Let's take your stream audio from THIS to THIS - much better.
This really terrible-sounding audio is being recorded on one of my favorite USB mics to
have ever released.
It's bad, but it's not far off from how many streams on Twitch sound.
But THIS is how it should sound.
How did we get here?
It's simpler - and yet also more involved - than you might think.
I'm EposVox, the Stream Professor, and we spend a LOT of time talking about improving
your stream or video's image quality.
Encoding settings, capture cards, camera choices.
Perhaps TOO much time, as it's actually way more important to have good audio quality.
Audio is number 1, after all.
We're going to dive into how to keep your stream audio from sucking, and how to sound
better than the vast majority of streams on Twitch, YouTube, or heaven-forbid...
Facebook... with some easy steps and compromise in today's episode of StreamGuides sponsored
by Elgato and their Wave:1 and Wave:3
microphones.
We'll also be using these for our demos.
The Wave microphones are easy to set up, needing just a simple USB cable, have high-quality
capsules designed with the minds at LEWITT, and have some killer features like ClipGuard
that help keep your audio perfect.
The principles we discuss will apply to any microphone, however, and I'll note when that
differs.
We'll be discussing 3 areas of focus in this video: Physics and your setup, technique and
mic usage, and adding a little polish with post-processing.
Chapter markers will be on-screen and in the description in case you need to reference
back to this video at any point in time, or want to link it to your friends with struggling
audio.
Wink wink.
## PHYSICS There's a lot you can do with post-processing
or clever tricks to add a little polish to your microphone sound, but none of that matters
if you're not setting it up right and ignore the laws of physics.
Physics dictate how everything in our dimension of the universe operates, and there are things
you just can't get around.
First, let's talk about your mic placement.
There is a direct relationship between the closer a microphone is to your subject and
the quality of sound you get - within reason - and the ease of reducing background sounds.
If you have a dynamic microphone, these are designed specifically to be used as close
to the speaker's mouth as possible.
Condenser microphones, on the other hand, such as the Elgato Wave, provide *much* more
flexibility to use at a distance.
In fully sound-treated and sound-isolated recording booths and music studios, condenser
microphones are often kept at a couple feet's distance from the singer or speaker.
If you're in such a scenario, like a vocal booth - go for it.
But the way sound works in a desk streaming setup are VERY different.
If you're streaming at a desk, you still want your mic up close to your mouth, probably
with a pop filter.
You also want to make sure your keyboard and mouse are positioned on the other side of
the mic: You want the mic between you and your keyboard and mouse (or other noise-generating
objects) rather than the opposite.
Basic directions will tell you anything making sound in the pickup area of a mic will be
picked up, and it's a lot harder to filter that out.
If you absolutely have to have your microphone less visible - be it for teaching or business
scenarios - a big "streamer microphone" is honestly not the right call.
A lavalier mic clipped to your shirt or a shotgun mic mounted just out of frame is the
way to go.
I have videos testing these on my channel.
But for standard streaming and broadcast scenarios, this is the accepted norm, and the trade-off
for cleaner, better audio is definitely worth it.
Specific keyboard choice matters here.
Gamers often chase the clickiest-sounding keyboard possible, but that's a terrible idea
for streaming.
O-rings can stop your keys from bottoming out while typing, but doesn't stop the switch
click.
I have come to love Logitech's Romer-G switches and Box Royal switches for more custom keyboards,
as they are much quieter for streaming purposes, while still being very comfy on my sensitive
hands.
Linear switches generally aren't great, as you're going to be bottoming-out the key,
smashing it into your desk and creating more sound - even if they lack the tactile click.
You probably don't want your microphone blocking your face, though.
A good recommendation is to keep your mic at a 45-ish degree angle from your mouth:
This allows the mic to still be pointed directly at where your voice is coming from, but doesn't
block your face to the camera as much *and* comes with the added benefit of not picking
up as many mouth sounds, breaths, or plosives.
Speaking of plosives, a pop filter is often a must to protect your viewers' ears.
Plosives are the harsh P, B, and T sounds that occur, which effectively hit the mic
capsule with a strong burst of air which can really hurt listeners' ears, as if you were
blowing right in them.
A pop filter is a basic mesh that helps diffuse those air bursts.
A pop filter should be at least 1 inch away from the mic capsule.
It should NOT sit right up against your mic's face.
The Elgato Wave pop filter clips to the shock mount or stand and provides a great air gap.
This 1 to 3 inch gap helps give room for the air to disperse, otherwise you're still pushing
it into the mic.
