THG TIM 2015, Technical Manual

Page: 45 / 48

TIM 2015 Technical Manual v1 (February 2018) Page 45
Some basic rules when making voice recordings:
1. Don’t record with the microphone touching your lips. It's too close, the voice will sound bassy when using a directional microphone,
and you may get pops and sibilants with ‘p’, ‘t’ and ‘s’, etc.
2. Don't record with the microphone too far away. It will pick up too much of the room sound, and it will sound boxy and roomy.
3. Try different rooms, if you have more than one. Your hallway might sound better than your bedroom, etc.
4. Yes, get a pop-shield and a mic stand. You cannot hold the microphone while speaking, as the noises from the hand movements will
be recorded. To get rid of that you need mics made for live use, and noise gates and things.
5. Once you get as good a sound as possible directly out of the microphone, you may care to apply compression, EQ and reverb/delay to
make it sound even better. Here you generally need to experiment, as what sounds good depends on both the microphone and the
6. Good equipment helps, but always take the time to get the best out of the equipment you have. If you don’t, getting the good
equipment will not help much. You learn a lot from using cheap equipment, not least which is why expensive equipment is
expensive.
[Adapted from http://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/24923/how-to-make-recorded-voice-sound-good with full acknowledgement]
You will find further good advice from Sam Hallas at the end this page on Sam’s website:
http://www.samhallas.co.uk/repository/tim_2015.htm
Contributing historical recordings that you made from the telephone
You can provide us with a single tape/Mini Disc/CD or digital WAV file of the entire session (leave the editing into segments to us). As this is
a spare time activity, it may well take some time to edit and format the recordings for TIM 2015.