First Things First — Audio Production

Audio is the half of video nobody notices until it is wrong, and then it is the only thing they notice. Here is the order to fix it in.

1. Get the microphone closer

This is the whole thing. Nearly every audio problem an amateur has — room echo, background noise, thin voices, hiss — is a microphone-distance problem wearing a disguise.

Halving the distance between mouth and microphone roughly quadruples the level of the voice relative to everything else in the room. No microphone upgrade, no plugin, no amount of post-production will do what moving the microphone six inches closer does for free.

If you take one thing from this page: closer.

2. Fix the room

Rooms with hard parallel surfaces — which is to say most Indian offices, with tile or stone floors and glass — sound like bathrooms. That reverberation cannot be removed afterwards. It is baked into the recording.

You do not need acoustic panels to start. Soft things absorb sound: a rug, a sofa, curtains, a bookshelf, even a duvet on a stand just out of frame. Record in the room that has furniture in it, not the empty conference room with the nice table.

3. Turn things off

Free, and skipped constantly. Ceiling fans. Air conditioning. The refrigerator in the next room. Phone notifications. The building's generator, if you can schedule around it.

An air conditioner produces a broadband hum that sits underneath everything and cannot be cleanly removed. Turn it off for the take, and run it between takes. In an Indian summer this is a real trade-off, which is exactly why it needs planning rather than improvisation.

4. Set levels properly

Aim for peaks around −12 to −6 dBFS. Distortion from clipping is permanent; a quiet recording can be brought up.

Use headphones. Actually listen. Almost every ruined recording was audible as it happened and nobody was monitoring.

5. Record a backup

On anything that matters, record a second, independent track — a separate recorder, a second card, the camera's own audio alongside the desk feed. Audio is where single points of failure hurt most, and a backup track has rescued more shoots than any other habit.

6. Record room tone

Thirty seconds of the empty room, after the take, everyone silent. It costs half a minute and makes edits invisible.

7. Now think about the microphone

With the mic close, the room controlled, the noise sources off, levels set and a backup running, a better microphone will improve the result. Before that, it will not.

The order, restated

1. Distance
2. Room
3. Noise sources
4. Levels
5. Backup
6. Room tone
7. Microphone
8. Preamps, plugins, everything else

The India footnote

Earthing and hum. Venue power and questionable earthing produce ground-loop hum routinely here. Carry a ground-loop isolator and a DI box.

The house feed is not a backup. Taking a feed from the venue's desk is convenient and entirely outside your control. Record your own independent track as well, always.

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Gloworks is a video production and live streaming studio in Bengaluru.