Edit Day – Paring Tangents

Today, I had a real breeze of an edit for DLC. So much so, I actually wound up paranoid about it.

The thing is, I knew I had a short show to trim down. I had 90 minutes of audio that I wanted to pare down to 60 minutes for the episode. But to my surprise, even scrimping down, paring out literally stage directions and discussing the edit, we still wound up with over 75 minutes of audio, so I went through and checked for more anecdotes and oddness, in case I’d messed up somehow.

Turns out nope.

What happened this time? I think, this time, we just put Jeb and Fox in front of the microphone and asked them to talk, as expansively as they wanted, about topics they cared about. We didn’t get tangents, we didn’t get forks, we didn’t really even get any splits – we just listened to people talking about something they loved, and we wanted to facilitate that conversation.

So, Podcasting Tip: If you tangent a lot on your podcast, and that’s being a problem for edits, consider if maybe you shouldn’t be talking about the thing you’re trying to talk about. And if you’re trying to talk about something, and the other people keep pulling the conversation away, consider if maybe they’re not listening to you, and are bored.