AUDIO MASTERCLASS | Let's Process YOUR Vocals / Voice Overs!

[Music] [Music] all right hello everyone good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world my name is jason levine and it is lovely to see you here back on the friday master class on adobe live where today we're going to be um working on user submissions and i'm going to be processing your voiceovers that's right earlier this week i reached out to the community on twitter and suggested that you send me some raw voiceover files so that i can kind of go through and show you what i might do to uh to your to your recordings and this is the first in a series of many actually got this idea from my good friend terry white whom you may have seen earlier this morning who's doing a really awesome master class on kind of lightroom classic versus lightroom cc and which one is for you well a couple weeks ago he started the series where he was doing sort of photo retouches based on user submissions so um i thought that was a wonderful concept and uh thank you terry for the suggestion so i thought we would do that today so we've got three different voiceover artists that we'll be working on and again we're going to kind of evaluate the recordings take a look i'll i'm going to give you a lot of different ideas and techniques and tips kind of along the way there's always lots of different ways to process things and of course you're talking voice over you know first and foremost largely it just depends where is it going what type of thing is it for is it a commercial is it a trailer is it a podcast what is it so there's different concepts and different ways that you might process all of those things but in any case i'm going to try and cover as much of that as we can and if you've got questions of course i'm following the chats if you want to be in my line of sight view for the chat i'm following the chat directly at behance.net adobe live but if you're also watching on my youtube channel jason levine video i'll be peeking back over there as well i can see some of you there so uh thank you very much and as always of course you've got a wonderfully international audience watching today so elizabeth mock how's it going robzilla how are you mallory it's great to see you again cal and wade steve festus casaboom always lovely to see you lindsay palmer umacorn great to see you and then we've got uh major mal one danish naim david lewis oh yes david lewis will be working on your file later today uh left edit hello from london uk how it's going st photo works from malaysia great to see you fm boy dpk on all right sweet and desiree hey hey okay so uh one last thing to you know i told you i'm i'm still kind of re i'm redesigning the studio slightly so if you notice the lighting today is a little bit different what what do you think i don't know maybe it's too bright maybe it's a little too i don't know it's different right i used to have a more subtle blue backlit halo now it's not subtle it's kind of nice i don't know i've got to redo a bunch of my soundproofing this weekend uh uh most of it was permanently mounted some of it was semi-permanent and for whatever reason in the last week maybe i don't there's no explanation things just started falling off the walls so i've got been doing a lot of caulking and things this weekend it's going to be it's going to be real fun so much for not doing anything in any case let's go ahead and get started we're going to dive right in we're going to move over to audition here and let's get working with our first file since everything looks like it is rolling along nicely okay all right i'm also going to grab my headphones while i would normally do this of course on speakers um i can't really hear i i you'll get you'll get echo uh feedback if i have to pump up my monitors the way i would normally mix uh voices or vocals in here so i'm just gonna do it in headphones so we can kind of listen directly all right so our first file plug myself in here uh our first file comes to us from twitter user sleepy eve now i want to point out too that all of these all the stuff that i received here again these are voiceover artists sent me these files on twitter this is uh evelyn's site uh and again at sleepy eve here and this is a whole series of different kind of raw spots that she was doing and the first thing that i'll do so when i get a file like this is that i kind of look and i notice okay well it it looks good it looks healthy it's a healthy file um we've got some dynamic differences here you can see these little sections here not that they're necessarily quieter but they don't have as much uh intermittent peak changes you know here we've got again kind of consistency in the overall peak and loudness this one seems to be the hottest but the very first thing that i do before i even play back i've talked about this on stream a lot and this is a great practice for anybody especially if you're working with voice over is run amplitude statistics okay this is going to tell you all the statistics all the data all the nerdy details about your audio before you even get started all right now to the naked eye while this may appear that this is kind of yeah it's sort of it's perfect and there's nothing wrong and everything's great because everything looks fairly healthy and in balance and we can see up at the top here that the peak amplitude is showing up at zero okay um but then we can see that there's actually some clip samples now 12 clipped samples uh and i'm i'm guessing these aren't probably consistent although they may all live right here we can actually probably even find out exactly where those live yeah and they are so you notice i click on the this is like our little drop a pin finder and sure enough you know it went right to that right to that transient attack right there so 12 clip samples is not is not that big of a deal however before you begin doing anything you should you should solve that problem okay and there's two ways that you can do it so again if it's just a simple a single uh series of samples based on like a transient attack let's take a listen to what this actually sounds like thanks okay thanks wow lovely wow lovely okay there's even a little bit of crunchiness a little slight bit of distortion in there when you're in audition you're working in 32-bit float now i'm not going to get into a whole detailed explanation about that because we want to process voice over and that isn't super 100 relevant necessarily i mean it is in terms of dynamic range but the really short answer is you're always processing in 32-bit float so a really easy way just to kind of fix that problem is to take this on clip volume tool our unclip gain tool that's