Optimizing the Noise Gate For Super Clean Audio - Rodecaster Pro 2021 Firmware 2.1 Features

hey hey welcome everyone it's Jurgen here at Poly mash another one of our series on the road caster Pro firmware update in 2020 and the new features that have been made available to us so I'm excited to get started today in talking about optimizing the noise gate and how that helps both youtubers streamers podcasters and everyone who's gotten their hands on this unit so with that let's get started all right so the road caster Pro release introduced some really cool features and you know not the least of it this ability to basically manage and edit effects on the unit and that means that we can now for the first time really start to optimize this mixing console and tweak it for our podcasts for live streams and so forth and I wanted to sort of revisit a little bit about you know why that's important and today focus on how to fine tune the noise gate and get the most out of that because that's for live for live streaming that's one of the you know amazing things is that you can really optimize your voice really optimize your settings and make your live stream audio sound like it came out of a post-production studio but without having to spend the time of going through post-production so let's have a quick look at the features again and sort of a quick just recap of you know what this means for us so why would we want to be using the rode caster Pro you know we're I know that a lot of live streamers are using it I know that a lot of podcasters are using it you know we've used it for on site and a number of applications and what I'll be talking today about today is sort of specific to helping video production on the fly maybe daily podcasters and people who don't want to go into the post-production modes that often necessary and so to optimize your voice for videos and livestreams really they're sort of usually a couple of things involved one is a noise gate that did you know that tries to suppress the ambient noise in the recording location that you're in so maybe that includes a de-esser and the thing is is that most mixing consoles that you might have even if you have a small bérenger or some other model or Mackey's a small mixer very seldom are they chock-full of effects like the essays or compressors and sometimes it takes a lot of outboard gear to configure a ability to record this live and Creek order live video so you would have to have an outboard de-esser or an output compress or an expander in order to achieve some of the things that are sort of baked into the road caster Pro as an all-in-one mixing console so that's what I mean by you know optimizing for live video there's not really queue you know an equalizer built into the road caster Pro I think that some of the things that you might be looking for can be achieved with a combination of the DSO and the effects effects that are included it's an exciter and sort of like what's called big-bottomed and that adds a lot of sort of base volume and the broadcasting kind of a sound and that now too can be tweaked and of course there's a compressor built in and what I want to cover today sort of a cool trick to use the compressor for the noise gate and if you guys are the audio files among you guys who I understand it's it's about the software that comes with it and some of the spectral display and the display of the frequencies that are going through it and that's what we're gonna you know look at in a minute but first you know a recap around why this 2.1 beta it's still in beta it hasn't formally been released yet and I've installed the beta on my road cast up in of Melrose canister Pro I've been very happy with the quality of the beta often you sort of take a risk of your object crashing they do recommend that you don't do this for production work but you know I've been very happy with you know with the stability of it I haven't had a single issue basically except for one thing and that is that the docking seems to still have not work as expected and a number of people have talked about that and you know we're in touch on Reddit and elsewhere with the you know with the road and hopefully that gets fixed in the final release but the 2.1 beta update has been an awesome update and mostly because the effects are live editable on the console itself and editable through software and that means that they now have given us some tools that can live on the desktop on a laptop that allow us to shape the sound of the console as we are listening to it through our headphones and that's a really awesome effect I mean awesome feature and so it helps live streamers and youtubers because it sort of allows us to create an instant broadcast ready sound for our live streams and for our videos and if you do have a podcast and you also occasionally record videos I think it's great that you can basically take what you might do in Adobe Audition you know usually where you might be doing post-production effects and you can now pretty closely match the settings that you might have in Adobe additional that you might apply to your voice in the dhobi Edition and match it during live streaming and phone calls and so forth right and so yeah so I think that that matching the podcast audio you know it's great the fact that it's an all-in-one mixing console for live streams and that you can dial in guests on the phone and do a number of other things as well as sort of recording an instant podcast while you're streaming and there's a new feature to export to mp3 and you know if we haven't covered it in the previous videos we will dive into some of that in the future but they're also it's useful the beta release is useful for podcasters as well because as I mentioned these editable effects help us match what we're doing in life in for you know with our post-production settings and so this concept that Road caster Pro was built around this ability to instantly produce a podcast on the fly we know with interviews that's especially useful you know if for example you have a daily show or and or if you have a podcast that you want to match so you know I just I appreciate you know where they're going with in continuous improvement for the console because you know it matters a lot to get that sound you know similar and but today's focus what I wanted to do is talk about getting the most out of the noise gate because that's sort of a contentious topic for some audio files is that you would apply a noise gate to your recording before it's actually getting saved into post-production that's usually a no-no you're trying to work with the raw audio and and not destroy or have any destructive editing happening there and before this fell before this firmware release you know rode just had a single preset for a noise gate and it was a kind of a one-size-fits-all you couldn't tweak it and by tweaking it what I mean is apply as little as it's necessary for your situation and you know if you're working adobe audition for example and you're doing a noise profile it you know it doesn't reduce you know heavy handedly but it reduces is only as much noise or as little noise as possible and leaves you with the purest possible audio without the noise that you could have and that's now possible on the road caster Pro as well because of some of this features so let's dive in into how do we go about fine-tuning