We’re podcasting live from the middle of Hurricane Abigail to bring you these 7 tips that you can put into action in your own Audio Drama.

1. Do a scene-by-scene breakdown of a professional quality Audio Drama. How does each scene start? What does the soundscape suggest? What characters are involved? What is raised, revealed or resolved? And how does it end? We talk through some examples in Neverwhere and The Sound of Thunder.

2. Try to include a ‘marquee scene’ in each of your shows. That one scene that really showcases your production talents.

3. During the writing process, consider spatialisation. Exactly who is where in each scene, physically? If you have 3 characters in a room, where are they all? Where is the door? Think of the distances between each character and how this applies to your sound and levels. This can help to keep a consistent, realistic sound in production.

4. Dialogue – less is more. Cut, cut, cut. Is your character saying in five sentences what she can say in one? Try asking yourself what you could cut if you ABSOLUTELY had to. You’ll be surprised.

5. Use basic noise reduction techniques. Each line of dialogue is like a little brick on the screen of your DAW. These little bricks all have their own noise floors, and if you’re using a few remote actors these can vary wildly. If the noise floor is high, noise reduction can annihilate the vocals, so use the noisiest recording to create a room tone file to mask it, before layering the scene with its soundscape.

6. Don’t make your characters tell each other things they already know, just because the information is important to the plot. If anything, have them drop hints, or make a way for it to be relevant and sound natural.

7. Try varying the pace of your scenes; one scene could be dialogue heavy whilst two intense characters are sizing each other up… cut to the next scene where a hero is clinging to the roof of a train which is on fire. Choo choo.