Noise Gate Tutorial for Podcasts (Audacity) - Improve Your Podcast Sound Quality - Justin Kral Audio

everyone this is Justin from Justin Crowell audio and today I want to help your podcast sound more professional by showing you a neat little tool called noise gate and this fear'd we're gonna discuss what a gate is how to use it and its benefits on your podcast but Before we jump in I want to give you a heads up there's gonna be a bonus tip at the end of the video so make sure you stick around so what is a noise gate well it's a plugin that's in your recording software or DAW that is meant to automatically mute unwanted sections of audio all while letting you keep the sessions of audio that you want to hear if you want an analogy a noise gate is similar to a gate around your house when the gates closed people can't come in when the gates open people could walk on through in our case replace people with audio and add the fact that we can automatically set the noise gate to open and close based on some simple parameter settings so you may be asking how this works well a noise gate is based on the principle that you have some quieter unwanted background noise that was accidentally recorded on the same track as some louder audio as say your vocal some of this background noise could be a garbage truck going by it could be a TV in the next room or it could be some neighbors upstairs we don't all have the perfect recording location and as podcasters we have to deal with this stuff all the time so before we get to the technical stuff I'd like to show you an easy to digest visual explanation of how a noise gate works let's check out the dry erase board so if you have a podcast and you record it yourself you certainly know what waveforms look like they're just a visual representation of the actual audio that we're recording on the dry erase board I have some waveforms that I drew I want to stress that I am a professional audio engineer and have no business in fine arts but we can see that we have some larger waveforms here and here that equate to louder audio and we also have a section of smaller waveforms this would be a quieter section of audio let's say that the louder sections are you speaking into the microphone and the quieter section is the sound of your neighbors having a barbeque in their back yard every time you stop talking your microphone picks up your neighbors party maybe you didn't notice this while recording but upon playback causes you great distress we've probably all been there I know I have so what do you do you can certainly take all of your day to manually edit out each and every section of background noise I don't have time for that and you probably don't either this is where the noise gate comes in the goal of the noise gate is to close on these unwanted quieter sections of audio ultimately muting them all while staying open for the louder sections of audio that you want to hear this is largely achieved by setting a parameter on the noise gate called the threshold so you can move the threshold up and down and when the audio is loud enough to hit or go beyond the threshold setting the gate will open and you're going to hear that audio if you have audio that is lower in volume than the preset threshold the gate will close and you won't hear that audio it's essentially muted so let's draw it out my green marker is going to represent the threshold so I know every waveform has a crest and a trough or a top and a bottom but for this example this representation may make it a little bit easier to understand and then these black horizontal lines are going to represent the top and bottom limits of our threshold keep in mind this dry erase board example is just a visual primer to help with the detailed explanation later in the video so as I said we're allowed to move the threshold up and down and since the black lines represent the high and low limits of the threshold we can set the threshold anywhere in between them when I was first learning this I would think of the threshold as like a blanket or a cover so any audio covered by this so-called blanket would not be heard so if I set the threshold aka the blanket above the loudest section of audio say right around here the threshold is now covering or is on top of all of that audio therefore you're not going to hear any of the audio the noise gate will stay closed the entire time opposite that if you take the threshold or blanket if that's how you're thinking of it and bring it all the way down below the quietest portions of audio then the noise gate will be open the whole tire time and you'll hear everything but neither of these are what we're going for remember we want this quiet section muted while retaining these two louder sections and how do we achieve that well in theory it's pretty simple we set the threshold in such a way that it is covering or just above the quiet portions of audio but also below most of the louder portions of audio just like that so in this scenario the noise gate would stay open for these louder portions of audio and closed for this quieter section however you don't really get this clear visual when you're using the actual noise gate plugin so I wanted to go through this simple visual representation first in hopes that it sets you up for an easier understanding later on and with that said let's move on to the computer and try out the noise gate on a slightly different scenario that you may encounter in your podcast quick disclaimer audacity doesn't come with the noise gate plugin however you can easily download it and install it from wiki audacity team.org there's going to be a link in the description below it only takes a few minutes and it's well worth it so what I have in front of me is a clip from one of the podcasts I record mix and edit on a regular basis the show is called yeah no yeah and there's a link in the description if you want to check it out if you're listening to this on your phone speaker or computer speakers I'd recommend you pause and switch over to a decent pair of headphones if possible so let's take a listen and that a lot