Shure SM7B & GoXLR Setup For Live Streaming | Best Microphone Settings

before we get started though I'm going to assume that you have a stand or a boom arm or something so that you can get your microphone close to your mouth because without that it's going to sound terrible and pick up all of the room sound and just not be very good so these settings won't really matter if your microphone isn't set up correctly first okay so let's get started making our sm7b sound good with the go XLR and obviously to make things a little bit easier when I'm trying to explain volume and decibels and stuff I've added in an audio mixer on top of the actual software here so you can kind of see what I'm saying when I say it so first things first we have to set up our microphone gain because if we don't set that up correctly all the other effects and stuff we put on this microphone it's just going to sound terrible so to do that you need to press the mic setup and then as soon as I press that it's probably going to get quieter because now there's no effects on this microphone at all it's literally just a bland flat microphone and all you can hear is the gain so does that with the sm7b you can have this as a dynamic unless you have a cloud lifter or something then you'll probably need a condenser instead but if you don't have a cloud lifter you're going to need to just this Dynamic mic type and then set your gain I have mine at 50 decibels this microphone is very gain hungry and a lot of people will tell you you need 55 60 even more sometimes just to get it in this like good area however I tried this and obviously the go XLR is supposed to have up to 70 decibels of gain or preamp power or whatever you want to call it but for some reason when I had it set correctly so that it was like in the the 55 60s I wanted to get in the good range so like 58 I guess is around where it should be 58 or so will be the correct volume but when I added in the compressor and stuff it was still clipping because it's still peaking it just didn't sound very good for me so the way that I like to do it is have my gain slightly less in this area and then boost it up with the compressor later on so my gain settings in here are actually around 50. I like to have it at the very high of low or very low good so try and get your voice around there but I'm going to go for this 50 decibels and hopefully everything else sounds good by the end of it next we're doing our gate which is obviously the Noise Gate to help cut out any backgrounds this is going to be kind of individual and subjective depending on your location what your microphone sounds like how loud your houses are where you live or whatever or even how loud you speak it's in the way that we're going to do that is basically just turn the gate off effectively and then that allows us to actually figure out what level we should have the gate set up because obviously the gate is supposed to cut out any background noise or at least any noise when you're not speaking the best way to do that is if you stop speaking for a few seconds look at your audio meters which are obviously here and then see how loud your background noise is so let's do that and as you can hear or at least see my background noise is like -55 minus 50 ish on my meters so that way I know that my gate should be around -50 minus 45 or so so I'm going to put my gate to like minus 50. and then the attenuation is effectively how open or closed the gate is once it hits this number 100 means it's completely closed no audio is coming through whatsoever I don't like this some people do but I don't like the fact that it's on off and like a switch and I find that very unnatural sometimes especially on how strong this like gate is and stuff so I like to have the attenuation a little bit lower and I put mine at like 85 so I get a little bit of noise and it's more organic or natural feeling to my ears at least anyway but feel free to have 100 if you like it that or if you have a lot of background noise going on have it completely close off but for me I like it 85 attack as quick as possible so as soon as I start speaking I want this gate to open effectively and start working and then releases the opposite of that I want a slower fade out though so release is how long it takes to engage the gate once I've stopped speaking so I have mine at like 200 milliseconds so it's a very quick-ish but it's a Fade Out compared to how quickly it opens next we're going to move on to our compressor and honestly I like to do my compressor before doing my equalizer mostly because the compressor is kind of going to change the sound of your voice it compresses things down and makes it sound more balanced and a little bit more flat sometimes and then I can use the equalizer to add in any frequencies that I think are missing or things that just don't sound right later on I like to have a relatively strong compressor I like to sound like I'm on a radio show where things sound very obviously compressed flat balanced and there's going to be no real difference between whether like this the volume is kind of going to stay the same so for my compressor I have my threshold minus 25 decibels ratio of 5.6 to 1 attack at two milliseconds so it starts very quickly obviously and then release 25 milliseconds and makeup gain is kind of going to be custom for you so if I remove this makeup again right now obviously it's not going to sound quieter which I'll boost up in post so you can actually hear what I'm saying but the idea of makeup again is once you've compressed the high like audio down so it is compressed and flat you then want to bring it all back up with the makeup gain and you want it to be set around minus 12 decibels so you're aiming for this line here and your meters between -15 and -10 around this area here so for me that's going to be like 10 decibels of makeup gain and as you can see it's now hitting just underneath the peak like average speaking voice of me here is like minus 11 minus 12 decibels or so and that for me sounds good and then later on in OBS I can add other filters like a