A long time ago, when I first started working in radio, I was absolutely terrified of dead air. The silence. The lack of either music or speech going out through the transmitter to the radios of my faithful listeners.
It took only 2 or 3 seconds of dead air for me to begin to panic. Yes, yes, I know that doesn’t sound like much to you if you’ve never worked in the medium, but it was a huge deal to me, and it is to most people just starting out.
When you’re doing spoken-word products, however, there are moments in which a few seconds of silence isn’t the end of the world. Sometimes over-editing can be far worse, because if you take out all of the natural pauses of your speaker, allofthewordsruntogetheranditbecomesveryhardtoprocesswhatisactuallybeingsaid.
You will find that this is particularly true of recordings of live seminars or presentations.
Unconscious Habits Quickly Become Annoyances
When you’re editing a recording of a live event – yours or someone else’s – you will typically find that the speaker falls pretty quickly into a pattern that has nothing to do with the words. Most speakers have little verbal habits – a way of taking in a breath, a word or phrase that is repeated often, or a longish pause in speaking – about which they are entirely unconscious, but that when you’re editing become annoying quickly. This annoyance factor is true of audio-only as well as video recordings, but it’s much more noticeable in audio-only situations.
If you are editing your own presentations for packaging as products to augment your business, then take a step back from the editing program and give yourself a good listen. What is your thing?
(Yes, everyone has one. I’ve been a public speaker for most of my life and I one too! Well, more than one, but my brain seems to pick one per presentation. Go figure.)
Listen to yourself unedited. Why do you do that thing you do? Are you making sure the audience is still with you? Have you forgotten where you are in the presentation and are using some word or audible habit to cover? Or are you just one of those folks who has a vocal/verbal filler habit all of the time? (You know what I mean … the person who says, “You know?” or “Right?” or loud exhalation through your nose or something else that you – likely unconsciously – use to fill space, because most people are very, very uncomfortable with silence.)
If you hear something that you always say to make sure people are listening, you can choose to teach yourself to instead look for their nonverbal cues to tell if they’re listening, rather than demand a response from them in your speech.
If you are covering for a lost train of thought, consider having better notes for yourself next time.
If you make weird breath noises, you can choose to work to become conscious of them yourself and stop it.
Back to Editing
But still, you’re working with something you’ve already recorded, and now you need to decide what to do with it. Spend hours and hours engaging your OCD sense of perfectionism and edit out every single “You know?” or breath sound or silent gap. Or ignore all of the annoyances and just put it out, unedited, as it is. Or something in between?
I’d advocate for the middle way. Why? Because …
- Editing out all of the annoyances will inevitably make the final product sound stilted and unnatural. The glitches are part of the human experience. Besides, the hours and hours it will take for you to make it perfect are not really worth it. There is no such thing as a perfect recording. Really.
- Leaving everything in is just as extreme as taking everything out. But in this case, you end up not with a stilted, unnatural-sounding product; you end up with a product that annoys your customers. Annoying your customers is not good for the bottom line.
Taking out some of the instances of an unconscious catch phrase or noisy breath and leaving others in will produce a recording that feels genuine and is listenable. That’s what you’re after, since in this atmosphere creating online audio products for an online audience tends to be as much (or maybe more) about the person presenting as it does about what they have to say. You want the person in the recording to sound human and real as well as someone who intelligently and articulately delivers content worth listening to.
How do you achieve this balance?
Practice. And forgiveness.
You will make some really poorly-edited recordings at first. That’s just the way it is. Deal with it. But make sure you get a little better with each new recording. No one expects perfection, so forgive yourself for not being perfect, get over yourself for wanting to be perfect, and get better at what you’re doing.
Over time, you’ll instinctively realize that this “Right?” should stay, and that one should go. And you’ll remove the ugly one and leave the one that serves as an identifier of your unique voice.
The same goes for silence. Sometimes a 2 or 3 second pause is good for the brain. It allows just a bit more processing of the thought just spoken, before jumping to the next concept to be presented. Give your audience that breathing room. They will have no idea why they like it, but they will like it.
What are your editing challenges? How do you face them? What do you wish you knew how to do better? What don’t you know that you really want to learn?
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