Why does my home recording sound echoey and muddy?

Echo and muddiness in a home recording are the sound of the room arriving at the microphone a few milliseconds after the direct sound. No plugin removes it convincingly, which is why prevention is the whole strategy.

Step by step

1. Confirm it is the room.Clap once in the space. If you hear a short ringing or a flutter afterwards, that is what the microphone is capturing along with your voice.
2. Get much closer to the microphone.Halving the distance roughly doubles the direct sound relative to the room. This is the single most effective change and it costs nothing.
3. Put something soft behind the microphone.A duvet on a stand, a thick curtain, a wardrobe of clothes. The wall behind the microphone reflects your voice straight back into it.
4. Put something soft behind you too.The wall behind the performer reflects sound back past the microphone. Treating both sides of the source deals with most of the problem.
5. Break up the parallel surfaces.A full bookcase, an irregular shelf of objects, furniture against a bare wall. Parallel hard walls produce flutter echo, which is that ringing you hear when you clap.
6. Cover the hard floor.A rug or a duvet on the floor between you and the microphone kills a strong early reflection that makes voices sound hollow.
7. Move away from corners and the room centre.Corners build up low frequencies and make recordings boomy; the exact centre of a room is where standing waves cancel and reinforce most severely.
8. Use a dynamic microphone in a bad room.Dynamic microphones are less sensitive and usually more directional, so they pick up much less of the room than a large-diaphragm condenser. In an untreated bedroom that is an advantage, not a compromise.
9. Use the polar pattern.Set a multi-pattern microphone to cardioid, and aim its rejection — the rear of the capsule — at the noisiest or most reflective surface.
10. Avoid the small-room bass build-up.Close miking adds bass through proximity effect, which in a small room compounds the muddiness. A high-pass filter around 80 to 100Hz on voice cleans it up substantially.
11. Do not rely on plugins.De-reverb tools have improved and still leave artefacts. Recording it right takes ten minutes; fixing it afterwards is never fully successful.
12. Test and listen critically.Record thirty seconds, listen on headphones, move one thing, and record again. Two or three iterations usually solve it.

Tips

• Closer to the microphone is the cheapest and biggest improvement.
• Duvet behind the mic and behind you. That is most of a vocal booth.
• A dynamic microphone in a bad room beats a condenser in the same room.

Common mistakes

• Putting acoustic foam on the ceiling and calling it done — Thin foam absorbs high frequencies only, so the recording loses air and keeps the boxy midrange and boomy bass. Thicker absorption at the first reflection points does far more.
• Recording in the middle of an empty room — It is the worst place acoustically — equidistant from parallel surfaces, so reflections arrive together and standing waves are at their strongest. Off-centre, near soft material, is much better.

If it doesn't work

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