If you are just a starter in the audio field, who doesn’t have a huge budget for an expensive but still needs decent sound quality, after a bit of post-production, the result will be the optimum. We will use Audacity as an illustration. Different programs are going to be slightly different in terms of the features that they have.
Noise is always an issue for every microphone, not just the cheap ones. So it’s essential to make the track as clear as it can be.
Noise Reduction in Audacity
Select the area that only has the noise.
Go into “Effect”, then “Noise Removal”, and click “Get Noise Profile”.
Go back and highlight the entire track. And get to “Noise Removal”.
In “Noise Reduction”, find the happy medium like 22. And leave the other effect where they are (sensitivity: -0.16, frequency smoothing: 550, attack/decay time: 0.04).
Even though you get rid of background noise and the sound is pretty good now, we still can’t call it an optimum track. Because without a change of volume at different frequencies, your voice is still a bit muddy.
Especially when instruments and other vocals are piling on top of each other and competing for the same frequency. So the poor sound quality is not often the issue of the microphone itself. What you can do is to lower or boost the volume of some frequency to highlight the instrument or vocal, so the whole track can be heard clearly.
You would like to increase the volume of high-end (over 1 KHz) to add clarity to vocal. If you also have the guitar sound in the track, increase the mid-range frequency (100-1000 Hz) for the drum kicking. Though of course, when you are doing the broadcast, a bit more bass should help your voice sound good.
It may take you a little while to know exactly what slider to move to get the exact effect you want. This is a bit of trial and error. But you can check out the second episode to find out some conventional settings to optimize recording.