Kennedy-Spaien, Dot Com

This ain’t a how-to. I wish I had this skill down to a set of easily reproducible steps, but sadly every time it comes up, the solution is different.

One of my clients, Jimmy Moore of The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show, scored an interview with Dr. Dean Ornish. The interview was a year ago, so I hadn’t yet drilled “best practices” into his head, plus he intended the interview to be for his blog, as the show hadn’t started yet.

Suffice it to say, the interview sounds like it was recorded via tin cans and twine to a wax cylinder (actually a microphone on a telephone). And it is over seventy minutes of raw audio. My job: distill it down to two 25-minute episodes and clean it up.

The stakes are high: a low-carb personality interviewing the king of low-fat diets is bound to be a ratings topper, but OUCH! what a job.

If you find yourself in this kind of situation (and you’ve already decided not to retain my services to fix this for you) here’s one tip:

Use a 30 band graphic EQ plugin in your editor (I use Audacity for editing and Garage Band for final production in these cases). If you start completely dropping frequencies from the low end, you may find that you can subtract out the lowest five or so sliders without changing the sound, while making the signal less “hot”. This will likely allow you to boost your gain without worsening the distortion already present.

After this, you will still have your work cut out for you, but it may be just what you need to start the salvage operation! Just remember, you can’t magically perfect a bad recording after the fact, but this tip might just get you started!

Check it out at: The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore.