How To Improve Your Mic Audio In OBS Studio - Best FREE VST Plugins For Live Streaming in 2021

[Music] hey everyone joe here from atomic overdrive now do you want your obs mic audio to sound better you're probably saying hey joe got a real cheap microphone it's not gonna sound that great well what you're hearing right now is through the uh shure sm48 that's right the shure sm48 a forty dollar microphone so in this tutorial i can show you how to improve your audio in obs studio for your microphone as well as your uh game and also your own music audio to make it more immersive now i did this tutorial about a year ago on my other channel and but this is kind of updated one for obs 26 and for 27 as well so if you see the other video that's mine as well that said this video is going to be quite long and so i'm going to put down some chapter markers below which i normally don't do but it's going to be a big video and some of the stuff you may be able to skip over if you already know so that said let's get in here to the tutorial [Music] okay everybody the first thing we need to do is go over to tokyodom.net and go down to tokyo don labs and grab our plugins now they do have free ones and paid ones here now we do want tdr molotok notice the free download okay we're gonna need tdr nova also notice free download okay the third one we're gonna need from them is tdr vos slick eq free download so when you click on free download it's going to carry us to the tdr vos you know slick eq page and we're going to want to do this for all three of these plugins now if you're running windows i recommend getting the windows installer and if you run on mac you get the mac package so we want to click on say windows installer download it accept and download then we can download the plugin to our wherever folder you want my case the desktop and just click save you can go ahead and save that file okay once we get all three of those downloaded we're gonna need to go and also get wider from polyverse okay so now over here on polyverse and we want to get infected mushroom by wider and of course you know links for all these will be description below and this is yes another free plugin this is a stereo whitening plugin you want to click on download now fill out the information sign up for the pre polyvars newsletter and click get your free copy okay when you get that downloaded we'll then install our plugins okay everybody once you have all four your plugins download we need to install them now for just demonstration purposes i already downloaded tdr via sticky cube because i already have them all installed but what you want to do is just double click on your zip folder you will then have a setup file you know setup.exe and listed here for each one of the plugins just double click on it start running it click run click yes then you'll click next accept the agreement next again choose all of them click next next next next next next and finally install just go ahead and click install and install all the plugins do them all like that and once we get all those installed then we can go into obs and start setting these up so finally just click install and you're good to go okay everybody i now have obs studio opened up and just a reminder if you're running streamlabs obs there are some compatibility issues with that software and vst plugins so you may not be able to use this tutorial and if you do some of the plugins may not work correctly that being said let's get in here and start setting this up now you'll notice my audio has two bars peeking up right here that's because i am running in on stereo signal however not all interfaces have a stereo signal going out and if yours only has one side lighting up here right click on it and go down to advanced audio properties okay then you want to find your microphone and click mono you want to put a little check mark in there uh to make sure you're getting a full stereo signal that way your listeners on your uh streams and everything we'll hear both sides instead of just one side of your audio okay that being said hit close on that and also you'll want to make sure that your gain levels uh when you're speaking naturally like i am right now are hitting between negative 12 and negative 18 db as you can see mine are right here on the little view meter here uh it's important to get the correct gain settings coming in if not your audio could be too loud after going through my tutorial so yeah everybody needs to have these settings set so your audio is peaking between negative 12 and negative 18 db while speaking normally into your microphone okay now let's start adding our filters now to add your filters is quite easy all we got to do is just right click on your little meter here and go down to filters wonderful now you'll notice there are no filters listed it's no problem we'll have to add them okay now we have a plus sign and minus sign a up arrow and a down arrow the plus sign will let you choose what filters you want to add okay the minus sign will help you remove those if you want to remove one and the plus the up arrow and down arrow actually change the order they are in the list here so let's click on the plus here and add our first one now first one is just going to be noise suppression and you can leave it labeled here as noise suppression and i'm going to recommend rn noise here this is the one that a new one that comes in obs 26 and is the one i recommend now there is a beta version of obs 27 out that actually has nvidia rtx voice listed in there their noise reduction plug-in and if we run an nvidia graphics card that one will be available to you to use at least if you run the rtx video graphics card but for the most of us