- I'm gonna give you some amazing voice editing tips
if you are just getting started with Audacity,
it's a great voice recorder, manipulator
and you can go further than that,
you can do things like add music, mix in stuff
and even add effects.
(upbeat music)
So let's get started.
And the very first thing I'm gonna remind you to do
once you've opened Audacity is go to the audio setup
and just make sure you've got your playback device selected
as the sound card or the audio interface
you're using to listen
to the audio from Audacity, and with the recording device,
likewise, make sure it's your audio interface
USB microphone, or if you just are starting from the basics,
your internal microphone, that's absolutely fine.
So once that's set up, you can record easily.
And the way you do it is you just go
for the record button up in the top left
or you can hit the R button on your keyboard.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic Audacity voice editing tips.
When we finish, we can either hit the space bar
or the stop button up here.
Let's play back
by just hitting the play button here or space bar.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic Audacity voice editing tips.
Okay, sounds perfect to me
but I think it's missing something.
Let's add some music in and mix it on another track.
This is absolutely possible and one
of the easier ways is to go to the file menu
and we'll look for the import option.
We'll look for audio and sitting right there is a music bed
from the Music Radio Creative Production Library.
It's called Feeling Good Today.
Let's listen to the mix.
It's automatically mixed it onto a new track
so we should be able to just hit the play button
or space bar and listen to what we got so far.
Hello, this is Mike Russell
and I'm gonna give you some epic
Audacity voice editing tips.
Now you know what, that's not bad
but the music is overpowering the voice,
so let's just quieten it down a little bit,
either by using the envelope tool up here
or hitting F2 to switch.
And then I am able to place on a few points here
and potentially one here at the end.
And then I can place on another one here
and fade that music right down and again,
fade that music right down so that now when I play back.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic Audacity voice editing tips.
You heard the music turned down
and fade back up when I finish speaking.
I'm gonna undo that.
Now I can do this by going to the edit menu, undo envelope,
that was my last action
or hit the command or control Z button.
And then we'll get back to where we were.
We can go back to this tool
which is the standard selection tool
and we're back to the mix.
And I wanna do that all on automation.
I don't wanna mess about with envelopes.
I want Audacity to do it for me.
So this is how you do it, first of all,
because I'm a little bit OCD, I'm gonna name the top track
and I'm gonna call it Mic Voice.
And then I'm gonna click that Mic Voice title
and I'm gonna move that track to the bottom.
Now this is important.
You need your music on the top and your voice on the bottom
for Auto Ducking to work, for auto ducking to work,
all I need to do now is select all of the music.
I double click there and then I can go into the effect menu.
I can go to Volume and Compression
and I can look for Auto Duck.
Now it gives me a nice preset
that I actually think is pretty cool.
I'm just gonna go ahead and apply it.
And what it's done is it looks at the voice track
and it'll look at any other track that's going on
down here and duck your music accordingly
as to what's happening in the tracks below it.
Let's play and have a listen.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic Audacity voice editing tips.
(upbeat music)
Wow, and I actually think it did
the auto ducking a little bit better than me.
So it goes to show that Audacity
really does have some pretty neat effects
for voice editing.
Now talking about voice editing, I've got a little bit
of silence at the start of my recording and the end
and I can kind of get rid of that in a few ways.
Firstly, I can click here and then right click
and split the clip there, and I can do the same at the end.
And I can right click and split the clip
and then just delete
those sort of silently bits that I don't need.
So I'll just select that little bit there.
And I'm just gonna hit the, sorry,
I'm gonna select it by double clicking on it first.
Like so, but this is so tiny, this clip, so, so tiny.
This one's a bit bigger.
I can double click that one.
I can delete that one.
For this one,
I'd actually need to zoom in
using my zoom tool just a little bit.
Then I can double click and delete that as well.
So that's hunky dory, that's fine.
But I'm going to command Z to get everything back
to the way it was and show you a quicker way.
And the quicker way is to select just the audio
you want to keep.
That's the audio there.
And use this tool up here
it's called the Trim audio Outside Selection
or Command or Control T.
Boom, there you go.
And now if I want to
I can also move this around in time simply by just moving.
Now unfortunately the Auto duck will not move
with the audio.
You have to rerun the effect, so do bear that in mind.
But that's pretty much how you do most
of those basic things.
I'm actually gonna put that back, that audio
and I'm actually going to mute out my music
and I'm just gonna play the audio here again from the start.
Let's have a listen.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic audacity voice editing tips.
Now obviously my studio is really quiet
and there's not much background noise there
but what if there is background noise you want to remove?
You can actually easily see in Audacity
if there is background noise by going into this menu.
And instead of just working in waveform
you've got spectrogram, which completely changed the look
of your audio and you're like, what on earth is that?
It's a representation of frequencies going on in your audio.
If we wanna see a bit of both, we can actually just go
to the multi view and that'll get a lovely waveform
at the bottom and a lovely spectrogram at the top.
Spectrograms are great because they'll show you
background noise when you're not speaking.
So when I'm not speaking, this area here should be black
and so should the end bit, but it's not,
there is a little bit of hiss,
maybe a little Mac fan going off in the background.
Maybe it's my audio interface whirring up
or something like that.
I don't know.
But I wanna remove that audio.
So Audacity has an easy way.
Select just the noise you wanna remove.
You can do it in spectrogram, or way form view.
It really doesn't matter.
You can go into effect.
Then you've got noise removal and repair.
You've got loads of options here.
Noise reduction is the great one really here.
So now I've selected the noise I want to get rid of.
I get the noise profile, that's done.
Now I select everything,
go back into that effect, noise removal and repair.
I look for noise reduction right there.
And then I simply run it with the base settings.
Let's see what the base settings do and boom, look at that.
Look at how much cleaner now my spectrogram has become
since I ran that noise reduction.
Now obviously on a studio quality recording,
you generally wouldn't need to or want to do that.
And there are more efficient ways to remove noise
when you're working with studio quality recordings
that I show you in other videos.
So make sure to go and watch my videos on noise gates.
They'll be on your screen somewhere and yeah,
learn about noise gate 'cause it's really good.
But let's listen
to how it's changed the sound of the audio, if at all.
Hello, this is Mike Russell and I'm gonna give you
some epic Audacity voice editing tips.
So noise reduction or removal
in this case has really done a good job.
And I'm gonna zoom right in and maybe just show you
so that you can really see what exactly is happening here.
Let's zoom out.
Let's move my cursor right back to the start here.
Hello, that's where I'm working from, just around here
just around the start area here.
Let's take a really good look at the spectrogram there
and I'm gonna hit command Z on my keyboard.
Just undo, and look at all the noise that was reintroduced.
So noise removal in Audacity.
It's pretty good, it's worth using.
In this video you've learnt a number of things.
You have learnt how to record, how to mix in music
how to AutoD duck, how to split, how to trim
and also how to remove a little bit
of background noise or a lot of background noise
if that's what you're working with.
What are you suffering in Audacity?
What is it you want to know more about?
Let me know right now in the comments down below.
(upbeat music)
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