RODECASTER Pro Masterclass -- Ultimate USB Mixer Tutorial Guide 2021

today i want to teach you guys how to use what i think is the best mixer on planet earth for content creators for podcasters for streamers etc i think it's the best piece of equipment i have recommended this particular mixer up to hundreds and hundreds of creators across youtube uh across amazon across all my social media platforms and zero people i've recommended this mixer to have been dissatisfied with it just a disclosure here rode gave me the mixer i'm gonna demo it for you live here rode gave me this mixer for free two years ago or so but so this is not a sponsored stream so if it sounds like it's sponsored it is not at all so what we're going to do today is i'm going to teach you how to use the road caster pro mixer the best mixer on the market today for creators and how to do effects how to hook up microphones how to use compressors and by the time you finish watching what we're putting together today you will have a much greater understanding of how audio works and how you can improve your audio situation whether you're using this particular mixer or not so i'm excited to go over that and of course i'll be answering all of your questions right here i'm reading every single one of your questions on my phone so feel free to ask any audio questions as we go through the demo pretty sweet setup right just going to be showing you guys the road caster pro mixer live as i use it live and as i program all the software right here on today's broadcast i'm really excited to do this one because i received so many questions about this mixer because there's so many fancy buttons on there what are you supposed to do right cool so let's just start from the beginning let's start with how you configure microphones with the road caster pro okay so you can configure and hook up microphones with the road caster pro very easily through the simple set of menus that they have available on the mixer itself so in the first demo that i'll do today this is the rode procaster microphone right here that i've got already hooked up to the mixer and i'm going to show you the menus that you'll want to go through as you're hooking up this particular microphone to this mixer cool so let's switch right over so what you're going to do is you're going to plug in your microphone into the xlr jack of the channel that you desire there are four channels here one two three four that you can plug in your microphones to directly in the back what do i mean by that see the little xlr cables here in the back one two three four you plug it into the corresponding channel and then you'll be able to set up your microphone on the mixer side from there so i've got this particular microphone plugged into channel one so what we're gonna do is press the channel one button and then we're gonna go through a set of uh setup to do this microphone correctly so the first thing you're gonna wanna do when you press channel one it's going to bring you to this menu is you're going to want to select the microphone of your choice now as you can see rode microphones are built in to this particular mixer and so you can select exactly the microphone that you have if you have a rode mic so for this one in particular we're going to select the rode pro and here the the dynamics of the audio just changed as soon as i hit that button you can do other microphones from other brands and we'll go over that in just a moment when i set those up but the rode mics are particularly configured for this mixer for maximum audio quality once you select your microphone then the next stop is going to be level here what you're going to do is you're going to put the microphone in your broadcasting position so let me show you where mine is at put it in broadcasting position depending on your mic if you have a dynamic microphone like this one you want to have it as close to your mouth as possible maybe thumbs up distance away from your mouth with a thumbs up between you and the mic for other microphones you may want to do hang 10 distance you can select the distance but put it where it's going to be when you're broadcasting before you do this next step okay then what you're going to do is you're going to go here into this levels menu and you're going to talk like you do when you're broadcasting so hi everyone my name is awol and i am a digital consultant i help people make better decisions with their technology every single day so as you can see here the levels one of you want them to be in the green as you can see here inside of that little green area right there and you see how mine are kind of toward the middle but not quite sticking in the middle all the time so what i'm going to want to do is i am going to crank up the levels on this just a notch or two until on average my vocals are in the middle of this green area but they are not exceeding the green area that's where you want it to be you want to be in the middle of the green area but not exceeding the green area ever even when you get excited okay so that's what you're gonna do there so then once that's all set up then you'll be in great shape to be able to have the proper levels on your microphone to get everything done cool beautiful so now that the levels are set the next thing you're going to do is you're going to select what are the most important features of the mixer in my opinion and that is the audio processing so let's go check that out so there is an audio processing menu built into the mixer itself if you just click the audio processing button for that channel you can access all of the audio processing for this particular mixer right here inside of the mixer which is great so let's talk about what each of these filters means and what all of the options are for each of these filters so that you can better understand what they do now of course you can listen to them that's obviously a great way to do this you can listen to them and if you just listen to them you can get a really good idea of what sort of impact they're going to have on your um on your audio of course and then you can i can give you a verbal description as we experiment with them here today okay great just got the camera in perfect focus there so you guys can see all of these so the high pass filter is a classic audio filter hit the high pass filter button so let me just back up here let's go ahead and cover what we're doing right now in the road caster pro mixer you can select a number of effects inside of the mixer and manipulate them there and you can manipulate them in the software the road caster pro software so the first effect that i'm going to teach you right now is called a high pass filter i'll teach you how to manipulate it inside the road caster pro and on the software side and you'll be able to listen so be sure to wear headphones and turn up the volume you'll be able to listen and actually hear what effect essentially a high pass filter has on your audio okay so here it is so here's the high pass filter inside the mixer we're going to select high pass filter right here and as you can see you've got a couple options built into the mixer you can either enable or disable the high pass filter i obviously you want to enable it and what does it do so a high pass filter helps you eliminate those really high highs for a number of reasons one there could be room noise in your room like fans air conditioning you know lawn mowers whatever that you want to get rid of those super high highs and that sort of room noise it can help you eliminate that it can also just straight up help you uh get rid of really really annoying super high frequency sounds okay and that's a big reason why people do high pass filters so you can change with the dials here the frequency of that it eliminates so i'm going to move it up up up hi my name is andrew wall up up up one two three four five six seven so when i move the high pass filter up like this it eliminates less and less of the high frequency sounds so it's only going to eliminate sounds that are above 200 hertz okay and then as i move it down it's going to eliminate more and more of the high frequency sounds down to two hot down to 20 hertz as you can see so depending on how much you want to eliminate the high pass frequencies how much of the highs you want to get rid of you can adjust the high pass frequency accordingly and so i like to leave it at a nice middle ground 60 hertz but you guys can make your selection there now you can also control this through the road caster pro companion software and here it is you can download this for free on rode's website and so what you're going to do is you're going to open the road craster pro companion software click open effects editor and this will give you access to be able to control this inside of your computer rather than just only controlling it inside of the mixer for your high pass filter and as you can see your your options are exactly the same here for the high pass filter so you're going to select your microphone in my case it's microphone channel one you're going to select high pass filter down here and then you're going to select the frequency that you want to adjust while you're talking into your mic i like doing it this way personally so you can always by the way go back to the factory default mode here and if you set factory default it'll bring it back to 60 hertz so it'll bring it back to the where it started but i like using this so that you can adjust the frequency down down down and you can listen to it as you're talking and listen to how it changes your audio do you want to have super super crispy highs or would you rather have a nice mid sound with your audio would you rather it sound kind of clean and less noisy if you want it to sound more clean and less noisy then you can move the audio down to 20 hertz like this and it'll sound clean and less noisy so just for the sake of the stream i'm going to leave it down there at 20 hertz which is by the way a very very aggressive high pass filter uh by the way so that's not typical i guess you could say and that's cool and you can experiment with what type of sound you want based on the microphone that you have cool so that's how you adjust high pass filters and that's just one of many filters that i'll be going over for you here cool that's high pass filter awesome great so now we're going to talk about other effects that are available in the road caster pro and this is these are effects by the way this is knowledge that you guys can use across every mixer this is knowledge that you can use across every uh effects platform that uh is out there okay so this is not just road caster pro knowledge this is audio knowledge that you can use anytime anywhere software based hardware-based you guys name it okay uh so welcome everybody who's joining if you're if you're enjoying this education on audio feel free to follow me to educate you guys better on audio on video on lighting you name it and so here today i'm just educating you guys on audio to teach you how to have a better sound when you're broadcasting and when you're doing live streams and when you're doing your podcast sound good beautiful all right so the next filter that we're going to learn how to use is called noise gate so a noise gate filter is available built in to the road caster pro mixer and it allows you to eliminate primarily room noise so if you have a fan which i do if you have air conditioning which i do i live next to an airport literally i have kids i have a wife people are mowing their lawn you name it you are going to want to use a noise gate to eliminate unnecessary background noise wherever you are and so that is available right here in the road caster pro mixer physically in the mixer and i will show you how to do it digitally through the software as well okay so what you're gonna do is you're gonna select your microphone minus one so hit that then when you arrive in these menus you're gonna go to audio processing click that then right here you're going to see noise gate click noise gate and here you will basically see where the threshold is for how noisy your audio is and whether you need to turn down or up your thresholds for audio in order to eliminate background noise now how do you know how much background noise there is it's a really tough question right so one what i recommend doing is disabling the noise gate and i recommend going back to your levels right here and then looking at the levels right here with no noise gate on check it out and just look at how much background noise there is you'll see it right here on these levels check it out as you can see there's a relatively low amount of background noise through this microphone because i have the high pass filter on but what you're going to do is you're going to look at these menus and you're just going to be quiet and you're just going to let your microphone pick up whatever background noise there is in the room watch so you see how the levels are kind of popping around 60 down there so around 60 or so is where we're going to want our noise gate to be and if that's where we put it we're going to be minimizing the amount of effect that we're having on the audio and maximizing the impact of a noise gate to eliminate background noise but not eliminating our own audio we do not want to eliminate our own audio so now that we know it's around 60 that's called your noise floor by the way go to audio processing noise gate and what you're going to do with noise gate you can enable it but for our threshold here it's at 52 we can actually turn our threshold down to more like 55. now hold on a second just a moment ago when we were looking at our levels it was at 60. so why would i have our threshold down at 55 here's what i recommend whatever your noise floor is when you go and look and see how much background noise there is under your levels a moment ago let's say your floor is 60 negative 60 db you want to put your noise gate 5 decibels 5 db above that so in case it gets a little louder in case that fan cranks up a little bit more in case the air conditioning turns up a little more in case that lawnmower gets a little bit closer to your window whatever it may be you have a little wiggle room with your noise gate to make sure that this pulls out background noise from your audio that you don't want cool beautiful and so that's exactly what we did here if negative 60 was my sound floor i move my threshold 5 decibels above that to negative 55 and change db got it got it there are some other settings here when it comes to learning about noise gates there's attack hold release and range those are all very precise items so i'm going to adjust them in the software side right now so you can check those out over here okay and so here is the software version of the road caster pro what you're going to do is you're going to go right over here click this button in your road caster pro software go to effects editor and it will pop open this screen you're going to select your microphone minus microphone number one and then you're going to go down to noise gate here we've already set our threshold in this demo but you can adjust the threshold here and what does attack mean this tells you how aggressively essentially it removes background noise so the lower the attack these faster it cuts off the background noise and the higher the attack the slower it cuts off the background noise and so if let's say there are sudden background noises in your background people clapping a baby's suddenly crying a dog barking whatever it may be you're gonna want your attack to be lower in that scenario why why do you want your attack to be lower because you want it to eliminate that background noise faster because there's going to be a sudden loud noise makes sense if you're in a space that doesn't have necessarily sudden loud noises and what have you then you're going to want to um use a different strategy and that other strategy is going to be having the attack be higher in that scenario and so if your attack is higher that means that it's going to slowly fade out more slowly fade out the background noise so that you're there as opposed to suddenly cutting it off when your height and your noise gate kicks in got it got it so in my space i don't have babies suddenly jumping out of nowhere or dogs suddenly jumping out of nowhere so i'm going to turn up my attack up to a much higher level actually i don't need a low attack then you can do hold so what does hold mean so hold when it comes to noise gate is the setting where how long it's going to hold your audio before it turns the noise gate on or off right same thing with release so it's going to hold your audio in place before it goes away for a certain amount of time then it's going to release your audio at a certain amount of time and so i recommend leaving these at default to start with there's no reason to there's no reason to go from there okay awesome range is the amount of basically decibels that it's going to apply the noise gate filter to and so you do not need to adjust this setting necessarily but if you want to you can change your range so that basically there's a wider range if you want that the noise gate will apply its effect to but i don't recommend changing that setting uh unless you are knowledgeable of what your range of noise could be when you're measuring your noise in your background okay so the most important two settings to keep in mind are threshold dropping your threshold down to five decibels within where your sound floor is check attack if you have sudden loud noises drop your attack down if you have a lot like slow loud noises coming in like air conditioning or whatever then turn it up so you have a smoother noise gate experience and you'll be in better shape uh whenever the noise gate kicks in or kick turns off got it great so that is noise gate and those are the important effects and important elements of noise gate that you need to understand i'm just trying to teach you how to use various common effects that are in software that are in hardware uh that are in the road caster pro and other audio interfaces so that you can make better decisions on how to make your audio sound more premium how to make it sound better cool so for the next settings that we're going to use here in the road caster pro mixer this one is called a d esser so let me let me bring this up for you and then we'll talk about the de-esser so in the road caster pro mixer i'm going to teach you right now how to use the de-esser filter de-essers are very common and why do you want a de-esser so whenever you say things with the letter s you're getting those s sounds which are very annoying people do not want really high pitch uh s sounds when they're listening to audio they want those s sounds to be kind of muted down if you will so that it doesn't pierce their ears so they can listen to you for long periods of time notice how many times when you start paying attention how many times i'm using the s sound when i'm talking to you so many right s is the third most commonly used letter uh in the english language so de-essers help you eliminate that annoying s sound so here's how you get the de-esser filter applied in the road caster pro mixer in which settings you should be focusing on with that so what you're gonna do is select your microphone mine is microphone one it'll pull up whatever menu you were on okay you wanna select audio processing i'm gonna show you the built-in de-esser inside the mixer and i'll also show you the software version so built into the mixer here you're going to select de-esser it's the s with the cross through it and if you would like i'll go ahead and put it back at factory default here using the software and the factory default settings for de-esser are pretty solid okay they're pretty pretty solid and what you're gonna do with the de-esser is you're going to want to adjust your settings and listen to your s's and i know this is going to be really annoying for you guys to listen to me do this right now but this is how you do it so what you're going to do is you're going to say a lot of words with the letter s in a row and you're going to turn up i want you to put on studio headphones i want you to put on headphones and i want you to listen to the s sounds that you're repeating over and over and over again and i want the s sounds to get to a point where they're clear but they are not annoying and i want you with these settings to focus on how to get your s sounds to where uh they aren't distorted either because using the de-esser filter you can actually distort your s's and make it sound bad so i'm going to disable the filter and this is the way it sounds without the filter as you can hear when i say slippery snake slippery snake um slippery snake sam sam sam you can hear the s's much more clearly right not good so then when i turn on the de-esser filter now the s's slippery snake are much more eliminated as you can hear so the key oopsie so the key settings that you're going to want to use here are ratio and threshold okay so what you're going to do is you're going to turn up the ratio i believe you should do four to one ratio with your de-esser it makes a huge impact to go up to four to one ratio this helps you basically have the uh de-esser uh be more aggressive essentially in eliminating your s's i i recommend using it it makes the as you can hear the s's are more comfortable now slippery snake now that i turned the ratio up you can consider turning it up even more than that up to six to one if you'd like or even ten to one now just be careful you don't want to obviously distort your asses but as you can hear my s's are just really completely eliminated at this point isn't it much more comfortable to listen to me say slippery snake now i know slippery snake's not an interesting word but isn't it more comfortable those asses are are they hurting your ears not anymore so in my experience turning up the ratio on your de-esser on this filter here just straight up to maximum or at least 4 out of 10 to uh 10 out of 84 to 1 or 10 to 1 can make a huge impact that's really honestly where uh where the greatest impact for this is going to be okay then what you can do is you can change your threshold on where it starts eliminating the s's so if you move the threshold up it's going to eliminate less and less of the s's as you can hear if i move the threshold up still it's going to illuminate less and less of the s's so that more of them are punching through and so i recommend dropping the threshold down to basically uh to be very careful and to try to find a middle ground as you can see when i move this down it completely mutes my audio right you don't want that it takes all the highs out of your audio and then when i move it completely up it lets all the highs through and the de-esser isn't doing work so what you're going to want to do is find a good middle ground here where the audio sounds nice and clear but and the s's are eliminated but it doesn't make your audio it doesn't greatly impact how clean your audio is and see here that is so you hear my s's they're a little bit too aggressive so i'm going to drop this down to 30 db that's good slippery snake slippery snake let me bring it up just a hair to 26 slippery snake and then if you want to you can adjust this on the software side as well so the road caster pro companion app is the easiest place to do this so in road caster pro companion app you're going to go up here to the top corner and you're going to go to the effects editor once you do that then you're going to click on your microphone mine is microphone number one then you're going to go to the de-esser filter once you do that you can tweak all these settings here and you can get them in just the right spot and notice how there are more options here for de-esser because there was actually a page 2 on the mixer believe it or not so what you can do is i like to drop the threshold down to where it still sounds clear check one two three and then you can do the frequency here so the higher the frequency the under for the frequency field the basically higher the the less of your s's it eliminates and the lower the frequency here the more of your s's that it eliminates and so if you want to drop this down to a little bit lower as you can hear it eliminates a lot of my highs but if i bring the threshold up it keeps a lot of the brightness of my audio in the mid-range so what you want to do is you want to do