Getting Started with Adobe Audition - Complete Beginner Tutorial

hello I might Russell from music radio creative calm and welcome to my getting started with adobe audition complete beginners guy so let's get started and before we even hop into adobe audition on the screen behind me let's talk about getting audio into adobe audition and for this generally i would advise not using your computer's internal microphone but actually a professional microphone and I recommend microphones with XLR connections okay so you can't plug that straight in the back of a computer you can't plug a USB mic direct in but I like to use pro mics and they're really not more expensive than USB mics at all but in order to get them in you'll need an audio interface for this example I'm going to show you this focusrite scarlett 2i2 it's a very popular audio interface and the first thing you'll need to do is take the USB connector from the back of the audio interface and plug it into your computer and then of course to connect the mic up you're going to need to take the XLR and plug it into one of the inputs on your audio interface make sure it's powered up and the light is on and if we speak into this you'll see that I've got some audio coming up there and if I make it too loud it'll go red and I'll show you a little bit more about levels when we get into Adobe Audition but let's set that at a reasonable rate and now we can hop into Adobe Audition and configure our audio interface so that we can record audio so here we are inside Adobe Audition you will want to first of all set it up to record and playback audio this is available to you in the Adobe Audition menu on Mac or the Edit menu on PC and you go to preferences you look for audio hardware here now you'll see is my default input I already have it selected the scarlett 2i2 USB you need to look for your connected audio interface and make sure to select it again you should select it for your output as well but for this tutorial I'm using a sound craft desk to play the audio to you so I'll leave that as is but generally when you connect an audio interface you need to select it as your input and your output there before you go ahead and do anything else you want to go to all a channel mapping in the preferences and make sure that input number one which of course is this microphone that we just connected that's selected as both channels for your default stereo input so input one there and input one there should be selected and then for your output for me I've got lots of channels on my sound craft desk but for you if it's a simple audio interface output channels should be one on the left and then two on the right then click OK and that should get you started now we want to test out we want to try recording a test file with our newly connected microphone so the first thing you can do to get started recording right away is just simply hit this record button down here in the bottom of Adobe Audition hit record it'll prompt you to record a new audio file I'll call this mic test and you can choose the sample rate usually for audio only it's 44 100 for video it's 48 thousand so depending whether you're working with video or audio only select your sample rate mono for me it could be stereo though if you're recording music or something else and bit-depth should generally be 32 floats so click OK and immediately adobe audition starts recording look there is the audio from my microphone appearing as a waveform in side audition down here you've got the levels meters and you can see how loud or quiet I am at the moment I'm in between sort of minus 29 and minus 27 dB but I definitely need to be a little bit louder and I can change this on my audio interface by turning up the volume knob ever so slightly and look at Adobe Audition as I start to turn that knob up it gets louder and louder and louder but don't go too loud with this because you'll see the red and these red bars here mean that you're clipping so you want to turn down the volume on your audio interface until you get below minus 6 DB minus 6 dB so that you're not getting any red on those meters is pretty sufficient hello testing testing anywhere between minus 12 and minus 6 this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone to my focusrite scarlett 2i2 audio interface it works and then to stop the recording you hit stop which is this button here or you can hit the spacebar on your keyboard so we've made our first recording in Adobe Audition let's listen to the quiet audio at the start and let's listen to the audio after I turned the volume up on my audio interface this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone let's listen to why you never want to go too high and peak into the red but don't go to later in this because you'll see you get digital distortion and clipping it sounds absolutely awful now we're going to show you some of the powerful features that are possible inside Adobe Audition improving audio removing noise and things like that really beautiful stuff reducing echo but first of all let me give you a little tour of all the panels inside audition when you first load it up so you know what you're dealing with first of all up here in the top left we've got a files panel and this is where all your open audio files will appear so the file that I've just recorded appears up there as mic test if I bring something else in it would also appear as a list here below we've got the Media Browser which is like a browser for your hard disk so you can see I'm currently the root of my Macintosh HD I can navigate through and find exactly what I need or I can go to a favorite that I've saved here my radio imaging packs and I can double click into a folder here with sound effects in two beeps and then if I click on something it will automatically play like so and that's because I've got this button pushed in which is the autoplay button really handy button to have pushed so you can quickly go through and listen to anything that you want to bring into the audition waveform view here so I'm gonna drag and drop this file like that and I can double click it and there it is and I can play it back by selecting hitting spacebar or you just hit the play button there as well so now I've got two files open we've also got an effects rack we'll look at this in more detail in a moment when we start to add some enhancement effects to our audio we've got markers here so if you want to play some markers you hit the M key on your keyboard this is great for podcast editing where you make mistakes and you want to place some markers to remind yourself to go back you can then double click to go between the markers and in properties its general duration sample rate everything else about your audio files displayed here down here we've got the history so you can see everything I've done to the audio file can be backtracked by clicking here or redone by clicking here so you can kind of see a big history of everything that's happened to