really more volume and just attenuate this ever so slightly all right so let's go down by like a db and a half now if we scan again and scan the entire file again and i'm assuming all of those clipped samples were in that one and they were in fact now you can see there's no clip samples now we've adjusted our overall peak amplitude we're about 0.09 decibels below zero and everything's healthy and if we listen to this wow lovely wow lovely it's better now it has a little there's a little bit of crunch in there maybe we could fix this with a little bit of d clipper i'm gonna scan it and see what it says let's try and repair it all right take a listen here wow lovely wow lovely oh interesting so yeah so take a listen here here's the before wow lovely wow wow wow wow now if you're listening in headphones there's a little like it's more almost clicky than it is clippy uh because theoretically we're not clipped but in fact because we had clipped samples the waveform was actually slightly compromised digitally so when you run the d-clipper it just takes that edge off all right so let's redo the d-clipper you see that it's going to attenuate everything but now when you listen wow lovely wow wow wow that little clickiness is just it's just a little less harsh and you can see that it found approximately you know four four samples across this entire file right in this location here now it's going to process the whole thing but that's okay took a little bit of the edge off all right so now this is looking good and a good starting point when i before i begin processing i typically like to bring a voiceover to around anywhere from like minus three for its peak to minus six so again if i rescan this now word around minus four so this is right where i want to be this is not an absolute rule i just like to know that there's a little bit of headroom because ultimately regardless of the type of voiceover that you're working on you're going to add most likely unless they tell you not to if you're not doing the processing someone else will they're going to add some kind of compression so if you've got everything kind of peaking at you know minus one minus point five you're just you're just not leaving enough headroom uh in the event that you know maybe you eq something significantly and now you're above zero and of course in 32-bit float you can always attenuate down so even if i raised all of this 20 db and everything was completely clipping i could after doing that bring it right back down and restore it it's going to be fine that's the benefit of 32-bit float now if you're in a straight 16 bit audition doesn't work natively in 16 in other words it doesn't it always processes in 32 but if you were working in 16 bit you tried to go 20 decibels up and then back down you you'd actually have baked in distortion at that point there's no saving it so 32-bit gives you a little bit of that flexibility there um okay so now let's go ahead and kind of quickly listen to some of this and kind of get the feel for what this is all right here we go female adult nicole lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic wow already incredible service finally i hope it isn't too cold did you forget my order okay so these are really wonderful right i love i love and i love hearing like the character in people's voices i really you know i really tune into all these little subtle things so this is wonderful i can also see that evelyn has joined us in the chat thank you for joining us evelyn thank you again for lending us your sample for today okay so overall this sounds great and i see evelyn also uh listed the microphone she's using a razer siren not familiar with that one um but i'm hearing a little bit of there's something in the low end that i that is that's registering for me that i don't love so we're going to go into our special frequency display which we've talked about many times on stream here okay now when you're in the spectral frequency display for those of you new to this again we're looking at frequency over time so we have our frequency along our vertical axis here and you can see all the way from zero hertz to whatever this is a 44 1 file so based on the nyquist limit our top sample here is going to be 22 000 22050 hertz 22 050 hertz okay and then the color that you see represents amplitude so first of all the first thing i see is that this was recorded in obviously in a very clean environment um there's no there's no ambient noise and how do i know that well because again color is amplitude so where you see it closer to sort of yellowish orange that's the greatest amount of amplitude right and then as it fades into red and sort of a darker purple and then a deep purple and then into black we're going into silence all right and naturally you're going to see more black in the upper registers because you know the human voice there's just not a lot there's just not a lot of frequency content going out of us you know above 16 or 18k right outside of certain certain sounds so when i look at the background the in-between space it's very clean now this could also be a noise gate i don't know how this is set up but it looks fairly clean it even maybe there's even like a little bit of attenuation here so this could be a native noise gate of some kind it could be some kind of noise suppression on the input if it's a usb style mic many of them have that dsp built in but it doesn't matter it sounds good it sounds clean what i see however that i heard that's a little troubling is down at the bottom here okay and i'm going to zoom in from about 0 to 2k all right so this area that you see down here all right and you can see it's fairly persistent now as we zoom down further all right remember we're looking at really the amplitude and the degree of that amplitude write it right at around 60 maybe even as high as 70 hertz there's just this there's just this persistent bar of something all right now as i look at this waveform what you can see now this could be also again based on the microphone if the microphone had what's known as a base roll-off which in this case it may have but it wasn't utilized because it's picking up 0 to 60 or 0 to 80 hertz um there's there's just some kind of low frequency noise going on here it's not like hum hum would be represented as a solid horizontal line it's probably just the mic picking up some of the lower bass frequencies and a bit of subsonics and if that mic is a dynamic mic and uh you're speaking fairly close on it then we're getting what's called proximity effect where it's going to accentuate some of those base frequencies a little bit so as i look at this i'm like well i don't think there's a lot of her actual