[distant & echoey] Do you think this sounds good?
Neither does anybody else. That’s why today,
we’re talking about stepping up your audio game.
Let’s get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪Gerald Undone♪
♪He’s crazy♪
[normally] What’s happening, Donk Squad?
I’m Gerald Undone, and today, as promised,
we are discussing audio, how to improve your audio.
And this is for YouTube videos, for streamers on Twitch,
for people who are doing just some light video production.
Keeping it simple, keeping it more likely
useful to the viewer of this video.
If you remember in the last video where we talked about
audio interfaces, which we’ll be getting to shortly,
I said that today I would be making a video
where we’d talk about the introduction
to the audio chain and how to get the best--
where to start getting the best sound really.
And so that’s what we’re gonna do today.
This is going to be part one of the audio series.
Today we’re only gonna be talking about the beginning
stages of the sound because I always say that
the biggest improvement usually starts at the source.
Step one to getting good audio is “create good audio.”
So this takes practice. But you know how if you watch
YouTube videos, you see a lot of people
where their levels are constantly going up and down?
And sometimes they peak, their audio clips,
cuts out, it goes too low, you can’t hear them,
you’re adjusting your levels. And then if they want
to fix that in post, they have to use a compressor.
But the more effects that you add in post--
which, like I said, we’ll get to probably in part two--
the more digitized and fake... and you can tell.
If you take a really poor-grade sound and you run it through
a bunch of effects to try to make it sound good,
it’s never gonna sound quite as good as that creamy
broadcaster voice that you’re probably going for.
And a lot of that comes from the fact that people
that you’ll hear in broadcasting
have great voices for this, to begin with,
and they’ve trained to deliver their audio
almost as if a compressor was already applied.
So I urge you to practice this, and it’s pretty easy to do.
First of all, get your posture right.
OK? Make sure you take in deep breaths.
Find a good part of your voice that
is an even point, ‘cause sometimes, you know,
[high-pitched] you can talk up here.
[low-pitched] You can talk way down here.
[normally] Depending on your voice and your vocal range.
But there’s usually a frequency where
your voice operates where your loudness is more uniform.
And you can do this in a few ways.
Like on the camera over here, for instance,
I can actually see my audio levels moving.
[varied volume] So I could talk in a way where I try to
keep the levels from-- [normally] and if I see them
moving up and down like that, that means I’m not doing
a very good job. But you could just count at the camera:
one, two, three, four, five.
You can do it in your editor, you can do it on your camera,
you can do it if you have a recorder.
Sometimes OBS, if you use that for streaming,
has a little thing. You can just see where the levels go,
and you can try and get a consistent vocal performance.
That is key. If you have a consistent vocal performance,
you can do a lot with very little,
without processing, without anything too fancy,
just because you performed well.
And I’m just talking about talking, by the way.
It’s not even just singing. But the same principles
apply to everything. The sound starts in your mouth,
so the better that you create sound there, the better process
you’re gonna have. So start that. That’s free!
Practice that, get that going. OK, number two:
where does the sound go? Well, it goes
into the microphone. This is a--
This is a cardioid condenser microphone.
I think that if you want a really,
really excellent vocal capturing device,
a condenser mic for a studio setting is a good way to go.
So like I said, this is a cardioid pattern.
That means it kind of is shaped like a heart.
You know, cardioid, cardiac, heart.
And that’s the pattern in which it picks sound up.
So on this microphone, the element is right here,
and the cardioid pattern would be kind of something like this.
So you can hear the sound, you know, maybe not completely
as well, but still reasonably good in an area around it.
Where an alternative to that would be something
like a shotgun microphone. Its shape of how it receives
sound is much more pointed, and I guess that’s where it
gets the idea of the shotgun from. But it’s more like
a spearhead coming in this way rather than
a fatter kind of shape, like a heart.
The reason why these shapes are important is because you need
to know what your situation is, how you’re gonna be recording.
Are you gonna have a lot of noise and other things
that you want to try to cancel out that are
coming from over in this way? Then maybe you want something
more focused, like a shotgun. But I still think that getting
a little bit of tone of what’s coming around the audio
in this kind of way is going to produce a better sound.
So if you can control the audio in your space,
then you have a lot more flexibility, obviously--
and by “control the audio in your space,” I mean control
other sounds and control how your sound is moving around
in your space-- then you can use hypersensitive microphones,
and turn ‘em up and position them in all kinds of cool ways
and stuff like that, and you have a lot more flexibility.
But if you’re in some run-and-gun scenario
and you want to cancel other things out,
that’s why people often use shotgun microphones
on their cameras, like the RODE mic and that kind of thing.
So those are some things to keep in mind when we’re talking
microphones because microphones are very, very important.
A common theme that goes around is that gear
isn’t that important, and it’s more about the story,
and I agree with that to a certain extent.
But when it comes to capturing things-- again, I already
explained this-- you start, and the more steps you get away
from it, the less important it gets, in my opinion.
