How to record your voice with a microphone?
The recorder is meant to be obvious, so this page is less about where the buttons are and more about what to do with them: what makes a voice recording sound good before you press a single button, every option the recorder has and when to reach for it, and how to fix a take rather than start over.
01
Choosing and placing the microphone
Any microphone the computer can see will work. Distance decides more than price.
1 · A quick note
Built-in laptop microphone
Works at once and needs nothing. It also sits next to the fan and the keyboard, and hears the room as much as you.
2 · An immediate step up
Headset or earphones with a mic
The capsule sits near your mouth and far from the machine, which is most of what matters. Wired beats Bluetooth every time.
3 · Most people, most of the time
USB microphone
The biggest improvement for the money. A dynamic one forgives an untreated room; a condenser hears more detail, and more of the room with it.
4 · The studio way
Audio interface and XLR microphone
What a professional uses. The browser sees the interface as one more input, so everything here works the same way.
Whatever you use, the recorder lists it under Record → Microphone, and the choice is remembered for next time.
Where to put it
Keep the microphone about a hand's width from your mouth, roughly fifteen centimetres. Closer sounds warmer but exaggerates breaths and lip noise; further away lets the room in. Angle it slightly off to one side, so your breath goes past the capsule rather than into it and hard consonants like p and b do not thump. A pop filter, or a sock stretched over a coat hanger, does the same job.
Put it on a stand or a stack of books, not on the desk itself, so typing and knocks do not travel up into it. If it is a handheld one, hold it still: every finger movement is recorded.
02
Setting up the room and the workspace
Most of what makes a recording sound bad is the room, not the microphone.
A hard, empty room throws your voice back a few milliseconds late, and the recording sounds hollow and distant. Soft surfaces absorb that: record in a room with curtains, a sofa, a carpet or a full bookshelf, and face the soft side. A walk-in wardrobe full of clothes is the classic home studio for a reason. Hanging a duvet behind the microphone is nearly as good.
Then deal with the noise you have stopped noticing: the fan, the air conditioning, the window, the phone, the refrigerator and the computer's own fans. Record ten seconds of silence and play it back loud. Whatever you hear is on every take you make.
Put the script where you can read it without turning your head, at eye level, so your voice stays pointed at the microphone. Stand if you can, or sit upright on the front of the chair: a collapsed chest makes a thinner voice. Keep water within reach.
Before you press record
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03
Speaking so it sounds good
The microphone records a performance, and a few habits make every performance better.
Warm up
Hum, read a paragraph aloud, roll a few tongue twisters. The first take of the day always sounds like the first take of the day.
Keep one distance and one level
Leaning in on the quiet lines and back on the loud ones does more for consistency than any compressor.
Slow down slightly
Leave a beat of silence between sentences. Silence is easy to shorten later and impossible to add convincingly.
Smile when it fits
It is audible, and it is the quickest way to sound engaged rather than read.
Breathe away from the mic
Through the mouth, turned slightly aside. A breath taken straight into the capsule is a gust on the recording.
Keep going when you fluff a line
Pause, repeat the sentence from the start, and cut the bad one out afterwards. Stopping costs more than the mistake did.
04
The recording options, and when to use them
Everything that affects the next take lives in the Record menu. None of it needs touching to get started, but each switch solves a specific problem.
Lists every input the computer knows about. Pick the one you are actually speaking into: a USB microphone and the laptop's own capsule both appear, and the browser does not always default to the better one. The level meter under the controls moves when the chosen input hears you.
The browser can clean the audio before it reaches the recorder. The stages are built for video calls, which is why each is a trade-off for a recording. A switch the browser does not support is marked as such and left unticked.
- Automatic gain
- Keeps the level steady when you move or vary your volume.
On whenA built-in microphone in an uncontrolled setting, or a speaker who wanders.
Off whenA decent microphone at a fixed distance. It also pumps the room noise up in every gap.
- Noise suppression
- Removes steady background noise such as a fan, traffic or a hum.
On whenThe noise cannot be switched off at the source.
Off whenA quiet room. It can make a voice sound thin or underwater, so try a take both ways.
- Echo cancellation
- Stops the speakers' output from being recorded again by the microphone.
