Audio Production : Record Better Audio

1. Introduction and What you're going to learn: Hi there, It's Thomas George, and welcome to this audio production class. In this class are showing you how you can record and process better audio. This class is for video makers, audio engineers, YouTube as podcasters, voice-over artists, online course creators, or for anyone who wants high-quality audio. In this class, I've got loads of stuff to show you. I'll start off by teaching you all about audio recording gear. So things like microphones, audio interfaces and microphone accessories will then look at treating your room or professional and DIY methods so you can record high-quality audio at home. We'll then look at how to use Audacity, which is free open-source audio recording and editing software for Mac and Windows, show the essentials of how you can use the software for recording, editing, and processing audio. This includes teaching you how to record or capture your audio in Audacity, as well as how to play back then export your audio. After this, I'll show you some essential editing techniques in their software, as well as how to process your audio. This includes how to remove background noise, as well as how to use EQ and compression. Okay, So make sure you join me in this class if you want to learn the essentials of how to record high-quality audio. 2. My Recommended Budget Audio Recording Setup: Hi and welcome to this lecture while I'm going to show you what equipment you can use to get high quality audio on the budget. So you'll notice here. I've got a few different pieces of equipment. I've got this microphone, which is a sure sm 58. I also just applied this foam cover. The shore, sm 58 does have a built in pop shield for live performance, but at home it is best, really to try and get the best quality audio at source. Having a pop shield is a better option. But a phone cover like this can still do a great job against some of those plus of sounds, which is a blast of air you can get from certain words. These phone covers as well only cost a few dollars. Okay, moving on. We also have this box here. This is an audio interface. This allows you to record the microphone into the computer. The one I recommend here is the focus right to I to this has two inputs on this. Really great. If you're starting out, is quite inexpensive around about $100 and allows you to record your audio into your computer, and also you can hook up your monitors or your speakers via this audio interface as well. There's also a solar version, which has one microphone pre amp so you can just plug in one microphone, which is even more inexpensive if you want to say even more money. If you do want to record more than one microphone, though, do you recommend getting there to input version, which is called the Focus right? Scarlett to I t. Another thing you'll notice is this Microphone death stand. These are great if you want to do podcasts or voiceover work at home, these are around about $20. The next thing we've got here is an XLR cable. To connect this microphone into the audio interface on XLR cable will cost you around about $10 and the next thing you'll need is a pair of speakers to monitor your audio or a pair of headphones or effects. Also, if you want to save even more money, you can probably get all of their second hand for under $150 1 more thing to mention is, if you do want to recall this audio, you will need a computer or a laptop with some audio recording software, so this microphone actually is an analog signal. We need to convert it to a digital signal with this audio interface, and then we need to record it in a laptop or computer to just be aware that you will need to record this with Eva, a laptop or a computer. If you don't have a computer or laptop that you can use, there are two alternatives. One is You can get an audio interface that records onto your phone or tablet or two is. You can use a handy recorder such as this one here, which is the zoom hate five that actually records onto an SD card so you don't need a laptop or computer. You can plug the microphone directly in one of these inputs on record onto an SD card will go over handy recorders in more detail later on, so you may not think this equipment is the most inexpensive. However, it will give you the best quality audio at source for this price points. I do recommend having a look at this microphone, this shore sm 58 or a similar dynamic microphone and also this audio interface. The focus, writes Scarlett. Try to or if you just want to record one, input the solo when mixing your audio A. Recommend using a pair of speakers or high quality headphones. However, when recording, I do recommend checking good audio to make sure it's not distorting or that there's too much background sound. So for this, a cheap pair of earphones can get started for recording. But I don't recommend this for mixing. So just to show you what you can achieve with this equipment, I have been recording this entire lecture with this microphone and audio interface. I'm sure you can hear that sounds pretty decent. There are other alternatives to the set up, including a USB microphone, which is at a similar price on doesn't actually require in order interface. However, I do feel having a separate microphone and audio interface gives you more options. For example, you can use this microphone in over situation such as location recording or even on stage. Having a separate audio interface also means you can upgrade your microphone or even use a different microphone, such as a shotgun microphone, which be looking at later on so thank you for watching this lecture. Hope you found some useful information. The next few lectures were going to go into even more detail about microphones on audio interfaces. 3. Microphones for Video and Filmmakers: Hello and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at different types of microphone. You can use four film. So when recording films, sometimes you might not want to have the microphone in shots. However, the audio is still very important. So in this lecture I'm going to go through four different types of microphone that you could potentially use when recording audio for film. So the first microphone I'm not actually counted. It's the built in microphone on the camera, so this is the audio from the built in mic on camera. As you can hear, it doesn't really sound that good. This could be OK if you're filming a vlog, wake up close the camera or in situations by all here isn't that important, However, if it's the film, if you want to do something professional, definitely don't recommend using built in mic on your camera. Next type of microphone is a dynamic microphone, so this type of mike is great for any voice, servers or podcasts. For this example, I'm using the shore sm 57. However, if you want to film video, have Mike out of shocked. This may not always sound the best. This is an example of the audio from the shore sm 57 right now. And it's not the best for situations like this because it's just too far away. However, for voiceovers, this is an excellent mike for beginners. Moving along. We have a shotgun microphone. This is the type of microphone you want to use for film because you can have it out of shot because of hyper directional, so you can point out your subject from a distance. Obviously, the closer you are, the better it will sound. But it's still much better than using. A dynamic microphone had much better than using the built in mic on your camera. So this microphone amusing right now, is actually the road video Mike, and it sits on top of your camera. Sophie using a DSLR or a mere less camera where camera that allows you to plug in a microphone. This could be a great option so you can plug it in, and it will actually record the audio onto your SD card so you can plug it in and it will add the audio onto your SD card so you don't need to sink the video and the audio. In post, however, it does sit on top of your camera, and if you have any shots where you really are from a distance, it's still not going to sound that good because you want the Micah's close as possible, even with a shotgun microphone. But for vlogs or situations where you're up close to the camera, this could be a great choice for recording audio. With Phil on, the audio you can hear right now is actually being recorded on this microphone to run about four feet away. Still sounds OK. Could be best if the mikes up close. So if I was a lot closer to the camera on the microphone, it would sound a lot better. What we really want is a shotgun microphone up close, which is where a boom standard comes in handy right now. The audio you can hear is recorded for a shotgun microphone on a boom stance, so you can't see in shock right now. But if you swap to the other camera, you can see this microphone. So this is great for situations where you don't want the microphone, your shop, but you want them. Mike as close as possible. So if you're going to be moving around, you will need someone to operate. This boom stands. You can get Mike stands and have a shotgun mic on a mic stand if you're going to be stood in the same place. But if it's a conversation between two people or someone's going to be moving around, you'll need someone to operate boom sand. So using a microphone like the one you can hear right now is a great shotgun microphone for recording audio for film. You don't have to use this microphone. I do recommend they're having a shotgun mike and having as close as the actor as possible to get the highest quality audio. If you don't want the microphone in shop on recording audio for film on the next type of microphone is a lavallee, a microphone. It's actually recording onto my phone. You can get Love Mike's that plug into power packs, and you can plug them into your camera or into an audio interface or portable recorder. But for this it just lets you record onto your phone, which could be super useful If you're recording for film, I do recommend using a love Mike as well as a shotgun microphone as a backup on it can be useful for certain applications. This could be useful for really wide shots or when the actor is really far away from the camera on the boom. Operator can't get into the right position without being in shocked. So let's just do a quick test off the different microphones now. So this is an example off what the audio sounds like. This is an example of what the audio sounds like. This is an example of what the audio sounds like. This is an example of what the audio sounds like. So I hope you realize, now that using a shotgun microphone does make a big difference. You want the Michael's closest possible on out of shot, really when recording audio for film. And I do also recommend using a love Mike as a backup mike. And definitely don't use the built in mic on your camera unless you really need Teoh. And it's in situations where the audio isn't too important. But if you want to take this seriously, just remember, audio is very important. So thanks for watching this lecture. I hope you found useful. I'll see you in the next one 4. Different Microphones and their uses: Hello and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at microphones. So if you want to record any kind of audio, getting an external microphone is very important. Of course, On a lot of cameras and laptops, you will have a built in mic, but it's never as good as having an external microphone. So here, right from 2 May I have a selection off different microphones. I'm going to quickly go through them now so you can hear what they're each individually sound like. So the 1st 1 here is the electro voice. Ari 20 Mike Number two is the shore, sm 57. The 3rd 1 is the zoom hate five. They're moving along. We have the shore sm 58. And then we have this microphone here, The blue Yeti. They're not here. I've got a rode NT G one. This is a shotgun microphone and then down about two lapel mikes. This is the first lapel mike, which is the road link and then below this I have the road. Smart laugh. Plus on. Now let's go into a lot more detail, starting with this first Mike, the Ari 20. Okay, so this first microphone is the electro voice, Ari 20. It's this microphone here, as you can probably hear it sounds great. The sound you can hear right now is the sound recorded into this electro voice, ari 20 of no processing apart from gain, because all of these mikes will be at the same volume level, because sometimes if you hear audio louder, your mind will play tricks on you and you think it's better. So it's a great clear microphone you may have seen it before is very popular for podcasts, for radio shows for voiceover work. Very classic microphone hasn't changed in such a long time. There are different models similar to this, but this is the one that I like. The electro voice Ari, 20 as you can see as well, is quite a large microphone, and it is quite heavy, so it may not be ideal for location recording, but it does sound great if you hear this microphone compared to the built in microphone on my laptop right now. So so much different on the built in mic on the camera. It's so much better than any built in microphone, but it is quite expensive, Mike It's a great one. If you want to consider doing a podcast work and the voiceovers or any radio shows, the next microphone is this one here. This is the Shure SM 57. This is another classic microphone. It's instrument Micah's. Well, you go to any big recording studio. There will always have plenty of these microphones. It's we kind of go to jack of all trades entrant microphones great for snag drums. Great for guitars. Also fantastic for live performance, you'll notice, though it doesn't have a built in pop shield. So we'll have to have a pop shield or pop filter. We may get some close ifs. It is very durable, though on it can withstand a lot of life performance. So someone knocks over laxed and it probably won't break. I don't ever recommend dropping the microphone, but these two microphones, especially the 57 58 we look at later very durable, so going back to the 57 you can hear now has a great tone. It's also being used for voiceover work. It's also even being used for presidential speaking, so it's a very good jack of all trades microphone, but especially great for instruments for a microphone is also quite inexpensive. It's around about $100 new. Or you could buy it second hand for a lot less as well, although it may not be the number one mike for voice overs, if you can find a great deal, it's a great my toe have as a backup, or it's a travel microphone as well. So if you're just starting out with microphones and you want to save some money and not spend too much on the mic, I do recommend having look at this all the one jack of all trades instrument microphone, the shore sm 57. Also, be sure to check out the PdF attached this lecture. Want more information about these microphones? Okay, going along. We have the zoom hate five in the middle here. This is actually a handy recorder, so it's more than just a microphone. We have this microphone on top this X Y pattern. This stereo Mike actually allows you to attach different types of microphones that up on the Boston we have two inputs, so you can actually recall two different microphones into this at the same time and record this one on the top. So this is great for filmmakers. Location recorders you want to be out about, But you don't want to actually take a laptop with you. This you can all record just on this one. Device on what you can hear right now is actually been recorded onto an SD card. There are various different handy recorders out there. Zoom on the main ones that actually create them. There's a zoom H one which is similar to this without the inputs. This is a zoom hate five. There's also the zoom hate six, which is very popular, which has four different mic inputs. So if you recording our location, you don't take a laptop with you on audio interface. I definitely recommend having a look at the Zoom Hedge. Five on moving along. We have the shore sm 58 similar to the short s and 57. However, this one has a metal pop shield, which is why it's very popular for life performance. So you don't read a pop shield like these over the top has one built in, so it's very durable, which is why it's also used for live performance. If you see your favorite rock band, a swing in the microphone around the cable. It probably be OK if it's the shore sm 58. It's also quite inexpensive, around about $100 on a great microphone for life performance similar to the 57 but mainly for vocal live performance. So if you want to sing or you don't do a conference, I recommend having a look at the shore sm 58. So for the short sm 58 actually all of these microphones here that I'm going to talk to you about there are over alternatives. Thes are really just the classic Go to Mike's. If you want to check out of a company's, please feel free to do that. Also, be sure to check out the PdF attached this lecture for more information about these microphones. If you can't quite remember everything that I'm saying, okay, going along, we have this USB microphone, which is the Blue Yeti microphone. It's a USB microphone because we don't need on audio interface on analog to digital converter. It's got one built in all. We need to do it. Just plug in the USB and we're good to go this microphone has different polar patterns, and it can be used in different situations. If you just wants to a voice over there like this, I do recommend using cardio, which would just pick up really the front off the microphone. If you are recording a band or room, you can use the Omni Polar Pattern on. It also has a figure of eight pro Lopata, which might be useful if you're recording to vocalists or two singers at the same time. In the PDF document attached to this lecture, I have included more information about polar patents. So this is a great, inexpensive microphone. If you just want to plug in and play and not have any audio interfaces you can use. This microphone is very popular for online course. Creators also live streamers. It doesn't quite sound as good as having a dedicated analog to digital converter or an audio interface. The XLR microphones, like these ones here will sound