How to Sound Good (Part 1) - Microphones

So you’re working remotely, and you don’t want to sound like you’re on a construction site. People constantly complain about your voice sounding fuzzy and quiet. When you hear yourself, you notice that things just sound… wrong… Your voice is echoing around the room, the dogs are barking, someone’s ringing the doorbell, the neighbor is mowing their lawn, and you have to practically shout into your microphone to be heard.

You can do better. You can sound better. You want to sound clear, loud, and professional.

But how?

This post is part 1 in a series dedicated to helping you sound better while working remotely. In this one, I’ll be going over identifying the problems you want to fix and things to consider when picking a microphone.

In future posts, I’ll be going over methods for addressing common problems.

TL;DR

Get a better mic and put it close to your face.

Find your problems

Before you dive too deep in the rabbit hole, try and identify the problems, so that you can tackle them one at a time.

For me, my biggest problem has always been noise . By this, I mean the persistent, droning, sounds in my world. Everything from air conditioners to line noise in my microphone.

Related to noise are other unwanted sounds, like people watching TV or my daughter playing. These are a bit different from regular noise, since they tend to be a bit less predictable, and are often human voices, so the built-in vocal isolation features in meeting software often fail to block these sounds.

Another big thing for me is volume. I tend to talk fairly quickly and quietly, and sometimes microphones struggle to pick up my voice if the mic isn’t practically inside my mouth. But sometimes, I can be pretty loud, and I don’t want to blow out everyone’s eardrums just because I’m laughing at a joke.

On top of that, like most people, I don’t particularly like the sound of my voice. It’s not really an insecurity thing; I’ve accepted that my voice is mine, and I’m okay with that. But in meetings, I always feel like the timbre could be just a little bit more pleasing to the ear. Beyond that, all microphones and rooms introduce a little bit of their own flavor that you may or may not want to account for.

Record your voice with the same setup you use for meetings (if you do meetings on your laptop with a headset, recording your voice on your phone with the phone mic won’t do much good), and really listen to see what you want to change. Any voice memo or recorder software will work. There are even websites that can do it, if you can’t find anything else.

There might be a whole list of things for you to improve, like me, or you might not need to do anything at all. There’s someone on my team who sounds fantastic and doesn’t do anything special at all! He just uses a decent headset and he’s good to go. He could probably improve things a little bit, if he really cared, but he already sounds better than 95% of remote workers.

If you use Microsoft Teams, there’s a really useful “test call” feature (go to Settings > Devices > Audio settings > and click the “Make a test call” button), which lets you record a short message, which gets played right back to you. This gives you a full end-to-end test, including any extra processing the meeting software is doing for you.

Get a better mic

The single most significant thing you can do to improve your sound is get a better microphone. My recommendation is either a decent headset with a built-in microphone that sits in front of your face or one that connects to your computer via a physical USB cable.

Headsets vs USB mics

Headset microphones

Headsets like that work well because even if the microphone is kind of mediocre, you can overcome a lot by simply putting it an inch or two from your mouth. If you use this kind of mic, be sure to position the boom (the part with the mic) such that it doesn’t sit directly in front of your mouth, since you don’t want it to pick up your breath. A wired headset will work a little better, but something wireless will probably be fine for most.

The Good

Mic can be very close to your mouth

Affordable

Simple

You get both a microphone and headphones

The Bad

Can feel uncomfortable and most aren’t well-suited for all-day use

Ugly

Basically, if you want to make your life easy, just get a headset with a boom that puts the mic near your face. These will nearly always do a good job with basically no fuss at a low price. If you want something better, have more uses for your mic, or just want to have more fun, then read on.

USB microphones

USB mics work well because they tend to be easy to set up, reasonably affordable (vs ones that use things like XLR cables), and can be very high-quality. I recommend something like a Blue Yeti or Snowball or a Zoom H1essential handy recorder (my personal weapon of choice).

One really useful feature is that many USB mics are designed to capture sound that comes from certain directions, while rejecting sounds from other directions. This is called its polar pattern (many even have multiple patterns, which you can switch between). In noisy environments with dogs, kids, and TVs (welcome to working in a motorhome!), this means that by pointing the microphone at yourself, it will pick up your voice nicely while barely picking up loud noises to your side or directly in front of you.

These microphones also frequently have other useful features, like a volume boost switch, mute buttons, high-pass filters, etc.

Also, because these mics don’t need to be attached to your head, you can often position them off-camera, so that you don’t need to have a microphone in-view for video meetings.

If you really want the best audio quality or want to use the microphone for music, then consider looking beyond just USB microphones, and start looking at ones that connect via XLR. To use one of these, you’ll also need an “audio interface” to sit between the mic and computer; you plug the XLR cable into it, then connect it to your computer via USB, to convert the mic signal into something digital for the computer to work with. An AKG P420 condenser microphone connected to a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interfaces was my introduction to the whole world of audio, and I’ve used that in plenty of meetings.

If you’re not looking for something specific, I wouldn’t bother trying to track down the best condenser studio mic you can find; just go read some reviews and find something affordable that sounds good. Condenser mics tend a sound a little better to me, since they are more sensitive, but they are kind of pricey and can be too sensitive, so a dynamic mic would also be a good choice.