the rn noise is the one you want to use now i do have a nvidia graphics card however this is obs version 26 so therefore i'm going to recommend everybody just to use rn noise for the most compatibility once we get that done let's add a tdr nova let's go down and click on the plus sign and to add it we want to click on vst to uh point x here plug in and add those and let's name it tdr and nova okay once we get that done we'll go find it in our list here find our drop-down list box here and go down to find tdr nova now i have a lot of plug-ins in mind because i do a lot of audio work obviously however you're not going to have that many you're probably just going to see the ones that you just installed want to find tdr nova in that list and click on it and you'll see it's now just in the box up here and let's click on open plugin interface okay wonderful and this is what tdr nova looks like it's really nice parallel dynamic equalizer as the name says here and it does quite a few things it's a really great one now we want to use precise here and if you want to click in and you can actually start see yourself while you're talking and this will help you dial in your voice issues and corrections and stuff okay now the first thing i want to do is go down here which is hp and low p or high pass filter low pass filter click on that and we want to change the frequency here up to about 40. and let me see yeah about 40 go up and if you hit the control button you can actually get hard steps here so you while you move your mouse up and down you get hard steps and let's click on a low pass filter here and turn that one on and we want to cut down to 25k here and that's what i recommend using that way when you're using kind of like a lower quality 16-bit uh you know streaming you know software like obs uses the ac that'll keep any artifacting out of the noise or anything and if you're using a 16-bit interface it also helps that as well okay so get those done we don't need three and four we can just turn those off so we only need one and two let's click on one here and we want to change our q value to 0.5 here now what we're going to do with this one is actually add a little plosive protection a kind of deep plosive and we're going to do that by adding a little bit of compression to this band here now frequency i want to use is 120 so scroll this up and down to you get around 120 here it doesn't have to be precise but round 120 is close enough we don't touch the gain but we will need to use the threshold here to add a little compression to that point and i recommend only pulling this down to negative 9 db as too much might actually take a base out of your voice and we want to take base out we just want to prevent any explosives okay so the ratio here i would recommend is go up to five to one kind of protect against ninja plosives and stuff and you can see as i say plosives plosives it kind of dips down a little bit right here and that's kind of protecting and kind of like uh actually explosives in the audio okay for the attack and release here the attack i want to make that a little faster punch in a five here for five milliseconds release 200 milliseconds and we're good to go and while we're at it out gain here we do need to bring up to about 6 db before i forget that one it's going to add 6 db that way it'll bring up audio to a more nicer level okay once you get that done let's click on 2 here then little 2 there and we're actually going to add sibilance uh kind of ds okay do this is quite easy what we want to do first is actually change our q value here to 1.0 okay and around 1.0 there we go now obviously 400 hertz isn't where we're having problems with siblings for most male voices it's going to be around 7 000 and it ranges anywhere between low as 5 up to 10 find what fits your voice my voice on this microphone is 7k is where i have sibilance problems as you can hear all this is very harsh on your ears yes i know however this is easily dealt with click threshold here and we want to lower the threshold to negative 30. and that's really going to help uh start cutting out those uh sibilance problems anytime it peaks above negative 30 that's gonna start helping on those siblings now the ratio here uh right now by default is two to one we want to bring this up somewhere around five to one if it really depends on your voice and your microphone if you don't have much of a sibilance problem or if you have a lisp then you don't need much a compression you can actually pull that down to two and leave it at two however you have like a real serious uh list uh i mean a sibilance problem you may want to go higher but for this microphone and for me speaking the five to one seems to work the best okay now for the attack here i want to run let's say like five milliseconds on it as well with release around 200 and that's going to work quite well for de-essing and if you're just curious if it's working test test test test test test as you can tell that really takes the harshness off your esses and your z's and i highly recommend everybody use this a lot of streamers don't do this and a lot of youtubers don't do it either and it just kills my ears and stuff listen to uh so much siblings problems so yeah that'll help uh cut out the s problems like i said uh what you want to do is just find where it's actually peaking like right there of mine but if yours is like over here then just adjust it down adjust it where you need it to okay so yeah it's pretty easy to dial in and after you find out where you have the problems with the frequency here then with the ratio you adjust how much you need you know as far as the you know de-essing and this works quite well and i really