voice down there in fact i really know there isn't and i can also see visually i'll draw a line here with my marquee tool that really kind of the the base the base fundamental of this voice really begins somewhere at around 100 hertz and you can you can see that pretty clearly just by looking at again those orange sections right of the dialogue notice here in the middle between like 60 and 120 it's it's like a different shade right it's more purple because there's really nothing there really the fundamental of her voice starts right about here right around let's say 110 hertz so what that means to me is that i can probably just get rid of this stuff i don't need any of that now it's not super loud if i just go ahead and play back just that selection right here okay now this is coming in at around say it's peaking at around -43 so it's averaging around say minus 48 minus 45-ish give or take again as she's speaking i hope for me though you don't really need any of that now here's the thing if you're not going to be processing at all you could deliver this as is and with low frequency noise at minus 48 db you're you're not going to hear it you're really not but the second you start eq'ing particularly if you're going to be eq'ing the low end the second you start denoising the second you start compressing well unless you're using band limited compression you're also going to be compressing this low frequency information and i can see i can tell you there's nothing down there that we need how do we verify that now i told you this is going to get super nerdy i'm going to go ahead and copy this whole thing over to a new file all right so here here's what that looks like and again amplitude alone this isn't super loud let's go ahead and amplify that all right i'm going to amplify this about 30 decibels so this is what if you felt like ah just leave it we could just leave it there it's not bothersome this is what ultimately we'd be keeping take a listen and let's go to our frequency analysis here it's like is that the persistent heartbeat no it's it's like low frequency pulsing right because the microphone and the table or whatever is picking up some resonance but there's nothing there that we need we don't need it we just don't need it so there's a couple ways that you can you can attack that all right in this case let's go back to our spectral frequency display here and really the easiest way you can just hit delete and take it out it's that simple and now all of that is just gone all right now did we lose any of the low frequency warmth of the voice itself no again even look here you can see there's there's no fundamental that really starts below that and we still have a bit of presence in the 40 and 60 range but really the bottom baseline fundamental is around 120 here so we haven't destroyed warmth we haven't done anything it's gonna sound awesome so now when we play this back female adult nicole lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic wow already and i i want to scrub through this here a little bit to make another point again getting super audio nerdy on you here but when you look at this frequency spectrum here excuse me frequency analysis here you can see that there's still a healthy amount of low end what we've effectively killed are the subsonics and a lot of your a lot of your microphones out there today i'm i'm sorry to say they actually have pretty impressive um frequency response ratings particularly on the low end you'll usually see a figure of like 20 20 hertz to 20k 20 hertz is subsonic you can't really hear it but you can feel it that's i've got a sub down here and you know if you leave it to leave 20 hertz going for about five minutes you know it can make a lot of people vomit myself included um so we have enough healthy 180 it's still there's still a bit there but we don't have any of that subsonic rumble and now we don't have to worry about what happens if we start processing that rumble all right so that's just a little thing that i will typically do not everybody does that um if you ever run into an instance where you've processed your voice you're listening you're like i just don't know go to the spectral view take a look take a listen and try and be really precise about what you're cutting out here all right now again when we talk about delivery of a voice with something like this no i'm just going to look over at our chats real well augustus clark thank you very much julian miller my hair looks amazing today thank you mr knight rider chris simir dalek hello [Music] all right uh okay joey what's up okay robzilla pro tip we don't need it that's correct now remember just on that rob you know if i were doing this voiceover i've got a super low voice and when i'm doing radio voice now again this is kind of like excitable in fact it's it's great because um evelyn she's like happy or like neutral if i were doing something like this there's just inherently going to be more low end my fundamental is is lower so i wouldn't do a sweep to slice everything necessarily however um if it's subsonic boom you don't want any of that right if you're in a movie theater and you know when you feel the chair shake you shouldn't feel the chair shake from someone someone talking you know unless it's some really bizarre voice over i mean that's very uncommon not even darth vader's voice has subsonic rumble no no no you know i mean you you could make a case for why you might do that that's not what's typically done right that's explosions you know volcanoes erupting that's subsonic there's no there's no subsonic in here barry white you know one of the greatest greatest uh uh bass voices ever it wasn't a lot of subsonic in there it was just low frequency all right so again you you can play around with it you have to be mindful of it but you should be aware of what's there in case you need to get rid of it now i mentioned before that i don't hear any ambient noise well adult nicole lovely nice but there is a little bit of room tone and it becomes a little more obvious again when you kind of listen in between the spoken sections now you're really going to have to raise your headphones to hear that i'm not going to i'm not going to bother trying to let make you hear that stuff but this is one of those things where now we can start to tweak this ever so slightly now i'm going to do this in the effects rack so that we can stack this in a live time chain typically for a voiceover sometimes i do it in the chain sometimes i just destructively process as i go and then save versions or save copies if you do everything in the effects rack you don't have to do that so first step here is going to be just a little bit of