- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative. In this video, we're gonna show you how to properly set up the gain on your Focusrite Scarlett
2i2 audio interface. To do that, we have the
Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser microphone
plugged into the interface. The interface is already
connected to the computer here. If you want pricing or specs or looking for a place to
buy any of these items, we do have a whole pile of
links in the description below. Right now you are listening to the lav mic and we'll switch over to this once we set our gain properly
using the steps in this video. Now, before we show you how
to set up the gain on this, let's quickly talk about what
is gain and what is a preamp. So the way a microphone works is it captures a tiny little vibration, right now coming from my
voice into the microphone. That tiny little vibration gets turned into electrical energy and comes down the XLR cable into the interface. That vibration is not
enough for your computer to get a good signal. So we need to pre-amplify
that by using a preamp. The gain controls how hard
that preamp is working. The trick with the preamp is you want it boost that audio signal while introducing as
little hiss as possible. So using the guidelines in this video, we will hopefully get the
minimal amount of hiss, but obviously there are varying qualities of preamps as well depending on the make, model, or whatever you're using
for an audio interface. Now on this audio interface here, we do need to turn on Phantom power, and now we can set up the
gain for this microphone. We had to turn on Phantom power because it activates a
condenser microphone. You don't need to do that if you have a dynamic microphone. So now let's set up the gain
on this audio interface here. So I'm gonna get this
Velcro out of the way. It's kinda in the way there. So here we can tell that we're already turned
all the way down to zero. As we turn this up, we're gonna notice that this
green light starts blinking. When that blinks it's at -24 dB. So if we look at our audio interface here, I can reset the peak and
we can see here that yeah, it is around -20. So I am just a little bit over that. So -20 is in the neighborhood of where you wanna be if
you're doing a recording. So now we're talking about
setting gain for a recording, not something live like a live stream. We'll talk about that in a minute. If you're setting your
gain for a recording, you're multi-tracking, you're singing, you have your guitar plugged in and you're putting it
into Logic or Pro Tools or anything like that. You wanna kinda be somewhere
between -18 and -12. And the reason for that is you want to maintain
an amount of headroom. If you go all the way up to zero, your signal will get clipped
and you will lose information. It will not sound as good. And there is nothing that you can do to recover that lost information
from going above zero. So you wanna stay between -18 and -12 if you're doing a recording. Now, I'm gonna bump this up. We're gonna look at Logic here. And I bumped this up until yeah, it's somewhere around
that -15 mark right there. Now watch as I do my intro. So right now I'm just
speaking and it's at -18. And then I say, hi, I'm
Jordan from Kettner Creative. So right there, we went from -18 to -12. And that's the whole point
of having that headroom. So later in post-production
I can compress it. I can do whatever, but we want that raw audio file to have all the headroom that we need. So if we're recording a
podcast and we're laughing, or we get animated, we're telling a story that we don't lose any
of that information. Now that's all how I would set up gain for an audio recording,
somewhere between -18 and -12. You don't wanna go louder than that. But what if we're doing something live? What if we're live streaming, doing a live video conference
or something like that? My personal opinion
and the way that I work is I would cheat that as
close to zero as possible, because you do want it as loud as possible for the people who are
live interacting with you on the other end. So it's worth the risk to
get a little bit closer to your headroom cap, but we do wanna leave a
little margin for safety. So as I turn this gain up here, we're gonna see eventually it goes yellow. There's just a little yellow flick. When it has that yellow flick
that we can see right here, that means that it has crossed -6. So we don't wanna be too
much higher than that. I'm gonna turn it up here just so you can see what it
looks like when it hits zero. When it hits zero it's red. When it's showing you red,
we are losing information. The audio signal is clipping. So you should be able to
hear the clipping right now. And now I'm gonna back it up. So we wanna stay so our loudest thing that we're gonna say is at -6. So I'm gonna reset this meter here. Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative. See right there -4 1/2, 4.7. I think that is kinda acceptable. If we wanna fine tune it, we would turn it down
just a little bit more. So this is how I would set the gain if I was doing live streaming. Now you can't just copy
paste my setting here. You can't just look and see, oh, the gain knob is at 75%
when Jordan does live streaming, that's not how it works. You need to tune this to your voice. If you project better than I do, you're gonna find that you
need less gain and that's good. The harder that you push the preamp, the more background noise you'll get. Especially on the Focusrite Scarlett, I find that a lot of noise gets introduced once you push up past nine out of 10. So if you can, you wanna
keep this as low as possible, but on the other side of that coin, you wanna boost it so
people can actually hear you if you're in a live streaming. So I hope this helpful. If you're doing a recording, your multi-track recording,
keep your gain set where it's flicking green regularly. That'll mean that you're
somewhere between -18 and -12. If you're live streaming, you want your loudest, most
emphatic points of your speech to be somewhere around -6. I hope this helps for you. If you have any questions, please leave them in the
comment section below. And if you wanna see more
videos like this in the future, please like and subscribe. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)
