How To Record Your Voice with Adobe Audition CC (Audio 101: Part 1)

all right hello good morning good afternoon hello everybody thank you Rufus and Michael for for the handoff they're just getting settled in here so nice to see you all here on a Monday and as the title suggests maybe you haven't seen the title yet but I know Rufus hey star crunch mm hi sy Luna so yes so for the first half this morning where I'm doing something a little different today inspired by by mr. Terry white going to be doing an audio learning stream for this first hour so the first hour is going to be focused solely on audio 101 basics for just recording a microphone in to audition good morning Admiral Shane good morning Paulina good morning sliced media good morning in which name moorwen XO hey are how are you Emily oh hi actual Kevin so we're going to focus on that and I actually have three setups here my standard broadcasting microphone that I always use which is um lunch with Beatle J's hey Stan aren't there on the east coast today an 80 40 50 condenser microphone which is what I use for almost all recording a voice and everything that I do and then we'll do a combination of other common microphones that are used I don't use any sort of USB microphones but I do have a USB headset so we'll use this and kind of talk about how you set this up and how you record with this and how you make this sound good and then also showcase probably one of the most common ways to just start recording you know doesn't have to be the recording an album right a lot of reasons to record your voice and things just using like the in this case that the Apple headset microphones you can well you the earbuds but you know the mic is here the mic part is that's here this also makes a good string bass if you get really bored and what that's plugged in over there so we'll record through all of those different different devices hey Neil how are you and hey good morning Pam Vargas hey Paul Weaver so yes I hope you guys will enjoy it so what will happen is I will go until 10:00 and then I'll stop the stream just that the VOD is complete one hour of just this and then I will restart again it'll be seconds so don't leave stick around and then we'll be doing at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time is kind of continuing on where I left off Friday working on that fuzzy Island Edit and remember we were doing those 4k renders for those of you who were watching on stream we're doing those 4k renders in the background they eventually all finished and so we'll be kind of integrating some of those as close-ups into that edit I showed him some of the rough cuts of what we've done and he was so psyched and again had forgotten these performances so it was really cool to to be able to showcase that will be d hey how are you hey CBR network yep the one from last week now is the one from Friday not to be confused with the one for Monday because we found two right I found two of these fuzzy island performances but the latter one which was a song of his where I showed we had three takes I wound up taking all that footage and upscaling it to 4 K so that we could do kind of cutaways to like to the hands to the soloing to really kind of show off the performing a little bit better and just to kind of break up the edit a little bit more Admiral Shane perfect now I want to point this out too it's it's 9 of 4 so this is not this is not going to be a quick five-minute how to start recording I could certainly do that um there's lots of those out there that's not what I want this to be this is going to be a ridiculously comprehensive or frankly as comprehensive as you want it to be but really all the ins and outs to get set up because to be honest and I was thinking about this this morning once you're set up to record 2 of that once audition is ready to roll it's basically let's see so far in audition here I think what did I say it's like it's like three clicks so you create a file you have to name it I guess that's typing but really consider this the first click so it's one click two clicks to set your levels and then a third click to start recording and that's it okay so it's really three clicks but there's a whole bunch of stuff that you want to set up that you want to be aware of before you actually start so that you know what's happening so that if there is a problem if there is a glitch if you change your microphone if you upgrade from you know earbuds which by the way I've done many many a last minute voice over with these Apple earbuds or even like a little bows and your ones that have the mic on them some of the Logitech's you can still get a pretty good sound again if you're kind of just aware of setting them up and how to how to do it properly here in audition so Admiral Shayne I want to see those cues for sure let's let's make this very interactive because I'm hoping that this will be a nice reference that will live here and it'll also be on my youtube channel later today I'm recording a recording live so I'll publish that up there as well so uh cool awesome so shall we shall we get started okay what has to happen first a lot of this okay so we're going to start of course by just actually setting up the microphone to record and just put headphones on I really need them on just now but um so we're going to do that by going into the preferences everybody's favorite thing settings and preferences a hold on one second here change something on my audio there we go all right a new mug he have falling it you know what I my my Winnie the Pooh ones were dirty I left them in my office over the weekend so and I didn't feel like I didn't feel like cleaning him yeah I got lazy alright so you've got a microphone a USB microphone an eighth inch mini plug or forget what that is in millimeters or a standard mic and you want to record your voice in audition how do you start okay well the first thing that you're actually going to see is this which is not variant Pam is taking notes excellent limo Leo Colombian coffee absolutely so the first thing you need to do is go into your preferences to make sure that you're actually using the correct device now this is in slightly different locations on the Mac and PC on the Mac of course it's the audition menu preferences and we'll go into audio hardware I want to say that on the PC I think it's edit preferences I think the preferences are in the Edit menu I'm not mistaken on somebody on a PC probably confirm that I was going to pull up my PC today but I had a family member whose machine died and I had to lend them my my one existing PC so we'll go into preferences alright now again there are there's audio hardware an audio channel mapping let's just start with the hardware because the first thing we need to do is tell audition what device are we going to be recording from now I'm in a unique situation here because I have a lot of different devices that I can choose from to record with in fact I took one out so they just wasn't so much in the menu I don't want to look I don't want it to look too different from what you'll you'll likely see so what we're really focused on for recording of course is the default input now this also determines the default input for the editing view or the waveform to channel view or the multitrack view and we're I'll talk more about those in the MINIX you can record into either or and as mentioned when you click the twirl down here you'll see all the various devices that you have selected now this Focusrite thunderbolt this is my external sound sound device this is running via Thunderbolt 2 it has 18 or 20 inputs same amount of outputs and this is kind of everything I use this for everything so when I do multitrack music when we were recording we could go Friday and I was at the piano when I had individual mic phones all going into this device and the mic that I was speaking on going into this device and the room mic everything was feeding this multi input device now we also have available to us the built-in microphone and that's where I have the earbuds connected to Ronald says our IP PC and the Plantronics headset which represents a USB or a standard USB microphone now I know a lot of you out there use things like the Yeti and the snowball and all these variations of USB most of those because they're they're basically stereo and/or mono devices dual channel mono or stereo that's another good thing to take note of if you're recording a microphone signal right one microphone one voice one signal should you record in mono or stereo well a microphone signal is assuming you're it's one person talking on one mic that's a single channel so it there's no reason not to record into mono again many of those USB styled mics will offer stereo recording to you but it's basically filling the left and right channel with the same content you can always convert to stereo later and a lot of times just to simplify things it's better just to record a voiceover in mono there's no real reason to record it in stereo you can convert it to stereo later for processing and that's another stream we're just going to talk about recording today so the Plantronics represents a standard USB now on the Mac side this your USB microphone will likely show up with an actual name so whether it's the Samson u1 or again the snowball or whatever Plantronics shows up these are standard plug and play devices they don't require any additional driver they don't have any mixer of any kind on the PC sometimes these things show up with names sometimes they show up as USB audio codec or standard USB audio device that's how you know that you're tapping into whatever your USB microphone is if it doesn't show up at the actual name again PC and Mac USB microphones these days especially if you're using Windows 7 or Windows or above Windows 8 or 10 there's standard audio devices so they don't require a driver unlike this Thunderbolt which again because it has so many inputs and has all routing I have this whole separate mixer here that controls for each of the outputs and inputs all the various routing of where I want signals to go you know etc etc you you very likely will not have to deal with any of this but just be aware that different sound devices will have different options and you can actually even see here that if you do have a separate mixer or a separate mixing panel this will access that automatically this Settings button and that includes on Windows the standard Windows recording mixer okay I'm just going to take a second to look at some of the comments here all right very good very good cool all right so let's let's start just because I'm here with my Thunderbolt and then we'll go and we'll record the USB and we'll record the in fact you know what no let's not do that let me do that let me start here just I don't want to change anything this these are my defaults right now okay so we're gonna use the standard Thunderbolt 4 in and out meaning that I'm recording on the same device and I'm monitoring on the same device now the master clock you probably won't have to fuss with this too much basically that's related to the actual sample clock which is the sample rate that you see here now people ask me this all the time and I told you this is going to be super thorough and nerdy 40 for 144 thousand 100 Hertz or 48 thousand Hertz 48k which one do we choose well the standard for video is 48 K alright so if you're going to be doing any editing if you're going to take this audio file and somehow work this into a video whether you're publishing a video for youtube maybe like sine apps we talked about this you're editing videos of gameplay and you're going to do some voiceover commentary wiggle wiggle hey hey / grater nice huh grater huh grater 48 K is where you want to be now if you're simply recording a voiceover that will is really audio only okay it doesn't really have any video destination maybe you're doing a voiceover for you know could be could be a podcast for a radio styled commercial something that doesn't involve video well the standard for that and the standard for iTunes and this entered for Spotify and the standard for Pandora is and the CD standard that's where this comes from is 44 1 so again if video is not part of your bag it's not part of the thing that you're going to be doing well that's second there's no reason not to be recording in 44 1 I just changed my sample right so some of my settings here changed again for our purposes we're going to keep this in 48k because I I tend to tie everything to video can you convert later yes can you still upload 48k mp3s to places yes but just be aware that if really there's no video component to what you're doing you probably want to be in 40 for one okay now the other thing to to keep in mind is that if you were on the stream when I was talking about talking about high sample rates you can see here 96k 192k and I see Admirals actual Kevin is chiming in a little bit here there is definitely more high-end presence and there's definitely more air in space in the sound of 48k this is something that you will actually perceive even if you're older like me and as frequencies and your ability to really hear high frequency tends to roll off as you get older unless you have super ears 48k it sounds better so as a general rule anyway like I I'd like to record at 48 K 32-bit that isn't ultimately how I deliver files but it's just a better overall sound so I'm going to show you the conversion towards the end of our hour here as well so remember that if you're not going to be doing anything you don't want to have to convert you're just going to be doing a standard audio file that's going to go to just an audio destination you can use 44 1 by default I'll typically choose 48 K because that works everything else okay so all of this is set in here now one more thing before we leave this dialogue all right is the buffer size now I'll show you some examples of a buffer that's too long now I think the default here is 512 the buffer size is basically what that determines when you are talking into a microphone recording or recording into a microphone recording music or whatever you've seen me do this the time that it takes to go from the microphone through the cable into the sound device into the machine into the application there's some latency there and this is it's you can see its measured in samples there are 48,000 samples per second so obviously the greater the buffer the more delay there's going to be with the signal actually hitting the software now if you don't need to monitor yourself live in other words