Transcript
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another video. Today we are in our marketing series, and we’re going to talk about how to get your sound right. Now, this is one of the most important parts of your video creation, and everyone is going to be creating videos. It doesn’t matter if you’re a setup video studio business such as myself or whether you are a landed business or even a plumbing business. If you’re doing marketing, you are going to have to create video content. So pretty much every business out there today is using video. It’s the best format, and you need good sound if you want to have a good product.
Choosing the Right Microphone
So what are your options to get started? You don’t want to spend the earth on your microphone but it’s really important that your sound matches your camera. So the first and most obvious answer is if you’re in a studio environment ideally you want to get a condenser mic. These are the studio condenser mics.
They’re usually quite large, cylindrical, and they sit on your desk. Now I don’t personally use one and that’s because I like filming in a variety of locations And also my nature of business isn’t always set up in one spot. However, I have brought in the equivalent, which is the light bulb. And the light bulb is a bit like a studio condenser mic, and it sits roughly where my hands are now.
The audio quality from a studio condenser mic is just fantastic. That’s what singers use in recording studios, and they’re incredibly accurate, deep, full sound. And that’s what basically you’re seeing when you look at YouTube videos.
Are they expensive? Yes. I would recommend that any studio condenser mic less than about two hundred and fifty dollars. The quality starts to degrade quite quickly, so you do end up spending quite a lot of money in this department.
But your sound is generally worth it because you’re not making a video for today. You’re making a video for today and probably the next five years. Seriously, I have used marketing videos that I created ten years ago, and I still use them because the sound quality was good enough to keep using them. So that’s a real thing.
Exploring Lavalier Microphones
Now, the more common and very cheap form of a microphone is a wired lavalier mic. So these wired lavalier mics they usually have a plug on the end this one’s an iPhone plug but this one also comes with a traditional analog audio out plug so this one’s good for two options Plug it into my iPhone or I could plug it into my camera or computer.
And these things you just kind of find a nice spot on your body and you clip them on and you try to hide the wire out of the way.
That’s not a bad option if you’re starting cheap. You can get a reasonably good wired lavalier mark for as little as, say, dollars thirty. So that’s a fantastic way if you just need to jump in tomorrow and you’re not ready to commit yet.
But be prepared. There are some major drawbacks with these wired lavalier mics. One, they’re hard against your body all the time, which means that they have that ruffling sound against your clothes unless you’re very careful.
They are in your shot, and the other downside is that the wires just aren’t that long. To put it in perspective, right now my camera is about three meters away from me, and that’s because I’ve got the big fixed focal lens on, And there is just absolutely no way that this wire is going to reach there. And because it’s an analog signal going through here, every single centimeter it travels, that audio starts to degrade and get worse and worse and worse. So if I got a cable extension for this, by the time it got to my camera, it would sound pretty bad. So not a bad way to get started if you’re just doing some selfie videos, some videos from, say, a webcam in front of you.
Very convenient to get started, but also just a bit of a pain as well.
Advantages of Wireless Lavalier Microphones
But there is a much better version, and that is the wireless lavalier mic. I’m holding one right now. This is actually the second mic of the microphone I’m using right now. The other one is actually just down below me and they form a set.
This one’s off. And basically a wireless lavalier mic is made up of at least two bits: a transmitting microphone that you put somewhere near your body and a receiving portion, which is sitting there receiving the signal from the transmitter and then sending that signal to your recording device. So in this case, have a unit that looks a little bit like this without the fairy bit on top here, and it’s sitting on my camera right now and it’s plugged into my camera and it’s just sending the signal across wirelessly and that’s really really useful.
Now the advantage of these wireless lavalier mics is that you can use them pretty much anywhere you want. You can use them outside, you can use them inside.
And if you get one which has two transmitters, going back to one receiver, you can do interview style content because two people can speak at the same time. Try doing that with wired lavalier mics and you’ll be a little bit jostled around.
So this particular microphone that I’m using is the Rode Wireless GO II, R O D E.
And while I’m not particularly plugging their products, I do recommend it as a starting microphone brand if you don’t know what you’re doing. Rode puts out very high quality products, and more importantly, none of their products are bad. That means if you’re buying a road product, you’re in pretty good hands.
Now this one in particular, the Wireless GO II, you can see it comes with the little furry wind hood on top and these wind hoods are to stop that rustling sound if it moves around. This is really useful because if I go outside into an outdoor setting and there’s just a little bit of breeze, that stops the breeze hitting the microphone and you get much clearer sound.
One of the things about these microphones is a lot of people, when they clip them on, they clip them on like this.
But you actually don’t need to clip it on on the outside. And what a lot of better situations do is they actually clip it in upside down.
