Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Feature walkthrough

on HomeLife headphones you're caught my headphones are caught and my hit my hate that my headphones are caught what's happening boo chunkies mic delgadio here back with another video on home studio setup for voice-over and today we're going to walk through the features of the focusrite scarlett 2i2 audio interface so i'm editing and i realize i totally forgot to say thank you to Richard for loaning us a fellow boo chunky loaning us his focusrite scarlett 2i2 Richard thank you so much really appreciate it if you're new to voiceover or if you new to new to audio what's an interface well put simply an interface is a little box that allows you to connect an XLR based microphone either condenser or dynamic it allows you can to connect it to your computer so it's a device that sits in between that will take the analog signal for a signal from your microphone turn it into a digital signal and send it over to whatever piece of software you have in your computer that's your digital audio workstation via audacity Reaper Pro Tools Ableton Nuendo Cubase Studio One any of those it will allow you to take this analog signal turn it into a digital signal and in that box for our purposes there are two features there's the digital to analog converter BER can converter that changes that signal from one format to the other and the other part is the preamplifier microphones as a whole have a very very very weak signal imagine this my voice is vibrating the air which is vibrating an extremely thin membrane and that extremely thin membrane vibrates increasing minuscule amount of electricity that transfer and so that signal is so Incy Wincy and it goes over to the computer over to the computer but the interface pre amplifies the signal into something that the da W can work with the preamplifier and good that preamplifier is works with how good your microphone is to try and get a nice clean signal over to your computer so in interface preamplifier analog to digital converter and there's other stuff that it does it's got you know depending on what you choose or other features to it so we're going to look at a good entry-level voiceover certainly for voiceover a good entry-level mic interface so if you're ready to start recording audio books and things like that the focusrite scarlett 2i2 so i have it right down here so we're going to take a look at the features that it has and just sort of give you a basic walkthrough so you can decide if oh oh that looks like the thing that I'll need okay let's take a look the - I - has two channels channel 1 and channel 2 so you can hook two microphones to it you could hook two instruments to it you could hook a microphone and an instrument to it so if you uh wanted to also make music and you had a guitar you could plug a guitar into channel 1 in your mic into channel 2 those jacks are what they call combo jacks so allow you to put in an XLR cable or add a tip like a tip sleeve like a guitar like a guitar cable you could just plug that right into into the center so it will take both below it there's a switch that says line or instrument so depending on what you're plugging in whether it's a microphone or an instrument like a guitar you choose between the two because the instruments have a different signal level than the microphones - and you don't want to overload or change your creative and anything like that so just if it's an instrument use the instrument if it's a microphone use or if it's a microphone or an external piece of equipment like a signal processor a dbx 286s it online because it's generally a higher signal than what the instrument will generate it's my understanding okay so you have to each one of them has their own gain knob gain refers to how loud the signal is it will it will amplify the signal to send it on to the next item in the so in this case it receives the signal from the microphone and the gain knob says how much louder you want to make that signal before it goes on to the next step in this case the next step might be the computer the next step might be some other piece of equipment or anything like that so you are setting the gain and for us and in voiceover generally the next stage is the computer and it's going to end up on disk somewhere so you want to do it without clipping and hopefully the Scarlet gives you some feedback to let you know if you are clipping or not so as there is signal coming in the light illuminates and it turns green that says hey we've were loud enough to get signal now if you do something too loud I'll snap my fingers it turns red so the signal was too loud and it clipped so if you are too loud if you need to scream into this microphone or something like that and you see it turn red that means you've clipped and you've overloaded the signal so that's a bit of feedback so then you would adjust the gain downward does that make sense I hope it does I hope it does so the there is a visual feedback that says if your signal is okay and not clipping if it does clip it turns red perfect next to that there's a red light here and it's actually a button and below it it says 48v and that is whether or not your microphone needs phantom power which is often 48 volts can be 24 volts it's 24 or 48 volts of power some microphones these condenser microphones specifically they generally require 48 volts of power in order to get the signal now if it's a dynamic microphone you don't need the 48 volts about what's really just for condenser microphones and that light is also a button I'm not gonna press it because it will turn my microphone off but if you press it it turns the light off the phantom power is cut and it does activate for both channels now it only activates it for the XLR the 3 pin so if you have a guitar plugged into it you don't have to worry about electrocuting your guitar if you're turning on phantom power because the phantom power won't go down down the center if that makes sense I hope it does so only the XLR is type jack we'll do it but that means you might not you'd have to be careful because it applies phantom power to both that if you had a dynamic microphone that or a ribbon microphone that couldn't handle that kind of power you would have to be careful and not apply you wouldn't be able to apply phantom power to either channel because it does do both you you energize both ports at the same time okay next to that is a switch that says direct monitor direct monitor allows you to have very very low latency audio in your headphones as your live as you're talking into the microphone so right now I have it set on because I want to hear myself in my headphones if you don't have that turned on then it's not going to send audio back to your headphones unless your computer is sending audio back now that round trip from the microphone to the interface