Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

Pipping – an audio engineer’s nightmare. What is it? When recording your voice, pronouncing some letters such as “p” cause you to expel air rapidly from your lips, passing over the microphone, thus creating this sound. The recordings I did for the first scene had pipping so I was informed by our video production team. How do I solve this problem I asked. Well, the answer was quite simple. It is the position of your microphone and ensuring your microphone has a filter. Let me explain…

I was using an Apple iPod to do the recording. Convenient, but certainly not the best quality. The microphone for the iPod I borrowed had a missing filter on the end. You know, the fluffy stuff – similar to what is on the ear pieces of your headphones. This breaks the draft of air flow and helps to prevent pipping. I also needed to hold the microphone a little further away. This was a bit tricky because my initial experiments showed that if too far, the recordings were too quiet.

Anyway, that is my lesson for today. So if you are wrestling with Peter Piper while recording into a microphone; remember the distance of the microphone from your lips and if you can, have a filter on the end.