do like using this this is actually the one i use even in davinci resolve to cut out siblings and plosives okay now that we have our you know tdr nova set up let's add our next plug-in and what we're going to add now is slick eq is our equalizer plug-in okay so let's close this one out and like before go down here to the plus sign and no we want to go down here which is vst plug-in yes that one and let's type in slick eq okay alan said this is our equalizer and like before let's find it in our list here to be on the tdr slick eq let me see if i can't find one yeah td of our slick eq yeah be this one right here for me okay and let's open plugin interface okay wonderful now tdr uh vaslick eq is a really nice plug-in i really like the way it works and you have a different options here change the curve i'm going to recommend the british one for this particular voice since i'm going for more of a broadcast voice i recommend british okay for the low pass here leave it at 85. the gain here i'm going to recommend to start out around negative four and like before you can hit the control button and use your mouse to have hard stops and about four works quite well now we want to use the bell here make sure you're using the bell and for the mids here we're actually going to drop this one down to 400 so you can press the control button as well pull it down to 400 so you have the hard stops and i want to cut out 4 db of the gain and you already noticed this is starting to take out some that uh that shallowness as your voice and give your more a voice a more of a broadcast sound okay as far as the highs here go up one to two db and of course put it on the bell as well okay i'm going to recommend you use eq saturation this is going to boost any kind of yucky high ends your uh as far as the 2 db here and the 4 db here it's going to add some coloration to the audio make it sound like a tube on fire to an extent okay now you can play around these and choose the one you want i like using mellow that gives you the more of a broadcaster sign like a you know a tube amplifier would have and you can actually bring that up i don't recommend about 12 however just find what sounds the best to you okay leave it set to auto and as far as the full right here click on that and go down to live and ignore that when you restart it again it will go to live and what this is really good is going to add zero latency which makes these excellent for live streaming okay and if you're wondering how these sound you can turn these off individually and turn them on and get kind of the voice uh find out what's working best for you now for lows here if you want more bass bring this up as you can hear this adds a lot more bass if you want to take away bass break it down okay for the most part the mids here that will cut at 400. uh normally between negative three and negative six db works the best i'm gonna recommend is negative four for you to try out and that's actually what i use on the sm48 here and if you need more clarity in your voice since the highs you want to adjust if you need more clarity you can bring it up however be warned you could add more sibilance as well and if your voice is overlooked you know overly high and you want to make it a little softer you can bring these down so this is what i recommend for broadcaster voice sound and i think it works quite well on most all microphones just adjust the lows and highs as you need them okay that said was that our next plug in and it would be ma talk for our compressor okay let's close this one and let's go down click the plus sign again and no do not quit compressor we want to go down to vst plug-in again and let's type molotok that way we know that one's the compressor okay and of course find it in the list as well you'll find it under tdr molotov and open interface again all right this one also we want to put it on live yeah live's very important for that one okay now we want to adjust our threshold first here to negative 24 and of course we can hit our control button on the keyboard for hard stops on that as well okay as you can see this is already starting to actuate wonderful okay now it's going to add some compression and it's going to lower the audio but don't worry you're probably already noticing it we can bring it back up for makeup gain here okay and negative six on the makeup gains what i recommend this is to keep it from getting too high now by default the ratio is four to one however i don't run four to one far as this one i run a three to one make it a little softer and also to soften it up a little bit more make it seem a little more natural we can take the knee here right now it's at point five which is like a mid on the knee we can soften it up a little bit more to 0.25 make it a little bit softer okay 0.25 on the knee works great okay now on the attack and release here i want to pull the attack down to 3 milliseconds there we go three milliseconds and the release i want more around 300 milliseconds as far as the alpha beta and sigma right here this settings uh this is for another tutorial again however just ignore these and leave it set at 0.0 which is all the way on alpha okay and that's our first compressor and this will actually help start uh keeping our audio at a more listening level that way things don't get too quiet and things don't get too loud so this works to compress those and keep them a little more you know consistent okay that said let's add our next plugin and our next plugin will be wider okay let's click on the plus sign again go down to vst plug-in and let's type in a wider this is our stereo imaging plug-in it's a very good one absolutely free again and we may have to go down and find