Want better sound? Stop buying microphones
Every week somebody in The Studio asks which microphone to buy. Almost every week the honest answer is: none, yet.
Sound is the first thing an audience notices and the last thing most people work on. But the fix is rarely the mic. It is the room, the distance, and about thirty seconds of attention before you hit record.
Get closer
The single biggest improvement available to you is free. Halve the distance between your mouth and the microphone and you roughly quarter the amount of room you record along with your voice.
On a phone, that means holding it at chest height and a forearm away, not propped across the desk. On a lapel mic, it means actually on the lapel — not somewhere near the sternum under a jumper.
Kill the reflections, not the noise
People hear a hiss and buy a mic to fix it. The hiss is usually the least of it. What makes a recording sound amateur is reverb — your voice bouncing off a bare wall and arriving at the mic twice.
You cannot remove reverb afterwards. You can only avoid recording it.
- Record facing soft things. A bookshelf, a sofa, a wardrobe of clothes.
- Avoid the middle of an empty room, and avoid corners.
- A curtain drawn behind the camera does more than a £200 microphone.
Record somewhere boring
Kitchens are hard. Bathrooms are worse. Cars, oddly, are excellent — all that upholstery. The best-sounding video I made last year was recorded sitting in a parked car because it was raining.
Then, if you still want to spend money
Buy a lavalier before you buy a shotgun. It solves distance permanently, it costs less, and it does not care what your room is doing. A shotgun mic in a reflective room is an expensive way to record a reflective room.
The order matters: position, room, then kit. Most people do it backwards and wonder why the expensive thing did not help.