you're just going to talk on mic record it and edit it after the fact it doesn't really matter what that what that buffer is the higher the buffer size let's say we went to 512 or 1024 2048 the less chance you have for any kinds of audio dropouts now when we talk in Premiere about the fractional playback resolutions you've seen me do this a lot a fractional playback allows you to do things like play 4k 6 k 8k haaaah on a slower machine you're not seeing all the pixels but when you stop it'll show and reveal all the pixels all the fidelity everything like that well that's to prevent dropouts and things while you're editing well the buffer size kind of works in the same way in the sense that more so when you're mixing really but when you're if you find that you're getting dropouts you've seen me get those dropout indicators before or like the performance in the app is just it's sluggish it's not very fast or it's just it feels like it's going to crash try increasing the buffer size now the default I don't even know what it is anymore it may be 256 it may be 512 these are a bit these are a bit slow and I'll let you hear in a minute why because if you're trying to monitor yourself while you're recording if you've got a buffer of 512 you're actually going to hear like a slap you're going to hear yourself twice it's going to be very hard to record that way so the lowest setting you can get the better now not all machines can handle these extremely low buffer settings so 128 is kind of a comfortable medium that's what I'll set everything to by default that usually is it's it's fast enough you're not going to have any dropouts or delays and it should still be enough where if you have to monitor yourself it's not it's still doable even for a singer you know singer doesn't want to hear their voice of a compromised that should be pretty good alright so these are all your basic settings your input your output the clock will set automatically the buffer size and the sample right okay all right so let's click Okay on this now again I'm I'm using my microphone here this is my 80 40 50 all right so this is a XLR microphone feeding into my focus right Thunderbolt Yan Eric isn't a higher buffer better as for a KA more in memory ayan confused no no a higher buffers not it's all it's only better so there's there's two sides and I want to get to the recording on earth but I'll answer that right now no a higher buffer is only good if you find that your when you're playing back your your dropping out samples or things are skipping or your hearing pops and clicks it's going to affect all methods of playback and recording so for instance if you have a very high buffer setting and you hit the spacebar with a low buffer set and you hit spacebar it starts playing immediately with a high buffer setting there's a delay right similarly when you wind back or go forward or make changes in the UI there's going to be a delay so it becomes very difficult for audio because remember unlike video and if you're tweaking color and video it doesn't matter if you sort of see it immediately you know where you're going with audio if I'm making a change to an EQ and I make the change and then I don't hear it for another half a second it's very confusing it's very difficult to mix or to process with a very long buffer so you really want the buffer as low as you can get it right it's going to improve performance overall and it's not related to memory at all it's solely related to the communication capabilities of your of your machine and the the device that's doing the recording now if you've got your just internal sound card your internal you know whatever Windows uses these days and whatever Mac use is just on the laptop or on those machines like I said you're just really looking for the sweet spot and I would try 128 samples as kind of the starting point there and if you can get it lower believe me it'll be better it is better everything would be just a little faster when processing and working all right cool okay so how do we begin all right now as I mentioned you can record in the waveform view which is the standard two-track view that you see here or the multitrack we're going to start in the waveform view this is where most of you will begin so we'll go file new audio file okay now once again it kind of prompts you with all right let's give it a name so we'll call this Jason 80 40 50 here's where you choose your sample rate now again I'm going to say 48 K because you can always convert later it's going to sound better it's going to capture more frequencies you know you can throw them away later better to get more you know it's kind of why we shoot for K 6 k 8k we're not we don't want to really deliver 8 K but the more media you have the more that you can crop and move around and recompose kind of the same thing with with sample rate up to 96 K alright so 48 K is what I'll choose now this is what I was talking about before we want mono or stereo one microphone one voice there's no reason not to do mono okay you can record stereo some microphones I know I've seen this in the chat here before some of you have said well I record stereo and the mic is on the left side and there's silence on the right side that's stupid yes it's by design because one mic channel one input one signal one ear now some of the devices out there are smart enough where they will automatically send the same signal to both ears to both channels and you'll have a what appears to be a proper stereo file there's if it's a solo voice there's there's no reason to do that you can always convert after the fact okay and again mono smaller file size less have heavier less stress on your CPU or your drives when recording another case in point now we're working in 32-bit float this is our native bit depth you never have to change this this is the the native bit depth here now someone says I need a quick voiceover I need to be 48 K 16 bit because they're going to broadcast that like very quickly here's where you can change that okay why not recording 16-bit 16-bit is what all of our audio files are ultimately delivered as iTunes Spotify pretty much you know CDs again the problem with 16-bit is that if you have to process the audio noise reduce add reverb effects and things 16-bit has a much more limited dynamic range so again when we talk about similarities between imagery or video and audio right if you're working in raw right whether raw Stills or raw video you have that much more latitude for color right if you know high frame rates for playing around with time remapping it's kind of the same idea with with bit depth the greater the bit depth the greater the dynamic range the more that you can process and affect your audio without degrading that original signal the default is 32 bit float I recommend leaving it there until you have to export when you're all done okay so don't even change that so 48 K mono 32 bit float click OK alright limo leo says Wow alright now the first step and by the way I need to just modify something here and what we'll come back to this so under your audio channel mapping ok I'm back in the preferences here now because my focus right device has so many inputs this microphone isn't necessarily connected into input 1 and you can see here for channel mapping