denoiser all right this i love this denoise effect used sparingly it is very effective all right and it's very effective for just removing just a little touch of some of that room tony maybe low end kind of noise and in this particular instance of it you can see that i'm telling it to focus on lower frequencies i could probably do broadband but i don't want it to touch the high end i don't want it to touch the mids so let's see how this does so i'm going to i'm just going to see i'm going to drag let's see what this sounds like around 18 percent all right i'm going to loop this little section right here for myself again you might not hear this as well but i'll process it momentarily and let you see what it's doing okay so at 50 we're like completely dry did you forget my order what's the holdup why is it taking so long where is my food world class all right so i'm actually gonna go because there's a little bit more mid-range noise in there i'm gonna go focus on all frequencies now again just to kind of show you visually what's gonna happen here here's before it's a little hard to see some of that gradient purple i'm zooming in all the way so you can see it there all right let's just go ahead and process this all right and now you can see there's just that much less there's very little of that gradient purple now this this was like a key click right here all right this is also something we could probably just take out if we wanted to i'm going to show you another way to do that in a second but now we've just removed a little bit of that room tone now room tone is nice right we always think about room tone when we're doing dialogue replacement maybe you don't necessarily need it when you're doing voiceover right you want it really kind of clean and dry so we used very a very subtle amount around 20 percent and now when we play this back female adult nicole lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic okay so this is great so the last step for this one because i want to move on i've been about 24 minutes here um i like the eq of this now again i've talked about this ad infinitum on stream you know the microphone i can't not use this the one chooses the wizard harry the microphone chooses the voiceover artist all right not every mic sounds great on everybody and the same mic that sounds great on me might sound horrible on you or two versions of the same mic one might not sound good on my voice it's just the way it is you really have to find one that complements the better qualities of your voice if you've got a super sort of thin you know not full bodied kind of voice that's not an insult not everybody has that kind of voice then you probably don't want a very sensitive condenser something like a blue yeti because that's just going to really over accentuate the high end and the high mids and it's going to sound thin and a little brittle just the way it is you might find a variation that sounds okay based on distancing based on the treatment in your room it can sound okay but as a general rule you might want a dynamic mic which is just automatically going to kind of warm things up make them a little bit warmer a little bit bigger and then you can use effects like compression and things to thicken them ever so slightly all right people always ask well how do you get like a really big sound if your voice is sort of thin i mean you can't you can't re-synthesize i mean you can but it's not going to sound very natural some of it just has to be in you and that's why we have voiceover artists with all different types of characters in their voices because everybody sounds a little bit different all right so but for this i think the eq is great i wonder when my order will arrive now again if i were doing like a movie trailer or something else maybe i would really accentuate and make it just a bit brighter and a bit crunchier and really kind of punchy in the face with it but i like that you know this feels like radio commercial to me um even tv commercial i don't i don't need it to be in my face i just need it to be present and clean and i really like the eq but the one thing i do want to work on a bit is compression so let's go over to um oh so here let me uh we're going to do it all all at once in real time so i'll keep the denoiser on there and i'm going to use a native compressor basically the one that i really think is pretty decent all right tube modeled compressor here all right mallory is asking is the voice recorded in adobe audition 2 i've never used this program uh you'd have to ask evelyn i'm assuming it is but i don't know so evelyn maybe you can answer that for us all right if uh if it is bruce gonzalez what kind of mic am i using so the mic that's on this particular stream is a sennheiser mkh 416 right which is a very standard shotgun mic all right shot man from bangladesh how are you all right okay very good okay so again for something like this now because we have some fairly significant dynamics changes if i were processing this for a commercial obviously this isn't all meant to be in one spot right i would very very likely you know process this section by itself process this section by itself process this section by itself because these are obviously different reads of different content they're not this is just a a string out of different samples right so i'm not going to process everything the same way so let's take a section though that's consistent and of the same theme like this one here female adult positive thanks thanks a million okay and we just want to control some of these dynamics right we can see that kind of if i'm just looking at just straight peaks average here is somewhere around minus 15 ish but we've got quite a few that are going minus 12 minus 10 minus 9 you've got this one peak here which is like minus 5. again there's nothing wrong with dynamics dynamics are wonderful but for voice over for commercial for radio for streaming you want things a little more consistent because you're sacrificing some overall loudness by allowing those i mean you've got a you have a six to seven decibel change in peak that's twice the amplitude granted it's just a momentary transient but it really throws everything else off so for this i'm going to use a really fairly subtle amount of compression here like maybe maybe maybe let's do like two two and a half to one all right and that means that for every two and a half db above the threshold that i set it's one db at the output now for attack again this is it's not fast speech but these are short little clips so i really want the compressor to kind of kick in right away so i'm going to set this at around let's do like a 0.3 millisecond attack and then uh for