The Independent Creator's Playbook

I’ve noticed that a lot of people struggle with room echo and background noises, so I wanted to do this episode to help you start taking steps towards inproving the quality of your recordings.

Sound Proofing is the process of sealing your room so that outside noises don’t get recorded by your microphone. This is normally done by installing special sound-absorbing fiberglass or mineral wool in the walls, floor or ceilings.

You may not have much control over how sound proof your room is, but there are some things you can do to control the sounds being created in your space.

Eliminate as much excess noise as you can:

Remember: Eliminate background noises before you hit record. Turn off fans, AC, or heaters, and set your phone to airplane mode.

Sound Treatment is reducing the echos and sound reflections in a room by adding things like sound-absorbing foam panels, bass traps, and sound diffusors.

Standing waves happen in rectangular rooms when a sound wave bounces off one wall, then back and forth between the two walls until the energy dissipates. This is most common in low-end frequencies, but can happen in high frequencies as well. Too much energy in the low-mid range (200-500hz) can cause a track to sound muddy or boomy.

Remember: Listeners notice sound quality. Background noise and room echo is distracting and degrades the listening experience.

Flutter echo is a ringing sound caused by sound bouncing off of parallel walls. You’ll hear this in the high-end of the frequency range.

We don’t always have a choice about the room we record in. When I started recording the seanwes podcast back in late 2013, I was recording in my “office” (which is just my dining room with a standing desk).

It was a small room with only a little furniture in it, so there was quite a bit of flutter echo in my recordings. I tried to compensate for this by bringing in some big couch cushions. I ended up moving to a spare bedroom and building some sound absorbing panels to help with the reflections. (They did help.)

The ideal room will be a room with quite a bit of soft stuff in it. Furniture like chairs, couches and bookshelves can all help absorb and diffuse sound waves.

“Pretty much every room has its own sound, when you walk in the room, there is an enormous amount of factors that control what that room sounds like. The size of the room, the materials that make up the floor, the walls, any furniture in the room, all these things affect the sound of that particular room.” – Joe Gilder, Home Studio Corner

I've found that most dynamic microphones are less sensitive to background noise and reflections than condenser microphones.

Condenser microphones are more sensitive, more detailed, but they pick up EVERYTHING. So if you have a perfectly treated room with good acoustics, a condenser mic will give you great sound. If you are in a room that hasn’t been treated and soundproofed, you’ll run into problems.

If you have a noisy room or a room with a lot of echo and you can’t treat it, record with a dynamic mic instead of a condenser. Here's the gear I recommend if you're interested.

When I first started recording podcasts, I was using a Shure PG42. It’s a decent condenser USB mic, but I was recording in my dining room, so there was a lot of echo. If I had known then what I know now, I would have sold the PG42 and switched to a dynamic mic.

Mic technique is another big part of how much room sound you’ll hear in your recordings. The further away from the mic you are, the more room sound you’ll hear. You should try to stay between 3 and 6 inches away from your mic while recording.

I learned something new while doing research for this episode. It’s something called NRC: Noise Reduction Coefficient.

The NRC is a single-number (0 to 1) index determined in a lab test and used for rating how absorptive a material is.

So a 0 is not sound absorbant at all (a surface that is complete reflective when it comes to sound waves), and 1 means the surgace absorbs all sound (no sound reflection at all).

Here are the noise reduction coefficients numbers for some common materials:

Some materials are more sound absorbant than others. Look up Noise Reduction Coefficients (NRC) numbers before buying materials to help absorb sound.

If you’re interested in buying sound treatment materials, here’s what you need to know.

1. Egg Crate Foam. Almost worthless for low end frequencies, but decent for absorbing frequencies in the mid and high mid ranges. Pretty ugly, so I’d suggest buying acoustic foam instead.

2. Portable Sound Shields. The idea here is to have a shield wrap around the back of your microphone to stop your voice from reflecting off the wall in front of you and bouncing around. These work well (from what I hear) and start at around $50.

3. Furniture. Bookshelves, desks and couches/chairs can all help with sound absorbtion/diffusion, depending on the material they’re made out of.

4. Blankets. Most blankets are only going to absorb the high end frequencies, and only if they’re thick. A good thick duvet will be your best bet.

5. Carpet. Having carpet in your room will help a little. Thicker is better, but don’t expect too much.

6. Bass Traps. Bass traps are usually wood frames with a lot of sound-absorbing mineral wool or fiberglass, usually at least 3 inches thick for absorbing extra low end frequencies. Very commonly places in the corners of a room.

