The Budget-Friendly Beginner’s Guide to Perfect Audio
CJFP 06 - July 26th, 2024
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Check out the bottom of the article for a recommendation on the “Mobile Recording Studio” I used to recommend to my clients.
Newcomers to this newsletter might not know this about me, but a sizeable part of my production career was centered around podcast production. My first solid creative job out of college was as an audio editor. For the better part of the past decade, I’ve been counseling would-be podcasters on how to assess their recording environments.
Unlike video, it’s sometimes difficult to tell when a recording space is good for audio or not. When I was younger, I often heard someone say “Wow there’s good acoustics in here” and had no idea what that meant. It’s like when someone would knock on a melon at the store and say “Yep, that’s a good one.” I guess I’ll just take your word for it.
This newsletter is going to be a little shorter than others, but this week, I’d like to share a brief crash course on how to know if your audio recording environment is good or not so that you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
The Science of Not Pissing off Your Listeners
First, let’s examine what exactly constitutes good and bad audio. The audio is good if it is clear, enjoyable to listen to, and contains exactly what it’s meant to without much else. I’m being purposely vague here. Whether your audio is good or not will depend on what you’re trying to do with it, but universally, it should be free of things like static, noise, or echoes (at first, if desired you can always add these things in later) and shouldn’t make the listener want to top listening.
Bad audio is easier to spot. Often it causes a verbal reaction: “Wow. That sounds bad.” Let’s examine some of the previous points in more detail to figure out exactly what each is.
The “clarity” of a piece of audio is subjective and situational, but generally means that it is one designated thing be it a single voice, piece of music, or themed ambiance. Whatever it is, it should be that and nothing else.
“Static” is called “noise” in the audio world. Remember the old days of black-and-white static fuzz on a TV when no particular signal was tuned? That’s the visual form of noise. The sound you hear when you think of that image is the audio form. This noise can be caused by various factors including electrical interference, poor-quality cables, or malfunctioning recording equipment. In the background of all audio, there are small amounts of static depending on how sensitive your recording equipment is and how loud what you’re recording is. This is called a noise floor. You want to get this as low as possible.
An echo occurs when an audio source hits a recording point multiple times. If a person is speaking directly into a microphone while standing in a room, the sound waves travel in all directions. Some hit the mic directly, while others continue to travel until they hit walls or ceilings and then bounce back into the mic, creating an echo.
The best way to approach the problem of bad audio is scientifically with an eye toward physics. What is sound from a physics perspective? Sound is a wave of pressure changes traveling through a medium such as air. These pressure differences move like waves through the air, bouncing off of whatever they come into contact with.
Here’s the kicker: The best way to assess an audio space is to think of sound like light from a flashlight and imagine your walls as mirrors.
Light also travels in waves and behaves similarly to sound in this respect. Look around the room that you’re in right now and imagine every surface that you can see is perfectly reflective like a mirror. Then imagine you begin shining a flashlight around the room. The light is going to bounce at perfect angles straight from one mirror to the next until it becomes diffused enough not to be noticeable.
Sound functions in a surprisingly similar way. Imagine the person standing in the middle of the room with a flashlight is actually speaking. The sound is going to come out of their mouth, focused in one direction, but traveling in all directions, and begin bouncing off the walls until it becomes so dispersed that the waves are no longer noticeable.
How would you hypothetically stop the flashlight beams from bouncing off the walls? Make the walls less reflective.
So how would you stop audio from bouncing? Same way. Make the surfaces less reflective.
Look around the room again from this perspective and imagine an audio source in the middle that is generating audio waves with a recorder right in front of it. Some of the waves hit the recorder, but most travel outwards into the room. If they hit something soft like a pillow, their momentum is going to get absorbed by that pillow, and have less of a chance to bounce back to the recording device, which means fewer echoes.
From this perspective, the design of a sound booth has begun to make more sense. Soft surfaces stop sound waves from bouncing around and causing echoes. Angled surfaces bounce waves away from recording points. They are heavily insulated to not only keep sound in but also to keep ambient sound out and ensure that the recording equipment is picking up only what it is meant to.
Microphones are placed as close to their subjects as possible with the gain set as low as it can be in order to record only what is in front of the mic, reduce ambient noise beds, and reduce the number of echoes that are able to return to the recording device.