the release again fairly quick release for this not super super fast but let's maybe bring this down to around 150 it's probably going to land between 150 and 225. i've got about four decibels of makeup gain on here let's start this at zero i'm going to play this back and let's adjust our threshold and see where we come up female adult positive thanks thanks a million looks delicious wonderful amazing service wow that was fast it's here i may have to cancel my order does it normally take this long check please may i have the check please nice place that was a great meal okay all right so now again if i were to just process this one section here and remember that with your gain reduction meter we've got to see we've got to see these lights we've got to see at least that third light blinking that's telling us that we've exceeded uh we've exceeded the threshold so at again 2.5 or 3 to 1 it's one decibel at the output if we don't see three bars on that gain reduction meter we're not compressing means you got to drop the threshold even more all right so if i were to apply this right now what you can see is that it just evens those peaks out a bit more nicely again that one is still a little bit hotter that's okay that can be a little bit more dynamic all right but it's not that drastic change between all of the various um all the various spots right there and again if we were to go to something like a zero millisecond attack let's make this a little bit longer and apply that all right we can squeeze it down anymore but now this gives us the ability to kind of raise everything more globally right and give it really just a bit more presence and a bit more punch female adult positive thanks thanks a million looks delicious wonderful amazing service wow that was fast okay now again by compressing and re-amplifying now you're hearing a little bit more of that room tone so maybe we would have wanted to remove a bit more in advance again i'm going a little more subtle here but you get the idea but right away you can see now that this looks very much more consistent than it did originally right so this is ultimately how you want your voiceover to be consistent now for things like uh again dialogue and a film they'll typically give that some breathing room right this is why you tend to have to listen in for dialogue and then the sound effects and sound design comes in it blows you out of your chair more and more they're compressing everything so that it's very very even but if you really want to preserve dynamics this is what it looks like right and then you look at a section like this right here i mean these this looks great i probably wouldn't even add any real compression to this maybe just a little bit of limiting to even out some of the peaks right and you can also do that let's say that i wanted to cap this at -6 we went into something like amplitude and compression a hard limiter let's do a minus six db ceiling okay no input boost let's leave the look ahead which is your attack time at seven milliseconds that should be fine release time default at 100 okay right and it's just going to cap off so that nothing goes above -6 right and you can see those two little peaks right there it's not going to adversely change the amplitude we didn't add any boost so it's just going to be a little bit more present okay now the last thing that i want to show you here with regard to this file let's take this compress we can leave the compressor in there is the noise gate all right so actually here you know what i'm going to i'm going to process let me go and do this process all of this and then let's let's grab our noise gate all right now this is if you want to add complete silence between your spoken passages because remember there's still room tone in between each of those spoken passages lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic all right and you can see that again if we zoom in here by the way evelyn's files getting all the explanation the rest of these i'm just going to start to kind of fly through there's still room tone in here right there's still some of that room noise in between sections what if you don't want any of that what if you want it just totally silent well that's where the auto gate comes in and you can find that in the dynamics effect in audition now this also has a compressor it also has an expander and a limiter i don't like the sound of these compressor limiters as much which is why i didn't use it you could in fact use the same settings here and it'll sound kind of the same i don't love this compressor as much although for voice it's okay i just i like the r2 model one a little bit better but really they function and sound very similar but the gate is invaluable so here again i want a fairly quick attack fairly fast release and i want some hold now the release is going to determine how quickly that gate closes so if we want it like totally silent in between passages we bring this release down to nearly zero if we want a little bit more of that room tones that it's a little bit more natural we could do something like 200 milliseconds so let's take a quick listen here i'm going to set the threshold and see how it's sounding we'll process it and then we'll show you some differences okay female adult nicole lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic wow already incredible service finally it isn't too cold did you forget my order what's the holdup why is it taking so long okay so i'm adjusting the threshold to make sure that with that attack time which is super fast that i'm not not only am i not cutting off her starting consonants but if there's some thanks like i don't want it to be thanks i really want to hear those s's so i want to make sure that it's kicking in fast enough and that the release time is preserving that so if i apply this as it is you can actually see that first of all in between the sections now it is completely black meaning that there is no sound right so that's perfect there's no room tone and if we investigate zoom in you can actually see a little a little trail off at the end right there right the release time that's a 200 millisecond trail before it closes the gate closes the window now evelyn had actually sent me a a a processed version of some of this work uh let's see where is it it's this one here and if you take a look here notice there is there is no decay it's a very sharp closure okay now that that's a personal preference i don't usually typically like so so much closure because oftentimes you can end up with little artifacts little clickies in there which by the way evelyn there's a couple of those little clickies in there to prevent that you elongate the