How to use music in podcasts

Scoring, or the art of selecting and placing music into a podcast, is high stakes stuff. At its best, it can lend style, set pacing, and elevate work to its peak. At its worst, scoring can distract, confuse, and grind an otherwise strong story to a halt. It can feel challenging and even scary for beginners but, with a little knowledge and technique, scoring not only becomes surmountable, it can even be a whole lot of fun.

In this workshop, producer Benjamin Frisch walks you through the basics of the craft, art, and philosophy of scoring. You’ll go from conceptualization, to picking good tunes, and effectively implementing them with finesse and a few tips and tricks. Through presentations and live demonstrations, you’ll learn practical ways to use music to pace and punctuate your work effectively, techniques and effects to modify music to lend it a sense of space and place, and also learn to think about music as a meaning-making part of your editorial process. Benjamin will also discuss licenses and the landscape of music libraries. After the class you’ll come away with new ways of thinking about scoring, to make your stories sing.