Make ANY Mic Sound PROFESSIONAL For Twitch Streaming! - P1xelPerfect

hello and welcome to pixel perfect today i would like to teach you how to sound professional with any mic that you're going to use in your streaming setup so in my last video one of the biggest things that i talked about was that audio is key to having a successful stream the biggest thing that makes viewers leave your stream is having bad audio bad microphone sound bad mix anything that makes it difficult or unpleasant for the viewer to hear is gonna make them leave and one of the most important things you can do is make sure that your microphone sounds professional so today we're going to talk about two things we're going to talk about your hardware setup and then we're going to talk about your software setup to start one of the most important things you should know about when streaming and using a microphone in a live setting is the placement of your mic personally i like to make sure that i have my microphone nice and close but not too close to my face to get that warm dry voice over sound similar to what i would think morgan freeman would sound like in a voiceover i know some people like to not have their mic directly up in their face and they like to have it set off in the distance but i don't like to have a lot of room noise i like to make sure that i can eliminate as much room noise and background noise as possible so placement is key and the first thing i'm going to recommend that you do is get a boom arm for your mic desk mount boom arms are incredibly helpful for setups not only because they allow you to swivel and pivot your mic in different positions to allow you different types of sounds but they can also help hinder any sounds on your desk that might vibrate otherwise through the base of your microphone for example let's say you play a lot of keyboard intense games right on your desk you're going to be clicking the keys a lot and moving your mouse around a lot and the constant movement and tapping on your desk is going to vibrate through the base of your microphone which will be potentially eliminated through the boom arm it's going to absorb a lot more sound another thing that is also really important with the boom arm is you can actually put padding between the base of the boom arm that mounts on your desk so it will absorb the sound even more personally all i do is slap a couple pieces of cardboard in between my desk and the mount itself so the cardboard can help absorb all the shock impacts on my desk to help eliminate any vibrations that's coming off the desk into my microphone the third piece of equipment that i can recommend to you is a shock mount now you've probably seen these on microphones like an audio technica at2020 it's a little mount that holds the microphone it looks like a little trapeze with strings that are holding it in place and those are specifically designed to make sure that there are no vibrations or sounds hitting the microphone so you get a plosive free experience now granted not all microphones are going to have a supporting shock mount most shock mounts are typically made for condenser style microphones not dynamic microphones so i use a short sm7b which you can see is hidden behind my monitor over here i don't have a shock mount for that because it's a dynamic mic its signal source level is much quieter than that of a condenser microphone thus it doesn't pick up in packs as much as a condenser mic would and so having the padding in the boom arm is more than enough to already help limit any of the impacts that it may pick up through my desk the last piece of hardware that i'm going to suggest for your microphone and any mic can use this because you can get any style of it is a pop filter this can be a metal mesh filter or a fabric filter and typically it will mount on whatever your mic is mounted to so for example you can get a little swivel clamp that will then go onto your boom arm and then you put it in front of the capsule of whatever microphone you're using this will help reduce plosives as well such as any of the p's b's d's and t's that are on your mic hearing those sounds or when you exhale deeply and blow onto the microphone can be jarring for viewers usually doesn't make them leave but it's typically an unpleasant sound to listen to especially when you have headphones on i know i don't like to hear those typically when i'm listening to a streamer but it's not a big deal it's not going to make me leave unless it's a continuous thing you know so making sure that you reduce any impact sounds any unnatural or jarring sounds to the mic is essential so no impacts from the desk and no pulses from your mouth going into the capsule of the microphone next if you're using a usb microphone like the blue yeti for example make sure that you're on the correct pattern on the back there's four patterns that the blue yeti supports make sure that you're using the cardioid pattern what this does is it only records audio from one side the side that it is facing and then actively rejects audio from behind it it will still pick up some sound but it is vastly different than something that is omnidirectional which will pick up from multiple directions make sure that it's on the cardioid pattern this way it only picks up what is directly in front of it now once you've got your mic mounted and you've got the potential shock mount and the pop filter on it the next thing we need to talk