RØDECaster Pro demo with voice effects explained

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the three Tech's if you've ever wondered how we're recording these shows or if you've ever one to start your own podcast or radio show we've got something for you this is the road caster Pro it's an all-in-one podcasting solution designed by Road based on customer feedback on how to more easily create better sounding podcasts it's well constructed and can be portable for remote podcast recording it has four microphone inputs with professional sounding voice processing on every channel it has a built-in mixer for connecting microphones a USB player smartphone in Bluetooth device its headphone mixer is suitable for up to four guests these eight pads allow you to trigger playback of sound effects or pre-recorded audio tracks during your podcast it has all this plus an internal recorder with a giant record button that records to a micro SD card you get this for the price of $599 they've also included effects processing onboard which features their aural exciter and big-bottomed to give you that radio voice sound it's designed to get you up and running within minutes after plugging in your microphones and memory card the rode caster Pro all-in-one podcasting solution so Bob this is a really cool all-in-one device for podcasters and anybody who wants to just have high-quality audio recording in a single box you don't need a computer to run it and I'd like to walk through some of the voice effects and processing that you get on every channel here ok so right now I have all of the effects turned on I'm going to go ahead and press the one button here and you'll see that it brings up a menu and you can change different options if I tap microphone Road has different presets for its various microphones that it makes such as the pod mic which is a new microphone that's just coming out I just have this AKG c 414 condenser microphone here that I'm talking into so I chose condenser and what that really does is it allows me to apply what's called phantom power because this microphone needs additional power in order to work properly I'll go back and then I'll go in to tap levels now here you can see as I talk that you can see this green meter moving up and down and you can adjust your level with a minus and a plus sign here and basically you want it to be in this little green range that they've conveniently high on the screen so you just turn it up or down until the levels are just bouncing around in that little area there and you'll notice at the bottom of the screen it also has this thing for phantom power so this is where I would switch it on for condenser microphone it also has options for voice tone and strength so for me okay I went into tone and you can choose from deep and this is what deep sounds like if I bump it up to medium you can hear what medium sounds like they're a little bit of a change there and this is high so if you have high or you prefer this sound for your voice you could change these various settings so again this is high I'll go back down to medium and this is medium still and then I'm gonna go back down to deep which is what I chose for my voice and everybody has their own preference for how they like to hear their voice sound this is just what I settled on after a little bit of playing around now if I jump into voice strength you can see there's three different options here as well so the first option here is soft I actually have it set to strong but let me go ahead and change it we'll go down the chain again and you'll be able to hear the difference so again this is currently set to strong I'm gonna change it to medium and you can hear maybe a little bit of difference on how it sounds on medium and let's go ahead and switch it down to soft so I think if you can listen carefully you might be able to hear how people with softer voices it seems to be emphasizing the sibilants it's bringing you more forward it is so if you're a soft speaker or you have guests who are soft speakers you can adjust the settings here so again this is soft I'm gonna go back up to medium medium here is again what we're listening to now and finally I'm gonna bring it back up to strong which is again what I chose as the default do you hear those differences Bob oh yeah the contrast I think you should record yourself on medium for a while and see what you think but it really made a major difference in the sound of your voice you know if someone has a higher voice or someone projects a lot you can you know compensate for that voice very nicely with a couple of clicks of a button that's a cool feature yeah it's super simple as you can see there's no dials or knobs that you have to turn like there are with traditional professional audio equipment when it comes to these effects it's just an honor and off or you know you choose from three options so they made it really easy for you to do that all right let's go ahead and jump into some of the funner stuff here under advanced ways okay now on the screen you can see there's a bunch of options here first of all you've got the compressor you've got a de-esser you've got ducting you've got a high-pass filter noise gate they've also included a built-in effects voice processor so they've included the aural exciter and the big bottom processor so those two are frequently used on radio broadcasts so if you're used to hearing people's voices there that's why they've included them here because people always ask how do I get that radio voice sound so this helps you with that okay let's go ahead I'm gonna start turning these off and we'll go through each one individually so you can hear the individual effect that it has on the overall sound of my voice so this is with all the effects off now I've turned off the compressor I've turned off everything and this is just the raw input into the road caster on what and what it sounds like you're flat I'm pretty flat now I know a flat nope very little character to the voice it's really just the