Top 10 takeaways from Dallas Taylor

Insights on audio, podcasting, and finding your voice.

Last updated: May 6, 2025

Author: Megan Schmidt, Writer & podcast producer

Recently, we were able to sit down with Dallas Taylor. Aside from being the Creative Director for Defacto Sound and a Ted mainstage speaker, Dallas is also the host and creator of Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast that deep dives into the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.

Whether you’re a novice or an experienced audio mixer, there’s much to learn from this pro. Here are his top 10 tips for audio editing. Want to read the full interview? Just keep scrolling.

1. Start with passion, not promotion

Twenty Thousand Hertz began as a way for Dallas to explore and share a deep love of sound—not as a marketing tool. While it has helped grow Defacto Sound, its success came from prioritizing quality storytelling over promotion.

2. High-quality audio = Instant respect

People immediately judge content by its production quality. Crisp, clear audio (like polished video or good lighting) conveys professionalism and earns trust right away.

3. Dialogue is the foundation

Great audio starts with a clean, expressive voice track. Every emotional beat in sound design depends on clear, noise-free dialogue. Dallas even mails high-quality mics to guests to ensure clarity from the start.

4. Editing = Respect for the audience

Meticulous editing shows care for your listeners’ time. Dallas views narration as a tool to distill long conversations into their richest points, often summarizing complex ideas in just a few impactful lines.

5. Something should always be changing sonically

On Twenty Thousand Hertz, a new sonic element happens every 5–30 seconds—music, sound design, or pacing shifts—to keep attention and prevent listener drift.

6. Music should support, not distract

Music is used strategically: minimal, non-intrusive, and always serving the narrative or emotional tone. Dallas often edits music stems to avoid frequency clashes with the human voice.

7. Emotional dynamic range > Loudness range

It's not just about volume shifts—it's about taking listeners on an emotional journey. Laughter, awe, curiosity, and sadness are intentionally woven throughout each episode.

8. Consistency in quality, flexibility in style

While each episode is sonically unique, Twenty Thousand Hertz adheres to a strict loudness standard and internal rules to maintain consistency. Exceptions (like mini-series or branded music) are rare but thoughtful.

9. Leave room for imperfection (When it serves the story)

While Dallas holds Twenty Thousand Hertz to high audio standards, he also appreciates when raw or “imperfect” sound adds authenticity. Strategic use of breaths, mic rustles, or ambient noise can ground a story.

10. Finding your voice takes time—and cringe

You won’t sound like Ira Glass right away. Embrace early awkwardness, define your lane, and grow through practice. Your voice emerges not just in how you speak, but in what you choose to share.

Can’t get enough? Keep reading to get the full interview with Dallas:

Do you consider the Twenty Thousand Hertz content marketing at this point for Defacto Sound?

When I first started Twenty Thousand Hertz, I did start it with “From Defacto Sound, you're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.”

But fairly quickly, I dropped that. One, because it felt like it was shoehorned. And when I started the show, it was very much in the spirit of seeing that there was a major shift happening in consumers and where they find entertainment.

And so, back when I started this, I had started the idea of the podcast about a decade ago, and it took us a year to put the first ones out. But even back then, I was working really heavily in cable television doing a lot of work for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and I could see that the business model was starting to show its cracks. And in order to kind of slowly pivot into what I imagined this new world would be, I knew I had to make something myself, begrudgingly, because I don't really consider myself a host, or, at the time, not a thought leader. And I couldn't afford to have anyone else read it and talk about it, so that was me.

I did hope that it built some sort of connection enough that someone who is interested in what we do as a company would use Defacto Sound through that trust. And I did discover that it really did work that way, but I had to really pump the brakes hard on using it as content marketing.

And I continue to do that too, because I believe that the best, quote unquote, content marketing, is something that absolutely does not at all address the thing that is like the elephant in the room. And that is like: “Come work with Defacto Sound!” And so I figured that if I just gave, gave, gave, that hopefully that one little blurb—”[this podcast] comes from Defacto Sound”— would trigger in the minds of people who needed us.