to the computer to whatever the processing the computers doing back to the interface back to your headphones that can take a while it might take a few milliseconds to do and that would mean in your headphones it would sound delayed it's called latency and you want to not have latency especially when you're talking into the microphone because latency can affect your delivery especially if the latency is long it tends to make you speak more slowly as you're waiting for the you're waiting for your headphones to catch up it's just you know if you're talking if you've ever been on a phone like on your cell phone and you're talking there's an echo and it makes you really wait and slow down and makes it hard to concentrate latency can affect your performance so the scarlett helpfully allows you to turn direct monitoring on and that way the signal never leaves this box it goes right from the right from the jack out to the headphones and you can hear it with no latency perfection that's what we that's what we want generally for voiceover next to that is the monitor button knob so the monitor is like the great big volume knob so if you have speakers that plug into the back there are two tipping sleeve which is like a headphone jack like this let me pull this out here like that so that's a tip ring sleeve that you can plug into so you if you have powered monitors there are two jacks on the back that allow you to plug in a left-right sorry I'm bumping everything in here it's it's extremely crowded in the booth right now sorry about that so the monitor button or the monitor knob allows you to adjust the volume that's gonna come out of your speakers so when you're listening back you can adjust the volume it's a great big knob for that if there's one complaint I have with this device it's that a big big knob like that is not at all unusual what it desperately needs from my opinion is it needs a mute it needs a mute button so that you can shut the monitors off why well when I'm speaking into the microphone it's coming out the monitors so that in a situation where you have a talent in a booth and you've got an engineer who wants to hear it if he's in the other room the monitors should be able to play but there's no way to turn it off so if you're if you're acting alone me and my booth with my monitors and everything like that it means I always have to turn the monitors down in order to prevent that signal from coming back into the mic and causing an echo and potentially causing feedback but certainly for me I do a lot of work at my booth and I like my monitor set at a specific volume because it's the vine I want to always edit at the same volume that way I'm not trying to make things louder and softer based on what I hear I always want my monitor my monitors just sort of be at that nice set volume the manual says you got to turn it down and then turn it back up which I wish was different I wish it was different because I want to always make sure I've got that I want that button to be essential or that knob to be set and forget for most circumstances so what I would end up doing is I'd probably paint a little dot or something or you know have a little arrow that points this is always gonna turn it back up to here it would be so much easier if there was just about that button that's a mute or cut or whatever anyway that's that's the one thing lastly there is the headphone section so right now my headphones are plugged into the front of the of the scarlet and I can hear it but you notice I've got my volume turned all the way up that's my second issue with this and it's not really an issue with the scarlet it's probably the combination of these headphones and and that device I think these headphones are of a higher impedance which means that if the headphone amplifier doesn't have much gusto it never really gets loud enough in your headphones so even though I have this turned all the way up it's really not that loud in my headphones so you need to make sure that you have monitoring headphones that have a low impedance so that would be its measured in ohms 600 ohms there's a really high impedance 60 ohms a low impedance sometimes there's a 250 and 300 I think for this for this particular device you would benefit by having a lower impedance a higher sensitivity set of monitoring headphones and that's something you'd want to look at if you had high impedance headphones you would need another probably another amplifier that this ran to so that you could get enough volume it's one thing that's that's one thing about it so but if that's it's a minor like it's it's I can certainly hear myself it's just that I don't like to have a turn all the way up I'd like to have it halfway up so that I could adjust as needed but all the way up it feels not even though it's not particularly loud in my headphones okay that is the front of the Scarlett on the back I'm gonna have to get it in b-roll on the back there are two jacks as I mentioned and that's to plug in external studio monitors so they are quarter-inch jacks they're not RCA jacks and they're not bare wire like you'd find on the back of your your receiver or something like that they're quarter-inch jacks and typically you would send it to a powered monitor otherwise you'll need adapters or something to convert the XL the quarter inch jack to either an RCA or bare wire in order to get it into a home receiver or you know some other kind of amplifier and last thing on the back there is a USB that allows you to just plug it into the USB port and there you have it I like the Focusrite Scarlett I do recommend it for people if they're creating a basic a basic set up this is very much a basic set up that I would recommend to an aspiring voice actor who wanted to work for the next five years and not need an equipment upgrade this is a rode nt1 not the nt1-a I like the NT one personally a little bit better than the nt1-a if we're talking rode microphones so a rode nt1 and a focusrite scarlett 2i2 an XLR cable a set of headphones and acoustic treatment and you're off to the races a great entry level but can last set up so now go get yourself a microphone and an interface get it all hooked up so that you can get into your booth even if your booth is your bedroom closet or your coat closet out in the front of your house but getting a booth somewhere and record something amazing thanks we'll talk to you next time

Channel: Booth Junkie

Views: 159,641

Keywords: vo, va, voice over, voice acting, voiceover, voiceacting, voice work, voicework, vocal booth, home studio, microphone, acoustic treatment, soundproofing, reaper, cad, cad microphones, tlm-103, e100s, mhk416, mkh 416, 416, neumann, sennheiser, focusrite, focusright, scarelett 2i2, scarlett 2i2, voiceover interface

Id: X6DKB2PZeSI

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DjangoSucka]

Mike’s awesome