Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our studio in Jerusalem with my brother. It is February twentieth, twenty twenty-six, and the air is crisp, the coffee is hot, and the audio interface is glowing a beautiful shade of amber.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. It is a beautiful day to talk about the invisible architecture of sound, Corn. You know, I was just looking at some new research on psychoacoustics this morning, and it is incredible how much our brains fill in the gaps of what we hear. We are not just listening with our ears; we are listening with our expectations.
That is a perfect lead-in for today. Our prompt comes from Daniel, and he is diving deep into the technical weeds of how we present ourselves to the world. Daniel is looking into equalization, or EQ, specifically for podcasting. He is experimenting with using AI to generate target EQ profiles, setting up complex vocal chains for things like de-essing and compression, and he is wondering if there is a standard format that works across different digital audio workstations, or DAWs.
This is such a great rabbit hole, Corn. Daniel mentioned he has been recording a three-minute sample of his voice, running it through an AI tool to get a spectrogram, and then trying to figure out a target EQ based on that data. It is a very modern, data-driven approach to a very old, artistic problem. It is like trying to use a map of the stars to figure out why your living room feels a bit chilly.
Right, and it raises a lot of questions about the philosophy of sound. How much of our "sound" is the gear, how much is the room, and how much is just the physical shape of our vocal cords? Daniel noted that sometimes he listens back and thinks he sounds too nasal or just not like himself. I think we have all had that experience where you hear a recording of yourself and you go, wait, is that really what I sound like to the world? It is a form of auditory dysmorphia.
It is the classic voice confrontation. When we speak, we hear our voices through bone conduction, which adds a lot of low-end resonance. When we hear a recording, we are only hearing the air conduction. It sounds thinner, higher, and more "nasal" to our own ears, even if it is perfectly accurate to everyone else. But when it comes to EQ, we are really talking about the balance of frequencies. If you think of your voice as a spectrum from the deep bass rumbles of a sub-woofer up to the high-pitched whistles of sibilance, EQ is the tool we use to tilt that spectrum.
So let us start with Daniel's AI experiment. He is talking about generating a target EQ profile based on a sample. Herman, as our resident gear-head, what do you think about the idea of using a spectrogram to define a personal EQ? Is the AI actually seeing something we can't hear?
It is fascinating, but it is also a bit of a double-edged sword. There is a technology called match EQ that has been around for a while in plugins like iZotope Ozone or FabFilter Pro-Q three. You take a reference track, say a professional narrator like George Guidall or a podcaster with a voice you really admire, and the software analyzes their long-term average spectrum. Then it looks at your recording and says, okay, to make Corn sound like this narrator, I need to boost the two hundred hertz range by three decibels and cut the five kilohertz range because your microphone is a bit too bright.
But that assumes the goal is to sound like someone else. Daniel is talking about sounding like a better version of himself. He wants to fix the "nasality" he hears.
Exactly. And that is where the modern AI tools of twenty twenty-six come in. Tools like Sonarworks SoundID Voice or the latest Adobe Podcast enhancements don't just match you to one person; they match you to a statistical model. These models have analyzed millions of hours of high-quality speech. They know what a "clear" voice looks like on a graph. When you feed it your three-minute sample, the AI is looking for deviations from that ideal curve of intelligibility and warmth. It is looking for "resonances"—those sharp peaks where your room or your microphone might be ringing.
Is there a danger of losing the unique character of a voice if we all aim for the same AI-optimized curve? I mean, if everyone uses the same "ideal" profile, do we all end up sounding like the same person?
Absolutely. That is the "uncanny valley" of audio. If everyone uses the exact same target curve, we end up with what people call the "corporate podcast voice." It is very clean, very compressed, very bass-heavy, and sometimes a little bit clinical. It loses the "texture" of the human being. But for someone like Daniel, who feels his recordings on his OnePlus phone are sounding too nasal, an AI-generated profile can be a great sanity check. It can point out, "Hey Daniel, you have a huge spike around one point two kilohertz that is making you sound like you are talking through a plastic straw."
Let's talk about that nasality for a second. Daniel specifically mentioned reducing it. Where does that live in the frequency range? If I am looking at an EQ plugin right now, where do I put my cursor to "fix" a nasal voice?
