Have you already listened to our “Tuning in to Sound Quality” tutorial? If so, your training is about to pay off. It’s listening time. Critical listening time.

Play back your voice recording without any accompanying music from beginning to end, listening closely all the while. Keep your ears peeled for any of the following problems:

Momentary noises are short, intermittent noises like dogs barking, plosives, your chair creaking, paper rustling, tummy gurgles. Momentary noises that occur in the spaces between words and phrases can probably be muted or cut away using simple editing tools. Momentary noises that take place in the middle of words are more problematic and can usually only be solved by re-recording the affected section.

Persistent noises (often referred to as “stationary noises”) include sounds like the humming of mechanical equipment, wind or rain, the rumbling of distant traffic and so on. 

Never has the saying “prevention is better than a cure” been more appropriate. Persistent noises can be very troublesome to remove, so the best way to avoid them is to only record at times when persistent noises are not present. In other words, if the rain is belting down on the tin roof above you or if the sound of howling wind can be heard in your recording room, console yourself with a cup of hot chocolate and save your recording for another day. 

In some cases persistent noise can be removed from a recording. For example, very low frequencies (rumbling sounds) can often be filtered from your voice recording using simple editing tools found in most sound recording software. Editing tools for removing low rumbling sounds usually have names like “Low cut filter”, “High pass filter” or you can use a simple equaliser to remove the very lowest bass frequencies.

Persistent high frequency sounds, or broad-band sounds (hissing and white noise sounds) are very difficult to remove without the right software and expertise. With that in mind, I’d like to caution you against using any noise reduction effects that your sound recording software might include. In my experience, the noise reduction effects offered by many recording programs are average at best and can actually degrade the quality of your voice recording unless used sparingly. 

However, high quality noise reduction software is available. I personally use Izotope’s RX program, which can achieve almost magical results, but it’s not cheap and requires some skill to use properly.  

Conclusion? Prevention is better than a cure. Enough said! 

Once you are satisfied with the quality of your voice recording, it’s time to introduce your chosen background music and assess the overall pace and flow of your recording. 

Adding music to your project is usually a simple “drag and drop” function for most recording software programs like Garageband and Audacity. Open the folder of your computer that contains your chosen background music and simply drag it into the main window of your project.

Now you should be able to play back your recording, whilst listening to your background music at the same time. Are you ready to start mixing? Great! Here’s what comes next:

Adjust the volume of the music until it feels comfortably balanced with the volume of your vocal track. There’s plenty of wiggle room here and no specific volume level “standard” that you need to achieve, but if you are feeling uncertain about your volume balance, then I have a couple of suggestions for you…

Firstly, listen to your recording at a relatively quiet volume while assessing the volume balance. You are creating a hypnosis or meditation recording that your listeners will play at a fairly quiet volume, so it makes sense to simulate those same conditions when reviewing how your recording sounds.

Secondly, if you find yourself fiddling indecisively with the volume of the music – a little louder, a little quieter, a little louder again – then err on the side of quieter and leave it at that.

Now that you’ve balanced the volume of your voice and the music, listen to your entire recording once again and as you do so, contemplate the pace and timing of your vocal performance.

This is an important step!

Listen to it with your eyes closed and experience your recording as if you were a client listening to it for the first time. If that means going into a hypnotic/meditative state, then go there.

As a professional therapist or healer, you no doubt have plenty of experience with meditative and/or hypnotic states of consciousness, so bring that experience to bear on this part of the production process. Listening in a deeply relaxed state will give you a fresh perspective on how your recording comes across – a perspective that is more closely aligned with what other people will experience when they listen to your recording. Subsequent adjustments to your recording, if they are required, will lead to a finished result that is even more attuned to their needs.

Your performance might be spot on and need no adjustment whatsoever, but sometimes you might feel that you rushed some passages or perhaps you left too much silent space between some parts. 

Remember that you can snip your vocal recording into as many parts as you like, opening up space between some parts and closing it up in others. Now is the time to make those changes, but only if you feel they are necessary.

At the conclusion of your recording, you will probably need to fade out the music (and you may need to fade it in at the start too). Fades are simply volume changes that take place over time and while the procedure for applying them varies from one recording program to the next, they are such a simple and commonplace editing function that you should have little trouble mastering them.

Obviously, the volume of your recording will vary over time – that’s completely normal, but you should aim to keep it at or below -1db. It must never go so far “into the red” that it goes beyond the maximum “0db” level. If it does, your recording may be audibly distorted in that moment.

If at its loudest point, your recording is still quieter than -3 db below maximum, it will probably sound noticeably quieter than other comparable recordings. Your listeners will end up compensating for this by turning up the volume on their stereo and will probably wonder why your recording is quieter than everything else in their collection.

Many recording programs come with a handy editing feature called a “limiter”. Limiters are a fantastic tool (and a staple amongst professional audio engineers) that will protect your recording from clipping distortion. Limiters allow you to gradually raise the level of your recording until it approaches the maximum allowable volume, then if a peak in your recording looks like it will exceed this maximum level, the limiter steps in and compensates for this by reducing the volume for a split second. In essence, limiters are like a volume “brick wall”. They will save you from having to watch your level meters like a hawk and will help you to safely raise the level of your recording so that it peaks where you want it to peak.

Professional recording studios and mastering engineers often go to great lengths to maximize the average volume of music productions. Their efforts in this regard are the result of a competitive approach to mastering known as “the loudness wars”. But you’re not mixing a band or recording a dance music production. You’re creating a relaxing audio production and so maximizing loudness is not crucial. However, it’s still important that your recording peaks at an appropriate level and does not become so loud that it exceeds -1 db. Limiters make this process easier, but you can live without them if you are prepared to keep a watchful eye on your master levels prior to finalizing your recording.

Speaking of which, finalizing your recording is your next step.