Also, if you're using one of those cheaper flyswatter style pop filters that are made
of fabric, you want them to be dual layer (or more) or they're not really doing much
of anything.
Some mics come with a windscreen instead of a pop filter.
While this can technically help reduce plosives, it doesn't do so fully and moreso acts as,
well a windscreen.
A filter to help keep wind from distorting the mic.
It's okay to use one in place of a pop filter with some distance between your mouth and
the mic, but using both a pop filter and a windscreen is kinda silly.
The pop filter, when used right, should be doing the job and the windscreen cuts down
higher frequencies of your voice, so both is just hurting your sound.
Many microphones come with a neat mic stand to give you a basic option for sitting your
mic somewhere, but putting that on a desk where you're typing or banging your arms a
lot - a normal occurrence for game streams - that sound will translate up to your microphone.
A shock mount can help reduce these noises significantly - as can getting your mic up
on a microphone arm.
Conveniently, Elgato also sells Wave Mic Arms now, too.
They have the normal mic arm that can go up over your computer monitors, or the mic arm
LP that reaches under your monitors for a more slim profile.
I reviewed these quite favorably in my "Microphone Arm Buyer's Guide" linked below.
The second way physics affects your streaming setup is, well, the rest of your setup other
than your microphone.
Two big things are involved here: Noise from other sources, and reflections.
Added noise is mostly obvious.
If you keep your PC on your desk right next to your microphone, avoiding fan noise can
be impossible - especially when your PC is working super hard to game and stream.
Keeping PCs on the floor - using something to keep it off of carpet and able to breathe,
using cases with dust filters, etc. - makes a world of difference for your ambient sound.
And the obvious - shutting your door, telling family when you need quiet time, shutting
windows when you can, etc.
Reflections are the tricky one.
Reflections apply to sound as much as they do to light.
When you project sound out of your mouth, it shoots out and bounces off of all the surfaces
in your space (just slower than light would).
Your desk, your computer monitors, your walls, your floor and ceiling.
Your walls (and indirectly your desk and PC monitors) and your ceiling are considered
"first reflection points" - they are the big ones most likely to produce reverb or "room
sound" when you talk or shout.
Covering your desk with a nice soft desk mat helps a lot with your desk, and pointing your
camera angle so you're not talking directly at your PC monitor can help with some of those
initial reflections back into your microphone.
But then comes sound treatment.
Elgato makes their Wave Panels which may look like cheap Amazon foam, but actually provide
a 3-step professional solution.
A little bit on your most empty wall portions can help reduce the "wetness" of your room
sound a lot.
Alternatively there is cheap Amazon sound foam, which won't perform quite as well, or
moving blankets do a great job at deadening a room.
If you have non-carpeted floors, getting a rug below you or around you can help, too.
This should all be a motivator to design your backdrop set and stream space a little more.
Ultimately, an empty room with empty walls will always sound worse than a room that just
has a bunch of stuff in it.
The more things to break up and absorb sound, the better.
You can watch my video breaking down my acoustic treatment journey in my big garage studio,
linked below.
## TECHNIQUE
Your mic is positioned properly and environment is tamed, but how do you use it?
That may sound like a silly question, but the most common issues people actually run
into with microphones is just using them wrong.
I mentioned before that dynamic mics pretty much require being up close to the speaker's
mouth, and condenser mics will work best that way for desktop streaming setups.
Choosing the right mic and positioning it correctly are big steps.
Beyond that, you have to actually "train" your voice.
New creators often start out shy and quiet, and that doesn't really work for entertaining
an audience.
Projecting your voice is important.
While you may be streaming your voice directly into your viewers' ears if they're wearing
headphones, you're not actually sitting next to them.
You have to speak up, speak clearly, and project your voice into the microphone.
Often new streamers will buy entire new microphones not understanding why it doesn't pick up them
mumbling and whispering at a distance any better - not talking about ASMR - and it just
doesn't work that way.
That being said, you don't need to yell.
You'll also see many streamers over-compensating and just talking at a shouting or yelling
volume and that's not healthy or sustainable, plus you're causing a lot more reflections
off of your walls and desk.
Some of this you pick up just through experience and time - but taking opportunities to gain
more real-world experience, such as public speaking classes, really help.
I mumble a lot in day to day speech, but my college public speaking class really helped
me make sure I'm heard by an audience and that directly translated to on-microphone
speaking skills.
This isn't just a matter of your peak loudness, either.
Consistency matters a lot.
Starting your sentences super loud but trailing off as you finish your sentence is not an
enjoyable listening experience, and much harder to balance for.
