The Allure Of Microphone Preamps For Voice Over

how could anybody doing voiceover justify spending two three or four thousand dollars on a high-end preamp why are they so cool what do they do and what do they add to a voiceover recording well i'm going to show you i'm lenny b voice over audio engineer let's make your voice sound better there's a pretty good chance that you have a great preamp in your audio interface whether it's a focusrite or an audient or an ssl they have what's called clean preamps and it just amplifies the signal of your low-level microphone amplifies that signal and makes it something that's big and bold and loud enough for your software to understand and be able to manipulate but there are a lot of people who um they choose to add an additional preamp and some of them can get pretty pricey and a lot of them are modeled after some of the classic hardware units and they can range in price from about four five six hundred dollars all the way up to two or three several thousand dollars why are they so cool well let me show you what a preamp actually does and to really explain this we need to talk about saturation because you've heard me talk about it in some of the videos if you subscribe to the channel you've seen me use soft tube saturation i use this a lot and i always say how it uh thickens up the sound of a voice and i'm going to show you exactly how it does it when i first saw this i'm like whoa i get it now the visual so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use a test tone and this tone is only going to give you an example of the voice that's running through a system and so that's 250 hertz i don't know what pitch that is but it all um associates with a pitch and you go all the way up the spectrum right so this is just a test tone and we're using this to replicate a very specific pitch that our voices would make when we're recording all right let's shut it off but i want you to see uh it's um it's a sine wave and it's a very clean wave so we're able to just look okay let's hear what that sound that frequency sounds like so we've got a test tone it's running through the meter which is the top one this is the input this is the output at the bottom and then i'm going to add this soft tube saturator and then it's running through the pro q3 by fab filter which has a uh they call it a spectrum analyzer which allows us to visually see which frequencies are being triggered and what's apparent what frequencies are apparent in the audio path so when we turn that back on you can see as i cycle up the pitch it's showing uh it's showing you know what what tone that is in the frequency analyzer of the eq and then when when you use an eq you're actually raising or attenuating specific frequency um areas in the spectrum of your audio so just to give you an idea of what what we're looking at here let me take that one off okay so what we do is when you have a tone and you've got your voice and i'm sorry if your dog is listening and uh getting annoyed by the tone he'd be he'd really be upset by that so let's look at a let's just look at 250 and we've got a zero level going in a zero level coming out and when i add i'm gonna i'm gonna turn on the soft tube okay what we're doing is we're only adding saturation and this is all going to make sense when we get down to a preamp but when you add saturation look what it does when i say it thickens up the audio all i'm doing is adding a little saturation watch what happens you add some saturation what uh what happens is that tone is still the same but you can hear it thicker and you can visually see that it's adding uh even and odd harmonics that's what these are called this is this is the color and this is what it does to the audio i'll take it off again we'll just listen to the difference and i'll i'll shut my mouth so you can hear it that's without it that's the pure tone and we'll slowly add it again you could listen [Music] now what happens is the volume ends up increasing so we would have to lower the output of this but i just wanted you to understand and see let's shut it off understand and see that it actually thickens the sound it adds material to the sound it's not just that tone so imagine what that can do to your voice it actually thickens up pieces and parts of the different tone in your voice so how do we relate that and what does that mean in terms of a preamp well a preamp and the hardware units they have uh either tubes or transformers that add those same kind of harmonics so when somebody says oh i just got this killer preamp and you'll see some preamps just have an input and output knob that's what they're doing you are adding harmonic content to actually thicken up of the voice this is very apparent and you can associate it with a guitar amplifier those are two preamps in some of the tube guitar amplifiers and when you raise the gain and you drive the signal into the tube amp the more you drive the more it adds subharmonic uh information and eventually if you drive it hard enough it turns into a distortion and it's not to be confused with an over's distortion like if your your input level is too high this is a a saturation and a distortion of the harmonics and in um in recording uh of music and vocals and guitar and keyboards and and drums that type of distortion can be pleasing and add a warmth and a compression kind of sound to it as well it's been described as that too so understand adding a preamp into your system it doesn't just allow you to get a more gain and more volume and preamps actually add content and add sound to your voice it's the only one of the only things that can add material to your voice whereas a compressor or an eq will actually remove material and filter things out so instead of the soft tube let's take a look at one of the other plugins that i use and talk about often which is the waves sheps omni channel andrew scheps is a award-winning producer for albums that you've heard of he's one of the guys behind the scenes behind the mixer board and he's worked with waves to put this together i love this because it has such great processors it's a multi-processor unit all in one and i think it's like 38 bucks or something uh on the waves website so i really do i use this a lot and it helps me i love the way the eq sounds and whatever so um i can go on and on about this there's a 10 off coupon code that i have and i'll put it in the the description of this video if you want um uh to get this and add it to your plugin collection but let's take a look at the this preamp and the first part of this uh plug-in the sheps omni channel it has a preamp which adds saturation