What does it mean to reach 100 podcast episodes?

We’ve just broadcast the hundredth episode of our This Is A Voice podcast. There’s a LOT that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen, so we thought we’d answer some of your questions and share the secrets of making a lasting podcast. You can see the full This Is A Voice podcast playlist here

Why is a podcast important?

We started the podcast for two reasons:

1. I love doing radio interviews, and it was an opportunity to set up our own series
2. People told us they found us scary

The first point still stands – I still love doing radio and podcast interviews, and although the tech was challenging to start with, it’s getting easier.

That second point is one of the main reasons we’ve kept going to 100 episodes. People have told us they are a bit in awe of what we do and have achieved. Yet we’re ordinary people, who have talents and a desire to share our knowledge. We’re also both hard workers. Everything you see in our lives comes from those facts. When you listen to a podcast you are hearing us for real. Listening to someone chat for 30 minutes or so is one of the best ways to discover who they are and what they know, believe and understand.

So the importance of a podcast for us is that people get to know us in a different way from our books, courses and masterclasses.

 

What makes your podcast unique in the singing world?

We love duetting. We both work together at a high level in the same field, and we’re husband and wife. So immediately there’s a relationship and a long history that can’t be faked. We work with the same students, but in different ways. We have a similar knowledge base and approach to our work, but we come from different backgrounds as musicians, which makes for interesting conversations about the practicality of music. And we’re live in the room together when we record, rather than in separate studios, and that’s always a great dynamic.

We’re also both published authors, separately and together, with (currently) 12 books between us on different aspects of singing – the performing side, the teaching side, the anatomy and physiology side, the academic side, working with child, adolescent and adult voices. We have that knowledge at our fingertips, and you’ll often hear us chatting about techniques for different age groups or about professional standards.

We currently work in many different music genres – Gillyanne sang professionally as a classical choral singer and is renowned for her work in classic and contemporary musical theatre. I’ve been employed by national opera companies, touring musicals companies and in the West End, and have coached performers for auditions across the board and in the recording studio. We’ve also coached spoken voice and presentation. It’s not just that we know our stuff, it’s that the stuff we know is totally practical.

And while some of our episodes may have a focus or direction, it’s all real-time conversation – no pre-rehearsed scripts or cranking out the same old stories. We think our guests find that refreshing, if not a bit challenging. We go off-piste so often we’re not sure sometimes there’s a piste!

 

What about your guests? Where do you find them?

We invite guests who we think are experts in their field, and who we think have something to say about what they do. Sometimes we know something about what they do so we can all riff together. Sometimes we don’t know their field so we can ask them the questions that we want to know the answers to. Talking to people who have expertise outside of our own is a brilliant way to learn new ideas, approaches and concepts. We love it when that happens.

For all the guests we’ve had so far, there has been an existing relationship with us. So they’re friends, colleagues, co-workers. One of us will say “ I really want this person to guest” and we’ll discuss it. We don’t both have to know them, and we trust each others’ judgement to find interesting people.

The one exception to the personal relationship rule was Dr Ayan Panja, who recorded two fascinating episodes with us on being a GP (general practitioner) in the medical world. Gillyanne had been engaging with him on his podcast and socials for many months and had read his book, but we’d not met “live”.

So if you’re going to pitch to be a guest on our podcast and we don’t already know you, the shortcut is to

1. Write a bestselling book on a topic we’re interested in
2. Host a great podcast so we can get to know you
3. Engage with us on our blogs and socials!

 

How many hours does it take to produce an episode?

Well currently it’s me doing the recording, editing, uploading and show notes.  So when I first started it was two full days minimum. It has got a bit quicker.

We plan an episode first. If it’s us duetting, that could be a 30-minute conversation, plus background research to confirm any facts. Gillyanne is a planner, so will often do a lot of preparation. I’m more of a freewheeler, so I will create bullet points for myself to riff around. Our topics could come from something that just happened in a lesson, or one of our Registered Teachers has suggested something, or there’s been a headline recently that has sparked curiosity.

Then we record it, transcribe it, edit it, create the video for YouTube and the audio for the podcast platforms, and start on the shorts and excerpts. Now, because of AI’s help in choosing the best bits and formatting the shorts, I can almost finish that in a day.

If we have a guest, there’s a lot more to it: the planning, the invitation, sorting our possible topics and “headlines,” and making sure our guest is comfortable. There’s also an extra stage in the editing process. All our guests get to see the transcript before launch, so if there’s anything they want to edit out, we do it. We want them to have autonomy and to feel comfortable with the episode content.

 

How has the editing changed?

Video editing will always take time, and I do like to be “hands on” with the podcast. I’ve been through four editing apps, but here’s a shoutout to Descript, which was a game-changer. With Descript you’re not editing the video file, you’re editing the transcript. So when you cut a sentence out of the transcript, the relevant part of the video gets cut too. As a writer and wordsmith that’s golden. It makes the editing much faster. Descript will also edit out the ums and ahs and repeat repeat words. It took me some time to get used to the jump cuts (I prefer a more legato look), but since everyone on YouTube was doing it, I bit the bullet.

Descript will also export your edited file into video, audio and transcript at the touch of a button. I’m experimenting now with their new AI feature “Underlord” to speed up the process even more.

The only other app I use is OpusClip, which turns my landscape video with 2+1 speakers into portrait mode with 3 individual speakers in their own box, for YouTube shorts and Instagram. It’s like magic.

 

What has been the most rewarding aspect of building the podcast so far?

There are two. We get to talk to really fascinating people, and listeners get to know us better. We are in your ear for 45 minutes. And so many people have said this. “listening to the podcast made me want to come and work with you”, or “I listen to your podcast and it means a lot to me, I find it so useful and you’re sort of funny”. That’s really nice. I think it allows us to share with people our same passionate purpose with a much, much wider audience.

