Mastering Your Voice Over Audio with Logic Pro | 2021 Tutorial

welcome to touch technology review today i'm going to show you how to master your audio using logic pro we're going to be mastering an audio file that's used as a voice over or face to camera scene such as the one that you're watching right now so this is ideally suited to those of you producing youtube videos or creating podcasts we're going to look at the process of normalizing the audio we're going to apply some noise reduction we'll add some eq compression a limiter and in the final step we're going to take a look at the loudness level meter that will help us determine how loud our audio file is so that we can be sure that we're compliant with the audio level standards of the various platforms so without any further delay let's get started and check out how to master our audio file using logic pro so i've got logic pro open when you first open the application you'll probably get a screen which will ask whether you're wanting to create a software instrument audio track drummer track midi track or guitar and bass track so obviously because this is a voice over we're going to select the audio option and we can leave the audio input and output set to the defaults here because we're not using the audio recording feature of logic we already have a file that i recorded previously using my zoom h6 audio recorder so in order to import that file we're going to go to the file option at the top import and then we're going to select the audio file option and we'll navigate to the file that we're looking for i'll open that up and you'll see the audio waveform of that file appear on that track that we just created we can use the vertical zoom in order to increase or decrease the view and the horizontal zoom to increase the width of the track as well now the first thing i can tell about this audio file is that the signal is rather low so we're going to need to normalize that audio level in order to bring it up to a decent volume if we listen to it now you have to reject both possibilities the mere possibility of there being something ineffable english quality you can hear that it's quite low so in order to normalize that track we'll click on the audio track twice to open up our track and file view window below we'll make sure that we're on the file option and then we go into functions and select normalize normalizing the audio will instantly increase the level of the audio file across the whole span of the track so now we have a great place to start with in terms of our audio file this also works in the inverse if your track is a little bit too loud you can normalize it down to a lower level so that you're starting off at the best possible volume to master your audio track so once we've normalized we're now ready to apply noise reduction now i'm not going to apply noise reduction to my file because it was recorded in such high quality using the rode nt1 condenser microphone into the zoom h6 audio recorder so i can't actually hear any noise that needs to be reduced however if you're using a cheaper lav microphone or if you happen to have a lot of ambient noise in the particular audio that you've recorded then you might want to apply some noise reduction now in terms of noise reduction there's two different approaches you can apply a noise filter or a noise gate so if you have a lot of hissing in your track perhaps you could go and use a noise filter which is actually available as an effect on the left hand side so if i go to my track one in the left hand column go to audio effects and click on the arrows but you'll notice that there is no noise reduction filter available because that's one of the legacy filters that you have to access by holding down the option key at the same time so now if i hold down the option key i'll see the legacy option appears and there's a whole range of legacy filters available so if i want to apply some denoiser i'll select that tool mono and if i press play on the audio to listen to it i can then adjust the threshold and the amount of noise that you're reducing so my preference here is to really avoid using this type of noise reduction as much as possible only use it if you're really noticing a high degree of hissing in the track that's usually due to using a cheaper microphone so if you are going to use it you want to go about that level if you go much higher you're going to start cutting into the actual harmonics and the audio quality of the vocal track itself so use noise reduction very sparingly and only enough to limit the amount of excessive noise or reduce it to the point that you're not affecting the actual quality of the audio track itself and the second way to get rid of noise is by using the noise gate which is under the dynamics filter so we'll scroll down to noise gate click on that and we've got a few presets here which we can choose between an acoustic a backing vocal electric bass gate fast gate hard floor noise percussion or tighten up because this is a vocal track we can select the backing vocal gate to begin with and we can listen fundamental mysteries they recoil from even the hint of potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's world view so the way the gate works is you have a threshold and you have how much reduction you'd like to apply so you need to play around with these two parameters so that you're changing the cutoff point when the signal will be cut out completely so the noise gate as the name gate implies acts to open and close an audio gate if you like to allow the signal to be heard and to prevent it from being