10 Tips for Better Sounding Vocal Recordings for Beginners

In today’s video I provide 10 tips to help you improve your spoken word recordings, whether it be for a Podcast, YouTube, Skype Call, Remote Teaching, or Telework. These tips may seem basic, but if you’re a beginner they can help you improve your sound quality significantly.

Tip 1: Shut Off Noisy Devices
Unnecessary background noise is one of the most obnoxious things to capture in a recording. That’s why if you have any devices that make noise that are not essential to your recording, you should shut them off to avoid the distracting noise.

Tip 2: Use the Polar Pattern To Your Advantage
If you are not able to shut off all the noise making devices in your room while you’re recording (for example: computer fans), place the microphone so these devices are in the null area of the polar pattern. Microphones have something called a Polar Pattern, this tells you what areas around the microphone are sensitive to sound. For spoken word recordings, you will mainly be using mics with a Cardioid Polar Pattern. This polar pattern has a dead area at about 180-degrees, so place your microphone with the rear of the mic pointed at the noisy devices.

Tip 3: Get the Mic Closer To Your Mouth
If you are in an untreated room, chances are there is a lot of reverb (an echoey sound). A way to decrease this effect is to bring the microphone closer to your mouth so that your voice is significantly louder in comparison to the reverb.

Tip 4: Get the Mic Off Your Desk
When teaching online or gaming, you may find yourself typing on a keyboard. If your mic is close to the keyboard, this will be extremely loud for your listeners. Get a microphone boom arm to get the mic off the desk and farther away from the keyboard to decrease this noise.

Tip 5: Avoid Plosives
A pop filter can help tremendously in reducing plosives. Plosives are the loud popping sound that occur when a gust of air hits the microphones diaphragm. If you are unable to use a pop filter, a trick you can use is placing the microphone at a 45-degree angle from you, pointing at the corner of your mouth. This allows you to speak past the microphone as opposed to directly into it.

Tip 6: Record in Your Closet
If you need a makeshift sound booth but can’t afford one (who can afterall), you can toss the microphone in your closet and record there. The cloths that are hanging up act as sound treatment and absorb a lot of the sound of your voice and reduce the amount of reverberation in your recording. Unfortunately, you look very uncool doing this, so it’s not the best choice for video.

Tip 7: Set Your Gain Correctly
This is a very complex topic, so I can’t go very in depth here, but I recommend you check out my video on how to set your gain properly.

Tip 8: Don’t Move Around So Much
When you are recording it is easy to move around and move off mic. When you do this, you’re not only affecting the level of your voice, but you’re also affecting the tone of your voice. As a beginner it is a very good practice to remain fairly still while you’re recording so you don’t end up making your listeners adjust the volume of their playback device.

Tip 9: Speak Into The Correct Side of the Mic
When you get a microphone you should read the first. This will provide you with instructions and inform you of the correct side of the mic to speak into. Also when you get a mic you should play around with it and try speaking in different areas around the mic to ensure you know the sound of the mic, and so you can verify you’re speaking into the correct side.

Tip 10: Verify You’re Recording the Correct Microphone
It would be impossible for me to demonstrate how to set your mic input on every piece of software, therefore I will suggest you search on youtube “how to set audio input for software x”. Then once you’ve done that scratch the microphone grill and look at the meters to determine if the correct input is selected.

Tip 11: Practice, Practice, Practice
Speaking into a microphone is not a natural skill; it is weird. Because of that it takes practice to get confident, and sound natural. You should do some test runs of your recording or streaming set up to learn it, and get comfortable speaking into the microphone.