There were a couple of people on our Accreditation program who came to us specifically because of the podcast; they heard how we talked about things, and they heard us as people rather than seeing us as authors or voice experts. One thing that people tend to spot is that we aren’t afraid to say “We don’t know”. We aren’t afraid to say we’ve changed our mind on a few things. And we also aren’t afraid to tackle some pretty tough topics.

 

Has the podcast made you more effective and strategic as voice trainers and coaches?

Well, it has and it hasn’t. The byline in our description of the podcast says, Jeremy and Gillyanne “have been chatting about voice for more than 20 years – this time they’ve switched the microphone on”. And that is absolutely accurate. We have these conversations all the time. We’ve been having these conversations over breakfast for 25 years. So, in a way, the fact that we get to talk about voice training, about voices in general, about techniques about music, about performing, we do that already.

When we have guests, and we get the opportunity to ask them questions, find out what they think, find out how they work, what their take is on certain things. And quite often their take is it might be aligned with what we do, but it might be slightly different, or it might even be something very different. And I know that’s happened at least a couple of times in the podcast – something that changes how we work or how we teach because we have so much amazing input from experts around the world.

The podcast has also become a resource for our teacher training. Sometimes we’ll point our teachers towards a particular episode on the exact topic we’re working on that week.

We’ve always been able to break down concepts and explain techniques, but I think the chat aspect of podcasting has refined that. It might interest you to know that we’ve got to the stage now where I do hardly any cuts. What you’re hearing is pretty much a stream of consciousness. And if you see any cuts on the video, it’s just to cut out a few hesitations or when we repeat a word because we can’t quite grasp what it is that we want to say. We’ve worked together for so long that we know when somebody has come to the end of this thought, needs some help, or wants clarification.

What would surprise your listeners about life behind the scenes of the podcast?

I am actually quite shy. And unless I’m in a performing situation, and I do see the podcast as a performing situation, I’m shy. So I wouldn’t necessarily talk to people or or ask them for a conversation. The fact that I have a podcast means that I’m much more comfortable saying “Would you like to come on the podcast and talk to me?”.

As for Gillyanne: “Some people might be surprised that I over-prepare like mad. And sometimes I really have to stop myself. I have a list in front of me to ‘get through this’. Having the guests has really helped because when you have a guest, you listen and respond to them. That means you can’t always follow your plan!”

We don’t like being on video. The first series was audio only, and yes, occasionally, we recorded in our jammies. It took a lot of persuading for us to go on video. Gillyanne still hates it if she has a bad hair day. So do I.

But there’s something powerful about seeing the way we chat and interact that makes us more human. So we’re sticking with the video.

 

What problems have you had?

OMG can we talk about broadband? We are currently, for a variety of reasons, producing the podcast on my 2Mbs phone signal. We live in the country right on the Welsh border (the border runs through the river in the garden). And we are too close to the exchange to get superfast broadband, which is bizarre, but that’s the rule. Our wired broadband is down to 11 Mbs but in my office (some distance from the router so wifi is dodgy, and separate ringmain so I can’t use the powerline adapters) it’s shaky.

UPDATE: Just today I had Starlink fitted. It was a risk because we’re surrounded by 30metre trees, but so far so good. We’ve jumped from 2Mbps to 250Mbps. I’ll take it!

And a shoutout to the country noises. You’ll occasionally hear chickens in the background. We have five chickens now, and they love the sound of our voices. They will come and congregate outside the door and squawk

 

Do you have any tips for people starting a podcast?

Read my book! The book is called Just How Boring Are You? And it’s how to be a great podcast guest. There’s also a lot of information in there about being a podcast host as well. The needs are similar, but the podcast host has a much wider range of things they have to do. Be sure that you want to do it. I read recently that only 16% of podcasters manage to produce more than 10 episodes. And most don’t even get past three, because they realize just how hard it is to create a podcast, not just once but over and over again. When we first started we were doing weekly – doing a weekly episode was a killer. So we’re now doing approximately fortnightly. That works for us within our work life.

You’ve really got to know what it is that you’re trying to achieve. You need to know why you’re doing it and what your angle or brief is. You might not find your brief for the first four or five podcasts, because it certainly took us some time. If you listen to Episode one, you’ll hear that we had a biscuit tin. That went after about episode three, because we realized it wasn’t necessary. What was necessary was an identifier. So here’s another shout out to Connagh Tonkinson who wrote and recorded our theme tune. And I love our theme tune. His brief was a podcast theme tune that lasts about 30 seconds, and it needs to make me smile every time I hear it. He absolutely nailed it.

Get as many questions as possible from your listeners.  We love questions. Questions really help us to find out where you are what you know what you want to know, how we can help. If there’s anything that we can share or explain or clarify, we love doing that. So please ask us more questions.

If we could fill this room with all of our podcast listeners, and we only had one thing we could say, it would be to tell us more. Ask questions, give us feedback, let us know what you would like in the podcast. We love your feedback, and not because it’s about Oh, you’re wonderful. The feedback helps reflect the value of what we’re offering to our listeners, and I think it also helps us frame what we might do in the future. So that’s what I’d like

 

What about the next 100 episodes?

What are we planning?More guests, deeper conversations, more shorts, more social media. Gillyanne is mentally lining up some really interesting people to talk to. And that is something that actually gives me a lot of pleasure, particularly people who are, you know, completing new research and so forth. And also because what makes really good singing teaching and vocal coaching and choir leadership. It’s very much a multidisciplinary approach. And so I’m looking forward to having more people in that area to talk about how their work impinges on singing voice can be with that.

What would you like us to talk about next?

 

You can see the full This Is A Voice podcast playlist here