HOOKING UP YOUR FIRST STUDIO

what's happening to junkies Mike Delgado here back with another video on home studio setup for voiceover not in the booth today I got a new table to put my computer and junk on so I ended up disconnecting everything in my studio and so I was gonna hook it all back together and I thought what better time didn't show maybe people who are new - voiceover and new - setting up a desk all the different things and bits and bobs and wires that you need in order to hook up everything in your studio now I'm gonna make it like this is gonna be a desktop studio I'm not gonna involve the booth in this one this is gonna be just like what a first-time setup might be you'll also note this is untreated space at the moment I'm gonna paint the walls and so all my acoustic treatments down so I'm just gonna really concentrate on on hooking up everything here on the desk so starting from a perfectly clean slate I'll walk you through all the different things that I'm gonna hook up and attach to the computer the first thing that we're gonna hook up is the interface now my interface is an audience ID 22 and that's this piece of equipment right here this is sort of the brains of the operation the interface is where you connect your microphone to the computer and it's got knobs and buttons in here that control the gain on the microphone how loud the microphone will be and whether or not it supplies phantom power yours may look different than this one yours may have buttons on the front it had me about buttons on the side it may have buttons in software they're all a little bit different but they all do essentially the same things so this is the first thing that we need to do and we'll hook this up to the computer depending on your interface it may be powered over USB or it may be powered directly with power with a wall wart so you'll need to look into your manual about about how it connects and then you'll connect the USB to the computer once you have it connected it should show up as a sound card on the computer so if you have an audience or a personís or a focus right it should show up as a sound card after you've connected your interface to the computer the next thing we'll hook up is the microphone now most microphones that you're connecting to an interface are going to get connected with an XLR cable an XLR cable has two ends male and female and it's got these typically it's these three pin connectors this is definitely the kind of cable you're going to need if you're using a condenser microphone that requires phantom power you don't want this kind of connector because this connector won't carry phantom power and you certainly don't want one that's that's headphone size phantom power you're gonna really want to go over this XLR type cable this will just plug one in into the into input one of your interface if it has more than one or or any one that you choose so in this case I've got input one into and I can just connect right to that so this one will then go to the microphone so I've got my microphone right here and this one is the gauge ECM 87 so we've got a condenser style microphone and we have the shock mount depending on the depending on the microphone you buy it may have a shot mount it may not sometimes they'll be a pressure fit shock mount where the microphone just fits in and it squeezes it to hold it in place others will screw on to the bottom it all depends on which microphone you have the shock mount will typically have a threaded connector on the back and it they're fairly universal there are two different sizes there's a large size that connects to a microphone stand and then there's a smaller size that will connect to something like a scissor mount and if if you have a scissor mount with a small one a small connector they make adapters so you can thread into the into the the large size to go to the small size so we're just gonna use in this case a nice small desk desk type microphone stand that we'll just put on the desk here a lot of microphones can be fairly heavy so if you find that it's too heavy or the microphone makes your mic stand tip over or if you have a boom arm that attaches to the microphone stand it makes it tip over one trick that you can do is you can find these ankle weights a lot of times you can find these at Goodwill at secondhand stores for people that have given up on their New Year's resolutions you can just slide these over the stand it makes them a lot more stable most microphone stands they they have a swivel in the middle that's an adjustment that allows you to adjust the height so you just spin it until it's tight and then it won't move then connect the female end to the bottom of the microphone and it will only fit one way it should click in if you're sometimes the XLR will have a little button on it that will lock it into place so you can lock it the next thing you're gonna need is you're gonna need a pair of headphones one so that you can hear yourself you can hear something that's playing back and they should be over ear or on ear so that they don't leak much sound so that sound coming out of your earphones won't end up back into the microphone there are two that I recommend my personal favorites are the Sennheiser the either the HD 280 pro or the HD 380 Pro the HD 280 Pro very common they sound great I like them for their comfort they fit over the ear all the way around the ear so that you can wear them for a long time they're also very well insulated and they do block a great deal of sound there's the two 80s there's the two 80s and the hd3 80s I often keep my two 80s here at my control desk and I keep three 80s in the booth the reason I typically use three 80s and you'll see 388 the h2 380 pros in almost all of my videos is I really like them because the cord can be replaced it just disconnects and you can replace it so this cable is not the one that came with these headphones I have a short one that's just the right length whereas the two 80s have this long coiled cable that can just tend to get in the way sometimes of rubs against my zipper sometimes it just it gets in the way so I don't always like to use it another really good option for headphones is the sony MDR 75006 is these are excellent sounding you'll see them everywhere I find personally that these are far less comfortable for me when they're on ear so they they have to clamp very tightly to reduce a leak and for me I find the sound of these less pleasant to to listen to for a long period they tend to be much more detailed they have a very crystal clear high-end that after you get used to these can make every other headphones sound dull they are really super clear but I do find