you don't need crazy expensive equipment to sound like a pro on twitch at the end
of the day it might help but really you just need to understand how to level
your audio how to mix different audio sources and
how to apply my three favorite filters to your microphone and lucky for you
we're covering all of that today and more let's go
hello there my name is Eljay from streamscheme.com i'm also a variety
streamer over at twitch.tv/Eljayem_ there are links to both
those in the description i'm live right now most likely and over on stream
screen we have over 200 plus guides devoted to helping you become the best
streamer you can possibly be so check those things out understanding
your audio is something that's crucial becoming a content creator on twitch
and it's really interesting because it's also one of the biggest barriers that
most people face a lot of people can't see or hear when
their audio is bad and if they can know what's bad they
don't know how to fix it so before i got into online content creation and
streaming i was actually the film industry for
over seven years and audio was always something in the film industry that
seemed to stump people there were people who specialized
in it and anyone else really didn't understand it which i thought was odd
because at the end of the day audio can be very very basic to understand
and get sounding good today i'm going to take you from plugging in your
microphone to literally getting it positioned in front of your face to
getting it leveled and getting it all the way through to the final stages
there are time codes in the description and in the top comments if you want to
skip to a particular part go ahead otherwise let's just get into
it so the first thing i want to stress to you is that today's tips are going to
be for any microphone that said you don't need to buy the ear
cleaner throat guzzler 6000 it's just not important to spend five grand on a
mic you can get this working with a usb microphone a headset whatever
that said i do think it is important if you want to take content creation on
twitch seriously that you look at investing
a small amount into getting yourself a nice usb microphone
for example i bought the at2020 plus recently when i upgraded because i
didn't want to invest too much but i still wanted to have good quality
sound using something like a webcam microphone or a headset for example
that's designed for gaming or a laptop microphone
is going to lead to lower results because at the end of the day those
things aren't designed for content creation they're designed for quick zoom
calls or just something on skype right so it's
never going to get you the same quality you can out of actually buying something
designed for content creation in my seven
mistakes small streamers make video which is uh linked at the cards and in
the description i said that in the film industry we have
a saying that is 60 of your film is audio when it comes to
streaming on twitch or generally streaming at all
a lot of the time it's actually a hundred percent because people put you
on in the background or they play a game or they do something else
so having good audio is absolutely crucial so the first step once you have
your audio sounding good is to listen back and learn to diagnose the problem
so what you're going to do is you're going to open obs or slobs and you're
going to turn on the monitor feature for your microphone and start speaking
but what you're going to want to do is head to your mixer here open advanced
audio settings and you're going to want to turn on your
microphone and set it to monitor only or if you're
recording and you want to make sure the audio is going through
like i am then monitor and output you'll be able to hear
yourself in your own headphones and you can start getting an idea for how your
audio sounds how loud or how quiet it is now what i want you to do is i want you
to move around a bit lean over lean this way lean that way
get an idea for where your voice sounds best and make sure you're speaking at
the mic properly the thing is the at2020 plus
the one i have has a little blue light on it so i know where the front is
but often with these condenser usb microphones the front can be a bit
ambiguous and sometimes people will be talking
into the back or the side of the microphone without even knowing it
so make sure you move around your mic listen to it talk to it and find where
you sound the best or the loudest so once you can hear yourself all you
have to do is just move your arm around and you'll get an idea for how the
mic picks up audio as i said the at2020 has this little blue light
which means it's the front and instantly you can already hear the difference in
my voice watch
see what i mean and you can do the same thing just moving your mic around
see what i mean test test so one of the first things i'm going to tell you in
this entire video is that to get good audio sometimes you just need to have
your mic in the right position even if your audio sounds best when your
mic is here or something don't do that
because obviously people want to see your face so find a good position where
it sounds good and doesn't obstruct you you might be thinking okay but my game
or my music is really loud what do i do then don't worry i'm going to show you
how to mix all of that at the end of the video let's just get
your mic set up first okay so the next step is to level yourself on
your desktop before leveling yourself in your broadcasting software this is a
step that so many people miss now if you don't know what leveling is
