(Very) Newbie Question on Understanding Voice Levels and dB

[TenbarCreative]

Begging the Forum's indulgence, I'm greener at this than a freshly mowed golf course.

I'm doing some test voice recordings for an anticipated podcast.  I keep seeing that my voice dB levels are consistently "in the red" (-6 to 0). The playback, as you might imagine, is static-laden and sounds just awful.

I'm not crowding my Rodent microphone and I'm speaking in a normal conversational voice (i.e., I'm not broadcasting into the microphone, rather letting it do the work).

Moving away from the mic doesn't help--it hurts.  Sounds like, well, I've moved further way from the mic!

Looking for some help from the more experienced Audition Users and sound technicians here on what I need to do to make this better.

Is there an adjustment in Audition for this (probably), where is it and how is it used?

My thanks in advance.

[ryclark]

Normally recording speech should be done to much lower than you would expect with the meter hovering around -18dbFS peeking to -12dBFS. Certainly not -6 to 0 as you have discovered. You need to leave enough headroom that absolutely no portion of the audio can go anywhere near 0dBFS. You can always Normalize the audio after recording or use Compression to bring up the overall level. But once you have overloaded the analogue parts of the mic input and run out of digits in the conversion then it sounds horrible and you can't go back.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

So what is your recording chain? I.e, how do sounds from your mic get into the computer? If you are using some sort of a preamp, then it sounds as though you need to turn the gain down, and probably the level a bit too. Turning the gain down means you can get closer to the mic, therefore getting more level out of it, and not have it overload the first stage. Sometimes on some mics you can use the built-in attenuator (it will say something like -10dB on the switch) to achieve the same thing, but however you look at it, you need the chain less hot, as ryclark says.