microphone here and how that sounds going into the road caster Pro let's go ahead and turn these back on one by one and we'll talk about what they do so the compressor what I just turned it on and what this does is it makes the quieter parts of what I'm saying louder and it makes the louder parts softer so it makes a much more even tone across the entire recording of what I'm saying so that's what the compressor is for and I again it's just a simple on/off switch normally there's a lot more settings that you could do with a compressor but it's just the simple on/off switch here so the DSR let's turn off the compressor so we'll hear it flat again and then let's turn on the de-esser so for this demo I thought that it would be best demonstrated with a little tongue twister so let me turn off the de-esser again and I'm gonna do a little tongue twister here for you that will demonstrate the sibilance she sells seashells by the seashore the shells she sells are surely seashells so if she sells shells on the seashore I'm sure she sells seashore shells dsr on she sells seashells by the seashore the shell sheet she sells are surely seashells so if she sells shells on the seashore I'm sure she sells seashore shells that oh yeah yeah it's not like bang hits you in the face was like oh that's better it's cleaner it takes away that it takes away that sibilants and that harshness of what you're saying so the de-esser is pretty useful for that because our human ears are very sensitive to those that particular frequency of s's and teas and it sounds were really bad if it's if it's overemphasized okay that's the de-esser let's turn that back off and let's let's do the high-pass filter right do you want to hear about Peter Piper Bob or Betty botter let's try Peter Peter okay all right well Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked all right that's no high-pass filter let's turn it on Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked I guess you don't need a pop filter yeah so we should explain maybe what high-pass filter means so basically this high-pass means it's allowing all the higher frequencies of the sound to pass through and the lower frequencies which is what the peas and the bees tend to generate like that burst of air that sounds like a low-frequency burst so that's what people use pop filters for generally but the high-pass filter can also help with that and remove some of that Rumble yeah Bob you've got yeah low-tech Bob's got a pop filter in front of his mic the next feature is the noise gate which I think we've already demonstrated so I'll be silent for a few seconds and you'll be able to hear some of the background noise in the room okay and by the way this works better if you're listening to this on headphones so I'm going to turn the noise gate on do you hear that what am I missing did you hear the noise before the background noise there's a computer fan noise yeah with it off what the noise gate does is it quickly opens and closes and mutes the the microphone when I'm not talking but you might notice that when I am talking if you listen carefully you still might be able to hear that fan noise in the background so it doesn't totally eliminate the fan noise it just eliminates it when I'm not talking and it just mutes and unmute very very quickly if you find that you're not getting good results with the noise gate it could be because you're too far away from your microphone or you haven't adjusted your microphone input level appropriately it's not loud enough to activate the gate to allow the sound to go through let's now turn the noise gate back off and let's explore the effects aural exciter as the name suggests it might it's supposed to excite your voice right let's see what it does okay this is without the aural exciter and let's turn the aural exciter on and see if you can hear a difference there Bob in how my voice sounds with the aural exciter did you hear anything there a little bit not not a lot okay listen to the upper range okay okay this is again with the aural exciter and then when I turn it off you can hear that this is without the aural exciter and then now let me turn the aural exciter back on and now you can hear it with the orlick's yeah yeah it brings that range up I'm not using my good headphones tonight I got a different pair on and so I I'm handicapped gotcha okay no worries all right so that's the aural exciter let's turn that back off again this is again flat and let's talk about big bottoms Bob now let's don't well let's talk about the effects big bottom so okay FXX big bottom this is if you want to extend the deep range of your voice so this is again without the big bottom and let me turn the big bottom on right there and I don't know if you hear a difference there with the big bottom but oh boy a huge would have extended the lower range of my voice a little bit so you could hear it a lot deeper and let me switch it off again and you can hear this is without the big bottom and how that sounds that's a big effect I think it is so what I've done now is I've switched everything back on again and you can hear this is how it started at the beginning of the show they also have this convenient processing switch which basically flips all of the processing on or off so I'm gonna go ahead and flip that and you'll be able to hear what difference it makes when I have everything on and when I have everything off so this is everything off and now this is with everything back on again pretty big difference huge huge yeah well that is a pretty in-depth walk-through of all of the individual effects that you have on all four microphone channels I should also mention that some of those are also available on the USB the smart phone and the Bluetooth input let's just take a quick look at that so if I go into USB which is what Bob is coming through in through right now right you can set it up for none as far as presets no presets speech or music I currently have it set up for speech and if I tap on the advanced button here you