The microphone is still in the clear so it’s no problem and you just get a lower profile look on your clothes which is really nice. But there’s an even better way of using these and that’s to put it down on the table And that’s actually just where my real microphone is sitting right now. Sitting on the table about sixty centimeters away from me, and there’s no cloves rustling, and it’s not in the way. So that’s a great place to start with your microphone.
Connecting Microphones to Devices
There are many options out there. There are many Chinese ones that are getting better, but they’re not quite there yet. So be aware. If you think you’re getting a good deal on AliExpress or Temu, I would think again. Honestly, the Chinese microphones are probably three to five years out from being at the same quality as the rest of the world. And it’s really important that you have good sound.
So let’s move into the next part, which is how do you actually connect your microphone to your device? And there’s basically two situations. You’re either using a phone or you’re using a camera. And what you’re going to find is that your microphone probably has the wrong adapter on it unless you bought it specifically for your device.
So for example, the one that I’m using right now, the transmitter that’s attached to my camera, sorry, the receiver that’s attached to my camera, it’s using a headphone jack like this, plugs into the receiver, and that headphone jack then plugs into the camera. And that’s all good.
Looks like this.
But the reason I’m bringing this up is that you have to be very careful because phone headphone jacks and camera headphone jacks are not the same.
See this here, this is a microphone and a camera headphone jack, and it has two black rings on it. So that has two channels and an earth, I believe.
But on this side, this is a iPhone or Android phone headphone jack, and it has three black rings on it. That means it has audio, left ear, right ear, so that’s two channels, and one microphone channel as well. So three channels here, two channels here. So that means that if you want to plug a microphone in which only has two black rings on its adapter, you’re going to need one of these special cables that tapes TRS to TRRS and once you have this adapter cable no problems but you might find that using a cheaper cable isn’t going to be the one that works for you.
But there’s another fantastic way to do that and that’s to get an analog microphone to USB connector. So in this case this one just connects straight onto here And basically that just turns that into a USB C compatible device, and then I can plug it straight into my Android phone. So that’s useful to know. Lastly, what I will say is most cameras, because they don’t play audio, they use the same type of cable as a microphone. So you’re just looking for the one with the two rings on both sides.
Just important to know.
Improving Sound Quality Tips
Okay, so let’s go into some quick tips about making your sound a little bit better because there are a few quick pitfalls and you can avoid them very easily. The first one is you need to reduce hard surfaces to an absolute minimum in your room.
If you’re in a small room like I am right now, we have one, two, three, four walls, one floor, one ceiling. We have six hard surfaces. Now lucky for me, I’m in a carpeted room, so that’s one down.
But I still have five hard surfaces to deal with. So what do you do? The expensive and the correct way is to go out and to buy some acoustic studio paneling. That’s that stuff that looks like egg crates. And you put this over at least half of your walling. What this does is it reduces the echo, echo, echo effect that happens when your voice bounces around multiple services.
But if that’s a bit too much for you right now and you just need to produce one video, that’s total overkill. What should you do?
Go to your bed, grab your doonas, grab your sleeping bags, and hang them on your walls. It may sound silly, but if you only need to record one video but you need that sound quality to be top notch, doodles and sleeping bags absorb a huge amount of sound from your room and will massively improve your quality.
Second, get the mic away from your body. You will see a few of my videos I have the mic up against my body, maybe because I’m filming outside or somewhere else, but it always sounds worse when it’s attached to your body. If you can get the mic on a stationary surface, the audio quality will boost a lot.
Second, this one’s a little bit tricky, and it’s a bit technical. But if you’ve got a microphone going into a camera, you have two recording devices. And that’s because your microphone’s recording sound, and then it’s sending that sound to the camera, and that camera is then recording that sound a second time.
If you have a double recording setup, which is very common, what you need to do is turn your microphone all the way up, but then turn your camera’s microphone volume all the way down.
What this does is it boosts the signal being sent to your camera. By having the volume all the way up in the microphone, it sends a really nice strong signal into your camera, and then by turning it down in the camera, you can make sure it doesn’t do that clipping sound when there’s too much power coming in. And that’s going to give you better volume and clarity than if you do it in the other way.
Lastly, I will say just do a lot of trial runs when you’re starting. I’m sure you’ve heard those testing one, two, one, two people out there. They’re not doing it to be crazy. They’re doing it because doing four or five quick recording setups thirty seconds each will massively boost your quality and get you way up to speed much faster. Don’t go into a thirty minute video before you’ve got your sound right. And of course, lastly, final tip, charge your batteries. I have seen too many people lose a twenty minute clip because they did not charge their microphone batteries.
So I hope that helps you out.
And obviously, if you need to talk about microphones more, there is plenty on YouTube or you can get in touch for some one on one coaching and I’m happy to assist you further. See you in the next video.
Useful Links
Once you’ve got your sound right, check out how to edit a simple video:
Editing a Simple Video with Filmora
And here’s a link to my favourite Microphone: