Fundamentals
- Like taking a picture, you want to separate the things you want to capture away from the things you don’t. You do this in a photo through a variety of choices such as lenses, composition, exposure and focus. For sound, you do this through your microphone choice, where you point the microphone, the distance between the mic and sound, and your gain.
- To leave a comfortable buffer for your recording, try to keep the levels between -12 and -6. It’s easier to make a recording that’s too quiet louder, but hard to make it quieter when it’s too loud.
- Whether it’s a discussion, interview or narration, warm ups are good to have instead of just jumping in. For narration especially, warm ups are key to good delivery. If you’re recording your own voice by yourself, warming up your voice, mouth and face will save you time by reducing mistakes and make for a better sound overall.
- When recording with other people, guide your subjects but don’t over direct them. You goal should be candid, natural delivery.
- When capturing sounds in the field, make sure to monitor the sound with earbuds where possible, especially if you’re working by yourself. When capturing sound in the field, try to anticipate the action or create it.
- Under most circumstances, your recording levels for most situations should fall between -12db and -6db. This is to give you some buffer so that any sudden loud noises won’t make your audio capture “peak.”
- Ideally, every key element being captured is recorded to a separate track and file. You can do this by either recording with more than one microphone or by recording elements individually in isolation.
- Before recording voice, have everyone do a microphone check by speaking at the volume they’ll be using during the recording and testing for ‘p’ pops by saying the “Peter Piper” tongue twister. If the pops are very audible, adjust the microphone distance, use a pop filter or decrease the gain on the microphone.
- Where possible, make sure there’s no music or similarly repetitive background noise. For the cleanest capture, switch off background noises like air conditioners or fans. Tell everyone present to switch their phones to silent.
- Try to capture at least one minute of room tone per location, especially where there’s recorded speaking. This will be used to “patch” or “fill” any silences you make by cutting audio out of a track.
Unscripted: Conversations
The same techniques above apply to conversations. But there are a few extra things to consider depending on how many people are speaking and how many microphones you have:
Turn-Taking: Where the focus of the interview is on one person, a recorded conversation places more emphasis on dynamic between several people. Try to avoid exceedingly long stretches of a single person talking (over one minute) by acknowledging points the person makes as they go or asking related prompts if it seems the person is struggling to find their words or to finish their sentence.
Interruptions: If you’re recording an interview or conversation, try not to interrupt your subject too often. This makes it hard or impossible to remove the sound of your voice if it overlaps theirs, especially if you’re sharing a microphone.
Overall, unscripted conversations work best when everyone including your subjects are at ease, especially if it’s their first time. Re-assure them that they are free to say anything they want, and that any undesirable bits such as off-color jokes or mis-stated information can be cut out after.
Whether you’re recording an interview, conversation and even narration (if the location isn’t a studio), remember to get your one minute or more of ambient sound.
Semi-scripted: Interviews
With semi-scripted interviews, help your subject by setting the mic at a height and position that’s comfortable to them and encourage them to keep their mouth relatively in front of the mic so that the captured audio remains even and constant.
- Change the game: If your subject has already been interviewed before, there’s a good chance they’ve answered a lot of similar questions. Whether or not this is the case, we generally feel it’s not imperative that you make it through every question on your list. Be sure to leave room to ask follow-up questions that unpack their answers.
- Act natural: Depending on your subject, if you can treat your interview as a conversation (backed up with questions for structure), you’re more likely to get unique moments and insights than you would if you rigidly stuck to a list.
- Guide, but don’t over direct: Your subject might not be the most confident or eloquent speaker, and that’s totally fine. But occasionally, you might want them to repeat a statement that’s especially impactful or informative but where their delivery isn’t as smooth or orderly.You might also want them to rephrase their answer to include the original question if you think you might use their answer separately and need the context included (Q: “When did you first start?” A: “I first started when I…”).
Some examples of how you can ask your subject to repeat their statement:
“That was really good, but could you repeat that for me in a complete sentence?”
“Do you mind trying that one more time?”
“Could you include the question in your answer?”
Give your subjects a heads-up that you’ll be doing this before you start the interview, but don’t make them repeat themselves too often during the talk. Your goal should be to catch a good conversation with them on record, not extract pristine audio clips from them.
Scripted Recording: Narration
For scripted narration, you can enhance their vocal delivery by warming up:
- Body: warming up your body is basically anything that lets you shake off any tension or stress that will creep into your delivery. You can do this actively by stretching your neck and shoulders at the very least or joking with your subject to break the ice.
- Breathing: to warm up your breathing, you need to activate and warm up your diaphragm, the big flap of internal muscle under your lungs that helps you breathe.
- A quick way to do this is take a deep belly breath—as opposed to a shallow chest breath—and slowly exhale by hissing in a controlled manner, letting out a minimum amount of air at a time.
- Voice: A classic way to warm up your voice box without straining your voice is to use tongue trills or lip rolls. These involve making controlled vibrations with your tongue or lips and raising your pitch up and down.If you’re having trouble doing lip rolls, you can lightly pinch the corners of your mouth with your thumb and finger.
- Mouth and Face: You can loosen up the muscles in your mouth and face by first “scrunching” all the muscles in your face (as if you ate something extremely sour) and pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Hold this for a count of three.Then, do the complete opposite by stretching your mouth, eyes and eyebrows up and outward for a count of three.
You’re going to look silly doing this, so you can either own it, or do this in private or covering your face with your hands.
Finish the warm-up doing a quick massage of your cheeks and jaw joints.
Good to Know: If you keep find yourself getting tongue-tied or breathless, you might need to revise the script and make sure it’s written to be spoken and not read. Doing this will save you time and energy.
Freeform: Field Audio & Foley
Key Takeaways
- Record in mono and not stereo.
- Record at least one minute of the ambient audio of your interview/discussion location (the room tone) with the exact setup as your recording such as keeping the microphone pointed where your subject was. Where possible, avoid having music or any other non-repetitive sound.
- Especially for field recording, always keep your headphones in to monitor the sound. To not do so would be like shooting a picture without framing it in the screen or viewfinder.
- When recording with other people, ask them to repeat statements if you really need, but don’t constantly coach or interrupt them.
That’s all for this part on the Production phase of the guide. If you want to learn more about the previous part, check out Part 3: Pre-Production Otherwise, continue on to Part 5: Post Production.
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Part 6 — Publishing & Promotion
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