← Podcast Editors Mastermind
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- [00:00]
A
Before we begin the Podcast Editor Mastermind show, I wanted to key you in on something. After this interview concluded that you're about to hear. I had to leave for a trip. You'll get an idea of what that's about during my intro, but after I got back, I didn't want to edit this interview. It was 58 minutes long. We had some retakes. It was going to be a lot of work and I had a bunch of my own work piled up after being gone for a full week. I needed a shortcut. I thought of something I heard other people try. So I thought, I'll give it a shot. And after I got the results, the then it was like, okay, now I'm excited to get started. So at the conclusion of this interview, you're about to hear I'll share what I did differently. And it's not the tool that we talk about during this episode of the Podcast Editors Mastermind Show. Welcome to the Podcast Mastermind Show. I am Steve. My daughter just got married, Stuart. And today we're going to be talking about filler words. Do filler words matter anymore? And how should we approach that with our clients? Because they're paying for us to take them out. Right. Today I'm going to bring on with us here Tom Hansen. Tom started KNVP Studios in 2014 and has offered his services in the professional television, film and audio video business for over 30 years. He's got a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications with a minor in audio recordings and music synthesis, and has worked with the biggest studios in the world such as mgm, Sony Pictures, MTV and hbo. And he's also created this really cool tool. We'll talk about it later, but it's called Audio Core Assist, which I'm going to be using to edit this show with. It's a service that creates marker files for audition, Reaper, Hindenburg, and Audacity. Tom, welcome to the show.
- [01:35]
B
Thank you, Steve. Great to be here.
- [01:38]
A
We get to talk about one of my favorite topics today, which is filler words and why filler words matter. Has listenership and the need for removing filler words. Has that changed over the past 10 years in your eyes?
- [01:49]
B
I think it has. I would say 10 years ago Filler word removal was more important during casual conversation. You know, filler words, they're just going to happen. We want to increase the listen through rate of our listeners. Or in the case of video viewers, filler words can become annoying. I think there's a certain tolerance for them. But overall, I believe there are two different types of podcasting, there is the casual social type podcast and then there is the professional authoritative type podcast. It's widely understood that for the social type podcast, where let's say there's three or four people gathered around a microphone or two and they're discussing the latest Game of Thrones episode, that's going to be more of a casual conversation. And I think when things get heated and in a casual conversation, it's really hard to remove the filler words and I think it's more accepted. Whereas on an authoritative podcast where you're trying to either sell something, consider yourself an authoritative figure and you want polish that removing filler words is important. The listen through rate I think dwindles. In other words, when someone starts your show and starts listening to it and eventually let's say you within the first minute or two you've dropped five ums. Sometimes people don't have a tolerance for that. It's kind of a balance between professional and casual.
- [03:42]
A
Yeah, most of my clients are in that authoritative type of podcast where it's going to be professional and they want to come off as professional. They're in what they feel is an influencing type of a podcast. They are teaching people and they want to be coming off as professionals. And it's not just a chit chat show. All the might have fun with it. I can see how those fillers get in the way because I've been editing them out for over a decade now. Professionally. You were talking about how people drop off after five ums in a minute. How do you know that that really damages the authoritativeness of a show that's going out whether it's audio or video?
- [04:21]
B
Well, I did some research and I created a Reddit called Podcast Editing Help in that I did some research about how filler words impact listener engagement. They came back with a few studies that showed essentially filler words do affect the listenership and the listen through rate of podcasts if the podcast is edited properly. In other words, filler words are removed
- [04:58]
A
and done so well. It's not a bad edit, right? Of AI edit.
- [05:01]
B
Right. It's a good edit. There's a higher perceived professionalism and authority. It presumes that there's better performance on platforms that factor these Things such as YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts. For instance, one of the studies for from Riverside of actually of all places, it says episodes with less than 4 filler words per minute saw 18 to 22% higher drop off rate in the first 10 minutes compared to clean episodes. And they found that the or the effect size is especially strong among 18 to 34 year old listeners, which I imagine is quite a large chunk of the listeners of our shows. So I think that reducing the filler words can increase, and this is, according to some of the research I did, is that 10 to 25% increase in listener in average listen through rate is achieved when proper filler word abatement is provided.
