Robots!

Beeps and Boops to Boot

Hello again, and welcome back to Sound Bytes!

First, I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who subscribed! I was overwhelmed by the response, especially the number of people who signed up in the first 48 hours. I truly appreciate it! And if you shared it—double thanks! Some people signed up with specific domains or listed their job titles, and, in a totally not-creepy way, I took a peek at some of these domains to see who was out there. We’ve got an amazing, diverse group: audio journalists, producers, sound designers, heads of audio, composers, old friends, coworkers, and the group that excited me most, students!

I’m not sure why but students were not on my radar of who would find this. I think that group will find this Substack extremely valuable. It made me rethink my posting schedule, and I’m bumping up some posts I had planned for later, like dialogue editing, dialogue mixing, and speed-running your dialogue edits, hyper-speed-running and mega-hyper-speedrunning your dialogue edits. Yes, there are ways to go fast, faster, and fastest! Without sacrificing quality, which is so important to note. There are different speeds for different needs mostly depending on your deadlines. And since dialogue is 90% of podcasting work, mastering that skill is a must.

I also realized that not everyone is working in the same genre as I am. I’ve worked across many genres, and I’ll be covering them in future newsletters and videos. My hope is that, regardless of the genre I’m discussing, you’ll be able to focus on the concepts and steps I’m taking to get things done. For example, in the last newsletter and video, I showed how to make a sizzle compilation using a techno track with fast cuts. But if you're working on say, a piece or an episode on classical music and you wanted to drop a sizzle reel in, swap out that song for a classical song, swap out those interviews for classically trained musicians and apply those same techniques and you still have something engaging and dynamic that is making the hair on the arm of the listener stand up.

Or take today's Sound Byte which is about adding a robot effect to a human voice. I’ve used the same plugin for more serious purposes, like disguising voices of people worried about hostile foreign governments coming after them. My point is, even if a post isn’t in your specific genre, there’s almost always something you can apply to your own work.

OK, lets get into it!

Today’s Sound Byte

The TL;DR

When applying vocal effects, first think about what you want the voice to sound like, then begin auditioning presets. Today I used Krotos Dehumanizer and fine-tuned 3 different Robot presets to create that vocal effect while maintaining the clarity of the speaker. Pepper in sound effects during dialogue pauses, and don’t overthink the music—pick a track that fits your theme and edit to align with your ending. Adjust dialogue spacing so that allows room for the final swell of the music outro.

Video Breakdown

If you're new here, this is essentially a video presentation of the written newsletter, where I walk through my Pro Tools session for today's Sound Byte.

Breakdown Buffet

Now, let’s dive into Robots! This example comes from Inc. Magazine’s From the Ground Up podcast. In this season, we start most episode with fun banter between the hosts that ties into the theme of that episode. These intros often call for something creative with the audio.

As you can hear, the intro is sparsely populated, which is intentional. I like to keep intros short, sweet, and simple—there’s no need to overthink or drag them out.

In the Sound Byte, you heard the robot sound effect on the voice in there. I’ll cover that later, but first, let’s talk about the music and sound effects.

In the last newsletter, I mentioned that I prefer working with tracks that have stems. However, the track in this build was a straight stereo mix—and that’s fine. Sometimes you get lucky and the stereo track just works when there are no difficult edits, or instrument that are bothering you that you need to take out. Or there is no swell or hit you are building to accent a moment where you would need to pull back instruments before letting the frequency flag fly.

I absolutely love this track! I think it has a great original sound to it. It tells the listener computers or robots or something digital, I can see many applications for it.

It comes from Universal Production Music which is my favorite music library overall. Universal Production Music is not cheap from what I remember. They have a tiered pricing system depending on the size of your company, so if you're an indie podcaster, you will get it for cheaper. But if you work for a major company or outlet, they will price accordingly. But hey, that is the company dime, so live it up! Just tell your supervisor that Nick approved the purchase and you should be fine.

Many times when you do short creative builds like this, you only need to worry about the intro and outro of the songs unless you know you have a good swell moment somewhere in the middle. So I just cut the outro of the song to match the end of the dialog and bam, done with the music edits. Again, no reason to overthinking things. This song plays fine.

Now, let’s talk about sound effects. You probably noticed they’re also very sparse. I like to use them sparingly, if at all, and rarely double or triple up effects playing at the same time. A good trick when searching for sound effects is not to be too literal. For instance, I didn’t only search for “robot” sounds. Instead, I searched for words like “glitch,” “computer,” or “servo motors.” Having a mental dictionary of words you can search for sound effects comes with time and experience.

I tried to keep the sound effects in the gaps between dialogue, a luxury we have in podcasting that you don’t always get in TV and film. Space them out, and give each sound effect and piece of dialogue its own moment to shine!

Now, for the star of the show—the vocal tracks and the Dehumanizer plugin!

Dehumanizer has a lot of different settings, knobs, sliders, options—and honestly, I don’t work with this plugin often enough to know what every one of them does. I often start with a preset that’s close to what I want, then tweak it to get the effect I’m going for while maintaining clarity in the voice. That balance is crucial—being able to understand what’s being said is always the priority.

And I'm going to say this so many times you are going to get so sick of hearing it. But everything, and I mean EVERYTHING in audio is about finding balance. Think about vocal de-noising that is all about finding the balance between how much background noise you want to eliminate and how much of the dialog you're willing to mangle. Or compression, how much do you want to flatten your audio level, and how much coloring you were willing to add to that audio. Or audio recording, record too low and you get hiss when you turn it up later. Too high and you get distortion, so you find the balance. I mean, the whole concept of mixing is structuring balance of everything in your session.

But the good news is your ear gets more tuned in to this sweet spot the more that you actually do it.

OK, back to the presets.

For this project, I used the presets Basic Vocoder for Diana (first speaker), Sir Robot for Christine (second), and Ken Saber for Josh (third), to give each host a slightly different sound. You could select one preset and then copy the plugin across all the tracks, but I liked having some variety here.

One thing to note about Dehumanizer presets: they often start off cranked up way too high, so you’ll usually need to dial them back to ensure clarity.

If you are interested in learning about the automation function I used to turn the robot effect on and off you can find those steps in the video, around 13 minutes in.

One final note about Dehumanizer: it’s not a cheap plugin. It retails for about $500, but I’ve seen it go on sale for around $170. If you plan to only use it once, you can always get the limited free trial.

Going forward, I’ll mention pricing on plugins I cover for two reasons. First, some plugins are must-haves if you’re editing and mixing yourself, and you should budget for them. This plugin, Dehumanizer, I do not consider a must have. There are 10 to 15 other plugins I would recommend before buying this one. Second, I want to highlight the investment engineers make in their craft. Even for a show with only dialogue and theme music, your engineer has invested thousands of dollars for just plugins, which I think should be considered when negotiating rates.

OK that’s it for Robots! If you didn’t watch the video, I mentioned that next week I have something special planned—a Pro Tools Halloween mode I built. So keep an eye out for that in next week's video.

As always, if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to reach out on Substack, LinkedIn, or at PodSoundBytes@gmail.com. You can also find me in the “Podcasting Community” Discord group.

Thanks for reading!