← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E682 - Podcasters, Silence is Golden - Don't Kill The Space, What Mozart Can Teach You About Podcasting
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Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. It's Dave with you now. We just talked about having silence in your podcast when your guest is speaking. But what about you as a host? Oh, you're killing me with your, with your. I want to remove every piece of silence. I can't have any dead air. Oh, my audience will leave. Well, no, no, they're not gonna leave. And you can be a little bit annoying when you remove all of the gaps because all your words really go fast together and you're not really breaking words and you go from one word to the next word, and it's a big long thing. And all people are going like, why is he saying and what's he talking about? What? And that's what's happening are people are going to these tools like Descript and Riverside and blah, blah, blah, and they're saying, hey, take on all of humanity and make me sound like an AI podcast. That's what you're doing. You're pushing the button, going, I want to be less human. Well, we're humans. We pause, we think, we stop, we think, we stop, we talk, we. We talk and we think and we stop and we pause. It's what we do. We're humans, so don't remove the humanity from your podcast. And so what I did. So I went back into the archive of the how to podcast series and I brought back this episode where I'm addressing the idea that we, as hosts of the show, maybe as just a solo podcaster, no guest, we need to embrace the gaps in the silence in our show. It allows our audience to stand step with us. It gives them a chance to catch up with us. And we don't get too far ahead of our audience. When we remove all the gaps and we sound like we're running down a hill at full speed trying to have a conversation, it doesn't work. Silence is golden. And there's a lot of ungolden podcasts out there that have removed every ounce of silence. See, here's the extreme. We have people who say, don't edit your podcast, which I think is absurd. And then we have people who over edit their podcast to the point where you've removed every trace of humanity, and somewhere in the middle is a guy named Dave who's going, can we just do a little bit without overdoing it? It's the how to podcast series. I'm going to listen to this with you. And let's, let's talk about silence, which sounds ironic. Anyways, here we go. Welcome back to The Daily Dave here on the how to podcast series. Happy to have you back again. Today we're going to talk about silence. Did that feel weird? Yeah. Silence. Yeah. Doesn't that feel odd just to have that moment of what. What happened? We're gonna talk about silence here on the podcast and how silence can be your friend. It really can be. The Daily Dave here on how to podcast series. It's all about silence in your podcast. Here we go. So as a musician, when I come to my instrument to play, I play guitar, bass, drums, piano. Been playing for 42 plus years. But when I come to the music, learning new music many times as a musician, we focus on the notes and the chords and the. The structure of the song and all the things that need to be played. But a good musician will tell you that it's not just the notes you play, but it's the silence between the notes that are equally as important to a great song. Take that thought for a second. The silence between the notes are equally as important as the notes themselves. That's an interesting thought. One of the things that Mozart is credited for writing is he said the music is not in the notes, but in the silence between. The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between. How does this relate to podcasting? Dave? This isn't a music podcast. This is a podcast about podcasting. One thing that I find quite distracting as a listener to podcasts and I listen to a lot of podcasts, is when people use tools or maybe bad editing to remove the silence, to remove the brakes. Our voices. And when we speak, we have a natural cadence to our speech. Our words aren't jumbled or smashed together. We're not in a rush. We're here to create content that's listenable for our audience. One of the pieces of feedback that I'm getting continuously now is that people like to come to my show because they feel like it's not rushed, they feel like it's soothing. I've heard lots of interesting comments around the pace of my podcasts, and I do that on purpose because as a musician, I find that it's a space between notes where the true beauty of a song lies. So what I want to do for you is I'm going to read to you a passage, and I'm going to read it as if I would read it to you on the podcast. And then I'm going to edit that same passage and show you the difference, because I want you to hear the difference between a. Something done with. With cadence and with Breaks and with space versus what I'm hearing in podcasting and with all the great tools that are out there. And there's amazing great tools. Some of them will actually remove silence, like just delete them. And I can tell when I listen to a podcast that uses these types of tools because everything gets cut really, really close and almost robotic. So my challenge to you is just to listen to these two and make a decision on what you feel works best for your show. And again, whether you are editing for your on your own or you're going to hand this to somebody for editing, I want you to have a sense of what you like for your show. So here's two examples. First, I'm just going to read as if I was doing this on my show. And I'm going to leave the space in. Okay, I'm purposely going to leave the space and I might exaggerate the space just a little bit so you get a sense of really what I'm talking about. But I want you to have an idea of what it sounds like and what it feels like for you as you listen. I want you to see if you feel. Do you feel rushed as a listener? Do you feel like you're able to comprehend what I'm saying? Are you able to grasp the topic or the quote? Because you've never read this before, you've never heard this information. Are you able to digest this and then compare that to an edited version of the exact same thing and how you feel once you hear that? Okay, it's a little experiment. You are the expert here. It's your ears that are going to tell you what sounds good to you. So here we go. Are you guys ready? Okay, we're gonna go into this passage. I'm gonna read it to you the way I would do it and then edited. Okay? And I'll have a little noise in between the two so you understand that we've switched. But here we go. This is part of what Mozart may have been trying to convey with his somewhat nebulous statement. It's something that every good improviser or composer knows. You write or play a note and then. Then where does the next note come from? The silence. But only if you're listening for it. Otherwise our playing becomes a stream of run on sentences that has no meaning, no subtlety and no breath. This is part of what Mozart may have been trying to convey with his somewhat nebulous statement. It's something that every good improviser or composer knows. You write or play a note and then there Then where does the next note come from? The silence. But only if you're listening for it. Otherwise our playing becomes a stream of run on sentences that has no meaning, no subtlety, and no breath. Okay, so did you pick up on that? How did you feel when you compare the first version to the second version? Did you feel rushed? Did you feel anxious? Did you feel like, oh, wow, that's a lot of words in a short amount of time. I've heard a lot of podcast gurus say that you need to edit out all the silence in your podcast to give back time to your listener. Okay, I agree with the fact that we need to be concise with our podcast and not have huge, big gaps of nothing. I get that. I like that as a listener. But what I don't want is to feel rushed, to feel on the edge of my seat so that I can't grasp what's going on. It's not how we normally talk. How would you talk around your kitchen table? How would you talk to your friend at a cafe over coffee? Would you be rushed? Would you not have breaks in your thought? Would you not take your voice up and down and back and have a gallop to your voice? Any great song that you listen to is not one thing all the way through. It's got dynamics, quiet, build up, louder part, slows down, speeds up. There's just this feeling that you're going somewhere. And I think when we take out all the silence in our podcast, it makes for a very odd feeling and experience for our listener. Always, always, always create a podcast for the listener. That's your main focus. So don't give your listener anxiety by making something that's so edited. Takes the heart out of it, takes the feeling out of it. Those dramatic pauses help to slow down and let your listener catch up. Think about it. If you're going to do a presentation live, when we get nervous, we tend to speed up, slow down, plan out your podcast, think about what you want to talk about, have confidence in your topic and your ability to share that topic and give yourself room to think. It'll drastically reduce your ums, your ahs, your those little filler words you put in as you get further ahead than your brain can keep up with. Giving yourself space will allow you to have a nice, concise podcast that doesn't feel rushed. It gives your listeners the chance to stay with you and have a great experience listening to your show. So again, if you're going to edit your own podcast, don't kill all of the space. If you're going to give your podcast to somebody to edit for you. Ask them. Please don't remove all the space. Leave me some space in my podcast. You're the host, your show, and I hope the comparison between the two sentences are two little examples there, give you a sense and some context about what you want for your show. Again, I can't tell you what to do for your show. There's gurus that have been around forever. I can't tell you what to do with your show. It's your show. You do whatever you want. It's your show. Please remember that. But I just want to give you an example of maybe how some silence that what happens between. Note to note, that gap in between is really important in music. And I really believe it is also important right here in podcasting. So I want to empower you with that. And again, if you need help with your podcast, you're looking for an editor to help you. You can go to some of those sites and meet a stranger and try to build a relationship with them to edit your podcast. I have my hand up. I would love to help you. Let's work together and come up with a plan that works for you. I'd love to be a part of your team and do your editing for you. But if you just need some advice on your podcast and maybe you want somebody to listen to it, I'd love to help you with that as well. Okay. HowToPodcast CA is a website and I'd love to meet you there. Let's have a conversation and don't forget to add some silence in your next episode. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being part of the podcast. So I get asked quite often, usually at the end of a podcast, like right now, Dave, how can we help you? Like, how can we as a listener, like support the show? Can we come rake your leaves? Can we cut the grass? Shovel the snow? Watch your dog help you move? What can we do? Clean your dishes? Oh, that'd be interesting. Well, if you don't, if you can't do that because you know you're in Poland, maybe you can help us by supporting us with our Buy me a coffee. It's right there on our website and you know, it just will help us to a stay fueled because, you know, we drink a lot of coffee around here and it helps the show. So if you want to help us, it's out of the goodness of your heart. I can tell you that listening to the podcast to this point, you've already helped us so much. But I Do have people saying, dave, I'd love to. To give back something small, even just to the show. Buy me a coffee. Link is on our website, how to Podcast Ca. And you can support the show that way. It would mean a lot to have you on our team supporting what we do here. If you find value in the show, then that's great. Share the show, tell somebody about it. And when somebody says, dave, I want to start a podcast, who should I check out? Oh, you should go check out the how to podcast series because of all the great co hosts and all the things that happen here, the meetups, everything. And I would appreciate that. And then fill her a cup once in a while if you can. But again, thank you so much for being here and supporting the how to podcast series. Take care. Talk soon. Hey, you're still here. That's awesome. So I do bonus content at the end of the episodes just because you're here, and I want to encourage people to listen longer. So you've proven my point. It's like that bus stop bench that you drive by every day, and you look at it, you're like. And it says right on there. You just prove that buses, bus, signs work. You're like, yeah, you got me. This is what I'm doing at the end of the episode to encourage people to listen longer. And I appreciate you being here. I was talking to a podcaster, and they were saying that they feel like they're being judged, and they were working with another podcast guru, and it was just judgment after judgment after judgment, just. Just beating them down like they couldn't do anything right. And they kept on telling this podcaster that they should do this and they should do that, and they got shoulded. That's a word. Now, should Id be careful how you say that. Should it to death. And they're like, I'm done with this guru, because they don't build me up. They just tear me down all the time. So they came to me, and I'm thankful they did, because instead of should, I use the word could. See, should as a word is a gatekeeping term. And if you don't do it their way, you're not doing it right. So replace the word should with could. And I try to give you options. I don't tell you this is the single way to do whatever you want to do. I give you options. We talk through the options. We. We discuss, entail them to your podcast and what you need. So if you're tired of the shoulds, it's time for the kuds. And reach out to me at howtopodcast ca. Let's get you away from the judgment. Let's get you away from feeling like a big crap thing because people are just crapping on you all the time. Let's. Let's help you. Let's. Let's help you with your show. HowToPodcast CA links right there from a calendar. I'd love to help you anytime. Reach out. Let's move you from should to could. Can't wait to talk to you. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.