There is an insane amount of options when it comes to improving the audio quality of your microphone. It is easy to work yourself into an audio optimization ‘rabbit hole’ where you’re tweaking all kinds of complicated settings through software. While doing so may indeed result in a greatly improved audio quality, for many people the biggest improvement comes from getting the basic fundamentals right. A few quick changes can make the biggest difference, and it won’t take long at all.
Positioning is a very underappreciated topic when it comes to microphones. Unless you’ve messed around with mic monitoring before, you might not realize that simply putting the microphone a little bit closer/further from your mouth and adjusting the gain can have a huge impact on the way you sound. It is therefore important that you know how to position and set up your microphone correctly, which is not as commonly known as you might think.
1.
Keep your microphone 6-12 inches away from your mouth
One of the more common problems we notice is that people are keeping the microphone too close to their mouth. Doing so will result in the ‘proximity effect’, which is a phenomenon that leads to an increase in lower frequencies and it will basically make your voice sound unbalanced and bass boosted. Besides that, the closer you are to the microphone, the bigger the volume differences will be when you move your head whilst talking. Both of these issues are very noticeable to the listeners.
To avoid these problems, you want to keep the microphone at a distance of 6 to 12 inches away from your mouth. Each mic has its own sweet spot, this is something you would have experiment with for your own microphone. The handsign in the image above will give you a good starting point, but you should try talking from different distances and see what sounds the best.
A boom arm would be a great solution, and it also allows you to comfortably keep the microphone at your ‘sweet spot’ at all times, even when moving around. You can mount the microphone arm to the side or back of your desk so it won’t be in the way of anything either. We highly recommend our Sensic SA-20 and SA-30 boom arms, check them out below:
2.
Set your mic gain correctly
When you found the sweet spot in terms of distance, you have to make sure the gain is set properly as well. When you crank up the gain too much, your audio recording will most likely be clipping, which means it will be digitally distorted.
To set the gain correctly, you want to open up any audio recording or streaming software. These usually have a visual audio level meter with a green bar going up whenever you speak. You should speak into it from the sweet spot distance and make sure that the bar doesn’t reach the red zone at the top, if it does, you want to lower the gain. If it doesn’t get anywhere near the yellow zone, the gain is set too low.
3.
Keep the microphone off your desk
If you’re using a table stand, the mic will be too close to your keyboard and too far away from your mouth. This is going to make your typing sounds and well as any vibrations from your desk (such as tapping and moving objects) very loud and they will overpower your voice.
You can reduce this problem by using a shock mount or by placing the microphone on a shock resistant surface like a rubber pad, although again the best solution would be to simply use a boom arm. The arm allows you to put the mic far enough from the keyboard, and vibrations from your table won’t get picked up anymore.
4.
Keep the microphone at a slight angle
When talking straight into a microphone you’ll often hear those loud popping sounds when saying the letters ‘P’ and ‘B’, these are called plosive sounds. To combat this you can either use a pop filter, which diffuses your sound, but you could also put your microphone slightly at a slight angle. By doing so, the air from your mouth will go past the front of the mic instead of going directly into it, which should avoid these plosives.
5.
Make good use of your microphone’s polar pattern
Most microphones have a specific polar pattern, such as cardioïd, which means it picks up sounds better from certain directions. Since this polar pattern also blocks sounds coming from other directions, you can use this to your advantage. You could position the mic in a way where it picks up your voice, but blocks everything behind the mic (keyboard sounds, fan noise, etc.). A lot of microphones nowadays are also able to switch between different polar patterns (cardioïd, bidirectional, omnidirectional), which could be useful in other scenarios as well since they all pick up and block sounds from different directions.