How far should a microphone be from your mouth?
There is no correct number, and any page that hands you one has decided something about your voice and your room without hearing either.
You bought a microphone because the sound was bad, and the sound is still bad. It is bad differently now, which is a kind of progress, but it is bad.
Almost every guide answers this with a figure. The figures disagree, and none of them has heard your voice, your microphone or your room, which are the three things that decide the answer. Before you pick a number, know that the two failure modes are not equal. Too close creates problems that are irritating and mostly preventable. Too far creates one that is permanent. If you are going to be wrong, be wrong close.
Why is there no correct number?
Because the distance is a trade, and both ends cost you something.
Bring it nearer and you get more of your voice relative to the room, which is what you want, and more of everything your mouth does that is not speech, which is not. Move it away and the mouth noise recedes, and the room comes forward to take its place.
There is no position where both are perfect. There is a position where both are acceptable, and it sits somewhere different for a softly spoken person in a carpeted study than for a loud one in a tiled kitchen. A page giving you a single number has decided which of those you are.
What goes wrong when you are too close?
Three things, in roughly ascending order of how much they cost you.
Plosives
A plosive is the burst of air that leaves your mouth on a P or a B. It is not a loud sound, it is a physical puff, and when it hits the microphone directly the recording gets a low thump underneath a word that had no thump in it. A foam cover helps and is about the cheapest fix in audio. Angling the microphone off the centre line of your mouth helps more, because the puff travels forwards while your voice travels everywhere.
The s sounds
Move close to most microphones and your s and t sounds sharpen, then start to hiss. It can be reduced afterwards, up to a point, and past that point the treatment begins to lisp the voice. Far better not to record it.
Clipping
Clipping is what happens when a signal is pushed louder than something in the chain can describe: the microphone capsule, the preamp, or the recorder's input. It flattens the tops off the loudest moments and gives them back as a crackle, and it is permanent, because nothing was written down to restore. The usual cause is gain staging, the level set too high for how loud the source really is, so the fix is almost always to turn the input gain down and leave headroom rather than to move. Distance feeds into it, since being closer arrives hotter and a level that was fine at a hand's span can clip when you lean in or laugh partway through a take. Set the gain for the loudest thing you are going to do.
What goes wrong when you are too far away?
One thing, and it is the worse one.
The room arrives. Every hard surface sends a copy of your voice back to the microphone slightly late, and as you move away the direct sound gets quieter while the reflected sound stays where it was. The proportion tips. The recording stops sounding like you in a room and starts sounding like a room with you somewhere inside it.
That is the one fault clean-up cannot work around. A hum can be reduced. A siren can sometimes be cut out. Reflections are made of your own voice, arriving late, occupying every frequency the thing you want to keep occupies, so removing them removes part of you. Software tries, and it is far better than it was: the current tools pull a roomy recording back to usable, where the older ones handed back something thin and underwater. It is still reconstruction, it still costs a little of the voice, and heavy reflections still win, which is why distance comes first.
A starting point, not a rule
For a microphone you speak into rather than one you aim, roughly a hand's span from your mouth is a sensible place to begin: somewhere between fifteen and thirty centimetres, positioned slightly off the centre line so you are not breathing straight down the barrel.
That is a starting point and it is marked as one deliberately. A shotgun microphone, the long thin kind that gets pointed at somebody rather than spoken into, works at a different distance altogether, usually further away and above, just out of frame. A clip microphone on your chest has its own rules. And your own voice overrules all of it: speak softly and you will end up nearer than the range, project and you will end up further away.
Should the microphone be in front of your mouth or off to one side?
Off to one side, slightly, and slightly above or below your mouth rather than dead level with it.
The reason is the plosive again. That puff of air travels forward in a narrow cone, so a microphone just outside the cone hears the same voice and none of the air. It also stays out of frame more easily, and you stop drifting closer to it, because nothing is in front of your face inviting you to lean in.
Consistency matters more than precision. Most directional microphones, which is to say the cardioids most people film with, get noticeably bassier as you move in close; it is called the proximity effect, and an omnidirectional microphone barely shows it. That is why somebody who leans forward on the interesting bit can sound like two different people in one video. Pick a position, mark it, hold it.
How do you find your own number?
Record yourself three times, and listen back on headphones rather than laptop speakers.
Say the same twenty seconds at three distances: as close as you can bear, a hand's span away, and an arm's length. Include a sentence with several p and s sounds in it, and one where you laugh, because that is where the failures live rather than in calm speech.
Then listen to all three in a row, checking two things. Can you hear the room. Does anything bump or hiss. Take the closest position where nothing bumps or hisses, and if you can still hear the room from there, distance is not the problem you are solving and there is a separate post for what is.
Mark the spot with tape, and doing this once means never doing it again. The number it hands you is worth more than any figure on any page, because it was measured against your voice instead of an average of everybody's.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.