So the most important thing is the sound
coming from your mouth. The second most important
thing is the thing that captures the sound.
The third most important thing is how that sound is then
converted or delivered into the next thing,
and it gets less and less important from then on,
as long as you don’t have a complete break in the chain.
So, for microphones in a controlled space,
put a cardioid condenser mic on some kind of arm.
I’ve got the RODE flexi-arm thing here.
It’s great, I can move it around.
You’ve probably seen a lot of YouTubers use
this kind of setup. My microphone
is a Studio Projects mic. You can’t really get this one
anymore, but I’ll put some links in the description
to microphones that are very, very excellent
for their price point. I guess I should have said this earlier,
this is part of the vocal performance: talk at the mic!
If the microphone is over here...
[distant & tinny] So now the mic’s over there,
and I’m talking over here. Not only am I gonna have to
boost the levels, which means I’m also boosting the noise
in the environment-- because there’s always noise
in the environment. Listen carefully.
[faint, indistinct whirring & rumbling]
You hear all that? All that’s just going on,
and a lot of environments, unless you’ve soundproofed them,
are gonna have stuff going on. So the further away the mic is,
the more I’m gonna have to boost the signal in order
to get the same level, that same constant vocal performance,
but now you’re gonna be picking up all this other junk.
And if you can get the mic real close...
[low & clear] So if I can bring
the mic in here and talk, I can talk a lot quieter.
[slightly louder] But if I talk loudly enough
into the mic like this, then I can probably bring the levels
down to a point where we’re not gonna hear as much of
the other noise that’s going on, and we’ll get what seems like
a much cleaner sound. But if you have a reasonable
control of it, you don’t even need to see the mic.
Like, I have the mic down here below where you can see it,
so I get to control my shot better,
but I’m still projecting my voice at the microphone.
And I have to be careful not to-- you know,
say I’m holding something up. I don’t want to be
holding this [slightly muffled] up in front of my face,
[normally] ‘cause it’s so easy to hear that, right?
One, two, three, four, [slightly muffled] five, six,
[normally] seven, eight, nine. You see how the audio
changes, then? Don’t block your sound. Sound is waves.
Straight line. Straight line into the microphone,
and you’re winning. Your sound quality is gonna go way up
just by talking directly into the mic, and you’d be surprised
how many videos and stuff like that I see where people
are all over the place-- they’re talking over here,
talking like this, they’re blocking their face,
they get in real close, they’re getting real far away.
It’s not consistent. Do your best to deliver
a consistent performance. OK, so moving on.
Like I said, we’ll try to keep the chain going here.
I have a pop filter. That’s what this is
in front of the microphone. It does some things.
For some people, you might not notice a lot,
for other people, you’ll notice a lot.
These things are designed to remove some of the unwanted
effects of a vocal performance, whether they be
plosive sounds that you get with, like, [mouth popping]
Some people suggest that it helps a little bit with
de-essing, which is that kind of-- [lisping “S” & “Th”]
that sound that comes at the end.
Anyway, usually, they’re pretty inexpensive,
you just clip ‘em onto whatever apparatus you’re going with.
And it also stops you from a kind of spitting into the mic
a little bit. I mean, that’s-- I don’t know if that’s
its full intention, but they’re something that you might
as well put on if you can. They’re not that expensive.
It’ll probably help enough people to make it worthwhile
to recommend it to all people, I guess.
So you got that, you got the microphone,
you got the vocal performance, right?
And now we’re moving on. How is the microphone suspended?
Like I said, I like to use the RODE,
but basically some kind of way where you can suspend the mic,
where you can get the mic as close as possible to your face
and have control over it whilst not elbowing it or knocking
it around, and ideally not putting it on a surface that,
say, if you had a mic stand right on your desk
and you’re typing right beside it, that’s no good either.
So you kind of want to get it up and at ‘em, and near you,
and close. With a lot of things, the closer, the better.
It’s the same thing with light. The closer the light
is to the subject, the softer it will be.
The further away, the harsher it will be. Same with sound.
The further away you are from the mic,
the harsher, the worse the sound will be.
The closer the sound is to the mic, the better it will be.
So same concept. Try and find a way to
get your mic up and at ‘em. OK? The cord.
Most microphones that require this type of power
will use an XLR cable, which is that big guy
with the three dots, looks like this.
XLR connectors are great. They’re secure,
they feel good, they’re usually pretty rugged, and they provide
resistance against interference and that kind of stuff.
Often in the case of these types of microphones
is they require something called “phantom power,”
which is that you can’t just go plugging the microphone
in and start talking and hoping that it’s gonna work.
You need to give it a little bit of extra juice,
so you’re gonna need something that provides phantom power.
Now, there are a lot of things that do this.
You can plug your microphone directly into your camera
if your camera has an audio interface
that takes XLRs and have phantom power.
So cameras sometimes have that. USB audio interfaces,
which is what we were talking about in the last video,
they usually provide phantom power on the microphone inputs.
