Welcome back to the channel StreamYard family. Today,
we're gonna be taking a look at five steps that you can do today to make your
microphone sound better.
For those of you that don't know me. My name is TheFranswah.
I'm a professional content creator who happens to like making videos
about microphone quality.
I'm very excited for this video because every single one of these steps is
very important in order to get the best quality out of your
microphones.
The first thing you need to do is establish what kind of microphone that you
have. If you have a microphone like myself here,
it's most likely either a condenser microphone or a dynamic
microphone. These two microphones are built in different ways.
They are engineered in ways to capture audio differently.
The condenser microphone is more sensitive to sound,
while the dynamic microphone is less sensitive to sound.
This Shure MV7 here is a dynamic microphone.
I have to have it closer to my mouth in order for it to get the clarity of
my vocals.
It's important to know whether or not you have a condenser or dynamic microphone
before we start this video.
You can just Google the microphone that you have and ask Google whether
or not you have a condenser mic, a dynamic mic,
or some other form of microphone.
These microphones require you to be very close to your mouth.
Whether you have a dynamic or condenser microphone,
you still need to be pretty close to your mouth in order to get the full
spectrum or the full frequency range of your vocals. For a dynamic microphone,
you typically want to be within two to five inches of your mouth.
And for a condenser microphone,
you want be about a fist distance from your mouth. In order to do this,
you'll most likely need a boom arm,
which is what I have holding my microphone up here.
If you keep your microphone on your desk,
it's gonna be incredibly difficult to get good sound out of that microphone,
because you're gonna have to crank the volume on that mic,
which is going to result in a lot of air noise,
a lot of background noise, and just a lack of clarity overall. You
can find boom arms in the price range of 20 all the way to 100 dollars.
Just keep in mind. If you do go to the budget side of boom arms,
you're gonna have the issue where it's like flimsy and if you hit your desk and
stuff, it will shake that boom arm,
which will create noise from your microphone.
It is better to get a nice sturdy boom arm to completely eliminate the chance of
other noises, but if that's something that doesn't bother you,
then go ahead and get that budget boom arm. And you can just find on Amazon.
In recordings, there's something we call plosives.
Plosives are speech sounds created from the letters T K B
P D and G. When speaking into your microphone,
these letters will create more force from your mouth,
which will hit the diaphragm of your microphone, creating a pop sound.
In order to eliminate plosives, there's a thing called a pop filter.
A pop filter looks like this, what is right in front of my mic right now.
It really reduces the force of those letters coming out of my mouth.
I can actually show you the difference of this,
and you can really hear it if you put headphones on. Peter
Piper, pop, pop, pop, pop filter,
and then when I place the pop filter back in front of it, Peter Piper pop, pop,
pop filter,
it sounds a whole lot better once the pop filters in front of microphone. Again,
you can get a pop filter from the range of $10 all the way to a $100 dollars.
Keep in mind. If you do go with a budget, pop filter,
like the one I have right now,
you'll be dealing with a slightly muffled audio from your vocals.
If you get the more expensive pop filters they design them in such a way that
there's not a lot of muffling happening. And if there is,
you can't really hear it. When you are recording,
you want to make sure you are at the appropriate volume.
This is important so that your viewer doesn't have to turn up the volume too
much or turn the volume down because they're annoyed by the volume level.
In audio, there's this little thing that we call clipping. Clipping happens when
an audio signal exceeds what it is capable of.
It's called clipping because what it does to the audio signal is literally clip
off the top of that signal, creating a really terrible noise.
This actually happens more often than you would think. In order to prevent this,
we need to make sure our audio volume is set it up correctly.
If you're on Windows, what you can do is go down to your speaker icon down here,
right-click it. Go to sounds. From sounds, you can go to the recording tab.
You can find your microphone, right-click it, go to properties.
Once you're in properties,
you can go over to listen and click listen to this device. From there you
can go to levels and you can adjust the volume level here based on
what you are hearing.
My Shure MV7 actually requires more power than a typical USB mic.
That's kind of why you see it boosted all the way here. Alternatively,
you can set up VoiceMeeter following one of the VoiceMeeter guides that we have
on this channel.
And you can set up the volume level from that application.