a combination of increasing your threshold as high as it can go while decreasing your frequency as low as it can go with while your audio still sounds clear okay so i'm bumping up my threshold to maybe negative 15 db something like that and then i'm going to eliminate down my frequency on where it eliminates the s is so that when i make s sounds it they sound nice and comfortable okay and i'm trying to find a middle ground of those two things in order to make my audio as comfortable for you to listen to as possible so that all of that nice mid-range and high range is still there but there are no s's impacting the audio so that it is so that it's not annoying for you to listen to makes sense and i'm just going to continue to drop this down and we're almost there i think we're almost there with the audio we're almost there and there it is there's the balance i'm looking for between frequency and threshold to where it is a nice balance that we are now in good shape and so i feel really really good about that awesome there it is that's how you balance those two items and now we our s's are eliminated and our audio is still clear and people can listen to us for a long time and we won't be annoying to them i'm gonna drop my threshold down just a little bit there there we go just a little bit check one two three two two two three three three three three three there it is nice and clear that's how you apply a de-esser filter so that you get those annoying s's out of the way while still maintaining clarity on your audio so that you can have a nice full sound whenever you're talking whenever you're doing your podcast so people will want to listen to you for long periods of time without it sounding super annoying awesome but wait there's more so there are other filters that you can apply in the road caster pro mixer that i want to teach you about these are best practices and best settings for all of the filters in the road caster pro so now that all of this is happening we are going to move into the next filter let's do it the next filter all right so what we're going to do is do the compressor filter so this is universally the most useful filter on planet earth definitely the most useful on earth every single good microphone that sounds good uses a compressor filter i'm using one right now and it makes your audio uh basically sound more clear it makes it sound more consistent and it keeps the um the audio at a consistent volume level if you will whether you are becoming quieter or louder that's what that's what it does so how do radio broadcastery guys sound super good all the time where their voice sounds super consistent so part of the reason why they sound a lot better than the average person is they deliver a very consistent volume level with their audio into the microphone the entire time i'm one of those sorts of people because i have thousands and thousands of hours of practice however everybody doesn't have that much practice and so if you want your audio to sound more consistent and to sound big all the time a compressor will take your audio the low parts of your audio and the high parts of your audio and even them out so that you have a nice normalized level of audio that's super loud all the time that's basically what compressors does it takes your audio waves you've seen you guys have seen audio waves and smashes them down and makes them more even so that you sound big bold and awesome at all times and that's built into the road caster pro here's how you do it you're going to select your channel in the road caster pro click the channel button here then you're going to select it'll bring into this menu audio processing then you're going to go to compressor right there and this is the basic compressor filter and let me go ahead and just reset it to its default parameters there it is and we can talk about what the best settings are for the compressor and how you can do these effects i'm going to show you how you can physically do it in the mixer itself and how you can do it in the software side so basically what you're going to do with the compressor first things first my favorite setting for the compressor is doing uh is adjusting the ratio so i like adjusting my ratio up to four to one from two to one so that we have a much uh more aggressive compressor and it just has a much tighter sound whenever you turn the compressor up that high you can decide how high you want your compressor to be but four to one is a good middle of the road setting for everyone as you can see when you turn up your compressor it makes your audio sound even tighter maybe even too compressed it might get rid of some of the expressiveness of your audio whereas if you turn the compressor all the way down it makes your audio sound a bit more open it makes your audio you might be picking up more of the kind of intonation of your voice the throatiness of your voice things like that whereas if you turn the ratio all the way up it'll eliminate all of that and it'll make your audio just even tighter it's up to you do you want an ultra tight sound it's up to you you can make that decision it's all available to you here in the mixer now that i listen to it i really like a super super high ratio compressor sound you guys can make your own decision on what you think is best okay great then using the compressor there's a number of other fields that you can use to make it sound exactly the way you want it to sound let me give you the difference between compressor and not i am now not using the compressor right now this is not using the compressor hi my name is awol digital awol thank you so much for watching then when i turn the compressor on then the compressor kicks in did you guys hear the impact of me turning the compressor on it just sounds tighter it sounds more consistent in my opinion and that's why people use compressors that's exactly why okay this is the physical interface you can do everything here in the physical interface and take a look at your levels here in real time but let me show you the digital interface so here using the road caster pro software you can go up here in the top corner and open the effects editor and when you click open effects editor it'll open this screen you're going to select your microphone mine is microphone number one and then you're going to go to the effect that you want to uh that you want to adjust in this case it's compressor right beautiful so now you can see your levels over here in real time in this screen while you're doing all of the compression effects so you can take a look at do i need to adjust the gain do i do it do i like how the audio looks now for example if i turn the ratio all the way down you notice how this line over here this line right here went into a complete vertical uh 45 degree angle when i turn all the way up notice how it has an even higher ratio and it turns with a little curve there what does that mean what it means is that it doesn't let your audio peak beyond a certain point and it compresses it down even further watch so if we turn our threshold down notice how this little white line over here ends up coming down uh right here and it shows you where it's compressing the audio and where it isn't compressing the audio so you get a visual indicator of that so basically what you want to do is you want to pull your threshold down to where it is compressing your audio but not taking away any of the expressiveness of your audio that's pretty much it and so that's where you're going to adjust your threshold to where this white line see the solid white line down here at the bottom is toward the top of your peaks of your audio but it's not smashing the peaks of your audio okay so i am going to talk very loud now check one two three and notice how i'm getting this little white line if i move it too far down as you can see it starts to smash the peaks of my audio if you want to move it even further down you can smash those peaks of your audio even more if you want and it gives you an even more compressed sound if you do that if you smash the peaks of your audio like that you're going to want to turn up the volume or you're going to want to turn up the gain on your on your uh particular setup so if i do that i'll have to turn up my volume see how when i turn up my volume i now sound a bit more normal now i smash down the peaks so you can make your own decision on how tight you want your audio to be or not see how my little white line there is smashing all the peaks on my audio and making it tighter looking how compressed do you want your audio to be you move your threshold essentially down to smash those peaks or not and that will make your audio sound tighter or not makes sense i mean it is really that simple so let me show it to you one more time so you can understand so my name is a wall check one two three awol digital check one two three you see all those peaks in my audio up there where like the little blue tips are if you if i wanted my audio to be just super super super tight and super compressed what i would do is i would smash all of those peaks as a result or i would smash all those peaks so how do you do that so what you're going to do is you're going to move your threshold down even further to where it's smashing all of those peaks and it's now impacting the whole high end of your audio and as you can hear i i think it makes it sound weird and it makes it sound bad i think it's too compressed and so what i like to do is i like to bring it to where my threshold is just at the tippy top of the peaks of my audio and that's it and it's not actually smashing any of the rest of the audio and greatly impacting it and so i'm going to bring it up here to where the bottom the white line is only just barely scraping the top of the peaks but not actually eliminating them and that way my audio just sounds super tight all the time without being annoying cool you can also adjust the release and the gain and the attack but those fields are not as important with compressor it's all about the threshold and the ratio super compressed sound right now now here it is here's the way it sounds without the compressor on as you can hear major impact on the volume of course and then here's the way it sounds with the compressor on which one sounds better the answer is obvious in the road caster pro turning their compression filter on and filtering your audio appropriately makes you sound fantastic that's what you should be doing so that's how you use the compressor filter in the road caster pro cool i release between five to ten videos every day and i do four three to four live streams per week to teach you guys about audio video lighting people normally pay me 150 to 250 per hour for advice on how to do this stuff you get my advice for zero dollars because i want to help you out so cheers to all of you the next effect that we're going to be talking about is an exciter filter so what are exciter filters the road caster pro has an exciter built into it and there are exciter filters uh in all sorts of software and hardware out there what do they do well basically what they do is they make the low end of your audio boomier and they make the mid high range of your audio sound more exciting more stimulating sounding it's an effect that is applied on top of your audio to make the low end and the high end more thrilling and it's just designed to catch the attention of your viewer let me show you how this works in the road caster pro mixer physically then i'll show you how you can manipulate these effects digitally awesome perfect so here physically in the mixer if you want to do the it's called the effects or afax exciter and big bottom click the channel channel number one or whatever channel your microphone's plugged into and it'll pop up this menu where you can select any number of effects go ahead and select the afax filter or effects filter and there are two filters that are in built in here you've got the oral exciter and you've got the big bottom both of these i think are important and are unique features of the road caster pro mixer that make it better than other mixers watch what happens when i turn this off this is without the exciter on oh my god right like do you hear the difference in the way the audio