- This video is sponsored by Epidemic Sound.
There is a whole world of audio plugins
that you can use to make your microphone
sound more professional.
In this video,
I'm going to go over my five favorite audio plugins
specifically designed for live streamers.
We're going to be covering noise gates,
EQ, compressors, even de-essers.
Essentially everything you need
to get the best sound out of your microphone.
And best of all of these plugins are completely customizable
to your own voice and still totally free.
(upbeat chillhop music)
Before we get started with the video,
there are three important things
that I need you to understand.
Firstly, all the links to every single plugin that I mention
are down in the description below this video.
Like I said, they're all free to download.
So open the description to find the download links.
Secondly, we're going to be using Elgato's Wave Link software
to add these VST plugins to our microphone chain.
You can also use OBS Studio to add VST plugins
but at the time of recording,
VST 3 plugins still aren't supported.
And finally, once you've actually installed a VST plugin
onto your computer, you actually need Wave Link to find it
before it can be added to a channel.
To do this, simply open up the preferences window
then click on the Audio Effects tab
and click the Scan Plugin Folders button.
All right, boring stuff out the way,
let's jump onto the PC and add our first VST plugin.
So what you're listening to now
is the Elgato Wave: 3 with absolutely no effects
or any kind of post-processing applied at all.
It sounds right doesn't it?
But we can make it a whole lot better
by adding some VST plugins.
And the first VST plugin we're going to add is a noise gate.
Effectively, what a noise gate does
is it mutes your microphone when you're not speaking
by closing the gate
and that should stop any of that background noise
from coming through your microphone when you're not speaking
as soon as you start speaking again
it unmutes your microphone by opening the gate again.
My favorite noise gate plugin is one called Renegade
because it has some really visual ways
of being able to understand the exact settings
that you're applying to the gate.
So as I explained before,
you need to head to the description below this video
download the Renegade plugin from their website
and then install it onto your PC
and make sure that you scan the folder within Wave Link.
Once you've done that,
you should be able to find the effect
if you click on this little Effects button here
on your microphone channel.
Click the plus icon
and then browse to find the Renegade plugin.
So the first thing we need to do
is actually establish what our noise floor is
and this is going to be unique
to absolutely everybody watching
cause it's dependent on the environment
that your streaming PC is actually in.
So what we need to do is be completely quiet
and then look at the levels
that microphone is picking up without us speaking.
So for me, you can see that it has hovering
of sort of around that minus 60 decibel range.
And what we want to do is actually set our threshold
to around five decibels roughly above that level.
So minus 60 plus five,
we're going to set this to around the minus 55, minus 54
sort of range here.
And now if we're quiet,
you can see that our levels are below that threshold
that we've just set.
So what this means is that anytime
that our volume is above this threshold
hence when we're speaking, the gate is going to be open.
But anytime that the volume is below that threshold
when we're not speaking
and it's just the noise of our room, the gate will be shut
and therefore not allowing
any audio to come through your microphone.
We can also here, adjust the attack and release times,
which is effectively just how quickly the gate opens,
how long it stays open, and then how slowly it closes again.
The defaults here are a little bit quick for my liking,
so I like to set my attack to around 10 milliseconds,
and my release to around a hundred or 125 milliseconds.
The final setting that we can adjust in Renegade,
is the mix percentage,
which is this little dot here
you can drag up and down on this gain map graph.
Effectively, what this does
is it decides how closed the gate is when it is closed.
So if you drag this all the way down to the bottom,
100% the gate will be fully closed
letting it absolutely no noise when you're not speaking.
If you want something a little bit more natural
you can set this to around 80, 85%.
It is going to let in a tiny bit of room noise
but it's going to sound a lot more natural as well.
Next, we're going to add some EQ to our microphone chain.
Now EQ will forever be the hardest setting
for me to recommend to you
because it's so inherently based on
what your voice sounds like.
The microphone that you're using,
the environment that you are streaming and recording from.
In fact, even if you and I
were sat at the exact same microphone
at the exact same studio or streaming space,
we'd still want different EQ profiles
just because inherently our voices are different.
