You don't need a recording studio to make something worth selling. You need a quiet room, a decent phone microphone, and about 30 minutes of focus.

Setting up your space:

Pick a soft room. Carpet, curtains, sofas, cushions - anything soft absorbs sound and stops echo. Avoid kitchens, bathrooms, and rooms with hard floors and bare walls.

Silence what you can control. Phones on airplane mode, stand away from closed windows, curtains drawn, any housemates warned, pets in another room, fridges and fans off if they're nearby.

Put the phone on a flat surface (a table is perfect).

Place it so that the microphone at the bottom is pointing towards you, face up. Sit down, around 30–40cm away and angle about 5 degrees off to the side rather than speaking directly into it - this avoids the harsh "popping" sound on words with hard P and B sounds.

What to record with:

A lavallière microphone you can clip onto your clothes outperform your phone's built-in microphone by a wide margin, and they're inexpensive (around £15 on Amazon). You can find one here.If you're only using your phone, that's fine too, most modern phones have a good microphone providing you record in a quiet, soft room - sit around 30-40cm away from it and record a short test clip first to check the sound before committing to a full take. You can record on your phone’s voice note app.

If using a lavallière mic, remove jumpers etc as they can cause a rustling sound when you move, clip the mic to the centre of your chest, 5cm above your solar plexus, try to ensure the mic is pointing towards you as much as possible, although mild slippage is normal.


A simple pre-recording checklist

1. Room chosen and quiet
2. Phone/devices silenced
3. Mic positioned 30–40cm away, slightly off-axis
4. Script or rough outline in front of you
5. Water nearby (dry mouth is the enemy of a clean take)
6. One uninterrupted 20–30 minute window blocked out

That's the whole setup. The recording itself rarely takes as long as people expect - it's the sitting-down-to-do-it part that takes the longest.

Human Impact can assist you all the way during this process until product completion.

Contact us today at: info@human-impact.co or www.human-impact.co

Next: once you've got a raw recording, professional editing is what turns it from "fine" into something people are genuinely happy to have paid for.