And so I would say that now, Defacto Sound certainly wouldn't be as successful as it is had the podcast not existed. Because it just opened up so many doors and so many relationships that were fundamentally rooted in the nerdy thing that we're both nerdy about. And then blossomed into a relationship that then turned into a business partnership.

That definitely makes sense to me. In the same way that if 99PI (99% Invisible) actually was part of IDEO or a firm or something, it would just increase its credibility.

I actually had a conversation with Roman about this because I had talked to him and I was like, “Gosh, I'm struggling.” You know, it's like, it could always be bigger, and—I'm thankful for the size of Twenty Thousand Hertz, but it's not 99% Invisible. It's like one-tenth that, and maybe it's like one-thirtieth of, you know, This American Life or a Radiolab.

And so talking to Roman, I was like, “Help me get some clarity.” And Roman gave me some really amazing advice, and it was exactly what you said. He said, “The thing is, I'm an appreciator of the designed world, but I'm not an architect. And the difference between you and I is that you can tell these stories about sound, but you can also execute. And that's where I would lean into.”

And so it was a really fundamentally great piece of advice early on that reminds me that Twenty Thousand Hertz is more ingrained in the DNA of who I am, what I'm an expert on, and then me being able to really just preach that good word of sound.

It's like this very holistic type of podcast that really ingrains within our culture.

Well, let's get to the stuff you can preach well on. I want to first start on the importance of high-quality audio, or the importance of audio in the first place. When I say “high quality,” what does it mean to you?

So the importance of high-quality audio is similar to the importance of a high-quality video. Even when you see me on this camera, there's so much stuff that happens instantaneously when a shot comes up.

It shows that I'm very serious about what I do. Because inherently, in a split second, you know like, “Okay, this person has put a lot of time and effort into how this looks. Clearly, there's some sort of lighting that I can't see, it's very well designed, etc., and therefore I must take these words seriously.”

And so in a split second, from my visual appearance—which I think is incredibly important, especially as I interact more and more with people from all over the world through this camera. I wanted to make sure that there was a level of gravitas that was immediately clear when I popped into a meeting. So I feel like it starts, and everyone is on another level. Everyone kind of knows we can take this to another place.

And so I talk about the video aspect because I think a lot of people can understand that much more clearly than sound. And one of the reasons that I started Twenty Thousand Hertz is that sound appreciation is still in its infancy, culturally. And I can also describe that in the sense of food and cooking.

Twenty, thirty years ago, we had Martha Stewart and Julia Childs. They were starting to democratize cooking; anyone could have super high-quality meals they could make and start to appreciate food. And corporations started adding a bunch of stuff for shelf life and addictability. And so it opened up this whole new world where anyone can cook. And that was the whole premise of Ratatouille.

And so that's the way that I think about sound in general. So the reason I did the podcast was to help people realize that there's much more to the sonic universe than music. Music is amazing, but it's only a small fraction of everything we hear through language, through sounds, through nature, and all of these things.

And so why high-quality audio matters—especially from a voice perspective—is that the second something is high quality, it becomes transparent. No one thinks about it being high-quality, because you can hear so much nuance in the way that someone is performing every note and every articulation through the way that they're communicating. Because everyone is singing when they're communicating.

I can say the same words fifty different ways, and they can have slightly different meanings based off of the way that I'm projecting and the way that I'm communicating. And so having high-quality audio democratizes people's voices. And I think that's the real key. The important aspect of great audio is that it takes someone who has an amazing idea and it puts them on a stage. People listen and people go, “Okay, there's something here, because inherently I can really clearly understand everything.”

I think the biggest reason: because it allows for people to have respect instantaneously.

And respecting the audience, too. When you haven't put in the time to sound good, to me, it comes across as–I stopped short of saying a lack of respect for the audience. But it’s understanding and empathizing with the audience and their comprehension. That's where I believe that quality is a respect for the audience. And then finally editing. Editing is the ultimate in respect for the audience and respect for their time.