On whenSpeakers are playing while you record.
Off whenHeadphones are on. It then has nothing to cancel and can only do harm.
Use it whenever you record from a script, so the first word is not drowned by the click of the key and you have time to take a breath. The choice is remembered.
Plays the microphone back to you in real time, through the output device you choose, at the level you set, with or without effects. It deserves its own chapter, which comes next.
05
Hearing yourself while you record
Monitoring sends what the microphone hears straight to your headphones as you speak. It costs nothing to try, and it changes two things.
You hear what the microphone hears, not what your own head hears.
Your voice reaches your ears partly through bone, which is why a recording of yourself sounds unfamiliar. In the headphones you hear the recording as it will be: the thump of a p, the chair creaking, the fan you had stopped noticing, the drop in level when you turn to the script. You fix each of those while it is happening, instead of finding it on playback and recording the take again.
The second thing is control. With your own voice in your ears you settle at one distance and one level without thinking about it, the way a singer does, and you hear at once when you drift. Most people speak more quietly and more evenly with monitoring on, which is exactly what a recording wants.
Headphones, never speakers
Speakers feed the monitored signal back into the microphone and the echo grows. Closed-back headphones leak the least.
Set the level with care
Too loud and you speak more softly to compensate; too quiet and you stop listening. Your voice should sit comfortably over the room.
If it arrives late
That is the browser's latency. A USB microphone or an audio interface usually brings it down, and so does closing other tabs.
Turning it on
Record → Monitoring switches it on. Output chooses the device it goes to, usually the headphones, and Level sets how loud. All three are remembered.
Effects in your ears
Hearing yourself dry can be unflattering, and some people perform better with a little polish in their ears. Record → Effects offers six presets, and Adjust effects… opens the chain: a low cut to remove rumble, presence to add air, a compressor, a reverb with a choice of room, plate or hall, and an echo with time and repeats. The chain can be changed while recording.
| Preset | Low cut | Presence | Compressor | Reverb | Echo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dry | off | off | off | off | off |
| Clean vocal | on | off | off | off | off |
| Radio voice | on | on | on | off | off |
| Vocal plate | on | on | on | on | off |
| Slapback | on | off | on | on | on |
| Big hall | on | off | on | on | on |
When to leave it off: a quick memo, a laptop microphone with no headphones to hand, or a speaker who finds their own voice distracting. Monitoring is a tool for the takes that matter.
06
Fixing a take instead of starting over
Recording never erases anything: a new clip lands on top of the layer and hides what is under it, so a mistake is a few seconds to repair.
Put the playhead a word or two before the mistake, press R, say the line again, and stop. The new clip replaces exactly the stretch it covers, and its edges are crossfaded into the audio around it so the join does not click. If the new take is worse, undo it and the original is back.
Pick the clip, move the playhead to just before the fluff and press S to split it. Split again just after, pick the middle piece and press Del. For a long pause, trim instead: drag the end of a clip inward. What you trimmed off can be pulled back out later, because nothing was thrown away.
Drag a clip along its layer, or onto another layer, and it snaps to the playhead and to the edges of other clips, so two takes can be butted together exactly. Hold Alt to place it freely. The rulers either side of a moving clip show the gap to its neighbours in seconds. Every change, from a new clip to a volume nudge or a deleted layer, can be undone with ModZ and redone with Mod⇧Z. Experiment freely.
07
Working with layers
A layer is a track that plays alongside the others. Add one with N, and the up and down arrows choose which layer the next take lands on.
A conversation or a read-through, one voice per layer, so each can be re-recorded and balanced on its own without touching the other.
Choose File → Import audio…, or drop a file onto a track. The file becomes a clip you can move, split and record over like any other, and the voice goes on the layer above.
The same line read three ways, on three layers. Mute all but one with M to compare, keep the winner and delete the rest.
A guide read to time the real one against, muted before the download so it never reaches the file.
Each layer has its own volume and mute switch in the Layers menu, and its own effects chain. Unlike monitoring effects, layer effects are heard in playback and rendered into the download: choose a preset or adjust the chain, and switch it off again at any time, since the clips underneath are never changed. The menu also lists every clip on the layer, so any one can be picked, downloaded on its own or deleted from there.
