Recording Voice for YouTube / How I Record and Edit

one of the questions i've received over and over again from viewers of this channel is how do i record audio how am i recording my voice for videos just like this one in this video i'm going to share everything that i use and everything i do when producing audio for the videos you see recorded in the space uh here on my channel when i first started making videos on youtube i wasn't thinking about audio at all i just used a cheap microphone i recorded my audio directly to camera and i didn't do anything to treat uh the room around me this bag here is the one that i use it is the lowepro pro tactic 450 aw a super popular backpack so first thing i did was go out and buy a better mic thinking that was going to solve the problem well it didn't it turned out that the main problem i was having was controlling echo and reverb in the room because my voice was bouncing off the of the walls off the floor for example if you record in a room that has like a tile floor a concrete floor or wood floor or something like that get something on the floor like an area rug anything that can help absorb some of the some of your voice so that it's not bouncing and reflecting off the floor and then back into the microphone now walls are a little bit trickier because you may have windows you may have furniture you may have things hanging on the wall which can obviously make this kind of difficult to manage well one of the things you can do if you don't want to be touching your walls and you just want to make the space a little bit better for when you do sit down and make some kind of recording is to invest in some of these is to go on amazon get a big box of some of uh some of their moving blankets and then you can be hanging these blankets around you like you can clip them onto a c-stand onto some type of rod now one of the things that i like this about this particular blanket here is that this one is really thick and plush and it's actually quite heavy and it has these grommets that are uh built into the top by the way i'll be putting links to all this stuff down below in the description if you want to check it out so when you have grommets like these what you can then do is get some like shower curtain hooks something like that and then you can put the hooks and the grommets and if you put a rod on the wall then you can hang the blanket on that and then you're covering the wall with a really large absorbent blanket like this that will help keep your voice from reflecting and bouncing back around another option of course would be to invest in some of those foam acoustic tiles i did that at first and i thought they were okay i thought they worked pretty well and i was initially happy with them but over time i got kind of uh i don't know i just i got kind of annoyed with them because i didn't really care for how they looked i know that sounds kind of silly but it's true what i ended up doing was going the diy route and making my own uh sound absorbing panels and i made a bunch of these it's just a wood frame with some insulation on the inside wrapped in fabric i hung those all around the walls in here you don't see any back here behind me but they're on side of me over here and i also have a couple suspended from the ceiling up here above me as well and these i think work better than those acoustic tiles ever did also when treating your space for sound identify anything in the room or nearby that is making noise i would recommend just recording some audio without you speaking and then listening to what that recording sounds like wearing headphones this is technically known as the noise floor it is really just it's like the foundation upon which your voice is then layered listen to it and see if you can identify anything that is making noise i mean it could be one of the lights in your room it could be a fan it could be an external hard drive near your computer whatever it is that sound is mucking up your audio so do what you can the microphone that i'm using is a sennheiser mkh mkh-416 this is a shotgun microphone which is a type of microphone that is designed to be positioned away from a subject out of frame and that's why you don't see like a microphone like right here next to my face or a microphone clipped onto me here and it's probably about a foot and a half away from me and as far as the angle goes like what angle is right what i've found is if you point it directly at your mouth at least that this is my experience with it it's almost too sharp if you point the angle of the mic more like to hear like below your below your chin then the audio has more resonance it has more bass it has more presence now before you run off and google that or click the link below in the description i will tell you that the sennheiser mkh-416 is an expensive mic but there are other shotgun microphones out there that are similar to the sennheiser that cost a lot less and offer similar audio quality shaka mics from deity and rode are well made and they offer great sound for a lot less shaka microphones like these from sennheiser deity and road i mean these are professional mics that use xlr connectors they are not microphones that are designed to be you know plugged directly into a dslr or mirrorless camera so what i do is record audio from the shotgun microphone to an external recorder and then i sync that audio from the external recorder with the video from the camera later in premiere now this tascam from a qualitative perspective is it's okay it's it's not great it's nothing to get excited about it's kind of old it's outdated it's been around for a while however it is cheap it's just a very basic recorder that you can connect a couple of xlr mics to you have variable gain control all the necessary controls and you can record directly to an sd card you can attach batteries to it it can run on battery power or it can be externally powered through its usb port which is how i use it and again it's okay overall way better than audio recorded by the camera okay so that covers treatment uh microphones and recorders now let's jump over to premiere and take a look at how i edit audio in post all right so now let's jump into adobe premiere pro and i'm going to demonstrate for you how i typically edit audio both on the timeline and i'll be demonstrating for you which effects i use and the settings that i use in order to process uh my voice over my externally recorded voiceover here's what we need to do the first thing we need is a sequence using the audio and video that was recorded by the camera to do that we just drag that clip down here to the new item icon at the bottom of the project panel and that automatically creates a new sequence using the same settings that were used in the video all right so this sequence here what i want to do is i'm just going to rename this one because this is our like our base sequence here i'm going to then drag in the voiceover clip that was recorded externally select all three clips right click synchronize click ok and now premiere is going to scan the audio file recorded by the camera or rather the ninja in this case compared to the audio recorded externally to the tascam figure out where they line up and automatically line up the