heard so once it gets beyond a certain level it will completely close and once it's lower than that it will open up again so you need to adjust your threshold and reduction and also to make it less severe and to soften the impact of that gate opening and closing you can change the attack hold and release so it's not so obvious and again i would recommend that you use this one sparingly or very lightly because it can be quite severe and sound a little bit odd if you go in too hard with a noise gate you also get an option on the right hand side that you can use to change the cutoff of the high and low frequencies and this can be helpful too in terms of the high cutoff especially in terms of reducing the hissing sound you can drag the slider across turn the monitor on so you can hear what you're doing and if you drag the slider across you'll be able to hear that high end range being reduced and that can cut out some hiss and syllabus but again i find if you go too far on these sliders it really becomes a bit too severe and artificial so i tend to avoid over doing it when using these fields i only use them very lightly if i have to so once you've taken care of your noise problems the next option is to go in and apply some eq so in order to do that we're going to go into the effects rack on the left hand side select the eq option and we'll add a basic channel eq you can just go in and manually adjust the sliders until you get the sound that you're looking for or you can use a number of the presets available and there's a whole range of options available under voice from backing vocals brassy bright choir clear vocals male vocals vintage vocal presence voice over eq adding warmth to the voice there's so many presets here i would highly encourage that you start with one of these presets it's going to save you a lot of time and it will give you a great idea as to what your audio will sound like before you start modifying it further so for example if i was to choose a male vox 02 preset it's going to drop off some of the mid-range and increase some high-end in order to compensate for what is sometimes excessive bass in a male vocal so let's have a listen to that one english quality and quantity in order to confuse quantity and quality you have to reject both possibilities so you can turn the effect on and off in order to preview it is the mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is and then as you're listening to the vocal you can simply drag the sliders in each one of the frequency ranges in order to adjust them further so i think the treble is a little bit high for me so i'm not going to go with these suggested options and then once you've selected one of the points if you want you can actually get further control by tightening the frequency range that you're adjusting by sliding that range in and out and that gives you more precise control over a particular frequency range so if we're dealing with a 3.4 kilohertz range here i can really hone in on that range and increase it or decrease it in order to master the audio in that particular frequency range so let's have a listen to that now no fundamental mysteries they recoil from even the hint now this is going to be a completely subjective process so the way i tend to approach eq is to listen out for frequencies that i find annoying or distracting and minimize them rather than boost the eq too much in the first instance so if i come back to this high end frequency i might just increase it way up the top here and have a listen to that a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved scene in one's world view the desire for absolute order usually leads to tears and human affairs so i find that in the range of around three to four kilohertz there's a little bit too much syllabus in my voice so i like to drop that one back a little bit in fact i'll go against the suggestion of the preset and go a little bit under the mid range there so i can drop that frequency down and then i might sort of again contract that a little bit more so i'm really focusing in on that range and then i'll select the next keyframe along and i might just boost that one in the treble range a little bit more and then in terms of the mid-range i'll probably just keep that close to the zero point and with the bass sometimes i find my voice can be a little bit muddy so i like to roll off the bass at the end and even at the treble and if i listen to most people at any rate there is no evidence the quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement what matters instead i believe is a sense of focus a mind and effective concentrationism and and you know that might be a basic eq to start with and that's really cleaned up some of that syllabus dropped off a little bit of the base tape it off the high end and that gives me a very clean audio to work with so once you're happy with your eq you're ready to move on to the next filter which is going to be a compressor so in order to access that we'll go into the filters on the left hand side we'll select dynamics and then we'll select a compressor one of the things i love about logic is there's a lot of options that have already been created for you and they're all really great sounding compressors that have been configured for you to suit different styles of vocals from the spoken word to singing and narration so so you can go in here and preview all these presets until you find one that you think suits your voice the most i quite like the opto vocal number two and within that you get a different set of options from the platinum digital to studio vca studio