NEW Zoom H6 Complete podcast setup tutorial

hey guys I wanted to run through a set up information on the h6 used mainly for podcasting this is a new version of this video that I did about a year ago didn't go into full detail on actually plugging in Mike's setting levels getting headphones plugged in things like that so I'm gonna do a little more in-depth here I'm not going to cover every single feature mainly going to run through things that you need to double check before doing podcast recordings because that's obviously what our focus is gonna be if you've opened the box for your age six you see almost everything that's here on the table you have the unit itself obviously and then it does come with these two attachment microphones these are good quality mics and they attach into the front I should say at the top of the h6 like so and you can swap those out easily this is an XY pattern microphone this one is called a mid side pattern microphone I will talk about setting levels and things like that later on but this does have a volume dial excuse me a gain adjustment dial just like the other inputs do so if you want to get a room recording for example or record a conference table or a live event or something without actually plugging in specific microphones you can always use this XY it sounds pretty great and it does have a line in excuse me a line in Jack on the side here so if you wanted to say run a sound board or some music from your phone into the h6 while you're recording you can use this eight-inch jack here to do that also will take lavalier microphones if you have an eighth inch loud mic will plug in there as well USB cable that comes with this is used obviously with the h6 and either to plug into your computer to use it as an audio interface you can also use it to retrieve files from your SD card without removing the SD card and then if you use a a brick that you would get from like an iPhone charger you can actually plug this in to run power for the Aged six if you don't want to have batteries and have to replace those or get recharge batteries you can just use USB for power instead and then of course we have the SD cards I think it comes standard with a two gigabyte micro SD and this adapter two gigabytes for most people should be fine but obviously any SD card that you'd want to buy you can definitely get something with higher capacity for longer recordings you will want to note that the more tracks you record the bigger the files are going to be so maybe you're safe with one microphone with a two gigabyte card but if you decide to record you know with everything on the h6 that's six tracks and that's going to be six times the space so you may want to get a larger SD card and then I have this headphone adapter which I'll I'll talk about a little bit first thing I'm gonna do here is get some mics plugged in so we can see what that looks like with the inputs on the side of the zoom here checking levels making sure things are working so we have four input jacks here these are XLR combo inputs so you can see it looks like a normal microphone jack an XLR jack but it also fits a quarter inch plug right in the center here so you can do either align in with a quarter inch cable or just a standard microphone if you have a guitar or something you can plug that in here as well and there's two on this side two on this side some of the info we have here on the side of the h6 SD card slot headphone jack headphone volume power button and on this side the button and the scroller for the menu and the USB jack the top is the connection for the X Y and the mid side mics which we've mentioned already and then you have a line out and a remote slot here on the very bottom power button here we're gonna hold that down to turn this on and let's run through some settings here on the top of the h6 so I'm gonna bust out a sm58 microphone to start see sorry I don't know some things around here so you were my microphone cable just gonna leave mine wrapped up for simplicity I'm gonna plug the XY excuse me the XLR cable the input end into the h6 for this it doesn't really matter what input we're using if you are recording multiple people I would recommend making note of inputs one two three and four just for reference in post-production and then we'll take the other end of this cable plug it into the microphone here okay so a few things when you get ready to do recording and we'll cover some of the settings on the menu here in a second I just want to run through this first so as I mentioned you have a gain knob for all four microphones and the built-in excuse me the XY mics if that was plugged in the gain adjustment here is adjusting the amount of signal you're actually getting from the microphone and when we plug in headphones later and talk about monitoring level just note that those are two different things so this is the gain adjustment that you're going to be getting from the mic itself so there's one for each input and then we have these are called the record enable buttons and there's one for L&R is the top here which isn't plugged in and then you have one through four for each input like this so we're gonna enable one because that's what input we're using right now the most important thing to check I would say when you're doing recordings is the level for each mic and make sure you obviously you're recording with each mic because if you only have one selected but you have four mics plugged in you're missing out on some of those tracks so just things to verify before you start recording we also have a pad switch here for each of the microphones so if you have a guitar plugged in for example that's going to be a much higher level than a microphone would be so you might need to flip the pad button on and that just drops the input gain negative 20 decibels which will give you some more control for something that's a little louder or if you're piping in a soundboard or some music or something from from a phone or an iPad or