Well, hey there amigos.
Welcome to the Pod Sound School.
I'm Veronica and today we're going to chat about audio signal flow.
Why do we care about something called signal flow?
Well, not only is signal flow a basic audio production fundamental, but it also extremely
useful when it comes to troubleshooting.
For example, have you ever gotten set up to record and everything goes smoothly and sounds
great and then just a day or two later, in the same environment with the same setup,
it sounds like garbage or nothing works?
More times than not, strong understanding of signal flow will solve most of these frustrations.
What is signal flow?
A short definition is, the flow of an audio signal along the path from a starting point
to a destination.
Let's illustrate this.
What if I could take a snapshot of a millisecond of my voice.
Ahhh, this is the waveform of my voice during that millisecond.
It made vibrations through the air and if you were here with me, your ears would have
transformed it for you into audio that you can comprehend.
But if no one was here, it would simply dissipate into the surrounding air.
Instead of letting it dissipate, let us use the magic of audio production and have some
fun with the signal, so that we can deliver it nice and loud and sounding great, to
intended listeners at a distance.
To do this, lets send the signal through a microphone.
This microphone is a transducer and it will transform the vibrations of our waveform,
into an electrical signal.
Now that the vibrations have been turned into an electrical signal, it can be ran through
a cable.
Now, if the end of the cable isn't plugged into anything, then this is the end of the
road for our signal.
Let's plug the cable into a preamp.
This preamp will boost the signal, make it more powerful and prepare it for its next
stop, the DA converter.
Here at the DA converter, our signal will be transformed again.
This time from an analog electric signal into a digital signal, a stream of ones and zeros.
Now that are signal is digitized, it can be ran through a digital cable, like a FireWire
or a Thunderbolt cable.
Again, if we neglect to plug this digital cable into anything, our signal will come
to an end, never to be shared or heard by anyone.
Let's plug the digital cable into our computer.
Now that it's plugged into our computer, we'll need some software or an application to record
it, so that we can make our signal permanent.
For this, we'll use a DAW or a digital audio workstation.
Digital audio workstations contain virtual versions of the old analog tape machines and
mixers.
In particular, they contain a main tool that we use to control our audio called a channel
strip or a track.
This track will allow us to arm our computer to record and to direct our signal into the
software application and before recording, we can once more adjust the volume or power
of the audio and we can monitor its input with meters.
Let's quickly press the record button before our signal vanishes into the air and is never
captured.
And there it is podskis, our beautiful audio signal, recorded and preserved for all time.
Now we can play it back through the same channel strip and further manipulate and treat how
it sounds.
Once we're happy with it, we can export it as a stereo file and upload it wherever we
plan on sharing.
Wow, phew, easy right, even for me.
That was a lot of information, right podskis? [foreign language 00:04:14].
And if you like this video, don't forget to subscribe to our channel.
Thank you and until then, happy casting.