Want to get into freelancing your audio production skills but don’t have much experience editing files other than your own? If you’re an aspiring producer, there are some audio editing practices that you should understand before getting started.
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In this article
- Mixing Exercise for Audio Editing
- Conversation Editing (For Podcasts)
- Background Noise Editing
- Step 1
- Step 2
- Step 3
- That’s a Wrap on Post-Production Exercises
We’ve put together three audio production exercises for you to begin training for your freelancing future!
Conversation Editing (For Podcasts)
Mixing Exercise for Audio Editing
There are plenty of clients looking for their audio files to be laid over music files. These mixing gigs require you to know how to control the volume of each file for the best listening experience. The music can’t overpower the spoken word but it can’t be so quiet that the energy of the spoken word feels amiss.
We’ve created an audio file, completely free for you to use, to help develop the skills necessary for mixing gigs. As you’ll see below, it’s accompanied by a fictitious job description that outlines artistic direction, information about the project and more to help guide your efforts and exercise your ability to interpret a client’s needs.
Radio station Jump 99.9
Job description:
We are Jump 99.9, a top-100 hit music destination for a young and engaged listener audience. We need a stinger for our afternoon talk show. The stinger will be used to transition our listeners into the afternoon talk show after the Workday Wrap Up hour of uninterrupted music ends.
Art Direction:
We appeal to a primarily female audience between the ages of 18 and 35. The new afternoon talk show hosts are two women in their late twenties and early thirties who are bold, open, and entertaining. Please find a sample of music to mix with the stinger V/O that captures the essence of what it means to be wrapping up your work day and listening to some down-to-earth, hilarious women to unwind and laugh.
Final File Length:
5 seconds
Need help finding a music sample to download and mix with? Check out our post on the best free music libraries.
Preview the audio here:
Conversation Editing (For Podcasts)
With the proliferation of podcasts, the freelance gigs for podcast editing have increased tenfold! Often, what we hear in the final episode is much shorter than the original recording.
Even the most conversational podcasts still undergo a thorough editing process to make for a more polished-sounding final episode.
The below exercise will test your ability to cut audio down to a specific length while making decisions around what conversation pieces should remain to create an entertaining and cohesive final cut.
Voices’ Mission Audition Podcast
Job description:
This is an excerpt from our podcast Mission Audition where Andrew, Kyle, and Tommy talk about achieving a genuine read for the fictitious software, FloZone. Please consolidate the three individual audio tracks into one file for the podcast episode.
Art Direction:
We want the final cut to sound more conversational and less like the speakers are taking turns at the mic. Be creative in the way you break apart the three speakers so that they exchange dialogue more than once.
Final File Length:
2 minutes
Preview the audio here:
Background Noise Editing
Aside from the world of voice over, where high-fidelity recordings are captured in a soundproofed space by professional voice actors, audio recordings often have background noise and sound floor issues that need to be removed. It’s common for clients to outsource these kinds of tasks as not all teams have an in-house audio producer.
Whether it’s a recording of an interview at a live event, a segment recorded outside, a recorded Zoom call or any other scenario where audio is captured outside of the recording studio, background noise will permeate the original audio file.
Step 1
Try your hand at identifying the background noises that need to be removed in the first audio track. Hint: there are six background noises to be treated!
Step 2
Listen to the second track to hear how our in-house audio producer, Randy, cleaned up the recording.
Step 3
Download the file and edit out the background noise for some hands-on practice!
Want more ear training exercises? Randy put together this video to help you train your ear.
That’s a Wrap on Post-Production Exercises
We hope you’re feeling confident in your ability to edit other people’s audio files and are ready to start offering post-production services through your Voices account.
Let us know what you thought of these audio editing practices exercises in the comments below, and what other exercises we should add to the mix next time!
Comments
This was actually great. I loved it. Hope you guys create more exercises for us to practice with. It helped me out a lot!
For the heading “Background Noise Editing,” what tools did your in-house audio producer, Randy, use to clean up the recording?
Hey there Phyllis, it was likely iZotope RX!
Thanks a lot for sharing these, especially for the RAW audio examples!