you have your default stereo input that relates to that waveform view that we according into now and then you have your default outputs now for the waveform view and you can see here at rep you know channel 1 mono this microphone is actually not connected into input 1 this is going into input 6 I think yes and you can see here analog 6 is what currently is being fed by this microphone now this mic over here as you can see you can kind of see in view that's analog 5 but this mic is 6 so I'm going to just change that default stereo input here of that input 1 mono I'm going to change that to focus right input 6 now if you have again you're using your USB microphone you're using a headset microphone you're not going to have to change any of these things these will these will follow because you're only working with a mono or two channel device for a multi input device here is how you can sort of change the default mono input so I'm going to change that to input six mono I don't even have to change the right because I'm recording in mono here it doesn't matter and click OK alright makes sense tracking what the goal is to file agreement and if it's safely not to change yep exactly very good very good actual Kevin okay alright so we've now set a blank file we have our device selected what do we want to do now well we want to check our levels so you have your meters now your UI may not look like this the default can move around I have my level meters docked along the side often you'll see them docked along the bottom here and you know this is the same the standard layout of the docking panels very similar to that of premiere and After Effects very easy to move and move these things around just depends on where you'd like seeing them I like having my levels kind of vertical so I typically will dock them over here all right like that that's very big sometimes very big is nice ok so to see your level before you even begin recording all you have to do is double click inside the level meter click click inside the level meter and now you can see uh that we're actually getting some level is is this why people tap the mic to test levels absolutely and this is why you will always hear on stage or in a venue or in a studio you know testing one two one two hi my name is hello testing testing and one two three these are all good things because they're not only going to test levels but they're also going to let the audio engineer know if if you're if you're off axis if you're too close if there are popping peas if it's too hot you get the idea now for most of your USB microphones and again we'll come back to this in just a few minutes you don't really have any level setting you might have a lack of control on the device itself this logitech has a mute but it doesn't have any way on the device to increase the amplitude so for that you often have to go into your your system properties now again this is a little bit different whether we're talking Mac or PC in Windows it's you know if you double click in the bottom right on the or right-click rather on the speaker icon it'll take you into the standard Windows mixer this is assuming you're using onboard sound or even some of your USB devices and you'll often have a slider in there that will allow you to adjust the input now if I selected my I'm just going to turn that off for a second if I selected my microphone here actually everyone's changed that back here inside the Mac this is my level setting so this is allowing me to adjust the level of this headset mic right now okay now you're not hearing it but you can see I talked into this loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud there's nothing because the levels all the way down at zero bring it back up bring it back up bring it back up now you can see that we're peaking right around here right okay so on the Mac you're going to have this option inside the sound panel for your internal devices now if I go down to the Plantronics here same thing the Plantronics gives me a volume setting right here okay just rub my fingers together in front of the mic no damage risk yes can hear that little ASMR ring okay so again on the Mac side the sound control panel this is the only place this is your this is your one opportunity to set your input level right so if it's too quiet and you're recording you don't know why go to sound make this adjustment on the input side okay now you may have noticed my Thunderbolt did not have any input controls that's because they're all contained in this separate mixer okay so again if you've got an external multi-channel device it will very likely have some kind of mixing routing panel that's where you adjust levels and things okay this process is really important because this is one of the things that most people who are trying out audio or trying to record this is often where it sort of gets confusing right at the start like how come there's not enough level why is it so quiet or why is it so loud right I've heard this a lot alright let's see you know Eric is saying we've got a serious logic you're late 2013 serious logic to sound card yet integrated audio yeah I mean all of your integrated audio today you know it's it's all it's all okay I won't say it's bad and I won't say they're great some are pretty good the Mac one is not bad some of the PC ones are okay some of them are very noisy and bad I'm sure anyone who's ever tried to plug in whether a mic input or a line input into various PC laptops or towers over the years and even the old sound blasters you know some of them were okay some of them were very noisy and crummy so you really just have to test it out and see the main thing is you just want to make sure that you've got some healthy level now there's a couple different ways to view that there's a lot of right-clicking that happens in audition and it's very important to know that you can do this pretty much anywhere if you right-click on the level meters here you'll see that you can show different decibel ranges now without getting super super technical about decibels we're working in the 32-bit float right I was about that before so 32-bit float effectively means that you've got 24 deaths of 24 bits of audio and then those other 8 bits and I think actually Kevin was just talking about this a minute ago those are really used for rounding and all the processing and everything that happens with a 24 bit dynamic range you're looking at a hundred and forty decibels approximately a hundred and forty-four decibels of dynamic range right so so think of that as like number of stops on your camera that's a huge amount of dynamic range so so and when we're working digitally we're working on what's known as a negative logarithmic scale so if you happen to notice at my level meters here the peak the loudest we can get is zero right so it's not like in the in the analog days where zero was kind of where you want it to sort of be and then you had six or 10 DB of headroom above that digitally the loudest you can get zero and the quietest you can get let's use 24-bit as an as an example is negative 144 decibels technically negative infinity but negative 144 okay so where do you want to be when you're recording where should those level meters be well you don't want them to go up to zero okay not that