RODECaster Pro Noise Gate Settings - V2.1 Firmware

in this episode we'll take a look at how to set up the noise gate on the road caster Pro [Music] before we get started there are a few settings we need to take care of just so that we are all level set here let's come into the gear menu then go to advanced and then we'll come to audio first up we'll go to multitrack and multitrack the two most important things here are to bypass audio processing make sure that's turned off and then post-fader is turned on now the bypass audio processing will turn all of our effects off and we don't want that in this case and then post-fader will allow us to actually record all of those effects into our recording very important if you want these to get recorded to your recording so you don't have to do a bunch of post-processing work come back out come over to the processing menu we'll make sure that the effects edit mode is turned on that will enable us to use all of these fine-tune settings come back come into the operations menu and make sure that the broadcast meters are on I think that will just be a little bit helpful for us come back out a couple menus and then we'll come into headphones in headphones we want to make sure the limit maximum volume is turned off this setting right here can really affect how the overall headphone experience goes we want it off so that's not coloring our overall sound because we need to be able to hear what's happening as we make the changes to the settings now to help with the demonstration here I have turned a fan on in my room which you can hear in the background here fairly prominently now there's something I need to say before we jump into how to set up the noise gate I would not rely on the noise gate if you do not have to the reason for that is noise gates are kind of an old-school way of managing noise they don't sound super transparent they're pretty obvious in fact and so it's not the best option always but it is an option that's there if you've really needed so that's kind of my philosophy my philosophy is you should really address the noise in your room in as much as possible so don't use this as a crutch and avoid addressing the noise in your room so if there are fans and you can turn them off do it if there's an air conditioner or heater that's on you can turn it off for the duration of the recording do it if there is a lot of reverberation in your room sound bouncing off the walls making this echo a kind of effect hang some blankets in the room whatever you need to do to really improve the sound quality now that's the ideal solution obviously that's not always possible so let's talk about the noise gate here so I've got a couple things going here I can set the noise gate on the road caster Pro itself but there's also a companion app so if I connect my Road caster Pro to my computer via USB and I run the road cast rap on my computer I also get this application here that gives me some really helpful tools so right now I have it set on the compressor but we can come over here and take a look at the noise gate and you will notice when I stop talking this shows the levels here so if at the top is 0 DB loudest down here is minus 60 so it gets quieter down here at the bottom when I stop talking look what happens okay looks like the fan noise sits somewhere in the probably minus 55 range if I had to guess or didn't have to guess and just kind of eyeball it here so that's kind of a good piece of information that'll be really helpful for us as we've set the noise gate so let's go ahead and jump into that alright so we have a variety of settings a threshold attack hold release and range so let me just kind of walk through what these different settings do first of all what does threshold do this is the level that the audio needs to fall down to before the noise gate kicks in and you can see right now it's set to minus 52 remember we saw that our noise floor sat somewhere around minus 55 so we can use this information to change this I'll go ahead and enable it and I'm going to bump that up a little bit so I want the noise gate to kick in a little bit before we get to that noise floor so I'm gonna say maybe 50 and let's just start there and see how it goes so I'm gonna go ahead and switch back to the compressor so we can see this view and let's see what happens hmmm nothing yet that might not be aggressive enough so for now also just so we can hear it very clearly I'm going to take this range and let's crank it up to maybe 30 for now okay I'm gonna go ahead and drop the attack as well just as a starting point and I'm gonna go ahead and drop the hold ah now you can hear it kicking in can't you did you hear that so let's go ahead and switch back here and you'll see what happens okay it stopped kind of pulled down at some point so what happened is when I stop talking some of the fan noise still got through so what that tells me is you probably need to adjust that threshold a little bit more let's come up more into the 45 - 45 range so it'll kick in a little bit sooner that way there we go so now you can hear basically every time I stop talking it pretty much kicks in alright now you can see how it doesn't sound super natural but we can do some things here to kind of tweak that so it does sound a little bit more natural next up is the attack and what the attack does is this is how quickly the gate turns off when you start speaking again and you can hear it can sound a little bit more natural if you kind of ease into it and so let's maybe use maybe 3.4 milliseconds see how that sounds so I'm going to stop talking here for just a moment and then when I start talking what we want to make sure is that we don't set this to such a long time that it cuts off the first parts