like that microphones should not need the pad so we'll turn that back off and then you will be able to start seeing here and I'm gonna switch cameras so you can look at the input level for this microphone so the first thing you'll notice here is the display panel telling you a lot of things the numbers on the top is the timecode of how long you've been recording or if you're listening back the time of the file that you're listening to battery the location of your file so it's telling you what folder it's in and what the name of the file is and that's for on the SD card when you've retrieved these files so you know which is which we have a channel strip for every single input the sample rate and bit rate that you're recording that and then this is the important thing to look at the time left on your SD card so the SD card I have is pretty large this is telling me I have a hundred and ninety six hours of recording available so you just have hours minutes and seconds so before you start recording something I would always look at this if it's under an hour and you know you're gonna record for you know 45 minutes to an hour or more that's a obvious that you would need to either clear the card or get a bigger card to have more space so if I start tapping on this mic to get some signal you'll see that I have my volume or excuse me the gain of the mic is showing that I have a signal here on channel one and that's exactly that you what you want to see so when you have your mics plugged in and you're doing a sound check before you're recording make sure that you see input on all of these all these inputs here on the channel strip display that's gonna tell you exactly if it's if you're getting signal from the mic or if it's too high or too low so I mentioned the gain control here so if I crank this up you can tell it's already I'm barely even touching it and it's getting into the orange and into the red and then if I tap on it it's telling me that this is clipping and you can see a few things it's getting red all the way to the top of the channel strip and then the input is flashing it's yelling at me that I'm that the signal is way too high and when you plug headphones in and you monitor while you're doing the soundcheck you'll be able to tell this but these are just things to look out for as you're setting up so if you ever see anything even in the orange I would say is too high because you want a signal that is controllable so that way in editing you have room to increase or decrease the volume if you need to and be able to manipulate that audio so if it's even in the orange I would say that's too high for these sm58 that I'm using and also the ATR 2100 which is pretty popular mic for podcasting I usually set this right about five excuse me sorry you cannot see that in my bed I usually set the inputs to five maybe five and a half and that seems to be standard pretty good volume for most people's voices but again everyone's voice and setup is different and if you're using different mics definitely do some testing with this before you before you are solid on what your input should be so once you know that you're getting signal from everything it's really simple make sure you have record enabled the tracks that you want to use and just hit the record button it will light up it will turn red and it will start counting time and it will tell you what your recording recording length is and then you'll notice here in the bottom it's a little hard to see but the the timecode here the space on the card is going to go down as the recording goes up once you're done recording you just hit stop and now you notice you see here that this is oome zoom oh - it changed numbers that means it's telling you that zoom 0:01 is recorded and now it made a new file and it's ready to record again if I record again it will now then create zoom 3 record their stop and then if I record again change it to zoom 4 so it just keeps creating new files every time you hit the stop button if you want to keep things on one single file you would just hit the pause button instead it will pause the recording keep the timecode where it is stay on the same file and then when you want to keep rolling again just hit the play pause button and it will keep going these fast forward row n FS board buttons are for playback if you want to listen to what you've recorded just to audition things and play it to age six before you move the files off to your computer all right now it's time to run through some of the settings on the menu here again I'm not going to cover every single thing just mainly what you want to check out before you start recording we have sorry about that we have the menu button which opens the menu and goes back and then we have the scroll wheel here which goes through the options and if you click that in it will select options on the menu so let's open that up so I had to turn the camera exposure down a little bit just to kept this menu because it's so bright the first thing that you see here is the folder options once you record it will ask you if in the SD card if you want to like group these into different folders by default it will put everything in folder one but if you want to be organized you can open these up and then it will tell you that if you hit the record button it will select that folder to record too I recommend once you're done with the recording just grabbing the SD card and taking everything off of it and then wiping it from clearing it basically to start from scratch that's my preferred method but this option is here if you want to the most important thing is the input and output here so again I'm not going to cover every single thing you don't need to worry about the low-cut or the comp limiter or the monitor phantom power is one of the most important things so some like to require extra power in order for them to work most dynamic mics don't need phantom most condenser mics do need phantom so based on what Mike you have you want to check the specs on that and if it needs phantom power you have to turn that on from the zoom so you click the phantom to open it up set the voltage now almost all regular mics are going to be plus 48 volts and you can change this some lavalier mics might be 12 but again most regular mics that have an XLR connection you're gonna be 48 so keep it there and then you're going to select which inputs are on and off so if all four my let's say using 4 mics they're all exactly the same and they all need phantom power you'll just select all turn it on and it will hit that for all 4 mics if you have like your mixing and matching then you'll need to pay attention to you where they're plugged into which input they're plugged into and turn those on and off here in this phantom power thing so if you plug your mic in and you know you've turned up the gain knob and everything and you're not getting any signal chances are you have a microphone that is either not working or it most likely has phantom power and needs to be turned on in order to get signal from it plug in power is if you have a lavalier mic plugged into the XY connection that goes on the top of the h6 that is a different kind of phantom power that's the 12 volt that I mentioned that needs to be turned on for a 8 inch loud mic going into the XY pickup monitor mixer this is something that you might want to check out so if you have let's see I'm going to open this and it opens up the excuse me it opens up the control surface that you see on the home screen of the h6 so if you have headphones let's say you're splitting headphones between 4 or 5 people as you're recording so everybody can hear themselves when you have an adapter that is not a headphone amplifier it will gradually reduce the signal so if you take one signal and you split it five ways that signal is now a little bit lower so what happens is a lot of times it's little too quiet so if you have you know five people on headphones some people might want it louder so you might want it softer also this is good if you have you know four people with totally different voices maybe somebody is really really loud and you have a solid gain level for them but in the headphones they're kind of overpowering everybody this is a spot where we can turn down the volume level of individual tracks so at the top here it's going to tell me what option I have selected so this is track left pan and then if I scroll it'll tell me track left level and then track right pan right level check one pen and level and that goes the same for all six of these options so if you want to adjust the volume of what you're hearing on track one you would push in to select and you can raise or lower the volume here all the way up to 12 dB if you need to for track one level hit enter when done and you can scroll through and do the same for track two three four this is not the recording level so like I said gain and volume or different things this is the level that you're hearing things act so always when you are when you are doing the soundcheck and setting levels for the mics pay attention to the gain and make sure those are solid and this is off of monitoring for when you're listening back to the headphones just want to make that clear you don't want to crank up the gain if somebody's too quiet because then you'll start clipping and the other distorted track so you can and that will save your settings so every time you come in if we've set that to twelve it's gonna remember that right here so if you want to set everything to twelve just for a louder signal by all means that makes it easier to set and forget you mean you should need line out level if you're gonna take a line out of this which we said it was on the bottom here you need to adjust that and this is where you'll do it here in the input and output menu a lot of the stuff you shouldn't have to change so recording format it's telling you that it's going to default to forty four point one K and 16-bit that is standard for audio I recommend keeping that if for some reason you're doing mostly video content you may want to change this to 48 and 24 that is the standard for video but again the default format should be totally fine then you have a backup recording option so this is nice if you're you know not too familiar with setting levels and recording and things like that if you plug the XY mics into the top make sure those are enabled you can select this to do a backup recording and it'll automatically record a backup from the XY mics that 12 decibels lower than whatever input you set so let's say you set it to you set the dial to five you think it's fine and then once you're going through the recording people start getting louder and then things are distorted well the backup will automatically have a backup set for you at negative twelve and then that will basically save you if you have anything that's overly distorted it only does it from the XY mic so it won't record from all six tracks that way but at least it will save you you know if something's ruined the backup will probably save you you can rename how the project are how the files are titled so we saw when I was hitting the record button it was naming things zoom one zoom 2003 you can set that to be labeled off at the date if you want again I'm not going through absolutely everything the next most important thing that I would say is the SD card here so as I mentioned I recommend taking all the files off the SD card once you record getting them on your computer so that they're safe and backed up and then formatting this card it will clear everything on there on the card so if you click that it will ask you if you're sure you say yes it will wipe the card clean and it will put it back to its max capacity so you know especially if you're only using the 2 gigabyte card that comes with this thing I recommend formatting it every time and one thing to note is the first time that you plug that SD card in you will want to format it before you