they can't and sometimes it happens you get excitable hey oh there I I just clipped right there it happens if that's happening a lot though you want to attenuate or back off on that input right so now again mine is actually on a front panel here and I'm not gonna just my microphone because I have this set up for my streaming server here but that's what you want to do you basically want to be when I used to work a lot with radio radio folks I used to tell them you know you kind of want to keep it or they used to tell me that they had been told for years you want to keep it in the yellow and by the way you'll see there's different options here if I turn on let me turn off these LED meters I like it just this kind of gradient you want to be somewhere between minus 12 and minus 3 that's ideally where you want most of your voice to fall it can be quieter but if you're seeing everything all the way down here at minus 30 you're too quiet and you're probably going to bring up a lot of noise when you make it louder and obviously if you're too hot you're just going to be digitally distorting so you really ideally you want to be somewhere between minus 12 minus 3 now a lot of that has to do with the sensitivity of the microphone how it picks up a lot of it has to do with your positioning right I mean I don't even use a pop filter and I still occasionally have popping peas and things but I speak on mic all the time so I'm I know how to account for those things all of this comes into play all right may seem like a lot it's daunting it's confusing this is why audio sucks right because there's all these little things that like if they're not right it's going to sound bad but once you know it it's actually really simple you know hold on yawn eric has a whole bunch of questions here so art of arson got a terrible his home on your mic I tried on PC for streaming could not figure it out for the life of me yeah I mean and that's the thing out of arson and it could have been the input on the integrated sound on your PC I mean some of them and I'm not I am not hating please do not misunderstand me okay it's just a fact that a lot of those integrated sound I'm talking years ago I haven't I haven't really used PC laptops in quite a few years but I mean I've used everything from old IBM's to Lenovo's used Dells forever when they were the hot thing HP workstations and so even some of the newer Dells I've been privileged to check out some of those old ones the integrated sound especially the input was horrible as exactly as you described it was buzzy and huh me and noisy and terrible nothing you can do about that most of the time except use an external USB soundcard firewire sound card Thunderbolt sound card I mean you know those devices weren't they weren't intended to be recording devices play out as pretty much as as much as you're going to get with those and you can still do input but as you noticed a lot of them are pretty that they sound pretty nasty yawns I was asking of the current sound blasters good yeah you know I haven't I haven't listened through a sound blaster yawn Erik in quite a few years but you know they were always I mean I can't speak for now but they were always yeah for gaming and stuff that were always pretty good they always many of them had you know multiple out you know 5.1 output long before that was standard so they offered a lot of flexibility that you didn't have with an onboard sound that was much more expensive with very high-end sound cards so again I can't really speak to their quality today certainly back in the day for Paul Weaver they um they were good enough I mean they were okay certainly for recording boys you know all right all right let's see what else we got here hundred time sessions where the engineer was doing preamp gain to track it in awesomer yes now actual Kevin is talking about preamp gain now this is something that I'm not really going to get too much into here because this doesn't apply to everybody but the term that I will often drill into new engineers when I'm teaching audio is this concept of gain staging and it's really the microphone into the preamp and getting that level set correctly even before it gets to the sound card to the application and this is a process that you really have to you have to watch you have to meter you have to listen and you can do it again with these external cards that I have very accurately and make sure that basically gain staging means that you're getting enough signal into the preamp so it's right in the sweet spot it's right in that yellow but it's not too hot it's not going to distort and it's not too quiet so that you're artificially enhancing noise you're kind of right where you want to be and that's again that's really what you're trying to do when you're kind of setting that input level all right okay very cool all right so hey Adobe cush okay so now that we've got this set remember what we did let's go back to the other step so file new audio file give it a name 48k mono 32-bit float we end up with this double click on our level meters now we can see that we have some signal once we have that signal there all we now have to do oops is click record which we're going to do although I'm just gonna hide my moving my new eye here a little bit this earpiece is this piece of hair is what is I'm doing not a hair piece of piece of hair okay so now I have to put these back on so I can hear myself so we are now recording as you can see now it's not recording the music that's going behind me because remember I set this to a discrete channel so it's using input number six okay so here we go let's do a little recording hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition okay good fairly even as you can see let me do one more and I'm going to leave a little pausing in there or actually I want to try and do some popping Peas hi this is Jason Levine and today at hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we'll be talking about recording your voice and using pop filters in Adobe Audition okay so when you're done you click stop and that's it and now if we wind back here and play this hi this is Jason Levine and today at OK or click over here hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in adobe audition okay recorded all right that's it all right if we want it to continue where we left off or keep on going again we want it to double check levels come over to my level meters double click in here check my levels again hit record okay keep on moving now let's go ahead and record from some of those other devices because I want us to also compare the sound let me just check what I said here hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition ok excellent alright so what we're going to do now is we're going to switch over to the ear buds alright so we're going to go back to preferences audio hardware and this time we're going to change whoops we're going to change the input to built-in microphone okay now you're noticing kind of a unique situation here that we allow you to do which is the input is one device the output is another device this is not uncommon in the studio this is not highly recommended for most for most things because it can be a little problematic when we're talking about master clock this sample clock