- This mic right here is the Elgato Wave 3 USB microphone, and I'm gonna make it go from sounding like this.. to sounding like THIS. With the new wave link update, and a handful of free incredible plugins. And hey, don't worry if you don't have an Elgeto Wave 1, Wave 3 or a Wave XLR. Yes, this we have link update is big, and it's gonna make applying these kinds of effects to all of your programs way easier, but you can still use these tips, techniques and plugins to make your mic sound great in the likes of OBS studio, and Even Streamlabs OBS. YES.. even Streamlabs OBS! So stick around, and let's get that microphone of yours sounding amazing, okay? All right cans on, and let's do this. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) So if you haven't heard of the Elgato update to Wave link. Essentially, it's allowing you to use VST plugins in your mic chin. This is a big deal because it lets you process the sound of your microphone before it gets to your OBS, discord, your in game comms, all of it. And because it lets you use VST plugins, which by the way, VST stands for Virtual Studio Technology at studio hardware and software form. These plugins let you do things like equalize your voice, giving it more base and more clarity or dynamically controlling your voice with compressor or a limiter. You can even use these on your game chat as well, if you've got a really light group of team mates. There's lots of stuff you can do. You can have special effects. You can have reverbs. You can have effects like this. Then you can sound amazing when you stream everyday. Hey,(inaudible) stop making fun of me. I've got a case that wabblies, you haven't got a lozenge, or a glass of water, do you? - And before we go on, no, this is not a sponsored video. I'm not being paid by Elgato or anybody. I'm just excited about this update. This is production quality boost for so many content creators in a way that's very easy to set up. And I think that's a pretty big deal. If by the time you're watching this video, this update has been rolled out, then you just need to update your wave link. But if it's still an open beta, I've left a link to it in the description. Once you've downloaded the beta, you have to make sure that you've uninstalled your current wave link version and unplugged your wave device from your computer. After that, install the Beta and reconnect once the installation tells you to. Next, we're gonna need some VST plugins. I've actually made a link available below, which is a zip file and it contains all of the free plugins I'm using in this video. And don't worry, if you prefer not to grab that, I've also left links to the individual plugin pages if you wanna grab them one by one. And as I said before, they're all absolutely free. Most of these plugins will install as VST3 plugins. VST3 and VST2 plugins tend to default to here on Windows, and to here on Mac. Elgato have recommended that you set your own dedicated folder for your VST2 and VST3 plugins. To do that, go into Elgato wave link, and in the top right corner you'll see a cogwheel, click that cogwheel and under the Effects hub, you're gonna see where you can choose a folder for your audio plugins. Set it to wherever you want this to be. And bear in mind, when you're installing the VST plugins to this location, it will still default some of your VST2 or VST3 plugins to those locations I mentioned before. What I'd recommend doing is gonna those locations after you've installed all your plugins, checking the VST2 and VST3 folders. If they're there, moving any of the plugins you recognize that you've installed to your new folder location and just keep everything in the one place. Once all your plugins are installed, go back to wave link, hit the cogwheel and under Audio Effects, hit he rescan plugins button. And what that does is scan for the plugins you've installed. And once Elgato wave links has found them, it will show them on screen. And while I'm gonna show you how to set this up to sound great with plugins, do remember the techniques that can help you improve your mic sound, that you don't actually need a plugin to do. Things like the proximity effect, the signal to noise ratio. Basically, getting closer to your mic is given you a better sound. And if you're too far away from your mic, and all of your room's starting to get into your signal Staggy of Elgato did an excellent video covering exactly this. I'll leave a link to it in the description, do check it out. All right, I'm gonna strip my mic off all these effects, and we're gonna start building this from the bottom up. Just before we begin, I would highly recommend you download a program called Audacity. I use this for testing the entire set of my effects, one by one, or all together. And what I do is, I set the input to my stream mix so that I can then toggle on and off the effects in wave link and hear them in the recording in Audacity whenever I'm listening back. Recording these comparisons and then listening back helps me establish if I'm doing something right, or I need to go and fix something to improve the overall sound. For full transparency, I'm gonna show you how I set up my wave3 in wave link. If you click here, you can see, I have set my input into 21 DB. I have the enhanced low cut filter on, and the clip guard on. If you click this button here, this is where we're gonna put our audio effects. At the bottom here, you can see that there is a toggle for the filters on your monitor mix. So you can hear it. If you're listening to your monitor mix through wave link, how it sounds signs with on, without the effects. And the one that I recommend putting into Audacity, which is the stream mix. You can toggle everything on, and off right here, or you can do it one by one by clicking on the speaker icon beside each plugin. (upbeat music) So the first plugin up here is Renegade. Renegade is a noise gate. The basic idea of a noise gate is if you're not talking, it's closed, and if you start talking, it opens. Allowing people to hear you, but not allowing them to hear below a threshold that you set. Which means then it can help cut out things like mouse clicks, and keyboard clicks, and just general room noise. So if we click on the + button here, you go to the effect, and down to Renegate, go to this cog wheel here, and you can see here visually, it's already working. This here is the threshold. If you bring this down to the very bottom -70, and you'll see here when I'm not speaking, there is like a little bit of volume done there. That's my room noise that's sitting about minus 50 DB. So if I bring this up past that, and you can hear that the noise gate is effectively closed. Now, I actually want to have this up a little bit further. Put it about -29 for me, I find that if I have it there, my mouse clicks, and my keyboard clicks don't come through. Over here. This dot right here, I would recommend just dragging that right down to 100% . And if we move over to the envelope up here, this is basically how quickly the gate opens, stays open, and then closes. So for me, I want the attack to be 30 ms. I wanna hold it open for about 70 ms. And then I want to close it within about 20 ms. The softer attack helps with the keyboard clicking, and lets my voice still come through quite clearly. Do make sure that it's not cutting off certain words that you're saying. Words with softer beginnings like, S's or F's. Test it, listen in Audacity, make sure that it's working properly. (upbeat music) The next plugin I'm gonna add is a De-esser. This is optional, but I will add it in, just in case you feel you need to use it later on. At the minute, you can't drag and drop plugins into different orders. So having these in this order is really important. If we go up here again, go to effect, and click on the De-esser. And once the answer is open, you should see this. All we're gonna do in here is bring down the