release time and make sure you have some hold but let's mimic that same technique because there are times where you want it just totally silent i'm going to repeat my last command let's give it a release of say like 50. we might even have to go slower i mean faster but let's see if that does it all right yeah and now you can see there's virtually no no fall off no uh no decay whatsoever right and if we do it even more aggressively let's just go down to like 50 which is the lowest it goes all right yeah female adult nicole lovely nice fabulous looks fantastic wow already incredible service all right and actually it works for this style it works right it really it actually works you don't even need that little bit of decay maybe it's a little more aesthetically pleasing maybe if it's just the voice by itself that you were listening to there's probably going gonna be music here it would be nicer but if you've got stuff underneath it keep it super clean you can do that with the gate all right pretty cool yes okay nice interesting okay malory when we get a voiceover done whose job is it to correct the sound it's done by the voiceover artist well that's the thing you know uh i wouldn't say i would say no it just depends right depends who the client is uh i've done stuff where because i'm an engineer i'm like i'll process it it's my voice i know how i wanted to sound and i do that and if they don't like it then i'll send them a raw one and say please don't call me again um most of the time i would imagine if you're doing a vo project someone's like okay you know here's here's the copy read it just send us the raw file we'll do what we need to do with it and that's that's i would say probably nine times out of ten the case okay thank you very much evelyn that was awesome moving on all right so our next file comes to us from twitter user at davidpresenter sitemastersproduction1.podbean.com and uh let's take a listen to this hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever along with london's leading music venue the 606 club of chelsea i'm david lewis and i'm with you for two hours of great music so the show is a little different this week in so far as for the first time in six months i don't have a guest with me in the studio instead we are going to focus on this year's efg london jazz festival it all starts next friday friday the 13th of november a month through until sunday the 22nd we've got gigs down at the club and what we're going to do during this show is listen to the artists coming up in the festival awesome okay and i see evelyn just chimed in with the exact same exact same so it's good that we're consistent yeah i mean most of the time it's it's it's going to be somebody else you know and it just depends on the client right they're going to they're going to tell you what they want and what what they will or won't want you to do one thing that she points out too for things like plosives or little again momentary sibilant clipping sections or something i would totally fix those because you wouldn't want to send them something bad and that's something which like they if it's not there they're not gonna know that you removed it now noise reduction if you don't know what you're doing it's real easy to muck up your files so don't attempt that if you're not kind of a little more seasoned or schooled and doing it but plosive removal sibilance removal yeah that that kind of stuff you can probably get away with and again basic normalization or attenuation not a bad idea all right now again this one here very different sound again we're going to scan this we can already see no clip samples very healthy looking peak amplitude minus four and a half right where we were before our measured bit depth captured at 24 bit lovely very consistent here again i don't know how david's capturing this could be with a live compressor it doesn't feel it feels compressed but not not overly so it feels very broadcasty as it should right so for this um again two fundamental things that i might do all right and this definitely has a good a good help a good helping of room tone now i've got my headphones way up so i don't know if you're all hearing that but there's definitely some healthy room tone in there so once again i'm going to come into my denoise and again assuming i'm doing the final processing on this i'm going to take that out we don't we don't need we i don't need that room tone so and i can also see as i look here it's kind of primarily focused and sort of below 1k so i don't know if this i don't know if this one's going to do it we may have to use the broadband uh the broadband one as well or maybe even the smile which is low and high let's actually take a listen to that hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever along with london's leading music venue the 606 club hello and welcomed all right hello and welcome hello and welcome right now let's turn it on hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead board okay and one more time with a smile hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever along with london's leading music venue the 606 club of chelsea i'm david lewis and i'm with you for two hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever along with london's leading music venue hello hello yeah i might i might even go a little bit more and i'm not sure which curve i'm liking better here hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead all right this one let gonna go with that i'm gonna go about 36 percent okay so again this one for me doesn't need compression uh little subtle de-rooming denoising the only thing for me now again this is a stylistic choice this david has a great voice here and um i like that there's actually a little bit of a of an upper mid-range bump in fact it it when i heard it i immediately went ah this now this is obviously in the uk the beatles uh rubber soul 1965 has this very particular eq bump at around 4 500 hertz which kind of brightens the upper mids and i'm hearing that in here which i like but for my ear i would probably attenuate it ever so slightly that's just my personal preference my personal choice it sounds wonderful it may be coming across as slightly sibilant to some um or just maybe just a little a little bright right in some of those uh transient consonant sounds so to do that we're going to use a little bit of parametric eq all right so let's go into the parametric equalizer here actually we're going to add it to the rack okay and uh first we just kind of need to identify what it is that we're trying to trying to really improve upon or or or just subtly subtly uh finesse so let's listen to this section right here and what we're