That being said,
I do have some baseline subtle changes that I recommend
and use as a starting point but you do need to listen back
to how these affect your voice
and the bits of your voice that you like and you dislike,
you need to choose yourself to make cuts and boosts
at those specific frequencies.
So my favorite free EQ plugin is one called TDR Nova.
Again, once you've downloaded,
installed, and scanned that within Wave Link,
we can add it into our microphone chain
by finding the plugin
and we can see it opens up a new window.
Now you might notice that we can't actually see
a frequency response of our voice right now.
And that's just because you need to change this setting here
from off to in, which is now going to show
our actual frequency response
of our voice coming through our microphone
and then we can apply an EQ to that.
So we're going to apply a basic three band EQ to our voice.
We actually don't need all four bands enabled here
so you can turn off the fourth one,
and make sure you have the first band selected.
We can either make adjustments up on the graph.
If you want to just drag the nodes around
or you can adjust the Q, frequency, and gain values
down here using the knobs at the bottom.
So for our first node, we're going to add a little boost
to add some warmth to the low end,
somewhere in that 100 to 150 Hertz range.
For me around 140 Hertz, I'm going to add a one decibel boost
and just adjust the Q, the actual bandwidth,
the number of frequencies this applies to,
to something a little bit more wide, something around 0.9.
For our second node,
we'll make a slight cut in this sort of broadcast boxiness
frequencies around 400 to 900 Hertz
typically for most voices.
For me, it's around 500 Hertz
and I'm going to cut around a decibel and a half here.
And again, adjust the Q width
just to make it a little bit more narrow
so it's only applying to those specific frequencies.
Finally, our third node is going to be to add some clarity.
We're actually going to add a shelf
starting around 3,000 to 5,000 Hertz range.
So select our third node, change it to be a shelf.
Again, I'm going to start mine around 4,000 Hertz
and we're just going to add slight gain here
of around 0.8 decibels, nothing to offensive
and again adjust the Q value to something around one.
Now this EQ is intentionally very subtle
because I know how many people are going to
just copy this video blindly.
And I don't want to make any massive changes
because there's such a variety
of different voices out there.
So please like I've said many times,
listen back to your own voice,
make the changes based on how your voice sounds
and how you want it to sound.
The next plugin that we're going to be adding is a compressor,
which is going to make your volume level of your microphone
much more consistent
so it doesn't matter if you are speaking at a normal voice
or shouting when you get excited,
it's not going to be
a really unpleasant listening experience
for any of your viewers.
That's exactly what a compressor does.
It compresses any volumes above a certain threshold
brings them back down
so that it's more consistent volume wise.
There are plenty of different
free compressor VST plugins available on the internet.
My favorite is one called RoughRider 3.
So let's get that added to our microphone chain.
There are really only three different settings
that you need to understand
to set up any kind of compressor.
Those are the ratio, the threshold, and the makeup gain.
The ratio is just how much of a compression
is going to be applied
whenever your volume exceeds the threshold.
So these are commonly two to one, four to one,
eight to one, or even 10 to one compression.
And the further up that scale you go
the more compressed your signal is going to be
whenever it exceeds the threshold.
I typically recommend a ratio of four to one.
It's nice and natural sounding
while still obviously applying a compression.
But if you want a more compressed sound
or a less compressed sound,
feel free to play around with this.
The threshold or here in RoughRider 3,
it's called the sensitivity.
This is just the decibel level
where you want the compressor to start working.
So any sounds above minus 18 decibels as I have it set up,
is going to start applying that four to one compression.
So I recommend setting this to minus 18 decibels
or minus 20 decibels somewhere around there.
And it's just going to depend on how loud you are normally
and how much gain your microphone already has.
Finally, you're probably going to require
some kind of makeup gain because when you apply a compressor
you're reducing the overall volume
whenever you exceed that threshold.
So for me, I have it set to three decibels.
You can adjust this
just purely by looking at your OBS meters,
make sure that when you're speaking
you're still sitting in that sort of yellow
minus 12 decibels roughly kind of zone
and then add some makeup gain as you need it,
just to make sure that you're sitting around that level.
