Three ‘rules’ for a decent sounding show

Having spoken with a few listeners there are a few things that make a big difference with regard to how professional a show sounds. It boils down to a few simple ‘rules’ which I follow.

1. Consistent volume levels between music and spoken sections
   People don’t like it when they set their listening volume to a comfortable level and then the spoken links are either too quiet to hear or jarringly loud. To address this I run a subtle compressor over each channel (Deck 1, Deck 2 and Mic). 
2. Music beds behind spoken sections
   I record the show multi track for ease of editing if required and then drop music beds in (generally a selected of my own tracks) at a low level during the links.
3. Side-chain compression on the music tracks linked to the mic track
   That way the level of the music drops in time with my speech.

I sort all three rules in the edit so I don’t need to worry about this while recording. As long as I get clean music tracks and mic track it’s easy to tweak. With my shows I took a bit of time on the first one getting this sounding right and then saved the file as a template to use for future shows.

It’s good to record in a single take and roll with any ‘mistakes’ as this makes the show sound more live, makes it quicker to record and leads to something with more personality.