going to do during this show is listen to the artist coming up in the festival so our first act on the festival is amani she's going on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track okay so this is a good section because there's a lot of s's in it so what i'm going to do here is we're going to start by um let's enable band number four i've got this in full reset mode by the way so everything is turned off i'm going to start at around 4 500 hertz okay and i'm going to use a q value of around 12. that means a very super narrow band right because i just want to attenuate just a little of that s now you could say why not use a de-esser i almost never use de-essers i always find them to be a little too aggressive and frankly i have an analog eq that i used to use um as a side chain eq to attenuate along with the side chain compressor to like attenuate really harsh sibilance and it sounded very natural there are some digital ones that do it fairly decently our native de-esser for my money is very aggressive so i think it would destroy kind of the the the beautiful characteristics of this voice so i don't want to use that but a little subtle eq with a very narrow band will probably be just just what we need so i'm going to loop this play it back now i'm going to have to sweep through and find exactly kind of that center frequency that i'm hearing and then pull it down ever so slightly so here we go so our first act on the festival is amanda she's going to be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly after her fight mr flowers against cameron so rather fittingly our first sir finally follow us on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track so our first act on the festival is amanda she's going to be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly okay so it's right about all right it could even be 45 it could even be 63. 56 is actually kind of one of the base fundamentals of sibilance it's not that it's sibilant it's just that for me there's there's a there's an ex it's accentuated so i would i would probably recommend bringing that down that's my personal preference so i'm going to attenuate that let's bring it down to around minus six and a half let's take a listen so our first without act on the festival is amani she's gonna be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track so our first act on the festival is amani she's getting me on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track so our first act on the festival is amani she's gonna be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track okay it's subtle right it's a very narrow band it just took a little bit of that edge off again that's my personal preference now again where this is going maybe you want a little bit more of that accentuated if there's other music going on here i could see why this actually could benefit really nicely okay if there's like a bed underneath this but for standalone i'm just going to soften that edge just a little bit now for some this may be a little bright again if you want to take off some of the shimmer we could even do something actually i'd probably use one of these um shelving filters here and dial in around 12k and we could pull a little bit of this down so our first act on the festival is omani she's going to be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first dress before our first act on the festival is amanda she's going to be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first track okay just kind of warms it up a little i don't i don't think it needs that so i wouldn't touch 12k and frankly the rest of it is really nice now if i wanted to do anything again i typically will always kind of a b against the frequency analysis as well oh sorry and i still have david's lower third up there all right let's get that out of there as i'm looking at the frequency analysis here i mean i might even give it a little sort of in the 150ish range you can see there's a dip right there's a dip we haven't touched 200 hertz but there's noticeable first act on the festival is ammani she's going to be on stage along with lex can there's a little bit of a dip over here occasionally so again i might give it a little bit of around say 110 120 if i just wanted to warm things up a little bit more all right maybe a queue of around four cameras so rather fittingly our first track so our first act on the festival is amani she's gonna be on stage along with lex cameron so rather fittingly our first dragon okay give just a little bit more low end warmth um this is a very very nicely done voiceover so subtle change here and again at this point if we apply this denoise oh sorry we did it just to the selection here let's do the whole file we go ahead and apply this to everything all right go back into our spectral frequency now okay let's go to the beginning and let's show the before so again if you're taking a look here i'm watching the stream you can see that there's just decidedly more gradient of reddish purple here because of that room tone after it's not totally black but it's just attenuated it's a little more subtle so now when it starts hello and welcome to this week's straight ahead brought you as ever along with london's leading music venue the 606 club of chelsea i'm david lewis and i'm with you for two hours of great music all right wonderful now one last thing i wouldn't personally do this but some might say well i'm still hearing there's a bit of kind of room reflection so it's not so much the room tone like the noise of the room but there is a bit of reflectiveness wherever this was captured so we do also have it's called d reverb i don't love that term because really it should it should be d d ambience d reflection but if you want to pull out a little subtle amount of that room reflection you can use this now that this is it's kind of aggressive when once you go beyond a certain range you start to incur some artifacting but it can actually kind of de-room a voice-over so let's just take a listen to here kind of in the default and see what it does so the show is a little different this week in so far as for the first time in six months i don't have a guest with me in the studio instead we are going to focus on this year's efg london jazz festival it all starts next friday friday the 13th of november a month through until sunday the 22nd we've got gigs down at the club and what we're going to do during this show is listen to the artists coming up in the festival so our first act on the festival is ammani she's going to be on stage 39 it's it's pretty subtle all right you got to be you got to be headphones super loud just a little but again you saw when i went to like 