Usually, nasality lives in that middle-upper range, somewhere between eight hundred hertz and one point five kilohertz. If you have too much energy there, it sounds "honky" or "pinched." It is the sound of the soft palate not fully closing or the sound reflecting off the hard surfaces of a small, untreated room. But you have to be careful. If you cut too much in that range, the voice loses its "presence" and starts to sound hollow or "scooped." It is all about surgical precision. You don't want to use a wide brush; you want a narrow "Q" value.
A "Q" value? Explain that for the non-engineers.
Think of the "Q" as the width of your EQ adjustment. A low Q is a wide, gentle hill that affects a lot of frequencies. A high Q is a sharp, narrow needle. For nasality, you want a high Q. You want to find that one specific "honky" frequency and just tuck it down a few decibels.
And he mentioned de-essing too. That is for those sharp "S" sounds, right? I know I struggle with those sometimes, especially if I am tired and my articulation gets a bit lazy.
Right. Sibilance. That usually lives much higher up, between five kilohertz and eight kilohertz, though for some people it can go as high as ten kilohertz. A de-esser is actually a specialized compressor. It does not just turn down the volume of everything; it only turns down those specific high frequencies when they cross a certain threshold. It is like a tiny, super-fast volume knob that only cares about the letter S, the letter T, and the "ch" sounds. If you use a regular EQ to fix sibilance, you just make the whole recording sound dull. A de-esser only acts when the problem occurs.
It is interesting that Daniel is looking for a "vocal chain." For our listeners who might not be familiar with the term, a vocal chain is just the sequence of effects you apply to the audio. Usually, it is EQ, then maybe some dynamics processing like compression, and then maybe some final polishing. Herman, what is your "gold standard" chain for a podcaster starting out?
The order is vital, Corn. My standard chain always starts with a High-Pass Filter, also known as a Low-Cut. I set it right at eighty or a hundred hertz. There is no useful human speech down there anyway. All you find below eighty hertz is the rumble of the air conditioner, the sound of a truck driving by outside, or the "thump" of Daniel hitting his desk. By cutting that out first, you save your other plugins from having to "work" on sounds that shouldn't be there.
That makes sense. If the compressor is "seeing" a low-end thump, it will squash the whole voice to compensate for a sound the listener can't even really hear.
Exactly! So, step one: High-Pass Filter. Step two: Corrective EQ. This is where Daniel would fix his nasality. You find the bad frequencies and cut them. Step three: De-esser. Clean up those "S" sounds before they hit the compressor. Step four: Compression. This is the "glue." It levels out the volume so the quiet whispers and the loud laughs all sit at a similar level. And then, step five: Tonal EQ. This is where you add a little "sparkle" or "warmth" if you want it.
Daniel asked a really technical question about transportability. Is there a standard EQ format that works across different DAWs? Like, if he sets up a profile in Audacity, can he move it to Reaper or Adobe Audition or Hindenburg?
This is the part where it gets a little frustrating. In the world of audio, we have standards for the plugins themselves—like V-S-T three, Audio Units, or the newer C-L-A-P format—but we don't have a universal "preset" file that every EQ can read. If you use the built-in "Graphic EQ" in Audacity, it saves a text file or an X-M-L file that Reaper has no idea how to interpret.
So he is stuck re-typing numbers?
Not necessarily. The "pro move" is to use third-party plugins. If Daniel uses a free plugin like the TDR Nova from Tokyo Dawn Labs, or a paid one like FabFilter, he can save a preset within that plugin. Since those plugins can be opened in almost any DAW, his settings will travel with him. He could record in Audacity on his phone, move the file to Reaper on his desktop, open the same plugin, and his "Daniel Voice" preset will be right there.
What about "Impulse Responses"? I've heard people talk about those for capturing the "sound" of a room or a piece of gear. Could Daniel capture his EQ as an I-R?
He could! That is a bit more advanced, but it is a very clever workaround. An Impulse Response is basically a digital "fingerprint" of a frequency response. You can use a "convolution" plugin to apply that fingerprint to any audio. It is a very accurate way to move a complex EQ curve from one system to another, but it is "static." You can't easily tweak the individual frequencies once the fingerprint is made. Honestly, for most podcasters, the best way to be transportable is just to know your numbers. If you know you always need a three-decibel cut at one point two kilohertz with a Q of two, you can dial that into any EQ in ten seconds.