of my words and this is what that sounds like so you couldn't hear anything I was saying way too long let's try this area right here okay now when I start talking is it cutting off the first part of my words I think you'd probably go so I think generally I'm gonna go somewhere in the maybe the four milliseconds range not too far so it kind of eases in a little bit but not so aggressively alright next up is hold let's go ahead and crank that up and see what happens when we do that we can set all the way to two seconds and let's see what happens oh it's almost like our gate never engages anymore okay that's too extreme let's drop it down maybe to 0.3 seconds okay so what that does is basically after we stop talking it waits for this period of time before it allows the gate to engage so that's what the hole does I think at this point let's leave that at 0 or 0.5 that's the shortest we can do we'll come back and tweak that if we need to so next up is to release what does that do well when I stop talking in the levels fall down to the threshold the release is how long it takes before the expander or gate noise gate will kick in and apply this amount of range so it applies it in sort of a phased fashion it's not just all at once but what it does is it takes this amount of time point one six seconds before it gets up to the full 30 DB of gain reduction to essentially turn off the noise so let's go ahead and tweak these settings a little bit and see what happens if I go with a really fast release you can hear as soon as I stop talking the expander or gate kicks in now if I increase that let's see what happens so if I go all the way to the other end two seconds let's see what happens there it kind of fades out you notice you notice how the audit the noise sort of fades out as I stop talking that's what the release does for us now you have to decide and for your particular situation what makes sense the nice thing about having a longer release time is it doesn't sound so obvious and so fast and aggressive and so you know obviously if I go all the way down to 0.05 seconds again it kind of pulls the sound out immediately sounds weird sounds like I'm on like I'm a pilot talking on you know talking to my copilot something like that so if I pop it out here too maybe let's go to half a second and see how that sounds okay we're roughly at about half a second now little better but this is where it's subjective and you get to choose what makes the most sense for your particular situation there is another consideration here now if you're using a noise gate and your that you're only recording yourself or one person I think it's better to use a longer release because then it kind of gently fades the noise out and again not so obvious however if you are recording multiple people on a podcast I think you can sometimes get a little more aggressive but again you just need to kind of test it out and see what works best for your ear you have to trust your ears you have to be able to know and have an opinion about what sounds better so I think one thing that's really important is that every once in a while it should be a good idea to turn off the noise gate and see how things sound and then turn it back on and when you turn it back on does it sound better that's really a question you need to ask yourself okay so next up is range range is how much gain reduction it's going to do in other words when I stop talking how much is it going to pull those levels down and you can see right now I have it point down 30 dB now that's quite a lot let's try it something much milder maybe a minus 9 DB so you can see there it doesn't totally eliminate the noise but it makes it definitely a lot less prominent and this is little less obvious even than the 30 even with the long release time of 1 second so let's kind of look and see what happens visually as I stop talking you can see that slope is a little bit not quite as steep so it takes it a little bit longer before it fades out it's still getting most of it and in fact we could probably even come up a little bit more if we wanted to just to kind of test it again subtlety is the name of the game I think to effectively use a noise gate I generally prefer to be a little bit more subtle than a done really hardcore and aggressive I think that's probably not quite enough so let's go back over here I always say at least 6 I would I would I think I'm pretty comfortable with 9 DB of gain reduction so again let's see how that sounds yeah that does a pretty nice job now another thing you can do is check your breaths and see if your breaths are getting captured by the noise gates so if I take a breath after I let me go ahead and let it kick in let the noise gate kick in and then take a breath and let's see if it captures that if I breathe really loud it captures it but if I do a normal breath it doesn't capture it it actually leaves the noise gate in place that can help you and post to it just less work for you to do to kind of manage those breaths and they're not quite as I guess distracting so there's a look at the noise gate now we'll have to come back in to another episode where we take a look at the noise gate in the context of recording multiple people because when you're using a noise gate and you're recording multiple people it not only serves to help reduce some of the noise but it also kind of acts like an auto mixer and so there are some other considerations that you want to keep in mind when you're doing that so hope this was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 22,396

Keywords: RODE, RODECaster, RODECaster Pro, Noise gate, Noisegate, Noise-gate, Setting, Settings, Setup, How to, Tutorial

Id: yiKy6efd5cM

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020