Shouting during an exciting moment in a stream is okay, but having half of your sound shouting
and half really quiet is not fun.
You also have to balance the projecting you're doing with your mic gain and levels either
on your physical controls or in software.
You may find that over time you actually have to reduce your mic gain because you're projecting
better than you're used to.
The Elgato Wave mics make it easy to quickly tweak gain, and the Clipguard feature makes
sure you never clip or distort during loud moments, even if you do get a little excited.
Technique is still king, but these bonuses certainly help.
Beyond loudness, there's also lots of little tricks you can practice to improve your mic
technique.
Learning to soften your plosives makes for more natural speaking pattern.
Drinking plenty of water and making sure to reduce your mouth smacks and clicks also lowers
the abrasiveness of your audio.
Also: Don't drink soda right before you go to stream or record.
It makes your saliva thick which makes it hard to speak - I struggle with this a lot.
There's also the classic Tay Zonday tip of moving your mouth away from your mic a bit
to breathe.
Not everyone can help it, but a heavy breather can be very off-putting during a live stream.
Learning to breathe more quietly or away from the mic does a lot to improve viewer retention.
All of these skills just take practice and conscious reminders whenever you watch your
streams back to keep working on them.
Vocal coaches can help, too!
They'd also tell you that doing vocal warm-ups to get your vocal chords ready go a long way
to protecting your voice from going out after long streams.
If you find yourself regularly losing your voice or feeling strained after streams, you
should be putting in a lot of work to help keep your voice healthy before you burn out.
Another important note for consistency is just keeping the same distance from your microphone.
If you're constantly moving closer and further away from your mic, your audio levels are
going to be all over the place.
WEEEEUOOOOUUURIP!
Two final tips about technique have to do with vocal fry and voice "pulling."
A "vocal fry" is when you're speaking without enough breath being pushed through your vocal
chords.
Whether speaking or singing, most of the sounds we make are actually made by air moving across
our vocal chords, not by working them like a muscle.
A common vocal fry I hear online from newbie presenters is when they relax their breath
before the sentence is done, resulting in the final word or few words sounding whiny
or almost as if every sentence is a question.
This sounds really annoying?
And while you may be used to it, someone hearing you for the first time may bounce really quickly
because it's off-putting?
Again, conscious efforts to stop this will make what seems like an inherent trait to
your voice go away quickly.
Practice makes perfect.
Vocal "pulling" is quite similar - this is pushing, pulling, or tightening your vocal
chords to force a sound that isn't your natural speaking tone.
For example when I do my radio announcer voice, Like THIIIS.
It's cool and there's a time and place for it - but that place isn't conversation, or
conversational long-running streams.
Unless you're a shoutcaster, I guess.
This wears your throat out quickly and is just unnatural sounding.
Many of my earlier videos had me fully locked-in to the radio announcer mode, and while some
found it cool, many definitely found it annoying.
I promise, your normal conversational voice is just fine.
Really.
POLISH
Getting everything right before your audio hits your computer will always beat out doing
anything after the fact, but sometimes you still have to tweak something, or you want
a little more.
Let's talk about that.
First, let's talk about background noise removal.
What if you still can't quite reduce it enough in your space, or clicks and keyboard taps
keep making it in more than you'd like?
If you're streaming with OBS Studio, as of recent updates it ships with two noise filters
that can help you.
RNNoise runs on the CPU and will be tough to run alongside CPU-demanding games or applications,
but does a great job at removing background noise from your audio.
If you have a Nvidia RTX Graphics Card, which I know is tough these days, you can use RTX
Voice either as part of the Nvidia Broadcast app or via the OBS Filter if you install the
VoiceFX SDK.
This allows you to use special cores on your graphics card to automatically filter out
any frequencies that aren't your voice, based on AI training.
I demo'd this back when it first released and it's basically magic.
Additional resources on setting this up are linked below.
What if you just want to make your voice sound... better?
Or keep it from clipping?
Wave Link - the software backing the Elgato Wave microphones and Wave XLR interface - allows
you to activate an awesome feature called "Clipguard."
This is effectively full protection from ever peaking or clipping your microphone and distorting
in your viewers' ears.
Clipguard works by running a secondary "safety track" at -20dB lower than your main audio
feed, and automatically switching to it if you get too loud - such as when you cheer
after winning a game or something.
That way, your viewers can still hear your enthusiasm and energy, but not breaking headphones
or sounding all distort-y and gross.
If you want to "enhance" your voice or get rid of some gnarly frequencies going on, that's
where VSTs come in.
VSTs are audio plugins that can run in real-time and modify your audio.
