What's up guys, I'm Pete from the Gaming
Careers YouTube channel, and we're a channel
dedicated to helping you grow your
Twitch or YouTube Gaming channels so you
can make a profession out of your gaming
passion. Today we're going to be talking
about how you can remove background
noise from your voiceovers. Now if you
have background noise in your audio
recordings already, because you live on a
busy street where there's a lot of car noise going
past or maybe you have to have a fan
on in your room or maybe just have a
beast computer that has a really loud
fan and you can always hear that
in your audio recordings, today i'm going
to be teaching you how with free
software you can remove that background
noise so you can just hear the crystal
clear voice. Now you may be thinking that
high-quality audio doesn't really matter
as long as your video looks good,
but actually I find the opposite is true. If
you go and have a look at your favorite
streamers or YouTube channels I guarantee
that they'll probably have on par audio
quality with their video quality if not
higher. So what I'll be covering in this
video is I am going to turn on some of
the fans that I have in my room, to create a
kind of noisy environment and take an
audio recording. Then I'm going to jump onto
the computer and i'm going to show you
in Audacity how I can remove that
background noise, so it will be a live example as
to how I've removed the noisy fans from
my recording so you can do the same home.
I've now turned the fans on so hopefully
you can hear that there's quite a lot of
background noise going on.
Not an ideal recording environment but
something worthwhile for the tutorial so
I'm just going to create quick voice clip
that I'm going to use to then remove the
background audio. "Hi I'm Pete from the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
why not subscribe?" Now before we jump
into audacity and look at the noise
reduction process, I would just give you
4 tips on how to record higher quality
audio in general. The first one is try and
remove as much noise as you can before
even recording your audio. So if you can
turn fans off or close windows, that's
really going to help because the less
noise you have the less noise reduction you
need to do. The second tip is all about
the mic positioning from your face.
I know a lot of YouTubers use the Blue
Yeti or the Blue Snowball and you want
to try and position that about 6 to 12
inches from your face. Not directly in
front you don't want to be speaking into
it like this, you want to be about 6 to 12
inches away. My third tip would be to
invest in a cheap pop filter. A pop
filter basically just remove some of the
pop noises that you create when you
say your P's and your T's and removes
them from the microphone, it acts as like a
filter in between your mouth and the
microphone. They're really cheap, you can
pick them up on amazon pretty cheaply or
you can always just use a sock as it
does just as good a job. Finally my
fourth tip is to make sure that your
audio levels within whichever program
you're recording your audio with are set
correctly. If this is your camera
settings or in something like Audacity,
you want to be aiming for between
-12 and -6 dB for when you're recording your audio,
then you can always boost this if you
need to in post-production.
Now the first thing that you're going to want to do is
download and install Audacity. I've put a
link in the description below to take
you to the website and there are
versions for PC and for MAC so it doesn't
matter what operating system you're
running. The installation process is
actually pretty basic so I'm not going
to cover that here, just install it as you
do with any other program. So the next
thing we want to do is to open up our
audio file that we're going to be
editing. You can of course use
Audacity to record your voice overs and I'd recommend doing so, so if you're just
looking to record and then edit your
audio afterwards then you just hit the
record button, but I'm going to be opening
up my example that I recorded earlier.
The next thing we want to do is just to
zoom in on the timeline so you can
select the zoom tool here and try and
find a point in the video where you
weren't talking and it's just the
background noise that's occurring.
Once you've found a section that has just
background noise and none of your voice
over the top,
you want to select that section. Next go
up to Effect, down to Noise Reduction and
then a new window will pop up, you just
want to click "Get Noise Profile". What
that's going to do is it's going to take the
section that you just highlighted and
set that as the noise profile. Now select
all of the audio, you can do that by
pressing "Ctrl+A", go back up to Effect,
Noise Reduction and then if you copy my
settings here you can play around with
these if it's not quite removing all of
the background audio but I find my
settings are a pretty good starting point,
and then you can just press "OK". Now what
this has done is it has taken the noise
profile that you set and basically
subtracted that from the full recording.
It does lower the quality of your voice
a tiny bit, but hopefully if you've set a good
noise profile, this should be pretty negligible.
Let's now listen back to what it's been
able to do in terms of noise reduction.
I'm pretty satisfied with that,
so we'll go ahead and export the audio,
we just go up to File, Export Audio
and save the file as a WAV.
I would then go back into your editing
suite of choice, for me that's Premiere Pro
and import the new .wav into your
project and drag it down to a new
timeline. As you can see it matches up
perfectly because this is the exact same
length, and then we can mute the original
audio track which has the noisy
background audio.
And that is pretty much it,
hopefully you guys have had good results
with that and been able to reduce the
noise in the background of your
recordings or your voiceovers. If you've
watched all the way to this point in the
video and you've found the video helpful,
please do give it a thumbs up. That really
does help us out and also have a look
around at the Gaming Careers YouTube channel
where we started to really build up a
good amount of videos helping you
guys create better videos for YouTube
and better live streams for Twitch, until
next time guys, Peace!