it and just click on wider all right and click on interface now this one's going to take the mono signal and spread it out to a more wider area rotten the stereo image as you can see it start bringing it out it starts getting really crazy so i don't want to go too crazy with it what i actually use is 22 and it's really going to depend upon you what you want to use i personally for the microphone i wouldn't go over 30 percent and under 20 seems like you're not really using it but hey if you want to go more crazy with it go ahead it's your audio but i recommend around 20 25 for most people and it depends upon your voice really so that said let's add our next one here and our next plugin is going to be mawtalk again however this time we're going to use it as a limiter and let's add vst plugin again and of course this one want to type in molotok limiter wonderful get that one typed in so we know that's the limiter plug-in and right before go ahead and find in the list here and go down to tdr molotok and click open plug-in interface alrighty first thing we need to do is turn precise to live so get the zero latency mode turn off the sidechain uh you'll pass here and we want to change our threshold here to negative 12. okay get that set negative 12. the knee i recommend a 0.75 on this one in case you're wondering a 1 would be the hardest the knee can get and 0 will be the softest sneaky yet for a limiter you want a fairly hard or completely hard knee that way pretension protects any audio from getting too loud and peaking up and uh hitting zero db which can cause clipping we don't want anything to clip all right attack we want three milliseconds on this one as well and release three also 300 let's put that on 300 there as far as the ratio though i do want to go up to eight to one and as far as the makeup gain let's just add three db of makeup gain that way in case it gets too loud say bang bang pop pop as you can see it keeps it from getting too loud and clipping we don't want any audio to clip that's very important okay so once we got that done we're good to go on that one okay let's go down and click the plus sign and click on expander now this is the expander plug-in that comes built into obs studio and it works quite well and it's the one i recommend okay by default the ratio 2-1 is what i recommend however the threshold here i actually use a negative 20. and if you get too low like i said negative 40 there then if you're banging on the keyboard or there's noise in the room you just liable to pick it up now an expander is a gating plug-in however it's a little more natural sounding keeping things getting too complicated for just an example here if audio hits negative 20 db like we're speaking right now then the audio sounds uh fine it's the same level coming out however if the audio say goes below negative 20 db each decibel below negative 20 db gets pressed down 2 db so for example if you have negative 30 db which is 10 db lower than negative 20 db it would make the audio sound as if it was negative 40 db you know pushing the audio levels down more okay attack and release here i don't like these attack and release uh want something a little bit more quicker five milliseconds and release here i'm gonna recommend around 500 and that 500 is gonna make it very smooth not too choppy or if you have a problem with uh you know like i said a lot of noise and stuff you want to close a bit faster then lower it down to say what 200 or 250 milliseconds but between like 250 and 500 is what i recommend 500 if any way possible you want to leave the detection on rms and leave the output gain at 0 db and this is what i use right here uh this is actually what i use so yeah this is the expander i use it works great is what i recommend okay that said that has our audio adjusted now let's just close all these and start from beginning and as you can see here without noise suppression if using a real noisy room this is going to help when i stream i like to use a fan however it's not on right now but turning noise suppression on real help you know keeping like fan noise and stuff out okay then your tdr nova you know to keep any kind of sibilance implosives down and of course the eq gives us a nice big broadcaster sound that we all like mala talk our first one here is the compressor just to kind of compress their voice get their audio levels a little more natural sounding but they don't get too loud or too quiet wider to add our stereo imaging and of course mod talk one more time this time as a compressor but uh tightened up a bit more so it works as a limiter to keep our levels from actually peaking out now negative zero db if we do because that you know we'll clip our audio we don't want audio clipped and finally expander just to kind of you know bring it all together and keep our audio sounding nice and tight and to keep in those uh breathing or keyboard noise out of your audio that stuff that might and you'll make it past the noise suppression plug in so anyway this is how to get your microphone sounded good but we're not done yet let me show you how you can make your music and your game audio actually sound better too while you're speaking in obs studio okay so the first thing we want to do is add a little ducking to our game audio and we want to go down to filters and of course plus sign again and but this time let's go and actually use the compressor that's in obs okay click on compressor and we want to name this game ducking now the reason we want to do this is if we're playing with our game and stuff and we're going to speak to our audience we want any kind of like monsters roaring you know gunfire explosions and stuff in the background to be suppressed