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Measure Twice, Cut Once.

A lesson from today’s audio editing

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

We all know the saying. We’ve heard it hundreds of times and experienced the pain of it so acutely on many occasions. Yet, still, we periodically forget the wisdom of this age-old adage.

This lesson became painfully clear to myself today as I sat down to edit the audio for my most recent podcast.

Over the last few weeks, I have learned so much about podcasting, from interview prep to recording, to editing and hosting, I’ve done it all, even building out my own website for the podcast. Yet, Sunday evening, as I sat down to record a phenomenal episode, I forgot to check my EQ, which inadvertently ended up spiking quite a bit during the episode, causes A LOT of pops and clicks.

Of course, I did not know this at the time. So I continued with my recording, clicking and popping the whole way through only realizing this morning the mistake I had made. And damn did I pay for it as I spent the next few hours rectifying the situation.

Here are the 3 lessons I learned:

1. Measure Twice, Cut Once. — In this scenario, that means I need to check my audio before every recording and make sure I am not spiking. As well as ensure that I do not touch the mic throughout the recording, as that can cause some annoying audio issues.
2. The click reducer plugins are a life-saver, but only they can also kill your vocals. — Meaning that when using a click reducer, you are inadvertently reducing some of the data, whether that be your voice spiking or not; You’re still losing data. What I found worked best for me was to find a bit of audio that was devoid of clicks and use that section to make my proper adjustments: adjust EQ, Normalize, Compress, Normalize. Once I completed that, I ran the click reducer, which suppressed some of the clicks, and then I added a hard limit of -1.0 dB to remove any audio above that, which thankfully managed to get rid of almost all remaining clicks.
3. Noise Reducers Work Best after Compressing. — This one is pretty straightforward. When I first began editing audio, I would run my noise reducers first, and then, after compressing, I would manually edit out the extra noises. However, what I have found to work more effectively is to run my amplification first, giving my sound a larger wavelength and then run my noise reducers after once they have something to work with. This drastically cut down on the individual edits that I made to ensure that the background was quiet.

While I sure I will continue to learn and grow along this journey, I was quite glad about the progress I made today in my understanding of audio and my ability to salvage it. Of course, it would have been nice to have never made that mistake, but then I would never have learned these lessons.

It’s all about perspective. You can either be thankful for your challenges and realize they are an opportunity for growth and self-betterment. Or, you can be bitter and curse them, wishing you had an easier life.

The choice is yours. But only one option leads to happiness.

So make the right choice and grow.