Next, we're going to add a de-esser.
Now this is completely optional but I would say,
especially for condenser microphones,
like the Wave: 1 and Wave: 3,
adding a de-esser will reduce the harshness of the S sound,
which obviously when people are watching you broadcast
for several hours at a time can be pretty fatiguing.
For this, we're going to be using the T-De-Esser plugin.
So get that installed,
then add it into your microphone chain.
So within the plugin interface,
there's really only two controls
that you're going to need to change.
That is the processing,
the actual amount of de-essing that's happening
and the intensity.
So I'm going to start by increasing the intensity
just cause I know that I like it a little bit higher,
something around seven.
And then the easiest way
to see the processing happening in real time
is to hold the S sound
and then adjust the amount of processing
until you see it start to be affected here on the level.
So this is a bit of an extreme example,
but I will hold down the S sound
whilst adjusting the processing.
(prolonged hissing)
So what level of processing you end up using
is largely personal preference.
I think a good starting point is just making sure
that a few decibels of harshness are removed
whenever you're using words that have that sibilance in.
Again, the main changes that you're making here
are really subtle
but if you can make any kind of improvement
to the sound of your microphone, why wouldn't you?
The fifth plugin is actually a completely optional one
and it's going to depend
on how noisy of an environment you're streaming in.
I don't personally use it,
but if you find that even with a noise gate,
when you are speaking
you can hear a lot of noise coming through,
you might want to use a noise suppression filter.
There's actually two different routes that you can go
with noise suppression that I would recommend.
If you have an Nvidia Card
and want to have similar results to Nvidia broadcast,
then Xaymar has actually built that into a VST plugin
that you can add.
Secondly, you can go down the route of adding a VST plugin
based on the RNNoise suppression filter,
which is also found within OBS Studio.
It's really good at removing constant background noise
but it doesn't do any sort
of learning of a noise environment.
If you do end up needing
to add a noise suppression filter to your microphone chain
it's worth noting that you want to drag this up
so that it happens right
at the beginning of your microphone chain
before your EQ and compression or de-essing happen.
So now that you've got your microphone chain set-up,
here are some bonus tips
to really get the most out of your new setup.
Elgato have actually added a new audio device to your system
that you can use to use this new microphone chain
in any different program.
It's called Wave Link Microphone Effects.
So you can just open up Discord or your game
or even something like Zoom,
add that as your microphone input,
and then you're going to get the benefit
of that full audio chain
with all of those VST plugins that we just added.
You can also toggle
whether these audio effects apply to just your stream mix
or also your monitor mix.
So if you don't want to hear the plugin effects
in your own headphones
you can just toggle this within the software.
If you also own the Elgato Stream Deck
you can add the Stream Deck plugin
and then the sampler action
actually allows you to sample your microphone in real time
and then play back that sample.
So if you want to do some quick testing of changing your EQ
or any of the plugins that we talked about,
I'd really recommend going down this route
of taking audio samples and then playing them back
so that you can hear the changes in real time.
It's also worth noting
that all of the audio effects that we have applied today
are actually applied in order from top to bottom.
And you can drag and drop to rearrange them.
Some people like to compress before they EQ
rather than EQ before they compress.
So feel free to do a bit of research
and see what's sound works best for you.
I would definitely recommend
putting your noise gate and noise suppression
right at the start though,
because you don't want to be applying
any additional effects to any noise.
It's also definitely worth mentioning
that effects don't have to just be applied
to your microphone chain.
You can actually add VST filters
to any of the different channels within Wave Link.
So I, for example, have a compressor added
to my Voice Chat channel,
just because I know that my teammates
don't have the exact same audio setup as me
and I don't want to hear those massive volume changes
when they get excited.
So I've added the same compression
to the voice channel as well.
You could also add something like a limiter
to your music channel
to make sure that no songs go above a certain volume level.
And speaking of music,
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Thank you, Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video
and thank you guys for watching.
I'll catch you in the next one.
Peace.