- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, we're going to show you
how to set up and connect the Rode PodMic
with the GoXLR audio interface
for live streaming.
If you're looking for pricing or specs
for anything that you see in this video
as we're setting everything up,
you can check out the links down in the description below.
We do have links for current up-to-date pricing
on everything that you see here,
from a variety of online retailers.
Now, for the purposes of this video today
we have the audio interface already set up
and connected to our laptop.
It's already recording so we can get straight
to setting up the Rode PodMic.
The first thing that we need to do is
we need to connect the microphone
to the audio interface, to the GoXLR here.
We're going to use an XLR cable,
plug it into the back of the PodMic
and plug it into the back of the GoXLR.
Now we don't recommend using a cable like this
that would GoXLR from the microphone
to the headset input on the back of the GoXLR
That won't give you enough game.
The preamp isn't as good on that jack.
You really do need to use this XLR cable to XLR
for the better preamp inside the GoXLR audio interface.
Let's put my headphones on here
so I can hear what I'm doing.
So open up the mic set up window here
inside the GoXLR software.
Here we're going to make sure that we select dynamic.
If you click condenser there
it shouldn't hurt the microphone in any way
but it will use 48 volts of Phantom power
but you don't need that since this is a dynamic microphone.
That Phantom power will not help make
the Rode PodMic make sound better in any way.
There's no benefit to it whatsoever.
It's recommended that you leave it off
if you don't need it.
As we bring up the game,
we will start to see that the meter moves
somewhere around 52 Decibels
seems to be the sweet spot for me
where I'm regularly inside the good area.
I'm not in the loud and I'm not on the low area.
You can see here that I'm on the lower end of good.
Maybe I will bump it up to 54.
You can also type it in there if you want.
And that gives me a little bit more volume.
You can see that I just touched on the loud area there
but I'm not going in there regularly.
And it didn't get to a point where I was peaking.
So this is a really good setting for you.
You might end up with more or less gain
For this microphone it really depends on your voice
and how loud your voice is, but you do want it
to represent what mine represents right now
when you are talking naturally, you want it to be right
in the middle of that good area on this meter.
Next let's talk about the noise gate
that's built into the GoXLR.
The noise gate is a very useful tool
for automatically muting a microphone
until you speak into that microphone or
until the noise that the microphone
is trying to capture exceeds a certain threshold.
The best example of why a noise gate exists
is when you mic a drum kit.
When you have five mics around all the toms
and the snare of a drum kit,
you don't want the mic on your floor tom
to hear your snare drum.
So what you do is you put a noise gate on it.
So that mic only activates when you strike that one tom
because that's when the volume is loudest
right in front of that microphone.
So more increasingly it is becoming more popular
for live streaming environments,
just because people are trying to control
the background noise.
So it really depends on your environment
but don't feel like you need to use this.
I often don't use this.
I find that when you hear that clicking in and out
as the noise gate kicks in, I don't really like that.
So for me, most of the time I use the noise gate turned off.
That being said, if you do have some background noise
that you're trying to eliminate
I'll show you some settings here that I would use.
You don't want to be too aggressive with the threshold.
If you increase the threshold too much
you will hear it clicking in and out all the time.
So hey, keep increasing it here.
And you can see as they get more aggressive
it's actually clipping off my voice.
So that's way too aggressive, obviously.
So you don't want to be that high.
For me, I like keeping up between minus 40 and minus 45.
For me, this means that it easily breaks the noise gate
or exceeds the threshold.
And the microphone opens up right when I start speaking.
But it is low enough here
that it does hide some things like mouth noise
or when I breathe in between talking at certain times.
So it is useful at this range
but it's not so engaged that it's distracting.
And that's personally where I would fall with this setting.
The attenuation is how much of the microphone gets muted
when the noise gate kicks in.
For me, I like this at 50% to 75%,
but for my personal taste, closer to 50%
This means that when the noise gate kicks in
it's only muting about 50% of the microphone.
So again, it does sound more natural
as the noise gate engages and clicks on and off.
In terms of the attack and the release.
You can leave the defaults here
10 milliseconds and 200 milliseconds respectively
are totally fine. We can leave those there.
So that's how I would set the noise gate.
Next, we have the EQ.
Now there's a reason that you bought the PodMic
because you liked the way it sound.
Maybe you liked the way it got reviewed
and you know other people using the microphone
that are really happy with it.
So I would say if you're doing a talking
head video like this one and you don't have gain noise,
just leave the EQ flat
because that's why you bought this microphone.
You like how this microphone sounds.
So there's no reason to really mess with it too much
unless you have something really specific.
Like for me, there is a weird spike
in the frequency response of this microphone
that you might want to make changes to
for your personal taste.
That's an option as well.
But another thing to consider
and the reason that we brought this up is
if you're mixing your microphone with game noise
half of the game here is to create space
for that game noise and to help make sure
that your microphone is clear when it's competing
with those other sources.
Another way to think about this is if you were micing
or EQ'ing a whole band on a stage.
The kick drum needs to be in one frequency range.
The snare drum in another, a vocal in another
a piano, a bass guitar. You want all those things
narrowed to specific ranges.
So when you sit back from the mix,
if they're all set to the same volume,
you can still hear all the instruments.
So what we're trying to do here is
we want to make sure that the microphone is more clear.
So we don't just have to crank the volume.
It'll just stand out more on its own.
That's what we're going to do with the EQ here.
So to do that, we're going to roll off
the low end of this microphone.
We're basically putting in a high pass filter.
So we're going to go 31.5 is good
you go all the way minus nine.
Next on 63 Hertz, we're going to go minus three or four
minus three is probably pretty good.