fet classic vintage and vintage fet and vintage opto so let's go with a classic vca to start with and let's preview that adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd of course i can't describe what it is the mind does because no one can we don't understand how the and you can really hear the difference when i turn the filter on and off as to how it allows that vocal to really stand out and especially if you have a music backing track this will help your vocal really stand out and get more attention you can further tweak the preset by adjusting the ratio so i tend to go in at around the two and then i'll increase the makeup a little bit as well and then you can change the input gain and output gain either under or over the zero mark depending on how loud you want it to be we understand a lot about how parts of brains work but there are fundamental questions that have not even been fully articulated yet so i'm pretty happy with the way that's sounding now the next thing we're going to go look at is a limiter and we'll go into the dynamics and limiter option and again there are presets available we'll select the one for vocals we'll click on play ideas currently in play are variations on the notion that pseudo-darwinism selection goes on within the brain and now that i've added a limiter i'm just going to go in and add a de-esser which just could have gone in under the noise reduction category but i like to do this at the end once i've got my audio mastered the way i like it and the dsr helps remove some of that syllabus that i was talking about earlier and it's particularly helpful when you're pronouncing s words anything with the s or shh sounds in the vocals so i'll go and select a preset for this one again the male vocal wide band and we'll click on play no fundamental mysteries they recoil from even the hint of potential zone of mystery or an unresolved scene in one's world view the desire for absolute order usually leads to tears and it's really hard to tell what the filter is doing so in order to help with that i tend to put the solo on and then i can hear the actual frequency that it's cutting isolated without the rest of the vocal and that helps me decide whether i've gone too hard on the filters or too soft so i just want to remove a very small amount of syllables so i'm just going to dial it in around the 8 000 frequency range and i'm going to reduce the reduction to around 22 decibels so i definitely don't want to be cutting into the treble of my vocal too much and by doing that i'm going to have a very subtle impact on the end result which is all i'm looking for so once you've done all that you're almost ready to export your audio file out to be used in any project but before that we're going to go and check our levels by using the meters available in logic pro so to do that again in the effect rack we'll slide down till we get to metering and we'll go and select a multimeter because i normalized that audio earlier it really is already at a point where the levels seem to be about right so what we're aiming for here especially if you're producing a video that's going to go out to a platform like youtube is to make sure your audio conforms to the luff's audio standard at negative 14 decibels so if we have a look at the meters on the right hand side here we get a luff's reading and we can see that we tend to be sitting at around negative 13.4 no fundamental mysteries they recoil from even the hint of potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's world view the desire for absolute order we're really very close to our mark there at negative 13 negative 14 or thereabouts if you look at the zero mark here if we go anything above zero we're going to be going far above our recommended levels and we're sort of aiming for the spectrum to come in at around your negative five to negative materials at any peak moment and we want an average reading here of around negative 14 have long seemed determined to win a race now if it was a little bit loud or a little bit too soft we can just go back into any one of these areas here let's say the limiter and change the gain and that should give us a perfect level for when we're publishing to youtube if i bring it into my audio editor of choice at the moment that is davinci resolve i'll also use the loudness level meter within the video application before i export just to make sure that nothing's changed once i've gone into my video editor and that again is going to conform to that negative 14 lufs standard so that's pretty much my process for mastering audio in logic pro it's a matter of about three or four filters you can use a lot of the presets available in logic which is one of the great things about the application and if you are looking for complete customization over that sound you can go in there and manually adjust every single parameter in all those filters thanks for watching hopefully you enjoyed this video if you did feel free to hit me up with a like and consider subscribing to the channel so that you're notified of up and coming video releases and if you're looking for tips on how to record your audio during a video production i've created a video with five steps to improve your audio and i'll leave a link to that in the description box below thanks for watching see you on the next one bye for now you

Channel: Touch Technology Review

Views: 18,556

Keywords: audio, logic, logic pro, mastering audio, podcast audio, eq audio, compression, logic pro x, better audio, better audio for youtube

Id: XE9lruYe49Q

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021