My audio Was terrible when I got started.

  • What was the problem?

When I recorded audio for my videos I could always hear a room echo and white noise in the recording, you could hear every creak of my chair and the keyboard or mouse clicks.

  • Why was it a problem for me?

The problem arose when I went into the recording and started to edit the flow of the conversations.
Unwanted clicks or white noise kept getting in the way since I would often have an audio cut into sudden keyboard sounds or into a louder (due to automatic mic settings) white noise. You can only do so much with cutting and audio ramps.

  • What did I not try?

I did not try sound treating my studio room since I fixed my audio before I resorted to that.
It would have also been expensive for me when in a hurry since a single 1m x 0.5m (3.28 x 1.64 feet) piece of sound treatment foam is ~15€ and I would need several square meters of the stuff in order to cover the problem spots
(sound treatment is to stop sound bounces in a room, sound isolation is to stop the sound from escaping a room)

  • What did I try?

I tried putting a blanket over me and the mic when recoding audio in post (sounded terrible)
I tried to have the mic in a box that I had lined with cloth (sounded even worse)
I tried to run my audio through noise removing filters (which took a long time to get right on a video to video basis)

  • What microphone do I use? / What worked?

The mic I use is a Rode VideoMicro (around 50 EUR ~ 60 USD) that I bought along with my camera last year. It uses a 3.5mm jack and nothing else.

I found out through trial and error that I just didn’t know how to use the microphone since I had always used a crappy webcam mic that sat on the top of my monitor.

I always assumed that is how it should be since my mic wasn’t a fancy condenser mic like the ones EvilToaster or Rammy use.

The Rode VideoMicro is referred to as a shotgun mic
It’s a microphone that has a directed cone shaped area where sound is detected and the closer you are to that middle the better the quality.

EvilToaster gave me the simplest and most effective explanation that I have gotten
Turn down microphone gain (this stops the other audio from getting in the way of your voice)
Move the mic close to your mouth (this makes up for the loss in gain and means your computer won’t have to process the audio so much)

I also didn’t really think about the mic direction so when set it up closer to my mouth I had it actually pointed away from me at a 90 degree angle, pointing it towards me properly really pushed my audio to the best level it can be on a budget.

I hope that this helps someone, it really would have helped me in the spring of 2020 when I was just getting into video recording.

Here is a link to the specific mic I use #notsponsored
www.rode.com/microphones/videomicro