sounds let me turn the big bottom off this is the way it sounds without the big bottom do you see do you hear how hollow the audio sounds without the exciter on and without the big bottom on so in my opinion out of all of the effects i'm going to turn it back on because it's even hard to listen to by comparison without those effects on without these effects on this mixer the road caster pro mixer has far less impact on your audio than it would without that effect on okay so if you only remember one thing that you need to tweak in in terms of your audio get the levels right check the right microphone and make sure you get your settings up and running with the aural exciter and the big bottom in your road caster pro mixer to make it sound absolutely fantastic okay so let's go over the initial settings here with both of these i'm going to make sure that they're set both on factory default great and they are so with the oral exciter you need to really put on a pair of headphones and listen to how this impacts your audio because this is all subjective okay so the tune is basically which part of your audio it is emphasizing and making more exciting okay so if you move this up to the high end it's making the higher end of your audio more exciting if you move this down to the lower end as you can hear it's making the lower end of your audio more exciting you put it in the middle it makes the middle part of your audio more exciting etc so this is selecting where in the sound field where uh where in the frequencies it's going to impact your audio the most so generally speaking you want this to be in the kind of mid high ish range 3600 hertz is a good spot for it to be in if you want to have crispier sounding highs in your audio you can bump this up to about 4 000 and hear how clear i start sounding you can move this up even if you want a little bit more up to 4 500 notice how the highs are getting a little higher if you move it all the way up to 5000 notice how the very highest highs in my audio now sound crispier they now sound more clear but the mid end doesn't sound as good now it sounds kind of hollow in the middle so a good middle of the road setting in my opinion is the default frequency range of 3600 i actually have a hard time getting a better setting than that i'll go over these in more detail in a moment but big bottom is very similar with the tune field and big bottom if you move this down the lower the lower it goes there the lower the bottom if you will on your big bottom audio effect the higher you go up here the higher your bottom of the audio is okay if you move it all the way up as you can hear it makes the low end drive that it adds a little bit higher okay i actually like to in turn turning this one up a little bit it makes you sound more broadcastery as you can hear this is the hardware version of how to affect all of this i find it easier to use in the software version so if you download the road caster pro companion app you go click up here in the corner and open effects editor that's how you can open up this effects menu that we're talking about here then you select your microphone minus rode minus road caster pro microphone number one and then you're gonna do all of your effects for oral exciter which is going to be the high end exciter and big bottom which is going to be the low end exciter okay so on the high end excuse me i recommend leaving this at about 3 600 but you can choose how much it affects the way you sound what do i mean by that so if you adjust the harmonics field i'll show it to you you turn this up i'm gonna turn it all the way up as you can hear it makes me it makes it sound more musical if you will i sound even more musical than i did before and if i turn it down to nothing it doesn't have that sort of vibration that vibrato effect in the exciter so you can choose how much you like the way that that sounds but let me turn it all the way down so you can hear the difference this is andrew wahl hi my name is andrew wall this is harmonix all the way down hi this is andrew wall and this is harmonix all the way up so if you turn it all the way up as you can hear it gets very aggressive with how it affects your audio and so if you're going to go up that high that aggressive with that field you may want to turn the mix down so if you go mix all the way up oh god that sounds terrible and if you go mix all the way down you can't hear it at all and so if you want to go mix somewhere in the middle this can help you find a good middle range okay to where it you can hear the exciter taking place here here's the exciter off here's the exciter on here's the exciter off one two three four five here's the exciter on one two three four five to where the exciter is having it has a presence in your audio but it doesn't hurt your ears okay and so somewhere around i think harmonics around 60 is good 60 to 70 if you want to do that and then the mix somewhere around 40 to 50 is about as much as i can recommend i would say a 70 40 is about the highest end you want to go with this field in my opinion so a good middle of the raid route road setting is 60 40 with 60 harmonics and 40 mix but if you want to go a little bit more aggressive you can go 70 harmonics and 40 mix but i don't recommend going above 40 mix right here these are the best oral exciter settings in my experience with this particular microphone you your mileage may vary now on the big bottom side i like having a big bottom that is higher up so listen to the difference here if i turn this all the way down this is the way it sounds with the tune all the way down and if i turn this all the way up this is the way it sounds with the tune all the way up here's the big bottom off one two three four five here's the big bottom on one two three four five personally i like big bottom up because it makes the uh i don't like low low low low low audio people generally can't hear it they're listening on their phone so the higher you have the tune in big bottom the more the average person can hear this effect so i recommend turning it all the way up actually then for drive watch what happens when i do the drive drive all the way down and it doesn't really have much of an effect drive all the way up and now all of a sudden that big bottom has a huge presence down there and you can really hear it and if you turn the mix up as you can hear whoa you hear what we hear what it's doing whoa you hear all of that bottom oh my god that's getting super loud right you can't turn the mix up too high okay guys you can't turn the mix up too high otherwise it really starts to become a problem so what you want to do is you want to find a good middle of the road setting here like a 60 40 etc with the mix maybe 60 30 to where it is boosting the low end of your audio but it's not getting too aggressive it's not getting too aggressive so i'm gonna turn the drive up i'm gonna i've got the mix at about 30 and i think this is a good middle of the road setting here for this and if i turn the drive down it doesn't sound quite as aggressive and if i turn it all the way up it starts to sound way more aggressive so i'm going to drop it down here until it sounds like it's in a nice perfect spot which is about a 50 30 in my opinion maybe like a uh yeah 50 30 is a great middle of the road setting with big bottom there you go those are the optimal settings you can choose what you want to sound like and those are those two settings combined so just the final impact of this is like this if i turn these effects off this is the way it sounds without the oral exciter check one two three four five six seven eight nine my name is awol digital consultant hi and this is the way it sounds with these filters on in my opinion it sounds significantly better with all those filters on okay so that's how you use the effects effects process audio processing right here in the road caster pro mixer cool you guys enjoying this education i'm just trying to teach you how to become better at audio i'm trying to teach you how to improve um the way you sound whether you're using this mixer or you're using any other software how to how to choose your settings how to understand how the settings impact your audio and how to listen to those settings so that you can get the perfect audio settings along the way cool and for those of you watching live here is the total impact of all of those settings put together so if you want to hear the total impact with all of them off and all of them on here is the difference between all of these settings that i just did off and on so hi my name is andrew wall i'm a digital consultant and you can go to my website awolddigital.com if you want to book me all right now i'm going to turn all the audio processing off hi my name is andrew wall i'm a digital consultant and you can go to my website awolddigital.com if you want to book me notice how the effects being on has a massive impact on how good your audio sounds and that's why people buy the road caster pro mixer it just sounds this good out the box that's the effects that it's processing this live this is the level of audio quality that you're normally going to achieve you know if you're in an editing software if you're doing post processing if you have a podcast editor editing your stuff later the road caster pro does this live in real time it makes you sound this good pretty freaking great right i i think it's great so that is just some of the effects there that you're going to want to look at when you're using the rode caster pro got it but wait there's more all right let me take a sip of water and i'm gonna teach you even more things about how to use the rode caster pro will that work on zoom yes so this i use this mixer on zoom every day so all of these effects will work on zoom they will work on go to meetings they will work on obs they will work on stream labs obs they will work on everything this is processing your audio this mixer processes your audio in real time and outputs it anywhere you want to output it all right so it's just going through the usb jack here in this mixer and going over to my computer over here and so you just select it as an input on your computer even on your phone even on your tablet and all of these audio enhancements that are happening right here in real time in the mixer are going into your computer they also can go straight into your recording they can go straight into your broadcast they can go straight into recording internally in the mixer all of this is happening in real time anywhere you want to output the audio you can even output the audio to a master mix somewhere somebody else's mixer you can output the audio to four pairs of headphones five actually a pair of speakers you name it all of this is happening in real time anywhere you want to output it which is another reason why this is the sickest and best mixer on the market it's just the best mixer man like it's just the best creator mixer it's the best home studio mixer i i could buy any mixer i could be using any mixer right now i could use the go xlr i could use any number of behringer mixers and high-end mixers this is the best overall mixer for a home studio period some other mixers are specialized in certain functions and they're better at certain functions in this mixer but in my opinion overall this mixer is the best mixer for home studios it just is so yes it works on zoom it works on zoom it works on slack it works on everything skype works on everything cool so like so just to let you know i sound the way you hear me sounding right now in meetings so whenever i talk people are like hey ball your audio sounds so good like i know it's because i have this mixer man the mixer just makes me sound great that's it it just makes me sound great so not only can you use a compressor on one channel at a time in the road caster pro you can apply a master compressor to every single input that's in the mixer at the same time pretty cool right so what am i talking about master compressor settings here in the road caster pro here's how you do it i'll show you the software side and the hardware side you're going to go into channels on your mixer then here in channels you've got mic 1 mic 2 mic 3 and mic 4 your usb input your phone and your