clips for me on the timeline all right so that was pretty quick first thing i do is just kind of come in here and just trim off any loose ends at the at the beginning and the end of the clip down here just kind of like a really quick little trim just to get it into a good spot then i right click on the the video select unlink and this will unlink the audio track from the video so then i can delete the embedded audio track drag the voiceover track up i'll keep this sequence that we just created as is like i'm not going to touch this sequence instead what i'm going to do is come over here to the project panel right click on our new sequence select duplicate and then call this like one b something like that so then i would open one b i go through and i trim out anything that i know for a fact is not going to be in the final video because i don't know i screwed something up or maybe the cat jumped up on the desk something like that then when i'm done with that just initial raw edit go back to the project panel right click on right click on 1b duplicate then create one c make another round of edits and then just keep going you know however many i i think are really necessary and the reason that it's helpful is because oftentimes maybe it's just me but sometimes i'll get pretty close to a final edit like i'll be really really close to finishing a video and i'll suddenly have like a change of heart about something and i'll realize that something i trimmed for the sake of time is actually really important and something that people should know and so because i worked incrementally and i have all those sequences i can go back a version and find whatever it is that i had cut before and uh and copy it pull it into uh the the newest sequence that i'm working in without having to redo everything so it's it's just a way to keep your sanity it's a way to work a little bit better uh not just faster alright so kind of like a cooking show where they put a dish in the oven and it comes out fully baked i've already taken the liberty of creating uh some actual sequences here so let me clear the ones i just created for demonstration purposes what i want to do is i just want to give you um i just want to give you a quick listen to what the audio sounds like without any effects applied to it at all and when i do this pay attention to the meters over here on the far right and and look at and see where uh they're hitting questions i've received over and over again from viewers of this channel is how do i record audio how am i recording my voice for videos just like this okay so a couple of things you may notice there so one there the uh the meters are kind of hovering right around negative 12 decibels which is where you want it to be that's kind of the sweet spot when it comes to recording audio typically on like a recorder like the tascam there's actually a little tick mark on the on the meters there that shows you where negative 12 is and that's right around where you want to be maxing out oftentimes with cameras like the color of the meter will change from white to yellow when you're hitting yellow yellow means you're right around negative 12. however you will notice in there that there are parts at which my voice does bounce above negative 12 like it gets up to like negative nine maybe even negative six so it's a little uneven and that's mainly my fault it's mainly because i have a really bad habit of like starting off really strong at a sentence and then kind of getting softer as i get down and then i jump back up again and i don't know it's just a natural cadence i guess and and i'm going to talk more about how i've addressed that on the timeline but first let's attach some uh some effects to the voiceover so we can start tweaking the audio and getting it to sound better so when attaching effects to voiceover what i like to do is attach effects directly to the track on the timeline and the reason for that is that then those effects are applied to every single audio clip that happens to sit on that track so when you work this way you kind of want to designate tracks on your timeline for specific uh types of audio like for example audio one and audio two are only going to be voice over any sound effects any music whatever that's all on audio three four five on down but audio one and uh audio two are reserved purely for voiceover which means we can apply effects to those tracks and they will and all the clips will inherit that effect click on audio up here at the top and then up here in this audio track mixer there's this tiny little chevron up here this tiny little arrow and this is such an important piece of the interface and functionality of premiere and it kind of cracks me up that it's not more accessible but it's not and uh and this is where it is so when you toggle this open this is where you can append effects directly to a track and if we look down here at the bottom of the of the mixer you'll see there's audio one audio two audio three these are the individual tracks on the uh timeline i will first apply effects to audio track one and then when i'm happy with the sound there i'll copy everything over to audio track 2. the first effect that i typically apply is multi-band compressor multi-band compressor adds it compresses the audio makes it louder increases the gain it helps get it up to where we want it to be which is right around negative three decibels at least that that works pretty well for me now i have to admit i don't do anything all that fancy in here i just come in here and i select the broadcast preset this preset just seems to work really well out of the box so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to play back the same audio you heard before except now i'm going to toggle broadcast on and off so you're able to to hear the effect questions i've received over and over again from viewers of this channel is how do i record audio how am i recording my voice for videos okay so yeah it increases the volume it compresses it it makes it sound a little bit richer all right so the next step that i typically do is to add a parametric equalizer and this is a step where you are kind of like just fine-tuning the audio it's almost like editing an image where you're adding a little extra contrast and typically voices tend to live right in the in the middle in the middle frequencies here and it kind of creates this boxing kind of sound and that's oftentimes what you're trying to pull a little bit of out and you're trying to sweeten the base and the high end first thing i typically do is turn on the high pass filter because this will hopefully drop out any low humming and then with my voice what works well is right around 100 hertz just pull this up right around two decibels and doing that increases the bass it creates a little more resonance in in my voice and that's right where it lands for me so let me just play this really quick start talking about hardware and software i want to take a moment now what i have learned to do is to is to find the frequencies by you know pushing these values up and then moving them back and forth raising their gain to figure out where they where they start to sound kind of a little just just not very pleasing to the air like a little jarring i'm