To sound good on a podcast, you need the combination of right talking speed (about 150-160 wpm), confidence, coming from experience, and knowledge of the subject, and technical training when it comes to enunciation, breathing, delivery of emotions, and elimination of fillers and inflection.
Here are 12 simple tips and strategies you can implement to make your podcast sound as good as possible:
1-Think about your podcast voice – apply a narration style suitable for your podcast’s theme. Think if a deeper or higher voice is more suitable for your podcast. Consider the pace of speaking. Do you need to enunciate everything perfectly or is a more modern, conversational and casual style applicable? Do you want to sound like a mentor and expert or more like a friend? Whatever you choose as the best option for you, try speaking clearly.
2-Experiment with enunciation – record, listen, modify
If you want to sound like a professional podcaster, you should consider modifying your vocals to some extent. Your natural voice when recorded can lose some warmth, vibe, and emotions. Most people will sound better when applying some modifications and working on their enunciation.
You need to start your podcast voice training routine:
It is important to find the right balance between how you naturally sound and focused enunciation. It is important to record yourself, listen, and correct. Make a few tries before you decide on a vocal style you want to apply. Listen to your voice, make notes where some phrases came mumbled or words were indistinct so you can easily correct this with a reasonable amount of practice. Listening to yourself will sound strange at the beginning, With time you will hear the difference as you start introducing changes to your vocals.
3-Communicate emotions and feelings through your podcast voice
As mentioned above, it is important to find an overall style for your podcast. But next you need to find how to convey emotions in your show, think of how you are going to express excitement, joy, and enthusiasm and how you will show care, sadness or sorrow. This is the next step you should master after finding your overall style and enunciation if you want to sound good on a podcast. Your podcast needs to communicate with your audience and nothing communicates better than emotions.
4-Stand while you are recording
Practice recording your podcast while standing. In the beginning, you could feel a bit uncomfortable but this will pass, especially once you will be able to hear improvement in your recording quality.
The key benefits of stand up recording:
- Opens up your breath; standing enables a deeper breath and makes it easier to pronounce with more clarity and consistency. When sitting you have compression on your diaphragm, it contracts and flattens when you inhale, so whenever you stand up you remove this pressure and allow for deeper breaths. With increased breath capacity you can record longer phrases. Lowering the breath rate helps you avoid running out of air. With improved airflow, you will be able to speak more clearly.
- Allows for easier expression; while standing you are not bound by the close proximity of objects surrounding you. This allows for a better expression, hand gestures, whole-body movement, and head shifting. All those motions will impact your delivery and can boost your vocal quality and the overall quality of the episode. With released muscle tension you will feel overall more relaxed.
5-Practice breathing
Modern recording standards, and especially the podcasting scene where not everyone is a professional voice-over artist, are more liberal when it comes to audible breathing. It is overall more acceptable today but if you practice you can have another advantage and a better quality podcast.
How to practice breathing for podcast voice training?
Eliminate big gasping breaths by practicing silent breathing. Knowing your script will help you, look for moments where the script requires pauses. This is where you can take deeper breaths. Recognize which sentences will require faster delivery and breath before or after to avoid losing breath mid-sentence.
Finally, position your microphone correctly. Don’t have it directly in front of your mouth when airflow is the strongest but have it to the side and above or below your lips line.
Control yourself and once you position your microphone don’t turn your head instinctively towards the mic. Keep your head away or even tilt it further for a short period of time to minimize the sound.
6-Review the script – boost your confidence and eliminate stutter
To sound good on a podcast, the knowledge of the material is crucial as it will make you more relaxed providing for a more natural flow of the episode. Rehearse out loud – the script sounds different in your head. Read the material aloud several times before you start recording. This will also warm up your vocal cords.
Rewrite if the written script doesn’t flow when reading out loud, don’t get too attached to clever words and phrases you have used. Sometimes what we write down doesn’t sound good and natural when vocalized. Edit your podcast script if you need to with the goal to simplify and make it clearer and easier to understand for your audience.