them to be uncomfortable for long-wear I don't like things actually touching my ear I want it to go around my ear and clamp my head not clamp my ear because my ears will get sore and the 75006 is tend to make my ear sore that's just me but for a hundred bucks you absolutely cannot go wrong with 75 o6s they also have a ten foot cord a little bit of a bug somewhere on your interface there's gonna be a headphone jack and it's probably gonna be a quarter inch so if you have a they call it a 3/8 inch 3.5 millimeter I forget the small size the like the phone size headphone jack you're gonna need to put on an adapter and most of your premium monitors will have it's it's screws on so it doesn't accidentally get lost and you just take that and you plug it into the headphone jack you just plug that in there and now you'll be able to listen to what's going through the microphone and you'll be able to hear your playback depending on how your desk is set up sometimes that's really long and you don't want that cable on your desk so one thing you can do one thing I do is and since my headphone jack is on the back of the interface I actually actually have it go out the back and come under my desk and so I just use a long really durable extension cable that's sort of permanent and I have the jack actually come out the front of my desk so you can use an extension cord if you have to it's just a stereo since your headphones are always going to be at your desk you'll probably want a headphone stand and I just use one of these super cheap really basic ones that just clamps onto the desk some people like to have them on their desk I like to have them out of the way when I'm not using them so I actually just attach it and hang my headphones right off the end of my desk so they just sit there like that out of the way when they're not in use so now we can listen to ourselves over headphones but the last part that you'll you may want to add is you probably want to add a pair of stereo monitors or at least one for voiceover but generally - because you may also be listening to a stereo signal so you'll want to have monitors now these are different than speakers in that monitors are optimized to sound neutral there they're trying to give you a detail of what it actually sounds like rather than being hyped for bass or hyped for treble or anything like that they try and give you the true representation of the sound even those studio monitors they all sound different depending on how big they are they do try and give you a very accurate representation of what you've recorded they're very detailed so that way you can hear if there's any imperfections anything that you need to redeliver and so you might need a monitor something like this is a really good monitor to use if yours these are the JBL's LSR 305's they're bigger than your typical desktop speakers but they're uh they're they're really true sounding not very heavy on bass because it's got a little tiny little tiny woofer on there but these are a real common and you can put these on your desk they're not too heavy but because you're putting a heavy speaker on your desk it could actually make your desk vibrate and add unwanted vibrations and they'll be pointed not at your ear so you can also get these little these will foam monitor stands that allow you to angle and adjust how these monitors point at your ear and they also acoustically decouple the speaker from the desk so they don't make your desk vibrate add unwanted vibrations to your desk can reduce the coloration of the sound a little bit I mostly just use them so that I can angle that tweeter up up at my eye up towards I level and it just sits on there I'll show you in a second on the back of the monitor you'll see that it's got a different kind of connector than you might be used to for a speaker there's power requirement so each speaker each monitor will have its own power there's an amplifier built into this it will usually have a knob or two to adjust the gain how loud they will be the maximum order you're doing is you're actually setting the maximum volume it's usually a set and forget and then there'll be two different kind of connectors you can either connectors you can either use an XLR style connector or a tip tip ring sleeve and then there may be some switches on whether or not you want it to be bass boosted or treble boosted to try and account for differences in your room and these are generally set and forget because they're on the back the monitors get attached the way I typically attach them they can be XLR they can be a quarter-inch I usually use a quarter-inch two XLR connector so the quarter-inch plugs into the interface the XLR plugs into the back of the monitor on your interface there will generally be Jax that will say out they may say Mon they may say out they may say left and right but you just generally plug them in and that'll be connected now we're gonna plug it into power next so the monitors themselves they should have a usually they have an LED an indicator of some sort that indicates that they're on you can leave them on all the time I generally mine plugged in and on all the time but if your energy conscious you can turn them off in the back as far as positioning these they should be four they should form an equilateral triangle with one point of the triangle being essentially the back of your head and then 60 degrees out to each one and they should all be the same distance apart same distance from speaker to speaker and from speaker to ear as best you can a good rule of thumb to know if you're if you're close to having it set up correctly is you measure the two the distance between the two fronts of the speakers and then sit in front sit in front of them and as you look at the speaker if all you can see is the front of the speaker and you can't see its edges then you know you're centered properly so now I have those sets so that all I can do is I can only see the front when I'm in my typical sitting position your interface should generally have two different outputs so that you can run the headphone jack and the monitors simultaneously or you can switch between the two so they should have independently controlled volumes and generally whenever you're recording you'll turn your monitor speakers all the way down and you'll control your headphone adjustment to familiarize yourself with the with the with your interface there are some knobs and buttons that are pretty common to all of them you should find one for the monitor volume you should find one for the headphone volume and then there will be a separate knob or slider for the gain of the microphone and that's different than how loud it