Podcasting is a team sport, a creative handoff from planning and pre-production to recording to editing and release. But although being on the mic as a host might be the most forward-facing, no one is a star player on a podcast. Hosts can and should adopt strategies that streamline collaboration and minimize stress, and that starts by avoiding the hurdles that can hold up editing later. 

In this post, we’ll explore practical tips for hosts to make things easier for their producers and editors and foster a more productive and creative partnership—and keep the episodes coming out on time. Work alone? These tips still apply if you’re your own host, producer, and editor. 

I asked three editors from my company Multitude what to do to make their lives easier.

Stop problems before they start

While the best editors can seem like magicians, there’s only so much background noise that they can actually take out. So before you start, double check your audio levels, your equipment, your clothes, and anything else that might get in the way of recording. And this goes double for your guests!

Bren Fredrick, the editor of Multitude’s mythology podcast Spirits, said it best. “Don’t be afraid to ask your guests to make adjustments before and during recording sessions—most people are happy to learn what they can do to sound their best! Next time a guest shows up wearing a stack of clinking bracelets, for instance, tell them you want your audience to hear what they have to say, but their bracelets are talking over them. You, your guest, your editor, and ultimately your audience will all be happier with the end result.”

Before every recording, it should be someone’s job to lead the recording spiel. That might be an engineer who is running the session or one of the hosts. No matter who is doing it, take it seriously; you’ll save yourself and your editors a massive headache (from the jingling of those bracelets).

Retakes require full pauses

One of the advantages of podcasting being an audio medium is the ability to do seamless retakes. Whether you mispronounce a word, get lost in your notes, or get a fact wrong, just restate it and your editor can make your mistakes disappear. That is, if the hosts allow the editors to do their job. Here’s what Brandon Grugle, Multitude’s Head of Production, recommends:

"The best thing on-mic talent can do for me is to, when they make a mistake, actually stop and restart the sentence. It's often pretty difficult to get a natural sounding edit point when we naturally want to correct our mistakes in the moment. This often ends up blurring two words together, like micropho–uhmicrophone. Just start the word over and I can fix it.

If you want to push yourself a step further, avoid a common speech pattern that makes retakes impossible. When two people talk over each other and someone lets the other talk, the talker frequently begins their next sentence by saying, “What I was going to say was…” How can we remove the overtalk and interruption if you refer to the interruption? In order to not confuse the listener, the conversational car crash has to stay in. That one phrase bakes an otherwise easy edit into the podcast, and it can be avoided by stopping fully and starting the sentence cleanly.

A little mic technique goes a long way

One of the things a podcast’s post-production team does to make the audio “sound better” is match everyone’s audio to the same levels. But there’s only so much they can do if you don’t stay on the microphone. Multitude’s senior editor Mischa Stanton put it like this:

“As a podcaster, your microphone is your instrument, so you should learn how to play it! Learning proper microphone technique is a really easy way to both make your recordings sound more professional AND save time later, after the recording is done. While each microphone is a little different, most are designed to pick up the clearest audio right in front of them, head-on, and at a distance of about 6 inches away from your mouth. Be sure to keep yourself at a uniform distance throughout your recording session, and always speak into the microphone at the correct angle! This will create clear, consistent recordings that require less clean-up and fewer adjustments in post-production.”

If the hosts get to be the forward-facing members of the podcasting team, the least they can do is master their instrument!

Send audio immediately to the person who has to work on it

This one is my own tip: send your files immediately. I touched on this when you’re guesting on someone else’s show, but this should mean double for the people you work with on a regular basis. If you’re handing off your audio to someone else, send it immediately. The folks who need to hear this advice the most are the ones most likely to forget, so start training yourself to go to Dropbox, Google Drive, or WeTransfer before you get up from your recording chair.

If you want to be your editor’s best friend, send the audio with a legible and descriptive file name. 

“It'll change from person to person, but my best advice about naming standards is to have one,” Mischa said. “My go-to structure is: ProjectNameOrCode_FirstnameLastname_YYYYMMDD.” 

So if we were recording an episode of the jobs interview show Attach Your Résumé on October 22nd, it’d be “AYR_EricSilver_20241022.wav” with a _1 or _2 at the end if there are multiple files or recordings in a day.

Treat yourself with kindness

Like most podcasters, you might wear many hats and also be your own editor. That doesn’t mean these tips won’t apply to you. Treat yourself like you would treat a coworker whose company you enjoy. Keeping the next stage of production in mind as you’re recording will only make your life easier in the future. Instead of making this a problem for Future You, send a present to Future You with clear retakes, good mic technique and legible file names.