- [06:15]
A
Ooh, proper filler word abatement. I'll have to remember that. That's really good.
- [06:19]
B
Put that on a bumper sticker and
- [06:21]
A
I, you know, people might be wondering, well, what is it? You know, who cares if they drop off? I got my download. But when you're looking at things that are ranking for completion rate, when you're looking at Apple podcasts, they have a completion rate and that will help someone to rank better in their charts. You look at YouTube, it's all about engagement. It's all about keeping people's eyes and ears on the content for a longer period of time. And it does get to be annoying when you kind of like hear this guy just fumbling through what he's trying to say. Right, right.
- [06:57]
B
I know exactly what you're talking about.
- [07:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. I was editing something just today where, here's where I think the importance of removing filler words comes from. When you've got somebody who's an expert, but they don't sound like an expert because some of the words that they're using are very iffy, sort of kind of like, you know, right. Those are iffy words. They dilute the power of the message. So removing those filler words makes them say things more purposefully. It becomes more impactful, it becomes more authoritative as the word that you've used. So I'm with you on removing filler words. Of course, I'm an editor. I get paid for that. That's a big chunk of what I do. So I'm a little bit biased on that. And Riverside might be a little biased on that with their study as well because they have an editing tool inside their service they're going promote with the recording part of Riverside. So I am of course in 100% agreement. I would like to get more into some of the details in the study that you put together from your searcher and your Reddit article, which of course we will have a link to in the show notes@podcastmastermind.com 128 what's another one of these things from your Reddit article that we could highlight real quick?
- [08:06]
B
According to Soundstack, this is back in 2023 podcast listener survey, they had a control group of 4200 participants. The key finding was 41% of weekly podcast listeners say frequent ums make them more likely to stop listening. And the second most cited audio annoyance after excessive ads. So if you have a lot of ads in your show, that apparently is more disruptive, I think, than UMS. And I found that in the almost 12 years I've had KNVP Studios up and running and participating in editing of shows professionally, I've noticed that there's been a huge fall off within the past maybe three years where filler words became less important. Ten years ago, removing filler words were more important to my clients, and they would seek someone out who could do it. Mainly because 10 years ago, people were not trained on how to edit and they didn't want to know how to edit. They were just looking for someone who could do it.
- [09:24]
A
I see where you're going with this now.
- [09:26]
B
We've now gone from being a professional offering a service to now that just about anybody can do it with enough gumption and willpower, they can take care of it themselves. But in that time, I believe that filler words became less important and more important, was just making sure the whole thing flowed. Whereas I wouldn't say they weren't interested in maintaining listenership. But over the past several years, because fewer professionals, editors like ourselves may be seeked out, people want to do it themselves. Now, filler words are the last thing they're going to worry about. Whereas us as professionals, that's the first thing we worry about. So I think the importance has kind of shifted in the past couple of years, that people are no longer seeking out the removal of filler words as much as they were 10 years ago. What would you say?
- [10:45]
A
Hmm, I might be in my own little bubble. I'm not experiencing that at all. Although that might just be because of the influence of video and because removing a lot of fillers from video becomes a problem. A problem in that the video gets all jumpy for long form. That just doesn't work. In fact, jump cuts in video are kind of like filler words and audio. Over time, it becomes aware on your senses, either your eyes or ears, and after a while, you just get exhausted. Another person, I was listening to a different podcast today who had a guest on, who was in a show, a host of a show that I listened to. She edits her own podcast, but then as a guest, she wasn't editing yet because she was a guest on the show, and there was A lot of her filler words coming out in that. Because the host didn't quite edit the same way that she did.
- [11:40]
B
All right.