08
Getting around the timeline
Zoom in on one word, or see the whole recording at once.
Press the ruler to put the playheadthere, and drag it to scrub. Zoom in with + or the mouse wheel until one word fills the screen, and press 0 to see the whole recording again. When you are zoomed in, an overview strip under the layers shows every clip across the whole recording; drag its frame or click anywhere on it to jump there.
Home and End go to either end, the left and right arrows step, and L loops playback, so you can listen to one phrase round and round while you decide about it.
09
Downloading the result
The layers are mixed down in the page, with their volumes and effects, and saved straight to your disk.
Choose File → Download when the recording sounds right. The formats on offer depend on what your browser can encode, so the list varies. On a phone the finished file is offered to the share sheet as well as saved, so it can go straight to Messages, Mail or Files.
MP3lossy
Plays everywhere. The safe choice for sharing, a message or an upload.
WAVlossless
Uncompressed. Pick it when the recording goes on to another editor, a video or any further processing, where a lossy file loses a little more at each step.
FLAClossless
Lossless like WAV at roughly half the size. The archive copy.
AAClossy
Smaller than MP3 at the same quality, where the destination accepts it.
OGGlossy
The open equivalent of AAC, and the one with the least delay at a punch-in.
Any single layer can also be downloaded on its own, lined up with the rest, from the Layers menu. That is how you hand one voice to someone else, or bring the parts into another program as separate tracks.
Keeping the project
Autosave keeps the layers and clips in the browser's own storage on this device, so a reload or a closed tab brings everything back. For a copy you can move to another machine, back up or return to in a month, choose File → Save project: it writes the whole project, audio and all, to one file, and File → Open project… brings it back with every clip, layer and effect in place. On a shared computer, untick File → Autosave in this browser and the stored copy is deleted at once.
Nothing is uploaded at any point. Capture, mixing and encoding all run in the tab, which is the whole of the privacy policy.
10
Driving it from the keyboard
Once a take is rolling, reaching for the mouse is a noise on the recording. Every control has a key.
Playback
- Play or pause
- Space
- Start or stop recording
- R
- Loop
- L
Timeline
- Go to start
- Home
- Go to end
- End
- Step back
- ←
- Step forward
- →
- Zoom in
- +
- Zoom out
- −
- Show all
- 0
Layers
- Add layer
- N
- Arm layer above
- ↑
- Arm layer below
- ↓
- Mute current layer
- M
Editing
- Split clip
- S
- Delete clip
- Del
- Deselect clip
- Esc
- Redo
- Ctrl⇧Z
- Undo
- CtrlZ
- Show this list
- ?
Press ? in the recorder to see this list whenever you need it.
11
Common problems
Each one has a cause and a fix.
The browser is listening to a different input. Open Record → Microphone and pick the one you are speaking into; the level meter moves as soon as the right one is chosen. If no input is listed, the browser was refused permission: allow the microphone in the site settings next to the address bar and try again.
The microphone is too far from you, or the room is reflecting your voice back. Move to about a hand's width from the microphone and record somewhere with soft surfaces. Noise suppression can also thin a voice, so try switching it off.
The input is too hot. Turn the microphone's own gain down in your operating system, step back a little, or turn on Automatic gain in the Record menu so the browser keeps the level in range.
Monitoring is on and you are not wearing headphones, so the speakers feed back into the microphone. Either put on headphones or turn Monitoring off in the Record menu. The effects you hear while monitoring are not part of the recording.
Monitoring effects only change what you hear in your headphones; the take is recorded clean. Layer effects, set from the Layers menu, are heard in playback and rendered into the downloaded file, but the clips underneath stay untouched and the chain can be switched off at any time.
Yes. Zoom in until the word fills the screen, put the playhead just before it, record the replacement and stop. Only that stretch is replaced, and the join is crossfaded so it does not click.
Yes, on this device. Autosave keeps the layers and clips in the browser's own storage. For a copy you can move or keep, choose File → Save project, which writes everything to one file you can open again later.
Still stuck? Get in touch and say what you tried.