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.
