- Hello, I'm Mike Russell from musicradiocreative.com.
In this video, we'll look at dynamics
and dynamics processing effects inside Adobe Audition.
(discordant electronic music)
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Here I am in Adobe Audition, working with some audio.
Probably needs a little bit of compression,
and that's really what dynamics does.
Really, they could have called it a compressor
but they called it dynamics instead in Adobe Audition.
There are two different effects
and you'll see here in amplitude and compression,
there's dynamics and dynamics processing.
Let's get into that.
Before I do, let's just play you a little sample
of the audio we're gonna work with.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- Okay, so we got this audio.
You can see there's a bit of dynamic range
that could be easily compressed
to make the volume a consistent level,
and in the past, I really used
to use the dynamics processing quite a bit.
That was my favorite,
and the reason is dynamics was introduced as an effect
at a later date into Adobe Audition.
Now I just use dynamics all the time.
So dynamics processing,
in order to set up a good compressor here,
you just bump up a little knee here
and you get a compression ratio of two to one there,
with a threshold of minus 26.
That's quite a nice bit of compression.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- And you can see if I switch on the preview mode there,
it's really bumped up that audio,
probably a little bit too much.
I'm gonna pull this down a little bit.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down to.
- So, immediately with dynamics processing here,
we have created something absolutely amazing,
but not only that, you can add a noise gate
in the dynamics processing effect
by simply pulling down this dot here and then pulling it up
for your threshold on your noise gate,
so if I put it right up there,
it's gonna gate out a lot of stuff.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- And that's probably too much,
so you need to pull it all the way back
until you get a reasonable noise gate.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- Still clipping a bit there.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down to signal.
- Still clipping a bit,
so we probably need to pull it back a bit more.
If it's too harsh, you can spline curve,
so make it more of a smooth compression.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- And you'll find that sounds a lot better,
a lot less harsh, a lot less clippy on the audio.
So you've got all of that with dynamics processing,
but now I use dynamics all the time,
so let's get rid of this one.
I know they're similarly named,
which makes it complicated.
Before I do, before I go onto dynamics,
I just wanted to show you a real benefit
of dynamics processing in Audition,
and I'm gonna go to the multi-track to prove this.
Let's call this Dynamics,
and we'll go ahead and bring in a music bed,
(upbeat electronic music) something like this,
and place it onto track two,
and then we'll bring in that piece of audio
of our speaker there, let's play this all back now.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- Now you can hear that the music is
overpowering our speaker at the moment, but not for long.
If I put dynamics processing onto the music track,
let's do that,
amplitude and compression dynamics processing,
let's go back to default,
let's switch on sidechain for a mono input here,
and then over here on track one, the voiceover track,
we simply send the output of that
to the sidechain input on track two,
which is our music track.
Now, you'll see.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most.
- And as I start to move this around,
it ducks the music for me.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down to signal flow,
so you're dealing with the microphone
and then into your preamp and your EQ
and your mixer and your cables, it's everything.
- And then it fades the music back up seamlessly.
So dynamics processing does have its advantages,
especially for sidechaining in the multitrack.
But let's talk about the dynamics effect,
which was kind of a legacy effect from Premiere Pro.
Still in Premiere Pro, and it's awesome by the way,
and this can do a whole lot more.
On the default settings, you've got a noise gate,
you've got a compressor, you've got an expander,
you've got a limiter, so let's look at this.
Noise gate, let's switch it on, switch preview mode on
and you'll see immediately it's cutting out
in between the words as a noise gate should.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- Sounding a bit clippy, so push the hold up.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all. - Sounding good,
so compressor on, ratio up a bit.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
- Now we have a uniform sound,
gonna pull that down a bit, 2.5.
- [Man] Mic choice is.
- Bit more. - Mic choice is.
- Push the makeup gain up. - Mic choice is.
- This is where we can switch the limiter on
and say don't go any louder
than minus three dB in this instance.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most.
- And then we ride the makeup gain up
until we hit the red light.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down to signal flow,
so you're dealing with.
- So we can do about 8.7 dB of increase,
and I can hear still clipping,
so I'm gonna pull the gate down a bit.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down to signal flow,
so you're dealing with. - Little bit more on that.
And we can also use an expander
which will also fade down when there are silent points.
- [Man] Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes down.
- Expander not needed at the moment of course,
'cause we're using a gate.
If we didn't have a gate though.
- Mic choice is usually the most important.
It all comes. - Now you see with
the ratio increase, the expander is doing its job as well.
Expander a little bit softer than noise gate
but generally does the same thing.
And that is dynamics and also dynamics processing,
and where you might use one or the other
inside Adobe Audition or Adobe Premiere Pro.
Probably, in Premiere Pro, you're gonna wanna stick
with the dynamics effect only.
It's really, really fantastic.
I hope you enjoy using them, maybe you can let me know
in the comments which one you prefer.
Do you prefer dynamics or dynamics processing?
And if you wanna learn even more about Adobe Audition
and audio editing, my courses are open for enrollment.
We'd love to have you in there.
mrc.fm/learn is the URL.
That's mrc.fm/learn.
(uplifting synth music)
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