7. Sound Diffusors. Sound diffusers are designed to scatter or disperse sound by using irregular hard surfaces to break up and scatter the sound waves. So imagine a table top covered with pieces of two by fours cut to various heights, that’s what most sound diffusion panels look like. You can buy these online or build them yourself.

8. Acoustic Foam. Most acoustic foam doesn’t do anything to stop low frequencies, but it will absorb the higher frequencies. If you hear a lot of flutter echo in your room, you can invest money in some acoustic foam panels to help treat it.

You can build a lot of these absorption and diffusion products yourself. Check out:

You can use EQ to remove or reduce certain frequencies, 400hz for example. Listen to your recording and try to identify the frequcies where the room echo is most noticable, and then cut a couple db. Be careful not to remove too much; that will make your voice sound unnatural.

There are various de-reverb and noise removal plugins available for audio editing apps like Logic Pro X and GarageBand, and Audacity has a noise removal feature built-in.

My favorite method so far for cleaning up room echo has been an EQ plugin to remove some of the low-mid range (between 300 and 1200 hz).

My favorite for removing background noise is a tie between Logic Pro X's legacy Speach Enhancer plugin (it has a nice denoise feature), or Izotope's RX plugins, which are often on sale for $29 (there's a plugin included in that pack called Dialog Denoiser that also works great for removing background and line noise).

One other great option is the Auphonic website, which will clean and enhance up to 2 hours of audio per month (you'll pay for more time after that). The only downside is that it'll take a little longer because you'll have to upload the audio to a website for processing instead doing it on your computer.

It’s possible to improve sound quality a little bit with post production, but it’s better to fix the problems before recording.

Finally, if you’re having problems with buzzing or other electronic noise in your recordings that you can't identify the source for, you may have a problem with your power supply.

Buy a Furman power conditioner ($60), plug your computer and audio gear into that, and see if that solves the issue. If it doesn’t, you may have faulty recording equipment or cables.

Kelsey asked: Can you discuss room noise related to living near an airport and frequent thunderstorms?

Sound proofing is going to be your best bet here, but it’s going to be challenging because you’ll have to do some major construction to sound proof a room. Some people build a “floating room”, which is a room frame inside a room to make it more sound proof. You can read more about that here.

Other than that, I would suggest learning more using post-production to fix or remove background noises. There are lots of software solutions for cleaning up audio files (see the several I listed above).

Terence Tang asked: Without A/C or fans on, it gets hot in the room. For podcasting, it’s fine because you can’t see the person sweating, but what about with video? I don’t want to be drenched in sweat on camera. Any suggestions?

First; are you sure your viewers don’t want to see your drenched in sweat?

Seriously though, you can buy a quiet fan to help push some air, or just run the AC at full blast until right before you hit record. If you’re recording with a shotgun mic, place the fan directly behind the mic to reduce the amount of fan noise the mic will hear.

For podcasters wondering the same thing: The supercardioid microphone I'm currently (Shure Beta 87A) using doesn't pick up fan noise, but you should always make a test recording to hear how your recording sounds. If you can leave a quiet fan running without having it be terribly noticable, go for it.

Today I’m sharing my process for writing outlines. If you've never written an outline for your podcast before, I'm going to teach you how today.

What does a podcast outline do for you? It helps you stay focused. It helps you make sure you cover all the topics you want to cover, or ask or answer the right questions. It helps you keep the episode on track.

Listeners want to know what they’re going to get from a show. You may have recorded an epic episode with tons of great advice and takeaways, but if you don’t tell the listeners in advance what they can expect, they won't know what's coming. People will tune out if they don’t know to expect or what the point of the episode is.

In this episode, you'll learn how to outline your episodes and explain the content of your episode at the start of your episode so you can keep people listening (and subscribing) to your show.

If you’ve never done outlines before for your podcast, I recommend trying it.

If you don’t have an outline, you won’t have structure. Your show won’t feel like it has direction. You might forget important things.

If you’re doing an interview, you might miss important questions or forget to talk about certain things.

While doing an interview, it’s ok to go with the flow and the conversation, but your listeners will appreciate if you prepare topics to talk about with your guest.

The purpose of outlining is to keep you focused on the big picture things before you dive into the small details.

If you try to write out an episode from start to finish, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of one section and lose sight of the big picture.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to what these folks have to say about outlining:

Scotty: I’ve been doing mind mapping to begin my process of outlining. I select the main takeaways that I can focus on and then prepare the outline. Sometimes my mind goes off the outline but that’s alright. Mind maps have been huge to stop me from staring at the cursor blinking wondering where to start.