record anything and then the last thing is the USB option for the to be the SD card reader or to be an audio interface with the DW like logic or audacity or Pro Tools we'll cover that later once we plug that in alright and then let's talk about the headphone situation so say we have a headphone jack here on the side if it's just you take a pair of headphones this has a quarter inch adapter so I'll need to take this off but if it's just you then you plug your headphones in here aside once you do that the display will default you can see it will tell you what the volume is and then once you plug the headphones in it will tell you with the headphone volume is because that's different than the speaker that actually plays here on the back and you can adjust that up to 100 whatever is easiest for you so yeah I mean just one headphone when you're monitoring if it's just you if you have a group I definitely recommend having headphones for everybody when they hear themselves they they record a little differently they pay attention to the mic placement how close and far they are from the mics things like that if they can hear them so it doesn't recommend headphones for everybody and there's two ways to do that one is with the splitter so I have this Belkin splitter that takes one headphone jack and splits it to five different outputs so you would just plug this into the headphone jack up normal and then everybody would plug their headphones into this instead it works it's cheap this was I think 12 bucks and it gets the job done I mentioned talking about the monitor mixer that this kind of degrades the the volume of the signal so it might be a little too quiet for everybody to really you know be able to hear themselves and everybody else that's recording so the main way to do things is to run this into a headphone amp now I have one cable that I use for that for mine it has the 8 inch headphone jack here and then this splits into a left and right quarter inch cable and most headphone amps are going to have a left and right input might also say input 1 and 2 and then the headphone amp will have two four or six or eight different jacks for people to plug their headphones into mine is it's a rack system so this is what like a rack style headphone app looks like it's this middle unit that's actually has the lights lighting up I'm playing music right now in the background which you can't hear but it's getting signal it's a good way to tell so on the back of this thing it has two inputs it has an XLR style input which has a left and right and it has a quarter inch jack input which has a left and a right as well so what you would do is simply plug the lineout cable from the h6 into the back of the headphone amp and then as you can see it has channel 1 through 6 and the nice thing about this is that everybody has their own volume so they can turn their own headphones quieter or louder if they want to and it has even a bit of EQ it has a base and a treble knob so you can if you like it more basic you want to get the low into people's voices you can totally adjust that and personalize it and if you have maybe one of the smaller bérenger headphone amps or something they don't have a split left and right input it's just one single quarter inch stereo input so you need a different kind of cable for that I will make sure to link all the links to all of these items on Amazon so you guys can just click that and order whatever you need to order but essentially it'll be the same cable eighth inch on one end but it will have a single quarter inch jack with two rings on the other all right so before we wrap up I guess technically I didn't show exactly where the SD card slot is so this just prise open an SD card is in there push in wants to take it out put on your computer shove it back in and then format and before we wrap things up let's do the last part which is going to be the USB connection so just take this cable that you have and the smaller end plug into the jack here on the side of the h6 and the other end is going to go into your computer and then once you have this plugged into your computer we're going to go back to the menu and go down to the USB menu here which we have shown up select and then you have the two options so you can open the card reader and that will just make the h6 show up on your computer like it's a flash drive or something and you can look at all the files on there or the main reason you'd want to use it as an audio interface you would select that and it's gonna ask you stereo mix or multitrack so stereo mix no matter how many inputs you have recording it's gonna sum all of those down to a stereo mix so just one one left and right and then if you want to actually record individual files so up to six at a time definitely hit multitrack and then it's gonna ask you if you want to use battery power or not so if it's USB it's plugged into your Mac or your PC it's already getting power from that so you can select that option and then it will show you here like your channel strip like you normally would it will show you the inputs it'll show you volume levels once you start recording and have the mics plugged in but you notice a lot of the other parts of the display are gone because that's going to be handled on your on your da W so let's switch over to the computer screen so here I have just a blank Logic Pro session open and ready to roll now this is gonna look slightly different based on whatever da w you're using but in general most of the names and the settings and things are going to be gonna be pretty uniform at least selecting your audio device and things like that so in my Logic Pro menu I'll hit preferences go to my audio preferences and I click my input and output device here I should see the option for the h6 so I will hit now it will let you a do W well lets you choose different in input and output devices if you want if you were to do that you want to pay attention to where your headphones are gonna be plugged