Consider Speed – recognize when there are moments when you can speed up with your voice over and when you should slow down. Correct pacing can improve your performance and quality of the episode. Add emotions – add subtle emotions to your show. Think how best to address sadness, fear, joy, excitement, etc. Be mindful and have restraint not to sound like an annoying local radio commercial. Avoid pitfalls – most common are technical terms and foreign words. Read them out loud and get familiar with the pronunciation. Also, avoid complex phrases that will twist your tongue and complicate the recording process and require multiple takes.
7-Slow down your narration
When you are reviewing your script note which elements require faster pacing for more emotional delivery and where you can and should slow down for a moment of suspense and for your listener to have a pause to think. Slowing down is also important not only for building suspense but it is an overall recommendation as most podcasting beginners tend to speak too fast. You shouldn’t rush through your material. Given your audience time to enjoy your show. Practice this by reading the script aloud and fit the tone of your podcast to the material you are presenting. Aim for a pleasant, conversational tone. Slowing down is also a great help with eliminating fillers and vocal inflection described in points below. Slowing down is another point on your podcast voice training list.
8-Make pauses – recapture listeners attention
Pauses while talking are important to capture your listener’s attention. If you record a podcast at a constant pace, even if you are not monotonous you can lose your audience. The attention can easily drift away as people start thinking about other things or even contemplating a bit you just mentioned a moment ago.
Additionally, since a large percentage of people listen to podcasts while doing other things parallelly (driving, cleaning, doing house chores) the risk of losing attention is much higher. That is why pauses are so important. You should try to recapture and re-engage your listeners in your podcast on a regular basis.
9-Eliminate fillers – You can easily do it with a bit of practice.
A filler is a sound, word or phrase that is spoken in conversations to signal to others a pause to think without giving the impression of having finished speaking. Each language has a bit different fillers but they all play the same role.
To sound good on a podcast eliminate the most prevalent fillers (in English those are
sounds – ah or uh, er, and um, words/phrases – like, you know, I mean, okay, so, actually, basically, right). In professional podcasts or recordings, the effect is very unpleasant for the listener. We can of course edit them and cut them out but it is extremely difficult to recreate in software the impressions of natural flow, eloquence, and confidence. Your goal needs to be practicing to eliminate hums exactly for those reasons.
10-Eliminate vocal inflection
Vocal inflection is applying the intonation of your voice on the last word. It indicates the more important role of the word in a sentence. By applying this intonation your sentences can sound like questions, or like insecure statements asking for approval.
How to overcome vocal inflection?
Familiarity with the overall topic will boost your confidence and delivery of your message.
Practice with final material – know when the sentences are ending so you can end them in a neutral tone.
Practice aloud and even record and listen to your practice sessions.
11-Protect your podcast voice – especially 24 hours before recording
When becoming a podcaster your voice becomes your tool. Take good care of it like you would for your expensive microphone.
To sound good on a podcast you must:
- Save your voice – at least 24 hours before recording, reduce or even stay away entirely from alcohol, smoking, avoid long public speeches and screaming at events and parties. Don’t wear out your vocal cords.
- Rest and regenerate – have a long uninterrupted session of good night’s sleep to help your muscles (including muscles responsible for breathing and voice) regenerate.
- Stay hydrated – try drinking at least half a gallon (2 liters) of water daily. Drink it throughout the whole day with small sips. This will keep you hydrated and protect your voice from damaging too easily. Also during the recording day drink room temperature water. Both too hot and too cold water can have adverse effects.
12-Warm-up your vocals – don’t sound tired when you record
You will simply sound better after warming-up your voice. This is especially important if you are recording early in the morning and you didn’t have a chance to have a natural warm-up. Don’t ever record straight out of the bed as your voice is worse when you wake up (do you remember how people sound on the phone when you wake them up with your call?). Also after a long sleep, you are naturally dehydrated.
Wait at least 30 minutes to an hour. Use this time to hydrate yourself, warm-up your voice, and get your brain working in a higher gear.
Simple warm-up guarantees you will sound good on a podcast include:
- Record the first few paragraphs two or three times in the beginning.
- Re-record the first few paragraphs at the end before the end of your podcast episode.
- If you are in a hurry try at least humming before you start recording
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