- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative. In this video, we're going to show you how to set up and connect the
Shure SM7B Dynamic Microphone to the GoXLR Mini audio
interface for livestreaming. In this video, we're going
to show you how it sounds, how to connect it and
which settings I would use if I was streaming and we're
going to cover which settings I would use if I wasn't streaming, if I was just using this for
general purpose recording. It is a little bit different, especially in the EQ
section when we get there. Now, the Shure SM7B is
notoriously high quality. It's a studio grade microphone which makes it a favorite
for livestreaming. If you're watching this video, you probably already know
a lot about this microphone and how it is so highly recommended for an application like this. Especially if you're in a
somewhat noisy environment like a house or something like that, where you're living with roommates, there's other things going on, maybe you don't have
a purpose built studio and you do need good quality sound without picking up too
much background noise. That's what this microphone is for. The GoXLR Mini is an awesome size and it has a ton of features that are built for livestreaming. Again, you probably
already know about them if you're watching this video and the rest of this video now is just going to be about setting up and connecting these with
the best possible settings. If you are looking for current pricing or specs for anything that
you see in this video, we do have links down
in the description below where you can find everything
that you see in this video from a variety of online retailers to help you find the best
price and the best quality as you're shopping around for
audio equipment like this. Now, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect the
Shure SM7B to the GoXLR Mini. Now I don't recommend
using a cable like this that goes XLR to headphone jack and then using the jack on the
front, the headset mic input, that preamp is not as
good as the XLR preamp in the GoXLR Mini. So I do always recommend using
a proper XLR to XLR cable. Most people just call them XLR cables. And then use that to
connect the Shure SM7B to the GoXLR Mini. Now on the back of the Shure SM7B, as a general rule of thumb, I
leave all the switches flat. So the high pass filter is flat and the mid boost is flat as well. Generally, especially with
the EQ settings that we have with the GoXLR Mini, there's
no sense doing that there. We have better control over
exactly what we're trying to do with EQ settings for the GoXLR Mini. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to open up
our mic set up window here. And we're going to make sure that our gain is set up correctly. So previously you've been
listening to the lav mic that I've clipped on to my jacket and now you can hear the Shure SM7B. You can see as I'm speaking
into this microphone at a natural volume about a
fist away from the microphone. A lot of people get upset at me saying that the microphone is too far away in the comment section. With the camera angle here
it is an optical illusion. It just a fist away. I do have fists that are quite large but it isn't that kind of three to four, four and a half inch
range, which is ideal. You want a distance for this microphone that is comfortable and that
can stay at a similar distance throughout your livestream. If you set up your microphone and you're right up on
the microphone like this and then as you play or
as you're livestreaming, you get more relaxed, you're going to want to think
about your approach to that and find a setting that is
more comfortable to be in for a prolonged period of time. For me, I'm always really
comfortable around a microphone about a fist away, something like that is a really
good, consistent distance and you don't need too
much gain at that distance. So as you can see here, for me speaking to get
right in the good section on this mic meter, I'm using
about 63 DB of gain today. Generally, if I'm really excited then I'll be using somewhere around 61 DB. If I'm having a down day
where I'm a little less, where I'm more low energy,
if that makes sense, then it might be 64, 65. But the big thing here
is watching this meter, just making sure that you're
when you're speaking naturally that you do get right in
that good section there and then you can close it. Now, I didn't mention this before but obviously you want
a dynamic microphone. Condenser microphone plus
48 volts won't hurt this. If you are using a cloud lifter, which I don't think you need, then you would need the
condenser microphone to power that cloud lifter and you're definitely
not supposed to be using the 3.5 millimeter setting
with the Shure SM7B. Next, we have the noise gate. The noise gate is a powerful
tool that you can use to unmute your microphone
as you speak into it. Essentially you have two variables. You have the threshold which you can set. And when you exceed that
volume of that threshold when your microphone
captures enough volume it will break the noise gate and it will unmute the microphone. This is extremely common
on things like drum kits. Every time I hit the snare I
don't want the floor tom mic or the rack tom or something like that to hear the snare drum. That being said, if I'm
hitting the floor tom, I want that floor tom mic to open up. So it's really effective
on things like drum kits. In the livestreaming world, it's not quite as critical, but you can use it if you