your audio and if you have video there's a video tab here and I'll drag in a video file yes Adobe Audition can handle video files as well double click into this and look as I move through the video there the video is moving along in real time it's pretty cool stuff level meters we've looked at and how to set them correctly when making a recording and you've also got over here the essential sound panel which is great for easily adding some audio effects when you're working in the multitrack view which we'll look at later on in this tutorial for now I'll close that down and the final thing I wanted to show you about the layout the overall layout of Adobe Audition is this up here in the top right and these are your workspaces these are particularly handy if you want to quickly change the look of audition to work for your specific workflow so though a radio produces use audition there is a radio production workflow here with a big effects rack and some metadata area here as a lot of radio producers need to add tags and things for radio play out systems you've also got the classic audition view in there and the big time meter there so you can really see the time or of course we can go back to default and we're gonna even reset to Saved layout which gives us everything back as we were I'll just close that panel down again and down here we got the selection view so we can see where our cursor is at any time the time here updates as we move our cursor along and if we select and highlight part of our audio we'll see not only the start but also the end of that highlight and the duration of their highlight and then up here on the time bar we can actually put our mouse up here and hit the scroll wheel to zoom right in and on my magic mouse I'll this is why I love an Apple Magic Mouse I can actually scroll left and right as well really really easily in Adobe Audition so place my cursor here press play this is Mike testing out my press stop or hit the spacebar this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone even easier now let me show you some of the cool effects you can add in Adobe Audition and let's get started with the effects RAK over here and here you can one-by-one add different effects to your waveform and apply them so for instance I can say click this triangle here and the first thing I might want to do is add a little bit of EQ which enhances certain frequencies and also takes our frequencies we don't want to be there so I'll go for parametric equalizer I'll go for the default view so it's a flat line and then I'm going to add a HP curve here so this will roll off base it's called high-pass this is Mike testing out mine and you can hear as I roll it up it certainly rolls off that bass so this is Mike testing out my newly connected I just want to roll off any of the low-end any of the Rumble where there might be car noises plane noises general background noise thumps that we don't need I can also go ahead and take the H part here maybe change the curve clicking this button this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone and then I can add a little bit of high end I can also sweep through and this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone to my or I can even use it to take frequencies out this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone okay let's listen to before this is Mike and then after this is Mike you see the improvement this is Mike this is Mike and so that's the first thing next thing I can do is go ahead and add some compression and to show you how this works I'll actually open the preview window that'll show you a before and after view of what I'm doing so let's highlight just a small selection and then we'll go into the effects rack again amplitude and compression and we'll look at dynamics and we'll go to default and we're just going to look at this middle strip the compressor strip here and I'll add on a bit of compression just turn up the ratio to get it working and then you can see down here if I actually move this out the way you'll see that this has been compressed so the louder parts have been pushed down and it's got a lot quieter so we'll push the make up gain up a little bit like that and now you can see when you're recording something and there are loud bits and quiet bits compression pushes that makes it all sound a similar volume level this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone and then off this is Mike testing out my subtle difference but just makes it easier to hear everything that's been said particularly if someone's listening to your podcast in the gym on a treadmill something like that when we're done with all our effects we can hit the apply button there and that is now written into this part of the audio so now we've got before over here anywhere between minus 12 and minus 6 this is Mike testing out my new leak and you can definitely hear the difference between before and after so these are the differences you can make inside Adobe Audition with ease I did want to look at multitrack in a moment but before I do let's go back to that video I imported and listened to the fact that there's a lot of wind noise on this play a bank or a competition looking at them as allies tons of wind noise easily reduced by let's switch off preview window and let's open up something called the spectral frequency display here and this is like a heat map of everything that's going on in the different frequencies so the high the mid and the low the bass end of your frequencies it's like a heat map so yellow lots of bass going on not so much high end and around here we can hear the bass let's play it back and then if we select up here we hear the treble end so we're looking here at a lot of yellow and that is essentially our wind so we want to roll that off now there are a couple of ways I could do it I could just go into spectral frequency select all that wind nicely with my box here hit the Delete key and it's gone let's listen now it sounds a lot better compared to before you're a competition looking at them as allies but we might actually just go in and do it with a bit of EQ filter an EQ here in the effects menu parametric equalizer default view HP for high-pass and let's roll this up if we look at this here it's probably going up to about 250 Hertz if you look over here 500 is here 250 in the middle so I'm actually gonna roll this up to around 200 Hertz and see what a difference that makes we can see by switching on the preview window this is before this is after let's play your competition looking at them as allies and yes it has removed the wind so you can do things like that in Adobe Audition and on top of that you can actually go ahead and even insert denoise plugins which are available here noise reduction restoration D noise this is something we can roll up from 0 to 100% to reduce the background noise let's try it you're a competition looking at them as allies and as you can see not only is it removing a lot of