing Ripple editing is a feature that will automatically move items that are to the right of your edit point to the left to fill in a gap whenever you move or you delete a media item this will all make much more sense in just a second when I show you how it works so let's say that I wanted to Ripple out a couple of these ums and Us in Joe's track thanks for having me Courtney uh last last week we were having a Converse so right here he says Uh there's a little false start and then he starts again here what I'm gonna do is I'm going to enable Ripple editing by clicking this button up here two times I click it once it goes to Ripple editing per track I click it again it goes to Ripple editing all tracks which is what I want I actually have keyboard shortcuts set up for the two Ripple editing states that I use all the time which is the keyboard shortcut over the one key which you should have too if you're using the config file that's Ripple editing off and then the two number key on the regular QWERTY side of the keyboard not the number pad is Ripple editing all tracks I almost never use Ripple editing per track so what I'm going to do is change this from Ripple editing off to Ripple editing all tracks and now what I can do is this I can split it here split it here select this middle bit and delete it and now both of my grouped media items get deleted together and everything to the Right Moves down to fill the gap check it out if we look at the end here I'll undo that and redo that everything down my project to the right kind of ripples to the left to fill in that gap which makes this kind of edit really really fast but there is one thing that you need to keep in mind and that is with ripple editing on for all tracks it goofed up my music here so let me undo that delete and watch what happens when I delete it again to my music it took out a big chunk of my music and now the timing in my music is kind of goofed up so the first thing that you need to know about Ripple editing is it's really great but if there's music or something underneath the thing that you are Rippling you're going to want to address that and you can do that by locking this media item so I'm just going to right click on this media item go to item settings and then choose lock item right there and now I can't move this item or adjust it in any way and when I delete this everything works as it's supposed to have me Courtney last week we were having a and now all I need to do is maybe make a tiny little fade here and adjust the curve something like this thanks for having me Courtney last week we're having a conversation uh obviously we're we are married we if I want to do the same with this uh I can do the same thing split split delete and obviously we're we are married we but it gets even better because I have created a little action that will make that whole process even faster let me show you how it works I'm going to undo that and the action is this I'll show you in the actions list here it's right here it's called Ripple delete and I'll go into edit what this is is a custom action that links a few actions together to basically do a bunch of those steps for me so instead of splitting here splitting here deleting and then moving the cursor back here and playing the transition all you need to do is press two keys on the keyboard s to split and then I'm going to put the cursor right here and press C when I press C it's going to split it right here delete this bit move the cursor back to here and play the transition so that I can hear the edit that I just did check it out conversation obviously we're we are so all of that happened really fast let me do it one more time for you conversation obviously we're we are married we haven't that one custom action does a bunch of things and essentially makes editing dialogue really really fast so now what I can do is I can just play along here and find another little bit that I want to edit out to clean it this is a mouth click I want to get rid of that I'm going to press s and then C to clean it I've seen and now it's gone it's really really fast I'll keep playing that is the way to go and you were telling me that it might not be the best method of cleaning the oven so um I ended up here's another um I can take that out with two keystrokes s and then C the oven so I ended up I'm hard-headed I decided I was gonna do it anyways and improve the internet right here's an extra and but anyways and prove the internet right I'll show you a little bit more at the end here and I'll just kind of do it in real time when I heard Joe's close there was a couple of things in here that were perhaps not as tight as they could be but check out how fast this is to edit I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did oh but before I do I want to make sure that I lock my music so that that doesn't get goofed up all right let's go back and edit out some of these things that Joe said here to tighten this up a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did um I know that I did I appreciate all of your Insight and and your of your Insight and your site and your ex site and your expertise on it expertise on it uh what are we going to talk about expertise on it what are we going to talk about next week so that just took a couple of seconds and now listen to this section from start to finish I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did I appreciate all of your Insight and your expertise on it what are we going to talk about next week I think if you were hearing that for the first time there is zero chance that you would have heard any of those edits that I just made now that isn't always the case sometimes