of her and it's like something I've thought about a lot with these types of pop performers it's like you want them to do choreographer where they're basically jumping up and down and sing in the same time that's insane you know it's insane and also any singer will tell you singers have bad days when you're singing all the time it's hard to keep your voice in shades yeah there have been all these leaked things of her okay so what do we have here we have two hosts in conversation it's a pretty popular format right now and the noise gate works really well here the audio is more or less raw so please forgive the civil ins but other than that things sound pretty good right next I'm going to reveal something you may not even realize is happening to your audio I'm going to hit play again but this time I'm going to mute host one here on the top track so we just here host choose track the bottom track and then a lot of her and it's like something I've thought about a lot with these types of Proctor formers it's like you want them to do choreographer basically jumping up and down and you know it's insane okay so did you hear all that it's subtle but what you're hearing is what is called bleed lead is caused by a sound source accidentally getting into the microphone of another sound source in this case hosts one's voice is being picked up by hosts choose microphone this is fairly normal when recording multiple sound sources with multiple microphones however it is worth taking the time to try and minimize bleed prior to hitting record this can be achieved by adjusting the physical locations of each sound source or each microphone but that could be a whole video by itself since we have the bleeder in our tracks let's continue with getting rid of it now I'm going to unmute host one and increase the volume of host two when I do that listen for how it affects the sound of host one and that a lot of her and it's like something I've thought about a lot with these types of pop performers it's like you want them to do choreographer they're basically jumping up and down and in the same time that's insane you know it's insane and also any singer will tell you singers have bad days when you you can now hear that host 1 doesn't sound like she used to do now she sounds a bit washed out less focused and not as upfront I'm obviously over exaggerating this but I want you to hear the negative effect that the bleed is having this is what we're trying to get rid of and the noise gate is a great way to eliminate this extra noise without having to go in and edit it out manually it just takes a bit of finesse to start to set this up you have to first select a portion of audio for our purposes I selected a section of host 2 that has bleed and some direct audio keep in mind the goal here is to get rid of host ones bleed that is on host choose track to keep all of host twos direct audio if you think back to the dry erase board example host ones bleed is now taking the place of our neighbors backyard party once that's selected we're gonna go up here to effect and scroll all the way down to no escape as I said before noise gate doesn't actually come with audacity but you can easily download it from wiki audacity team.org as I said before link in the description once the noise gate pops up you'll notice that there are more than a few parameters if you're not we're only gonna use a few of them and I'll be sure to explain them you may have already noticed something that we discussed in the dry erase board example that's this guy right here the threshold this is the main parameter we're gonna be focusing on when you bring up the noise gate it is usually set to some type of default settings now the only way we're going to know what settings are right for us is to experiment and listen using your ears as paramount and making this sound good this goes for just about everything in audio there are a few maybe know situations where plugging in random numbers or settings without using your ears is going to get you good results so we have our noise gate up with its default settings and we have our audio selected next thing we need to do is hit preview this will let us hear a 5 second sample of what the noise gate did no it's insane if you listen closely you can hear that the quietest portions of the bleed from host 1 are starting to disappear specifically the word insane got chopped in half as well as when she says and also any singer the phrase gets cut off at the word also tick careful listen I'll play the original again and sing in the same time that's insane no it's the same and also any and here it is again with the gates default settings no it's insane so we're going in the right direction but how are we gonna get rid of the rest of host ones bleed well let's think back to the dry erase board we need to set the threshold in such a way where it's high enough for the noise gate to stay closed for the bleed audio but not too high because we want the gate to stay open for the louder direct audio of host 2 question is which direction on the threshold slider is higher or lower on the dry erase board it was easy because the visual was going up and down to figure this out let's skip the subtlety and move the threshold all the way to the right now the threshold is set to negative 6 decibels best thing we can do now you guessed it let's use our ears I'm gonna hit preview and listen to what happens No all right your speakers or headphones are not broken as you can hear the only audio that remained is a very small clip of host 2 saying the word no that's this peak right here and it happens to be the loudest peak of our whole audio selection going back to the dry erase board example the higher the threshold the less audio you will hear since we heard almost no audio during this preview you can be sure that negative 6 decibels is on the higher end of the threshold spectrum this is actually as high as this noise gate goes I want you to fundamentally understand how this is working rather than just plugging in random numbers guessing or chalking it up to black magic so let's quickly