I like to think of editing as building up a soup. With video, we have dialogue, music, effects, etc. But, what about audio? Is there a common stack that a podcaster should think of? Like, what should the key ingredients for their soup be?

There are a lot of different ways of approaching it. The way that I make my show is very strategic from every level, whether it be music, music editing, how long the music goes, how short the music is, when we sound design something, when we don't sound design something, all the way to the point of when my voice is going into the show, do we keep my breaths or do we not keep my breaths? Those are decisions that we're making all the time. And every one of those means something.

And so when I'm thinking about making the soup, for me, the base is always going to be the voice. Dialogue is always king: everything relies on clarity of speech and all the performative aspects that can go into that.

I’d actually go as far as to say that I wasn't even a great communicator—I don't know if I would call myself that now—I wasn't as good of a communicator prior to the podcast, because I didn't hear myself, and my singing and, like, me performing. So even when I go back to my early episodes, I'm like, “Oh gosh, you had so much ability to perform, but you didn't.”

So having a fundamental, great root of dialogue is always important, so much so that we send microphones to guests rather than trying to post-process that. Post-processing something, at least traditionally, has taken way longer than just sending someone a great mic. It's way cheaper just to go, here's a $60 microphone than spend $500 trying to make it work.

And so when you have this really strong foundation, the emotion comes out of the voice so much more detailed because it sounds great, and these microphones are picking up all of this nuance. So that's a good, fundamental thing.

And also, if you have very cruddy audio, nothing below it will stand out. If you have noisy dialogue or noisy voiceover, you can't effectively use music because you're trying to get through noise and gunk. Same thing with sound design. And I would even take it a step further and say that sound design is almost impossible without incredible dialogue to begin with, that's just crystal clear where there's no gunk. Because a lot of what we do at Defacto Sound, at Twenty Thousand Hertz, is just eliminating all noise to where every single element can speak with clarity. That's what we're always aiming for, is clarity.

Having that great audio really just allows for us to be able to do the things that we want to do and try to emotionally move people.

Ok, let’s say we’ve captured good audio, we’ve done the post-processing, and have invested the time in cleaning it up. Now, how do we start to build it back up? How do we know which ingredients we need to add to get a good audio soup?

The biggest advice that I give to people when it comes to a podcast—assuming that you're going to have decent sounding audio—is to edit.

And then edit again and then edit some more and then edit more even beyond that. There's such a refinement process that happens in post-production and in editing specifically.

 Fundamentally—how we think about narration in general—the bulk of the show, we're using narration to summarize what the guest said. We're doing a lot of things where we may have had a 90-minute conversation, but when it hits Twenty Thousand Hertz, they might have five minutes total time there. So what we're doing is in narration. We're always evaluating these points where it's like, “Okay, this story isn't relevant to the hyper-focus that we're going through. But I can say it in two sentences.” So we're using narration as an editing tool to summarize, to get things done much more quickly. Because we're boiling down somewhere around like three hours worth of tape down to something that averages 25 minutes. And only three fourths of that is dialogue, because we're going to have moments of music, or sound design. So we're thinking about that.

That's a big tool—how to take something that's a raw interview and really boil it down to the richest version of that.

Now, when we talk about the intro and the outro: the intro is all about framing and positioning. Like, how do we get someone who wants to continue listening to this in 30 to 45 seconds? How do we convince them that this is worth their while? And of course, having high production value, I think a lot of people kind of perk up a little bit and go, “Okay, there's a seriousness and a gravitas to this just because of the way that our show sounds.” I think it attracts a lot of people because it just moves so quickly.

And then when we're thinking about the outro, it's all about figuring out how we can lean into some sort of emotional vibe. I believe that when we're talking about something like sound—which some people can perceive as, like, science, or it’s something that's a little out of their realm—the emotion that we add to it is the glue that makes it stick deep in the psyche. So we think a lot about that.