have like a low grade fan or PC noise or something
like that in the background and you just want to mute the mic when you're not speaking right into it. Now the downside of this
is that you can actually hear the noise gate clicking in and out. If you're on a livestream
with a game, it's no big deal. Oftentimes the game noise
will mask it and you're set. But if you use it in a video
like I'm doing right now, you can actually hear it
and it is quite distracting. I'm going to put my headphones on. If you put your headphones on, you'll be able to hear
what I'm talking about as I change these settings. So the first thing that we
have here is the threshold. As I raised the threshold
on the noise gate, you will hear it clicking in and out. If you're too aggressive, you will actually mute
microphone as I'm speaking. That is definitely what
you do not want to happen. So if you go too aggressive, the microphone will mute when you speak you'll get clipped syllables. You'll miss the beginning
and end of phrases. If you lean back from the microphone, there's a good chance the mic won't open so you do want to be very conservative. For me, I keep it, if I do use this at all,
it's somewhere around -55, just super conservative. So if I do stop talking then
it just turns off for a second. But here I do just want to
demonstrate over and over just so you can hear
it clicking in and out. So I'm just going to start
and stop talking here. You can hear that noise
level in the background from the preamp, just a little
bit clicking in and out. Now the attack and the release are how you control how fast
the noise gate kicks in. 10 milliseconds and 200
milliseconds respectively are good, but it can be distracting if you have these settings too aggressive. For attenuation. This is how much the noise
gate gates if it's activated. For me I like being really
conservative here as well. I set it somewhere around 50%. This way when the mic is muted, you do still hear about 50%
of the background noise. So it is more natural as the noise gate breaks over and over. But like I said, if you're playing a loud video
game or something like that, it will mask the sound of the noise gate clicking in and out. But again, I keep it somewhere around -50. I generally will never go
more aggressive than -45, unless there's a really,
really specific reason for it. So next we have the microphone EQ. I just expanded the more
advanced settings for the EQ. Now a lot of people buy the Shure SM7B because it's a great sounding microphone. So if you're doing a talking
head video like this one, you might want to consider
just leaving that EQ flat. Let the microphone do the work that you bought this microphone for. That being said, with
EQ what we want to do is we want to make sure that
our voice and our microphone is clear and it's punchy
through the background noise that you're going to
be livestreaming with. If you're doing a video game for example, you want clear frequencies
for the microphone and make sure that the
microphone is punchy when it needs to be and it's not too muddy where it would interfere with game sound. A very good example of this
is a band at a concert. You don't want the acoustic guitar in the same frequency range as an electric piano or keyboard. Those two will conflict and you won't be able to hear
either instrument very well. But if you can put each
instrument into a pocket of EQ, the kick drum over here,
the bass guitar next and so on throughout the frequency range, then you can actually
stand back from your mix and you can hear each instrument well. That's what we're going to try do. We're going to try and
notch out this microphone and make it more clear but
make room for the game noise so you're not in constant
frequency conflict with those frequencies. I am going to enable the fine tune here. This allows us to swing the
frequencies here by about 100Hz. So if I don't like the frequencies that they've accepted by default, then I can fine tune them here. So I'll walk through what I
would select for each of them. For the 30Hz here, I'm just going to turn this noise gate off just because I can hear
it clicking in and out. I don't think it adds anything
for this particular video. So for the 30Hz here, I'm going to roll this all the way out. Basically what we're creating is what's called a high pass filter, but essentially we're
taking the microphone out of the subwoofer at everybody's sub that's
listening to this livestream. There's nothing useful from
the vocal range in the sub. It will just make it
more muddy, less clear, and really that's where
you want to be hearing the game noise in the sub anyway. Generally on any concert
or any application, you're going to roll
this out for a vocal mic just to clean it up. There's nothing really useful down there in that frequency range. Next we're going to roll
this second channel here to about 120. So what this is going to
do, if I can get it there, is by being at 120 here, we basically set the high pass
filter or the base roll off to come back to its full volume at 120Hz. You might want to tweak this a little bit. If you are a female, you might want to consider
rolling this down to about 100Hz. I do think that that will make your voice a little stronger in the low end. For males we have so much
generally speaking low end there, especially myself, I've quite a low voice that if I put this high
pass filter into 120, I have enough strength down there that it does still keep a lot of presence. Presence is important when