the noise gate and and this weird thing that I said at the beginning how the hell does a compressor help with that and you know what I mean by that is that it that the road caster software now actually includes in the compressor view a live depiction of the volume levels and that your audios generating so I'm gonna be quiet here for a minute because as you see as I'm speaking this is the the software version of what you might see ordinarily on the display panel of the road caster probe and I want to be quiet for a minute and right now you can see by this little empty gap that my noise gate is turned on and right now my AC is off I'm gonna so just to illustrate what I'm gonna do is turn off all of the effects so I'm going to turn off the noise gate I'm gonna turn off the big bottom and the aural exciter and the high-pass filter and so now what if I go back to the compressor and I'm gonna be quiet again and you would see that there is some noise in my environment so maybe at 65 66 decibels this level here and I actually know that when I'm AC is off right now so I've got this really cool it up that I wanted to showcase and in the end that app let me just switch over to to showcase a little noise generator app that I have and it allows us to it's called fan noise and it allows us to generate some noise to emulate what you might ordinarily experience so I for so I'm going to hit play on that and you know and generate some noise and I'm doing that with another iPhone so just bear with me for a moment and while we're waiting I'll let you check out the TM soft fan noise generator so that's a way in which when it's very quiet in my studio I'm in the kind of a noisy place but this is a way in which I can basically start to generate the and emulate my AC sounds so I just turned it on [Music] and I have a little speaker here on my desk and now it's generating about 54 decibels worth of fan noise which is when my AC is running I'm kind of in a noisy environment that's the level that I need to get rid of so this pretty accurately reflects that when my AC is running what the noise level is and why is that important well it allows me to if I now turn on the noise gate it allows me to sort of manipulate it and I want to demonstrate a couple of things about how the noise gate actually works so I know that my noise level happens at around 54 decibels so that's the level that I need to sort of have the floor reduced to you can see it here so the threshold in my noise gate setting I'm setting it exactly 54 decibels but the other thing that makes a difference is the range and if the range is too great as you'll see in a minute so I'm going to enable this noise gate and you should have probably here to higher the difference and let's look at the compressor you can see it's greatly reduced and in there's just a little bit of a trace left on the bottom and that's kind of what I'm looking for because if I increase this to you know to be very aggressive in the range setting now all the noise is gone you might think that's a good thing but for me it's not because I want to remove remove only as little as necessary and that's the sequence with secret that you can achieve with the range setting so if I go to let's say 27 decibels I can now just see sort of a barely a trace on the very bottom and that's kind of what I'm looking for and you know if I for example if I turn off my fan noise app which I'm using here on the on the computer so I'm going to turn that off and we'll talk it back over you can see that it now totally eliminates it but I need to have my setting set in a way that when my air conditioner comes on which I know that is sort of operating at a minus 54 DB level that you know in that scenario it still filters out as little noise is necessary for me to get a super clean recording and a super clean video sound so does that make sense so 27 seems to be good like if I went the other direction and I reduced the noise by 20 decibels and I go back to the display view and I've just turned on my fan noise generator you see it it's much lower I mean it's lowered it by just about 20 dB but I'm trying to sort of push it down to where it just barely registers and that way I feel I'm getting you know the best of the best out of the noise gate and I guess for my settings here you know that winds up being just about 22 decibels so I'll leave the noise gate enabled I'm going to turn the Gandhi exciter again you might hit a slight difference there and I'm going to turn the big bottom on again because otherwise my voice sounds like it is no but you know like that's the broadcast setting and we're gonna go in another video we're going to go into some of the settings for both the aural exciter and the big bottom and how you can use that I'll also turn on any sort of low rumbles that I might have in my house the reverb setting I don't use you know unless I want to scare people you know when suddenly sound like I'm in discharge yep you know I don't use that sort of stuff on my videos just contradicted myself I realized and and the compressor I use very rarely as well and but that but if you do use the compressor in post-production the fact that you can now use the software to fine tune it is an awesome way to match your post-production settings again that's the whole reason for for you know take affront to taking this so I hope that sort of made sense to you guys I know that this can also be done using the you know using the built in and I'm just gonna go back to the built in displays that the road caster pro has so you can do what we just did using the road caster pro but it doesn't have the display and it doesn't show you the decibels of the noise that's happening in your room you know here's when it's quieter with my AC off so you can see that I've got you know some soundproofing to do I also wanted to just the screens on when you configure each microphone that is where the effects now live on the lower right if you tap on that you start seeing the effects for each channel in this case this is my microphone and you know you can manipulate the compressor noise gate the SR and everything that we just did using the app you can do that on the device itself as well so I'm hoping that let me turn my fan noise back off and take one last check here on and I'm going to be quiet for one more time and see whether this is working how I had envisioned it and you might be able to tell already this indicates that right now my AC is off but that does it for today's video I hope this gives you some things to play with in some ideas to play with when you want to fine tune the noise gate on your road caster Pro after you apply the firmware update and I'm so signing off for now this is Jurgen at poly mass comm and we'll see you in the next video bye for now

Channel: The Podcast Growth Channel by Polymash

Views: 6,451

Keywords: rodecaster pro firmware 2.1, rodecaster pro, rode, rodecaster pro review, podcasting, rodecaster pro firmware update, rodecaster pro setup, rodecaster pro firmware, rodecaster pro tutorial, rodecaster pro live stream, rodecaster pro compression, rodecaster pro noise gate, rodecaster pro noise, rode rodecaster pro review, podcast equipment, rodecaster pro live stream zoom, rode rodecaster pro tutorial, rodecaster pro podcast setup, rodecaster pro 2021

Id: azkSYC5HcH4

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020