Audacity Tutorial 2020 "How To Use Audacity"- Install, Setup, Recording, Editing, EQ, Compression...

who wants to learn about audacity from an expert if I were you I would all right everyone just a brief intro in regards to the things that we'll cover today we'll go over a safe installation and mic setup will talk about the microphones will talk about buttons tools enabling and disabling plugins using hotkeys will edit a voiceover in real time so you can see the workflow will process the audio that's the equalization compression and normalization we'll talk about saving the project and exporting the mp3 or wav in stereo to your preference stay tuned until the end I'll have a summary of everything that we went over as well as all the hotkeys typed out for you and the compression settings alright I hope you enjoyed the video listen we have an awesome tutorial on audacity today why should you trust me my name is Josh Meyer of Josh Meyer Viacom that's Jo sh m ey er vo as in voice over comm I am a professional voice talent and I've done over 3000 voiceovers I just so happen to be an expert in audacity I've seen people post videos online tutorials some of them are are great informative some of them are slightly misleading so I figured I'd go ahead and make a tutorial for you all right here we have a trusted website this is audacity team.org the official website if you're like me and you're you're unfamiliar with a site and you don't want to download random things and have a worry about it well rest assure this is legit audacity team org you go to download select your operating system Windows Mac Linux I have Windows so I would click Windows the newest version 2.3.3 always have the newest you would go ahead and click that and that would redirect you to fossa perfectly safe and normal go down once again select your operating system and install it yes allow the app to make changes to your computer select whatever language you speak if you're listening to me it's likely English and go ahead and install that and then bring it up so once you've installed audacity this is what its gonna look like we have if you're on Windows definitely select Windows directsound right here I want to talk about something very important this is your microphone input you have a few options here you have your built-in laptop mic we're desktop mic and then you have whatever microphone you have plugged into your USB so there's going to be different setups here depending on what you're doing and what you need done so for instance I have my microphone running into a warm audio tone beast preamp into a dbx compressor into my audience id4 interface so since I have that plugged in audacity recognizes that now if you have a simpler setup like a USB mic it will recognize that mic as well whether that be a snowball or Samson meteor mic and I just want to say please don't use your laptop mic it sounds so bad and chances are if you're using audacity you need sound quality that is better than the built-in mic and the reality is is that you can get a solid USB mic for cheap these days I have an example right here for you something that's budget-friendly but rocks this is and just disclaimer nobody's paying me for a word basically I want to share this information because I went through the growing pains myself and I wish that I had a tutorial like this to kind of help guide me so as far as USB mics in the sub one hundred dollar range I own two one would be the blue snowball the other would be this Samson meteor mic this microphone rocks I believe it's fifty to sixty dollars on Amazon plugs right into your computer and when you open up audacity after you plug the mic in it would say Samson or it would say snowball so it will recognize the microphone that you have plugged in and you want to make sure that that is selected incredibly important right here we have the mic so depending on your setup once again and the level of your speech you're going to want to adjust this and I'm going to create an example right here you're gonna see these sound waves and that looks beautiful to me a really great range to be in is anywhere from negative fifteen to negative 6 DBS coming in and that would leave you the Headroom that you want to process your vocals afterwards without clipping and distortion and damaging the audio so what you want to make sure you stay away from is it getting too close to the ceiling coming in too hot at the very highest in my opinion you want to come in around this level right here around negative five DBS you don't want more than that all right moving on just to kind of give you an example of what I'm talking about with the with the microphones I went ahead and pre-recorded a quick recording off the laptop mic and a quick recording off the Samson meteor mic just just so you can see what I'm saying you don't want to use that laptop mic before we do that let's talk about the headphones situation if you have an interface such as a focus write or an audience like myself I've got my studio headphones plugged into my interface so I want to listen back through my audience now if I wanted to play that off of my speakers or if I had my head phones plugged into my laptop itself then go ahead and select your your built-in card for me that would be real tech alright moving forward just a quick example of some of these recordings now if you wanted to drop in music or a different recording you could either import that or even easier just click drag and drop an audacity will load that right up okay so now that we've checked our mic levels I just kind of want to show you briefly what I'm talking about with these microphones so I'm about to play the laptop mic let's record using the cruddy built-in laptop might mean or let's not because that sounds really bad one more time let's record using the ruddy built-in laptop mic it's painful all right let's check out the samson and this is a new test recording with the