bluetooth right so all of those channels are running simultaneously in your mixer right here you can see them all running right here right each one of these channels you can apply different effects to if you want to but here's what's cool the final master output l and r here left and right you can apply a compressor to every input on the entire mixer together which is sick so hit the gear cog go to channels and then go to master compressor boom this master compressor will apply to every channel so be very careful with how you use the master compressor because if you go too aggressive with this master compressor it could greatly impact how everything sounds if you got all of your microphones tweaked in just right this is something that uh just to be careful with so what are you going to do when it comes to understanding these settings so first things first you see these little levels right over here you want to monitor those levels we'll go ahead and turn this off you're going to want to monitor those levels and see how high up your audios pop in here on these bars check one two three notice how i'm up at like negative 40 or so db one two three four five six seven eight nine then i hit enable okay so as you can see my threshold down here is really really high my audio is not popping above negative 40 db maybe it's going closer to negative 35 db maybe negative 30. so my threshold is too high so if i want to i can drop my threshold down to about negative 30 db and then it'll potentially start to impact my audio a little bit more i could bring it down a little bit further to negative 35 db or so if i really wanted it to start to have an impact on my audio down there cool and you can go even lower than that depending on where you're at so as you can see once i start going down even lower to like negative 40 db then it starts to actually impact some of my audio and slope it off and if i went down to negative 45 db now it starts to really compress my audio and then if i go down to negative 50 db it really starts to impact my audio in a negative way so i recommend for me i would put it at about negative 45 db somewhere in there negative 45 and it starts to clip some of the peaks of my audio i'll show i'll show you in the software how you can get this just right in a moment in terms of your ratio with compression i like hi personally i like highly compressed audio and so let me just show you all of these settings in the software side so you can monitor them here on the hardware side and get the job done as you can see but there's also a software side too so master compressor here in the road caster pro software is great so here in your road caster pro software click up here in the top left hand corner and click open effects editor when you click open effects editor it'll open this screen here you're not going to select your microphones one two three or four you're going to select instead master m here and master will impact all of your microphones simultaneously alright keep that in mind then you can visually see what's going on with your audio down here you notice how my audio right here is at about negative 45ish db this line maybe a little bit higher negative maybe it's like negative 38 or i'm sorry uh 40 41 somewhere in there 40 41. okay that's where we'll want to set our threshold is 40 41. so we'll put it at about 40. 41.6 somewhere in there it's right about in there okay then as you're selecting your ratio generally speaking you want to go with about a four to one ratio with your compression so that it sounds nice and tight now if you want to go higher you can 10 to 1 ratio as you can hear makes is just a very aggressive compressor notice what happens when you change the ratio this basically this line see these white lines here these white lines are basically smashing your audio or not smashing your audio they're compressing your audio or not compressing your audio and so as you turn up the ratio it compresses your audio more it kind of puts a lid on your audio if you will and so when you go with a high ratio boom as you can see it starts to put a lid if you will on your audio i personally like highly compressed audio on a master compressor i don't recommend turning this up too high because it will smash all of your audio too much so i think that a four to one ratio is a good ratio to have okay in terms of your attack and your gain and your release you'll have to make those decisions for yourself on how aggressive you want the compressor to be i like to leave it on the default settings here and then for gain you can choose how much this compressor is going to compensate for it's it's going to smash your audio a certain amount then you'll need to boost your gain to compensate for how much it's smashing your audio that's basically what that means okay and so if you're going to you do this you're going to want to add again add gain here so that your output is where you want it to be uh to compensate for how much it's smashing your audio i can't tell you the best settings for you because you need to look at this and look at your final output meter and see where it's at okay so you'll have to make your own decision there all right so that's that so you disable this notice the difference when i disable it it doesn't my audio does not sound as good does it and then when i turn it on my audio sounds good and so having a master compressor allows you in the road caster pro to have one compressor directly to each microphone then it allows you to put an extra compressor on top of all of your microphones simultaneously to make them all sound even to make them all sound like they're at the same volume level to make your audio that much tighter without having to edit it later without having to having to add extra effects later you get all of the impact of uh like a post-processing of a podcast editor of a professional audio editor inside the mixer in real time all right so master compression is what gets the job done there for you and i highly recommend focusing on this setting don't just set up the compressor on each individual channel use the master compressor in order to make all of your microphones all of your inputs on your mixer sound even to each other got it that's just the whole point it makes everything sound even to each other you might have one microphone that sounds softer one that sounds loud louder master compressor it's going to go and squish it all down so it all sounds exactly the same as much as it can okay cool that's master compressor all right the first thing that we're going to do today is learn about how to use these sound pads on the road caster pro you see these pads right over here on the side there are eight triggerable buttons right here where you can play a sound of your choosing i'm gonna do one right now any sound effect you can think of so you can play a theme song you can play a sound effect you can play a recording of yourself you name it all with triggerable pads there are two ways to control this that i'm going to show you today one inside the mixer where you can program it you hit the gear cog up in the top and you click sounds if you want to access the menu also you can just straight up from the main menu here click the music icon on the main menu and it'll take you right here to where you can control the sounds now here's a little known feature when it comes to using the sound pad so as you can see all of the buttons are programmed right here and you can click one to edit it but there's actually two banks of buttons you can go forward and there's a second bank of buttons that you can use with this mixer so you have a total of 16 sound triggers that you can use at any point it's not just 8 it's 16 sound triggers which i in my opinion makes it way more valuable uh by having all of those sound triggers little known feature there okay so let's go ahead and manipulate one of the sounds and i'll teach you how to input and change and manipulate an individual sound cool cool so let's go ahead and click the applause button that was this one right here cool and so with that you can do a number of settings here inside of the app that allow you to change the settings of it so number one you can change the color of the button itself as you can see right here it is yellow so if we want to we can change it to red we can change it to blue purpley greeny whatever you want it to be i'm going to leave it at yellow e because it's different than the other ones alright so then there are a number of different playback modes that you can use here so there's latch pause replay and play let me show you how their behavior is different so with latch mode watch what happens when we hit it [Applause] as you can see it plays the sound back and then of course when we hit the button again it turns the sound off and if we played another sound it'll allow both sounds to play at the same time okay that's how the latch button works when we go to pause we hit the button [Applause] and it pauses in the middle of the sound playing then it finishes playing the sound so do you see the difference there so the difference between those two modes is that latch mode will play the sound from the beginning when you press the button and turn it off from the beginning when you press the button it restarts the sound whereas pause mode will obviously play pause in the middle of playing the sound depends on what you want to do with your sounds but there's two different options for you the next one is called replay mode watch what happens with the behavior of replay mode notice how every single time you hit the button it restarts the sound over and over and over again as soon as you hit it okay so that's yet another mode that differs from the other two and then the last mode here is just regular play mode and notice how on regular play mode when i hit the button over and over and over again it doesn't replay it it only plays it once so no matter how many times i hit it in a row it will only play the sound once so if you want a mode where you where you basically are not going to accidentally press a button and play your theme song twice or something like that and you know for sure that that button only needs to be played once that that sound only needs to be played once that is going to be the perfect mode for you awesome those are all the play modes but there's a bonus option here so this allows you to play the sound then it ends at the end of the sound with the arrow running into the line right it plays until it stops but you can loop a sound as well so check this out i'm going to go into loop mode and loop mode works with all of these and i'm going to hit the applause button and it should just continue to do applause there it is over and over and over again the sound never stops cool so that's how that works and then it doesn't stop because it's in loop mode so you turn it off and then then it stops so you notice how if it's in loop mode and you're playing it it'll play over and over and over again in a loop it'll trigger whichever function you have right here over and over and over again in a loop so that's how you loop a sound but wait there's more so one thing that is really important that a lot of folks miss when they're checking out sound triggers obviously you have the triggers over here but there's a monitor button here so if you want to hear the sounds you hit the green button so you can hear it in your headphones some people don't want to hear the sounds some people don't want to hear the music playback some people don't want to hear those items you can choose whether it plays back in your headphones or not by hitting the green ear button the monitor button on the mixer itself okay so i prefer to hear the sounds because that allows me to use this volume meter right here this slider next to the sounds to adjust the sound accordingly so i can hear the way it sounds in the final mix that everyone is listening to so that's how you adjust the volume and you choose whether these sounds are playing in your headphones or not right here so if you can't hear the sounds for example when you press the button in your headphones that's because you need to hit the ear button and then it'll play back in your headphones got it that is a troubleshooting item