about is called the proximity effect so basically the proximity effect says that the closer that the mic is to the source of the audio the more bass it will pick up so if you have a very deep robust voice the closer the mic is to your mouth the more bass it's going to pick up and the farther away it is the less bass it's going to pick up now this will hold true for any type of voice regardless if you have a deep voice or not i don't really have that much of a deep voice i have a pretty mid-range baritone voice like most guys do so that being said i don't really need to worry too much about the proximity effect but also note that with the proximity effect if you are not using a pop filter you will get more plosives like the p's b's d's and t's that will impact the capsule of the microphone so you don't want any of those sounds hitting the mic so be cautious of how close you set the microphone to your mouth to make sure you get that nice warm dry voice over sound now the last thing i want to tell you about before we go over to the software side and use all the plugins that are part of obs i want to tell you turn your game down one of the best things you can do for your mic is turn the gain down on it if you have a dedicated gain knob not your volume knob but a gain knob on a usb microphone or whatever interface you're using turn it down you typically want to set the raw input of the audio to whatever your loudest point is so if you like to scream a lot make sure that your gain never actually peaks or clips in obs that little audio meter down there make sure that when the audio meter goes up at your loudest point that it never hits the zero that is incredibly crucial for setting up better audio in a later setup plus having a quieter gain will also make sure that you don't pick up nearly as much room noise if you have fans running or air conditioners and also it won't pick up your keys from your keyboard or anything else like that you want to try and eliminate as much room noise as possible okay so for the next demonstration now that i have all of the hardware set up we're going to move over to the software side into obs where i will be actively changing all of the settings on a blue yeti to specifically show you how to make any microphone sound professional okay so we're at the streaming setup right now normally i would have a sure 7b as my microphone but for this video obviously i'm using the blue yeti right now you are hearing completely unaltered audio the only thing that i did do is i had to go into the windows settings specifically down at the sound settings and then into the sound control panel because for whatever reason the blue yeti has an incredibly sensitive preamp though the physical gain on this microphone is all the way down right now and yet it is still coming in way too hot in obs so what i did is i went into the microphone properties which is the blue yeti right here and i went to levels and i had to lower the sensitivity down to 60 because it was just coming in way too hot literally me just talking like this was clipping the microphone and i don't know if there's another setting in windows that was doing this but i just lowered this so i can give you a better demonstration of how to set the mic up so if your blue yeti is coming in too hot that's an easy fix you can do before adding anything else to the settings in obs this is again just raw audio you're hearing as you can see this right here so i have the audio set up right now where if i were to scream it should only come up to about negative three i'm not going to do that because i don't want to hurt your ears but that is what i was trying to explain before is that you want to make sure that your gain make sure that it's set so you never hit this little zero right here in your audio meter let's go ahead and click on the gear and then go into filters and as you can see i have four effects built in to this yeti right now these are all free and these are all easily accessible everything here is built into obs directly except for the vst two times plug-in these you have to download and install for obs to see and i will show you how to do that briefly so essentially i'm just going to leave these up here for you so you can copy all of what i have put down and then you can directly apply them into your blue yeti settings so here i have the compressor it is off currently and so the ratio basically says anytime your volume goes above this number right here it's going to reduce it by that much the attack is how fast the compressor kicks in the release is how fast it lets go basically saying how fast and how long it takes to squish the audio and then release it and then the output gain is what makes it so that this will make it quieter the output gain brings those volumes back up because this if you don't have any output gain all you're going to do is make your microphone quieter you got to make sure that you bring those quiets back up so it's basically the threshold is making the louds quieter and the quieters loud to make it a more smooth consistent sound so let's turn this on now the first thing that this is going to do is you are going to hear some room noise because of the way that it's making the sensitivity increase but we have a solution for that so here is the mic now with the compressor on you are obviously going to hear quite a bit of a difference and the next thing we're going to turn on right away is a noise gate and the first thing that you'll notice is that it completely quiets the microphone when i'm not making any sound so now the noise gate is set and essentially what this does is it's going to turn off any room noise anything that is below these numbers will make it so that the microphone does not hear it and then as you notice when i get quiet again the noise starts to fade out it rolls off that's what these numbers are so the attack time is how fast again it kicks in the hold time and then the release time is how long it takes for the microphone to get back down to being completely quiet to that zero pickup sound so the longer your release time the longer it's going to take for that audio to begin to fade out so now you have a compressor and a noise gate built in so the compressor basically makes your levels more stable instead of really really loud and really really quiet it basically makes it a little more level for the viewers to hear and then you have your noise gate to make sure that there's less background room noise you can't fully eliminate room noise without at least having some acoustic treatment and i don't have acoustic treatment in my room one good way to eliminate this like how i do is i use a dynamic microphone rather than a condenser microphone dynamics are just significantly quieter than condenser microphones next is the vst plug-in which is an eq and so basically what this is going to do is it's going to boost all the lows and all the highs to give you that nice sweet warm voice over sound and so i don't have it turned on right now but when i do that now it is on and you're going to hear make sure you're listening with headphones you're going to hear a pretty significant difference and to give you that nice sweet sound you want to boost to about the 200 to 300 range and just let it roll off and then you want to make sure that you also boost your highs and for the most part most people you're not going to really notice anything past the 20 000 range anything it's usually just about the 5 000 and above range this is where you're going to really start to hear that high end clear up so for example this is everything on my tab one so if you just want to copy these and drop it right in then you have this for band two all i did with bands two and three is i made it that the mids are flat because this is a very ear sensitive area and will be very harsh to listen to if any of this is boosted so you want a really nice flat sound through here and same thing with band three all i did is made sure that this was pulled off and lastly here is the high shelf this is basically just boosting all the high frequencies to give you that nice little bit of crisp sound to it now if you want this plug-in it does have more it's from reaper they are free and you can get all these extra ones that you can mess around with and so basically all you have to do is just go to reaper.fm rea plugs and then make sure you download either the 32-bit or 64-bit i imagine everyone is on 64-bit at this point which make sure it's whatever version of obs you're running which as far as i know only supports 64-bit anymore so just download the 64-bit install it and then you should be good to go if it doesn't show up right away just close obs restart your computer reopen obs and then they should show up right away as stand-alone eqs and other plugins for it okay so now that we have the compressor the noise gate and the eqs in there the last thing we're going to add is a limiter and so what a limiter does and it's also known as a brick wall limiter is it's a plug-in that specifically makes it so that this sound never hits zero it's basically guaranteeing that no matter how loud i get in the microphone it's never going to go above the negative 3 db this mic may peak and it might sound distorted but it's guaranteeing that for your viewers they will never hear the actual zero and distort any louder it's a really good safe way to make sure that you throw this on at the end of your chains so that your microphone never goes above a certain volume and there you go that is pretty much the difference between making sure that you just throw a mic on there and just let the gain run wild and you hear a bunch of different sounds versus actually adding compressor eq noise gate and limiter so you actually get a much more robust and warm sound and that's pretty much the entire setup guys if you have any questions feel free to jump over to my twitch channel at twitch.tv pixel perfect i do stream pretty much every day over there and you can ask me any questions if you don't want to wait for another video to come out for any more tips and tricks i really appreciate the support if there's any questions you had that you didn't understand about the video please feel free to leave a comment in the section down below also please don't forget to subscribe i'm not going to ask you to turn on post notifications because i know those can be annoying sometimes but the subscribe button is free and it's just one click so i really would appreciate it if you clicked that and supported the channel as well thanks so much for your support and i'll see you guys in the next video peace i can already kind of smell it i thought it was a higher level wow that was really bad that was really bad

Channel: P1xelPerfect

Views: 16,424

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Id: L9yAmtR_WVw

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020