Make your voiceover sound cleaner with a noise gate

what's happening booth junkies I'm just going to take a quick moment to talk to you about one of the things that I've used to really help me clean up my audio to make it much easier to get it ready for production and that is using a noise gate one of the nice things about a noise gate is it helps reduce the sound of the silent parts so in between the words and the phrases that's the time when you can normally hear ambient noise you can hear your breath you can hear yourself rustling around in the booth so I've taken a few seconds I've recorded a few seconds of audio and I want to show you what it sounds like before the gate gets applied and after the gate gets applied and you'll see how much cleaner the audio sounds now you're probably going to need your headphones for this one so grab them put them in and then you don't make it much clearer what we're talking about here so let's take a look at the audio what we have here is just a minutes worth of recorded audio and we're going to see what it sounds like before we apply the gate and then we'll configure our gate and apply it and you'll hear the difference it makes so let's just listen to it in its raw form right now it was a hot summer's day and I was the driver on Engine 3 on the east side of town the backstep man was okay so just in that first second if you have your headphones on you'll hear right away right in the beginning you'll hear a mouth click and some breathing hear that inhale it was a hot summer's day and I was the driver on Engine 3 on the east side of town the backstep man was and then there's an inhale the next word now inhales are fine but they tend to get a little bit distracting especially if you if you slash breath into it I try and uh practice breathing as quietly as I can but you can still hear them Lin for the day two privates and Aleut oh and listen to that if you have your headphones on Lin for the day here two privates and you'll hear a little thump in between there I think it's probably my my heater or furnace or something that made a noise or maybe it was some traffic from the outside but there's a little tiny thump in there not something that maybe everybody would notice but your your engineer or your you certainly want to have the highest quality recording you can so you want to make sure that little knock gets managed let's listen again Lin for the day to prime you hear that little thump in between Lin for the day to pride so the great thing about this is a noise gate will help us manage all that stuff and here's all a noise gate is a noise gate is just a door a door that closes during the silent part and opens when there's sound so it lets sound through and tries to make the quiet parts quieter so it closes down on it it gates out the ambient sound reaper which is my preferred daw has a gate built in I think a lot of audio workstations probably have a gate built in but I'm going to be showing you the one that comes with Reaper it's called rege 8 and I think a lot of the settings are going to be similar no matter what da W you choose so let's go ahead and add it in the way we do it in Reaper is we click the FX button and it brings up a list of plugins different effects that you can add the one that we have here is called re gate and I've already got that pre-selected here so I'm just going to add that and by default you'll see that it comes with this default configuration if it's turned on I think we're going to find that it's not going to do anything it was a hot stuff you can still hear the mouth click you can still hear the breath and the reason because is because we have to go through and do some configuration now luckily for voice artists there's not a ton of configuration that we need to do there's really just a couple of settings and they're going to vary depending on what your room sounds like they're going to depend on how you deliver and where your settings are on your on your interface but I'll show you what mine are and hopefully it will help you get your set the very first thing that you need to set is the threshold and that is how loud the sound has to be before the gate opens by default we can see here that Reapers gate is set to minus infinity so that means pretty much any sound at all is going to keep the gate open or so the gate is just open all the time the door is open and all the sounds coming in so the first thing we do is we adjust our threshold slider until the background noise is is cut out but the voice comes through so let's just hit play it was a hot summer's day and I was the driver on engine and so we want to make sure that the threshold is set below that but above where the background noise is so let's just record let's just record for the sake of argument let's just record a few seconds of room tone shall we if we turn the FX off and listen back there you should hear me breathing fidgeting pretty quiet but you can hear it in the beginning you hear that noise that's the background that's the room tone let's see what the gate says that that is for us turn our gate on for that section you see where that gate lives right there or where that threshold lives so that is our basic room tone so we want to get above that point and that will automatically clamp down on everything now my boots pretty quiet so that's - - about 60 dB that's pretty quiet but we want it to be we want to manage a little bit higher than that because we want to take away the breaths and any rustling and any thumps so I normally bring it up a bit higher than that so maybe minus 40 dB and now we can hear that the gate is completely closed right that sound that background noise is not loud enough to get in perfect silent we like that okay so now if we take that and we apply it back to our recording let's see what happens it was a hot summer's day and I was the driver on Engine three on the east side of town the backstep man with great so now I don't hear that breath so automatically I've taken out my background breath I've taken away that rustling let's see if it also gets that little thunk that's in there in for the day - private sandal it did in for the day but there's something here that we that we should listen for and listen for the very end of that word de Lin for the day you can hear the gate closed can't you it clamps down on it and it actually sounds like that word day gets cut off in for the day you hear that in for the day that's no good people will notice that people will hear that gate and they'll say oh there's something going on there so we can adjust some of the different settings to help try and get that trailing off word to get the ends of words there's a way for the gate to close more slowly and that's called the release so when the gate is open and we're going to close it or I'm sorry when the gate is yes open and it closes back down we might want it to have it take just a little bit longer we can adjust the release in milliseconds or we can tell it to hold the gate open for a few milliseconds after the threshold has come down so we'll try a couple of different settings and see which which helps that day sound not get cut off my gut tells me is it's probably going to be the hold we want to just hold the door open for a couple of milliseconds handful of milliseconds before before that gate starts to close so we'll probably do it at like half as long as the typical releases by default so let's set it at fifty milliseconds that's really short but that should be long enough hopefully to get that last word day two so we can hear the rest of the word day placement from headquarters to fill in for the day there we go we can hear it from headquarters to fill in for the day you can hear that little tiny bit and so it's just it's we're just holding that gate open for just a microscopically extra extra time just to get that last little letter and breath to come out and it's still you can still hear that gate closed a little bit and we're going to sat in one second orders to fill in for the day you can still hear because I do a little bit of an inhale there if the words if the beginning of the words are cut off I'm not sure if I have any two privates and a lieutenant made up the crew of Engine three and when one of the privates was out sick the other one would automatically become the driver for the day the air was filled with the fragrance of summer that morning as we rated for the air was filled with the fragrance of summer that morning as we waited for our guests to arrive it would be a beautiful day for I don't hear anything there but if you do find that the words the beginning of the words are getting cut off the pre open so you could if you find the beginnings of your words are getting cut off you can actually tell it to open the gate a little bit in of it in advance so that's what the pre open is so I usually do the pre open like five or six milliseconds just so that gate can start to open before the sound comes in and that way you don't hear some of those really sharp sounds like peas and bees that have a really sharp beginning that the attack doesn't take too long to open so I just say open it up a few milliseconds in advance so the pre open and the attack I usually do it a few milliseconds in advance now if we go back to that day out of town the back still in for the day so there's still a little tiny bit of noise gate that you hear you can hear because my breath is I'm actually taking a little bit of breath the other setting that you'd want to mess with on a gate is the the wet and the dry setting and it's really the dry setting if you've never heard those terms before there's there's what you call the wet and the dry side the dry side is your original recording as it's stored on disk exactly as it went through the microphone on disk with no effects applied the wet side is after the the audio has gone through whatever effect it is in this case the gate it's after it's gone through that effect what did the effect do to it and that's called the wet side the nice thing about the digital workstations is you can actually say well that wet side did something that I that I didn't want it to do or it did too much of something so I need to bring some of my original signal back and so the what we're doing here is it sounds a little weird to have that complete absolute silence in between the words we expect to hear a little tiny bit of breath we expect to hear a little tiny bit of room tone so we use that we use that dry side to bring just a hint of that breath back without it being distracting so there's the dry side slider and I usually bring it back to maybe minus 40 DB maybe minus 60 DB and that's just to bring a little tiny bit of that room sound back without it being distracting so now let's see if that day gets any better I'll in for the day I'll in for the day - private still hear it a little bit let's see Bill in for the day - private send a lieutenant made up and maybe we need to have the release go a little tiny bit longer bill in for the day - privates and a lieutenant made up the crew of Engine 3 and when one of the privates was out sick the other one would automatically become the driver for the day the air was filled with the fragrance of summer that morning as we rated for the air was filled with the fragrance of summer that morning as we waited for our guests to arrive it would be a beautiful day for CID now those sound much better so we've managed all that breath in the middle and we've now got it set so that you can still hear that little tiny hint of room tone you can still hear me working you can still hear me breathing but it's not so distracting that you hear the the breaths in between words which over time people will latch on to it as they're listening to latch onto it and they'll end up just hearing your breaths in between and get distracted instead of the instead of what you're actually talking about sometimes it's okay but if you have a distinctive breath noise that happens every time you create a sentence then people will start to latch on to it and that's all they'll ever hear and so you want to try and minimize it as much as you can and so a gate that really helps once you get the hang of the settings you can tell Reaper or your digital audio workstation to memorize those settings as a preset because your delivery generally is your delivery and you'll do it the same similarly similarly every time so you can also have it save those parameters save those settings in a Reaper we just do it as a preset here and we can make our own we use the plus sign we save it and we call it mics default gate something like that and that way I can have it come back and always remember those settings as my preferred settings for my gate so that's it thank you so much for watching now get in your booth and record something amazing

Channel: Booth Junkie

Views: 70,296

Keywords: voiceover, vocalbooth, voiceacting, voicework

Id: zVWoxC3m4cc

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2016