better, but it is good to start with. And if your brand new you don't to spend too much money on audio gear, I do recommend having a look at a USB microphone such as this one. The blue Yeti. Okay, and next is a shotgun, Mike. It's actually a condenser shotgun, Mike by road. This one is great for any video makers on. They don't want their mike in shot. So it's actually super cardio ID, which means it has a very directional pattern, so you can actually use it from a distance as long as you pointed in the right direction. So it's very popular to use a condenser shotgun, like in the movies, films TVs, but they don't want the microphone and shot. So this one's actually quite inexpensive for one of these types of Mike's So Ryan, about 100 to $200. But in the big movies, big TV sets there will spend a lot of money on these kind of microphones. So this one actually requires phantom power or additional 48 volts. He can turn on phantom power or the plus 48 V button. Normally on your audio interface or sometimes inside your computer, just make sure the gains all the way down before you turn on Phantom Power on gradually increase it. So this is a great mike. If you want to actually record audio for video and you don't want to have the mike in shot . Okay? The next microphone is a lavallee, a microphone. The notice Here I've got these two Clipper Mike's the top one here is the road filmmaking kit or road link on. This is great if you want to record audio video, so you'll see these clip on likes on a lot of new shows. A lot of interviews. So if you can't actually get a shotgun, Mike there or you want to have a mic closer to you can use one of these love Mike's. So this first microphone is the Road Link filmmaker kits that has two of these power packs . One of them attach is to the microphone, and the other one can attach to your camera or to your audio interface. So these are great if you're out and about and you want to record audio with video. These are quite expensive around about $300 on the next level. Air Mike is a lot more inexpensive I'm going to tell you about now, so there's microphone below. You might be able to hear the difference. This is the road smart love plus, and this actually attacked us to your phone so you can record audio into your phone, fusing iPhone. You might have to have a double, but it works absolutely fine. So if you're out on, all you have is your phone review that have a camera or on audio interface or a zoom H five . A handy recorder, for example. You could just grab this microphone on your phone and start recording high quality audio and even use the camera on your phone if you want to create a flog. So these are useful for YouTubers vloggers who don't want to take much gear with them you need. It's a small microphone on your camera. Okay, so I've gone through a selection off my favorite microphones here, and they all have different uses. It really depends what you want to record audio for. If you recording audio for podcasts or voice overs, you may want to consider this ari 20. If you want to record instruments or for live performance, maybe have a look at the shore s and 57. If you want to record vocals live or for conferences, maybe have a look at the shore sm 58 for a USB microphone This is a great one, This blue yeti. It's a lot more inexpensive than actually buying audio interface. However, it may not sound as good. Zoom hate. Five. This handy recorder is very useful for video makers who don't want to take laptops or order you interfaces with them. We need to take is this small little recorder. If you're recording for video and you do want to capture high quality audio, do you recommend having a look at shotgun microphones? This can be more expensive, but they do get a much better sound than generally one of these love Mike's, which is still great, though. So if you do want to clip on Mike, if you're doing an interview, that kind of thing I do recommend having their look at love Mike, the wireless power pat ones. This film making kit will generally sound better. The ones that go into your phone, however, is still very useful, and I actually carry this little smart left plus in my pocket at all times. So in case having an idea or a video American film it wherever I am, okay, just for another quick comparison. Let's go through what these microphones sound like So the 1st 1 here is this electro voice , Ari 20. The next one is the shore sm 57 going along. We have zoom hate five. Then we have the shore sm 58. Then we have the blue Yeti USB microphone up here we have the road nt do one shotgun microphone. Then we have these two lapel mics. The 1st 1 is the road link. This is the filmmaker Kit on the one blow is the road smart laugh plus then just for comparison, we have the built in mic on our laptop and then we have built in mic on that camera. So hopefully now you should realize not to use the built in mic on your laptop or camera and to definitely get an external microphone. So I hope you've enjoyed my selection of different microphones. We understand a little bit more about what they sound like and how they can be useful. So thank you for watching this lecture. I hope you found it useful. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Microphone Accessories: Hello and welcome to this lecture. We're going to be looking at some recommended microphone accessories, so if you have a microphone and audio interface, you might want to consider getting some accessories for your microphone to help you improve the quality off your audio. This fierce accessory here it's kind of all in one package is a mic stand, a shock mount on the pop shield so this Stan could be useful when recording audio on your desk. So for a podcast or even a voiceover on the shot, Married helps reduce some vibrations. For example, bumps on the desk all movement of your feet on. Then we have a pop shield, so this is very useful for reducing some of the close of sounds. So these are blasts of air that come from saying certain words. One thing to know is this does not come of a microphone, however, is great for lightweight microphones such as the shore s and 57 or the short s and 58. But if you want to use a bigger, heavier microphone like this one here, the electro voice Ari 20. I don't recommend this mic stand this microphone stand package however, is great fuel beginner as it really is all the one device accessory. If you want to record podcasts or tutorials on next, is this one speaking into right now, which is the more deluxe and far superior version of what I just showed you? This is a lot sturdier allows you to move. The microphone, however, is a lot more expensive, but it doesn't allow you to hold much heavier microphones. I do you recommend this for podcasts, voiceovers, or if you want to record audio on your desk, these are excellent, but do cost a lot more than the first package that I showed you. So it only really recommend this. If you want to take recording audio seriously, if you're beginning, the first package is great for a lightweight microphone. If you're just starting out, though, I do recommend spending the extra money on the better quality microphone than just a boom stand like this. Okay, and moving along. We have this death stand here. This has a solid metal base and allows you to actually have much heavier microphones on this stand. This death stand is quite heavy, though I don't recommend it for traveling but it doesn't allow you to hold much heavier. Mike's such as this one, the electro voice Ari 20 and can be useful for podcasts or any work in the studio where you want your microphone on the desk moving along. Here we have this large reflection filter. This is great if you have a room that has a lot of reflections, and you want to make the room sound a lot better without actually treating the room. You can use a reflection filter like this, so this will reduce some of the reflections in the room. These can be quite expensive, but they can be great if you're using a certain type of microphone, such as a condenser microphone, which is more sensitive, then a microphone like this, which is a dynamic microphone but only really recommend having a look at a reflection filter. If you do have a room that doesn't sound the best and has a lot of reflections, I'd always recommend trying to find the best place to record audio. However, if it's not quite possible and you're still getting a lot of reflections, a reflection filter like this could be a great addition to your recording audio set up moving along. We have a pop shield here, so this could be very useful for reducing some off the close of sounds to These are the blasts of air that you may get from speaking into the microphone. Certain microphones, such as the Short s and 58 also the electro voice Ari 20 do have a built in pop shield, but it can be great to double up to actually reduce some of those Pelosis sounds. If you're using a condenser microphone rather than a dynamic microphone like these, I do recommend getting a pop shield as condenser microphones can be a lot more sensitive to blast of air. There are other types of pop shields as well, such as this, which are made from a tight light material. So these basically do the same thing, but they're less durable. They are, however, less expensive than the metal pop shields. If you're on a budget, though, or maybe even if you're traveling and you want to be lightweight, I do recommend getting one of these foam microphone covers, which can help reduce some of those place of sounds as well. It won't sound quite as good as a pop shield but could be better than not having a pop shield at all. So if you recording outside and using a shotgun microphone, do you recommend using a wind muffler so these could be very useful for reducing any wind sound? There are of a microphone accessories available thes of the main ones that I use. If you're just starting out, I do recommend getting this first accessory packs that talked about the stands for shock mounts on the pop shield. But this will only really work with a more lightweight microphone, however, is great for podcast or tutorials or voice overs, and it is quite inexpensive. So thank you for watching this lecture. Hope you found it useful. We understand now just some of the accessories you can use for microphones from recording audio. 6. Boom Operating Tips: Hello. Welcome to this lecture. I'm going to show you a few tips operating a boom stand, so tip number one is toe. Have the microphone as close as possible to the subject, ideally about two feet away, if possible. You also want to make sure that the microphone is pointing at the subject's mouth, not just in the direction you want to point out their mouth because this is hyper directional, and it will sound a lot better pointing at the subject's life, then just kind of in their direction. You also want to make sure that the distance is always the same. So if the subject is moving, make sure you keep the same distance between the microphone on the subject. This is important because it may affect the sound quality if the distance changes throughout the shot. Next is the know the script. So if there's a part of the script where the subject stands up or if they're moving or if there's two or more people, you may have to change the position of the microphones. We really need to know the script. Some top boom operators actually know the script as well as some of the actors. This is very important because you need to make sure that the microphone is in position before the actors start talking. It's also very important to remember that small movements can cause vibrations that will be picked up by the microphone. So using a big understand that allows you to put the cable inside can really help with this . Otherwise, cable will be on the outside and might actually bash against the stand to cause additional unwanted noise, moving your hand on a boon Stanick and cause additional unwanted sound. Do you really want to keep movements as minimal as possible? There is a technique, though, to actually move the mic without causing too much sound. So if you hold the boom stand between your thumb and index finger on twist with your other hand, you can rock the mic. This will cause minimal sound of allies. You're moving your hands around calls a lot of noise, which may ruin the shots. My next tip is about being aware off lighting. So if you controlling the boom, just be careful where you actually have it. You want it close a subject as possible. However, you don't want it causing any shadows. If you cause a shadow onto one of the actors faces, for example, you completely ruin the shot. So work where the camera operator and find the best place to have the boom mic without causing any shadows. Also, you may want to be more careful of the lights when you're in the studio rather than natural lighting outside on. The next tip is trying not to be too distracting to try not to make any sudden movements or noises that may distract the actors and also try not to be in their eye line or making the eye contact as it may distract them whilst they're speaking. Also, be aware of what kind of shoes you're wearing. Make sure they're not noise issues, or he may add some additional noise to the shots. There is something you can use called Hush heels, which is patting material which sticks to the bottom of your shoes to kind of mitigate any foot movements. One more thing to mention is I'd look at getting a shock amount as well, like this one here, as this will reduce vibrations on any unwanted noise. On the next tip is to learn some camera lingo. Maybe learn about lenders because you will be working with the camera operator. And you really want to know the language about filmmaking. We might embarrass yourself and not know where to actually go or what to do. For example, no in different types of lenses and how wide they are that you know how close you can get to the subject without being in shot. So these are some of my top tips for operating a boom stand. I found this lecture useful, and I'll see you in the next one. 7. Microphone Accessories to Reduce Wind Noise: Hello. Welcome to this video. I just want to show you some outside audio recording tips. So out now in the big park is a little bit windy, and you might be able to hear on the shotgun microphone. Now some of the wind sound. This could be very distracting when you're recording a video, really don't want the wind sound, especially if you outside there's a few different things you can do. So we can get is some wind noise reduction foam in sickness onto a shotgun? Mike, we should get rid of some of the wind sound. So let's add this now. We might be able to hear that it's reduced some of the wind side. If you're having a lot of wind sound, you can get a wind Mufleh, so it's a lot bigger. It's also called a dead cat. Not really sure why, however, Let's to touch this now, and you might be able to hear the difference, and hopefully it will reduce some of the wind sacked. If it's really, really windy, though it might not reduce. Also, just be careful and find a good location. Maybe that's surrounded by trees or isn't in a really windy location. Okay, now I've added the window flower you might be able to hear. That's reduced some of this wind sound. Remember, this is a shotgun, Mike. If you do want this out of shots, you can keep it further away. But just be careful with wind. Sound way you are Maybe not record audio on top of a hill or some of super windy, maybe by the beach. It's not going to get rid of all of the wind side, but will reduce it. Also notice here I've got a lapel microphone and level there, Mike, and this has a small wind muffler as well, so you can get these wind mufflers for this small clip on love. Mike's as well. I just want to make this quick video just to give you a comparison off the wind. Sound with and without any kind of wind reducing foam or even a win Mufleh. Another quick thing is, if you recording outside, try and point your microphone in the same direction that the wind is traveling so reduced that breeze sound 8. Audio Interfaces and Examples: I welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at audio interfaces. So in front of me now I have four different audio interfaces that each have their own advantages and that each at different price points. So in audio interface has a few different functions. And I'm going to quickly run through them, though. So this microphone here, this is plugged in Irvine XLR Cable on this will send an analog signal. So we plugged this XLR cable into our audio interface on Then we can increase the gain with the microphone pre ampere. Then after this, we're going to send the signal. So this analog signal into our computer so the audio interface actually convert cyst analog signal to a digital signal so we can record the audio with that computer. So this actually works that of a way to as a digital to analog converter so you can send us recorded audio to a set of speakers because the audio interface does convert digital to analog as well. It also can be high quality than the digital to analog converters on your computer. With an audio interface, you can also control the amount of volume being sent up to your speakers with unmonitored I'll also most audio interfaces will have a dedicated headphone output as well. So this first audio interface, this is the focus, right? Scarlett to I to I recommend this audio interface for anyone starting out. It's quite inexpensive around about $120 there are various different versions. This is a to I to so it gives you two inputs. There's also the solo, which is one inputs, and you can even get four on the eight input version. So the audio you're hearing right now is actually being recorded on this focus, right, Scarlett to I to So the microphone preempt might not be quite as good as the more expensive audio interfaces that we're going to look at later on, however, is still great. And if you're starting out, this is a great audio interface. To consider on the next audio interface is the Shore X to you. This is great because it's so small. The audio you can hear right now is being recorded into this audio interface, so it does have a lot of the same functionalities as the over audio interfaces. It allows