it's quite difficult to make some of those edits depending on what's happening in the other track or what the actual word is but with those techniques using Ripple editing and especially with that custom action you can edit dialogue super super fast coming up next you're going to learn how to use volume automation for dialogue [Music] in this lesson you are going to learn how to use volume Automation in dialogue tracks when I'm editing a podcast I don't do a lot of mixing back and forth between speakers because well in general I just don't feel like I need to when one person is speaking usually the other person is not but in some cases you'll have a situation where one person is speaking and then another person will make a comment and in those sections using volume automation can help bring a little bit more clarity so in this situation Courtney makes a comment here while Joe is speaking let's check it out laundry detergent it's like with baking soda or well I know what is the point what is why are they pushing that as a benefit like should I just add more to all of my products again I'm the dope and I think so what I'm going to do is Select Courtney's track press V to bring up the volume envelope and I'll zoom on in here I'm going to shift-click two times at the beginning of the section that I want to make a change to and then shift click two times at the end of the section that I want to make a change to that way the first and the last Point remain at zero decibels and then I can just pull the middle section down just like this with baking soda or why not what is the point what is why and that's really fast to make a quick volume change to Courtney's track so in this section I want to bring Courtney up a little bit so I'm going to do the same thing and I'll bring her up and I might want to bring Joe down in this same section so I'll pull him down just about there and you probably have noticed when you're moving media items or points in your envelope you get these really nice vertical guides that show up when you are moving these and that really helps with alignment products again I'm the dope and I think so a simple tweak to the volume using volume automation just like that can really help but that isn't the only volume automation available in Reaper if I select Joe's track and press V again that will disable the visibility for that volume envelope that doesn't delete it it just makes it so that we can't see it anymore and then if I click this button right here that's labeled trim I can select my volume pre-effects which will bring up that envelope and this is another volume envelope so it will change the volume over time exactly like the other volume envelope except that this does it before the effects and when you make a change to this volume envelope it shows up in the waveform up here which I think is really handy because it kind of gives you a visual confirmation of the change that you are doing in other words if I wanted to bring this section up a little bit because it was a little bit quiet against the music I can really quickly see that this change put this whole section A little bit closer to the height of this beginning statement right here I think a lot of folks are going to find the conversation eye-opening I know that I did I appreciate all of your Insight and your expertise on it what are we going to talk about next week so volume prefix is another handy volume envelope to use especially because like I said before it's pre-effects so sometimes you may have a situation where you have a speaker that turns away from their microphone maybe leans back from the microphone while they're speaking and their audio drops below the threshold of the gate and the gate will start cutting that audio out now what you could do is just adjust the threshold you could even automate the threshold or what you could do is make a change to the volume pre-effects which will push the volume up into that audio gate and allow it to come through and then you don't have to change your threshold now you might be tempted to use the volume pre-effects to manually kind of normalize all the waveforms in your podcast but you don't need to do that because that's incredibly tedious and the audio compressor in the limiter are going to do that for you so the only time that I use the volume pre-effects are when I can hear something that I need to boost up in the mix and it's nice to use the volume pre-effects because I can visually see the change that I'm making so that's pretty much it coming up next you're going to learn how to render your project [Music] in this lesson you will learn how to render out your project now that my project is edited and sounding fantastic it's ready to render now before I render I'm going to do a quick loudness calculation on my entire project using control number pad 9. this isn't something that you always need to do but because I didn't edit this like I normally do I wasn't keeping track of the loudness as I was editing this podcast because I was creating these lessons but I want to get a quick look at it before I render so it looks like I'm in a pretty good spot my true Peaks I was 100 positive we're gonna be fine and I'm about one decibel shy of where I want to be for loudness now there's probably 50 different ways that you could fix that I could just mix up my dialogue tracks after about this point in time by one decibel that would fix my loudness or I can come over here to the re-limit effect and set this to negative one which will make my project one decibel louder and now if I do that calculation again I'll be right at negative 16.6 that won't be the same loudness throughout because I can see that