The Good

Great sound quality

Affordable (depending on the mic)

Low latency

It doesn’t need to be visible when you’re on-camera

Polar patterns can help block out outside sounds

Often have useful extra features

Plenty of options

The Bad

Cable management can be annoying

Limited mobility

Cost, if you go big

Wired vs wireless

While wireless microphones are really handy, you’re nearly always trading that convenience for lower audio quality and latency. You’ve got quite a bit of wiggle room with audio quality, so the major concern is latency (that is, the amount of time between a sound being made and your computer receiving it in a usable way). The general rule of thumb is that you probably won’t even really notice less than 50 milliseconds of latency. Any more than that, and people might start to notice that your mouth movements aren’t quite lining up with your voice.

With remote meetings, you get a little bit of extra leeway here, since things tend to get a little laggy and weird when working remotely anyway. But it’s already bad enough, so do you really want to make it worse?

Bluetooth commonly introduces 30-200(!) ms of latency, and pretty much any extra processing to improve your sound is going to introduce even more. If the mic on its own isn’t enough to improve your sound, then I’d stay away from bluetooth. Some proprietary wireless formats can work with significantly less latency.

A wired microphone (be it USB, XLR, etc) will usually have almost no latency at all. You’ll usually be looking at more like 2-10 ms, which is perfectly usable. For that reason alone, I’d stick with something with a cord.

Mic placement

In general, you want your microphone to be as close to your mouth as possible without blasting air into it when you talk.

If you’re using a headset, then life is pretty easy: position the mic an inch or two from your mouth, slightly off-center.

As an experiment, try recording yourself with any microphone (if you have a laptop, the built-in mic will work), with your mouth about 3 feet, 1 foot, six inches, and 1 inch away from it. You’ll hear a HUGE difference in quality as you move closer. You’ll also notice that as you get closer, it might be kind of tricky to keep yourself from getting too loud, causing your voice to become distorted. You can see that the ideal distance is a few inches from your mouth. You should position it a little off to the side or below your mouth, so that you don’t pick up breathing sounds or plosives (the blast of air that you hear when saying “p”). You don’t want to point it directly at your mouth; you should instead point it off the side a little bit.

Personally, I just hold my microphone below my face, about three to six inches from my mouth. This allows me to move it if needed, and I can ensure it’s as close as possible. I generally point it up past my face. If I’m on camera, it’s generally not hard to keep it slightly below the camera’s view.

I have a clip that allows me to clip it to my laptop screen, but I rarely use that, since it positions the microphone far enough away to noticably affect the sound.

When I’m not travelling, I use a small, telescoping tripod, which I can set right next to my laptop, raised close to face-height, and pointed at me. This puts it close enough to sound good, while also sitting barely outside my camera’s view.

Mic accessories

Dead cats

In quite a few different environments, I’ve found myself sitting outside or directly below or in front an air duct return vent. A dead cat is a poofy, fuzzy cover for a microphone. It blocks the annoying sound of wind blowing across a mic, which just about everyone by now is familiar with. A dead cat is a cheap and super effective method for almost entirely eliminating that sound. They also work very well for blocking plosive sounds.

If you have any problems related to air blowing across your mic and generating that awful sound, a dead cat is the answer. Get one and use it. There generic ones that fit a wide range of mics, and fitted ones that are made for specific models of microphone. Get a fitted one, if you can; and a generic one, if you can’t.

Pop filters

If you don’t have to deal with wind, but still find your self blasting breath into your mic every time you talk about Peter Piper and his pickled pepper picking (these sounds are called “plosives”), a pop filter might be exactly what you need. A pop filter is a small screen that sits between your mic and your mouth, which blocks those sounds. If you imagine someone singing in a recording studio, there’s a really good chance you’re picturing a weird, small round thing that they are singing into. That’s a pop filter.

Realistically, you probably don’t need one, since you can avoid most plosive sounds by simply not talking directly into the mic (move it over a few inches, and talk past it instead of into it). But if you want to look cool, they are cheap and easy to use!

Note: a dead cat also acts as a pretty solid pop filter!

Mic stands

A mic stand is simply something you attach your microphone to, to hold it in position. If you are always working in the same space, like a dedicated home office, you can set your microphone up once, and never need to even think about.

For my home office, I have a long boom arm clamped to my desk, which reaches out and positions the mic directly in front of me, below my camera’s view. My mic at home is fairly large, so I have it sitting sideways, to keep it out of view. The microphone is encased in a shock absorber, a set of elastic bands that hold the mic in place in a way that it doesn’t directly touch the stand through anything rigid. This helps keep the lower-frequency sounds, like someone walking around, or me bumping the desk, from being heard.

While traveling, I almost never use any kind of stand, but on the rare occasions where I can have a dedicated desk, I use my small telescoping tripod.

Some microphones have built in stands, too, which can be pretty useful. If you are able to use one, a mic stand can make your life easier while opening up a whole world of possible mic positions, so I high recommend picking one up.

Next

So you’ve got your mic hooked up. Now what?

Easy: try it out! Just like before, record yourself talking for a minute, and play it back. With any kind of luck, you’ll hear an immediate improvement. Realistically, though, there’s still a lot to be desired. In my case, when I first started using a more sensitive microphone, I noticed that it was picking up a lot of extra noise that my lesser mics completely missed.

In the next post in this series, I’ll be going over dealing with the basics of audio plugins and gates.