ultimately audition chooses what it thinks is the best choice because we're monitoring the output here I will typically set the output of that of the master clock I'll set the master clock to the device that it's outputting the Focusrite is going to have a much more reliable clock being an external device than our internal built-in microphone anyway again it sets this based on what it thinks is best but typically you'll want this to be the output device if you're mixing in and out right so I'm recording with the headset mic but we're going to hear it back through the Focusrite we're going to leave everything else the same here okay because again when we get into multitrack that's where I'll change this buffer size so you can hear what it's doing all right so built-in microphone okay we're gonna make a new audio file I'll call this Jason built-in headset 48k mono 32-bit okay let's double click now uh I'm gonna just have to move this a little bit so to use the headset mic properly you really want to wear these okay they're designed to pick up sound you know from a certain distance from your ear here I'm just going to move this so you can still come see me here all right so let's see what our levels look like here all right looks it looks a little hot so again this is where I'm going to go into our system preferences sound I'm going to look at the external microphone and yeah you can see I'm peaking there it's way too hot so let's just back this off these tend to be pretty sensitive but perhaps surprisingly they're actually decent they're decent microphones I'm going to turn this so that you guys are hearing me - okay all right so here we are you're seeing my levels into this headset now it looks a little bit better it's like we're peaking around - 4 - 6 so let's go ahead and record hi this is Jason Levine and today we're talking about audio 101 recording your voice in Adobe Audition not exactly what I said before close oh hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we'll be talking about recording your voice into Adobe Audition stop take these off Gavi is back on here alright and let's take a listen hi this is Jason Levine and today we're talking about audio 101 recording your voice in Adobe Audition not exactly what I said before this can also hear all the movement of that on my hair and everything was closed up but you can hear that the sound is actually very clean albeit perhaps a bit thin hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we'll be talking about recording your voice into Adobe Audition now if we wanted to compare the sound of this to the one we just recorded you got a couple of ways that you can do that in your editor panel there's this little this is a flyout menu here where you can swap between the open files at the moment you can also just go into the files panel and double-click so if we wanted to hear what the Audio Technica version sounded like hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition now if you're saying it's not loud enough yet because this is raw we haven't we haven't chain we haven't done anything to process this it let me let me mute these so you can actually hear the very clean sound of these recordings back you know I'll wait until we do the headset one because I want you to compare all three together so let's do that now let's do a recording with the headset so once again back in audition preferences audio hardware let's change the default input to the Plantronics now I think it may tell me yeah I may have to do a sample rate change whoo how is this gonna work now ah because I'm streaming everything 48k and I'm connected digitally ok hold on I have to think about this for a second this might this might kick me out crap oh all right we'll do it for one second and then it'll be fine okay bear with me here okay I change this to 44 1 you all right uh that's because of how I have this routed for my streaming talked about sample clock well the sample clock of the thunderbolt is very strong okay it's not going to let me do something to let me do this so let me think for a second here I think if I switch maybe if I switch both of these bear with me for a second you meet you mate you may lose me here just hold on okay there we go haha that did work okay why I had to go kind of a backwards way I don't exactly know all right just to verify Plantronics is set and we'll just change the output back before I before I play it back for you okay now we'll have to do the same thing with setting levels in here no doubt so file new audio file pull this Jace USB mic alright can I talk about the psychedelic Brownian noise brain altering functions that used to be in Coweta that I can't find an audition to the FDA make Adobe take them out the FDA did not make Adobe take them out Adobe made made us take them out and what what he's referring to actual Kevin is referring to is we used to have something called what was it called now oh I forget the name of the filter but yes we had a filter at one point that could do all kinds of uh what's what's a biofeedback and I want to say mind control but wave generation for relaxation and these kinds of things and I don't even remember the name of the filter but yes when audition was acquired formerly Cool Edit there was something questionable about it and we had some presets and things and they they made us they made us take them out so yeah sorry about that okay so once again the level on this is super super hot so we're going to back this off probably to around looks like we can even go to under 50% it's still very very responsive okay very very very responsive so now when we look at the levels here they should be a little bit better and of course you can adjust the level by just pulling this further away from your from your mouth I have my set from your mouth hole okay mind control yeah there was a whole section of the manual art of arson tripping balls filter yeah it was really cool I wish I could remember I could remember what we what it was okay it'll come back to me and re-engineer it yeah we'll see all right so let's do a quick recording here we've got the USB mic connected hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we will be talking about recording through different microphones in Adobe Audition CC okay we'll just do that one okay alright so now we're going to go back to our hardware we're just going to switch everything back to the focus with me here hold on okay and we're back all right cool okay so now this is where now we can start to compare the sounds of these and then I'm going to show you recording in the multitrack very quickly in our last 10 minutes and show you kind of how that how that's different and also how the buffer settings affect what you're doing okay so let's take a listen to the USB recording that we just did and in fact just to kind of level the playing field let's normalize everything 2-1 again we're not affecting the dynamics we're just going to look at the loudest peak and globally make everything louder until it hits minus one okay or the loudest peak hits minus one and that's what we did right here so we'll do that for all three of these files alright let's repeat the last command though this one it looks like it's peaking at zero actually make that one smaller and let's go to the