Beginner's Guide: Fairlight Audio Editing And Mixing in DaVinci Resolve

i'm going to cover compression settings additive and subtractive equalization voice restoration and i'm even going to cover how to mix your voice with music using something called sidechain compression whether you're using a professional microphone at home or a shotgun microphone while you're running and gunning a gopro or even an iphone it's just really important to capture the best audio you can okay so here we have a audio file that i recorded with my studio microphone at home and i'm in the edit timeline and although you can apply some audio effects here in the edit tab we're gonna hop over to the fairlight tab where you should do all of your post processing for your voice so here i have a voice over on channel 4. this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone so the first thing i like to do is get my entire audio file at a good baseline volume so i'm going to right click on it and select normalize audio levels my target level is negative 3 so let's go ahead and select normalize that'll bring the overall volume up just a little bit next what you want to do is come over here to the right hand side in your mixer and we want to find a4 which is the audio 4 channel that we're on and the first thing you want to do is click on this little plus button and you want to come down until you see restoration scroll over to fairlight effects and select de-esser now a de-esser will actually compress the s in the sh when you speak so let's go ahead and adjust this so it kind of balances out our voice first thing you want to do is select listen to s only and i know for my voice the frequency range between 7 000 to about 8 000 is where we want to really focus our attention let's go ahead and turn up the amount so we really boost those harsh frequencies and listen to my voice from the beginning this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b around the 7.5 k range is where i'm going to kind of suppress these frequencies let's go ahead and turn off the listen to s only and instead of having this thing cranked to 100 what i like to do is start at 50 and work my way down because sometimes what can happen is this really squashes the high end and we don't want that this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b and i think it sounds amazing so 50 is a good amount for my specific voice you can also turn the reaction time of how quickly this compresses that high end i keep mine at medium this next one is kind of up to you if you want to use it i use it on my voice sometimes and it kind of gives the vocal a little bit more body so to speak go ahead and click on that plus button again come down to dynamics scroll down until you see airline effects and select soft clipper then i like to come up to the preset and select soft drive this is without it this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone and this is with it on the microphone i use is the shure sm7b so as you can hear it makes it a little bit more throaty next what you want to do is close that out you want to come down here to the eq and you want to double click on it the first thing we want to do is do some subtractive equalization meaning we're going to get rid of all the frequencies that we don't need in our voice so the first thing you want to do is select band 1 then you want to drag it up and what i like to do is kind of cut out everything below 100 and below if you want a little bit more bass in your voice then you can kind of lower this down a little bit but honestly anything below 60 hertz is kind of just sub bass even anything under 100 hertz is really just sub bass which your voice really doesn't need and if you plan on mixing your voice with music you kind of want to save the low end for the music so you don't have any phasing issues which creates distortion which sounds like crap on your speakers next let's go ahead and go to band 2 i'm going to click on this little drop down arrow and select the notch filter then i'm going to turn my q factor up all the way and what i'm going to do now is pull this up as far as it will go i'm going to swipe between 200 and 300 hertz to really hear the problem frequencies this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b and i think it sounds amazing so a lot of those harsher frequencies that we don't need i think are a little higher towards 280. so i'm going to now pull down just about to negative three we're going to do really really small surgical adjustments as far as cutting frequencies that we don't need next i'm going to do the exact same thing with number three i'm going to turn the q factor up all the way and i'm going to sweep between about 300 and 500 just to see if there's any problem frequencies there this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shirt so i can already tell about 440 to 450 is where i have some problem frequencies which is okay i'm just going to pull a little dip down maybe 2 db there now if you want to add some clarity you can actually come over here to band number 4 and you can pull up some frequencies around 5 to 6 000 and kind of emphasize the high end of your voice when you're boosting frequencies you want to actually have a low q factor when you're cutting frequencies you want to have a high q factor i'm going to put my curve around 5.5 k this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone okay so the last thing you want to do in the eq is select band number six and we're going to turn this down to about 15 to 14k we don't need any of those higher frequencies as those are just kind of not needed so here's with the eq off this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone now here's with it on this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure so sounds much better sounds a little bit cleaner boosting with some clarity really nice let's go ahead and close that out also by the way if this isn't default for you guys you got to make sure that your fx eq and dynamics is selected because what i actually learned in music production school is you need to eq then compress so make sure to have fx eq and dynamics selected all right so next what you want to do is double click on the compressor now that'll bring up this awesome looking thing and so the first thing you want to do is turn it on and come to the beginning of your voice and play it through this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone now this is already perfect because you want to actually between negative 3 and negative 6 gain reduction and that's right here you will see the gain reduction meter here bouncing down and up as you listen to the voice the microphone i use is the shure sm7b as far as my compressor settings what i like to do is actually turn up the attack a little bit to about three to four milliseconds just because i want the emphasis and the articulation of my words to punch through and once the compressor waits that amount of time i want it to actually work on kind of compressing the rest of this sound if you have your attack time too fast you're going to cut off and kind of squash the very first part of every word that you say as far as the release time i like to have this as quickly as possible because if you stop talking i want it to kind of react quickly to the next words that you start speaking into the microphone this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone now if you have only negative three or a little a little metering right here what you can do is actually turn your threshold down to get the proper amount of gain reduction the microphone i use is the shure sm7b and i think it sounds so depending on how loud your voice is and how dynamic your voice is you're going to have to actually play around with this and make sure that you fine-tune this threshold to your liking also i like to turn the ratio up between 2.5 to about 3.5 kind of just personal taste but just kind of play with those settings and see what you like best this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone then the last thing i like to do in the compressor is actually turn up the knee to about 20. now as you make these adjustments you'll see up here that this is affecting how the compressor is reacting to the dynamics of your voice this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b so i don't know if you guys have noticed but there's this popping sound that actually happens with my mouth or something after i stop talking here studio microphone you hear that kind of thing you a microphone it's kind of annoying so one way to fix that is just to cut it out another way is you want to turn on the gate and a gate will basically just cut off the signal volume level when your voice goes below a certain threshold so i'm going to really exaggerate this so you can hear it this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone so it's almost like too fast if you crank it up too high it doesn't do a very good job so if i bring this back down and i actually bring the attack up just a few milliseconds this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone and then also if i want to bring the range up it'll really kind of cut it off quickly studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b i also adjust the release time so it's a little bit faster me talking into my studio microphone but do you notice how that pop is gone now studio microphone a studio microphone now if i turn this gate off your microphone you hear the pop and the breath so that's a way you can kind of restore just a good sounding vocal without having to go in there and chop all those little things out or use a d popper or whatever this is the best way to do it in my opinion okay so the next thing you want to do you want to come over here to where it says limiter go ahead and turn that on by default it squashes the top of the signal where the compressor is so if you look at this graph right here and you turn the threshold so it's not negative 20 but let's say negative 9 you'll see it's just kind of touching the top of that line that's what i like to do this limiter is just to kind of preserve the very very high peaks and transients of your voice as you talk you don't want to squash it too much it's just kind of there as a safety net this is a sample clip of and you'll see some gain reduction happening on the limiter as well and you only want this to kind of flash you don't even really want to see it ever talking into my studio microphone the microphone then since we kind of squashed the vocal by compressing it what we can do is actually bring up the overall volume of it with this makeup slider so let's go ahead and pull this up all the way and if you push it too far you'll see this red line occur that means you're going to start clipping and distorting it so you don't want to do that you want to just bring it down so it's right below the line you can adjust this so it's like negative 2 negative 3. but i like to kind of just bring it up as high as you can so you can bring the overall volume of the track up this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b alright so this is the before this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone and this is the after this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b much better much better okay so now if you want to mix your voice with some music go ahead and bring in a song of your choice this is what it sounds like if you just drag it in and do no adjustments this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use so obviously it's way distorted you can't really hear my voice and it doesn't sound very good the first thing you want to do is come back to the track where your vocal is or your voice wherever you're talking come over here to the compressor and go ahead and turn on this little button that says send go ahead and close that compressor out then come to the channel where your audio is in this case this is channel 5 for me so over here in the mixer i'm going to double click on this compressor i'm going to turn it on and then i'm going to select listen so now essentially what we're doing is we are sending the volume of the vocal to the audio channel and this audio channel is being compressed every single time my voice comes through using this compressor so now this is what it sounds like this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone sounds a little bit better so the next thing i like to do is just turn the threshold down a little bit and then also turn the attack time down as quickly as it will go because we want this compressor to immediately duck the volume of the music as soon as it hears the vocal or the specific audio track speaking i'm also going to turn up the ratio just to about 2.4 and now we can hear what it sounds like now this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone now this is where you're also going to have to turn down the audio volume of that specific song there's only so much you can do with this threshold and the ratio before you start really starting to distort it and get like a pumping effect which sounds like this this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone and that doesn't sound very good so you kind of find like a good balance between you know your threshold and the actual volume of the song so in this case i'm going to turn the volume of this song down to about negative 8. this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone now i think the volume of that song could be a little higher i'll just turn up to 5.9 this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone i use is the shure sm7b and i think it sounds amazing and here's a little quick hack or something that you guys may want to know and that is if you want to just kind of muffle the sound as soon as you start talking what i like to do is just trim the clip where i want that effect to happen come up here to the equalizer turn on this eq turn on band number four and bring this down to about i don't know 250 500 make sure that's make sure that specific part of the clip is selected that you want this effect to happen on and then add some basic cross fades on the audio and check this out this is a sample clip of me talking into my studio microphone the microphone and then when it fades out i think it sounds amazing [Music] please like and subscribe if you found this helpful and i will see you my next video

Channel: Jamie Fenn

Views: 108,365

Keywords: jamie fenn, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, Davinci Resolve 18, davinci resolve fairlight tutorial, davinci resolve 18 fairlight, fairlight mixing davinci resolve, audio mixing fairlight davinci resolve, fairlight eq, fairlight compressor

Id: 2hyrywcKKYs

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Mon May 30 2022