Audacity Tutorial 2021 - Compressor Settings -ULTIMATE GUIDE- How To Use Compression -FREE EQs

all right ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another audacity tutorial i'm josh meyer of joshmeiorvio.com i'm a professional voice talent i got into that through writing music i've done over 3000 paid voiceovers in counting and i just so happen to be an expert in audacity so today we're gonna have a nice short video about compression how to use it and how it can benefit you as usual i will leave links in the description below for free eqs that i've created um we'll have a male eq and some female eqs these are eqs that i created um you know just as you know a general general way of speaking just knowing you know certain trouble areas for men and women that i see time and time again so you know hopefully they work great for you if not and you're curious about getting a custom eq feel free to reach out and as always shout out to my students who are just killing it i have been crazy busy helping so many people up and coming voice talent setting up home studios performance training all the way to finding work outside of the hamster wheel that is the pay-to-play website so stick around like subscribe i definitely have much more valuable content coming to you and it really is such a pleasure serving you all so without further ado it's been a couple months since i posted a video but if you guys think that i would leave you hanging think again okay uh i've got a lot more valuable content coming so stick around like subscribe let's talk about compression what compression is is it deals with the dynamic range so we have soft parts of a voiceover or a vocal in a song or even for music quiet parts louder parts and what compression will do is it will try to make the quiet parts more loud and compress the louder parts thus making it um making it more congruent in sound okay and i'm going to create an example for you of really dynamic range so please forgive me i will be uh i will be starting off quiet and then i may get loud at the end just just you know if i blow you away my apologies so there's your fair warning so anyway what i'm going to do is i'm going to replicate soft to medium to loud and then we're going to go into compression and i'm going to show you how you can work this thing to your benefits so i'm gonna start off super quiet i'm gonna start off super quiet now moving up to more of a medium range medium range right here and now we're going to get really loud really really loud and i think i got so loud that i actually you know made the mic clip but whatever um you get the idea anyhow i typically wouldn't do that but this is a this is good for the example so let's talk about the compressor okay so let me pull the compressor up here all right so we have the threshold what the threshold is is it's saying okay where would you like us to set a filter right so that anything currently right here that is above negative 15 dbs will then be affected by the the compressor and it will be compressed at a two to one ratio right here so that means like every two db's above you know it'll be compressed down to one so how do we know though where to set the threshold now for voiceover you know typically it's a pretty congruent sound wave however there are some pretty dynamic reads out there that may start off sounding a bit sad a bit quiet and then the mood changes and things become happy and a lot more fun but in that case we could certainly have a dynamic read where we have very small sound waves and much larger sound waves so what i'm going to do here is teach you how you can use the the threshold and the ratio to your benefit now with voiceover we're not going to need to compress a whole lot so the ratio you know really shouldn't be really shouldn't be high you know i think a two to one ratio is just a really solid solid place you know if you're just looking for kind of a one-size-fits-all type deal for your voiceover but nonetheless i'll teach you how to use this stuff to use it to your benefit now in a song singers you know there are parts of the song that can be quiet parts of the song that can be very loud when you're really really projecting so this is this is definitely relevant to vocalists as well so without further ado how do we know how to set the threshold here what we can do is we can highlight the quiet parts and we can play it and then watch this meter right here and then let's see where it ends up gonna start off super quiet okay so like the loudest part in the quiet part is negative 18. but let me play that again super quiet you know by and large we're coming in right about here so you know roughly negative 21 dbs you know in between 18 and 24 let me play that again super quiet right okay so i think it would be safe to say i'm going to start off super quiet that we may want to set the compressor at about i'm going to start off super quiet negative 24. let's do that so that's just an easy way to kind of measure like well how do i measure like what db this is let me just make a duplicate of this track so we can have a side-by-side and i will just throw the compressor on negative 15 db threshold two to one ratio make up gain for after zero db by the way if you're having trouble with sibilance after compression you can try unchecking this box and that works for a lot of people so hopefully it'll work for you but let's go ahead and slap that on okay great so let's see what happens when we change the threshold to negative 24 though the threshold let's throw the threshold