talk about what is actually happening when you set the threshold to negative 6 decibels since we just established that negative 6 decibels is indeed high and combine that with the fact that we know the higher we set the threshold the less audio we will hear we can conclude that the gate will be closed for everything under negative 6 decibels and you will not hear that audio so we must also conclude that the audio we just heard of host 2 saying no must be louder than negative six decibels that little bit of audio is loud enough to break through and open the gate or you can think about it as being above the blanket like on the dry erase board if I was going to use my green marker the threshold is currently set right about here where my mouse is all the audio under this invisible line is muted meaning that the gate automatically closes for all audiences everything above the invisible line makes its way through meaning that the gate automatically opens for any audio louder than the current threshold setting that's why we were able to hear the word no hopefully the overall concept of the noise gate has begun to sink in let's take what we now know and apply that to the opposite end of the threshold spectrum if I take the gate threshold and move it all the way to the other side we land on negative 96 decibels I'm sure some of you already know what this is going to sound like but let's hit preview and take a listen no it's well now it sounds like the original audio and that's because it is the threshold is currently set so low that the gate is open all the time and you can still hear everything this is the same as me drawing the green marker line at the bottom of the dry erase board so let's use all this information and try to find the sweet spot for the threshold just as a reminder this means having the gate closed on all the bleed from host 1 and making sure it stays open for all of host twos direct audio so there's a few ways to go about it from here I can take the threshold setting and work my way up from negative 96 decibels or I could go back to negative 6 decibels and work my way down what I'm going to actually do is go back to our default setting of negative 30 point 10 decibels because I know we're already in the ballpark there let's preview this here one more time to refresh our ears of what it sounded like no it's insane ok so just like the last time we pre you- thirty point ten decibels the gate is open during all of our direct audio and it's closing for only some of host ones bleed this leaves us with the question i posed earlier to get rid of the rest of the bleed which way do we need to move the threshold slider the answer should be clear now it's to the right which as you now know means we're going higher on the threshold spectrum so let's start using our ears I'm going to slide the threshold up little by little and preview it each time no it's the same okay so at negative 28 point 30 decibels is a little bit of improvement there but we still have some to go let's go up a little bit more mm-hmm no it's the same and negative 21 point 30 decibels actually sounds pretty good if this was something for a client I would probably stop right there we can hear all of host twos original direct audio and I would say about 99.9% of the bleed from host 1 is now gone if you go too much further the gate will start closing on the audio we want to keep take a listen of how that would sound mm-hmm no it's okay we move less than five decibels and we're already cutting off the last word of host twos direct audio precision is key here so let's back off and go back to negative 21 point 30 decibels and that my friends is how you set the threshold parameter of a noise gate not that challenging right however it's a critical part of the noise gate but it's not the only part the next parameter of the noise gate I want to show you is the attack and decay this guy right here the attack and decay determines how quickly the noise gate opens and closes when the threshold is met this parameter is crucial in fine tuning the noise gate to give the absolute best result now arcade is set pretty well prior to shooting the video I try to clean this up a little bit more by adjusting the attack and decay but the threshold truly did most of the work so there isn't really much more I can do now this isn't going to be the case every time I work on tons of podcasts where the attack in decay settings are the deciding factors in whether the noise gate sounds good or not so I'd like to dive in a little to show you how it functions as well as show you the extremes of this parameter as it can give you bad results if used incorrectly so we're currently set to 232 milliseconds that's pretty darn quick what that means is that once audio hits the designated threshold in our case negative 21 point 30 decibels the gate will take 232 milliseconds to open or to close on a lot of noise gate plug-ins there are separate parameters for attack and decay sometimes the decay is even known as release these plugins will give you even more flexibility for dialing in your noise gate so if we go extreme and slide the attacking decay all the way over to the left we're now at 10 milliseconds let's have a listen to what that does mm-hmm so things seem to sound somewhat the same however host 2 starts to get cut off when she says no it's insane I'll play one more time listen for that phrase mm-hmm No and what's happening here is the gate is opening and closing too quickly and is cutting off small pieces of the direct audio that we want to keep ultimately leaving us with a very choppy sounding piece of audio now let's go to the other extreme 1000 milliseconds or as I'd like to say one second this will have the gate waiting to open and close for one whole second once the audio hits our selected threshold mm-hmm no it's in the same okay very subtle here what I heard most was at the end host Wan starting to say and also this wasn't there at the previous setting of two hundred and thirty two milliseconds since we told the gate to wait a full second before closing again this little bit of bleed