Repairing Plosives and Clicks in a Voice Recording

Plosives are the bursts of air that hit the microphone on hard P and B sounds, and clicks are the tiny snaps from a dry mouth. Both are common in voice work, and both can usually be fixed by editing rather than by reaching for a plugin that might damage the rest of the line.

The instinct is to run the whole take through a repair tool. The better move is to deal with each event where it happens, because state-of-the-art processing applied across an entire file always leaves a mark somewhere.

Plosives need a targeted fix

A plosive shows up as a low-frequency thump at the start of a word. A high-pass filter placed only on that word, or a short fade over the burst, removes the thump without touching the surrounding audio. Broad de-plosive settings tend to soften the whole low end.

Some editors let you split the plosive from the word and treat the piece on its own. That kind of surgical work sounds tedious, and it is the reason a repaired take can sound untouched while a globally processed one cannot.

Fix the sound where it lives. Every repair applied to the whole file is a compromise the rest of the take has to pay for.

Clicks and mouth noise

Mouth clicks are short, sharp, and easy to spot on a waveform because they look like thin spikes. Most editors have a tool that draws over the spike and fills it from the surrounding audio, which removes the click in seconds with no audible trace.

Work through them in one pass while you listen with good headphones. Left alone, they become the thing viewers notice on the second watch, and there is no plugin that removes them all without scrubbing some real detail from the voice.

Prevent the ones you can

The cheapest repair is a recording that never needed one. A pop filter between mouth and mic, a mic angled slightly off the direct line, and a glass of water during the session remove most plosives and clicks before they ever reach the file.

Take a short break when your mouth dries out, because clicks cluster when the speaker is tired. A little prevention here saves a long editing pass later, and the take sounds better for it.

Key takeaways

• Repair plosives at the word level instead of filtering the whole take.
• Use the editor repair brush on click spikes, working in one careful pass.
• Angle the mic and add a pop filter to prevent most problems at the source.
• Pause for water when the mouth dries out, since clicks cluster late in a session.