this beginning section is a little bit louder but I don't really think it's a big deal overall it's looking pretty good cool and now I'm ready to render so to do that I'm going to come up to the menu click file and then come down to render now this render window has a bunch of options which is awesome but it can be a little bit overwhelming so I'm just going to touch upon the things that you need to focus on if you want to find out more information check out the reaper user guide it's a great place to start the source and the bounds should be set by default to master mix and entire project and that's what you want Master mix means it's going to render from your master mix track an entire project means it's going to render your entire project now the only thing that you want to watch out for is that you don't have any audio that is way out here in no man's land so to speak this can happen sometimes if you are editing and moving some things around and you get a little tiny sliver of audio that's living way over here so to just make sure that you don't have that press Ctrl p age down on the keyboard just to take a look at your project if it looks something like this you probably have a little sliver of audio over here but if it looks like this and you can see your entire project you're good to go in this section right here you'll see that all of these boxes are grayed out because this is set to entire project it is set by default to render a tail which is currently set to 1000 milliseconds so right now it's going to render one second of Silence at the end of this podcast I'll leave that up to you whether or not you want to put that in there this output section is pretty straightforward I want to set a directory for this render I'm just going to put it in an exports folder in the episode number the file name should default to whatever the project name is and you can change that right there there are a bunch of options here in the wild cards section where you can have it automatically name your file with the project name and a bunch of other things so you can explore that that's a very cool feature right there and this shows you what the file will actually look like and where it's going in the options section here there are a few things you're going to want to look at one of those is sample rate currently it's set to 44 100 also known as 44.1 this is a very common audio sample rate that you will find for music the other option that would be relevant is 48 kilohertz usually this is what I use because pretty much all of my projects have something to do with video and 48 kilohertz is a video standard sample rate either way you go 48 kilohertz or 44.1 are both standard sample rates for podcasts and there's really no audible difference between them although you will find on the internet that someone will tell you that there is pick whichever one you want in the channels section you have the option to set this to Mono or stereo and then there are some other options which you definitely should not choose because they're not going to be applicable if you want to save file size selecting a mono file will make a smaller file but you're going to want to make sure that you have monitored or listened to your project in mono which you can do with this mono switch right here which is a good idea because some things like music and other sound effects that you may have can sound pretty funky in mono and you're definitely going to want to listen to it before you export it that way I usually export projects in Stereo because I'm not really concerned about the file size and that's fine for me if you click this normalize button here you have an option to normalize your project when it renders so let's say you couldn't get your loudness quite right all you need to do in the render window here is Click normalize click this normalize to make sure this is set to lufsi and then set this to negative 16. make sure to check this brick wall limit option here set that to True Peak and then set this to negative 1 DB because I'm using re-limit and the other effects in my project I don't really need to do this but that is an option that you can check out metadata is something that you are probably going to want to use in your renders additional information that gets baked into your renders which is really useful for podcasts for MP3s I think the most common metadata scheme is ID3 and I'm going to include a link in the description that talks about exactly what you need to do in terms of metadata for your podcast it'll be things like the title the description the artist the album the date and things of that nature a lot of these things you can use wild cards for so for the date you could just insert a wild card for date and that way you don't have to update that every time you render once you're done getting your metadata set up you should absolutely create a preset here so that the next time you can just recall the preset for this particular podcast and most of these things with the exception of your description and maybe one or two other things will automatically populate with the appropriate information that's going to save you a ton of time in this bottom section you can set the format for your render by default it's set to wave I usually like to render out a WAV file for every project even though that's not the deliverable file type but I like to export a wave for kind of archival purposes and if I need to make another version of one of the compressed formats like MP3 or AAC it is way faster to do with a full res WAV file than coming back to the project and re-rendering everything from inside of Reaper so I leave this set to wave you don't have