And I did mention earlier that there are times where we use my breaths and we don't use my breaths. If I'm just a Voice of God narrator, all my breaths are gone. That comes from an old documentary technique, back when I was working at the Discovery Channel. They were all just narrators, they weren't a character in the story. They were narrating you along, so we always removed breaths, like they're not even like a human in a way. But when I'm contributing or having cross-talk with guests, you'll hear my breaths in it, because there's so much life to the breath.

So there are nuanced techniques, vocally, that we do to psychologically let people know what my role is, one way or the other.

I’d love to keep talking about these kinds of “atmospheric” elements. Let’s say my show is an interview, and I’ve done so many edits. It’s tight, but it’s just not really immersive or emotional. What would I look at next?

We have a rule at Twenty Thousand Hertz: something is always going to change sonically within 15, 20 seconds (if that, it may be five seconds). So anywhere between 5-30 seconds, you're going to hear a sonic change, and that's entirely intentional.

That's where music and, by extension, sound design, come in. If you took a stopwatch to Twenty Thousand Hertz and click the stopwatch every time there's a sonic change, that's where you're going to see that difference. This is a very quick-paced thing. There's something changing every 10 to 30 seconds, no matter what. And if it's going long, there's a reason it's going long.

We don't like long, drone-y talking. What we're trying to do is just always grab the listener's attention and bring it back to the show. It's very easy to drift, and just start thinking of other things, but if we have a music track that comes in after something, that's an opportunity for us to grab your attention back.

We know in this world that the attention will continue to drift off, and it's our job to always be pulling you back into it. Part of the reason we use music is to give us opportunities for sonic changes. So that could be a music start. That could be a music stop. That could also be changes that happen within the music.

We are very particular about how we start a track of music and what that music means. We talk a lot about “bleep bloops” and “A to B” music. This is music that doesn't really tell you what's happening, but it may put you in an inquisitive mood. But we want it to be very low key. Our biggest struggle with music is, “Is it minimal enough?” Because, there's so much addition. So we use splits, we cut, we use tools to take out various elements of music, just to get the gunk out. Because we don't want a saxophone playing at the same time as a human voice.

So we do these things—”bleep bloops”—where I might kick off the show and then it's “bleep bloops.” We're trying to set a tone, just to let people know we're moving somewhere. We don't know where yet. It may be informative. It may take us somewhere, and then we have that button out. So we chapter-ize things in that way.

And then, as the show progresses, we try to lean people into certain emotions. Music is really good at spoon-feeding how you're supposed to feel. So we always try to think about it in a way where we're not spoon feeding it, but we're just giving you a gentle nudge.

I would say: something that's really dense, like trying to force emotion and music, is off-putting to me. I would always rather under-push emotion; let the music itself be less than what we're trying to get you to feel, out of respect to your emotions. See where you can take something rather than over spoon-feeding music.

The vast majority of music that we work with is actually way too dense and way too rich, and it's really based off a fundamental aspect of how music is written. Music is written to be mostly consumed by itself, and a lot of that stuff gets put in libraries. But when it’s supposed to be consumed by itself, what happens is, you have the entire frequency bands completely stacked. You have those solo violins, you have those solo saxophones, you have all these things that are literally instruments that are in the exact same spot as the human voice that are happening simultaneously. So we're actually pulling layers back, constantly, just to let it support what's happening and not be the star of the show.

We think a lot about that with music. I would say that we do also try our very best through music, and through sound, to have a range of emotions. We want to make sure that if we're going to try to make someone cry at the end of something, our goal is to really make you laugh at the beginning of it. We want you to go through the dynamic range of emotions.

I would actually say that here at Defacto Sound and Twenty Thousand Hertz, when we talk about dynamic range, we actually talk about dynamic range from an emotional standpoint far more than we talk about dynamic range from a sound, “loudness and quietness” standpoint. Because dynamic range can be visual, it could be emotional, it could be sonically, it could be all kinds of stuff.

Ok, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the “bleep bloops.” What kind of sonic element are they? Are they like a loop dropped in for a couple of seconds?

