Hidden Elgato Wave secrets to make your stream sound PRO

if you want to make your microphone sound better remove background noise or even make your discord or voice chat audio a bit less crunchy with the elgato wave or wave xlr microphone or audio interface you can finally do that with the power of vsts this is the video for you elgato got us a christmas present something i've been asking for since basically ces of 2020 vsts with the wavelink software which means for your wav usb microphones as well as the wave xlr audio interface you can now use software post-processing on your microphone and they actually have implemented it in a really clever way that you can do some really cool stuff that not enough people are talking about and i want to show you some of the secrets of elgato waves vst filters in this video however one of the things i really wanted to be able to show you how to do you can't do yet so there's also going to be a bit of a feature request in here as well this video was sponsored by nerd or die and their snowed in winter sale stay tuned until later in the video to find out my favorite stream package and how i've been completely overhauling my stream due to the awesome stuff that they provide in case you were unaware wave is a product line that elgato the capture card company released that includes a usb microphone along with an xlr audio interface that they released this year and one of the pretty much only missing features that i declared even back last year with the wave usb mic release that i really wanted to see was vst filter implementation and the vsts are basically like a system-wide set of audio filters or audio plug-ins that you can kind of use interchangeably in different applications so you can use it in software like pro pro tools or ableton for music making or professional recording but you can also use them in obs or you know in audacity things like that they're really powerful and they can be anything from free cool tools that you can download that we'll talk about to super expensive like thousands of dollar suites that professionals use the reason it was important to get this natively integrated into the wavelink software is the entire software is built around the concept of it being a mixer and outputting the final mix to your stream so you would do all of your mixing and you know source switching and all of that in the wavelink software and then just add the final stream mix to obs or what have you and output it that way and if you do it that way then you can't add individual filters to just your microphone in obs studio you have to go in and add each individual audio device and that kind of makes it messes up the whole flow of the wavelink workflow in the first place it kind of defeated part of the point so by having vst support you could then add filters to the individual devices and at minimum we wanted to be able to do it to the microphone track elgato's gone above and beyond and allowed us to implement these features on every single device you add to wave including other microphones you add to it which is pretty sick so to get this feature if you haven't already update your wavelink software or go to the link in the description to download the updated installer for wavelink this includes the new vst functionality they're even advertising on their website it's pretty cool once you have updated you then need to install some vst filters now if you go to the audio filters you know section in wavelink and you don't have any there's a nice little button that says get more audio filters and elgato i've actually provided a kind of curated list of what they recommend for different vst plugins based on your specific you know actions like compressors eqs things like that which is pretty neat the ones i tend to recommend installing are the re-plugs which are released by reaper but they're free to download and use in other applications as well as the rtx voice plug-in yes xamar the developer of the stream fx plug-in for obs studio also developed an rtx voice based vst now this still requires an nvidia graphics card and you also have to download the audio effects sdk from nvidia and install but then you can add rtx voice as a vst filter just to your microphone without needing to run the rtx voice or the nvidia broadcast app which is super cool we're going to talk about this in a moment once you have installed all of your vst plugins you then go to settings audio effects and choose your vst2 folder so there's two different tiers or i guess versions of the vst pipeline there's vst2 and vst3 and it detects the default like systemwide vst3 folder but then you have to choose your vst21 the problem here is your plugins could have installed to multiple different folders so for example if you have the vst2 version of rtx voice that is actually installed to see program files common files vst2 replugs however are under c program files vst plugins so you got to kind of pick and choose where you're finding them and then choose scan plugins now i will say across two different computers i was installing to test this and set this up this was the buggiest part of the experience so far they did have a fairly lengthy beta run which i just wasn't able to fit into participating in but between my two computers i had the absolute worst time actually getting it to detect all of the plugins i had installed you can consistently show them and then if like i clear list so i can get it to detect them again it just won't detect them anymore and completely inconsistent results across the two pcs so that was very frustrating but beyond that they should show up here once you've scanned and found your plugins click ok and now you have little wave icons below each of your audio devices in the wavelink software now this is how you add filters to your individual devices and as mentioned before you can add them to any device in the wavelink not just the microphone this immediately makes it more powerful than something like the avermedia live streamer nexus or the go xlr which can only add you know their preset based uh you know post processing to the microphone itself and over time i have come to actually not very much like the compressor and eq settings in the go xlr itself you click the little icon and then you add your filters and things like that now it's worth noting that the vsd filters are applied in an audio chain from top to bottom so you know the top one will be first second one will be second and so on all the way down to the bottom and that kind of matters because there are different workflows when it comes to eq'ing before you compress or compressing after you you eq these provide different results so you want to keep your chain you know entry in mind in terms of just generic microphone processing chain if you're setting up these kinds of elements i recommend noise reduction coming first be that through a noise gate or the rtx voice vsc filter followed by eq'ing followed by compressor and then you can do like a de-esser or a notch filter if you have crts in the background like me things like that but that is generally the recommended progress of the chain to get kind of nicer results that i recommend in terms of settings for your microphone unfortunately post-processing you know it's fairly unique to your specific microphone your specific voice but generally speaking you want somewhat of a cut around the 800 hertz to 1000 hertz range for a mid cut of just a couple decibels that way you can a lot of mics get really muddy in the mid range and then maybe a little boost to the low end around 125 hertz but then you start cutting around 60 hertz or lower for what's called a high-pass filter to then remove a lot of boominess and bass that you don't want kind of blowing out your viewers speakers or headphones or what have you and then maybe a little boost to the high end again you really got to play with this fine tune this i have been learning eq over the past few years of doing this for a living and it's