Mouth clicks, plosives and breaths: prevent them, then fix them

People listen to audiobooks on earbuds, up close, for hours at a time. Noises nobody would ever notice across a room become really obvious: a click when your tongue comes off the roof of your mouth, a thump on every P, a big gasp before a long sentence. A few are natural. A lot of them wear people out, and they’ll mention it in their reviews.

They come in three flavors, and each one has a different cause.

Mouth clicks

Clicks and smacks come from a dry or sticky mouth. When your saliva’s too thick, it makes little snapping sounds every time your tongue and lips move. They’re worst after coffee, dairy, or a long session.

Drink water before you start, not just during. Water an hour or two ahead of a session does a lot more than a glass at the mic.

Skip the dairy, coffee and sugary drinks before you record. A lot of narrators swear by a slice of green apple to clear up a sticky mouth.

Keep water next to you and sip on breaks. Then swallow and give it a second before you start reading again.

Part your lips before you start a phrase. A lot of clicks happen right as your lips come apart to speak, not while you’re talking. Opening just a little, a moment before the first word, with an easy breath, gets rid of most of them.

Plosives

P and B (and to a lesser degree T, D, K and G) shove a burst of air out of your mouth. When that hits the mic, you get a low thump or a pop.

A pop filter or a foam windscreen breaks the burst up before it gets to the mic. Use one.

Talk slightly past the mic instead of straight into it. Angle it a little off to the side, or a bit above your mouth pointing down, and the air misses it while your voice still gets there.

Don’t get too close. Closer is better for your noise floor, but inside a couple of inches the plosives get worse and so does the boomy low end the mic adds up close. Four to six inches with a pop filter is a good balance.

Breaths

Breathing is part of talking. A narration with every breath taken out sounds strange, almost breathless. What you want is breaths that are quiet and natural, not breaths that are gone. Publisher specs usually say the same thing: soften them, don’t remove them.

Turn your head slightly away from the mic to breathe before a long sentence, so the breath comes in quieter.

Breathe through your nose when you can. It’s quieter, and it doesn’t dry your mouth out.

For long, twisty sentences, mark your breaths in the script so you’re not gasping halfway through.

Cleaning up what’s left

You won’t catch everything. When you’re editing, start with the gentlest fix and work up.

1. Turn it down instead of cutting it. A loud breath dropped 6 dB or so usually sounds totally natural. Cutting it to silence leaves a hole.
2. Replace a noise in a pause with room tone, never silence. A dead-silent gap sounds like a dropout on headphones. (See room tone.)
3. For a click in the middle of a word, use a de-clicker or spectral repair. It takes the click out and leaves the voice around it alone.
4. Re-record it if a whole passage is full of noise. One clean punch-in sounds better than ten little repairs.

Automatic de-clickers, plosive filters and breath reducers can handle most of this across a whole chapter. Just don’t crank them. Push a de-clicker too hard and your consonants go dull. Push breath reduction too hard and the pauses start pumping. Listen to the result on headphones before you commit.