I would say no. Usually, we're trying to play music for either 30 to 45 seconds, maybe a minute, but it doesn't go on too long. I definitely have a tolerance for how short something is and how long a music track can go. There are times where I may be reviewing something and I'm going, “Gosh, this music is just still going.” It just becomes wearing, especially if it's very repetitive. So we do need changes in the music.

A lot of times when we're approaching a music track, what we're doing is we're either starting to loop sections or we're taking out certain stems from it. We like to work with companies that give us their high-quality stems that the composer made; it's very easy just to remove something from it. We’ll get hyper minimal with a piece of track that sounds and vibes well, so it doesn't start to command everything. You still would hear changes, because over repetitiveness—like just looping something repeatedly—can get really wearing. So a lot of times what we're trying to do is establish a piece of music.

And we have a few different ways of establishing music. There's the “Establish under, and almost immediately start voice.” You're always going to hear the downbeat, maybe two beats, and then start voice. But we literally have it already at “under-a-voice” volume.

We also have the “Establish, fold, and pull back.” That might be something where we’ve gone through a very important segment, and we need the listener's brain to process something for a few more seconds. So in that case, we may start music, let it play semi-full for a couple of seconds or bars, then we pull that under, and then we proceed.

Then, we get to “Advanced Twenty Thousand Hertz,” probably a hundred episodes ago. Because you can listen to the first hundred episodes and really not hear strategic music changes happening within the music tracks themselves. But about a hundred episodes in, we started to get hypercritical about changes that needed to happen in order to get from one place to another.

So “Advanced Twenty Thousand Hertz” is when we had to really start getting particular about making sure we're spreading out the dialogue enough to make it hit, or shortening it enough, or even taking out words or lines just to make the music hit in the places that they need to hit to really get that flow going.

Then, when we're talking about outro music... I would say the most frustrating part of making Twenty Thousand Hertz is manufacturing buttons at the end. I think many of the buttons and music that go out are, well, a lot of times they feel like an afterthought. They might fade out, or they just kind of fall on their face, or they're just way too bubblegum. One of the most challenging aspects of what we do is ending a track of music where it doesn't sound corny. Where it actually has something that's meaningful, but it's not over-, or even under-, done.

Now, it’s not often, but sometimes we’ll put a music track that ends and a new music track starts. Usually we like to give a breath there. But at the end of our show, a lot of times our final track of music will end, and then a new track of music will happen for the credits.

It just kind of depends on vibes. And sometimes when you have an intensely emotional ending to something, you need the emotional release. Like some sort of pop music, just to go, “Okay, all right, you can release that now.”

But sometimes if it's really somber and we need that to stick with you for a long time, we'll play that same music all the way through the credits. It’s music curation and music supervision, and building that into a show could certainly be a full-time job. I would love to hire for it if I could afford it. There’s a lot of strategy  just behind how to use music and what music to use.

What about consistency across the show, across episodes? Is that something you're thinking of with a music library or collection? Or are you starting from scratch for each episode?

I early on said I never wanted to hear the same track of music twice. It happens occasionally if it's very clear that it needs to. For example, we did a two-part series on Apple, and we're doing a third part soon. I did keep the music consistent through those three episodes, because they felt like a spread out mini series to me. And, I wanted to use Keith Kenneth’s music.

I'm just a huge fan of Keith Kenneth; he wrote a lot of the Apple music for their classic commercials. I’ve worked with Keith on various things throughout the years, and I knew that I needed Keith's music in there to make it feel “Apple,” because he quite literally defined the sound of Apple for me.

So in that case, we kept it similar, but it's very rare. When I'm listening to something, if I can hear reused tracks, I'll note it in my head. But it's hard to always find new music.

You were talking about dynamic range earlier in terms of emotional dynamic range. First of all, what is “loudness” nowadays?

The way we've measured and even enforced it has changed. But, to the extent we can talk about podcast loudness, is that something that is the creator's responsibility? Is it the podcast host’s responsibility? How do we even think about it?

It's a good question. We take that responsibility unto ourselves, because we don't really want to have any variable that's out of our control. And so for us, our overall is going to be -16 LUFS. Every episode and every single commercial we've ever done is all going to be that. Nothing grinds my gears more than a random spec change over the years where someone goes, “Actually, we're going to do -14 now.” I get why, but you're crushing 200 episodes of this legacy.

Or when dynamic ad insertion happens, if our entire catalog is at -16 and they do -13 for their ads, I'm just like, “No. We literally have to turn it off because we're not gonna have a three decibel increase on your ads.”

It's important; when somebody comes out with best practices, we follow those. Otherwise, we get to this Wild West situation where we can't insert ads or we can't insert a promo from someone else because the industry is deciding arbitrarily to change things.

I also think that helps when people are listening to multiple podcasts. We're all in some sort of industry standard here, but I don't really want to entrust another organization to do that. I think maybe at the host level, but certainly not at the app level. I know the apps do that for sure, I just think it's best if there's less fiddling with audio after the fact. And this is something that's really hard as a sound designer and somebody who does this for a living.

And there are a million reasons why it’s so difficult when a company does a thing on top of what we’ve already done. For example, when I was working at Discovery, there was a time where I got to go to Master Control, and they were like, “What do you want to see here at Master Control?” And I was like, “Show me Discovery Channel and show me TLC.” Like, if I go up and I push a button, the audio is turned off on the channel, like the whole network. I wanted to see that box.

So I went and I saw that box and I was like “Oh that’s incredible! But... what’s all this processing?” I'm seeing compressors pump, I'm seeing EQ curves in there. And I’m like, “We're always trying to hit a moving target when somebody else is doing something on top of our best practices.”

So there's a lot of that that happens. And now you have a lot of sound bars and headphones doing voodoo on top of what we already do. And that is not the intent. I'm personally not a fan of wondering if we should be listening to manufactured Atmos in our AirPods? No. I don't think they sound good. It’s like, “Why put a room in something that sounds so intimate and close to me?”

These are spicy takes, by the way.

I know that having night shift mode and all these things are great, especially for legacy content. But a lot of this stuff has been solved now. It’s very difficult for a mixer of something like a major Netflix show to now be mixing it for these small rooms. But then we're also applying processing arbitrarily. That's meant to be for these eighties movies. And so it just makes it incredibly difficult when everyone's trying to doubly, or triply, or quadruply solve the same problem.

And when something goes wrong in audio, the very first person pointed to is the mixer. And I'm like, “Well, I did this, but there are also 14 other random algorithmic processes happening on top of it because they're all trying to fix a problem, too.” I don't think you can get away with that.

If the same thing was happening with visual stuff, cinematographers have power. They’d be like, “Why are you applying more coloring to my thing?” or whatever. But I think audio is in its infancy. It's like everyone's trying to do a magic button on top of things that are already doing well.

Well, if you make it sound good when you deliver it, you've done everything you can.

Yeah, just look at NPR, who has some of the best audio engineers on the planet. They're in Washington, DC, and they have a raw U87 mic. Because there are so many member stations that have varying degrees of compression and other things. So NPR is like, “Ok, well, they're going to get a raw signal.”

I personally think the whole thing should be the other way around, where the source is responsible for the high-quality aspect of it. And I appreciate companies like Adobe or iZotope or FabFilter that are making legitimate tools to achieve the source quality being amazing.

I'm not a fan of everyone fooling with it after it's gone through the world's best Grammy award-winning mixers, the world's best post production people, the world's best re-recording mixers. And then a random company comes in and goes, “No, we're going to make it better with something we're going to globally put on everything.”

Stop doing that.

Take a movie theater, for example. You go into a theater and someone goes, “That's way too loud. Why? Why did the director do that?” But it wasn't the director. Somebody walked by the center speaker and bumped it, or something. We have to have something that's consistent to begin with. And if there's a problem, I'd love to see culture go, “What's wrong with this room? What's wrong with my settings here?” Because most of the time, the problem isn’t happening back in the mix room.