still something i'm learning every day to improve on and do better at so there's nothing i can just kind of generic cookie cutter recommend to you but i do recommend using the replugs plugins as they are pretty phenomenal and come the closest to the built-in kind of parametric equalizers that come and say adobe audition or something that i'm used to working with and so that's pretty neat if you're looking for more unique effects or filters such as for example specifically a de-esser if you have a lot of sibilant s's after you compress everything that shows up under the rej audio filter so if you're looking for that rejs and then load light on and they have a de-azer there and that's what i typically use in my streams i've actually been using replugs in obs for like five or six years now so this is pretty cool if you use the rtx voice filter again i recommend doing that first that way you're not you know you you want your noise removal or suppression or gating to come first because if you do it at the very end then you're already compressing and raising the noise floor of all your background noises and things like that so it gets a little more gnarly when you start trying to remove that out whereas if you remove it first then all your post processing works with a much cleaner signal but if you add the rtx voice vst filter it's fairly straightforward it's just kind of on or off for compressor uh where you start it with which is the threshold is the minimum you start talking to activate it if you want a super light compressor that basically could just kind of act as a clip guard so that you don't start clipping which again the elgato wave stuff has built in so there's not necessarily a reason to but you would set a really high threshold of like say minus five db i set it around minus 16 db for my kind of talking voice and things like that and then typically for voiceover you want a compression ratio of four to one or three to one that's just generally what's the most pleasant and then you can tweak your attack and release speeds based on how you want it to kind of sound it's a little difficult to explain in an overview video like this i'll have some more resources on learning these settings in the description below but here's a screenshot of what i typically use what's cool however is you can do this to different devices so if you have a secondary microphone added to your setup say for a second guest or something like that you can also add these filters to that without needing to do it separately in obs or anything like that and still mix it all in wavelink which is incredibly powerful for multi-person podcasts or guest spots or two-player setups or something like that and it's something the go xlr and the nexus cannot do which is nice you can also use this to normalize and kind of smoothen out your voice chat because if you've ever tried streaming with a big pop and discord server with a lot of people yelling into their mics especially if people don't have high quality mics and no one's volumes are kind of normalized you can normalize that out with a basic compressor or limiter add that compressor to your discord or voice chat audio track in wavelink and now you can make that sound a lot nicer and you have the option of doing it either just to your ears or to your ears and the stream or you know what have you which is really cool all these filters per device you can set for the filter chain to only apply to your headphones or to apply to only your stream or to apply to both which is really neat if you've watched any of my streams recently you know i've had a blast completely revamping my stream graphics and with that i've been using nerd or die's stream os package this was a package i effectively requested from the nerd or die devs i'm even in the commercial for it that they run which is pretty sick and at least from my tinkering around this is one of the more in-depth packages that you can get it is all classic windows 95 windows 98 era themed they have multiple themes within this package so you've got the classic you know looks like the operating system theme but then you've got a vaporwave one a nighttime one a cyberpunk one and then you can make your own tweaking the customs you can change every icon you can pick and choose your different elements and your widgets they even have alerts that have different little pop-ups you can customize the graphics for it is pretty wild and this has been the most like i don't know impressed or or involved i've been in a pre-made stream package in a very long time i feel honestly really weird recommending it to you all because i don't want you all to have the exact same one as me but that's the cool thing about the customization is i'm spending all my time on stream making this my own so then when you boot yours up and you pick yours up at eposvox.gg slash nerdordie and use coupon code eposvox to save 15 or check out their winter snowden streamer sale yours will end up looking completely different too because you can customize it just the way you want it is pretty stellar and we're gonna be doing a lot more streams as i kind of figure it out and tweak it for all my different use cases and things like that again that's equals fox dot gg slash nerd or die to upgrade your stream today and lastly i wanted to end on one possibility that would be really powerful with wavelink with these vst filters that is currently not possible so i'm establishing it as kind of a feature request or what have you for elgato here and that is sidechaining sidechaining is the ability to apply a filter to one source but base that filter on activity from another source and this allows you to do something called audio ducking which is the process of making an audio source get quieter based on the activity and another source i have a whole video on this how to do it in obs specifically linked below but what this would allow you to do is take your game sound or your game and music sound and automatically reduce it whenever you start talking and then have it kind of increase a little bit slowly whenever you stop talking that way you can have a bit of a higher you know average sound that your audience can hear without having it too quiet but then when you start talking it does reduce that level and allow you to make sure you're not getting kind of over you know overspoken by your game or music or what have you which is a really awesome way to handle your stream as long as you don't have it set too aggressive or whatever but currently sidechaining doesn't work with the vsts enabled in wavelink it doesn't have the the vsts don't have the ability to see the other sources you can do this in obs you cannot do this in wavelink if they can get that working at some point in wavelink that would be incredibly powerful and really honestly just take it to the next level but yeah overall this is fairly straightforward it's just you get to use vst filters in wavelink but in order to kind of make sure you know why that's super important and how to best use it hopefully this video helped you out if you have any additional questions about audio processing or things like that we have a great audio community over on my discord as well that's discord.gd eposvox hope you have a great holiday week i do have a couple more awesome videos coming later this week so be sure to check those out thank you so much for 300k this year it has been a phenomenal ride i'm eposvox the stream professor and remember be kind rewind

Channel: EposVox

Views: 3,954

Keywords: wave link, best free vst, vst plugin, free vst plugins, free vst plugins 2021, best free vst plugins, elgato wave link software, wave link beta, elgato wave, how to, best free vsts, best free vst plugins 2021, wave link vst, elgato wave 3, audio effects, vst plugins, elgato wave rtx voice, elgato wave vst tutorial, elgato wave mic processing, elgato wave sidechain, eposvox, epos vox, stream professor

Id: x6hMjbW_u40

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021