Samson meteor mic obscenely different obscene ly different okay well since we have this open let's talk about some of the tools here this would be the record button so once you have your mic set in and everything's all good here if you wanted to just start recording a voice over or vocals or whatever you would just click the record button and if I did not have these in for instance you would just click record hello this is Josh Meyer doing a tutorial thanks for playing appreciate you coming so you kind of see how that goes you would just click the record button it would start now over here we have a few different options if so basically we're we are recording in mono right now I always recommend recording in mono because you can always make that a stereo track once you have the final product however if you have that in stereo you're going to find out that a lot of microphones and especially if you're running in an interface only record in mono so what you're going to have here is you're gonna have a stereo track with audio only coming out of one speaker or one side of the car and you absolutely don't want that briefly what you would do is make your mono recording you would record your mono track clean it up and I'll go through how to clean it up and you would just highlight that entire thing once it's done you have the final product and you would highlight that by double clicking control D and you would go to the top track and click this arrow down and create a stereo track and that would ensure that the audio is playing from both sides both left and right okay so going back into the mic comparison now in the Samson mic it is clearly a much higher quality mic and it picked up a lot more of the background room noise such as the laptop fan or if your your AC turned on just some of that white ambient room noise because it picks up more - better mic so one more time here's the laptop mic let's record using the cruddy built-in or not okay let's let's move on to the Samson and this is a new test recording with the Samson meteor mic now if the background room noise is going to be an issue for you we have a quick simple fix for that so let me zoom in here so you can have a better look so what I did is I highlighted just some of this room noise it that's all just room noise so you would just highlight ambient noise go to noise reduction get the noise profile highlight the entire track by double-clicking you can go back to effects and repeat noise reduction I prefer instead of going to effect and repeating just doing ctrl R for repeat oh my goodness way better all right so let's say you make a mistake you can always go to edit undo noise reduction so let's do a comparison hmm now let's repeat highlight the whole track repeat the noise reduction all right and I think we could repeat that again make it even more quiet there it is virtually and this is a new test recording with the Samson meteor mic and you could even do that one more time if you wanted to and this is a new test recording with the Samson meteor mic incredible tool incredible tool okay moving forward let's talk about these tools so this is the selection tool this is the tool that you're going to be using the most and I'll just create a track just so I can show you exactly what I'm saying about these tools so what I did there to stop that instead of clicking stop I've got my hand on the keyboard I hit the spacebar now if I wanted to play I would click the spacebar again and I'll just create a track just and I'll just create a track just so I stop it no big deal when you stop it with the spacebar it will go back to exactly where you place the selection cursor so I place it here I'm sure gonna play from there what I'm saying and when I click the spacebar again it will retreat back to that previous spot where it is right here we have the envelope tool I'm not gonna go incredibly deep into this this is going to be for a different tutorial such as recording voiceover with background music or recording a podcast with background music this is a handy tool for that so basically what it would do is let's say my voiceover starts at about one second about one second here that's where my voiceover would start and let's say you know just for just for an example it the voice-over ends at three and a half seconds so what I would want to do is I would want the music to be loud while I'm not speaking and then quiet down once my voice pops in so I would create an anchor dot if you will I would create an anchor dot and then I'd start - I'd create the next stop at one second and then I would squeeze that audio down you see where that white area goes down that squeezes the decibel level so that would essentially fade that sound so let me just make make the voice of louder for a moment so I'll just make it louder for the example click on the envelope tool I've got my anchor set and I want that to have a sharp fade and at about one second and you see that just kind of squeeze that audio down and let's say my voiceover ends at three and a half seconds and I want the music to become loud again once I'm done speaking so this area right here would be the area that I would be speaking in so this is this is where this tool would be handy if you don't plan on using background music then you really don't need to know much about the envelope tool and I'll just create a track just so I can show you that what I'm saying about these tools see it's squeezed the decibel level down and I'll just create a track just so I can show you exactly time I'm saying about these tools big time okay moving forward I'll create another quick recording oops I want to select my selection tool so I'm going to just record something random so I can show you the slider tool the slider tool once again is going to be more relevant with music if you need to sync your vocals timing wise you can slide this slide this around very cool to know okay so just so you can see kind