can see that I have some of the features that I had before with a microphone input but not all of them so I have compressor de-esser high-pass filter then I have the two effects processing like aural exciter as well as the big bottom okay so you can you can get pretty darn close to the same effect then coming in through USB as you can from a local microphone yeah you can that's good really the only things missing here are the noise gate and the ducting all right okay well but the ducting is only for the master for four channel one right I see it on all four channels now okay so it's available on one two three and for any of those four channels could trigger the ducting effect and make the other channels lower in volume that don't have ducting turned on and the thing I notice is once you've gotten familiar with it you can just dance right through that boom it's it's real easy to operate it is really easy to operate with the touch screen here and really once you get it set up the way you like it you don't really have to change anything switch it on and hit record and you're ready to go so there are some other options here which we can just briefly talk about if we look at the sounds you can see that in this screen you can actually record a sound off of a microphone the USB is smart phone over bluetooth you can record that directly into the trigger pad and I mentioned the other way of doing it was through your computer connected to USB you could drag an audio file over to it and load a sound onto one of those pads the other thing you can do here is configure some of the hardware options under advanced this is where you might want to go if you're looking at doing multitrack recording because in here there's some new options to allow you to bypass audio processing for the multitrack audio so if you don't want any of that noise gate compression you know de-essing applied to your sound on the multitrack recording you can turn that off here some people like to do that because they like to do their own effects in post editing there's another volume control over there on the top there's that that one all the way on the on the right hand side there what's that little volume because there's four individual headphones but what's that what's that little volume control - yeah that's a good question so this fifth volume controller or knob up here you can see that it's got a little speaker icon next to it and what that does is it allows you to output to a stereo mix and what you could do there is if you're doing a live podcast for example or panel discussion on a stage you could output that sound to the PA system in the room okay oh that's wonderful we didn't talk about the little red and green buttons at the bottom of all those sliders down there so can you kind of tell me what those do exactly the green and red buttons down here are solo and mute buttons respectively so green is solo red is mute so for example if I keep talking and I press the red mute button you're gone all right so that's the mute button a solo button if you press that what that does is it allows the engineer plugged into the front of the road caster Pro with those headphones to hear just the solo Channel so this is good for you know fine-tuning the sound settings if you've got you know four people in a room all talking at the same time it might be hard to adjust just one person's microphone so I could solo for example my own channel and then I could play with my settings on my own and just hear myself in the headphones that's what solar does it's sort of the opposite of mute because it mutes all the other channels yeah except that one yeah but it doesn't actually affect the recording that's important to note so you could keep recording and even though you're soloing a channel everything that's unmuted is still being recorded to the okay recording okay what kind of format is that SD card what's the audio file that it's creating yeah the audio file on the micro SD card is a stereo wav file so it's named with a dot wav file extension it's 24-bit and 48 kilohertz sampling rate okay that's that's decent I like that and you do need to take out the card to access any of the recorded files on the road caster Pro because just by connecting through USB doesn't allow your computer to access any of those recordings overall I just just there's so much that this thing can do to simplify when you're making recordings in the studio and we've got all three of us hooked up with microphones and stuff this takes that extra bit of worry away you have again another copy another local recording going on and I think that's great absolutely it does simplify the recording process for us it simplifies bringing in remote participants because we can easily patch those in through USB on the computer or hooking up a smartphone through a wired connection like a headphone jack connection or through bluetooth another thing I'd want to mention is that road did say that they're going to bring multitrack recording to the built-in card so you don't need a computer to do multitrack recording in the future you can just when you hit that red record button it'll record both stereo and multitrack files directly to the built-in SD card it gets that kit down by quite a bit and improves your independence so that I like that that's a really good thing so hopefully you like that behind the scenes look at how we do our recording here on the three texts for these remote podcasts and YouTube videos hopefully this also inspires you to take a closer look and think about maybe starting your own podcast show or radio show thanks for watching subscribe and click that Bell button for notifications when we come out with new episodes let us know in the comments what you thought about this and see you next time on the three techs [Music]

Channel: The Three Techs

Views: 52,018

Keywords: rodecaster, pro, rode, voice, podcast, effects, explanation, aphex, big bottom, aural exciter

Id: fl_TmnK1D40

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2019