Finally, to really assess a space, you need to sit in it and listen. This is a game called “Ear Training” and it’s a vital skill for telling stories with audio. You can practice right now. Without moving from where you are, try and write down on your phone or computer 10 things that you can currently hear. At first, this seems very difficult, but with practice, you’ll notice that every space has an ambient tone to it. Even quiet spaces, I’ve found, usually have the muffled sounds of people on the other sides of walls, AC vents, computer fans, hallway footsteps, or even your own breath!
In a single sentence then: The best way to assess an audio recording environment is to sit in the middle of it and look for reflective surfaces and listen for ambient tone, then work to correct both.
Sometimes you can’t choose the place you record in so I’ll leave you with some low-budget tips for making audio more professional no matter what space you’re in.
1. Get the mic close to your recording source.
2. Insulate your environment with anything fluffy or jagged you’ve got lying around. Put pillows around the mic, egg cartons on the walls, a big rug on the floor, that kind of thing. Don’t forget about the ceiling!
3. Look for sources of ambient noise. Turn off fans, exchange noisy computers for quiet smartphones, close windows, shush chatty coworkers, etc.
4. If that doesn’t work, try recording under a blanket! You’ll be amazed at how well this works. If you have a closet at your disposal, that also works great.
5. If you notice a lot of wind sounds in your recording, try covering your mic with a (clean) sock and pulling it tight. The material of the sock will absorb the harsh wind sounds while allowing vocals to pass through. Just be careful not to touch the mic while recording or you’ll end up with scratching noises from the sock.
6. Finally, do sound checks with your subject to get the gain as low as you can while still leaving the audio decently loud without clipping. When I’m recording someone, I tell them to do their sound checks as if they were talking to an elderly person who is hard of hearing. First, adjust the gain with an eye on the ambient noise bed. Then adjust the recording levels to the point where they hover around -12db and don’t clip. You can always turn the sound up later, but if you need to do so, you want to make sure you don’t raise the ambient noise at the same time!
Sounds good to me.
My Recommended “Mobile Recording Studio”
When I used to take on new podcasting clients, most were completely fresh with no equipment save for a laptop or some junker microphone they had lying in a drawer and couldn’t remember the origins of.
Most, if not all, wanted to record in person, face to face, and were inspired by the likes of Joe Rogan. I had to delicately explain the reason for Rogan’s setup in a mind-boggling Spotify contract. Most top-of-the-line podcasting equipment will cost you an arm and a leg but there is a closely guarded secret:
99% of your audience can’t hear the difference between a $25 microphone and a $500 microphone.
What follows is my go-to “Mobile Podcast Recording Kit” that I not only used to recommend to clients who wanted to dip their toes into podcasting but also to remote clients who mostly recorded their interviews over the internet but occasionally found themselves doing in-person interviews.
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Shure SM58 Microphone
This is the microphone you see when you think of the word “microphone” and for good reason. It is the microphone you should start with because you’ll likely use it for the rest of your career. They’ve got a great range, they handle background noise well because they’re directional, they’re handheld and lightweight, and they don’t need phantom power to operate.
The only consideration I’d mention for this mic is that they pick up a lot of wind sounds so consider also grabbing a cheap foam wind filter for the end of the mic.
Zoom H5 4-Track Audio Portable Audio Recorder
Repeat after me, you do not need the $2,000 audio mixer for your podcast.
I have used this audio recorder for going on 7 years now and it still runs and sounds just as great as the first day I got it.
If Batman was a sound designer, this would be on his tool belt.
When I worked in video production, this was always in my camera bag. Shooting a concert at a music venue? Just hand this to the A/V guy and he’ll know what to do with it.
When I worked in audio, this was the only piece of recording equipment I would bring sometimes.
This recorder sports two styles of input. It’s got XLR and TRS-in which will work for nearly any microphone. The damn thing even has phantom power.
The two smaller mics attached on top can be used to capture stereo audio which is amazing for ambiance or for interview audio in a pinch.
Click HERE to purchase this recorder using our affiliate link.
Standard XLR Cables
Your standard XLR cables. This is the bedrock of any audio project. No need to shell out for incredibly fancy ones. These are everything you need and are usually my go-to. The Amazon Basic cables have never failed me and come in a two-pack of three-foot cables which are perfect for this mobile recording kit.
And that’s it! Seriously. This has been my grab-and-go mobile recording setup for nearly a decade and I have no plans to change it any time soon.
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey