How to Improve Your Voice for Podcasts and Recordings
Get closer, but not too close., Get a yourself a digital audio workstation., Add a gate to clean up., Add a filter., Apply a little compression., Go in for some normalization.
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Get closer
When making a podcast recording, most people make the mistake of either coming in too close or staying too far away from the microphone.
This will either cause distortions in the first case, or make you increase the volume and amplify the noise.
The optimal distance between your mouth and the microphone is two to three inches.
By doing this, you capture most of your voice and the least amount of disturbances and background noise. -
Step 2: but not too close.
A Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW, is a system designed for recording, editing and playing digital audio.
There are numerous professional and amateur DAWs out there, and any one of them is quite fine for these purposes.
The best ones are Image-Line FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Apple Logic Pro, and they are pretty pricey. , Gates are useful for stripping away unwanted sound that falls below a user-determined level.
You can tidy up your audio with these steps:
Install a DAW and upload the recording by selecting the “upload” button and browsing for your recording in the hard drive.
Locate and manually remove any noise in the silences between your words or sentences.
This is great for removing louder noises.
Apply an existing gate provided by the DAW, which will get rid of noises that are softer than your voice.
Simply find the gate function in your DAW, and set the noise reduction amount to around
-20 to
-75dB.
Play around with your recording until you find the perfect spot.
This combination of manually removing strong noises, and gating the soft ones really gives the result of a quiet and clean vocal take. , A filter is commonly used to eliminate any low-end frequencies and thin out a sound.
Most people use it on to remove rumble, unwanted low-end material, and "boominess." Here's how you preset a cut-off frequency, above which anything will be allowed to go through and anything below it won't be:
Find the filter option on your DAW, and find a high-pass (low-cut) filter.
Make the cut at around 80-130 Hz.
This should make the recording sound a lot cleaner and more enjoyable to listen to.
This process is also called “cutting” using equalization (EQ). , This is not a very important step if you’re simply recording a voice podcast, but if you want to clean up a song recording, this is a must to avoid sounding uneven.
A couple of steps should do it:
The best number to use is around
0.8 for compress ratio,
0.88 for compression hardness, and
-18 for floor.
You can leave the noise gate falloff in the middle.
Doing so will really even out the volume of your audio, and these settings work on a great majority of recordings. , Simply put, normalization is used to limit the loudest part of your audio at a certain targeted level.
Depending on such things like the dynamic range of the content and your target level, normalization may result in peaks that exceed your recording equipment's limits.
Your best option here would be
-1dB. -
Step 3: Get a yourself a digital audio workstation.
-
Step 4: Add a gate to clean up.
-
Step 5: Add a filter.
-
Step 6: Apply a little compression.
-
Step 7: Go in for some normalization.
Detailed Guide
When making a podcast recording, most people make the mistake of either coming in too close or staying too far away from the microphone.
This will either cause distortions in the first case, or make you increase the volume and amplify the noise.
The optimal distance between your mouth and the microphone is two to three inches.
By doing this, you capture most of your voice and the least amount of disturbances and background noise.
A Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW, is a system designed for recording, editing and playing digital audio.
There are numerous professional and amateur DAWs out there, and any one of them is quite fine for these purposes.
The best ones are Image-Line FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Apple Logic Pro, and they are pretty pricey. , Gates are useful for stripping away unwanted sound that falls below a user-determined level.
You can tidy up your audio with these steps:
Install a DAW and upload the recording by selecting the “upload” button and browsing for your recording in the hard drive.
Locate and manually remove any noise in the silences between your words or sentences.
This is great for removing louder noises.
Apply an existing gate provided by the DAW, which will get rid of noises that are softer than your voice.
Simply find the gate function in your DAW, and set the noise reduction amount to around
-20 to
-75dB.
Play around with your recording until you find the perfect spot.
This combination of manually removing strong noises, and gating the soft ones really gives the result of a quiet and clean vocal take. , A filter is commonly used to eliminate any low-end frequencies and thin out a sound.
Most people use it on to remove rumble, unwanted low-end material, and "boominess." Here's how you preset a cut-off frequency, above which anything will be allowed to go through and anything below it won't be:
Find the filter option on your DAW, and find a high-pass (low-cut) filter.
Make the cut at around 80-130 Hz.
This should make the recording sound a lot cleaner and more enjoyable to listen to.
This process is also called “cutting” using equalization (EQ). , This is not a very important step if you’re simply recording a voice podcast, but if you want to clean up a song recording, this is a must to avoid sounding uneven.
A couple of steps should do it:
The best number to use is around
0.8 for compress ratio,
0.88 for compression hardness, and
-18 for floor.
You can leave the noise gate falloff in the middle.
Doing so will really even out the volume of your audio, and these settings work on a great majority of recordings. , Simply put, normalization is used to limit the loudest part of your audio at a certain targeted level.
Depending on such things like the dynamic range of the content and your target level, normalization may result in peaks that exceed your recording equipment's limits.
Your best option here would be
-1dB.
About the Author
Frances Parker
Enthusiastic about teaching hobbies techniques through clear, step-by-step guides.
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