Mouthclicks

Mouthclicks are the tiny clicks that are picked up by a microphone when it’s very close to a person’s mouth. They are created by saliva, lips, tongue, etc.

Some people have almost no mouth noises and other people have tons.

Causes:

• Dehydration, and surprisingly, over-hydration.
• Not projecting your voice enough. This brings down your voice-to-mouthclick ratio, which is why when people speak in a whisper really close to a microphone you will often hear lots of mouth noise (like in those ASMR videos).

Some people are almost “allergic” to hearing someone’s mouth noises and they will immediately turn off a podcast if someone on there has nasty mouthclicks and/or noises.

To get rid of mouth noises in post-production:

• iZotope RX has a module called Mouth De-click which is great for removing mouthclicks.
• And I recently tried a plugin called Spiff from Oeksound which can also remove mouthclicks and noises.

NOTE: You _could_ remove mouthclicks by hand in the editing process but if there are too many then this manual process becomes impractical.

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