leveling is changing the sensitivity of your microphone to affect how much
it picks up aka changing how loud or quiet
everything around the microphone is so as you can see i've gone into my
settings here and i can manage my devices and device properties
so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go device properties with my
microphone selected make sure you don't have your webcam or any other sound
devices on go to your device properties and you
can see that you can start leveling it here now
you're listening to me through slob so just watch what happens when i change my
desktop yeah it's
it can be pretty bad and you need to be very very careful
so what you're going to do is you're going to find a good middle ground turn
on test and you'll hear yourself and you can make it work once you're
happy with that head into your broadcasting software such as streamlabs
or obs and look at where your mic is sitting
now you want to be hitting the yellow area and not the red area if you're
hitting green you might be a little bit too quiet
so just do your best to hit that yellow mark once you're leveling your desktop
you're going to come into your broadcasting software and
you're going to start leveling yourself now you can see i'm hitting yellow just
fine when i yell or speak a bit louder it
goes into red but we're going to fix that in a bit
right now just when i talk normally i'm in yellow which is good
i know it's important sometimes to er on the idea of being quieter but i just
don't like losing that kind of bassiness i don't
exactly have the best voice so i i do aim for the yellow and that's
fine while you're leveling you're probably
going to hear some background noise like a fan or maybe some dogs or your
keyboard clackering don't worry we're going to have filters that'll fix all of
that soon for now just get your voice sounding
good and to a nice volume so before i show you guys those
filters and how to mix your different audio sources i just want to show you
guys this cool animated overlay pack it's one of 13 different animated
overlays coming out in the next two weeks
they're entirely free we've built them we're very very proud of them and
they're completely set up and good for you to go
from the start when you get into it you're gonna get this little welcome
here which teaches you how to install it shows you where the fonts are
it takes you through just chatting takes you through be right back
stream ending it even has little countdowns and the in-game is all set up
with vertical support bars horizontal support bars
and different webcam borders for you the entire pack
is animated it is free all you need to do is subscribe to the youtube channel
so you know when it's coming out it should be out in the next two weeks
though so get hyped i hope you guys enjoy it
we're super proud of these products and we can't wait to give them to you for
free so filters filters are something that i
think you're going to want to use almost all the time
now the three main ones that i use all the time are noise suppression
a limiter and a noise gate now they each do different things
but all along the same lines so the first filter we're going to set up and
the one that i think is most important is
noise suppression now if i have a fan going next to me or if i was lucky
enough to have air conditioning in my office
then this would be perfect because noise suppression
is able to pick up that fan depending on your settings
and remove it from your audio now obviously it's going to strip a little
bit from your voice so be careful not to push it too far
but it does a pretty good job at the end of the day sometimes it is better to
simply just remove the audio source turn the fan off turn the ac
off but if you're stuck with it and can't change it then this is a fantastic
filter for solving that problem okay so getting
straight into filters now you this is just my base microphone still i haven't
got any filters on it yet i'm about to turn on a fan that's right
next to me which is where i have it during my stream
not as loud as i would normally have my phone on as much as i actually have on
in this particular one but i want to show you an extreme case
my pc is still running right next to me and i'm going to screen record the
entire process first things first i want you to head
into your settings here you need to turn on your monitor only
i'm turning on monitor and output because i need you guys to still be able
to hear my voice and i need to be able to hear it
okay so let's turn this fan on and hear how
this is
that's pretty bad that's pretty bad we'll see what we can do
uh but i think you'll be able to hear the difference pretty pretty extremely
so what we're gonna do is you're gonna come
into your microphone on this cog wheel filters uh and you've got my three
filters i mentioned here first things first we'll
turn on noise suppression yeah yeah you can still hear it a bit
so you can lift it up more i have it on 10 because that's usually good enough
because the fan's only on one normally and i've got it on three for the example
well there you go that's pretty crazy ready
it's important the next filter is a limiter now a limiter does exactly what
it says on the box it limits how loud you can be pretty
simple you set a max db or a max loudness and when you
scream laugh joke or even just like pop into
the mic it won't blow out your viewers eardrums
now i'm going to kind of level this in post because i want to blow your ears
out but i don't have a leveler on right now
and you can see i'm starting to hit red now i'm going to yell
again i'm going to level it in post just watch this red thing
you see it goes all the way to the top now i'm going to turn my limiter on
you'll see my limiter is there i'm still hitting red a bit
uh i'll maxed out the gain and just watch
see that time it doesn't go higher than that even if i'm louder
it's super important make sure you set it up and finally
setting up the noise gate filter now this just means that anything that isn't
a certain loudness won't get transmitted through the microphone
so you might be thinking isn't this just like noise suppression no no it's not
noise suppression strips things out entirely a noise gate just turns off
your mic pretty much until a certain loudness is met and then
it will quickly turn on so clackering on your keyboard won't
appear speaking will however when you start speaking the
clackering on your keyboard the fan all that stuff will come through with your
voice so i've just turned the fan off because
i just want to show you the noise gate now so let's just show you the clicking
can you hear it i think you can so we're gonna turn on the noise gate
i'm still clicking watch i don't know how i can show it to you it's just not
gonna pick it up unless i speak while it's there so you might not be
able to hear it it's pretty good you'll close an open
threshold you just need to balance so that your voice can come
in and your clicks won't i have found that for my microphone
the settings work quite good your attack hold and release time come down to
whether or not it's going to close that gate back
up after you finish speaking instantly or a little bit after
and the same thing whether it opens straight away
to let your voice come through or if it gives it a second
i've left these on default because they seem to work great but if you're having
trouble where your voice is getting cut off at the start or the
end you can play with these settings a bit after
this is why i say to use all three of these things because if you imagine that
your audio is simply just a gate or a dam letting water through a
noise gate will hold it until enough is there it'll let your
audio through a noise suppression is like a filter to
catch the bad stuff and the limiter is in case too much is letting through
and it stops it that's a pretty good analogy i didn't write that in the
script i just came up with that okay so the final step and the most
important one is mixing your microphone and your music
and your game all together so it is a good viewing
experience for your audience there are huge streamers who still get
this confusing who still you can barely hear
their audio from their game or even their voice because their game's too
loud so we're gonna cover mixing now quickly this one's really tough because
you can't just do the monitoring system i taught you at the start of this video
because obviously when you start speaking into your microphone it's going
to come through your desktop into your headphones which
is going to count as another audio source
and it's all going to get mixed up so i'd recommend getting a game up or a
youtube video or music whatever the other audio sources you're going to use
in your streamer turn them on get your mic going hit
record you don't have to go live just hit record
and start speaking start talking try level it as best you can
usually you want your game or your other stuff to be a little bit lower and then
stop recording and listen back to it and make
adjustments so how to mix your game audio now i'm
gonna have to go in here and i'm gonna have to turn off my monitor and my
output otherwise it's gonna be impossible for
me to mix these but you'll still be able to hear me and
that's fine now first things first i need to have some background track so
i'm going to chuck on some music now
and i can see on my bars there it is playing pretty well i'm a bit louder
than it so i'm just going to drop myself down a little bit
and you should still be able to hear me now look at the way my levels work here
you've got this fairly solid and then this is
fairly solid now if this doesn't look good in post
i'm going to look real silly but essentially you want to be higher than
its highest now mixing is always a bit of a tricky
game so just try and keep yourself louder than where your music is if it's
too low then no one's gonna be able to hear your
music if it's too high then no one's gonna be able to hear you properly
so it's a balancing act find a nice place for it and just work on it
when it comes to mixing you need to be very much on top of it and pretty much
just practice makes perfect every single different game every single
song is going to have a different loudness to it a different db if
someone's firing a gun it's obviously going to be quite loud compared to say
the sounds of farming sim so you have to pretty much be on top of your audio at
all times and just be careful once you get an idea for monitoring it
using the recording you'll you'll be pretty good at doing it live
a big bonus tip for this is turn on subtitles where you can most games have
them included these days and there's also a lot of really good
extensions for twitch i use one on my stream so
if you want help with that check me out or i'll make a video on it soon so now
with all those things you should be able to get your mic set up and sounding like
a pro if you enjoyed this content if it helped
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if you have any questions comment them down below i answer within five minutes
currently i haven't broken my streak even though we are getting way bigger
so yeah that's all i'll see you next week thanks guys