50 suddenly it sounds it sounds very processed and artificial so you got a bit you got to be careful with d reverb but great that we could uh check that one out okay nice evan i'm glad you said something about the dslr i tried using it and found it to be really heavy-handed like a guillotine yeah absolutely it's it's it's not it's not great and it's not that honestly there are very few de-essers that i think work really well there's a couple of waves uh third-party ones that are recreations of analog gear that do a really good job ours are so so really if you've got really bad de-essing that you can't re-record just know this between 5.6 and 6.3 k are kind of the standard fundamentals use a super narrow band 8 10 12 even a 16 a q value of 16. boost it up wait until you hear those that are slicing your eardrums and then pull them out all right and as long as you're super narrow and it's again momentary you know sibilance is is is is passing by you know um your brain won't interpret that momentary lapse of high frequency and if anything it'll just gloss it it's like it's masked over so i will do that a thousand times over using um a software de-esser all right and for our last sample so thank you so much uh david lewis for that that was wonderful it's really great david is saying yes it's a radio show so there is often a bed underneath it oh very nice and it's run through an analog desk with a mic compressor running at about minus three there you go see man a man can hear these things so it was really wonderfully done uh and firing pincing i don't like using de-essers i mean don't get me wrong de-essers can be great and like i said my analog solution nails it every time i seldom wire that in there's some software ones that are good but usually and especially with mics today you could probably tackle most of it with just a little bit of narrow band eq okay for our last one we have a file by amy ferrati at ames1217 her site amyfvoice.com friend of mine amy fratty does some really awesome work and uh let's take a listen to this and we're going to run our amplitude statistics and you can see that we are very healthy here we've got nice plenty of amplitude again this is like a raw read of lots of different spots now this one this file is 16 bit so this is actually great i didn't notice this earlier so again if we're going to be processing this a lot of your usb mics record at they only do 16-bit resolution they don't do 24. so before you begin processing it is absolutely essential that you convert the sample type not interpret convert you're going to convert it you can keep the sample rate whatever it is so it's at 44. i won't change that mono i won't change that but i do want to change it to 32-bit float okay if you process it 16-bit you will have diminishing returns especially if you're doing noise reduction compression and eq all right you will destroy your sound before it even starts to sound good it'll sound good in preview but after you process and fit you're gonna be like something's not quite right you must convert to 32-bit okay do not process on a 16-bit file always work in 32-bit just a good way to be okay so let's take a listen at ge healthcare we've always known what our people are made of but recently we've been put to the test and we've been called to meet a challenge that's like nothing any of us have ever seen we've been called to be resilient to be selfless to be brave and to be our very best okay i love this all right this one this you're like feeling this one in your heart right it's like emotional emotional story emotional voice over here so sounds wonderful sounds like a uh a nice full-bodied dynamic mic being used here you can hear all that nice warmth and again when i look at this and listen i'm hearing a little bit of something in the low end that is just just not i just don't love and you can see that there's just some there's some instances where there's just some low end stuff going on here that we probably don't need now again as we look at kind of those low end fundamentals if i drew my little line right here and zoom in yeah it's the same we're looking at it just just below about a hundred hertz so all this other stuff it's just a lot of that low end kind of subsonic stuff that we don't really need so something else that you can do in lieu of in lieu of deleting that in this case we can go a little bit more subtle or again a little bit more less aggressive well i guess it's still pretty aggressive because it's an fft filter using the fft filter now there's a preset in here which i've shown before that i made years ago called kill the mic rumble because i can see that and that i think has a cutoff starting at around 100 hertz i'm going to extend this to around 120. all right with the drop off here at 80. so basically preserving everything above 80 which really there's not much i could probably even squeeze that in a bit go ahead and apply this right it does the same thing as deleting it and again now when i listen at ge healthcare we've always known what our people are made of but recently we've been put to the test and we've been called to meet a challenge that's like nothing any of us have ever seen it's still warm it's still full uh it's still emotional it still has warmth we just got rid of the subsonic rumble that we don't need all right i've only got a minute here so i got to show you one last thing again maybe i want to just kind of pump up a little of those upper mids i'm going to go to a third-party eq that i have here where i already dialed this in at 5k giving it about a 1.2 db boost and then just a little bit of shimmer at 12.5 k again the mid range and low end is wonderful so let's just play this back we've been called to be resilient to be selfless to be brave and to be our very best and to be our very best all right go ahead and apply that it just adds a little bit more clarity a little bit more brightness and then as i look at this again you know i would add some subtle compression on here but i would keep it fairly subtle i wouldn't go aggressive and just keep things real nice so unfortunately my friends that is all the time we have uh we've got the illustrator daily creative challenge coming up next so stick around for that thanks for watching see you next time bye-bye you

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 4,627

Keywords: Premiere Pro, editing, puget systems, system configuration, 4K editing, how to edit in premiere pro, how to configure your PC, how to configure your Mac, Jason Levine, Beatlejase, tutorial, Adobe Care, AdobeCare, Caroline Sears, Matt Bach

Id: 4ot7Li77W50

Length: 62min 47sec (3767 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020