OBS Studio comes with some basic tools built-in, but I usually recommend mixing them with the
ReaPlugs VST set - a completely free set of VSTs released by the makers of the Reaper
audio editing software.
If you see info about a free trial, that applies to Reaper itself, not the ReaPlugs, so you
may have downloaded the wrong thing.
Add your microphone device to OBS, right click it in your mixer and select Filters.
Add a new filter.
Here you can add EQ to tweak frequencies, a compressor to balance out your levels a
bit, and so on.
My BIG warning here is to keep it simple.
It's easy to fall into the trap of over-doing your post-processing - something I did for
years - and making really wacky sounding audio.
In reality, you just want to tweak what you have and make it sound a little bit better.
Our example here, the Elgato Wave, is a wonderful and natural sounding mic out of box, so we
only want to tweak it a little bit.
My generally-recommended audio chain is Noise Gate first - be it with RNNoise, RTX Voice,
or a more traditional gate, then EQ, then compressor, then De-Esser if needed.
Some people prefer to have their noise removal at the end, but I find it easier to get smoother
results if you're not amplifying the background noise with the other post-processing earlier
in the chain.
So here's what my processing chain typically looks like.
EQ using the ReaPlugs VST I mentioned before, OBS's built-in compressor, and a de-esser
again using ReaPlugs.
EQ-ing is more of an art than a science.
I could make a whole series on this (comment if you'd like that) but here's some general
rules to follow:
- Usually you want to start cutting everything below 60hz to avoid too much bass.
You might think you want this left in, but many listeners will complain about "boomyness"
and you might start to activate the subwoofers on listeners' setups, which isn't a good thing.
Higher voices may not need this, but mid and lower-end voices do.
- 100-150hz is where some of the "warmer" frequencies live.
A small boost to this can help give your voice that warm, "radio" sound on some mics.
On others, you may need to go ahead and cut this to avoid muddiness.
- Muddiness in the voice is a huge problem around 200-250hz.
Too much of these frequencies and your voice can be almost impossible to decipher.
I usually cut a little bit here, depending on the mic.
- The 800 to 1000hz range is considered the "mids".
A lot of your more nasally frequencies live here, a cut at 1000hz can significantly improve
the sound of your audio, depending on the mic and speaker.
- Frequencies around 3000hz can add some clarity to your audio via a small boost.
Too much and you start to get crisp and too sharp for some listeners' ears.
Remember, less is more.
And a HUGE rule for most EQ-ing work is to cut before you add.
We're not here to boost you to sounding like a robot (unless you want that), we just want
to cut out some less flattering frequencies a bit.
Sometimes a little mid cut, a little high boost, and a low-cut is all you need.
Play with it and test a lot - with plenty of breaks to prevent ear fatigue.
Compressors are a little easier.
What is a compressor?
The name is pretty self-explanatory, but it takes your audio and squishes it down, or
compresses it.
The loudest parts become less loud to give you a more consistent-sounding feed.
This comes at the cost of dynamic range, but helps a lot with broadcast audio where you
don't want to be getting super quiet and super loud unexpectedly.
For the Ratio, 3:1 or 4:1 is generally the ideal ratio for voiceover, as a general rule.
The threshold should generally be at a point where you're getting around 5dB of gain reduction.
For me, -16dB works but you may need to play with it.
Then you add 4-5dB of gain back either in the compressor settings or with a secondary
gain filter.
The Elgato Wave microphone sounds great and pretty natural out of the box - so you might
want some noise removal for keyboard sounds, but you may not even want or need a compressor
as Clipguard already keeps you from clipping, it just helps with uniformity if you vary
your speaking volume much or move around a lot.
CONCLUSION Clean up and prepare your environment before
you start recording or streaming, master your technique while using the microphone, and
provide some finishing touches after you've already sent the signal to your computer - and
you have high quality, top tier audio to please viewers' ears and help take your streaming
career to the next level.
Obviously different microphones sound different and need different tools - but these principles
apply to just about any audio setup.
And if you're looking for a microphone upgrade, you can't go wrong with Elgato's Wave:1 or
Wave:3
microphones - they have high quality capsules designed with LEWITT, come with amazing virtual
mixing software called Wave Link, and are plug and play with a single USB C cable.
Elgato also has a variety of other tools to build your stream setup - such as their great
new microphone arms.
Links to those will be in the description.
Thanks to Elgato for sponsoring this guide.
If you need any additional help setting up your audio, come chat with us on Discord at
Discord.gg/eposvox.
Get subscribed and I'll see you next time.
Remember: Be kind, rewind.