When the microphone starts hearing your habits
The last few parts of this series have been about the capture side of V3: the recording chain, mic technique, consistency, and choosing a book voice on purpose. That work made the microphone more predictable. It started hearing the same voice, in the same way, every time.
And once that happens, something slightly uncomfortable follows. The mic does not only hear your good choices consistently. It also hears your habits consistently.
So this is the next part of the V3 mindset. If the earlier parts were about getting the microphone to behave, this one is about getting me to behave.
Not by becoming precious or theatrical about recording. I am still me, in a room, reading into a microphone, but I am removing the little safety net in my head that says, “It’s fine, I’ll fix it later.”
The safety net I removed was not really gear
It is easy to talk about tools here, but the safety net I really removed was an assumption. The assumption was: if something slips into the recording – a click, a breath, a rushed restart, a slightly panicked retake – I can repair it later.
And yes, often I can. But over time, I realised that if my workflow depends on repairs, I start recording in a way that creates more things that need repairing. It becomes normal. It becomes baked in. Future-me inherits every rushed breath, every messy restart, every “that will do”. Future-me is already doing the editing. I do not need to make his job harder.
V3 is me refusing that deal. Not because repair tools are bad, but because every strong fix costs something somewhere else: time, clarity, or that faint processed feeling you only notice after living with the audio for hours. So rather than recording and hoping, I am trying to record in a way that future-me can trust.
The paradox is that being close helps, and distance does not save you
This still feels backwards to me, which is usually a sign that I should test it rather than argue with it. I used to assume that if I wanted fewer breaths and mouth clicks, I should move further away from the mic. Surely distance would make those little noises smaller.
The problem is that mouth clicks are tiny, bright, horrible little events. My microphone was quite happy to hear them from across a four metre room. Getting further away did not make them disappear. It mostly made my voice smaller compared with the room.
Moving closer did something more useful. It made my voice much louder compared with the room noise: fans, distant traffic, trains, motorbikes, all of that. The background stayed roughly where it was, while the voice came forward.
Breaths and mouth clicks did not magically go away. But close mic technique made the real problem clearer. It removed the excuse. If I want fewer distracting breaths and clicks, I cannot solve that mainly by hiding from the microphone. I have to create fewer of them at source.
That is why this part is about performance habits rather than repair tools. The repair tools get their turn later. Here I am trying to give them less work to do.
So, breath control means giving myself time on purpose
The simplest breath advice I can give is also the hardest to follow in the moment: do not rush.
Not because rushing always sounds fast. Often it does not. The problem is that rushing leads to snatched breathing, and snatched breathing is noisy. The whole performance starts to feel like I am trying to get through it.
So I have started doing something that feels almost indulgent while recording: I take longer pauses than the listener will ever hear.
That is not dead air for the final audiobook. I will trim most of it later. It is working space for me: space to reset, to breathe properly, to read ahead, and to arrive at the next sentence rather than collide with it.
The habits are simple. Not easy, necessarily, but simple. I breathe more slowly and deeply as a baseline. If I am breathing shallowly, the narration tends to get shallow too. The voice tightens, phrasing gets pinched, and the breaths become more obvious because they are grabbed rather than placed.
I plan breaths for the hard bits. Long sentences, names, numbers, emotional lines, careful articulation – those are all places where I try to breathe before I need to.
And when I fluff a line, I do not punish myself by rushing the retake. That one matters. When you make a mistake, it is very tempting to jump straight back in, as if speed will erase the mistake. For me, that is exactly when breath noise and mouth clicks show up, because I restart before my body has reset.
So the rule is: fluff the line. Stop. Pause. Breathe properly. Then try again.
It feels slower while recording, but it is faster overall, because the retake does not carry that faint strain of someone trying to recover from the previous mistake.
With mouth clicks, repeatable habits beat clever tricks
Mouth clicks are infuriating because they feel so small in life and so enormous in the edit. I have tried a lot of the classic tricks. Some help a little. Some help briefly. Some are more folklore than reliable technique.
What I have settled on is less glamorous: make my mouth more predictable, and only use a light de-click as a backstop.
Hydration matters, but for me, the way I hydrate matters more than I expected. Gulping water is often not helpful. It can make my mouth feel as if it is trying to correct itself, and weirdly that can increase mouth noise.
Warm herbal tea, taken steadily, is more reliable. I avoid milky or sugary drinks close to recording, because for my mouth they are not predictable. Some people swear by green apples, and I have found that soda with a tiny touch of lime can sometimes help, but those are “maybe” tools for me. I do not build a process around “maybe”.
Warm herbal tea is boring, and boring is what I am aiming for.
I have also learned that sometimes the problem is not a dry mouth. Sometimes it is the opposite. And if I simply spit too much out, my mouth decides it needs to replace it, and then we are off again.
So, do not tell anyone, especially not Jern, but I have been known to use a clean sock as an emergency saliva sponge. I am not recommending this as universal best practice. I am just admitting that audiobook production is less glamorous than people think.
Tongue position is the habit that actually stuck
The most useful mouth-click habit for me has been tongue position. Between sentences, I try to keep my tongue floating rather than pressed firmly against the top or bottom of my mouth. When the tongue rests firmly, it can create little suction points, and when I move to speak again those suction points release as clicks.
So the habit is:
- Between sentences: tongue floating, relaxed.
- Before I start speaking: mouth slightly open, tongue set, then go.
That does not solve everything, but it makes the starts of lines cleaner. It reduces that “first syllable click” problem, which is especially annoying because it happens right where attention is highest. And again, it is repeatable. That is why it belongs in V3.
A light de-click is a backstop, not a lifestyle
I am not pretending I never use tools. I do. But the way I think about them has changed. In V3, a light de-click is a backstop for the little clicks that still slip through. It is not the main plan, and it is not a reason to stop paying attention.
If I am relying on heavy de-clicking all the time, it usually means something upstream has gone wrong: hydration, fatigue, tension, mic position, or simply recording too long without a reset. At that point, I would rather fix the habit than keep paying for it in the edit.
So I make it routine
To make all of this less dependent on mood or memory, I use a spoken opener at the start of a session. It is partly a warm-up, partly a level check, and partly a reminder to myself about the behaviour I want before the book starts making demands. It goes like this:
Before speaking, Peter paused, breathing properly and placing each word with care, his head steady and his gaze fixed.
Bright birds perched briefly on the rail as red leather shoes crossed yellow stone.
Susan’s tongue stayed floating between lines, mouth slightly open before she spoke.
She sold simple shells by the silent shore, never rushing, never forcing the sound.
In New York, unique, unmistakable, every vowel opened cleanly, every consonant landed, and the voice stayed calm, close, and clear.
That opener exercises the mouth, reminds me what I am meant to be doing, and gives me a quick check that the session sounds right before I start the book. I keep it in the recording file too, because if there is any session drift later, it gives me a useful reference point.
So, where does that leave us?
If there is one idea I want to land here, it is this: once mic technique is consistent, the next upgrade is not more processing. It is better behaviour.
Close mic technique does not remove the need for performance craft. It makes performance craft matter more, because the microphone is finally hearing me clearly enough that I can improve the right things.
Next time, I will talk about gain staging: leaving headroom, keeping tone stable, and making sure my performance is not being driven by a meter.