that many of my digital clients have come to me with they're like my sounds are broken awol you've got to hit the ear button so that you can monitor the sounds if you actually want to monitor them but wait there's more so with the sounds there's many many many more options that you can do check it out you can get rid of a sound if you want to by hitting the clear button right here and you can just get rid of whatever sound is in there and it'll clear that particular pad go ahead and hit the confirmation and then boom there's now no sound built in to that pad okay then here's the really neat part you can record a sound clip directly from your mixer so this could be something that comes in through a usb port through a external input through a bluetooth through one of your microphones and you can record a sound and it becomes a playback sound for that particular pad so let's learn how to record a sound using the rode caster pro a custom sound and then this way you can do catch phrases you can make sounds you can do whatever you want and you can have those play back in real time anytime you want even during a show you can capture somebody saying something and then play it back to them later pretty neat right check this out so what you're going to do is we've already selected that particular sound here in the sound pad so let's just review how we got here we hit the music button in the main menu then we go to the pad that we're looking to program then we click the record button and then once we get here we're going to hit obviously the record button here and it's going to record everything that's coming through the mixer at that time alright so i'm going to do just a quick recording here and you guys are going to see how it works hi my name is andrew wall otherwise known as awol digital i'm a digital consultant that helps people make better technology decisions and grow their internet business more effectively thank you so much for watching then we hit the stop button to stop the recording now as you can see there's a timeline here and we can drag our finger across the timeline to different parts of the recording that we want to monitor then we can hit the playback button and it'll play it back for us so let's go ahead and do that hi my name is andrew wall otherwise known as awol digital i'm a digital consultant that helps people make better technology decisions and grow their internet business more effectively thank you so much for watching awesome so if i wanted to use that as my sound for that sound trigger i could then just use it and it would just apply i would go back and then i would apply it but wait there's more so if you want to over dub another sound on top of that sound then what you can do is you can hit record again enable overdub or hit record again and it will dub another sound on top of that one to make a multi-layered recording for that sound really neat right so let's do it hi my name is andrew wall otherwise known as awol digital i'm a digital consultant that helps people make better technology decisions and grow their internet so as you can hear i dubbed over and i'm gonna hit save and so i dubbed over me going doopy doop doop on top of the uh original recording and then let's play let's play the whole thing back and see if it recorded both layers hi my name is andrew wall otherwise known as awol digital i'm not gonna make you listen to that whole thing but you guys get the point so now that button on our pad right here is in a dub of two sounds on top of each other at the same time so you can create any number of dynamic sounds custom inside the mixer that's how you make a custom sound from your own recording this can be from a dj mix this can be from a microphone this can be from anything at all that you could ever imagine the sky is the limit with your creativity and you can choose what it is that you want that custom sound to be pretty neat right cool so in the sound pads here's how so with the road caster pro here's how you unlock the secret bank if you will of sounds that are available there almost everyone misses this one okay so here's how you get the secret bank of sounds so what you're going to do in your road caster pro is you're going to click the music icon up here in the top right hand corner then it's going to pull up your main sounds that are currently on your road caster pro right over here then what you're going to do is you're going to click forward and then all of a sudden there's a secret bank of sounds bank number two that you can use to program an additional bank of sounds over here the sky is the limit so this is going to increase the number of sounds on the road caster pro from 8 up to 16 sounds simultaneously and then the way you access those sounds of course is hit one of the buttons and then what you're going to do is you can either program in a sound into it i'll show you how to do that in the software in a moment or you can record a sound into it i'm just going to record a sound just for fun so i'll select a color blue it won't let me select it i guess and then i'm going to hit record hi my name is awol digital i'm a digital consultant that helps people succeed by buying the right gear learning how to use it and then broadcasting on the internet for profit done and then now that that sound is there as you can see the button now appears over here as a new trigger in the secret sound bank and then we hit the button and hi my name is awol digital i'm a digital consultant that helps people succeed i'm not going to play back the whole thing but that's how you access the secret sound bank on your road caster pro and then if you want to switch to the other sound bank you just go back and then go right here and as you switch between the two banks bank one and bank two it will change the colors here on the side to let you know which bank of sounds you're currently accessing in the rode caster pro so there's so many functions with sound triggers you can record your own you can over dub your own and you can program in your own so let's talk about how you program in your own sounds into the road caster pro so here's how you do that you're going to go ahead and go download the road caster pro software there's a companion app that comes for free with the mixer and here you've got two selections in the software up here sounds and podcasts now obviously we're going to choose sounds today so what we're going to do is we're going to choose sound number you just click on one of the pads that you want to manipulate and all these menus look basically the same as the menus that are inside of the mixer but here's a couple key differences with the menus you can change the names of these right and so what i'll do is i'll change it to name number three so that can help you decide and understand what all of these do you can change the color of course of each button from here the playback style of each one and you can even loop playback by clicking that arrow with the line right there you can loop playback and make it a loop to whatever you want which is really neat but here's the part that you are really really going to be really interested in you can transfer our sound to your road caster pro mixer by clicking this button it'll pull up a menu where it goes to whatever folder i'm going to choose this random sound i have on my computer and boom it just plugged in that song that sound into my rode caster pro mixer by uploading it from my computer as you can see there's an icon here uploading it from your computer into your road caster pro and so now when i hit that sound trigger over here on my road caster pro [Applause] it plays that sound back from my computer so that's the way that you can program in any sound from your computer into the road caster pro and there is a total of two one two now three banks of sounds that you can program on the software side so let's recap inside of the road caster pro mixer you can program two banks of sounds inside the mixer itself you get access to bank one then you get access to bank two then you get access to bank three once you start using the software do you see how it just unlocked in the middle of this live stream when i started using the software and so that is a secret feature that you guys want to know about you guys want to use the road caster pro software because it'll unlock three banks of sounds as soon as you access them in the software that's how you get a total of 24 sounds that you can play back on the road caster pro cool so you can also take sounds from the road caster pro and then plug them into your computer itself i'm not going to go over that right now because that'll tank me using the mixer it will cut the sound off by the way whenever you go from your road caster pro to your computer so i'm not going to do that live but you're going to go through the same process that you would imagine where you take a sound from the road caster you go find the file on the road caster and you plug it in to your computer accordingly cool and then if you want to delete your sound it's really easy and start from scratch you just hit the garbage icon right here and it gets rid of the sound and you can start from scratch and put in whatever you want into that particular slot and as you can see as soon as you delete that slot it will turn gray and you will have a visual indicator on the mixer that lets you know that that slot is gray and there is no sound there as you can see when we hit the button nothing plays back [Music] got it that's how you program sounds in on the software side of the road caster pro so as you can see based on everything that we're talking about here there is way more extensive options for playing back sounds and for loading in sounds into the road caster pro then you probably knew about and i wanted to make sure you knew about all of those features because this is one of the best things about the road caster pro is the sound playback so many people use things like stream decks or various sound back sound playback programs like voice mod and all sorts of triggers to play sounds in their studio but the road caster pro literally does all of that in one unit which is really really cool how to get an external let's call it traditional audio input into this mixer uh so that uh you can hear those sounds from a different computer for example in your mixer so here's how this works so this is how you bring an external input into your road caster pro i'm talking about your phone your ipad another computer a laptop a console anything that has a sound output which is pretty much any device you can input into the road caster pro mixer what am i talking about so that can all go through it's a phone icon but it doesn't just have to be a phone here okay and it's a phone icon and it's an entire dedicated channel that you can use for any external input that you desire so in today's demo i've got my computer here my hp omen computer setup and out of the back of this computer out of the headphones jack i've got a headphone jack line running in this mess of cables up to the back of my road caster pro mixer and you see that little cable right back there plugging into the back of the mixer that's plugging into the headphone jack on the back of the mixer right back there okay or that's plugging into the phone jack on the back of the mixer right back there and there's an icon on the back of your mixer that looks just like that phone you plug in a cable into that input on the back of your mixer and all of a sudden the audio input from that particular source will come into your mixer so now that that cable is hooked up how do you get the sound to go through so the first thing that you're going to want to do of course is make sure that the that particular channel is unmuted so what you're going to do is you're going to go here to the phone channel it looks like the phone icon you're going to unmute that channel and i recommend with every channel that you're looking to monitor using the monitor button the ear icon right here use that monitor button so you can listen to everything on that channel i recommend bringing the volume level down when you first set it up down to the very bottom when you're getting started then on the particular computer that you're looking