of how the workflow would go and cleaning up your audio and doing a little bit of processing I'm going to record a voiceover and take you through my process step by step let's do it okay so I've got a little bit of script here I've made audacity audacity is box a bit more small so I can read while recording so I'm just going to record a voiceover briefly when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or BV there we go when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or behaviors it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed you can begin to find hope to learn more call 1-888-300-3455 let's go back to our selection to selection tool alright yet a fumble like I did and we have two tracks we only want to hear one right now so the track that you'd like to hear simply click solo it will only play that track when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or behave let's go back to the beginning here when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or BB oh yeah I have no idea what that was but let's say that you had made a mistake like that and you just continued recording on the same track and you wanted to get rid of that you would make sure your selection tool is highlighted you would put that about a half second just before the voice that you want to keep starts and go ahead and drag that and highlight this whole area that you'd like to get rid of and what you can do from here is either click the scissors the cut but I prefer to use the hotkeys like I said this will save you so much time and if you want to learn a hotkey or you can't remember the hotkey that I stated you would simply just hover the cursor over top of whatever button and it will highlight and tell you our cut is control X so let me cut that I like control X POW cut that boom it's already gone when you or a loved one starts having fantastic mood so anyway that's how you would just get rid of a chunk or a piece that you wanted to cut out now the same principle applies for copying so for instance let's say I liked everything about this voice over on this track below except for maybe the first line and let's say you know this isn't actually the case but let's say man this entire track is way better except for this part but the one that I recorded up here this parts the best in the rest is trash so what you would do at that point is you would just highlight the point the area that you think was better when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings and you could control C for copy that and you would go to this and let's say you didn't like this one and you wanted to replace your top recording first sentence or first you know beginning and you wanted to replace that in this area what you would do is highlight what you want to replace you've already controlled copied you would highlight the bottom go to silence that is control L so let's silent that and since we already have this copied we can control V for paste all right so let's highlight this control C for copy let's highlight this silence it control V for paste when you or a loved one when you or a loved one start right so that wasn't actually a case and let's say you made a mistake edit undo and you can go back as many steps as you want and trust me you're going to make a mistake that you didn't mean to make so edit undo it's going to be a good friend of yours moving forward I'm gonna take you through the workflow so first and foremost we already talked about that ambient background noise I'm running a compressor with a noise floor so there's not a ton coming through there maybe just a little if I cranked up my headphones but for the sake of your setup and there is just a little back there for the sake of your setup you may not have what I've got going here so we would highlight this ambient area effect noise reduction we'd get the noise profile we double click to highlight the entire track control our to repeat it or effect repeat noise reduction I use ctrl R now it's applied it if you had a lot more noise back here you'd actually be able to see it visibly like I did in the Samsun mic example but it has been done now a quick recommendation is you like to allow about a half second prior to the audio starting so I'm going to leave a half second control X I'm gonna highlight the rest control X I'm gonna cut that out noise reductions already been applied so now at this level I want to make sure that the spacing of the read sounds good and natural and it's the type of spacing that you want sometimes you're going to need to cut chunks of time out if you have a really quick read but you can't actually read that quickly so you need to kind of fade all of these sentences together you know you would just start cutting time out but this isn't one of those quick reads however we want to make sure that the timing sounds good so when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or behaviors it can be very upsetting right and there's a little mouth click right there so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to going to highlight that and I'm going to silence it first and foremost betting but one stagnant and that comes in a little late I'd like to bring that in and make that come in sooner so I'm going to highlight about a half second control X to cut that out it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed yeah I love that so first and foremost I after I apply that noise reduction I like to go through and silence chunks of time now you can be more precise by using the zoom tools so you can zoom in you can zoom way in and this is helpful when you're trying to sync audio to music like very precisely so go ahead the spacebar to play whatever area you highlight just to make sure you're not cutting off any sound that you actually need nope we can definitely sound into that silence that loved one starts having unusual mood swings or beep we're behaviors so to play to stop spacebar