Why equipment does not solve it
Several dialogue editors made the same point from different directions. A trained voice performer learns tongue positions that produce clean consonants, which takes years and still leaves some noise behind. Someone recording on-camera presenters described exactly the gap: people who are lively and engaging in front of a lens, alone in a booth with a microphone, have often never had a diction lesson. Their summary was that an expensive microphone no more produces a voice performance than an expensive guitar produces a guitarist.
What people do at the session
- Say something. More than one contributor said the most effective long-term move is telling the performer, during or just after the session, that it is happening — most are unaware of it and want to improve.
- Settle them. Nerves dry the mouth, so effort spent relaxing the performer was reported to reduce the clicking directly.
- Watch for chewing gum, and expect it to be hidden rather than mentioned.
- Accept retakes. One reply observed that experienced performers already treat retakes as part of the process.
The disagreement about water
The thread did not settle this. One contributor has performers sip water before every take and reported it helping considerably, on the theory that dryness rather than wetness causes the clicks. Another said water has never helped them and that coffee makes it worse. A third offered the observation that nothing dries the mouth like having just brushed your teeth. Since it costs nothing, it is worth testing per performer rather than adopting as a rule.
The warning about cleaning it up afterwards
- Removing clicks by hand after the fact was called the most reliable method by more than one person, and it is slow — the question came from someone spending an hour on twenty seconds.
- The caution worth keeping came from a contributor who pulled back from doing it thoroughly: a show they had cleaned exhaustively passed quality control and still sounded lifeless, because the naturalness had gone with the noise.
- Some voices are simply noisy and no technique at the session changes that.