is on the output the gain is how loud it is on the input and generally you turn that preamp up as high as you need to get a good waveform without clipping clipping means that you're so loud that you overload what gets saved on disk so that the waveform gets cut off gets cut off at the top for most it's all gonna depend on your interface but for most basic prosumer interfaces that i've come in contact with you'll probably start with your game knob about 3/4 3/4 of the way of the all the way turned up is generally a good place to start and then after you're speaking and it's too loud you find that the waveform goes all the way off the top in your da w then it's too loud and you'll back it down a bit generally you want to get yeah elevate your voice nice and loud and if you see that the waveform goes all the way off the top of the track then it's up to you laughs and you can back it down a bit it really depends on how sensitive your microphone is what kind of microphone you have a shure sm7b very insensitive microphone you might have to turn that all the way up other microphones you may have to back it down the next thing you might need is something like a FET head a Fed head is used for certain microphones like a dynamic microphone if the interface cannot provide enough gain to get a usable signal out of it so you may have a microphone like this a dynamic microphone instead of a condenser microphone and these usually require a lot more gain they require the knob on your preamp to be turned all the way up and that can often make the signal sound pissy there'll be a lot of underlying noise because the preamp is working really hard and it's not working as efficiently as it normally would by having it turned all the way up so if that's the case you may need to use something like a FET head or a cloud lifter and all this is this is a pre amplifier or an inline amplifier this little doodad right here is a FET head a cloud lifter is a little box they work and hook up exactly the same way and what this does is this uses the phantom power from your interface and it powers some circuitry in here that will make that microphone sound louder if you're using something like a cloud lifter you'll definitely need to use something like a little little pigtail this could be six inches like this one it could be twenty five feet but you'll need an extra cable to connect from the might not from between the interface and the microphone so in this case we will plug the Fed head into one end of the cable clicks into place and I'll just plug it in line near the back of the interface so that is set and forget you just leave it there and then you just plug this plug your microphone plug your cable into the microphone now if you use something like a Fed head or a cloud lifter you'll need to turn on phantom power on your interface for that particular microphone so in mine it's a switch yours may be a push button may be labeled phantom power may be labeled plus 48 V and that uses power now the Fed head and the cloud lifter block phantom power they receive it and then it doesn't make it any further down the line so even though we're using a dynamic microphone that does not use phantom power it's still on on your interface but that device is using it as its power source and not sending that down line so the microphone still is not receiving phantom power so there's no risk of damaging it when you plug that FET head or cloud lifter in you will turn your game down probably it will probably be too loud if it's more than three-quarters of the way up I do find I have to I can turn this down to about the 50 between 50 and 60 percent of maximum signal and that usually works now if you're a streamer you may still need to use a gate or a compressor but you won't necessarily be able to use them in software because it may introduce lag or latency or overhead on your computer and so you may need to get a hardware processor very common one very very popular one in an excellent one is the dbx 286s this takes your most common vocal effects and turns them into a piece of hardware rather than having taxing your computer to do this and it happens in real time it will have a noise gate it will have a compressor and it can both reduce the amount of hiss and even out your signal so that the difference between the loudest and the quietest parts is not so great so these are used in between the microphone and the interface they will have an input and an output that allow you to connect it to the interface in line if you're going to use one of these you should look for an interface that has sends and returns or sends and receives on it rather than having just a preamp so in my case in the case of the Audient ID 22 there is a send and return for each channel and so a send and return you can actually if you're using a send you can have a signal come in the interface get sent to another piece of hardware that hardware does whatever it does to it and then returns the signal back into the return or if you're using something that includes a my a preamplifier in it your microphone can be plugged in here and then just return signal to the interface depending on the hardware and how the output looks you may need to either have a cable that's got dual tip ring sleeve two quarter inch jacks or one that's a quarter-inch two XLR all depends on what kind of hardware you're using and you can look at the manual and what the output looks like I have a preamplifier that takes this kind and the dbx 286s a quarter inch jack and the return on the Audient is a quarter inch jack so you can plug this from the output and put the other end in the return on the interface and now the microphone XLR will go into the input if you buy a 286s you won't need a cloud lifter you know you won't need a Fed head because this will provide ample power to power something like a shure sm7b so you don't you should not need to buy both a Fed head or cloud lifter and a dbx 286s this sort of has the the strength of a FET head built into it with the strength of a cloud lift or built into it so now we have the microphone going into the voice processors a processor the hardware processor this is going to take care of all of our effects then that sends that signal that processed signal into the interface which converts it from an analog signal to a digital signal and sends it along its way sorry about that sorry for the change in continuity I completely bricked on the ending and I totally messed it up so I mean editing that's like I'm gonna try and redo that ending cuz I just didn't do the last version right sorry for that so it looks a little bit different you can see I've got everything all set up now