down to negative 24 here okay all right so you can see already okay that it has compressed and made louder these quieter parts right here so for instance we'll measure again i'll play this and we'll find it starts max okay so it's maxing out just below or yeah just below negative 12. let's play this and check its max gonna start off super quiet way louder way more loud okay that's good so already just by changing the threshold we have more congruence more congruence already simply because this is in fact more loud in comparison to this now we're going to talk about the threshold okay so i'm actually going to undo this and we will create another duplicate track of this i'll throw that same those same compressor settings on this one here in the middle and we had only changed the threshold for this guy and for this we're going to we have the changed threshold and now we're actually going to change the ratio as well so basically the more dynamic range that we have here i mean and and what i did was create like basically an extreme case um so you know this isn't going to be typical for a lot of people i just wanted to make a very difficult scenario uh for your example so that you could see you know how you can use this stuff how you can measure use it to your benefit and change so we had a two to one ratio but we would certainly get much more congruence if we changed the ratio so let's start off at a four to one and see what that looks like voila already looking nicer already looking more nice more congruence already here we have look i will play this max level okay i'm going to play this so prior to changing the ratio i'm going to start off super quiet we were maxing out at about negative six and now after changing the ratio i'm gonna start off super quiet look at that negative three so you're seeing that we are already getting more congruence in the track and once again this is an extreme case so let's say that we wanted to compress even further what if we changed the ratio to like something crazy like eight to one what would that look like and what would that sound like okay look at that look at the congruence of these sound waves pretty incredible right okay so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to normalize it so i don't blow you away when we have a quick listen and we'll normalize that ooh to negative three i should probably normalize the entire track great so i'm going to hit solo and we're going to have a listen now we do want to stay away from setting the ratio way too high because the more that we compress you know eight to one that's that's pretty solid that's pretty pretty tough ratio the more that we compress the more it will affect the audio the more digital you can sound you know it definitely can damage your audio if you over compress so that's why i typically stick with light compression but extreme cases they call for extreme measures so let's have a listen to this and see how it sounds i'm gonna start off super quiet and i'm going to duplicate this and make it a stereo track just in case this is not coming in on stereo for you all i'm gonna start off super quiet i'm gonna start off super quiet now i'm moving up to more of a medium range medium range right here and now we're going to get really loud really really loud i mean that's incredible and that didn't even really sound bad because you know here's here's the reality if you have real if you have nice equipment and the quality of your audio is really high you can afford to do some of this stuff without it sounding god awful so anyway even with you know some of these usb mics like you can pull stuff like this off if you need to you know but basically now you understand how changing the threshold and the ratio can benefit you now one more time let's listen to this guy this was just the you know regular settings negative 15 on the threshold two to one ratio let's have a quick listen to this actually that's not fair because i did not normalize this so now we're going to normalize it all right now it's normalized you're not gonna be blown away i'm gonna start off super quiet i'm gonna start off super quiet now i'm moving up to more of a medium range medium range right here and now we're going to get really loud really really loud now since we normalized to negative three the highest peak in this audio will be at negative three but the quietest the most quiet audio maxed out at gonna start off super quiet i mean what is that negative 14 so that is a very big difference negative 14 dbs versus negative 3. now down here when we changed the threshold and we changed the ratio now we're maxing out on the quietest part let's see here gonna start off super quiet at negative six and the loudest is negative three so that is a 3 db difference as opposed to an 11 db difference you get what i'm saying okay so there you have it ladies and gentlemen once again it is such a pleasure serving you like subscribe stick around i have not forgotten about you i've got much more much more valuable content coming big shout out to all my students and big shout out to all the people getting eqs for me i know you guys are super happy and i i feel blessed i feel blessed um you guys have been so so good to me so anyway it is my pleasure to serve you i will certainly be back with much more valuable content until next time stay safe stay positive i got your back

Channel: VoiceOverMaster

Views: 11,208

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Id: 4dTGiReB_Qg

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021