People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound

People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound

Watch any two videos on a phone speaker. The one shot on an old camera with clean audio holds you. The one shot beautifully with the microphone across the room does not, and you will not be able to say exactly why you closed it.

Grain and softness read as authenticity. Bad sound reads as effort — the listener is doing continuous work to reconstruct words from a smeared signal, and that work is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with taste. They leave before they consciously decide to.

If you have limited time, spend it on the sound. This is the least glamorous advice in the course and the most reliably true.

The room beats the microphone

A microphone picks up two things: the sound travelling straight from your mouth, and the same sound arriving late after bouncing off walls, floor, ceiling, desk and window.

Direct sound weakens quickly with distance — roughly 6 dB for every doubling. Reflected sound barely weakens at all, because it arrives from everywhere at once. So the ratio of clean voice to room is set by two things: how close you are, and how reflective the room is. The microphone's price is not on that list.

This is why a four-hundred-dollar microphone at one metre in a tiled kitchen sounds worse than a phone at twenty centimetres under a duvet. It is the single most useful fact in beginner audio, and it costs nothing to act on.

Distance and angle

• About a fist's width from your mouth — 15 to 20 cm.
• Slightly off to the side, maybe 30 degrees, so the blast of air from p and b sounds passes the capsule rather than hitting it. A sock over a wire coat hanger works as a pop filter if you want one.
• Directional microphones get bassier the closer you get. That is the proximity effect. Some people like it; you can roll it off later.

The cheapest real improvement is soft mass

Not acoustic foam. Soft, thick, heavy things.

A duvet, a blanket, a full wardrobe of hanging clothes, a bed, curtains, a sofa, a rug. Put them on the surfaces facing you and facing the microphone — the wall behind the microphone and the wall behind you matter most. Bare parallel walls and a hard floor are what you are fighting.

Recording inside a wardrobe with clothes in it is not a joke. It is the standard budget vocal booth, and it beats most treated rooms for a single voice.

Here is the reason it matters so much: reverb cannot be fixed afterwards. Noise reduction works by learning the pattern of a steady, unchanging sound and subtracting it. Reverb is not a separate sound to subtract — it is your own voice arriving a few milliseconds late, with the same frequencies. De-reverb tools have improved a great deal and still leave a hollow, gated quality on anything heavy. Solve it by moving closer and adding soft mass, not by processing.

Levels, phones and room tone

Levels

Record so the loudest peaks land around −12 to −6 dBFS. Not near zero.

Digital clipping is not the warm saturation of analogue tape. It is a flat square edge where the waveform should have been, and nothing recovers it. A recording that is too quiet can be raised. A clipped one cannot be repaired. If your recorder offers 32-bit float, this problem largely disappears — but assume it does not until you have checked.

Recording on a phone

Most readers of this will do exactly that, and it works.

• Use a voice recorder app that saves at a decent bitrate rather than recording video and taking the audio from it.
• The microphones are usually on the bottom edge. Do not put your hand over them.
• Airplane mode, so a radio burst does not appear in the file as a buzz.
• Fridge off, fan off, window shut. Then record thirty seconds and listen on headphones before you commit to a take.
• Put a folded towel under the phone so desk knocks do not travel into it.
• In a large or echoey room, a wired earbud microphone held at chest height often beats the phone's own microphone, purely because it is closer to your mouth.

Cheap lavalier microphones are genuinely good value. Their failure is cloth rustle: tape the cable in a small loop as strain relief, and keep it clear of collars and jacket zips.

Record room tone, every time

Thirty seconds of the room with nobody speaking, at the same levels, in the same position. It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing — the next two lessons both depend on it, and the moment you need it, going back to record it is impossible because the room has changed.

Ten minutes today

Record the same sentence twice: once at arm's length in your normal room, once at twenty centimetres with a coat draped over your head and the microphone. Listen to both on the worst speaker you own. You will not need the rest of this argument.