to play something back on you're gonna start playing audio so what i'm gonna do in in this example i've got just some music here as you can see that i'm pulling up on the screen and i'm just going to start playing some lo-fi beats okay and the low-fi beats are playing back right now so now that those are playing back i'm going to slowly move my slider up on that channel up up up until that audio starts to come through and if you're not hearing any audio from that channel that means that your routing is not correct inside of your computer you might be wondering why is the audio not coming through what the heck is going on so if this is a computer issue or if this is a laptop issue here is how you fix that so what you're going to do is you're going to pull up your sound settings in your computer i'm pulling this up right now and you right click on the sound icon on your desktop and you go into sound settings then what you're going to do is you're going to choose here under output the output that you have plugged into the road caster pro mixer so right now it's going into the wrong output the output i'm actually using is the speaker output now that the correct output is selected then the sound will start to work and the reason why i wanted to bring this up for you guys is that this happens all the time when people try to plug in their audio from their computer into a mixer and it doesn't work make sure your the correct output is selected make sure the output from the device the correct one is selected so that when it comes into the mixer you're getting the right audio and then watch what happens there it is all that music is coming through from spotify through the mixer now so now i can using the mixer i'm gonna turn it down just a little bit but now using the mixer i can mix music with my microphone simultaneously or i could mix a call that's coming in on this computer with my microphone where i could mix game audio with my microphone any type of audio that you could imagine coming in through an input on the back of your mixer can now be mixed in real time using the rode caster pro so think about the possibilities here four microphones a usb input any external input and a bluetooth input all possible here and that's how easy it is to hook up an external output from any device that you could imagine right on your road caster pro and it with that external device if you want it to go away just hit the mute button and if you don't want to hear it in your headphones hit the ear button and it goes right away in your headphones and boom you are in control that's how you plug in an external input that could be an ipad that could be a phone that could be a console that could be a laptop a desktop computer anything at all that outputs audio can go through like a physical cable can go into the back of this mixer just like that cool right if you want to connect your phone or any bluetooth device to your mixer that is also possible it is crazy good are you ready so here is how you connect a bluetooth device to your rode caster pro mixer so that could be any bluetooth device that you can imagine that can be your phone your tablet that can be even like any sort of external computer like a desktop computer that's got bluetooth a laptop that has bluetooth any sort of bluetooth device that you can imagine that can output audio and input audio through bluetooth can be connected to this mixer just like this are you ready so the first thing that you're gonna do step one is you're gonna go to the bluetooth channel on your mixer right here so click first things first make sure you've muted the channel by hitting the mute button at the bottom so see this mute button right down here make sure you mute that channel and bring the audio all the way down cool once the audio is all the way down you can then unmute so you know you're safe and you're not going to blow any blow your head off then i recommend hitting the monitor button so you can listen to that input as it starts to come into your mixer as the next step got it cool then after that what you're gonna do excuse me just need to take a sip of water then after that what you're going to do is you're going to hit the bluetooth button right here on your mixer click it and then what you're going to do is hit the bluetooth on button here in the bluetooth menu once you do that it will start to uh it will start to enable the bluetooth on your mixer should work instantly then click the pair button and then once it's in pairing mode you'll see the light start to blink right here on your mixer that means that it's sending a signal out and it's waiting for another device to start connecting with it so what are we going to do in this example i'm going to use my phone so in my phone i'm going to go into the settings menu here just like your phone just like anybody else's go into the bluetooth menu of your phone or whatever device and then as you can see it will find under other devices when it's searching for devices down there it'll see road caster pro so i'm going to click road caster pro and it starts connecting to my road caster pro and just like that it's connected and as you can see i got visual confirmation on the mixer itself that is connected to the road caster pro just like that seriously just that simple just that fast to connect a bluetooth device okay but how do you have an input coming in through that bluetooth device how do you have an output coming in through that bluetooth device how does that work so what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to play back some spotify on my phone so that you guys can hear that and it'll start to come through that particular bluetooth input so i just played spotify and now i'm going to turn up the channel here and through the magic of bluetooth my phone is now connected to my mixer i'm playing back some stream beats and through bluetooth the bluetooth signal is going into the road caster pro mixer through the bluetooth channel here and i can now control that bluetooth input using this volume slider here up or down i can mute it i can decide whether i want to monitor it or not you name it it's all controllable through the bluetooth input on the mixer here's the crazy part about bluetooth though the bluetooth input on the mixer on the road caster pro is not just for music and for input on the mixer it also outputs to the bluetooth channel at the same time so for example if i'm calling someone on my phone it will have my audio from the mixer play back into the phone call back to them so let me repeat that one more time if you connect your phone via bluetooth to this mixer you can have a call with somebody i'm gonna pause the music you can have a call with somebody through your mixer so that you can use your good microphone you can even have four people live talking through the mixer and you can talk to a caller if you will that's coming through the mixer so anyone that wants to bring a collar into the mixer you're going to use the same bluetooth connection method you're just going to bluetooth in your phone like i just did and then the caller will hear the master mix on your mixer so the master mix that's popping right here they will hear the master mix on your mixer back through their headphones when you do a call with them on your phone or on a laptop or on a desktop computer so this is the easiest solution to bring in a caller on a mixer i've ever seen you just literally bluetooth one of your phones and call somebody and as soon as you call somebody and as soon as that happens all you have to do is slide their audio up and then all of a sudden their audio is coming in the mix and you're talking to them in real time through the road caster pro it's that simple sick right road caster pro has every function you could possibly imagine it's fantastic i love it i love it i love it and so i have a lot of people that want to know how can i do a call-in show i want to just call my friend and bring him in and a lot of people will hold up their phone to their microphone like caveman so everybody can hear through their microphone instead of doing that you can pull their audio directly through the mixer using the bluetooth channel and then you can get as high quality of audio as possible through that call and if you do smart things with your phone like doing a facetime audio call or a zoom call or some other kind of data call the audio that's going to come through the bluetooth channel here is going to be even higher quality in terms of the audio so if you can avoid doing a traditional phone call traditional phone calls have a very low audio quality in comparison to data calls which have a much higher mathematically much higher audio quality uh than a traditional phone call phone calls usually sound like garbage okay so there you go my goal is to go through all of the equipment in my studio here so that you guys uh can not only buy this gear but you can actually know how to use it you know what i'm saying like what's the point of buying a nice piece of gear if you don't if you can't optimize the uh the quality okay beautiful so there's even more that i want to teach you guys about uh when it comes to this mixer and so the next thing i'm going to teach you about is how to get usb audio into your mixer so on the road caster pro mixer you can play back not only audio and you can record not only audio from one two three four microphones not only can you bring in a bluetooth input and not only can you bring in any external input that has a cord you can also bring in usb input into the mixer what do i mean by that well on the back of the mixer itself back here you see that little cable back there you see that little guy right back there next to your power cable on the back of the mixer you see it that is a usb cable that you're going to want to run from your mixer into your computer and so i have that one currently plugged into my laptop you do not need a usb 3.0 you can do usb 2.0 from this no problem but usb 3.0 is preferred then once you run that cable your mixer will be connected to your computer and so what you're going to want to do with your computer is you're going to want to make sure that your audio settings are set up correctly so what does that mean let me pull it up on the screen for you you right click the sound icon in windows and you go to sound settings you can just search for sound settings as well and you want to make sure that your road caster pro mixer is your output device your speakers and you're going to want to make sure that your road caster pro is your input device on your computer when you're looking to use usb audio cool cool so once you've done that then the routing is complete then on the mixer itself what i want you to do is i want you to drop the volume all the way down on the usb channel this is the usb channel i want you to drop the volume all the way down before you turn on audio so you don't blow your face off i want you to unmute the channel and really importantly i'm going to keep going over this i want you to click the ear button here so you can monitor the audio from that channel no matter what if you're going to be pulling audio from that channel got it so your volume is all the way down it's unmuted if it's muted it's red if it's unmuted it's not you're going to click the ear button right here so you can monitor the audio that's coming in from that channel so you know what's up got it good next on your computer what you're gonna do is you're gonna play back some kind of sound okay so it can be music from spotify it can be whatever you want it to be and so i'm gonna just play back my tutorial stream i did yesterday just as just because it has audio okay but this is just an example you can play back just to be clear here you can play back any kind of audio you want music gameplay from a video game uh you know a video a sound effect anything cool this is just an example so i'm going to play back this audio from my live stream from yesterday i'll just fast forward it just me going over the mixer yesterday and then on the mixer itself what you're going to do is turn up that particular channel the usb channel until that audio starts to come through for each of these filters you can better understand what they do now