How to Polish Your Voice Recording Using GarageBand

When you're starting to record a podcast, you want to have a good quality original recording to work with. However, the nice thing is that there are software programs that invlude radio engineering capabilities that allow you to edit and tweak your voice to maximize the quality of your podcast. Here's how you do this using GarageBand.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• computer
• a podcast recording to work with
• GarageBand software

1. Open up your project in GarageBand.
2. Listen through the entire thing and make note of things that you'd like to cut out--mistakes, coughs, background noise, awkward pauses.
3. Now go through each of them one by one. Locate the exact location of the first cut on your audio track.
4. Go to the Edit menu and choose Split. This divides the audio track into 2 parts. Then, you want find the end of the section that you want to remove, and split that as well. Basically, you're isolating the mistake.
5. After you've created the segment, click on it and hit Delete. This should either automatically piece together the section before the mistake and after the mistake. Or, if not, then drag the second part and drop it right after the first cut began. This way, you will have a smooth transition.
6. Also, you can play with the way your voice sounds by adding effects. To do this, click on Real Instruments and select an effect. Play the audio track back to see how it sounds, and find one that you like.
7. You can also add jingles to enhance the podcast, by looking through the podcast audio loops that GarageBand provides.
8. After you've got everything you want on your audio track, it's a good idea to smooth out transitions between the music, sound effects, and your voice. You can do this by paying attention to the volume curves. Lover the volume curve in order to fade it out, and then gradually bring it up when the next track is starting. This is the equivalent of a Fade In/Fade Out in video editing.

Tips & Warnings

• Before you record the podcast, you can also modify the Speech Enhancer effect and see what that sounds like. These are customized settings that are supposed to reduce noise and optimize the sound of your microphone. Click on Info/Details in order to edit the speech enhancing options.
• For the background music, it might be helpful to lower the volume, so that the narration is clearly heard. You can do this easily by using Ducking--Control/Ducking. Arrows will pop up, and you'll want to click the arrow pointing up for the lead track, and the arrow pointing down for all the other ones. The Ducking control automatically lowers the volume for your backup tracks.