When you are mastering your own podcasts, your buddies' podcasts, or whatever, make sure you've got an average or integrated loudness of -14 LUFS and you've got your audio software brickwall limiter plug-in ceiling output set at -3 dBFS. It's best to stay within this range when mastering in order to ensure your sound is consistent across all platforms. -16 LUFS can be somewhat quiet than the opps i.e., other podcasts. And I am not saying you should engage in loudness wars or anything.
The thing is you don't want your background music (or sound effects for that matter) to sound too thin because of too much filtering. So if that's the case you really wanna avoid a high-pass filter on the main fader (or the main stereo output in your favorite DAW). Although you can still proceed to have a low-cut filter on the group channel of your vocal tracks.
Sometimes you may also want to make the background music a little bit dull with a high-shelving filter after you find that the music has a rather bright tone to it. For that, I suggest you try these magic center frequencies with a gentle first-order filter cutting one decibel or half at 700 Hz or 3.5 kHz. It's the secret sauce.
Podcasts equalization techniques
Well, podcasts aren't meant to be treated as recorded music so you don't need much bottom end (i.e., low-frequencies). The only exception of not cutting at around 50 or 80 cycles (''hertz'') with a 12 dB per octave filter (or maybe a first-order filter) is when you've got a little bit of background music something, something going on here and there.The thing is you don't want your background music (or sound effects for that matter) to sound too thin because of too much filtering. So if that's the case you really wanna avoid a high-pass filter on the main fader (or the main stereo output in your favorite DAW). Although you can still proceed to have a low-cut filter on the group channel of your vocal tracks.
Sometimes you may also want to make the background music a little bit dull with a high-shelving filter after you find that the music has a rather bright tone to it. For that, I suggest you try these magic center frequencies with a gentle first-order filter cutting one decibel or half at 700 Hz or 3.5 kHz. It's the secret sauce.