- [11:41]
A
And. And was the word that became the filler word. And can you believe it? The word and. Because everything was tied together with an and. And it became a bit of an obstruction in my hearing because every time she kept talking, she'd say, and this and that and the next thing. And. And my brain keeps adding things up and became a filler word. Anything can become a filler word when it's repeated over and over again. Whereas if they just took out or silenced an and every once in a while, that would have given my brain a chance to finish listening, absorb what was said. They sound more professional because it's not just tying. And a lot of times the and is really tying together things that aren't related. And I was that. And then this happened. And oh, by the way, you know, it's just. I got to come up with a better example than that. But and became a filler word that then caused me to. At some point, I had to pause it. I had to pause it and take a break. I couldn't believe I did that because I'm like, I could deal with this, right? But then again, as a podcast editor, I'm taught and trained and doing this daily, I'm taking out filler words. So maybe we as podcast editors are just too sensitive to ums and other people. Would you agree with that?
- [12:53]
B
I would totally agree with that. And I find myself on any medium, YouTube, Netflix, anything where you're engaged with media and you hear something that's annoying. For instance, I know that people will upload videos and you watch these reels of people, and the edits are so tight, there's no breathing room at all. That is what we're obviously trying to avoid, but the technology is making it happen. I assume people aren't really editing these things. You know, they're not putting them into Premiere and Avid or anything like that and editing them. They are relying on the tools. Because the whole idea, I understand behind something like TikTok is it's got to be short. So when you remove all the silences and the natural pauses, that drives me insane. And I can't listen to that. I'd rather have the you knows than have it just a complete run on sentence for a minute and a half. And part of our job is we want to make the conversation flow. We want to make it comfortable to listen to natural. Sometimes we have to leave the filler word in sometimes it's on a syllable that you can't edit it out where you want to remove the. Or the. You know, or you. Or like. And it blends in with the syllable of the previous word. You can't do a, you know, a cut really that effective. So, yeah, I think that everything's a run on or everything's an, um. There's no real middle ground. And that's something. As an editor, you're trying to prevent those issues from happening. And I think the tolerance for that has shifted a little bit. Just having this conversation about filler words seems more difficult now than it was 10 years ago. From my end, it seems like it's become passe, like it's not important, which is not something I believe and something that I think that filler words are going to happen.
- [15:17]
A
Yes.
- [15:17]
B
But when you're recording something and you want to be authoritative, filler words should be acknowledged and controlled. I think there should be a controlled burn.
- [15:30]
A
So I gotta ask you the question then. Where does it pay off for the client of ours to pay us for removing filler words among the other things that we do?
- [15:41]
B
I think you have to sell the point that you want to retain listenership, and you want to retain it week over week. Right. You want to keep that one listener who subscribed, who is a fan, because of your content, that you want to portray yourself as an authoritative figure on your subject. And the best way to do that is to be yourself when you're recording. You know, be your natural human self, and then leave it to the editor to polish and remove excess filler words. There's a symbiotic relationship between the client and the editor. You become a team. The more you guys can work together, the more improvement you can make on the show. The more improvement you make on the show, the better your listenership. The better your listenership, the better your potential for making money. The more money you make, the happier you'll be. It's all relational, I think, between the importance, between the Establishing the relationship between the client and the editor and coming to an understanding of what a polished episode sounds like and make it better, improve it.
- [17:04]
A
Yeah, we're not saying filler words are some kind of defect. No way are we saying anything like that. We're saying they can get in the way of an excellent listening experience. And that's what our clients want, is their audience to have an excellent listening experience. And when we identify what that filler word is and we start to remove some of those where it's applicable, I Think that's where it pays off. It's just hard, hard, hard to describe that to somebody who's just thinking they need someone to put the intro outro on and make the volume levels right. Right. Why should I pay you 200 bucks for this? I can use AI. Well, here's why.
- [17:39]
B
Yeah, that's the thing. Filler words themselves are annoying, but there's also awkward phrases. 100%.
- [17:49]
A
Oh, confirmations. Yeah, 100%.
- [17:51]
B
Yeah. To use another awkward phrase. At the end of the day, I've got a whole list of these things
- [17:57]
A
which we can go. In fact, I'll put a link in the show notes so you can send me yours. I'll put mine in there, too. Unnecessary words in a podcast recording.
- [18:04]
B
Actually, I've read your blog on that here.
