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In this episode, we share a tip for making your videos sound better with room tone.

Room tone is that subtle and consistent noise that exists in the background. No matter how quiet you think a room may sound to your ear, there is always some noise. It could be the soft hum of a refrigerator, an airy noise coming from air vents, or a subtle buzz from light fixtures in the room.

When filming outdoors, room tone is easier to hear with your own ear. Noise from wind, leaves rustling or neighborhood traffic can all blend together to create a room tone – even when you aren’t, technically speaking, in a room.

Keep in mind that room tone is a consistent sound. Someone honking their horn or a neighbor turning his leaf blower on and off are just noise.

When you go to edit your video, you will often want to adjust the timing of how elements are presented. For instance, if you want to add a pause in an interview clip. The problem is that when you create that pause, you are adding a truly silent moment between two elements that have a subtle background noise. When you play the video, the background goes from soft and subtle to completely non-existent and back to soft and subtle again. Those two sudden changes draw attention to themselves. They are a distraction, and you don’t want your viewers to be thinking about that audio change while they are watching your video.

An easy way to solve this is to have some audio of just the room tone all by itself that you can use to fill in that gap you created when you added the pause. By doing this, the background noise remains constant and doesn’t draw attention to itself.

Capturing room tone every time you film is a good habit to form and it is easy to do (most of the time). Once you are all set up and ready to begin filming, just start recording with your camera. I try to get twenty to thirty seconds of room tone. If a noise interrupts that stretch – like an airplane or ambulance goes by – I just keep recording and start counting out the thirty seconds over again.

If you are conducting an interview or if you have other people nearby, let them know that you need complete silence from them for about a minute while you are recording your room tone. But if there are many people involved, good luck trying to get through thirty seconds without someone sniffling or making a noise.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE