You can also try turning down the volume of the recording or the amount of pre-amplification done if your mic has a gain adjustment to try to reduce the signal level while still close to the mic. The easiest way to do this is to back off from the microphone so that it isn't driven beyond it's limit. Sometimes this can be considered a good thing, such as overdrive on a guitar, but most of the time it is not, such as your current experience.Īgain as others have mentioned, to fix this you need to reduce your signal level. This results in a break in the waveform which can't be produced by a speaker and lost information that the system was unable to capture, which is why you hear a grainy and distorted sound. The end result of clipping is that the maximum value is applied (or all values stop being applied in the case of a dynamic mic). Clipping occurs when the signal input to a step of sound processing (such as the mic capturing the sound, the computer recording it, or any hardware in between touching it) can't handle the level of the signal in whatever form it is in. As others have rightly said, the problem you are experiencing is called clipping.