- [18:08]
A
I'll just read them off real quick, which is one of my crutches. Write, write like, write like, write like. There's no reason for write like. And just like that. The word that is like celery. There's no benefit to the word that in a lot of cases. No, I can't say all cases because it is being used properly in a lot of cases. But when people say things that. That isn't necessary. And I dare people to cut it out and see what it sounds like if they do a good edit with it. I would say that. There's another one. I would say that. Of course you would say that. You're saying it onto a podcast. Right. Your clients or their guests are saying that. So that's how we did that. There's two. That's in there too.
- [18:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [18:53]
A
Anyways, you know, really.
- [18:56]
B
Basically.
- [18:57]
A
Basically, yeah. Any of those adjectives that are just inserted in a conversation certainly are not necessary. I just use one there, really. I mean, just. And, but. And so. And for instance. And so. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you know, I've got more on here. I'm not going to finish it up. They can go read it. They get a little bit long after that. Well, one thing that I noticed is after I. And I think I'm coming back to this point again, is when I realize when that crutch has revealed itself, then I'm able to focus on it better and I'm able to concentrate on making that the target and it makes the rest of the content just flow by quicker because I'm. Okay, there's the filler word for this person. If I take some of these out, it's going to make them sound better. Once I've realized what that is, I Can get more efficient with my work and get a better result in less time. And I know with your tool Audio Core, that puts a highlight on those crutches, those filler words. Tell us a little bit more about how audiocore works. I mean, what's the process Here we go to your website, knvpstudios.com audiocore. We could also just do a Google search for Audio Core Edit and it'll be the first result. Not Audio Core, but Audio Core Edit will be the first result. What do we do then? How does this thing work?
- [20:22]
B
You Visit my website, www.knvpstudios.com audiocore. So you actually upload your audio to my website. It gives you a breakdown of what it does and within 24 hours I get back to you. This is not an online tool that is, you know, spits it out immediately. This is something I have to run through software I developed. You'll receive a file for your particular DAW, of which there's four. You'll receive two files, one with all 100% of everything that it found and then two, that one that you've drilled down to your wants or needs. And then you also get the pre flight checklist showing you exactly what it's found.
- [21:10]
A
That's the best part. That's the fun part.
- [21:13]
B
That's the fun part. Yep.
- [21:14]
A
Do they have to go for a membership there is it per episode. What do you do?
- [21:18]
B
There is no membership and your first episode is free actually.
- [21:22]
A
Okay, so test it out.
- [21:24]
B
Yeah, you can test it out. And then I also have a professional tier where I do everything with the markers. But. But then I also provide professional noise reduction and preparation service. Plus you'll get a transcript.
- [21:39]
A
Oh, so that might be good for the beginner or the person who's editing their own podcast.
- [21:43]
B
Right. If they don't have the tools, like I have access. I actually just upgraded to RX12 advanced, so the izotope just came out with 12. I have Accentize's tools DXRevive Pro and DX Split, which I found just fantastic. So I have tools here in my tool belt that I can provide and clean up your audio as well as provide you with the markers so that you can then take all of that back into your own system and you can edit yourself with cleaned up audio and the markers.
- [22:24]
A
I probably should have sent you this one. Recording ahead. It was incredibly horrible. Couldn't figure out what it was. Went back to the original source, which was recorded with video. I wasn't editing the videos. Just pulled the audio from what they gave me. The gentleman that they recorded, he was in a men's bathroom.
- [22:40]
B
Oh, no.
- [22:41]
A
No headphones, no microphones, just his laptop, or maybe it was even his phone. I don't know. All I know is there's a men's urinal in the background of the video and it explained everything to me. And I could not find, for the life of me figure out how to make it sound any better than it was. It was tremendously bad. Let's just leave it with that. All right, Tom, I appreciate you coming and talking about do filler words really matter? And I'll put all the resources and links, of course. Where do you put them in the show notes? Because that's what we do in the podcasting space.
- [23:11]
B
Thanks, Steve. I appreciate you taking the time talking with me.
- [23:15]
A
All right, It's Steve in the editing bay, post production side of the show. Wanted to share with you what I did differently, and it's something you've probably heard of, and it's not what we were talking about earlier with Audio Core, although I did use that, and I'll share a little bit about it in a second. I ran a transcript and I threw it into Chat GPT and asked for the meat. Where was the content that we would use? Because there was a few start and stops. There was some backroom chat and I wanted to zero in on the good stuff. And I hadn't taken really good notes while we were recording, not like I usually do. I threw it into ChatGPT and it came back with 10 key takeaway segments with the timestamps for those segments. And it even gave me this section called if I were producing this episode with a three key summary and timestamps. But it didn't include a few of the good interactions that I wanted to use, and it would have really cut it down to about 16 minutes. Now that I was given those sections, I was able to clearly see, okay, this is the meat. All the other stuff is the backroom chat or things that we didn't necessarily need. I chunked the audio recording into eight segments. It suggested 10, but I just used eight. And by the way, Descript or reverse side, if you're using those tools already, you know that you can just ask their AI to do the same thing, pull the selections for you. They can even chunk it into clips for you, help you find those media selections and even help you create the narrative. Hindenburg's got a cool thing where if you find the audio in the WAV file, you can save that to that library off to the side. So there's other ways to do this. I'm just telling you how I did it. During the detailed edit of those eight sections, I did a couple of things. I sped up Tom's tempo, which speeds up the way they speak and it gives it a little more energy, does it for me as well. And I did a touch of truncate silence which reduces long pauses. If you know Tom well, then you may have noticed. But the other 99% of you, you didn't notice, did you? And that's the key to being a good editor. So I really want to know if you noticed that Tom seemed a little bit sped up from his normal cadence of speech. Let me know. Send me an email steveodcasteditoracademy.com or just start a chat in the Facebook group podcast Editors Club on Facebook. I also did use Tom's service Audio Core edit assist. I got an epiphany while doing that. I realized what I've known to be true for many years when editing with script based programs. Seeing the filler word during playback, when you're doing the detailed editing, it does help me go faster. It's simply because I can read ahead while listening to the audio. Even at 1.5 speed, which I do edit at sometimes or most of the time. I can see the um coming up because it's labeled that way. I can see the filler word coming up in the transcript, which is in the timeline. That's how it works with Audition, Audacity, Reaper, Hindenburg. That's really handy. It's right there in your timeline. Seeing the words before you get to them will help you to select that area before you even get to it and be able to delete it just like that. Of course you'll want to hear it and make sure it's what you want to delete. But for the most part, if it's standing there by itself, it's low hanging fruit in my world, that's coming out. So the end result is, did this workflow save me time? Yes, I think it saved me time and it saved me, I don't want to say sanity in this case. It was just I didn't feel like editing at the time and I usually love sitting down at my daw and editing. It just. I was not excited because I knew I was going to have to pick out these pieces where we'd stopped, regrouped and started again. And I was able to take that 58 minute interview and cut it down to 22 minutes of what I think was the really good stuff. Thanks for listening to the Podcast Editors Mastermind show. If you'd like to give me feedback on your workflow and what's working for you, hey, I'd love to hear it. I think it's going to become an episode in the near future, so maybe I'll get you on the show. Send me your workflow process to steveodcasteditoracademy.com or just hit me up in the Facebook group. Podcast Editors Club. On Facebook, this is Steve Stewart. Muchos gracias, amigas and amigos. I've been in the podcast industry for a long time. Podcasting since 2010, podcast editing professionally since 2016. And in that time I've learned a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. And I've also learned you can never learn enough. Everything keeps changing. Look at what AI and video is doing in the past couple of years. The Podcast Editor Academy has a goal of helping you to migrate through all of these changes as well. Draw on my over 10 years of professional podcast editing experience in my more than 30 years of running small businesses. Wait, is that right? 30 years? No, wait, it's 35 years. More than 35 years of running small businesses. Get access to me and other resources in the Podcast Editor Academy. Register now for a 249 quarterly membership. Every week I send out a weekly challenge. Get some of that windshield university Zig Ziggler always talked about with our private podcast you can take on the road with you and of course, our monthly office hours where you can get together with other professionals in this industry where the real learning takes place. Join now. Podcasteditoracademy. Com that's podcasteditoracademy. Com.