to use a 24-bit WAV file you can use a 16-bit wave file which will save a small amount of space 16-bit is totally fine for the secondary output you should probably do something like MP3 and you can set that up right here for the bitrate you will find recommendations on Apple's site that say anywhere from 128 to 256 kilobits is appropriate I usually do 256 for podcasts but you may find that 192 or 160 is more appropriate or you could go all the way down to 128 if you wanted to and that's pretty much it once you've set that up you can click render and it will render out your project now you'll see that when it renders it's going to take a little bit of time especially if you're working with a podcast that is more than 12 minutes long which is how long this very short demo podcast is so if you're working with a podcast that's an hour or more it could take a couple of minutes to render depending on your system and what you're actually working with inside your podcast so that's one of the reasons why I like to render out a full resolution wave file that is uncompressed because if I need to re-encode an MP3 or an AAC file if I need to make a different version of my podcast I don't have to go into Reaper and take that time to re-render from the original project if I have a WAV file it's not really going to sound any different but it will take like one tenth the time if I need to re-encode an MP3 file so that's why I like to do that and here are my files and if I open this up in media player classic you'll see I have my podcast graphic and things are sounding and looking fantastic coming up in the next lesson you're going to learn how to save all of the work that you did creating this podcast into a project template so check that out coming up next [Music] in this lesson you're going to learn how to create a project template once you've created your first podcast episode it's going to be a lot faster to create future episodes if you start from where you left off in your previous podcast and you can do that really easily with a project template let me show you how to set that up the first thing that I'm going to do is save my current project wherever it is so that I don't lose any of my work and then I'm going to save kind of a dummy project I'm going to go to file save as and I'll just call this podcast that way if I make a change and accidentally hit the save button I don't overwrite my last version of my project next I'm going to get rid of the things in my project that I know that I don't need for a template and that's primarily going to be the dialog tracks so you could delete the individual tracks but I prefer to leave these with their colors that I have set up with this action right here and all I really need to do is Select them and delete the media items but before I do I want to make sure that Ripple editing is set to off and I can do that with the one key on my keyboard and now I'm going to select my media items here and delete them and then what I want to do is clear out any automation that I've used for these two tracks and I can view all of my automation right down here with this button show all active track envelopes and then I can right over here just click this drop down and clear out each one of these in that way I don't have that volume Automation in my project template which is something that I definitely don't need I can also hide my volume envelope and my EQ envelope here which I think will probably be a little bit cleaner for my template I'm going to bring the cursor back to the beginning with the w key I'm going to leave my marker right here because for future podcasts that's going to make the intro really easy to dial in for every episode I'm just going to save this one more time and then I'll come up here to the menu underneath file project template save project as template I'll call this cleaning with chemistry click save and now if I create a new project all I need to do is come over here to project template and then open up my cleaning with chemistry template [Music] thanks for watching this course if you made it this far you should be proud of yourself because this course covered a lot of ground and my hope is that you now have the skills that you need to be able to edit a fantastic podcast I tried to pack as much content as I could in a 2 hour and 20 minute long course and it was a lot but there were some things that I just couldn't get to in that amount of time things like recording and Reaper using third-party audio effects Advanced routing side chain compression de-essing Graphics customization add-ons like repack and SWS and more so if you want to learn about that make sure to hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out on what's coming next and if you want access to millions of creative digital assets for one low price check out envato elements with envato elements you get access to music sound effects stock footage Motion Graphics templates photos vector graphics fonts and so much more a single subscription gives you access to everything you need to create great projects see for yourself at elements.invato.com thanks again for watching this course let me know what you thought about this course down in the comments and if you like the video go ahead and give us a thumbs up my name is Dave Bode for envato and I'll see you around [Music]

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 13,920

Keywords: reaper tutorial, podcast editing tutorial, podcast editing, how to edit a podcast, reaper for podcast editing, reaper podcast editing, podcast editing for beginners

Id: y-Tu14fG4C8

Length: 137min 48sec (8268 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022