you're trying to build trust. It's that old AM radio tone that this microphone is
really good at reproducing. It builds trust and authority, and that's probably why
you bought this microphone in the first place. We don't want to rob
it of too much of that but setting this to be at
zero here at the bottom, somewhere between 100-120Hz
is a really good idea. Next we want to do a low mid cut. You're going to hear all this sounds. I'm going to set it to about 400 Hertz. This is another move
that I do quite commonly. C398, I can't get it quite on. 409, somewhere in there. We're going to do a -2 here and you're really going to
hear this microphone open up. Something like -2, -3. I generally don't go too
aggressive but -2 is good. You can hear it just create
that space in the microphone. This is where a lot of
game sound comes in. And again, in that
frequency for the vocal mic, it is just kind of muddy. By taking that out, it makes this microphone
quite a bit more clear. You don't need that low, low mud there. So we're just going to clear that up. Next thing we're going to do is at 2.5 K, we're going to go +2, and somewhere between 1.5kHz
and 3kHz is really where the main intelligibility
of the voice comes from. So by rolling this down to the low end of the available frequency swing here in the advanced enable fine tune mode, we can get it as close
to that as possible. You can see that we can't really, actually we can get pretty close. So we might want to do
that on this one as well. So we might go +1 here. Something like this will
create a nice wave here where the voice sounds nice
and clear where it needs to be but we're not cranking frequencies that won't add to the
experience of the livestreamers. Next on the last one, we're going to take this all
the way up to 10K, maybe 12K, and we're going to roll
it down to about -2. Now again, there's nothing really useful for a vocal above 12K, but that is where a lot of special effects are in your game sound. So what we've done here is we've created more clarity, removed the frequencies
that we don't need, punched up the ones that
will add to intelligibility amongst competing game noises, and hopefully this will
work for you with your game. You might need to tweak this a little bit. It is a little nuanced, but these are my general
rules and general principles that I will use as a starting point. And it really is pretty easy
to go right with this setting that I've chosen here in this video. Now, the next section that we
have here is the compressor. What the compressor does is
it narrows the dynamic range or the volume range of your microphone. So if you're pretty emotional and you get really excited in the games or if you sometimes fade
throughout your livestream, this will help to maintain
the volume of your microphone so you're not having to
ride the faders up and down throughout your entire livestream. So as we lower the threshold here, you will hear the compressor kick in. I'm going to go do about -15. Now you don't hear the
compressor kicking in yet because the ratio is set to 1:1. So I'm going to bump
this up to 3:1 or 3.2:1, something like that sounds really good. I generally choose 3.2:1 or 4:1. Now you don't want, again you don't want to
go too aggressive here, because what you're going to do is it's just going to sound like a limiter where you sound flat and unemotional. The worst thing any
audio engineer could do is put a compressor on Adele, for example. You want her voice to be very dynamic. You want to hear the swings, the dynamics that she
chooses when she sings and you don't want to
flatten it too tight. So 3.2:1 is pretty good here. Basically what this means is everything over -15
as we approach zero, zero is where we clip the microphone, everything over -15 will get
compressed at 3:1 or 4:1, whatever we choose here. That is a medium conservative setting but it is still quite aggressive. If you think of us compressing it at three to every one part,
that's quite aggressive but I wouldn't go more than 4:1. 2:1 you don't really hear. The attack and the release here are fine at 2ms and 100ms respectively. And then now we have the makeup gain. Since we compressed everything above -15, we do need to add a
little bit more volume. So I'm gonna do five
decibels, something like that. You'll hear me getting
a little bit louder now. So what we've done is we've
squished the loud parts and we've raised the
volume on the quiet parts which narrows the dynamic range. I do wish that they had a meter here so you could see the squish
of the compressor working. A lot of audio software does have that and it can be quite effective. But here I hope that you can see throughout the progression of this video that our mic here became
more clear, more punchy and now it's really narrowed
into that tighter range. It will give you more trust and authority. It sounds much more like a broadcast here with this microphone setting and I hope this will work
for your livestream as well. Again, we do have pricing or specs for everything that you see in this video. So please check that out down
in the description below. And if you have any questions, if there's anything I didn't cover with these microphone settings for the Shure SM7B and the GoXLR, please leave a comment down
in the comments section below. And if you want to see more
videos like this in the future, please like and subscribe. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)