on my desk but now that we've gotten all of the equipment hooked up we've got the hardware processor in place if we're using it we've got our interface all hooked up we've got our microphone hooked up to the computer the last step is to make sure that the da W itself can actually receive the audio so that's the last thing that we're going to do well make sure the microphone is on we'll make sure that the interface is hooked up and we'll make sure that the da W can see it so let's switch over to the screen and I'll show you the da W that I use which is called Reaper and I'll show you sort of where the settings are if you're using a different da W it may be a little different but pretty much all the da w's hook into the sound card in the same way so the menus might be in different places but it should work about the same so let's take a look so my version of Reaper will probably look a little bit different from yours I have a playlist called Reaper for voice over where I go through all the different configurations and settings and I encourage you after this video if you haven't watched that playlist to go through and make sure that you have Reaper set up and configured so that it works really well for voice over but the long and short of what we're doing is we're making sure that the da W that the computer itself and the recording software can see the interface so in Reaper in the title bar whether you're on Mac or Windows you should see this information about the way it's coming into the computer so the bitrate and so forth and you can go to audio device settings and that will bring up the Reaper Preferences window that goes right to the device now if you're on a Mac you can also get there via Reis Reaper preferences and that brings up the same menu and then you can find it in the audio device and that's where you will check now if you're on Windows you'll probably want to use a zero for all two and improve the way the da W talks to the interface and can reduce your latency I don't have that on the Mac but there are lots of tutorials and I'll link to one this is one that I found Reaper a tutorial for Reaper that is called SEO for all setup latency monitoring and buffer settings that we'll go through how to configure SEO to make sure that it can connect to your connect to your interface but once you're in there this window will look a little bit different if you're on Windows but essentially the process is the same you make sure that you switch the audio device itself from whatever the built-in sound card is to your interface so in mine case mine is an audience ID 22 on Windows it will say SEO for all here and then within that there'll be some selections where you actually choose the interface by its name so the interface looks a little bit different on Windows than it doesn't match but the process is the same you need to make sure that Reaper knows about the interface and then you can click OK once that window is gone you then can double click on the left-hand pane where the tracks go and there will be a a selector that shows you all of the different inputs for your device and then we arm it with the red button and we should start to see as I pull that shore sm7 be closed we should see that the meter moves with my voice and I've I click record I can start to see that waveform forming across the screen and I can't start to dial in how that looks so if I increase the gain I'm turning up the gain you can see that the waveform gets larger to the point where it Clips sorry about that and if I turn it down it gets quieter all I'm doing is changing the gain setting on the interface itself and I try and look to my waveform is one that I can see but doesn't get close to the edges of the little swimlane there and now I can go back and see all of my recording you can see where it clipped we can see where it looks okay and we now can see that waveform this meter will tell us how close we are to the top and if that light turns red that means that we have clipped so if I turn the preamp up again until it gets too loud we'll see that that light turns red and that means that I have clipped I have exceeded the waveform what the waveform can get stored on disk I've clipped I've exceeded what the full scale volume is so that's the essential settings of it now from here I'm not going to go into that all of the da W settings here but what you can do from here is you can go over to the Reaper for voiceover playlist that I have on YouTube and that will walk you through how to set up Reaper all the different configuration things so that you can have it optimized for voice over so that you can make sure that you have backups in place so and everything so if you're looking to become a voice actor I'll tell you exactly everything you need to do to change Reaper so that can be really optimized away from music production and into voice production does that help I hope it does it was beneficial for me to go through and make sure that I have everything configured here on my desk and this is what your typical first studio might look like from here I'd need to acoustically treat the walls and make sure that I experiment with my microphone placement so I can get the possible sound but now we've got all the electronics we've got all of the hardware hooked up whether we needed the voice processor whether we needed something like a Fed head or a cloud lifter and we have our interface all of our cables we've got everything all set up so I really do I hope that helps I hope you found it beneficial and that's all I have for you today so go get your equipment all hooked up maybe buy whatever you need to buy if you need to buy it sorry there's stuff you got to buy but go out and get get the things you need but I encourage you to get something set up so that you can get out there and you can record something amazing Thanks we'll talk to you next time

Channel: Booth Junkie

Views: 160,256

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

Id: G8GqoHVGoGo

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/BangsNaughtyBits]

Always glad to see the gentleman pass through the sub but while much of what he covers is directly applicable, there are differences between the voiceover world and podcasting. Particularly for beginning podcasters, his mic selection tends to be on the high end for a new podcaster and condenser mics can be unforgiving to those that don't have highly controlled environments.

That isn't to say that which isn't directly applicable isn't a solid learning experience. I highly suggest his episodes on customizing Reaper's YU for nonmusic applications, for example.

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