limiter and a little bit of extra gain and stuff to get it to that minus five so I don't peek don't clip or whatever when I'm live but for you just play around with this makeup game so you hit around -12 on these meters obviously next we're going to be doing The Equalizer which is going to be the thing that changes the sound of this microphone the most but something I want to say first is obviously on the back of the sm7b there's two switches for me I keep them flat don't change change those things obviously you can if you know exactly what you're doing but the majority of people keep this flat when it comes to the sm7b obviously it's a very dark microphone and by dark I mean it's very bass heavy it doesn't have a lot of clarity and it lacks a lot of that top end that you might want to have in and that was one of the issues I was having because in my brain I was like this is very bass heavy so my old equalizer would often remove a lot of the bass around here to try and counteract that and it just made everything sound very flat and had no good sound in there at all so instead this time around I kind of keep the bass in but add in a lot of the treble and Clarity up at the high end instead to get this more like professional sound that you're hearing now so for my equalizer obviously this down here at like 30 Hertz is sub bass it's stuff that you don't really hear that often or even human voices don't often go that low so I remove a bit of it because when a microphone is obviously picking up sound and stuff things in the background like air conditioning fridges is maybe some fans or whatever I don't know are going to be in this kind of area so I remove a little bit of this because my voice isn't that Bassy it's not going to be heard down there so put that at minus two and then in the actual base I like to increase it a little bit so I have both of these up for it like so it's 63 Hertz and 125 Hertz four plus four for both of those which is great and that adds a little bit of that basiness back in that everyone seems to like so for me personally I like to scoop out the mids on this microphone which is a very common thing that a lot of people do in the EQ anyway but a lot of the audio around there is going to be very muddy and just not sound very good if you leave it in so for me around 250 Hertz and 0.5 or 500 Hertz whatever you want to call it is -2 for both of those and then at one kilohertz and two kilohertz which is heading towards that like nasally sound which isn't going to sound good either I kind of leave that flax if you start increasing your like frequencies here you're going to add in a lot of that nasally sound which is is definitely not something you want to listen to for a long time especially on a live stream and finally we're actually at the treble section of the EQ now and as I said earlier on this microphone is very dark and lacks a lot of clarity and power and stuff that cuts through all the audio so adding things back in at like four kilohertz eight kilohertz and 16 really brings your voice to the the Forefront of the sound and ends up making it sound a lot more clear usually if you add this much treble into another microphone especially like condenser one it will sound terrible and probably pick up way too many like s sounds and stuff and be very harsh to listen to so for me with the sm7b at four kilohertz I add in three and then at eight kilohertz I add in six and that's 16 I add in six and as you can hear once you have all of this equalizer set up and all of the things done the way that I have at least on my voice I think it sounds very good so it has enough bass and Clarity to sound professional for a long period of time and when it comes to go XLR and setting up your microphone there's only really one thing left to do which some of you might not have if you have a go XLR mini but if you have a full-size go XLR you get a DSO which is the thing that removes a lot of the S sounds from your voice however as I explained earlier on this microphone was very dark so I had to add in that Clarity at the top end so I added a lot back in it 16 Hertz again on this equalizer so the de-esser you don't want to have on very strong if at all because obviously adding in the de-esser is going to counteract the treble you've just added in and it's just going to be kind of a waste of time so for my de-esser I have very low I only really have it at like 20 maybe 30 at the max but 20 is fine because without it this is kind of what it sounds like but then if I go up the like 20 or so I'm removing a lot of that like harsh s sounds if you go very high and then all the way to 100 it just removes everything and you end up sounding a little bit like you have a lisp because it just removes a lot of that like top end and S sounds which do add to your actual Clarity and your voice cutting through all the things so de-esser have it as low as possible preferably off or just kind of like 10 or 20 or so if you do have a lot of that harshness in the top end of your voice and if you set up this all correctly hopefully you would have gone for something that sounds a very flat and boring kind of like this to something a little bit more exciting and professional sounding like this instead obviously your voice is a little bit different to mine unless you happen to be English and Northern as well but obviously feel free to play around with the equalizer a little bit once this is all done because your voice is going to have different frequencies to mine you might have more bass less bass more travel more nasally than me who knows but play around with it and hopefully you can find a bright and sound for you anyway hopefully this video was useful for you and actually have a microphone that you're happy with the sound now but if you want to learn more about content creation and streaming and stuff check out these videos wherever they are I always forget and I will see you all in the next one

Channel: Nightow1

Views: 58,557

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Id: IJz7Q8Zs6jM

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023