play it can be very upsetting stop highlight but once diagnosed can be very upsetting but once diagnosed oast you can begin to space for stop now once again I'd like to bring this in a bit closer cut it a small piece of time out so it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed you can begin so I feel like I would want to come in around here and you can kind of say it and the pace that you like in your mind while you're watching the cursor move and that will give you a solid area to work from so let's see how that sounds behaviors it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed you can be now I'd like for that to come in just a hair so I'll highlight that small area just a hair more quickly once diagnosed you can begin to find hope maybe just a touch more but once diagnosed you can begin to find hope ok so here's a little trick that I'm gonna show you once I process these vocals so setting but once diagnosed you can begin to find hope you hear that I'm gonna teach you how to get rid of that um once we bring the volume up on this so let's finish it out home to find hope okay let's bring this in cut a little time out control X to cut hope to learn more call 1-800 timings good there highlight that area silence or space while1 880 spacebar stop nothing there but signs go ahead and silence at a 1 888 bring that 8 8 in a bit closer small area control X to cut that time made hundred eight eight eight one two three four eight eight one two three four or eight one two three four or visit our website alright the timing see good let's go to the end we'll take the silence back there we won another half second on the end and we can highlight the rest and cut that off control X so let's bring the volume up let's talk about how we do that now me personally I know that when you overprocess vocals it begins to sound sound electronic it begins to sound unnatural it begins to sound boxy robotic undesirable characteristics should we say so just for the sake of allowing you to see what I do I would oh by the way I just want to talk about your programs while we're here add or remove programs now when you have audio on here you have to have a track for a lot of this stuff to show up so once you have a recording and you're ready to process your vocals let's make sure you have the the plugins that you want so we would go to effect add remove plugins and we would see all these plugins enabled so that's great we know what we already have but we don't know what we don't have unless we meticulously look through for the disabled but we can just click disabled and it would show you all of the things that you have available that are disabled and if you wanted to enable that you would simply highlight it and click enable and that's it now you'll see EQ equalization right here now audacity 2.3.3 does not have eat you anymore EQ this is very very good to know EQ has been replaced with filter curve so if you're not seeing EQ pop up anywhere and you're freaking out like don't freak out it is definitely called filter curve now and that's exactly what it is it still has the same priest as the old as the old Audacity I'm going to apply my EQ and then go back to EQ just so I can show you filter curve is what it's called filter curve this is an equaliser that I made up specifically for this microphone set up my voice and brings some clarity for it so I'm going to create a an advanced tutorial on how to create your own equalizers specifically tailored to your voice and microphone in audacity that is going to be an advanced tutorial but just to kind of show you some of the preset tools that audacity has you would go to the filter curve manage it would be factory presets so you know it's got that bass boost it's got that treble boost some people on audacity will tell you you know this is how you eat you your voice just do a bass boost and then do a treble boost and listen you can do that but please please know that you can rewind that by going to edit undo undo because I've heard people do that even on their tutorials and afterwards their audio does not sound good at all it sounds awful and amateur and you don't that's not what you're looking for here you you are looking for clear clear sound clarity not too much bass that muffles it and then bringing up troubles that just accentuate some of the syllabus that is not what you want so you can give that a shot if it works great for you and you love it fantastic but just know that more often than not it's not going to be the best play for you knowing how to identify problem areas and the Hertz in kilohertz range is essential once again I'll create a different tutorial on that that'll be an advanced tutorial so going back you know they have the factory presets based trouble boost walkie-talkie yada-yada this is the EQ that I created one of them at least so first step was the effect filter curve which is EQ I apply that and for me then I would go to compressor and I find that negative 10 DB on the threshold with negative 40 DB on the noise floor and the ratio at two to one the attack time all the way down and release time all the way down those are the best settings for me because you over compress audio and it becomes apparent and it creates that boxy robotic type sound that you don't want really crunchy so the less compression the better negative 10 DB is is really solid place so then I would compress that after I equalized it and brought down some of those trouble areas then I would go to compression and you see the you have this peak here and some of this stuff is is loud and we want to finish that by normalizing it down to negative 2 dB alright let's see how it sounds when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or behaviors it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed you can begin to find hope to learn more oh that's right yes hope find hope ok so we have this at the end and we want it a little bit there