threshold of the D-esser. The way a De-esser works is it listens for sibilance in your voice, like S's, F's, C's,X's, and it listens for that high pitch sound. And it dynamically reduces it, without affecting your
overall voice too much. At least that's how it should be. If you find it's making your voice sound muddy, try and reduce the amount
that you've applied. I'm gonna bring this down to about -32. I'm gonna set the intensity to 7, and set this sharpness to -7. You may not be able to hear how effective this is on my voice. So I'm gonna do a really extreme example, so you can hear what it's doing to the sibilance in my voice. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s S-s-s-s-s-s--s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s Hopefully that makes sense. I don't touch any other settings in here for myself, so I'm happy with that. (upbeat music) Okay, so the next plugin I'm gonna add is an Equalizer, or you might know this as an EQ. An equalizer or EQ is an audio filter. It isolates certain frequencies, and either boosts them, lowers them, or leaves them unchanged. This is good for rounding out the lower end of your voice, taking room sound or nasal sounds out of the mid range, and adding a bit of clarity into your high end. Going to the + button again, and we're gonna load up TDR Nova. When you load it up you should see this. You might not see this feature here. If you want to see that, just click the "Out" function up here. And what that means is everything you adjust here, it's gonna show the signal, how it's affected after you've done your EQ work on it. So the first button we're gonna look at is this one here. Boosting frequencies in around 110, to around 140,150 Hz can help you add a bit of worth and a bit of body to the lower end of your voice. I find that if I set
the Q value here to 1, which basically tells you how tight or loose the band's gonna be on the EQ, and then I'll put the frequency to about 115 Hz, you can click here and type in whatever you want. And I'm going push it again up to about 3. Be careful not to go too far, or you will start sounding muddy. If it does sound muddy, just bring it back a little bit. I like to use the second band to pull out a little bit of the frequency around the 180 to 240 Hz area. This area for my voice at least, can quickly create
muddiness on certain mics. So I like to just correct it a little bit, If I can hear any amount of muddiness, especially if I'm boosting this lower end. So I will put it around 230-ish, and I gotta bring it down not very much, just about 0.5. The third band, I like to use to pull out some of the mid range in my voice. This is great for pulling that nasal kind of sounds, or some of the room noise you might be picking up. And I usually put this about 1000 Hz. I'd say about -1.5 DB is fine, and I've actually lowered the Q number to 0.5, and you can see that the band is a lot looser, not as tight as the
first band, for example. Finally, I wanna boost around the 3000 to 6,000 Hz area to put a little bit of clarity into my signal. I'm gonna set this around 3.2. I'm gonna leave the Q at about 0.6 and I'm gonna push this up to 4.5 DB. I'm happy enough with my sign, so I'm leaving that there. (upbeat music) The next plugin I'm
gonna add is an exciter. This is completely optional. I'm adding this to just push in a little bit more presence, and a little bit more body into my vocal. So again, we go up to the + button, and we go to effect, and we add La Petite Excite, which if you've done French, it means the small excite, maybe, I don't know. I did German at school, and I failed that as well. So this is the Exciter interface. The only 2 things we're gonna look at is the low end and the high end. I'm gonna push a little bit into the low, maybe about 0.5 and I gotta push it by 1 into the high end. And that's all I'm gonna do with this. (upbeat music) Final plugin I'm gonna add is a Limiter. Usually a limiter is used to prevent a signal from going over a certain level. And they're very good at doing that. They can also be used to increase the overall lightness of a signal, which can be quite useful on vocals. Using this limiter lets me keep the vocal closer to the original sound, while still enhancing it for the final touches. Once again, just go up to the + button, hit the effect and add frontier. When it loads up, this is what you should see. The first thing I wanna change is the release. I wanna make it fast. Then I'm gonna go over
to the output level, and this limiter will not let your vocal signal go past
wherever you set this. I'm gonna set it to it to about -3.5, and then the threshold, I'm gonna bring it down. For me, to about -8. And I can see on the reduction that it's kicking in there. You want to test this on Audacity, through your recording, tweak the setting, and just make sure it's right for you, cause I might speak louder than you, or quieter. So everyone's gonna be different. If you pull this threshold down too far, you're gonna bring up a lot of the noise flow in your microphone, so do be wary of that. I'll show you an example. This is it sitting at -24. This is at 0, and this is at -8. So, I'm pretty happy with that, I'm gonna leave that be. And the final plugin. Yes, this is the final final plugin. Everyone needs this, and it's vibrato, baby. This is a vibrato plugin
by Melda production. I've included the files for this in the zip, and I've included a link to their website, so you can get their full production suite for free. And it's just an example of one of the effects that you can add into your vocal chin. Hopefully we can toggle these on and off in the future, to have some fun with it as well. I hope this video helped. This is such a big deal. Having this kind of access to production quality on your microphone before it reaches any programs on your computer. If you enjoyed the video, don't forget to hit the sub and bell. And let me know how you guys are using VSTs, what you find that's interesting, whether it's in way of link, or out of way of link. Any favorite VST plugins you have. I want to know about it, and anything cool that
you're doing as well. Feel free to hop in there on Discord, say "Hey". And, let's talk about
cool ideas and stuff. I'm Defrag, and you and me, we're gonna meet again. Bye.
