So the latest regular work I've been doing is a podcast by
The Front Porch, which hosts "Conversations about biblical faithfulness in African-American churches and beyond". It's a great podcast with
Isaac Adams and
Thabiti Anyabwile, and occasionally other guests. It's always really insightful to listen to while I'm mixing their voices. Here's the latest podcast:
I thought I'd share my signal chain for this podcast. It varies from week to week but it's usually most of these.
The Chain
First off, a nice simple highpass. Always necessary since their Zoom recorder always picks up some handling noise.
Next, a stereo tool (appropriately called Stereo Tool). The Zoom recorder is stereo, and the 2 podcast hosts tend to be on opposite sides of the stereo recording.
After that, de-reverb. They're not in a studio, so once you start compressing, the room sound comes out real quick.
After that comes some real EQ. Take out some chest resonances, room resonances, and anything else that sounds wack. No boosting as ReaEQ is not the tastiest of EQs when it comes to boosting.
Next, a compressor that's only used to squash the loudest sounds (mostly loud portions of laughter). Call me lazy but it tends to work well and saves me time from automating the entire thing!
After that, some more EQ, really to prepare for what's next more than anything else...
Next is Slate! Most of the tasty stuff happens here. 1176 compression, some more EQ moves, and you can't see it but on the end is Slate's "Revival" which is pretty much a "turn 2 knobs til it sounds good" plugin. I rarely go wrong with it.
That's it for the tone; now we bring up the levels until it's reasonable for a podcast (and its end platform, Soundcloud). This is the free equivalent to Waves' L1 limiter. Realistically all it's doing is applying gain at this point, since I've had my levels relatively low for the Slate stuff to work well. (-18dB rms is the sweet spot for any analog-modeled stuff.)
I save my de-essing for almost last. By this time things are pretty compressed and the esses have come out to haunt me.
Almost there! Some final limiting to round out the spikes. I aim for -0.3dB since Soundcloud will eventually turn this into a 128kbps MP3, and ye old MP3 encoders don't take well to clipping.
Finally, a gentle high cut. Also because of 128kbps MP3, which introduces distortions most noticeably in the high frequencies. This is the lazy way of compensating for it.
Hope you enjoyed! Come back to see us.