so that our viewers can actually hear us speaking makes sense okay for the ratio here for a game i don't use a 10 when i actually use a seven and a half to one however i do set my threshold at negative 30 db we can just bring this slider on over and so when i got there close enough the attack though i want the attack to be more natural sounding like if somebody's moving the sliders itself and not too quick and to do this i want to be attacked to be 100 milliseconds and the release to be at 1 000 milliseconds which is one second okay and for the side chain input source the microphone now what this does like i said again is it ducts your audio so when you start speaking anytime your audio gets above you know negative 30 db it starts pushing down the uh game audio levels so that you can speak and your viewers could actually hear you okay wonderful so once you get that one done hit close and let's right click on music and go down to filters on it also and we're going to at plus sign add a compressor to it also yes we're going to do a little ducking here now this one we want to add uh at your name music ducking so we know which one it is music ducky wonderful okay now music ducking i don't want the ratio to be that high and i recommend a five to one on the ratio here however uh threshold i also want negative 30 db okay and just like before we want a 100 on the attack and a 1000 on the release to keep things sounding very natural and not too you know militant or anything that way things feel very soft uh soft and of course go down gotta choose microphone because when we speak cuz we want to compress down that way it keeps our music stuff in the background and this because we want our music to be immersive but not uh so loud that you know viewers can't understand what you know the streamer you me what we're saying during our streams and stuff okay now that one being done we want to add wider and what the wider is going to do is let us uh bring up the stereo image a little bit wider on our music make it a little more immersive so let's click on the vst plugins here let's type in you know about wider music okay got that done click ok find the wider in our list down here at the bottom click on it again open it up and for this one i recommend to bring it about 150. it's really going to depend on you how you think uh you want your audio sound about 150 really makes the audio uh sound really immersive now let's get that done click the x and close it off now the problem is with music sometimes it could be too too forward like you've got symbols and stuff stuff too high in the music we don't want that we want our music to be in the background you know the music is kind to help bring the stream together not you know kind of like stand out in front of you so what we're going to do is add a little uh you know slick eq here let's add that one type in slick eq okay and i'm gonna name this one music and this is kind of soft in the background music okay find it in our list here slick eq boom there we go now let's open our interface okay now for this one i want to keep things a little more natural sound so we're going to leave eq set turned off we do want uh for here to put it on live okay and i actually i use the british one myself because of the eq curve but we can turn these two off we only need the top one and we want to make sure it's set at linear okay because we don't want any kind of coloration to the music however if you want to have at it now the frequency right here i want to pull that down to 750 let's put all the way down 750 and of course we want to use you know the shell filter here and we want to lower this six db now by lowering xclox it's going to take any kind of highs out of the music and that'll keep your music in the background and what this does it's going to help when you speak will you the music still be in the background still sound nice however it's going to make it so the viewers of your stream can actually hear you more clearly and this is what i actually use on my streams as well so that's it folks that's my tutorial and my settings i use for uh you know streaming and stuff so i hope you enjoy okay everybody so yeah pretty long to uh video but hopefully the information helps you out and if you want to help support this channel then simply to share the video with your friends and family sharing this video is the best way to help my channel grow at the moment so anyway yeah the video i made about a year ago i got a lot of feedback on it and i took a lot of that feedback into account for this video so hopefully i covered everything of all the issues people had down in the comments from a video in this one so anyway thanks for watching everybody i appreciate you taking the time to watch the video as well as share it so anyway if you like this video how about give it a thumbs up thumbs up is highly appreciated and if you're not a subscriber to my channel hey that was a great time to subscribe subscribing's free it's for you unless you know at least more great videos like this one so hopefully see you in the next one everyone thanks for watching

Channel: Atomic Overdrive

Views: 13,010

Keywords: atomic overdrive, obs studio mic settings, obs vst plugins, how to make your mic sound better, How To Improve Your Mic Audio In OBS Studio, Best Free VST Plugins For Live Streaming & Podcasting, obs audio settings, obs microphone setup, obs studio microphone setup guide, best obs audio plugins, best obs audio filters, best obs audio settings and filters, obs mic audio filters, obs audio plugins, obs studio audio settings for recording, obs studio microphone settings

Id: 14VTTp7HVvc

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021