- This mic right here
is the Elgato Wave 3 USB microphone,
and I'm gonna make it go
from sounding like this..
to sounding like THIS.
With the new wave link update,
and a handful of free
incredible plugins.
And hey, don't worry
if you don't have an Elgeto Wave 1,
Wave 3 or a Wave XLR.
Yes, this we have link update is big,
and it's gonna make applying
these kinds of effects
to all of your programs
way easier,
but you can still use these tips,
techniques and plugins
to make your mic sound great
in the likes of OBS studio,
and Even Streamlabs OBS.
YES.. even Streamlabs OBS!
So stick around,
and let's get that microphone
of yours sounding amazing, okay?
All right cans on,
and let's do this.
(upbeat music)
So if you haven't heard
of the Elgato update to Wave link.
Essentially, it's allowing you
to use VST plugins in your mic chin.
This is a big deal
because it lets you process
the sound of your microphone
before it gets to your OBS, discord,
your in game comms, all of it.
And because it lets you use VST plugins,
which by the way, VST stands
for Virtual Studio Technology
at studio hardware and software form.
These plugins let you do things
like equalize your voice,
giving it more base
and more clarity
or dynamically controlling your voice
with compressor or a limiter.
You can even use these on
your game chat as well,
if you've got a really light
group of team mates.
There's lots of stuff you can do.
You can have special effects.
You can have reverbs.
You can have effects like this.
Then you can sound amazing
when you stream everyday.
Hey,(inaudible)
stop making fun of me.
I've got a case that wabblies,
you haven't got a lozenge,
or a glass of water, do you?
- And before we go on,
no, this is not a sponsored video.
I'm not being paid by Elgato or anybody.
I'm just excited about this update.
This is production quality boost
for so many content creators
in a way that's very easy to set up.
And I think that's a pretty big deal.
If by the time you're watching this video,
this update has been rolled out,
then you just need
to update your wave link.
But if it's still an open beta,
I've left a link to it
in the description.
Once you've downloaded the beta,
you have to make sure that you've
uninstalled your current wave link version
and unplugged your wave device
from your computer.
After that, install the Beta
and reconnect once the installation
tells you to.
Next, we're gonna need
some VST plugins.
I've actually made a link available below,
which is a zip file
and it contains all of the free plugins
I'm using in this video.
And don't worry,
if you prefer not to grab that,
I've also left links to the
individual plugin pages
if you wanna grab them one by one.
And as I said before,
they're all absolutely free.
Most of these plugins will install
as VST3 plugins.
VST3 and VST2 plugins tend to default
to here on Windows,
and to here on Mac.
Elgato have recommended that you set
your own dedicated folder
for your VST2 and VST3 plugins.
To do that,
go into Elgato wave link,
and in the top right corner
you'll see a cogwheel,
click that cogwheel
and under the Effects hub,
you're gonna see where you can
choose a folder for your audio plugins.
Set it to wherever you want this to be.
And bear in mind,
when you're installing the VST plugins
to this location,
it will still default some
of your VST2 or VST3 plugins
to those locations I mentioned before.
What I'd recommend doing
is gonna those locations after
you've installed all your plugins,
checking the VST2 and VST3 folders.
If they're there,
moving any of the plugins
you recognize that you've installed
to your new folder location
and just keep everything in the one place.
Once all your plugins are installed,
go back to wave link,
hit the cogwheel
and under Audio Effects,
hit he rescan plugins button.
And what that does is scan
for the plugins you've installed.
And once Elgato wave links has found them,
it will show them on screen.
And while I'm gonna show you
how to set this up
to sound great with plugins,
do remember the techniques
that can help you improve your
mic sound, that you don't actually need
a plugin to do.
Things like the proximity effect,
the signal to noise ratio.
Basically, getting closer to your mic
is given you a better sound.
And if you're too far away
from your mic,
and all of your room's starting
to get into your signal
Staggy of Elgato did an excellent
video covering exactly this.
I'll leave a link to it
in the description,
do check it out.
All right, I'm gonna strip my mic
off all these effects,
and we're gonna start building this
from the bottom up.
Just before we begin,
I would highly recommend you download
a program called Audacity.
I use this for testing the entire
set of my effects,
one by one, or all together.
And what I do is,
I set the input to my stream mix
so that I can then toggle on and off
the effects in wave link
and hear them in the recording in Audacity
whenever I'm listening back.
Recording these comparisons and then
listening back helps me establish
if I'm doing something right,
or I need to go and fix something
to improve the overall sound.
For full transparency,
I'm gonna show you how I set up
my wave3 in wave link.
If you click here, you can see,
I have set my input into 21 DB.
I have the enhanced low cut filter on,
and the clip guard on.
If you click this button here,
this is where we're gonna put
our audio effects.
At the bottom here,
you can see that there is a toggle
for the filters on your monitor mix.
So you can hear it.
If you're listening to your monitor mix
through wave link,
how it sounds signs with on,
without the effects.
And the one that I recommend
putting into Audacity,
which is the stream mix.
You can toggle everything on,
and off right here,
or you can do it one by one
by clicking on the speaker icon
beside each plugin.
(upbeat music)
So the first plugin up here is Renegade.
Renegade is a noise gate.
The basic idea of a noise gate
is if you're not talking,
it's closed,
and if you start talking,
it opens. Allowing people to hear you,
but not allowing them to hear below
a threshold that you set.
Which means then it can help cut out
things like mouse clicks,
and keyboard clicks,
and just general room noise.
So if we click on the + button here,
you go to the effect,
and down to Renegate,
go to this cog wheel here,
and you can see here visually,
it's already working.
This here is the threshold.
If you bring this down
to the very bottom -70,
and you'll see here when
I'm not speaking,
there is like a little bit
of volume done there.
That's my room noise
that's sitting about minus 50 DB.
So if I bring this up past that,
and you can hear that the noise gate
is effectively closed.
Now, I actually want to have this
up a little bit further.
Put it about -29 for me,
I find that if I have it there,
my mouse clicks,
and my keyboard clicks
don't come through.
Over here.
This dot right here,
I would recommend just dragging
that right down to 100% .
And if we move over
to the envelope up here,
this is basically how quickly
the gate opens, stays open,
and then closes.
So for me,
I want the attack to be 30 ms.
I wanna hold it open
for about 70 ms.
And then I want to close it
within about 20 ms.
The softer attack helps with
the keyboard clicking,
and lets my voice still
come through quite clearly.
Do make sure that it's not
cutting off certain words
that you're saying.
Words with softer beginnings like,
S's or F's.
Test it, listen in Audacity,
make sure that it's working properly.
(upbeat music)
The next plugin I'm gonna
add is a De-esser.
This is optional,
but I will add it in,
just in case you feel you need
to use it later on.
At the minute,
you can't drag and drop
plugins into different orders.
So having these in this order
is really important.
If we go up here again,
go to effect,
and click on the De-esser.
And once the answer is open,
you should see this.
All we're gonna do in here
is bring down the threshold of the D-esser.
The way a De-esser works is
it listens for sibilance in your voice,
like S's, F's, C's,X's,
and it listens for that high pitch sound.
And it dynamically reduces it,
without affecting your overall voice too much.
At least that's how it should be.
If you find it's making
your voice sound muddy,
try and reduce the amount that you've applied.
I'm gonna bring this down to about -32.
I'm gonna set the intensity to 7,
and set this sharpness to -7.
You may not be able to hear
how effective this is on my voice.
So I'm gonna do a really extreme example,
so you can hear what it's doing
to the sibilance in my voice.
S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s
S-s-s-s-s-s--s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s
Hopefully that makes sense.
I don't touch any other
settings in here for myself,
so I'm happy with that.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so the next plugin I'm gonna add
is an Equalizer,
or you might know this as an EQ.
An equalizer or EQ
is an audio filter.
It isolates certain frequencies,
and either boosts them,
lowers them, or leaves them unchanged.
This is good for rounding out
the lower end of your voice,
taking room sound or nasal sounds
out of the mid range,
and adding a bit of clarity
into your high end.
Going to the + button again,
and we're gonna load up TDR Nova.
When you load it up
you should see this.
You might not see this feature here.
If you want to see that,
just click the "Out" function up here.
And what that means is
everything you adjust here,
it's gonna show the signal,
how it's affected after you've done
your EQ work on it.
So the first button we're gonna look at
is this one here.
Boosting frequencies in around 110,
to around 140,150 Hz
can help you add a bit of worth
and a bit of body
to the lower end of your voice.
I find that if I set the Q value here to 1,
which basically tells you
how tight or loose the band's
gonna be on the EQ,
and then I'll put the frequency
to about 115 Hz,
you can click here
and type in whatever you want.
And I'm going push it again up to about 3.
Be careful not to go too far,
or you will start sounding muddy.
If it does sound muddy,
just bring it back a little bit.
I like to use the second band
to pull out a little bit of the frequency
around the 180 to 240 Hz area.
This area for my voice at least,
can quickly create muddiness on certain mics.
So I like to just correct it a little bit,
If I can hear any amount of muddiness,
especially if I'm boosting this lower end.
So I will put it around 230-ish,
and I gotta bring it down
not very much, just about 0.5.
The third band,
I like to use to pull out
some of the mid range in my voice.
This is great for pulling that
nasal kind of sounds,
or some of the room noise
you might be picking up.
And I usually put this about 1000 Hz.
I'd say about -1.5 DB is fine,
and I've actually lowered
the Q number to 0.5,
and you can see that the band
is a lot looser,
not as tight as the first band, for example.
Finally, I wanna boost around
the 3000 to 6,000 Hz area
to put a little bit
of clarity into my signal.
I'm gonna set this around 3.2.
I'm gonna leave the Q at about 0.6
and I'm gonna push this up to 4.5 DB.
I'm happy enough with my sign,
so I'm leaving that there.
(upbeat music)
The next plugin I'm gonna add is an exciter.
This is completely optional.
I'm adding this to just push in
a little bit more presence,
and a little bit more body into my vocal.
So again, we go up to the + button,
and we go to effect,
and we add La Petite Excite,
which if you've done French,
it means the small excite,
maybe, I don't know.
I did German at school,
and I failed that as well.
So this is the Exciter interface.
The only 2 things we're gonna look at
is the low end and the high end.
I'm gonna push a little bit into the low,
maybe about 0.5 and I gotta push it
by 1 into the high end.
And that's all I'm gonna do with this.
(upbeat music)
Final plugin I'm gonna add is a Limiter.
Usually a limiter is used to prevent
a signal from going over a certain level.
And they're very good at doing that.
They can also be used to increase
the overall lightness of a signal,
which can be quite useful on vocals.
Using this limiter lets me keep
the vocal closer to the original sound,
while still enhancing it
for the final touches.
Once again, just go up to the + button,
hit the effect
and add frontier.
When it loads up,
this is what you should see.
The first thing I wanna change
is the release.
I wanna make it fast.
Then I'm gonna go over to the output level,
and this limiter will not let
your vocal signal go past wherever you set this.
I'm gonna set it to it to about -3.5,
and then the threshold,
I'm gonna bring it down.
For me, to about -8.
And I can see on the reduction
that it's kicking in there.
You want to test this on Audacity,
through your recording,
tweak the setting,
and just make sure it's right for you,
cause I might speak louder than you,
or quieter.
So everyone's gonna be different.
If you pull this threshold down too far,
you're gonna bring up a lot of
the noise flow in your microphone,
so do be wary of that.
I'll show you an example.
This is it sitting at -24.
This is at 0,
and this is at -8.
So, I'm pretty happy with that,
I'm gonna leave that be.
And the final plugin.
Yes, this is the final final plugin.
Everyone needs this,
and it's vibrato, baby.
This is a vibrato plugin by Melda production.
I've included the files for this
in the zip,
and I've included
a link to their website,
so you can get their full
production suite for free.
And it's just an example
of one of the effects that you can
add into your vocal chin.
Hopefully we can toggle these
on and off in the future,
to have some fun with it as well.
I hope this video helped.
This is such a big deal.
Having this kind of access
to production quality
on your microphone before it reaches
any programs on your computer.
If you enjoyed the video,
don't forget to hit the sub and bell.
And let me know how you guys
are using VSTs,
what you find that's interesting,
whether it's in way of link,
or out of way of link.
Any favorite VST plugins you have.
I want to know about it,
and anything cool that you're doing as well.
Feel free to hop in there
on Discord, say "Hey".
And, let's talk about cool ideas and stuff.
I'm Defrag, and you and me,
we're gonna meet again.
Bye.