How to get better audio, tips by Udemy instrutor Scott Duffy

Scott Duffy said

I just got done recording a new course, and have been continuing to struggle to get the audio just right. Today I thought I would summarize my best tips for recording audio for your courses, in the hopes that it would help someone.

1. One of the keys to good audio is having a quiet place to record. If your house is in a quiet part of town, that's a good start. We all sometimes have to deal with construction or one time events. But if you live in an extremely noisy part of the city, you will find yourself being only able to record late at night.
2. Another key is the type of room you are recording in. In order to avoid echo, it needs to have lots of soft surfaces like furniture and carpeting. Some people record sitting inside a clothes closet because the clothes absorbs all the sound. Others record with blankets hanging around them. Think about how sound bounces around, and you want more things that absorb sound and less things that reflect sound around you as you record.
3. If you have both of the above, it almost doesn't matter what microphone you have - expensive, cheap, condenser, dynamic. Microphones pick up sound, and so if there are no other sounds other than your voice, that's the ideal state.
4. If you make a mistake during recording - say something incorrect, or find yourself making an error - stop recording and start the lesson again. I have seen programming courses on Udemy where the instructors code wouldn't compile and then spent 5 minutes searching around to find the error. I do every lesson 2 or 3 times, and my delivery of the material gets better each time. It's worth it to re-record when you catch yourself making a big mistake.
5. You can't take echo out in editing. If your sound comes back with too much echo, you can play with the levels, add some soft music to the background to disguise it, but ultimately it's not easy to remove.
6. Clean your audio using a tool like Audacity. Do noise removal, boost the volume, and clean up the ums, ahs, long pauses, stutters and mistakes if you can. Students will appreciate a mistake-free lesson and not an instructor that says "uhhh, uhhh, uhhh" a lot. My recent course had 120+ lessons. Every one was cleaned manually in Audacity, and yes it's a lot of work.
7. In general, don't have music playing constantly behind your talking. I use this for my promo video and my introduction lesson only to inject some energy, but 99% of the course does not have music playing throughout.

Sam Chifley added the following

• Tip 1 - Without stating the obvious. You need to go ahead and run a few tests with your microphone before hand in order to make sure you can actually remove the sound from your audio. Don't record the whole course and then find out that your audio doesn't cut it. All audio can be repaired but the time it will take to repair will likely make it worthwhile recording again with different settings. (You can remove echo just it isn't worth your time and effort! Your not on a film set)

• Tip 2 - Know your microphone! Don't talk into a condenser microphone directly (The opposite is true for dynamics get as close and personal as you can and use a pop filter) Likewise know if it an end-address microphone or not. 
• Tip 3 - Avoid increasing the volume in editing as you will learning fairly quickly that your microphone has these limits for a reason (Background noise and clipping) 
• Tip 4 - Sound is a funny thing and you can not hear noise and it can exist it is just outside of the range of your computer aside from paying a few hundred dollars for a sound card zoom in and look at the recording.  
• Like wise them $2 earbuds don't cut it! Get some studio headphones (Sony and Bose are personal favorites of mine!)

My two cents

• I sit in a corner facing towards the intersection of walls. Right now my corner has got a wooden closet. The sound goes through the TV first & then the plywood before hitting the wall.
• About background noise or birds chirping outside, I think if the sound wave produced through your mouth is significantly stronger than the noise; the microphone will vibrate to your sound and effectively cancel the noise.
• Plus, I use an entry level dynamic microphone(Samson Q1U) with a pop filter.

David Winegar Said

My suggestion for audio would be

• To pick up a good mic, it saves tons of time in messing about if you have good quality to start with.
• I bought from ebay a BM-800 mic for about $20 and it is very high quality, USB mic. Don't plug into the mic input on your computer, but use a USB adapter - it make a huge difference.
• Then use a program like WavePad sound editor (Windows) to fix your audio a bit more. You can reduce background and hum and also cut out those "ummms" from your audio without having to re-record.

Roma Connie Waterman said

• I will add this from my experience- you don't need a program like audacity if you have a good mic to start work- it will eliminate a lot of issues just to start with a good quality mic (obviously if a noisy venue is an issue you are going to have trouble regardless tho). You will also find the sound of breathing is normal and often editing is not needed as its not as noticeable. Pop screens and filters go a long way in helping with this.
• The other thing I do at the beginning of every lecture is I say the title of the lecture then Count from 5 backwards, making the 2 and the 1 silent- why? Because in editing I know what I'm editing if I have a lot of audio and video to edit, and also the countdown helps me know where to start the editing process (I talk really fast and often there's no gaps!)
• I've also found editing is actually quicker if I make a mistake somewhere to keep going but do the Count again so I know there is an edit when I come back to it- I'm finding I'm recording less and editing more- but it's much better content than trying to do a whole lecture again.

Enough horsing around, I must get back to work.