Garrett: Outlining definitely benefits me. It helps me get my thoughts organized in advance so I can just start typing away and get the rough draft finished. I do think it’s important to not stick strictly to the outline. Sometimes you’re writing and you realize the order should be different, or you need to add something, or remove something, and that’s okay. The outline isn’t the definitive.

Let's start by walking through the sections of a typical episode outline, and then dive into more detail about each piece.

Please feel free to adapt this outline to meet your needs. This is how I outline and I hope it will give you a nice starting point but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Scotty asked: Do you have your headline set before you plan your attack? Or do you start to write your outline then form an engaging headline from there?

Now, Scotty said headline, but I think he means title. I always start with the Main Topic or the Big Idea.

This can also be the title of your episode, but you don’t have to have the title before you start writing the outline. You can change the title later if you want.

Start your outline with your big idea. This will be the main topic of the episode.

After you have your main topic, what is your hook? What perspective or opinions do you have that are unique or interesting about this topic? What are your listeners going to take away from the show?

After you have your topic and hook, start writing your intro. Think about how you’re going to introduce this topic or idea to your audience.

After you have your main topic and intro, start thinking about the main points related to that topic that you want to make. These will be your headers. These are the main sub-topics or ideas that will make up the meat of your episode. You should also address counter arguments after you’ve made your main points, but I’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Finally, you’ll need to do a recap of what you talked about in the show, just to summarize everything. Then you’ll do your outro.

Let’s get into the details of each piece of your outline. First, the intro.

If you’re just starting your podcast, it’s important to tell the listener a little bit about yourself. Tell the audience who you are, what you do for work. Tell them how old you are and if you have a family. Tell them what you do for fun in your free time. Talk about your hobbies. Talk about your goals for the future.

You don’t have to go over all your personal details in every episode, but remember that new listeners join all the time. It’s not a bad idea to do a quick introduction at the beginning of every episode just for the brand new folks.

Talk about why you’re doing your podcast. Tell your audience what your show is about. It’s ok to elaborate in your first episode, but try to describe the goal of your podcast in a single sentence in future episodes.

Tell your listeners who your show is for. What kind of people do you want listening to your podcast? Is there anyone you don’t want in your audience?

For example, my podcast is for people who care about making great podcasts. People who are interested in learning about audio and writing and technology and everything that goes along with podcasting. If you aren’t passionate about podcasting, this show isn’t for you. I’m not trying to reach everyone with my podcast, I only want the people that care intensely about podcasting.

In your intro, tell your listeners what they can expect. Explain to them why this topic matters and why they should care.

Talk about what problem you’re going to solve for them, or how the information can help them. Tell them what they are going to learn about or takeaway from the episode.

After you’ve introduced yourself and told your listener what you’re going to talk about, then it’s time to get into the meat of the show; the main points.

So you have your main topic. What do you want to talk about or share with your audience about this topic? Do you have any stories that you can share? Do you have any great blogs posts you can mention and discuss?

This is where starting outlines in mind maps has been a game changer for me. For those of you wondering, I use MindNode for mind-mapping. It’s a great app.

Before I start doing any real writing, I add all the key points in a circle around the main idea in the mind map. Sometime I’ll have an idea for a sub-topic inside of a sub-topic, so I’ll throw that in real quick, but I’m not doing any real writing yet. I’m just trying to brainstorm all the big points that I want to hit.

You don’t have to do any real writing inside of a mind map outline. It’s just for laying out the main sections and big ideas of the episode.

After I have all my main points on the mind map, I start thinking about which order they should go in:

It’s really easy to drag the little topic bubbles around and rearrange them in my mind map, which is another reason I like using mind maps for outlining instead of text documents.

You should do some research before you get on the mic. What are other people saying about the thing you're talking about? Bring a couple examples to share. Read related blogs posts. Watch videos.

Even if you think you know a lot about a topic, there are probably still things you can learn from other people.

Invest some time every week doing additional research on your topic.

After you have all your sub-topics and sub-sub-topics laid out, dive in and start expanding those. This is the point where I export my mind map as a text document and import the text into my writing application, which is Typed (at the moment).

After you finish writing about your main sub-topics, think about counter-points or opposing arguments. This is something I learned about in writing class in college.

You can strengthen your own argument by anticipating opposing arguments and addressing them before someone else gets a chance to bring them up.

It doesn’t always apply, but it’s still a good habit to develop.

In fact, I’ll do it right now. I’m thinking about counter arguments to my argument of “Outlining is a good idea.” What argument could someone make that counters mine?

You could argue that outlining in too much detail and reading from that outline can suck the life out of your delivery. Sean McCabe and I discussed this in episode five of my podcast.

My counter argument to that would be: Yes, writing and then reading an entire blog post can sound stale and lifeless, but only if you don’t write like you talk or if you aren’t good at reading what you’ve written in a way that is dynamic and interesting.

Also, I don’t think that most formats need that detailed of an outline. When I start doing interviews, I’m not going to write out my thoughts about every sub-topic. I want it to be a conversation, not me reading out a paragraph and then letting my guest respond. That’d be pretty terrible.

Do some research and see what other people are saying about your topic. Find and address any counter-arguments.

Try to find people who disagree with your opinion about your topic. What are they saying? What arguments are they making? Are any of their arguments valid? If not, why? Address them in your show. Try to put yourself in someone else’s head. Why do they think that way about that topic or idea?

After you touch on your main points, go back through and collect the most important thoughts and points for your recap section. Think of this as the Too Long, Didn’t Read section of your outline. Make a quick summery of the best ideas of your outline. This is your last chance to give your listeners some takeaways that will stick with them.

There are a few things you need to do in your outro.

1. Thank your listeners. They just invested time listening to you. Make sure you tell them that you are grateful.

2. Ask for a review on Apple Podcasts. Make it easy for people to leave a review of your show, give them a link. The best time to ask for a review is right after you’ve provided a bunch of value to your listener. Many of your listeners will want to help you out. Remind the listeners that Apple Podcasts reviews can help your show get new listeners which will build the community. Good for you, but also good for them.

3. Read an Apple Podcasts review or other feedback you get. This creates a personal connection and shows the other listeners that you pay attention to your audience.

4. Tell people where they can find you online. Don’t assume that people know where to find you. Share your website, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Facebook, anywhere that you want your audience to find and interact with you online.

5. Ask for feedback. Ask for your listener’s thoughts and opinions. Ask them for permission to share those things on future episodes of the show. It might even become a topic for a future episode.

6. If you know next week’s topic, tease it. TV shows do this all the time. It’s a great way to get people excited for your next episode. It gives them something to look forward to. Of course, this only works if you have topics planned in advance.

Listeners want to know what to expect before they listen to your show. An outline can help you discover what the important takeaways are. Then you can share those takeaways in the title, show description, and intro.

Don’t start filling in the details before you’ve written your intro, main points and sub-points, and outro.

For your intro, tell your audience who you are and what you’re going to share in the episode.

For your main points, thank about and share the most important things you can think of that are related to your topic. Do some research and see what other people are saying about the topics. Try to find and address any counter-arguments.

For your recap, collect the most important thoughts and points. Summarize the best ideas of your outline. The recap is your last chance to give your listeners some takeaways that will stick with them.

For your outro, thank your listeners for listening to your show. Ask them for questions and feedback. Ask for a review in Apple Podcasts. Read an Apple Podcasts review. Tell them where they can find you online. Tease the topic for your next episode if you know it.

Christopher asks: How do you approach outlines for material that works best with visual aides? Like screencasts instead of podcasting.

I think it works the same way. There are some topics that I’m not going to do podcasts about. Things like mixing and mastering are very hard to teach without visual aids.

I haven’t tried outlining for my screencasts yet, but I’m going to start because the ideas are the same. It’s still important to introduce the topic, talk about the takeaways and main points, and then do a recap and an outro.

Even if I’m not writing a super long and detailed outline, it’d still be helpful for me to plan a screencast using the process I described in this episode.

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I had a thought yesterday that I posted to Twitter:

Pro tip for growing an audience: Focus on what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

I was thinking about this because it’s really easy as a podcaster (or writer, musician, etc) to focus on what we’re getting out of the work we’re putting out into the world. We think a lot about how what we’re doing is going to benefit us.

I’ve started thinking about it differently. Instead of focusing on what I’m going to get out of something, I want to focus on what I can give to my audience.

It frustrates me when I see podcasters whose main motivation for growing an audience is so they can sell ads. If your focus is on getting to 15,000 downloads per episode so that you can get sponsors, it’s probably not going to happen.

Focus instead on delivering something valuable to the audience you do have, and answer questions for people who aren’t listening to your show yet. That’s how you grow an audience.

/end rant

If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts, or share the episode with a friend. Thank you! 💙

If you like this show, you might also like my new show, The Podcast News.