How To Handle Clients That Won’t Heed Your Advice To Improve Their Audio Quality

Some clients that you edit/produce podcasts for may have terrible recording habits that require you to do WAY more audio fixing in post-production than normal.

These bad habits may include:

• Bad Microphone Technique (continually and drastically varying the distance between their mouth and the microphone)
• Lots of Background Noise (like air conditioners, fans, room reverb/echo, people talking in the background, etc.)
• Table Thumps (these can be especially terrible when using a desk-based microphone like the Blue Yeti, etc.)
• No Plosive Protection (making their plosives horrendously jarring)
• Heavy Breathing (related to microphone technique above, and very weird to listen to)

How can you avoid having to fix these audio blemishes in post-production? Train your client to NOT make these mistakes when recording! If your client actually listens to your sage suggestions then their audio will be much better quality, which is better for every single listener.

But what if your client will not heed your advice to avoid all the above audio mistakes? Well, put simply, you’re hosed. You are going to have to spend lots of extra time in post cleaning up their easily-avoidable mistakes — and even then, the resulting audio quality will STILL not be as good as if they avoided all the mistakes.

At some point, you may want to fire these types of clients if their audio shenanigans becomes too time consuming to fix.

Have you ever dealt with a client like this?

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