but we don't want it as loud as we have it currently so there's a couple different ways to attack this we could D amplify it so we could go to the amplifier and then drag this down until it starts saying negative DBS and we could try negative 3 DBS in that range to find hope that's way better so let's undo that find hope and then we can redo that to find hope way better furthermore let's undo the amplify we could also fade out find hope - sounds great you can begin to find hope all right we can highlight that again and if you're having trouble just zoom in and that will give you more precision and we could control our to repeat that fade out and hope nice hope - we can do that let's try it to find hope to learn so whatever would work for you in this realm feel like the amplified the D amplification sounded a little better and I would want to do that at about negative 4 DB s find hope to learn more much more naturalistic let's zoom out to learn more call 1 888 8 1 2 3 4 or visit our website great alright so you know what this is what we got so just briefly about processing your vocals the steps that I take would be I would EQ then I would compress it and once again negative 10 DB on the threshold noise floor negative 40 DB the ratio at 2 to 1 attack time and release time all the way to the left and then I would finish that off by normalizing that to negative 2 DB now for instance let's say that you didn't feel like normalizing oops we do the filter curve redo compression let's say that you didn't want to take that step but you see right here we have a small clip and in order to get rid of that clip we could either normalize down to negative 2 DB and that would leave from your highest peaks to decibels of shelf before you start to clip or you could simply go to effect scroll down to limiter do a limit you could do negative 1 DB that would leave one decibel of Headroom but but still make it very loud or we could do negative 2 dB negative 2 and you but that did that went ahead and just cut these clips right out so one last time I would go to filter curve I would EQ it then I would compress that we had these Peaks don't like that and I still don't like that peak so what I would do here actually is I would just I would cut that by a negative one decibel and then I would normalize it to negative two DB normalize and this P is back so I will real quickly once again scroll up go back to amplify now if you scroll to quick this box will definitely close down on you as you saw there and I did a negative for amplification I'll redo that so now that we have the finished product this is what I would do I would control D for duplicate that track control D that creates the duplicate track we go to the top track make stereo track and now we have audio coming from the left and the right speakers in stereo processed vocals with Headroom no clipping trouble areas in the EQ have been dealt with let's have a listen when you or a loved one starts having unusual mood swings or behaviors it can be very upsetting but once diagnosed you can begin to find hope to learn more call 1 888 8 1 2 3 4 or visit our website beautiful ok so what you would do from here is anytime that you get to a great place like you didn't have to wait until you were here to save let's say that you were doing an audition or you were recording a verse or spitting a 16 you would definitely and you crushed it you thought that was fire you would definitely want to go down and save that project you would save ass and whatever folder you would want for me it would be voice over everything but you know for this you would save as and be like this is med commercial or whatever shift arrow I'm gonna highlight that ctrl C for copy and I would save that project to my desktop or whatever folder that you want and now it's time to export it so you can either go to file export export as mp3 or WAV wave is a much bigger file mp3 is fantastic so you would export it and it would bring up the export or if you're like me and you like the hotkeys you want to do a quickly ctrl shift e for export boom there it is and I had already copied that that text so I would control V for paste Med commercial save it to the desktop fantastic save as type so you want to do mp3 files or a WAV file typically but you have all these options if you need something else mp3 files are fantastic they're high quality without being too huge so then you would export it into whatever folder you want and now you know what the hell you're doing in audacity okay so before we go I just wanted to go over a brief summary of everything we covered today we set up the installation we selected the mic you press record to get going use your hotkeys for workflow and I have them all listed right here so if you wanted to pause and look at the hotkeys they're right there for you we also talked about enabling and disabling plugins in effects we talked about processing audio so that's the EQ compression at negative 10 dB at the threshold negative 40 DB noise floor two to one ratio and attack and release all the way to the left we talked about creating the stereo track so you would double click the entire track to highlight that and then you would duplicate it using control-d lastly we save the project and export with ctrl shift e in stereo my name is Josh Meyer thanks so much for watching this tutorial if you have any questions that I can help with please don't hesitate

Channel: VoiceOverMaster

Views: 135,242

Keywords: audacity tutorial, how to use audacity, audacity recording, audacity editing audio, make your voice sound better audacity 2020, how to use audacity for podcasts, audacity 2020, audacity 2.3.3, audacity setup, Audacity eq and compression tutorial, learn audacity, Eq audacity 2.3.3, eq audacity 2020, how to record in audacity, audacity how to, audacity settings, audacity settings for voice over

Id: xtVCR97tT1w

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019