We’ve been talking about clean audio so much. When do you want to not try to clean someone’s audio?

We have a very specific show. We're held to a standard, probably just by myself. I hold ourselves to a standard where we're the beacon of audio quality. So generally speaking, I'm always trying to be as polished as we can possibly be from an audio standpoint. Now, keep in mind, we're a show about sound, coming from a sound design team, and from a sound designer. So we have three levels of, “We need this to sound incredible for our own reputation.” That is so rooted into Twenty Thousand Hertz.

However, I love it when I hear Radiolab do the thing where you hear a jostling microphone and they're like, “Oh, okay. Is this thing on? Okay, let's hit record,” and stuff. We've talked about that, internally, of wanting to add more of that stuff in, but we get so hyper-edited and hyper-distilled that sometimes we don't even give room for that.

So I'd say that's something that I would like to do more of. And we're starting to stretch thoughtfully into doing that. Like, if you hear the thing being set up, your mind's eye can see that someone is jostling and getting ready; you know where they are in the conversation, you know they haven't warmed up yet, and all of that influences the message that you're going to hear during that section.

There are certainly storytelling techniques where you do want it to be a little raw. If you're out on the street and you're talking to somebody, you still want to hear a little bit of that, because the difference between sound designing it and hearing it from a single mic are going to be slightly different.

So there are certainly a bunch of amazingly high-quality, beautiful shows that add gunk or keep gunk in it purposefully to set your mind in a certain place.

Absolutely, I feel like it humanizes a well-produced show a little more. Who else do you think is doing that well?

I mean, a lot of those Gimlet shows that were around that are no longer around. Reply All, Every Little Thing. Now we have Hyper Fixed and Search Engine, they do those things well. Of course This American Life, Radiolab, even 99% Invisible does it a lot more.

All of the shows that I love do that sort of thing, but they do it strategically. It is not that they have “dirty” audio in the show, it’s that they purposefully make the choice for what type of place they want you to be in mentally. I think that it’s like a magician performing for you.

So, you think something was just messed up. Like, when you’re performing magic, you can lie the whole time. That’s the point of it. And when you're hearing something—especially from one of these just monstrosities of storytelling—every blip in it is poured over, or at least thought through from a very high-level perspective of what it means and why it needs to be there.

For someone starting out, embracing the freedom and flexibility to find your sound can be overwhelming. What advice would you give to them?

Yeah, so it’s like, “How could someone find their voice?” Since I've gone through this, and I did not think I was very good at it early on, so much of finding your voice is you finding your voice. It's not that you're gonna have the right equipment—though, of course, having a baseline of things that sound good and that are easy to use is going to be an incredibly important part of how you do it. As long as you can get from saying something to another place in the smoothest way possible and at the highest quality way, I have no preference on how it's done, or what DAW you're using, or what microphone you're using.

But back to finding your voice. From my own personal experience, I don't think I wanted to be a thought leader. I think I just wanted to be someone who's jazzed about sound and telling you how cool it is. I didn't even know what my voice would be, or how it would turn out. I still don’t even know if I have a real crystal clear idea of what my voice is, being so close to it, but I would say that it just takes time and practice. The part that everyone gets hung up on is coming out and not being as polished as you know you can be one day.

But I realized that, unless you get through the gunk and make the mistakes, you're never going to go from zero to Ira Glass the first time you do something. It's just not going to happen. You know, I'm still in my infancy of trying to become an Ira Glass. But even Ira Glass, you can go and listen to his stuff early on, and it's a different vibe, and it took a while for him to find that. He’s continuously maturing, even to this day.

Same thing with Roman Mars, same thing with a lot of these amazing people. You can go back to their early stuff and hear that it's quite different. So much so that I remember I asked Roman if I could play one of his early episodes of 99PI, and he was like, “You know, I don't know if that's really how I would want to represent 99PI now.” It was so long ago for him it was like a different version of himself.

