Guide

How to Record Your Voice with Background Music

If your work is speaking — guiding, teaching, comforting, explaining — the recording should be the simple part. This guide shows the calm way to get a warm voice recording with gentle music underneath, on a phone or a computer, without learning audio engineering.

What you need

• A phone or computer with a microphone. Headphones with a small mic are fine — often better.
• A quiet room. Soft furnishings help; echo is the most common flaw in home recordings.
• Your words, roughly planned. Reading naturally beats reading perfectly.
• A piece of calm music you have the right to use. Relaxifi includes a small library of suitable music, so you don't have to find your own.

Prepare the room first

• Soft beats hard. Curtains, a rug, cushions, a sofa or a bed soak up echo. Bare walls, tiles and glass bounce your voice back and make it sound distant.
• Avoid the middle of an empty room. Sitting near a bookshelf, a wardrobe of clothes or a corner with soft furnishings usually sounds warmer.
• Switch off the hums. Fans, fridges, heaters and open windows are easy to forget and hard to remove later.
• Do a ten-second test. Say a sentence, play it back on headphones, and listen to the room as well as your voice.

Your microphone matters less than the room and your distance from it. If you are thinking of buying one, our beginner's guide to choosing a microphone explains what actually makes a difference.

The easy way, in six steps

1. 1

   Record your voice

   Speak at your natural pace, a little slower than conversation. Pause where a listener would want to pause. Don't worry about small mistakes — you can trim the edges later.

2. 2

   Let it tidy your voice

   A good tool will gently soften background hiss and even out the loudness for you. In Relaxifi you pick one of four styles — from natural to close and calm — and the polishing happens in one tap. There is nothing to tweak by hand.

3. 3

   Lay music underneath

   Choose calm music and set it quietly behind the voice. A good starting point: music you can barely notice is usually right. If you find yourself listening to the music instead of the words, turn it down.

4. 4

   Balance the two

   The voice should always sit on top. Play the whole thing once through at a comfortable volume and trust your ears — if you can follow every word without effort, the balance is right.

5. 5

   Smooth the start and end

   Give the piece a gentle beginning and a soft ending rather than an abrupt cut. Relaxifi fades these for you; you just set where the music finishes.

6. 6

   Save and share privately

   Save the finished piece to your library. From there you can share a private listening link that plays straight away on the listener's phone or computer — no app for them to install, no files to attach, and it works on any phone.

Keeping music from drowning out your words

• Set the voice first, then bring the music up underneath. Start with the music very low and raise it slowly until you just notice it — then stop.
• Choose music without lyrics. Sung words compete with spoken ones. Slow, steady music with no sudden changes is easiest to listen through.
• Check on headphones and on a phone speaker. If every word is easy to follow on both, most listeners will hear it clearly.
• Leave room around the voice. If a passage feels busy, the music is too loud, not your voice too quiet.

Closed, wired headphones make this much easier to judge — our guide to choosing headphones explains why. And if you're recording something slow and spacious, the guided meditation guide covers pacing and pauses in more detail.

On an iPhone or Android phone

A phone's built-in voice recorder captures your voice alone — it cannot mix music underneath. That is why people end up juggling a recorder app, a music file, a separate editor and a file transfer, all on a small screen. Relaxifi does the whole job in one place on the phone: record, choose a voice style, pick music, share the link. Nothing to move between apps.

On a computer

Full audio editors can do all of this too, and much more besides — if you enjoy learning them, they are the stronger tool. But they ask you to work with tracks, filters and export settings. If you would rather concentrate on what you are saying, a focused tool like Relaxifi takes you from microphone to private listening link in one sitting, with nothing to install and nothing to learn beyond the page in front of you.

Three tips for a clear recording

• Stay about a hand's width from the microphone. Closer sounds warm and personal; further away picks up the room.
• Smile slightly as you speak — listeners can hear it.
• Record one good take rather than many. If you stumble, pause, breathe, and re-read the sentence; the tidy-up step will handle the join.