by: AskPat 376 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 376 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business related questions, five days a week.
All right here's today's question from Filmon.
Filmon: Hey Pat. My name is Filmon. I have a podcast called This is Africa podcast. My question relates to intro music and software that we can use to change our intro music. I'm looking to change mine up and was just looking for some guidance. Any sort of direction that you give in regards to changing that up. I love the work you do. Please continue to put out some amazing content and sharing that with the rest of the world. We really need it. We also very much appreciate it. Thanks again, Pat and all the best.
Pat Flynn: Hey Filmon, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. I truly appreciate all the kind words and that means so much to me. I can't wait to help you out today. I know this kind of dance of changing your intro music. I don't know exactly why you changing or are changing your intro music. Perhaps you're just bored with it. It's okay to change. I think that's the big thing to just get over. I know a lot of people who have made changes in their brand. Especially a podcaster who's had so many episodes in the past and just doesn't want to change their intro music because it's been the same for so long. It's okay to change, as long as there's particular reason why you want to do it and there's a good reason to do it and what you're changing to is for improvement. Hopefully that's all in alignment.
I will say that I changed the intro to AskPat, I can't even remember how many episodes ago. But the reason for the change was because apparently—and I didn't know this because I couldn't hear it. But in the first 100-150 episodes, I can't even remember. But apparently in the original intro, if you go back to the older episodes you'll hear it. In the original intro there's apparently at times during the intro, a really high pitched sound that only a percentage of people could actually hear. I started to get these emails from people as soon as the show came out, that we're saying, “I love your show but I can't stand your intro. It hurts my ears.” I was just like, “Oh well, I'll turn it down.”
Well that didn't matter, it was the pitch of this particular note that was in the background. I went to the people over at MusicRadioCreative.com who helped create the intro. I said “I can't hear it but is there any sort of high pitched noise that during this intro?” They actually said, “Yeah, we have that in there but we didn't realize it was hurting peoples' ears. We'll take it out.” They created a new intro for me and after I'd listened to it for the first time, I was like “Wow, this is way too different. I don't like it.” But then I was like, “You know what, this is great and the intro is just the intro.” As long as it's great, it does what it needs to do. It has the same feel as the original and it solved that issue of the high-pitched noise. I didn't worry too much about it and I just have been using that since and people love it and it's great. It's cool. It still has the same hip hoppy, scratchy kind of feel. That's what I was going for.
I don't know again, why you're changing your intro. Just know that it's okay and obviously you know that, because you're asking this question. Now in terms of software, if you wanted to do this yourself, which is option A, I guess. There's a lot of different kinds of software you could use. You can use something like GarageBand would be the simplest if you're on a Mac. It's already built into the computer. If you don't have that, either on a Mac or a PC, you can download Audacity. That can be found at Sourceforge.net/projects/audacity. Again that's Sourceforge.net/projects/audacity. Or you could look it up Audacity on Google. Don't go to audacity.com, they provide audio consulting, that particular company. They specifically say “We don't create software.” I think it's just an issue with the name. But anyway, that links there, that's in the show notes. But also you can't just look up Audacity. It's a multi-track audio editor or recorder. You can take your existing file wherever it came from and you can change it.
Hopefully if you are already in the midst of creating your own intro and editing your own stuff. You might have your original sound file to begin with and maybe it has different tracks, in which you could then start to play around with it a little bit and turn it into whatever it is you want to turn it to. Again that's Audacity, there's also GarageBand. There's also Adobe Audition, which is now in the cloud, which is really cool. That's what I'm using lately to edit my podcasts and stuff. Adobe Audition, I'm using the Creative Cloud 2014 edition. It's been working great, I've been using it for the last few months testing it out. Versus what I was using before which is GarageBand and it's great. I like it because it's a lot faster and it just makes a little bit more sense to me now that I'm getting deeper into audio and professional audio, those sorts of things. But if that's not you, that's fine.
Any sort of audio software will do for whatever you're looking for. Then what you could do is you could download for example, if you're starting from scratch but using similar software. You could download royalty-free music. Again, you want to make sure you don't use like some other band's track or anything like that. You can get into major trouble with that. You want to download royalty-free music. There's AudioJungle.net, there's iStockPhoto.com, which has their own audio section. That's where I got a lot of my stuff for my previous podcasts. Then you can just add a voice track over it to do your intro. That's that.
Now I will say that there's a lot of benefit of having a professional producer create your podcast intro for you. There's a wide range of prices you could pay for that as well. You could go as simple as Fiverr.com. You could pay somebody anywhere between five and 50 bucks to create a nice little intro for you. Make sure you do your due diligence on who you find on there that's producing those audio pieces for you, because you do get what you pay for often on Fiverr. Which is five bucks typically per project or some denomination there above that. But I've heard of great intros on podcasts that have come from Fiverr, you can get good stuff for cheap on Fiverr if you find the right people to do it for you. There's also Elance.com, where you can hire some audio professionals, voice over people, things like that. Depending on how intricate you want to get with the uniqueness of it.
You can also hire the people over at MusicRadioCreative.com. Isabella and Mike do a fantastic job. They're the ones who did the AskPat intro. They also did a lot of other stuff that I've done in the past. The one day business breakthrough podcast intro was done by them as well. Again that's MusicRadioCreative.com. The nice thing about paying somebody else to do it and yes it does cost money. But somebody else does the work for you and then you don't have waste time fumbling around with it yourself. It can be done in a professional manner, especially if you go sort of from a high end with somebody like Music Radio Creative. Which I say high end, but it's just a few hundred bucks. Sometimes even less depending on what it is you get. You check them out again MusicRadioCreative.com.
But those are your options and I would suggest if you have the budget for it to hire somebody else to do it. People are great at it and that's what they do. They love to serve people like you who have amazing podcasts. If you're doing it yourself, like I said some of the software will help you, GarageBand, Adobe Audition, Audacity. I wish you all the best of luck. I can't wait to hear what your intro sounds like in the future. Hopefully after you hear this podcast episode and make some changes based on my advice. Best of luck to you, Filmon, I really appreciate it. Again, just a quick shout out to your podcast, that is the This is Africa podcast. I look forward to that because I just got back from Ghana, Africa for a Pencils of Promise field mission. I just had an amazing time there, fell in love with the country, the people there and very interested in doing more work like that in the future. Filmon, best of luck to you, wish you all the best. Thank you for having your question uploaded to Speakpipe and I'm happy to feature it. Because of that we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt.
For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show and if you are like Filmon, you can get your AskPat t-shirt sent to you again free of charge. Just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.
Thanks so much. I appreciate you and to finish off here's a quote from David Joseph Schwartz. He said, “The success combination in business is: Do what you do better and do more of what you do. See you tomorrow, bye.