- All right guys, hands up
if you are the kind of person who has spent hours and hours on the visual side of your stream, making sure everything
is perfectly aligned, your camera is set up properly, your alerts and your overlays, but when it comes to the
audio side of your stream, all you've done is
plugged in your microphone and added it to your streaming software. And I'm not blaming you, I'm
a culprit of this myself. I often spend far too much
time on the visual side rather than the audio, but why is that? Why do we settle for good
enough when it comes to audio, when actually just
spending 10 to 15 minutes on your audio setup once can make a massive
difference to your stream? Well, settle no more,
because in this video, we're going to be going through five steps that you can implement today with your current microphone that can massively improve the
audio for your livestreams. (upbeat music) All right, so step one is all
about microphone positioning. Making all the changes in
the physical environment to actually give your microphone the best chances of
picking up a clean signal. Now, most microphones nowadays come with a built-in or
attachable desk stand, which is super convenient, but will actually leave the microphone pretty far away from your mouth, meaning you have to crank the gain to be able to get a decent audio level. Not only that, but these
stands encourage you to position your microphone
kind of close to noises like your keyboard and your mouse which are typically,
noises you want to avoid hearing on your stream. So what I recommend doing
instead is getting a boom arm which can attach to your
desk and your microphone and then you can use that
to raise the microphone up off the desk, away from those noises and closer to your mouth. I use the RODE PSA1 microphone arm which is pretty universally popular and it does work well for a whole handful of
different microphone weights but it is quite expensive, about $100 so you don't need to
go and spend that much. I actually used one of these
for about two or three years, which is just a cheap
microphone arm from Amazon. The only real issue I'd say with these is these exposed springs
can be a little bit noisy if you're adjusting them whilst streaming, but they certainly do the job
for a good couple of years. So now your microphone is
hopefully raised off of your desk and you can position it
closer to your mouth, but just how close to our mouth do we actually want to position it? Well, the boring answer is it completely depends
on your microphone, but a good starting point is usually about three to six inches between the microphone
capsule and your mouth. As a general guide, I tend
to set up my microphones with between four to
eight fingers of width between the microphone
capsule and my mouth and then I'll listen back to a recording and see how that sounds. If you're too close to the microphone, you're going to hear
some unwanted mouth noise like salivating and breathing and if you're too far away, you're going to get more of that
room noise and reverberation and less low-end from your voice. Another microphone positioning tip is that you'll want to have
your microphone off axis, so that you're actually
speaking past the mic rather than directly into it 'cause this will help with
plosives, the P and B words, that blow a lot of air into the microphone since you're speaking
past the mic instead, this will definitely help with those and it'll also helps your
audience be able to see your mouth rather than it being
covered by a microphone. If you're still struggling with plosives even after moving your
microphone off axis, you might want to invest in
a pop filter or windscreen. They come in all different
shapes and sizes, some designed for specific mics and some that are more general, that just attach to your boom arm, but these will disperse
the large sound waves before they cause distortion
and they're pretty cheap. I think this cost me the equivalent of about 6 or $7 on Amazon. Whilst we're on the topic
of microphone positioning, if you are streaming with a microphone that has multiple different
polar pattern selectable like the Blue Yeti or the HyperX QuadCast, please make sure that you have set it to the cardioid pickup pattern which is the one that looks
like an upside down heart and make sure you're talking
into the front of the capsule. Seriously, the number of streamers I see still talking into the
top of the Blue Yeti, it gives me nightmares. Right, so I say microphone
positioning done, let's jump into the fun
stuff over on the PC. So I'm using the Elgato Wave:3, probably my favorite USB
microphone right now, but this process will
work for any microphone that you're using for streaming. We followed the positioning
advice that we've just covered, so it's got a pop filter, it's raised up on a boom arm and it's nice and close to our mouth and we're speaking off axis. Before we dive into OBS and the filters that we're going to apply, it's worth noting that you do need to set the gain correctly on your microphone. So if you look down here
at the OBS audio mixer, you should see your
microphone levels changing. If you don't see anything down here, you'll want to jump into your settings, go to the audio tab and just make sure that your
mic slash auxiliary audio is set correctly to the microphone. Once that's set, you should see
down here the meter's moving and you want to adjust the
gain on the microphone, so there's usually a physical
dial on the microphone, to make sure that we're speaking
in this yellow range here, around minus 15 decibels. Once that's done, we're ready
to apply our first filter. So come down here to the little cog wheel next to our microphone,
click that and go to filters. So the first filter we're
going to add is a noise gate which effectively closes the gate. It turns off your microphone
when you're not speaking, so none of that background noise filters through whilst
you're not speaking. So if you click the little plus icon here, you can see that there
is a noise gate option, but instead, actually we're