of course you can listen to and there you go that's seriously it's that easy you just slide the slider up if you just listen to them you can get a really good idea of and you slide the slider down and all of the usb audio all of the audio outputting from whatever usb device you plugged it into like your computer all of the master output from that computer is now playing back through the usb channel in your mixer and you can mix that into your recording you can mix that into your stream you can mix that into whatever you're making your podcast in real time using this slider right here you mute it you monitor it it's that simple so the possibilities are now kind of endless aren't they so you guys are starting to see why i am so crazy about this mixer four microphone inputs any audio at all that you can play through your computer any external device that you can connect to with a cable and any bluetooth device at the same time all of which can be remixed in real time using physical sliders with a digital interface all within the road caster pro that's how you connect a usb device to this so gamers out there that's how you bring in your gameplay audio if you want uh podcasters out there that's how you can bring in your theme song or you can play back a reference video that you want to show your audience people that do demos this is how you can play back a trailer or a reel of your product is through the usb channel on here the possibilities are literally endless in that you can play back any audio that you can play on your computer through the mixer and it will be captured through the mixer in real time and you can mix it in the mixer in real time which is also super attractive amazing right really going hard on this road caster pro content because it is a it can be a intimidating device to use but as you can see each of these functions i'm showing you today are quite simple to use they're quite simple uh just as if you if you implement them one at a time it's actually quite simple how does my audio sound to all of you guys does it sound good i tweaked it in and we're all you're listening to this live through the road caster pro mixer no enhancements other than what the road caster pro is bringing to the table i think it sounds fantastic let me know what you think but wait there's more so um in the mixer we can do even more cool stuff and i'm going to show that to you here in just a moment so here is your ultimate guide on how to do recordings in the road caster pro mixer there are multiple ways that you can do recordings and there are multiple settings that are involved and the first method i'm going to show you is just built into the mixer itself so the road caster pro has this gigantic recording button right here and you can just straight up hit it once you have a micro sd card plugged into the mixer and it just records automatically but that's just one recording function you hit the button again and it stops recording but there are multiple recording functions and things that you can do that i'm going to go over today so first of all when i hit record a moment ago and it started recording to the micro sd card notice how this little flag popped up hit the flag hit the flag again it's marking the recording at different points to let you know that that particular part of the recording was something that you should keep an eye on for later pretty cool right so maybe you can mark a highlight or you can flag a particular part the start or end of your podcast you can click the flag and it'll mark that particular part of the podcast so that you can check it out later pretty neat right then you can hit the record button and it will end the recording so to insert and format a micro sd card in the road caster pro mixer it's super super easy so the first thing you're going to do is literally just insert the micro sd card into the back of the mixer no problem once you've done that then your mixer will pop up right here with a micro sd icon up in the corner cool and you can now do multiple things with the micro sd card it will tell you how much room it has on the mixer for that particular micro sd card and you'll have the option and it'll tell you the number of hours and minutes as you can see there that are remaining and the capacity of the card and then if you slide to format the card that red button right there you slide that over to the side it'll delete all of the content on that micro sd card and free it up for you to use then there is another function here that i'm not going to turn on right now because it will kill my report my recording but you can go to podcast transfer mode what does that do that basically makes it so if you hit the podcast transfer mode button that button will turn off your mixer in terms of its functionality uh with it connecting to your computer at the moment and it'll just make it so that the sd card in your mixer will then show up as a folder on your computer and you can now pull all of the files directly using your computer from the microsd card on your mixer but it will kill your audio during that time it whenever you do that it goes into this exclusive mode where you can only transfer data from your mixer to your computer and you can no longer use your mixer for anything else other than that it's very straightforward as soon as you hit that button a folder will pop up on your computer and then you can pull the files from the micro sd card and manage them on your computer in real time cool that's how you can manage your micro sd card very simple multi-track recording is something that you might be very interested in if you bought a road caster pro mixer or you're considering getting one what do i mean by multi-track recording here's what i mean there's so many tracks built into the mixer one microphone two three four microphones usb phone and bluetooth and sound effects all of these are different tracks that you may want to either record all together as one and that's the default mode whenever you hit record when you turn on your mixer it does regular regular recording and what regular recording does is it records the master output here all as one recording or you can do multi-track recording which will separate each channel into its own track when you bring it into an audio mixer later so how do you access that you go to the gear cog here and you go to advanced and then after advanced you're going to go to audio and then within the audio menu you're going to see multi-track as an option right here in this menu click that button so when you choose multi-track mode you can basically split up each of the audio tracks into their own separate track for the recording right here and there are multiple options that you can do so for example if i'm recording to my micro sd card and i turn on multi-track anytime i hit the record button from now on it will record each channel as its own individual track rather than smashing it together as one track cool right so let's go back into that menu same thing with usb if you're doing a usb recording you can turn on multi-track and your usb recordings of your audio will also be multi-track recordings which is really neat i'm not going to do that right now because that'll kill my audio because i'm going through this mixer to record right now you can also bypass all audio processing so if you enable this the recording is not going to use the audio processing that is happening in real time so what does that mean so for example here on microphone channel 1 i currently have a high pass filter i have a noise gate i have a compressor and all of this stuff going right now that is processing my audio watch when i turn this off my audio does not sound anywhere near as good does it guys it doesn't sound anywhere near as good but when i turn the processing on it sounds significantly better so if you wanted to do a quote-unquote clean recording without any processing at all on your audio on the recording then you go to advanced audio multi-track and you enable bypass audio processing and it will record your audio without any of that juicy audio processing in it got it awesome you also have the option to do post fader recording as well and so that will basically um just do post it'll it'll record after what inputs you provide from your fader post faders what that means most of you guys will not use that function so those are the important multi-track functions that are available i'm going to turn them off right now and all of these are available buried deep in these basically secret menus here gear cog advanced audio multi-track and here are all of your multi-track options so that you can now record as you see fit with your road caster pro mixer all of that is in your control right here in the physical interface on the mixer itself and so for a lot of folks out there they ask should i buy a focusrite solo instead should i buy a behringer mixer instead should i buy cheaper mixers instead basically and so the big advantage of the road caster pro mixer versus other mixers is the is the fact that you just you have end game mixer now so instead of spending 100 200 or 300 on a lesser mixer you can just have end game if you save your money you can have end game mixer now four microphone inputs usb input external input bluetooth input sound effects with three banks four headphone jacks and audio output records in the mixer records in your computer multi-track built-in processing full monitoring suite it's all built into this mixer just inside the package it's a full-blown production studio for audio just in one mixer no other mixer offers everything this mixer offers within this price range and so if you want to spend a couple hundred bucks today on a cheaper mixer go for it eventually if you're successful you're going to want to buy this mixer i mean this is the mixer that i suggest to all of my clients and 100 of my digital consulting clients have been happy with this mixer you might be priced out of it today i understand um and so you'll want to upgrade later i started with the focusrite solo in my setup to bring in my microphone input and then i upgraded to the road caster pro uh and there's no upgrade above this that i'm interested in it just as you can hear in real time the way it's processing my audio i mean do i not sound like an eight or nine out of ten right now i mean it just sounds that good right and this is a live stream smashing the audio through live stream it sounds this good live that's all the mixer man the mixer is doing all of this making it sound this good so i think it is well worth the money um to just be able to hit a button on your mixer go to audio processing and just literally like this is the way this microphone sounds without audio processing and then just when you turn on when you tweak in your audio processing and then you turn it on this is the way my microphone sounds with audio processing like just hitting that button just took my audio with the road caster pro from like a five out of ten to like an 8 out of 10 just like that by hitting a button is that worth a couple hundred extra bucks i think it is i i definitely think it is like you want to sound amazing right if you could spend a couple hundred extra bucks and go from sounding okay to sounding amazing at the press of a button wouldn't you do it the road caster pro offers that so that's my spiel on the pricing of the road caster pro is it worth the money yeah i think it's well worth the money it's the only mixer i recommend that's it and road and road does not sponsor me they gave me this mixer for free two years ago and they don't pay me a single penny to talk about it cool cool

Channel: Awall Digital

Views: 17,747

Keywords: rodecaster pro, rodecaster pro setup, connect your phone to rodecaster pro, usb mixer, rodecaster pro review, rodecaster pro tutorial, video podcast setup on a budget, podcast setup for two people, podcast setup on a budget, best podcast equipment for beginners, podcast equipment for beginners, podcast equipment bundle, podcast equipment, rodecaster pro review 2021, rodecaster pro sound pads, podcast setup for beginners, rodecaster pro mixer, podcast setup, Rode caster pro

Id: Rlo6-_izbD0

Length: 106min 19sec (6379 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021