into so if your output device is selected as the h6 and your headphones are actually going to be plugged into the headphone jack on the h6 and it's gonna feed that audio back out to you if for some reason you had headphones plugged into the Mac instead of h6 then you would want to change this to built an output or if you have a different da W or whatever just make sure you have that selected the right way this will apply it will activate the h6 and then you can make as many tracks as you want let's make six let's shrink these a little bit so you can see them all and then you're gonna have the input selection for all of these tracks so the tricky thing to notice here let's I'm gonna click my input drop down the L and R so the XY mics that you would plug into the top of the zoom those actually take input one and two so you want to note that say you have a mic plugged into input one on the zoom that's actually input three and that lines up with how the record enable buttons show up from left to right on the zoom L&R our first so that's that's a track 1 and 2 and then mic 1 is track 3 mic 2 is track 4 etc etc so the beach be aware when you have those plugged in if you want to record all six I would just run through these and select input one two three four five and six and you are free to label these change the title of the tracks that you know you know if you want to put people's names as the name of the track or you want to put mic one mic to whatever it's gonna be so let's do that really quick - so I'm gonna say L R one two three four boom now if I record I will know exactly what I'm working with so from earlier I had my sm58 plugged into input one I'm gonna plug that back in I'm going to record an able track 1 and you will see I also need to record enable track 1 here in logic again every da W slightly different but chances are you need to enable recording and an able monitoring here in Logic Pro so you can see I'm getting signal here from my sm58 if I record enable the rest of these you'll notice they are not getting any signal whatsoever because I only have one mic plugged in so if you using your H 6 as a monitor our excuse me as an interface same thing that we went over earlier with soundcheck and looking at the levels make sure if you have all 6 mics that at all six tracks are getting signal before you start recording it's an easy way to check and again make sure that levels are good you can see here I'm getting close to the orange if you look here when I'm tapping on this mic we're getting close to the orange so you might want to dial that back just a little bit and that is it so using it as an interface is pretty straightforward the only thing to look at is the the names of each input check your gain and you're good to go there is a spot here for a typical camera stand adaptor so if you wanted to have this on a camera stand or mount it to the top of a camera that's there on the back as well and there is the speaker so if you do want to play back tracks that you've recorded without headphones that will play it here so you can kind of monitor and listen to those in between takes and then obviously the batteries are here back I am for chargeable batteries for this I find that it's pretty good on battery life and if I record for you know 2 hours or less I haven't had any issues even with up to 4 tracks so if you're not going to be doing anything super long you may want to just get some rechargeable batteries and use those instead of having to always have this thing plugged in and near an outlet if you're going to go longer than that probably good to have a USB plugged in for power so just to you know wrap up and clarify things most important stuff is doesn't gonna be the game remember Gaines is different than volume so when you put your mics in and you're doing sound check make sure you have the gain set properly for all four inputs if you need to run an XY mic or you need to run a line in from something don't forget about your XY attachments they go here on the top and the 8 inch jack here on the other side and then in the menu the monitor mixer if you need to adjust the monitoring level for any of the tracks and then finally make sure you have selected exactly the number of inputs that you want to record so if you're doing all six make sure you have all six actually lit up and selected and then those are the main things I mean once you're good with that you're good to record there is a way to join these inputs so let's say you wanted to record tracks 1 & 2 and put them on one stereo file instead of an individual mono file if you press both of these at the same time it will either join them or unjoin them I think they were already joined so let's push that again yeah so now if I select 1 & 2 it will highlight both of them at the same time that means it's gonna record them 1 will be all the way to the left channel & 2 will be all the way to the right channel on one single stereo track so for some reason you want to record that way and then if you want to turn that off just click them at the same time again and it will put and back to individual inputs so that's everything chances are I've looked over one thing or said one thing silly so if anything is unclear please just leave a comment I'll try to get back to everybody if you have any issues with this or things you want to add yeah just drop a comment we'll make sure everything is up-to-date and accurate all right thanks for watching

Channel: Podsense by Crate Media

Views: 109,743

Keywords: podcast, podcasting, podcast recording, daw, audio, recording, zoom, atr-2100, skype, h6, sm58, logic pro, h4, h5

Id: CE4JP-6Tp4Q

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DocHolliday31]

Thanks for doing this. Will be purchasing the H6 one day soon. Glad to have this video

[u/[deleted]]

Love that H6.

[u/IReallyLoveAvocados]

H6 looks like one of the best products on the market. The fact that it works as both a remote recorder and an interface is killer