going to use an expander. An expander, similar to a noise gate, allows you to turn off your microphone when you're not speaking, but the advantage is is that
there's an adjustable ratio for how much you want to reduce the gain when it hasn't hit that threshold. So it allows for a smoother operation than the static open or shut noise gate. Effectively what this is doing is just making your quiet
sounds even quieter, so when you're not speaking, your room noise or your computer
fans won't be easily heard. So we can click the expander option, we can name this whatever we want, I'm going to leave it as expander, and we're going to change the
preset from expanded to a gate. Now ratio, this is the amount of reduction that's going to apply to any sounds that are below the threshold. So a 10 to one ratio,
which is the default, that's going to operate very
much like a traditional gateway, it's going to basically be open or closed. I prefer something a
little bit more natural, something maybe around four to one ratio, but feel free to adjust this depending on how much you want to reduce that background noise
when you're not speaking. Now, threshold, this the setting really that you're going to have
to figure out yourself and I'll help you through that. Effectively what threshold
is, is this is the volume at which the expander will no longer start reducing your signal. So any volumes above this level aren't going to have the
expander applied to it and all the sounds that
are below this volume level are going to have the
expander applied to it and reduce the volume even further. To calculate what we want
to set the expander to, let's disable the audio filter by clicking this little eye icon here and then have a look
down at the audio meter and be quiet for a second and see where our noise floor is sitting. So you can see for me, that there was a little
bit of noise around here between sort of minus 60 and minus 55, let's say minus 58 decibels. Now, this is going to be a
completely different level for you 'cause it depends on the
room that you're streaming in and how sensitive your microphone is, but you want to basically
set the threshold around about five decibels
above this noise floor. So for me, our noise floor
is about minus 58 decibels, five on top of that is minus 53 so that's what I'm going
to set my threshold to. Now, if we re-enable the expander, you should be able to
see that when we're quiet there is no noise at all coming through on our microphone levels. If you find that there is still
some noise coming through, then you need to up the threshold and if you find that it's starting to eat into some of your words and some of your words are being cut up, then you need to lower
that threshold back down, but around about five decibels
above your noise floor is a great starting point. The attack and release times
we can leave at their defaults. They are fine and we're not
going to add any output gain here 'cause we'll be doing that
later in the compressor. Next, we're going to add an equalizer. Now, this is going to allow us to shape our voice in a specific way, basically, boosting and
lowering specific frequencies in our voice to make it sound better. If you click the plus icon and have a look at the
filters that OBS has included, you'll see that there isn't
actually an equalizer included. So we're going to have to
make use of a VST plugin we can download from the internet to be able to add an equalizer. So head to the link that I
put down in the description, it is reaper.fm/reaplugs and download the VST
pack of Reaper plugins. Once they're installed, you
don't need to restart OBS. You can just click the plus icon and then come down here
to the VST 2.x plugin. Now, I definitely recommend
renaming this to EQ or equalizer just so you know which filter is which and then we'll get a dropdown list of all the different VST
plugins that OBS has detected, which is just our pack of Reaper plugins that we've just installed. We're only interested in one,
which is the ReEQ standalone. So select that and then we can click to open the plugin interface. Now, the EQ is probably
the hardest setting in this whole video for me
to try and recommend settings to you because it's completely
dependent on your voice and the environment
that you're streaming in and the microphone and so
many different aspects. If me and you were both
streaming from the same PC with the same microphone, the EQ would still be different because our voices are
inherently different. That being said, I do
have some blanket settings that I think are a starting point that I've recommended to
a few streamers before and it'll help you get
started with your EQ, but please, please do play
around with these settings and really identify
which bits of your voice you want to boost and which
bits you want to cut out because it really is
dependent on your own voice. As you can see, the yellow
wavy line that is showing here is the current frequency
response of the microphone and that blue flat line
is our equalization, so where we want to boost and
cut different frequencies. So right now it's flat, we're not applying any
real EQ to our voice. So let's make sure we have
our first node selected and our first tab selected down here. We're going to change this
to be a high pass filter 'cause we want to basically
remove anything below 60 hertz, which is below the human vocal range. It's mostly just noise down there, so change the type from band to high pass and then we're going to
just adjust the frequency down to around 80 hertz, somewhere around 80 hertz like that and then we're just going to
narrow the actual bandwidth down to around 1.2. Next, we'll move to our second node. So we can come across
to the second tab here and we want to just add a bit of presence which is usually found between around 100 hertz and 200 hertz. So you can actually drag the node here to between 100 and 200 hertz on the scale and maybe just up around a decibel or so. So you can see here, we've gone up in gain to around a decibel
between 100 and 200 hertz. And again, we can narrow
the actual bandwidth of this down to around 0.9. So the third frequency