built-in headset this is also command our control our for repeat last command just to bring everything in okay so let's take a listen first to the Audio Technica 40-50 condenser XLR microphone go in here and I'll mute myself so you can hear them very clean hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition hi Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition okay so you could hear that one there let's go to the USB mic and I'll mute myself here again so you can hear that hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we will be talking about recording through different microphones in Adobe Audition CC now right there you could hear a pretty fundamental difference in sound right so this is what I talk about a lot and that wasn't a cheap Plantronics headset either it's just that you know it's not meant to be a microphone that one would sing on so fidelity wise it's a little mid-range e it's actually got a lot of mid-range because by design it's kind of meant to cut through so as a gaming headset right you're you're in a headset you're listening to others talk it's going to make those vocal frequencies cut through so that it's not bombarded by all the other sound of sound effects and music and everything else does it make for a great voice over microphone mmm you know not necessarily but it can get the job done all USB mics all mics are going to sound a little bit different but this headset style this particular one you can hear it very clearly it's it's just kind of mid-range a hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio larb done we will be talking about recording through different microphones in adobe auditions okay you can also hear my phone ringing yeah I don't forgot to unplug it again today all right and then lastly the built-in uh earbud mics or rather sorry the um they're not built-in using the built-in sound card but with the headset Apple earbud headset take a listen to that hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio 101 we'll be talking about recording your voice into adobe audition now aside from the sort of ringing bangles and sounds like jewelry in there as I mentioned the sound of the little headset mic it's pretty good hi this is Jason Levine and today we're talking about audio 101 recording your voice in Adobe Audition alright so there's the earbuds here's the Plantronics hi this is Jason Levine and for today's audio one we will be talking about recording through different microphones in Adobe Audition and here is the condenser microphone here hi I'm Jason Levine and today for audio 101 we're talking about recording your voice in Adobe Audition okay fundamental different sound if I had to say if I had to pick the the the low-cost leader you can't see it damn it right here these these guys and I've seen a lot of streamers use the Apple earbuds because they just sound good they sound pretty good you know not to say that USB mics can't not to say that Plantronics headsets can't but as like something that many people have and I know a lot of different devices all your Android phones everything comes to some kind of headset that's kind of a good go-to if you don't have a desktop microphone I'm really into those in condenser we trust limo Leo indeed hey sigh Luna yes I mean there's there's no there's no question right so if I had to pick between two you know would be either my proper microphone when I'm in the studio or those headsets I I mean the the earbuds I seldom pull out the USB Plantronics anymore also it's not very comfortable but again all of them will sound a little bit different and as I've mentioned many times with my gratuitous Harry Potter references the microphone chooses the wizard Harry you know I mean really you every mic is going to sound different on everybody's voice so you have to find the one that really kind of works for you alright limo leo saying you've got the zoom h4n only problem is it also records all your PC noise yeah now I'm not gonna get into noise reduction today that's another class but I will show you next Monday how maybe we'll do noise reduction then I'm going to pull up I'm gonna put up a schedule when i stream friday i'll show what the schedule will be moving forward i haven't actually come up with it yet well i did but i it's not really organized well it is but it's not anyway did you see what just happened there yes no yes no yes no maybe all right Harry Potter reference yes the one chooses the wizard Harry I oh I'm always doing Harry Potter references can't help myself alright so okay multitrack recording and then we're at the top of the hour so do we feel comfortable now just getting a microphone setting it up and recording into the waveform view we feel good do you go through recording levels to minimize noise today is that in a future lesson too well yes now I talked about just before we actually hit record I did talk about gain staging I showed where four different microphones how you set the levels differently so for instance my 80 40 50 this is going through a focus right Clarett eight so I have you know a complete discrete mixer here I have onboard mixing controls I have to gain stage this through this external box properly for the USB and built-in onboard sound whether you're in Mac or PC that usually happens in you know the windows sound mixer which is the speaker icon in the bottom right of your taskbar right click there and you can open up the little mixer or in on the Mac it's the sound control panel it's not the control panel the sound preference and you actually set it here so again the headset here's where I set the headset mic input the microphone this is where I said for the earbuds this is where I set the level there and if I choose something like the focus right it doesn't show the controls here because it has its own mixer so yes that's all that was a little bit earlier and you'll be able to watch that on the UM on the VOD okay yeah sorry LARP you can it'll be there though you'll be able to see it yeah okay so let's see BK I can't decide yeah yeah bad audio you know it's uh it just it makes me not want to watch something that's for sure it's true very true yes yes okay all right so I've got a last couple minutes here so I wanted do some multitrack recording but do we feel we feel good about this it's easy and once you have it set up as I described it's what did we say it's three clicks well it's a couple more clicks but it's really three steps it's file new audio file double-click to set your levels and then record alright now if we're going to do a multitrack and this will be a whole other session because really this is about just recording voice here but I'm going to make a multitrack session file new multitrack call this voice test I'm not going to use any template I'll do it at 48k 32-bit now the master is stereo what that means is that the master session itself is in stereo we don't want the master to be mono you seldom ever do that anymore oh I have to change the target directory oh because it's blank alright let's just go ahead and stick this on the desktop and click OK alright now here is where I just wanted to very briefly talk about the buffer settings ok we're going to go into track 1 ok I want to make sure that I've got my device is set up correctly and I do alright and