I’ve made several changes to the way I record. Other than the headphones, everything is the same, I’ve just changed some of the settings.
1. Before: I had dropped the mic down below mouth level to try to eliminate plosives (hard B’s, P’s and T sounds). It had reduced the plosives, but hadn’t completely eliminated them. After: I raised the mic back up to mouth level but shifted it to the side, at a 45 degree angle. The plosives are still there (so Hans tells me) but to my ear, are much better.
2. Before: I didn’t know what those little switches on my microphone were for, so I simply didn’t use them. After: I looked up the specs on my Sterling Audio ST66 microphone and discovered that I had a 10dB attenuation pad and a Switchable 75Hz, 12dB/octave high-pass filter. Did that make any more sense to you than it did to me? I did a little digging, and figured out what those two terms meant. It turns out, an attenuation pad means I can put the mic in front of a REALLY loud sound source, like a drum, and it will be able to record the sound without distorting it. As a lowly little voiceover, this was NOT something I needed use, so I left it turned off. The other switch is called a high-pass filter, because it’s a filter that lets everything higher than it’s threshold pass, while everything below it gets rejected. In this case, anything below 75 Hz (somewhat lower than my voice can go) gets rejected. That sounded good to me! I switched that baby on, and on it’s going to stay!
3. Before: I tried to use the compression and eq on my audio interface. After: I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing and decided it might be better not to mess with the recording up front, but rather to wait and do all my audio processing after the fact where it’s reversible, using software plugins. (Obviously, I also had to learn how to use software plugins, but that’s a discussion for another night.)
These three changes have made a big difference on the noise floor of my recording, as well as on it’s overall quality.
Now my big dilemma: although better is good when it comes to short projects, better means different, and different is terrible for long audio narration. This probably mens I’ll be re-recording the beginning of Advent.
Ah well, that’s how it goes, doesn’t it? Three steps forward, two steps back. But in the end, all forward movement is a good thing, and I’ll just have to be satisfied with that.
