Set The DBX 286s For Great Voice Overs!

if you're not sure how to set up the dbx 286s with your microphone in this video i'll quickly walk you through everything you need to know to make it sound amazing with any mic and I'm going to do it in terms even a beginner will understand if you're doing some research to see if the dbx 286s is a good fit for you I'm going to show you why this little beast is one of the most popular mic processors available today when set correctly it'll give you that thick commanding broadcast sound that the professionals have and it does it at an affordable price first make sure you're using an XLR cable directly from your mic to the mic input on the back of the dbx 286s then using a TRS jack connect from the output which is a line level out of the DB x2 the line level input in your audio interface are getting these connections right with the correct cables guarantees that the signal level will deliver the best results and the lowest noise in the system if your audio interface has the option make sure it's switched to accept a line level signal set the input gain of your audio interface about a quarter to two-thirds of the way up so that you get some volume in your headphones we're gonna fine tune this for optimum settings towards the end of the walkthrough if you're using a condenser microphone engage the 48 volt phantom power button so the yellow light illuminates but use caution as phantom power can damage some microphones including some ribbon mics so I'd double check your specs just to make sure 48 volt phantom power is not necessary for dynamic microphones but I'm using a cardioid condenser in this case so I'll keep it on so let's set all of the knobs to the counter clockwise position and you're gonna notice it's gonna start sounding a lot different and that's our starting position here so it's not as loud I'm gonna just crank up the output so you can make sure you hear my voice we're going to start with the gain this increases the low-level signal coming from the microphone so you want to start at low and slowly turning up the gain knob clockwise so that your loudest speech just barely hits and illuminates the yellow LED the red LED clip indicator should never liked if the red LED illuminates at any time you've gone too far and you want to pull back now on to the compressor section make sure the process bypass is not engaged and that LED is turned off one quick note here that the lower the line input gain the more noticeable the compressor drive effect is going to be I suggest a more transparent or unnoticeable compression process is best so setting the preamp as we just did earlier I think yields the best results for speech in my opinion let's set the density at about five to start and we'll come back to that and slowly turn up the drive until the six decibel a gain reduction LED is lit for regular speech and the nine is lit for excited speech one two three four five six haha one two three four five more or less drive is not wrong it's just going to produce this do a different sound for you the more Drive you add the less dynamic range between the loud and the quieter sounds have all you moves and your consonants and words like T's and peas will be limited and your breaths and vowels will be more apparent in your recording now back to the density knob this controls how quickly that reduction turns back to the unreduced level so if you do the knob all the way clockwise it's fast it it reduces and then jumps back to normal levels quickly and if you lower it on some of the lower numbers it takes a long time to reduce back to normal levels dbx tells us that slower settings lower numbers are useful for reducing unwanted noise behind vocals and acoustic instruments if that's our Z recording while faster settings are useful for dating percussive sounds so for recording speech like voiceover I like to set it towards the middle of the Ring so that all the lights are just about off by the end of the space between sentences I believe this delivers a more natural sound I like to set the enhancer before I set the de-esser I believe they work well especially when you use them together the enhancer is basically a simplified EQ that can boost the low and high detail of your voice so what I like to do is start by slowly raising the low frequency detail until you hear kind of a pleasing warm color to your voice I prefer to use more low frequency detail if the voice is going to be the only audio in my entire production and I'd like to fill up the entire frequency range but if there's music or other elements that I'm gonna be including in my production in the back of my voice I might opt to use a little bit less but for for just purely voice I like to have a nice warm sound I like to use the high-frequency detail to accentuate the clarity and in the air and the breath in my voice and words you might raise this high-frequency detail and feel it's too sharp or too harsh but that is where the de-esser comes in now I've raised this and you may have that feeling like it's a little bit too sharp or too tinny once I hear that air accentuated in my voice I use the de-esser to filter out some of some of those sharp sounds but not all of them I filter out the sharp sounds during my s's and other harsh frequencies first what I do is identify the harsh sound with the frequency control and then set the level where the filter becomes active so let's turn this threshold up so it's using it's doing it all I'll usually go a little tend to over accentuate the threshold first over too much and then sweep and see where those those offending frequencies are see where those offending frequencies are seems like the majority of those frequencies are for me somewhere right in there that's where it's reducing it the most then I'll return to the threshold and back it off where it's unnoticeable and the end result is pleasing so it's it's a just filtering out those harsh harsh frequencies but I still have that high detail in my voice the expander/gate is the rock star of this unit it does an amazing job of eliminating room noise and computer fans and traffic noise from the outside and anything else it'll get rid of anything else that you really don't want to hear in the background of your recording now at this point after we've set these you can hear the fan from my computer you hear a little bit of the echo in my slightly treated room it's not professionally treated but I do have some room treatment to prevent the echo in the room this is basically a volume valve that prevents sound from pressing through it until a higher volume threshold is reached and you want it to open so when you're not speaking it lowers the microphone signal and when you speak at a certain level and it picks up that volume threshold it opens the mic until you stop talking and then it shuts it off again and you'll hear it working in action as we kind of scroll through these knobs here the threshold control sets the level that the door will fully open and let your voice pass through and we have to turn this up just a little bit and we'll come back to this one but you need to turn it up a little bit to see the effect so this controls the level of that door where it's going to completely open to let the voice pass through the red in the red LED indicates when the signal goes below the threshold when I stop talking and when I talk it's when it's open so you can hear it opening and closing there I like to just get rid of that room noise and then maybe go up a couple clicks higher so let me turn it off again you'll hear the room noise and cycle it up and that room noise goes away and because my voice is louder than the room noise it's louder than where the threshold is set and when it hears my voice it opens up the door when I stop talking it closes the door again now the ratio is where you set the amount of attenuation applied how much the door closes does it close to be completely silent or does it still let a little bit of that volume through of the room noise low ratio settings and higher gate threshold settings yield a more gentle effect whereas a higher expansion ratio z' work better for kind of abrupt gating which we don't want we want it to sound kind of natural so you hear the room noise there in the background and I'm having it close the door but not completely shut like this is because that could cut off some of the beginning parts of my voice it doesn't sound as natural that way so just quiet enough there and it's opening and closing to eliminate that background noise that brings us to the output game now it's really useful to compensate for changes in reduction that the compressor has made now I like to return to the process bypass button and try to match the processed sound with the unprocessed sound and I'll show you how to do that this is without all of these one-two-three-four and this is with it this is without and this is with I try to make to match the overall volume to match it so if I bypassed and you see this output doesn't work here but I'll turn it up a little bit now you can hear it's much louder 1 2 3 4 or 5 or quieter quieter so I try to match the 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 that's pretty close then what I'll do is return to my audio interface and fine adjust the clean input gain to reach the optimum level about negative 10 DB on my DAW so to compare this is what my voice sounds like going directly into my audio interface with no voice processing and this is how it sounds after giving your voice a real punchy bold thick professional sound from the dbx 286s I hope you found this helpful now I want to hear from you what's been preventing new from increasing the audio quality of your voiceover I'm happy to answer any questions about recording editing or producing voiceovers thanks for checking this out subscribe to my channel for more upcoming voice recording tips and professional techniques [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Lenny B

Views: 38,933

Keywords: DBX 286s, Mic Processor, Voice Over, Setup, recording, DBX 286, Preamp, Microphone, Walkthrough

Id: mTg-HzHTsec

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020