What we've done right there
is basically we've taken the microphone
out of this subwoofer of everybody on the live stream.
There's no reason to have your microphone in a subwoofer.
Most subwoofers are somewhere between 80 Hertz
to 120 Hertz on the high end of them.
So as we roll it in here, we're just kind of making sure
that our voice isn't causing any low rumble on the stream.
There's really no reason for that.
Next we are going to put in a little bit
of a cut here at 500 Hertz.
I find that with the Rode PodMic
you don't have to go too extreme here.
There's not a lot of low end mod
with this microphone, some other microphones
they go minus three minus four
on the Rode PodMic that's not really necessary.
minus two is plenty good enough.
Again, just with how clear the Rode PodMic is
with its built in frequency response.
We'll just go plus one
on the two kilohertz and four kilohertz.
This is where the clarity, the main clarity
of any voice comes from
Most female voices are around
three and a half to four kilohertz.
Most male voices are somewhere
between 1.5 kilohertz all the way up to three kilohertz.
So there's a bit of a range there.
For me, I find I bumped both of these
up to plus one when I'm using the Rode PodMic.
And that helps to make this microphone just
a little bit more clear, but not too excessive.
Next, we're going to reduce the 16 kilohertz to minus four.
Again, most vocal microphones like SM 58, SM 7B.
There's a cliff after 10 K anyway,
nobody's really looking for vocal clarity
around 16 kilohertz.
It's just not really that necessary for what we're doing.
So we just roll it off to again
make more room for game noise in this area.
So that's how I would EQ it.
We have a high pass filter here basically rolls
in the low end to 125.
We have a small, low made cut at 500 hertz.
We have a really small bump at two and four kilohertz
and then a cut at 16 kilohertz.
That's what I would do helps make this microphone
just a little bit more crisp and punchy on your livestream.
And I think that that works for a lot of people.
Next, we have the compressor.
What the compressor does is you can think
of it as almost an auto mixer.
It makes the loudest parts of your microphone
just a little bit quieter.
And the quietest parts just a little bit louder.
This means that you have to mix your livestream a lot less.
So it'll do some of that kind of in an automated way.
That's not exactly how it works
but that's a good way of thinking about it.
So for me, I would set the threshold at about minus 15.
This means that everything that goes above minus 15
we just lowered the threshold from zero to minus 15.
Now, when we speak, if we go louder than minus 15,
everything after that will get compressed.
Next with the ratio we decide how much
all that excess is getting compressed by
For me, I like compressing by 3.2 to 1.
That's my personal preference.
That's my standard.
That's my first starting point.
You can also go four to one
if you do want a more aggressive compressor.
Now that is pretty moderate in terms of compression.
but think about it this way,
you are compressing everything over minus 15
at three to one or four to one.
That's a lot of compression there
you really don't want to go more aggressive than that
or it just sounds super flat.
It's not very emotional to listen to.
The big thing that you don't want to do
by over compressing is
you really do take out all the emotion.
It sounds like you're reading the weather.
If you over compress too much.
Now you don't want to rip people's ears off.
You do want some compression there
to limit the things that are loud
but you want to leave some room for dynamics.
Dynamics are very important when it comes
to conveying emotion.
So just don't over compress.
That's the risk that you run.
So, so far we have compressed it a little bit.
So everything over 15 DB
is getting compressed at 3.2 to one.
So we made the loud parts quieter,
now we need to make the quiet parts a little bit louder.
To do that, we're going to add about
five decibels of mic up gain.
You'll hear my microphone getting a little bit louder now
so you can still tell that the default sound
is just a little bit louder.
We're pushing things up into that compressor.
And the compressor is now working.
It's really too bad that there is no compression meter here.
So you can see what the compressors actually doing
in a visual way, but this does push it into the compressor.
So is actively working
the sound coming from the microphone
into a more narrow range.
And that's exactly what we want from a compressor.
Next, we have the de Esser, The job of the de Esser
is exactly what it sounds like.
It removes the more sibilant frequencies
and it removes all the distracting S's
and T's and mouth noises and clicks.
It does a pretty good job.
I'm just going to turn it off here.
It has been on for the whole video.
So this is what it sounds like you do hear more clicking
and popping inside of the mouth.
You do hear S's and T's a lot more crisply.
So that's not usually ideal for things
like a live stream where people are listening to you
for three hours, it does get grading.
And it's a little bit irritating to listen to.
So if you turn this up to about 50, 60%
something like that, it really rounds off that edge
of your vocal and makes it a lot more easy to listen to
for prolonged periods of time
without getting grading or irritating.
So those are the settings I would recommend
just to re go through it,
the threshold on the gate between minus 40 and minus 45,
the attenuation around 50 to 75%,
depending on your taste there.
The EQ we made some more room for game noise.
So we basically let the subwoofer handle all the game noise.
We took the vocal mic right out of the sub.
We did a low mid cut for clarity,
but again making some room for game noise there.
And then just to make sure that our mic is clear again
we did bump the two and 4k up
and we did a high end roll off there as well.
On the compressor, we set the threshold to minus 15,
the ratio of 3.2 to one, you can go four to one
if you want a more aggressive compressor
and you can put the makeup gain
around four to six DB, somewhere around five
I think is pretty good for this microphone
and the de Esser, I like just putting it on
right at 50%. I think that sounds the best.
It's a really good compromise
without completely changing the way that your mouth sounds.
If you have any questions
about anything that I've covered in this video
please leave a comment down in the comment section below.
Again, if you are looking for current up-to-date pricing
on the PodMic, the stand, the cable
the GoXLR interface, the headphones,
anything that you see in this video,
we do have current up-to-date pricing
down in the description below.
And if you want to see more videos
like this in the future,
please like and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
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