There are not many towns where you can say R.E.M. and the B-52's both came out of the local music scene and have nobody look at you funny, right, and Athens is one of them, which is probably why so many people there still talk about music the way other towns talk about football. Bands talk about it after a show, venue owners talk about it while they count the door, managers and promoters talk about it over coffee, and a good chunk of that talk is better than most of what gets published as a music podcast. The hosts from this world who reach out to us usually have a very particular problem, which is that their show is half conversation and half music, and every editor they have tried either treats it like a talk show and flattens the songs, or treats it like a record and makes the conversation sound strange.
I run Pixel Samy Podcast, the editing side of our company in Dubai, and this post is my view of what an Athens music show needs from its editor, from the live session mix to the awkward rights questions to the college town audience that keeps changing every few years.
Who in Athens is actually starting a music podcast?
Mostly independent bands who want a home for their stories, venue owners and promoters who know everyone in town, and music business people like managers and engineers who have years of practical knowledge nobody ever wrote down.
Each of those shows sounds different. A band's show tends to be loose, funny, full of inside jokes and the occasional song played live in the room, and the edit has to protect that looseness instead of trimming it into something tidy. A venue owner's show, right, is more of an interview format, the touring band that came through last week, the local act about to put out a record, the history of a room, and the guest list is the whole draw. A music business show is closer to education, how splits work, how booking really happens, what a manager actually does, and those listeners want clarity more than atmosphere.
There is also the student layer, because the University of Georgia is in Athens, and a lot of student musicians, student radio people and music business students start shows of their own. That means the pool of new hosts, and of new listeners, refreshes every autumn when another class shows up on campus. Our general approach to hosts who pick up an instrument mid episode lives on the musician podcast editing page, so I will skip that ground here, right, and stay with what is particular to Athens.
What makes a live session episode hard to edit?
A live session episode carries two completely different kinds of audio, the conversation and the performance, and they need opposite treatment, so the editor has to know exactly where one ends and the other begins.
The conversation wants to sound close, warm and even, with the levels steady so nobody has to reach for the volume, and that usually means cleanup, levelling and gentle compression. The performance wants to sound like a band in a room, with dynamics, with the quiet verse actually quiet and the chorus actually loud, and if you run the same processing over it that you ran over the talk, the song collapses into a flat wall. To be very honest, this is the single most common thing I hear wrong on music podcasts, the songs sound squashed because somebody treated the whole file as speech. If you play in a band you have heard this exact problem on your own phone recordings, haven't you, where the talking between songs is fine and the songs themselves sound like they are coming through a wall.
So we split it, right, the talk sections get the speech treatment and the music sections get mixed as music from the separate tracks if you recorded them, and then the whole episode is brought to a consistent loudness so the jump from talk to song does not blow anyone's earbuds out. Apple publishes its audio requirements for podcasts, which recommend overall loudness around minus 16 LKFS, and that is the kind of target the finished master is aimed at.
Talking about songs you do not own
Rights are where music shows get nervous, right, and it is fair to be nervous, because who owns what in a song can be split between writers, publishers and labels, and a cover played live on your show belongs, in part, to somebody who was never in the room. I am an editor and not a lawyer, so I will not tell you what you are allowed to publish, and that question belongs to the band and whoever handles their rights.
What I can tell you is how we handle it on the editing side. The catch here is that the edit is the last point where the decision is cheap, because once an episode is live with a cover in it, pulling it out means a re-export and a re-upload, so we flag every performance in the cut and you decide, before publishing, which songs stay, which get trimmed to a short excerpt, and which come out entirely. And we never drop a track lifted from somebody else's record into your intro or your transitions. And if you play your own originals, keep the session multitracks, because a clean live version of your own song is a clip you can use for years.
Does a music show in Athens need an editor based in Athens?
Not for the editing itself, because once the session is recorded the work is listening, cutting and mixing, and that can be done properly from anywhere, as long as the editor listens to the whole episode and understands music.
Where local matters, right, is the recording. If you want an engineer to mic the band, run the board and make sure every channel is captured cleanly, that person has to be in the room in Athens, and a good one is worth every dollar, because no editor can mix a track that was never recorded. Once the files exist, though, they can travel. I wrote a longer piece for people weighing this exact choice, on whether the editor needs to live near you at all, and the practical side of working with a team in another timezone is on our remote podcast editing page.
How do late night recordings reach a team in Dubai?
You upload the session files to a shared folder when you are done, often after a gig, and since Athens runs on Eastern Time and Dubai is eight or nine hours ahead, even a late upload arrives during our day.
Music people record late, right, after soundcheck, after a show, after the bar closes, so the time difference works in your favour more than you might expect. Dubai is 9 hours ahead of Eastern Time while US clocks are on standard time and 8 hours ahead while daylight saving is on, so 7 pm in Athens is 4 am in Dubai in the winter and 3 am in the summer, and a session uploaded at midnight in Athens lands at 9 am Dubai time in winter or 8 am in summer. Multitrack sessions are big, and the folder takes them at whatever size they come in, so you never have to bounce stems down before sending. Two days after the files arrive, the first cut comes back to you, and after one pass of your notes the revised version follows a working day later.
What a college town audience changes about the edit
An audience full of students behaves differently from one full of commuters, right, because a big part of it finds you on a phone, in a short vertical clip, between classes, and only some of those people ever sit through a full hour. So for an Athens show I would plan the clips from the start, the funny story about a van breaking down, the thirty seconds of a song played live, the venue owner explaining how a band actually gets booked, and the long episode becomes the place those people land once a clip has earned their attention.
The other thing a college town does is turn its audience over. Every year a class graduates and a new one arrives, so the show cannot assume everyone knows the history, and the intro or the first minute of an episode should give a newer listener enough context to follow along, without boring the regulars who have been around since the old venues. Our page on podcast audio cleanup is worth a look if your sessions were recorded in rooms that echo, which in a town full of old buildings and back rooms is most of them.
The talk should sound like a kitchen and the songs should sound like a stage, and the edit's whole job is keeping those two apart.
When should you hire the sound engineer down the street instead?
If the main thing you are making is a live recording that has to stand on its own as music, something a band will release, then you want a music mixing engineer in Athens, not a podcast editing team in Dubai.
That is an honest line, and I would rather draw it clearly. We mix live session songs well enough for a podcast episode and for clips, with the dynamics intact and the balance right for a listener on headphones, but a record has a different standard, with hours spent on a single song, automation on every vocal line, and a mastering stage of its own. If that is what the session is really for, a local engineer is the better hire, and you can still send us the talk sections afterwards.
How much should an Athens band budget for each episode?
Plan on 199 dollars per hour-long episode if your show is mostly talk in front of one camera, which is our Starter plan, and treat a live session shot from several angles as Studio work that we price once we see the setup.
Bands do not have big budgets, I know that, and the reason I like per episode pricing for them is that it follows the way bands actually work, which is in bursts, a run of episodes around a release, then quiet while everyone is on tour or back at the day job. There is no retainer to cancel and no minimum, so you can stop and start without penalty. The full grid for both plans, including longer episodes and the monthly discount, is in our pricing section. If you are curious how a show with a different musical tradition handles the same issues, our post on podcast editing for Bristol country and roots music shows is a close cousin, and the post on podcast mixing and mastering goes deeper on the loudness side.
The Georgia Theatre is the kind of well known downtown room in Athens where a band gets listened to properly, and a music podcast from this town deserves that same kind of listening, which means an editor who can hear where the conversation stops and the song begins and treats each one the way it deserves. So yeah. That's my way of saying it.