Your relationship with Mr. Mic should be close but not too intimate. As a rule, stay about 8 inches from the pop filter. That’s close enough for the mic to pick up every nuance but far
enough to help keep plosives from overwhelming the pop filter and hitting the mic with a little blast of air that briefly overwhelms the word and ruins a take.
You want to position your copy – the words you’re reading – either just below or to one side of the mic, in such a way as to be as close as possible to the direction of your mouth into the mic but to also be able to clearly see the copy without the mic or filter getting in the way of your sightline.
Often, people and engineers will place the mic just ABOVE the copy, so that you not only have a clear view, but are also speaking just BELOW the actual path.There’s enough of a sweet spot in most mic’s pickup patterns – the area the mic is attuned to recording best – that you needn’t worry about not speaking directly into it. In fact, when the mic is positioned directly over the copy, there’s an odd psychological effect we see all the time, in which people tend to look at the copy and then tilt their head up towards the mic to deliver the line. This is NOT a good thing for two big reasons: First, by taking your eyes off the copy, you’re in effect losing your place momentarily and the extra effort to keep track of where you’re at is only going to impact your performance with unnecessary place-finding.And second, and even more impactful, moving your head from copy to mic means that atone moment you’re recording slightly off-mic and at the next, directly ON-mic. And THAT will cause a difference in the recording level and tonality, which will make for an uneven recording. That’s something a DJ might do, moving in on the mic to do a live ad lib or make a point, but for most VO recording, it just distracts from the overall performance effect, which means your listener will be dealing with unexpected changes in the sound of the recording instead of listening to a steady level that is all about the copy you’ve been hired to perform!