- One of the most common problems
that I see with people that are streaming
is that audio levels aren't set up correctly.
And actually streaming software nowadays
has a feature built-in to it called audio ducking
or sidechaining or sidechain compression
they all effectively mean the same thing.
Which allows this streaming software
to control your audio volumes for you.
The most common use case for audio ducking in streaming
is for you to be able to set your music or your game volume
and then as soon as you start speaking
that music or game volume lowers
to create some room for your voice
and when you stop speaking the music or game volume
returns back to normal.
In this video we're going to be showing you exactly
how you can set up audio ducking
or sidechaining for your own stream
no matter if you're using OBS studio, OBS live
or stream labs OBS.
(upbeat music)
So no matter what kind of streaming software you are using
OBS studio, stream labs OBS, OBS live
you want to come down to the audio mixer here
and you can see I have a very simple set up right now
I just have my microphone as one audio source
and have my desktop audio, as the other audio source.
And desktop audio that contains
my game, my music, my friends on discord.
So, it's a very very simple setup.
We want to apply the ducking to the desktop audio
so that when our microphone activates
the desktop audio levels get reduced.
So we come across here
to the little settings cog, on the desktop audio
click it go ,to filters you want to add a compressor filter
so click the plus go to compressor
I'd recommend naming this ducking
and then we have a whole handful of different settings here.
I'll go through my settings
of how I personally would set it up
but it's going to be unique to you
and your streaming environment.
So, definitely need to play around
and make sure you apply the learning of each setting.
So, let's start with ratio.
Ratio is how much the audio source is going to be reduced by.
So a ratio of 10:1 means that
effectively the volume level
will be 10% of what it was originally.
So that might be a bit high
let's go to something around four or five.
Again we can come back and play with this later
when we actually know how it sounds.
Threshold, this is the actual level
that your microphone needs to hit for the ducking to occur.
So -18 DB is a little bit high
I reckon, set this around 40 somewhere around there.
You can come down here
and actually look at where your microphone level is sitting.
So I'm saying, whenever my microphone goes above 40 decibels
or -40 decibels, we want the ducking to occur.
Attack and release in milliseconds
this is how quickly and slowly the ducking transition
will actually happen.
So usually for a normal compressor
you want the attack to be very quick.
But when it comes to ducking
you actually don't want a super quick attack time.
I reckon setting this somewhere
between 40 and 50 milliseconds sounds quite good
'cause it's actually how quickly
the music volume transitions or the game volume transitions.
So I reckon an attack of 50 milliseconds
and a nice slow release of somewhere
around 400, 500 milliseconds works well.
Output Gain you can leave as zero decibels
and finally the most important thing
is that you need to set the side chain
or ducking source to be your microphone.
Now with the ducking now applied
if I start playing some music
and we have a look down at the audio meters
you can see that as soon as I start speaking
the audio levels of the music will drop.
(Upbeat music)
So I start speaking the audio levels drop
and as soon as I stop speaking
(upbeat music)
the audio levels slowly return to their normal level.
This is audio ducking.
If you want to reduce the volume even more
you come up here and change the ratio to be higher.
So if I change it to a ratio of, say six
you can see now that the volume is even low when I speak.
Or if I really emphasize it by going to 10 or 11
the volume drops right down to around -40 decibels.
So have a play around with the audio ducking feature
in your streaming software.
The easiest way to test it is actually
to do a test recording, play around with the settings
do some speaking do some silence
to see exactly how it's going to sound
when it goes out to your stream .
Hopefully you've enjoyed this short two-minute tutorial
let me know what you think of the video idea.
It's something that I want to do
maybe every single week, to break up some
of the longer tutorial videos
that I'm obviously going to keep releasing.
So do let me know what you think
and I'll see you in the next video, peace.
(upbeat music)