Make sure that there's a jug of water and a glass available, and let him take reasonable breaks - I think that having a moist mouth without any mucus-forming stuff in it is likely to reduce extraneous noise, not increase it. Under the circumstances, you probably want the mic about 9' away from the speaker - no closer, or mouth noises will be exaggerated compared to the speech that you actually want to record. Let me reiterate and add very slightly to the basic rules: Get the mic off-axis from the speaker, just above mouth level, and use a pop screen. Using a gate is tantamount to an admission of failure! Compression and limiting sometimes, yes - but not gating. All I can say is that I've spent over forty years recording voices, and I've never had to resort to using gates at all. I've heard the results, and found them to be generally unlistenable to. Yes, I'm aware that there are some cloth-eared engineers that do this. I spoke with a sound engineer who records his vioce on one of the commerical sites,' IsIs audiobook' who applys the Noise gate to all voice talent who he use s. But, if this is really bad then you will almost certainly have to employ all of the techniques I've mentioned. It will help him to control his breathing rather better, especially on a long read. If he sits to read, then another thing you can try is to get him to narrate standing up - a lot of actors prefer to do it this way anyway. At least it would give you a starting point for talking about it. One thing you can try is to get him to listen to a recording of himself, and see what he thinks about it very often people are their own worst critics, and that may be all he needs to address the issue. I'd be the first to admit that this can be a problem with some talent, though.

If people are going to have to listen to him for any length of time, then you really must do something about this at source.

The only times you will sometimes get away with this (or any other form of volume expansion) is if your voice-over is over a reasonably loud music bed, or other noise, that's louder.īut you said that this is for an audio book, so it's unlikely that the foregoing will apply at all. All that happens if you use a noise gate is that you lose not only the sound from the speaker's mouth, but also all of the background noise - and when this comes and goes it will create a 'pumping' sound that after a very short while, will become even more annoying than the sounds you are trying to eliminate - seriously. Not really, otherwise I would have suggested it myself.

How to remove mouth noise in audacity