What is up guys! Welcome to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel, my name is Pete
and today we are going to be looking at how to get that professional sound by
playing around with some of the microphone options in OBS Studio. If you
are new here to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel, please do have a look
around at the other videos we've got. We've got loads of different content all
of it is based around helping you make a profession out of your gaming passion
through live-streaming and through content creation on Twitch or on
YouTube so definitely subscribe if you haven't already. There are four main
settings that we're going to be playing around with in this video that OBS helps
us change, all of them audio related so the first one is the Compressor. The
compressor helps reduce loud noises like when you're shouting or celebrating a
special moment in your stream as well as boosting the low noises such as when
you're whispering if you're trying to be sneaky in a gameplay moment. So it helps
really just normalize all the different volumes to make the sound profile more
consistent. Secondly we're going to be looking at the gain filter which just
helps change the gain of the actual microphone, so if you need to boost it at
all or reduce it this is how you do that. Thirdly we'll be looking at applying a
noise gate, this is a filter that basically cuts off your microphone when
you're not speaking and finally we'll be covering noise suppression which just
helps reduce some of that background noise, if you've got some fans running or
you know air conditioning or something like that, this will help reduce that noise
within OBS. Audio as a whole is something that often gets overlooked in a stream
setup because everybody wants to work on all the visual stuff but it's actually
really key to have a good audio setup. Your stream viewers are really going to
thank you for setting up your microphone properly. We have in the past covered
some external software such as voicemeeter which will help actually change
the sound of your microphone, but this video is more concentrated on the actual
OBS sound settings that they've recently released into the latest version of OBS
studio and they're going to help clean up the sound that you have from your
microphone rather than playing with the actual EQ and the sound profile that
your microphone gives. The final thing to mention before we get started is this
will work with your headset microphones or your cheap
desktop microphones but you're going to get better results if you're
using a proper condenser mic even a cheap one like the Blue Snowball
or Blue Yeti. I'll actually be setting up my Blue Snowball through this video so
you're gonna be able to hear the differences that each filter that I
apply makes and if you want to check out either of those microphones I have added
links to them down in the description. But it will work for every mic so follow
along if you want to have cleaner sound, let's jump in!
So here we are in OBS studio and right now I have no microphone filters enabled so what
you're listening to is just the completely raw input from my Blue
Snowball microphone the reason that I've done it like this is because you're
going to be able to hear the differences in how I sound before and after I add
each filter so it's gonna really help emphasize what's changed in each setting.
Just before we get started, if at any point in this video you find out that
you don't have one of the filters that I have in my version of OBS Studio please
do make sure that you're checking that you have the latest version of OBS
studio you can do that by heading up to the Help -> checking for updates.
Secondly I'm assuming that at this point you have your microphone setup in OBS
studio and that you see this little green bar here moving with your voice if
you can't then it's likely that you haven't got the right microphone
selected so if you come down to the little settings cog here, click that and
select properties. You can then select the correct device from all the list of
devices that Windows has detected. For me I'm using my blue snowball microphone
and that shows up as microphone USB audio class la blah blah blah.
So I've selected that one and I can see my microphone picking up the sound of my
voice. You can also do some quick adjusting of the level of your
microphone by dragging this slider here so if I drag it to the left I will get
quieter and quieter and quieter if I drag it back to the right I'll be
getting louder so you can do some quick adjustments there but you can actually
boost your microphone if you need more than this slider and we'll be looking at
doing that a little later with the gain filter. Now once your microphone is set
up and you can see this green bar moving with the sound of your voice we are
ready to make our microphones sound a little bit better with some
filters. Now even though in the intro I said that we were going to start with
the compressor I actually now think it makes more sense to start with the noise
suppression. So what noise suppression does is it helps to eliminate the mild
background noise that your microphone might be picking up, it's not really that
effective at removing large amounts of background noise so you can't be you
know in a loud room with lots of other people talking and shouting and it will
remove that. It's more for removing out you know computer fan noise or maybe
some street noise from outside your window things like that. So if I am now
completely silent you might be able to hear some of the fan noise from my
computer and the aim with the first filter that we're going to be adding is
to remove that. So to add our first filter we're gonna click on the little
cog again next to our microphone, select filters and a new window should pop up.
Now the new windows currently blank because we have no audio filter setup so
to add our first filter we can click the little plus icon here and select noise
suppression. We can now name our filter if we wish to but I think it's pretty
well named as it is so I'm going to leave mine as noise suppression and as
soon as I click the ok button here, you're gonna be able to hear a
difference in my microphone straightaway because it's going to be applying the
default noise suppression, the noise suppression levels that it has is the
default settings, so if you listen carefully you should hopefully be able
to hear the background noise disappearing when I press ok. I'm gonna
be quiet so that you can hear the current level of noise and then once I
press ok you should hear that noise gone.
Hopefully that was a clear enough difference and you can now hear that a
lot of the background noise from my microphone has been removed it will
definitely be more obvious if you have you know more noise in the background I
don't actually have that much but you should still have been able to hear the
difference. Now the level that is applied by default is -30 decibels, this is
a little bit too much for me but what you need to do is maybe start a recording
in OBS like I am doing right now and play around with the levels here and
make sure that you're cutting out all of that background noise when you listen
back to the recording. For me -30 is a little bit too much so I'm going
to change mine to -20. Right that's noise
suppression done so the next filter we're going to be setting up is the
noise gate, now a noise gate this helps by making your microphone completely
silent when you don't speak so absolutely no signal gets through when
you aren't speaking. Now this might sound similar to noise suppression but it's a
useful setting to have as it completely shuts off your microphone when the level
goes below a set amount and then it re-enables the microphone when a certain
level is reached again, this allows for complete silence when you aren't
speaking. To add a noise gate we'll go to the plus icon again and select noise
gate. Now when I hit OK the noise gate will be applied and you might hear some
differences in my voice but the real thing that we want to be able to do is
to look at our levels in OBS I'm going to click OK and then I'm going to move
the window up so I can actually see the microphone levels that OBS is receiving.
The first two settings are closed threshold and open threshold so what
we're going to be doing here is playing around with these settings and we want
to be looking down here at this green bar to make sure our microphone is
turning on and off when it should be. Closed threshold, the first setting this
is a level in decibels at which your microphone will mute itself at. If the
audio level is below this threshold your microphone will be muted. And the open
threshold this is the exact opposite, so this is the level in decibels at which
your microphone will be unmuted. So if your audio level is above this threshold
your microphone will be unmuted. What you want to be doing now is to test your
settings by speaking into your microphone for a few words and then
being completely silent for a few seconds and what you want to try and
achieve is that when you speak the microphone levels down here goes green
and when you're silent the microphone levels completely die out to absolutely
zero and you're going to need to play around with these settings the closed
threshold and open threshold until you can achieve that. For absolute best
results what we want to be doing is setting a closed threshold above the
noise volume and an open threshold just slightly below the voice level of
your voice when you're speaking into your mic. If you are finding that your
microphone isn't picking up when you are talking then what you're going to need
to do is reduce the open threshold until it does. If you are however finding that
your microphone isn't going silent when you stop speaking then what you're going
to need to do is increase the closed threshold. Keep playing around with these
two settings until you get the exact levels in which you need to, so maybe try
speaking at the level that you live stream at and for me the defaults are
actually pretty decent so I'm going to leave these as they are but that's quite
unique you're probably going to need to play around with these two levels until
you get something that definitely picks up when you do start speaking and definitely
shuts down when you do stop speaking. The last three settings here are attack time,
hold time and release time all of which are measured in milliseconds.
Now attack time this is the amount of time needed for a noise to be active to
start activating the microphone. Hold time is the amount of time that the
microphone will stay active after you stop speaking but don't set this to
shore or your microphone will be trying to turn off in between
words, which obviously sounds pretty rubbish. Finally the release time this is
the amount of time that it takes for the OBS filter to actually turn off your
microphone, so it won't turn off instantly it likes to do it over a
certain amount of milliseconds which sounds much more natural. Normally the
default settings for these three are absolutely fine but you feel free to
change them if you do need to. Great so hopefully you agree that my microphone
is already sounding quite a lot better and the next thing that we're going to
be adding is a compressor. Now a compressor is a really useful tool for
live streamers as what it does is it helps with those situations when you're
really loud maybe you've got an exciting moment in your game and you've screamed
out in joy. What the compressor will do is automatically turn down the input volume
so that it hopefully doesn't peak, doesn't distort and the volume can then
be turned back to normal when you've stopped making such a loud noise. So to
add a compressor we're going to do the exact same as we have done so far, go
down to the plus icon, click compressor and name it whatever you'd like. Now
like most of the audio settings in this guide the settings that you apply here
for the compressor are going to completely depend on you know how your
voice sounds, how loud your voice is, what microphone you're using, what acoustics
you're in, what your room shape is, all these kind of things so these settings
really are going to be completely unique to you and I'm afraid there is no way
for me to share the best settings. What you're going to need to do is play
around with them and get something that sounds good for your stream. I will
however explain now what each of these settings does so you can adjust them as
you see fit. The first setting is the ratio and this is the amount of
compression to apply, so this is default set to 10 but if I set this to say 2,
this would mean that when the compressor kicks in it will reduce the amount of
noise, the amount of volume coming from your microphone by half, if
you set this to 4 that's going to be twice as much compression so it's going
to compress it by even more than that so 2 is a very low setting, 10 is quite a
high setting but you need to set this to whatever ratio you want the compressor
to compress your voice by when it is enabled. The threshold in decibels this
is the threshold at which the compressor will kick in, so this really does need
you to fiddle around with the setting and choose something
that you need the compressor to kick in at. So if this is you know -18 decibels
like it's default is or maybe that is much too high of a level and you actually
want it to kick in a lower level or you know it's a higher number of decibels
for us because it's negative but a lower level like -30, you need to play
around with this setting and choose something when you want the compressor
to kick in at. The attack is how quickly in milliseconds you want the compressor
to kick in when it does detect that high volume. And the release is how quickly in
milliseconds you want the compressor volume to return back to normal once the
loud volumes have calmed down. The output gain finally this is just simply a gain
we're going to be looking at adding a gain filter anyway in the next step, you
can leave this at default and I'll be showing you how to add a gain filter if
you need one in the next filter. As with before I do recommend playing around
with these settings here whilst doing a recording of yourself in OBS so you can
hear what your microphone sounds like with certain different settings here
for the compressor. Try raising your voice a few times like you might do when
you're live streaming and see at which point you want the compressor to be
kicking in at and this might feel a bit fiddly and require you know a little bit
of time to get right but you know you only need to set it at once and once
that has set up you have a clean software compressor in OBS for all of
your future streams. The final super quick filter that we're going to add is
a gain filter and this is just purely a way to be able to boost or reduce your
microphones volume, it's as simple as that. All we have to do is click the plus
icon, select gain, name it whatever we would like and then here we can set a
boost volume or a reduction in volume if we need to so obviously if your
microphone is super quiet and you need to add a boost here that is how you do
it. Once you're happy with all your settings you can just click close and
again if you want to go back into any of your microphone filters you just click
the cog icon and then hit filters and all four of them are there for you to
play around with again. Hopefully by this point you now have a great sounding
audio setup through OBS studio and your stream viewers are hopefully going to
really thank you for less background noise and just a better sounding setup.
If you've got to this point in the video and you have found it helpful please do
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Gaming Careers YouTube channel please do have a look round of all the other
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I'll see you in the next video. Peace!