If you want to learn how to make your Blue Snowball go from "sounding like this" "to
sounding like this!"
using only free software, then you've come to the right place.
I'm Pete from the Gaming Careers YouTube channel, where we have videos explaining everything
you need to do to grow your gaming passion into your profession and today I'm going to
be talking you through all the settings and software that you need to make your blue microphone
sound as professional and production ready as possible.
So in this video, we're only going to be using free software.
If however you are looking for a guide that uses Adobe Audition CC to improve the quality
of your microphone, I have got a guide on that as well which I'll link up in the card
above as well as in the description below where I'll be putting all the links for this
video today.
Let's get into it.
The programs that we are using today actually adapt the sound of your microphone on the
fly so you can sound that way whilst streaming, recording voice-overs or even talking to somebody
on Skype.
The 2 programs that you are going to need are both made by a company called VB-Audio
and they are called Virtual Cable and Voicemeeter.
If you click the 2 links in the video description below, you'll be taken to the website where
you can download both of them.
Firstly, for virtual cable scroll down until you see the orange download button, click
that.
Whilst that is downloading, you can click the second link for Voicemeeter and if you
scroll down again to the bottom of the page, you'll see you can download the zip package
again.
Once they've both finished downloading you should have 2 zip files in your downloads
folder.
Extract both zip files using whatever software you use, I use 7zip so I can just extract
files here.
We're going to install the Virtual Cable software first so if you open up the unzipped folder
and then depending on whether you are using a 64-bit operating system or a 32-bit operating
system you need to run one of these 2 files as administrator.
On Windows 10 you can just right click the start menu, go to System, and it will tell
you right there which operating system you are using.
You can see here I am using a 64-bit operating system.
So since I'm using 64-bit, I'm going to run this file as administrator, if you are using
32 run this one.
This is going to open up a new window and you just click "Install Driver".
You are going to get a popup saying you may need to reboot your system to finalize installation,
that's OK we are going to reboot after we've installed both pieces of software.
Next we are going to install the Voicemeeter program, so head back to your extracted folder
and open up the Voicemeeter setup file, run that as administrator as well.
It's going to open up a similar window, just click install.
You'll get another popup telling you that you must reboot your system to finalize installation
and it will open a new window in your browser just thanking you for installing.
We'll go ahead now and reboot our system so that both programs can function properly.
Now that we've restarted our system we can open up the Voicemeeter application by just
searching for it in the start menu.
Your window may look a little bit different to this when you open up Voicemeeter this
is just because it's loaded my default settings since I already had the application installed.
What I have done is I've uploaded my settings into my Dropbox so that you guys can download
them and then that'll give you a good baseline to work from and then you can play around
with settings.
So if you look in the description and download the third file which is my settings from my
Dropbox, I'll then show you how to load the settings into Voicemeeter for you to then
adapt.
If you have finished the download, click Menu -> Load Settings and locate the settings file
that you just downloaded.
Click open and it should start to look a little bit more like this.
Don't worry if the bars here aren't going up because we just need to complete the Hardware
Input and Hardware Output devices to make sure it's picking up your microphone.
Firstly we'll set the input, if you come up here to where it says "1" and click the down
arrow you're going to get all your different microphone inputs.
If you have a Blue Yeti or a Blue Snowball here it should probably come up with the name,
for some reason on Windows mine doesn't but I know that this is my Blue Snowball or Blue
Yeti so select the microphone here on hardware input.
And up here where it says "A1" we want to be setting the Cable Input so the VB Audio
Virtual Cable.
Now you should start to see the bars moving as you speak into your microphone.
If you haven't loaded my settings then you can attempt to mimic the settings here by
muting certain tracks and making sure Stereo repeat is selected, however I really do recommend
just downloading my settings and then playing with it from there.
If you want to play around with the compressor effects to change the sound of your voice,
you're going to be moving this little red box around the graph here.
The settings I have here make it sound a bit bassier and like something you will here from
a podcast, but feel free to drag this around to wherever you want.
Now at this stage it's worth mentioning that whenever you want your microphone to be sounding
like this you need to have Voicemeeter running, so don't forget to start it if you start streaming,
recording your voice-over or if you want to sound like this on Teamspeak or Skype make
sure you have Voicemeeter running.
You're also going to need to make sure that whichever software you are using to record
your voice or send your voice across the internet that you have it setup to be picking up the
right microphone and the trick here is that it's not meant to be picking up your Blue
Snowball or Blue Yeti, it's actually meant to be picking up the Voicemeeter output.
To demonstrate this I'll open up Audacity.
So in whichever program you are using to record your voice or if you're using OBS be sure
to set it there.
You want to make sure that your microphone setting here is set to the VoiceMeeter Output.
If you have this set to your Blue Snowball or Yeti, it's not going to be applying any
of the vocal effects to make your microphone actually sound good.
So I'm going to quickly demonstrate here the difference between having VoiceMeeter On and
not having VoiceMeeter On.
Firstly, I'll record just from the microphone.
"This is how my mic sounds without VoiceMeeter running".
And now I'll change to using VoiceMeeter.
"And this is how my mic sounds with VoiceMeeter running".
Let's listen to them back.
"This is how my mic sounds without VoiceMeeter running".
"And this is how my mic sounds with VoiceMeeter running."
Hopefully you can hear the difference between those 2 and you can play around with the VoiceMeeter
settings to really make sure you are getting the sound out of it that you want.
And that's it.
Thank you so much for watching, if you found the video helpful please give it a thumbs
up because that helps us know which kind of content you guys enjoy and we can make more
of it in the future.
Also, if you're new here to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel, have a look around we've
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you guys enjoy then be sure to click Subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
Peace!