So, really, finding your voice is all about having the guts to try. And this is me preaching to myself, but it’s about not overthinking social media, or not overthinking what I'm doing, or whatnot. I have a lot of strategy, and I have a lot of rules for myself. So I think having rules of what you will talk about, what lane you're going to stay in, what are your goals specifically?

Because if you just sit and have a chit chat show with no goal, it's hard for the audience to understand what the point is, and it's hard for you to understand what the point is. I think that I'm extremely methodical and slow about making decisions, so it takes me many years to actually do a thing. Even Twenty Thousand Hertz included many years of development and thinking about it before I did it.

But the biggest holdup is just being worried about what I'm going to sound like, but you know what? I'm going to sound bad. And a lot of people are going to go, “Oh Dallas, what are you doing? This is so cringy.” But then everyone forgets five years later, when I'm doing it consistently, or now, pushing a decade into it.

There's going to be the awkward, middle school, teenage years of doing what you do. And maybe finding something and going “That’s not the right thing, I need to go over here.” But that's part of the joy of living: finding who you are, finding what you're passionate about, finding what you're not good at, what you could become better at, finding the thing that you really love and that you are good at. But it takes exploring, and it takes putting yourself out there to see what works, what doesn't, and knowing you can always delete it if you need to.

I've deleted many things in the past that I don't think represent what I'm about now. My biggest rule is: stay in the sound lane. There's so much in the sound lane, so I focus on that audience specifically. I have a lot of opinions on all kinds of stuff. I'd love to make videos about, like, cooking, but it just doesn't make sense. Sure, I'm super passionate about it, but it's not going to make sense for the crystallization of what I'm trying to do, or at least communicate, most passionately.

I would actually say that one of the biggest rules I set up for myself (that was arbitrary and not necessary) is that the star of Twenty Thousand Hertz is the sound. Everything we talk about is sound.

Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, is an incredible YouTuber. I respect what he does so much, because he's so thoughtful in something that can come across as very dry. But what he talks about is that the piece of tech is the star. He's not the star, it's the piece of tech. In his mind, he's just a Sherpa. He's telling people things, but everyone's focused on the tech. But when I watch Marques, I'm like, “Marques, you're the star. Your persona, how you approach it, how you think about it: you're the star.”

So, I think about that with Twenty Thousand Hertz. Especially lately, because everything is great, like we're eight years into the show and I still feel like I'm learning more about it. And arguably, I think the shows that we do now are so much better than shows in the past. Those were a lot more raw, which were viable in their own way, but we just know a lot more about our craft now. So I think with Twenty Thousand Hertz, the sound is the star. Secondarily, the person who made the sound is the star, and I'm merely a guide to get us from point A to point B.

Now, that's not accurate because it took me meeting listeners in real life to realize I'm actually somebody they want to know about, too. ‘Cause when I ask people for advice about how I can make Twenty Thousand Hertz better, a lot of it is like, “Talk more about yourself, share your own opinions and stuff.” And I'm like, “But that feels icky and weird.”

It's something we have to actively focus and force into our workflow, but it's something that I very begrudgingly do. And I'm now kind of coming out and going, “Okay, I'm a personality. I have to talk.” I mean, part of the reason that I do video stuff now is not because I want to—I don't, I want to just hide in a corner and just live my life—but I'm doing this because this is how you connect with the world. And I'm doing things that are uncomfortable. Talking about myself on the podcast, and putting myself on camera, because I know it's just important to be able to be a steward of these stories. To be able to get it out, and make it real to people.

Well, thank you for doing it.

Well, thank you for thanking me. I definitely don't do it for any sort of thanks, but it always is amazing when somebody says it’s impactful for them. Because podcasting is weird. It's so quiet. I just sit here by myself. You make a thing and just hope. And it goes out to hundreds of thousands of people, and I just hope that they get the vibes that we were hoping for. And the only time I ever find out if they have the vibes is if somebody writes or if I meet 'em in real life.

About the author: Writer, comedian, podcast producer: Megan loves stories that stick, told sometimes with words, sometimes with waveforms, always with heart.