you to control the game level On output level, however, is only one input, and you can only record on XLR cable of this. So if you want to record, say, a guitar or maybe a keyboard, it may not be able to do this with this short X to you. However, if you just recording a voice over or maybe a podcast, this could be great. One thing to mention as well is it doesn't have a dedicated speaker output, however, it does have a headphone out. It also has phantom power plus 48 volts, as do all of these over audio interfaces. So for certain microphones, you may need an additional 48 volts to power the microphone. This microphone, however, is a dynamic microphone and does not require phantom power. However, it's there just in case you're using a microphone that does require phantom power. So this is a great lightweight, inexpensive audio interface around about $100. The pre amp. May not be quite as good as these other audio interfaces, however. It's a great one to consider if you want to record audio whilst you're traveling, okay, and the next audio interface is this one here. This is the Apogee duet. So the audio you can hear right now is recorded through this order interface. So this is quite small. Obviously not a small lightweight as a shore X to you. They compared to this audio interface here it is very lightweight. So the main thing I like about this order interfaces how clear the mic pre amp sir, And you can actually add a lot of gain, which could be very useful for certain microphones that require more again, such as the electro voice Ari 20 to keep this audio interface slim line. The audio inputs aren't actually on this interface itself. On these breakout cables thes are combi XLR jack inputs. So you concert even XLR cable or a jack thes breakout cables also have monitor outs so you can plug this audio interface into your speakers. There's also a headphone out at the bottom off this order interface if you want to monitor with headphones whilst recording audio. So this apogee duet is a great audio interface. If you want to have some clean pre amps that can give you a lot of additional gain and also have an audio interface that isn't too big and bulky. It is quite expensive, though it can be up to $600 but it will give you a better sound than, say, the focus right to I two or the Shore X to you on the next audio interface is this focus, right claret for pre. You can get this with two pre amps. Four preempts on. There's also an eight preempt version. So out of these four audio interfaces, the focus right. Clara is the only one that requires mains power, so for the studio is great. But if you want to record when you're traveling on location, I don't really recommend it. The microphone I'm speaking into right now it's being recorded through this focus, right clarets, and as you can hear it sounds great. This audio interface has very clean and clear microphone pre amps. This focus right claret is a bit more expensive than, say, the scarlet. It is around $550. However, it has got really high quality microphone pre amps. So if you don't want to spend a bit more for a really great quality audio interface for the studio, I recommend having a look at the focus, right? Correct. One more thing to mention is the claret does have additional line level inputs at the back , which can be useful if you have any additional pre amps. Let's now have a quick comparison off these four different audio interfaces recorded with the same microphone using the same processing. The microphone I'm speaking into at the moment is the shore sm 58. The microphone I'm speaking into at the moment is a Shure sm 58. The microphone I'm speaking into at the moment is the shore sm 58. The microphone on speaking into at the moment is the shore sm 58. You may have noticed there that the more expensive audio interfaces give you a higher quality sound. However, the cheap audio interfaces a more than adequate for most applications. So each of these four audio interfaces do offer different features, and they do have different quality pre amps. There are different price points as well, so it really depends on how much want to spend. But if you're starting Garrett, I do recommend having a look at the focus right to I, too. If you want to spend a bit more money for the studio. A recommend having looked at the clarinet. And if you want to be more portable, I recommend having a look at the apogee Gerets. But if you want to save a bit more money and you still want to be portable than I recommend , having good look at the shore X to you. So thank you for watching this lecture. Maybe understand a bit more now about audio interfaces on. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Headphones and Monitors: Hi and welcome to this lecture. We're going to be looking at headphones on monitoring. So for headphones, you get two different types closed on open back headphones so the majority of headphones will be closed back. So this is where there's no sound coming out of the back of the head phones. Open headphones is where the sound also comes out. The back of the head phones. These can be useful for some mixing situations, but if you want to record audio that I definitely recommend getting closed back. Headphones, studio monitors and studio headphones are ideal as they don't have any built in e que, which adds color to the sound. However, if you have a pair of headphones or speakers that you're completely used to, then you can always mix on these as you know what they sound like. Let's now talk about reference tracks. I do recommend finding an audio example that you want your recording to sound like So. For example, if you're mixing a podcast, find another podcast that you want yours to sound like so regularly. Listen to it while you're mixing yours, so you know that your mix is always going to be in the right direction. It doesn't have to sound exactly the same, but using reference tracks is great for training your ears. I also recommend checking your audio on different systems, So whilst you're working on your audio and you've got it to a standard that you're happy with, it's worth checking this on different speakers, so make sure you check your audio on three different types. One mini set of speakers. For example, a blue tive speaker for your phone, one standard set of hi fi speakers and also your built in computer or phone speakers. Different speakers sound different. So if you're mixed sounds good on all of these different varying types, then it will probably same great everywhere. Okay, so that's just a quick overview of headphones and speakers. Hope you found this letter useful, and I'll see you in the next one 10. Room Treatment Tips: hi. In this lecture, we're going to look at some room treatment tips. So first of all, when the sound is created, for example, your voice, the audio will project out in all directions. The direct sound will travel in a straight line into the microphone, and the rest is reflected sound, which means it bounces between the surfaces off the room. A short time later, though, this will bounce back into the microphone, so the time it takes for the sound to bounce back and hit the microphone really depends on the size of the room. The number of times it bounced back into the microphone also depends on the shape of the room and how the room has been treated. Unless the room has been designed tohave pleasant acoustics than the reflective sound in the room will likely add unwanted room sound. Different materials can also change the frequency. Balance off the reflective sound, however, unless you're in a room that's being designed to sound good than it probably won't. For example, recording studios have some natural room reverb, but they have been designed carefully to sound that way. Another example is a cathedral they've bean designed like this to create a certain sound for the choir, as it can be very expensive to design a room in a certain way. An alternative is to treat the room in the way that reduces the amount of reflections. Now let's have a look at some top tips to treat your room of her any specialist equipment. It is important to realize that there's a difference between soundproofing on acoustic treatment. There are two things, though you can do to help improve the sound off your room. Number one is removed, the natural reverb off the room, and number two is to diffuse the sound of the reflections. The worst thing is to be sat in a small square room, which has hard surfaces all around it, such as walls windows, because the sound will just bounce back and forth between each off the surfaces. This will create a sound, which is a flutter echo, and it's not what you want. The rosters and things you can do to reduce this room selection is important. So try and choose a room that's an odd shape if possible. This way, the sound will bounce in different directions around the room and doesn't go back and forth directly between the four walls. Some rooms, however, just sound more pleasant and others just completely by chance. But try different rooms in your house or recording location and see which sounds best. First of all, remember, different positions off the room will have an effect on the sound I recommend against the common idea that covered with egg boxes is any good, because due to the walls being so close, the reflections will be much stronger on egg. Boxes are so thin that almost all frequencies will simply pass through them. Your best option is a medium sized room. Ah, good way to test the room is to just clap your hands in some bad sounding rooms. You will hear a heart wringing sound, which is flutter Echo on. This is common in small square rooms. Alternatively, in larger rooms, you're more likely to hear a pleasant reverb, which won't causes many issues when recording audio. So once you've chosen a room that sounds reasonable or you have no choice over the room, there are some things you can do to help. You can look at absorption so soft materials can help absorb some of the sound that bounces around the room. Also, you can close the curtains off your room or hang up a do they on one of the walls. You can also try leaning a mattress against the wall, and also try putting an extra rug down. You can also try having a sofa in the room, because this can help absorb this out a bean bag and generally anything soft can help. Also, thicker material can be great for absorbing those lower frequencies. Also, packaging foam on any insulation you confined could help absorb some of the sound that's bouncing around your room. The next thing you can do is diffuse the sound diffuses work by scattering the reflections off the sound so it doesnt reflect right back into the microphone so this can have a more natural, pleasing sound. There are different things you can use to scatter the reflections, which include furniture so cabinets, chairs tables. Also, bookshelves can be great if you also have a wardrobe full of clothes and shoes and toys, and open that up aswell. These things can help. The cheapest and easiest thing I recommend is actually hanging a do they are behind you and also putting up a mattress in front of the microphone against the wall. This could make a huge difference and improving the sound of your room. A combination of absorption on diffusion is really the best. Alternatively, you can buy acoustic treatment. So many companies sell foam acoustic treatment packages, which can make a huge difference when mixing and recording music based traps are probably the most important form of acoustic treatment. This will help treat the lower frequencies in the room. However, If you're working with audio just for a voice, you often cut out some of the lowest frequency. So these the ones that would have bean attenuated by the base traps. If you have the budget, I would definitely recommend getting based traps. But if not, I would spend your money on other acoustic treatments. Acoustic panels could be the most cost efficient way to treat your room. It won't give you an acoustically perfect room, but it will heavily reduced the amount of audible reflections in the room or elects make some great acoustic panels. But they can be quite expensive. I recommend having a look on eBay on when purchasing. Make sure you get the most dense ones you can find on. It's measured in kilograms per meter, cubed on around about 25 meters. Cubed is great. The other way, which is slightly more expensive, is using fiberglass insulation. Acoustic panels. Companies like Prime Acoustic make these. However. It costs a lot of money about $1000 for a full room treatment kits. You can, however, make some of these yourself by building within frames and purchasing the insulation material yourself. Realistically, if you're just starting out, you probably won't want to spend a lot of money on this. However, the sound of your room will make a huge difference. So do what you can with D i Y methods. But if you're still unhappy with the sound, a recommend looking into professional acoustic treatment. So there's just some tips about Reum sound hoping found this useful and I'll see you in the next lecture. 11. Room Treatment Example: Okay, so this is a standard kind of room that you may have to use for recording audio or mixing audio is far from perfect. It's a square shape, has a odd shape ceiling. Let's hear what this room sounds like. Now I'm just going to clap three times. You may have heard some flutter echoes there. It's not ideal. But what we're going to do now is apply some acoustic treatment. As you may imagine, not everybody can have their own specialist room just for recording audio podcasts. So for this, we're going to try and transform this room. Make it as good as possible for recording and mixing audio. Okay, Now, let's have a listen to a podcast microphone in this untreated room. Okay, So what you can hear right now is recorded through this dynamic microphone here on. This is very suitable for podcasts or voice overs. Now she can hear. It doesn't sound amazing in this room. On defy. Stand back, the quality you will get worse. So what we really need to do is be quite close to the microphone and also treat this room. Okay, Now, let's have a listen to this podcast microphone after we treated the room. Okay. Now, on speaking into a dynamic microphone, this electro voice, ari 20 on average distance you could use for voiceover or a podcast in this treated room on when I go back, you can tell the quality is not gonna be quite as good. But in the treat a room like this, it still sounds fine. Okay, And now we've treated this room. Some of this is professional acoustic treatment on some of this is D I Y. Now let's hear this room again. I'm going to clap again, and you should notice there would be less flutters than without this treatment. As you can hear, it's made a big difference. The room is no longer ringing out and just sounds a lot more suitable for recording and mixing. As you heard before. This room did sound quite bad, and now it's a lot more usable. So this is what you can do to your room with some simple acoustic treatment to treat this room. I use, um, d i Y methods, which included a large piece of foam. I also added some beanbags into the room on also put down a rug to help absorb the sound of the room as well. I use some professional acoustic panels which are hung on the wall also onto the ceiling. Okay, now, let's just do a quick comparison again between the untreated room on the treated room. So I hope you can hear that treating your room can make a big difference to the quality off your audio. So thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. My Recommended Audio Travel Gear: Hi and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at portable travel recording equipment. So whether you want to film a podcast in Thailand or video course the other side of the world or maybe even you want to film travel vlogs having high quality audio still important . But when travelling, though really don't want to take too much. So I'm going to show you some of the recording equipment I take when traveling. So, first of all, I've got this here. This is a love mike, a level air mike by road, the road smart love plus and it literally plugs into your phone and you can record great quality audio off your phone. So let's have a demonstration there off. What? This audio actually sounds like this is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. And also here I've just got a portable power brick and just a plug for my phone so it doesn't run out of battery. And that's all you can literally take if you just want to be super lightweights. So you can actually film videos and it will record the audio onto your video for your phone . So if you on the budgets and you want still want great quality audio recommends Just getting a microphone that plugs into your phone. This one's around about $50. Okay, and now I've got packed number two. This all fits in this small bag. It is a bit more expensive, a little bit heavier than the previous level air Mike. However, it doesn't allow you a few more possibilities when recording audio. So festival here. I've got some closed back headphones. So when recording audio really want closed back headphones? These air Sennheiser hates due to five mark two. There are plenty of of a headphones available. These are just the ones I like when travelling. Okay, and then I've got a handy recorder. This is a zoom hate five. This has a built in mic on the top X Y microphone and allows you to plug in two different microphones here. The bottom and then the microphone are used with zoom hate. Five is the shore sm 58 because it's really durable. When traveling in May, drop your bags and yeah, this is built really well. You can hold it like So if you wish, a lot of people do hold, that s and 58. It's great for stage performance. Or you can use a little stand. Okay, so this is a travel stand with a shock amount on a pop shield, like said, within a short s and 58 you might not need a pop shield is good as well. Just in case you have any more PLO sieves, it will mitigate that as much as possible. So you can really put this on your desk and you can record voiceovers or podcasts just with the shore sm 58. That's the second option. And of course you'll need a cable which plugs into the bottom of the handy recorder. So let's have a demonstration there off. What? This audio actually sounds like this is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. Okay, And pack member free is a bit heavier and, to be honest, a lot more expensive. And this is what I'm currently using right now to record a lot of my podcasts and voice overs when I'm out of the main studio. So let me show you What's inside? So first of all, we have another power off closed back headphones. The's at the Sennheiser is hasty. Two fives on when we open this up. It's actually this microphone here that I take with me, but without the pop shield. So just the microphone. This is the electro voice, Ari. 20. Okay, and then I have a stand. This is a man photo stand. It's actually a camera tripod, but I've got this attachment here. Changes it from basically camera tripod into a microphone tripod. So this is useful if you just want a small lightweight tried. But then I've got a map but charger because I will be recording within that book. Then in here I've got my cables for my audio interface. On the audio interface I like to travel with is the apogee. Juliette. This has a really amazing signing pre amp. And you can still travel with this audio interface. It's not the smallest, however. It's still quite lightweights, and in here I've got the cables for this audio interface. I've got the XLR cable for the microphone and then I've got these breakout cables, so this allows you to actually input to different XLR microphones and that has some speak out cables here on then, in the back of this bag, I keep my map book. So let's have a demonstration there off. What? This audio actually sounds like this is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. Okay, so I've got free, different options here. It really depends on how much you want to spend, how much weight you have. Despair. And also how serious you want to take recording high quality audio. Option one is literally just really this love Mike. Option number two is the short s and 58. This dynamic a vocal microphone with a zoom hate five handy recorder on a pair of headphones and option than the free is this microphone you can hear right now. However, with this stands this audio interface, the apogee Juliet and it never pair of headphones. Let's hear what these free options sound like again. This is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. This is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. This is a test off the microphone. Having high quality audio whilst on location can be very useful. Okay, so you can probably hear there is a difference between the free options. However, they also much better than just using the built in mic on your camera or the built in mic on your phone. So these are my free options for recording audio when you out of the studio, it really depends on how much you want to spend. I'm really how much weight you have Despair because option than the free is quite heavy. Obviously does sound the best out the free, but it is heavy. Option number two it is a lot more lightweight. And this was my old travel recording set up an option number one actually have with me at all times. I make sure I've always got this microphone in my pocket. So if I want to record some audio, that microphones always with me. So I hope you found this lecture useful, and I'll see you in the next one 13. Audacity Introduction: Hi there and welcome to this next section where I'm going to show the essentials of recording, editing, and processing spoken voice in Audacity. Audacity is free open-source audio recording and editing software for Mac and Windows. And the techniques I'll show you in the next few sections could be useful if you create podcasts, tutorials, or videos online where you want to be able to record audio. In the next few videos, I'm going to show you how to record or capture your audio, as well as how to play back and export your audio. After this, I'll show some essential edits and techniques and audacity, as well as how to process your audio, including removing background noise and how to use EQ and compression. So by the end of the next few sections, you should know the basics of using Audacity for recording, editing, and processing spoken voice. 14. Audio Recording Setup in Audacity: Hi there and welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at setting up audacity. So you're ready to record audio. So when you open up Audacity for the first time, it may look something like this. You can always click and drag to resize or Udacity. I'm just going to click and drag from the corner. The software fills up the entire screen. You'll also notice that we have this blank space in the middle here. And when we record our audio, this is where the audio waves will be displayed. And we also have these buttons at the top. The main ones we're going to be looking at in the next few videos is this transport section over here. And we'll also be looking at the input monitoring section here as well. The first thing I would do is actually change the sample rate of the project. If we go down to the bottom left, you can see the sample rate is 44,100. And I would actually change this to 48 thousand. So we can click on the arrow here and change it to forty eight thousand. Forty eight thousand is the standard sample rate for audio when working with video Music, 44,100 is often used. But if you want to record audio for video, and I recommend using forty eight thousand. Forty eight thousand as well is one of the recommended sample rates for YouTube videos. So let's just choose this. Next. Let's select our audio host. So this is the interface between Audacity and the sound device. If you're on Mac, it should so-called audio up here. If you're on Windows, I recommend selecting windows WAS API. This driver will give you less latency or recording delay. I recommend choosing Windows WAS API if you're a Windows user in this box here. But for Windows users, if you experience any issues when recording, it could try another driver as well to see if that resolves the issue. Okay, next we have the microphone inputs. So you can click on here and select your audio interface. My mic is plugged in this one here, Claret for pre USB. If you're using a USB mic, it should appear here as well. Going along, we can choose whether we want our recording to be a mono or stereo microphone I'm speaking into right now is a mono microphone. So I'm going to select number one, mono. Also for most voiceover mix, the microphone will be mono. So if you are using a mono mic, I recommend selecting mono as a file size will be smaller. Some microphones for recording music may be stereo, but generally microphones for podcasts or voiceovers will be Mono. So I recommend selecting mono here. Next we have the audio output. Here you can select where you want to hear your audio. Headphones or speakers are plugged into your computer. You could select Built-in output. Or if your headphones or speakers are plugged into your audio interface, you can select your audio interface from here. However, as I'm recording this screencast tutorial, I'm going to select the top one here. Okay, now let's monitor our audio to make sure it works fine. So we have this button up here that says Click to start monitoring. So let's click this now. And now you can see the level on the audio meter when I'm talking. We never want this to go above 0 dB. Because if it goes above 0 dB, it will clip or distort our audio. And this won't sound good at all. Generally, I want my audio around about minus 12 and on the peaks or the loudest points to be below minus six and definitely below 0. If you order as too loud, you can turn it down on your audio interface. Or if it's not quite loud enough, you can turn up on your audio interface. We can always turn the audio up after, once you've recorded it, we wanted to make sure it doesn't clip when we're recording. Depending on what type of mic you're using, you may be able to turn down your microphone input of this slider here. As I'm using an audio interface, it won't allow me to do so. Can change the gain on my audio interface. Okay, so now we're all set up ready to record. And in the next video we're going to be recording audio into Audacity. Thanks for watching and I'll see you there. 15. Recording Audio into Audacity: Okay, so now let's record audio into Audacity. Before we record, Let's make sure our microphone is in the correct position. And let's also make sure our notifications and emails are turned off. And it also recommend putting your phone on airplane mode when you record audio. I also recommend doing a test recording in there. Everything is working fine before we do our proper recording. Okay, so I'm going to press Record now and do a test recording. Okay, So this is a test recording. This is an example of the audio. And then I press Spacebar to stop the recording. And let's play this back by hitting the play button here. Okay, so this is a test recording. This is an example of the audio. Okay, that sounds fine. I'm just going to undo that recording by pressing Command Z on a Mac or Control Z on Windows. Okay, I'll also recommend recording some room sound as well. I'd normally record around five to ten seconds of the room. So I hit record and then I'll be silent. And that way I recall the ambience of the room. And this can be useful for any noise removal plugins or effects when mixing audio. Okay, So let's recall the actual recording now. It can go up to the transport controls here and hit the record button or use the key command R. Remember I'm also going to record around five to ten seconds of silence. Then I'll start speaking. Okay, so let's do this now. The microphone and speaking into right now is the electoral voice are E2E. This microphone is very popular for podcasts, register shows, and voice-over work. Then I stopped the recording by pressing the space bar. If we wish, we can record onto another truck by pressing Shift and record. Okay, so now I am recording onto another track. There again, I stopped the recording by pressing the space bar. We can select either track by hitting the Select button here. Say for example, now we want to record again at the end. We can just go up to the record button again. And it will record at the end of this track. Now if I stop the recording and then record again, it will again record at the end of this track. Again, I am recording. But if we have the other track selected, it will then record at the end of this track. But for now, I'm just going to delete this truck by hitting this expert in here. And we can make this bigger by clicking and dragging at the bottom of the wave. The larger parts of the wave or the louder parts. And the smaller parts of the wave are the quieter parts. Okay, So that is how you can record into Audacity. In the next video, we're going to be looking at some more features of the software. I'll see you there. 16. Playback, Zoom, Undo + Saving in Audacity: Hi there and welcome to this video where I'm going to show you some more features of audacity. In this video, I'm going to show you different playback controls, zoom controls, the undo feature and how to save. Let's first look at playing back the audio. If we click on the waveform here, you'll notice we have this vertical line, which is also known as a play head ruler. If I press Play now it'll play back from this play head ruler or vertical line. So the microphone and speaking. And we can stop playback by pressing space bar. If I click over here, for example, and then press Space-bar again by just shows. It'll play from this area here again. And it will record at that. Notice when they play back the audio, it will always go back to this play head roller. However, we can actually pause the audio. So if I play about now the spacebar, the microphone and speaking, and then I can pause the audio. And then if I un-pause the audio again, it will continue from where the audio was stopped. Right now is, we can also use the key command P to pause the electoral votes. Can also click and drag on this waveform here. This will now play from the start of the selection and we'll stop at the end of the selection. Notice when we hover over to the right to have this right finger arrow button. And we can click and drag to move the end of the selection. And if we move over to the left, we'll have this left pointing finger and we can click and drag this to move the start of the selection. Now if I play this back, it will start at the start of the selection and end at the end of the selection. This microphone is very popular for podcasts. However, we can actually loop this back. So it continued playing round and round until we stop by holding down Shift and then pressing Spacebar. This microphone is very popular for podcasts. This microphone is very popular for podcasts. This microphone, and it'll continue going round and round until we pause. This can be useful for mixing audio if you just wanted to hear one particular part over and over again. For editing and mixing, we may also wish to zoom in and zoom out on the waveform. We can go up to the zoom buttons here. So we have the plus button which will zoom in, and the minus button which will zoom out. We also have key commands that we can use for zooming. So we can zoom in with Command on Mac or Control one on Windows. We can go back to the original position by pressing Command or Control on Windows. And then we can zoom out with Command free or control three on Windows. Let's just go back to the original position. We have Command T on Mac or Control T on Windows. We can add new tracks by going up to Tracks, Add Track. Here we can choose the type of track, but for this, I'm just going to choose mono track. Like I showed you previously. We can select the tracks here. If we wish to record this track, we need to make sure this is selected. But if we want to record on the first track, we need to make sure this is selected and we can mute or solo the track. So with these buttons here, we can delete attract with this X button. And you can undo by pressing Command on Mac or Control on Windows. And you can redo by pressing Control Y on Windows or Shift Command Z on a Mac. We also can go up to View, and from here we can go to our history. This we can go to a previous point of our project. However, if we go back and then make a change, we won't be able to go forward for this. I'm just going to go back to where we were. Okay, and now let's save our project. We can do this by going to File, then Save Project. Or we can use a key command, command S on Mac or Control S on Windows. You may have this pop-up box appear, which means you're saving the audacity project. You're not saving the individual audio file. If you want to use your audio file in another application, you will need to export the audio from audacity, but we'll be looking at there soon enough for this. I'm just going to hit Okay. And then name is Project. And then choose a location and hit Save. Okay, so that's some more features of all dusty. In this video I've showed you a different playback controls, zoom controls, undo features, and how to save. In the next video, I'll show you how to export your audio out of all dusty so you can open this audio in another application if you wish. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 17. Exporting Audio out of Audacity: Okay, So in this video we're going to be looking at exporting your audio from Audacity. You can add it and process your audio in Audacity. However, if you just want to use Audacity to record your audio and then edit or process or audio in another application, then you can just export your audio out of Audacity once you've recorded it. In the next few videos, I will be showing you the essentials of editing and processing your audio. But let's now have a look at exporting. You can choose to either export a selection of your audio or export it all. Just be aware though if you have any tracks so load or muted when the export it, there will be so load or muted as well. Okay, so just for this example, if I've selected the selection tool and I click and drag over this selection of audio, I can export just the selection. To do this, we need to go over to File and then go down to Export. And here we can export the selected audio, which will just export this area here. However, if we want to export all of the audio that we wanted to select, Export Audio. For this though, I'm just going to export the selection. I'm going to choose Export Selected audio. You can obviously name your audio file here. And you can choose a location you want to save here as well. Going down with how file type. For file type, you want to choose WAV as this is a universal, uncompressed audio type. Aiff is uncompressed and fine as well. But wherever is a standard, so I recommend choosing this. I don't recommend choosing MP3 as this will compress the audio and degrade the quality of the audio, the file size may be smaller with MP3, but it won't sound as good as WAF. For encoding, I recommend choosing signs 24 bit PCM. So PCM is uncompressed and 16-bit and 24-bit other standard encoding bit rates. I recommend using 24-bit rather than 16-bit as if you mix your audio in another application, then you may degrade the audio slightly. If you're using 16 bit rather than 24 beds. However, this may be unnoticeable a lot of the time, and 16-bit still fine, but I recommend using 24 bit as it has slightly higher quality. Okay, and then hit Save. Then you may get this box appear, which is a metadata tags box. This is data that's embedded into the file, which we'll show in places like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Stuff like artist's name and track title. I'm just going to leave all of this blank though. So if you just want to export your audio out of audacity, so you can edit or processor in another application that you don't really need to fill any of their sin. Now let's hit Okay. And this will export the audio. Depending on the length of your audio and the speed of your computer, it may take a few moments to export. Now let's go over to my desktop, which was the location where chose to export the audio. You can see here we have the audio file. Now let's play this back. The microphone and speaking into right now is the electro voice RE2. And this microphone is very popular for podcasts, radio shows, and voice-over work. Great. And if we wanted to export all of the audio, it's the same process, File export, but just select Export Audio instead of export selected audio. And just follow the same steps I just showed you. Okay, so that's how you can export your audio out of audacity in case you wanted to edit or process your audio in another application. Like I said though, you can still add it on process your order in Audacity, which we'll be looking at in the next few videos. So recommend watching these if you want to edit and process your audio in Audacity. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 18. Audacity's Essential Audio Editing Tools: Hi there. Welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at some essential editing features for Audacity. I'm going to show the tools toolbar, which are these six tools at the top here. So these six different tools contain a lot of essential things for editing audio in Audacity, This video will be useful if you want to use Audacity, not just for recording audio, but also to edit your audio. This isn't a complete audacity course by any means. I just wanted to show you the essentials in case you want to use this free application for editing audio. So here are two mono audio clips from a recent music production tutorial that I produced and the person speaking and this recording is Ian Alexander. Okay, so now let's have a look at the tools toolbar, which is this area at the top here. This contains a lot of essential things for editing audio. I'm going to show you what these six different tools do. And I'm also going to show you the shortcuts for each one of these. Let's first look at the selection tool, which is selected by default. The key command is slightly as tall as F1 on Windows or function f1 or Mac. So we have looked at this previously, but I'll go over it again in case you missed it. So with this tool, you can click and drag over a certain area of audio and it'll just play back this area, for example here. Now I'm going to play this back. So let's press the Play button. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum throughout this two bar loop. And you can hear that the Audio stopped when it reached the end of the selection. Now let's click somewhere else to deselect the selection. Now let's have a look at the envelope tool. So that's the second tool here. And the key command to select this tool is F2 on Windows or function F2 on Mac. You'll notice when we have this tool selected, we have this blue line at the top and bottom of the order clip. And we also have these two gray areas are darker gray area and the lighter gray area. If I switch back to the selection tool by using the key command F10 or windows or function F1 or Mac. You'll notice the order clip looks different to when we have the Envelope Tool selected. So let's go back to that by pressing F2 or function F2 on Mac. With this tool, we can adjust the volume of an audio clip over time. Let me just zoom in on this clip here. Let's use the key command, command one to zoom in or Control one on Windows. And I'm just going to click and drag at the bottom of this clip so we can say a bit more of this as well. Okay, so when we have this envelope tool selected, we can click to add control points in this gray area. We can click and drag these control points to adjust the volume of the clip. So let me show you now. Let me just play this area here where we have this mistake. Also want to increase the velocity. Says the word no there. So it can actually click to add a control point around this area. Just this word. Now, I'm going to reduce in volume. Let's actually remove this breath as well. Let's click at the side there. And here again, we have four control points. I'm going to click and drag this down. And you can see this wave updates in real-time. And we've actually turned this area to silence and got rid of that mistake and the breath sound, Let's hit this button now. I also want to increase. So let me adjust the volume with these control points. You can see the waves update in real time. Obviously the smaller the way of the quieter the audio. This envelope tool can be useful for adjusting the volume of your audio clip at certain points. I'm just going to undo that now we've Command Z or Control Z or the windows. These changes will still be that even when we have another tool selected. Let's go back to the selection tool by pressing F1 or function F1 or Mac. You can see that we have this lighter gray area. And if I play this back, you won't be able to hear that mistake that was there previously. Also wanted to. Okay, so now let's have a look at the next tool, which is the pen tool. We can access this by using the key command or function F ray on Mac, the pen tool, we can adjust the individual samples of our audio. Let me show you this by zooming again. Let's zoom in with the key command, command one or Control one on Windows. Me zoom in far enough, you'll see the individual samples of our audio. So these dots here are our individual samples. Let me just zoom out slightly with Command D or Control D on Windows. Unlike I said, with this tool, we can adjust the individual samples of our audio so we can change the volume of the samples. And this might be useful if there's a click or pop sound and your audio, and you want to go in and adjust the volume of that one sample. So there's Pen tool allows us to really dive in deep and adjust the volume automation of the individual samples. We can also click and drag to adjust multiple samples. I'm just going to undo this day by hitting Command Z or Control Z on Windows, I would normally only use this tool though if there's a click or pop or an issue where I need to change a sample or a few samples in my audio. If you have a click or pop sound in your audio, recommend zooming in so you can see the individual samples and then try and fix this issue with the pen tool. Let's zoom out back to our original position by using the key command and command or control T on Windows. Now let's have a look at the next tool, which is the zoom tool. We can also select this by using the key Command F4 or function F4 on Mac. This we can left-click to zoom in or right-click to zoom out. We also have the key commands to zoom in and out. Command wanted to zoom in or control one or Windows. Command on Mac or Control a on Windows to zoom out. And then command to or control T on Windows to go to the default zoom position. Let's now have a look at the next tool, which is the time shift tool. And we can slap this with a key command F5 or function F5 on Mac. This tool, we can move our audio clips. We can also move our audio clips between tracks. For example, here I'm going to move the audio clip from track to track one. This may be useful if you want to record an overdub on another track and then move it to your main track. However, you can't move stereo tracks to monitor tracks or monitor tracks to stereo tracks. They have to be the same type of track to move around like this. So just bear that in mind. Now let's have a look at the next tool. And this is the Multi-tool. And we can select this with the key command F6 or a MAC function F6. The Multi-tool, we can do a lot of the functions from the other tools in this one tool. If you know how to use this tool properly, it can save you some time rather than swapping between the individual tools for each task. So depending on where your mouse cursor is, you may have different functionalities for this tool. So for example, right now at the top part of the audio where the wave, as you can see, the mouse cursor is the same as the selection tool. I can click and drag to select a section of audio velocity of the bass drum throughout this two bar loop. However, if I move my mouse up to this blue line here, you'll notice the mouse cursor will essentially be the Envelope Tool. You can click and drag here to change the volume. Let me just undo this now though. However, if we zoom in on the audio, Let's use the key command, command or control one or Windows to do this. And notice we can see the individual samples. Now if you hover over the individual samples, you'll see we have the Pen tool. Let's just zoom out again with command or control T on Windows. Now if we press Command on Mac or Control on Windows, then it will become the time shift tool. You can click and drag to move Eclipse. Okay, So that is the Multi-tool and it basically combines a lot of the other tools and one, okay, So that is the six different tools from the Tools toolbar. In the next video, I'll show more ways of editing audio in Audacity. I'll see you there. 19. Removing Silence and Splitting + Joining Clips: Okay, so now we're going to look at removing silence as well as splitting and joining audio files and audacity. Let's first talk about removing silence. Notice in this recording here we have this large bit of silence. Let me just play this back now. And every beat. Also want to increase. Previously we used the Envelope Tool to actually lower the volume here of a mistake. But let's go back to the Slack tool. So it's quite easy to remove silence and audacity. Or you need to do is use the select tool and then click and drag on the area he liked to remove and then hit Delete. Then it will delete the area you selected and the rest of the audio will snap back into place. Now if I apply this back on every beat, I also want to increase the velocity of this can be useful for moving mistakes or pauses in your audio. For example, here that looks like there's another unnecessary pause. Let's have a listen back up the same amount. Again. I could use the Select tool click and drag this area and then hit Delete. Now in the play this back, the pores will be gone. Same amount. So I want to keep my great. You may also wish to split your audio clips and to do this is quite easy. Just select the area you'd like to split. And then wherever this vertical line or play head ruler is, there will be a split once you hit Command I on Mac or Control I on Windows. Now you notice we have this black line. Now let's click over here to access the time shift tool or use the key command F5. And then we can click and drag these parts independently. This might be useful if you've recorded another part which you'd like to add in here or move your audio clips around. You can easily do this by splitting your audio. For example, I'm just going to move this clip over, then this one over. And let's say we wanted to split here. Let's go back to the Select tool by pressing F1 or function F1 or Mac, and then select this area here, and then hit Command I to split or Control I or Windows. And we split this audio here. Now we can go back to the time shift tool by hitting this button using the key command F5. And we can move this audio into the gap here. And I can move this one over again. May wish to get rid of this gap here. So let's go back to the slip tool. So let's hit F1 to access the Select tool. Click and drag over this area and now delete this. Okay, so that is how you can split audio and also remove silence. We can also make our Eclipse a bit more organized by joining our clips together. To do this, just make sure you click and drag with the selection tool, either clip you're like to join, and then go over to Edit clip boundaries and join. You can see there that black line has disappeared and this clip has now been joined. Just for another example, let's join these two clips together. So click and drag each clip with the selection tool. Go up to Edit clip boundaries and join. Okay, so that's how you can remove silence as well as split and join your audio clips in audacity. In the next video, we're going to be looking at some essential keyboard shortcuts or key commands in Audacity. I'll see you there. 20. Audacity's Essential Key Command or Keyboard Shortcuts: Okay, so now let's have a look at few essential keyboard shortcuts or key commands for Audacity, we do of course have the basic ones that we have for most applications, such as select all command a on Mac or Control a on Windows. On do we have commands that on Mac or Control Z on Windows? Redo a shift Command Z or Mac or Control Y on Windows. And of course copy command C on Mac or Control C on Windows. And paste command V on Mac, or Control V on Windows. I'm just going to undo what I did there. We have Command Z on a Mac or controls that are windows. And delete, which we looked at previously. We can select the area we'd like to delete with the select all, delete this, and then the audio will snap back to fill in the gap. Again, I'm just going to undo this. We have Command Z or Mac or Control on Windows. This isn't a key command, but I'm just going to show fade in and fade out as well. I'm just going to select the area at the end and then go over to effect here, go on, fade out. We also have fade in here as well. You can see the audio gradually fade out here at the end. By just want it to be a bit more powerful. Again, I'm just going to undo this. We have commands at, at the start we can fade in, for example. Again, let's go to Effect and theta velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Again, I'm just going to undo this. Fading in and fading out. Maybe more useful for music rather than spoken voice, but that's how you can do it. And other key commands is spacebar to play from the play head or vertical line. So I'm going to slip. And we can loop the playback by pressing Shift and spacebar. So if we have an area selected like this, we can loop this playback with shift and Spacebar. I'm going to select all the bass drums by clicking. So I'm going to select all the base and we compose of b. Bye. And of course we can't record with a keyboard shortcut. We can jump to the start of the track with J velocity of the bass drum. We can jump to the end of the track with K. And of course we have the zoom controls which we looked at earlier. Command on Mac or Control a on Windows to zoom in. Command T on Mac, or Control on Windows to go to the default zoom amount. And Command D on Mac, or Control D on Windows to zoom out. You can also zoom in or zoom out. So the entire order of your project fits on the screen by using the key command, command F or Mac or Control F on Windows. And of course we can save wave Command S on Mac or Control S on Windows. And another essential key command is exporting your audio. You can do this on Mac with Shift Command a or Control Shift E on Windows. That is some of the main key commands or keyboard shortcuts for our Udacity, I hope you found this video useful and I'll see you in the next one. 21. Removing Backing Noise Introduction: Okay, So previously we looked at recording and editing audio in Audacity. And now in the next few videos we're going to look at processing the audio by looking at removing the background noise. So ideally, don't want to have any background noise in your audio. Rarely you want to record in a place that's quiet. However, that's not always possible. In the next few videos, I'm going to show you how you can remove background noise and audacity. I'll be showing you the noise gate and also the noise reduction. In fact, these are two different types of noise removal plugins. And like I said, ideally you don't want to have any background noise. But again, it's not always possible. Here I have an audio recording that recorded for this example. When I play this back, you may notice that there is background noise, in this case a fan sound. Okay, so this is me talking into the microphone. This room is quite noisy. You may be able to hear that, that is a fan sound. So a fan sound like this is a very common noise that hair on recordings all of the time of a common signs that you may hear on audio recordings could be an air conditioner, Sound radiator, or even traffic sounds from outside the room. For the next few videos, I do recommend wearing headphones or using good-quality monitors or speakers. That way you can clearly hear what I'm doing. Okay, so now let's actually make a copy of this audio track so we can refer back to it once we process the audio. Also, when you add an effect to your order in Audacity, this change will be permanent. So we can't just turn on and turn off the effects like an other digital audio workstations or software. So the effect she applied to your audio will be permanent in all dusty. Do recommend having a copy of your audio track is unprocessed. So you can always go back to this if you ever make a mistake. Let's now sell out their struck by double-clicking on it. And then duplicate by pressing Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows. So I'm just going to select the first track again. Let's click somewhere that isn't on the track, and then double-click on the first track to select it again. Let's now duplicate this top truck again by pressing Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows. Scenario how free copies of this audio on separate tracks? Bond will be unprocessed, will have no effects. The next one will have the noise gates, and the third one will have the noise removal plugin. That way we can solo each track to hit the changes that we've made. In the next video, we're going to be looking at using the noise gate effect. And in the video after this, I'll show you how to use the noise removal effect. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 22. Audacity's Noise Gate Effect: Hi there and welcome to this video where I'm going to show you how to use a noise gate effect. Before we do this though, I'm just going to explain what a noise gate actually is. Noise gate as an audio effect that reduces the audio based on a threshold. If the level of the audio drops below a certain level or threshold that we can reduce this audio that's below the threshold. The threshold will be in decibels. And when using a noise gate and the level that goes below this decibel level will be reduced. We can even reduce this to silence if you wish. If the background noise is above the threshold, then we won't be able to reduce this. So if you want to use a noise gate to reduce background noise, then you need to make sure the threshold is above the level of the background noise. However, if the background noise is there whilst the voices speaking, then we won't be able to remove just the background noise. We can only reduce the background noise when there isn't any speaking. If you want to remove the background noise whilst the voice is speaking at the same time, then you may wish to use the noise reduction plugin, which we'll look at in the next video. But this video, we're just going to be looking at the noise gate effect. This allows us to reduce the level of the background noise when their silence or when their voice isn't speaking. So before I add any audio effects, I'm just going to rename track two and call this noise gate. That way we know that it's this track that has the noise scale audio effect on track to let's click on this drop-down menu here and then go to name. And we're going to rename this noise gate. One thing to mention before we continue Is if you're using an older version of Audacity than it may not have the noise gate audio effect. So if you can't find the audio effects than the recommend downloading a newer version of Audacity. Also, if you're using Audacity free points 0, there was an issue with the noise gate in this version. Again, if you're using this version, I recommend downloading a newer version of Audacity. Before I apply a noise gate effect, I'm actually going to normalize the audio. If I normalize the audio, is essentially going to make it louder and it'll be a bit easier to see the smaller sinewaves. Let's actually apply normalization to all three tracks. So when I compare the tracks, there'll be the same level. So let's select all by hitting Command a on Mac or Control a on Windows. And then let's go to Effect. Then let's go down to normalize. This will essentially boost up the volume so it's louder. And we can also see the sinewaves a bit clearer. I'm going to make sure the second setting normalized peak amplitude two is set to minus one dB. Remember you don't want this above 0 dB or the audio clip. So I recommend leaving this on the default minus one dB as this will give us a bit of room just in case. Now let's hit Okay. You can see that the audio waves are bigger and the audio is louder. Now let's solo truck do. And we can see the noise here a bit clearer. If there's just a horizontal line, then it will be complete silence. But if there's any waves on here, then there will be some sound. Let's just go to the normal Zoom amount by pressing command to. We can even click to drag this track down, make these waves a bit larger. You can see some audio here and we don't have complete silence. So let's just hit this button now. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is quite noisy. Obviously, you could hear the fan sound that and the audio. Now what I'm going to do is play back the audio again. But this time I'm going to look at this audio meter over here to try and find the level of the audio. There was a spike in audio here where I hit the microphone, but the fan sound audio level was around 40 dB. Let's remember this number. Let's now just click off the tracks and then double-click to select the only truck to. Then I want the audio to actually start around here. When I play back the audio or preview the audio. And the effect is going to start around eight seconds rather than right at the beginning. That's because an effect we can only preview back five seconds. So we will just be playing back the room sound. And I want to play back the room sounds and the voice. So if I hover my mouse over to the far left of this track, you can see the mouse icon has turned into this finger pointing left. Now let's click and drag this over to around eight seconds. Here we will have about 1 second of room sound, and then we will have the voice. This will only apply the noise gate effect to the selected area. However, once we've selected our settings, this will be stored in the effect. So we can always select the truck after and apply it to the whole track. Once we find our settings, we can always apply it to the whole track afterwards if we wish. Let's now add the effect. We can do this by going into effect and then go down to noise gate. Let's first look at the threshold and I'll show you the other settings after this. Okay. So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is we're cutting off a bit of the voice. May need to decrease this further. But just for this example, I'm going to put it really high. Let's try minus eight dB. So now when I preview this back, you'll notice it's going to get or reduced down in volume, the room sound and also the voice. Okay, So this is me talking into the market phone. This is obviously that setting is way too high. But if we have it too low, that's going to let through anything above this number. Let's play this back now and you'll be able to notice that it's not going to get efficiently, and it's going to let all the noise through the gate as well as the voice. Okay. So this is me talking into the market phone. This room is I believe for this around about 38 db should be fine. Okay. So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is but just to play it safe, I probably would have it on a roundabout minus 40. Let's now have a look at the settings up here. At the top we have select function. For this setting, make sure gate is enabled. The other option is analyzed noise level. This basically does what we did previously, wireless and back to the room sound. And I had a look at what the level was. So I don't actually like to use this as I prefer to do it manually like we did before. As a fine, we can get better results. The next control is stereo linking. If you're recording and stereo than the gate will only be applied when both of the stereo tracks go below the set threshold. However, I'm doing this and mono. And if you're doing any podcasts, tutorials, or voiceovers, that's probably going to be a mono. The other option is don't link stereo. If you have this enabled, then the trucks can be gated independently when one of the tracks goes below the threshold rather than both of them? Like I said, you probably going to be a mono. So don't worry too much about this, but I live on the default link stereo tracks. Okay, then we have threshold, which we looked at before. Let me just explain what this is again, as this is a very important setting, this will apply the gate only to the audio below this level set here. This is on minus 40.1, is only going to apply the gate to audio below minus 40.1 dB. However, if the background noise was a lot quieter, and maybe this could be on say, minus 50 db as with only gate the audio or reduce the level of the audio that's below minus 50 db. When the audio goes above the threshold, the gates will be opened and the simul pass through. So it won't reduce the order level. Any audio that's below this level for Gates will be closed and the level of the audio will be reduced. The threshold will normally be around minus 60 to minus 40 dB, depending on the level of your noise. For this example, the noise is quite loud, which is why it's on minus 40 or months 40.1 dB in this example. Next setting below as gate frequencies above, this will apply the gates only two frequencies above whatever you set here. This may be useful for moving some hairs and the audio, for example. But Settings below 0.1 kilohertz will actually turn off this feature. One thing to note, this feature may introduce phase shifting or issues in the audio. Don't actually recommend having this enabled. I'm going to leave this at 0. As I don't actually want to use this. Below this we have level reduction. So this we can set how much of the gated part of the audio will be reduced in volume. If you want complete silence, I recommend reducing the level to minus 100 dB as this is the lowest setting. Let me show you now. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is. However, you may not wish to have complete silence, as you may wish to keep some of the ambience of the room. Not having complete silence will also sound a bit more natural as well. Having some level here may sound a bit more natural and may sound a bit smoother for sections with and without the voice. I recommend testing this around minus 30 dB and adjust from there. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is okay. Now let's have a look at Attack, hold and decay. The attack and decay is how fast the gate opens and closes. Basically, attack is how long it takes for the gate to open. And the K is how long it takes for the gate to close once a signal has come pass the threshold, and after any whole time, if any, is applied, the whole time is basically how long it takes the gate to remain open once the signal goes above the threshold. So before the gate starts to close. Adding hold may be useful if you're getting any low frequency sounds that prevent the gate from closing between the waveform peaks. For these settings, you will need to listen back. And if you audio sounds quite choppy, then you may wish to increase the attack hold and the k times to make it sound a bit smoother. Let's just increase these amounts here just for this example. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is it took far too long for the gate to open and close with those times. So do you recommend decreasing this? Okay. So this is me talking into the microphone. This room. Is that sounded a bit more natural. Bumps still going to use a faster time. Let's try about this. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is sounded a bit more natural, but it could hear the voice we're starting to cut out. You may have to adjust this threshold to make sure you're gazing just a background sound, not the voice. Then you can adjust how much you reduce the audio that goes above this level of the level reduction here. And then you can adjust the attack holding decay. So this is how long it takes the gates open and close. I don't recommend having this too low, but I recommend having a small amount of time. So it doesn't sound too choppy. If you have this setup correctly, than negate effect will only work on the quieter parts of the audio, not on where their voice is speaking. Okay. So once we're happy with the settings, we can go ahead and hit Okay. You can see that and the audio that the noise we had previously has now been removed. Let me play this back to show you. This is me talking into the microphone. This room is quite noisy. May be able to hear that there is a fan sound. Settings are fine. Remember if you made a mistake, you can always undo by pressing Command Z on Mac or Control Z on Windows. But I'm just going to redo this with Shift Command on Mac or Control Y on Windows. When the voice isn't speaking, the fan sound has reduced in volume. However, when the voice is speaking, still a fan sound, but the background sound can be masked when the voice is speaking. If you want to remove the background sound whilst the voice is speaking, then you may wish to look at using the noise removal effect. We'd be looking at this in the next video. Okay, so that is the noise gate. And this can be useful for reducing any sound in-between where the voice is speaking. In the next video, we're going to be looking at a noise reduction effect. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 23. Audacity's Noise Reduction Effect: Hi there and welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at the noise reduction effect. So previously we looked at the noise gate effect, which allows us to reduce the background noise when the level is lower than what we're set with our threshold. The noise reduction effect, however, allows us to remove the noise throughout the audio, including whether speaking. If you want to use this effect on your own audio, I recommend recording just the room sound to effectively use this plug-in. If you haven't recorded and the room sound at the start of your audio, then you can always find sections in your audio where there's no speaking and try and use that instead for the noise reduction effect to remove this background sound, it really needs to be a constant sound like a computer fan for example. So the noise and this recording is a fan, constant noise, not spikes of audio. For example, here, we could remove the constant noise starts, but we couldn't remove this spike of audio. Okay, so now let's actually solo the third track. Now I'm just going to click on this drop-down box above and then go onto name. And let's rename this to keep organized. And let's call this noise reduction. Let's have a listen back to this clip. You can hit the Start there we have the background sound. So I'm just going to click and drag over this background sound. This is important for the noise reduction effect, and I'll show you this now. So let's go up to Effect and then go down to noise reduction. We actually have two steps we need to do in this noise reduction plugin. The first step here says select a few seconds of just noise. So audacity knows what to filter out, then click Get Noise Profile. So that's why I did I selected a few seconds there. It doesn't have to be as long as this, but I do recommend a few seconds. Let's now get noise profile. Notice the plugin is closed. It's meant to do that. Now we need to go back up to Effect and then down to noise reduction again. Now we're on step two. Now we can preview the audio that plays back for five seconds. You can still hear the fan sign, but it's not as loud. I'm just going to move the mouse over to the left and right of this highlighted area. So this finger icons appear. Just move it over here. So we got around a second of silence and then we can hear the audio. When we apply, this effect is only going to be applied to this area. However, after I've showed you the settings of this noise reduction effect, I'll show you how to apply it to the whole track. Let's make it a bit longer at the end as well. Now let's go back to effects and then down to noise reduction. And preview this again. This is me talking into the microphone. Let me just move this out of the way so we can see what's going on. Okay, So this is me talking into the market phone. Okay, now let's look at the second step. The first setting here is noise reduction. So this allows us to select how much we want to reduce the noise in decibels. Higher values will reduce the noise more, and lower values will reduce it less. However, if you reduce it too much, then it may ruin the quality of your audio. So I don't recommend setting this to high. But just for this example, let's increase it all the way to max, which is 48 decibels. Now abbreviate this back. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. You may have heard that that the voice recording wasn't quite as clear, but a lot of the background noise was removed. But for this, I'm going to drop it down to 12 again. Now let's talk about sensitivity going down. And we have this sensitivity slider. So the higher the value here, the more noise that will be removed. So just remember the settings that you apply here is applied to all of the audio. So where the voice speaks and where the voice isn't speaking, their sensitivity slider, I recommend choosing between 15 as if you have this set too high, then you may ruin the quality of your audio. But just for this example again, let's use an extreme one. Let's go up to 24. Okay. So this is me talking into the microphone. You may have had there. It did ruin the voice slightly. So let's drop this down a bit. I'm going to choose four, and let's preview this back now. This is me talking into the microphone. We may have some issues or artifacts when applying noise reduction. If you do experience this and I recommend adjusting the sensitivity. And you may also wish to adjust the number of smoothing balance. Adjusting these bands is also going to adjust the sound. So be careful as it may damage the quality of your audio here. So make sure you use your air for this one as well. If you do have any issues when applying noise reduction, you may wish to increase the number of bands. The default is free, but you can try higher values if you need. So after pressing preview and you can hear some artifacts are issues in your audio. Then you may wish to increase the frequencies moving bands as this will spread the noise reduction into neighboring bands. So this may smooth out the artifacts and make them sound more acceptable. However, again, if you set this to high, then it may make the audio sound less clear. But just for this example, let's try and extreme setting again. This is me talking into the microphone. Okay, it didn't sound too bad of this high setting. But I'm going to go back to the default which is free. This is me talking into the microphone. Okay, let me now talk about reduce and residue. If you have reduced enabled and this will filter out or reduce the noise from the audio that we have selected. When you press Preview, you can hear the audio with the noise removed. However, if you have residue enabled, then this allows you to hear only the audio that you wish to remove. Just the noise that you wish to remove. If we have residue enabled and we listen back with a preview button and we can hear some of the voice in the audio, then we know that noise removal is removing the voice as well as the noise. If that's the case, then I recommend going back to the above settings to adjust these so you can't hear the voice as much in the playback. Let's have a listen back with this on residue mode. We can hear a bit of the voice that, but it doesn't sound like too much of a problem. However, if I increase sensitivity to max and then preview this back, you can hear that more of the voice and the audio. So I recommend decreasing this as a voice may sound a bit unclear. Recommend going between residue and reduce and finding that sweet spot. We are moving the noise but you're not damaging the voice too much. Okay. So this is me talking into the microphone. We can still hear the background noise, but again, at the background noise is quite loud and you tried to remove too much, it may damage the quality of the voice. Do reduce, say, 20 decibels. That increases sensitivity slightly. You'll notice there'll be less of the background noise and the audio won't be quite as clear. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. Of course, we can smooth this out a bit more if you wish. This is me talking into the microphone. It doesn't sound too bad, but if I do so that residue here, you'll notice will be able to hear quite a lot of the voice. For this example, I'm just going to drop this to 12. Let's put the sensitivity on sex. Let's put the bounds on for residue. You could still hear the voice, but it wasn't too loud. So let's change the mode back to reduction and let's hear this back. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. Not perfect, but it's more acceptable. Now let's hit Okay. You'll notice that has removed the background noise. As we can see, that wave has disappeared. Now let's play this back. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. As I just highlighted this area here is only going to remove the noise from here. But if you want to remove the noise from all of your audio, what you can do is undo this by pressing commands, add on Mac or Control on Windows, and then double-click on this audio track to select all. Then go back to Effect, then go down to noise reduction. You can see that saved our settings. And it's also saved the noise profile from before. Now we can hit Okay, and it'll apply this noise reduction to the entire audio track. Now let's play this back and hear what this sounds like. Okay, so this is me talking into the microphone. This room is quite noisy. It may be able to hear that there is a fan sound. Of course, we can still hear the background noise. But if we compare it to the original recording, you'd be able to hear is a lot quieter. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. This room is quite noisy. It may be able to hear. This is above the noise reduction. Okay, So this is me talking into the market. This is where the noise gate. This is me talking into the microphone. This is the unprocessed audio. Okay, So this is me talking into the microphone. Recommend learning how to use the noise gate and the noise reduction effect and then apply them to your clips if you need to. You can also try using both the noise gate and the noise removal plug-in at the same time. But to be honest, if you want your audio to sound as good as possible, you want to try and record it with as little noise as possible. If you do have any background noise that you wish to remove, I recommend using the techniques or taught you and applying them to your own audio. Noise getting maybe more preferred as it doesn't actually damaged the audio. It just turns down the audio at the quiet parts to help remove the background noise. However, the noise removal effect can remove the unwanted noise whilst speaking. And also whilst there's no speaking. It really depends on which his best for you. But like I said, ideally wanted to record out any background noise, but that's not always possible. Okay, So that is the essentials of noise reduction in audacity. In the next few videos, we're going to continue looking at processing the audio with EQ and compression. I hope you found this video useful and I'll see you in the next one. 24. Introduction to Mixing and Processing Audio in Audacity: In this next section, we're going to be talking about applying audio effects and processing audio in Audacity to help improve how the voice sounds. If you want to follow along with me in this video, then be sure to check out the downloadable resource which you can access in the resources area of this class, which is in the projects and resources tab below the video player. This is also the same order file that we were looking at in the editing section of this course. But you can actually apply the techniques I'm going to teach you in this section to own audio clips. You can follow along with me with the exact audio clip. Before we get started, let's duplicate this audio track so we can quickly AB or competitive pieces of audio while we're mixing. So I'm just going to double-click on the track header here to select the track. Then I'm going to press Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows to duplicate. You can see here it's duplicated this track. We also have this empty track in the middle here. I'm just going to delete this by pressing the X button on the track header. Just to keep things organized, I'm going to name both of these tracks. On the track header here, the small arrow button. I'm going to click on that and then press name. If attract to this will be the original audio. So the unprocessed audio, I'm going to call it on processed. And track one will be the track that has the effects. So let's click on this arrow button on the track header, then go to Name. And for this I'm going to call this process. We can call this whatever you like. Now I'm just going to double-click on the top tracks header here. Just so I select only this track as we don't want the track to select it because I'm not going to add any effects to that track. Also, when we add effects to Audacity, these changes are destructive. That means when we add an effect is actually going to burn the settings into the audio. We can press Undo, but we can't simply turn the effects on an afloat. We can add other pieces of software or digital audio workstations. That's another reason why we want to keep the original audio track just in case we make a mistake, we can always go back because we have the original track here. I also recommend using high-quality monitors or headphones to monitor your audio for mixing. Mixing changes can be quite subtle. So you really want to be able to hear the audio clearly. Like I've said throughout this course, if you have really bad quality audio and applying effects and processing the audio weren't ready. Fix this. You want to make sure your audio is recorded well to start with. Then we can improve this by adding effects. In the next few videos, we're going to be looking at EQ and compression, which are really the main effects for mixing. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 25. A Brief Look at the Filter Curve or EQ Effect: Hi there and welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at EQ or equalization. We have two different types of EQ in Audacity, graphic EQ and filter curve. Graphic EQ allows us to adjust fixed frequency bands and filter curve allows us to have more control over adjusting frequencies. For this example, we're going to choose Filter curve. Let's apply this to our track. Let's make sure we have our track selected and then go to Effect. Then go down to filter curve. If filter curve is essentially a parametric EQ, but they call it a filter curve in Audacity. Eq or equalization essentially allows us to adjust the volume of different frequencies. We can use this EQ to change the sound or just a frequency balance of the voice if we wish. On this EQ vertically we have volume and this is in decibels or DB. We can increase the volume with positive values or decrease the volume we have negative values. And 0 dB is a level of the audio. Before we've applied the EQ. Horizontally, we have frequencies, so we have the lower frequencies on the left and the higher frequencies on the right. So this goes from 20 Hertz to 20 thousand hertz. The human range of the voice is generally around 100 to 8 thousand hertz. But again, it depends on the voice. And the human range of hearing is anywhere from 2220 thousand hertz, which is why this EQ goes from 20 to 20 thousand Hertz. We also have these grid lines, which can be useful if you want to find exact frequencies. However, you can uncheck, Show grid lines down here if you want to turn them off. But I find it useful to have them up. So we can actually draw in different breakpoints on this EQ by just clicking. Then these nodes will appear, which we can click and drag. For example, here I've made a boost around 1000 Hertz. You can always go back to default by pressing flattened. This will reset all the changes you've made on the EQ. So the line will be horizontal at 0 dB. If you just click above like this and you'll have this horizontal line is just going to make all of the frequencies louder. You will have to click to add more breakpoints if you want to just boost or cut certain frequencies. Let's add a few more bright points around this. For example, here we're boosting around 1400 hertz, or it can click and drag down to cut or attenuate around 1400 hertz. We also have this invert button here, and this will flip the shape that was created EQ. Be honest though, I wouldn't really use this feature. It isn't really that useful, but it's there just in case. Okay, so let's just play the audio back now and then I'll make some extreme changes so you can clearly hear the difference. Let's go back to flatten and then preview this audio back. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Now let's click the ads and breakpoints here and I'm going to make an extreme boost and the high frequencies. And let's play this back by pressing preview. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base stroke. Obviously that is too extreme. It could hear the higher frequencies were a lot louder. Now let's do the same with the low frequencies, clipped out breakpoints and click to drag this up. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base stroke. That is a bit more subtle as a voice isn't as low. Let's try adding the shelf here, but for more low mid-frequencies. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. That's a lot more obvious. Let's attenuate this now. It also wants to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base stroke. And let's press flattened again. And never extreme example here. That's attenuate the higher frequencies by adding their shelf here. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Let's go back to flatten. Now let's make some changes that may be more useful. So I'm actually going to filter out some low frequencies as this goes to 20 hertz here, but the voice will not be speaking this low. The only audio, a big guessing that this lower frequencies here will be low rumble noise, so we can filter or remove this. I'm going to collect, add some breakpoints here. Then I'm going to start my filter around 30 hertz. I'm going to preview this back now, but the changes may be quite subtle. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. You can hear though we went actually filtering the voice. We would just filtering any audio that was lower than their voice. Let's do the same, but for the higher frequencies. So the higher frequencies here weren't actually be the voice either. This may just be some high-end noise. So let's filter out the high frequencies again. Let's click to add a breakpoint. Then I'm going to filter around 16 thousand hertz. I could probably move this filter even lower to say, around 12 thousand hertz. But just to keep it safe, I'm going to leave it here. The filter starts around 17 thousand hertz. Again, I'm going to play this back, but the changes will be very subtle. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base strokes. I'm also going to add slight boost in the low-end, around 80 Hertz. I'm going to add a boost. So I'm going to click the Add three nodes, and then the middle node here I'm going to boost. Again. This may be quite subtle, but you may be able to hear a slight boost in the low-end. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum can be useful to make more extreme changes. So you can hear that exact frequency and then pull it down to taste. But let's hit this back butt. This more extreme change. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Let's put this down to around five dB and play this back. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Okay, I'm going to make another boost now. But this time in these high frequencies, I feel like the voice could be a little bit brighter. Let's have this band a bit wider. So around three to 6 thousand hertz. And then Adam node in the middle and increase this, maybe even wider. Let's preview this back. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Okay, That sounds nice. It might make this even wider. And just for this example, I'm going to boost it even more so you can clearly hear the difference. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. And let's drag this down to around about three dB. And let's hear this back. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base strokes. We can make this even wider if you wish, but I think it sounded pretty good. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base stroke. I'm going to have this boost start around 2.5 thousand hertz. That's some realistic changes and they add to this audio. If you want to clearly hear the changes back, I recommend starting with extreme values and then moving them up or down to something more realistic. This audio was recorded quite well. So I'm just making some slight improvements here. But you can also EQ if you have any problems, if there's a certain frequency that's causing you issues, you can try and find the frequency in the spectrum here and trying to attenuate it or reduce it. But really you want your audio to be recorded well and to sound as good as possible before you add any effects as adding effects to poly recording audio isn't always going to fix it. I also recommend not EQN just for the sake of it. If your audio already sounds fine and the frequencies are already balanced, you don't need to make any changes. However, for this example, I think these few changes didn't prove it slightly. Okay, another thing I want to mention is these sliders here. These allow you to zoom in positive values or negative values. This can be useful if you want to have a closer look. We also have this checkbox down here that says linear frequency scale. I recommend leaving this unchecked as it allows you to add a bit more detail in the lower ends. Notice here the frequencies are equal distances. But if you uncheck this, they're not at equal distances. But this allows you to add a bit more detail in a low-end. So I do recommend having this unchecked. Remember you can always go back to the default by pressing flattened. But if you are happy with your changes, I recommend actually saving a preset. We can save a preset by going to manage and then go down to Save Presets. I'm just going to call this example. Now if I just flatten this, I can load that preset. Let's go to Manage and then go down to User Presets. And here we have example. Go back to manage. We actually have a number of different factory presets as well. If we go back to Manage and then go into factory presets, you can see here, audacity has provided some presets. For example, let's choose this one here. I AM radio. You can see that it's filtering out a lot of the lows and the highs. But they do recommend adjusting the settings manually rather than using some of these presets that Audacity has provided. Let's go back to the preset that we made by going to manage user presets and then selecting it from here. Creating your own user preset can be useful if you're recording with the same equipment and in the same room as next time, you can just load this up instead of making it every time. Okay, so now let's actually apply this to our audio by hitting Okay. Now if I started this track and play it back, we have those EQ settings that we made applied to this audio piece of velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum throughout this two bar loop. So I'm going to select all the bass drums by clicking. If I click and drag one of them. That is the EQ effect. In the next video, we're going to be looking at the compressor. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 26. A Brief Look at Compression and the Normalize Effect: Okay, so the next effect I'm going to apply to this audio is the compressor effect. So a compressor effect turns down the louder parts of the audio and then allows you to turn up the overall level of the audio. This essentially compresses or squashes of sine waves to give your audio less dynamic range. This will stop the louder sounds jumping out in your mixed too much. And it will also increase the volume of the quieter words. So it's easier to here. This will turn down the volume of the louder sounds or the louder, whereas in your audio. And it will also increase the quieter sounds or quiet, uh, whereas in your audio, making them easier to here, I can press or effect is very common in mixing audio, and especially for mixing voice. Okay, so let's make sure we have the top track selected again. And now let's go to Effect and then down to compressor. Like I said, the compressor effect basically reduces the dynamic range of the recording. So the range between the louder parts and a quieter parts will not be as much. Okay, so now let's have a look at some of these controls. And the first one I want to talk about is threshold. This is a very important control for this compressor. The threshold is a level that the audio can reach until compression is applied. If anything above this level will be compressed and anything below this level will not be compressed. For example, right now is our minus 15 dB. So anything above minus 15 dB will be compressed, and anything below minus 15 dB will not be compressed. Just for this example, let's put this to minus 12 db. And I'm just going to uncheck this makeup gain box down here. I'll explain what that does later on. But now when I play this back, anything above minus 12 here on this meter will be compressed. Let's just play this back now with this preview button. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base drive. Change this to say minor six. And Ethan above minus six here will be compressed. You may notice this audio isn't actually going above minus six dB, so none of the audio will actually be compressed. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the base stress. There. The compressor wasn't actually doing other thing because the audio was below minus six dB. But just for this example, if I put this to minus 30 db and the thing above minus 30 db here will be compressed. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. I'm going to set this to minus 12 db. As I don't like to compress too much and I don't want it to still sound quite natural. Okay. I'll explain what noise floor is in a moment. But now let's talk about ratio, which is another important control for a compressor. This is the amount of compression that's applied to the signal. Once it's past the threshold. The higher the ratio, the more compression that will be applied to the signal once they exceeds the threshold. I personally like quite natural sounding compression. For this setting. I wouldn't really put it too high, sudden normally have this around free to one. I wouldn't personally go past about five to one. However, if you want a more compressed and maybe radio style compression, then you could always increase this ratio if you wish. Let me explain what these numbers actually mean. So it's called ratio because we have these ratios. 2-to-1, 3-to-1, 4-to-1, five to one, all the way up to ten to one. The larger the number, the more compression you are applying. Ten to one would apply more compression to the signal than say, two-to-one. Let me explain what these ratios actually mean. So let's start with two-to-one. So here if the signal goes above the threshold by two decibels, there'll be reduced to one decibel. Three-to-one means if the signal goes above the threshold by free DB, or three decibels, it will be reduced to one dB or one decibel and tend to one means if the signal goes ten decibels above the threshold, it will be reduced to one decibel. Essentially, the higher the ratio, the more compression will be applied to the signal that exceeds a threshold. If you don't quite understand those ratios, it doesn't really matter too much. Just remember, the more you increase this slider, the more compression you'll be applying to the signal once it goes above the threshold. Let's now hear an extreme example. Let's drop the threshold to minus 30 db and then have the ratio on ten to one. Any signal that's above this number here minus 30. This will compress any audio that's above 30 dB, our ratio of ten to one. Let's hear this back now. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum that is quite compressed, but it is quite quiet. What we're actually doing is we're turning down the louder parts of the audio, which makes the overall level quieter. This is where this makeup game for 0 dB after compressing checkbox comes in handy. I'll explain attack and release it in a moment. But let's now enable this checkbox. If I play this back now you'll notice is a lot louder. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. In a compressor, makeup gain allows you to increase the gain of the audio that you've compressed. Like I said, when you compress your audio, your turning down the louder parts. This makes the overall level of the audio quieter. After you've compressed the audio, you can increase the overall level. We have makeup gain. So if you have this box enabled, it's essentially going to increase the peak levels or the loudest parts of the audio to 0 dB after it's being compressed. Some compressors do have a Dalloway. You can manually set the makeup gain. But with this one, we don't have a dial, we just have this chatbox. So it's kind of an auto makeup gain, but we'll set the peak level to 0 dB. Now let me explain what attack and release time is. Attack times the time it takes for the signal to be compressed once it's gone above the threshold. So it's basically how long it takes for the compression to kick in. I don't recommend setting the attack time super-fast as the audio may sound a little squashed. But I also don't recommend setting a slow attack time as a compressor may not work effectively. For this, I'm going to leave it on 0.2 seconds, as there should be fine for a spoken voice like this. Now let's talk about release time. So the release time is how long it takes for the compression to stop working or to go back to the uncompressed sound. Once you go below the threshold, It's basically the opposite of attack. Fast release time means a compressor will essentially stop working as soon as the signal goes below the threshold. And a slow release time means it takes longer for the compression to stop working once the signal goes below the threshold. The spoken voice like this are generally choose quite a fast release time as if the release time is too slow than the compression may not work effectively. I do recommend starting with quite a fast attack and release times. And if you do hear any issues with the compression, there may be try increasing these to see if it helps fix any of those issues. Let me know. I mentioned this other checkbox which is called compressed based on peaks. If we have this uncheck, the compressor will compress a signal that sees a fresh hold and won't compress a signal below the threshold. However, if we have this checked than the compressor will increase the level of the signal exceeds the threshold, less than the level that doesn't exceed the threshold. It will boost the gain of the signal that's under the threshold more than the signal that's above the threshold. I like to have this unchecked. As if you have this checked, it's going to boost the signal under the threshold, which I don't really want. For example, it may boost any background sound that you may have. That leads me onto this last setting here, which is noise floor. This level here is what the compressor will not boost. Anything below this number will not be boosted. This can be useful if you have any background noise that you don't want to increase. Right now it's on minus 40 dB. So anything below minus 40 dB will not be boosted or made louder with the makeup gain if we enable it here. So if there's something like a computer fan or a Hesse and you're recording, then you can set the level of the noise here so the compressor doesn't boost that noise. Otherwise you may end up boosting the noise level to which is not ideal. Let me now adjust these settings to something a bit more suitable. I'm going to change the threshold to minus 12 dB ratio to three to one. And I'm going to leave the attack on zero-point two seconds and then release on 1 second. I'm going to make sure this makeup gain chatbox is enabled. Now preview this back. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Okay, great, we are, I didn't compression there, but it is quite natural sounding compression. If you do want to compress a little more, it could always reduce the threshold and increase the ratio. For example, let's change the threshold to minus 15 and the ratio to five to one. Let's say this. But now also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. I also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum. Okay, that sounds fine as well. I'm actually going to save this as a preset. So let's go to manage, then go to save presets. We're going to call this example more. Then I'm going to change the setting to minus 12. You'll notice as well this graph updates when we adjust the settings. Let's change this to three to one. I'm going to save this as a preset. So let's click on Manage again. Presets. Call this example less. Okay, so now I have two different settings. One setting with more compression and the other with less. But for now I'm just going to use this setting here. One more thing to mention is this question mark button here. If you check this, it will take us over to the old dusty site, which will give us a bit more information about the audio effect. Okay, so I'm actually going to apply this setting now. I'm going to hit Okay. And you can see that the audio waves updates. Let's now apply this backward of the space-bar. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum throughout this two bar loop, going to select all the base. Okay, so one more thing to mention is if you find your audio too loud after you've applied this compression effect, then you can actually decrease this level by using normalization. So many people use a normalized effect to increase the level, but you can also use it to decrease a level. Let me show you how to do this now. Once your audio track is selected, go up to Effect and then go down to normalize. We can actually turn it down here by maybe one or two dB. I'm going to make sure normalized peak amplitude two is set to minus one dB for this example. Now the peaks won't be at 0 dB, there'll be at minus one dB. You can see the audio waves are a bit smaller now, and the audio will be a bit quieter. Let's now play this back. The space-bar also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. There we go. Okay, So in the last few videos, I've already covered the essentials for processing and mixing audio. I've covered noise removal, EQ, and compression. There is still more we can do in terms of processing and mixing. But I've covered the essentials in this class. If you're recording in the same place with the same equipment, and then you can save your settings so you can use them again in the next recording. We can do this by setting up a macro, and I'll show you how to do this in the next video. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 27. Setting up an Effects Macro in Audacity: Hi there. Welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at setting up and effects macro in Audacity. Saving a macro will allow you to save your effects ready for next time. This can be useful if you record in the same room with the same equipment each time. You can of course, create your own presets in these effects and then add the effects individually each time we're using an effects macro can be a time-saver. I forgot to effect now. And that's the filter curve. You may notice we have the same settings that we made in the previous video. And same again if I go up to effect, but this time choose compressor. Again, we have the same setting that we made in the previous video. And same again with the normalized effect that we looked at in the previous video. Thus the keeps the previous settings that you adjusted in your effect. This is useful for making a macro as it's going to keep their settings that we adjusted previously. Let's now make an effects macro. And we can do this by going to Tools and then go down to macros. Now we're going to add a new macro by pressing New. You can name your macro here. I'm going to call this example and then hit Okay. Now we need to actually add the effects so the filter curve, so the EQ, the compressor, and also the normalized effect. And we can do this by going to insert. This does look a little complex, but only it's doing now is just fine filter curve. And this is alphabetical. So let's go over to F, and here is filter curve. Now let's press Okay to add this. Now let's go on Insert and then find the compressor. Here it is. Let's press Okay. Now I'm going to add the normalized effect as well. So let's go on inserts. Then go over to n For normalize. Here it is. And now let's press Okay. We're going to make sure that's after the compressor. We can click on these and use them. Move up, move down arrows. If we wanted to change the order, this is order I want EQ compression that normalize. So now I've loaded my Effects, I'm going to press Save and now close this window. Okay, so now I'm going to add this affects macro to the unprocessed audio. I'm going to double-click to select this track and then duplicate this. So we still got a copy of the original unprocessed audio. So remember you can duplicate with Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows. Now let's solo this bottom track here. Then double-click on this track header and then add this macro. And we can do this by going to Tools and then go down to apply macro. And here you notice we have our preset, which is called example. You can see that the audio waves have updated and we've loaded the filter curve effect, the compressor, and a normalized effect. Now if I play this back and swap between truck three and track one, notice they're exactly the same because we have the same effects. Also wanted to increase the velocity of the bass drum on every beat. Also want to increase the velocity of the bass drum throughout this two bar loop. That's how you can apply an effects macro. So it saves you adding the effects each time. However, if you're going to be recording your audio of different equipment or in a different room, then you may wish to manually add your effects and adjust them accordingly. But if you are recording with the same equipment in the same room and effects macro can save you a lot of time. That's the end of this video. I hope you found it useful and I'll see you in the next one. 28. Outboard Gear - The DBX 286s: in this lecture. I want to talk about a microphone pre amp on process er to. This is a piece of outboard gear that could be used to actually process on change ineffectual voice before it's even recorded. So the signal goes from the microphone into this pre AMP this process and then into your audio interface and then recorded in your d aaw, such as logic pro. So this allows you to actually make sure microphone before is recorded, so this could be very useful. Four situations such as live streaming way, obviously can't mix your audio. This could also be useful for people who don't mix the audio for creators who want to have the audio mixed just to save time. Effort. Energy. So I've got video here of my friends Sonny, who is an animator. He creates tutorials about animation, and he uses this mic pre amp process er, just so it doesn't have to mix the audio because it's not an audio engineer on. He just wants his audio to sound as good as possible without mixing. So I'm going to walk through the settings he uses so his audio can be mixed before it's recorded so I'm going to show on screen now. The settings were used for this pre amp. Just in case this is something that you might want to think about, especially for situations such as live streaming. I do personally prefer mixing my audio in post. I do think I can get it sounding slightly better then free this pre amp. However, for situations such as live streaming. Do you think this is an amazing bit of gear? So let's have a listen to this. So as I was going into the phone is, I was going into the far subjects. Motion design is in between graphic design special effects on here is their pre on bypassed . This is what is audio sound like before I think separate pass. So obviously has you can hear there's a lot of gains, so we have input gain here. Think of design is like the graphic design and the special effects. Some microphones might not provide that game as the Ari 20 so this could Adgate. We also have a compressor. Part of Martian design is much more so you can adjust the drive and also the density off the compressor is the sort of things that we don't really have an opinion on. It's kind of how we think we also have a high pass filter, the graphic design and here again, is the pre on bypassed. So this is the original signal off the microphone. Beefy. How we see things, how we like certain colors we might like set of fonts, lights. Just adjust the dancer to again. Maybe Gotham. And maybe you want to clean up the turning off. And also, let's adjust this Dr graphic side of motion design. Socialize the demotion design side, she'll say. So really drive this compressor if you want a more radio sounding voice, how during a long we have a de ESA where we can adjust the frequency. Also, the threshold Number eight signal a number eight motion. Obviously, that's quite extreme setting. So let's just reduce. This was the number eight. You wouldn't have an opinion on it. You don't have a thought on it because there was nothing for you to see. For you to be able to see something you, for you to have an opinion, something. Then we have enhancer, which is similar to a Q. As you have a low frequency enhancer motion is the number one thing the human brain sees above everything else. The number two thing the human brand sees is lighting of brightness. We also have, Ah, high frequency and having cinema. Unless you said, there's a slight little light on on the cinema screen and everything else is black. Your eyes will immediately. What? Look at that, Andi. The third thing, our faces and going along, We have a gate. Sorry on the fault. So let's just adjust. The threshold here has on a picture on a screen on. Then we'll look at that face is something that we always and also the ratio. Obviously, this is quite extreme gate setting. Let's just dial it back to bring some of the audio for again, actually recording this in quite a noisy room. So this gate is very handy because there's a sound of his computer. I can actually hear the sound of a road on this. Also output go listen to. So let's get back to the unconscious site, which is the animation on DA then I like to think that as if design and special effects were like the clothes that you wear, motion designed the actual margin part will kind of be like how to turn the lights on in the room. I thought this was the microphone were sounded like four. We went through this pre empt. You need to have the lights on in the room to kind of show you off. And that's how I think of motion design. So this is just a really handy way to add some processing to your audio before it's actually recorded. So if wants to live streams or kind of a short cut in recording audio, this mic pre amp process is very useful. Like I said, I do think you can get a better sound overall if you mix your audio in a digital audio workstation such as Logic Pro. However, this is a great alternative. So do recommend having looked at it, especially for situations we can't mix your audio. It streamed out lives such as live streaming podcasts, YouTube live that kind of think so. Thank you for watching this lecture. I hope you found useful and I'll see you in the next one 29. Thanks and Bye + Class Project: Okay, So in now at the end of this class, thank you so much for watching and I hope you found it useful for your class project or what needs to actually record, edit, and process your own audio in Audacity. I then want you to take a screenshot of this and then write a few sentences about what you did to edit and process your audio and then posttests as a class project so I can see exactly what you did. So thank you again for watching and bye for now.