Creating a Solo Episode – Recording and Editing

I’m working on a longer form series on how I create solo episodes, which will likely go on Medium. But I’d like to publish the parts here, as I write them.

As the baseball season winds down (for Yankee fans, anyway), I find myself thinking about the process of the sport as it relates to publishing my podcast.

Like many things in life, both have a number of moving parts and contexts in which you want to change your approach.

For example, in baseball, you have pitching coaches and hitting coaching. More granularly, they also have infield coaches and outfield coaches.

You don’t want your pitcher to take the same throwing approach as your right fielder.

The same thing goes for podcasting — I usually publish interviews for How I Built It. But once a month or so, I’ll do a solo episode, and the process is quite a bit different.

For one, I’m not scheduling with anyone, so I don’t need to find a set time to record. I’m also not doing a pre-interview…but that research is replaced with topic research.

Finally, I don’t usually send solo episodes out for edit.

I’ll cover every aspect of the solo show here eventually, but today I want to talk about recording and editing. 

Descript: My Solo Episode Workhorse

Unlike my guest interviews, I record my solo shows directly into Descript. I find it much easier to work directly in there, instead of importing audio recorded from somewhere else. 

I record in Descript because I also edit in Descript. I have a simple template with my intro and opening music, as well as the settings for leveling and ducking music. 

Because I’ve spent a bunch of time on the hardware for audio input, I generally don’t need to clean up my own input beyond the Descript presets. 

So the real reason I use Descript is because I edit a ton for content. I’ll get into planning and organizing in a different article, but I usually don’t fully script these solo shows.

So if I mess up a point, or forget something, I like to delete the text and pick-up where I left off. 

Descript lends itself very well to editing content this way, as you’re just deleting text…though sometimes it does get confused about where to place the cursor when I pick up — a minor thing that I notice almost immediately.

I will also add some audio ducking for background music, and possibly some sound effects, depending on how deep I want to go (though I do that more with the Podcast Workflows podcast that’s coming soon).

The last thing I’ll do, which leverages dynamic ad insertion, is create a gap between talking points (usually “Act 1” and “Act 2” and write down the timestamp so I can insert sponsor spots later.

Once the episode is recorded and edited, Descript also gives me some options: I can export it into a folder for my VA to upload, so I can upload directly to Transistor.fm, my audio host. 

It’s usually the former – but it’s nice to have the latter as an option, especially for members-only episodes.