and i would actually what i want to do is i want to show you the difference between this saturation from the soft tubes and this saturation we can see it visually so let's let's uh light up that test tone again and um so with the top with the soft tube you can see that looks a certain way and it's adding as you increase the gain it's adding different parts of the harmonic subharmonic content and now let's do the same thing with the shep so i've shut off i've shut off the soft tube and let's raise we want to be able to see this at the same time here let me see let's make it a little smaller so you can see it all right we're going to raise the saturation on this particular preamp and we'll raise it slowly [Laughter] and you'll see that that looks very different it also has different flavors this is odd harmonics this is even harmonics and it has a heavy harmonics which is i think both and they all look different okay what's the point here what do we what are we getting at and the reason why i want to show you this is the saturation is different from preamp to preamp and that's why some people may love the sound of the manly voxbox because that has a specific uh type of saturation that it adds has a sound it has a color they call that's how they describe it the soft tube saturation has a particular color and a sound to it so when you add saturation and add the thickness uh from specific preamps you're adding a different style and a different color and a different feel some preamps sound better on some sources than others so what's awesome about plugins is you're able to play with the stuff and get an idea of what that saturation and what that preamp sounds like without having to buy the you know the huge unit for several thousand dollars and one of the ones that uh is very sought after in the voice over world is the avalon 737 the hardware is near three thousand dollars if you actually want to buy the rack mount unit for this but universal audio has it in this software version which is awesome because it sounds so similar and they've modeled every little intricate detail to be just like the hardware unit but if you are working in the universal audio apollo universe you're able to access this and use it now before we start i want to tell you and just explain one thing what happens when you increase and we saw this a little bit earlier when you increase the gain and drive the tube to get that saturation you're also increasing the volume so that's why a lot of preamps and most of them will have they either have an auto feature or they'll have an input and now input gain and output level so as you increase the input gain on a preamp and get that saturation you're going to need to dial back the output gain and this is also common on units like the uh dbx286s it has a preamp and other features in it as well but you'll you'll notice there's an input and an output knob and that's the reason why they have that because you want to match you want to make sure that the signal level coming in is equivalent to the signal level coming out no matter what you do adding uh saturation or or whatever adding eq or adding whatever so um that's why i'm going to be looking closely at my input and output meters here so let's start the tone and you can see the level coming in is the same as the level coming out so as we um i'm gonna turn this gain all the way down and i'll turn it on and uh as i turn the gain up slowly turning up you'll see the saturation and you'll see the color and the visual until i get to zero actually it's a little bit more on the output meter so now we're matched and this is very different from uh the other uh saturation that we saw right the visual is different it's got this this uh high part saturation that wasn't apparent in some of the other ones which gives it a different tone and a different sound as i increase the gain the output level and the overall volume of what this unit is doing is going up so then we go to this here the output meter and turn it back down so i'm already almost at zero because i need to crank this up pretty high for you to see visually see and just because we're this high and you're seeing this saturation content if i lower it that doesn't mean that it's not there um a lot of times it's important to understand that adding saturation with a preamp is a very uh minimal process if you add just a little saturation it ends up doing a lot to the voice so you know it doesn't have to so if i were to add let's say just this much saturation and i'm only uh driving the gain this much i would need to go to my output and try to match that output gain which is there so now i'm adding saturation if i want a little more now my output meter is way too high i'm going to have to back that down there we go to zero again so that is uh that's the idea behind saturation and how a preamp adds material to your voiceover and that's why they're so cool and that's what a lot of people know in the music industry and the production of music and bands it's really cool to hear what this sounds like on a drum set it's really cool what saturation sounds like and what it can do to a bass guitar for instance or if you hear an incredible vocal in some of the amazing recordings uh that is a part of what's contributing to that sound is the preamps and the saturation once i saw visually what adding saturation and harmonic content does once i saw that visually what it can do for a voice it was kind of eye opening and i go okay now i get it now i see why some people can justify spending uh thousands of dollars on a preamp or even a couple hundred bucks on a great preamp uh modeled plug-in uh i see the value of it now and i hope i hope it's helped you and and uh kind of giving you some more toys to play with really you know adding saturation is just another way to optimize the sound of a voice a reminder to hit up my website if you're looking for free tips or free techniques for voiceover recording i also have a training courses for sale there on eq and other voice production processes i think your voiceover sound should inspire you if you love the sound of your voice when you're recording for voiceover or and you love the tone and you love the quality that you're getting it's just going to drive you to do more and do better and be more creative so let's make your voice sound better i'm lenny b audio engineer thanks for watching

Channel: Lenny B

Views: 17,524

Keywords: Voice Over, Voiceover, Microphone, Scheps Omni Channel, UnivesalAudio, Voice Actor, Microphone Preamp, Preamp Gain, Tube Preamp, Waves Plugins

Id: YcDHbK0D7XE

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021