Ep. 313 - How to Edit an Audiobook Faster: My DAW Editing Workflow, with Gabby Nistico

Send us Fan Mail

If editing takes you longer than recording, this one's for you. Gabby and I talk about how to edit an audiobook faster. Learn your shortcuts, keep moving forward while you listen, and fix your room before you reach for a plugin. Then I go through my whole editing and mastering chain, the order I do it in, and why I do the exact same thing every time.

(00:00) Editing audiobooks, commercials, all of it. Free Class Week is next week.

(01:29) Why editing turns into a bottleneck for so many people.

(02:02) Learn your keyboard shortcuts. If you're doing everything with the mouse, you're probably taking twice as long. I have about seven or eight keys bound to the things I do every single time.

(04:37) Keep moving forward. Edit while you listen and only stop for something big.

(05:57) Why editing speed decides how many auditions you can send in a day.

(07:21) Why I edited my first audiobooks by hand, and what it taught me.

(08:43) My DAW editing workflow. Step one isn't in the software at all. It's your studio. Get four to six inches of treatment if you can.

(11:07) Record clean, then a simple EQ with the high pass filter on. Save it as a preset so it's one click.

(12:36) A single band compressor. Minus 12 dB threshold, 2.5 to 1 ratio. Then a boost and a hard limiter if you need it.

(14:37) Clean-up. Mouth de-click and voice de-noise, both saved as presets.

(15:19) Why I don't trust breath plugins. They can clip your consonants.

(17:21) Do audiobooks need breaths? When in doubt, take them out, but watch your pauses.

(18:58) Do it in the right order, or you'll end up running the same fix four times.

(20:28) The same chain every single time on my own audio.

(21:22) What a hard limiter actually does, and how it's different from a soft limiter.

(23:46) Editing vs mastering. Gabby and I explain the difference.

(27:12) Every engineer does it a little differently. Find what works for you.

(28:54) If you're doing 20 or 30 things to your audio, pull it back. The box I bought early on and finally unplugged.

(31:04) Most raw audio sounds better than the processed version. Processing should never make your audio sound worse.

(31:31) Time is money. Find your bottleneck and go looking for a better way.

(33:27) How to trust your process once you have one.

(36:18) What is mixing?

Post a read in our Facebook group and get a note on it: https://www.facebook.com/groups/avosjourney

New to your DAW? Adobe Audition For Beginners: https://www.avosjourney.com/offers/TtoY2qLB?src=podcast-ep313

Audacity For Beginners: https://www.avosjourney.com/offers/R6NzcQrq?src=podcast-ep313

Our live classes are open to anyone during Free Class Week, 12 to 15 October. https://www.avosjourney.com/free-class?src=podcast-ep313

Every episode of the podcast is at https://www.avosjourney.com/podcast/

Support the show

Social Links:   

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/anthony_pica_vo/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/AVOsJOURNEY

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/avosjourney/ 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonypicavo/