- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video,
we're gonna show you how to set up and connect
the Audio Technica AT2020 Condenser Microphone
with the GoXLR Audio Interface for live streaming.
If you are looking for pricing
or specs for anything that you see in this video,
we do have links down in the description below
on where you can buy everything from a variety
of online retailers.
Now, for the purposes of this video,
today the GoXLR is already set up
and connected to our laptop.
It's already recording, so we can get straight
to the microphone setup, connecting it
and using the best settings possible for our live stream.
So we're gonna connect our microphone with the XLR cable.
We don't recommend using a XLR to headphone jack cable
and using it in the headset input on the GoXLR.
You won't get the best results.
If at all, any results, so don't use a cable
like this, use a proper XLR to XLR cable.
So now that I have that set up
I'm just gonna put my headphones on
and then we can set up the gain of this microphone.
We open up this mic setup window here.
We do wanna make sure that condenser is selected.
When you select condenser here,
that'll tell the audio interface to send this microphone
48 volts of Phantom power
that it needs in order to activate or turn on.
This microphone will not work without that setting selected.
Once that's selected, we can set the gain of the microphone.
We're gonna move the gain all the way up to about
37,
38 dB.
That's where I need it to be for me.
As you look at the meter here,
you can tell that it's right on the upper end of
what it considers to be good.
You don't want it going into that loud section
if it goes in by a bar too that's okay
but if you're regularly going past that
then it is a little excessive.
You will experience peaking or clipping.
And it'll show you a little warning here to indicate
that you do have the gain set too high.
So when you're speaking naturally
at your most commonly spoken kind of volume
then you do wanna make sure that you're right in
this good section, and then you can hit, okay.
Next let's talk about the noise gate.
The job of the noise gate is to remove background noise
from your recording.
What it actually does is you set a threshold
and when you speak
you break that threshold and it turns the microphone on.
It's kind of an automated way to mute and unmute your mic.
This is really common on something like miking a drum kit
where you want the microphone above each tom
only to activate when that tom is struck.
You don't want your floor tom microphone
picking up your snare drum.
That's not a good thing.
You want each microphone just to hear the instrument
in front of it.
Now they've added this,
it's becoming more and more common for vocal microphones.
It's not a feature that I love.
If you're doing a talking head video
like I'm doing in this one
because you can hear that noise gate clicking in and out.
And oftentimes it's more distracting
than it's worth, that being said, that clicking
in and out when the mic activates and deactivates
depending on the threshold that is masked by game noise.
So it's a helpful tool when you're live streaming.
So I'm gonna show you how to set that up.
Here, you wanna move the threshold
up until you're regularly exceeding the threshold
and turning the microphone on.
I'm gonna show you what it sounds like
if you set it too aggressively.
If you set it too aggressively
you can hear it clicking in and out as I'm speaking.
And that's not a good thing.
So I prefer to have it somewhere
between minus 40 and minus 45.
This means for me, whenever I'm speaking comfortably
even if I do get a little more
soft-spoken the mic activates every single time.
You never wanna set this so aggressive
that it misses syllables and misses words.
So that's why I recommend there.
With attenuation, I recommend keeping it between 50 and 75%.
If you leave it to a 100% attenuation,
you really do hear the microphone turn off.
The attenuation is basically how much
of the microphone are you turning off.
So when I have it set to 50%,
if I go quiet for a little bit
it'll only reduce the background noise by 50%.
Which makes it sound a little bit more natural when
you break the noise gate and click it on and off.
So that's a tool that you can use there.
I don't recommend setting it to a 100%,
unless you have some really specific goal
that you're going for.
So somewhere between minus 40
and 45 on the threshold, and then attenuation
at 50 to 75, depending on your preference.
Now, like I said earlier
I don't like this for spoken word video
because you can hear it clicking in and out.
So, but for the purposes of this video
I'm just going to turn it off now
just so you don't hear that clicking in and out
as we move on through the other settings.
Next, let's talk about the EQ and the goal of the EQ.
So a lot of the times you'll buy a microphone
because you like the way it sounds.
You buy the AT2020 the MT1, the SM7B,
whatever microphone you buy,
you buy, because the way it sounds.
So if you're just doing a video like this one
I would leave the EQ flat
and just let the microphone do its work.
You bought that microphone for a reason
because the way it sounds, so let it do its thing.
That being said.
When you're mixing multiple input sources,
you wanna try and give everything some EQ space.
You want everything to fall in a zone.
Think of it like mixing a band onstage
the acoustic guitar, the kick drum, the piano, the vocals
they're all kind of squeezed
in a very unique frequency ranges.
That way you can sit back from a mix.
And if they're all set to the same volume
we can hear each instrument
because they're restricted to certain frequency ranges.
That's what we're gonna recommend
that you do for your live stream.
With this video on the settings that we recommend.
So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're
basically gonna build our own high pass filter here
by rolling off the low, the 31.5 Hz all the way down.
The 63 Hz can come to about minus two or three.
So we wanna roll in the low end of this microphone.
There's nothing useful
in those frequency ranges for your voice.
This basically takes your voice
out of everybody's subwoofer.
You don't really want your vocal
in their sub anyway is not useful to have it.
And it just makes them sub that's more muddy sounding.
You want the sub to be focused
on game noise, explosions, music, that type of thing.
So there's no point keeping those frequencies
in the low end for your vocal mics.
We're just going to roll them off
clean up the mix a little bit.
The next thing that we're gonna do
if the EQ allowed me to roll off 400 Hz, I would,
but we had kinda had the round here.
So I'm gonna go minus two on the 500 Hz.
This is a low-mid frequency range.
By opening this up a little bit, we're gonna
allow more game noise in this slot and it will actually
make your microphone quite a bit more clear sounding.
It just gets rid of that low mud.
So by reducing the 500 Hz
we do create more space in the mix as well.
Next, we wanna bump the 2 kHz by two
and the 4 kHz by two, with these settings here
you will create more vocal clarity.
This is where most of the vocal clarity comes from.
If you're a female, there'll be a little bit closer
to 3 1/2 or 4k.
If you're male is somewhere between 1 1/2 to 2k,
so you may not have to bump both of these.
I bumped both of them for me.
And I find that it does open up the microphone quite a bit.
After that we can reduce 16 kHz all the way down.
Again, most vocal mics, if you're miking somebody
for a vocal like a Shure SM58 or something like that,
there's a cliff after 10k anyway,
a microphone like the AT2020 is a little sustained more
on the brighter frequencies like this, but just get it out
make more room for those frequencies
on your music or whatever.
It doesn't contribute a lot to vocals.
It just creates more sources in that space.
So I like to roll it out completely.
If you don't like how aggressive it is
then you can reduce it.
You can go minus four, something like that.
Meet me in the middle, somewhere like that.
So if you look at these EQ,
we've rolled off the low end, made more room for game noise.
We got rid of that low-mid at 500 Hz,
create a little bit more space in your vocal.
And then we pop two and 4k to create more vocal clarity.
This will really help your vocal standout in the mix
without having to turn up the fader to make it louder.
That's really what we're trying to do.
You don't want volume.
You wanna strategically use the frequencies
that are coming from your microphone
to help you achieve what
you're getting going for with your online live stream.
That's gonna help clean up your mix quite a bit right there.
The next tool that we have is the compressor.
Now the job of the compressor
is to make your loudest parts quieter
and your quietest parts a little bit louder.
You're narrowing the dynamic range.
You don't want your voice to be going up and down so much
that somebody has to change the volume of their live stream.
When they're listening to you, if you get mad
and you rage quit, you don't want to blow their eardrums.
And likewise, if you get immersed
into a game and you get a little bit quieter, more nuanced
you don't want them to have to turn up their volume.
You wanna manage that for them.
Think of a compressor is almost automated volume mixing.
That's not how it works,
but that's a very simplified way of thinking about it.
You wanna just compress it into a tighter window
so you're not moving your fader up and down the whole time.
What we're gonna do here is we're gonna
reduce the threshold to minus 15.
So we moved the upper end all the way down to minus 15.
This means that whenever we speak
whenever our microphone gets louder than negative 15
everything above that will get compressed.
I recommend compressing it 3.2 to one or four to one
either one of those settings work well.
People say that that's subtle, but
think about it, every time that you exceed 15 dB
we're still compressing all
of that at three to one, that's quite aggressive.
And people that recommend six to one, seven to one,
eight to one, that's like
you're basically putting a limiter into your microphone.
And that's not really the goal of compression.
You just wanna slow it down
narrow those loud parts of your voice
or whatever you're doing and put it into a tighter range.
So that's how you squish the top
of the microphone in terms of volume.
Now, we do wanna make those quieter parts
a little bit louder.
We wanna push it an inch at a little bit closer
to the compressor.
So the compressor's working for us
and we'll do that by adding makeup gain.
So we can add four or five decibels
of makeup gain or six somewhere like that.
Somewhere between five to seven
I would say is a really good setting for you to use.
And as you heard that did just make me a little bit louder.
So now, if this thing had a compression meter
we would see it, the compression, the compressor kicking in.
Unfortunately the GoXLR doesn't have a meter like that.
That'd be an awesome feature if they built it in.
So you can actually see what you're doing here
but if you couldn't hear it,
you can hear the compressor working
and just compressing that stuff
between minus 15 and minus eight, probably.
And just keeping it
in that window for us, which is absolutely perfect,
when we go to connect this to OBS for our live stream.
So those are the settings I would recommend
for the compressor.
Next we have the De-esser.
The De-esser has been on the whole time.
What it does is exactly what it sounds like.
It removes the S's, the mouth noise, the clicks, the pops
the T sounds what are known
as sibilance with a microphone and frequencies.
It rounds them off to make them a little bit more
easy to listen to when you're listening to a live stream
for three hours. Without it, I'm gonna turn it off here
just so you can hear it for the first time,
cause it's been on the whole time
you will hear a lot more breathing
mouth noise, clicking, S's.
They're much more pronounced with this turned off.
So you do wanna put that back on.
Now, if you have a GoXLR Mini,
you don't have this option, which is really too bad.
It's a really nice feature to have
but they just didn't have the power
to build it in, because the GoXLR Mini is just bus-powered.
So it does require that extra processing power, I'm sure.
So somewhere around 50 to 60%, I recommend
for the De-esser actually between maybe 40 and 60%.
I like setting it right at 50.
I think it sounds good for my voice.
So those are the settings I would use.
So if we're doing a live stream
the threshold on the gate would be somewhere around
minus 40 to minus 45 with an attenuation between 50 and 75%
depending on what you're going for.
The EQ, we have that high pass filter that rolls in.
So minus nine, minus three, zero, zero, minus two
on the 500 Hz frequency, 1 kHz can stay even.
And then we pop two and 4k up plus two, and that we roll
off the top that creates that space for the game noise.
That's really what we're aiming for.
And the compressor is set relatively conservative.
So we're not over compressed, overly chunky, sounds natural,
but it's a tool that narrows that dynamic range for us
and will help our stream sound more consistent
over a long haul.
And the De-esser just makes it more palatable
easier to listen to removes mouth noise.
S's and T's from your mix.
If you have any questions
about the settings that we recommend in this video
please leave a comment down, in the comment section below.
Again, if you are looking for pricing
or specs for anything that you see in this video
we do have a bunch of setup videos for the AT2020
specifically with recommendations
on how to make this microphone sound better.
Those are also linked down in the description below
beside the pricing for everything here.
And if you want to see more videos
like this in the future, please like, and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
(upbeat music)