here in this upper tab we have our input and output devices all right now again I'll cover this in another class but I just want to show you very quickly here a little bit about so that you can really hear what longer buffers do so we do input 6 and I'm going to do all of this with this same microphone so that you can you can kind of hear the difference okay alright so let's do 64 128 512 1024 or 2048 that's really extreme I think you'll get it by then but ok so I'm going to start with setting a buffer of 64 samples I think I think my machine can handle that so I'm to go into record ok oh and here I want to just record into a mono track as well delete this track again we'll discuss multitrack recording later this was more just to prove the point about buffers okay okay so now I am actually when I hit this eye button I am monitoring my input all right now I actually technically need to mute it here so now you're hearing me directly through the software which means if I increase the volume here this is actually adjusting what's what's going in your hearing exactly what's going into the track so when I record this now it's fine I can see my level it sounds good I know exactly what's happening and what's being recorded and how it's gonna how it's going to play back okay that's 64 samples now I don't know what you can hear it might sound slightly chorused maybe just a little bit not enough to be bothersome it's not certainly slapping back or echoing this is a pretty legit legit level of latency okay let's go ahead and increase that to 128 actually that'll be you won't be able to really hear much of a change there let's go to 512 okay so I'm going to take myself out of record make that change give me one second here you're not going to hear me for a second okay so now you can hear me and can you also hear that I am now I sort of sound like there's a delight like an echo on me will will evolve on to full show three to get ready now go cat go don't step on my blue suede shoe now that isn't actually being recorded that way but again it's this latency right it's giving the sound card enough time to kind of speed up and start rocking the difference is that now in my headphones I'm hearing this slap back and I think you're probably hearing it on the input too you guys hear that alright and that as a singer that's going to be very difficult but let's go to the extreme I'm going to turn this off go to 2048 hold on one second here we go just you'll I'll drop out for one second I'll come back in okay so now do you hear what's now this is like oh it's like half a second delayed I can't I can't even like it's I can't even talk because I'm so far behind myself there's no way that I could actually do anything like this and monitor what I'm doing how do you guys hearing that is it you're hearing it sort of appear late in fact hold on now you can really hear it echoing right to hear the slap back that's not a delay that's not an intentional well is what wha no that's what happens when the buffer is set too high you guys get it okay did that make sense see you later alligator goodbye Paulina thanks for joining me this morning all right could you guys and ladies hear that it's in your brain part of our sand I'm in your brain so could you all hear that could you hear the slapback could you hear that that delay so that is effectively what happens as you raise the buffer if you're recording and monitoring it's going to be very difficult in other words imagine your overdubbing right you're going to overdub some background vocals or a bass or something else and you have to be in time well if you're hearing yourself delayed it's going to be very hard to sing in time so that's why you want to get that buffer as low as possible especially for recording once you're editing and mixing it can be a little bit higher you don't want it too high because then again as you make adjustments if they're not happening in real time your brain is gonna get very messed up it's not going to know what's happening and it's very easy to do with audio you get lost and I've done this myself I've done it on the stream where I'm adjusting an EQ and like okay yeah that sounds doesn't sound so different it sounds it's kind of transparent and I'm like increasing amplitude of a frequency and going on it's like I'm not just amazing I'm not hearing a difference it wasn't turned on right well or or in the case of a high buffer it's happening so much later that you just kind of forget you zone you definitely heard that excellent be really good with some crackling so is yes slap back is not good exactly so now you know how to fix that audio hardware IO buffer size again the default at 128 is pretty decent I don't think you'll you'll have too many complaints there ideally you probably want to be around 64 if your machine can handle it but like I said 128 tends to do everything you need to do so my friends for this first hour I hope you enjoy this very comprehensive a lot of tech nerdy info did you guys dig that or use an analogue out from analog mic to monitor for tracking actual Kevin yes now again depending upon now this device of course I have direct monitor depending upon how you have everything routed there's lots of different ways to monitor the input signal correct because most will be using likely a USB mic or again some kind of built-in control whether isn't a lot of routing flexibility that's the best way to combat that especially if you have to monitor yourself live as you saw before when we were just recording directly into into the Edit in the waveform view here I don't really need to monitor myself while I'm inputting here I mean I'm monitoring it visually I don't need to hear it necessarily I'll hear it once I start editing and cutting it up and doing whatever alright Oh awesome though that's great to hear ad machine thank you Thank You art of arson short but sweet hey yeah poop sharp 54 yes audition does have scripting I don't remember exactly what sound Forge offers but yes you can script effects processes you can batch process yes it's very cool actually and since the beginning next audio lesson will be this Friday Friday at 9:00 a.m. so join me this Friday here on the Adobe channel 9:00 a.m. Pacific time for part 2 audio 101 all right bum ninja you dig you dig awesome thank you so much thank you thank you okay cool alright everybody so we're going to now segue over into premier but to do that I want to stop the video I want to stop the stream and I will restart so you may have to refresh if you're in the browser you may have to refresh the browser if you're on a mobile device you probably will have to in and out there or refresh it but I'll be back in seconds so thank you again for joining me for audio 101 part 1 today recording your voice through a microphone into addition CC and I'll be back in 20 seconds working on some editing in Premiere Pro alright everybody thank you I'll be back in just a moment stay tuned

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 69,913

Keywords: adobe, audition, recording, microphone, voice, voice over, podcast, USB, headset, logitech, apple earbuds, plantronics, gaming, audio, jason levine, beatlejase, twitch

Id: 0VHRpQFxIHo

Length: 67min 4sec (4024 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2016