was able to sneak through so let's set this back to two hundred thirty two milliseconds and move on to the final parameter that we're going to discuss the last feature of the noise gate I want to draw your attention to is the level reduction that's this right here this is pretty straightforward and won't need too much explanation this parameter lets you control how much of the level is actually reduced when the audio signal hits the threshold as you can see it's also based off of decibels just like the threshold itself so this whole time the level reduction has been set to negative 100 decibels which means that once the gate decides to close it will reduce the audio by 100 decibels in our case this is basically a hundred percent of the audio under the threshold if we move the slider over to zero decibels you can probably imagine what happens there's no level of reduction it sounds just like we aren't using the noise gate at all pretty straightforward you'll most likely want to keep your level reduction at negative 100 decibels but use your ears and feel free to experiment based off of your audio and that's a key takeaway here the audio in front of me is different than the audio in front of you and more than that every project you have in every podcast you record are gonna have at least minor differences things get recorded differently people speak at different volumes levels are certainly not always going to be the same so as I said at the beginning of this video it is so important that you use your ears when doing this hopefully my explanation wasn't too tedious however I want to make sure you understand the fundamentals so you can go and confidently apply this on all of your projects to quickly wrap this up once you dial in your desired settings close the noise gate for a second and reselect a larger portion of audio once you do that bring back the noise gate and double check that your settings are still there when I hit OK please keep your eye on the selected audio right over here once you hit OK this is going to semi permanently change your audio to reflect the noise gate settings I say semi permanently because you can go up here to edit and hit undo noise gate however if you make more than a few setting changes in audacity it may be hard or impossible to go back far enough and undo something what I think is a nice feature of the noise gate in audacity is that if you notice it gives you a visual in terms of what audio the noise gate has closed on and if I apply the gate again and click OK the visual wave forms of when the gate is closed will disappear and all that's left is a direct audio we wanted to keep speaking of visuals before I get out of here let me give you a really quick visual bonus tip throughout this tutorial some of you more Kenai viewers may have noticed this meter up here if you've been paying attention to it you may already know what it represents it's pretty straightforward this meter shows us the level of audio in decibels a decibel is just what we measure sounded if we hit play you can see that the meter reacts to the audio based on how loud or quiet it gets same time that's insane so how can we use this to our advantage well these decibel numbers on the meter directly correlate to the decimal numbers we've been using in the threshold parameter so what I've done is I selected host ones bleed that we were trying to get rid of and I've soloed hosts twos track so let's hit play without the noise gate and see the bleed registers on the meter so this little blue line right here which indicates where our recent audio selection has peaked is registering just under negative 24 decibels if we look at our noise gate from before you will remember we wound up setting the threshold at negative 21 point 30 decibels that's pretty close and that's kind of it look to see where your section of audio lives in terms of decibels on the meter and set your threshold to mirror that once you get close be sure to rely on your ears to fine-tune you must be saying Justin why didn't you talk about this method first well because if I gave you the easy way to do it first you may have not a stayed around to check out what I consider to be the proper way to set the noise gate and I'm here to provide thorough lessons on how to get your podcast to sound like the best of them I don't want to give you a few tips and tricks and leave you feeling half full I'm here to provide you the full information now that being said if small tips and tricks are your thing you're still in luck I came up with a guide that has five easy tips that you can implement while recording your very next episode most of the tips focus on the tracking stage because that's where it counts most in terms of getting it to sound right and just like this video it is completely free by reading the guide and implementing as many of the five tips as possible you will start to hear your podcast quality improve make sure you grab your copy by clicking the link in the description below also please leave a comment letting me know other things that you may be struggling with and would like to see covered on this channel if you enjoyed this video and found it helpful please be sure to subscribe and hit the little Bell so you don't miss anything I have so much stuff I want to cover and I want you to get every bit of it I also have my website and all the places you can find me on social media the link below so I add me and let's be friends alright everyone I will see you in the next video

Channel: Justin Kral Podcast

Views: 6,261

Keywords: how to start a podcast, noise gate, how to, audacity tutorial, podcast, podcast tips, audacity tips for beginners, podcast vocal processing, podcast tips and tricks, podcast tips 2019, justin kral audio, noise gate podcast, podcast editing, podcast audio editing, how to make your voice sound better, audacity podcast tutorial, how to edit a podcast, audacity tutorial for beginners, podcast sound quality, improve podcast sound quality, improve your podcast sound quality

Id: cMu-05MIKog

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 30 2019