Five Small Ways to Improve Your Audio Quality
As independent podcasters, we know that audio quality is important, but we also know what our budgets look like. Let's talk about simple and inexpensive ways we can improve our podcast's audio quality right now.
Listen to the room before you start.
Before you press record, sit and listen to the room. What noises can you hear? Everything you can hear can be picked up by a microphone. Turn off any fans. I always take the battery out of my clock that's above my desk in my office, because it ticks every time the second hand moves. Silence notifications on your computer and your phone. Maybe you have a dog sitting underneath your desk chewing on a toy and it's making some noise, you can move your dog to another room or maybe give them a quieter toy. You just want to make sure that the room is quiet with no background noises.
The next step would be to talk into the mic for a little bit, and to listen through your headphones to hear if your room is echoey. If it is, you can either treat that room or maybe move into a different space. Echoes are created when your voice bounces off of a surface in the room back to the microphone. So rooms with flat and hard surfaces are going to be way more echoey than rooms with soft surfaces like carpeting and furniture and curtains, which can absorb sound. And that's why lots of people recommend recording podcasts in your closet, because they're typically filled with soft, sound-absorbing clothes. If you have an echoey room, you can treat it by covering the hard and flat surfaces with things that will absorb the sound like blankets and towels.
Get everyone their own microphone and headphones.
Having everyone on their own mic will vastly improve your audio. If the person talking is closer to the microphone, there's going to be a lot less room noise getting picked up in your microphone. And everyone should also be wearing headphones while podcasting. You as the creator of the podcast definitely need to be wearing headphones, so you can hear everything that's being recorded and making sure everything sounds right and the audio is clean. But other people on the podcast should also be wearing headphones. And the reason is they can hear for themselves “I’m talking too loudly. I’m talking too softly. Oh, I'm shuffling these papers and it's getting picked up on the microphone.” You're just going to get a lot better audio when everyone can hear themselves.
Headphones are especially important if you're recording over the internet and you're doing remote recording, because you don't want the sound coming from somebody's laptop to get picked up on the microphone.
Record on separate tracks.
Make sure each one of those microphones is being recorded to a separate audio track. And the reason is, it's going to give you a lot of freedom when you're editing your podcast. You'll be able to fix a lot of audio quality issues, like adjusting volume for one person. Maybe somebody speaks super softly, and now you don't have to go in and find every time they talk and turn it up, you can just turn the whole track up. You can also cut a track if somebody is making extra noises that you don't want on the podcast. For example, maybe somebody takes a big gulp of water and it gets picked up on their mic, you can cut their track so the 'gulp' sound that you hear when you're editing is no longer in the final product.
Make sure you're using a microphone with a cardioid polar pattern.
All microphones have a polar pattern. And what that is, is where the sound is getting picked up from the mic. It looks kind of like a little upside-down heart. The pattern is showing you that audio is getting picked up from the front of the mic, less from the sides, and almost not at all from the back. The reason that is the best microphone for a podcast is that it's picking up your speaker's voice, but it's not picking up the echoes and room noise that are hitting the back of the microphone. And it's especially good if you have a podcast where other people are in the room with you recording because you don't want your voice to get picked up on their microphone, so it cuts a lot of that sound bleed.
5. Don’t Record on Zoom
We’re not saying that you can't record a podcast on Zoom, you absolutely can. We've done it many, many times. But when audio is recorded over the internet, it gets super compressed and the quality drops. It can even get so compressed sometimes that your recording can sound almost robotic.
Ideally, you should record using a web-based recorder, or have each person on the podcast record their audio to their computer, and then send you the file to edit together. If you do have each person record their own audio, we recommend recording with a web-based recorder as a backup option.