Let's get to the other big part of Daniel's prompt. He asked how much a personal EQ profile depends on the specific microphone or device. This is huge because he is recording on a OnePlus Android phone right now. If he moves to a dedicated studio microphone, like a Shure S-M seven-B or a Rode PodMic, does his EQ profile become useless?
It doesn't become useless, but it definitely needs a major overhaul. Think of it this way: your voice has a natural frequency response, but every microphone also has its own "color" or "frequency graph." A phone microphone is a tiny, tiny piece of hardware. It is designed primarily for "intelligibility" in phone calls, not for high-fidelity recording. Phone mics often have a massive "presence boost" in the upper mids to make speech cut through background noise, and they usually have very little low-end because the tiny microphone capsule just cannot physically capture those long, slow bass waves.
So if Daniel creates an EQ profile to "fix" his voice on his phone, he is actually creating a profile that fixes his voice "plus" the phone's limitations.
Right. It is a combined correction. If he then takes that same EQ—which likely has a big bass boost to compensate for the phone—and applies it to a high-end condenser microphone that already has a lot of bass, his voice is going to sound like he is speaking from inside a giant wooden barrel. It would be incredibly muffled. The EQ would be trying to fix problems that no longer exist.
So, is there a baseline? Can you have a "Personal EQ" that is just for "you," regardless of the mic?
I think you can have a personal "strategy." For example, I know that my voice tends to get a bit "muddy" around three hundred hertz. No matter what microphone I use, I usually look at that area first. But the "amount" I cut will change. On a dark, warm microphone, I might need a five-decibel cut. On a bright, thin microphone, I might only need one decibel. You are correcting the same fundamental "problem" in your vocal anatomy, but the "dosage" of the medicine changes based on the gear.
It is like wearing glasses. Your prescription is for your eyes—that is your "personal EQ"—but the frames and the lenses might change how the world looks. You are still correcting the same fundamental issue, but the implementation depends on the hardware you are wearing that day.
That is a perfect analogy, Corn. And we have to talk about the "Proximity Effect" too. This is something Daniel will encounter if he switches from a phone to a dedicated mic. When you get really close to a "directional" microphone, the bass frequencies get boosted naturally by the physics of the sound waves hitting the diaphragm.
We have talked about this before, but it is worth repeating for Daniel. If you are two inches from the mic, you sound like a late-night radio host with that deep, velvety bass. If you are two feet away, you sound thin and distant.
Exactly. So if Daniel creates an EQ profile while he is holding his phone six inches from his face, and then he does his next recording with the phone sitting on a table three feet away, the EQ won't work. The distance has changed the frequency balance of the source audio. This is why "consistency" is actually more important than "quality" in many ways. Before you even touch an EQ knob, you have to make sure your recording environment and your distance from the mic are the same every time.
This brings us to the "Room" factor. Daniel mentioned he sometimes feels he has a cold or just doesn't sound good. Herman, how much of that is "nasality" and how much of that is just a bad room?
A lot of it is the room. If you are recording in a kitchen with tile floors and granite countertops, your voice is bouncing off those hard surfaces and hitting the microphone a few milliseconds after the original sound. This causes something called "comb filtering." It creates these weird peaks and valleys in the frequency response that can sound very "nasal" or "hollow." You cannot EQ your way out of a bad room. You can try, but it will always sound "processed."
So Daniel's first step should probably be to throw a heavy blanket over his head or record in a closet full of clothes.
Unironically, yes. A closet full of clothes is the best recording studio ninety percent of podcasters will ever have. Once you have a "dry" recording with no echoes, then the AI tools and the EQ profiles actually start to work the way they are supposed to.
I want to go back to the AI part of this. We are in twenty twenty-six now, and we have services like "Descript Underdub" or "ElevenLabs Voice Isolation." These tools use AI to basically reconstruct your voice from scratch. They call it "speech enhancement." It is more than just EQ; it is actually resynthesizing the parts of the voice that might be missing or muffled. What are your thoughts on using those as a "shortcut" instead of building a vocal chain?
Those tools are incredible for "saving" a recording. If you recorded in a windstorm or next to a construction site, they are a miracle. But for a daily podcast, they can be a bit "uncanny." They tend to strip away the "micro-dynamics"—the tiny variations in volume and tone that make us sound human. If you use them too heavily, you start to sound like a text-to-speech robot. I think Daniel's instinct to learn how to do this himself with a vocal chain is the right one. It gives him "artistic agency." If you just hit the "enhance" button, you are at the mercy of whatever the AI thinks a "good" voice sounds like. If you build your own chain, you can decide exactly how much "character" you want to keep.
So let us talk about the practical side of building that chain. If Daniel is using a DAW like Reaper or even a mobile app like Ferrite on an iPad, what should he actually "do" tonight to start improving his sound?
First, record that three-minute sample. But don't just talk; read something with a lot of variety. Read a poem, then read a technical manual, then tell a joke. You want to capture the full range of your voice. Then, use a "Spectrum Analyzer"—most EQs have one built-in where you can see the "dancing lines." Look for the "fundamental frequency." For most men, that is between eighty-five and one hundred fifty-five hertz. For most women, it is between one hundred sixty-five and two hundred fifty-five hertz.
And that is where the "warmth" lives?
Exactly. If you want to sound "bigger," you give a tiny boost there. But here is the trick for finding those annoying frequencies, like the nasality Daniel mentioned. It is called the "boost and sweep" method. It is the most important skill an audio editor can learn.
Oh, I love this technique. It is so satisfying when you find the "culprit."
It really is! You take one band of your EQ, give it a big, ugly boost—maybe ten or twelve decibels—and make it very narrow, a high Q. Then, while your recording is playing, you slowly "sweep" that peak across the frequency spectrum. You are intentionally making your voice sound terrible.
And when you hit the "nasal" frequency, it will suddenly sound like you are talking through a megaphone or a tin can.
Exactly! It will jump out at you. It will be painful to listen to. Once you find that "whistling" or "honking" spot, you stop sweeping. And then—this is the magic—instead of boosting it, you pull that frequency down by three or four decibels. You have just performed "surgical EQ." You found the specific frequency that was making you sound nasal and you neutralized it without affecting the rest of your voice.
That is much more effective than just guessing or using a "Podcast" preset. And what about compression? Daniel mentioned that as part of his chain. Why is that important for a podcast? I feel like some people think compression is just about making things "loud."
Loudness is a side effect, but the goal is "consistency." In a natural conversation, we have a huge dynamic range. We whisper a secret, we laugh at a joke, we get excited and raise our voices. If you put that on a podcast without compression, the listener is constantly reaching for the volume knob. They are in their car, and they can't hear the quiet parts over the road noise, but then the loud parts blow their ears out.
It is about the "listening environment." Most people aren't listening to podcasts in a soundproof room; they are listening while doing the dishes or jogging.
Precisely. A compressor narrows that dynamic range. It brings the loudest parts down and the quietest parts up. It makes the voice feel "solid." It gives it that "weight" that we associate with professional broadcasting. For a podcast, I usually recommend a "ratio" of about three-to-one or four-to-one. You don't want to "crush" the voice, you just want to "tame" it.
So, to recap the chain for Daniel: High-pass filter first to remove the rumble. Then corrective EQ using the "boost and sweep" to fix the nasality. Then a de-esser to catch those sharp "S" sounds. And then a compressor to level everything out.
That is a rock-solid, professional vocal chain. If he does those four things, he will sound better than ninety percent of the podcasts out there. And to his point about different devices, if he moves from his OnePlus phone to a better mic, he keeps the same "order" of plugins, but he "resets the knobs." He might find he doesn't need as much corrective EQ because the better mic isn't adding as much "honkiness."
It is also worth noting that as you get more experienced, you start to "hear" these things without the analyzer. You'll just know, "Oh, that's a bit muddy around three hundred hertz," or "That's a bit harsh around three kilohertz." It becomes a second nature.
It really does. But I want to touch on the psychological aspect Daniel mentioned—not sounding like "himself." There is a famous study about how we perceive our own voices. Because of that bone conduction I mentioned earlier, we always think we sound deeper and more "authoritative" than we actually do. When we hear a recording, we feel "betrayed" by the high frequencies.
So, is it "cheating" to use EQ to make ourselves sound the way we "think" we sound?
I don't think so! I think that is the goal of "Personal EQ." If Daniel feels he sounds too nasal, and he uses a small cut at one kilohertz and a tiny boost at two hundred hertz to add some "chest resonance," he isn't lying to the audience. He is just aligning the recording with his own self-perception. It makes him more confident, and a confident speaker is a better speaker.
That is a great point. Audio quality is a feedback loop. If you think you sound great, you speak with more energy and authority. If you hate the way you sound, you tend to mumble or hold back.
Exactly. Now, on the "transportability" question one more time—Daniel, if you are looking for a "standard format," keep an eye on "C-L-A-P" plugins. It stands for "Clever Audio Plugin API." It is an open-source standard that is becoming very popular in twenty twenty-six because it handles presets and automation much better than the old V-S-T format. If you find a C-L-A-P EQ you like, it is very likely to work flawlessly across Reaper, Bitwig, and other modern DAWs.
And what about the AI "Target EQ" idea? Is there a tool that actually "exports" an EQ curve?
Yes! Tools like "FabFilter Pro-Q three" have a "Match EQ" function where you can "freeze" the curve. You can see exactly what the AI did—it might show a series of twelve different points. You can then manually copy those twelve points into any other EQ. It is tedious, but it is the only "universal" way to do it. You are the bridge between the softwares.
Daniel also asked about maintaining a "baseline EQ" with minor adjustments. I think the key there is to save your vocal chain as a "Template." In Reaper, you can save a "Track Template." In Audacity, you can save a "Macro."
Yes, and I would recommend he creates three versions of his template. Version A: "The Phone." This one has the heavy lifting to fix the phone's limitations. Version B: "The Studio." This is for when he eventually gets a dedicated mic. And Version C: "The Cold." This is a special EQ for when he is actually sick and his voice is physically different.
"The Cold" preset! That is brilliant. You'd probably want to cut some of the "muffled" low-mids and boost some of the "clarity" in the highs to compensate for the congestion.
Exactly. You are using technology to "heal" the audio. But again, Daniel, don't get too obsessed with the graph. The most important "analyzer" is your ears. If it sounds good, it "is" good. I've seen people spend hours trying to make their EQ curve look "flat" on a screen, and it ends up sounding like a cardboard box.
"The eyes are the enemy of the ears." I remember a producer telling me that once. He used to put a cloth over the computer monitor so the engineers had to listen instead of looking at the waveforms.
It is so true. Especially with AI tools, it is easy to trust the "score" the AI gives you. "Your voice is ninety-eight percent optimized!" But if that two percent of "un-optimized" sound was your personality, you've lost the game.
Well, I think we have given Daniel plenty to chew on. It is a complex topic, but once you start playing with these tools, it becomes very intuitive. You start to hear the world in frequencies. You start to notice the "one kilohertz honk" in the grocery store PA system.
You really do. It is a curse and a blessing. I cannot walk into a room anymore without thinking, "Hmm, this room has a nasty reflection at about five hundred hertz, I should probably put a rug down."
That is the life of an audio nerd, Herman. We are just trying to make the world sound a little bit smoother, one decibel at a time.
One decibel at a time. And Daniel, don't be afraid of the "OnePlus" phone. Some of the best podcasts in the world started on a phone. The "content" is the heart; the "EQ" is just the polish on the car. A polished car is great, but it still needs an engine to go anywhere.
That is a great place to wrap up. To recap for Daniel: there is no universal file format, so use third-party plugins or just learn your "numbers" for transportability. Your EQ profile is a combination of your voice, your mic, and your room, so you will need to adjust if any of those change. Use the "boost and sweep" method to find your nasality manually—it is a better teacher than any AI. And keep that vocal chain simple: High-pass, corrective EQ, de-esser, compressor.
And keep recording! The more you record, the more you'll understand your own voice. Your "Personal EQ" will evolve as you do.
I think we have covered it all. Daniel, thanks for the prompt. It was a fun one to dive into. If you are out there listening and you have questions about your own audio setup, or if you have found a "magic" AI tool that we didn't mention, we would love to hear about it.
Absolutely. We are always curious to see how people are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a home studio in twenty twenty-six. The technology is moving so fast, and we are all learning together.
And hey, if you have been enjoying My Weird Prompts, please take a second to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Whether it is Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or some new decentralized player I haven't heard of yet, those reviews really do help other people find the show. We appreciate every single one of you who takes the time to do that.
It genuinely makes a difference. We see those reviews and they keep us motivated to keep digging into these weird and wonderful topics.
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Thanks again to Daniel. Keep those frequencies balanced, everyone.
All right, I think that is it for today. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Until next time, stay curious.
Goodbye, everyone!
Goodbye!
