(upbeat music) - What's up, everybody. You know, not a day goes by that I do that and then I don't feel weird about it, so hope you appreciate that. Anyway, we have an awesome
video for you today. It is how to make any USB
microphone sound better, so stick around. This is only gonna take five minutes. It is going to totally
make your audio life and streaming a billion times easier. So for this video I am going to be using a
Blue Yeti to demonstrate. You can use any USB
microphone in the world. Right now, this is probably
the most popular one that all streamers have either
heard of or used themselves. The first thing you're gonna
wanna make sure you can do is listen to your microphone. Now, how you do this in OBS is you go down to your
audio mixer down here. You click this cogwheel. You go to Advanced Audio Properties. You click this dropdown next
to your microphone audio. You select Monitor and Output. And that should allow
you to hear yourself. Okay, now that you can
listen to your microphone, you're gonna have to go
to Reaper.FM/Reaplugs. There should be a link
down below the video. All right, this is what
the website looks like, and you're gonna click
the download version for your correct version of Windows. My version is the 64-bit version, so I'm gonna click the 64-bit, and I'm gonna hit save file. Once I've saved the file,
I'm gonna run the ExC, and I'm going to say
yes to all the prompts, and install it in its default location. If you don't install it
in its default location, OBS isn't going to know where
to look for the plug-in, and it's not gonna work. So once you've done that and
once you've installed it, restart your OBS, and it should
recognize these plug-ins. So now that you've restarted OBS, you're gonna be able to add these filters, so go into OBS, go into your source list, and find your microphone. Right click your microphone
in your source list, and go to filters, and then
once you have filters open, hit this plus sign down here, and we're gonna add
five different filters, and this part's really easy. So the first filter
that we're going to add is noise suppression, but OBS's default noise
suppression plug-in is pretty decent. So we're gonna add noise suppression. The next one we're gonna
add is a VST 2x plug-in, and this refers to the thing
that you just installed, so you can renamed these. It makes it a little bit easier to follow along with this guide. So I'm just gonna rename
this one to REAGATE, and I'm gonna hit okay, and then I'm gonna select
this dropdown up here in the top right, and then I'm gonna find reagate standalone,
click it, and that's it, and then we're gonna add another one. It's another VST 2 plug-in. We're gonna name this one
REACOMP, and hit okay. We're gonna select the dropdown here, and it's gonna be reacomp. There's two reacomps. There's reaxcomp and reacomp. The xcomp is a little bit more advanced, but you don't need it. It's just gonna make things
a little bit more obtuse and harder to understand, so
stick with reacomp for now. The last one that we're going to, or the last VST plug-in
that we're going to add here is going to REAEQ, and
we're going to hit okay. Then in the dropdown, we're
just going to find reaeq. That's the last VST one
that we're going to add, and the last one that
we're gonna add is Gain, so now that we have our five filters, I'm actually going to switch microphones, and I'm gonna stop using this microphone, and I'm gonna start using the Blue Yeti, and you're gonna hear what it sounds like before we've activated
all of these filters, and we're gonna adjust it as we go. This is the default Blue Yeti. You're gonna notice it
sounds like hammered (beep). We're gonna go back into our filters. You're gonna right-click, go to filters, and you're gonna turn on your
Noise Suppression filter, and the higher the suppression level is, the more of this sound
it's going to muffle. Okay, the next one we're
gonna activate is REAGATE, and to alter REAGATE, we're gonna click this Open Plug-in Interface button. And what this does is
whenever you go above a certain decibel level,
it's gonna open the gate, and anytime you're not
louder than that setting, it's not gonna let any sound through, so my room is about, about there, so anytime that I talk, it's going to open the microphone's gate. So this your compressor,
and there's two settings to change here. Number one is this ratio. You're gonna wanna set about
a ratio of four to one here. So what your compressors
gonna do is literally going to compress your signal, so anything really loud, too loud, is gonna make lower volume, and anything that's very quiet is going to make higher volume. And all you're gonna
wanna do is drag this down until it starts quieting your voice down. You want it to be about the top, and you could just play with
this until it sounds good. It's not important to
set it exactly like mine. It's gonna be different
depending on how close you are to your microphone, and
how loud your voice is, and your room. If you wanna play with the ratio, you could do that, too. I don't recommend playing
with anything else really. The ratio and your threshold
on the left-hand side are the only things you wanna change. And then we're gonna go to EQ, the EQ is really your bread and butter. What you're gonna wanna do here is depending on the sound of your voice, what I like to do is start by
dragging down the mid channels and dragging up the high channels, so dragging down these, and you can just play
with how this sounds, too. This might take you a while
to get it to sound good for your voice, but this
is your bread and butter. This is gonna provide
the most extreme change for your audio. Now when we do that, what
we're actually doing, let me open this again,
what we're actually doing is making these bands quieter, but we're gonna need to add Gain back because we've quieted down
our signal pretty well. You could use the Gain
slider here if you want, but it sort of obfuscates things, and you're gonna wanna set this to about, you're gonna wanna to
monitor your OBS audio here, and you're gonna want it to just touch into the yellow range. Right there seems pretty good for me. All right, and that's pretty much it, so our secret sauce, tip of the day today is going to be if you want, if you want better microphone sound in addition to these filters, you could, you just gonna wanna
get close to your mic. It just sounds a lot better. It gives it that podcast feel, so that's pretty much it, and just for comparison's sake, to see what it sounded like before we started messing with things, and what it sounds like now. This is the before, and this is the after, which sounds so much better. Okay, self-plug, so this video
is actually a separated part of another video of five technical tips that'll change your life. There's four other bits of tech, but I had friends encourage
me to make this video to separate out this audio portion because it was so useful, so if you wanna check out
these other four tips, here's the video that way. That way, that corner. Yup, yeah, right there. And if you found this useful, please like and subscribe and bookmark it and send it to your friends, and if you wanna send them
something that's faster or maybe easier to understand, I created this little
infographic over there that is hosted on my
website and in my Discord, so it's discord.gg/skullstream, and the website is skullstream.com, and there's links to both in
the description down below. So go have fun and good
luck with your audio, and I hope to save you
some time and some effort. Okay, now get out. We gotta go play Doom. It's (beep). (laughs) Okay, I'll leave. We gotta go play Doom Eternal
on nightmare mode for stream. Yay. (laughs) Stay tuned next week. On Monday, I'll release another video, and the new video that
we're gonna do next week is gonna be about five things that Twitch just really hates, like the whole platform
just really doesn't like, so that you don't step into any minefields that you guys don't know exist. (upbeat music)