that we're going to target if we move across to the third tab is the broadcast frequency, which is typically found
around 480 to 500 hertz. So if we bring that across here and we boosted it all the way up, you can hear that it
starts to sound very boxy like I'm speaking into a box. So we actually rather than boosting this, we want to reduce it down, cut it effectively by a decibel or two. So to cut it, either dragged
down on the node here or can actually adjust the game slider down by maybe a decibel and a half. And again, we want to reduce
the amount of frequencies that this is being applied to to something a bit more narrow around 1.2. Finally, I like to add some airiness to the higher frequencies which helps with the Ss and
general pronunciation of words. So if we move across to
this fourth node here, change the type from a
high shelf to a band again and around five kilohertz, which is actually where
this node is by default, we want to boost the
signal by a decibel or so and reduce the bandwidth
down to something around 1.5, so we're not applying it to
too many different frequencies. If for some reason you're
getting some high frequencies coming through that are
outside of the human voice but something like an air conditioner, we can add a low pass filter similar to the high pass
filter we had at the start. To do that, we just click
the add band button here, change the band type
to be a low pass filter and we want to adjust the frequency right the way up to 18 kilohertz or so and then we can just
narrow the bandwidth a tad and this will just cut out
any of those high frequencies that are outside of the vocal range, but something like an air
conditioner like I mentioned. So now we can close down
the plugin interface and if we disable the EQ, you should be able to hear the difference that that has made to my voice. And if you can't hear the difference when I toggled the EQ on and off, then you need to put some
headphones on honestly Chris. The next filter we're going
to add is a compressor and I've seen quite a
lot of misinformation being spread about what a compressor does, but effectively, all it does is it makes your volume more consistent by reducing the volume of some of the louder sounds, that's it. This is a really useful filter in your audio chain for live streamers, because if there's a moment where you get particularly
excited and loud, you're not going to deafen your audience by all of a sudden changing
your volume level massively by getting excited. The compressor will help
reduce that loud noise back to a more consistent volume, but you can keep it
sounding pretty natural so it doesn't sound completely robotic and the same audio level throughout. So let's add the compressor filter. We can leave this named as compressor and I'm going to start by disabling it so it's not actually being
applied to a microphone, so I can explain some of the
options without becoming quiet. So as you can see here, some of these options are pretty familiar from the expander filter and it's kind of exactly the same, but it's playing to volumes
that exceed the threshold rather than volumes that
are under the threshold as was the case with the expander. So the first option ratio,
this is exactly the same. It's effectively the
ratio of gain reduction that gets applied through any volumes that exceed the threshold. So the ratio here that's
default of 10 to one is going to heavily reduced any volumes that exceed the threshold. I like things a little bit more natural as I've said a few times in this video, something around four to one, but feel free to play around
with four to one, eight to one, 10 to one compression to see
what you like the sound of. The threshold, as I've said, is basically whenever a volume exceeds this threshold of minus 18 decibels, then the compressor is
going to be applied. So the default here at minus 18 decibels it's absolutely fine as is the default for the
attack and release as well. The final option here, the output gain, this effectively might be needed because when we enable the compressor, effectively, any volumes
above minus 18 decibels are going to be compressed
with a ratio of four to one which isn't a super heavy compressor, but we still probably need to add a few decibels of output gain. So let me start by setting
this to around three decibels which I think will roughly be about right and then if we enable the compressor, we're hoping to see that our audio levels remain in that yellow section. So you can see here three decibels was actually a pretty good choice, but you might need five, six decibels depending on how heavy of a
compressor we've been adding. The final step and the final
filter in our audio chain is going to be a limiter and this just has one sole function which is to stop us from clipping or digitally distorting our microphone, so it needs to go last in our audio chain. We add it the exact same way
that we've added any others and the only setting
that we need to change is this threshold from minus six to around minus one decibel. So this basically means that if we get really,
really loud at any point, we scream because we've had
a great moment on our stream, we're not going to clip our
microphone and distort our audio. It's going to limit it to a
threshold of minus one decibel. So that's it, we've now completed the five steps to better audio, microphone positioning,
noise gate or expander, equalization, compressor and a limiter. If we disable these audio filters, you should able to hear the difference especially if you're
wearing good headphones between my microphone before and after. So I'll enable them again and hopefully now you can hear that it is more consistent
audio, a better equalization and less noise coming
through when I stop speaking. If you've reached this point in the video and you've enjoyed following
along with the tutorial, please do give it a thumbs up and let me know down in the comments what else you would like to
learn in the streaming world. I'll catch you guys in the next one, peace (upbeat music) Chris, honestly Chris, Chris, (indistinct) honestly Chris honestly Chris (indistinct) honestly Chris (upbeat music)
Or the one from alpha gaming