How To Set Your Microphone Gain / Mic Levels

hey guys what's up it's randy from voices and welcome back to another video in today's video we're gonna cover microphone gain how close you should get to that microphone and getting the right levels for recording so let's get right to it now the first thing we want to do is establish the right distance to the microphone and now this is important to do first because it's gonna affect all the variables after it you can think of it like you know when you get in a car you want to adjust the seat and then the mirrors there's a certain order of operations that you have to follow to get the best results when you're setting up the distance to the microphone the rule of thumb is about six inches from your mouth to the microphone capsule and you can remember this rule of thumb because it's basically the same distance between your thumb and pinky from your mouth to the microphone so that's about six inches or so and that's really gonna give us the best tone possible sometimes people say if you need to get really loud in your read you should be backing off the mic and well this is true in some cases especially for singing in voiceover we don't really want to back off the mic too much instead we want to turn down that game and maintain that six inch distance to the mic at all times it's really gonna give us the best sound quality I'll explain more on that in just a minute what we're gonna do is talk into the mic as if we're recording some voiceover so this is actually a great time to utilize any vocal warm-ups that you have or anything that helps get you ready for the day and then I'm gonna reach down and turn up the preamp watching the meter inside my software so what I'm doing is watching that the green level coming in is getting as loud as possible without ever hitting the red now it's important to note if it does hit the red the take that we've recorded is essentially garbage so what we want to do is set our levels conservative that way we can press record and we can know it's not going to clip while we're focusing on reading the copy and delivering that read to the client another common question that we get is can I just record really quiet and then I'll boost it later in post yes technically you can do that but we don't recommend it the reason being is that all musical equipment has what's called an operating noise or a noise floor and what will happen if you record really quiet the noise will also be really quiet and then as you boost that the noise comes up with your voice so what we want to do is start by recording your voice nice and loud that is a big difference between your voice and that noise floor earlier I mentioned that you want to adjust the level on the preamp and not your distance to the microphone and now the two main reasons we want to do that are reducing reflections and controlling proximity effect we always want to try to eliminate reflections which are basically like little echoes that bounce around your room and come back to your microphone especially in small rooms or vocal booths the easiest way to do this is by getting nice and close to the microphone okay so you can think of it this way if I'm this close to this microphone you're getting about 99% my direct sound and about 1% reflections from around the room but as I back up you start to get more and more reflections coming in and less and less of my direct sound so we don't want to deliver audio files to have reflections in them so maintaining that sort of six-inch distance to the mic is going to be a really great rule to follow the second thing is the proximity effect as we get further and further away from the microphone we start to lose some of that nice rich low-end as well as that crispy top-end in your voice let me demonstrate okay so as I'm this close to the microphone you'll notice there's warmth through my voice there's also that nice crispy top end but as I start to back up you'll notice that the low end drops off as well as that top end the voice tends to really sound the best recorded from that six inch mark and that's why we use that basic rule of thumb it's what our clients tend to expect in audiobooks advertising podcasts you name it well I hope this helps you as you're setting up your studio please stay tuned for some more videos coming soon and if you want to learn more about pop filters and eliminating plosives click the video up here as always happy auditioning we'll see in the next one

Channel: Voices

Views: 71,419

Keywords: how to set up a microphone, microphones in 2021, microphone, microphones, best microphones, microphone gain, how to set microphone gain, setting microphone gain, microphone level, how to make mic louder on pc, how to make your mic louder on pc, how to make your mic louder

Id: XsBgTPfTw3I

Length: 3min 50sec (230 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020