This will kind of help you because it gives you a display of where your audio
volume is and this will make it a little bit easier when you know,
setting the volume for yourself. What you can do is left-click on this meter,
slide it down until it's about at negative 10 decibels.
Then what you'll wanna do is turn up your microphone from the Windows settings
like we did just moments ago until it's hitting around negative 10 decibels and
then you can left click here and slide this limiter back up.
If you're hitting right around negative 10 decibels on average,
that's about where you wanna be when you're live streaming and doing video
recordings. After you have your microphone set up correctly,
we're ready to start thinking about noise reduction.
There are many ways in many different apps that will help you achieve this goal.
Ideally,
what you'll do is set up a noise gate filter or a downward expander to mute that
audio in the background while you're not speaking.
Doing that can get pretty technical.
There's many parameters that go into a noise gate filter and a
downward expander. Not only are there many parameters,
but there's a whole setup process.
As far as getting a VST host or an audio processing object in order to
run the noise gate, filter on your microphone.
The easiest solution for this is to use a noise suppression software
like Nvidia Voice or Krisp. Recently, we did a video on Nvidia Voice.
You should definitely check it out.
It will show you how to set up an Nvidia Voice for yourself.
So you can use that noise suppression software. Alternatively,
if you set up VoiceMeeter using our VoiceMeeter setup guide,
you can set up a noise gate filter from the VoiceMeeter application.
On VoiceMeeter, what you'll do is go to your microphone source.
If you're on VoiceMeeter banana, it will be that first source here,
just like we set up in our VoiceMeeter Banana set up guide.
The noise gate is in the audibility section right here and it's labeled gate.
It's a single knob dial. They make it really simple for you.
They remove the stress of having to create a threshold,
an attack time, a release time,
and just made it one dial that you turn up or down.
What you wanna do is toggle on this A1 button here and slide this
dial up until the background noise on your microphone is
not coming through the mic while you're not speaking.
This will really help improve the audio of your streams by removing air noise,
fan noise and other noises from your stream while you're not talking.
The last suggestion I wanna make in this video is setting up some boosts
to your EQ.
EQ is an essential part of getting good audio out of your microphone.
We're gonna cover some basic EQs zones so that you have a better understanding
of how or what to boost in order to make your mic sound better. In this video,
I will be using VoiceMeeter simply because it is the easiest solution for
getting EQ and we've done a tutorial on setting up VoiceMeeter on this
channel.
You can set up an EQ through a VST host or an audio processing object;
however, a VoiceMeeter is typically the best solution.
What we'll do is go to the B2 selection here in the master section.
If you're on VoiceMeeter Banana, it will be labeled B2,
just like it is right here.
What we're gonna do is toggle on this EQ button and then we're going to
right-click that button. Once you right-click that button,
it will open up an EQ window.
There are two zones that we're gonna focus on in this video.
That's gonna be the main portion of our vocals,
which is gonna be on the lower end of this spectrum and then the sibilance
section, which is the hard S sounds that go into a microphone.
So the first thing we want to do is toy with this dial on 200
hertz.
Our vocals can go anywhere from 120 hertz all the way to
roughly 300 hertz, depending on if you're a male or female.
So it's kind of nice to just leave this dial heel right on 200 hertz.
What we're gonna do is boost it just by one decibel,
and we're gonna change this cue from three down to two.
This will kind of cover a wide in that vocals and give it just a slight boost
in that area. The second area we want to cover is the sibilance area,
which is the hard S's in your voice.
They're really harsh sometimes depending on the mic that you have,
and it's always nice to cut them out just a little bit.
So what we'll do is go to this 8,000 hertz dial here,
and we'll actually set it to around 7,000 hertz.
It doesn't have to be exactly 7,000 hertz, just roughly around there.
Your sibilance can be anywhere from 4,000 all the way to 8,000,
so it's kind of covers that whole range.
What we're gonna do here is do a slight decrease about negative two decimals and
we will increase this band from a three Q up to
roughly eight Q and that will do a slight cut in our sibilance frequency area.
Those are my five steps to getting better microphone, audio.
I hope this guide was easy to follow.
If you guys have any questions after watching this video,
make sure you leave them in the comments section below.
And I will do my best to personally respond to them.
We want to thank you so much for watching this video.
We're StreamYard and we're here for all your streaming needs,
and I will see you in our next video. Peace.