background noise but it's making their spectral frequency a lot clearer and the waveform afterwards looks a lot nicer compared to this waveform with lots of noise going on this is now a lot cleaner thanks to the noise reduction and restoration tools in Adobe Audition so hopefully so far after watching this beginners tutorial for Adobe Audition you will know how to connect your audio interface how to connect a microphone how to set things up so you can record and play back and hear audio all the panels in the default view of Adobe Audition and what they do how to record your first thing how to improve it using EQ and compression how to bring in video files and make noise reduction additions so for instance removing wind noise taking our background noise things like that are all possible the final thing I'm just going to show you here is the multitrack view it's available up here top left click multitrack and we'll call this Mike session like that you can save it to wherever you like again no template for this sample rate 44 100 bit depth 32 and we're gonna have it as a stereo multitrack so we can bring in music files as well click OK and this simply allows us to work in a non-destructive way so before we were making edits and changes to the waveform that were permanent here we can play about with mixing and adding effects taking them away with ease let me show you how it works so that might test I recorded at the start of this video I bring in two track one and let's get rid of all that clipped audio and just focus on this area here let's play it back hello testing testing anywhere between minus 12 and minus 6 and then I can go into the media browser and I can search through maybe for a bit of music here let's grab a little bit of music here anything will do that'll do perfectly so let's stop that playing back and let's drag and drop it onto another track right here and this will now actually play in addition to my first track let's zoom in and play and we can zoom this way as well so we can really make it clear now you can't really hear what I'm saying unless I use this volume control on track 2 to fade down this audio while I'm talking let's do that this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone to my focusrite scarlett 2i2 there we go so you can see that's a bit of music playing I can also go ahead and go back into my media browser head into the sound effects as well if I like I can grab a beep I can drag and drop that that'll do nicely and maybe I'm gonna drop it just about there cut off the music like so let's just cut make a little cut right here delete we can add a little fade on the end using this gray triangle thing like that and we've got this we can actually cut out the rest of my speech there and the rest of my speech there so this is all mixing together this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone we can tighten that up a little bit if we want Truffaut's so multitrack really allows you to mix together multiple pieces of audio so it's good for editing podcasts with multiple guests making jingles with many sound effects you can also go ahead and bring up the effects rack just as we did in wave form and I can go in here and I can say okay I'm going to add on maybe we'll add on a hard limiter to make this really nice and loud and we'll go for a default here limit to minus 3db this is Mike testing out my newly connected microphone and now you can hear with that hard limiter you can really hear what is being said on that microphone I can also add in some fun effects they are all available as well modulation one of my favorite menus you've got chorus here and we can add on one of the choruses let's go for a rich chorus listen to what it does and you can also go ahead and not only drag the yellow bar which is the volume but the blue bar is pan so we can pan myself from left all the way over to the right like so let's play that so much is possible when we're finished in multitrack we can go into multitrack mix down Session two new file entire session and boom we will very soon have this beautiful thing let's just get rid of the silence at the start this is kind of almost a jingle that we've made here look at that let's switch off spectral frequency display and then of course we can go ahead and save this file to upload to our play out software put onto our podcast host or do whatever we want put onto our mp3 player file save as and we can call this jingle you just choose our location so you can put it anywhere and your downloads folder if you like choose a format so wave is a lossless format it's good because it will retain all of the audio and not lose a little bit or mp3 is good if you want small files for podcasting you can even change the format so if you want it to be 192 kilobits per second or a little bit less degrading the quality but reducing the file size and then click OK to save that's pretty much it for the beginners tutorial but I did want to show you one last really cool thing you can do with Adobe Audition let's go ahead and drag in some completely ruined audio this is called clips audio and you'll see why because when i zoom in oh it's something I told you not to do at the start of this tutorial record with your levels really high let's listen for there's a new commander the blessing oh my goodness me that is unbelievable look at that red clip there I'm gonna just copy that little bit of audio here put it into a new audio file and see if there's anything we can do with that rather clipped audio for there oh my goodness that's right up above 0db terrible but there is a way to cure it in Adobe Audition window Diagnostics and you want to look for the effect called dee clipper and in this case is going to be restore heavily clipped preset here we scan through it'll find all the clips in your audio file lots of them 68 clips in this small sample and then you simply hit repair all done and now that clipping for there the Lord Commander the blessing if that's not too bad at all is it I mean it could be better if it was recorded initially at a lower level but restore heavily clipped has now made that waveform look like some kind of reasonable form of speech and not before a clipped form of speech so as you can see in Adobe Audition you can record you can playback audio you can edit audio you can mix it in the multitrack you can have multiple effects to make your audio sound better equalization compression you can also remove things like wind noise background noise restore clipped audio and so much more it's why I use Adobe Audition every day it really is a fantastic way of editing your audio and I hope this Adobe Audition complete beginner's guide video has got you started and of course if you have any questions for me do post them in the comments below this video [Music] music video PT calm

Channel: Mike Russell

Views: 129,820

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Id: sBwKEBVeH-w

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020