How To Improve Sound Quality on Your Videos

Improving the sound quality of your videos will mean an enormous difference in the results you’re getting.

If people can’t hear your video, they’re not going to watch your video.

Sound is crucial. Loud wind noise, distorted audio, or overly loud, cheesy, or distracting music can send people clicking off of your video in a flash.

When creating videos, you need to consider:

1. Do you have the right message delivered in an articulate way?

2. Can people hear your message?

You can have the most amazing camera, slider, and lighting equipment, but those are secondary to the sound quality of your video.

Rather than diving deep into the variety of mics, sound patterns, and mic setups for this article, I’ll keep it as simple as possible. People sound so much better with a lavalier microphone on.

external microphones make it easy to improve the audio quality of your videos

They make affordable (under $30) lavalier mics that you can plug into your phone.

You can also get a lav mic with receivers that lets you transmit the signal and send that into your camera or a separate audio recorder. There’s a night-and-day difference in sound quality between the mic in your phone or camera and a lav mic. It not only has better sound quality overall, but it also does a better job cutting out background noise, such as fire engines, people talking, construction, etc. It also has a basic windscreen, and if you are shooting outside often, you can upgrade the windscreen to something that does even better in the wind.

When you’re using a camera, you can set the lavalier mic’s sound level. When you’re on the phone, you’ll need to listen back to the audio to make sure it wasn’t clipping (when the audio is too loud it can get distorted).

Improve by leveling up your audio equipment and going pro

A $30 lavalier microphone will make a big difference in your sound quality. However, if you’d like crystal clear audio, getting a nicer mixer with preamps will lead to even better audio quality. If you don’t want to look into more advanced audio setups, go down to “music sets the feel” to skip this portion.

Personally, I love the Tascam 40D which is a high-quality external recorder. It has preamps which means the audio will have less background noise.

The most common setup is using a lavalier microphone which clips onto your shirt. You can hide it, or have it slightly visible on the outside of your shirt as pictured. People are used to seeing these mics, so most of the time your won’t need to hide it.

lab mics will help you improve the audio quality on your videos

If you need to walk around, you can have a wireless receiver kit like the rode link.

the rode link will help you improve the audio quality on your videos

Using an audio receiver means you can have a pack attached to your belt or in your pocket that sends the audio signal to another pack (which then records this audio into your Tascam recording device, or you can plug it directly into a camera.

The ability to transmit the signal comes at a cost. A decent lavalier microphone that plugs directly into a recording device or camera will generally cost $50 while a wireless kit like the Rode Link costs $400.

Want my full guide on how to improve audio, video, and lighting on your videos on your phone? Here’s my guide.

Music sets the feel, mood, and tone of your video. Just make sure it doesn’t overpower your voice.

Music selection is also incredibly important. I spend hours weekly looking for new songs that fit videos perfectly. You can license professional music song by song, pay for a monthly subscription, or find free music from places like YouTube or a free music archive. Not every video needs music; sometimes it’s just distracting.

Ask yourself, is this music contributing something to the mood and feel of the video?

Is the audio level low enough that it’s not distracting? Try to find a song that uses instruments that sound real. Watch out for parts of the songs getting repetitive. Some music tracks loop the same theme over and over, so you may need to use and transition several music tracks.

Here’s my full process for choosing music:

Conclusion: Your videos have the best audio quality and everyone loves them

We now understand how to improve the audio quality on our videos, whether we’re posting to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram stories. There are decent quality microphones that we can plug directly into our phones for much better quality audio. If we want to get advanced, there are audio recorders and wireless microphone packs, which deliver even better quality audio and more flexibility. An important aspect of audio is also choosing amazing music for videos, we looked at the process of choosing the right music for our videos as well.

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions or would like to discuss working together, please email me at jacob@jacoblevideoproduction.com

Now that you know how to get high quality audio, why don’t you read about ways that you can use video to reach existing clients and customers. You can read about that by CLICKING HERE

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