Audacity Compressor and Equalization

hi there this is Dan Lyons from how to make podcasts like a pro comm well last time we caught up I showed you the two things that I use in Adobe Audition to make my audio sound radio quality now a lot of you emailed me and said but I don't have the dhobi audition and I don't really have $500 to spend buying it so this is why I'm making this video to show you how you can get the same effects using audacity which is a free editor and runs on both PC and Mac so let's get into it here we are in audacity now I've already done a little bit of preparation here I've got my waveform as you can see this is a really uneven waveform and I've done that deliberately so I've got some fairly okay levels here then they sort of blow out a bit and get quite loud and then they get really really quiet at the end now like I said I've done this deliberately to show you the effect of two tools that we're going to go through in today's video now both of these tools are things as a radio DJ I use on all of my audio before I broadcast it because it really sweetens up the sound of my audio and the first thing that we're going to talk about is equalization now I don't want to over sort of load you with too much information because it's just going to get crazy I mean we could write a thesis on equalization but we're going to try and keep it really simple so let me show you how we put an equalization on this waveform so we select the whole waveform we go up to effect go down to Equalization now what is this line here and what is this range from you know 30 Hertz right up to 10,000 Hertz what is that all about that is your equalization range so within this range if you adjust certain frequencies the sound of your waveform is going to change you may have heard of musicians or recording engineers listening to some music and then saying oh that song needs a lot more top-end or it needs a lot more bottom end what they're talking about here is a group of frequencies within this spectrum so if somebody says it suddenly is more top-end they're talking about generally these frequencies to the right of this spectrum and top-end adding top-end gives something or make something sound very crisp and very clear and very clean okay if they talk about the bottom end they talk about the base frequencies so if you're adding more bottom end to a waveform you make it sound a lot more base here perhaps a little bit muddier as well so you know an artist like you know a Barry White obviously has a lot of bass in his voice so the sound engineers when they did an equalization on his voice may have had to take some bass out with the equalization because he had too much natural bass now there is no hard and fast rule about Equalization because we all have different voices thank god obviously we're all very unique so this really is a case of just experimentation generally what I find works really well for me is adding a fair bit of top-end because I like things to be really crisp and really clear so I add a bit of top-end there and I like to add a little bit of bass too because it's been scientifically proven that people enjoy listening to a voice that has a degree of bass in it so even if you don't have a lot of natural bass in your voice you can increase the bass that you do have by playing around at the bottom end ok so this kind of is is what my equalization looks like I like to put a little bit of mids up in there as well mids primarily or middle frequencies primarily determine how muddy something is so you need to play around with that if you want to put a for example telephone effect on a voice and make it sound like someone's talking a telephone what you would do is strip the waveform of the base frequencies so from about here down you would pull everything down and then the mid frequencies you would just put through the roof push right up and then you would play around the top frequencies and the high-end frequencies and move those up as well but that's not what we're doing we're not putting a telephone effect on their voice but I might do another tutorial about that very soon okay so this looks to me to be pretty good but it's not good enough just for it to look okay it has to sound okay so let's preview and see how that's come up one two one two one two one two one two nice okay well that to me sounds okay it sounds really crisp it sounds really clear now let me show you just quickly what happens when we overindulge in the top-end yes this can be a really easy mistake to make okay let's preview that one two one two one two one two one two ow it almost hurt your ears doesn't it what I've done there is I've added too much chop into that waveform and in turn what we've now got is this thing called sibilance where things are too crisp and it's it's almost too cutting on your ears so that's what happens when we overindulge so we want to pull it right back down again to that level that we're previously happy with and I think what you'll find is if you go over the top with any of these frequencies in terms of boosting them or cutting them out you're going to see huge difference in the sound so it's all moderation you don't need to mess around with an EQ too much to get that great sound so we're happy with that and we want to okay it now just before I do okay yes let's keep your eye on the waveform and see how it changes because generally what happens when you add a bit of top-end is you you're going to exacerbate some of the peaks so some of the peaks in the waveform are actually going to get worse let's have a look yeah as you can see primarily around this section here the waveform actually peaked more because I added those top-end frequencies and boosted them that's okay though because we can fix that with this next thing that I'm about to show you which is compression let me talk about compression a bit basically what compression does is it takes the loudest points in your waveform which are these bits around here and brings them closer to the quieter bits of your waveform so in other words it evens out a whole waveform now a compression really is so crucial when you're getting your podcast audio in shape because so often there will be podcasters who you know host a show with somebody else and they're having a laugh and having a joke and you know sometimes the laughter can be really hot on the mic what I mean by that is you know they're too close to the microphone when they're laughing and so you get a huge spikes of audio where there's laughter but then generally the rest of the podcast is quite low so how do you go about fixing that because it's awful to listen to you know somebody's listening and they they've got this great volume steady volume then they hear this laughter and its just blows their ears out well one of the things that helps take care of that problem is compression it does even out the sound let's go and take a look so we highlight the way if we click effect and we go to compressor now there's a whole bunch of stuff here that you really don't need to know I'm not a huge technical person I mean I know how this stuff works but I really don't want to bore you with it safe to say that the threshold is really what we're interested in now what the threshold is is basically it's this compressor say to you okay where do you want me to start compressing the audio do you want me if I move this slider right down you'll see the yellow line comes right down the bottom do you want me to start compressing this audio just from front go from the first thing from the quietest volume do you want me to start compressing or would you like me to start compressing only when it gets really really really loud which is up here well a good range to mess around with is between -10 DB and -16 DB so I'm going to go a stay safe at minus 14 DB now we'll say at this point as well you don't want to go overboard with a compression if you start playing around you know - 38 DB that type of compression is so hard that it will literally crush your audio and it will strip a lot of the frequency boosting and cutting that we did with the equalization because it will just smash your audio that's not what we want to do we want to let this waveform breathe but we want to pull the loudest parts down okay we don't want to completely stomp all over the audio so let's go back up to minus 14 let's have a listen one two one two one two one two one okay that to me sounds alright so I'm happy with that a style of compression leaves a ratio and the attack time there let's click OK and have a look at how the waveform changes Wow fantastic so that was pretty clear wasn't it I mean the loudest points that we had was sort of in this range here and now they've come right down so let's check it out see how it sounds one two one two one two one two one two one two one two three four one two three four that is why we use compression so there we go the wave form is looking a hell of a lot healthier hell of a lot happier it's going to be easier for the listener to listen to and it's so basic to do to put that compression on and the equalization that is how you get broadcast quality sounding audio it's not that hard it's very easy and this program is absolutely free so mess around with those things I think the key is experimentation like I said everyone's voices different so different rules are going to apply experiment around and please let me know how you go I hope you've enjoyed the video and remember for more tips and tricks to get your own online radio show or in other words a podcast check out my website how to make podcasts like a pro comm until next time I've been down Lyons take care

Channel: HowToMakePodcasts

Views: 308,077

Keywords: how to make podcasts, make podcasts, how to podcast

Id: E8LO21cHzZQ

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2011