How To Set Up Your Audio Interface

hey guys i'm felipe with screaming bundles and today we're going to teach you how to set up your Presonus audio interface the Presonus audio interface has everything you need to set up your XLR microphone and have it sound absolutely awesome here we have a view of the front of the unit with a XLR microphone plugged into the first port you can toggle sound levels on the fly headphone gain as well as your mix in real time more importantly the unit provides 48 volt phantom power to your XLR devices please only toggle this on if you're using a condenser microphone not a dynamic first thing we're going to do is grab our XLR it only goes in one way and we're going to plug it in to our first XLR port on the left now we're going to go and plug in our headphones to the back of the unit all right so now we're going to set up our audio box in Windows 10 it's the same thing for Windows 7 if you have a Mac it's a little bit different but first thing you want to do is you want to go to the Presonus website and download your driver so you're going to go to support and then you're going to go to downloads and you're going to find your box USB and you're going to need this software depending on what operating system you're using so if you're on Windows you're going to download the Windows version obviously and if you're on a Mac you're going to download Universal control for Mac either or it's very straightforward very simple now we're going to go ahead and download this we're going to execute it and it's going to basically do a step-by-step install you might have to restart but at the end of the install it might or may not ask you to restart your computer I would restart the computer anyways just to be safe and then when you boot back up in Windows what's going to happen is you're going to plug in your audio box to your USB port on your computer and then you're going to see this little application pop up it's called Universal control and then you'll know okay it recognizes my audio box everything's a-okay now before we get into this I want to talk a little bit about Windows default settings because Windows has a bit of a idiosyncrasy when you go to setup so we're going to right click here and go to recording devices and we should be able to see our audio box it's going to show up right there it's going to show there's a level there and I'm going to go ahead and double click this and we want to do certain things here so first thing we want to do is we want to go to levels and we want to make sure this is maxed out now what this is is essentially gain on the line as it's recognized by windows and we want to give it a hundred percent and then what we're going to do is anytime we want to control the audio levels for our audio box we're going to go ahead and use the controls on the front of the panel itself so maxis out to 100 and then on the enhancements tab you want to make sure we disable all enhancements now make sure this is checked we don't want to alter the sound any further we're going to go ahead and save this we're going to click apply or we're going to click OK it comes to play back you do remember that your audio box comes with a input for headphones on the back now I like to use this input because it allows me to monitor or check the sound level on my microphone directly with no latency so I'll plug in my headphones in the back and then I'll be able to control through the knobs in the front what that sounds like and there's also a knob that mixes the audio from directly from the input device meaning our microphone so it so it listens to the microphone directly if you if you shift that knob all the way to the left and if you ship that knob to the right it's going to give you windows audio so we can listen to whatever we've recorded I leave it somewhere in the middle or most of the time it's all the way to the right and it's just going to sound like a regular sound card so once we're done with these settings we're going to go ahead and we're going to make sure that our recording is set up correctly so right now I'm using OBS to record this tutorial OBS is obviously open broadcaster software but I want to show you what I mean by I want to monitor my audio levels so this is Adobe Audition you have a it's basically a software to record audio you also have audacity which is free but you want to go ahead and make sure that your hardware is correctly configured here so you want to make sure that your input device is set to your audio box and your output device is set to either the speakers that you have or an audio out on the same audio box or in this case I want the headphones on my on my audio box so I'm going to go ahead and click OK and I'm going to record and I'm going to call this test and you're going to see immediately this bar down here and what this bar represents is how loud I am talking you can see the waveform immediately right here when I'm quiet it goes completely down to zero which is perfect that's what we want it means that our condenser microphone is picking up our voice but it's not picking up silence and it's not picking up any background noise that's perfect now the other thing that we want to do is when it comes to spoken word we want to be between negative 10 and negative 12 dB so we want the average of our regular speaking voice to fall somewhere in this range and I'll explain to you the way db's work in a second but essentially this is a logarithmic scale and zero is is really loud that's all you really need to know you never want it to get to zero anytime I get to zero or close to zero you started to see it goes into the red right and what's going to happen if is if it goes all the way into the red and past zero it means it's going to clip and clipped audio sounds incredibly distorted so we're going to try to avoid that as much as possible a lot of times in our recordings we're going to see that we get excited and we raise our voice and it still won't clip right but if I shout cover your ears ah sorry about that you can see that it totally clipped and when we go and listen to that recording you can see the waveform here what I mean by clipping is it goes outside of bounds so anything that's over that is going to sound awful it's just going to sound atrocious and again just just a fair warning we want to we want to limit that as much as possible and really what you want to do is using the knobs in the front of your audio box you're going to be able to adjust the gain on your microphone and it's going to be a lot easier than having to dig through menus and and you know just just doing that in the middle of a stream or in the middle of a recording it's much easier to have it right in front of your fingertips and at the same time I'm just going to show you what that sounds like if I start lowering my gain start seeing that it goes down into the green if I start using it you're going to start seeing I get a little louder and it starts clipping so again going back to where we were I want to be in this beautiful range 10 to 12 DBS and that's going to sound perfect and that's about it for setting up our audio box there's a lot more to it in terms of recording and the specific software that we want to use but as far as setting up our device that's all we need to do thanks for watching guys and enjoy your new audio box bye bye

Channel: Felipe Zambrano

Views: 354,138

Keywords: twitch, live streaming, facebook live, podcasting, podcasts, at2020, at2035, xlr, preamps

Id: WxomMFEZvBc

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2017