EQ for Dialogue Audio: Make Your Voice Sound Better with an Equalizer

[Music] in this episode we're going to show you how i would use eq to make a dialog sound a lot better a lot sweeter in this case we're using adobe audition but you can use any digital audio workstation app any video editing app non-linear editor final cut pro premiere so on and so forth here's what it sounds like from the start here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the senken class 11d okay that's where we're starting let's go ahead and open our equalizer i'm going to come up to effects come down to filter and eq and i'm going to choose the parametric equalizer this gives us a lot of flexibility to choose the frequencies that we need first thing i do is i turn on the high pass filter i just want to get rid of anything below 60 hertz roughly there's really not anything in the human voice below there that's just noise from the room potentially air conditioning things like that we'll get rid of it same with the low pass filter there's really not a lot of content in voice above 18 kilohertz so we're going to go ahead and turn that on and leave it at its default settings all right now the strategy from here is first of all i want to get rid of the harshness in my voice and then i want to sweeten it up so to find the harshness first thing i'm going to go ahead and do take one of these mid frequencies here and boost it by 9 db and i also want to make it narrower by changing this cue setting in this case to 20. so i've got this really narrow kind of surgical tool that i can use and what i want to do is i'm boosting it so i can hear the really bad stuff the really harsh stuff and pick it out very easily and then once i've found it i will cut i will change this plus 9 db to minus 4 or 5 db we'll kind of play it by ear now the important thing here you have to use your ears to find these things there's no magic numbers i can give you there's no magic settings i can give you you have to use your ears so get the best set of headphones you can put them on if you don't have any right now put this video in your watch later list come back then and let's go i'm going to go ahead and start playing sweeping back and forth and let's find the harshness here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the senken koss 11d great microphone used in tons of movies and television shows sounds great on a lot of people's voices just doesn't sound great on mine but not everything is lost because that's where equalization in post comes in okay we'll pause there you hear the difference there let me go ahead and play it with this turned off and then i'll turn it back on you can hear with and without we'll start with it off so i'm giving you an audio sample here that we can use to show you how i would approach eq'ing this to make it sound a lot better okay so far it's a somewhat subtle effect you can hear the difference if you're using good headphones let's keep going i'm going to keep finding additional frequencies that may be problematic i'll do the same thing boost by 9 db narrow it up setting the q to 20. let's go ahead and play and i'm going to start sweeping until i find another frequency that's really not sounding good here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the senken cos 11d great microphone used in tons of movies and television shows sounds great on a lot of people's voices just doesn't sound great on mine but not everything is lost because that's where equalization in post comes in so i'm giving you an audio sample here that we can use to show you how i would approach eq'ing this to make it sound a lot better okay can you hear the difference now let me go ahead and play it with those two turned off and then with them turned on here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the second cost okay we got rid of a lot of that mid-range harshness and you don't even need to know specifically what frequencies those those are you just need to again boost by 90 b narrow your q to 20 sweep back and forth until you found the really nasty stuff cut in this case i ended up cutting by about 6 db on those two and then widen the cue back up in this case i went back down to two on this one i went a little bit wider to 1.3 you can hear again it took out a lot of that harshness so it takes a while to kind of develop your ear and be able to hear this stuff stick with it you will definitely be able to do it just wear some good headphones and go at it now that we have that major harshness taken care of i want to sweeten things up a little bit so i'm going to probably do a little bit of bass boost my voice sounds a little bit thin in this particular microphone and i'm also not hearing as quite as much articulation as i might like so i'll also probably do some boosting in the high frequencies let's go ahead and i'll run through it demonstrate it and then we'll come back and talk about it a little bit more it's 11d great microphone used in tons of movies and television shows sounds great on a lot of people's voices just doesn't sound great on mine but not everything is lost because that's where equalization in post comes in so i'm giving you an audio sample here that we can use to show you how i would approach eq'ing this to make it sound a lot better here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the senkan kos 11d great microphone used in tons of movies and television shows sounds great on a lot of people's voices just doesn't sound great on mine but not everything is lost because that's where equalization in post comes in so i'm giving you an audio sample okay so we've added some of that articulation back now in this case this is a slightly different thing it's not the typical kind of peak type of point on the equalizer instead this is what's called a high shelf it's represented here so if i actually turn this off you can see basically everything above about seven kilohertz it just pushes all of it up and so that's how that's working there go ahead and turn our low pass back on and then i also added a little bit of bass down here at 124 hertz i think a lot of times if you're feeling like a particular voice through a particular microphone is sounding a little thin and it needs a little more bass for men's voices somewhere in the 124 but again use your ears to to hear where it works best for the particular voice you're eq'ing and then i think a lot of times for women a little bit higher than that probably in the maybe the 200 range start and kind of sweep it back and forth until it sounds like it has the weight that you want it to have so there's an example of how to use eq to kind of sweeten the sound let's go ahead and play back a little bit of it with none of the eq and then i'll turn the eq on so we'll start with it off here we go here's another recording in this case i think a really good example of what a microphone voice combination sounds like that doesn't match this is my voice on the senken kos 11d great microphone used in tons of movies and television shows so there's a quick example of how to use eq to sweeten the sound of your dialogue hope that was helpful if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 189,840

Keywords: Audio, sound, video, EQ, Equalize, Equalizer, Edit, dialog, dialogue, fix, clean, improve, voice, vocal

Id: Jn6iB1SNvRQ

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020