There’s a saying amongst audio engineers that ‘garbage in equals garbage out’. Basically, no matter what you do when you’re mixing and mastering, if your initial recording was subpar, the final recording will reflect that. Like most axioms, there is a certain amount of hyperbole, but it does illustrate just how important getting your setup right when you start recording will be to your finished podcast. Making sure you’re recording as effectively as possible not only gives your listener a better sounding product, but it can also save you massive amounts of time in the editing bay trying to iron out mistakes. So let’s start with the basics.

Right now you’re probably sitting in the room where you will record your podcast. Close your eyes and take a minute to listen to your room. Seriously. Close your eyes for 60 seconds and listen to the whir of your laptop, the overhead fans, maybe the AC in the other room. Perhaps there’s an open window and maybe you can hear the sound of traffic, or the whirring of a million tiny bugs. There’s probably some construction going on around you if you live in the city, or animals fornicating if you live in the country. Anything you can hear, your microphone will be able to hear as well, and these noises will impact the final sound of your podcast, so do your best to mitigate those. Close windows, turn off ACs, make sure your computer has adequate airflow and isn’t running anything intensive while you’re recording.

What we’re trying to do is identify and eliminate any sources of consistent noise. Each one we can reduce will have an effect on our noise floor, or the sound your mic picks up when no one is talking. This is especially important for podcasts with more than one person, as multiple mics in the same room will all pick up the same noise, and compound it in the final mix. Having our noise floor be as low as possible from the outset means less noise reduction processing and gives our listeners a cleaner sounding podcast.

Next, snap your fingers or clap your hands and listen to the echos in the room. Sound loves to bounce off hard surfaces, and big spaces gives it even more room to do so. For example, think of what it sounds like to clap in an empty gymnasium. These echoes, as slight as they may be, are called reflections, and they can go a long way to degrading the sound of your voice in a podcast. This is because the microphone will pick up your voice speaking into it, and then immediately after the reflection of your voice bouncing off walls, and then the reflection of the reflection (and on and on…) and will make your voice sound distant and echo-y. Unlike noise, which careful processing can all but eliminate, getting reflections out of a recording is almost impossible to do to a satisfactory level.

To mitigate reflections, it is always best to record in as small and soft a room as possible. By “soft”, I mean a room with things like couches, beds, pillows, curtains, carpets, clothes, oversized teddy bears or anything else that absorbs sound instead of reflects it. That’s why they tell you to scream into a pillow and not at a wall. Being in a room with lots of soft objects absorbs reflections and makes your voice sound more direct and clean to the microphone. This is why a lot of voice actors who record at home do so in their closets. It’s a small space with lots of dense, soft material to soak up reflections. If you’re recording in the same space week after week, it might be worth it to look into buying some sound dampening foam, but hanging a heavy blanket on a wall can work wonders as well.

Once we’ve set up our room to be as dampening as possible, let’s talk about microphone placement. If you google “[microphone name] + polar pattern” you’ll see a picture that illustrating how well the microphone picks up sound around it. The most common polar pattern is called Cardioid, which essentially picks up audio from directly in front of it, and rejects audio relatively well from the sides, and very well from behind it.

When placing our microphones, we want to use that sound rejection to our advantage, by making sure the backs of our microphones are facing the noisiest elements in our room. If you have two people recording, make sure the microphones are facing away from each other to minimize the amount of crosstalk (person A’s voice being picked up on person B’s track). If you’re recording 4 people, arrange the mics in an X pattern facing outwards, to maximize noise rejection.

Some microphones, like the Yeti, will have options for multiple polar patterns. If you’re using it to record only one person, always use the Cardioid pattern (it looks like a heart) to maximize noise reduction. To record two people, use bidirectional (two circles), and situate yourselves directly in front and behind the microphone.

Finally, let’s talk about how to situate yourself in relation to the microphone. The accepted wisdom is to have the distance equivalent to your thumb and pinky outstretched between your mouth and the mic. However, while this is for ideal studio situations, you may find that speaking closer to the mic gives you a better signal to noise ratio. Essentially, the level of static noise your microphone picks up will be consistent no matter how loud or quiet your voice is, so the closer you speak into the microphone, the louder your voice will be without having to shout, and then when you mix your audio you can lower the volume of your track so that your voice is at a regular tone, but the noise is significantly reduced. Conversely, if you speak too far away from the mic, your voice will be quieter and you’ll have to bring up the volume of the track, raising the noise floor with it.

Be wary though, the closer you speak to the mic, the more likely you are to create plosives (which we deal with in our guide to cleaning up audio) and sibilance (which we tackle in our guide to editing). Always make sure you have a wind screen or pop filter between you in the mic, and if you’re really in a bind, taping a pencil to the front grill of a microphone can mitigate some of the problems by redirecting air away from directly into the capsule.

In general, I encourage those new to podcasting and guests on podcasts to talk closer to the microphone than they normally would, not only for a better signal-to-noise ratio, but also because it takes a while to get used to talking into a microphone, and oftentimes people just get caught up in the moment and forget to direct their audio into the mic, instead directing it towards the person they’re talking to. Speaking extra close to the mic will cause a disproportionate amount of bass tones to be picked up (known as the “proximity effect”), but we show you how to deal with that in our Complete Guide to Podcast Editing.