gonna play audio and i'm gonna raise the gain and you're going to hear some pretty crazy stuff we start talking about hardware and software i want to take a moment and share just a really basic yet important point about recording audio that able to shooting photos and videos and that is the following good audio comes from good so we're good there i feel like that took some of the boxiness out of the voice and why don't we just go back and i'll play this again so you can hear it without the with the eq on and off hardware and software i want to take a moment and share just a really basic yet important point about recording audio that when you think about it is actually applicable to now the next thing is to add a little bit to the high end and that for me typically lives somewhere around uh 10 000 hertz and i'm just going to lift this up by about i don't know around two decibels shooting photos and videos and that is the following good and that just adds a little bit more to the high end now you can also add a low-pass filter up here to kind of uh push off some of those super high frequencies there that probably aren't really needed anyway and that generally is the shape of the eq that i use in pretty much every video all right so now that we have the eq attached the next thing i like to do is add a dynamics effect now with dynamics what i want to do is i want to add a gate so that when you're speaking and if there's a gap in between um in between words in between sentences whatever then it will automatically drop like the gain will drop so that you're not hearing noise in between sentences it just kind of tightens things up and makes it a little more a little more precise now i've done this so many times that i just know right around where it needs to be so i just turn on autogate somewhere around that'll do uh so now when i play this back notice the color bands up here and when it turns red that means that the gate is being applied and the gain is dropping applicable to shooting photos and videos and that is the following good audio comes from good it's just a very subtle thing but i think it's nice i think it adds uh just a little it tightens it up just a little bit more the final effect the one that i like to use is a commercial plug-in that i obtained from plug-in alliance and it's called the spl d-virb plus now this is a paid commercial plug-in but from what i recall it's it's really not that expensive and the whole reason why i bought it was because i downloaded a free trial of it and installed it used it with premiere used it with some of my voiceover and it worked really really well so what this plugin does is it just does so in a very precise way it does a really good job i think of taking out just a little more of that reverb and it makes your your space sound a little like it's like it's even like the treatment's even better than than it actually is so before like going out and investing a bunch of money into treating your space even better um than it may already be you can come in here to this editor select direct vocals and uh and this just helps take a little bit of that extra reverb out so let's listen to it and see if it actually see if you can hear the difference between it being on and off we start talking about hardware and software i want to take a moment and share just a really basic yet important point about recording audio that when you think about it is actually applicable to shooting photo so i don't know i mean it could be the kind of thing you have to wear headphones in order to to truly hear but for me i just i just select this direct direct vocals preset every time and it works really really well right out of the box so i'll leave a link to that plugin below if you want to check it out all right so the last thing i do with audio before rendering the video is to go back through the timeline and look for any issues with uh with modulation with you know too much difference in gain between clips between my voiceover clips on the timeline just to help even them out a little bit so it's not so jarring like i was talking about earlier how sometimes i start strong on a sentence and then kind of taper off down towards uh towards the end of them back up again to the next one so what i do is i go through and i look for any moments like that i look and i listen for any anywhere that could be improved uh so this is actually a really good example here this is as you can see this part of my voice here is way hotter than the rest of it and so now it's kind of a decision of well is that where i want my voice actually to be and the rest of the clip is too quiet or is that too hot and the rest of the clip is where it should be like what is actually a problem is it that or is it the fact that i dipped down too low afterwards what i ended up doing was going the diy all right so now i'm going to add just going to drop this down some try to smooth this out a little bit see if it see if that works back but what i ended up doing was going right so it's a little bit lower i think it sounds a little bit nicer of course this is something that you can fine-tune now if you have something that is the opposite of that i'm pretty even through here and then i start to kind of trail off downstairs so uh let's listen to this really quick external recorder that has xlr inputs in order to be using these types of mics this is okay so what we can do to fix that is you know right around where it starts to dip what i do is i just put a node wherever that is and then put another one down here at the end and then just lift it towards the end of the clip almost like in a reverse angle from the angle from the downward slope you create an up slope that matches the down slope so that the two together create an even plane at least that's the that's the goal so just lift it up a little bit external recorder that has xlr inputs in order to be using these types of mics this is so yeah i mean this is again the kind of thing you can tweak kind of thing you finesse but the idea here is that you're raising and lowering your voice at the individual clip level just to get it nice and even all throughout and this is especially noticeable i think when wearing headphones so not necessary but it's just a finishing touch that i like to do to try and balance uh my voice all the way through the video all right i hope that answered any questions you may have had about how i record audio for my videos if i did not answer your question please feel free to leave a comment below you can also jump over to uh instagram or is it here uh jump over to instagram and you can follow me over there send me a dm and uh happy to answer any questions you may have also if you learned something from this video please remember to give it a thumbs up and to subscribe if you would like to keep in touch with me in the future thanks so much for being here everyone i'll see you next week

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 4,342

Keywords: todd dominey, youtube audio, youtube audio tips, audio for youtube, better youtube audio, sennheiser mkh416, shotgun mic youtube, tascam dr60d, tascam recorder, mic for youtube, video editing, voice over

Id: kYPvm2alcPI

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021