Go ahead and watch the previous video if you want to know
why I use the audio interface that I do
and some comparisons between popular models,
like Steinberg’s series and the Focusrite Scarlett series.
But basically, you need an interface that has nice,
clean preamps so that your great vocal performance
that’s going into your microphone,
where your microphone is positioned right
and everything, it’s not gonna get corrupted by some
crappy device that when you plug into it has, like,
[humming] like, hums and loops and stuff.
You don’t want any of that. You just want something
that’s gonna boost your signal nice and cleanly and give you
a couple of little controls and dials so you can set
the volume, turn your phantom power on and off,
maybe give you a little indicator of when
you’re peaking when your audio’s clipping.
You know, just stuff like that. That’s all you need: a nice,
clean preamp, basically, and then you can connect that
to however you’re recording. So I’m not gonna go too
in-depth about the audio interface. Like I said,
watch the previous video. But use something good.
Now, after that, you gotta get that audio
out of the interface and put it somewhere.
Now, audio interfaces usually have two ways.
Obviously, they have a USB thing,
that’s why they’re USB audio interface, and that can
go right into the computer, and so the audio interface
will do the conversion from an analog sound--
which is my mouth into the microphone or whatever--
into a digital sound into the computer via USB.
You record it that way, using your favourite
audio suite or your video editor.
Or if you’re streaming, that’s what OBS is gonna recognize.
That’s the device that you’re gonna see
on your computer that’s gonna allow you to put
your voice through your stream on the Internet.
So what I do when I’m recording videos like this is in addition
to the device being connected via USB to my computer,
I also use an analog connection, an 1/8 inch
headphone jack-type, because that’s what my camera takes.
And it goes straight into my camera, down,
and it’s a 1/4 inch connector into the back of my interface.
And this allows me to also deliver the sound
to the camera so that the camera
is making a recording of it, and if I want to have a backup,
I can also record it via USB into my computer as well.
So that would be sort of the final delivery
of the sound in this case before we go into
then packaging and processing the sound.
But one thing I want to touch on, and it’ll be my last point
for this video, is a lot of people caution
to not put the sound directly into the camera
because there’s a new set of things that are now factoring
in on your sound quality when you plug it into the camera,
which is: what kind of preamps are in the camera?
What kind of signal-to-noise ratio
does the way that the camera receives the sound have?
How is the camera going to be monkeying with the sound?
What’s the jack quality like, is it a crappy connection?
And my personal opinion is, as long as the vocal
performance is good, the microphone is good,
the signal is clean, the preamp is keeping it clean,
and it’s being delivered into the camera,
and all of the amplification is done outside of the camera,
you’re not gonna notice a difference.
And in this case, what I mean by that is,
I have my gain turned up to a position that I like it,
so the camera doesn’t really have to do anything.
If the camera then has to amplify the sound again
because it’s not loud enough, then you’re gonna get yourself
into a situation where, however good the camera’s preamps are,
that’s when it’s going to start to be a factor.
But you can turn that down all the way in your camera.
If you think that you can give the camera a nice,
clean, amplified signal, then in the camera,
turn its amplifier all the way down.
You usually have to set it to -12 dB or something like that.
But just turn it all the way down so that it’s not
boosting the signal at all, it’s just receiving the signal,
and then it’ll be, I don’t know, 95% as clean as
anything else, so you don’t have to worry about it.
All right, so that’s gonna be it
for this video because I wanted to take just this one
to explain how to get the quality sound delivered
to the recorded source so that then we can mess with it.
Because just jumping right into “here’s what to do
to clean up your audio,” or “here’s what to do to make
your audio sound better,”-- you gotta start with the voice
because you can’t just take any old audio that you find
and watch a video of, like,
”oh, just put a compressor on it, and everything’s fine.”
It’s not just gonna be everything’s fine.
Start with a good recording, then move out from there.
So I wanted to give you guys how to start with a good
recording in a usage scenario that’s probably more common.
We’re not in a sound stage right now,
it’s just a dude at a computer with a microphone.
How can we get the best audio out of that
on a reasonable budget? That’s what we try to work on.
And speaking of the budget, like I said,
the relevant links are gonna be in the description.
Go ahead and check those parts and the things
that I recommended. Also, check out my Kit link
if you want to see the specific gear that I use, but I’ll put
some recommendations in the description
just as loose links. But the next video is gonna be,
now that we have the sound, how do we make it
how do we improve it, how do we make it sound great,
what kind of effects and processes should we run
on it to improve it, and what kind of common problems
do you have with audio, and how can we improve them?
That’s gonna be the next video,
and that one should be out on Tuesday.
So if you’ve been enjoying this series,
make sure you subscribe and check out Tuesday’s video
if you want to know more about the audio stuff.
If you have any questions at all,
let me know in the comments, and I will try to answer them
for part two of this audio series.
And as usual, if you found this video useful,
helpful, or entertaining, go ahead and give it a like.
And if you did not find it any of those things,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I’m done.
♪